The 'plague of individualism' is only that of nihil ultra ego, 'nothing beyond self'. When the individual is properly anchored both in truth and in the community of the wise, then that individual is indeed a worthy individual (near the original meaning of the 'arya' in Buddhism, which the Nazis were later to purloin for their depraved ends). — Wayfarer

I must confess that I think there is a profound reading of "nothing beyond self" that isn't plague-like. It can suggest a bestial, thoughtless mind or a mind that has so transcended alienation that it is one with "God." As you likely know, Kant was accused of nihilism. Indeed, his view implies something akin to nihil ego ultra. The self arguably has to participate in God (become God) to understand/enjoy God. The question is then: what kind of self are we talking about here?

I like the idea of the "community of the wise." As you mention via the Nazi example, it's easy for a community to decide that it is wise and switch on the death machine for the unwise. As I see it, "true religion" should ideally transcend but include community. In other words, it will or is "social" or "decent" within an existing community but does not essentially depend on community. (Of course we need some community to become adults in the first place.) I have a soft spot for the sage who lives on the mountain, away from the usual noise and folly.

I do agree with that, but I think you're the only other contributor who has suggested that 'information' and 'meaning' are more or less synonymous in this context. I find that suggestion pregnant with, well, meaning. There is the trend towards saying, hey, maybe information is fundamental in the Universe - maybe it's not too much of a stretch to then say, hey, maybe meaning is fundamental - after all! (After having declared it entirely banished in the aftermath of the Copernican revolution.)

But I'm keeping clear of Derrida and Heidegger. I don't have time to study them in depth, and without studying them in depth, nothing much I say will be relevant. — Wayfarer

Thanks for the polite and well-written reply.

Yes, I thought information-as-meaning was quite relevant here. I was probably a little frustrated that you consider scientism to dominate Western philosophy when many consider Heidegger, arguably one of scientism's destroyers, the greatest philosopher of the 20th century. If being is meaning is intelligibility, then it is blatantly what constitutes the universe-for-us. The universe-apart-from-us is of course a "piece" of the universe-for-us, namely the "scientific image."

It's a damned shame that Heidegger wore the swastika and (so far as I can tell) peaked early, before he was sucked into and arguably ruined by politics. I thought you might especially appreciate Sheehan's interpretation, since Sheehan has great respect for the positive aspect of religion. In any case, I think your missing out on what's of great value in Heidegger, just as I did for quite awhile, put off by the ugly translations and the indulgence of the later work.

'Religion' has many meanings, and some of the connotations of that word are unavoidably negative, even evil, when we consider the chequered history of religion in the world. No question. But what I'm trying to argue is that there are epistemological and metaphysical issues that have become intertwined with religion, in such a way that the social attitude towards religion - the desire NOT to believe - influences our very being. I think that is the meaning of 'unbelief' - it's not that you won't bow to the Pope - I certainly don't - but that there is a kind of pathological hatred of anything that can be construed as religious ('pathological' because the roots are not visible i.e. unconscious.) — Wayfarer

I certainly agree that there is a desire not to believe in traditional religion, but the desire to believe in general is (as I see it) alive and well in politics. Within this "real" battle of politics, religion tends to function as a token. So I would read this pathological hatred for religion as religion. The religion of the left-leaning is this or that strain of humanism. The religion of the right is a blend of traditional religion with patriotism and a reverence for (possibly fictional) tradition.

Certainly, religious modes of knowledge are 'subjective' but only in the sense that they involve an understanding which must be first-person, i.e. they don't concern matters about which one CAN be objective; they don't concern objects at all, unless those objects are symbolic. Whereas science only concerns objects, and seeks explanations of everything in terms of objects and forces. But you see, to say this tends to provoke the reaction - ah, you're religious, you don't refer to science to sort out the wheat from the chaff - you're 'not even wrong'. — Wayfarer

I agree, but this "only" is pretty much subjectivity itself. And, as I see it, this "not even wrong" critique only has an edge against objectifications of religion. Is the world 6000 years old? Of course not. But that belief is still out there. Are we commanded by an infinite being to keep multiplying? Stone homosexuals? I know that you don't think so. But there are voices out there who do. As long as unsophisticated religion remains a "threat," I think we'll continue to see a distrust of any hint of objectivity in religion, at least until it possibly wins and burns all the books.

'Public' is a key word here. It means 'third person', what can be exhibited in the 'public square'. Again, religious or spiritual truths are not 'public' in that sense, because they can only be understood in the first person. But they're not subjective in the sense of idiosyncratic, peculiar to myself - hence the role of the spiritual mentor or 'guru' in validating your integration of spiritual truths. — Wayfarer

For me this necessity of external validation is off-putting. As I understand/experience "spirituality," it's a self-justifying experience. But that's just me being subjective. For me "spirituality" involves a "transcendence" of the assumption that there is one, universal, "proper" spirituality. Within my solution there is no need for a one-size-fits-all solution. It is revealed in retrospect to have been an assumption, a questionable inheritance from more objective understandings of the spiritual. I was wearing colored lenses without realizing it, in other words.

This seems to be a matter of opinion. Look at what Wayfarer wrote above. It's a, well, negative view of knowledge. There seems to be no real truth or knowledge to gain. Even if there is no one has found it (yet). It's more about finding and discarding false beliefs. You don't know the truth but you know the lies. — TheMadFool

I suppose I should clarify. Philosophers have often tried to make reality at least look rational. I sympathize with this to the degree that it's just the strong spirit trying to affirm its situation. For philosophers, the rational tends also to be the good. So the world had better be rational if it's to be good. Therefore perhaps the principle of sufficient reason. But what does it mean that everything must have a cause? I interpret this principle in terms of a description of the human tendency to look for a cause. This "cause" is a handle which we can turn to change things or gets renamed and reimagined as something friendly.

A "dark" philosopher is one who is willing to see the world as fundamentally irrational or a-rational. This "brute fact" is lit up by the same human purpose and human creativity that is part of this brute fact. I argue for epistemic brute fact. When I look at the fundamental question or the deepest why, I see the impossibility of an answer in principle and not as a matter of fact. --Or perhaps as a matter of the fact of human cognition as I have and seemingly can know it.

