In other words, justifying the PSR is beside the point. — Agent Smith

I think it was the The Celestine Prophecy or some similar book that denied (meaningless) coincidences, as if a Creator stuffed the maximum amount of a relationship between all the spacetime pieces of his creation. 'It's all signal. Noise is just an illusion caused by ignorance.' I can sort of see the allure. But these days I'm just so used to living in the casino. The idea of a fair coin. Brutal contingency, heads or tails for no reason, yet equally likely one or the other. Whether actual coins can live up to this idea is a separate issue. So the OP is like a mirror image of 'does God flip coins?'

The streetcar is experienced as a transcendent object, in a way that obliterates and overrides, so to speak, the subjective features of conscious experience; its “having-to-be-overtaken-ness” does not belong to my subjective experience of the world but to the objective description of the way the world is (see also Sartre 1936a [1957: 56; 2004: 10–11]). When I run after the streetcar, my consciousness is absorbed in the relation to its intentional object, “the streetcar-having-to-be-overtaken”, and there is no trace of the “I” in such lived-experience. I do not need to be aware of my intention to take the streetcar, since the object itself appears as having-to-be-overtaken, and the subjective properties of my experience disappear in the intentional relation to the object. They are lived-through without any reference to the experiencing subject (or to the fact that this experience has to be experienced by someone). This particular feature derives from the diaphanousness of lived-experiences.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/sartre/#TranEgoDiscInte

This seems like a good description of so much of life. We are immersed in what we are doing, our conventional identity (the idea of ourself as a named ghost responsible for driving the body) is just gone. And yet others will see us walk our usual distinctive walk, react in our idiosyncratic ways, so that the 'self' is something like the unconscious bodily style of this immersion.

persuades me that the "PSR" is not absolute after all but just an anthropic heuristic (,i.e. useful working assumption). — 180 Proof

:up:

The PSR has enjoyed the favor of philosophers, logicians, and scientists. It's considered rationally legit. Not woo woo, not nonsense.

Discuss... — Agent Smith

I can only make sense of it as a description of our nature, how we do science/philosophy. We look for reasons (exploitable relationships between entities). Curious George. The assumption that a reason for an event can be found is at least implicit in our looking for patterns in which to include it.

Life, no fair! — Agent Smith

:up:

So, a person who's in pain but alone, isn't in pain? — Agent Smith

I'd say that 'pain' tends to (try to) point at some secret inside of a person. So it's real-for-them.

I'd say that 'real' points (endlessly and terribly vaguely, and only in some contexts) at stuff that's there for all of us. You might 'think' you see a raccoon getting into the trashcan. If it's 'really' there, I should be able to see it too. Hard indeed to make sense of 'real' that doesn't involve more than one person.

Would the real hurt more than the simulation?

It frequently pops up in discussions on Wittgenstein. Pain presumably collapses the pereceived boundary betwixt reality and dreams (illusions). — Agent Smith

I'm thinking we tend to aim a word like 'real' socially. If something caused lots of people pain at the same time, it'd be called real. But if you suffer alone, not so much ?

Is there some meta-level or vantage from which to characterize how the site ‘as a whole’ changes along with each participant’s changing experience of it , one that wouldn't simply be one more subjective perspective? — Joshs

The 'self-knowledge' of the 'distributed operating system' is also distributed. The 'subject' with 'experience' is a body plugged into a 'dance' with other bodies using language and technology. The 'minds' of these subject/bodies are themselves bundles of memes and habits (another level of distributed operating systems?). 'Perspective' is parasitic on the singularity of the body. It's only contingently true that each body 'plays' just one handle here. It'd maybe be better to have at least two, and to methodically exercise differing approaches with each. As 'a' philosopher, I feel like a team of explorers. But folks are confused if you switch gears/masks to quickly. Folks are maybe too attached also when forced to play a single mask.

The website echoes the culture at large in assigning one name, one locus of address and responsibility, to some projected ghost that lives in each body. Is the notion of perspective not dependent on the everyday experience of eyes aimed at the world from different positions in space?

Sometimes I think you are willing to dissolve the subject. Other times you seem to want to make it foundational.

The age of rationality is ending, the age of irrationality and emotional incontinence is at hand. — apokrisis

Maybe. But I remember that folks were even afraid of pragmatism once. McLuhan's World city is new. The algorithms keeping us in bubbles is new. As far as Pomo goes, it has to be simplified to the usual vague rebellion in order to affect anyone outside a tiny bubble. Nietzsche is as radical as any of them and readable (which does not mean easy to understand, any more than the later Witt is.)

