Aristotle demonstrated that "knowledge", claimed by Parmenides as "being", is inconsistent with the reality of "becoming" which was asserted by Heraclitus. These two aspects of reality, being and becoming are simply incompatible. The solution to this problem is dualism.

Plato demonstrated in The Theaetetus, that "knowledge" as we know it cannot be described as JTB. This is because the possibility of falsity cannot be excluded, therefore we cannot hold truth as a criterion. In other words, the requirement of truth cannot be justified, therefore the idea that knowledge is JTB cannot itself be knowledge.

And if we remove the requirement of truth, we are left with justified belief, and this does not properly represent what we request from knowledge. So Plato concludes The Theaetetus with the proposal that trying to understand knowledge with the preconceived notion that it is some form of JTB is actually misleading.

The two are admittedly modeled as points, which works if you consider say their centers of gravity or their most-forward point. But by your assertion, do you mean that the tortoise is never at these intermediate points, only, the regions between? — noAxioms

I mean that if the tortoise is moving it is never at a point. This is because time is continuously passing, therefore motion is continuous too. So the closest thing we could truthfully say is that it is passing a point. To be at a point would require a stoppage in time. There is no time when a moving thing is at a point because that would a stoppage of time, which is a matter of removing the thing from time. That's the point of Zeno's arrow paradox.

Sorry to find a nit in everything, even stuff irrelevant to the OP, but relativity theory doesn't say this. In the frame of Earth, Earth is stationary. There's noting invalid about this frame. — noAxioms

I didn't say it's not valid I said that it's not true. Obviously the earth is not stationary. So that frame in which the earth is stationary is not true, it's an arbitrary (untrue) assumption, made for some purpose.

Take the zero-point energy, for example. In relativity it corresponds to the cosmological constant (lambda term) or 'dark energy' of the Universe. Besides the fact that measurement for the 'dark energy' does not match the theoretical predictions for the zero-point (the cosmological constant problem), we here have grounds for challenging relativity, based on the lambda term, given we affirm the validity of quantum. — Nemo2124

I believe "zero-point energy" is the consequence of relativity type thinking. Since relativity denies absolute rest, anything which appears like it ought to be rest, or is assigned "rest" (rest frame etc.), cannot actually be rest, to be consistent with the principle of relativity. Therefore assigning "rest" to something is actually a matter of assigning some form of unknowable motion to it if we adhere to relativity. This manifests in the Heisenberg uncertainty principle.

The tortoise moves harmoniously even by infinitisimals, at the end, taking an eternity to reach the finishing line, but reaching it in the end (because of the summation of geometric series). — Nemo2124

That the "summation of geometric series" will bring one to "the end", is actually demonstrated to be false by the need to assume "zero-point energy". The zero point cannot ever actually be reached in this way, and the practise of the summation of geometric series', is just a rounding off which does not represent physical reality. Since there cannot be any correspondence between the artificial end and any possible real end, due to the relativity premise which dictates that there is no end, then the end produced by summation is simply fiction. It's just a convenient way to avoid the problems created by relativity type thinking, but since it's fiction it produces useless metaphysics.

This is the problem approached by. If the abstract (ideal) is not representative of true reality, we need to understand and respect how this difference may mislead us. In this case, the physical reality of zero-point energy is evidence that the boundary applied by abstract thinking is not consistent with physical reality. So the series summation reaches the boundary (zero), but this is not representative of physical reality, and we are left with something real, called zero-point energy. The physical reality of what is actually represented by that name "zero-point energy" cannot be understood by this way of thinking because it gets swallowed up into the uncertainty principle, as an aspect of reality which cannot be understood.

We need a starting point here. Do we first take relativity to be valid or the absolute quantisation of space-time? Does the Planck constant suggest that there is a real fabric to space-time at the vacuum level? What is the nature of this fabric? These are questions that start to arise when we have a starting point, that is the discretisation of a space-time. In other words relativity has to make itself compatiable to quantum theory and not vice-versa. We just have to accept that the tortoise wins. — Nemo2124

The problem with this proposal is that there is too much relativity already baked into the procedural methods of quantum physics. Our understanding of energy and how electromagnetic radiation relates to massive objects is relativity based. So it's not a matter of making relativity compatible with quantum theory, it's a matter of falsifying relativity and starting from whatever that falsification reveals. This requires the appropriate attitude, as falsification requires application (experimentation) designed for that purpose.

