The self
The where does one go from here? Here, being the starting point for any meaningful inquiry at all: right here, in the midst of the world when one makes the critical reductive move into the present. I am referring to Husserl's phenomenological reduction, the suspension of extraneous "naturalistic" knowledge claims in order liberate "the world" from their presuppositions, then discover the actuality that has been there, always, already, but ignored because one was too busy.
I want to know about what it means for the "present" not to be a nonsense term. I think the path to a discovery of what a self is, lies here, in a discovery of the present. I've been reading Husserl, Heidegger, post Heideggarians and then John Mackie's Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong, Wittgenstein's Tractatus, and others (Levinas!) and I have come to the conclusion that the self is not illusory, but my strategy is not a familiar one: the self, the genuine self "behind" the empirically constructed self, if affirmed through ethics, that is, metaethics, the very thing Mackie denies.
I want to know about what it means for the "present" not to be a nonsense term. I think the path to a discovery of what a self is, lies here, in a discovery of the present. I've been reading Husserl, Heidegger, post Heideggarians and then John Mackie's Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong, Wittgenstein's Tractatus, and others (Levinas!) and I have come to the conclusion that the self is not illusory, but my strategy is not a familiar one: the self, the genuine self "behind" the empirically constructed self, if affirmed through ethics, that is, metaethics, the very thing Mackie denies.
Comments (167)
- Sherlock Holmes
So, what isn't the self or the present or whatever you wish to define? Why not? You could, in theory, use the answers of the prior two questions to begin to narrow down the answer to your root question.
I think what you are talking about really is what is called the ego by psychologists, and is the conscious entity which makes decisions. It could be called a self but the idea of a self has wider implications, encompassing deeper levels of consciousness which merge in and out of conscious awareness, for example in falling asleep.
The other issue is that, in some ways, the self can be seen as illusory, in the sense that the Buddhists describe, as not being static, but a viewpoint rather than an actual entity in its own right.
On the other hand, there is the entanglements in our engagements in the world, our politics, interpersonal contradictions and our principles, culture and the magnificent messiness of our lived lives. These conditions are in themselves ethically incidental, that is, they are the, as Wittgenstein put it, facts, and factual affairs are without ethical nature.
So the matter turns away from what to do and how make principles of good behavior in entangled conditions, and it turns to metaaethics: the GOOD. This is the beginning of the argument, pending your response thus far
But therein lies the rub: Buddhists do not try to eradicate the self in order to achieve abstract nothingness. Beneath the self, so to speak, the empirically constructed self or memories, attachments, the "stream of consciousness", is joy, bliss unparalleled. There is nothing more palpable than this.
I am certainly not wishing to dismiss the inner world and wrote a thread on it less than a fortnight ago. However, I did feel that a lot of people objected to the idea of the inner world, mainly as being dualistic or too selfish a concept.
But I am all in favour of meditation. I try to practice it but do improvise and don't always get to the point of bliss. So, you are doing very well if you can achieve this.
But what I would say is that you are starting up a really interesting area of debate, connecting the idea of the self(inner world) with ethics, so I hope that you get a lot of discussion going. I dived into the discussion because I couldn't resist it. If anything, the self is such a complex topic for debate because, for better or worse, we all have one.
By genetic disposition you refer to, more generally, the imposition made upon decision making, bringing into play possibilities that are yours, that constitute the choices you can make. A world, so to speak. Genetic predispositions are only a part of this. These possibilities are there, at the moment of choice, and while they do define what choices are there for a self, they do not decide. Now, this is a rather iffy proposition, for it will be insisted that choice requires freedom, and this term is nonsense, given that the principle of sufficient cause is inviolable. But here, this principle is dduly noted, and dismissed" it is the critical existential withdrawal from habit and familiarity that defines freedom.
Dualism is a surviving vestige of a failed attempt, failed because it tries to divide Being into parts, while it is an entirely simpliciter concept, beyond predication: you say Being is such and such and you have already presupposed being.
And meditation, I do this and have found that what stands in the way of real progress is the unseen assumptions that normalize the world constantly in play keep in place a foundation our affairs. Meditation works to undo this foundation, this language and culture, but more deeply, (and this is where things get frankly beyond weird) it undoes, or intends to undo, the very fabric the world, and by world I refer to Heidegger's dasein, being in the world. Phenomenology is the ONLY way to make sense of meditation., and this puts the matter in the hands of an examination of the structures of the self for it is in the self that the world is bound to the familiar.
I am aware of how this might sound, for most do not read phenomenology: it is thick and hard and alien to common sense. In my view, it is the only, heh, heh, true view.
"In the beginning was the word..." but the beginning is the beginning of the self - self is time.
Metaethics? No more non existent than any given empirical concept. Indeed, more real than these.
This is the way of the mystic, by knowing and controlling what to love or bring energy to, you in turn, control your destiny and whatever you may want to manifest as a part of your reality. Hence, love truly is what makes miracles happen, so long as you are conscious aware of it and only direct it to the things that which is good. Love is the primal essence of everything, including who you are, as well as being the energy to influence anything in this world of outcomes so long as you know how to use or invoke it.
Quoting Thinking
Is this true? I wonder if you would put some meant on this. Not that I disagree, at all. But it is stated, not argued, that is, justified. I think for starters, one has to examine love. How is this an absolute?
Experience it will not get you understanding. The understanding is not structured for this; it is rather a tool that has one function: to solve problems. Love is not the goal of the understanding, for the understanding cares about nothing. It is OUR goal, the extraordinary presence that beckons beyond the everydayness we are so invested in. Love is the desideratum that exceeds the desire. (You might want to check out Levinas's Totality and Infinity: an opaque, difficult thing to read, but once you are in it, it will destroy dogmas and orthodoxies.
With this topic, I find nothing. By this I don't mean to suggest that the self is an illusion or useful "folk psychology" or something of the like, it's just that I don't know how to properly think about it. It's easy to play games with the concept, such as: if Jones killed someone while he was drunk driving, 15 years ago, is the Jones now the same Jones who drove drunk? Or if I bang my head, and my personality changes, am I still "me"? This depends on the criteria you set up. But you can also do this for ethical considerations in relation to the self, the same problem arises.
But the concept is not less clear to me.
I would add that ethics is a thing of parts. On the one hand, there are the entanglements of our affairs, which is all you might find in Wittgenstein's great book of facts (Lecture on Ethics); on the other, there are the concrete actualities that are in the middle to these entanglements, the pains and joys themselves, looked at phenomenologically, released from the many contingencies and contexts that might otherwise possess them.
The facts are not incidental to ethics, some are scientific, fixed and abstract, like the Earth being closer to the Sun than Mars, they also vary across the board between people, cultures, principles, and so on, as in the "fact" that marriage stabilizes relationships; however, they are incidental to metaethics: the reality, if you will, behind our ethical entanglements, our arguments about the shoulds and shouldn'ts in this or that situation, that which all the fuss is about, is value, and its "thing itself" dimension, metavalue: The badness of the "ouch!"
Of course, such bads and goods are an integral part of experience. Even as I type, I have interest, concern, there are worries in the background, and so on. This the reality of the self that "shows" itself through its "value qualia" and is the genuine object of inquiry into the nature of the self.
But to understand is to deliver one from the nonsense that would otherwise define it. Look at the understanding as a kind of jnana yoga (as I do): is it first a pragmatic function that brings clarity, that prevents one from holding crazy beliefs and committing atrocities in the name of love. But there is also the Kantian insight: As integrated agencies, we are bound together by logic and language, keeping in mind that such things are in themselves transcendental: I use logic, a recall memories within the structures of logic and solve problems and even have a sense of self in logic, but the nature of logic is utterly alien to me. The nature of all things is transcendental.
Having said this, I agree with everything you said.
I'm going to need a Buddhist canonical reference for this, please.
When you put it like that, it sounds like atman.
Nirvana?
Quoting Constance
The idea that the self = nirvana, or that once the defilements are done away with, what is left is pure goodness and joy, is an idea that can be found in some Buddhist circles (esp. in Mahayana, and modern developments of Buddhism), but to the best of my knowledge, it has no support in the Pali Canon (ie. the text that is generally considered the authoritative text of what the Buddha taught).
Love of self is the same love for other selves around you. Perfection in relations is elementary.
Right. But let's take the matter further, and in this, I am only interested in how we interpret something like this, and have limited regard for what the Buddha actually said. (BUt then, as I read through the Pali canon I find some very odd references that quite absurd. Why, I wonder, should this original doctrine hold sway?) Go ahead and empty the self of its contents I like this on "annihilation":
There is no this world, no next world, no mother, no father, no spontaneously reborn beings; no priests or contemplatives who, faring rightly and practicing rightly, proclaim this world and the next after having directly known and realized it for themselves. A person is a composite of four primary elements. At death, the earth (in the body) returns to and merges with the (external) earth-substance. The fire returns to and merges with the external fire-substance. The liquid returns to and merges with the external liquid-substance. The wind returns to and merges with the external wind-substance. The sense-faculties scatter into space. Four men, with the bier as the fifth, carry the corpse. Its eulogies are sounded only as far as the charnel ground. The bones turn pigeon-colored. The offerings end in ashes. Generosity is taught by idiots. The words of those who speak of existence after death are false, empty chatter. With the break-up of the body, the wise and the foolish alike are annihilated, destroyed. They do not exist after death.'
It doesn't go far enough, does it? If you follow through on this annihilation, you must deny existence to anything language can make into an object, or reify by mental acts like gathering particulars under a heading, for a thoroughgoing annihilation denies all knowledge claims, for all such claims attempt to categorize the world. To think at all is to entertain a kind of illusion. Thus, all this talk about the four elements, wind, bones and ashes, these are not primordial things that stand above father and mother. There is no "person".
I prefer the prajnaparamita:
[i]Therefore, in emptiness no form, no feelings,
perceptions, impulses, consciousness.
No eyes, no ears, no nose, no tongue, no body, no mind;
no color, no sound, no smell, no taste, no touch,
no object of mind;
no realm of eyes
and so forth until no realm of mind consciousness.[/i]
This is annihilation, and the method is one of apophatic philosophy. My thoughts are that once the constructed self is eliminated, what remains is not nothing, but a depth of existence and well being that goes entirely beyond the pragmatic existence of everyday living. Nirvana, throughout the literature, confirms this.
That is a very accurate statement you've made. You've just slammed the question of self and reality into the stands.
Nirvana is a related topic that deals with the extinguishment of the personality. Complete nirvana, more officially called "Fifth Nirvana," is the final extinguishment.
Another self-revealing attainment is something called "liberation unleashed." It is the removal of the I-thought in the pineal. It could be called the transcendence of the "objective ego."
Another "ego" (2nd ego) could be considered to be any form of judgment of good or not good. This ego leaves one unclear and cloudy in terms of their assessment of their reality.
One last "ego" (3rd ego) is the arrangement of personal nucleus around self-pride and the achievements and comparative betterment that attenuate a high view of oneself. This self is transcended as the 8th stage of the 10 oxherding pictures where the mandala of experience is an empty circle. The previous stage in preparation is the transcending of the ox of independent doership, The bull gives way as stream-entry is engaged and all action is one action.
You know, there may be truth in all of this, but I cannot affirm beyond what I have been able to understand myself. Eastern philosophy is revelatory and it is not about faith, but actual encounter. As for me, I am what you could call a threshold person, meaning when I meditate, the conceptual grip the world generally has on me slips readily away, and there is in the interiority of my self a kind of rising presence of something entirely other than normal reality. The world loses its definition, its familiarity, its knowledge assumptions, and the whole yields to something extraordinary, unnamable, but unmistakable.
You find this in the Western apophatic literature as well. See Meister Eckhart, who prays to God to be rid of God, or pseudo Dionysus the Areopagite's Cloud of Knowing. The final extinguishment? I imagine
the Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thích Qu?ng ??c had achieved this when he set himself on fire. I do wonder what it must have been like to live inside that world where pain could be such a distant event.
Why do you quote or cite anything, instead of just making stuff up and ascribe it to another person?
Hold your horses!
Do you believe that what you quoted there is Buddhist doctrine??
What you quoted there is in the Pali Canon listed as a standard example of wrong view, in contrast to Right View.
Annihilationism is wrong view.
This is Mahayana doctrine. Why choose Mahayana over the Pali Canon? Can you explain?
As with any doctrine, one can either dogmatically receive it, then take this as an authoritative representation , disseminate what it says, learn by rote the utterances, divide into schools of thought, and call oneself a scholar. Or, one can talk the matter itself seriously, which means, while having respect for ancient ideas and those who founded them, realizing that these are interpretations of their own experiences and have no fixed, timeless say in the matters of determining what meditation is about, its nature and meaning, its revealed actualities.
What Buddhism is really about should never, ever be taken dogmatically, as a mere historical set of "facts". I don't choose Mahayana over Hinayana. These are mere classificatory distinctions that can be useful for referencing purposes, but to talk about what is essentially Buddhism, well, this takes one into the interesting interpretative inquiries: what is it that is disclosed in the interiority of the self when one meditates? How do we fit this into religious and philosophical paradigms? In the suspension of normal, spontaneous interpretative ideas, does Husserl's phenomenological reduction inform us in any interesting ways in understanding the meditative experience? And so on.
Case in point is your link to the right view. I do like this:
[The Buddha:] "By & large, Kaccayana, this world is supported by (takes as its object) a polarity, that of existence & non-existence. But when one sees the origination of the world as it actually is with right discernment, 'non-existence' with reference to the world does not occur to one. When one sees the cessation of the world as it actually is with right discernment, 'existence' with reference to the world does not occur to one.
There is a striking resemblance here to post modern thinking that denies a center to any proposition. Husserl's epoche, whereby all schools of thought are in abeyance, as is all naturalistic knowledge claims (so called). Many consider the religious dimension of this, reminiscent of Kierkegaard's "eternal present" which has a fundamental place in existential thinking across the board.
"Nonexistence" is simply an intruding conceptualization that has its meaning bound to a network of meanings, and to invoke such a term transforms a, call it "pure" perceptual event (very disputatious idea), into an apperceptive event, binding the understanding to logic and language, and here is where the most challenging part of meditation lies: in the undoing of the interpretative grip one's earliest training in the world has on one. Not to see a house AS a house, or to take up the world AS anything.
Quoting baker
Because I am not arguing about who said what, when or where. I care little for this. I only care about ideas and how they come into play in understanding the world and the rest is incidental. Now if I had the job of teaching this, it would be the same as it would be for Heidegger, Sartre, Levinas, Walt Whitman, Wordsworth, or anyone: incidental facts become part of the lecture.
Don't be silly. No one is making things up.
Metaethics investigates the meanings of moral terms, the nature of ethical judgments, and the different kinds of moral arguments and one near-universal moral principle that all people seem to subscribe to is the golden rule - do unto others as you'd like others to do unto you - and my hunch is that's a good place to start.
This is a false dichotomy.
If someone wants to make up their own idea of enlightenment and the path toward it, that's their thing, and they have the freedom to do so. But it is misleading, to say the least, to then call this "Buddhism" or "what the Buddha really taught".
The point is that the teachings in the Pali Canon are regarded as being taught by an enlightened being, and a unique one at that, someone who is categorically different than an ordinary person. As such, it is assumed that the teachings in those texts contain insights that an ordinary person simply cannot have.
Later texts are taught by someone other than the Buddha, by people who may not even be enlightened. As such, they aren't assumed to have such insight and such value as those by the Rightfully Self-Enlightened One.
You're missing the point. The Buddhist teachings in the Pali Canon aren't just "some more philosophy; yet another philosophical text"; that is, the texts themselves claim to be more than that.
Whether you accept them to be such is up to you. But when a text itself makes such claims about itself, it's not clear how come people so often ignore that bit and just go on reading it as if it was yet another text.
To give another example: If a text starts with, "These words were dictated to me by the Holy Spirit", do you just ignore this and other such references in the text, and try to independently establish whether what the text says is true or relevant or not?
I think it would be silly, to say the least, to take such self-referential, meta-textual claims at face value (or to try to establish whether they are true or not). But I also think it is wrong to ignore them. If a text basically makes the meta-textual claim about itself that amounts to, "This is not yet another philosophical text, and it shouldn't be read as such" -- then this is something I take seriously. That doesn't mean I believe what the text says, but it does mean I don't treat it as yet another philosophical text. This is what it means to recognize the genre of a text: a religious text is in some vital ways different and should be read differently than a philosophical or scientific or literary text.
You're not serious.
What amazes me the most in relation to Buddhism is how ready people are to bastardize it. Orignally, in the Pali Canon, a path of practice toward enlightenment is layed out, in considerable detail. But despite that, so many people make up their own ideas of enlightenment, but nevertheless believe they are legitimized by the Buddha, and even call those ideas "Buddhist."
Quoting Constance
To use the H-word, one must either be a Mahayani (supremacist), or someone who doesn't know what it means and how it is used in Buddhism.
What did Kant "really" teach? If he were here to tell you, would his thought be any less disputatious? The "real" Kant is, of course, a matter of scholarly work, but to the extent the object is to stay true to Kant exclusively, then the matter is not philosophical at all, for it is not interpretative, but historical. But then, Kant, in everything he said being philosophical, taken as it is, is inherently indeterminate, so the real Kant is really no more than a multitude of open questions.
This is what Buddhism is. Everything the Buddha said begs many questions, which is why it continues on as an open concept. Taken as a path of liberation, even, a practical method, it still is open. I would say as with Kant, even if the Buddha stood before us and told us exactly what he meant, it would still remain just as conceptually open as it is now.
Quoting baker
Insights! Of course, what else? Insights into what to do and how to regard the world. A foundation that provided, as I see it, the most important contribution to human thinking ever. But I would say in the event of meditation, all "schools" are in abeyance, especially when the significant changes occur in the way one's everydayness is apprehended. There comes a point, I do not argue but simply relate, at which attachments are genuinely loosened, and the world becomes, not to put too fine a point on it, a different place altogether. Schooled thinking has nothing to do with this, but it has been merely tool all along, a tool of second guessing interpretations and undoing familiarity held in place by pervasive conceptual strongholds acquired since childhood. It is at the conceptual level in the structures of the world itself that detachments have to be finally undone.
Quoting baker
Where is the proof? In the pudding. One has to read and confirm for oneself.
Quoting baker
I agree, it is not just some more philosophy, rather, it is THE philosophy! But look at it like this: Buddhism's great contribution is that is provides a practical guide to liberation, but such a concept is absolutely open, it presents a landscape of fascinating theo-philosophical thought, and there is so much in this that takes the matter of liberation into extraordinary fields of inquiry.
Quoting baker
I disagree. Buddhism laid out clearly as a method in achieve liberation is not the only way to achieve liberation. And you seem to think he was the only one ever to be "enlightened". I mean, what is enlightenment such that he was the only one and only his utterances make the right way? I've read the four noble truths and find them simply superfluous, not wrong, but certainly not exclusively right. They are extraneous to the essential idea: liberation.
Why disputatious??
This is the thinking of someone who is not a Buddhist.
That's a bizarre claim to make in relation to a religious text.
Religion is dogma to which one is supposed to align oneself. It's not something to discover, or verify.
*sigh*
That's your claim. I neither agree nor disagree with it.
What proof do you have that there is more than one way to achieve liberation? As in, liberation as it is defined in the early Buddhist texts?
I'm saying that in early Buddhist texts, he is called the Rightfully Self-Awakened One, and Buddhists texts say there can be only one such being per one cosmic entity of time. That's all I'm saying.
*sigh*
There are all kinds of ideas of what "liberation" is.
Theravadans have their own idea of what liberation is.
Mahayanis have their own idea of what liberation is.
Hindus have about a dozen ideas of what liberation is.
California Buddhists have their own idea of what liberation is.
Western psychologists have their own idea of what liberation is.
Every meth head has their own idea of what liberation is.
But these ideas of liberation are not all the same. Not all paths lead to the same goal. All things that are called "liberation" aren't the same. You're arguing for an equivocation.
The point is that such things are by their very nature not determinate. The language in play is open.
Quoting baker
Where do you think Buddha got it? Lived in a culture that laid out possibilities, and he practiced, observed, thought. His final words have no definitive claim on the very thing he brought forth. Buddhism is NOT a doctrine.