It's probably the stupidities in political extremes that are the most threatening.

Yep. Everyone wants to be an influencer. TikTok is truly the crucible for the development of your "more ideal community of tomorrow". — apokrisis

Exhibitionism. It seems like one of the ingredients even in the scientist/philosopher. TikTok has a mystical subculture, conspiracy theory subculture, and so on.They understand themselves to be truth-seeking and truth-sharing. What do we make of that? A universal urge to weave myth/science ?

Yep. In case you hadn't seen it, this is Peirce's theory of truth as the limit of communal inquiry. — apokrisis

Ah yes, I was influenced by that too. Our thinking seems to be directed toward an ideal community (a better version of the current one.) The very notions of rationality and truth 'demand' or 'imply' a community in the same world. What can it mean to be wrong or irrational if I'm alone ? And what is meaning itself supposed to mean if I'm alone?

In fact this whole set of lecture notes on Peirce and his grave misrepresentation by the likes of Rorty and Russell makes a damn fine response to the concerns raised in the OP. — apokrisis

I'll check it out. Nice final quote too.

Foucault would say yes, Derrida would say no. He and Heidegger wouldnt deny that we can point to cultural
hegemonies and world-views, but they wouldn’t analyze these in such a way that they would take the overarching group dynamic as primary or even complementary to the personalistic perspective. — Joshs

True or false or too ambiguous to decide, I can't help but read this as more insistence on the preciousness of the particular personality. I've granted that we are all snowflakes, that we can live alone in the woods and write manifestoes. But he we are trying to hammer out a consensus, impose 'ourselves' (fused inheritance) on that larger dynamic. We are showing off our dance moves, as if compelled. Movement is toward the other, the tribe.

Context for Derrida begins and ends with the singular mark. — Joshs

Paradoxical click bait, which is not to say that such gnomic absurdities can't be transformed dialectically into either commonplaces or slight advances on the source material. This kind of rhetorical onanism is why people hate Derrida and company.

The drift originates with time, not interpersonal language , from one element to the next to the next. — Joshs

Ah yes. This is our favorite point of disagreement. As I see it, you demand on implosion. Everything is self, self, self...while I insist that bodies in the same world are more or less foundational.

Is there an overall third-person ( or perhaps second person) logic that can be employed to depict the organizational dynamics of this I-thou system , or the larger system that includes all participants in a thread? — Joshs

There's just lots of bodies talking/typing, projecting themselves as candidates for partial assimilation. No one can grasp all perspectives or even a fraction of human knowledge, but philosophers battle against this finitude by focusing on the big picture, grand narratives, the master discourse. A continuation of theology by other means...

All events are metaphorical in themselves, as a mutual inter-affecting of source and target escaping the binary of representation and arbitrariness. — Joshs

If I can circumvent anticipatory hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia and perfunctory floccinaucinihilipilification, I'd like to suggest rolling smaller blunts.

Contrary to a long history, I have argued that a metaphor does not consist of two situations, a "source domain" and a "target domain". There is only one situation, the one in which the word is now used. What the word brings from elsewhere is not a situation; rather it brings a use-family, a great many situations. — Joshs

Sounds to me like a longwinded description of a target domain ('the one situation') and a source domain ('a use-family, a great many situations.') Roughly the source is...the past.

Shouldn’t we hold onto the framework until it begins to fail us? — Joshs

Who ever suggested otherwise? But that's that viewing it too simply. We can think of a network of beliefs/habits with some more being more crucial (risky/difficult to modify) than others. We can think of exploratory tentacles. We can apply this to a personality or to a culture. A philosopher would be one who experiments with updates of various frameworks (of the how everything hangs together variety.)

the inclination to discount any assertion or argument because we can't really know anything since we're permeated with prejudices and "culture" should serve to end discussion as well as judgment. Why bother? — Ciceronianus

Ye shall know them by their windmills?

We are loaded with prejudices, AKA culture. So we need them and yet they are in our way. — jas0n

/////////////////////////////////////
To a considerable extent customs, or widespread uniformities of habit, exist because individuals face the same situation and react in like fashion. But to a larger extent customs persist because individuals form their personal habits under conditions set by prior customs. An individual usually acquires the morality as he inherits the speech of his social group.