Given an eternity and the fact that the tortoise keeps moving, I think that it will eventually cross any line that is set at a finite distance in the race. — Nemo2124

It cannot, by the premises of the example.

Physical space is not "infinitely" divisible like abstract space. Like most, this paradox is merely apparent – in this case it's derived from confusing the physical and abstract. — 180 Proof

What would you say that "physical space" is made out of? The divisibility of anything is dependent on what the thing is composed of. If you assert that physical space is not infinitely divisible you need to justify this with some principles, say what space is composed of, and how this limits its capacity to be divided. We tend to think of space as nothing, but then it's just an abstraction, and infinitely divisible. But if it's not nothing, then what is it made of?

The ancient Greek atomists limited the capacity to divide physical substance by positing fundament particles, atoms. The atoms would be indivisible. But Aristotle demonstrated the logical problems with this perspective. Each atom would have to be the same because internal differences would provide for different ways of dividing. And if all atoms are the same, then the differences between different objects could only be a matter of quantity, unless we assume something else to allow for qualitative differences between things. This is why the dualism of matter and form was required.

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Sticking to the paradox, I don't think that Achilles can ever reach the tortoise, unless it reaches some sort of Planckian limit in distance and suddenly quantum leaps to become 'the winner'. That suggests that space-time is discretised, that you do reach a limit in physics that does not exist in mathematics. — Nemo2124

Maybe there are true, real limits within time and space, real quanta or discrete units of these, but use of the current way of modeling, which imposes an artificial limit or boundary, and uses calculus to show the approach to this limit, will leave us unable to find these real boundaries. And since relativity theory, which is the most common tool for physicists, assumes the fundamental premise that there is no such thing as absolute rest, modeling an object as reaching, or being at a fixed position in space, is inconsistent with relativity. Simply put, rest frames are imposed according to the purpose. By relativity theory, an object is always moving, and cannot actually be at a fixed position.

To be consistent then, if we employ relativity theory we cannot use the calculus which assumes a fixed position, the boundary or limit. If we quit using these artificially imposed limits, and model moving objects as truly continuous, instead of modeling them as approaching these fixed limits, then the issues and problems which emerge from employing principles of true continuity to the physical world, will reveal whether or not there are true boundaries to space and time. The point being that employing artificially (purposely) created boundaries, which do not correspond with true boundaries will just create confusion and unintelligibility, if we seek the true boundaries.

In the end, quantum leaps aside, although the tortoise moves at an imperceptibly and almost infinitely small pace, it still keeps moving and eventually will cross the line, given that there is no time limit. This seems to accord to what we perceive in reality, we are somewhat subordinated to nature's ultimatum. — Nemo2124

No, the tortoise will never cross the line if there is no time limit. Time will keep going forever, and the tortoise will always have more space to cover before it reaches the line. Therefore the tortoise will never cross the line. this is very similar to the way that Achilles will never reach the tortoise. The latter is a more complex presentation, the complexity designed to create more confusion when looking at the same problem.

Have they shιt all over Ukraine yet (again)? Reports a couple of months apart: — jorndoe

During the debate, prior to the election, Trump said that if he is elected, the war would be ended before he even takes office, because he knows Putin really really well.

I don't think the tortoise actually wins. In a similar way to the way that Achilles cannot catch up to the tortoise, the tortoise also cannot actually reach the finish line. To reach the finish line, the tortoise must first cross half the distance to it, then half the remaining distance, then half of the remaining distance again, and onward infinitely.

I think what this indicates is that this way of looking at movement, as proceeding from a start point to an end point, is somewhat incorrect. We ought to remove those points, those beginnings and ends, from the representation of the movement of the thing itself, and model the movement as moving past the designated points. Then we show Achilles as moving past the tortoise, and as moving past the finish line, instead of modeling the movement as ending at the specified point. I believe that this would resolve all such paradoxes.

To me, trial and error is a method of problem-solving, such that the solving of the problem is its entailed end. — javra

This would be one type of trial and error, to use it as a way of solving a specific problem. In the more general sense it is defined as "the process of experimenting with various methods of doing something until one finds the most successful". So it is a way of acting in which one is attempting to find "the most successful way", i.e. the best way. In this way, each attempt, each trial may solve the given problem, but we're looking for the best way to solve the problem.