Quoting baker
Sorry, this is most emphatically wrong.
Quoting baker
My claim? All religion is about liberation, and the question of how this can be reasonably discussed depends entirely on what is disclosed for the individual in the events of deep meditation. The less one can do this, the more s/he depends on others for understanding. the better one can do this, the less one relies on others, and once this latter is realized, methodological texts fall away. They were just heuristics all along.
Quoting baker
But what does this even mean if the notion of being awakened is not clear in one's own experience. It becomes a mere fiction, something alien and distant. How can the concept have any meaning at all like this?
Quoting baker
But these all vanish when one sits quietly and breaks free from the conceptual hold of the world. To see objects not as objects, but to bring no distinctions into play at the level spontaneous perception, and what was once a divided world becomes a profound unity. In this condition, and approaching it, one realizes that the only talk that can matter is that which acknowledges that beneath experience there is a foundation that is entirely Other than the everydayness of things. It intimates its own consummation and in this one realizes that the there is only one thing that is sought beneath the multitude of spiritual and otherwise ambitions. Not a multitude. Gautama Siddhartha knew this, I believe. He knew that there was this singular, consummatory event for all, and that is was not far and away, but right there, in our midst, unassailable and perfect, and we know what this is, for we see it in part played out in our lives, in loving relationships, in romantic visions, in childhood innocence, in a yearning for what we call God, an intimation of what was realized fully, perhaps, 2500 years ago.
I think if the Buddha were here with us now, he would agree: all of our endeavors are at the most basic level, a yearning for this extraordinary one thing. I say, the "end" in both senses of the term, of philosophy is to narrow theory in order to bring this into the fullest expression. Post Heideggarian French theology, Jean luc Marion, Michell Henry, Emanuel Levinas, then there is Husserl and Eugene Fink's Sixth Meditation, And John Caputo Apophatic thinking and Derrida, and so many others who see that theory has come to a dramatic point where the ineffability of the world enters the world! Odd thing to say, but I believe it is the mind reaching out to affirm the essential Buddhist thesis, which is that language will not consummate the self, Truth is not propositional, but what you might call meta-affective.
Based on what do you think that??
What have you heard about the Buddha, and which can reasonably be ascribed to the Buddha, that makes you think the above?
This is my first post to this forum.
The Self is a topic that interests me a lot this is why I got in here reading your comments.
I see your approach is quite influenced by oriental philosophy that I don't know very well. I'm more a naturalist-cognitivist so my perspective of the Self comes from a different angle what I think could be enriching. Some times different perspectives or beliefs generate frictions or harm other's sensitivity, this is not my intention at all and let me know if you think this post is not convenient for your debate.
I'll post here my manifesto on the Self that I have created that explains my view and I think could be interesting.
Your immediate reaction could be, as mine is some times..."we're talking different" things here! So an interesting debate could be : how would you call then my "Self" or how would I call yours :-).
The ontology of the Self, a manifesto
The self is a phenomena resulting of a cognitive process within the brain that generates the "I", a self-referenced mental-object within brain’s mental "model of the world". The "I" is a representation of the Subject as Being, as owner, creator, agent and receptor of the intentionality of its mental objects. The linguistic representation of the “I” is not needed for a Self to happen.
The mental raise of the self: The mental “model-of-the-world” is a representational mirror of the external reality, a second mental mirror comes from the mental representation of “the others” that makes the self to happen/emerge when the mental process realizes the “invariants” between the other and I (confronting both mirrors). Two confronted mental mirrors that create the self’s singularity.
The Self bio-basis: The self process is confined to synchronous integrated information exchange activity between the cortex pre-frontal ventro-median area and the temporal and parietal (praecuneus) lobes.
Self and experience: The self is not required for experience to happen or to be communicated. A conscious and an unconscious brain can be able to communicate its emotions without being self-conscious, i.e. reflex actions.
Self and time: The Self process "emerges" gradually as our brain matures and as we grow as individuals in a proper stimulating cultural context.
The Self is not something permanent, it dissolves gradually when we address our attention to specific tasks and/or non-referential thoughts. It dissolves and disappear as well when we sleep or die,
The self and evolution: The self makes us more adaptive and effective in our survival and homeostatic goals as a species.
As consciousness, the Self enables even more complex (larger, longer, more realistic and more integrated) models-of-the-world as it enables, i.e., evaluating our judgments against the other’s.
Self and memory: Access to memories is necessary for the self to happen. More accurate and longer memories that contain external descriptions of the world (i.e. science) the more empowered the self is.
Self and society: The main role of the Self is played in society, when interacting with others: it enriches the culture of the societies generating richer cultural models-of-the world. It reinforces the social cohesion via a stronger integration of the individual.
The self enables the feeling of self-confidence that evaluates our judgements, our decisions and actions so that can be self improved or communicated to others seeking improvement.
Self and the existential delusion: The Self is necessary for the emergence of the concepts of "infinite" and "finite" that foster the generation of fear, anxiety and depression as the "model-of-the-world" it generates is much larger than himself. This idea of confinement gets in conflict with its primordial instinct of survival. Systems of believes that sustain a teleological illusion mitigate these negative feelings (religions, intelligent design, spiritualism, mysticism,...).
Your link provides:
"And what is right view? Knowledge with regard to stress, knowledge with regard to the origination of stress, knowledge with regard to the cessation of stress, knowledge with regard to the way of practice leading to the cessation of stress: This is called right view."
I don't see Buddhism as subsuming the meditative event; I see meditation subsuming Buddhism. Meditation is the practical foundation to achieving liberation and enlightenment, and so the question that lords over all, if we are going to risk being assaulted by the Zen master's fan by thinking about what demands quietude, what is meditation as a method of liberation.? And this begs questions like, what is liberation, liberation from what? and to what? If one is going to talk about the meaning of Buddhism, one must looks to its concepts, but most seem to think there is nothing to say. This is because they don't read phenomenology.
If you want to say the true teachings of Buddhism lies with the study of the Pali canon, I would say, true? What does this mean? Do you mean historically, categorially? Then perhaps you can talk like this. By I quickly add the Pali canon bows low to the unfolding event in the deep meditative state, and a determination of this state looks to the phenomenological structures of experience.
Take "The Right View" from your link:
"And what is right view? Knowledge with regard to stress, knowledge with regard to the origination of stress, knowledge with regard to the cessation of stress, knowledge with regard to the way of practice leading to the cessation of stress: This is called right view."
What kind of stress is this referring to? There is the mundane stress of daily affairs, the common things that rise up in relationships, expectations others have of one, stress at home with family and siblings, from the need to establish security professionally, and so on. Is this what The Noble Truth of the Path Leading to the Cessation of dukkha dukkha nirodha gamini patipada ariya sacca is about? Of course, these are not excluded from the problematic, but this is certainly not where the concept as it is dealt with here hits its mark. For this, we have to examine what meditation and liberation are really about at the level of basic questions, putting aside the mundanity of relaxing and feeling better about oneself. One can take a valium for this latter.
What if I said meditation is an event that is understood only in an analysis of the structures of consciousness? Here I think of Husserl and his phenomenological reduction has been implicit in phenomenology since Kant, and here particularly, in Kierkegaard. What is the self? he asks in his Concept of Anxiety and Sickness Unto Death. Kierkegaard, responding to Hegel, sees that reason cannot be the ground for the actuality that is qualitatively set apart from it. Existence is not essentially rational but is utterly transcendent (not his language). Wittgenstein was a fan years later and the idea plays out in philosophy, analytic as well, but especially in Continental philosophy. The self, for Kierkegaard, is acknowledged as a kind of nothingness that sits in the middle of the temporal dynamic of the future that is constructed out of the past in a process of becoming (to borrow from Heraclitus). He says this, and of course, Sartre's Being and Nothingness is derivative of this, as is Heidegger's Being and Time.
This ontology of time and the self, the self being constructed out of a past to future dynamic, leaves the question of the self open, for the actuality of the self cannot be possessed by the past (see the long standing tradition of apophatic theology/philosophy--Meister Eckhart, Dionysus the Areopogite, e.g.s; deconstruction steps in announcing the "end" of philosophy), as it is an actual presence that is not discovered in an analysis of the precomprehended projection that is grist for the future making mill. The present is an "eternal present" which is the foundation for existential freedom: freedom the emerges as the "authentic" self that is no longer claimed by the language and culture and beliefs and attachments that issue form the past.
Forget how the crudely made paragraph above can be questioned, criticized, the point is merely to set up an answer to your question: In the event of meditation, the above is a rough sketch of a phenomenological description of its essential features. Ever since I read Kierkegaard's discussion of the eternal present, I realized what meditation is really about at the level of basic questions (keeping in mind that we are asking questions, probing into concepts and their underpinning meanings, not stating chapter and verse. A text is only as meaningful as its concetps, and these are only meaningful if their meanings are exhaustively examined. Postmodern thinking is the crown jewel of the centuries of meandering metaphysics seeking endlessly to say the unsayable, pronouncing, by MY thinking, that we are faced with, not a conceptual problem at all and all this busy work possessed this one flawed premise that it was a propositional answer that was sought; but no: our existence is a VALUE problem, and meaning follows upon value). "Actual" eternity is not defined as a succession of moments that never ends, but as a kind of ontology of nothingness that is always already there, and is the valuative "seat" of our being. Another philosophical theme I take seriously is metaethics/ metavalue. I think in the examination of value simpliciter, the phenomenon of suffering and joy, reveals an extraordinary insight, which is that the core of value is, as Wittgenstein relates in his Lecture on ethics, well, invisible. The "good" of joy cannot be empirically observed and is a transcendental actuality. This actuality is the self, the realization of which is the goal of meditation.
Buddhism realized this in its own way centuries ago, but phenomenology gave Buddhism its meta-discussion.
Not sure what this external reality is meant to be. Not that externality is not meaningful, but what you mean is unclear. Of course, this is a big issue. Seems to me that the mirror of external reality would hold within it that of the others, but then, what do you mean by "other"?
Quoting Raul
I am willing to think like this, in this naturalistic framework, but only AS naturalistic. But where do your, if you will, "reductions" lie? Are you committing yourself to a physical reductionist thesis? Then you will have to face the music: your utterances pronouncing an objective physical world would have to be physical, yet if that were true, how does epistemic affirmation occur? That is, how does a physical object like a brain, ever "know" an external object to affirm the out "thereness" of external reality?
Quoting Raul
I don't understanding this. Unconscious experience? This needs explaining.
Quoting Raul
I see, you wake up, there you are, fall asleep and you are not there; you die, you're gone. It rises and falls, like the tides and other physical things. Proving that there is an enduring self is not possible empirically. But then, empirical observation precisely called into serious question with a physicalist model. If the pragmatists are right about knowledge, and what is known is pragmatically known, then ALL claims to knowing are relegated to the bin of unknowables. Then there is the metaethical argument which I won't go into here unless you are so inclined.
Quoting Raul
Quoting Raul
trouble with evolution, which I of course think is a right view as far as it goes, is that evolution has nothing to say about the evolved self qualitatively. More realistic? No, better at solving problems regarding survival and reproduction, but wht actually brings about evolutionary change is entirely outside this: Genetic accidents have no intrinsic relation to evolutionary needs. They just occur and happen to work better than otherwise, but this, "better" refers to a quality that is entirely arbitrary to evolution, that is, accidents are not inherently evolutionary accidents. And the consciousness that has arisen over the millennia is not an evolutionary consciousness. E.g., granted, the reproduction is encouraged by the gratification of sex, but such gratification is not therefore so defined as the success of gratification. What it is, and all the evolved self is, isentirely OTHER than these processes and have to be understood only in their manifest qualities.
Quoting Raul
True, and it goes further: the self is constructed out of memory, as memory precomprehends the given moment. Ask, what is my "self" and you are already relying on memory even in the asking, for recollection of language and the learning, of structured logical thought is all part of the anticipated moment of asking, of walking down the street, and so on. One's identity is a complex memory.
But in this predelineated self, one finds much more than memory, doesn't one? Examine the self and its immediate interface with the world, which, not being so immediate after all, given that all encounters are precomprehended and that it is IN the recollection that the understanding can grasp the world in thought, BUT there is this strange insistence on "presence" which defies temporal delimitations: not only is my experience constructed out of memory, but there is the actuality that I face that is NOT memory at all. Put a spear into my kidney and I am not registering the event as a dynamic recollection, and the same goes for all experiences: the actuality of the event entirely escapes the understanding. Since the self is, as with all matters, predelineated by memory and the understanding and its recognition and familiarity with things rests with this, there remains that elusive "middle" world of actuality where the self has its center.
Quoting Raul
And yet, when we speak of survival have we brought theory to its final resting place at the foundation where inquiry goes no further? Ot don't we need to made foundations where they present themselves: at the level of presuppositions at work in the affairs is science? Science does not even pretend to be about the self; rather, it yields to the interpretative standards that have no regard for the actualities in the human self's world. Physicality? A meaningless term, ontologically. Propositional empiricism? What is the structure of the proposition vis a vis the world of objects? What of ethics and aesthetics, the most salient feature of being a self? That is, the meanings we are IN, in the world is what comes first in discussing the self. And also, the reductionist paradox looms large: You think all things reducible to the physical, yet, the concept itself is without predicative possibilities, i.e., there is nothing to say about it; furhter, you, the thinking agency conceiving of the physical would be yourself a duly reducible agency, and therefore you would need to show how that which is reducible can even conceive of what is not.
Quoting Constance
Based on what do you think that??
I think you're looking at the Buddha in a very romantic, idealistic way. A modern re-imagining: egalitarian, politically correct, democratic. Non-sexist.
The Buddha of the Pali Canon is not like that. He's an aristocrat, authoritarian, dogmatic. Even when he goes for alms or sleeps in the forest covered with leaves.
The Buddha of the Pali Canon doesn't care how you're doing or what your "hopes and dreams" are. You think he would agree that all of our endeavors are at the most basic level, a yearning for this extraordinary one thing? No, he's not a New Ager.
There are many metadiscussions of Buddhism. Starting with the ones in traditionally Buddhist Asian cultures. Then the metadiscussions in the many Western imports/exports of Buddhism that try so hard to make Buddhism seem palatable to modern Western sensitivities, that try so hard to present it as the one religion that isn't really a religion, but a philosophy.
But as one reimagines the Buddha and Buddhism this way, selectively regarding old sources, keeping things one likes, discarding those one doesn't, making changes here and there, as one prefers: What is the result of that? Is that something that can be relied on as a path to liberation?
The old tradition (that can be traced back to the historical Buddha and his disciples) came with a declaration of a guarantee: Do things the way you're told, the way preserved by the tradition, and this is your best bet to become liberated.
One might accept that guarantee, or not; but at least it's there and has some historical validity.
But the new reimaginings can offer no such guarantee. This is free-style, anything-goes, reinventing-the-W/wheel kind of "Buddhism". An ivory tower populated mostly by youngish able-bodied males who told society to go suck on a lemon and escaped into their own minds. Are they enlightened? Are they liberated? Maybe they even are, but they sure can't teach others how to become liberated as well.
Quoting baker
That passage quoted underneath is not Buddhist teaching. It's an example of the 'nihilist view' associated with the materialists of the Buddha's day. It's similar or identical to what materialists believe now.
Quoting Constance
:ok:
Quoting Constance
Have a read of Epoche and ??nyat?. (It's behind a paywall but registration for online use is free.)
Quoting baker
That's not what the Mah?y?na says of itself, although it is what the Theravada says about it.
[quote=Wikipedia]The Mah?y?na s?tras were not recognized as being Buddha word (buddhavacana) by various groups of Indian Buddhists and there was lively debate over their authenticity throughout the Buddhist world. Buddhist communities such as the Mah?s??ghika school and the Theravada tradition of Sri Lanka became divided into groups which accepted or did not accept these texts.[8] Therav?da commentaries of the Mahavihara sub-school mention these texts (which they call Vedalla/Vetulla) as not being the Buddha word and being counterfeit scriptures.[36]
Various Mah?y?na s?tras warn against the charge that they are not word of the Buddha and defend their authenticity in different ways.[37] Some Mah?y?na s?tras like as the Ga??avy?ha often criticize early Buddhist figures, such as Sariputra for lacking knowledge and goodness, and thus, these elders or ?r?vaka are seen as not intelligent enough to receive the Mah?y?na teachings.[38]
The reason these accounts give for the historically late disclosure of the Mah?y?na teachings is that most people were initially unable to understand the Mah?y?na s?tras at the time of the Buddha (500 BCE) and suitable recipients for these teachings had not yet arisen.[39] Some traditional accounts of the transmission of the Prajñ?p?ramit? s?tras claim that they were originally stored or hidden in the realm of the n?gas (serpent-like supernatural beings). Later, these s?tras were retrieved by N?g?rjuna.[40] Other Mah?y?na sources state that they were preached or preserved by bodhisattvas like Mañju?r? or Buddhas like Vajradh?ra.[41][42][/quote]
Quoting baker
I think that's completely incorrect. Having renounced his family and household, he also renounced any aristocratic rank, and besides there are questions as to whether his lineage really was aristocratic. The Sangha was open to members of all castes, which is one of the reasons Buddhism died out in India. And he was not authoritarian, as anyone was free to join the Sangha - sure, they would be expelled for breaking the monastic code, but that is not 'authoritarianism'.
Quoting Constance
Check this article out
Well, I don't think sucking on lemons is helpful. But the philosophy is just the a matter of making ideas clear, even if the matter itself is revelatory, intuitive and defiant of interpretation. This is why I think apophatic philosophy, in the East, neti, neti, is helpful. I mean, once you are in an earnest engagement to find out what is so mysteriously called enlightenment, it is in your inquiring mind where everydayness needs to be pushed aside. It is not a matter of saying what is essentially revelatory and intuitive, but rather talking around it, about it, indirectly through the familiar to point to what cannot be spoken.
After all, the actuality of the world, the "presence" of being here, cannot be spoken, and if a person can realize this at the perceptual level, that is, in the plain apprehension of objects in the world, in the midst of implicit knowledge events there is the palpable mystery in all things, and one experiences an extraordinary intimation of depth and profundity, then one knows without a doubt s/he is in the proximity of enlightenment, though its consummation may be light years away. It is what inspires one to move forward, do the hard work endlessly looking. I don't think the Pali canon is the exclusive vehicle for this at all.
Sure. And let's not forget that Mahayana is the "Buddhist" tradition that came up with a "spiritual" justification for killing, raping, and pillaging. I'm talking about the Secondary Bodhisattva Vows, of course.
Really? The Buddha of the Pali Canon who in the beginning, after he attained enlightenment, didn't want to teach at all, because he concluded from his first post-enlightenment experiences with humans that humans are just too stupid and too worthless to be taught?
The Buddha of the Pali Canon who was very liberal with the use of the word "fool" for people?
The Buddha of the Pali Canon who decided who was good enough to be taught by him and who wasn't?
The Buddha of the Pali Canon who is continually referred to with epithets like "the Blessed One", "the Rightfully Self-enlightened One"?
These strike you as not aristocratic, not authoritarian, not dogmatic?
Unrelated to that, my encounters with Buddhists from different schools support this.
Based on my reading of the Pali Canon, the Buddha is definitely not someone for whom I would say something like "I think if the Buddha were here with us now, he would agree: all of our endeavors are at the most basic level, a yearning for this extraordinary one thing."
Sure. But I don't see how you can do any of this in some relation to Buddhism. Neither the Buddha nor Buddhists would tolerate you doing that in their presence. What you describe is something they criticize severely.
I think you're assuming far more familiarity with and acceptance from the Buddha and the Buddhists than is warranted.
It's not a vehicle for what you're describing at all.
Well, that was a short conversation.
And this one:
Nascent speculative non-buddhism
(You don't have to fill in anything, just click download)
Why sugarcoat the Secondary Bodhisattva Vows?
A part of the Vows is about vowing to do things that are otherwise considered wrong or harmful, but still one should do them for the sake of the "spiritual wellbeing" of those who end up on the receiving end of those actions.
Would you like to be on the receiving end of those actions? A Mahayani coming along and beating you up and feeling justified to do so because he's sure that this will be to your benefit??