The activities of the group are already there, and some assimilation of his own acts to their pattern is a prerequisite of a share therein, and hence of having any part in what is going on.
...
These associations are definite modes of interaction of persons with one another; that is to say they form customs, institutions. There is no problem in all history so artificial as that of how "individuals " manage to form "society."
...
All habits are demands for certain kinds of activity; and they constitute the self.... They form our effective desires and they furnish us with our working capacities. They rule our thoughts, determining which shall appear and be strong and which shall pass from light into obscurity.
...
Ideas, thoughts of ends, are not spontaneously generated. There is no immaculate conception of meanings or purposes. Reason pure of all influence from prior habit is a fiction.
...
For thinking cannot itself escape the influence of habit, any more than anything else human.
...
The medium of habit filters all the material that reaches our perception and thought.
...
The essence of habit is an acquired predisposition to ways or modes of response, not to particular acts except as, under special conditions, these express a way of behaving.
...
Every moment of reaction and protest, however, usually accepts some of the basic ideas of the position against which it rebels.
...
Habits are conditions of intellectual efficiency...They restrict its reach, they fix its boundaries. They are blinders that confine the eyes of mind to the road ahead....Outside the scope of habits, thought works gropingly, fumbling in confused uncertainty; and yet habit made complete in routine shuts in thought so effectually that it is no longer needed or possible.
...
The most skillful aptitude bumps at times into the unexpected, and so gets into trouble from which only observation and invention extricate it. Efficiency in following a beaten path has then to be converted into breaking a new road through strange lands.
...
Habit is however more than a restriction of thought. Habits become negative limits because they are first positive agencies. The more numerous our habits the wider the field of possible observation and foretelling.
...
For it is a commonplace that the more suavely efficient a habit the more unconsciously it operates.

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/41386/41386-h/41386-h.htm#Pg014

Wouldn't be more apt to ask whether magical thinking is philosophy? — Ciceronianus

I don't think so. I'm with Witt & Gadamer on this. We are loaded with prejudices, AKA culture. So we need them and yet they are in our way. Metaphors, pictures, myths. Is there a system without some unjustified master concept, some kind of grand narrative that's true for no reason? Look for an image of their hero, their ego ideal, their proposed what-we-should-all-be. I've never met/read anyone, including myself, without holes in their story, things they take for granted without noticing it, a roleplay of some version of the hero.

You are missing the context. I'm being accidentally trolled and fooling around,

Was Helena Blavatsky a philosopher? What about Aleister Crowley? What about other kinds of thinking, e.g. religious, or New Age? Was Ram Dass a philosopher? The Dalai Lama? John Lennon?

If you wish, you can claim most anyone of these individuals or others who "think great thoughts" are/were philosophers. — Ciceronianus

Well I could offer up an opinion, but I don't think individuals legislate meaning any more than they can decide what five bucks is worth, and for similar reasons. 'Philosopher' is a token that bounces around in the world with other tokens, out there with telescopes and fire hydrants.

But no I'm not inclined to let everyone in.

Since it reasoning value is isolated from according to your Yours failed informs me about their I will epistemology in recognize the importance You so you DO willing to cherry pick the cases where you can comments or your points Atari basic that allows me to copy paste claims need will need to accept it of course written in you your of to decide philosophy or are you (like yours) and accurately I your reality have a program don't help this do with out conversation reject it truth

People confuse Chronicling with Philosophy. — Nickolasgaspar

To be seen is the ambition of ghosts, and to be remembered is the ambition of the dead...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_O._Brown

....indeed, he will doubt whether a philosopher CAN have "ultimate and actual" opinions at all; whether behind every cave in him there is not, and must necessarily be, a still deeper cave: an ampler, stranger, richer world beyond the surface, an abyss behind every bottom, beneath every "foundation." Every philosophy is a foreground philosophy—this is a recluse's verdict....

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/4363/4363-h/4363-h.htm

I am speaking of a paper flower for the buttonholes of the gentlemen who frequent the ball of masked life, the kitchen of grace, white cousins lithe or fat. They traffic with whatever we have selected.

https://writing.upenn.edu/library/Tzara_Dada-Manifesto_1918.pdf

-I have a program written in Atari basic that allows me to copy paste claims (like yours) and accurately informs me about their truth value. — Nickolasgaspar

//////////////////
“Philosophy is the true home of irony, which might be defined as logical beauty,” Schlegel writes in Lyceumfragment 42: “for wherever men are philosophizing in spoken or written dialogues, and provided they are not entirely systematic, irony ought to be produced and postulated.” The task of a literary work with respect to irony is, while presenting an inherently limited perspective, nonetheless to open up the possibility of the infinity of other perspectives: “Irony is, as it were, the demonstration [epideixis] of infinity, of universality, of the feeling for the universe” (KA 18.128); irony is the “clear consciousness of eternal agility, of an infinitely teeming chaos” (Ideas 69).
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/schlegel/