Trial and error in no way overlaps with unintended, and hence accidental, discovery: if one, for example, accidentally discovers a valuable jewel underneath one’s sofa while cleaning one’s room, there was no trial and error involved in the process; on the other hand, trial and error, because it always seeks an end, is always purposeful, intentional, such that when the problem is solved by this approach, its so being solved is not an unintended accident. — javra

I see we really do disagree. Discovery by trial and error is an accidental discovery. That you can give an example of an accidental discovery which was not made by trial and error, does not indicate that trial and error does not produce accidental discoveries. If a person already knew what would qualify as the best way, they would not have to use trial and error. We cannot define what would constitute the best way, prior to the trial and error procedure, therefore the way which is found to be the best way, cannot be said to have been identified as the best way, prior to the procedure. So the thing found was not being looked for, and its discovery as "the best way", is accidental.

This is a matter of moving from the general to the particular. The general is "the best way". But the particular which is settled on, was not identified as the particular being looked for, only the general was being looked for. So that particular thing, as what fulfils "the best way", was found accidentally. In other words, we cannot go into a trial and error process with the idea that X constitutes success, because we do not know what will constitute success until we compare the trials. This is relevant to the point I made about how knowledge concerning the end prejudices a trial and error process, robbing it of objectivity.

on the other hand, trial and error, because it always seeks an end, is always purposeful, intentional, such that when the problem is solved by this approach, its so being solved is not an unintended accident. — javra

Of course the intention of the trial and error process is success, but that does not imply that when success is found, it was not found accidentally. The issue may be best illustrated this way. We can only try a finite number of ways. So if we try ways A,B,C,D, instead of ways W, X, Y, Z, and find that C is the best way, instead of finding that X is the best way, this difference is dependent on the random choice of the finite ways that we try, and it is therefore accidental. Any success found through a true trial and error process, is fundamentally an accidental success. This is due to the nature of choosing the trials. And if there is specific knowledge which prejudices the selection of trials, this is not a true trial and error process, but a process based in some prior knowledge about what constitutes the best way.

As to evolution being a trial and error process, I then find this to be a fully metaphorical application of the phrasing. Evolution is not a sentient being; and thereby cannot as process of itself intentionally problem-solve anything, much including via any trial and error means. More bluntly, what problem might evolution be intending to solve? This is not to then claim that evolution is not in large part a teleological process, but evolution is not the type of teleological process which applies to the intentioning of individual agents (and only to the latter can trying and failing and then trying again, this with a set goal in mind, apply). — javra

You are restricting your definition of "trial and error" to problem solving rather than allowing the more general sense of seeking the most successful way. If you allow the latter then you could consider the possibility that living beings are seeking the most successful way of living through the trial and error process we see as evolution.

In an Aristotelian model of things, “optimal eudemonia” (what you’ve termed “happiness”) is everybody’s ultimate end at all times – and not just for he who has agreed to uncover rocks for someone else. It will hence equally apply to he who wants the rocks uncovered for his own hidden purpose by the person who’s agreed to do so. And this Aristotelian conception of the ultimate end is only the most distal (distant) telos of an otherwise potentially innumerable quantity of teloi any person might be intending at any given time. And in so being, though one might get closer to it at certain times rather than others (when one is more at peace, or else joyful, for example), this ultimate telos of “optimal eudemonia which can only translate into a perfected eudemonia” is the most unreachable telos of all teloi out there. The most difficult, if at all possible, to actualize. It here drives, or else determines, all other teloi, this at all times, but it itself cannot be obtained for as long as any personal suffering occurs or is deemed to have the potential to occur. This includes some personal interpretation, granted, such as in what "suffering" signifies. But I still find it to be the only coherent way of understanding 'happiness as ultimate end'. — javra

It was your response to say that the person's end is to turn over the rocks. That would mean what the person wants and desires is to turn over rocks, so doing this would make the person happy. So clearly the person would be happy doing this, because doing anything else would interfere with what the person wants, and that is to turn over rocks. Therefore the person would be most happy turning over rocks.

Secondly, why did the person who’s agreed to turn over rocks so agree in this first place? — javra

That is the issue I got to later, about communication.

How's that relevant to what we are talking about, spatial expansion? If the distance between the object and the center of the earth is caused to change due to the effects of spatial expansion, this change is not included in the concept of energy. Therefore such a change in distance would not change the object's potential energy.