Fortunately or unfortunately, no. The system of religious beliefs and practices is a closed, self-referential system that works by the principle of self-confirmation: one starts off by taking for granted that what the religion teaches is true and that "it works", and then one does the practices, and then one comes out "convinced" that is is true and that "it works".
It's like the science "experiments" that children do in science classes in school: the children don't actually discover anything, don't learn anything "on their own". What they do is they internalize the scientific terms and processes and then they learn to see the world through the lens of those terms and processes.
This external reality is the world that interacts with our senses: the light that hits our eyes, the sounds that hit our ears, the feelings on our skin, etc... One of the capabilities of our brains is to reproduce/mirror that external reality so that he can then make models and simulations of the "future". Example: it creates a model of the room you're in and this is useful for you to move around, it creates a model of your friend's personality what helps your talk to him and understand each other...
Quoting Constance
Those are categories and concepts we develop as we grow, as our brain grows. We learn how to categorize physical objects as well as conceptual objects that are communicated by the social context we grow in. The relationships of those objects and our brain assigns value to them, cognitive value, emotional value to achieve its main goal: keep the homeostatic equilibrium.
The episteme, the knowing, happens when the internal objects and categories, ideas have a external correlate. There is a "symbiosis","correlation" between the cognitive objects and the external world. When the cognitive predictions (manipulations of the internal objects that represent the external world) correlate with reality. Example: if I tell my wife I love her she will react in certain way, if I eat an apple I'll like the taste, etc... Pure biological activity.
Quoting Constance
Yes, there re experiments that show a person saying he doesn't see anything (consciously not seeing) but he behaves and moves avoiding obstacles. Search for "blindsight" in wikipedia.
Quoting Constance
Not all of them but many of them. Could you put some examples?
Quoting Constance
Our Self shares many qualities with the self of primates for example. We have more capabilities mainly related to language that enable deeper reasoning and manipulation/simulation of realty for our evolutionary advantage. Evolution is about patterns that survive longer and adapt better. Our brain have created this capability of the "Self" that enables evolutionary advantages. At least for now. Why do you see it is entirely OTHER? There are no "new qualities" in our brain, just more powerful. I don't think our Self has a singularity.
Quoting Constance
Agree, and a good example si this "Seven Seconds memory" man you can find in youtube.
Quoting Constance
This is incorrect. Heterophenomenology deals with actualities in the human consciousness and the self (I'm thinking on Dennett and Dehaene works, you should not ignore them).The success of science studying the self is that it brings "the new" and "actual new" not based on speculation but on scientific dialogue with our brain and our subjective manifestations. Thanks to this we can today not only better understand our limits and how the brain creates the "illusions of the self" (distorted reality in order to make it useful for our survival, pleasure, ...). Thanks to this we have reached levels of manipulation never reached in the past (for the better and the worst).
Quoting Constance
The Self does have a physical correlation that is within the information flow of our cognition, as liquidity is a special property of the matter we could think about the Self in similar ways in terms of physical correlates.
Quoting Constance
I think the other way around: not all the physical is reducible to things. The concept of Self does have predicative possibilities, at least the one corresponding to my manifesto.
Tell me what you think of what I call the opacity test: In your physical model of the world, there is a brain and this is the seat all we experience. Assume this true. Given a simple notion of transparency found in a window or a mirror, with, if "clear," an opacity of zero when it comes to delivering or transmitting the object as it is, how clear would be what is delivered by a brain, a thick, bulk of organic material? In fact, how is it that any at all of what is the original, independent object brought forth?
Rorty convinced me that such an idea is senseless. What we call reality is a matrix of pragmatic interface; in plain physicalist term, all you ever encounter is the collective neuronal epiphenomenal presentation. But here is the real rub: The idea of anything that stands outside of this physical "thing" we call a brain can only be conceived within this mass, thereby making talk of exteriors like this nothing less than metaphysics.
I think one has to take a good long look at this idea and ask, how is it that anything out there gets in here? Out thereness itself MUST be in here, point to my head. I know you want to affirm an scientist's world of the assumed understanding of an exteriority in the standard sense, but what good is this if it depends entirely on an assumption that cannot be explained at all, that in fact, on analysis, reveals exactly the opposite, for one can never conceive how a brain can "know" what is not a brain and phenomenology is the only recourse.
Quoting Raul
Yes, if you are going to work with the common assumptions of empirical science, all this is quite salutary. But all of this begs philosophical questions. It is one thing to talk about objects and brains. cognitive and and worldly relations, but what of the analysis of knowledge itself? Going on about one's business is well and good, practical, productive, but here, we want to ask basic questions, for this is philosophy, not physics. When you say you know there is a cup on the table (or bioactivity in a petri dish), how does this get affirmed on analysis of the relation qua relation, not the relation qua all the basic assumptions that are in place while one does the shopping and pays bills. What IS such an affirmation about? we follow here the rules of procedure any scientist would, only here, the themes are altogether different in that we look to what is presupposed by familiar, unquestioned knowledge relationships.
It is not at all that there is "nothing out there" but rather what that IS cannot be said, realized, at all. This makes objects of the world very mysterious, transcendental, impossible! at the level of basic questions.
Quoting Raul
Quoting Raul
Okay, the brain delivers mixed events. Consciousness is what is reported, conceptually identified. If my hands are doing what I am not aware of, it is not a conscious event, but is autonomic.
Quoting Raul
If knowledge is inherently problem solving, and to know is simply to know successful outcomes, then this places everything we consider to be true accounts of nature entirely outside the possibility of some intimations of what things "really are". I think this is likely true" Thinking and its language and its interpretative function is foundationally determinative of what the "isness" of the world is.
Of course, this is not exhaustive of our experiencing the world as world. But it IS exhaustive of our understanding's ability to establish belief and knowledge.
Quoting Raul
Quoting Raul
This is a wrong understanding of evolution. The self is not an "evolution" self, for reasons cited earlier. Not sure what you mean by "entirely Other," not that I disagree, but I miss your point. AS to the singularity of the self, this is a different matter, difficult to show because the center of an act of awareness escapes awareness. I find it very reasonable to argue that the self that is engaged on multiple fronts existing as a teacher, spouse, sibling, political activist, believer of this and that, and so on, is an aggregate self, but in the examination of the self's, errr, properties, we are looking at an interiority of affairs, not at the furniture of the world, and it is here we can "observe" the self in our stream of consciousness: this stream is our aggregate self. Look further and find this stream "runs," it constitutes time, not in time, but constitutes it, is the foundation of thought itself out of which meanings are produced, scientific meanings, as all meaning is essentially scientific. What, after all IS science if not the method of science, and what is this method if not the structure of thought itself: the simply conditional form of logic: If I impact nitro with sufficient force, THEN is will explode, hence, the meaning, in part, of nitro. This sructure is at the very heart of crossing the street, selecting a book, talking about the weather, everything at the level of basic assumptions about the world issues from here.
But in this interiority of multiple events, endlessly changing, there is always the abiding self that is on the subjective end of a given encounter. It's easy yield to the temptation to absorb this into the matrix of everything else, but then you would not be giving sufficient due to the actuality of this center. Alas, this is too difficult to talk about here. One has to read Husserl, Heidegger, Kierkegaard, Levinas, back to Kant, and so on. Open for discussion, though.
Quoting Raul
Quoting Raul
Seven seconds: the time it takes to define a constructed self in the given complex moment of awareness, made out of the past. But the question is about this middle vis a vis the actual experience, not to be found in the theoretical paradigms; for just as science must yield to the facts, so phenomenology has to observe faithfully the structures of the self as they appear "themselves". Awareness as an aggregate is a common view among phenomenologists. I think they are wrong for several reasons. One lies with the Kantian transcendental turn, which is best expressed by Eugene Fink in his Sixth Cartesian Meditation, a more than daunting read if you haven't read Kant. Here, it is accepted that all the appears before one as it is, prior to and presupposed by empirical science, has its grounding in experience, and the focus is here, on the "primal philosophical act..to reductive giveness."
An empirical idea is constructed out of the givenness of the world, and so prior to an analysis of what the self is, we have to look into what givenness IS, which really is just a matter of looking at the interiority where the self is and finding that all roads lead to this generative source, which is the self, which is NOT contained in the categories generated that give rise to the possibility of empirical science.
Most do not even know such inquiry exists. Alas.
Quoting Raul
I have little doubt about the above. don't get me wrong, I do not at all think that scientists like Dennett are wrong, but they do coincide with, say, Husserl's Ideas or Heidegger's Being and Time. It's just that these latter are at a more fundamental level. Of course, the metaethical argument for the self is completely beyond his interests as well. Indeed, the most powerful argument for the self lies not in ontology, but in metaethics. I find some analytic philosophers interesting, like Quine, who arrives at the same conclusions, essentially, as Derrida, and Rorty, who straddles the fence, though naming Heidegger and Dewey among the most important thinkers of the 20th century. Others, like John Mackie, are outside of insights at the basic level.
Begs the question" Buddhism?? This is my point. Read about what is said at all, and you will find not a closed system of thought, but an openness of possibilities. Those who try to contain religion and philosophy to a doctrine put up barriers to understanding. What is Christianity? Kierkegaard claimed that what Jesus, "Christ," was actually talking about lay with an existential analysis of the self, not in Christendom, not in orthodoxy.
To be clear: By doing what you suggest, one asserts one's supremacy over the text and the ideas it presents.
If this is what one is going to do, then why bother with the text at all? You might as well buy a blank notebook and write down your own ideas.
I can see how it can be read that way, but I don't agree with it.
Those who refuse to acknowledge the origins and the systemicity of (a) religion are forcefully superimposing themselves and their own ideas onto (the) religion, thus making (the) religion their subordinate.
He was a Protestant living off a trust fund, flriting with Catholic ideas from a safe distance. Of course he could afford to fiddle and flirt this way, never actually committing to the religious community which produced him and to which he was indebted. Ungrateful brat.
In other words, I judge, I condemn the areligious, "spiritual" approach to religion. Religious texts were not written for just anyone to read them any way they like and to do with them whatever they like.
It's a matter of common decency to acknowledge that and the religious tradition of which they are part.
I see ancient, original texts as openings for new disclosure, and therein lies their greatness. There are no definitive texts, only movement toward greater intimacy with truth at the level of basic questions. What is so important about Hinduism and Buddhism is that they presented an extraordinary efficient method for disclosing revelatory, intuitive understanding at this level. They presented a new intuitive horizon! And I believe it to be philosophy's sole remaining mission to talk about this, learn what it is.
Quoting baker
If i were putting forward something to replace Buddhism, this would be right. I just want to understand what it has to say. At the center is not a doctrine for me. It is an existential engagement.
Quoting baker
That about Kierkegaard and his inherited wealth seems like just an intentional ad hominem.
But remember what K stood for: a deeply understood religion that can take absurd notions like original sin and reveal that they are not absurd at all. What tradition to you have in mind, the one that sanctions the subordination of religion to social trivialities? The "churchy" way of affirming God in the margins of regular living? He was not aspiritual at all, quite the opposite. I can't begin to imagine why you would think like this. He thought the medievals had it right with religion square in the middle living and breathing. Read his Purity of the Heart; no more aspiritual than than de Chardin or Meister Eckhart. The opposite is true.
But then, this here is certainly NOT about the errors of the Pali canon at all! I mean, it is an interpretative expansion, but exploring meaning not unlike what it is to explore Jesus' words, only here, we have the "event" that is center stage, much more available for objective study. To me, meditation is a practical metaphysics!
Oh dear, that's ambitious for philosophy!
That's just it: You want to understand and engage with Buddhism on your terms. You're ignoring or downplaying the importance of the living tradition, the living community of Buddhism, ie. the people who are actually working to preserve the teachings and make them accessible (from librarians to translators to those who pay for the upkeep of Buddhist websites to the monks who teach meditation and everyone needed for the system to function).
And you think you can do that apart from committing yourself to an actual Buddhist community?
This is a vital point. Really think about it.
Not all ad hominems are fallacious:
/.../
[i]Walton has argued that ad hominem reasoning is not always fallacious, and that in some instances, questions of personal conduct, character, motives, etc., are legitimate and relevant to the issue,[30] as when it directly involves hypocrisy, or actions contradicting the subject's words.
The philosopher Charles Taylor has argued that ad hominem reasoning (discussing facts about the speaker or author relative to the value of his statements) is essential to understanding certain moral issues due to the connection between individual persons and morality (or moral claims), and contrasts this sort of reasoning with the apodictic reasoning (involving facts beyond dispute or clearly established) of philosophical naturalism.[/i]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem#Criticism_as_a_fallacy
Kierkegaard applied this to himself when he broke off his engagement because he thought he wasn't good enough to marry.
And I think that his lifestyle and his not integrating himself with an actual religious community disqualifies his opinion in religious matters. He was an armchair Christian.
I was talking about being areligious, not aspiritual.
Sure. I'm saying it might have nothing more in common with Buddhism than the name.
From what you've said so far about Buddhism, you're like someone who says that the best way to learn a foreign language is to study the textbooks and to do the exercises in the textbooks. But never actually try to function in that language as a member of a community that are native speakers of that language.
[i]Solang du Selbstgeworfnes fängst, ist alles
Geschicklichkeit und läßlicher Gewinn[/i]
This is what engaging with a religion on one's own terms is like: easy and with success that isn't worth much. It's like catching a ball that one has thrown.
It's only in interaction with others who are also pursuing that religion that one has to make an effort, new kinds of efforts and cultivate qualities that one could not on one's own.
If you follow that logic it leads to the conclusion that only you exist: solipsism.
Yes, that is true, though it does overstate the case, doesn't it? Wittgenstein and Kant famously refused to give sense at all to such things as the "out thereness" beyond logic, intuition and language, using forms of the term "transcendental" to refer to them, if such referring were to be allowed at all (there is the transcendental deduction, but this is open ended merely, not something metaphysical. And Wittgenstein says explicitly he only brings up the matter to say we should pass over it in silence).
But I always have had a different take on this, after all, if Kant was so sure noumena was not an intelligible idea, then why bring it up at all? That is, what is the ground in the world that makes bringing it up not pure nonsense? An excellent question, I think. My thought is that there is another dimension to being a self altogether, and this is discovered, no, intimated, in meditation, philosophies on apophatic theology, post Heideggerian thinking like Marion, Henry, and then there is Fink and Husserl earlier on, and then Levinas' Totality and Infinity, and others. I'm reading Caputo's Weakness of God. He takes Derrida as a threshold philosopher who takes thought to its "end" and here, we face, and I think this is his point, the wimpiness of metaphysical love, and are told, THIS is where our philosophical journey ends, keeping in mind that the totality of language has never possessed this.
If it wasn’t intelligible, he couldn’t have brought it up. He did, so it is. And he said so. He actually said, under certain conditions, the conception of noumena are necessary. That which is unintelligible cannot at the same time be necessary. In Kant, an idea is a concept of reason formed of notions by the understanding itself (A320/B377), and noumena are concepts thought by the understanding (B306). It follows that the question is necessarily predicated on a misunderstanding.
Quoting Constance
The ground for bringing it up is not in the world; if it were it would be incomprehensible anyway, which is the same as nonsense.
Quoting Constance
No, it isn’t, given these two basic transcendental premises:
“...But I can think what I please, provided only I do not contradict myself...” (Bxxvii fn)
“...understanding may be represented (...) according to what has been said above, as a faculty of thought...” (B94)
It is clear, that if understanding is that which thinks, then understanding can think whatever it wants for it is I to whom understanding belongs. Therefore, it is at least non-contradictory and at most entirely admissible, for understanding to think noumena if it wants. And it does want to, in metaphysical parlance, in assuming the possibility of non-sensuous determinable schema subsumed under the categories, which Kant terms objects-in-themselves.
Now it can be surmised why he had to bring it up: he’d already proven the categories only apply upon being presented with sensuous objects as phenomena, that is to say, under entirely empirical conditions and by that the means to cognize them, so it would have been catastrophic to allow a category to present objects to itself that can never be phenomena, after having allowed such objects to be legitimately thought, albeit under entirely pure a priori conditions yet maintaining validity in the cognition of them nonetheless.
At bottom, with no further reduction necessary, this is exactly how I do not contradict myself.
Easy-peasy.
the question is, why isn't noumena dismissible as dialectic overreach, as delusion, with "the mere
dream of an extension of the pure understanding"? It really is not intended to bring attention to Kant or Wittgenstein, but rather, both of their denials that any sense can be made of the very thing, by calling attention to it, that carries an implicit affirmation there is something in the presence of the world that cannot be dismissed, but does not belong to sensory intuition or the understanding, or, to the "facts" of the world. The Tractatus and the Critique are explicit in the line they draw on this.
Quoting Mww
Therein lies the rub: It is the elephant in the room, the "it" so readily referred to, yet denied so immediately. The term 'transcendence', should we not file this away, along with "the present kind of France is bald"? No. The issue goes to, why not?
Quoting Mww
It is clear why Kant thought like this. The matter here outs a question to the line drawn. It IS catastrophic to allow such a thing, and yet, there he is, committing this very catastrophe. One way to say this is to yield to delimitation of the understanding, but in doing so admit there is an incompleteness, in metaethics, and in a full disclosure of world ontology: If it were true that nothing at all imposed itself from "outside" (Levinas' Other) on a reasoned construction describing the world exhaustively, then discussions about noumena would entirely without meaning beyond the empty spinning of dialectical wheels. Quoting Mww
Would that it were.
This, for all intents and purposes, is a different question altogether. To this, I would say noumena can be dismissed as dialectical overreach, for those not academically disposed. I wouldn't grant dialectical overreach between, say, Kant and Schopenhauer. Those two guys would hash this stuff out forever, and I bet neither would give an inch even with similar metaphysical predication.
Quoting Constance
Actually, how often are noumena readily referred to? I know Kant confuses the issue somewhat by referring to them here and there, and it does take some concerted effort to recognize the conceptual or speculative consistency in doing so. But all in all, with respect to the overall knowledge treatise, they can be ignored.
————-
Quoting Constance
One possibility or the other: either we claim to know everything given from full disclosure, or we claim that not everything is knowable given from the limitations imposed by our cognitive system. Nothing wrong with admitting incompleteness or loss of full disclosure. Ful disclosure just might be too much for us to handle.
As an aside, it should be remembered that Kant isn’t restricting the understanding with noumena, in fact, he’s letting it run wild.....letting it think what it wants. He’s limiting sensibility, by making it inoperative except for objects to which space and time can be intuited. This now, may indeed prevent a full disclosure of world ontology. But then, transcendental philosophy wouldn’t work, and you’d need a different explanatory methodology.
What then is security? And I don't mean this in the everyday sense of the term. I defend a rather impossible thesis: within the self there is the oddest thing imaginable, which is value. I claim that value, like the pain a spear in my kidney causes, is absolute, and the self is therefore absolute. Pain as such, pain simplciter, not pain contextualized in an all things considered sense, but simply the phenomenon of pain itself, is not a contingent "bad" but an absolute.
Not a popular thesis. No matter, I am right, my detractors wrong. I can argue this very well, and it is the genuine foundation for moral realism and the reality of the self.
Actually, it's one of the most popular theses in the self-help genre. So ordinary, actually.
Google "self quotes" and look at the image results.
And an endless number of posts like this: https://www.thehappycandle.ie/my-declaration-of-self-esteem-i-am-me-by-virginia-satir/
You're right that this is an impossible thesis. Value is by definition relative, as the worthiness of something is always dependent on a purpose, or something other than itself which it is judged in comparison to. How do you conceive value as something absolute?
Philosophy has been all along a search not for truth, but for value. I think it is close to its end in postmodern deconstruction. Heidegger thought Buddhism was on to something, a new language, primordial, lost through the ages of bad metaphysics. He didn't elaborate, but he was right, and he set stage for a phenomenological philosophy that puts meaning first.
Quoting baker
You're part right. Look, if you're going to talk about the history of Buddhism, or, the various schools with their differences in place, then fine, and if you have a cultural/historical respect in place, then also fine. But an inquiry into the meaning of Buddhism at the basic level is a very different matter. Quoting baker
Well, see the above.
Quoting baker
You've never read anything by Kierkegaard, have you? I mean, quite seriously, you haven't read a thing of the man who affirmed God over reason. Armchair? And you have the story about Regina all wrong. And you spend so many words on justifying ad hominem arguments?
