As with mind, these pure ideas are only contingent, re: theory-specific, logical starting points, a way to deny to speculation its inevitable descent into self-contradiction. — Mww

Yes, I agree. Likely, we can't help but to speculate; the starting point of all constructions. And yet, like you suggest: end of the day, they never stop being constructions.

Understood. That would require reason to pre-exist and transcend mind, and to either do same re body, or to somehow be built into body. I think reason is also a process of representations

Would you consider Mind being a/the process you just described, and "mind" being an example of that representational, binary/dialectical based, process?

Here’s a relatively safer introduction to this Hypothesis.

What do you believe Mind is?

If it’s a spirit, any entity separate from the body and from energy/matter, then you better show where that entity is because otherwise, you’re a religion.

If you think mind is a function of the brain, then ok, end of the day, discard the function. Focus on the brain, the only reality (along with/as the body).

Not to mention, what’s happening to us is, not only don’t we discard the function, our bodies [are triggered to produce the feelings associated with] believe we are the function. But we aren’t. We’re the bodies.

What does "aware" mean that bacteria and archae are aware of drives, feelings, sensations, image-ing etc.? — Patterner

In varying degrees depending upon levels of sophistication of the biological infrastructure. Branches reach for sunlight, protozoa "find" food. We startle at a lound bang. All conditioned responses requiring an aware-ing of some degree.

Admittedly, a scientist would be qualified to reply. I'm hypothesizing. Others far more learned in the required fields can provide the corrections. Its nothing special. Mind/History moves by that dialectic.

This is not something that can be resolved by any amount of discussion. Go, and find out. Not in a thread or a book, but in yourself, is the answer. — unenlightened

Agreed.

But the "trigger" Mind/History "provides" for us to go and find out, is the discussion.

By analogy, that's why a common idea in Zen, for example, is to burn all the sutras/kill the Buddha after enlightenment.

but to a mystic, the practice they follow isn’t necessarily so. — Punshhh

Agreed. The practice. Not the preceding, corresponding or after thoughts

What about the idea I have of humans as organisms/species? Is it too unreal? — javi2541997

Yes, it too is unreal. It is functional, but unreal.

which might mean that it is actually non-real, right? — javi2541997

Only our "idea of" is unreal, "we" as in humans organisms/species are real.

How can I be myself without consciousness? — javi2541997

You already are [yourself] and you already are consciousness. The minute you "step out" (metaphorically) of consciousness to gaze at the images in your head which for humans have evolved into an entire narrative system---that is, if you are born into History, incessantly---you become [the fictional you of representation; the subject, ego, including the so called transcendental ego]

Yes, but this takes one out of philosophy (thinking) — Punshhh

Then so be it. To access reality one must be taken out of thinking.

When it comes to metaphysics:

Philosophy is a useful tool for understanding the system of representations of truth; a system we rely upon for its function. But it cannot access real truth. Accordingly, all of its fruits are relative and subject to change. There are no first principles, no categories, no a priori governing principles outside of the system of representation which philosophy is restricted to.

But Mysticism cannot be a useful tool for accessing real truth, because "mysticism," belongs no less to the system of representation which philosophy is relegated to.

So how do we access real truth? Not by representations (knowing), but only by being.

I agree with your point but it appears in its presentation to have missed the fact that it agrees with mine.

there are well established schools and methods to do this. — Punshhh

Yes there are schools of philosophy. But, as you say, they are necessarily restricted to thinking. How, therefore, can they ever arrive at pure "am" without thinking [and, therefore]?

What do you mean by "real"? — javi2541997

"Real" is the aware-ing organism, aware of its drives, feelings, sensations, image-ing etc. Shared by all living organisms in varying degrees

The "unreal" is human consciousness or "mind," representations displacing the real aware-ing with desires, emotions, perception, ideas, etc.

how can we distinguish? — javi2541997

We don't distinguish. Hence, the metaphysical/epistemological problem.

The latter, we access by knowledge, and it displaces the former, always there, but not accessed by knowledge. Rather, accessed by being.

It is only knowing which wants and distinguishes.
Being, just is.