Well and good, but we’re born alone, and we die alone. The ultimate questions have to be faced alone. So there is nothing the matter with what you’re saying, but it’s not sufficient, either. — Wayfarer

If these "ultimate questions have to be faced alone," then this "not sufficient, either" must be a personal matter. IMO, you tend to frame it as a social matter. You often gripe about the plague of individualism. But we die alone, as you say. Some of us (not me, really) face this "dying alone" in terms of a social project (world-fixing as life purpose), but this is optional. "Transcendence" of the world's "imperfections" is obviously a part of the spiritual tradition, as you well know.

You ignored my post, perhaps because it doesn't fit your frame of embattled theism (David) and towering, trendy materialism-scientism( Goliath). To be frank, it reminds me of the antinatalist or pessimist who frames the world in terms of depressed in-the-know people and happy dummies. Any particular entrapping frame (usually some oversimplified dualism) is probably going to open perpendicularly. The problem is the framing itself. We are swimming in meaning and value. This is just my view, but there's something like a scientism in your anti-scientism.

You say that religion isn't science, and yet you seem to resent religion's lack of "respectability" for the scientific method. It's as if you want to have your cake and eat it, too --that you're not happy with the "subjectivity" of religion. In that sense you (in my view) tend to present religion as a victim in some sense. But certainly religion transcends science subjectively. So it's just a matter of rendering unto Caesar what is Caesar's. If religion is not a set of propositions about public reality, then what has it to do with science at all?

Hi. I think it's great that you can enjoy Nietzsche without agreeing with everything he writes. As I see it, reading philosophy is exposing one's self to vivid, eloquent personalities. They are sometimes a little "crazy" or "obsessive," but their beauty lies in this excess. As we keep reading, we learn to take from them what we can fit into our own, unique lives. We are ourselves become philosophers by trying to fit all the incompatible pieces together.

If you like existentialism, you can't neglect Heidegger. He sees and describes what most philosophers ignore. This short, highly readable book is the best intro I've found: https://www.amazon.com/Heidegger-Short-Introduction-Michael-Inwood/dp/0192854100/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1508099015&sr=8-1&keywords=michael+inwood+heidegger

I've recently read the massive Being and TIme, and I'd advise a nice summary to get the gist. No need to bogged down right away. IMO, you should scan around and see what absolutely grabs you. I almost envy you: there's nothing like finding a new philosopher one loves.

If you like what's "morally" radical in Nietzsche, you should probably also look into Max Stirner. The common English translation of his book is long and "baggy," so I recommend a more eloquent summary, perhaps The Self-overcoming of Nihilism by Nishitani. This book looks in Nietzsche and Dostoevsky as well. Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground is amazing, too, especially if you like Nausea. It's another literary philosophical or philosophical literary book.

Thanks for the suggestion. I have never read Rorty, but I definitely will do. He was interviewed in a Heidegger documentary I watched recently. I really liked his demeanor. BTW I'm quite busy with a another project at the moment. I probably won't be ready to discuss The Concept of Time for another two weeks if that's cool? I plan to read bits and pieces of different texts to try to understand it... — bloodninja

I think you'll like Rorty. He assimilates Harold Bloom's "anxiety of influence" and this gives some real content to authenticity, which is otherwise vague if undeniably stirring and resonant. He's a strong writer of English prose, so he's a pleasure to read. I look forward to hearing what you think. Also, two weeks sounds great. It's something to look forward to.

Then let us first embark on this question. Is Virtue found only in extraordinary cases of heroism such as war or disaster or giving of ones whole life to missionary work in a foreign land? The common people seem to speak of it as such. — MysticMonist

Do they indeed? Or is virtue largely defined in terms of omission? "He doesn't steal. He doesn't lie. He doesn't cheat."

A materialist would say that the mind is made of the same stuff "out there".

An idealist would say that the world is made of the same stuff "in here".

Then aren't they both saying the same thing? — Harry Hindu

It does seem that both try to abolish a practically necessary distinction or at least to present it as an illusion. If I dream that I won the lottery, I can only spend that money in the dream. So as beings in the world there's a big difference between in-here and out-there. We might say that the out-there is "really" in-here since I have to cognize what's going on out there. On the other hand, we have excellent reasons for thinking that our brain being intact, well-fed by the blood stream, and attached to healthy sense organs makes the in-here possible. It's a Mobius strip.

Any theory that tries to cut or untie this Mobius strip is going to be an abstraction, a mere object of conversation. If we look at German idealism and Marx, we see that idealistic and materialistic theories tend to serve as "foundations" for visions of what humanity ought to be or "really" is. So such theories (seems to me) function as "middle men" or rationalizations for political preferences. That's reductive, but I generally think it's shrewd to look at the "fundamental pose" of a theorist. How does he want others to view themselves in terms of their place/purpose in the world? Where does this place him in the proposed, implicit hierarchy?

To be sure, there are abstract types who probably just relish the intellectual pleasure in playing "chess" with these ideas. They may pick this or that side for esthetic reasons in that regard, utterly detached from political considerations.

The difference between possessing an innate nature and not is that if the former is true then we can ground our moral claims and give them strong normative force. If the latter is true, and there is no innate human nature, then it appears that we have nothing to ground our moral claims in so they have weak normative force; we would be a social construction just like the socially constructed moral claims. Morality would be completely meaningless and arbitrary. To the question why be good? there would be no sufficient answer. — bloodninja

You might like Rorty. He tackles exactly this in C,I, and S. We can understand ourselves as groundless. We simply want a certain kind of society, one that maximizes freedom and minimizes cruelty, for instance. I don't find Rorty completely convincing, but he tackles exactly the issue you mention.

I would say that the content of the idea of "man" or humanity involves "his" nature. But part of this content is the knowledge that man is the self-transcending being. While his animal foundation is more or less fixed (till he rewrites his genes), his "cultural" or symbolic nature is an "anti-nature" or a potentially permanent revolution. Hegel comes to mind. Philosophy must lag behind a history that is still in progress. Similarly Dasein's individual "nature" remains open while a particular Dasein is still alive, still evolving. So humanity is a "big" Dasein whose story is still in progress. Thus humanities "nature" is not fixed. We have to wait and see, except you and I presumably won't be around long enough. Even then, the aliens who might excavate our bombed-out planet will never be done fixing what we were, for they would have to be done fixing their own nature. The past is "certain but indeterminate."