Off the deep end, I'd say.
Here is the beginning from Metaethics and Moral Realism posted 14 days ago:
Consider: the ethical anti objectivist John Mackie's thesis (Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong) that there are no objective ethics, and he runs through R M Hare's objections, the notion that "value statements cannot be true or false" and Kant, Plato, Sedgwick, Aristotle, but I am not going through all this. His Argument from Queerness I find central, which is quite simple: ethics is just too weird to consider as objective, and here he cites G E Moore's non natural property. Mackie denies this both on epistemological grounds and well as ontological, the former focused on intuitionism, etc., the latter essentially: what in blazes would objective ethics even BE? Inconceivable.
Mackie is wrong: To deny moral objectivism on the grounds that it is too weird implies a non weird standard already in place, and this would be, of course, empirical science. But how is it that empirical science is allowed to be the foundational basis for determining the nature of ethics? Ethics is about value, in its essence: If you want to really get the center of ethics, you have to give it its due analysis, after all, an ethical case is a thing of parts. On the one hand, there is its entanglement with the "facts" of the world. On the other, there is the metaethical, the "bad" and "good" of moral affairs. It is here, in the metaethical, that the essence of ethics has its objectivity and its reality.
The question is, what makes the ethical shoulds and shouldn'ts what they are? Ethical goodness and badness, and we will simply call this ethical value and, are not like contingent value and judgment. A good knife is good, say, because it is sharp and cuts well, but this virtue entirely rests with the cutting, the goodness, if you will, defers to the cutting context. But change the conditions of the context and the good can easily become the opposite of good, if, e.g., the knife is to be used for a Macbeth production. Here, sharpness is the very opposite of good, for someone could get hurt. This is how contingency works, this deferring to other contextual features for goodness or badness to be determined.
Ethical value, on the other hand, is very different, for once the context is taken away, and no contextual deference possible, there is the metavalue "presence" remaining. How so? Now we are in Moore's territory. Consider: You have a choice between the torture of one child for a hour, or the torture of a million children for, let's say an eternity (forget the foolishness of the idea). Utility clearly states the former over the latter, and even the most die hard Kantian deontologist would have to yield to the straight forward utility of this (Did Kant ever make any sense at all in ethics??). But here is the rub in this: the child torture for the one hour is in no way mitigated due to the "contextual" justification. You may have done the right thing, but the value in play is not at all effected by the conditions vis a vis the other children. In fact, there is no set of contingent conditions imaginable that undo or even mitigate the ethical value, the "badness" of the one child's torture. It is impossible to conceive of such a mitigation.
What IS ethical badness as such? Try this thought on an empirical object, looking for the "empirical as such" and you get what I call mundane qualia, and, just ask Dennett, qualia is without meaning, or, very close to nonsense, and I think he's right on this. But, if you want to use this language, value-qualia is certainly not nonsense, for apply a lighted match to your finger for a few seconds, review the experience, and remove all contingencies, all talk that could contextualize it entirely out of the analysis, and there is the remaining "presence" of the non natural quality of value/ethical badness and goodness. It cannot be observed, but that burning finger is more than Wittgensteinian "fact" (and Wittgenstein knew this) like the fact that my shoe is untired of that the sun is a ball of fusion. Such facts are all contingent. The metaethical dimension of ethics is not. It is absolute, though, not absolute in the way it is taken up in a conceptual analysis (where analytical philosophy often goes so wrong), but in the injunction not to do something. This is critical to my position: I cannot tell you what an absolute is, for this would be beyond what language can do, not to put too fine a point on it. It only "shows" itself, in the same manner logic shows itself, but cannot reveal itself in the showing. It only reveals itself in the inherent injunction not to do (my example is negative. Doesn't have to be) something.
Agreed. It is a feeling, alongside its complement, pleasure, these both absolute, or, irreducible, in themselves. The other basic part of the overall human condition.
Quoting Constance
Sure, we’re all imbued with a sense of value to be assigned. But value assigned is itself contingent on the object to which it is assigned.
I think I’d have gone with virtue over value, but....ehh....it’s your thesis, not mine, so, have at it.
I think you use the words "thereness", "exteriority" with too much "continental philosophy" connotations. I would say here that the "wittgensteinien" linguistic turn could help analyzing and say whether their connotations are maybe just linguistic "fallacies". Continental philosophers didn't have the concept of "information" (and many others) that we have nowadays so they couldn't understand it but today it is possible. I do conceive how a brain can "know" because I understand knowing as informational correlates and at present you have a good example: artificial intelligence. The convolutional networks show you how integrated information in certain ways generate knowledge. If you put this together with theories like Tononi's Integrated Information Theory that measure the level of consciousness I think we have a good way to grisp new understanding of what "knowing" and "being "conscious" means.
Quoting Constance
Well, the work of the "empirical science" as you call it is to transform the assumptions into something much more powerful, actual knowledge. Science is the only method demonstrated giving universal principles culture or religion agnostic. Science is not perfect as we re not, but is the best way to establish and honest dialogue with nature, with the world, with us.
Quoting Constance
You raise many questions here. In this posts I would like to keep the focus on the "self".
Quoting Constance
It is not "autonomic" it is "unconscious". Unconscious activity of the brain generates consciousness, and the self phenomena rises within a consciousness, not the other way around. We have to be clear on this. There're many evidences this is the way it works (one reference: Deahene works). The conscious state feedsback back into unconscious activity but the real power comes from the unconscious activity.
I emphasize this fact because unconscious activity is not necessarily "automatic", there is randomness and emergence of properties as any "physically complex system". Are you familiar with Conway's game of life and the spontaneous emergence of forms, shapes, movement and dynamics with complex systems? There is a lot of this in our brain, actually in nature, but let's focus on the brain and the self.
Quoting Constance
Why is our human "self" not the result of evolution as all the other features of our life? I don't think the self is different. You project metaphysical properties to the self, as most of the continental philosophy does. I do not agree. I've read, studied and forgot and studied again the authors you mention but they didn't have the linguistic tools and the technologies we have nowadays to experience and experiment the self. Heterophenomenology studies that "inner"world that you consider metaphysical and it is not. It is erratic and a creation of unconscious activities. Better to read Dennett, Dehaene, Damaio... more contemporary to better understand what is the "I". I can only say honestly that I have been were you are today, my studies were in continental philosophy but analytical philosophy, Witgenstaein, Quine... helped me jump into a new understanding that dissolves all your questions. Like when people were wondering where the Earth started and ended because they assumed it to be flat but Copernicus showed it is round so the questions automatically dissolve. We have a copernican revolution going on around the understanding of what we're but our langues is still full of connotations coming from false intuitions, too self-centric, too anthropocentric still.
Quoting Constance
Why not? I think you're limiting yourself with a wrong assumption. Give new science (Dehaene, Nothoff, Tononi) an opportunity to revolutionize your understanding of how the brain works. Look at how we can manipulate your brain to change your self, your personality without you realizing it. We can induce and manipulate brains to make people more religious, and increase certain types of intelligence. This scientific progress delivers a successful explanation and not only that they do what you would expect when better knowing your brain and yourself: they deliver better cures to mental illness that now we better understand.
Quoting Constance
The verb "TO BE" is a verb, nothing metaphysical, certainly an important one as it relates the subject and predicate in a unique way but I think understanding comes far before the verb "TO BE". Animals understand many things and do not have a language to explain it but they do understand because they manipulate their mental objects in a successful way, correlated with how nature works.
Quoting Constance
I'm quite skeptical about anything with a "meta-something" as I consider it as a linguistic specious trap. For me there's nothing like metaethics, like there is no metaphysics (even Aristotle ever mentioned this word). Ethical sentences are neither emotive nor descriptive as they don’t
describe any indefinable property. They are evaluative they regulate our
individual and social values. In this sense some ethical principles function as regulative principles of our moral life which is purely practical. With the amount of relativism with ethics and moral values how could ever be any kind of superior abstract level for explaining the ontology of our moral values?
Are you familiar with Plato's Euthyphro dilemma? We could ask a very similar question here, concerning the relationship between value and ethics. Is value based in ethics, or is ethics based in value. The answer would determine which of the two is more likely to be absolute. We have to consider the conditions carefully before we answer this question. We cannot just refer to examples like pain and pleasure, and conclude that value is primary, because Plato has already demonstrated that there is no necessary relationship between pleasure or pain, and value. So for example, an athlete will subject oneself to pain in training, for the sake of a goal which is valued. So pleasure and pain might be things which are given a positive or negative value, but this doesn't say much about value itself.
Quoting Constance
OK, I agree with the principle here, the knife is the means to an end, cutting. The sharpness is judged as good in relation to that end. So goodness and badness are relative, judged in relation to an end.
Quoting Constance
So you are proposing a "metavalue" which you call "presence". I assume that this would be the end to all ends, like Aristotle suggested happiness as. Is "presence" like existence? The problem with this type of proposal is that we already have presence, and we might already have happiness. So this type of end cannot incline us to act morally, because actions as means, are carried out for the purpose of bringing about the desired end. If we already have what is needed, presence, or happiness, then there is no need to act morally. So as much as you might insist that there ought to be a metavalue, or ultimate end, the absolute within which value is based, I think that this is just a pie in the sky ideal, imaginary, and without any bearing on real people living their real lives.
And I don't see how your example of torturing children is relevant.
Quoting Constance
As I said above, it's been a well known fact, since the time of Plato, that value is not grounded in pleasure or pain. It is something distinct from these, as we will forego pleasure for something of value, and we will also subject ourselves to pain, for something of value. Therefore your example, which says something about the "presence" of pain, would only be misconstrued if it were taken to be demonstrating something about the nature of value.
Quoting tim wood
I don't see anything absolute about the value of a dollar. And I don't see how you can make such an assertion.
Quoting tim wood
Don't you see that the supposed value is relative to that framework? Therefore it is not absolute. In what sense could you possibly be using "absolute" here, when you are saying that the value is relative (to this framework), therefore it is absolute? It's like you are saying X is unconditional within these conditions. It's contradiction pure and simple.
Don't think of it as value assigned. Simpliciter means not contextualized for judgment. Granted, it is difficult often to disentangle affairs, but then, the entanglements themselves are value intense. There you are with your friend's ax which you borrowed, and he asks for it back, but you know he is in a state of rage, but then the person he might kill you know for a fact to be a serial killer too slippery to be caught, but then again...and all this is maddening to you!
I mean, I'm not at all concerned with how this works out. Simplciter means the pain (pleasure, and all the rest) as such, as an irreducible phenomenon. The spear in your kidney is an intense event, and it bears the stamp of a non discursive and intuited "bad". Not a contingent bad, where one can talk about a bad couch, and discuss its pros and cons.
This tells us a lot about the self (and animal "selves," of course). Is it is as Wittgenstein said, that value never makes an appearance, and the "bad" of the pain is utterly transcendental (he would not even speak of it, would turn his chair to the wall at the very mention) and unavailable to language? I think not. I think we can talk about this just as we can talk meaningfully about qualia and "presence" qua presence. There is just very little to say, and what we can say is bound to the contingency language construction (there are no singular propositions, for affirmations are inherently deferential to their opposites, their defining associative "regions" as Husserl and Heidegger put it), but we DO affirm qualia intuitively, a nd all qualia is valuative, metavaluative, good or bad but entangled.
Language puts all this in question, of course, infamously so. Heidegger though such talk, like Husserl's, was like walking on water, for he know knowledge intuitions were impossible, senseless. My claim is that the impossible is exactly what we face: the metavalue to which all presence is bound. And this makes for the reality of the real. Metavalue Real, the essence of the self.
One does have to put aside presuppositions to allow the the metavalue/metaethical and the meta injunction to be clear. that is, to assault another with a spear to the kidney in wrong grounded in the metainjunction not to do it.
The above requires a close reading.
"The map is not the territory". There is the common model, the "in-hereness" of shared human understanding of the world, as distinct from the "out-thereness" of the cosmos. And then there is the indivdual model, the "in-hereness" of the individual understanding of the shared human understanding of the world as distinct from the "out-thereness" of the shared human understanding of the world. "Transcendence" is a relative term; the transcendence of the territory in relation to the common model, and the transcendence of the common model in relation to the individual model.
But these are just relative ways of talking; there is no absolute transcendence to be discovered.
What I was trying to say, is that value, by its very definition, is something which is relative. It is something assigned relative to a scale or some sort of hierarchy. The value therefore is always relative to the scale, and not absolute. To try and make value into something absolute would render it something other than value. A value without a scale?
So I can't even comprehend what you might mean when you suggest that life has absolute value. And, when you say that your money is legal tender for those specific things, this means that it is legal tender for those specific things, therefore it's value is not absolute by any stretch of the imagination.
The argument here places the need for training in a matrix of concerns that are contingent, all such concerns ultimately beg the value question. It runs not unlike those irritating deconstruction questions run: Training? Why train? to be great at football? Why this? and on, and on. The non question begging answer appears only when contingencies are abandoned and inquiry finds it mark: I do it because it is fun, enjoyable, pleasureable, blissful. ALL are bound to contingencies in the living experience, but here, I am doing with value what Kant did with reason: reason is always, already entangled in the very language used to talk about "pure" reason. But one abstracts from the complexity to identify the form just to give analysis. Here, I identify the very mysterious metavalue In the pain, and it is not the form ofethical affairs, but the actuality, the substantive presence.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
But it is not argument, not yet, about what to do. It is a descriptive claim. An exhaustive description of an ethical case possesses what GE Moore called a non natural property. The badness or goodness of what is in play is IN the fabric of the world. We do not find in the structure of language the actuality of pain. Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
It just to illustrate a point, and extreme cases make for a clearer illustration. The emphasis is on the way the value dimension of an ethical case is unassailable to competition and objections: no matter what alternative one can imagine to bring against the choice of choosing the one child's welfare, the "badness" of the torture is undiminished. This is NOT how contingency works.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Forgoing pleasure in a competition is about the relativity of value. I am identifying something that is not relative, but "absolute" acknowledging that this term is rather self contradictory because language itself does not possess the possibility of absolutes, all propositions being contingently bound to others. The claim rests on the premise that there is something transcendental about ethics that lies at its essence that is nondiscursive and intuitive. One is being invited to simply observe the pain simplciter, observe--- not weigh, compare, contextualize.
Look closely at the argument. It states explicitly as a major premise that regarding value, the map IS the territory, so to speak, hence the impossibility. It is not even about the inhereness of an event. Rather, it looks directly at the "presence" of pain, pleasure, suffering, joy and the rest bypassing the language (the map) that would claim it. When you miss the nail and smash your finger with a hammer, you are not, qua in pain, IN an interpretative event, though language hovers close by for deployment. the argument here looks only at plain, denuded (of words, references, ideas, contexts).
You say transcendence is a relative term, and this is no doubt right, and the same will go to ALL terms in play, and since language rules the understanding and language is a contingent body of meanings, one can never "say" anything that is not contingent. this is essentially the argument of Wittgenstein's (but please, in the tonnage of material written on this, there is room for a library of objections. To argue about this, fine. Just let me know, not that I'm so perfect at Wittgenstein, but I do have my thoughts).
Here is the ONE exception to language ruling over the understanding: value. and it is not as if one can produce a treatise on this and think one has escaped the delimitations of language. Rather, and this is a BIG point: the transcendence of value presents itself in the injunction not to do or to do X. X is, of course, entangled, messy, and we have agreed on this, which is cause for the reduction to the "material essence" if you want to use that kind of language, of ethics.
As I said, Plato demonstrated long ago, that we do not base value in pain or pleasure. I gave an example, as to why a person's attitude toward pain does not provide a good represent of one's attitude toward value, therefore pain cannot be used as a metavalue. There are many more examples, but it seems like you are in a condition of denial, so I don't see the point in producing a list of examples.
Quoting Constance
Yes, your state of denying the example, and also the reality about value, demonstrates this unassailability very well. However, the fact that one's personal perspective on value appears to be unassailable does not demonstrate that it is absolute. It just indicates that it appears to the person who holds the unassailable perspective on value, that value is absolute.
Quoting Constance
The problem though, as I explained, is that a person will subject oneself to pain, for the sake of something valued in some circumstances, yet at other times the same person will avoid pain because in this circumstance avoidance is seen as more valuable. Therefore pain does not suffice as evidence for any sort of absolute value.
Quoting tim wood
Yes, why are you asking such foolish questions? This is you with the foolishness, not me.
Quoting tim wood
No, I'm not arguing that everything is relative, I'm arguing that value is, because that's the nature of what value is. You just seem to be incapable of accepting the fact that you were wrong to deny this obvious fact about value, so now you want to claim that I was arguing everything is relative.
Quoting tim wood
I sure have not affirmed this. As I said, that is contradictory nonsense. The absolute is always outside the framework, as the ideal which the framework is based in. Even the idea of "the absolute as a practical matter" is nonsensical, because any absolute is an ideal, a theoretical principle which is not obtained in practice. Go ahead and keep insisting on your foolish nonsense if you like, insist that when you go into your house you have obtain the absolute inside, or that the fact you can pay a bus fare with coins means that the coins have an absolute value, but I'll have nothing of it. I'll let you live in your absolute fantasy land.
Quoting tim wood
I have no idea how to interpret your so-called "relativity of relativity paradox". I see no paradox, of course the relativity of relativity is relative. How could it not be without contradiction? Where's the paradox? You might want to explain what you were trying to say, but it appears to be just more foolishness like the rest of the things you've been saying.
Do you know how many ideas there are about what "the meaning of Buddhism at the basic level" is? As many as there are people willing to entertain them.
Four years ago, I discarded all the books I had of his and all the notes I made. So I'll just summarize: I was not impressed with his work. Affirming God over reason seems quite ordinary to me.
*sigh*
Quoting Constance
Take another look. It is a descriptive position, and certainly not about how people feel about things, their attitudes. This latter doesn't enter into it. to understand the metaethical issue one has to simply put a lighted match to one's finger and observe. There are clear empirical features, but once these are removed there is the residual value. See Wittgenstein's Lecture on Ethics, or see G E Moore's Principia Ethica to get an idea of this. the question is about the Good and its nature or essence. Attitudes follow on this.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
try to see that this isn't about a personal perspective. Consider the matter as one would consider qualia. My opinion, attitude, regard for qualia is completely off the table. Arguments that deal with this look to the possibility of apprehending something in the pure, uninterpreted phenomenon. Here, the claim is that the flame on your finger carries a non empirical, non discursive or irreducible intuition of a metavalue, i.e., an ethical badness.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
But the reasons for opting one way or another are grounded in conditions that are factual and contingent. The value in place remains independent. the argument insists that you abstract from all of the contingencies. Once done, there is a residual non contingent presence, which is the metavalue. All that is required here is observation and description, not judgment. Granted in less striking cases it can be difficult to see whether one is having an enjoyable experience or not. that does happen, but it is not the point at all. If one case can demonstrate and non contingency in the presence of the world, then one has a case for moral realism.
"sigh" ! You found the Concept of Anxiety ORIDINARY?? Not possible. You thought his existential dialectics ordinary? But it is here that the connection to Buddhism is clearest, where he elucidates the structure of meditation itself. One cannot be interested in Buddhism and think Kierkegaard is a bore. There has to be a radical misunderstanding somewhere.
When I first read this work I instantly thought how Kierkegaard was so aligned with the act of meditation. There is no question of this.
Caputo's How to Read Kierkegaard is a wonderful elucidation.
When one grows up as the only non-Catholic among Catholics and is bullied by them, and tries to make sense of it by reading a lot of Catholic literature, one begins to consider many things as ordinary that other people probably don't. It's a long sordid tale.
Oh, I took to Buddhism because it promised enlightenment, and I thought that once I'd be enlightened, I'd be able to figure out which religion is the right one, specifically, whether Catholicism is true or not. Needless to say, that didn't work out so well.
Probably because I don't approach religion with self-confidence and in the hope to find a solution to existential problems.
Which also happens to be why moral realism makes so much sense.
Oh. I see. Well, I frankly understand this. I attended a Catholic high school for a couple of years myself. Very authoritarian, to the point of cruelty. The Catholic philosophy on child rearing is that one is born into sin, and it is the mission of Christian parents teachers to annihilate the freely expressive child. I have talked to the Brothers who were my teachers and found them to be deeply embedded in orthodoxy. NOT moveable.