I’ll make the following hypothesis: The reason we wouldn’t willingly lobotomize ourselves or else place ourselves into a perpetual “experience machine” (were the latter possible) for the sake of obtaining optimal pleasure or happiness has a lot to do with our inherent nature – even if we’re not consciously aware of it – specifically, an inherent nature where we (or at least a majority of us) value reality, thereby that which is in fact actual, and conformity to such, thereby truth, above all else. — javra

I would hypothesize that it's, rather, because of our attachment to the Narrative we've built, and the "I" which takes center stage; both of which are illusions we are strongly but fallaciously attached to.

It's also stupid to think mind and nature are separate when mind is part of nature, it doesn't exist outside of it. — Darkneos

I assume you would hold that rocketships, skyscrapers, leprechauns and unicorns are part of nature?

Nature doesn't give a damn last I checked. — Darkneos

If Mind is part of Nature, it does.
But I agree, Nature doesn't give a damn, a damn and the giving of it belongs to Mind.

I told you that meaning making is the only reason you can type such things and have them understood. — Darkneos

That's my point. Meaning making is the only reason...etc. Meaning is made, not pre-existent. Fabricated, not discovered or disclosed.

The chemicals are just fine as they are. Only for Meaning makers are the questions begged. And ultimately, both questions and answers are illusions.

You never really draw complete thoughts out. — Darkneos

It's questions all the way down. Especially in a forum like this. I'm neither energetic nor presumptuous enough to provide what would be required to close a thought. Do you think there are thoughts completed anywhere? I don't.

do the fact finder(s) (judge/jury) see the testimonies? Although also subject to bias and prejudice, an important way to judge credibility is seeing and hearing the body testifying.

Maybe it’s only because we have Mind which constructs and projects fictions, that we think there's some truth to our complaint that/if it's all just chemicals. If you think about it, Mind has, in its make-believe, the audacity to criticize Nature.

Yah, it's all just chemicals. We breathe, we see, hear, smell, taste, touch, feel, and bond because of these chemicals. The rest is just talk.

Yes we would function but at a very primitive level and our ability to communicate and invent would be non-existent … — kindred

Yes. But not like plants. Like animals. Stimulus and response. There's nothing necessarily "bad." It might even be bliss. Maybe our infatuation with communicating and inventing (Mind, not consciousness) is classical Narcissus: in love with our own reflections (representations); an illusion, the cause of enjoyment, but also suffering. Maybe bliss stops at natural stimulus response based pleasure and pain.

doesn't god show his perspective in holy books. — QuirkyZen

I don't believe so. No disrespect to anyone who does.

You might ask, "then how do you even talk about 'God' [in this way]?"

I don't think Scriptures or any other form of Narrative manifesting outward of History is the source of [our knowledge of God]. I think so called revelation is History's response to the real source, our nature/Nature. Revelation is just as constructed, and therefore susceptible to human error as the concepts, love, mercy, God and eternity.

For me, God is (for lack of better) felt order sensed by/as the Body. And from that History constructs our [fallable] narratives.

Right, from our perspective. If what we call loving and merciful is eternally true, God's either not that, or not there.

But, who's to say from the perspective of God or what we think of as the eternal (both of which, by the way, are just as susceptible to human error as love and mercy; if any of these even exist eternally--outside of our constructions)

Maybe it's our thoughts which cloud our senses with ideas, making them susceptible to doubt. And as for the contents of our thoughts, they're made up of signifying images, operating as a system with belief as a built in mechanism.

So we doubt our senses except when belief is triggered. Philosophy as a machine in that system, necessarily suspends belief while it examines the structures of the thoughts.

how can deterministic processes lead to the realization of options. — MoK

Maybe the "options" are illusion.

The determinism in neural processes seem obvious to us since science has constructed that Narrative and it is conventional; i.e., that synapses are triggered by xyz, and there is no moment of an agent choosing to take a certain path.