I don't see your point. Either the ball is at 2m or it is not. If it is falling it is not at 2m, it is moving. If it is at 2m then something is holding it there and a force is required to cause it to fall.

If it's distance changes due to the expansion of space, this change in distance is not included in the equations of the concept of energy, and so it is not considered to be "motion" as the term is applied in that concept.

I'm not sure about that. The potential energy between two objects *increases* with space. A ball 2m above the surface of the earth is said to have more potential energy than a ball 1m up. So perhaps it all adds up. — flannel jesus

I don't think so, because a ball at 2m will stay at 2m, as time passes, unless forced to change. However if space expands as time passes, the difference due to this expansion is not accounted for in the equations of energy. That is why a difference in distance, which is attributed to spatial expansion, is not classified as "motion".

I for one don't find reason to assume the observer is separate from the actor (here specifically as pertains to the act of choice making). — javra

The reason to assume a separation between actor and observer is that this separation is purposeful. The purpose is as I explained, it provides for a more objective trial and error process, by separating the judge who holds the principles for judgement (good), from the agent. This removes prejudice from the agent's choice of actions allowing that the agent will explore all possibilities, thus enabling true objective trial and error.

Do you agree that trial and error forms a significant part of a living being's activities, and that the process we know as evolution demonstrates a large scale trial and error process?

In the example you provide, on the other hand, I as the actor must for whatever (I uphold end-driven) reason first comply with your request if I am to at all act as you wish on your behalf. Once I so comply, then my actions will themselves all be end-driven - this not by your want to engage in trial and error actions whose end is unknown to me - but by my own then actively occurring want to successfully end up so "turning over all the rocks in a specific area". This in itself then being the end which teleologically drives, and thereby motivates, my actions.

So, at least in the example provided, I still find all activities to be end-driven and thereby purposeful. — javra

This is a good point to consider, and I think that the example is applicable. In the way you explained the example, you simply have a desire to turn over all the rocks, and that itself is your end. From my perspective that so-called end is just the means to a further end, to look for something which is assumed to be under one of them. As Aristotle pointed out in his analysis of ends and means, each specific end can be viewed as the means to a further end, and this produces an infinite regress if we do not designate an ultimate, final end, which he named as happiness. So this activity of turning over rocks is like your "happiness", you are fulfilling what you perceive as your ultimate end, you apprehend no reason for this act, or even doubt the possibility that there might be a further reason which you are unaware of, therefore you are satisfied in your acts, and you are "happy" fulfilling your desire.

However, like I explained, true understanding of "purpose" requires that we put the activity of the part into a larger context, and this means into a relation to other parts and the whole. So, in this respect, your understanding of your goal, the end which motivates you, is actually very deficient and incomplete. Your actions of turning over rocks, though this makes you very happy appearing to be the only thing desired, are completely meaningless, unless we put those actions into the context of the observer, and the judge who is judging them in relation to a further end. This larger context gives your actions meaning.

Now, the issue we need to consider is this relationship between you and I in the example. In this example, I am somehow able to set you about, in your motivated actions, which are actually carried out for the purpose of my goals, without you knowing that you are doing this for me, therefore a further end. So, I somehow communicate to you, what you must do, and motivate you to do it, for my purposes, without you even being aware of my existence as an agent myself, with intention.

Then we can apply this to the dream/awake relationship. We commonly believe that the dreamer is set free to go about the random process of dreaming, so that the dreamer would be like you, randomly turning over rocks, except given a wider parameter of activity, to dream up virtually anything. And, in this understanding, the dreamer is unaware of the conscious observer, who has set the dreamer to this task, so the dreamer does not realize that this is actually being done to facilitate a further end of the conscious mind.

So here's the key point. In my description, of the relationship between conscious awareness, and the dreaming unconscious, I've revealed that the common understanding is really a misunderstand, and we need to invert this relationship to understand what is actually the case. In reality, the unconscious is the true observer, who sets the consciousness to the task of performing random acts. And in sleep, the unconsciousness is processing the observations, allowing the conscious only glimpses of this process through dreams. This provides the consciousness a glimpse of the reality of the unconscious, but not enough for the consciousness to understand why it behaves as it does, and the true meaning in its activities.

As demonstrated by the example, there must be some relationship between the unconscious observer/judge, who sets the agent to work, in order for the consciousness to receive its marching orders from the unconscious, but this relation is kept to a minimum to maximize the objectivity of the trial and error process. So the consciousness receives different urges and motivations from the unconscious, having very little understanding of the true meaning of its actions, and why it is doing what it does.