Quoting baker
Oh, again. What can I say, I genuinely think there is such a thing as enlightenment and Buddhists have been right all along. Philosophers like Kierkegaard help rehabilitate a conditioned mind by taking mundane experience apart, revealing the underpinnings of mundane events.
Quoting baker
You are a moral realist?? As am I, and I argue for this frequently. There are few takers on this as it requires a break with the familiar world. Unfortunately, what I consider the most penetrating reading is the least accessible.
Why are you a moral realist?
Your experiment is self-refuting. If I were to put a match to my finger, me doing this would demonstrate that I do not believe it to be an ethical badness, and so it is not a metavalue.
I must admit though, I really don't know what you mean by "metavalue".
Here is an account. There is a lot behind this, but in essence (btw, it likely will be encountered as novel thinking. Apologies. Should best be read fully before judgment):
It is the easiest concept to grasp, and yet, the most difficult. Easy because it is clear, intuitive, and not a logical product of argument. Hard because we don't think like this. Heidegger said the same of Being: There, in the intimations of our existence, most close to us, pervasive in every thought and engagement, yet so distant from the understanding. For Heidegger, being was complex, for there is nothing intuitive and direct that reveals some absolute nature of what a thing is at some unimaginable foundational level, like God or material substance. All that can be affirmed is bound to the interpretative conditions of affirmation: language and culture and history.
But take a look at, say, Dennett's argument on qualia, the conclusion of which is that it is an impossible term, just like Heidegger. Impossible, to put it Derrida's way, because it is a term that, like all terms, defers to other terms for terminological meaning. Wittgenstein called these states of affairs, facts, like the Earth being of greater mass than the moon, or that my shoe is untied: a fact, dull and equal to all other facts as a fact, and this is what the understanding can grasp in the logicality of meaningful utterances. the rest that is NOT fact, is transcendental, unspeakable. Open your mouth to speak it, and there you are in the middle of the delimitations of logic and language and memory. History: language is a constructed thing. Took centuries, and, it took a the personal assimilation process a much shorter time. Every utterance brings this into play, this interpretative medium.
Anyway, I bring all this up to make a point: A given perceptual event, qua perceptual, is thick with meaning. Not perceptual, but apperceptual. One cannot even conceive of what a direct intimation of a thing could even be at all. Pure nonsense.
But there is something direct about it, in the mix, that is, of language's meanings and the actuality before one. This is why Kierkegaard is considered a father of existentialism: he said there is this qualitative divide between what is there and what can be said about it. IT cannot be spoken.
But here is where ethics comes in and why Wittgenstein said ethics is transcendental. My example of the finger on fire: In the perception as one's finger is literally aflame, there are the facts, the logical, propositional possible utterances, like, well, pain is conducive to evolutionary survival, or, there is an event, I do not enjoy it, there is the physiology of nerves reporting pain, the quick withdrawal of the finger, and so on: facts, facts, states of affairs.
Here is the rub: Once the facts have been suspended, and all that remains is the most "local" fact, the pain itself, right there at the, if you will, Cartesian center of experience, we do the final reduction and consider this event as a qualia, the unutterable presence of the pain. Once analysis has taken the matter this far, the meta value becomes clear: this is not a dull fact like my shoes being untied. There is a residuum IN the torturous event that stands outside body of facts that announces itself in our word "bad". This clumsy sounding usage is unavoidable.
The argument I find definitive regarding moral realism is the above; in fact, I find that once value is so understood, there is no choice but to reify goodness and badness in the moral, transcendental conception, and the reification of these argues for a reification of the ego as well, for the center of our existence is the productive origin of value in the world. We are no longer in the empirical scientist's world, but in the phenomenologist's, and meaning---value-meaning, importance, interest, caring. loving, despising, and the rest, all issue from the self. These transcendental events issue from us.
Are you then supporting what Kierkegaard said? the core of his statement is the word "qualitative divide". Kierkegaard "qualitative divide" is full of dualism, full of God.
Are you saying you agree on Kierkegaard's divine moral?
Quoting Constance
Now I'm more confused. Before you mention Kierkegaard, now you mention Wittgenstein, are you saying the meaning of transcendence for Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein are the same? I would disagree to this, it appears you're mixing up things here.
For example Wittgenstein said as well that : "..."And it is clear that a world in which there is only dead matter is neither good not evil; therefore, the world of living beings can in itself be neither good nor evil." and then from here he concludes the "nonsense" of the world and sense being contingent
Quoting Constance
Facts suspended? Looks like you're building a play of a movie you imagine within your speculations but studying emotions and feelings like pain (Damasio) and seeing how they work I would say that "suspending" an emotion makes no sense. Do you mean to suspend the conscious phenomena of the pain? Well we know this is a construct of our unconscious, we know our brain unconsciously decides about what to do with this "pain" around 200ms before we become conscious of it (Libet). It can become conscious or maybe not.
This is to say again that the "local" fact of a pain is not something you can suspend. it doesn't work that way.
Quoting Constance
We, who? Well I guess Chalmers and metaphysical thinkers. As you can guess me and many other contemporary philosophers do not agree this "qualia", the way you explain it This dualist qualia is not needed to explain pain in a satisfactory way. Emotions and feelings are "incarnated", we have to work with the concept of an extended brain to understand them. Well I guess you know Damasio. Emotions do not need of consciousness to exists, etc. etc. This is the contemporary concept of emotions, again no need qualia... emotions and feeling can artificially be triggered as we know very well how they work. It can be done using electric signals in certains parts of our limbic system or inducing special conscious states with certain chemistry (drugs, psychotropic substances, etc.)
Quoting Constance
Well, I think you need to show us why it is unavoidable?
Let me elaborate a bit, if I'm able to manipulate your emotions and feelings with certain technology wouldn't you conclude that the mystery of how your emotions and feelings isv within the science of the technologies I used to manipulate you? If a tumor can change your personality and make you become a pedophile (google it and you will find several cases) wouldn't you think that your emotions and feelings rely on the chemistry and physiology of your brain and not on any metaphysical reality?
Quoting Constance
Can you demonstrate it? In the meantime I would claim this residuum is not needed to explain the word "bad". You just need to put it in a context. If in this case you put it in the context of my finger burning is bad. Well, in this case, this forum is not the right place to explain it as it is not that short but here you can find a good source to understand how pain works and why it is associated to the word "bad". As anyone could expect, such a complex things requires a complex and very technical language but if you really want to understand it I'm sure you can find it accessible:
https://stm.sciencemag.org/content/3/65/65ps1.full
I can understand that many people find it easier to speculate and build metaphysical worlds, but for them to become credible nowadays I think they first need to understand what science has to say about it.
Let's be humble to what the true dialogue with nature tells us about what we're and avoid falling into the temptation of solipsisms.
Sorry Constance, I don't buy it. I don't see getting to "the pain itself" as the final reduction. It's just a turning point, of going from the external world of what you call "facts", to the internal world of feelings. So there is a whole new world waiting for our analysis in the world of feelings. And I don't buy the notion that this is a world we cannot speak about, because we commonly talk about our feelings. It just requires a completely different way of talking from the way that we talk about the external world of "facts".
I think this is right, yes, though, not to get too hung up on overwrought terms like 'soul' and 'God'. A close reading of K's Concept of Anxiety will reveal that he thought such terms as part of the very nature of 'sin' (another dubious term which he rejects emphatically: the old fashioned, Lutheran sense of Adam's atrocious transgression).
As for K's religious thinking, his phenomenology serves to dethrone the sensibleness of common thinking, hence the affirmations of the Bible where thought really had no place at all. Thought cannot encompass the world, one reason why Wittgenstein was such a fan. To see where thought can go, we find his philosophy: a temporal dialectical phenomenology that overtly rejects the the primacy of reason. the divide I mentioned occurs where reason seeks to subsume the actualities of the world. Nonsense. the world's actualities are not categorial.
For the long version of this, see his Concept of Anxiety. In it, you see over and over, the foundations of later existential thought.
Quoting Raul
One has to be careful with Wittgenstein on this. Not the same, exactly. That would be impossible. Not mixing them up, but drawing on parallels in thinking. First, the following passage to your quote is "Good and evil enter only through the subject. And the subject does not belong to the world. Rather it is a boundary of the world."
When I speak of the world, I am not in W's world. I am thinking of the world of Heidegger's dasein and "Being in the World" and so references to the "world" get confused. W confuses me, frankly, but everybody is confused by him because he presents ideas that are open concepts. Anyway, he writes: "so good and evil which are predicates of the subject, are not properties of the world....Here the nature of the subject is completely veiled." Further, "What is good is divine, too. Queer as it sounds, that sums up my ethics. Only something supernatural can express the supernatural."
Quoting Raul
Such a suspension is meant to serve the purpose of analysis. But think of it like this: We suspend facts all the time, as I am doing as I write. I am not thinking about many things as I concentrate on one. In this way thought itself is a matter of abstracting from the general body of related ideas to particular ones that rise to an occasion. Here, you are being invited consider an ethical case, an extreme one to make for poignancy. There are many details to the case. If I were to inquire about the logical form of the propositions that describe the case, then I would abstract from all that is not propositional as such, focusing, as Kant did, on the logical forms, the conditionals, the negations and assertions and tautologies and so on, that make propositions possible.
Here. I am after something specific as well: I want to know about the anatomy of an ethical case, what makes ethics what it is, its essential features. I am not interested in how to determine what to do. I want to know what ethical goodness and badness is, what all the fuss is about. This is a phenomenological question, a question of the Being of the phenomenon of pain and pleasure, suffering and joy; it is a descriptive account I want.: just to observe and acknowledge.
Talk about the brain and anything else that is not there, in the bare descriptive of the event is suspended, just as Kant suspended everything but logical form to discuss pure reason, not that I am so keen on Kant, but his method is just simple analysis that looks to rational form in judgment and extrapolating from this to what must be the case given what is clearly there.
Quoting Raul
But you wander from qualia with all this talk. To speak at all about qualia, and surely you see this, is to use language. Language cannot speak what is there. One cannot say the color yellow, but the presence of yellow is fit into and contextualized by a theory of color, and the many ways color turns up in casual or technical talk. There is not stand alone talk about yellow and referring to the limbic system has nothing whatever to do with the problem of qualia.
To play a game in philosophy, one must at the very least attend to the way the problem is presented. This is a simple, descriptive affair of something that lies before you. If I were to ask for an exclusively descriptive account of a cloud's phenomenal presence, such a request would be unproblematic. Same here.
Quoting Raul
It is spelled out more explicitly in the OP entitled Metaethics and Moral Realism.
But Raul, the ideas presented here did not rise up ex nihilo. See G E Moore's Ethica Principia. Moore wanted to know the nature of the Good. He concluded that it was a non natural property. Then Wittgenstein, Read his Tractatus, his Lecture on Ethics. Then read John Mackie's Ethics: Inventing right and Wrong.
The context is not complex. You are being invited to think phenomenologically and if this is not familiar to you, if you have never read any Continental philosophy, well, hmmm, you perhaps should consider this.
Consider then: facts of the world. Is my migraine, just because it is an interior event, any less a fact? Is it not somewhere in the grid of worldly affairs as much so as glaciers and planets and clouds and everything else? The problematic here is not location, in my head or on top of a mountain. The mountain is there, in the world. As is my headache. Factual affairs. Only in this factual affair, over here, in my left side, there is a spear in my kidney and the phenomenon we call pain. I see no reason to separate sensate feelings from other facts at all. Everything is just there, an aggregate of atoms.
So once you complete that turn in the turning point, and you observe the sensation, it is just another event no different than any other event as an event.
So then, the matter goes to describing what is there. Very simple. Only, unlike the cloud or the untied shoe, this event is painful. So, what is pain? Observe, there is the feeling. Is it not qualitatively distinct from other facts? I would say so, since the pain hurts like hell! And then, what is this?
Then of course, the matter of the ethical "badness" of the pain shows itself. this is an absolute. See the argument in the OP Metaethics and Moral Realism.
As I understand we have different positions on how we "are on the world" (never ending story within history of philosophy :-) ) let's try to build from statements where I think we agree. Little by little so that we can understand where the fundamental divergence is.
Quoting Constance
Right!
Then, if we stick to this idea for a moment, if the world's actualities are not categorical, don't you think that the tool (language) and the method (rely on reason) of continental philosophy is not appropriate by itself?
Symbols and categories are the food of reason but they represent a way of being in the world, not the world itself. If I'm in a world where the Earth is assumed flat, I would wonder what is there beyond the oceans? where does the Earth ends? because the category Earth for me is represented by certain properties, being flat. This simple assumption would generate a world of ideas (illusive monsters at the end of the oceans).
If I stay within my house and just spend my time on survival activities I will never get to know that I'm fundamentally wrong. Only by observing the sun and the shadows and by creating technologies that allow me to observe the stars and measure certain movements I could at the end, as Copernicus (and others before him) did, get to know that my flat-Earth world makes no sense. This man that got out of his "house" and experienced the world in a richer way was able to create new categories and new technologies that allowed him to better understand the world.
If you agree with this principle, wouldn't you agree that it is more likely that neuroscience gives you the right tools and categories to better understand what Husserl called phenomenology?
You can say that technology is the way of being modern human's (Heidegger) but isn't language itself a contingent technology that emerged from a very successful nervous system? Instead of relying on the categories "meaning" and "sense" as used and understood by Heidegger and Dreyfus, shouldn't we open the black-box?, the brain, and analyze it using the new senses we have created (EEG, MEG, fMRI, photon migration tomography, transcranial magnetic simulation, etc.). Don't they have something new to show us related to the categories we create?Shouldn't we give a chance to the transcendence of heterophenomenology? Traditional phenomenology accepts the subject's self-reports as being authoritative. In contrast, heterophenomenology considers the subjects authoritative only about how things seem to them. It does not dismiss the first-person perspective, but rather brackets it so that it can be intersubjectively verified by empirical means, allowing it to be submitted as scientific evidence.I guess you see this more a risk to fall into reductionism?
:up:
It's not "an event" though, that's a misrepresentation, and you ought to be able to see this. There is a huge multitude of things going on all required for me to feel pain. You cannot reduce pain to "an event".
It is about the multitude of things no more than logic is about the multitude of axonally connected neurons. Pain is NOT reducible. Such complexities are only analytical correspondences. When experience the horror of being, say, tortured you are not IN the event having a "gee my neurons are very excited" experience. Such an idea is patently absurd.
But you also encounter this is such a reductive attempt: When you make the move to higher ground analytically, looking to physical brain activities, in the act of data extraction in the observation of the brain, you are not working from outside perspective looking at the brain. You are LOOKING. Literally a product of brain activity and precisely the kind of thing you are supposed to be analyzing. This is the most obvious form of question begging imaginable.
The pain is what is evidently there, unproblematic in what it is. The reduction is on your part: you take what is clear as a bell, the screaming pain and claim this is not what it really is. It's explanatory grounding is elsewhere. Well, of you are doing a scientific analysis on thephysical anatomy of pain, then fine. But that is not this here at all.
At this point, I am moral-realism-adjacent. I think most people are moral realists, but are aware that it is taboo to actually declare oneself as such, so they devise other moral theories in order to mask their moral realism.
For all practical intents and purposes, moral realism (in the form of moral egoism) seems to be the only viable way to be.
Neuroscience is not the ticket into this. And a lengthy justification for what I think is true goes absolutely nowhere. As I see it, the only way to move forward, or at all, would be dialectically. Otherwise it would simply be a lot of wasted writing.
I would begin with a question, which is clean and to the point. Assume the material physicalism implied by your references to EEG's and MRI's and the rest, or even, if you're like Wittgenstein or Rorty, you are not ontologically committed to this, but you see this as the only way to talk at all about the world, foundationally or otherwise, making you a conditional physicalist. Whatever. But assume the above: In this this physical model of all things, how is it that anything out there (the mind independent world) gets in here (the mind)?
Just to note, to is intended to be taken for no more than it asks. Lengthy justifications for affirming the "outthereness" of things are beyond the parameters of the question. Just tell me how this "out there to in here" works.
I think most people who think are not moral realists because they also think science defines the world and science cannot discuss morality; therefore, it is assumed morality has no meaning.
But then, most thinking people do not read Continental philosophy. Only here does one find the vehicle for affirming the ontology of ethics. It can do this because it takes as first philosophy meaning, not a model of the physical universe, which is infamously absent of discussions about meaning, or, the meaning of meaning: meta-meaning.
Alas, these arguments require a lot of hard reading and a reorientation of one's attitudes. I don't see why you are averse to Kierkegaard. He "speaks" (thought he does it with style, with far too much style--the extended metaphors are maddening) what meditation IS. Again, it is in a circuitous way that he does this and he is so embedded in the Greeks, post Kantians, Hegel, religious exegeses, and so on, that his references are often entangled things. But once one reads through all this, it is clear: Kierkegaard was right! Putting aside the colorful BS and the pseudonymous narratives, he was right, essentially, in analysis of the self vis a vis meditation. this is why he is called a father of existentialism.
Right, but not a solipsist dialectic but a dialectic coming from the dialogue with nature, our nature, the world through scientific method. This is the dialectic that has made progress human history.
We're not better philosophers or better people than past civilizations but we do have best technology and science than in the past. This is the actual, factual breakthrough.
Quoting Constance
This one is an easy one. Do you have children? just observe them, see how the grow and learn,. Specially during the first 3-4 years. They interact with the external world in many ways, they copy the behaviour and sounds of the adults, they try and learn via a trial-error approach.
Their inner nervous system that initially is just worried about keeping homeostasis in a very simple way (crying when hungry) little by little gets more sophisticated.
Their brain absorb so many things during those 3-4 years, it creates so many mental objects.... should I follow? This is how the external and physical world gets in your brain.
Then the self rises as the baby interact in society and builds self-consciousness.... should I continue?
Well, that is an easy answer. But I am putting the question to the simple affirmation itself. There is my cat under the table. Here am I. How is it that an epistemic connection is made such that cat over there gets into this brain thing such that I can say, I know the cat is under the table in a way that is sustainable independently of any experience making faculties. One might begin with, well, we perceive the cat, to which I ask, is perception like a mirror rendering a faithful representation, and you might reply; well, how would you reply?
My previous answer responds all these questions. Your interaction with cats and tables in your childhood created those mental objects in your mind as well as the rules on how they interact within the "model-of-the-world" you create as you grow.
Let's put it this way, a blind-born person would never be able the cat is black, the same way you would never be able to say the cut is under the table if do not experience the cat and the table and its relationship with the world.
One risk is though that once you get self-consciousness you start getting into what I think is the epistemic trap of the "meta-"... meta-physics, meta-ethics, meta-meta-meta-meaning"... there is nothing like that out there. It is an epistemological trap, we could say an intellectual epiphenomenon with no epistemic value outside yourself.
Humans, reflexive people, with a very developed self-consciousness can understand you concepts. Most europeans have studied continental philosophy and metaphysics so belief me I know what I'm talking about, but, again,it has no epistemic value outside us.
Quoting Constance
Well, "solipsism" doesn't complicate it for me, nevertheless is it you that is talking above about "epistemic connection"
But I want to emphasize: all you said is evasive. Leave out the meta concerns. There is the cat, here am I, a perceiving agent. Two things. How does it work?
Why evasive? I have responded but looks like you need more. Here you have all you need to understand on the state-of-the-art on how the brain works:
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=deahene+on+perception
By the way, the perceiving agent is your brain, not "you". You, yourself, is a construct within it.
You already know my manifesto on th eontology of the self:
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/490508
If I were to ask this of two plain objects, an offended car fender and a guard rail, say, one might simply say, the fender impacted the guard rail, it's body yielded to the extent is structure could not absorb the event, or something like this. Of course a brain is complicated, but so what? If the account begins with the object, the complexity of the brain doesn't enter into it; just keep things on the outside, as with the car fender.
I think that most people who think science defines the world are proponets of scietism, and therefore, very much assume that science is the one that has all the answers to moral questions.
And you think there are people who don't think?