Have I failed to see the light of philosophy or is it that philosophers fail to see the darkness? — TheMadFool

IMO, philosophers have willfully ignored the darkness. On the other hand, it's not clear that staring into the darkness is always useful. There are arguments to be made for false light. Nietzsche's opening of BG&E is crucial here. If by chance you haven't looked at it, I recommend it:

https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/nietzsche/1886/beyond-good-evil/ch01.htm

Instead, we just see that there are five asterixes. Or, on Gerson's usage, we mentally see the number five that is present in the asterixes. — Andrew M

Good point. We always find ourselves already within a meaningful, intelligible, information-rich environment. Afterwards we can imagine "pure sensory input," but this is an abstraction. Before we can participate in theoretical conversation, we've already had to learn the "know-how" of surviving in our culture. We train our bodies to move around furniture. We learn to chew without biting our tongue. We also receive language "like the law." So we start as theorists in this "water" that has often become invisible to us, precisely because we've learned to swim in it.

It seems to me that whilst the representation is physical, the idea that is being transmitted is not physical, because it is totally separable from the physical form that the transmission takes. One could, after all, encode the same information in any number of languages, engrave it in stone, write it with pencil, etc. In each instance, the physical representation might be totally different, both in terms of linguistics and medium; but the information is the same.

How, then, could the information be physical? — Wayfarer

First, fascinating issue! Good OP.

I agree that it's indeed not easy to sell information as physical. I think that this information you ask about is synonymous with meaning. So we might ask whether meaning is physical.

I don't think it can be. I don't think we can define "meaning."

the sign is that ill-named thing, the only one, that escapes the instituting question of philosophy: ‘What is…?’ — Derrida

Meaning is. We can speculate about the emergence of meaning only from within the field of meaning. We can of course plausibly answer questions about the material aspect of the sign. But the sign is a sign only to the degree that it is also intelligible and participates in meaning. This intelligibility is what looks irreducible. It is like the optic nerve, which is a blind spot on the retina that makes the rest of the retina significant.

A last point: the physical as opposed to the non-physical is a distinction that exists "for" or "within" meaning. Meaning is prior to this distinction itself.

You may find this interesting:
http://blogs.helsinki.fi/nosp-2014/files/2014/04/2014-WHAT-AFTER-ALL-WAS-HEIDEGGER-ABOUT-HELSINKI.pdf

Here's part of the abstract and a line from the paper:

The premise is that Heidegger remained a phenomenologist from beginning to end and that
phenomenology is exclusively about meaning and its source. The essay presents Heidegger’s interpretation of the being (Sein) of things as their meaningful presence (Anwesen) and his tracing of such meaningful presence back to its source in the clearing, which is thrown-open or appropriated ex-sistence (das ereignete/geworfene Da-sein).

...
It follows, therefore, that the being of things is their intelligibility, their ἀλήθεια taken broadly. See, for example, Heidegger’s equation of Sein and intelligibility when he speaks of “the inquiry into the intelligibility of things [Sinn des Seienden], that is, the inquiry into being [Sein].”13 Or when he designates Sein as “the intelligibility [Sinn]” of phenomena.14 Or when he speaks of ontology as “the explicit theoretical question about the intelligibility [Sinn] of things.” — Sheehan

Some have an emotional investment in the word "God" and others have an emotional investment in the word "No God". — Agustino

I agree. Some atheists might deny that preference or irrationality is involved in their position, but not all of them do. (I would be called an atheist by most theists). "Pure reason" can function as one more idol. That's why I mentioned that collision of rhetoric or sophistry in the Kojeve thread. Just about everyone thinks that they are rational. It's the other guy who's all turned around. Why won't he listen to me reason?

For me what we have here generally is obviously the clash of personalities in terms of creative seduction (sometimes intimidation). We trade stories. "Here's my vision of my world the absolute truth about our world. Here's who I think you should be. Here's who I think I am. Here's who I think you are. " I'm not complaining or accusing. Just describing what I see. Your results may vary.

A Vagueness Imperative, is not making a case. It is a manufactured phrase designed to replace the word God so as not to upset the sensibilities of "scientific materialists." Pure obfuscation embedded in long paragraphs in the hope that the sleight of hand is not noticed. In short (I do prefer getting to the point), nonsensical babble masquerading as intellectualism. — Rich

I think you're tilting at windmills. Your "getting to the point" is just a repetition of dogma, a mantra. You love Bergson. Cool. I like Bergson, too. If that's the last word for you and everything else is a conspiracy to cover up his final revelation of the Truth, then I'm OK with that. Proceed. Believe. Preach on.

The alternative to what you call 'long paragraphs' is dogmatic assertion. I prefer to make a case for my ideas. Whatever Hegel's failings, he was write about the content or the development of the thesis being the thing itself. Philosophy isn't math. In math, the theorem can be used without its proof. In philosophy the "theorem" (thesis) is more or less devoid of content when unaccompanied by its development. Slapping different names on the "absolute" without developing one's vision of it is a rhetorical affair. Feelings dominate in this slapping-names-on. There's nothing wrong with feelings, but for me philosophy is largely the "labor of the concept." Hence their actual development in "long paragraphs" like this one.

So you yourself speak of the origin as vagueness and then mention the thermodynamic imperative as the force behind differentiation? And your primary objection to apo's/Peirce's description of this is the choice of "The Vagueness" instead of "God" for this origin? To me this is just an emotional investment in mere choice of names. Who cares if it's Firstness or God? Such names only have conceptual content in the theory as a whole.

Answer if you dare what God means to you. Do you take the bible as the word of God? Or is your God a "philosopher's" God? Are you a Taoist? A Christian? Do you believe in sin and personal immortality? I'm not saying you are wrong or right to believe in this or that direction. I'm trying to root out your emotional investment in the word "God." Does materialism offend you as a metaphysician? Or does it threaten your belief in the afterlife (if you have one)?

Finally, sure, the thermodynamic imperative is a theology of some kind. I don't think apo would deny that. But for those no longer pious this isn't much of a confession.

Cool. I may read the one you have, too. I've heard good things. I think it's something like the lecture being the ur-B&T, the longer book being the "first draft" of B&T and then B&T itself.