True, in the eyes of others the appearance which I present to them may be regarded seriously, in that they take me to be really concerned with the matter in hand, but in that case they are simply deceived, poor limited creatures, without the faculty and ability to apprehend and reach the loftiness of my standpoint. Therefore this shows me that not everyone is so free (i.e. formally free) as to see in everything which otherwise has value, dignity, and sanctity for mankind just a product of his own power of caprice, whereby he is at liberty either to grant validity to such things, to determine himself and fill his life by means of them, or the reverse. Moreover this virtuosity of an ironical artistic life apprehends itself as a divine creative genius for which anything and everything is only an unsubstantial creature, to which the creator, knowing himself to be disengaged and free from everything, is not bound, because he is just as able to destroy it as to create it. In that case, he who has reached this standpoint of divine genius looks down from his high rank on all other men, for they are pronounced dull and limited, inasmuch as law, morals, etc., still count for them as fixed, essential, and obligatory. So then the individual, who lives in this way as an artist, does give himself relations to others: he lives with friends, mistresses, etc; but, by his being a genius, this relation to his own specific reality, his particular actions, as well as to what is absolute and universal, is at the same time null; his attitude to it all is ironical.
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/ae/introduction.htm

Another version of the metaphor theory:

In a similar way, Schlegel affirms that our encounters with the world are always poetical, in the sense that they are not be merely receptive, but also creative. Reality exists through language, or, in other words, we always relate to the world metaphorically. This also means that there cannot be an ‘absolute’ (i.e., an absolutely true) way of referring to the external world, for we do not see the world as it is, but always in relation to ourselves. Schlegel’s theory of language is thus intrinsically connected to his theory of mythology. Both in his Jena and in his Berlin lectures, Schlegel stressed the fact the experience of an existing totality has a mythological basis without which the experience itself would be impossible (Behler 1992: 77–78). Once again, Schlegel stressed the idea that mythology is not merely a phase of human rationality, but is part of our being in the world. It is a structural principle of human intellectual activity, the purest rational activity being a mythological one: be it in art, sciences, or in our daily activities, we always relate to the world metaphorically.

In his letters, Schlegel claims that language is the “most wonderful creation of human being’s poetical talent”, because it is through language that human nature is able to reflect upon itself (SW: VII, 104).

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/schlegel-aw/#PhilArt

This is not true for your god like artifacts. — Nickolasgaspar

I have a rotary phone and it's not plugged into the wall or anything but I can talk to God on it. My nurse likes to pretend I'm just imagining things, and I pretend to agree to spare her feelings, because she is scared of not being scientific. But me and God laugh together like mad when she leaves the room.

If I cry out: Ideal, ideal, ideal, Knowledge, knowledge, knowledge, Boomboom, boomboom, boomboom, I have given a pretty faithful version of progress, law, morality and all other fine qualities that various highly intelligent men have discussed in so many books, only to conclude that after all everyone dances to his own personal boomboom, and that the writer is entitled to his boomboom... the authority of the mystic wand formulated as the bouquet of a phantom orchestra made up of silent fiddle bows greased with filters made of chicken manure.
...
The dialectic is an amusing mechanism which guides us in a banal kind of way to the opinions we had in the first place...
...
But supposing life to be a poor farce, without aim or initial parturition, and because we think it our duty to extricate ourselves as fresh and clean as washed chrysanthemums, we have proclaimed as the sole basis for agreement: art. It is not as important as we, mercenaries of the spirit, have been proclaiming for centuries. Art afflicts no one and those who manage to take an interest in it will harvest caresses and a fine opportunity to populate the country with their conversation.

https://writing.upenn.edu/library/Tzara_Dada-Manifesto_1918.pdf

This passage from Ari is quoted in Of Grammatology.

Spoken words are the symbols of mental experience and written words are the symbols of spoken words. Just as all men have not the same writing, so all men have not the same speech sounds, but the mental experiences, which these directly symbolize, are the same for all, as also are those things of which our experiences are the images.

Loaded with ore. First we have pure-concept => speech => writing. We have the 'same mental experience' with suggests Kant, especially w/ the last part. Our experiences are 'images' of some other kind of thing.

I've only really looked at Ari's ethics and poetics. Liked the ethics, can't remember the poetics it's been so long.