I've been around Buddhism for some 20 years. In this time I have encountered so many ideas about what meditation "truly is" (and the supposedly peace-loving Buddhists and proponents of mindfulness viciously fighting over it) that by now, all of these ideas seem equally valid/invalid. It really depends on whom you ask.
I had turned to Kierkegaard to help me solve my problem with theism. It didn't help. All in all, he struck me as yet another theist basking in his faith. A faith I had no hope of obtaining. The idea of a leap to faith is to me like a spit in the face -- like someone telling me, "See, I can do it, but you can't!! Shame on you!"
What the !@#$# did you read to get that impression?
Analysis is reduction. What are you saying, pain ought not be analyzed? That's a value judgement which needs to be justified. How do you justify it, by insisting that pain is the absolute, metavalue? And you justify this by claiming that pain ought not be analyzed. That looks like a vicious circle to me.
Quoting Constance
No, not quite, I'm not observing the brain, I'm observing the finger, the pain is in the finger. And it is the fact that the pain being in the finger makes the brain want to analyze it, which makes it appear to consist of parts.
Quoting Constance
I'm not denying the pain, I'm saying that there's more to it than just the pain. I feel the pain, I look at the place where it hurts, and I see the wound. Oh, there's a reason why I'm feeling this pain. PAIN is not the end of the inquiry, it's the beginning.
It's my standard grudge against theists, it has nothing to do with Kierkegaard specifically.
Ok Constance, let's go with how the cat gets into the brain.
At the beginning it works the same way a cat would get into the microchips of the computer that has a webcam. Light hits the cat that hits our eye that hits our visual cortex.
Our visual cortex contains already certain neurons that are sensitive to the cat as part of our learnings when we were children (I assume this brain has seen and interacted with cats before).
So those neurons related to cat-ness get activated (here it is exactly same way a CNN works), the image triggers the associated word cat, uit gramatics and it triggers as well lot of neural-networks that get activated that situate the cat within our model-of-the-world so that we get the cat and its properties, expectations activated, the cat-ness gets active.
Our brain is ready to interact with the cat.
Makes sense?
It is not reducible I agree, naturalism (forget about word materialism) is not reductive because it actually expands our understanding on the power of biology in our brain instead.
I would say that dualists are the ones that have a "reduced" concept of the power of nature (matter, energy, however you want to call it) and lose time with what I think are naif and solipsistic intuitions of the meta-thinking that has not made any progress since Aristotle. Metaphysicians are always trying to reinvent the wheel (Kant, Heidegger, etc...), this is well accepted among philosophers.
The pain you feel in your finger can be induced in your brain from external people activating the specific group of neural network that trigger it using electromagnetic fields. Doing this you won't need the finger to feel the pain, we induce it. But you, subjectively will swear it is your finger burning !
If I disable those specific finger-pain related neural networks you will not feel that pain anymore even if I cut your finger.
Makes sense?
Let's go even beyond, we could trick you neural networks in a way that when I burn your finger you feel the pain in you ear. All this is possible and it is possible because all your pain is within the biology and architecture of your brain.
It is painful I know, but pain is in your brain.
No. I am saying that when one puts the analytic game in play, which is the taking apart of things, ethics does turn out to be a thing of parts. But in this analytic reduction, we discover a "part" that entirely resists analysis. The same is true for all things, really. I see the color yellow and analysis gives me talk about the electromagnetic spectrum, the comparative qualities vis a vis other colors, emotional values associated, and on and on. But the color itself? Just as a yellow "presence," there is nothing to say, for the saying contextualizes, which brings in what is NOT the presence. This is what being irreducible means. All language is contingent, analyzable, but that presence before me is not language.
The "circularity" you see in this is of course, not simply right, but rather profound: Did I not just "speak" to you about yellow telling you it was unspeakable? This is a fascinating philosophical passageway into post modern thinking. It gets "worse" not better, regarding the paradox of the understanding's being locked into language for interpreting the world, on the one hand, and on the other, being "impossibly" clear that yellow, a "given" sound, feeling, emotion, etc., are all in their "presence" not language at all!
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Sure, but this is all "outside" the given phenomenon. Even the fact that the pain is in the finger is beyond, if you will, the "qualia" of pain. the analysis that brings the entire ethical issue at hand to its parts, then the recognition that there is a part, THE essential part that is not reducible, suspends all talk about brains and fingers and locality.
The hardest part of this is, to bring a little jargon into it, is to actually DO the phenomenological reduction, the release of the phenomenon that is before you to its bare essentials, its "pure" presence. See my comments just now on the problem this poses regarding language and objects.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Depends on what you are inquiring about. If you are dicussing human anatomy, pain gets very complex. But here, it is a phenomenological examination of pain. If you were an empirical scientist, you would have as your foundation a body of paradigms that go to work, always already there the moment an issue rises. Here is it the same, only we are in another field, that of phenomenology, which begins with the "thing itself" and moves into examinations of the structures of experience respecting the full value of the given as its foundational assumptions.
Of course it is not language. It is about biology of your brain.
Capgras syndrome, phantom-limb-syndrome... we can induce you the feeling of someone following you just increasing certain neurotransmitters and certain hormones in your blood and brain... and you would swear someone is following you, doesn't this change the way you understand "presence" and the "feeling of presence"? And you still think you can rely on your metaphysical ideas of the "pure presence"?
We can even make someone more or less religious, believe more or less in deities, or make him believe he is god by stimulating activity in certain areas of the brain (see Ramachandran research). Doesn't this change the idea we have about religion?
A tumor can change your personality (see the case of pedophile the medicine discover he was pedophile because of a tumor in his brain, famous one you can google). Doesn't this change the idea we have about pedophile? It challenge our justice system and our values (google it, is really worth it).
Of course.
It is the questions begged that this hinges on. You say light hits the cat, and I ask, light? Cat? I should first be clear that I am working with a model of physical materialism, not phenomenology of ontological dualism weak or otherwise. Just a world of material things bound to the necessity of casual sufficiency, which I take as provisionally unassailable (the provision being that we not talk about grounds for its assailability).
The next question I ask is, these causal events where the light hits the cat, then reflects, hits the eye, on to the retina and so on: in order for this to constitute a knowledge yielding event, there must be something epistemological that carries the object, the cat, to my interior world. Causality doesn't do this. I mean, the dented fender of my car does not "know" the guardrail that caused the dent. You can say the matter with knowledge is much more complex than this, which is obviously true, but prior to the 3 to 4 pound mass of neurons, where the light reflects off the cat, this is far more simple. How is it that the reflective event "over there" off the cat, can carry, if you will, the "ofness" that eventually becomes my knowledge OF the cat?
Ordinarily, one would not ask such a question the case of photos, videos, digital or otherwise, because we already have a model of the original object in mind, confirmed in familiarity. All one has to do is observe the original, compare it to the photo, and you have confirmation of verisimilitude. But here it is very different: it is the original that is in question, and there is no model beyond this that can be brought in for comparison. All models beg the same question!
Quoting Raul
On this last part: undoubtedly pain is in your brain, but then the question is begged: where is the brain? Jump to the chase: If you cannot affirm that causal networks are analytically epistemological, then you cannot justify that your knowledge of the cat is about that "whatever over there" based on a physicalist's, materialist's, or naturalist's model of the world, for all models like this would have to show the same thing: magical knowledge at a distance. Why magical? An idea is only as good as its justification.
So, there you are, a competent surgeon with an awake patient probing around the brain looking for responses so as not to remove anything vital and it is clear: brain and experience correspond. To argue against this is folly. But the issue was never about our functioning, pragmatic grasp of the world, but about whether your grasp of the world could be about something OTHER than pragmatics. Pragmatists like Dewey, Rorty and even Heidegger (his ready to hand instrumentality) say your knowledge is inherently pragmatic. There is no magical "reaching out" beyond one's apperceptual faculties, rather, the object that we see, hear, and so on, is a pragmatic/conceptual of-a-piece presence. If you take electromagnetic fields to be in their exhaustive analysis about what is "out there," independent of experience, then you would be committing the metaphysical fallacy of positing things unseen.
Existentialists are anything but metaphysicians. They are phenomenologists, committed to a limitation of ideas to what actually is presented.
What does this have to do with ethics? Physiclist, materialist, naturalist (it matters not here) models yield to models of meaning and value. We can now proceed to construct a new model of the world, one in which values are not subordinated the "metaphysics" of science, and the subjective/objective division at the ontological level simply vanishes.
Of course, all of this is true. Too true, meaning too commonplace for philosophy. You are thinking a a world of unquestioned assumptions about knowledge relationships with the world. This matter here is about the questions that are rightly ignored by functioning scientists. Science needs to know its place, however.
What is material Constance? I think you're very reductive or do not understand contemporary physics if you think as material world as bounded to the necessity of casual sufficiency.
I could understand you say this 100+ years ago... not after relativity and all the rest...
Quoting Constance
Of course, as I say those causes are the mental objects you learned during childhood. Your chilhood is when you internal world gets built.
Quoting Constance
Yes it does.
Quoting Constance
We call it memory, neural-traces that keep our memories and form our memories as the memories of the computers but in the brain and with neural networks. (have you watched the second Blade Runner?).
Artificial Neural Networks do it as well.
Quoting Constance
Yes, there is a model, the one you build during your childhood as your brain interacts with the world.
Quoting Constance
this is what I'm affirming, neural networks that have learned are causally epistemological.
Quoting Constance
Pragmatics do not only refer to the world you see. Your comment is quite naif. Electromagnetic fields are part of nature, are natural. This is why I tell you you should stop using materialism or physician because you have an obsolete understanding of matter (materialism); better if you talk about nature.
Blind people are humans too :grin:
Quoting Constance
It has been built: heterophenomenology. I see you haven't watched the videos of Dehaene I proposed you. You're too concentrated trying to show you're right :nerd:
Quoting Constance
Are you the one telling science what is his place? :lol:
Science has won its place along history and many people have died defending it, but here we're, in a very humble way, with the ambition of explaining and understanding everything but step by step in a continuous and humble dialogue with nature, with our nature.
This is not an issue in contemporary physics. And causality is not intended to reflect any advance beyond the apriori principle of sufficient cause, that all things subsist in events that cannot be conceived ex nihilo. The only thing that you could bring to bear on the issue at hand would be something that could be a knowledge bearing medium, like the hand written commandment from God. I don't suppose you have an argument for this, but then, even if you did, the conditions for knowledge claims would still be there: there are the tablets, there is you. It would only be the arbitrary assumption that God put the tablets before you that affirms the knowledge that there are tablets at all.
There is then the matter of quantum entanglement. but I have never heard that this can apply to bridge the gap between objects and the perceptual equipment of an epistemic agency. But then again, even if this were somehow implicated in an attempt to make such a connection, one would never get beyond Wittgenstein and the rest who place all knowledge claims within the the framework of the structures of meaningful utterances, i.e., logic. the "aboutness" of a proposition regardless of the hard science context in which it is made is something that cannot reach beyond its own nature. There are no, say, conditional grammatical forms "out there".
Quoting Raul
Of course they are. And you are quite right to say so, but this kind of knowledge claim about the causal world and a descriptive account of the way things "cause" a child to develop is exactly what is in question. This conditioning: what is its nature? How is it even possible to conceive of it such that objects as independent of perceptual conditioning can be the objects in perception?
it is not that I think there is nothing out there independent in this way. One has to admit that there is something to this otherness of objects, they are not me, but outside of me, or, they transcend me. I certainly realize there are things there that are not me, but the moment I take up the matter, the object, in the faculties of my understanding, I bring the object into this "totality" of my conceptualized experience.
And it gets worse. The question then turns to an analysis of this interiority, and this has as its center, TIME. Hence the book's name, Being and Time. There are no things, only events.
My position is this: there is no world, only worlds.
Quoting Raul
Oh, thank God! Please tell me how this works so I can call the newspapers.
Quoting Raul
A terrific film. Alas, not useful here.
Quoting Raul
Model? Model of what? All that you can say is composed IN the very mind that is supposed to be the object of your explanation!! You do see how this works, right? I mean, you are never going to get this to work: All that you can say about the real "brain" that produces pain, ideas, consciousness and so on, is conceived IN the very thing that is being reduced. You cannot reach out of phenomena to affirm this natural world, for every utterance, every observation you make is phenomenal!
This is why you can never affirm that cat. That cat belongs to eternity once the perceptual lights are turned off, for this is the removal of the logical form of propositions, the sensations, all thought identity, any possibility you can even imagine.
Best to side with Rorty: Our knowledge is pragmatic. To stand on a street corner, look around and acknowledge the many knowledge relationships you have with the world of the things before you is to know what happens when these things are confronted. A road is for driving, it is hard to the step, supports one's weight, can be dangerous and on and on. These are all pragmatic determinations, not ontological (unless you are making pragmatism into an ontology. Heidegger sort did this).
Quoting Raul
I do appreciate that grinning face. I do not want others to get angry about ideas. But they do.
There is no argument here that denies electromagnetic fields, evolution, stellar analyses, carbon dating, or anything at all science and its paradigms (provisional theories. See Kuhn, who was a Kantian) have to say. I am an adherent and an admirer.
But these are just not useful here. Here, they beg the question, that is, assume what needs to be proven, and I should add, they are fine this way and scientists do not for the most part care at all about arguments like this one. Not their field.
Quoting Raul
Yes, Danial Dennett. Acctually the first true heterophenomenolgist was Emanuel Levinas. See his Totality and Infinity, Alterity and Transcendence, Time and the Other, and so on. It is not that phenomenology says there is nothing there, no "cat" (note the double inverted commas) there, nor any "people" or other things. This gets complicated. remember, Heidegger's Being and Time, Sarte's Being and Nothingness, and Husserl's Ideas and all the rest, devote a great deal of thought to others, but they are affirmed by the collective ideas that we witness within. It is understood that the horizon of our phenomenological gaze is both confined to interiorityand inclusive of others that are not us, for in the phenomenal presentation, we witness otherness; otherness is IN the interiority of the perceiving agency, and this is confirmed by no more than its presence. Phenomenology is a descriptive "science" (Husserl called it this).
The Other, therefore, comes to us embedded in our own interiority, yet in this setting, is presented as Other. This Other is transcendental, as are all things not me; it is just that this "outsideness" of things occurs within, and this sets the stage for a great deal of post modern philosophy. Levinas holds that the Other is beyond our Totality, which is Heidegger's dasein; the other intrudes in the face that reveals an ethical obligation to respond that issues from transcendence, which religiously is construed as God.
It is certainly not the case that phenomenology reduces the world to subjectivity. Rather, it understands what is means to grasp a thing and that behind or "below" knowledge, there is a transcendence, and transcendence is defined by what escapes our totalizing reach that wants to integrate all things into itself. This is Levinas. This totalizing principle meets the face of the Other and ethics is born. But Levinas doesn't take the matter to its core, for the Other's presence's significance lies with the more fundamental and irreducible value qua value.
Okay. But K is by no means typical. His Attack on Christendom rails against the banality of middle class Christianity. He thought the medievals has it right with their singularity of devotion.
At some point, I could recite by heart passages from De Imitatione Christi ... it seemed so right, so true ...
But I eventually decided that the banal middle-class Christians were better off in life, and that devotion is for losers.
What about the superposition principle? Incoherent state of particles?
Quoting Constance
I have to insist here, I see this happening in other artificial systems we humans create. In engineering and physics we call them complex systems. Complex systems have the capacity of new properties and capabilities to emerge within them. Properties and capabilities impossible to predict. One good example are the Convolutional Networks that learn to recognize objects in images. Nothing metaphysical but just physical, physics of information. And those complex systems are heuristic and stochastic as our brain is.
Quoting Constance
But this "otherness" and the "me" is another mental object, maybe the highest level one but as any other that emerges during childhood. If you would grow up in the forest (like Frederick II in 13th century did with many children) without any contact to other humans, no contact to human language it is very likely you idea of the others, your "self", would be very very different and you would not have the instruments to make the questions you are making here. This is to say that it is the culture and the environment you grow up that determines your Self and how you are in the world. So this example illustrates as well that this "otherness" and this "me" is a reflexion, a literal mirror-reflexion of the "other" humans that your brain recognize being like you (same body, same gestures, capabilities...). 2 mirrors opposite one to the other. No surprise they generate the idea of infinite like it happens in the infinite images reflected in 2 confronted mirrors.
Quoting Constance
No need, professionals in this field have already explained it and earn their lives explaining and making research to better explain how concepts are caused by external objects interacting with our brain. It is not yet digested by the pop-culture but it will come and as always in history, this paradigma-shifts happen in silence. Stanislas Dehaene (who works for French ministry of education) and Georg Northoff are good ones doing this.
Quoting Constance
No, here I think you make a fundamental mistake. What I can say is the result of scientific+philosophical studies of the subjective narratives of people, studying their subjectivity. Heterophenomenology successfully studies the subject as an object
Quoting Constance
Sorry but yes we can and we do, again through heterophenomenology. Another way is looking at cases where the brain system breaks due to accidents or illness. Those case-studies are so helpful as well to kill so many prejudices about what we're. Good reference here is Ramachandran.
Do you know we can know your decisions before you know them (Libet)? Do you know we can induce a brain to be a religious brain (Ramachandran)? Do you know Capgras syndrome? Did you see in youtube the man with only 7-seconds memory? We can induce you the sense of presence of someone else just with some drugs altering you state of consciousness. A tumor can make you a pedophile (you can google it, real story).
These are cases that allow us to exit from our interior as these are like doors that open to what we're really are and how our brain cheat us :grimace:
Quoting Constance
Ontological :-) I understand you use it here in its full metaphysical sense so I have to say nice metaphysical word but not epistemic value outside virtual illusive metaphysical systems. Sorry, here we diverge fundamentally. For me metaphysics is like an invented philosophical religion. I know it sounds strong, but it is how I see it. Well and many other philosophers. I do not subscribe to any meta-something view of things.
You can call me pragmatic. I would not accept this either. All this for me is completely obsolete terminology. I subscribe to naturalism that I'm quite sure you're not familiar with (see Daniel Andler and Sandro Nannini).
Quoting Constance
Yes agree, but science does paradigm shifts, progress, what ensures continuous and concrete progress. Philosophy has always had to follow, they go hand-to-hand but science dictates the reality. It is not the other way around.
Quoting Constance
And I subscribe to this, while I think Husserl and subsequent followers have gone too far with phenomenology. I'm anyway not an expert on this topic.
Quoting Constance
Yes, and, maybe aside comment, most of the times the mother and the father are very influential.
Quoting Constance
Quoting Constance
Yes I subscribe to this.
Quoting Constance
No, I have problems with metaphysics as I said above sorry. The Dasein is such a confusing concept.
Quoting Constance
Wonderful!
Just to say, yes, religiously as God, and not religiously as the "existential delusion"
Quoting Constance
Agree. But would you agree that science and technology is the only successful way to scrutinize the trascendental world?
Philosophy's role is that of consolation (Boezio's), about dealing with our inner needs of further existential explanation but most of the epistemic value comes from science. Well, nowadays philosophy is important as well to articulate what human civilizations want to become with all this science and technology challenging the foundations of our ethics, laws and politics.
Quoting Constance
Value qua value... yeap!.
It is hard to build the bridge... but I think I'm almost there, thinking that value can be reduced to the homeostatic principle. Or, like I like to do, the other way around... Homeostasis importance has to be expanded as the main driver of existential value.
I know one could say... but homeostasis describes a biological thing, this is materialism... yes and this is the purpose of "naturalism" to get rid of materialistic prejudices and expand the powers of nature! A very much unknown nature that we are discovering is beyond any existential-human claim.
The same as it is with all concepts: it is hermeneutically grounded. Talk about quantum mechanics is first language, and it is here that phenomenology stakes its claims. Physics, even the most cutting edge, are not ontologically basic. What is basic is the construction of thought and the world at the level of original generative description; it is Kant, or rather, Husserl and Eugene fink's Sixth Meditation carrying on Kantian idealism, that takes center stage. An idea of any kind is a taking the world up AS, and an in this phenomenological ontology, the phenomenon is a bundled "event". How this is explained differs across the board, but it is clear to me that the eidetic dimension of an object pragmatic and the field of Being that comprises all things, that is the "what it is" is pragmatic, a body problems solved (ready to hand). You observe a hammer, realize implicitly its nature as something settled, familiar, "known intuitively," that is, immediately, always already: this is our "sense of reality" which is a lifetime of pragmatic successes, or "consummations" (Dewey). This account reduces reality to an aggregate problem solving, it "region spatially desevered" when encountered (a little Heideggerian terminology that I won't repeat. He really wanted a break with everything traditional and this makes him theoretically alien to standard discussions).