I hope you got the lecture as opposed to another text by H of the same name. I say this because it'd be nice to discuss/unpack it together. Is it a thin book translated by WIlliam McNeill? Here's a sample:

Dasein, as always specifically mine in each case, knows of its death and does so even when it wants to know nothing of it. What is it to have one's own death in each case? It is Dasein's running ahead to its past, to an extreme possibility of itself that stands before it in certainty and utter indeterminacy. Dasein as human life is primarily being possible, the being of the possibility of its certain yet indeterminate past. — Heidegger

Yes, deeply. (Wo)man is the (incarnate or sense-feeling knowhow laden) Concept is Time. That sort of thing. I know you're a fan of Heidegger. I've been reading Being and Time lately, having long been a fan of Kojeve and Sartre. As mentioned elsewhere, the lecture The Concept of Time won me over. So I've been pushing through the longwindedness of B&T (it's worth it).

I haven't read much philosophy. I must admit I've always looked down on Western philosophy in particular. So much emphasis on tedious distinctions. So many words - every philosopher seems to feel the need to rename things that have already been named 15 times by 15 other philosophers. Each philosophy breaks the world up into different pieces. So much pomposity and triviality.

One thing I've found on this forum is that there are smart people who use philosophies as tools. They keep them in their tool box and pull out the one they need when it's appropriate. They use them to figure things out rather than to justify their confused, unsupported musings. I put you in that class, along with apokrisis, fdrake, mysticmonist, timeline, and others. I was going to say that it makes me want to read more philosophy, but that's not really true. It makes me wish I wanted to read more philosophy. I view sloth as a virtue, not a deadly sin. — T Clark

I actually understand. I don't think a person can love philosophy without also hating it. No one hates (bad) philosophy like a (good) philosopher. As I understand it, it's a quest to cut through the BS and the confusion. But bad versions of this quest only further muddy the water. I also resent the constant reinvention of the wheel, the barrage of neologisms. I tolerate this only when I think there's something new hidden behind this bad habit of presentation. Heidegger is a great example. I couldn't really love the guy till I found the short lecture The Concept of Time. The only new term in it was "Dasein" or "being there," and this was justified. The rest is understated and terse. It offers the gist. Then one becomes willing to wade through the massive Being and Time. Sartre did the same thing in Being and Nothingness. Sometimes I think this is just a way of hiding "groundlessness" in a pseudo-scientific framework. And maybe it's the game one feels forced to play to be respected.

I think it's mostly the usual intellectual vanity that fixates on jargon. I tend to be suspicious of one-jargon minds as still too green to stand on their own as the unique collision of the stories they've been told. The green mind must always lean on some respectable/famous justification for its own creations.

Your tool-box metaphor reminds me of pragmatism. It gets "behind" the tedious disputes by looking at what we are really trying to accomplish with such disputes. It unveils language as a tool. It is language that unveils language as a tool and is therefore a tool itself. Then we have existentialism, at its best, (along with religion and literature) describing what exactly it is that we want. One of the things we want is to figure out what we want.

People – scientists included – hold on to cherished old beliefs with such love and attachment that they refuse to see the wrong in their ideas and the truth in the ideas that are to replace them. — W's quote

I think this is very true. Such ideas are the cultural or spiritual "bodies" of individuals. We have to face the "death" of these crystallizations of ourselves in order to remain open to the new. Or rather that's what openness is. A "being-toward-death" is a "being-towards-birth." A total identification with any particular idea is a death-like hardening or freezing of this process. We get tired of death-birth and try to lock down the process in terms of a final/ultimate vision. It's easy to forgive/understand individual thinkers for this. It's not easy to stay strong in the face of aging or stay humble in the face of success.

Good point. That's also very Hegelian. The "Concept" is a self-othering little fellow. Making distinctions enriches our conceptual picture or story of reality. Reality thickens. Even if things in general are running down, there are uphill pockets (we ourselves). That's an interesting aspect of apo's theory. We are meaning-making backflows.

On the individual level too our vocabularies swell. To some degree this is the meaning of life for me. I just want to continue enriching my mind, weaving a more and more fascinating story. I want the backflow to pile up high, just because it feels good, perhaps. There's a love involved.

That's all part of scientific method - it includes rationality, but many other things besides. — Wayfarer

That's why Popper is so great. He includes the "irrational"/creative source of hypotheses. Science is a criterion for these hypotheses than can comfortably ignore their source. It doesn't matter if we get a great scientific hypothesis from a random-symbol generator. Its greatness will be established by its survival of various attempts to falsify it.

We might say that it has (we have) an unstable essence. Man is still a work-in-progress. The idea that man is essentially otherwise essenceless is arguably one stage of this work. It indicates that man is the kind of entity whose only fixity is being-always-in-progress. (This fixity is itself part of that unstable self-knowledge, self-naming, or self-creation of man.)

Absolutely. I was, of course, sure that you were aware of know-how. It's very Taoist, isn't it? This know-how? Mastery is making a process unconscious, automatic.

I think we're very much in agreement that theoretical knowledge (including the theoretical knowledge of non-theoretical knowledge) is all just stories. To the degree that philosophy is the science of science or the knowing of knowing itself, it's especially a story about storytelling, telling the story of self-interpreting story-telling "being-there" that is never finished naming itself. It's something like the self-consciousness of this story-telling. It's a cat chasing its own tail.

The concrete Real (of which we speak) is both the Real revealed by a discourse and Discourse revealing a real. And the Hegelian experience is related neither to the Real nor to Discourse taken separately, but to their indissoluble unity. And since it is itself a revealing Discourse, it is itself an aspect of the concrete Real which it describes. It therefore brings in nothing from outside, and the thought or the discourse which is born from it is not a reflection on the Real: the Real itself is what reflects itself or is reflected in the discourse or as thought. In particular, if the thought and the discourse of the Hegelian Scientist or the Wise Man are dialectical, it is only because they faithfully reflect the “dialectical movement” of the Real of which they are a part and which they experience adequately by giving themselves to it without any preconceived method. — Kojeve

In other words, any story about reality has to include the stories that "reality tells about itself," including this meta-story itself. Any theory of existence that leaves out "mind" or theory itself must be shallow or merely partial (however useful), since it doesn't even explain its own presence as explanation. Perhaps all meta-stories are more or less partial (and more or less useful.)

I also like the "wise man" as being a phenomenological descriptive poet. Language need not always be an argument in terms of the given. It perhaps more importantly reveals what in retrospect appears like fact. For instance, if Heidegger or the Tao much earlier points out "know-how," it's hard to deny the "truth" of this know-how. But by bringing it to mind can change the kinds of things that we bother to argue about. I'm especially interested in pointing out unnoticed structures or assumptions that force the contingent to look necessary, constraining the freedom of thought.