But the same could go for the so-called Mind, where the illusion of option exists. Even in a decision seeming so free as which road to take at a fork, was ultimately the last domino to fall in a series of autonomously structured triggers. To oversimplify, a thought emerges, "the heart is on the left,"--like I said, over simplified--all the way to "ini mini miny moe", structures and structures signifiers of constructed meaning snap like dominoes until you move. The positive feeling in the body that is triggered by the "settlement," or what we think of as "belief", we also call a choice.

For each individual mind the result is different, but not owing to a free agent making a choice out of options, but by the conditioned process of signifier structuring at each specific locus in History where these triggers are built. Some might not think of the left as superior but the right because it is the hand that's raised. All of these pieces of data stored at various loci in History act in accordance with a highly evolved system of conditioning. If not, find the moment of choice that did not involve a thought, image, language, a final trigger which is silent. That could just be that feeling in the body, designed to end the dialectic; also a conditioned response. And if you deliberately "choose" to defy the triggers, and go the opposite, it was just those antithetical triggers that got you there, triggered by something daring you to defy it, releasing a positive feeling because your locus is conditioned by History that way. And so on.

Ultimately that suggests, if so called decisions are autonomous movements of stimulus and conditioned response, the self has no free will. But actually further, there is no self. Body is an organic process, Mind is a process functioning with images.

It is not oblivion if no one is there.

If the human body, like all other bodies in nature, decomposes and disintegrates into the soil, then no body is there.

That leaves Mind (maybe the body was organically conscious, aware of its sensations, feelings and drives, and that disintegrates with the organs). Mind is the reason we go forward into imaginary time dreaming of an afterlife.

So the question is really, what is Mind? If it's a soul or spirit--there is no evidence of that outside of Minds own constructions--then why oblivion? We construct complex Narratives to suggest it will go on constructing.

But how? As long as there is the organic infrastructure and energy, Mind constructs. How does it continue when the Body is gone?

I think it's not eternal oblivion, because the Mind too just stops.

For the body it's the eternal presence: Nature. There never is an individual experiencer of any Narrative.

For Mind, it's History. That’s what Mind is even while in the living: just the progression of Narrative we evolved to construct, and we do it as a species. So, any individual contribution remains forever in the afterlife of History. Oblivion is irrelevant because the Subject of the body's Narrative was never there, not the experiencer. "I" was just a tool, just stood in for the body, projected as the experiencer in the Narrative. In reality, the Narrative triggered feelings, constructed meaning for sensations, and triggered actions in the body; the only real thing. The body was the experiencer of stories; and it returns from where it always is: Nature
And the stories have made their contributionsto The Story; and like this sentence, there they remain.

If we can only see two sides of an idea, how do we know they unite at a highet level? — Gregory

We don't "know," we settle (or, knowledge is settlement); and, they don't unite at a "highest" level, they unite at the [temporary] ["most"] functional level (or highest is functional)

just care about philosophy that helps me live well mostly, call it pragmatism. Stuff like "how do we know anything" is noise to me. — Darkneos

If you understand that "what is irony" is a construction, as is everything which flows out of it, constructions of meaning; and that, the real "you" lies somewhere outside of that cave of shadows, in the feelings, sensations and drives of the body; while you will never escape pleasure and pain, you might escape attachment and suffering.

I don't like using up space with long unsolicited explanations, and the statement just made requires long explanations, so I guess I'm unclear. On the upside, I hope my unclear statements might trigger pursuit by others into tunnels they may not have considered, and I learn a lot about tunnels from their responses.

Uhhh...ok... — Darkneos

I meant both sincerely. Thanks for the interesting take. Sorry if I was frustratingly unclear. But for me, all good. How could I really know? So obviously I've grown a little from this. I'm ready to move on.

I don't think I've left you hanging, right?

Thank you/Sorry.

why even post that or reply to me to begin with? — Darkneos

To cut to the chase, I/we can't help it. It's autonomous.

Philosophy isn't a feeling so much as a system or method. — Darkneos

think it does make sense but some people like to insist otherwise, so far no one has been able to show you can't define it. — Darkneos

If you take the position that Irony (for example) has a definition, why not stop at the dictionary definition?

The exploration further, call it philosophy, is a desire to build meaning. That desire is rooted in a positive feeling. We may not perceive that root feeling on the surface, so overcrowded with layers of constructions, but at the root is an unnable positive feeling. That is what I said was the first movement in philosophy.

