In the Beginning.....
Looking for trouble here:
What, exactly, was there in the beginning such that to utter the words makes beginnings possible at all? In the beginning there was the word? Take this quite literally: How are such things that are "begun" to be conceived prior to their beginning; or, what is presupposed by a beginning? An absolute beginning makes no sense at all, for to begin would have to be ex nihilo and this is a violation of a foundation level intuition, a causeless cause, spontaneously erupting into existence simply is impossible, just as space cannot be conceived to "end".
But this takes the matter in the wrong direction. For it is not about trivial intuitions like sufficient causality, but about the origin of ideas and meaning. The event begun presupposes the ability to conceive it, and language as such does not speak, and logic does not make sense. Here is the terminal point of "beginnings" where religion finds its existential reality: the impossibility of conceiving beyond the boundaries of the thought that makes beginnings possible by conceiving of them, for what is possible that cannot be thought? One must take Wittgenstein very seriously here; but then, one must put him down very emphatically: it is in the saying, the twilight world, where meaning meets its dark underpinning, and the world is a naked impossibility---this is brass ring of both religion and philosophy.
The real question is, does the world "speak"? I mean, religion is a philosophical matter, and the reason this idea sounds counterintuitive is that philosophy, in the minds of many or most, has no place in the dark places where language cannot go, but this is a Kantian/Wittgensteinian (Heidegger, too, of course; though he takes steps....) legacy that rules out impossible thinking, and it is here where philosophy has gone so very wrong: Philosophy is an empty vessel unless it takes on the the original encounter with the world, which is prior to language, and yet, IN language, for language is in the world. Philosophy's end, point, that is, is threshold enlightenment, not some foolish anal retentive need for positivism's clarity.
The world does speak, but meaning here is without precedent in the crude familiar, a "hobgoblin of little minds".
Of course, you may think otherwise.
What, exactly, was there in the beginning such that to utter the words makes beginnings possible at all? In the beginning there was the word? Take this quite literally: How are such things that are "begun" to be conceived prior to their beginning; or, what is presupposed by a beginning? An absolute beginning makes no sense at all, for to begin would have to be ex nihilo and this is a violation of a foundation level intuition, a causeless cause, spontaneously erupting into existence simply is impossible, just as space cannot be conceived to "end".
But this takes the matter in the wrong direction. For it is not about trivial intuitions like sufficient causality, but about the origin of ideas and meaning. The event begun presupposes the ability to conceive it, and language as such does not speak, and logic does not make sense. Here is the terminal point of "beginnings" where religion finds its existential reality: the impossibility of conceiving beyond the boundaries of the thought that makes beginnings possible by conceiving of them, for what is possible that cannot be thought? One must take Wittgenstein very seriously here; but then, one must put him down very emphatically: it is in the saying, the twilight world, where meaning meets its dark underpinning, and the world is a naked impossibility---this is brass ring of both religion and philosophy.
The real question is, does the world "speak"? I mean, religion is a philosophical matter, and the reason this idea sounds counterintuitive is that philosophy, in the minds of many or most, has no place in the dark places where language cannot go, but this is a Kantian/Wittgensteinian (Heidegger, too, of course; though he takes steps....) legacy that rules out impossible thinking, and it is here where philosophy has gone so very wrong: Philosophy is an empty vessel unless it takes on the the original encounter with the world, which is prior to language, and yet, IN language, for language is in the world. Philosophy's end, point, that is, is threshold enlightenment, not some foolish anal retentive need for positivism's clarity.
The world does speak, but meaning here is without precedent in the crude familiar, a "hobgoblin of little minds".
Of course, you may think otherwise.
Comments (395)
Quoting Constance
The idea that reality inhabits "the dark places where language cannot go," is pretty common. Kant's noumena, Lao Tzu's Tao, Schopenhauer's will are all grappling with what comes during "the original encounter with the world."
Prishon say: trinity undivided.
Religion generally deals with issues of the origins and nature of reality, ontology, so, of course it's philosophy. You have a history of kicking areas of study you don't have any respect for out of their appropriate place. Religion is not philosophy, psychology is not science, [joke]ice dancing is not a sport, Mitt Romney is not a Republican, bleach is not an appropriate treatment for the Covid 19 virus, Velveeta is not really food.[/joke]
Kant had one thing in mind: NOT to go there. Read his transcendental dialectics. No, they do not bring into its thematic distinction. Saying the Tao that can be spoken is not the eternal Tao is indicative merely and presents no substantive work on threshold philosophical experience. Schopenhauer , as far as I've read (will read into it if you have something in mind) does not make an existential issue of the alienation that constitutes the encounter with the world logically prior to all else. He presents the concept of the will, , but does not examine it fully as a crisis that lies beneath the mundanity of normal affairs and a real underpinning to being in the world that can be exposed, brought to analysis. This latter can only occur when a philosophical assault is brought to bear upon the living event of being in the world.
What I have in mind is the truly hard question of philosophy, which is not consciousness (though indirectly, one can claim this) but presence.
No further questions. I rest my case.
This is an interesting post, but there seems to be a lot of different topics here. What is your main point?
If it is about whether things can exist beyond our conception of it and language, then the answer is yes, so long as it abides to the Principle of Sufficient Reason (which you have alluded to): It is logically possible, but we must have a sufficient reason to posit it. Something like Aquinas' Five Ways: Since all things in the universe are contingent, it is necessary to posit a necessary being as their cause; even if such a being is not imaginable to us since we have never perceived such a thing.
Whats glib about them. GLIBberrig in Dutch means slippery. Whats slippery about them?
"Seem". Indeed. Seem...
Not true.
Yes they can.
Thats because you dont understand.
Is too.
But the question is begged: Prior to the Big Bang as a meaningful notion at all, there is the language out of which this theory in physics is constructed. Big? What does this mean? It is a particle of language, so what it means is contingent on what language means. How can language be examined, given that it takes language to do the examining? Now you are in a world of thought bound, not open, for the struggle to make language make sense ends, inevitably, with a compromise, a reduction, and delimitation, and this approach has been exhausted, evidenced by the bankrupt endeavors of analytic philosophy.
No: the matter has to be taken more, if you will, personally: there is no objective world of mountains and valleys and car washes simpliciter. Such thinking is naive to philosophy. There are only worlds and mysterious connections. This mystery has to be experienced intimately, just as one experiences one's daily affairs with all the passions being diffused among trivialities, and one is always already spent prior to getting even to the threshold at all.
Partially. It does indeed deal with creation.
I meant what I said and I said what I meant.
Not if there is an eternal universe. A 4d spatial static substrate on which our universe evolves. And a next one.
There was a fluctuating time before it took of in one direction (entropic time).
Sigh... the usual accusation.
Prishon say: troooooolls. Likey likey
@Prishon is a pain in the ass, but he's not a troll. Calling someone a troll is just another example of the malady I was referring to - delegitimizing an argument without good reason because you don't like it.
Prishon say: pain in the aaaaass. Auw!
another example of the malady I was referring to - delegitimizing an argument without good reason because you don't like it.
:ok:
But what is nonsense? Vague talk about the limits of logic and how this renders the most salient dimensions of human existence unspeakable is just dismissive, and sets one on a course of inquiry that, in positivist fashion, prizes clarity over substance, and if "Making our Ideas Clear" (Peirce) were the be all and end all of philosophy. This is rubbish of the worst kind, closing doors to contents of meaning and experience.
My point is to ask basic questions as if we actually existed, to follow Kierkegaard, and inquire as if the weight of the world and all its significance were more than an abstract study of the law of the excluded middle. Such questions go to the core of what a question is, which is never to be exceeded by what is abstracted FROM it, as with cognition in search of cognitively constructed equations that can neatly packaged and sold off to deluded academics.
Beauiful! Philo-poetry! :ok:
I assumed you would take that as a compliment.
I did! But Prishon is an imaginative guy. Likes to expess and imagine. No further implications. I like being a PITA! As long as the pains implies backreaction from the ones I give that pain to.
This is from John 1:1 from the New Testament. My understanding is that "the word" is the translation of the Greek logos, which is understood as Jesus. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logos_(Christianity). Quoting Constance
This is Genesis 1:1 from the Old Testament.
Richard Friedman in "Commentary on the Torah" offers a direct translation from the Hebrew as "In the beginning of God's creating the skies and the earth - when the earth had been shapeless and formless, and darkness was on the face of the deep, and God's spirit was hovering on the face of the water, God said "let there be light,."
This does not suggest creation ex nihilo, but suggests God created order from the pre-existing chaos.
Quoting Constance
I don't think that is the question at all. The NT "in the beginning there was the word" is not meant to replace the OT account of creation and beginnings. You're reading John 1:1 as a Wittgensteinian commentary on the primacy of language, but it's not, and no one suggests that the world did not exist prior to language.
Well...you know...I kind of do. I acknowledge that that way of seeing things is a metaphysical proposition, but then, everything in this thread so far has been metaphysics. As usual, when I say "metaphysics," I mean neither true nor false.
The fact that they both attempt to answer the same questions doesn't make them the same fields. If that were the case, then science would be philosophy and religion would be science because all three deal with ontological questions.
Reliance upon sacred texts, deities, and the supernatural are well within the purview of religion, but not of philosophy.
I do agree that that religion often does delve deeply into ontology, but not always and not necessarily. Even in the Western tradition, the OT offers only a very short account of the origin of the universe, and it provides no explanation for where God came from. But, see, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theogony for other theological systems that do.
God's word has the power of creation.
If the world began when language began, then millions of years prior to the evolution of language existed in some non-existent state, whatever that means.
God has no power he doesn't have to earn. A necessary being is an incoherent idea. Who created God?
Which is this thread about?
I think he is saying that the god of the philosophers is more reasonable than the God of the religions because religion says he creates from nothing. So religion has to explain what this God is and how it can create something by sheer power
In the beginning there was the word, and the word was god. This is very much the same as all beginnings, in the sense that they are a relation of one thing to another. We see this at the base of all theories: energy and it's information ( frequency and amplitude ) create a wavicle, a field and its excitation, a string and it's vibration, order and entropy, 1+1. These are the limits of logic / metaphysics.
To construct anything one has to begin by relating one thing to another. Here begins our relational understanding. The construction of a relation is necessary to create a distinction, such that in relation to each other two things become distinct. The distinction is information. This is the beginning of consciousness "as we know it". Of course, assuming a systems understanding, this relational beginning would have it's counterpart in the real world. So the "real" world starts in exactly the same way. :smile:
1) goods of nature (babies, strawberries, ect)
2) and goods of action, like sacrifice
If God contains of the good of (1) he has no more casual power than the universe. If he is a necessary being he can only have (1) and not (2) because he doesn't change and can't be tested or do wrong. The conclusion is God has no casual power unless he is contingent
Gods are eternal. They posses the magic essence. They created the world in their image. So the world is eternal and magic filled. The eternal magic is created by divine words only. Which goes to show that in the beginning there was the word. Spoken by gods for the holy trinity to emerge. From which we and every living creature are formed. In the beginning there was one-ness. Shifting over time in a dual interdependend world united by the magic bodies that we are. In between we are. The contemplation of the holy trinity unit is heard by revelations. To be spread by the word. I give you that words.
In religion, God is defined as that one being who does things by sheer power.
If you are suggesting that "gods" generically adhere to the description provided, that would simply be incorrect to the extent there are religions that do not hold as you have alleged. If you are suggesting this is Christianity (as I might glean from your reference to the trinity), you'll need to give textual support for it. Your reference to gods (in the plural) speaking in order to cause the emergence of the trinity (which is understood as a single entity) presents a claim that the gods created God, which is not Christianity, but is a polytheism that posits a theogony (as in who gave birth to the gods, as you see in Greek mythology), which is something the OT clearly does not do.
All of this strikes me as confused and confusing, but if you have some clarification for it, please share.
But the question here is about the religious dimension of human existence, and 4d spatiality is a science term that has no bearing. You are working in a world of scientific assumptions, but this has little to do with the foundation of meanings that constitute the human condition at the level of basic questions, the level where the most important issues arise. Too much analytic philosophy has turned philosophy into exactly this kind sanitized theorizing.
Authentic philosophy does not assume things to be the case that can stand a more fundamental analysis. Before you can even talk about time, one has to ask, what is the structure of time that is there PRIOR to, that is, presupposed by normal science.
Eternal? What can this possible even mean?
There is no prior. God created the whole if infinity of time. No time involved. The word was spoken and BANG. The eternal universe was there. His wird is revealed. I heard him speak. The is the holy trinity. His own image. Thats from what he created. From himself. The contemplation of the holy trinity is the contemplation of god. But Rishin no care about god. God can go to hell says Rishon. As far as I'm cincerned god is dead. I care about his creation though...
I agree with your post. As Kant said about the series of past causes, it's indeterminate. We can speculate if it's eternal or not but time itself is either material or mystical. Both options seem as absurd as a finite or infinite past seemed to Kant. So we have a casual series which science makes rational sense of. Where it starts is beyond us which is why religion talks about a "beginning" so much. It becomes a religious question because science can't know the whole of reality
Unless we are elite physicists we have no idea how to even conceive of these matters. Any wonder that literature/religion/myth/philosophy are so attractive. For my money any discussion of this subject is exceptionally speculative and the best we can do is read the distilled ideas of experts and pretend we understand.
'Big Bang' is a term used by Fred Hoyle in 1949 to gently mock the event, so don't get bogged down in the wording. Physicists do not believe there was explosion but an expansion. Personally I couldn't care less.
The idea of beginnings and endings seem to me to be human conceptions and preoccupations and, while such frames certainly match lived experience on earth, they can hardly be expected to describe all which is the case.
Most folk choose to make shite up.
Philosophy is an empty vessel.
I am not an elite ohysicist. Im a particle physicist and have a rather clear view what happened.
I think this just points out the arbitrariness of your philosophy/religion distinction.
Quoting Hanover
One definition of "philosophy" from the web - "The study of the fundamental nature of knowledge, reality, and existence, especially when considered as an academic discipline." About half the people in the world are followers of Abrahamic religions. For most of those people, you can't discuss those subjects without also talking about God.
To be clear, I'm not saying that all philosophies are religious or are religions. Would I say that all religions are philosophies?... My answer is a tentative yes. I need to think about that some more.
Not sure that counts but thanks for being grandiose. :razz: Laat je niet gek maken.
By George, he's got it!
This is something I've discussed many times on the forum. If you haven't seen those posts, now is not the time to go into it.
Why you not sure? Are you also physicist? It IS grandiose to know! :grin:
Send me the link to this past discussion so that I can get up to speed.
So it seems is theoretical physics.
One might call this the ‘metaphysics of presence’, after Heidegger and Derrida. Indeed, if one begins with presence , then one finds oneself ‘before’ language , becuase presence, as self-presence, auto-affection, self-identity, must be before language since it precedes relation. The trick is to think before presence Then language reappears , not as that which takes place between presences , but as prior to presence.
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/1560/deathmatch-objective-reality-vs-the-tao/p1
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/10427/my-favorite-verses-in-the-tao-te-ching/p1
And many others.
I've never heard of a particle physicist who eschews mathematics. :roll:
Ok. The Big Bang is a better story than Genesis. With Genesis the story is given, and folk spend their time trying to make the world fit the story. With physics, the world is given, and we change the story to fit the world. One story closes off further discussion, the other opens it up.
I dont eschew it. But the ideas, the imagination is what truly counts. Math hides this. For example the math of local gauge (phase) transformations combined with a symmetry breaking (Higgs mechanism) is imaginary. No one can give a satisfactory account of mass creation (in the sense of saying what actually the math describes; I asked too much about this on physics sites; Deleted!) Ghosly Goldstone bosons eaten up by the gauge field fir the weak interaction? Nono. I donot buy that. They could be wrong you know. The math is perfect and shiny. Nature doesnt follow though.
Not just laypeople...
Quoting Prishon
...(sigh).
Is that a lovesigh?
Can you give an example how these flowers look like? Im very interested in big bang physics and math!
I thought you claim to be a particle physicist
I am. Nevertheless, Im interested in speculative bullshit. Always an outside chance I can learn something.
The questions you ask indicate otherwise. Where did you get your degree?
Which questions?
Everywhere. Where did you get your degree?
Exactly what I expected. Second time ask about the degree answering my question with a nonsense answer. VU Amaterdam. Whats so important about a degree.?
Then why are you asking people on a random website questions about physics when you can just ask your colleagues.
Something doesnt add up
Huh? What then. You think I have collegues? I only studied there. Particle physicist is not my daily work. And luckily so! Im not bound and fixed to the standard model. That damned phone!
So you have a degree or just studied there?
After master I quit. Didnt wanna spend 4 years on how an electron behaves. For 1200 euros a month. Better things to do!
So you don't work in the field and have no colleagues
So. Ive answered the question. What question of mine?
I see THOUGHTS AND IMAGINATIONS TO BE DESCRIBED BY MATH ONLY. Math is nice but can lead astray. Its the image that comes first.
Everywhere, on threads and your threads
Can you give an example of one?
You think I havent done that? Ive emailed with Harari even. About the rishon model. Most others just dismiss. Fixation on standard model.
You've asked about Machs principle, which you can just look up on Wikipedia. You ask *us* if there is something wrong with the Higg's mechanism when this is a philosophy forum. It's all very strange
I dont know if Mach used spacetime or space and time. Newtonian spacetime or Einsteinian. And its a nice question for all
There is no Newtonian spacetime. Newton kept space and time separate
Thats why it is Newtonian. Absolute spacetime. Infinite c.
Anyhow. Im tired. Prishon wanna sleepy sleepy (weieired...). Was nice talking! :smile:
Well one last question. What do you mean that he "kept them apart"? They cant live without each other...
In the USA it's childish to talk about yourself in the third person, as you seem to know:
Quoting Prishon
Thats exactly my intention! The child isnt endowed yet.
You wanna talk physics? Have a GOOD discussion, dialectical discourse? You seem to know about it.
Why are you harassing @pirshon. Generally, his posts are higher quality than yours.
Gregory is trying to piss you off. Seems like he's trying to get you banned by harassing you. You should stop responding.
Ah! Banno has joined the troops...
Whers did you get that one from? What lack of quality? Are you jealous? Give a physical argument please.
AND any...
I do! Thanks T! :smile:
I do! Thanks mister T! :smile: Bed awaits. Oh bliss of sweet dreams and dark nothing...
No. Its that small phone.
Often, a large number of posts and threads means low quality. Generally, that hasn't been the case with @Prishon. You, who's primary contribution has generally been off-hand, smart-ass snipes at other people's posts, probably shouldn't be the one to complain.
The sea? Boats? This is rhetorical, right? But I don't deal in vague metaphors. Do you think Kant was a good sea faring captain? Why, pray, continue....
Then, of course, the actual arguments step forward. My claim is that first, one takes the world as it is rather than what it is reducible to in order to accommodate the lame assumption that nothing can be said. Second, what can be said
The sea is a common metaphor for alienation at the basic level where meanings lose their grasp of the world, but it is also the place where one confronts this alienation: one has to "experience" this, in they way Ahab experienced that whale: with passion. But Ahab did have the "advantage" of being offended, illustrating that the world does not disclose itself in the deep recesses of its being unless one has somehow put the mundane attachments at risk. A person needs break he bonds that tie one to trivial interpretations. As with Ahab, it does not always go well. But then, it can go very well indeed, as with the Buddha. How well? Read into the Pali canon. I wonder if this rings a bell, the Abhidhamma. Weird to read, granted, but make the effort to grasp the essentials, and things get very interesting. Even Heidegger thought this contains something primordial.
Talk about primordiality to analytic philosopher and you will get only blank stares.
I wasn't trying to piss him off. I was trying to find where his mind is
Stop harassing people.
Pretty much the same is true of you.
Could you expand on this?
Generally your posts have been reasonable. And you have earned more than one defender... ready to be tetchy on your behalf.
Anyway, the point is that imagination won't get one far in physics, unless one can put one's imaginings in mathematical terms. I'm not so sure the maths is "pure and shiny" either... you might comment on Inconsistent Mathematics.
It is from the Greek, and can be taken to refer to language and logic, and how it is essential to apprehend the world: apprehending the world, taking it in to the understanding, realizing what things "are" is all done in the meanings generated by language, and since this already there as essential prior to any specific field of understanding, a study of the way language and its meanings structures the world is considered by many to be where true foundational philosophical inquiry rests. The true bedrock of analysis at the level of the most basic questions is language. The question that is presented here is, when one sees this, and learns to think at this level, the world shows itself as more, much more than language can say. Consider terrible pain as a very simple example. Is my apprehension of pain an expression of logos? Now, my understanding reaches into my vocabularies for different things that bring the pain to light and raise my awareness, but IN this contextualizing, the pain stands out as entirely Other than logos.
Quoting Hanover
I do like the way the Bible takes matters that are foundational and constructs meanings to explain things. At the very least, it shows a regard for matters of fundamental importance that is all but lost in modern culture (busy, busy, distracted). At most, it bares the soul in its primordiality, prior to the "distance" created by culturally valorized trivia.
But let's face it, God didn't say anything. BUT: this saying can be seen as the way language in its iterations, its propositions, its theorizing, its dialectics, and so on, constructs meaningful possibilities that ar beyond language. Language makes it possible for one to see that at the basic level, our ideas are never equal to the ideatum, and our desires are never equal to the desideratum.
Closing in on Hegel here......
How are you defining “primordial” exactly? Is it an abstract term with some concrete meaning, or just a ritualistic and impressive noise one might make - a group identifying chant?
Sure. But in a more realistic way, we can ask how it is that language, "the word", constructs meaning that makes it possible at all to conceive of anything at all. The tree in the Eden was a knowledge tree, so what is knowledge? It is the power of language and logic. We were kicked out of Eden because we developed that supreme violation of comfort and familiarity: the ability to inquire. Nothing but trouble from there.
Language "creates" the world. Prior to this, there is no world; there is what cannot be said, but talking like this raises Wittgenstein's, and the Buddhist's, ire. But once acquired, language is the backdrop of understanding that constitutes a person, who can then drop the explicit, move back into the primordial through the regressive (call it) method of yoga, and let the world speak as it once did.
Language is the technology for negation and absence. It's allows us to say what the world isn't, and that allows us to say what it is.
It makes the world that way.
you guys are creating this whole Wittgenstein like theory about how everything derives from words.
I'd think the way to interpret that line should probably come from a Biblical literary analysis. Otherwise, you guys could be very wrong here.
Lexi is Greek for "word" by the way.
I thought we were talking about how in Genesis it goes
And God said "Let there be light"
And there was light.
It seems to be saying that speech is magic.
You're right, though. The logos in John 1:1 isn't about language. it's more about logic, specifically a rational principle pervading the universe. One of the proponents was Philo, an Egyptian Jew. He was awesome.
The significance of speech in Judaic thought is a thing (tracht gut vet zein gut, and lashon hara), but I'm having trouble correlating that to contemporary linguistic theory.
Surely maths is what converts the intuitions into actual counting? It reveals the degree to which an idea works …. in terms of numbers to be read off instruments and dials.
I see irony here. Kant says we can’t access the noumenal. The pragmatist nods a head and says, yes, that is why we have to turn our descriptions of reality into a mathematical theory that takes as its evidence … tallies of marks that some meaning can be read into.
The constraints of phenomenology can’t be broken. But they can be better organised by a shift from everyday language to a rational structure that accepts, in the end, we are only assigning interpretations to numbers on a dial we claim to have accurately read.
I enjoy the confounding fact that science arrives at its realism by way of stringent Copenhagenism. In the end - to speak of the thing in itself - we just have to convince each other in our little circles of rational enquiry that we shared the exact same idea (some equation), and we observed the exact same numerals appear on a dial just as we were led to expect.
Talk about humble bragging!
Quoting Prishon
But folk are always trying to provide those kinds of intuitive stories. Like a famous celebrity, a particle would cross a crowded room at light speed if it could. But it’s celebrity causes it to become entangled by the cloud of interactions with these well-wishers. It has a mass and so it’s progress is proportionately slowed.
Quoting Prishon
But how else to explain why the weak force is massive and yet the EM photon flies free … at a massless speed of light?
It could be wrong, as indeed any conception of the noumenal could be wrong. But again, that is another advantage of numbers over words. With the logical structure of mathematical claims, the restriction of all claimed evidence to numbers publicly displayed on the dials of instruments, the mathematically-expressed proposition can just be flatly wrong. Everyone present can point at the dial and laugh at the great embarrassment of the failure of a prediction.
But let folk mess around with words and they can come up with any number of confusions that claim to be “theories”, yet fall short of the dignity of even being able to be wrong.
Words are of course very good at telling truths, or falsehoods, at an everyday social level. As theory and evidence, that is the language game they were designed for.
But science is mathematically-definite claims married to numerically-precise acts of measurement. Agreeing that the appearance of a number on a dial proves a theory and ain’t just a lucky fluke requires another level of statistical super-structure. However that supports the general contention here.
So if you think the Higgs mechanism could be wrong - that there was something shonky about the dial reading at CERN - your doubt doesn’t mean much until it is elevated to a level that is itself framed with a technical precision.