For me we have something like a total experience. In this total experience I can open up a physics book and understand the kitchen table that I am reading this book on as "mostly empty space." Is this the truth of the table? Is my experience of it as something-to-read-on an "illusion"? As I see it, no.

As I see it, there's no real point in calling one perspective an illusion. The physics book gives us a way of looking at the world which is useful for certain human purposes among others. When I want to eat lunch, I can't use this "mostly empty space." I use the table as as familiar object that holds my food up at a height that is convenient for me. Similarly, when I listen to music, I am not thinking of pressure waves. Music for me in this situation is an irreducible experience. Bach is not "just" or "really" pressure waves. Of course we can and do blend ways of talking. We can say that pressure waves "deliver" the "message" or "signal" of Bach.

In general we can talk of the "manifest image" and the "scientific image" (I get these terms from Sellars.) The scientific image is, however, born from and only functions within the manifest image. We have to have "common sense" and learn lots of pretheoretical skills before we can even learn or make sense of the scientific image. I have to know English and how to handle a calculator, for instance, if I'm to learn to think in terms of the scientific image. Science evolved within a prescientific culture historically, too.

But the scientific image has been so powerful that many are tempted to understand it metaphysically. This is the position that sound is "really" soundless and that light is "really" invisible. (If this is what you were getting at, then I am doubly sorry for being so rude.) You might say that everything hinges on overloading this word "really." What really freed my mind on these matters was perhaps pragmatism and ordinary language philosophy. "Really" doesn't have a fixed meaning. We use it in all sorts of ways. There's an assumption about language often in play that traps our thinking from the get-go. We imagine that we are doing math with words. But words are far more "organic" than numbers. The total unit of meaning is all of human experience. To rip out words from this total context is a necessary and useful but imperfect process. Applying this idea to an example, we can think of the futility of mind-matter debates. The terms "mind" and "matter" have no fixed meaning. In ordinary use they function quite well. They form a useful but imperfect or fuzzy distinction. The metaphysician ignores this fuzziness as something contrary to his purpose (a word-math science of the absolute).

"Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man"[edit]
In his "Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man" (1962), Sellars distinguishes between the "manifest image" and the "scientific image" of the world.
The manifest image includes intentions, thoughts, and appearances. Sellars allows that the manifest image may be refined through 'correlational induction', but he rules out appeal to imperceptible entities.
The scientific image describes the world in terms of the theoretical physical sciences. It includes notions such as causality and theories about particles and forces.
The two images sometimes complement one another, and sometimes conflict. For example, the manifest image includes practical or moral claims, whereas the scientific image does not. There is conflict, e.g. where science tells us that apparently solid objects are mostly empty space. Sellars favours a synoptic vision, wherein the scientific image takes ultimate precedence in cases of conflict, at least with respect to empirical descriptions and explanations.[7] — wiki

But even if survival wasn't a thing, as we agreed upon, the underlying restlessness is there keeping us unsatisfied and doing, doing, doing. Always becoming and not being. We can't be, we must become until death- the final not be for our little socially-constructed selves that once existed and had to do all that doing! So why do we need to create more socially-constructed selves to view the world and run around restlessly? There is none. It is creating more doing socially-constructed selves for the sake of it. This is aggressive absurdity that has to be enacted through incarnation of yet another individual who has to take the mantle of living an aggressively absurd life of instrumental doing. I'm not sure if this is making sense. — schopenhauer1

I like "we can't be, must [only] become until death." This issue is whether this endless becoming is bad, good, or indifferent in some universal or "transpersonal" way. Returning to the "sweet anguish," it's a matter of whether the sweetness is worth the anguish. I don't see how that issue can be resolved objectively. In my life I currently find this endless becoming more pleasant than unpleasant. Perhaps you feel the opposite way. Antinatalism seems to project a personal decision "outward" as a decision-for-all.

To be clear, I'm not against antinatalism (pronatalism). I'm politically neutral. I have abandoned the transpersonal pose. I don't "know for others" and I am glad to no longer need to know. In my view, the unconsidered medium or background of metaphysical thinking is this assumption that it is a knowing-for-all. As unconsidered "medium" it dominates the message. Every answer is constrained by what's hidden in the shape of the question. I understand abandoning the mission to know-for-others as a form of detachment or transcendence. Obviously I'm still interested in sharing my ideas, so it's not about a prohibition of knowing-for-others. That would still be knowing-for-others. It's really just pointing out the apparently necessary as (potentially first-person) contingent.

So when we ask "why do we need...," you have a point. But why do we need to have a why in the first place? I'm interested in pointing behind this grasping after justifications.

Sorry if I offended you. I didn't mean to be rude, but I think I was, after all, an A-hole.

...about the distinction of sound as a sensation, and as a pure physical (non-biological) phenomenon. — Hachem

This is a good theme for discussion. It's not new, but it remains fascinating. We experience reality sensually and yet tend to model it physically in terms of concepts like waves, etc., that are experienced conceptually. So what is the true sound? Our model of its cause? Or the first-person experience of sound? Am I on the right track?

This would be more or less Whitehead's viewpoint, only because he acknowledged the creative impulse that was undeniable. Ultimately, it must be incorporated in any metaphysics though sometimes neatly hidden away in some manufactured concept and/or phrase. The alternative is "Everything just happened" (the initial miracle) and then keeps happening (the ongoing, never-ending infinite miracles). — Rich

The "alternative" is not that much of an alternative. If God is a brute fact interpreting itself, then "everything just happened" and keeps happening. We can find order via this self-interpretation. We can tell stories about our origin and destination.

I will say that some acknowledge our intimate experience of creative evolution or being-there more than others. Some do perhaps sweep this under a rug. But in some cases this is simply because it's not relevant to their narrative.

This is the kind of "cutesy" game-playing that puts me off. If you have an idea to share, then share it.

My guess is that you're a poet or a metaphysician who happens to be attached to the word "science." You're constrained by an unconsidered "scientism." I could be wrong. That's just my guess. If I'm right: Be a poet. Be a metaphysician. Be a mystic even. Because that's what "invisible light" and "un-hearable sound" remind me of.