I think he is right. I think Richard Rorty and the pragmatists align with Heidegger, and give us a startlingly compelling account for the answer to the question, what is Real? It is hermeneutical pragmatics.
BUT: there is a rub! And this is Kierkegaard, or begins here: There is "something" here in my midst in the object that is not pragmatic, and this is actuality. Notice the paradox: A "say" actuality, but in the saying I subsume in language the very thing I am trying to, errr, performatively dismiss. The saying and the thinking IS the performance and I can't ever "get to" the actuality beneath the terminology, but there is no mistaking that this actuality of a cat is not a concept, not a pragmatic "eidetic affair of an actuality" (Husserl)
Here it gets complicated. Time becomes the structural center.
Quoting Raul
Interesting to note: You are such a system, and talk about things that are not in or of such systems is really what metaphysics is. Freud's psychoanalytical constructions of ego, id and superego is considered meta psychology. I mean, look at it like this: if one wants to localize events at the level of basic questions, saying here is a tree, there is an application possibility for the concept of "convolutional networks that learn to recognize objects in images" all of these begins at ONE locality, and this is the foundational level of philosophical inquiry: the experiential matrix of a self. One never, at this level of discussion, even observed an object that is free of cognition and affect, such a thing has never even been witnessed once! To talk like this is an abstraction from the source, which is experience.
It is not that talk about the theoretical structures of thought in computer science modeling is meaningless. Such a claim would be patently absurd. But it is to say that in doing so you are not thinking at the level of basic questions, the ones that look into the presuppositions of empirically based theoretical systems. As I see it, one has not crossed the threshold into philosophy until the focus turns to foundational questions, and here we encounter hermeneutics.
Quoting Raul
Sure. I think you treat phenomenology the way Dennett does in part of his qualia paper, as another word for qualia: what stands before us in the physical world has the sensory input and the conceptual form that put's it together. This sensory input, can it be acknowledged as it is independently of its concepts (to speak in Kant-ese)? That would be a way of referring to qualia, the "being appeared to redly."
Phenomenology is nothing like this, (though Husserl's epoche and the extraordinary claims he makes about "the thing itself" do need explaining. But not here unless you want to). All of our interhuman affairs remain as they are. Interpretation as to their meaning at the basic level, however, has changed dramatically. Phenomenology allows the world as it is to "speak" and prioritize, allowing meaning to dominate rather than empirical science paradigms in which meaning is localized as one event under the general rubric "the natural world". For a phenomenologists, the natural world is, analytically, a region of thought that circumscribes its own "domain"" if you want to talk about nature, then nature talk commences, specialized fields recognized, each with its distinct domain.
What is sought for in philosophy is the grounding of all domains, and this is Being. What is Being's domain? This specialized primordial domain is formally called ontology (despite this term's being coopted everywhere these days), and it has a history of metaphysics behind it. Phenomenology says Being is here and now, right before your eyes and in the analytic of experience.
Quoting Raul
All this is preanalytic by the standard imposed by existential thinking. Such researchers do not care about phenomenology, just as a geneticist does not care about Adlerian psychology.
Quoting Raul
Dennett will tell you that when he discusses such things, he implicitly dismisses, say, the Kantian objections. They all do. Quine despised Derrida, yet if you follow his thoughts about indeterminacy, you find yourself aligned with the conclusions of deconstruction (see David Golumbia's Quine, Derrida, and the Question of Philosophy). This is because this issue ran for over a hundred years and Russell and Moore got sick of it (Moore was a Kantian, then one day just asked, am I raising my hand? Looked at his hand and said, of course! following Diogenes who walked across the room to disprove Parmenides.
But then: One can read about heterophenomenology, acknowledge the sense of it, and still realize that while true, this or that big claim, the theoretical divide has not been crossed to basic questions. A philosopher like Rorty, whom I like because he straddles the middle so well, can on the one hand argue against phenomenology's intensionality--pain? where is the intension there?--, and presenting a monist view that looks a lot like what a physicist would put together (see, e.g., his view on Leibniz's brain tour of thought), but then, he takes Heidegger and Dewey and Wittgenstein (a phenomenologist? Not explicitly, but...) to be the greatest philosophers of the 20th century (and he adored the Kantian, Thomas Kuhn)! The thing is, Rorty's ontology is radical pragmatic phenomenology, and I think he is right: out thereness is nonsense if taken to be independent of the human contribution. I walk out of the room, and I take the cat with me, for "cat" is a pragmatic construct embedded in language and experience. That out there? Utterly transcendental and unspeakable. Rorty is the one who said, "how does anything out there get in here? is an impossible question, but only at the level of basic questions.
Dennett would say the same, or similar.
Quoting Raul
Yes, I guess I these things. If you really think you can "exit" your interior you have two choices. One is to affirm that causality carries knowledge, is inherently epistemic, and you would have to say how this works. Another is to construct a metaphysics that does this. All we observe is not all there is, and "beneath" observed events there are knowledge relationships that make the essential connection. This sounds insane, but then, and this is where Rorty gets off the bus: 1) this "exteriority" that is present in our interior is, upon examination, something that subsumes our interior! 2) There is also a nondiscursive "intuition" in the affirmation of otherness that just won't go away in that it presents a picture of ourselves in the world that is a kind of simulacrum of the really Real.
I will not go into this unless you want to. It is very alien to one's familiar world.
It is very important, in my pov, to see that no matter how one slices it, you will never get beyond neurons and axonal connections and neurochemistry that fill the explanatory need, which is why I began with the cat. Brain talk does not get beyond this because this physicalist talk is presupposed. I look at the matter as one of opacity, clear and simple. There is a brain, and I am inside. There is no question that I am a physical brain manifestation inside a physical brain. This is just the opposite of metaphysics. Tell me abut the pathway from the cat to me. No need to be complex, just give me the rough detail, BUT, in full knowledge of the arguments here presented.
Doors? Wittgenstein rightly tells us that doors are first part of states of affairs, part of facts of the world. What is a fact? A propositional construction. There are no propositions "out there".
Quoting Raul
Pragmatists are not metaphysicians. Entirely the opposite. (See Rorty's Mirror of Nature.) And as to its being obsolete, this is simply the presumption that comes with placing oneself in the discussions that use contemporary technical language. Even old Kant, while his thoughts have had two hundred years of development and have been shred and pulverized over and over, has never been refuted in the essentials laid out. Heidegger's Being and Time is almost a hundred years old, but contemporary phenomenologists, many of whom are French (Nancy, Henry, Marion, et al) work in his long shadow. Note Andler's references to so many in the history of philosophy: all unsolved matters, their thoughts still, in his mind, contemporary; mind/body? Still haunting the analytic scene? Rather telling, I think, of the direction of their work.
I looked into Daniel Andler and read his Philosophy of Cognitive Science paper. First, he is French, which is surprising since the French are famously post Heideggarian phenomenologists. Anyway, I can see that he moves in circles outside of phenomenology, and this means there are a host of questions begged that are not acknowledged as such, and he admits the limitations of addressing these are due to space and his purpose.
Interesting: Looking for something enlightening as he peruses the history of cognitive theory. Mostly I am familiar. He is doing speculative science: let's assume the world is the world of our everyday lives, known in greater detail in our sciences. this is the assumption that begs the question. He says earlier: even the keenest defender of philosophical naturalism can see that a full naturalization of the mind delivered by cognitive science remains a distant prospect. He knows about that cat! that all such thinking runs into the cat problem which is there is NO demonstrable way out of phenomena, and all one can do is talk AS IF there were a way.
Quoting Raul
No, empirical science has not done this at all. Philosophy is an apriori discipline. this gets forgotten because science gives us pain killers and cell phones. But really, it has little to do with authentic philosophy which looks to presuppositions.
Quoting Raul
Expert? You don't have to teach Husserl to know what he says. It takes reading. Most analytic philosophers have not read much continental philosophy. Kant, but little more. This is why they don't really understand that the problems they are trying to solve have been rendered all but moot.
Quoting Raul
If you think the Other is beyond our totality, then you can only think naturalism is a defensible thesis preanalytically, like thinking that mountains are mountains, and stars are stars, and so on. Philosophy hasn't begun yet.
Quoting Raul
Not sure what an existential delusion is.
Quoting Raul
Of course, I would say all of this is very important, indeed! But as to "science and technology is the only successful way to scrutinize the trascendental world"?? it is quite out of its league. See earlier.Quoting Raul
I think this is the hope of analytic philosophy in general, that through discussions about what our working concepts can mean and can "hold" in terms of novel theory. My view is this may be entertaining, but that ship has sailed, wrecked, and sunk to the bottom of the ocean. Philosophy has reached its end, in fact, it "reached" this when Buddha found enlightenment. One has to realize some basic things about the work of wisdom: in the end, it is clear that the bottom line for inquiry into the nature of the self and its world is not cognitive; cognition is a tool that seeks out value. The point to all things lies with the value they produce, putting the issue squarely on an issue into the nature of value, meaning, importance.
Using just words? Quite herme-tic as well, isn't it?
Quoting Constance
Your intuitions and language are aggregates of problem solving that you learnt while you grow up during your childhood. I would even say more, you would never be able to talk or conceive the linguistic categories if you are not exposed to a family context where people talk. Language is not trascendental and the categories we use are contingent and relative to the problem solving of our lives.
Quoting Constance
Would be interesting to see what he would say about superposition states of particles and about bosons and fermions. For me it looks like Kierkegaard's thinking has been overestimated. He was pushed by the christian religions as he served their purposes. But this is another discussion.
Quoting Constance
This is you saying those things I talk about are not in those systems. I of course disagree.
Quoting Constance
Quoting Constance
But phenomenology can be conceived within empirical world thanks to heterophenomenology. It is a branch of cognitive naturalism.
Quoting Constance
Right! and then they opened the door and saw in a monitor that someone from outside, using electromagnetic fields raised his hand but his unconscious made him believe it was him to raise his hand. They would not think the same way with current understanding of the sense of agency and how consciousness is constructed.
Quoting Constance
Heterophenomenology is not "existing my interior". It is working under the assumption that your brain and my brain functions the same way so I can study yours to make conclusions about mine.
Quoting Constance
No technical language, but the naturalistic presumption. Yours is metaphysical, mine is naturalistic.Quoting Constance
We're all doing speculative thought... it is philosophy :wink: ... but his naturalistic approach is a winning one.Quoting Constance
Of course, he is humble and realistic, but he follows what I think is the right way... philosophy but with science. Not a philosophy that tries to positioned itself above everything as the king of the world with their anthropocentric views of things (meta-things are good examples). Andler puts nature above anything, being humble pays off.
Quoting Constance
Don't you think this is a "religious" absolutist way of defining philosophy? it appears toas your position your capabilities of thinking above any real, above nature. As Daniel Andler and naturalists say, many philosophers position themselves above nature. This simple thing is what naturalism fixes, putting below nature, approach nature in a humble way. Same way science does.
Quoting Constance
Yes, together with philosophy, naturalistic one. Are you telling me a phenomenology conceived as only using human reasoning is more powerful? No, quantum mechanics experiments could never be understood using any phenomenological reasoning... goes beyond naif human intuitions.
Quoting Constance
Isn't this what your phenomenology does?
Quoting Constance
Are you serious or being cynic here? :chin:
Quoting Constance
Right, human cognition is limited so isn't it womewhat true that we invent technologies that empower our limited cognition: computers, telescopes, algorithms, biological tools, large hadron collider, etc...
Not just words, but observations of the structures of experience. Hermeneutics says that knowledge is deferential: terms always have their meanings tied to other terms. To think at all is to take up the world AS a symbolic system, and to think about "things in the world" is not a reference to some alien ontology like "substance" or "nature" but exists in a problem solving matrix that interacts in "the world". Such a term as "nature" suggests that what is natural is the bottom line for ontology. Hermeneutics claims that this term belongs to an interpretative matrix and it is here the bottom line is to be found" it is a term that is "regionally limited" and this is not what philosophy is looking for. Nature is a broad and inclusive concept, granted, but it is not foundational. You see, before one can discuss what is natural, you have to go through the very faculties process what one receives. It would be nice if the brain were like a mirror of nature (Rorty's book name, by the way), but just look at this "natural" object, the brain, I mean, I think you really have to be honest about this: that thing is entirely opaque, and this is working with a very clear physicalist view of objects. The brain is an object! You see this point. All the advanced chemistry you can imagine is not going to come to the aid of making two objects, my brain and my cat, come together epistemically.
Analytic philosophers like Dennett know this! You ask Dennett about this and he will simply shrug his shoulders, for he knows, as Wittgenstein claimed long ago: such questions are impossible! for one would have to step out of epistemic relations to "say" what this is, and the saying is inherently epistemic.
I take this as unassailably true, though, keeping in mind that there are NO unassailable truths in the absolute sense.
Quoting Raul
But all of this talk about childhood resides in a terminological setting that is hermeneutical. You have to give up the idea that when you perceive a thing there is some "absolute" connection. Dennett would entirely deny this. The "really and truly" part of what is is hermeneutics, and the "input" is, the moment it makes its entrance into the brain thing, nothing at all as to what that thing is if the brain were removed from the account of what the thing is.
If you think this is intuitively contradictory, if you will, then you're right. There is something IN the understanding that affirms existence qua existence. This, I am arguing, is value. Existence reveals its true nature in the value-meanings of the world and what intuitively asserts itself in the ultimate question about "what is" is value-meaning. Without value, the question would be ontologically no more meaningful that, way, ones and zero in a computer binary system.
Douglas Adam's question he poses to Deep Thought, of life the universe and everything, in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is, value.
Quoting Raul
No, it is this discussion. Take a look at his Concept of Anxiety. Of course, we are in the early 19th century, but this matters not at all. Note that Daniel Andler reveals that Cartesian problems remain entirely at a distance from CURRENT theory! Descartes??? Dualism? That was the 17th century.
Of course, K's Anxiety is a difficult work. Most fear to go.
Quoting Raul
But the assumption that a tree is still a tree when all experience manufacturing faculties are removed (I leave the scene) is a claim that one knows beyond knowing! It is kind of crazy. I think this clear...as a proverbial bell.
Quoting Raul
so, if you will, tell me how, briefly, cognitive science gets my cat into my brain. Note that the moment you lift an explanatory finger that you are bound make explicit references to what is NOT my brain.
It is not that cognitive science is wrong. Not at all. The point here is that this is speculative science. not philosophy. This is not the bottom line of inquiry. This is a Dennett shrugging his shoulders, then getting on with arguing AS IF the natural world were in fact the natural world. As analytic philosophers all do. Ask an epistemologist about affirming "P" in "S knows P". S/he will tell you, well, you have to have P adn that's it! They ignore more penetrating "Kantian" questions simply because they know these go places their logical rigors dare not go! Levinas, Husserl, Fink, Heidegger and on and on; analytic philosophers do not go here because they just like working on puzzles, flexing cognitive muscle. Whole books written on Gettier problems! Nonsense, really. Degrades the entire enterprise.
Quoting Raul
But of course you have to go through your own experience to get to the Other's brain. How is this done, again?
Quoting Raul
Explain, please, vis a vis the above.
Quoting Raul
Quoting Raul
Not sure what is winning. It is more like more of the same under the aegis of new language. Dualism? Still talking about dualism. Ignoring Kant. It just SOUNDS like progress. Never, ever get past Wittgenstein.
Quoting Raul
Being humble does not undo what he is saying. Nice try. Remember, it is NOT just Descartes. He runs through many ideas taken up by contemporary philosophers, and it is not like a physicist talking about Newton. These basic philosophical issues are not one whit closer to being solved because you will never get beyond the cat to me.
Quoting Raul
Not religious. Just looking to what is presupposed by knowledge claims, that is, looking into the logical structure of such a claim. You say C-fibers firing, e.g., and then, fiber? What is this? I mean, what is the thought that utters it, the intuitive foundation of the world that I receive, what can and cannot be affirmed foundationally? And so on. One does not look at the world for such answers, simply at what must be the case in order for thought and science and being in the world to be the case. Of course, it is accepted that there is a world, but only to the extent that such a world presents itself in the most "immediate" way, as presence. Beyond the analysis of is metaphysics: affirming what is present is also a non presence. Now we are in metaphysics.
Quoting Raul
No, Phenomenology does NOT cancel science in the least; at all! It simply says that here, you are not at the ground level of inquiry. There is a question that is something of an elephant in the room, however: When we make observations of the world, we are presented with what is not experience, even though this cannot be confirmed, understood in any model whatsoever! "Outthereness" is not an abstract transcendental, but an IMPOSING transcendental. This is what all th fuss is about in Derrida (?), Husserl, Heidegger(?), Levinas, and others because, for some, the Other is an ethical transcendence. The question is, what IS there that is MORE than the totality of experience? The issue goes to Time. More on this as desired, but it is the basis of my metaethical claims.
Quoting Raul
Philosophy has been going on a very, very long time. Very hard to thumbnail this. We live not in a world of things, but of events. to step beyond the boundaries of an event is to cease and desist making the event in question, aka, experience. How do we do this? Meditation. the trouble with philosophy as you have been reading it, is that it can never objectify the self totally, subsume the self under it Totality fo understanding. It wants to do this, but the egoic center can never be made into an object, and all along, it is the self's Being that hs been at issue. Other things are not actualities, hence the nonsense of words like "material" and "substance" which are at nst placeholders for thigs unspeakable, at worst bad metaphysical assumptions, as if calling a thing natural could establish a basis for the Real.
Likely typos, not proofreading, sorry, no time.
Have you considered this question from the point of view of the "Great Chain of Being"?
https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Great_Chain_of_Being
The Great Chain of Being describes the hierarchy of being and its many levels. Man is a microcosm. Man's being is structured like the universe. Plato described our higher and lower natures in the chariot analogy suggesting that the corruption of the dark source is the source of all our difficulties.
Regular ethics tells a person what to do but metaethics describes what we ARE: But it requires a person existing as the three parts of the tripartite soul to become inwardly balanced. Man exists out of balance so cannot experience metaethics but responds to indoctrinated or acquired ethics.
The goal of metaethics is conscious evolution; the evolution of our out of balance level of being into a higher quality of conscious evolution or inner unity along the Great Chain of Being where metaethics or objective conscience would be the norm.
If you want to think about evolution and metaethics, then perhaps De Chardin is the best way to go. At least he recognizes qualitative divisions in evolving creatures. Really, it is here, in the evolved features that the issue lies with. I mean, before there is talk about a hierarchy of Being, we need to look closely at the evidence before us that is the grounding of any and all metaphysical thinking, because all things have their final justification is what is clear and present. Metaphysics can get very messy and preposterous and you find yourself with your head in the clouds wondering how things got this way. This happens when lose touch with what is there, in the world primordially. First, there is the experience and then there is the question! The question opens possibilities. For me, I first look to the actuality of an ethical problem, and determine its parts. I find at the center there is the defining Real: the value. then Wittgenstein, Mackie, and others make their contribution. THEN one may be tempted to draw conclusions about the "meta" nature of evolution, its teleology, perhaps.
The point of this is to first establish qualitative distinctions in ontology BEFORE one makes extravagant elaborations. Pain is there, in one's midst. What makes it ethical at all? The ethics of pain qua pain is at issue. It is not in the descriptive facts, as facts are simple states of affairs, no greater of worse than any other, sitting there on the logical grid.
If one thinks our experiences can be sublime, profound, deeply important, somehow, and these are acknowledged as evolved features, then the structure of evolution must include this. Chain of Being? Would this not mirror the hierarchy within, which is, after all, the source of all speculative thinking?
Fine. Now what IS it? When you put your attention to the self, its apparent descriptive features, what is there to "see"? this presents questions like, what is the meaning of meaning? For the first thing encountered is the fact that things are not just there, but they are important, we care. But what is this caring about? It is about things in the world, but the caring about things presents the question as to what there is in things to care about, and the matter turns to value, or, the value of value: We bring value into the world. It is the self that makes things meaningful, both conceptually and valuatively. The self is the center of all meaning in the world.
