Noble Dust

' He brought up the problem of transubstantiation within the context of materialism. Can you explain in detail your position, as a materialist?

Do you?

That's no argument against the charges Thorongil has brought to you.

Yet it's clearly implied. I'll let T Clark correct me if I'm mistaken.

Hey there, young tulip. Kindly note my quote of T Clark for the proper context of my comment.

Well said. If only materialists could wrap their heads around this concept. Belief is as funny a thing for the theist as it is for the atheist.

Thanks for your vacuous contributions! :-d

Give me a break. (Oh, look, a metaphor within the context of common usage! Must be vacuous.) So do you still not understand what it means, then? I'm n...

Well, you need to specify what you mean by "specify", right? :-} But in all seriousness, I stated at the beginning that it was a poetic concept; that ...

It seems to come down to the fact that you're taking an analytical approach, while I'm not. I think your analysis would probably indicate that you're ...

No problem. I feel like philosophical discussions often get bogged down by a lack of personal experience, yet when personal experience is brought in, ...

I'll tentatively say yes.

I meant something both unique to and inextricable from our experience. The mental process is the hardware by which the software of experience is progr...

Nothing determines levels of hierarchy per se; what would be the thing that actually determines them in the first place? If I said "yes, priority and ...

How is that a narrative? Because it's not strictly logical? I'll take a narrative over banal logic any day. What is the mega-meta narrative? Why does ...

It's hard to parse through, but I do think of it as both subjective and objective because that dichotomy tends to be misleading. The fact that beauty ...

(Y)

I'm not sure; why is the distinction important for you? So we don't experience beauty as something external to us, is that the distinction you're maki...

Yeah, that could work. It's true that beauty is subjective in the sense that it's viewed through the subjective view of the individual, which means th...

True, it's contradictory. The second statement is my view.

In my view the physical is generated by the non-physical. I'm not sure how one being superior to the other would obtain in any meaningful way. Conscio...

I disagree. But it's just a subjective aesthetic judgement, I guess. Beauty is there if you're willing to see it.

Because they're animals that have brains. Obviously I don't know for sure if they have limited consciousness, it seems impossible to know. But what ma...

If consciousness is a spectrum, then animals would have some sort of limited consciousness. I'm not sure what's sentimental about that.

Ontologically, beauty is first an experience. The combination in the bird of color, movement, and song, cause us to experience beauty. But moving outw...

Because it's not a physical aspect like limbs or mass. Consciousness gives birth to reason, imagination, etc; the things you're using to discuss in th...

Capricorn

(Y)

Why, because a hypothetical massive bird the size of you would kill you? So that hypothetical situation that will never exist nullifies the beauty of ...

Two songs at once? Who are you, Charles Ives?

But again, as I'm re-reading you here, the point that I'm making has to do with conciousness. The experience of red might be the same for the female c...

Their level of development of consciousness.

That's possible. But we have conscious awareness; the ability to train our minds with spiritual disciplines like meditation or prayer; we can have rel...

Exactly. (Y)

Not quite, beauty doesn't entail an entity in the sense of it being an entity itself, but it does require an entity in the sense that it requires an o...

Good god, dude. I've had some spates with the mods, and with TimeLine, and with yourself, and I can honestly say that I'm just about as much phased by...

Quick tip, highlight the text you want to quote, then click "quote". That way, the people you respond to will get notifications that someone has respo...

Ok; just responding to your comments.

The leap is just a simple metaphorical leap; we see a beautiful aspect of the bird which the bird cannot see; what's to say that something else sees a...

No. I agree, but I'm not talking about evolutionary functions. But I'm talking about a hierarchy within which "minds thinking about things in that way...

I realize I'm confusing the terms. I see it like this: experience -> theories, models (obviously that's incomplete, it's just within the terms we were...

That's what I'm saying.

Well, "we" might not know that, but maybe there are some that do know that. The Buddha, the Christian mystics. My view includes the possibility that t...

Fundamental to experience. Likewise, theories and models themselves exist only within experience.

But the point I want to make, and probably didn't really make, is that "beauty" is something different for the bird than it is for us. Our very concio...

I get that that's what is according to Kant, but I'm saying, in disagreement with Kant, why can't we experience the world as it is in itself? Edited f...

Edit: and actually, if we can't define the most fundamental concepts, then how can we define the less fundamental ones?

We can define more or less everything, except "physical" and "mental"? Two of the most fundamental concepts? I acknowledge that the more fundamental t...

But why not the experience of the world itself?

That clarifies things. So what do you think we can define, then?