My own line would be Anaximander => Aristotle => Peirce. And I wouldn’t feel as if I was missing much just sticking to those three. — apokrisis

Well I'm not really trying to talk you in to checking them out. I just think Braver found a nice way to string them all together. They're all talking about the tribal mind, you might say. And this tribal mind 'is' the intelligible structure of the world in some sense (like a discrete sign system imposed on an otherwise undifferentiated continuum.) I do plan on reading more Peirce.

Well you know I love concepts on this side, but 'emotion and inspiration' is tricky there. I tend to understand inspiration as having more than just emotional content. To me inspiration is the unity of concept and emotion. I can recall a particular peak experience. It was feeling and concept together, a sort of grasping the world as a harmony. So I would have said maybe that the world was God was harmony or something.

Of course I agree with questioning the 'inner light.' But that just takes us back to where I already try to live, in the space of a thinking that turns back on itself, that understands itself to be essentially transpersonal. The ego (as opposed to the body) is a convention. And this is something 'I' try to articulate in detail, while responding to and incorporating criticism, an endless task....

The Philosophical Method is an exercise in frustration, not the pursuit of happiness.
Making up answers and assuming things you don't know ease our anxieties so you should be skeptical of your assumptions. — Nickolasgaspar

I agree w/ the last part...or do I? I mean I always assumed I was after the truth....

.

...on her breast is inscribed: you will die. This is her only remedy. Who still believes in doctors? I prefer the poet who is a fart in a steam-engine – he’s gentle but he doesn’t cry – polite and semi-homosexual, he floats...

https://391.org/manifestos/1920-dada-manifesto-feeble-love-bitter-love-tristan-tzara/

In this case it only sneaks in supernatural ideology since pure witnesses do not exist(as far as we can tell). — Nickolasgaspar

So the idea of the pure witness is basically just...consciousness. If you want to ghost story to attack, consciousness is a good one. Religion is such an easy target these days.

And what is the wise conclusion that is produced by criticizing this made up concept sir? — Nickolasgaspar

It's a concept related to one you depend on. As I went on to suggest.

You are knee-deep in metaphysical assumptions that you haven't even noticed yet.

Don't worry. The machines work whether or not you believe in them or understand them.

.

I can go on exposing all those unfounded deepities which prove my point on the pseudo philosophical nature of your statements. — Nickolasgaspar

'Deepities' is the best thing you've contributed so far.

You start by making unfalsifiable claims like.
-" In other words, the ultimate reality is not something seen, but rather the ever-present Seer. "
-How do you know that the ultimate reality differs from the reality we can observe. What are your objective facts that lead you to that conclusion? — Nickolasgaspar

Are we on the same planet? I am criticizing the concept of the pure witness in this thread. If you can't see that, you are lost in a private dream. Take a breath. Go back and read. Or don't.

Philosophy is defined by its etymology (Love of wisdom). — Nickolasgaspar

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etymological_fallacy

He is making speculations based on his personal goals and emotional needs. This is known as religion or magical thinking. — Nickolasgaspar

It might be that the worst form of magical thinking is the fantasy that one is free of it. The battle against magical thinking may itself be 'magically' motivated.

Do you think your aren't acting from 'personal goals and emotional needs'? Why do you want the truth so bad? Is knowledge valuable in itself or is science just a tool to get us what we want? Are you sure you don't just want to gloat above the poor fools who aren't as enlightened as you?

I only demand a meaningful use of the method for the production of frameworks that have real intellectual value — Nickolasgaspar

What is this value? Why all the fuss? Why the fear of magical thinking? Can you prove that magical thinking is bad? If not, it seems your fear of magical thinking is just magical thinking?

I'm down with critical thinking, I magically tell myself. I just think its only really exciting target is itself.

I notice that the source materials is from or about Ken Wilber. Personally I think in the transpersonal philosophy space, Bernardo Kastrup is superior. — Wayfarer

I bumped into the term 'pure witness' in a Wilbur book, and I realized that Husserl and Kant maybe had similar starting points. I'd put Wittgenstein, Hegel, Feuerbach, Foucault, Heidegger, Norman O. Brown, Derrida, ... in the 'transpersonal philosophy space.' Philosophy pretty much just is transpersonal, if one takes something like a universal reason as a binding norm and tries to articulate the structure/truth of a shared world/reality.

I've glanced at Kastrup. He's sophisticated. I still think 'mental' breaks down without its other. But I respect any metaphysics that at least tries to give an account of our sharing in whatever this talk is and the world that it's about is...You and I agree that any good account has to account for itself too.