Quoting Prishon
You can’t both want to go public with your private theories and reject the rationale for that public approach.
Again, science is about making rash counterfactual claims in a completely public fashion - one framed with mathematical definiteness and so as little as possible wiggle room. Then the evidence is also public. We can all read off the numbers for ourselves.
Obviously you keep mentioning your pet theory that speaks of the Cosmos as a 4D torus in a 5D space that spits out 3D rishons. It sounds a bit mathematical. But is one a Euclidean manifold, the next a material field, the final step a spray of particles? What kind of “not even wrong” confusion of words are you throwing together here - even if it is very easy to see the labelled diagram of three kinds of shapes you likely have “in mind”.
Sure, I can visualise a drawing of a flat manifold with a hovering torus and jets of “rishons” and “anti-rishons” spurting out from both sides of its Janus-arse. Your word picture is constructible. But that ain’t sufficient proof it is true, let alone that it has the necessary logical structure to be making any grand claim about the Universe.
I think Constance is connecting it to existentialism. She's wanting to make the same kind of point Sartre was making, and opposing that to Wittgenstein, maybe.
Well then, the proof is in the pudding. Clarity simpliciter is not the issue here. It is clarity at the sacrifice of substance. The substance I have in mind is the final confrontation of philosophy whereby the world reveals it own inner militation against any thesis that would possess it. The simplicity here is the final simplicity, whereby one acknowledges that all along it is not the pursuit of conceptualization and its endless inventiveness that is sought by philosophy, but value, and here, not the endless valorization of novel amusements, but existential simplicity: the eternal present. Herein lies God.
Odd that you make that left turn into "energy and its information" for it is a move away from where you might have headed, which is the analysis of meaning and difference (and deference). Or: diffusion of meaning in the positive assertion. One cannot say what a thing is and have the meaning fixed and singular, as if the saying definitively grasped what it was. More basic than logic, for it goes to the very possibility of a positive assertion.
Quoting Pop
Sounds like you're close to something, but then ...information?? Counterpart in the real world? At any rate, the construction of relation as constituting meaning is close to a good point, I think. The distinction: can you elaborate? say more about this "counterpart" if you would.
Still, you havent talked physics with that guy proshin.
Actually, it's not the Higgs mechanism discovered at CERN. It's the particle that goes along with the field.
But looking forward to your book! Good luck.
My book?
What do you mean by this?
But go back to the beginning: the good? What do you mean by this word? Why do you take this God idea seriously? I mean, if you're going to talk about God, why not put aside traditional metaphysical notions God being a necessary being or a changeless being? What does this term 'God" mean; address this question, then move on to implications of His being.
God! Or a joint effort of more of them. The usual meaning of a beginning doesnt apply to his act of creation. His word must not be taken litterally. He usher the words "let it be", and the universe, in its eternity, came to be. It's the eternal and infinite universe we see today. Describable by physics (and math describing the physics) as far its material an spatiotemporal structure is concerned. God(s) stands on the outside of it (again, not an outside applicable litterally, as outside the house) and on the inside as well, as he created the universe from within himself.
So when you curse, God(s) curse(s) himself (themself). Comit suicide and you kill a part of God(s). Not that he (they) would mind, after all, that would be to confess his (their) own fallibility.
You touched upon it with your quote from Wit. Dig a little deeper and you find that the relationship of two things, is the metaphysical base of logic. It turns out that this relation, or interaction is information. A bit much to unload here, but If you skim this short thread, you'll get the idea. :smile:
Infinity, forwards in time, into the future, is not a problem; in a sense, we have all the time in the world.
Infinity backwards into the past, however, boggles the mind; how can the universe have experienced infinity, that's what's implied, to get to this point (the here and now)?
Thus, for that reason, we're always thinking about beginnings. In short, all this talk of beginnings are symptomatic of our inability to comprehend infinity with respect to the past. Can the past be infinite? This is the question that "in the beginning..." actually seeks an answer to. So, can the past be infinite? Yes/No, Why?
Then why there is a problem backwards, in the past?
I wish I knew but I did say,
Quoting TheMadFool
What do you think?
"how can the universe have experienced infinity, that's what's implied, to get to this point (the here and now)"
I get your point. If you roll time backwards (which is the same as reversing all velocities of the particles in it though you might counter that this doesnt reverse expansion) it all comes together again. In the future it all matter ends up accelerating away from each other to infinity. Cant there be processes like this following up one another? BB- to infinity-BB-to infinity, etc. No bound in time or space.
If you really think about it, when we consider the notion of cyclical time, what we're actually saying/claiming is that matter & energy, their innumerable configurations that create the universe, is cyclical. The cyclical model is a model of matter-energy and not of time. Think of it like a wheel rolling on a flat surface - the flat surface is linear time but matter-energy is the wheel, cycling through all the various permutations possible, that being finite, the process ultimately repeating.
Beginning only makes sense, if the beginning had been recorded, faithfully archived, witnessed and experienced. Begin is a word that the subject of beginning utters, and declares when the process of the beginning actually begins. Or later recalled by other minds when given the detail of the beginnings with the faithfully archived data and information.
When these elements are missing, beginning becomes just a meaningless conjecture, imagination and fiction, therefore an empty word, no fault of philosophy or language.
Another thing about beginning is that, it is a psychological judgement on something. There is no such an object called beginning in the real world. The universe does not have anything called "begin". What we call as "begin" might be the end of something in the universe, but actually the universe might not even care what we think, call, judge about it at all.
So we might be looking at something projecting from our mind that actually doesn't exist in the universe. Therefore there is nothing strange or absurd about the origin of the universe is not knowable to us immediately.
Kant didn't deny the dark place where words cannot go, but he simply drew the line where meaningful perception can be made and where it is not possible.
BB is a hypothesis that you have the universe but the beginning is missing. When the moment of beginning is missing, the only thing possible is again just speculation, imagination, conjecture and guess. The creation of the universe stories in the religion have the full elaborations of the creations in the archive, but we don't know who even wrote them, and again no one was present when the alleged creation was taking place. Hence the mystery of the universe's origin remains and continues.
We still have no firm and clear definition of the universe either. Is the universe one and single entity? Or are there multiple different entities of the universe littered all around in space? Do we even have a clear objective definition of what the world is?
Not quite along the lines I had in mind. Don't think about temporal priority, rather think about logical priority as in something presupposing another and the other then is logically prior to it, meaning you cannot conceive of the one without the other. So, what is prior to this whole enterprise of talking about big bangs and creation is the process of thought itself that is presupposed. Thought is not a mirror to nature, but is extremely opaque, with its logic, vocabularies, semiotics, and its signifiers and signifieds, and on and on.
As for God, it is not a vacuous concept, but begs to be put under the microscope of inquiry: what does it mean? Its meaning is laid bare by examining what is present in the world to find what it is that the concept does, what it is a response to, why it was ever conceived, and so on. So before one talks about God, one needs bring out this essential meaning.
But then, it is this Kantian prohibition I want to put to rest. Take a qualified Hegelian look at Kant: What lies before your eyes is a microcosm of God, unfinished, but in it there is the noumenal presence, and there is no sharp line that sets noumena off from phenomena. Beyond Hegel, I invite one practice the infamous phenomenological reduction (Husserl) in order to witness a world reduced to presence.
Of course, there is a world of argument here, through Derrida and beyond (see the French theological turn in Michel Henry, Jean luc Marion, et al). But basically i agree with working to divest theory of its metaphysical encumbrances as well as its scientific encumbrances, and I actually believe this can lead to something revelatory, call it Husserl's yoga.
Sure. Which experts do you have in mind? How about Heidegger?
But Kierkegaard (and I am in the middle of Paul Ricoeur Time and Narrative. see how he handles it) will "leap" upon this: that past is always already (not his language, of course) the present, for every moment of cognition that can call the past the past, is not executed in the past, but the present, and the past "adumbration" (Husserl) is really a subsuming present.
For me, there is no way out of this, though Heidegger would say I am with Husserl, walking on water, I respond, the world is walking on water: not turtles all the way down, but intimations, foggy but profound, that reveal something extraordinary, occluded by everydayness and the presumptions of science. The trick for me is to follow the reduction to its end: the more reduction, the more givenness, is Michel Henry's way of putting it. He ignores Derrida....of does he? Caputo thinks Derrida is the very height of apophatic theology. His discussion confuses me.
Logos (Greek): variously meaning ground, plea, opinion, expectation, word, speech, account, reason, proportion, and discourse.
The Greek ‘logos’ as presupposed by a beginning has precedence. Yet the ultimate in logos means not just ‘word’ or ‘logic’ - it points to the possibility/impossibility of experiencing the perfect relation or absolute interconnectedness (omniscience). And logos is not alone.
What else is presupposed by a beginning? Aristotle refers to logos alongside ethos and pathos in terms of one’s capacity or potential to persuade. Except an ultimate notion of ethos is not just about character, but points to the possibility/impossibility of achieving quality, or excellence (omnibenevolence) through distinction. And the ultimate in pathos is not just about feeling or motivation, but points to the possibility/impossibility of tapping into an infinite source of energy (omnipotence).
It is at the intersection of these possibilities/impossibilities of absolute, infinite perfection, which both limit and are contingent upon each other, that we find a beginning, the origin of ideas and meaning, to potential and value, and from there to events and ‘beginnings’. No relation, however perfect, could even exist without experience: the possibility of energy source differentiated by quality. And no source of energy, however infinite, is even useful without identity: the possibility of distinguishing the quality of proper relations. And finally, there can be no distinction of excellence or quality without the fundamental laws of physics: the possibility of ideal relation in the use of energy. And vice versa.
And vice versa?
No experience exists without relation.
So they're inextricable? I think I understand what you mean.
Quoting Constance
"In the beginning" there were (are?) vacuum fluctuations.
Remember Wittgenstein in the Tractatus was adamant about stepping beyond what the rules of logic prohibited. There is this line that cannot be crossed, the line of impossible utterances, for what is given to us must be able to be cast in logical structure, which prohibits, for example, talking about the "nature" of logic itself: to explain what logic is, one would have to step out of logic to a point of observation through another medium of symbolic representation, and this would need further to be validated in the same way, and so on. So one is stuck within the self affirming givenness of logic.
But this encourages a positivistic take on analyzing the world at the level of basic questions. Clarity of what logic permits is the best we can do! And this is where my complaint begins, for the world is not clear at all at the basic level, yet it does yield meaning when analysis is brought to bear on it at its foundations. One could call this an apophatic approach to philosophy, which is where the logic takes one: not the dull precision of making finer and finer adjustments in arguments, and not the attachment to empirical science so popular today. Rather, the "openness" of thought that encounters itself, and instead of merging more abstractly into discursive trains of thought, one is brought into the the world "itself", back into Being, into presence.
Of course, all this is much debated. I would say this is exactly where the debate should be.
I take my place among those who genuinely think that philosophy's job is to "discover" something original, beneath the complexity of language and culture and all of its indulgences and presumption, that is the existential basis for terms like divinity or the metaethical good. Real philosophy begins with a reduction method of suspending the vast number of competing claims that clutter thought and give misleading impression that what we seek is complex, like a scientific theory.
What is primordial or if you prefer, originary, is intimated through a pursuit of givenness as such. Of course, such a claim is readily dismissed by most. Such is the thinking that holds whatever can make a cell phone or a flat screen tv must also be suitable for philosophy. Naïve.
Very Hegelian, and not wrong, by my thinking. But what happens when one explicitly allows language's abundance to fall away, and loosen its tacit grip on the given moment? One can do this; it is philosophy's job to do this, that is, to hammer away at assumptions that most don't even know are there. This is a process of litereally unmaking the world, for these assumptions were never inert eidetic entities sitting in some mental basket just waiting to be summoned. They are actively, quite literally, defining the world, making it a familiar place. It is this familiarity that is the enemy of philosophical enlightenment.
So yes, let's say an assertion, an affirmation carries in its meaning the all that is not what sits before one, just as a number sits, in its affirmation, a broad range of contextual "other" numbers. One is not two, but were it not for two, one could not be one, for to apprehend one is a diffuse, "regional" affair, and there is no real singularity.
Then how do my assertions acquire validity at all? It is via the elephant in the room: existence. Put one's attention on the reduction of the actuality that lies before one, reducing its Being to appearance, to phenomena only, dismissing all else. My claim is that this is an astonishing method of foundational thinking that intimates something deeply important about being here.
And this insight is not from a transcendent vantage point?
The passage in John 1:1 is mysticism with roots in platonism and stoicism. I think the assumption running through it was that the world's logic is our logic. We perceive the world's logic through a kind of sympathy that could be described as having access to the divine mind through logic. Or you could say our minds are the Divine mind, just muddied.
Two side effects were:
1. The One, which is a higher, unexpressable truth, and
2. Matter, the mind's dead end.
These are like poles between which the mind swings like a pendulum. And this is the trinity, btw: the Christian translation is Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. The original was One, Logos, and Anima.
Quoting Constance
Yes. The stoics and platonists wouldn't allow that you ever go beyond the pendulum's swing. There's logic that says you can't. The One, if you think if it as a domain, is unified. There's no way to form a sentence in that domain, so if you entered, you wouldn't be able to remember it, because you were never there. You are a product of primal judgement.
You can't extend down into the realm of matter, either, for basically the same reason.
Just an ancient language for talking about the same issues, maybe?
If I'm following...
You're referencing sort of a raw data feed that enters your brain, unprocessed at all by reason. It's a hyper-empiricism, devoid of rational organization within the mind. Was this not part of Kant's project in responding to Hume? That is, we can't see the causation when one billiard ball hits the other, so our mind imposes it, which is no different than all the other things our mind imposes on the world in order to understand it, whether that be space, time, or other sorts of things?
The immediate sense impression you reference doesn't make sense to me because it would necessarily be mediated in some way. That mediation isn't limited to sense organs, but by reason itself, which is in fact impacted by language.
So explain to me the elephant just as it is, unmediated by sensory organs or reason. How could that ever be done - the pure unadulterated elephant?
I can undestand all your doubts and questions abour the meaning and lack of foundation of this statement, which is so basic for the Jewish and Christian worlds. So, the following are my ideas about it, only to reinforce your position.
***
The word "Word" is a translation of the Greek word "logos", literally meaning "word" or "speech". This is the meaning ancient Greeks used initially. But with time it came to mean "reason", which in Greek is "logiki", clearly a derivation of "logos".
Now, "In the beginning was the Word" never made sense to me since the first time I heard it in school. It still doesn't, if I connect "Word" to and with the meaning of speech. If you echange the words, the saying becomes: "In the beginning was Speech". (Not as elegant, of course, but it shows the point.) It certainly doesn't make sense. Yet, Jews and Christians managed to keep alive this meaning with all sorts of explanations, the most important of which are that God created the world by (the power of) his word, that God's Word became flesh (Christ being that Word), etc. Still, all that doesn't make much sense, does it? Instead, I believe that logic and reasoning (the second meaning of "logos") make much more sense ... "In the beginning was Reason". This can be easily extended to mean "Consciousness", something which a lot of thinkers today consider as governing the Universe. "Consciousness" has no language, no face, no location and not time. It really makes much more sense than the materiality of speech. Indeed, just think, would God with all the powers that He possesses, use something material like speech to create the world? So, most probably we are talking about a figure of speech and not actual speech! But even if someone insists to use speech literally, the following --at least-- questions arise from that story:
1) What has speech to do with the creation of something physical like the world?
2) What kind of speech could be that?
3) Did or does this speech have existence or any meaning for other parts of the universe beyond our planet? As far as I know, we don't have any evidence, not only about speech, but even about life in other parts of the universe.
These questions are rhetorical, of course. They rather show the irrationality of the matter. And they can be explained as follows:
We all know about how egocentric Man has been and still is and that in essence he considers this plant as the center of the universe (not spatially, but conceptually). The Bible actually "speaks" as if there is no one else alive in the universe than the Mankind. Everything is said and happens with Man in the center. In fact, not the whole Mankind but only part of it: the Jewish! God delivered the 10 Commandments to Moses. In his language, Jewish, of course. Since then these Commandments, as well as the stories in the Bible, had a huge impact on a big part of Mankind. What about the rest of Mankind? And what about all the other religions of the world that have a different story to tell about the creation of the world?
Now, why "Word" is interpreted literally as speech and not as reason? I have only an idea for that: Speech (language in general, including writing), is the main communication tool Man has. By giving such and imporance to it, the Church and religious leaders and authorities, can then us "The Word of God" (and the "The Word of Christ" in Christianity) as a powerful way to control the faithful, subduing them to the will of God. The Word seems more powerful than action. "Listen to the elderly" is an extension of that, used to force blind discipline. "If you don't listen, ... "That great man said ..." Words are more powrful than actions, examples, reasoning, and so on.
What if they used "Word" as "Reason"? They would impel people to think, to reason, to doubt! "Have faith and not doubt!" is their motto. Authorities know best. You must listen to them. You are no one to doubt them. Makes sense, doesn't it?
Conclusion: Unfortunately, the statement "In the beginning was the Word", wherever it comes from, has no value for me as interpreted by the Bible and the majority of the Jewish and Christian people.
Sure. Ok. I've used that answer when people ask how something can be created from nothing. They just say the quantum vacuum isn't nothing.
Usually I retort 'Yeah well, a thing has structure and the vacuum does not have any structure, therefore the vacuum is not any thing (which is why the vacuum fluctuates, or "is unstable" as Frank Wilczek says.)'
A speculative thinker who is almost unreadable and readily misinterpreted is unlikely to help. How about one of the numerous physicists writing on the subject?
That observation from Luc Ferry does draw, in sharp contrast, the different purposes being pursued by using the language of the "Greeks" to connect or not connect to the meanings of the cosmic order as it was expressed at that time.
For some, this meant that the world was involved in another process where the unchangeable world described by the Greeks did change.
Another group wanted to prove that the desire for the cosmic order was really about seeking an even more unchangeable thing than what people had previously been asking for. This group wanted to appropriate the efforts of previous philosophy where the other group could not have cared less.
The word God means moral perfection and innocence. Such a state seems impossible for humans and for a necessary being, although not for a lower "god". There cannot be a being of Pure Act because virtues are divided up between ones a being can have by nature and ones that require the eye of the tiger to obtain. There might be a being of infinite innocence but it couldn't have the maximum of courage if it was always in a blissful changeless state "rolling around heaven all day". Again, there is innocence and acquired goods, childhood-natural goods and goods that must be performed. So are there wizards and a pantheon? Are these who "aliens" really are? It's not bad to think so. I listen to a lot of traditional religious music and connect with the mystical ethos of it. But all this talk of the world coming from a language, whether it be of Genesis or an Om, goes back to the paternal Pure Act being of traditional religion who in reality can't represent all reality because some goods in reality must be experienced in order to partake of.
Is man then morally perfect? Or comes the devil to play around? And the apple to take away innocense? What is the difference between the word of God and God? Does he use His words as we do? Does he create a beginning like we do? What starts his talking? A desire to express?
Anyway, I wasn't disagreeing with you. It's just that I've never found that the quantum vacuum ends any arguments or leads to any resolution in these types of questions.
Man is not perfect as I said
Don't be so sure about that. The description I gave at start is taken from a standard (the biggest) dictionary of the Greek language. So, it is certainly correct. Your reference instead was from a foreign source. And one can find a lot of and different variations from foreign sources ...
Then I said that this meaning was extended to mean "logiki" (= reason), which is a derivative of "logos". Thus, I covered the the meaning of the word "Word" sufficiently enough to expose my view on the subject.
You may know some Greek but certainly not so well as a Greek person, who might be a translator and have all the necessary Greek references for such an analysis.
So try not to reject something that is so analytically described and belongs to a language that is not your native one. You could just bring up your interpretion as an alternative and to be discussed. That would be acceptable.
He "ushers" the words? What could this be? Speak, usher, actually ushering is so vague one might as well leave it alone altogether: God.....then there was a world. But this "then" is a causal word, or is it meant to be sufficient reason, so the creation is simply a mere thought? But thought and speech cannot be separated, can they?
But then, it is the literal I am most concerned with. Not the idea and its intent, obviously, but the simple, albeit ignored, fact that in order to conceive of God, creation, or anything else, one has to conceive, that is, think, use words. It is here, in the language relationship to the world that the term God and creation that such things have to be unpacked. What we find, I claim, is a world reduced to its actuality that has been neglected in all the clutter. Here you find disclosure of what these concepts mean, but it is existential disclosure, not discursive. A reduction (see Husserl's epoche) simplifies.
I skimmed. The metaphysical basis of logic, as you say, and Wittgenstein: you know such an idea is an oxymoron in his thinking?
As to the tutorial, I found it a bit elementary. Not wrong, but a bit off the mark. Such discussion of perceptual knowledge relationships begs the question, what is knowledge? which is presupposed in all this. Wittgenstein's Tractatus draw lines between sensible propositions, and nonsensible one, claiming that even in his own exposition he was in violation. Many take this as they take Kant: an endorsement of positivism, which attempts to reduce what is unclear available, familiar language. this, I claim, cleanses philosophical thought of all that is truly extraordinary about being human, the opposite of philosophy.
This term has a long history. It is taken up to refer to a basic analysis of the world as it is understood, received by the understanding. It is the property of language that makes thought possible as if the thoughts of individuals are strung together by something essential, the very essence of intelligibility, the way the world "discloses" itself in language, if you like.
But don't see how this is all nonsense (or, maybe I do), unless you tell me how.
Yes. You are a bit less forgiving than I am. Not necessarily a bad thing.
First of all, I have not mentioned anything about "wrong dictionary"!!
But since you ask, I googled your description "Logos, (Greek: “word,” “reason,” or “plan”) Logos, (Greek: “word,” “reason,” or “plan”) plural logoi, in ancient Greek philosophy" (as such), to see where you have copied it from and found two occurrences, both in Facebook. The following is copy-pasted form one of these FB entries:
[i]Imran Abdul Jabar
26 October 2020 ·
Logos, (Greek: “word,” “reason,” or “plan”) plural logoi, in ancient Greek philosophy.[/i]
You could at least look in a standard dictionary, which I thoght you did, instead of using a description from an member of Facebook! And then telling me that my description --which I took from a dictionary of Ancient Greek language-- is not correct!
Come on, this is not serious! That's all for me here.
I'm not much interested in his thinking, I was referring to the quote you posted.
Quoting Constance
The relationship of one part to another, is where logical structure begins. This is the beginning of knowledge. Knowledge is related and integrated, and is progressively built upon, such that any subsequent structure ( added understanding ) has to fit existing logical structure, as per constructivism. So, things understood tomorrow have to be understood in terms of today's understanding. So, it is a building onto current understanding.
Occam's Razor is god?
Quoting Constance
Wittgenstein proceeded beyond this; as if the Tractatus were his final word. He subsequently showed the limitations of his view in the Tractatus, showing "the nature of logic" in terms of following and going against rules.
And he had much to say about the identification of simples. What is to count as a simple depends on what one is doing. There's a deep tendency for folk to choose this or that to be the ultimate simple - Logos, information, dialectic (@Pop); but any such choice will be relative to this or that activity - that language game.
So answering the question "what was at the beginning..." - the beginning of what? That'll tell us what game we are playing.
Very impressive Banno. Here begins the world of informational structure. What came first - the thought or the physical structure that enabled it? How are these different? Can one exist without the other?
How does the way you frame the idea of "informational structure" relate to the language games perspective of Wittgenstein?
There is a way to understand the game that Wit refers to. It is a game of the interaction of forms. The forms can be anything physical. It is not so important what form they take, but it is important that they take form. In the interaction of form, everything evolves.
Information is: the evolutionary interaction of form. This is the game as I see it.
To understand the game you need to understand the principles of constructivism, systems theory, enactivism, and information, in the sense I have defined it. The definition of information thread was supposed to enable an understanding of the game, but nobody is interested. Oh well. :smile:
** It is a bit much to unload here. Banno mentioned me and used Wit's quote, so I couldn't resist. Didnt mean to derail the thread.
:100:
I don't think you have derailed the thread.
Constance has asked us to consider the matter beyond the terms of adequate explanations for what we have worked out, more or less, to be adequate.
Nor do I; but I wonder what you think of @Pop's reply.
I'll admit not seeing much in it at all. Saying "forms can be anything physical" doesn't ring with Wittgenstein's analysis. Saying that it's all interactions of forms doesn't clarify anything. Proscribing a definition of information as "the evolutionary interaction of form" simply looks confused.
That's just not how I sue the word "information".
It looks like Pop missed Wittgenstein's point and wants to impose yet another notion of absolute simple.
So I'm left nonplused. I'd be interested in what others see.
My goats run to their barn when I arrive with treats. How do they remember to do that?
Wit did not have the benefit of any of the theories that I mention. So he could not go deeper than word games.
Quoting Banno
In other words, how you conceive the beginning is the start of your informational structure. You build onto that. If you start with god, then you build on that. If you start with energy, then you build on that.
Regardless of how you start and what you build it will exist in some form. This is what we see across cultures, and through the ages - different forms of understanding.