What does this mean?
For me the phrase I Am doesn't exist for Man in Plato's Cave. In reality the totality of the human organism can be described as "We are Many." As I understand it, the potential for Man is inner unity where the three parts of the tripartite soul exist as ONE or as a solution rather than as a mixture. So the real I doesn't exist as of yet. It is our potential.
Rather than a soul a human being has the seed of a soul. Jacob Needleman describes our situation as Acornology in his book "Lost Christianity. Our real rather than acquired self is like the kernel of life within the husk of the acorn. Jacob Needleman writes:
[i]I began my lecture that morning from just this point. There is an innate element in human nature, I argued that can grow and develop only through impressions of truth received in the organism like a special nourishing energy. To this innate element I gave a name - perhaps not a very good name - the "higher unconscious." My aim was to draw an extremely sharp distinction between the unconscious that Freud had identified and the unconscious referred to (though not by that name) in the Christian tradition.
Imagine, I said, that you are a scientist and you have before you the object known as the acorn. Let us further imagine that you have never before seen such an object and that you certainly do not know that it can grow into an oak. You carefully observe these acorns day after day and soon you notice that after a while they crack open and die. Pity! How to improve the acorn? So that it will live longer. You make careful, exquisitely precise chemical analyses of the material inside the acorn and, after much effort, you succeed in isolating the substance that controls the condition of the shell. Lo and behold, you are now in the position to produce acorns which will last far longer than the others, acorns whose shells will perhaps never crack. Beautiful!
The question before us, therefore, is whether or not modern psychology is only a version of acornology.[/i]
The mistake modern psychology makes is the assumption that the husk of the acorn is like our real self. Can a person be capable of distinguishing between the outer man (our personality) and the inner man (what we are born with)?
“Give me beauty in the inward soul; may the outward and the inward man be at one.” – Socrates.
Can they be at one? Who is willing through efforts to "Know Thyself" to experience what they ARE rather than how they imagine themselves?
The problem is order and value. how do you value a moment compared to an eon or infinity. how do you value a quark compared to a planet. For us humans we have to be able to quantify and qualify things and put them in order to understand some form of algorithm or story that makes sense to us.
What I'm calling existence is outside our conscious awareness (self) and hence cannot be valued within existence or our value systems.
The problem may be (relating to Constance's issue) that your looking for meaning where their is none. Existence doesn't present questions or answers, it just 'is'. What it is everyone and anyone will question but there is no substance or temporal 'fix' we can put on it because it is outside our knowledge and perhaps our understanding of what it is, so it does not fit into the categories, orders and values we have for all other things, there is no interconnective or relational connection to it as compared with all other things within it. It is as definitive as we have got, it is the base of our being the base of our universal understanding.
What is in the world and the interaction of self in the world, everything we do, feel ,think and be is another story of dissection, division, definition, purpose and reason. This is where the complexity of uniqueness, individualism, ism's, social beliefs, systems of belief, and just being in existence itself lies.
Since the acorn is a metaphor, the merit of acornology lies with its borrowed explanatory powers, and to me, it doesn't really capture the analysis of the self. True, cultivating better acorns is roughly like improving oneself, but the devil is in the details and this is not brought out by, well, acorns.
"Chemical analysis" of acorns? What are you (or he) suggesting? This is what needs to be explained.
The husk of the acorn is analogous to human personality. We are not born with it but it is acquired in life. It is the source of the OPINION of ourselves. We re born with what we ARE. The healthy kernel of life within the husk is analogous to the seed of the soul which has the chance to develop and become an oak or in this case, to become evolved Man.
Our personality is like a horizontal line connecting us to death. It changes over time by mimicking and hormones. We may have the same knowledge at thirty that we have at twenty but our being has changed along with opinions of ourselves.
The seed of the soul is connected by a vertical line to its source. Where our personality is guided by appearance as with materialism, the seed of the soul is nourished by the experience of vertical truth.
The young seed of the soul initially feeds off of personality experiences. It would be normal for a person to become open to what they are rather then how they appear to be so the husk of the acorn cracks open. It is quite possible that the efficiency of materialism makes it impossible for the personality to outgrow the enchantment with materialism to experience themselves, what they are. Then they can die inside.
As we are, our personality is the dominant part of our lives while the inner man remains in the background and doesn't grow. It is possible that a person can consciously strive to awaken the inner Man containing the seed of the soul by weakening the reactive dominance of our personality. Instead of being limited to animal REACTION they can become capable of conscious ACTION. They can become conscious of the forest rather than being fixated on the trees.
A real Man IMO is one who can put knowledge of the trees and its needs into the perspective of the forest as a whole and its needs along with the will to act upon it.
Not sure why I'm looking for meaning where there is none. Clearly, meaning is there, in indulgence, the rapture, bliss, suffering, pain, and so on, IN the world. There is no mistaking this: right there, in my pounding headache or the Haagen Dazs I had for dessert. In terms of the sheer "presence" of these, I take them as foundational and irreducible.
As to the notion of "just is" keep in mind that physics held a consensus at the end of the 19th century that believed for the most part there was little else to find out in the field in terms of its fundamentals. "Just is" is itself a theoretical term. When we speak of what IS we put in play a history of thought handed to us culture and language.
This is true with philosophy as much as anything else. Consider the difference between Eastern and Western thought. the trick, though is to find common ground. After all, they are talking about the same world, it's just that there is this persistent "what it is" body of paradigms that gets in the way. The difficulty lies in bringing them together, and phenomenological thinking does this.
Ah, the soul. Pray, elaborate.
Quoting Nikolas
Fine, but tell me more about the soul, I mean, what there is in experience that gives warrant to this notion as a meaningful one. We begin with what we witness, not with metaphors and assumptions and metaphysics.
Quoting Nikolas
It's not that I disagree with all of this, rather, I don't know its foundation beyond the arbitrary positing of the soul. To argue the case, one has to begin with what is there, present and "at hand" so to speak. From this, one moves outward.
We begin with the experience through efforts to "Know Thyself" That the human essence is in three parts or mind, appetites, and sensations. These parts are not consciously connected but are connected by imagination. As a result our inner world doesn't experience the outer world. Instead we interpret it. Our senses are weak. Our emotions are filled with negativity, and being governed by duality we do not see that the universe as a triune reality. Step one is to verify what we ARE: the human condition.
Meister Eckhart describes the seed of the Soul. Can Man become a son of God: "The seed of God is in us. Given an intelligent and hard-working farmer, it will thrive and grow up to God, whose seed it is; and accordingly its fruits will be God-nature. Pear seeds grow into pear trees, nut seeds into nut trees, and God-seed into God." Meister Eckhart
The seed is rarely present. Jacob Needleman describes it in his book "Lost Christianity"
[i]What we need to learn is that merely to look at things as they are with bare attention can be a religious act.
The principal power of the soul, which defines its real nature, is a gathered attention that is directed simultaneously toward the spirit and the body. This is attention of the heart, and this is the principal mediating, harmonizing power of the soul. The mediating attention of the heart is spontaneously activated in the state of profound self-questioning. God can only speak to the soul, Father Sylvan writes, and only when the soul exists. But the soul of man only exists for a moment, as long as it takes for the question to appear and disappear.[/i]
The seed of the soul only appears when we stop imagining reality. Can we experience rather than imagine reality? Can the three parts of the tripartite soul exist as ONE? How can it be done to allow the seed of the soul to grow?
Simply, we know too little to say we know so much. Thus there may be more, but our capacity it limited to understanding what we can know.
There has to be a point or points of origin. A point so fundamental that further questioning can only project from it, around it or despite it. It is hard to exclude existence from this base line, and trying to define it is an interesting exercise. Either way it appears to be a 'what is' from which we launch all our everything.
Attention of the heart? You mean emotional attention, to regard the world in a loving way. Self questioning leads to this? I think it requires a certain kind of self questioning. The question opens up possibilities and violates familiar thinking. What happens in self questioning, the "Who am I, really? and Why do we suffer? and so forth? It sounds like you think the question at the basic level presents something, but you cannot yet call it a soul, I don't think. You first have to be more descriptive: what is it one's encounters in inquiry that warrants positing the soul? Here one has dropped standard thinking altogether and entered a relatively alien world, relative, that is, to our everydayness.
Can you confirm such a thing, and explain it keeping faithful to what the world actually presents itsel;f as Being? This is where things get philosophical. Eckhart, remember, wrote of how he prayed to God to be rid of God. He wanted to be free of this everydayness that a lifetime of conditioning imposed on his thoughts and feelings, and, especially, his baseline intuitions.
This "what is" has a philosophical history that is not altogether antagonistic to, if you will, reclaiming something deep and primordial about being a self. But it takes some serious reading. I am reading the French post Heideggerians who take the moment of inquiry that sets one apart from mundane thinking very seriously. See Levinas, Michel Henry, Jean luc Marion, and others. Fink's Sixth Meditation hs always been a favorite, but one needs Kant and Husserl for clarity, I think.
."Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity. It is given to very few minds to notice that things and beings exist. Since my childhood I have not wanted anything else but to receive the complete revelation of this before dying." ~Simone Weil
I don't mean emotional attention which is animal in nature but rather conscious attention which is a quality not arising from the earth but from a higher perspective which reconciles animal duality into a triune perspective. Anyone seeking to understand the meaning and purpose of Man on earth IMO must eventually study conscious attention if for no other reason to experience why we don't have it but are attached to the shadows on the wall of Plato's Cave.
https://www.brainpickings.org/2016/03/25/william-james-attention/
Long before contemporary psychologists came to examine the self-referential base of consciousness, James writes:
Millions of items of the outward order are present to my senses which never properly enter into my experience. Why? Because they have no interest for me. My experience is what I agree to attend to. Only those items which I notice shape my mind — without selective interest, experience is an utter chaos. Interest alone gives accent and emphasis, light and shade, background and foreground intelligible perspective, in a word. It varies in every creature, but without it the consciousness of every creature would be a gray chaotic indiscriminateness, impossible for us even to conceive.
[i]Most people probably fall several times a day into a fit of something like this: The eyes are fixed on vacancy, the sounds of the world melt into confused unity, the attention is dispersed so that the whole body is felt, as it were, at once, and the foreground of consciousness is filled, if by anything, by a sort of solemn sense of surrender to the empty passing of time. In the dim background of our mind we know meanwhile what we ought to be doing: getting up, dressing ourselves, answering the person who has spoken to us, trying to make the next step in our reasoning… Every moment we expect the spell to break, for we know no reason why it should continue. But it does continue, pulse after pulse, and we float with it, until also without reason that we can discover an energy is given, something we know not what enables us to gather ourselves together, we wink our eyes, we shake our heads, the background-ideas become effective, and the wheels of life go round again.
[…]
The abolition of this condition is what we call the awakening of the attention.[/i]
The growing loss of conscious attention in the world leads to n increased obsession with fragmentation
Man on earth is a being with both a higher and a lower nature. This can only be consciously reconciled through the third force of conscious attention which the world struggles against in favor of emotionally justifying the superiority of fragmentation.
If you want to begin to understand the origin of NOW have you considered Plotinus' idea of the ONE?
https://iep.utm.edu/plotinus/
a. The One
The ‘concept’ of the One is not, properly speaking, a concept at all, since it is never explicitly defined by Plotinus, yet it is nevertheless the foundation and grandest expression of his philosophy. Plotinus does make it clear that no words can do justice to the power of the One; even the name, ‘the One,’ is inadequate, for naming already implies discursive knowledge, and since discursive knowledge divides or separates its objects in order to make them intelligible, the One cannot be known through the process of discursive reasoning (Ennead VI.9.4). Knowledge of the One is achieved through the experience of its ‘power’ (dunamis) and its nature, which is to provide a ‘foundation’ (arkhe) and location (topos) for all existents (VI.9.6). The ‘power’ of the One is not a power in the sense of physical or even mental action; the power of the One, as Plotinus speaks of it, is to be understood as the only adequate description of the ‘manifestation’ of a supreme principle that, by its very nature, transcends all predication and discursive understanding. This ‘power,’ then, is capable of being experienced, or known, only through contemplation (theoria), or the purely intellectual ‘vision’ of the source of all things. The One transcends all beings, and is not itself a being, precisely because all beings owe their existence and subsistence to their eternal contemplation of the dynamic manifestation(s) of the One. The One can be said to be the ‘source’ of all existents only insofar as every existent naturally and (therefore) imperfectly contemplates the various aspects of the One, as they are extended throughout the cosmos, in the form of either sensible or intelligible objects or existents. The perfect contemplation of the One, however, must not be understood as a return to a primal source; for the One is not, strictly speaking, a source or a cause, but rather the eternally present possibility — or active making-possible — of all existence, of Being (V.2.1). According to Plotinus, the unmediated vision of the ‘generative power’ of the One, to which existents are led by the Intelligence (V.9.2), results in an ecstatic dance of inspiration, not in a satiated torpor (VI.9.8); for it is the nature of the One to impart fecundity to existents — that is to say: the One, in its regal, indifferent capacity as undiminishable potentiality of Being, permits both rapt contemplation and ecstatic, creative extension. These twin poles, this ‘stanchion,’ is the manifested framework of existence which the One produces, effortlessly (V.1.6). The One, itself, is best understood as the center about which the ‘stanchion,’ the framework of the cosmos, is erected (VI.9.8). This ‘stanchion’ or framework is the result of the contemplative activity of the Intelligence.
It seems to me that the self - or a large part of it - is our relationship with the world. It is ever changing - you can't step into the same river twice...
Sure, I've read the Enneads, or, enough of them here and there through time, and I understand pretty well the essential thinking. It is written about in different ways by Taoists, Hindus and Buddhists, Kierkegaard, Jaspers (the Encompassing---no doubt he had read Plotinus), Levinas, et al. Interesting to read broadly on this issue because other fill in the gaps, open lines of inquiry that one didn't know were there. And in doing this, my view is, there is a conscious assault on the conditioned experiences that hold our minds, souls, selves, whatever. Eckhart wished to be rid of "God" but really it is the firmly based experiential grounding acquired through a lifetime that needs to be exorcized.
The real question is, after one has reviewed the matter and observed the crisis of the understanding when it comes to God and the everydayness of living and thinking, how is liberation achieved? The One is bound to the many, if you want to talk like this, and the many is a perversion of this if taken as foundational. See Kierkegaard's Fear and trembling, e.g.You know, they are all talking about the same thing.
Is there nothing at all that IS the river?
Perhaps we have a self but it isn't much if it is not in a relationship to something. The ever changing river is the relationship between us and the world. That seems to be what the self is.
It seems that the self is bound up with consciousness. We are only a self in terms of consciousness which is our relationship with the world.
Perhaps, but then, there is Husserl and Derrida and those in between and the idea that eternity is not some infinite succession of moments, but rather the absence of time, and time is what is produced when memory surges forward with its history of events, language, culture and so forth, into an unmade future. This stream of future making events IS time; and we are not in time, but we, our personality, predilections to act, think and feel, ARE time. This is Heraclitus' world.
But what of the self? This fleeting being constantly in flight into the future caught in a temporal dynamic? This is where actuality is, in this fleeting process' center. The eternal present, as Kierkegaard thought of it.
This might sound far fetched, that is, until one takes up meditation, the act of annihilating time. There is something to the strong claims made by Hindus and many Buddhists (Mahayana) that say, in the deepest meditative states, something qualitatively distinct steps forward that is more real, so much so it makes eveydayness look pale by comparison.
Physical time is a physical object just like a chair or table except it has an extra dimension. If physical objects disappear so will physical time. An analogy would be an oak tree and the molecules that make it. If the molecules that make it dissolve into atoms, the oak tree will evaporate and disappear.
There may be something in this. But it ignores the essence of ethics: pain and pleasure, suffering and bliss. This may fit into a causal matrix in our general affairs, but they are not mere causal events, reducible to the principle of sufficient cause. I mean, that screaming pain from a spear in your kidney, how can causality explain this? It is, after all, that pain which is the essence of the ethical prohibition NOT to inflict it on others, or yourself. All ethics has this feature: no pain, pleasure (of some kind or another) at stake, then no ethics!
For me the cornerstone of morality is the sacredness of life. One should not harm life because it is sacred (humanists - replace sacred with worthy, valuable, etc)
But to add: that oak tree dis present not out there in some remoteness from experience, but in experience itself, and experience is generated from one moment to the next. Experience is Heraclitus' stream that one cannot step into twice, or even once (Porphyry). time is not "out there" but in here, experience. Einstein knew this very well having read Kant when he was 13 or so.
It seems to me that there are many kinds of time. The most obvious is physical time. Another is mental time. Also mathematical time. Mathematics IS time of we define time as the relationship between objects in 'space'. There can be mathematical objects in abstract spaces. Logic is also time. Any order is time of one kind or another.
I haven't the faintest idea what you're talking about. My point is simple: causality is about cause and effect and ethics is just an extension of causality given an ethical twist with the assumption or inference that we're autonomous (free) agents.
I doubt that the self can be equated to consciousness because within a framework that entertains the possibility of souls, there are periods (between lives) that we're not conscious and yet we still believe the self exists. Also, what about children, infants - they're conscious but they need to attain a certain age before they pass the mirror test.
Can you be sure we are not conscious in these times? We are conscious in dreams but don't generally remember.
I' not sure but that blade cuts both ways - are you sure that we are.
But all of these issue from the origin, which is an agency of human consciousness. All hard sciences, all logical propositions, all that can be said at all! issues first from the agency of experience. Is that air you're breathing? For by the time a breathe makes it into conscious awareness it is a processed event through, to put it in physicalist terms, a 100 billion neuron brain thing.
That brings us to the question of whether there is an objective source 'out there' that maps into our consciousness.
Here is a rather "weird" piece of reasoning. But then, the world IS weird:
In the traditional sense of "out there" there is nothing but repetitious finitude. I seriously think, and this is pushing it for most, that the objective source is "in here". I look out into a starry night and I know that eternity is somehow there but then, intuitively an entirely impossible concept. What IS the delimitation of finitude? I think it obvious: it is a brain, of specified dimension in weight and volume and density. I think I am looking at the "place" where the gray matter simply ends when I put my wonder and curiosity to the matter of eternity. A physical border? But then, if it is the brain that "makes" this border, the brain itself cannot be "in" this made finitude any more than a painting can be in a painting (yes, it could but this would beg the question, where is this painting, in another painting? I mean, you can ask this forever until you get to the Real place which is not a painting at all). The brain must be outside the border it creates, in eternity. And since it is outside, all that is inside the brain is in this outside, and this means that our experiences are eternal and the foundation for all we experience lies here.
One way to look at Wittgenstein's claim that our values and logic have their generative source "elsewhere".
"My brain is only a receiver, in the Universe there is a core from which we obtain knowledge, strength and inspiration. I have not penetrated into the secrets of this core, but I know that it exists." —Nikola Tesla
Does a conscious circle of humanity exist in the world or has it ever existed? Is the lifetime search for Simone Weil for conscious life outside of Plato's cave just a hopeless desire but in reality she was doomed to the cave life of imagination and just attached to the shadows on the wall?
Excerpted from a letter Simone Weil wrote on May 15, 1942 in Marseilles, France to her close friend Father Perrin as she was nearing death:
At fourteen I fell into one of those fits of bottomless despair that come with adolescence, and I seriously thought of dying because of the mediocrity of my natural faculties. The exceptional gifts of my brother, who had a childhood and youth comparable to those of Pascal, brought my own inferiority home to me. I did not mind having no visible successes, but what did grieve me was the idea of being excluded from that transcendent kingdom to which only the truly great have access and wherein truth abides. I preferred to die rather than live without that truth............................
I think the limit of finitude is consciousness, but consciousness grows and can ultimately encompass the absolute.
I agree with Wittgenstein in the sense that the order of the mind is the order of the objective world. Our ability to reason is reflected in the fact that the world is objectively ordered: in our minds there is mathematics and mathemics, in the Platonic sense, seems to be also out there in reality.
My position is that the self has the same premise and is a part of existence that is unknowable. This could take a lot of explaining but our lives as a journey in time and space seems to be part of existence of which we cannot know from outside self.