But there's so much more to it than is conveyed in that abstraction. — Wayfarer

I'd say what really matters, to me and maybe everyone, is feeling, feeling, feeling. Some philosophers have suggested that concept doesn't grab the absolute, that maybe art is better. And some religious thinkers have put feeling first. In my opinion, that's the cleanest route. Let it be called 'feeling.' Or, if it's ineffable, don't even start to argue for it.

////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
From Leibniz, Lessing, Fichte, Jacobi and the Romantic school, Schleiermacher had imbibed a profound and mystical view of the inner depths of the human personality.
...
While ....we cannot ...attain the idea of the supreme unity of thought and being by either cognition or volition, we can find it in our own personality, in immediate self-consciousness or feeling.
...
At various periods of his life Schleiermacher used different terms to represent the character and relation of religious feeling. In his earlier days he called it a feeling or intuition of the universe, consciousness of the unity of reason and nature, of the infinite and the eternal within the finite and the temporal. In later life he described it as the feeling of absolute dependence, or, as meaning the same thing, the consciousness of being in relation to God.[7] In his Addresses on Religion (1799), he wrote:[38]

Religion is the outcome neither of the fear of death, nor of the fear of God. It answers a deep need in man. It is neither a metaphysic, nor a morality, but above all and essentially an intuition and a feeling. ... Dogmas are not, properly speaking, part of religion: rather it is that they are derived from it. Religion is the miracle of direct relationship with the infinite; and dogmas are the reflection of this miracle. Similarly belief in God, and in personal immortality, are not necessarily a part of religion; one can conceive of a religion without God, and it would be pure contemplation of the universe; the desire for personal immortality seems rather to show a lack of religion, since religion assumes a desire to lose oneself in the infinite, rather than to preserve one's own finite self.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_Schleiermacher

A nice piece of Blake, showing a kind of fusion of the mystic and the metaphysical/philosophical.

Men are admitted into Heaven not because they have curbed & govern’d their Passion or have No Passions, but because they have Cultivated their Understandings. The Treasures of Heaven are not Negations of Passion but Realities of Intellect, from which all the Passions Emanate Uncurbed in their Eternal Glory. The Fool shall not enter into heaven let him be ever so Holy. Holiness is not The Price of Enterance into Heaven. Those who are cast out are All Those who, having no Passions of their own because No Intellect, Have spent their lives in Curbing & Governing other People’s by the Various arts of Poverty & Cruelty of all kinds. Wo, Wo, Wo to you Hypocrites. Even Murder, the Courts of Justice, more merciful than the Church, are compell’d to allow is not done in Passion, but in Cool Blooded design & Intention.

The Modern Chruch Crucifies Christ with the head Downwards.

The Last Judgment is an Overwhelming of Bad Art & Science. Mental Things are alone Real; what is call’d Corporeal, Nobody Knows of its Dwelling Place: it is in Fallacy & its Existence an Imposture. Where is the Existence Out of Mind or Thought? Where is it but in the Mind of a Fool? Some People flatter themselves that there will be No Last Judgment & that Bad Art will be adopted & mixed with Good Art, that Error or Experiment will make a Part of Truth, & they Boast that it is its Foundation; these People flatter themselves. I will not Flatter them. Error is Created; Truth is Eternal. Error or Creation will be Burned up, & then & not till Then, Truth or Eternity will appear. It is Burnt up the Moment Men cease to behold it. I assert for My self that I do not behold the Outward Creation & that to me it is hindrance & not Action; it is as the Dirt upon my feet, No part of Me. ‘What’, it will be Question’d, ‘When the sun rises do you not see a round Disk of fire somewhat like a Guinea?’ O no, no, I see an Innumerable company of the Heavenly host crying ‘Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord God Almighty.’ I question not my Corporeal or Vegetative Eye any more than I would Question a Window concerning a Sight. I look through it & not with it.
— Blake

A wonder that generations of mystics lack your insight Jason. Your work is obviously cut out. — Wayfarer

If you think it's an unworthy example, say so. Show me the good stuff. But if you think it's a good text, then you should be defending it with more than sarcasm. I'm not even anti-mystical, and I don't resent when mystics also write/think (William Blake is great.)

The 'pure witness' concept, which seems to be tied up with Heidegger's 'Being' and the hard problem of consciousness, is complex. I don't pretend to have figured it out. But the particular text critiqued is a disaster.