The universe has to exist in some form, and as a consequence, so do all of it's components. We exist in different forms, as does our understanding. These forms are the things that interact in systems theory, and in this process we are enacted into the world in Enactivism.
This is a paper demonstrating contemporary understanding:
The evolutionary origin of form and function - 2014
Abstract: "The evolution of multicellular organisms with complex forms and functional abilities can be accounted for based on a fundamental tenet underpinned by the second law of thermodynamics, with natural selection acting on the ability of the organism to transduct energy (nutrient) most efficiently from its ecosystem by deploying that form and those functions. The information that gives rise to form and function is dispersed throughout the organism in the constituent cellular phenotypes and derives mainly from the interactions between information bearing proteins. The concept of a gene, beyond a means of specifying the amino acid sequences of the peptides from which the proteins are formed, is both mostly unnecessary and possibly misleading."
Note how they are using information.
Seems to me you are just offering yet another game.
It's the overreach that bugs me the most, though. Think I pointed that out before. Taking speculation as gospel, and thinking that it applies to everything.
I'm trying to provide you with an overview of how the game works, but yes, this also necessarily becomes another game. Another form of the game.
If you ground your understanding in a science like systems theory, you too will be able to talk about everything. And the idea that everything is information will make sense to you. It is not very difficult to understand in principle.
As I mentioned before, it has an almost religious fervour. Sure, it explains lots. That's not the same as explaining everything. That's the overreach.
Systems theory enables a view of the universe as an evolving articulation of systems. Where everything is informationally created bottom up and articulated laterally also. It literally is an explanation of everything, except the quantum foam. The foam has to move to form, and thereafter everything is an evolution of form - quite literally. Energy particles > elementary particles > atoms > molecules > cellular proteins > cells, organs, Bodies, families, communities, countries, humanity, the biosphere, the solar system, the galaxy, and the universe are all interrelated and interacting systems, evolving together. What they have in common is physical form. This physical form is endlessly variable and open ended, but it is what enables them to interact and evolve. What is interacting is the unique qualities of one system with that of another system. This interaction is information, imo. Information between us serves the same purpose - it allows us to interact and evolve. So, information is the evolutionary interaction of form. Form in this case is the form of one understanding interacting with the form of another understanding. Make sense?
Yeah, as I said, so does god.
Have a look a the thread on Confirmable and influential Metaphysics. The position you are taking strikes me as a "Haunted Universe" proposal, as discussed in the article cited.
Mind AssociationConfirmable and Influential MetaphysicsAuthor(s): J. W. N. WatkinsSource:Mind, New Series, Vol. 67, No. 267 (Jul., 1958)
Can you answer this question? It is a notch deeper than the word game:
What comes first, reality, or the thought that creates it?
That, it ain't.
What you are proposing is not the consensus. Information, complexity - promising areas of research. But again, you want to turn it into something it isn't.
By the way, did you manage to find something that isn't information?
https://isideris.gr/?product=mega-lexikon-tis-ellinikis-glossis
https://www.politeianet.gr/books/liddell-henry-sideris-i-mega-lexikon-tis-ellinikis-glossis-exatomo-156949
https://vendora.gr/items/gmnky3/mega-lexiko-tis-ellinikis-glossis-liddell-scott-konstantinidou-4-tomi.html
It is quite expensive, but anyaway, you have to know Greek, and more precisely ancient Greek!
I wouldn't come back to this exchange but I deem it is fair since you brought up a standard reference for your description. :up: Yet, it is a very bad description, because tranlating "logos" as “word,” “reason” or “plan” is only confusing. One should first tanslate the word literally, as it was initially used ("word", "speech"), and then how it has evolved ("reason"). As for the word "plan", well, it's totally irrelevant! (I wonder where did they get that from!)
I believe this is over now. More than enough has been said on this issue.
They are doing science; you are not.
Good question. I'm guessing they mostly run on emotion. Their memory is emotional instead of intellectual.
Why must you concoct such odd solutions to the question of how goats remember? My dog's behavior (and my cat's and my chickens to some degree) all exhibit behaviors strikingly similar to memory based behavior that I see in those with language.
The idea that when a rainstorm comes my goats run in circles for a covered area, testing each spot for how dry it is, with every new rainstorm a new adventure in searching for cover, is a strange suggestion. It sure looks to me like they run to the barn because they know where the barn is and they know that the barn offers them shelter from the storm. If the roof collapses one day on their head, it'll probably be some time before they go back in, having remembered the time they got bumped on the head.
But the earth also seems to remember that it's supposed to turn on an axis. Clouds remember that they're supposed to rain in low pressure zones.
We assume goats are doing something extra, that involves some sense of self even if mostly unanalyzed.
Is this what you meant, @Constance ? Is accessing the primordial a matter of tapping into something we share with other animals?
Quoting Hanover
Right, but probably because of becoming afraid of the barn, not from realizing that they should check the barn's structural integrity before entering. That's what I meant by emotional memory.
I assume the inner workings of my mind are the same as yours and to a lesser degree my goat's. I'm not sure why animal minds should be treated as operating on some markedly different way than human minds. It seems you're trying to sustain some language based intelligence philosophy and are willing to bend your observations for that. My dog remembers all sorts of stuff. I see it every day.
So why aren't clouds intelligent? Don't your observations show that they are? They don't dilly dally running in circles when they come to a low pressure zone. They go straight to raining as your goats go to the barn
The intelligence I think they're (the goats) lacking is negation. They would need some kind of symbolism to express "Hanover isn't dangerous."
Without any ability to express it, how could they recognize it?
Instead, I think they just feel joy when they see you. Everything they ”think" is positive. That means it can't be intellectual in the way we are.
But to talk about possibility of impossibility points first to the "'words or logic" that constructs concepts like possibility and impossibility. Perfect relation? What is this if not a language construction? Absolute interconnectedness in the logos? What is this if not a logical interconnectedness? That is, the "saying" is always analytically first.
Quoting Possibility
And this tapping into eternity, how does this cash out in analysis? Terms like finitude and infinity are fascinating to me, but it is not as if they are exhausted in the mere utterance, the incidental usage. for the question posed here goes to the structure of time itself. Time, I claim (and I am no more than what I read) is the structure of finitude, and finitude is subsumed by eternity, both, obviously, difficult terms and deserve discussion, but the final discussion to be had on this and any matter looks at the th phenomenological analysis of time. What is time? This is presupposed by talk about beginnings.
Quoting Possibility
Don't know what you mean by infinite perfection. Not that I have no ideas about such a thing, but what you mean is not clear. At any rate, This intersection: is there just this (leaning Heideggarian) construction? Or is there not something, if you will, behind this in the reductive act of suspending all these possibilities? Once you step into that rarified world where language's grasp on the givenness of things is loosened, and meaning is free from interpretative restraint, is there not some undeniable qualitative change in the perceptual event as such?
What you say about identity is quite right, I think, and this then makes a turn toward agency, for identity is general, definitional, as in the identity of a term, a concept, but agency is all about the actuality of what it is (who it is). Most clearly an issue for ethics.
Certainly. But it depends on if you are interested in philosophical analysis or scientific. This latter is not at the basic level, for it presupposes phenomenal presentedness.
A most revealing question: How is it that within logic, we can acknowledge logic's limitation in a way that is non trivial, non abstract? We see delimitations all the time, but these are contingent, that is, set up by equational details, but to question logic itself is not to deny logic, which is impossible, a performative contradiction, but to set oneself apart (Dosteovsky: Am I a piano key?) from it, for logic does not come to us as an empty form, but full of the language and culture that makes a claim on belief, sets the terms of engagement in the world. It is not the logic, but the world and its institution (Kierkegaard's sense of original sin) that occlude something "Other". And we stand on this primordial and very unfamiliar threshold. My claim is that this is where philosophy is trying to take us.
Quoting frank
And to make that dramatic step toward the one: how is this done? Isn't the logos, in this extraordinary affair, simply a term that would possess what it is that lies so impossibly before the inquirer? Philosophy is, one might say, the true final frontier, and the obstacles it presents are about its own structure and history. The utterance itself turns on, militates against, the endeavor! For the finality lies not in a more and more elaborate construction of a grand thesis, as if Hegelian Geist were unfolding in the dialectical path of conceiving it, but in the impossible simplicity that is originally there. Impossible because, recalling Kierkegaard, actuality is NOT rational. Divinity discovery is not rational achievement.
It would be great if you could also give a sign that you have read my reply to your post ( https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/588043) two days ago ...
Take Kant's position, and there you are , this noumenal entity whose very thought structure prohibits access to the noumenal eternity that is the metaphysical setting for, well, where we really are, and what we really are; but you absolutely cannot speak of this, understand this, because it is beyond the categories of thought, as well as space and time. By this account, you night as well just sit back, try to be a good person via the categorical imperative, and drop all pretentions of making sense out of this metaphysics.
My claim (borrowed, put together) is that this conception can only lead to one conclusion: that cat on the sofa is really not a cat on a sofa at all, but I cannot see this because I understand the world only through my cognitive and sensory limitations ( and , I should add, you get the same conclusion with the materialist's assumption that all we actually perceive is the inside of a brain). But consider: the very noumena that is supposed to be utterly hands off to the understanding cannot be exclusive in any way: it is the transcendental whole, all inclusive, and this include the this obsevable world. Finitude and infinity are not mutually exclusive; rather the latter must subsume the former, and this means my perception of the cat being on the sofa is no less noumenal than that which is supposed to be beyond the threshold of Kantian epistemology.
The elephant in t he room is this "presence" that is noumenal that is right there IN the empirical event unfolding before my eyes and mind. Looking for eternity, divinity, the absolute is therefore a matter of destruction of the conceptual dynamics that keep this extraordinary apprehension at bay.
Real meditation is destructive.
The elephant as you've described it here is the phenomena, not the noumena. If not, how do you distinguish the phenomenal and noumenal?
How do I conclude you are intelligent and not a cloud responding to pressure zones?
Yep. 'In the depths of our hearts the light of God is shining on a soundless sea with no shore.'. --. Rumi
Quoting Hanover
I think you're making assumptions. It's not from observation, that was my point.
I tend to agree with a lot of what you say, the gist being that talk about "the word" really should be taken as a way to describe God's creation of the world, or, the foundations of existence, and so on. This is an absurd presumption of language and a testament to the boundless need we have to bring things under our control. It is on this point I would begin a response. While this anthropomorphic tendency certain does lead to absurd thinking, it is important to observe that the anthropomorphic presence is also presence of what is not anthropomorphic at all, for to see that this cup on the table is a "worded" situation, that is, I think about the cup, the table, "being on" something, and so on, even if I don't explicitly say this on recognition. And when I look up and behold all things, there is the stamp of logic and language all over it; it is what makes the world familiar to the understanding for us (not so much animals, and this is an interesting point for another time).
Any presence that comes before a person is a thoughtful presence, otherwise it is not a presence at all, as in an infants mind blooming and buzzing, there is no presence of anything until singularities are carved out of the world via language (the notion of mere familiarity and language being joined at the hip is an interesting one). So, when it comes to something being at all, we are deep in language, the word. The foundational analysis of existence must be about the language that separates, individualizes and carves out meaning out of "difference".
When the issue of God and creation and the beginning of all things, one way to think of this is to respect that language brings "the world" into being qui9te literally. Now, what is beyond language is another matter, but it needs to be approached not as a distant metaphysical impossibility, but a very close, intimate one: after all, the language in question is all over the place, there, when I awaken in the morning in eerything.
My thinking is that we need to allow the term beginning loses its value here altogether, just as you say, but this must be done in the intimacy of the actual encounter with the world, not with an understanding historical metaphysics of the Bible and Jewish metaphysics (though this latter brings to mind things I know little of, but have gathered some through Levinas and Buber and other who live in two worlds, really, philosophy and religion. If you have something interesting to read on this, let me know).
Sure, and my point was that unless you're going to fall into some sort of solipsism, you have to make assumptions based upon the observations you make. My goats engage in intentional behavior that clouds and rocks do not. The rock does not stubbornly sit before me refusing to respond to change in a literal sense.
But, if there is some philosophical theory that will unravel for you if it requires you hold that goats cannot engage in intentional conduct, and I have to use the cloud analogy to substantiate that goats don't engage in intentional conduct, then I feel fairly satisfied in rejecting whatever that theory is.
But these comments are altogether vague. My experience tells me you haven't read Heidegger at all. Physics presupposes exactly what needs to be examined, therefore, they say little or nothing of philosophical interest.
Thank you for your reply to my comment to your to[pic, @Constance!
I liked the presentation of your posistion. Very good. :up:
But when you go to observe clouds and rocks, don't you think you might be influenced by your worldview? If you saw an indication of intelligence in rocks, wouldn't you speed to explain that away?
Our ancestors from around 5000 years ago didn't do that. You'd be considered crazy and possibly evil if you doubted that the world around you is alive with peeping, knowing, invisible eyes. Your observations would back that up.
Quoting Hanover
Sure looks like it.
Quoting Hanover
I don't have any theory that must hold sway. I was asking sincerely how one would remember things without language. I'm not sure how that would happen. Like muscle memory? Like the memory of an aroma where you literally smell it again by the magic if cranial nerves?
Where have I stated that I am doing science? I do theory.
That everything is information is already implied in Systems Theory and Enactivism, but I hone in on it in ways that they haven't. Specifically I define it, and through this definition have found that nothing can exist outside of information - outside of the interaction of two or more forms.
Normally we would say we can write data to a hard drive, and move the hard drive form one room to another, and hence we think we have moved information. This is not true. This is the same problem as Schrodinger's cat. No matter how certain we are about what's in the box, we can not know for sure until we open it. The same is true for the hard drive, we can not know if there is any data on it until we read it. This, and many other similar illustrations validate my definition, such that it is predictive and can be used scientifically to probe situations logically - situations that we cannot directly observe. Of course I state this as a belief.
i will put aside much of this. Sorry, because people who think like this are often very good people; I just take issue with what I call bad metaphysics. I would put attention to the interesting parts. For example, moral perfection and innocence? Infinite innocence? Here is a problem: infinite innocence, or, pure innocence. This idea suggests one can do no wrong because one IS a perfectly good will. Being a perfectly good will does not guarantee perfect actions since perfect actions are actions in the world, and all that is in the world is contingent, and knowledge of the world is requisite for action. To know the world is to know all about ethical entanglements, their complexities and the institutions of culture and language that make them so, and this is the very essence of what is NOT pure innocence. A purely innocent person is like a child, full of joy and spontaneity, but really not challenged in the ways of intersubjective thinking.
Then this talk a "paternal Pure Act". I frankly don't like the paternal part, but I do like the idea that "some goods in reality must be experienced". But what IS this Good that needs to be experienced? You can say it is a good of divinity, but then, what is there in the world that suggests divinity? It really does come down to this: We make claims, assertions, but the validity of these depends on the world having something that "says" this. The world must speak first! to warrant any claim at all. What is there, I ask, in the world, that gives warrant to this "Goodness"?
Does that conclusion amount to a rejection of a claim that something else can be recognized outside of the stories we make to explain things?
Ah, there it is again: Stove's Gem.
I taste oysters only with my tongue, and hence I never taste oysters as they really are.
As if this meant one never tastes oysters.
SO there's the problem with the OP. If you adhere to Stove's Gem, if you never taste oysters, of course you can't recognise the beginning.
The alternative is to recognise that you do taste the oysters. The noumenal is a misleading nonsense.
I believe the world has bad and good elements. Just like God, or the universe, or whatever, it's just the essence of reality
Yes, nothing can exist outside of the interaction of ideas, but the interaction of ideas has a physical basis in neurobiology, and given a systems understanding, a similar such situation must have evolved outside of mind initially. So the evolution of informational structure in mind is equal to the evolution of informational structure outside of mind. So there is only one way for informational structure to evolve, and everything that evolves is informational structure. So panpsychism is the obvious conclusion.
It will take a while for this to get over the line, :lol: and I think the showdown will be in cellular biology, where greater resolution of what is going on due to technology, is pushing opinion towards a recognition that what we are seeing is mind like. As suggested in the paper cited earlier. It concludes with the comment : "The concept of a gene, beyond a means of specifying the amino acid sequences of the peptides from which the proteins are formed, is both mostly unnecessary and possibly misleading."
I think this is as much as any academic who values his tenure can say at the present moment, but more and more are starting to say it, it seems.
So, is that to say, that you consider the challenge made by Constance to be irrelevant to your enterprise?
That's a good response; Pop's path has the hallmarks of idealism.
Can you point me to the challenge please?
I was referring to this:
Quoting Constance
I don't take issue with this at all. In fact, it is the kind of thing Derrida makes a big deal out of: after all, if (following Saussure) relationships is the kind of thing knowledge IS, then this makes knowledge indeterminate, for the relationship is not direct, but diffuse among that which is not posited but is in relation to what is posited, and the relation itself becomes a part of positing. Nothing singular can stand out, ever. Logical structure refers not to the form of knowledge but the content, and affirmations, say, scientific ones, hold their place only because they await sufficient cause, that is, dialectic opposition, to change. This is Kuhn, or close to what he says in Structures of Scientific Revolutions.
Rorty loved Kuhn, and Rorty helped me confirm some basic ideas. His trouble was that when he got to that threshold where he knew knowledge did not cling to the object, had no ontological claim to the "what" of the thing, he did what all goo d intellectuals do: he dismissed all non intellectual alternatives. Never occurred to him (that I have read) that deconstruction really meant destruction to achieve insight. Can't imagine his type "sitting quietly, doing nothing", but then, this is what I privilege over all esle, for it opens the door to, well, sheer openness, which is where philosophy is directing us.
Not so much the efficiency of reasoning as the simplicity of encounter. One is not simply cutting out what is not required to explain X; one is rather asking more originary questions. You might say it is Occam's Razor at the level of basic questions, such that the superfluous premise becomes the presumption of speaking/writing at all. Occam's Razor is about an explicit act in theorizing, but it can never, ever be rid of the foundation of thought that makes thought itself possible. The best one can do here is allow philosophy to do its work, which is the destruction of assumptions that are implicitly at work defining the world at the basic level.
Quoting Banno
But Witt never thought that language had a place in giving expression to those spooky, mystical, threshold experiences one encounters that yield meaning without perfect clarity. By his standard, he was simply avoiding vacuous thinking. By mine, he set a standard that explicitly denied talk about the most interesting things about being human. Take a problematic term like "ultimate reality". You find this in the Pali Canon in the Abhiidhamma. Wittgenstein said that such terms make no sense, that they are logically impossible terms because even a word like reality, this absolute that is all inclusive, has no possibility of an alternative, an opposite, and terms make no sense if their opposite cannot be conceived (one cannot conceive of an up with out a down, e.g.). But then, there is this awkward intuition that does not listen to logical objections like this, nor does it refute them. Rather, it is IN the indeterminacy that language must deal, elucidate, elaborate, and so on.
Hence, my thoughts on Witt. regarding tis matter. The "game" is certainly afoot, but the point I am making is this: language games are open is the sense that interplay is indeterminate, endlessly reinventing (the world, Rorty and his pragmatist predecessors say, is made, not discovered); but I am claiming there is something that is NOT a game at all in the middle of all this, which is intimated when the game is intentionally, if partially, terminated, yet inquiry moves forward.
Heidegger thought the Buddhists were on to something. I think he was right.
Interesting question. First, an animal can remember without words. Second, I think for us, the words are there and provide a backdrop of remembering, as with all those familiar affairs, but if something novel occurs, it finds its place first within this backdrop, but if it it is truly novel, a new paradigm is needed. If God started appearing here and there as an intuitive and undeniable presence, we would not leave language to make this affirmation; rather we would assimilate the experience, but IN this assimilation, God would remain God, like a new color (as unimaginable as this is) would remain what it is, but would be understood contextualized in the usual way.
Well, that's not what I would have supposed, although care is needed here. Russell commented that "Mr Wittgenstein manages to say a good deal about what cannot be said". Much of the Investigations, and also of On Certainty, touches on this topic, which his biographers agree was for him or the highest importance. Wittgenstein's enterprise is targeted at the enterprise of scientism; for him what is of the greatest import is what is unsaid.
We can either deconstruct to achieve insight, or construct a big picture consistent with science and physics which I prefer to do. And when I do I find it is all about the evolution of forms. These forms are all self organizing, and they are made of endlessly variable informational structure. So really, everything can be reduced to the self organization of information. We know what information is - the evolutionary interaction of form, but we don't know what self organization is. We know self organization is what creates order in the universe, from which structure and life evolves.
When I consider this issue, I find that if I say self organization is caused by God, or physics, or the anthropic principle, etc. I do not change what it is, but I change myself. I limit my ability to experience reality. It becomes something like Wit's word game, or as I prefer to call it information game. Ultimately this becomes a process of information, where what occurs is an interaction of forms. :smile: So we cannot escape the fact that everything is information, because everything is information from every perspective.
So it makes sense to me not to define the source of self organization, rather to call it consciousness, and this way there is consciousness and information in its many forms. This way I do not limit my ability to experience reality, and in this knowledge I also learn to respect the various forms of reality of others.
Analytical is kind of the opposite to my approach. But I think I get where you’re coming from. And I didn’t mean absolute interconnectedness IN the logos, rather logos AS the ultimate idea of interconnectedness.
Possibility/impossibility points to the quality or diversity of the idea(l) - what do you think logic constructs its concepts out of? Itself? And construction requires a source of energy. Perfect relation is paradox, because nothing else is necessary. And if this paradox exists, then any and all of them do.
Quoting Constance
Interesting that you read ‘an infinite source of energy’ as ‘eternity’. The finitude/infinity of energy is the paradoxical quality of time, and the qualitative flow of energy is time’s directional logic. Have you read Rovelli’s ‘The Order of Time’?
Incidentally, I think talk about anything is just a way to test our reasoning, which I would argue is more than the sum of what we read.
Quoting Constance
Yes, there is not just this possible prediction, but also its negation - the impossibility of it all. You’re presuming a ‘perceptual event’ has form: a definable quality to be changed. But any perceptual event is qualitatively variable in itself - it manifests variable observation events according to a predictive relation, but it’s also variably perceivable as such. So it isn’t so much change as a vague awareness of variability - on the periphery of any capacity for perception. That either draws attention and effort (affect), or not. It’s not undeniable - it comes down to an availability of energy.
Quoting Constance
My point here is that at this intersection we must embody energy, logic, quality, or some combination, in order to relate to anything at all. You agree that any quest for an unlimited source of energy is one of identity: it assumes that everything has a proper, definitive relation to everything else, and if we somehow manage to complete this process of identification, then the source must reveal itself. It’s an issue for ethics because to do this we assume that our perspective embodies a proper, definitive relation to everything else.
Conversely, any quest for a proper, definitive relational structure to the world (such as ethics) assumes an unlimited source of energy. The idea that there is an ought is predicated on the assumption that we embody unlimited agency. The reality of human experience is that our own limited attention and effort is selectively focused, and it is only in a proper relation to everything (and everyone) else that we can even approach unlimited access to energy.
Some games invoke the modification of their own rules. That's not necessarily a termination.
I read something about logic being preformatively unquestionable and you lost me.
Is speech material? Anyway, so you think conscious thought and its reason was there in the beginning of all things? As if God were a rational being who set out to create something? You take issue with the Word, but I think few take this literally. It is more about what you think: in the beginning was the rational creator who fashioned all things according to a rational plan, and so forth. But you know there are terrible flaws in this reasoning: You have to deal with Kierkegaard who argues against this Hegelian view by pointing out that the world of actuality bears nothing of the rationality that is supposed to be its defining feature. The stuff of things is qualittively different from reason. And the ethics of this world, grounded in being kicked around by viruses and other diseases, and all the lovely torments we know so well, as well as the joys indulgences: this has nothing at all that is rational about it. Falling in love is not a rational affair. Of course, you are saying that God's (just a place holder term, really) reason is not apparent to us, but then there is the matter of following the bread crumbs of life: one begins with the world, and infers from it what is the case metaphysically (in order for metaphysics to be at least prima facie adequate). And this world/creation is not rational. WE are rational, and WE are ethical. Then God created US?? But where is there evidence for something like this?
I don't buy into creation myths at all. But you do say consciousness has no language, location or time. No language? Language is logic and meaning. No language, no logos, for language is the bearer of logos, the evidence for positing logos that comes before us giving rise to inquiry at all. So you can't say outside of language. TIme? But it takes time to utter this, and time to conceive at all. How is reason and logic supposed to be outside of this necessary condition? Location? Same objection.
Well, you have touched on the very point: Kant was wrong to make this prohibitive distinction. The noumenal is the most inclusive concept imaginable, and this present moment of p henomenological plenum is inherently noumenal; we just don't see it this way because we are too, well, busy. It's philosophy's job to undercut all this by asking foundational questions. It is a destructive enterprise. As to what noumena is when one finally realizes it is there, in the touch, the sights and so on of the phenomenal world, this is presently out of bounds to our concepts, NOT because the world is different from reason (which it is), but because language is a shared exchange of meaning, and this, call it mystical engagement, has not been collectively realized. This, however, in no way diminishes what it is.