Of course it's [grown into] a system etc. But everything beyond whatever that positive feeling is--the feeling both our bodies are after by, for lack, "discovery"--is making-up meaning.

In the end some of us produce functional new paths, some don't, but we're all making meaning to attach to organic feelings. So ultimately we're confounding any path to that once real feeling, with making sense.

I'm not sure what you mean. — Darkneos

We do not focus on the truth we already know. "Irony" like most things surfacing through minds as culture or history, is not a definite singular thing. It represents first an organic feeling best left not displaced by signifiers. But inevitably minds come up with "irony" [for the feeling triggered when facts reveal themselves to be fictions and vice versa]. And its definition is already impossible because it is not the unnamable feeling, but the construction for it in code. But because it is constructed we give to it also constructed meanings. If conventionally accepted within a range of functional applications of that signifier, then we settle upon that as "definition." Fair enough. A reasonably necessarily dialectic for "irony" to function as code.

But then philosophy (also first an unamable feeling, stretched by Mind into [a] near infinite structure of signifiers, requiring extra lengthy narratives to arrive at the feeling [akin to discovery]) comes along and takes the dialectic beyond the reasonable conventional one designed to give the Signifier some signifieds, the construction of meaning [out of feeling]; but to a place which is clearly more fictional, a game claiming to be uncovering the core of truth.

What does it mean to say "everything is ironic", or "relative?" We claim to be making sense of it, but, ironically we're
confounding it further.

EDIT: not sure how tge erasure got there, but who knows? Maybe they were meant to be.

if it’s just a bit about our attempts to make sense of things — Darkneos

Ironically, we might just end up confounding things.

whether humans are categorically different to other animals. Most say they’re not, but ironically that’s something only a human could say. — Wayfarer

Ironically, both are something only a human could say... or, does that negate the irony?

sorry to hear that. Thank you

because it is not an interpretation to say that the aforementioned countries are not in the Bible. It is, instead just a brute fact. And that brute fact, by itself, refutes Nietzsche's aforementioned famous phrase. — Arcane Sandwich

But, by fact do you mean Truth? Because I think that's up to interpretation. And, if fact and Truth are not the same, what is the difference? Does Truth even deal in difference?

I don't see how you reduce the "I" to the body. — Metaphysician Undercover

You are correct, and I have caused confusion.

The "I" is imaginary; in waking and in dreams. What I meant to say is that the real being is the living body, not in the narratives constructed by its imagination in both waking and dreaming. Although the latter is where we conventionally identify the real being (that is, with the "I").

I understand that you still take issue...I just thought I should clarify.

The idea of determinism, for me, isn’t a simple domino effect; it’s more like a web of interconnected factors—each one influencing the other. Our choices, in this context, aren’t isolated events but are deeply embedded in this complex system. And while we may not fully understand it, I think determinism accounts for all of this complexity and interconnectedness. — Matripsa

It can be called History; each so called individual, a locus in History. At the risk of sounding New Age (though it is not), it is like Indra’s Net. It is also found in Hegel, looked at without nit picking. It is not just Greater Mind or Greater History which is driven by dialectic. Each point of Mind/History, each locus and every seemingly choice/action is the outcome of Mind/History intersecting and interacting with that locus and through micro dialectics gets settled upon. Even choices which seem to be deliberate exercises of free will designed to resist History, are already constructed and informed by History. To give an over simplified e.g., you weren't born with the
settled notion that the thing is an apple(-and-all-structures-attaching-to-apple). It was input and though you think you have a choice, you don't. Then, if you choose to defy History and think of it otherwise, every place you settle at as the otherwise, has been input by History and structures the otherwise.

It's tragically stupid of us to accept the current state of democracy. We don't allow our Bankers to grow rich by cooking the books and stealing our money. Why do we allow politicians and other social influencers to gain huge success by stealing facts?

Why do so called liberal democracies exist? To protect freedom. Already, we have a system of restrictions (laws) in place to maximize freedom. Already we recognize the necessity for restriction to allow for liberty.