It's plausible that the worldy institutions of science are imperfect. It's also plausible that money is involved in this imperfection. But hating on science itself because individual humans or institutions are imperfect doesn't really make sense to me.

What physical science is attempting to do is to negate personal experiences, and turning it into some sort of illusion, purely to suit its own materialist biases. — Rich

I'm not a fan of scientism, of the scientific image of reality being adopted wholesale as a metaphysical image of reality. No particular image exhausts the real. They are simplifying maps for different purposes. That last sentence is itself one such map. It's a map that helps us deal with the cognitive dissonance of a collision of narratives.

Science exploded triumphantly, as I understand it, by moving from explanation to description. Galileo watched that chandelier sway and saw a mathematical pattern in its swaying. He didn't paste on a metaphysics. Things just do behave like that. We expect them to continue to behave like that. Going beyond descriptions of publicly observable patterns is metaphysics, not science. Or that's roughly how I see it. Certainly some scientists are "reductive" metaphysicians who would call personal experience an illusion. But I don't see how science itself can make such a claim. To speak of "illusions" is to become metaphysical.

If that's true, then all knowledge, all concepts, are just stories. Which I actually believe. But that's a different discussion. — T Clark

I like this. Since I'm studying Heidegger at the moment, I'd add "know-how" to the stories. I suggest that theoretical knowledge is "stories," while "know-how" is more elusive. Know-how would be knowing how to ride a bike or knowing how to sing. Lots of this "knowledge" is "pre-theoretical." This is the kind of stuff that philosopher's tend to overlook, because there's not much they can do with it but point out its existence. Yet much of human reality is the performance of this know-how. (Note that the keyboard disappeared for me as I was typing these thoughts. The know-how of typing was an invisible background or support for the conscious task of putting these thoughts together.)

If some of us think of God as immanent in the world, does that mean that God is an emergent phenomenon from the "brute facts" of the universe? — T Clark

Good question. For me, we participate in or even are in our totality what might be called "God." We might even say "Christ," to stress our existence as incarnate concept of word. Dasein or "there-being" or human reality in its fullness is a self-interpreting entity or situation.

We try to trace everything in the causal network back to an origin. I don't see how we can avoid epistemic brute fact. What is current brute fact can perhaps always be assimilated in a larger or grander explanation, but I think this just shifts the role of brute fact to some other entity. Since I believe in something like (philosopher's) "matter" or thing-in-itself-ness (despite the absurdity of this from another perspective), I looks to me like "God" would be an emergent phenomenon. Or we can widen "God" to include all being as a single clump. Then God is a brute fact interpreting itself.

That's fine, but in the end, my pre-established criteria does not lead to another life which passes on the issue. Rather, I let dead dogs lie. The existential situation rests on me alone to deal with. — schopenhauer1

I pretty deeply agree with you here. We can't live one another's lives. What "being-towards-death" or mortality means to me is the radical "mineness" of my life as well as my death. All systems and complacencies are threatened by the absurdity that comes with mortality. Or that's how I see it, which, according to how I see it, cannot be authoritative.

Here's something grimly beautiful that you may also enjoy:

The starting point of Kojève’s Master-Slave dialectic is the suicide of the Master. The Master in embracing death dislodges his attachment to the world. Whatever his triumphs, the Master is already dead and has already exited the stage of history. The world already belongs to the Slave. The only Freedom is death, thus the Free Master is already dead. It is the absolute freedom of suicide “which obviously distinguishes man from animal”. (IRH 248) The animal is a thing and thus determined entirely by natural laws. Man is free and autonomous precisely to the extent that he is not a thing. It is man’s power to embrace the nothingness, to be the nothing that makes him genuinely human. Contra Carnap, Kojève reveals that there is nothing more philosophically meaningful than Heidegger’s “nothing which itself nothings”. Man is the no-thing that nothings. In death the purely negative nature of man is revealed. Man is not a part of nature; he is a problem and question to nature.

Man creates himself as Man by the choices he makes with the limited amount of time he has. Death is the end of Time.

And in contrast to “natural,” purely biological death, the death that is Man is a “violent” death, at the same time conscious of itself and voluntary. Human death, the death of man and consequently all his truly human existence- is therefore, if we prefer, a suicide.” (IDH 151) Kojève intentionally uses the Christian language of incarnation, to express the manner in which Christianity is implicitly Atheism, the worship of Death itself. The Christian doctrine of Incarnation is the worship of God as Man’s mortality. The truth of Christianity is that it finds the Godhead, in a Man who voluntarily takes upon himself mortality. Christ as the Incarnation of God, is an allegory for the Truth of Man as the Incarnation of Death. — site

https://fatidiot.wordpress.com/2014/09/29/the-phenomenology-of-being-toward-death-in-the/

I agree we can get caught up by something, but the root of it is a restlessness that needs to be relieved. Perhaps boredom is too narrow a word. I have used restlessness in the past, and may employ that again here. I don't deny pleasure exists and humor and other forces that we are positively driven towards based on our preferences. However, there is root restlessness at the bottom of the need for these preferences. We don't like to be at the level of restlessness, but rather in the midst of this or that pursuit/thought/goal. — schopenhauer1

I will agree that there is something like an impossible or infinite desire. As you may know, Sartre writes about man qua man being a futile passion to be God or the in-itself-for-itself. His chapter "Existential Psychoanalysis" in Being and Nothingness is a description of something like this restlessness. I think the desire for the young woman used as an example above is anguish as well as sweetness because it involves the chasing of something like a projection.

We project something like a fullness or density of being on various objects. Upon close examination, this fullness or density is not there. Nietzsche also wrote that whatever we can find words for is already dead in our heart. I can relate to this. It's the revelation itself that's most exciting. It's the striptease. So there's something crucial going on like a "distance" effect. The "futile" movement itself gives the pleasure, but there's an anguish in it, too.

So maybe we mostly agree in these new terms, especially if you understand this restlessness to be "within" the desire. Boredom is a state that I almost never experience these days. It occasionally happens when I am trapped in a social ritual and can't amuse myself in the usual ways. I suppose this kind of boredom would be a desire for desire, a desire to return to the sweet anguish or creativity, etc. (I hope I've proven that I'm not closed off to the discussion of the grim aspects of existence. I just tend to draw the conclusion of a radical freedom as well as a sort of moral neutrality from the same kind of premises.)