No, no, no...That's not it. It is certainly not the case that I do not taste oysters when I taste oysters. But point here to see that the tasting is one thing, the proposition is another. The latter is an interpretation of the affair before you. So, if the matter is contextualized such that talk about oysters and how they taste makes sense, then you have a seamless (roughly) contingent account using the familiar vocabulary. But take the matter to the order of philosophical inquiry, THEN interpretations change, and here, since we are in the throes of what I call "good metaphysics" contextual conditions become very different, extraordinary. The tasting, and even the propositional counterpart, become subsumed under the metaphysics, and the metaphysics is not merely a dialectical spinning of wheels: it is real, in the encounter.
What else could it be?
Definition of "speech" by Oxford LEXICO: "The expression of or the ability to express thoughts and feelings by articulate sounds." Aren't sounds material?
Quoting Constance
No, I din't say that. I only said the "Word" ("logos") as "speech" doesn't make sense in ths famous Christian quote and I just tried to give a better explanation by considering the meaning that word "logos" acquired with time, and that was "reason" ("logiki"). This is much more plausible since reason is beyond any borders imposed by languages (speech), religions and civilizations. And this because its nature is mental, spiritual and not material. The expression "conscious thought" which you are using is very close to it. The word "Consciousness" that I used, is also very closely connected to "Thought".
Yet, as plausible as this "version" may be, I cannot claim anything more about it, since I have not has any realization about Consciousness being "the beginning of all things" as you say. A lot of thinkers calim or believe that, though.
Anyway, once more and to conclude: I am not a proponent of the idea or theory that the Universe was created by Reason. I just brought up "reason" (logiki, from logos) as a better interpretation of the word "Word", interpreted as "speech" in the Christian world.
So you want to do philosophy of language, but vaguely back it up and give it a sense of authority with references to the Bible (and other assorted scriptures)?
No. For the ordinary person, they are the same.
For the ordinary person, with physics, the story is a given too, and one spends one's time trying to make the world fit the story.
Hi again. I'm sorry, I had not enough time to respond to your whole comment. But here's more of me! :smile:
Quoting Constance
OK, but is this actually an interpretation of "In the beginning was the Word" or just an opinion about some being (creator) who created the world? See, there are a lot of such interpretations, esp. coming from East. So, we have to stick to our Christian quote and esp. the word "Word" or "logos". At least, this is how I understood your topic ...
Quoting Constance
Idem.
Quoting Constance
Good! I don't either. And "In the beginning was the Word" is one more of 'em! :smile:
Quoting Constance
Good that you mentioned this! I didn't think at the moment that "has no language" could be taken to mean that it does not contain language. Of course it does! And it is affected by it. But what I mean is that consciousness is beyond language. Just think this: Man has been always gifted with consciousness, well before he created languages. Language is not the main content of consciousness. Consciousness contains all sorts of things: knowledge, ideas, feelings, etc., which may be common to any two persons on the planet, independently of their native language.
Quoting Constance
Exactly! This is exactly where the quote "In the beginning was the Word" fails. When "Word" is interpreted as "language". BTW, I just read that this quote comes from the Gospel of John, which like all Gospels was written in Greek. So, by "Word" did he refer to the Greek language? That God spoke in Greek? Of course all this is ridiculous talk, but it shows the confusion around the word "Word". And this is more pronounced in English, in which the main meaning of the word "word" is "A single distinct meaningful element of speech or writing, used with others (or sometimes alone) to form a sentence and typically shown with a space on either side when written or printed." (Oxford LEXICO)
In Greek at least , the corresp. and original word "logos" can be interpreted with in another meaning than speech, as reason ("logiki").
I really wonder why haven't they translated the Greek quote at least as "In the beginning was the Reason" ... This would have saved us a lot of time in discussing it! :grin:
Quoting Constance
What proposition, exactly?
Quoting Constance
So you are saying that the cat being on the mat is one thing, the proposition "the cat is on the mat", a different thing? And yet "the cat is on the mat" is true only if the cat is on the mat.
Of course the world is always, already interpreted. Your reaching for, talk of, an uninterpreted world is a conceptual mistake.
How does that observation relate to Wittgenstein recognizing the limits of his enterprise against the background of what has been left out?
Meaning is doing.
So funny you should ask. I'm out of town for the long holiday weekend and the new pet sitter called, apparently upset my dogs cornered her and left her running for safety. Appears they didn't know her and didn't like her visiting the yard. I called my son and had him take over the duties. They know him and remember him.
However they remember him, I don't know, but they do.
I just don't understand what you're saying. If you're saying the phenomenal is all there is, then you're either arguing idealism or you're taking an anti-metaphysical Wittgenstein type stance, but I detect neither in what you're saying.
Sure. I don't either. But I was wondering about the memory of events. How do you remember that "the dogs cornered me when I went over to feed them" without language?
Smart to use a sitter. Kennels are expensive.
I've had dreams that defied contextualization of the usual kind. Forcing it, an image appeared, but I knew some of the dream had slipped through my minds fingers.
Maybe we're surrounded by such images. The cross, the star of David, the yin-yang?
I just do. This idea that every mundane thought must be articulated into language and spoken to oneself is absurd. Perhaps you're describing your own mental processes, but not mine, and surely not Fred's, who clearly remembered "that lady is a stranger, but that young man is not, "
This empirical claim regarding how thoughts must occur pervades so much discussion on this site, it has become sort of a given that then motivates a philosophical position regarding how we're to deal with knowledge, but it's just plainly empirically false. I truly do not think every thought in language, nor is that limited to "how to" thoughts, which seems to be a distinction often made motivated to salvage this nonsense position.
The word 'language' is based on the word 'tongue', and it frequently refers to a format for speech, but we can also use the word to refer to symbols of other kinds, pictures, and what not.
I'm guessing that when you remember being cornered, there is some modeling going on (it's the state of the art scientific view, so not a hair brained philosophical stance).
What you're proposing is modeling without any sort of symbolism? Or at least that's the intriguing notion I'm taking from you.
@Isaac
Can modeling happen without any linguistic or symbolic component? If so, could you explain how?
Quoting Hanover
True, there are those who robotically trot out the same sequence of behaviorist memes in response to whatever they come across on this forum. They are frustrating until they just fall off your radar and you return to real philosophy.
Linguistic, the answer is an easy yes. Aphasia doesn't preclude modelling (although it disrupts it - so there's a link). Symbolically, I'd say it depends on the type of model. Your sensory inputs follow two main streams of model hierarchy, one deals with object manipulation, the other with object recognition. The object recognition stream will have what might be called a 'symbol' as the input for each stage (even if that's just the symbol 'edge', or the symbol 'light'), so yeah indispensable here. The manipulation stage I'm not sure (outside my area of expertise - such as it is) I think it's more process driven, so maybe not describable in symbols? Not sure I'm afraid.
But he is he uncompromising in the matter of discussing what is not to be discussed. He would turn his chair, e.g., to face the wall when the attempt to discuss the foundations of ethics (metaethics) came up. Then see his Lecture on Ethics as well as the Tractatus: No doubt, Witt takes God and religion very seriously (in his notebooks: What is Good is Divine too. That, strangely enough, sums up my ethics.).
My issue lies with his insistence not to talk about the matter, or better, not to talk "around" it, elucidating the periphery, the region where words make partial, even nebulous and obscure, intrusions into the place where familiarity loses its grip.
Language games, I am sure, is derivative of Dewey and the pragmatists and Heidegger, all who came before Philosophical Investigations, and for whom categorical thinking was dismissed in favor of a more fundamental analysis, which is pragmatism, essentially. This is the way I see it: Pragmatism is one of the most defining insights in philosophy of the past century (that I have read. I don't read much analytic philosophy, though. I read Quine and found his Radical Indeterminacy. Indeterminacy in language is a principle theme in post modern thought and Quine and Derrida were saying very similar things, differently).
Any way, there is nothing I can see in Witt that makes the extraordinary qualitative move into discussion about the kind of existential threshold indeterminacy I want to defend.
Well, sure. I would bring in certain analyses that divides the playing field to make it more enlightening. I mean, you suggest that these terms are somehow equalized by their being in the world, and being differently regarded, and this difference equalizes; which may be true if the matter is handled with an eye on just utility. God is a useful term, used to wipe out civilizations or to bring solace to suffering.
But if one desires to know things at a level of basic questions, doors are opened that are otherwise closed.
I argue that the more one gives the world analysis at the basic level, the more basic level assumptions falter, and this leads to something revelatory, something by the standards of utility is really beyond charted territory.
Not sure what you mean when you state at the beginning that you are not interested in insight, so I am reluctant to bring in a response to the rest. After all, philosophy without the pursuit of insight is like a wheel without a carriage.
I don't think an aphasic person is really language-less, are they?
People who recover report knowing what they wanted to say, but just couldn't access the right words.
If someone was truly language-less, how would we know modeling was happening? By their behavior?
I was using it as an example. Most aphasics suffer damage to one of the two main language regions, they don't lose them entirely. The point is that it does seems to affect modelling, but not proportionate to the loss, indicating that if they lost all capacity, some modelling would remain.
Quoting frank
Mainly, if we see modelling in experimental data from language capable people who can express their thoughts, we can then map similar behaviour over to similar regions in language-less people and make a reasonable inference that it represents the same processes. That way we can make a judgement about what is and is not impacted by the loss of language.
The paradox you mention is between logic and the actuality. If you go by Hegel, then the real's rational nature is only imperfectly realized in our current Zeit Geist: it approaches perfection in God's self realization, and because we see only as our unevolved reason permits, contradictions rise up. But all this is awaiting so sort of divine completion in which contradictions fall away. So, all relations do have the stamp of paradox, for one can easily find contradictions everywhere since knowledge falls apart with inquiry at the basic level. This is what, by Hegel's standard, contingency is all about: the imperfection of realizing God's perfect rationality.
Hegel was essentially on your side because he agreed that reaosn in the abstract had no great value. Kant's pure reason is not very important here. What is important is the way reason grapples with what is given, making science what it is. Hegel doesn't separate things from reason: they are parts of the same grand disclosure of Truth in God.
I think Hegel is interesting. Continental philosophers take him seriously (though not as he would like); analytic philosophers don't talk about him except in philosophy history classes. You have to go through Kierkegaard: reason and objects are qualitatively completely different. To me this goes directly to ethics: That pain in your side where you were assaulted with a baseball bat: THIS is rational?? No. It has nothing to do with reason.
Would it be reasonable to guess that a dog, with very similar neuro anatomy and physiology to a human, is modeling without language?
Could that kind of modeling show up in a dog's memories?
Case in point: in another thread, someone commented to you and you responded that they should read my response to that same question because I articulated it better than you. Such is a common occurrence: that you hear or read someone express your own beliefs in a manner better than you could have linguistically expressed them.
This very idea that you can have complex thoughts that you have not and cannot fully linguistically express means those thoughts pre-existed their linguistic expression. That is, you know what you want to say, but you just can't get it exactly right. That 'knowing what you want to say" is primary. The saying it secondary.
But that's in line with my suggestion that nonverbal mental content may be emotional in character.
My belief that you have to protect people when they're vulnerable is heavy on emotion, light on intellect. So when my opponents asked for an argument, I floundered and was just left wondering 'what is wrong with you people?'
Your eloquence came through where my emotion was silent.
Quoting Hanover
Maybe. The non-linguistic modeling Isaac talked about might explain how that's possible.
Why do you reject my claim to you that I have complex mental ideas and thoughts without them being reduced to language? I'm sharing with you empirical data that proves the empirical claim.
Either (1) you don't believe me, or (2) you don't believe the dispute is over an empirical claim. If #2, then we're arguing over definitions and your claim is tautological. Is that what this is?
I mentioned before that it has to do with the inability to express negation without fairly precise symbolism that would qualify as language.
If I were coaching you to communicate well with someone who has limited intellectual capabilities, I would tell you that they hear with their bodies, so to speak. The body doesn't understand "don't" or "not." So give directions in positives. Tell them what to do instead of what not to do.
Tell your dog to sit and stay.
Don't tell the dog not to attack the sitter.
If I'm right that dogs can't understand the significance of "not", and I think I am, can you see why that would limit its ability to form complex thoughts?
See, when I mentioned this to Constance, she was like, 'Yea, Hegel.'. And I was like, to myself, 'Yea, she understands that without negation, there are no propositions because a P is the negation of a negation.'
So it's not just emotion that makes me silent here, it's that somebody on the planet understood and that's enough?
Do you have a dog? My dog definitely understands "no."
These are just such odd claims that are empirically false. I remember my philosophy professor explaining to me the simplistic and limited intellectual capacity of animals, and I thought then (as now) whether he ever spent time with animals.
Intellectual ability among the species is a matter of degree, not type. I'd imagine chimps and baboons would make this more clear, but alas, zoning laws won't allow me those.
Ok.
:ok: I was simply pointing out what seems to be a fact - animals know what negation is. I'm not sure but doesn't animal training involve a carrot-and-stick (reward-punishment/affirmation-negation) schema?
If the dog thinks, "I shouldn't stay in the road." then it would appear that the dog is using language.
We were trying to arrive at non-linguistic thought.
As I said, Isaac's non-linguistic modeling is probably our best bet.
You seem to be of the opinion that negation is limited to human-level languages. How then do you explain the dog's actions? The dog gets up on all fours and moves away from the vehicle's path (negation) , there being no indication of it wanting to do something else (affirmation). I'm just curious. Does that mean dogs have human-level language or are you wrong? I'm not sure.
The point I was trying to make is that we can deconstruct to gain insight, but then we have to construct new understanding in terms of our new insight.
Ultimately what is needed is an understanding of the big picture, into which we can situate our narrative, and insight. This is what I try to do, but on re-reading my comment, I can see you would be hard pressed to understand me. It is a bit too much to unload in this setting. Thanks anyway for the chat. :smile:
I get the feeling you didn't read the post you responded to.
We're trying to arrive at non-linguistic thought.
If a dog uses language, then the dog won't help us with our project.
My dog thinks "I shouldn't knock over the garbage can, " but then he does, and I can tell from the way he's now under the bed that not only does he know he shouldn't have, he doesn't want to get in trouble, so he's hiding.
Well, I can tell you this: I have thoughts which I find hard, sometimes impossible, to articulate.
Yeah, I used to have border collies. I know how intelligent dogs can be.
I don't think that's unusual.
So, does what I said about myself make/break your case?
I wasn't making a case. But I'm sure someone on this forum is just waiting for a chance to not only disagree with you, but insult the fuck out of you.
Start a thread on it. :up:
:smile:
Yes. By what I understand to be modelling. A model is just a device which generates a probability function of producing some result given some input. My model of the table just takes the various inputs (visuo-spatial, locational, sensory, proprioceptive...) and generates a set probability function of a known result (trigger the collection of models likely to produce the word "table", trigger the models to plan the movement of my cup-holding hand...) etc.
We could call the resultant function a symbol 'table' (it functions like one, in that it stands in for an actual table). Abstract concepts can be just such a model, but they don't have any means (that I know of) of actually being in charge of the models which use such concepts.
So my concept 'not' (as in negation) is a higher order model (a model of models), which takes inputs (model) and is likely to produce outputs such as language (using the word "not") and decisions about categorisation (which of the understood models fall into the category {negations}). This higher order model has little to no necessary* effect on lower order models which actually use negation in their functions (for example where inputs are likely to lead to a negation of action).
* I say 'necessary' because they will have some constraining effect, our models are well-networked and each can have promoting or constraining effects on the others. Even something like our higher order concept of [negation] can affect the priors for lower order models using that process, it's just that it's not necessary.
But the issue here has nothing to do with Rovelli or physics. Philosophy is not physics, nor is it abstract speculation. Think of eternity, for example, but withdraw from assumptions that are in place in the everydayness of affairs (of which science is an extension) and move into a more basic analysis, which is the structure of experience itself. The issue of time is fundamentally different, for time at this level is what is presupposed in talk about Einstein's time. Has nothing to do with physicists being wring and phenomenologists right; rather, these are modes of inquiry radically different from one another.
Quoting Possibility
Where you go wrong here is in "vague awareness of variability". One has to pull away from any particular categories of disciplined thinking, whether it is be science of knitting, and withdraw one's attention altogether. Of course, this kind act is usually cognitive, and here, in the idea I am defending, this is true as well, as it is a movement from the particular to the general. E.g., I withdraw from one taxonomic classification to a higher one, and there is no qualitative existential change, only different vocabularies come into to play while others dismissed. Look at the entire enterprise of thought this way, and while certainly qualitative changes are there, in the practice, in the subject matter, after all, biology is not pottery, but the understanding remains steady in the familiar way of things, and when some Kuhnsian paradigm shift does occur, it is MOSTLY assimilative, having to make revolutionary changes out of the normal science's established systems. Where does Quantum physics get its terminology? It is borrowed from existing vocabulary, and modified using metaphorical extensions. The new is always an assimilation of an existing totality (to borrow a term form Levinas, Heidegger, et al).
This provides a working concept to proceed here: Philosophy, I am claiming, is where thought goes when the world exceeds all paradigmatic categories. Heidegger wrote Being and Time just to go here, to the place where thinking meets its terminal point and explanations run out. But (and this is a crucial idea) instead of thinking like a scientist and dismiss what is not known as something always coming, waiting to but constructed conceptually, theoretically, which is an essential part of Heidegger, where Heidegger looks for some primordial language that has been occluded by centuries of bad metaphysics, I claim the reduction to something primordial and profound lies in Wittgenstein;s eternal present. Put Rovelli aside, pick up Kierkegaard's Concept of Anxiety.
Again, NOT at all that Rovelli (I read a synopsis) is in any way wrong, but the terms of analysis are very different. Time, its past, present and future, are here features of the experience that is already in place antecedent to what a physicist might say. (Einstein knew this. He read Kant when very young. He just knew he wasn't going to take on philosophical issues).
Quoting Possibility
Yes and no. No, because this definitive relation is never definitive. All of our concepts are open, evidenced by what happens when you chase down meanings, which is what deconstructionists do, and can sound childlike doing it: What is a bank teller? What is money? What is economics, and so on, and so on. Then, what is a person? What is this, that, and questions are not simply playful antagomisms, but are indicative of the indeterminacy of language (something Willard Quine famously wrote about; and he hated deconstruction...while agreeing!) Concepts are, all of them, open. So what happens, I ask here, when the broadest concept imaginable, Being, stands in openness? THIS is an extraordinary event, to allow the entire conceptual edifice to be "suspended". My claim is that if this is done faithfully, allowing openness its full due, then the world qualitatively changes, for there is no longer any conceptual recourse, no body language into which one can retreat, no "totality" that can subsume all things, for one has breached into eternity.
Energy? Why not shakti, or Brahman? Or thathata? Of course, these terms have different meanings, all of them, but note something important: When Hindus and Buddhists use vocabulary like this, they are understanding the world as it appears, mixed with thought and affect; cognition is not separated from these and objects in the world. How does one privilege ideas in a system like this? According to meaning, and affect is no longer a marginalized phenomenon. It takes center stage in ontology. And saying something like God is Love no longer is just a romantic foolishness.
True, and such it is with being a person. To put it in Rorty's terms, vocabularies are open, waiting to be recast. But again, I say, much in opposition of Rorty and others, not that there is a final vocabulary (bad metaphysics) there are higher vocabularies, and I don't mean just higher as more inclusive; I mean more profound, and yes, that there is such a thing as what you could call existential profundity. It is why religion is so full of cliches like "the power and the glory"--a lot of metaphysical hogwash, but mixed with something else that is certainly not howash.
It doesn't seem likely that you have math floating around your synapses. It sounds like you're saying the brain has something like logic gates to create if-then networks? And these are pre-linguistic models?
But is a concept material? But then, what do I mean by material? Material is at the basic level supposed be the most inclusive term, including pots and pans and abstract thought in mathematics. The idea is that there is this ontology that concludes all of this, but the problem is that there are obvious apparent differences and a term like material is borrowed from the pots and pans contexts of use and extended to include all things? Sure, saying a word, using lips and larynx and the rest is material, as a classificatory term, but ideas, logic, language and meaning, and so forth, these do not fit the category, and for obvious reasons. We want to say all things are one, perhaps, but this one is not materiality, because this would be a violation of the boundaries of the appearances upon which out concepts are drawn. My pen is material, but a thought? It has no feel to is, no weight, no visibility and so on. But these are the defining marks of material, are they?
Quoting Alkis Piskas
I see. So instead of "in the beginning the was the word" is should be "there was reason"; but I thought you had an objection due to words not being sufficiently liberated from the vulgarity of physicality, as if God had vocal chords. Anyway, I would certainly agree that God is not like a person vocalizing the world into existence. It's just that the word 'word' I never took to be this physical event. I equate word with a meaning and its logic. Instead of logos, which sounds more like a reference to principles and laws of logic that are universal, I look at meaning, which is inclusive of affect as well as cognition. This is the original affair that sits before me prior to the analytical separation. There is no separation in base line experience: I think, feel, concern, care all in the single event. Analysis reveals what it is, the what is it does not thereby become a body of analytical pasts. It remains whole. (This is one way to talk about a complaint against rationalism existentialists have.).
Consciousness, I agree, is closely connected to thought. But more that this: it IS thought. I tend to think like this: When we talk about consciousness, it is an ontological matter, as consciousness Is the ISness of my egoic presence, call it a transcendental ego. But to talk about this sans thought, reflection, reason, affect, mood, and so on, is to reduce consciousness to a pot or a pan or a star cluster, a mere presence before my eyes sort of thing. But clearly consciuosness never comes before one's eyes, so this classification is simply off the table. And since our notion of things are evidenced only by the way they appear, and consciousness never makes an appearance (like this) it is entirely wrong minded to infer from object appearance's concept of Being or Reality, to that if a consciousness.
Quoting Alkis Piskas
The beginning of all things in my thinking here has to do not with some temporal order, but outside ot a temporal order, in the here and now. How is this possible? It gets very weird, frankly. One has to make a critical step out of familiar thinking. But look: putting all texts in abeyance, at least explicitly, observe the world before you, and there are tables, chairs, a computer and so on. My view (constructed out of readings) begins with the question what is it that lies before me? And, how do I know these things? Ontology and epistemology. I know them in time, or better, they are constructed or made out of time, for these are presented to me as events in which memory is called up to identify. Thus, this present is made of the past, to put it bluntly. But I am trying to acknowledge the present thing there before me, so how do I get to the present when the past is the very essence of "knowing" it is there at all?
Such is the dilemma. I claim that the "metaphysics of the present" is a real possiblity. This claim goes against most others. They are mistaken. They don't indulge the aesthetics of the real enough; such is the bane of the intellectual philosopher, so busy constructing thought, it isn't meaningful to think that the point is to dismantle thought. How does one dismantle thought? This is philosophy's job: make the eternal present a real event by undercutting memory's hold on the present via inquiry at the level of basic assumptions.
This about the Bible: I have a lot of respect for what you could call primitive authentic experience. Ideas so full of nonsense, yet they are closer to the foundation of something deeply important.
Authority with references to the Bible? Really, it's the other way around: philosophy brings analytic clarity to obscure thinking. What kind of authority did you have in mind?
Take a look at my later comments. I try to go more into the issues you raise. ) I wrote them this morning not having read this post of yours here.)
"I am tasting an oyster," for one. There is, in this event, a great deal of language involved, though it is not explicitly exercised in the actual tasting event. When I walk out in the morning and see all around me as familiar, the trees and hills, etc., if I were, say, a feral child all grown up sitting on a limb like Tarzan, things would still be familiar, and I might even be able to wonder existentially in some simple way, but how far could this go having no schooling, no language modelled around me giving definition to things? It is language articulates the world in symbols and makes inquiry and logic accessible. Language is the essence of thought itself. I imagine Tarzan would be more like a beast of the jungle than a king.
So, as I taste something, I know I am tasting it, and the tasting event emerges out of a matrix of language that has already established a working understanding. Right there, behind the tasting, if you will, there are "regions" of language possibilities waiting for context to "speak" that is, give meaning to, the occasion.
Quoting Banno
No, I'm not saying that either. I am saying something that is frankly radical, but true. Observe the cat. In this observation there is a conceptual counterpart to the "presence" of what is there, and by presence I refer to what is not spoken, or speakable. Moore called ethics a matter, at the level of metaethics, of a non natural property. He was referring to, if you will, the qualia of pain and pleasure (and internal prohibition and valuation) Think, as Kierkegaard did, of the actuality over there on the sofa like this: in the broadest sense, it is an actuality that is qualitatively NOT a cognitive presence as an actuality. We, says Wittgenstein, bring meaning (and ethics and aesthetics) into the world, and take up the whatever it is there on t he couch as a cat, that way we can anticipate it when we see it, "know" about its possibilities, etc. This is what a thought is, a forward looking apprehension. BUT: the moment of apprehension is seized by knowledge in the forward looking event. If knowledge, this forward looking affair, can be put down, like a Buddhist or a Hindu puts down experience in deep meditation, or, via jnana yoga (philosophy), the world becomes a revelation--something altogether new comes to light.