If free choices are what we value as freedom, and if troll farms assault our freedom by profoundly fettering our free choices, they need to be regulated, even in a free and democratic society.

Yes, not only is this a contradiction (restrict free speech to protect liberty), it is a challenge on multiple levels. But we do it all the time--with physical restrictions, economic restrictions, social restrictions.

We create our own hierarchies of value everywhere. Regulating free speech at the root need not be any greater a violation of human rights than regulating the order in which customers are served in the bank. I dream of an ideal anarchism as much as anyone. But for things to function, there needs to be rules. Freedom in social venues needs to exist with some protections.

Not to be argumentative. I understand your points. Fair enough.

What was your (or, for that matter, 'the') first experience of 'apple'?

I do not deny the creative capacity. It's creative capacity all the way down [to the forever forsaken so called first experience]. But you're right that I deny the "I" as the source. "I" is a product/tool.

There is a so called real so called I. The body. Although that is affected by the creativity, feeling a positive bond with the "I", the feeling is real, but the object of the bond, the "I" is a small-c creation.

We are not two persons. So, again, the dreaming and the waking human is one: the body. The intriguing problem you raise is a function of the make-believe, or creative capacity.

I don't really understand what you mean by "fitness to surface" — Metaphysician Undercover

If I said dreams are autonomously moving signifiers called out of a
storage in memory, with no central agent, you would consider the arguments against that, but generally, you'd accept the possibility.

But if i said, so too are all of your so called experiences in your waking. Only in waking, these autonomous manifestations follow eons worth of evolution, such that they structure and project effeciently, following certain laws which serve their only function. First, the will to manifest (because the primordial, original or true nature of these images---the imagination---was to stimulate conditioned responses; built in was the drive to function or manifest). Following that, highly functional laws to sustain and promote the manifestations (all made-up by the evolved system), from difference, to cause and effect, reason, logic, grammar, and so on, and out of these, History.

Because dreams are just the outflow of the manifestations which have evolved not to stop, they do not conform to the rules which structure the ones in waking. So, the former seem to be what we would call random. They still signify, but that's another discussion.

The waking manifestations have been regulated, conditioned to follow a dialectic of such efficiency that only the images structured most aptly for the situation (given umpteen factors, run through speedy dialectic, conditioned trials and errors) get to manifest. That is, these operations of mind, are the most fitting to surface. To be simple, your eyes see a round red edible thing, your stomach may release triggers of hunger, etc. But these images stored in memory, autonomously flood those real bodily events with so called experience, their efficient constructions. And "apple" and the hundreds of corresponding structures displace the body with these Narratives. The "I" itself is just a structure which, in the promotion of manifestations, emerged as functional, surfaces a lot and so on. But it is just as autonomous a process in waking as in dreams.

They're both dreams, and in neither of them is "I"/ are you the real being. The body is and always is.

Your post was interesting.

Indirectly related is how in Quentin Tarantino movies, he makes us see always a hierarchy of evil: there's the bad guy(s), often a gangster(s); but soon enough the Real Sicko(s) appear.

I know Im simplifying and paraphrasing but you refer to the human as being doomed to a condition of monstrosity (because we always faced with evil (choices)).

I think it is only in History (Mind) that we are potentially so doomed (conditioned). Because (though almost trite to say) History moves dialectically and difference requires varying degrees of evil and good: to move. I think as human animals, like all other creatures (and why should we be inherently different?), there is no good and evil, no difference. We just are.

Am I a completely different person when I am asleep, from when I am awake? — Metaphysician Undercover

When we're awake our imagination (dreams) function in such a way as to be fit to surface (in the world). When we sleep, the autonomous constructions and projections don't stop; they just function without much regard to fitness for surface. Both processes are made-up; one works to create meaning in History, the other also functions to create meaning, but strictly within one tiny locus of History (so it doesnt signify in the same linear logic of our waking narratives). The question isn't are you the same person; you are. The question is, are you really that person? Or, is that person real?

there is the message that the messenger brings to us. — PoeticUniverse

Doesn't the messenger also construct the message? The messenger is the message.