Thanks for the directness. I'll even say that we ourselves are certainly describable as "creative force," the "mind," and so on. I'll even say that something like "meaning making" is "always there." One might say that "being-there" is a self-interpreting entity. I also like the Tao Te Ching. As far as I can tell, I was "thrown" into a state of always already "being there" with a past, creatively fashioning a future from this past. In short, I think can agree on some things, if not on the terminology.

Yet I also believe that the world was here before I was. I've seen pictures of myself as a baby, I don't remember being a baby. So there's a tension between these visions. I can live with this tension. At best (seems to me) we can weave the little stories we use locally into an always grander and more cohesive total narrative. Must the fact of our personal experience of creative evolution negate narratives of the emergence of this personal experience that are woven in with physical science? I don't think so. The total experience of life is always richer than any usefully reductive narrative applied locally. Metaphysics is a genre of poetry even. It is itself a manifestation of this same creative evolution. Sometimes I get the sense that you would like the creativity to stop, since you're sometimes dismissive of truly creative posts.

God is the reason (and therefore the entity) which makes the existence of other actual entities possible. God "provides the limitation for which no reason can be given: for all reason flows from it. God is the ultimate limitation, and His existence is the ultimate irrationality" (SMW, 257). — Rich's quote

Hi, Rich. I can't help but point out that this looks like slapping the name "God" on brute fact. He is that "for which no reason can be given." How many times did you claim in our discussion that this postulation of (epistemic) brute fact was "lazy"?

You also accuse apo of "hiding his spirituality under a rug." But I asked you if you were a theist and you didn't answer. You just repeated the same mantra about what philosophy should be. IMO, you should just argue theism if that's your position. I still maintain, though, that there's not much content in most versions of "the philosopher's God." Such "Gods" tend to be no more than the terminus of actual conceptual content. They anthropomorphize and mask the threat of global contingency.

And no, I do not feel offended. In fact, I hope you will turn out to be up to the task in exposing the fallacies in my threads by something more than proofs of blind loyalty to the phase physical science is now in. — Hachem

Respectfully, I think you betray yourself here. Who said anything about physical science being at an end? I'm more or less an instrumentalist. I trust the tech, because I can directly experience its success. The theory is justified in practice or as practice. If science was only "explanation," it would be the same old magical thinking. As I see it and value it, science makes accurate predictions and makes better technology possible. "Knowledge is power" can be interpreted as a criterion for knowledge.

I gave you reasons for my skepticism which you did not address. Why are you either not in school or not taking your scientific breakthrough to scientists? If what you are really doing is philosophy, then that's great. Or maybe you are doing philosophy of science. There's not a lot of that here, but I'm always happy to talk about Popper. He's one of my favorite philosophers. I'll even read a 150 word summary of your views and see what I can make of them. I've studied physics formally, but I did not specialize in physics. There's a big difference between undergrad classes and graduate education, so I make no great claims about my physics knowledge. But I'll be less of a party pooper and try to meet you half way.

So, sincerely, please provide or link me to a summary. This will not only be for my benefit. I think it will all of us here (and even you perhaps) to see where you're coming from. I mention this because I saw a thread where you started with a question about comets. I don't think that's the way to go. It's too "cute."
As I see it, no one likes to waste their time. So open with a bang. (I know. I know. The worst vice is ad-vice.)

I share your concerns about that side of Kojeve. I'm also a fan of Sartre and Heidegger without being a fan of their politics. I am (far more than most) a self-consciously apolitical thinker. I think about politics, but my goal is to understand rather than shape the world. Correction: I want to shape the world, but I find that "local" action on my own life is far more efficient. The world as a whole is not something I wear on my shoulder. If I were to project this goal of understanding as opposed to fixing the world as a whole as a universal human duty, then I would be lapsing right back into politics. I would be prescribing rather than understanding.

That said, politics is essentially violence. Its sublimated form involves using persuasive speech to motivate voters to steer the state as the instrument for this violence. So representative democracy is violent, too. Indeed, political discourse is on such a low level that I don't feel particularly sentimental about the word democracy. As Sam Johnson said in so many words, it's not necessarily better to be eaten by 50 rats as opposed to a single lion. As I see it, the world is a collision of wills. We might say that civilization is the manifestation of this collision in terms of rhetoric rather than violence. The civilized man asks questions first, and shoots later.

Kojeve's famous lectures on Hegel are not at all only political. Kojeve is an "existentialized" Hegel. He takes the concepts of existential time ("thrown projection") and being-towards-death from Heidegger and blends them with what he finds most important in Hegel. The translation is beautiful, too. It's a special book. It's been in my top 5 philosophy texts for many years now.

Here's a sample of one of the more far our or difficult passages:

The concrete Real (of which we speak) is both the Real revealed by a discourse and Discourse revealing a real. And the Hegelian experience is related neither to the Real nor to Discourse taken separately, but to their indissoluble unity. And since it is itself a revealing Discourse, it is itself an aspect of the concrete Real which it describes. It therefore brings in nothing from outside, and the thought or the discourse which is born from it is not a reflection on the Real: the Real itself is what reflects itself or is reflected in the discourse or as thought. In particular, if the thought and the discourse of the Hegelian Scientist or the Wise Man are dialectical, it is only because they faithfully reflect the “dialectical movement” of the Real of which they are a part and which they experience adequately by giving themselves to it without any preconceived method. — Kojeve

I agree completely about our need to tyrannize over ourselves. For me the basic or the deepest theme of philosophy is always who we think we should be. All action and speech more or less explicitly reveals this constantly, even if we haven't clarified it to ourselves. Indeed, we might only clarify this ourselves because we already think we should be the type of people who can account for ourselves. To engage in philosophy is to have already partially answered this question. It is already to say that it is good to be able to give reasons.

This is how Kojeve sees the philosopher. He is on the path to being able to give a complete and satisfying account of who he is (which will include his world). The wise man (the ideal) is the possessor of this complete account. The wise man is the completed or transcended philosopher. Philosophy is dialectical. Wisdom just describes or is this completed-in-time dialect. Kojeve understands Hegel to have accomplished this. This is wild and arrogant, of course, and Kojeve is a "grand" philosopher. He was not a professor. He "jokingly" called himself a "god." As you might imagine, the feel of the book is like good Nietzsche. It's a storm or a sunrise.

Ever read Ariel?