It is a conceptual mistake, and I agree, as do many others, but it is not an existential mistake. This goes right to the point: conceptual mistakes belong to a body of judgment and error that is deliberately being opposed. The argument speaks for itself, but the "soundness" depends on the world and the way it presents itself. These concepts we are supposed to abide by come to us with foundational biases that have to be identified. Deconstruction, e.g., is part of this.
No, it certainly isn't. But I am talking about speech itself, not the concept or faculty of speech. And as I see now, this is not clear from the definition I brought in. Sorry about that!
Speech is composed of sounds, which are material. And it is produced by an air stream from the lungs, which goes through the trachea and the oral and nasal cavities. And all of these are also material. It is in that sense that I mentioned "speech" connected to the word "word". A word is an element of speech, recorded (spoken, audio) or printed (written).
Quoting Constance
Certainly.
Quoting Constance
Are you talking about "One is all, All is One", the alchemist belief? Or, maybe the mystical "Everything is One?" If so, such things do not belong in my reality. Mixing physical objects and non-physical elements do not fit in my reality either. So I can't think, and much less talk, about that.
Quoting Constance
Well, I actually said that it makes much more sense. But even if I accept this, it's only a hypothesis, and it is not part of my reality. I don't have any such realization neither have I given it much thought. So fact is I'm really not interested in it at all! We can talk of something else if you like ... :smile:
Quoting Constance
Your views are quite interesting.
Quoting Constance
Do not think. Thinking involves past and future. Just be there. Be aware. Observe. Perceive. This is the only way to be in the present.
Quoting Constance
It may be. But Metaphysics are involved only when you think about and try to describe "present". You don't need them to experience the "present"! :smile:
Quoting Constance
I did and found them quite interesting. But as I said a little earlier, one way or the other, I m not really interested in that quote furthermore. It was just an "intellectual" exploration of the subject and maybe egotistical in a way from my part! :smile:
Just to make clear: the rabbit out of the hat is not a world without language, but a world through language making itself and its alinguistic content appear. Language is the house of Being (a great philosopher once said), but as language brings being to light, there is that-which-is-being-brought-to-light. We receive this in interpretative language, but language does not have fixity in this; it is malleable, expendable, not rigid or dogmatic because the world holds it there. Language is open. I am saying in this openness, the question (the piety of thought), the second order reflection, inserts an aporia, and here one is freedom. Now, freedom to do, to see what? that is the question.
A thought: no, your dog does not understand "no". Understanding what another says means there is agreement between both parties, and a dog's received meaning has no conceptual contextualization. Humans say this word, and the prohibition is wrapped a body of associated thought. Not so with Rover. Rovers "no" does not register symbolically because she has no language. She does have, you could argue, associated experiences that make the "no" familiar and is conditionally connected to punishment and reward, the same as us. But "to understand" the word, well, dogs don't have words.
So knowledge of god wouldn't be propositional?
Not sure how you know what a dog knows. But anyway, if you take my phone and I say "no," how is your understanding of no different from my dog's in terms of type and not degree of understanding.
How then do you explain a dog's ability to recognize the names of 1022 items, replete with a capacity to "categorize them according to function and shape"? Less extraordinary, border collies are notorious for knowing such things as their left from their right in herding sheep per the instructions of their caregiver. All this requires a good deal of conceptual contextualization regarding what sounds symbolize - with no language production on their part.
Heck, my own dog recognizes the difference between "go inside" and "go outside", be this the house, a specific room, or the car. A very abstract idea that is very relative to context. And this without any formal training; hence, no formal punishment and reward.
Whether you agree or not, the basic idea is old and has little to do with who's best at reading a dog's mind.
[I]Being[/I] stands out against [I]non-being[/I].
It's the the answer to the question you asked.
In terms of the Kierkegaard use of the term "Eternity" Constance has made reference to, the Moment that is possible to participate in that sense is not the same as the result of stilling the mind or getting the "monkey mind to stop chattering." If time is imagined as a river, that would be letting the current carry one along to find out what not pulling the oars is like.
The matter of agency in The Concept of Anxiety requires the Single Individual to become responsible for what happens that thrusts them into the immediacy of their decisions as actual events.
The encounter is outside the bounds of the psychology we use to understand experience.
It's an empirical claim is it not? Where is the empirical proof? My observations inform me otherwise.
Which claim?
I don't know what an "empirical claim" is. There are claims. Justifications can be empirical. It's kind of rare for a claim to be justified entirely empirically. We usually like some logic in the mix.
Yes. The freedom one experiences requires a transformation of elevated consciousness, which brings sin into the world, for prior to the positing of spirit, one is not capable of sin. Of course, K rejects the rather common Lutheran notion of original sin as some horrible, unspeakable transgression committed by Adam (see the Smallcald articles that K refers to). He gives an existential, that is, phenomenologically descriptive account of why it is we are born to suffer and die. It is rooted in Augustine: it is our alienation from God, the absence of God in our affairs, and this absence is there, in the analysis of time, for to be more this world's than God's is exactly what it is to devoted to culture and its indulgences, which are inherited and possessed in recollection, what K thought "Christendom" encouraged.
Kierkegaard can be, of course, off putting with his Bible talk, but The Concept of Anxiety is a cornerstone of existential thought in its temporal analysis of freedom. It altogether bypasses the principle of sufficient cause as a refutation to freedom.What I want to say is that when I stand before my future in full sight of my possibilities, I stand apart of what would spontaneously set me to action, and in this no cause possesses me. Now this crossroads of will and sufficient cause cannot conclude in a violation of causality, because this principle is intuitively inviolable. But as I see it, this is not the point. The point is, when you make this qualitative leap from spontaneous action to deliberative action at the philosophical level, where the totality of existence is brought to a stand still, that is, you stand not simply before this or that possibility in some categorical determination, but before all possibilities, before Being itself, you suspend all that makes this world the familiar place that it is, and Inquiry has no possibiities before it, for there is only the eternal present, free of decision making. K calls the one can do this a knight of faith. For me, it is an extraordinary event, to stand before Being as such and make the world stand still. This is where philosophy is supposed to take us.
This should sound familiar, because it is something Eastern mysticism has been talking about for centuries.
You know, that is a very good point. So a well trained dog cannot, I think we can agree, produce an internal dialog. Sparky can't think, "Well, Jane is sleeping and I wish she would get up and put some food in the bowl. It was the same last week, I mean why own a dog if you're not going to......" There is no concept of time and space, no prepositional constructions, no conditional, negations that can be explicitly spoken internally. But: they do have familiarity that reaches conscious awareness; but then again, do they? When you say, "Let's go outside" does outside mean outside, or is it just a Pavlovian reaction? Of course, they feel good in this activity, bad in that one and they do make the connection between verbal noises and activities, they can anticipate. But is this knowledge?
Depends on what you mean by the term, of course. We say Sparky knows this and that, but we are being loose with this epistemic term. Safe to say, Sparky has no conceptual knowledge. But perhaps he has, and I suspect this si true, some kind of proto linguistic grasp of things. We have the conditional propositional form, and Sparky certainly follows events following other events.
Do you mean by this “knowledge by acquaintance of abstract ideas” or “propositional knowledge”. I of course agree they don’t have the latter. But, in the example I linked to, to categorize items by function and by shape demonstrates an acquaintance with abstract ideas, i.e. the awareness of concepts. Outside and inside are themselves abstract ideas addressing a relation between an enclosed space affixed to a relatively opened space and the directionality between these. But I think the example I linked to carries more weight. I by examples such as this conclude that language is not necessary for the apprehension of concepts.
Words of truth and beauty, to be sure. We need the language, though, for without language, philosophy is bound within the individual experience. After having contemplated the boundary of understanding, and having discerned "the idea", one will inevitably find that language fails, that the lemmas simply do not exist for sharing with another. So, in the lack of adequate linguistic invention, we equivocate, and all is lost...
Sorry, I can't get this ... "the Moment" and "the result of stilling the mind" are two things of totally different kind. One refers to time and the other to mental activity. How can these be compared?
Quoting Valentinus
Sorry again. You lost me.
I said a very simple thing and which can be applied by anyone and on the spot. How have you managed to make it so complicate? :smile:
I was referring to the "Moment" in the way Kierkegaard uses it in talking about time and our experience of it. I don't want to derail the thread over the matter by quoting chunks of The Concept of Anxiety
but this gives a snap shot of his thinking:
I brought it up because it is central to what Constance is proposing and different from the notion of the present as what is experienced when one "stops thinking."
Quoting Alkis Piskas
Well, I have been fired from some jobs for doing that. I don't know if it is an art, in the Socratic sense, or simply a knack.
Well, I don’t assume a singular progression of time as Hegel does, so for me the paradox isn’t between logic and actuality, but between the possibility of an absolute (rather than ‘perfect’) rationality and/or energy source. Is one a ‘beginning’ and the other an ‘end’, a telos? Or perhaps this is a balanced ternary logic (-, 0, +), qualitatively imagined?
Kierkegaard, on the other hand, assumes a perfectly rational singularity (God), so your jump to ethics in his relation to Hegel makes sense. Everything evolves according to Hegel, so reason in his abstraction cannot realise this eternal rationality (pure reason) that Kierkegaard assumes. Nor can it, in Kierkegaard’s subjective philosophy, ever determine the ethical rationality (practical reason) that Hegel assumes.
Pain has a quality that directs energy away from logic and towards action. It isn’t that it has nothing to do with reason. Rather, we assume an inner logic - an embodied rationality - in order to determine a qualitative (outward) distribution of energy (as attention and effort). The way I see it, reason ranges qualitatively from pure logic to pure energy.
This dualism of inner in relation to outer system is unavoidable, but the structure is highly variable. Kierkegaard’s system logically assumes God in order to describe subjectivity: qualitative judgements of affected experience. Hegel’s embodied system, on the other hand, assumes an unlimited process or source of energy (the progress of history) to describe a dialectic: manifesting past experiences of logical contradiction. With Hegel, it seems there can be no synthesis without a process of dissolving identification (thesis/antithesis), from which we then reconstruct history as a new dialectic develops.
I don't know what is art "in a Socratic sense" ... I only know that Socrates was crystal clear in his arguments! I was 12, I had not a clue about philosophy and I could still understand him! :grin:
Quoting Michael Zwingli
In the end, philosophy is supposed to be practical. We forget that in our academic pursuit of a theory of everything, a philosophical description of reality. Where language fails us, it is our own embodied relation that ultimately completes the structure of reality. It’s what’s missing from every written philosophy.
Dogs seem to have a more qualitative sense of the world. Our verbal expressions are like promises and threats: they have qualitative value, potential and significance for Sparky. They’re not understood (I think this fits better than known) according to objects in spacetime, but according to qualitative relations of embodied experience. When you say ‘let’s go outside’, they understand quality in the ideas you’re expressing: the arrangement of shapes and sounds in “let’s go” have an immediately inviting, inclusive quality to it; while “outside” has a more distant and variable quality related to possible smells, textures and tastes.
For one, the claim was that a dog doesn't know what "no" means. It is an empirical claim, meaning you are asserting a synthetic fact, claiming to know something about dogs. We know things about dogs by observing dogs and gathering data about dogs. I want to know what it is specifically that has been gathered about dogs that draws you to that conclusion. I realize that reason will be imposed upon your data. I wasn't arguing for some type of hyper exclusive empiricism.
I do wonder, though, whether the claims made about the limitations of what a non-linguistic entity may know really are just analytic claims about what propositional knowledge is. If we assume propositional knowledge refers only to the linguistic understanding of a sentence, it would be logically impossible for a non-linguistic entity to possess such knowledge. My position is not that, but it's that propositional knowledge is that knowledge that can be reduced to language, but the underlying content of the proposition pre-exists the language and exists separately from it, thus allowing the non-linguistic entity the ability to possess that knowledge.
That is, are you saying "a dog doesn't know what 'no' means"? or are you saying "a dog cannot know what 'no' means"? If the former, we have an empirical dispute and need to do research. If the latter, we have a logical problem regarding what "know" means.
With or without "Bible talk", what Kierkegaard is calling for is theological in so far that it tries to locate an individual life in the ultimate conditions of its existence. Up to the point of recognizing the limits of language in carrying out actions, the view is in step with what described as "meaning is doing"
But Kierkegaard still has things to discuss and wants to develop a psychology that understands what it cannot understand. I am not sure how that difference between Wittgenstein and Kierkegaard relates to the philosophy you are calling for.
Or perhaps better: Language as we know it in our complex symbolic dealings in logic and math, is not qualitatively distinct from what Sparky does when retrieving toys and such. That is, when I do modus ponens, an analogous structure can be found in Sparky's mind as he singles out circles from other things. Consider a pragmatist's theory of knowledge: it is the conditional structure that is truly at the foundation of knowldge about the world, or anything else. IF I hear, see this noise, these squiggles on paper, THEN something occurs with regularity. What is nitro glycerin? The answer goes to its forward looking meaning: IF X impacts a surface of resistance Y, in a given quantity and velocity, and IF X has certain properties (all analytically reducible to if...then...epistemic terms), then X is nitro. Properties? How does one "know" a property? Through its association with a symbolic designation, like a noise (signifier), such that IF I observe properties P (that furry moving organic thing), signifier S (a phonemic noise like 'dog') "works" to carry meaning.
Anyway, I do think our complex symbolic systems are essentially pragmatic, like a dog's relatively simple "cognition". And when the dog responds to spoken words, it shows basic conditional thinking. When you say he is aware of concepts, I think this means he is pragmatically aware, and this is true of all animals, that is, aware that some X follows from some P. To say this is Pavlovian is not to diminish what he does. We are Pavlovian, too.
Interesting: language, Derrida says, is a symbolic "standing in" for something else, separating thought from the what thought is supposed to be about. I think Sparky's training is the first step toward the creation of an internal world, set apart from things.
Just some musings really.
I claimed that they don't understand negation. The "no" command is not an example of that.
Quoting Hanover
I think you've repeated this three times now, which is bad luck. I think you actually want to argue with the person who, in response to the notion that we think without speech, asks for an example of this cast in language.
I'm not that person, sorry.
You're saying he couldn't generalize the comment of "no" to mean to do the opposite of what the affirmative comment is? If that's all you're saying, then I'll agree you're probably right, but that has to do with the level that dogs can conceptualize things. That isn't to say dogs don't understand language or that it means that if they did fully understand language he'd be able to figure out what you meant. It just means dogs have limits to understanding. I could probably teach my dog to gather 1 bone, 2 bones, or 3 bones, showing a full understanding of number concepts 1, 2 and 3. I'd probably lose him if I asked him to gather two times the number of bones that he had feet. I'm not sure that's a language issue though.
A five year old can't do calculus, despite having access to language.
Yes. And with that limitation on conceptualization, their behavior is probably more a matter of empathy and conditioning rather than analysis.
Very much in agreement here. I like to think of it as there being no metaphysical division between human cognition and that of lesser beings ... only a gradation of magnitude. Principles of thought such as that of identity and of noncontradiction may not be cognized by lesser animals (nor children) but all life makes use of them to the extent that life experiences and then both acts and reacts relative to that experienced. Its hard to properly justify this, though it seems self-evident to me. And this degree of cognition, of course, becomes exponentially greater in adult humans in large part due to our capacity to manipulate symbols to a vastly greater extent, with human language as the prime example, so as to further abstract from more basic concepts. At any rate, enjoyed reading your views.
As an aside, having skimmed through some of this thread, as with @Alkis Piskas, I very much equate "the Word" not with human language but with Heraclitus's, and later the Stoic's, notion of logos. Heraclitus's can be confusing, but the Stoics more directly equated the logos to the Anima Mundi, the operative or animating principle of the world. Here, to keep to the previous examples, Sparky is as much of the logos as is his human caregiver ... as is anything that is part of the cosmos. I know, its a more mystical-ish reading of Genesis 1, but "In the beginning was the logos (the Anima Mundi and all it entails)" makes sense to me, whereas "in the beginning was the one linguistic term produced by some omni-this-and-that person" ... not so much. While I get we're not strung up on mythologies:
Quoting Constance
I find that: no logos (e.g., no Stoic anima mundi, including its metaphysical laws of thought), no human language, for human language is dependent on such things as laws of thought which are themselves intrinsic to the logos / the anima mundi.
These being my own passing musings.
Are they all that different though? Science informs philosophy and philosophy informs science. I’m not talking about Einstein’s time (and neither is Rovelli, although he starts there), but about what is presupposed. And it’s this presupposition that is explored in the second part of Rovelli’s book.
Quoting Constance
I think you’re presuming that I’m deferring to scientific methodology, but this is far from the case. I’m certainly not proposing that we ‘dismiss what is not known’. And I don’t think you can so confidently assume you know what a physicist might say (just how many interpretations of quantum theory are there?) or how all scientists think. I recognise that the terms are often different - but I’m not looking for analysis (and neither is Rovelli in his book), rather coherence. So I don’t seek to understand the primordial or profound as a reduction to ‘something’, but more as the simplest totality of existence.
My recommendation of a book (and your evaluation of its synopsis) is not wholly indicative of my position. The way I see it, Rovelli’s process of deconstructing time as we understand it leads us effectively to Wittgenstein’s eternal present: living in a world without time, consisting of interrelating events (phenomena).
His more recent book ‘Helgoland’ leads us beyond that point to the relational structure of reality. That he does this from the perspective of quantum physics demonstrates the symmetry at work here. These, for me, are checks and balances to ensure we’re on the right track. But they also suggest that assuming reduction to a singular primordial ‘something’ may be holding us back. Physicists, for the most part, are looking for the source of energy; theologians are looking for the source of quality; while philosophers are looking for the source of logic. The answer, I think, is at the intersection of all three. Where Wittgenstein defers to silence is where we must look to a broader understanding of energy and quality, beyond their logical concepts. Too many philosophers won’t venture here.
Quoting Constance
Ok, I think I’m (almost) with you now. What you’re describing here - a system structured according to meaning, with affect at the centre and ‘God is Love’ making genuine sense - for me constitutes a six-dimensional qualitative awareness. Your expression of it here is the closest to my understanding of this that I’ve read, so thank you. It is here that I find the triadic relation of energy, quality and logic - not as linguistic concepts but as ideas - also makes the most sense.
Incidentally, my reference to Rovelli is a grounding that for me prevents the tendency to separate thought and affect, cognition and objects. It’s more effective than what I currently understand of phenomenology - but I’m getting there, slowly...
This is quite interesting!
You don't mean Anima Mundi logos like this one, do you?
Just a joke! :grin:
(BTW, you can find many such AM logos. But I have chosen this one as most interesting, because the letters complex also contains the letter '?' (Greek capital lamda, 'L'), which can be said to represent "Logos"! Only this is a coincidence; they don't know that! :smile:)
I found about Anima Mundi and logos at https://thesaurus.plus/related/anima_mundi/logos. I know Stoics quite well, but I don't remember this data. (Well, there are a lot of things I don't remember about them today! :smile: )
It's great that you brought up this! :up: Thanks!
It was the first one I noticed. Before I read it stands for Animus Mundi... :smile:
Clever ... for a non-Greek! :smile:
But why this absolute rationality taking center stage? Rationalism and telos is always a bankrupt idea because reason has no value, that is, a rational perfection refers to form, structure of thought only and carries no weight beyond this. Just an empty vessel, reason. It is only when something in the world is in play that purpose and meaning are brought in. This is why I insist on a qualitative "leap" into a deeper understanding of the world that philosophy can uncover. My tentative claim is that language and its logic is only pragmatically meaningful: its mission, if you will, is to realize value, and this puts the burden of meaning on aesthetics. The Good, Wittgenstein said, is what he calls divinity. He is not talking about contingent goodness, but something profound he thinks is above language. Of course, he was right and wrong about this.
Quoting Possibility
You would have to tell me why you think K thinks like this. He doesn't hold those things.
Quoting Possibility
This is why one has to, if the interest is in getting to the real foundation of what being a human being is about, look to what is prior to this kind of talk. Of course, not historically prior, but logically prior, something prior because it is assumed, and sits invisibly, because uninquired, at the base of all inquiry and discussion: always, already in the presuppositions of anything that can be brought up for theory and discussion. I'm talking about the foundational place of language to the world. I have been arguing that beneath anything we say there is the impossible unutterable noumena which is not outside of experience at all. Phenomena are actually noumenal entities. But what makes something noumenal? It is not that it is beyond language, but rather, only beyond language in its, to speak Hegelese, Zeitgeist, which actually reflects Kierkegaard's concept of sin. Sin (but put aside the Christian thinking here) is essentially being possessed by culture, but the manner of conceiving of sin is important: It is an existential break from something primordial. Heidegger will later dismiss K's religiousness, but move forward with this "break" saying K is right, we in our normal assimilated ways of living according to "the they" which is the thoughts that circulate so freely and dominate throughout society in the form of given institutions and ideas, are out of touch with something deeply important. He thinks there is some nonalienated original condition.
Thus, pain is, prior to being taken up in science, in evolutionary theory, in talk about energy, or "moving away from logic toward action," I am saying, given to us as a conditioned term, blunted by language's tendency bring all things down to a familiar level (they they, or das man, as Heideggger puts it). Language makes us forget, reduces the world to familar terms. We don't think this is so because we are IN this zeitgeist, and it takes philosophy to see it.
This is where philosophy has to take us if it wants foundational meanings to appear. And there is no where else philosophy wants to go.
Quoting Possibility
One has to be careful with Kierkegaard, making him sound like a rationalist. It is not that he thinks God is logically assumed, but that God is conceived as an actuality that is intimated in childhood, and realized (bringing in sin by this) later as an incompleteness that is evidenced by the calling, the existential anxiety which is realized int eh fateful moment when a person reaches self awareness and affirms this incompleteness in her existence. It is an existential dialectic, not a logical one. Of course, Hegel never thought empty logic was of any value, but to say "the real is rational" affirms God's rationality, and K will have nothing to do with this. My take on K has reason trying to deal with something entirely outside of reason because reason attempts to embody, encompass, "totalize" the world by bringing all things to heel.
I think you're right about Kierkegaard and Hegel, essentially.
Whatever else one might want to say about Kierkegaard, your description captures his rejection of Hegel fair and square.
I've come back to your three long replies several times, trying to work out a suitable response.
But I've just no clear idea of what your point is.
The quote above is by way of an example, a puzzle that doesn't seem worth solving.
If you do not think something is worth addressing, what is the point of saying that?
Why put down the inconsequential as you see it? Should not that all take care of itself?
I don’t believe it is necessarily taking centre stage - there are always the three ideas in play, among which we assume an embodied position. If we focus on quality (a paradox) as origin, then the distinction is between energy (as the idea of an absolute source) and logic (as the idea of absolute rationality). If we focus on logic (absolute rationality) as origin, then the relation is between energy (essence) and quality (ethics). And if we focus on energy (flow) as origin, then the dynamic is between quality (ideas) and logic (structure).
Meaning, value, actuality, etc is then attributed as we are embodied in the system.
So a description of the world as rationalism and telos necessarily assumes a subjective, affected perspective or relativity - and any attempt to point this out will be rejected. This affected subjectivity - the embodied position - is what’s missing from the system description.
Wittgenstein explored the dynamic between thinking and logic within a language system, and recognised that just as there is more to the structure or logic of reality than language, there is also more to the quality of ideas (aesthetics) than thinking (within language). What’s missing from his system description is also energy - much like the Tao Te Ching - rendering it only pragmatically meaningful. It’s not just language and its logic, but an embodied, practical awareness of their limitations, that realise meaningfulness in interaction with the world.
Quoting Constance
Not that Kierkegaard thinks like this, but that his system description is rendered complete only in relation to an embodied existence of eternal rationality, a position he necessarily assumes by omitting it from his description.
Quoting Constance
The aim of philosophy is to ultimately embody the logical methodology or ideal relation between inner and outer system. If we are to accurately describe this using language and logic, then we need to include in our description, as Wittgenstein and the TTC have done, a purely practical method for embodying an inner/outer relation to the ‘impossible unutterable noumena’ assumed by the description. Without this practice, any understanding of the methodology is incomplete.
From Kierkegaard’s perspective, the assumption is that God already occupies this non-alienated, original condition, and that we merely dance around it. Any embodied relation we may have to this ‘impossible, unutterable noumena’ is subjective, affected and illogical. He relies on Hegel’s description, with its assumption of the open-ended progress of time/energy (a device Heidegger also relies on in his own way), to demonstrate the anxiety of our condition. Without this temporal relation, Kierkegaard’s description lacks directional attention and effort, rendering our condition eternally absurd.
Quoting Constance
Do you believe we can talk about pain as an unconditioned term? Pain is a quality, as I described, but alternatively it’s a logical relation between attention and effort, or a motivation to alter relational structure. There’s no one way to interpret pain, but perhaps there is a correct methodology to align our condition with an ideal origin, and in doing so unconditionally understand pain.
Quoting Constance
Again, not that he consciously thinks this, but that his system description automatically assumes a logical embodied position. And logical not within language, but in the sense of a complete (absolute) relation. But I do heed your warning, nonetheless.
Regarding Sparky, just a couple more thoughts. You seem to have a lot of respect for what (or "who") he is. I doo, too. But is he is a rational creature? What reason is, is seen only in his behavior, that is, whether he demonstrates reason in actions. Of course, this is the way of it with us as well: I know another's rational interior because of the rational behavior in speech and actions. But then, I look at the "within" of myself to observe first hand my own rationality and it does appear that the symbolic system at work is driven by the simple givenness of logic: I never can observe what logic is because I have to use logic to observe. Logic is always remote in its justificatory validity. So, I do wonder what this dog's interior is like. I think interms of affirmations and negation, yes's and no's, but while his interior cannot "say" these things internally, there is basic aversion and attraction. Nor can he say the conditional form, but he can make associations of causality. How about universal quantifiers? Does rural Sparky know all squirrels hop around in trees? I am sure he does. IN fact I think it can be shown that not just dogs, but all animals possess this capacity for formal, non verbal logic, and this can be witnessed. In the interior of Sparky's mind, however, I
The one philosophical thesis that comes to mind here is pragmatism: In the interior of experience, there is no rational faculty, no reason as such, no logical rules. We call them rules, but this is just a way of categorizing something holistic in its original presence. The entire experience is that out of which reason as a concept is abstracted, but the original whole is some unthinkable aesthetic/reason/sensible/intuitive actuality. And animals have this.
I think the question really comes down to the difference between symbolic representation and this original prelinguistic basis for rationality. This is where philosophy has always taken its cue. This latter is what we share. But this is the foundation for an elevation to higher understanding.
Heraclitus' world? I agree with this. In fact, I am sure that in the argument of Being contra Becoming,....well, there is no Being in this sense. If there is an absolute, it is an eternal becoming. But as to the divine logos, I was listening to a lecture on Hegel and it was stated that Hegel did not believe in a rationality, or logos, as it is currently conceived in this particular frame of historical progress, to be acknowledged as the be all and end all of the logos. We are just a stage of developing an emerging divinity, and this ultimate end is not to be conceived by us, here and now.
But Hegel is not a popular philosopher, nor is Zeno or Marcus Aurelius. Logos is best, in my view, handled by hermeneutics: what we acknowledge as disclosing the world to our understanding is an interpretative order of things. Now, whether this is evolving into some grand finality, is another question. But it is not reason that is front and center; it is value. Metavalue and metaethics. That is, the Good. Wittgenstein thought the Good was divinity.
Threats are very basic, but promises, now that stretches witnessed behavior to a point beyond. What is a promise, essentially? One has to dismiss knowledge of the conditional form, the counter factual: promises are logically complex, for one has to be able to conceive of a broken promise, and here, there is the anticipated event that does not materialize, and there is disappointment. Clearly, anticipation is part of the promising construction, and there is no doubt dogs anticipate, just as mice and lizards do. But broken promises, or fulfilled ones, are not simply about anticipations, about my anticipating another's behavior.
But on the other hand, complexity is implcilty in everything ever said. One cannot understand an affirmation without its opposite, its "binary" associations, and so on.
As to the qualitative relations, of this there is no doubt. In fact, I think this kind of thing really binds a dog's "sense" of the world with ours. Sparky "cares" about his affairs, and this caring is part of the whole experience, intertwined inextricably with reasoned judgment. This is why he has a moral position in the world, for caring is about something of value, and this goes to the Good and Bad of the experience itself. Being scratched in the nose by a cat hurts! Like us, our reason is affectively and valuatively bound.
Agreed. By promise I’m referring to Sparky caring about an anticipated event, and trusting in its relation to the sounds we make. You break this trust enough times, and the sounds start to lose their significance for Sparky. I knew a kelpie once who would respond only to her caregiver’s voice. She could also follow hand signals that even contradicted his voice commands (he’d taught her to ‘stay’ beside a pretty girl on the beach while he called her repeatedly - a neat trick).
I agree with your thoughts on Sparky (and kin).
As to logos and reason, to add some further comments, we moderners have lost the likely animist notion of reason that used to be pervasive with the ancient notion of logos. We nowadays abstract reason as something that (all too often, only elite) sentient beings do in their intents for figure out what is. Whereas, to my best understanding, logos used to address reason as that which in any way determines, or else sets the boundaries or limits of, that which is; e.g., all four of Aristotle’s causes were of themselves reasons for, and, hence, would have been elements of the cosmic reasoning for what is (to the Stoics if none other). What we think of as causation, then, used to be an integral aspect of the logos, i.e. of the cosmic reasoning.
Once so conceptualized, its an easy inference to the conclusion that speaking – the determining of what is, can be, etc., via symbols wherein the being(s) in question produces, or causes, the determining symbols – is itself one aspect of the logos which animates reality. But then so too could be construed a dog’s bark, for instance; the dog’s production of a sound which can symbolize, and serve to determine in others, the dog’s emotive state of mind and associated intentions. At any rate, from this vantage of cosmic reasoning, it can be important to remember that lego, from which logos is derived, can mean “I put in order” and “I choose” in addition to “I say”. Logos then, can be interpreted as the cosmic ordering which chooses what is … and which expresses itself (hence “speaks”) via this ordering.
We moderners are inclined to view reality as mechanistic in manners fully devoid of agency, even to the extent when pressed that our own sense of agency is but illusion. Ancient logos pertains to a worldview wherein agency pervades the cosmos.
However, all that having been said,
Quoting Constance
Couldn’t agree with this more – be it from a modern or ancient pov regarding reason, or anything in between. But then, some further thoughts:
If there cannot be any reasoning that is not dependent upon metavalue, upon the Good, then can one find any alternative conclusion to that of the Good as metavalue in some way determining all reasoning? (for clarity, I take it we both understand the Good to not be a personhood)
Meaning is doing? No issue with this at all. But what is doing? A question like this takes language as an interpretative stand in for what ever is really going on. I am advocating a departure from language use, what we receive from our culture at the outset of putting opinions together, as a norm, as what tells us what to believe and how to believe it. One has to step away from normalcy itself, and this is essentially the major Kierkegaardian premise, in order to receive the world in a profound and primordial way. His knight of faith may someone who acts and speaks like an entirely normal person, but the entire edifice of her personality is underwritten by God in the here and now.
God is not Being as opposed to becoming (doing). God is simply what is not possessed by language because language cannot possess actuality.
:up:
While I don't see much intelligence in rocks and clouds, I think you are right to acknowledge the role that interpretive habit has on my not finding it. There's also the obvious relationship with self-image. 'I'm not one of those flaky types.' Or 'I'm not one of those closed-minded science-worshippers.'
I think when we talk about logical rules, we refer only to what we can structure within language, recognising that there’s more to logic than that - that is, there is a relational structure to ethics, and to values, which is reasonable beyond the logic within language. That is, it has to do with the qualitative structure of affect and the limits of energy and perceived potential in an embodied experience.
Quoting Constance
Quoting javra
Metavalue and metaethics - the Good - refers to the possibility of an ideal relational structure (ie. logic) to this interweaving of energy and quality (in relation to an embodied rationality). If logic is not front and centre, then it’s the system you embody in order to describe what is.
How so?
Quoting Possibility
This I duly agree with.
Quoting Valentinus
I would argue that it is exactly the same. Time is not like a river, or, the metaphor is too narrow. Read the Concept of Anxiety on Time: It is the present that subsumes the past and the future. When the knight of faith (Fear and Trembling) proceeds with daily affairs, there is recollection and their is anticipation, but these pass within the boundless eternal present. Now ask, what is it that one does in meditation? I mean essentially, putting aside the endless, and tedious, books that heap upon this simple event so much text and history, what is the matter about?: it is about a termination of the past acting as a totalitarian master over the present. This is the everydayness of living, bound to thoughts that move seamlessly to action, never raising the question that would undo it all. This is exactly what Kierkegaard's argument is in his account of sin, for this undoing opens what is closed, which is the eternal present, which is freedom, eternity, is God, the soul.
It is an existential dialectic (borrowed explicitly from Hegel to counter Hegel. See how here and elsewhere he (Unscientific Postscript, e.g.) puts Hegel under attack, but K's thinking is dialectical: his soul, body, spirit mirrors Hegel's rational schematic. Frankly, I have only been reading Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit recently, and, just as when you read Kierkegaard, you see where Sartre, Heidegger GOT their foundational ideas, so when you read Hegel you see where Kierkegaard got his. K's difference is the application of dialectics to the very personal and intimate relation to God.
He is stepping away from the "normal" seen as a society that is content that the Christian values it purports have been integrated seamlessly with the world as Hegel presents it. On the other hand, it is the individual alone who receives the world in a profound and primordial way. So, for instance:
As a matter of the concrete, this view is being presented as a condition every person is operating within. The condition necessary for the condition is described as inclosing reserve in the previous chapter. Inclosing reserve can lead to freedom or un-freedom (as characterized by the demonic). The challenge this gives to our "normal" lives bears on how we understand the work of parenting and education. So, for instance:
With the above said, I return to agreeing that Kierkegaard understood what Banno referred to as "action as meaning" but I don't have a handle on how you are presenting this view of the human condition to bear as a matter of philosophy in the register of Heidegger and others.
I am saying no to this: Science does not inform philosophy unless you are taking a course in the philosophy of science (which is specialized) and philosophy is not speculative science. This is a popular idea because science is very good at advancing technology. But ask Neil DeGrasse Tyson how it is that a brain can reach beyond itself to apprehend Jupiter or a light wave, and he will simply dismiss the question, or get the answer wrong, grounding it in question begging assumptions. Now analytic philosophy (which wants very much not to be wishy washy and get no respect) with its prioritizing of clarity over meaning does move along with science's emerging theories, but this simply delivers the impression that all is well at the base, while at the base there are glaring absurdities.
Continental philosophy brings light to the foundation of understanding, but, as wheels go, it deals in meaning, and meaning does not make a clear mark of its thought, because at the foundation, things lose their confidence and certainty.
Read the first several pages of Husserl's Ideas I to see where philosophy has its authentic grounding: it is aporia.
Quoting Possibility
Then I would have to read the book. If Rovelli "deconstructs" time, then he dismantles the affirmations of time by revealing its associative "differing and deferring". John Caputo argues in his "Tears of Jaque Derrida" that deconstruction undermines, across the board, knowing's affirmations, and thereby reIeases the world from fixity, from the "totalizing gaze" that says, I know this, I can grasp it, fit it into systems and categories of thought. This can be an intellectual exercise, of course. But Derrida, Wittgenstein and others were very religious. It is a following through of Husserl (see those crazy French post, post moderns, like Michel Henry or Jean luc Marion), that is, existentially religious, like Kierkegaard, whom Witt adored.
I want to defend the idea that is along these lines, that the language that constructs all thought, scientific, philosophical or otherwise, is more than a system that makes logical moves out of confirmable premises. Language constructs reality, such that as one sits and watches the world go by, there is an interpretative construction of the moment that is there IN the observed event. Of course, this is my cat, but there is a more primordial understanding of its Being which is not "being a cat" at all. And this goes for subatomic particles, spectral analyses of star light and so on. One has to look first at the world that gives itself to such affairs. The "originary" world has to be understood at a level prior to, or beneath, the thick body of interpretative history that is the constitutive self that takes on the enterprise of thinking in the first place.
Deconstruction can be loosely talked about, but it should never be considered an affirmation, a positing, regardless of how contradictory this is, and it is of course, contradictory in the extreme.....or is it? I mean, It is not to say one may not affirm this or that, but that such affirmations are never definitive, and all meanings issue from a diffusion of associated ideas. Language is always "under erasure" the moment it is spoken or written.
So deconstruction puts one, Caputo says, in the ultimate skepticism as it annihilates all affirmations. This is where philosophy must go in order to be liberated from the tyrant of language. I affirm that to do so is a revelation, even, as the Buddha said, an apprehension of ultimate reality, though this really does push it, always keeping in mind that the very language that is used here is infinitely deconstructable. Ultimate??? Reality???
What can these mean?
But of course, there is Heraclitus in this. The world as Becoming; so many are here, from Hegel to Heiedgger. Deconstruction terminates this, not because it is wrong, but because at the level of basic ideas, even "becoming" is no more than a "differing, deferential" term that is self erasing. Derrida's point is the cancelation of all presumption of knowing, of thinking that an idea somehow really has its grounding, even partially. It is not that we are getting closer to the truth with science, but that the truth is just as indeterminate as the concept Zeus or Amitabha and the Pure Land. Only here, with the termination of this presumption can philosophy find its purpose. Liberation.
Quoting Possibility
Yes, this about assuming a singular primordial "something" is right on the mark. But this "broader understanding of energy and quality" raises the same objection: The place philosophers won't venture to go is the annihilation of theory. Derrida's is self annihilating (under erasure) and Wittgenstein's Tractatus talks at length about nonsense, as he confesses in that very work.
I take the matter beyond Derrida, I think, for he spent his days lecturing. He should have spent them liberating his own interiority from the constructions of language that occlude the Real, whatever that is.
Quoting Possibility
I can't say I understand "six-dimensional qualitative awareness" or the "triadic relation of energy, quality and logic". I suppose I need to read Rovelli.
I was saying Alkis Piskas' view was like describing time as a river, not that it adequately described Kierkegaard's version of Eternity.
Right, so it's a matter of identity.
Yeah. And, side-point, it only seems 'rational' to me when we admit irrational tendencies like this. We include our bias in the model.
You mean we're normally irrationally certain that we're unbiased. Yes.
But is there some kind of unbiased knowing? Maybe it's always there underneath the rationality.
Meta- means ‘about the thing itself’. Metaethics and metavalue together examine the nature of ethics, judgement and aesthetics from a perspective beyond ‘the Good’, which questions if ‘the Good’ is even possible, and if so, what is the relational structure of ALL that we have not embodied to ask this question: the sum of subjective and affected experience inclusive of, but not confined to, this possibility/impossibility of the Good?
It’s often the notion of energy as a source that keeps getting shifted like a hot potato around philosophical discussions. We talk about ethics as if each of us is not limited beyond intentionality by how we source and arrange any potential to act. We talk about ‘the Good’ as if there is no energy component to it, but won’t acknowledge the incommensurability of attention and effort that necessarily limits any embodied relation to it. So we keep losing track of information, leaving uncertainty or entropy unaccounted for as we carelessly shift focus from one disembodied system description to another. And then we go looking for it, as if we didn’t just leave it behind in the variable uncertainty of the previous embodied relation.
I’m just saying that a moment to take stock of how we’ve arranged these ideas of logic, quality and energy before we shift from one perspective to another can be useful. If there’s no logic in our description of reality (as in Kierkegaard), then we’ve embodied its assumption as a relation to God. If there’s no source of energy accounted for (as in Hegel’s description), then we embody its assumption as an unlimited capacity to act. So when we shift from Hegel to Kierkegaard, then our capacity to act appears limited by the imperfection of our embodied relation to God. Within Kierkegaard’s view of Hegel, then, we’ve suddenly lost the source of motivation to strive for a perfect relation we cannot attain - not realising that this source was simply ‘left behind’ in Hegel’s embodied assumption.
Sure - philosophy, if it can be grounded, is grounded in the notion of aporia - the question - which is what motivates science. Science is not the answer that Neil DeGrasse Tyson gives to a question, but the correct process or methodology in asking and answering a question. Science, if it can be grounded, is grounded in the notion of certainty - the answer - which is what motivates philosophy. And philosophy is not the question we ask but a correct process or methodology in asking and answering the question.
But I do agree with your descriptions here of analytical and continental philosophy. Very astute.
By a broader understanding of energy and quality, I’m referring not to theory but to practice. The Tao Te Ching, for example, talks about wu-wei: the indirect relations between perceived intentionality, potential and action. The sage, by understanding the relation between the quality of ideas and the energy of the world, appears not to act, is perceived as incapable of acting, expressing no desire or intention; and yet embodies wisdom.
Quoting Constance
You won’t find it in Rovelli. The terminology you’ve highlighted here is my own. The way I see it, this qualitative change you’re referring to in the world, in which the entire conceptual edifice can be suspended, I describe as a shift in dimensional awareness - from a five-dimensional awareness of value, potential or significance in events, actions and observations, to a six-dimensional awareness of meaning or truth in language, value and conceptual structures.
Geometry has a logical, qualitative structure which we can recognise as both abstract and embodied. How we understand and render geometric structure relies on a perspective position outside: a line is a one-dimensional relation between two points that assumes a perspective position in two dimensions, ie. an awareness/distinction of shape; an object is a three-dimensional relation that assumes a perspective position in four dimensions, ie. an awareness/distinction of time; an event is a four-dimensional relation that assumes a perspective position in five dimensions, ie. an awareness/distinction of value/potential/significance; a language, value or conceptual structure/system is a five-dimensional relation that assumes a perspective position in six dimensions, ie. an awareness/distinction of meaning/truth.
At each of these dimensional levels of awareness, the world is qualitatively different - so much so that there appears to be no way to describe the world consistently. You’ve said that affect takes centre stage and that ideas are distinguished according to meaning at this particular level of ‘openness’, but in order to interact meaningfully with a linear relation, for instance, we need to develop a clear methodology for shifting perspective from meaning to shape and back again, without assuming or losing information.
What I’ve been proposing is a fundamental triadic relation of energy, logic and quality. This leaves nothing to our assumptions, or that cannot possibly be understood in some sense.
Energy, for instance, describes the fundamental quality (difference) of the Shakti-Brahma relation (logic). The aporia here is not between ‘Shakti’ or ‘Brahma’, but in how we embody a flow of energy: thought and affect both playing key roles in our distribution of energy as attention and effort. A logical description of energy such as quantum physics can inform and be informed by this model, dissolving both the question-begging assumptions of physics and the metaphysical ‘woo’ of Hinduism in a meaningful dialectic. The resultant understanding is not theory OR practice, but wisdom.
I like deconstruction, and in general like what you say here. But does 'ultimate skepticism' keep one from successfully ordering a cup of coffee? Perhaps 'ultimate skepticism' is 'skepticism about the ultimate'? always keeping in mind that the very language that is used here is infinitely deconstructable. Ultimate??? Reality?? What can these mean?. That part speaks to me. I connect it to Wittgenstein. There are thinkers trying to slap us out of our complacency. Not sleepwalkers but sleeptalkers. Babbling inherited strings of tokens, thinking we know what we mean, that it's right there, glowing and whole and present, if we could only spit it out. Along with that the whole sacred fiction of the isolated interior. But, as you say, keeping in mind that the very language that is used here is infinitely deconstructable. Like W calling the TLP 'nonsense.' Even if his view kept evolving or changing, that gesture continues to resonate for me. It's as if the point is to start a fire. No particular phrase need be cast in a starring role. Are we ever liberated from the tyrant? 'History is a nightmare from which I'm trying to awake,' but often it's a game, not a nightmare. Anyway, what is 'escape' or 'freedom' like? Is that another impossible Ultimate? Another vague promise of rounded and fluorescent presence?
I like the way you are connected these concepts. One might first say that we are thrown into sin but then decide that having-been-thrown is itself the sin. This is to say that sin is inherited...not through baby talk but as baby talk and all the talk that's grown on top of that baby talk. But, as you say, this only makes sense if culture, any culture, offends or obscures something that precedes it. This I don't find plausible, personally. I suggest we're cyborgs through and through. Wipe away the cultural layer and we're just like the other monkeys with less hair and better fingers. What's more plausible but still difficult to credit is the notion that an inherited culture can be transformed, at least within the individual, into something higher, purer, better. Isn't the 'nonalienated original condition' the old fantasy of the garden before expulsion and consciousness of our nakedness? It can be read as the desire to return to an infantile state. And in many other ways of course.
Quoting Constance
Point taken, but isn't it language that also freaks us out, slaps us awake? And isn't philosophy a social enterprise, offering a subculture's Zeitgeist? I agree that part of its thrill is seeing one's little world from the outside, gazing on it as a relatively amoral and detached alien.
You need to abide by what Kierkegaard says. His descritption is contra Hegel and he is not a rationalist, but insists this rationalality we witness in our affairs, far from being some adumbration of the God's full realization, is altogether other than God. K does not hold that all is foundationally rational and partially grasped by reason in our own zeitgeist. This zietgeist is quantitatively "sinfull" (not int he typical Lutheran sense at all; he flat out rejects this)
Quoting Possibility
But there is analysis prior to this "inner/outer" opposition. Remember for Witt there is no "outer" talk is this talk is intended to be outside of logic. Like many phenomenologists, he has this prohibition against making sense out of a world that is not a fact, a "state of affairs". Such things are not in the great book of facts (LEcture on Ethics). Inner and outer are confined to language, whether it be language games or logical constraint. One cannot "talk" outside of a language game. The case I want to make here is that Witt and Kant and Heidegger and others are wrong to think like this, in this prohibitive manner, drawing a line between what can be said and what cannot. "If there is anything better than reason, reason will discover it" I read once, by someone. If one is allowed, and not implicitly barred by cultural norms and their judgments, to look closely at the world's threshold with the Other the meaning of which is not possessed by a restrictive system, like empirical science (which presently cares little presuppositional levels of inquiry), and I am talking What begins with Kierkegaard's Hegel attack in his Anxiety: when he talks about the spirit posited as a synthesis of body and soul he refers to an existential movement which is qualitatively distinct from a Hegelian quantitative movement of reason to reduce the affair to its terms.
You find K very much continued in the post, post modern works that follow through on Husserl's epoche. See Michel Henry on the four principles of phenomenology)
As to the incompleteness, see the epoche, the phenomenological reduction of Husserl. The very idea of such a thing is currently being played out in essays on the concepts of givenness, being, presence, and so on. There is a paradox in this: One the one hand, as Heidegger tells us, there is no philosophical work to do until we are already embedded in a world, like the American world or the Greek world in which language and culture constructs a self fit to self reflect, and break free of the das man. So to be aware at all, one has to first be enslaved (so to speak). BUT: this breaking free is the core issue, not the embeddedness. There is something IN the world that is primordial and profound. Heidegger thought this, but detested metaphysics. He did not see what I want him to see, that I am pushing here: Metaphysics is the radical other of the world, beyond its totalities (of course, Levinas at the bottom of this. See his Totality and Infinity, if you dare).
Quoting Possibility
Dances around, or, "sinfully" at a distance from. Affected, you mean in God's grace" illogical: remember that K will have his knight of faith the grocer down the street. Making the Leap, the movement is a qualitative step out of Hegel's quantitative zeitgeist, is the simple act, really, one K could not achieve, he confesses, of positing spirit, which is born out of existential wonder, then affirmed to be an alienation from God, realizing one's freedom in this, which gives rise to this foundational anxiety in which one can only yield to God to bring about a complete synthesis, which is definitive and eternal. Illogical in that it is NOT a discursive process. We are dealing things that are their own presuppositions (another borrowing from Hegel: something truly foundational has no explanatory priors or reductions). Subjective: Yes, of course. The big crit contra Hegel is this point. This relation to God is individual and the soul is individual and eternal as is its alienation; not some en masse dialectical movement of culture in history.
Open ended progress of time and energy? You use the term energy, but it makes what they say sound like something they didn't say. Heidegger doesn't talk like this. Of course, YOU can talk like this, obviously, and if you want to say that Heidegger really says this, you have to tell me explicitly: You know, Heidegger says this, but consider this using another term. Energy is a science term, and Heidegger would never go there. Regarding Time, his is a phenomenological ontology that deals with the structure of experience (another word he never uses).
Quoting Possibility
Calling pain a quality is like calling it a property. The issue comes in the "calling" at all. Not that we shouldn't call things something, but it takes a "qualitative leap" of a Kierkegaardian nature (putting God on hold) to see that in the calling we reduce it to what it is not. Language does this, reduces the world to something manageable, but what it is (contra Heidegger) is simply metaphysics. We live and breathe in metaphysics. My cat is metaphysics.
There is only one way to understand pain, and that is phenomenologically, through the reduction (Husserl): apply a lighted match to your finger and observe. SImply this. All explanatory theses are off the table and one is to allow the event to "speak". It is a method of apprehending the world that many believe (like K) has extraordinary religious, mysterious (Witt on the "Good"; see his "what is Good is divine, too. That sums up my ethics"; see the Tractatus on this) dimensions.
The area of discussion here is metaethics. We can talk about this if you like.
Quoting Possibility
Okay, I actually lean this way sometimes. But look at Derrida's Margins: affirmations are NOT affirmations. To speak at all is never a singular event, but is a plurality, a diffusion of what is not explicitly spoken, as the number one "defers" to the number two, three, and so on. These literally constitute the affirmative proposition.
Big issue: What remains is the impossible, the Other, the nonliguistic actuality of this lamp on my desk. I may not be able to speak it, but I am IN its presence and th e speaking it does not cancel its otherness.
How is it that I can stand outside of language from a stand point OF language, to make this kind of affirmation? So wonderfully weird. I will spend my days looking at the way Husserl's reduction addresses this.
So here is my case against bringing physics into the deepest level of inquiry: at the deepest level, there is no more discursive redundancies to be brought in, for we are here at the threshold where we are being asked to encounter existence, face to face, if you will. It can be an astounding business if one is intuitively wired for it.