I recently picked up The Concept of Time. [Heidegger] This is the short lecture. I think there's a longer text with the same name. The last two thirds are lean and lovely prose (translation by William McNeill). It's understated, suggestive.

I also have Existential Psychoanalysis. This is just a couple of chapters from Being and Nothingness, but Sartre is really on fire in the chapter "Existential Psychoanalysis."

[The] impossible synthesis of assimilation and an assimilated which maintains its integrity has deep-rooted connections with basic sexual drives. The idea of "carnal possession" offers us the irritating but seductive figure of a body perpetually possessed and perpetually new, on which possession leaves no trace. This is deeply symbolized in the quality of "smooth" or "polished." What is smooth can be taken and felt but remains no less impenetrable, does not give way in the least beneath the appropriative caress -- it is like water. This is the reason why erotic depictions insist on the smooth whiteness of a woman's body. Smooth --it is what reforms itself under the caress, as water reforms itself in its passage over the stone which has pierced it....It is at this point that we encounter the similarity to scientific research: the known object, like the stone in the stomach of the ostrich, is entirely within me, assimilated, transformed into my self, and is entirely me; but at the same time it is impenetrable, untransformable, entirely smooth, with the indifferent nudity of a body that is beloved and caressed in vain.

...
Destruction realizes appropriation perhaps more keenly than creation does, for the object destroyed is no longer there to show itself impenetrable. Is has the impenetrability and the sufficiency of the in-itself that has been, but at the same time it has the invisibility and translucency of the nothingness which I am, since it no longer exists.
— Sartre

That's what makes you believe in fairy tales like Relativity and Quantum Theories. :) — Hachem

For me the real proof of science is in the pudding, in the tech that works. Human vanity is massive and ubiquitous. How do I separate the charlatans from those with the real thing? I ask them to perform "miracles" for me. Let's say that GM and QM are "myths" or "fairy tales." Call them what you want. They get things done.

Earth viewed from space

What good is fundamental physics to the person on the street?

This is the perennial question posed to physicists by their non-science friends, by students in the humanities and social sciences, and by politicians looking to justify spending tax dollars on basic science. One of the problems is that it is hard to predict definitely what the payback of basic physics will be, though few dispute that physics is somehow "good."

Physicists have become adept at finding good examples of the long-term benefit of basic physics: the quantum theory of solids leading to semiconductors and computer chips, nuclear magnetic resonance leading to MRI imaging, particle accelerators leading to beams for cancer treatment. But what about Einstein's theories of special and general relativity? One could hardly imagine a branch of fundamental physics less likely to have practical consequences. But strangely enough, relativity plays a key role in a multi-billion dollar growth industry centered around the Global Positioning System (GPS).

When Einstein finalized his theory of gravity and curved spacetime in November 1915, ending a quest which he began with his 1905 special relativity, he had little concern for practical or observable consequences. He was unimpressed when measurements of the bending of starlight in 1919 confirmed his theory. Even today, general relativity plays its main role in the astronomical domain, with its black holes, gravity waves and cosmic big bangs, or in the domain of the ultra-small, where theorists look to unify general relativity with the other interactions, using exotic concepts such as strings and branes.

But GPS is an exception. Built at a cost of over $10 billion mainly for military navigation, GPS has rapidly transformed itself into a thriving commercial industry. The system is based on an array of 24 satellites orbiting the earth, each carrying a precise atomic clock. Using a hand-held GPS receiver which detects radio emissions from any of the satellites which happen to be overhead, users of even moderately priced devices can determine latitude, longitude and altitude to an accuracy which can currently reach 15 meters, and local time to 50 billionths of a second. Apart from the obvious military uses, GPS is finding applications in airplane navigation, oil exploration, wilderness recreation, bridge construction, sailing, and interstate trucking, to name just a few. Even Hollywood has met GPS, recently pitting James Bond in "Tomorrow Never Dies" against an evil genius who was inserting deliberate errors into the GPS system and sending British ships into harm's way.

But in a relativistic world, things are not simple. The satellite clocks are moving at 14,000 km/hr in orbits that circle the Earth twice per day, much faster than clocks on the surface of the Earth, and Einstein's theory of special relativity says that rapidly moving clocks tick more slowly, by about seven microseconds (millionths of a second) per day.

Also, the orbiting clocks are 20,000 km above the Earth, and experience gravity that is four times weaker than that on the ground. Einstein's general relativity theory says that gravity curves space and time, resulting in a tendency for the orbiting clocks to tick slightly faster, by about 45 microseconds per day. The net result is that time on a GPS satellite clock advances faster than a clock on the ground by about 38 microseconds per day.

To determine its location, the GPS receiver uses the time at which each signal from a satellite was emitted, as determined by the on-board atomic clock and encoded into the signal, together the with speed of light, to calculate the distance between itself and the satellites it communicated with. The orbit of each satellite is known accurately. Given enough satellites, it is a simple problem in Euclidean geometry to compute the receiver's precise location, both in space and time. To achieve a navigation accuracy of 15 meters, time throughout the GPS system must be known to an accuracy of 50 nanoseconds, which simply corresponds to the time required for light to travel 15 meters.

But at 38 microseconds per day, the relativistic offset in the rates of the satellite clocks is so large that, if left uncompensated, it would cause navigational errors that accumulate faster than 10 km per day! GPS accounts for relativity by electronically adjusting the rates of the satellite clocks, and by building mathematical corrections into the computer chips which solve for the user's location. Without the proper application of relativity, GPS would fail in its navigational functions within about 2 minutes.

To be sure, I haven't done the experiments myself. I don't have the equipment. But what's more likely? The most massive conspiracy in human history? Or individual crankery on the internet?

Do you have a degree in science? If not, why are you trustworthy? Can we reasonably expect a scientific revolution from someone lacking either the will or the ability to pass undergrad classes? If so, you would presumably be in grad school by now. You would be presenting your ideas to actual scientists. The medium is [often the essence of] the message. The fact that you present your ideas here speaks against those ideas themselves. As I understand it, a true man or woman of science would not be offended by this kind of skepticism. So I hope you are not.

http://physicscentral.com/explore/writers/will.cfm

The author of the quote above is:

"Clifford M. Will is James S. McDonnell Professor of Physics at Washington University in St. Louis, and is the author of Was Einstein Right? In 1986 he chaired a study for the Air Force to find out if they were handling relativity properly in GPS. They were."