You know, there is something about this kind of thinking that I find compelling, though not quite as you put it. You and I are, after all, the world, and the logos as any of its expressions is what the world is doing through us, so the ascription of the logos to the world, as what the world is and does, is not an improper anthropomorphism of sorts, as many would claim. I grant, it is hard to make this intuitive connection, because we are all so used to thinking of the world as, as you say, boundaried, we forget that there is some foundational genesis of all that is (See Eugene Fink's Sixth Meditation, e.g.; though here, it is a differently conceived). "Cosmic reasoning" may be pushing it, for I don't think the world of other things, trees, tables and desktops, is apart from language, rationally constructed, and that there is an "ordering" or "choosing" going on in the underpinnings of the world. WE are, however, what the world does and is and cannot be separated, so there certainly is a "becoming" in the world through us, these agencies of rationality and meaning; the world is becoming (but here we run into postmodern concerns I will not bring in)
So, in my sympathy with this kind of thinking, I am talking about logos being IN the world, and not separate from it by the boundaries we impose: clearly we are boundaried thinkers, but we are the world as well. As to our dogs and and other intelligent animals, I am interested in the underpinning of language, whether it is barking or speaking words, which is experience. Dogs experience the world, and in this there is an "innocence" that we should envy, but our intelligence is something we (and hence the world) are doing that is qualitatively unique, something new that our evolving condition manifests. What Sparky cannot do is think explicitly, and cannot separate language from immediate affairs, can't wander off into a corner and wonder. Wonder takes thought to new boundaries as it brings in questions of existence and experience that have no answers, but around such questions there develops a culture inquiry.
Yeah, that's a good point. Is this trust is a sign of higher intelligence? Or is it mere expectation, not unlike a turtle of a fish "expects" the sun to rise or there to be a provision of other edible things. Am I, in my thoughtless morning opening the refrigerator door and grabbing the milk, just like Sparky?
I think there is a difference is what underlies expectation. In me, there is a complexity attendant to it all, and this is a second order reflectiveness implicit in all prereflective thinking. I seem to read Sartre writing this in the Transcendental Ego.
Dogs cannot think symbolically, nor can they, therefore, think about thinking, experience in a way that is about experiencing.
I think I may be able to boil this down to a single question: Are what we linguistically call “the basic laws of thought”, thinking here primarily of the law of identity and of noncontradiction, existentially fixed and, hence, universally applicable? Or, are they simply the byproduct of biologically enactive cognition, such that they do not govern reality at large but merely serve as an evolved instrument relative to (some?) life via which we interpret those aspects of reality we can filter through these principles of cognition?
If existentially fixed, then, imo, cosmic reasoning.
Quoting Constance
Yes, I agree.
Lots of interesting here. First, compare Luther's (there are, of course others. Kierkegaard goes through them in his Concept of Anxiety--a VERY worthy read, if difficult) popular but absurd concept that Adam really pis*** off God, and do what K does: put aside literalism altogether and take the notion as a vehicle to understanding what I consider the most elementary question that a person faces: why are we born to suffer and die? It is just as you put it: "having-been-thrown is itself the sin." Of course sin is a badly connotated word and best off the table; but then again, others have stepped forward, like Heidegger and Husserl, and tried to humanize the concept and in doing so divest it of its deeper underpinning. Our "throwness" is the moral question given to metaphysics, the final recourse once one has exhausted all possible accountability in the world. Science cannot go here at all, for the ethical is foundationally metaethical: what is the Good and the Bad ethically speaking? Put the question to its instantiations: a small child, born into some wretched condition, lives a life of innocence yet suffers constantly, ends up with the black plague and dies a horrible death. Or the like, since such constructions come to me in multitudes, all very real, for they have all happened historically and now over and over.
Anyway, consider sin per the above as the truly profound question of being a person in the world. the affair goes to "invisible" value, the badness of pain is never witnessed. The pain certainly is, but it being bad is not. This badness (not to forget Goodness, what Wittgenstein called divinity) is utterly transcendental. My argument can be more fully spelled out if you care to read a paragraph or two.
So K's sin is not Biblical sin in the popular sense. It has to do the way we are existentially constructed, which K takes as dialectic between body and soul. Now we are talking about souls, eh? to go into this, forget about this term, again heavily connotated. Can't really defend the whole idea without a lot of writing. Suffice to say, the "facts" of the world must include the impossible, eternity. Impossible for obvious reason, but generally speaking, to conceive it at all, one must break logical rules, like, space is necessarily defined by its boundaries; infinite space has none; therefore, infinite space in nonsense. Arguing this here is really not the point. The point is this: that ALL of the assumptions that underlie our affairs of any kind rest on unconfirmable assumptions. That is eternity. Intuitive, logical eternity is a radical impasse to the understanding. And yet, we are not computer programs that have reached a limit, like an absence of ones and zeros. We reach OUT, beyond the ideas and desires, and this beyond is an unyielding "presence".
I better stop here. Stepping over the line, a bit.
As to cyborgs through and through, this biological reduction and being cyborgs I don't understand. As to the infantile nostalgia, yes, of course. But this begs the question, what was THAT?-- in infancy, the question about what it is we are alienated from sustains, for in infancy, we are prior to the pleasure priniciple's sublimation (to borrow from Freud), prior to inherited culture. This IS Adam, and sin's analysis begins here: the infant is thrown into a world free and innocent, only to be tossed around by the world's dreaded contingencies.
Finally, sure, about the monkeys. the "purer, higher, better" fist requires an affirmation that some like this even exists. What is love, joy, happiness, bliss, ecstasy, and so on?
Of course, you are right about language being both suppressive and enlightening, liberative. To discuss something like this, I think it would require a reading of Heidegger's Being and Time. And Hegel. Hegel holds that language possesses the terms of its own dialectical evolvement, since every affirmation contains the seeds of its own destruction, that is, to affirm X, as an affirmation, is bound up with its own denial because this is not, after all, absolute knowledge: contingencies hover all around, one can question (the piety of thought, the question!). In this questioning, things are torn apart, then resolved. Such is the movement of logic and life. Hegel thought this is all happening in the dialectic between the infinite and infinitude. I actually think he was right, though it is a strange thing to get into.
To say we are cyborgs in this case is to emphasize how technological we are. Language is something the ur-technology, that plugs us into something like a species-essence. Our personalities are built as/from this kind of technology. I also include the old man's cane. And where would I be without my prescription glasses? What bare, poor, forks we'd be without the tech that completes us and makes as human. And then humanity is a kind of bridge from the monkey to the transhuman? (I'll respond more later, just wanted to get that out.)
Interesting thoughts, and very close to where I think things go. To me, if a person is not puzzled, if the world is not one big intellectual and existential antagonism, then just put the matter aside and go on your way.
Wittgenstein wanted to slap us out of metaphysics, and this gave rise to a separation of the profound questions that haunt us and the places where philosophy can genuinely go. I never appreciated that, encouraging positivism and its insistence on clarity at the sacrifice of meaning. But he was right in that he brought attention to the place where bad ideas go to die, which is in critical analysis, and when he drew a line between sense and nonsense he made me look regionally, to the areas where sound thinking exists. I think that is very important because it takes one to foundations, which is why when I read Existential thinkers, and postmoderns, I find Wittgenstein everywhere, implicitly, for these guys talk about the "that which cannot be said" but from a distance, lest one fall into the trap of bad metaphysics.
A break with complacency? Yes, and this is Kierkegaard, Hegel, Heidegger, Sartre, Husserl, and so on. In fact, one can say that this one thing is the most salient feature of their thought, because breaking away like this brings one to the world of phenomenology, and this, Kierkegaard tells us, is a qualitative leap (as a disclaimer: one has to put aside the explicitly Christian content. You read K and you discover, Heidegger here, Sartre there; I mean, the famous things they said are lifted from Kierkegaard).
As to the isolated interior: Isolated from what? There are places Witt goes that I do not. But it depends on how this isolation matter is stated.
Calling the TLP nonsense takes one to exactly the place where post moderns like Derrida and post Derridaians elaborate. Witt's nonsense lines up with Derrida's erasure. And this erasure takes one to the very interesting French theological turn toward apophatic philosophy: Jean luc marion, Jean luc Nancy, Michel Henry and others. It is not that they write about nonsense, but that this nonsense, like Kant's noumena, issues analytically (and ultimately existentially) from the sense making that is here before us. Take noumena: Kant said rather grudgingly that we have talk about this because it had to "be" there otherwise representation would be of nothing. But where does the limitation placed on proper talk begin and end about this? He is very much in Witt's corner, with the Dialectics warning us that metaphysics is empty wheels turning, but then telling us that there is this....something out there, which we really can't talk about, being beyond time and space and the categories. But the question is begged: how can one draw a limit on noumena? How can it be all things, yet not there before me, in my computer, my shoes, my cat?
There is only one way to go: it IS there before me, for my phenomenological gaze is thoroughly noumenal, even in the gaze itself. My perceptions of this phenomenological presentation of objects, thoughts and feelings is utterly noumenal. Which is like saying language doesn't work here, but the "here" is right before us, in the perceptual act, and this actually supersedes, cancels even, the regularities of common experience.
That the entire world is deconstructable puts one face to face with the impossible. This Book on the desk is utterly epistemically without a foundation. Not that, a good empirical scientist might say, we are getting closer and our theories are some kind of Hegelian partial apprehension (though Derrida is very Hegelian. Am watching Slovaj Zizek on youtube. He is a staunch if qualified Hegelian and he stated this about Derrida. Never came to me till then. Now I read Phenomenology of Spirit from a whole new perspective), but that language is structurally not capable of foundational truth. But then: we live deep in meaning and caring and all the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. What can this be, to live on these terms of engagement, yet to acknowledge the emptiness of understanding. I think a Buddhist might have a clue or two...but she couldn't tell you; or could she? Another issue.
this goes to the isolation you mentioned. One thing one has to do is drop common tongue of interpretation, the endless talk about everything in our everyday lives as the basis for understanding the world. That is isolating, for the more one does this in earnest, the less the world's common interests have a hold, and then, instead of alienation being on the outside of these affairs, these affairs becomes the alienating cause. Eventually culture will come to this, after it is done with pragmatic technology infatuations.
To me it's more about being aware of how much clarity is possible or appropriate in a given context. The naive metaphysician does a pseudo-math with words without realizing that s/he does not and cannot sufficiently fix/govern the so-called meaning of those signs (hence 'pseudo-math'). From this perspective, one can grok deconstructive/Wittgensteinian critical gestures without losing the ability to write poetry, talk with Mom about God, etc. What does become difficult is to ask blurry questions naively, as if the signs had a clear enough sense for a relatively objective answer. The difference is basically something knowing when one is being a poet and when one is being a mathematician/scientist --which is not to say that this distinction can ever be perfect (this distinction is more of that illuminating nonsense that puts itself in question without erasing itself completely.)
So Kierkegaard is excluding this possibility of complete rationality as other than God and beyond our relation to God - even though he says:
In describing his philosophy contra Hegel, Kierkegaard has limited this existence of God, the possibility of rationality left behind in Hegel’s embodied motivation. All things are NOT possible, then - not if complete rationality is not. And so the God of Kierkegaard is in doubt.
Quoting Constance
Analytical philosophy is not looking to construct a ToE, but to analyse the accuracy of particular methodologies and demonstrate their limitations. It’s why Kierkegaard’s criticism of Hegel is so appealing. Kierkegaard qualifies the world we can experience by excluding rationality and eternity, and then demonstrates that by this exclusion we isolate ourselves from the very possibility of God. But is this isolation to be attributed to Kierkegaard’s exclusion of possible rationality, or to Hegel’s exclusion of possible eternity?
Wittgenstein, too, qualifies the world he can talk about by language and by logic, and then demonstrates that what can be talked about exceeds the capacity of logic, just as Russell demonstrated that logic exceeds the capacity of language. Therefore, pursuing a ‘logical language’ is an exercise in ignorance. But is this ignorance to be attributed to the limitations of language or of logic?
The answer we give in both cases illustrates how we are embodied in relation to how we describe the world, and hence what is missing from that description. But recognising with Heidegger that we are ‘thrown’ is just the beginning, as you say. I use the term ‘embodied’ because in my view we do not so much ‘break free’ as restructure, incorporating physics with metaphysics (hence my appeal to Rovelli).
Quoting Constance
I am unfamiliar with Levinas, but at first glance I’m intrigued by his approach, particularly with respect to time - I wonder how Rovelli’s description of reality not as objects in time but as ‘interrelated events’, or his approach in ‘Helgoland’ that “facts relative to one observer are not facts relative to another”, might inform it. I would need to explore further... when I have more time.
Quoting Constance
Well, I’m not claiming that Heidegger really says this, but that in describing it the way he does, he assumes or embodies a fundamental aspect of existence, which is missing from his description, yet exists in others. I have no academic background in philosophy, so my approach to this is unorthodox. If I were to use Kierkegaard’s or Hegel’s own terms to describe what I’m referring to here, then it would defeat the purpose, which is to describe the structure and properties of these systems in relation to what I see as a broader perspective. I do see your point about being explicit, though.
When I use the terms energy, quality and logic, I’m not using them in a technical way, or even as ill-defined concepts, but referring to profound ideas. So the words themselves are placeholders: for want of a better term, so to speak, which is arguably how these three words are used in everyday language: as placeholders for a more profound idea. Energy refers to a ‘primordial’ idea prior to change - the possibility/impossibility of an absolute source of potential. Quality refers to a ‘profound’ notion underlying difference - of an absolute distinction or binary. Logic refers to a ‘perfect’ notion fundamental to relation, of absolute interconnectedness.
There is no existence, no system, no reality without the unaffected, unformed possibility/impossibility of these three ideas. For me, this is where it all begins, and where we ultimately draw from, whenever we embody a system from which to describe a system. So it stands to reason that reality equals any description of a system plus the embodied system from which it is described, and necessarily includes the possibility/impossibility of energy, quality and logic as profound ideas. If you look carefully, you will see that any idea takes form by the correlation of two of these in relation to the third - even a description of these ideas themselves.
:up:
This bolded part is more of that good 'nonsense.' It can't be proved as a theorem, IMV, but it's a gesture, a poem, an aphorism...that tries to get at something. Language is fog with claws. Humans are amusingly sure that their barks are stuffed with mining. Chalk is cheep.
Isolated from the world, from others. The basic myth of modern philosophy, one might say, is a version of the picture-box soul. Then one can ask whether we can be sure of anything, whether one is 'really' a brain in vat. One also assumes that words have their meanings inside, within this box where they 'really' live, infinitely intimate. 'I know what I mean, even if I can't say it.' That goes with this myth. Words are vessels for isolated self-stuff (meaning). But this picture of the picture-box is itself taken for granted by skeptics who misunderstand themselves as radical. That's there's only and exactly one of 'me' in here....that the ego is singular. Why? Because we count one body? Because the 'fiction'/artifice of 'self' is used to control this single body? Blame and praise and train this single body?
This is not to say that we 'really' have 20 'souls' or no 'soul.' The point is to point out that which is ontologically farthest as it pretends to peep from the mirror.
I'm not sure we can escape this 'prison.' To me it seems the high and free and awake self is built from the usual junkyard parts. To me, the meaning system is grounded in practical life. To escape this would require something like freeing us all, in the real world, from practical concerns. Perhaps in some high-tech utopia where AI tends to our non-spiritual needs, we'd reinvent the ground of meaning. But I suspect (might be temperamental) that we are primarily pragmatic-technological primates.
Quoting Zugzwang
But then, does this toss the earnest quest for truth at a foundational level into the mix of meaning indeterminacy? I mean, as long as one knows a context well and can move through its language game, does this language play exhaust the content of its possibilities? Or, is there something in the world that is not a language game that issues forth and beckons, something impossibly profound, but the impossibility of it is a measure of the deficit of one's totality of understanding.
This is where some think postmodern thought goes, for in the undoing of confidence in language to seize meaning, there steps forward a resignation that opens up meaning in ways not assimilated by language.
Getting into very interesting thinking: apophatic philosophy.
Quoting Possibility
But then: System? An inherently rational concept. Any system you can conceive is structured by the terms and thinking you already possess. The matter here is to take the affairs of philosophy to their threshold, and then not impose more thinking, more metaphysics, but to embrace the indeterminacy. This is liberating.
The only system that services this end is phenomenology and the Husserlian epoche. See his Ideas I.
Quoting Possibility
I would need an example of the Tao to make this clear, that is, this correlation between energy and the Tao. Energy is a science term, connotatively packed, so I don't see how it works well here. Word choice matters a lot. This is why Heidegger had to construct his own, to be free of a long history of bad thinking. I don't think empirical science's "history" clarifies the Tao.
Also on Witt: Logic structures all thought (speaking of the Tractatus here), but it itself cannot be put in this structure to understand what logic is. One would need a third analytical perspective, which would need another to analyze it. There is no way "out" of this, for even the term"out" is nonsense in this context. From whence does logic "come"? What is its generative base? A terrific read along these lines is Eugene Fink's Sixth Meditation. Anyway, it is here philosophy reaches it end. I find the new post Heideggarian theories the right direction. The French I mention above. they don't systematize, but follow the simple logic of the basic principles of phenomenology to their logical conclusions. The result is an encounter with the impossible, which is where we really are.
Quoting Possibility
But you sound like Hegel. Read the First chapter of K's Concept of Anxiety. See he is not with this at all. He argues explicitly against it.
Quoting Possibility
How does Witt provide a practical method for embodying inner and outer?? what is inner and what is outer? Time /energy in Heidegger? He doesn't talk like this. As to the embodied relationship, what do you mean by embodied? K is very aware that one has to think and reason to conceive anything at all, but he does not think like a post modern: in the discussion about actuality and reason, actuality is not conceived as a rational noumenon. Love is not rational, nor is suffering, hate, bliss, ecstacy and so on. Reason encounters these, reduces them to its terms, and this is K's objection, developed later by Levinas and others: We conceive of God out of our Totality of reduced world, and in his analysis it is faith that is the leap out of this totality, out of e.g., the principles of ethics, into something entirely irrational.
Quoting Possibility
Yes, in fact I do.You have to look at this phenomenologically, as a metaethical issue. What is the Good? The Bad? Put a lighted match to your finger and wait. Ask then, what is the ontology of this phenomenon? What IS it? This begins the argument.
Language CAN BE a fog with claws. It can also break through ambiguity and uncover essential things. There is a great deal of value in seeing what is NOT the "truth"; such an approach leads to apophatic realization. When a Buddhist sits quietly doing nothing, she is cancelling the world, but in this, the world steps forward that was previously obscured by "fog" of many stripes: family, work, entertainment, and so on. Claws are terrifying, for what is this in light of the discussion before us? It is an awakening to human suffering, but without redemption. Nothing imaginable is more terrifying, but one has to learn to see this.
Quoting Zugzwang
Sorry for not getting back sooner. I am behind and it will stay that way I'm afraid.
Not sure which modern philosophy you are talking about. Brains in vats raises an epistemological issue, which is no myth. When you say "me" what do you have in mind? You seem to be saying the ego is not singular? Is the self a fiction? Words don't have meanings inside?
There are many claims packed into this.
Not a concept - an idea. I’m with you on embracing the indeterminacy, but if we use language to describe anything at this level, we’re not referring to concepts but to the indeterminate ideas prior to conceptualisation. Don’t be so quick to dismiss a word based on inherent rationality. Language is useless without some qualitative rationality. Without language, we’re relating qualitatively to the world, regardless of any rationality. But we ‘name’ differences not to relate to them, but to relate them to each other. This is what the Tao Te Ching addresses, to recognise both our limited embodiment of, and possibility/impossibility of freedom from, desire/affect, and relate to the text, and thus the qualitative rationality of the world, from the ‘emptiness’ of this unity, to anticipate how chi flows effortlessly through reality.
Quoting Tao Te Ching (Derek Lin translation)
Symbols in the TTC consist of no more than a qualitative rationality. It is in their relational structure to each other that quality is further differentiated or ‘named’, but it is in embodying a potential that we energise or affect this description.
Quoting Constance
As I mentioned before, any use of the term ‘energy’ merely points to an idea, limited by the system in which it is used. The etymology of ‘energy’ shows that it names this vague idea of a source of work. Classical physics uses the term ‘energy’ to describe work, matter in motion, but this implies affirmation of an unlimited source of work, or potential energy. Quantum physics recognises that this potential energy source is limited by our perspective, and that matter is no more than our anticipated interaction with potentiality, implying affirmation (less certain, more affected by limitations) of an unlimited source of possible energy. Empirical science’s history may not clarify the Tao, but I would argue that science’s current understanding seems to be heading that way in some respects.
Quoting Constance
Logic structures all thought within the limitations of language. But neither logic nor thought is limited by language. The way out of this is out of language as a limitation - as Witt says: “whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent”. Understanding reality isn’t in what we say but in what we don’t say - in how we relate, affected and limited as we are, to what is said.
While I agree that following through to logical conclusions seems the ‘right direction’ within phenomenology, I don’t think phenomenology is the only way (or the best way) to describe the relation. Phenomenology approaches the relation from one first-person encounter among many. This approach reaches its end at the threshold of the impossible - the relation is limited by the ‘aboutness’ of experience.
Witt approaches the relation from one speaker among many. This approach reaches its end at the threshold of nonsense - the relation is limited by the structure of language.
The TTC approaches the relation from one source of chi among many. The approach reaches its end at the threshold of action - the relation is limited by affect/desire. Among these three, only the TTC’s approach enables us to continue using language in relation to experience, if that language is free from affect. Not an easy thing to do in English; we need to open up all concepts as you say.
I'm not sure here what it is that quantum physics "recognises. "Potential enetgy sources that are limited to our perspective"? What do you mean by this? QM or QFT both "recognise" potential energy derived from a classical view on energy. Particles can interact and this interaction determines kinetic and potential (the potential to become kinetic) energy.
Sorry, but I am having a hard time keeping up with responses.
As to action as meaning, certainly K's analysis of Time and anxiety makes this central to his thought. Heidgger's ontology in Being and Time centers on this, and in doing so annihilates the present, for what is in the moment of apprehending an object or anything at all is the interpretative structures that we inherit in our culture. This is K, who called this our heritage, advancing a concept of sin that is twofold: there is this "brass band of loud enterprises" that is all culture presents in its distractions and indulgences; then there is Adam's sin, which is without heritage (for he was the first. Keep in mind, K only uses this biblical story to give an analysis of existential sin. He does not believe the literal take on this), which is, as I read him, the simple, primordial, and personal move away from freedom in the eternal present (presumably the existential counterpart to Eden). There is no sin at all unless one "posits" (a term K uses a lot) sin, that is, becomes aware of it by stepping OUT of the blind adherence to the world's preoccupations.
This should sound very familiar: Read Heidegger on his "das man", "the other" which is part of dasein. It is our "throwness" into the world that constitutes what is good, bad, interesting, simply "there" as a distinct and finite world of possibilities in which we find ourselves prior to any greater apprehensions at a deeper level, ontology. Kierkegaard resonates throughout this. Of course, Husserl before him, then Hegel (see how Hegel, who I think started it all, talks about the "natural" consciousness; put Husserl's "naturalistic attitude" under this, and Kierkegaard's "qualitative leap" then you have traced a major feature of existential thought: this dramatic separation from the mundane into freedom which is not simply more of the same (as analytic philosphers would have it), but deeply important and ontologically significant. (But then how to understand this freedom? Kant, Hegel are rationalists, and freedom is a rational matter. Not so for Kierkkegaard, somewhat so for Heidegger, for, for him, language is the "house of Being" and concepts disclose the world, create meanings and intelligibility. But he would never say, the rational is the real, at all.
So action as meaning: time is action, and all meaning is a temporal structured event. As I type, I recall how to type with every finger stroke, the meanings of terms in my head recalled;the past looms large in everything I can imagine, for imagining itself issues from t he past. To act is to recall. but (see Kierkegaard's Repetition) is there a way out of this, or am I condemned to be ventriloquized by history? Freedom is posited in the true present, and one is not in the sequence of events but standing apart from them, choosing. (Choosing ex nihilo? Another issue)
The same basic idea is part of Christianity, and since that religion is made of ideas that came before it, I guess we'd say it's older than that?
Wittgenstein refers to what lies outside language, and to speaking nonsense, as ‘practice’. This is the outer. It’s not pointless to embody that ‘of which we cannot speak’ - to love or hate, to suffer or relate to God non-verbally - to interact with the world when words fail us. This is how we perceive the structure of language and its limitations.
By ‘embody’ I mean wholly assume a position from which to relate. As I mentioned before, we embody logic in order to accurately describe a world without logic. We embody an ultimate source of energy in order to describe eternity (a world without change). In phenomenology we embody qualitative experience or consciousness in order to describe what is objective. But we cannot wholly extricate logic either from language or from consciousness, so we cannot use language to describe what logic IS in its entirety. We have Witt’s perspective of logic from within language use, and we have Heidegger’s view of logic from within our experience of being. And we have quantum physics, which demonstrates the existence of rationality beyond both, informing phenomenology that it’s still missing something.
Phenomenology outlines the problem in a different way, but can do little more than point out the limitations of consciousness and language, while attacking the strawmen of classical ‘Reason’ or scientism for presuppositions that physics can no longer afford to presuppose.
To leap into something ‘entirely irrational’ is not necessarily to abandon all possibility of relation. A leap of faith draws from one’s own affected experience to construct qualitative rationality (sufficient relation to determine action) by attributing attention and effort (affect) to distinguish between possible/impossible relations. Our faith is misguided when we draw from someone else’s description of affected experience. We will always lose accuracy here.
I’m not trying to argue that physics needs to be incorporated into phenomenology. I’m saying that without it, phenomenology is prone to inaccuracy and limitations it cannot correct by itself.
According to Wittgenstein, philosophy should be written like poetry, not in a scientific way. One might assume he only meant the content, another might assume he only meant the structure. I’m inclined to think he meant both. Poetry in the classical sense adheres to a strict logical structure of qualitative ideas in describing our affected experience to be understood more universally. If we follow this advice, then the aim of philosophy is to arrange inner and outer along these lines: embody an eternal, qualitatively rational and unaffected system that enables us to objectively describe the distribution of affect in consciousness.
Then any connotation or affect is not considered inherent in terms such as ‘system’ or ‘energy’, but is a current limitation of the consciousness they describe. What is inherent is a qualitatively variable rationality. ‘System’ refers to more or less logical or relationally structured, while ‘energy’ refers to more or less variable, regardless of logic. ‘Entropy’ refers to less logical as well as more or less variable regardless of logic. So when you relate to the text, you interpret my use of ‘system’ as implying that what I’m describing is logical, but I’m only referring to the possibility of relational structure, which I’m not inclined to exclude at this level of ‘openness’ simply because my limited subjective experience renders me currently unaware of any structure. How else do we relate to the impossible, except to embody its possibility?
QM and QFT often describe potential energy in terms of the classical view on energy, which is why certain aspects come across as incongruous, spooky, etc. But the calculations and applications of it defy classical descriptions. When you talk about an interaction of particles determining the potential to become kinetic energy, this potential doesn’t come from the particles, but from the relative variability of those particles in relation to each other. So it isn’t the particles that interact, but their relative potentiality, which is calculable as a wave prediction of attention and effort. The particles themselves are irrelevant to QM or QFT - they’re heuristic devices that give us something to talk about.
So, any potential interaction with a possible energy source in quantum physics is calculated in relation to the potential for interaction of a possible energy source. If an unlimited source of potential energy exists (and I think we are less inclined to assume this than we were in classical physics), then our perception of it as such is limited by our perceived potential for interaction. This is what QM recognises in its calculations, even if some physicists won’t acknowledge it.
I don't think Kierkegaard meant to distance himself from the problem of "inherited" sin and its relationship to the sins of a person might commit during a life. He strove to verify the language of revelation with his view of the human condition. His approach is similar to how Pascal argued that the Incarnation was scandalous to reason while also being the most accurate description of the problem of being human.
There is an obvious conflict between arguing on the basis of experience anybody could have and recognizing an element that sets people apart. In the Philosophical Fragments, Kierkegaard distinguishes what can be known as truth on the basis of our nature {and the recollection of it} with a truth that we would have to be conditioned to apprehend.
He goes on to graft the whole of the Christian story upon this distinction. It is mostly interesting to myself as something heard without anything following. But it is clear that was not Kierkegaard's intention. He was a Christian who had no qualms pissing off other Christians. His Works of Love is a smack in the face to anyone who thought it could be easy.
[quote=Galelio Galelei]Mathematics is the language with which God has written the universe.[/quote]
The first word must've been a number. Ergo,
[quote=TheMadFool]In the beginning was the Number, and the Number was with God, and the Number was God.[/quote]
What could be that number?
In the beginning i believe there was pure Energy (can not be created nor destroyed), chaotic with no stable pattern or information (quantum foam). Energy is the primal and fundamental "substance" in which information (pattern or structure) can be expressed. Within this chaotic energy at the lowest level of the universe, random patterns are constantly emerging and immediately descending back into Chaos (creation and destruction). Sometimes a pattern emerges that is potent enough not only to resist the dissolving influence of the surrounding chaos but can also nucleate and impart it's own pattern or form to the surrounding energy like a growing and expanding crystal (Big Bang and Inflation). This new and potent pattern becomes the template for an entire universe, with a specific logic that is internally self-consistent and specific to it's own structure (The Word or Logos of the Bible).
Ordo ab Chao --> The God of order is Chaos itself for Chaos is the alpha and the omega of all order or possible orders (Logos). Chaos is the full potentiality of infinite possibilities, the true source of creation with no need of any prerequisite. It is unbounded, unlike order which can only express a finite set of possibilities.
Meaning emerges out of the interaction and relationships between the ordered parts of an emergent universe. An atom or a molecule in our universe for example means nothing outside our universe because the underlying fundamental pattern of each universe would be different and incompatible. Think of the difference in pattern for example of Legos and Lincoln Logs construction sets, The Lego universe has it's own structure and logic which is different than the Lincoln Logs universe. Both are viable and meaningful but only in their respective universes.
The original question, as I understood it, what being created things before there were beings. Your answer, Samuel Lacrampe, includes a being that we can't probably imagine; but you called it a being. Now what was creating that being before it existed? if in the beginning there were no beings.
Remember only one thing, and keep it in mind when you answer or add to this topic: WHAT WAS THERE BEFORE THE BEING THAT CREATED THE BEING. You MUST assume there were no beings at first.
This gives me an idea. The usual manner in which aircraft pilots report on visibility is in terms of distance but I feel a more helpful way would be in terms of time for the simple reason that when moving at speeds aircrafts do reaction time is more important.
Typical, really. If you want to take the matter to the level where questions become philosophical, then, and I don't think this is a debatable point, You must go the source of all terms such as "quantum foam" or "chaos" before things are even taken up and talked about. You have to ask, what is it that a term has meaning at all? Why is language going unexamined with all this language being put forth to make sense of things?
So the question to you is not what is chaos? but, what is the relation between a term and the world? After all, you wrote paragraphs filled with language and logic. How is it that this needs no analysis to determine if there is not something PRIOR the manifest meanings of empirical science?
[Quoting Constance
A word or term has meaning when it signifies or points to a thing or idea such as when a finger that points to the moon means the moon and not the finger.
Quoting Constance
If the language is unclear then one should just simply ask for clarification of the specific terms or phrases in question. The main goal in this respect is for all parties involved in a discussion to have the same definitions for all the terms being used. The real point is the meanings and not the words... words are merely vessels for moving meaning from one mind to another (communication), for it is meaning and not mere words that bring insight and understanding to the mind. Two heads are not better than one head if the two heads can not communicate.
Richard Feynman - Names Don't Constitute Knowledge
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lFIYKmos3-s
Quoting Constance
A term or word is just a tool that refers the mind of the listener or receiver to an object in the world or a concept in the mind.
Quoting Constance
Not sure what you're asking here... perhaps you can rephrase the question.
But you have to ask the Derridean question: When one says words, how do these stand alone as a reference to something? Does the term 'moon' really refer exclusively, epistemically, to that object in the sky? Or is the matter more complex such that reference itself is called into question? Keep in mind what philosophy's mission is: To address the world at the level of the most basic questions. Prior to this, you are doing no more than speculative science.
Quoting punos
No, that's not it. It is not that certain language is unclear. It is that language itself is problematic, and it is philosophy's job to give this problematic analysis. For the matter is about the presuppositions of science, not science.
Quoting punos
A tool? Quite right. But how does a tool's instrumentality possess relationship possibilities 0f the kind you assume? I use pencil, but in that use do I "know' what a pencil is? Does a cow know its teeth are chewing tools? Of course not.
The interesting question this presents is pragmatism's, and Heidegger's: Is use engagement something that constitutes knowledge? Is language itself just pragmatic tools? Or do we grasp things in an existential "presence"? What can this mean? If I use the hammer, do I know what a hammer is? If language is all vocabulary and rules, how does vocabulary link up with moons and stars so that we can talk about them and only them?
Quoting punos
Science is not some clean and pure reflection on the world of objects. It is think with analytical possibilities that look to what is presupposed by utterances..
Sorry, but....BEFORE??? In what sense do you mean this?
In the sense of the OP. It started with "in the beginning there was the word."
Most words elicit a myriad of associated concepts that will vary in quantity and quality in different people and at different times. The more complex a word is the more it lends itself to varied associations and interpretations (not a fundamental problem of the universe but of human psychology). There is a hierarchy of meaning which of course arbitrary words can be assigned to... but the idea for me is to grasp the most fundamental meanings or patterns which all the other patterns or meanings are made up of (similar to prime numbers).
It's like physics and chemistry in the sense that quarks form subatomic particles, these particles form atoms, molecules, etc.. One can maybe even imagine the possibility of something like a "periodic table" of meaning or pattern. Everything works this way even text. Notice how letters make words, words make sentences, and sentences make paragraphs, etc.. (a fundamental pattern in itself) Once one gets to the most fundamental and simplest patterns or meanings then they become less likely to be interpreted or misinterpreted in many and various ways.
Quoting Constance
The problem with language is that it is not perfect, but that is not a reason to not use it. Look at what we have accomplished because of language (cars, planes, computers, the internet, philosophy, art, etc..). It may not be perfect but it evidently works and it is still evolving. Whatever the presuppositions in science are at any moment in time is only a temporary and dynamic position until a new paradigm shift occurs.
"The name that can be named is not the eternal name. The nameless is the beginning of heaven and earth. The named is the mother of ten thousand things." The I Ching
Even the Taoists knew that language was imperfect, but they still wrote their books anyway to at least try to explain the Tao. I think they did a good job considering.
Quoting Constance
A word's instrumentality possesses relationship possibilities because it's how the mind works. The mind records sense impressions and compares and contrasts with other prior impressions, making associations and relationships between impressions. The relationships are not in the words, they are in the mind, and words are just used as an attempt to express and reconstruct the relationship in another mind.
I find it better to think of what a thing does rather than what a thing is. I don't need to know what a pencil is, i just need to know what a pencil does or can do. If i need to write something on a piece of paper then i know i can use a pencil. There are different levels and dimensions of knowing a thing such as knowing how to drive a car compared to knowing how to fix a car.
And so, this kind of reflection tells you what about the essential encounter of things in the world? It is not that language is to be discarded, for our thoughts that lead us to this impasse are, if you will, the only wheel that rolls. The point is: look at the way my question to you gives rise to your newly stated explanatory context that looks entirely to language and simply recasts the problem. And if there were this periodic table in place? Would this be some kind of mirror of the world in language? You see, it is this mirror concept, that words are telling us about what is not "wordly" in nature, that makes the issue. What good is talk about subatomic particles when there is a meaning chasm that separates words from "the world"? The real question that haunts philosophy must look to more basic structures that are inplace logically prior to discussions about the world.
Quoting punos
I hear this often about how successful language and logic are in making cell phones, but it entirely misses the point. If something "works" does it therefore impart meaning beyond the pragmatic? If you think my taking the moon AS 'moon' is simply a pragmatic affair, then you leave what is apart from this out of regard completely and the consequence is your pragmatic reduction becomes an abstraction. Bonafide reductions cannot have ad hoc dismissals of that which the world presents as not containable, and in your case, pragmatically uncontainable.
Remember, speaking of paradigm shifts, Kuhn was a Kantian, an idealist. If this is your position as well, then you drop the scientific enterprise altogether as something that can ever hope to, well, "see truly" what is "really" going on, what the world is, for understanding is categorically bound to the mundane. Analytic philosophy goes this route. I do not.
Quoting punos
Take this position and you seem to move towards the analytic assumption that there is a wall, impenetrable, between us language users, language obstructionists, if you will, and the world itself, this latter, the thing itself, being removed from sensible discussion altogether. But there is a philosophical alternative: Look at language as a tool, a problem solving "event" as Heidegger did. But then, to see it as a tool is something that applies to the very ontological claim itself. One thereby must withdraw from language to observe language, which is impossible, clearly; but the matter needs to be recast. Language that talks about language opens mere engagement to inquiry, and inquiry is the question, and the question is annihilating in its nature, for it brings dialectic pressure, or even cancelation, on to a thesis, even the simplest, like "the moon is bright, tonight". In others words, possessed within the pragmatic totality of language there is the existential question that takes the inquirer beyond language. This, I claim, is philosophy's end, its purpose. This is where Taoists go, or desire to go. But then, all talk that carries that presumption of "knowing" has to be suspended. Scientific vocabulary is out the window, and one must sit quietly and let the world "speak".
Certainly not that science has no use. But it does not inform this issue here.
Quoting punos
You will not be able to separate words from mind. To conceive of a mind, one must first conceive of that which conceives of mind, which turns the matter over to thought itself, and here we encounter language and logic.
Quoting punos
Of course, but once you define a pencil by what it does, you have to ask, what is there in the doing of things, pragmatics, that discovers the very structures of doing itself. If it is pragmatics all the way down, that addresses all that is encountered that demands analytic satisfaction, then you have a lot of exploaining to do, as in the ethical/aesthetic dimension of the world: this spear in my side is killing me, but is this really reducible to the pragmatics of the affair? No. The world is far more than just what is done as a quantitative concept.
In other words, saying you are concerned only with wht a thing does, first, does not give analysis to the doing, which is, e.g., a temporal event, and there is a long history here from the Greeks, to Augustine, and so on. Second, says nothing about the existential dimension of the world
To simplify this issue where do you think information or structure comes from? From where or how did the first element of information or structure manifest? What is the "thing" that comes before the first thing?
It like asking when the first words appeared. Language arrived as a pragmatic, social event, presumably on the heels of more primitive practices buried deep in history. The real question is, what is the relation between language and things in the world? How did language make understanding possible at the level of existential wonder, that is, inquiry that asks questions that target what is not pragmatic at all, like questions about one's existence, Being, like "why are we born to suffer and die?"
It has to be understood that we are not merely "things that evolved and act". And this is not a physicist's line of inquiry. A physicist leaves off when basic questions appear; s/he does respond to, say, questions about temporality as a structure of experience that is presupposed by Einstein's theories, not presented in them.
As to things, and one coming before the other, this has been discussed many times. Take Schopenhauer's claim that the principle of causality is contradictory given that eternity has no beginning. It only gets interesting when you realize that our finitude is embedded in infinity, but there is no line of actual separation, for it is impossible to to say where on ends and the other begins. Ask yourself, as I do almost daily, how is it that anything out there gets in here (the mind)? Never happen. Just impossible to conceive. The only conclusion: what is here before me, what is there, "ready to hand" stuff of the world is, in my localized mental space, utterly metaphysical. This pen, beyond the condition of my experience, is eternal, transcendental, and we are not outside this, but we are this.
This is where question of beginnings leads.
Ah, but the beginning of an utterance? It implies creation is a narrative. Is this true? (Put temporal beginnings off the table. After all, "time" is term, a particle of language. What are these? This is the question that haunts science and makes philosophy inevitable, for one cannot confidently, and familiarly, speak of time, if time is a term and one cannot tell you what terms are.)
But the Concept of Anxiety is Hegelian,and ny this I mean while criticising Hegel, he uses the dialectical method to reveal existential structure of the self in actuality vis a vis rationality, famously commenting that Hegel had forgotten that we exist; and I see its closest connection to Sickness Unto Death, which has this tortured analysis of our finitude and eternity that cannot be simply put off for some Hegelian future rationality where dialectical crises have finally produced the grand scheme of things. It is this dialectical struggle that the analysis of the self yields, and that of time and eternity in which we find the basic structure of who we are bound with this.
I never read much Pascal, but the connection is clear, it seems, for K understood Christian falleness and sin outside of, to borrow a term, rational totalities, with which actuality is on a collision course. I can see your Pascal reference at work here, but not exclusively Christ, rather, the human self. Us.
As to sins committed in life that are not "structural sins", but individual sins, I haven't read where he puts this to theory. All we do is "sinful" in as much as it is alienation from God. But one can be a baker or a candle stick maker and if that person is what he calls a knight of faith, then the affairs of worldly matters are in the eternal present and s/he lives in God's grace.
That would be my rough take on this.
You should ask the OP. I am just saying what frame of reference to look at it from. I did not say it, I won't defend it, please ask the OP. I am washing my hands.
Like i've stated before, the relationship of language to the world is simply an agreed upon set of symbols that two or more entities can use to affect each other's minds to construct concepts of sufficient similarity (need not be perfect) in order to achieve a certain level of cooperation that confers some advantage in the world for both or at least one of them. Communication should be executed in such a way as to bring focus by expanding a certain idea while at the same time contracting other ideas not pertinent to the question or task at hand.
The point of language is not to understand the world but to understand each other. The brain did not evolve to understand truth.. it evolved to figure out what works in order to increase the chance of survivability and reproduction... a purely pragmatic endeavor. What would be different if you were to figure out the answers to your "non-pragmatic" questions such as about one's existence, Being, etc.?
The question as to "why are we born to suffer and die?" is a purely subjective interpretation of the situation, and signals to me your desire for a pragmatic solution. It's as if you think that the universe or God set everything up just to make you suffer and then kill you. If you want a chance at the right answer then you have to change your questions. Only the right questions yield the right answers.
If you want to understand language then look into and study how language evolves in nature. Look at how cells, ants, plants, etc. communicate. Try to understand how DNA and mRNA work. If you observe nature, and you know how to observe well, and know how to ask the right questions, then she will disrobe before you and expose her sexy secrets. When one becomes familiar with those more basic patterns then one will be better equipped to tackle the more complex forms of language and communication. Look to nature itself to inform your philosophy and not so much old philosophers. You must look at the systems below the one you are looking at to gain insight to "understand" it. Move out and under the human world experience and try to see things from a lower and simpler perspective. The level at which you are trying to analyze the issue is to complex if you don't know the basic forms it's made of. It's like trying to understand biology without knowing about chemistry, or understanding chemistry without understanding first physics.
Quoting Constance
It seems quite obvious to me that nothing is static and everything moves and evolves or changes in this universe. It makes no sense to me to define a thing as simply a thing with no ability to interact with other things in the universe. If it exists for any sufficient amount of time then it implies that it serves some function that keeps it existing. What else would the universe be if it did not evolve and "act"?
Quoting Constance
The questions dealing with physics or how the physical world actually works should not be answered through philosophical thought alone, and questions that can not be answered directly from physics are more properly addressed by philosophy. But philosophy has to constrain itself to the patterns that physics has already discovered so as to keep the whole enterprise coherent.
Quoting Constance
Only energy is infinite in duration.. and at the lowest level of existence there is no pattern or information, only a pure active soup of energetic chaos (randomness). Energy has always been, and it is the cause of information. The inherent chaotic activity of energy is constantly producing random patterns that instantly rise and fall. They fall because they are not viable patterns that are able to "survive" and replicate themselves (first instance of natural selection determined by initial local conditions). As soon as one of these potent patterns arise then we have the seed of a universe. This universe will have it's own unique physics, and logic, and it will have an internal consistency from which meaning and language may evolve. If i were to draw the line of "actual separation" as you say, i would draw it right between energy and stable pattern (above energy but below pattern).
For the sake of brevity i made this description a bit short and simplistic but only to convey the general idea and principle, more can be said about this matter.
Quoting Constance
Actual things do not enter the mind, just data or information about a perceived thing in the world. The brain tries to recreate it's environment as a neural simulation that we call the conscious mind as opposed to the unconscious mind from the data or information acquired from the sense organs. The brain creates a neural structure in itself that is representative of the object it perceived. The actual neural network pattern constructed is the actual symbol the brain uses to think with, but it is not the thing itself. The brain itself only perceives the output of the neural structure when it's output is active in the conscious mind.
Oh. Well, you did bring in science for your basic explanatory context, and I wanted to point out that the philosophical, as I argue, take on the world begins with a departure from this, not an engagement.
Quoting punos
The rest of this falls short. Before you talk about God or anything else, really, you have to take on the whole affair in terms of the most basic questions, otherwise you will simply end up with scientific cliches and philosophical trivialities. Anthropomorphism is the first to go, for popular concepts are the furthest away from insight. The issue of suffering and dying is, in its defining presence, absent of religion, especially bad metaphysics. Suffering is an issue because, well, it is there, in our midst, IN the world, as is reason. This latter has a very long history of phenomenological analytical study: one observes reason, its structure, the way reason is an essential feature of thought and judgment, etc., just to see what it is.
Note that in this history there is nothing of evolutionary theory. It is apriori theory, and thus deals with the essential nature of reason. Consider suffering in the same way: remove all that would immediately claim it in talk about evolution, biology, physics, anthropology, and so on. Suspend these altogether so one can observe it for its manifest parts and functions, as one one would observe, say, an automobile engine rather than anything else PRIOR to classifications and other explanatory contests. This crude analogy actually works. Here one stands in the world, now observe it basic features, as one might observe a rear axle or carburetor. The task first os observation of the phenomenon, not the scientific interpretation (though science is, in the philosophical analysis, everywhere; it is an expression of practical reason). Science's trouble (though we find no issues with science at all in what it does. As you say, it makes great flat screen tv's) has always been that when it encounters affairs at the basic level, the premises simply run out, but the world remains undefined at the basic level. Hence, philosophy.
Finally, it must be understood the what you call subjective is only reasonable in mundane discovery. Look further into it, and you find you cannot remove the objects of empirical science from such "subjectivity". this is simply manifestly true. Try to do this and you will find contradictions instantly upon you. Science cares not for this kind of discovery, and it is just not what science is about. Ask a modern physicist about how this brain mass can epistemically receive something in the world, and you will find yourself deep question begging answers. Hence, philosophy.
Quoting punos
But consider, and this really is the point, that when you look to nature, and its cells and the rest, and all the sexy secrets, there are questions unasked hidden by the process of disclosure. I observe an ant, I magnify its cellular parts, then classify according to categorical norms and the totality of scientific paradigms that might apply. This is all too clear to all who have endured high school physics. But to ask philosophical questions is a whole new matter. Here, we look at the presuppositions of science and everyday life. The sexy secrets have just begun, for the finality and determinacy of science is just an illusion. One has to ask the most basic questions to see this.
Quoting punos
Observe a blade of grass in movement. The observation itself is what is at issue. This is not a simple event, but is a thing "of parts": Here, the agency of observation, there the movement, and then, what is this act of observation? It itself is a movement, but this establishes one movement conceiving another, and the question as to the nature of movement itself is apriori lost, for the analysis of movement presupposes movement, the very definition of circularity in reasoning.
What is needed is analysis of this circularity, and this goes to the two sides, agency and object, and their relation. Consider this circularity more closely: I observe, say, my own brain in an "awake brain surgery". I speak, censors identify speech localities, and so on, and this is very useful for avoiding the surgical removal of important tissue. But this usefulness says nothing at all about this relation's identity; it only gives us utility. As to the relation, you find a brain trying to explain a brain: all you will ever get is brain answers that emerge, which are the very problematic you are trying to address. The brain you see is a brain phenomenon. Certainly, the whole matter reveals that there is a pragmatic relation, but the epistemic question yields this intractable circular reasoning.
As to what else the universe would be if not evolving and acting, it is like asking, what would a flower be if not petal and peduncle and the rest? To a particle physicist, it would be systems of atomic and subatomic particles; to a gardener, a beautiful natural presence; and on and on. It is not that it is not one or the other, but that saying what something is must have its contextual bearings. There is no "flower petal" outside of a context in which the term occurs.
We are the same, only the term of our analysis are very different at the basic level of inquiry. I am a perceiving being. Well, what is perception? ANd then we find we are simply in another world of thought, for all of our "outer" world events are perceived before they are what they are called in science and everydayness. This puts perception at the very front of understanding at the basic level. Turns our that this is very, very tricky: perception conceived by a being for whom all that is known is first perceived. Sound like question beggin at its finest.
Quoting punos
You say this, as expected, because you haven't read any continental philosophy. Analytic thinking rules philosophy in the US and Britain, and has for a hundred years or so. Now things are changing for the most obvious reasons: Analytic schools go nowhere. I've read enough to see this. Nowhere. They were so hell bent on avoiding the stigma of irrationality that they set their sights, following Russell, Wittgenstein, Frege, and others, on logic and coherency and they ended up containing the foundation of our human inquiry to the restrictions of science's paradigms. They are an insufferable lot, full of logic and rigor, but unable to say anything about foundational issues, for these are taboo since they trail off into experience apart from where theory can control and assimilate. But the horror of this is, this is exactly what true analysis of the human existence reveals: "we" stand outside of analytical categories at the basic level. This "outside" is very analytically accessible. We can describe the threshold.
Quoting punos
Of course, this is quite true. No one disputes it. It is simply preanalytical. Thatis, it's not philosophy. I mean, who could argue that the brain is NOT a system of neurons and synapses and axonal fibers and so on?? Or that evolution is not a valid theory? It would be absurd. But with these philosophy has not even begun.
But I am the OP. I like atheists, and you are one I assume from your moniker. But I like them because they have at least begun to second guess orthodoxy. Not that I agree, though, that, say, God is a meaningless term that challenges ethical nihilism. I do look for thoughts on this matter of beginnings because it opens inquiry into basic assumptions. What are your thoughts on this?