Are you then suggesting that intentioning can occur in the complete absence of any intent? Such that X can consciously intend some outcome Z despite not being motivated by any intent/end - an intent/end which thereby equates to Z's successful actualization at some future point in time? — javra

I am suggesting that if we maintain a separation between means and end, i.e., the act and the desired result of the act, then X can consciously intend the act without being motivated by the end. Further, if we assume two distinct types of agency, one which communicates motivations to act, and the other which carries out the physical acts, then the agent which is motivated toward physical actions can consciously intend these actions without knowing the intended end of the actions. And this is not to say that there is no further end because in this scenario the agency which communicates the motivation to act is simply not revealing the further end, to the one which carries out the physical act.

But, again, I don't find reason to entertain what you've so far suggested. — javra

Do you agree that trial and error forms a significant part of the activity of life on earth, in a general way? If you agree that evolution is a process based in trial and error, then you might see the need to determine the nature of the trial and error process, and what principles are required to produce a true and objective trial and error process.

Neither of these, however, refute the purposiveness of each individual agency of a total mind concerned. — javra

The point was not to refute the purposefulness of individual agencies, but to question how we identify and locate the purpose or intention. If there is a group of agencies which work together, in a united way, it is not necessary that any one of them knows "the thing intended" by its actions. The goal or end to the agent's actions might be something completely outside the actions of the agent. This is a matter of how we identify the purpose of an action, by placing the action within a larger context. What gives the action its purpose is the larger context, so that the purpose of an agent's actions are not necessarily something which is derived from the agent itself. Therefore we cannot accurately say that the agent is trying to accomplish something.

Accordingly, we cannot accurately describe acts of intentional agency as acts motivated toward accomplishing something. And, an agent may act in a completely accidental way, not intending to accomplish anything. This means that we cannot exclude the possibility that an act of agency may be fundamentally accidental.

As to trial and error processes, I can so far only disagree with such being purposeless. — javra

I agree that it is impossible for an act of trial and error to be purposeless, that would be contrary to the meaning, therefore self-contradictory. The point is that the purpose may be something completely independent of the agent making the trial and error act. If we assume that the observer in the trial and error act is separate from the acter, this becomes very evident.

Suppose I assign to you the task of turning over all the rocks in a specific area, because I am looking for something underneath one. You, the acter only know the specified act, without any knowledge of what constitutes success or failure, only I, the observer, knows. We can take what that analogy demonstrates, further, and assume an agent which has been endowed with the capacity to act "freely", in any way possible, instead of being assigned a specific task. This free agent simply acts randomly, without any goals or intentions, and like the example of you turning over rocks while I observe, it has no specific idea, of the "intention" of its acts, inherent within itself, but it is being observed, and its actions are being judged by the observer in relation to some principles of success and failure.

The trial and error actions of the agent in this scenario, are from the perspective of the observer, very purposeful. But from the perspective of the agent there is absolutely no purpose for its actions. If the agent allows any sort of purpose to direct its actions then it is not fulfilling its true purpose, as assigned by the observer, and the trial and error experiment would be corrupted.

What I propose, is that to have a truly objective trial and error process, the purpose must be separated from the agent in this way. If the agent grasps the intention in any way, this would contaminate the trial and error process by guiding the agent's actions in a subjective way.

So doing would then be evolutionarily unfit. And so it would not then be as common an activity in lifeforms as it currently is. On the other hand, whenever we as conscious humans engage in trial and error processes it is (as far as I know) always with a purpose in mind. — javra

This is a correct account of trial and error. However, there is another factor to consider. Since error is highly possible, and it could be injurious or even fatal to the acting agent, it is beneficial to the one proceeding in a trial and error process, to have someone else carry out the actions, and simply observe the other. So when we separate the agent from the observer in this way, trial and error takes on a completely different appearance. There is a fundamental form of deception which the observer must impose on the agent, to withhold information from the agent, concerning the intent of the agent's actions. True objective trial and error requires a separation between agent and observer such that the agent does not know the intentions of the observer.

While I grant that our unconscious doings might at times seem random to us, I can so far find no reason to entertain that any intention-devoid agency can occur. I acknowledge the possible reality of randomness in relation to agency at large, but will deem it to be the outcome of discordant agencies, each intention-endowed, whose interactions results in outcomes unintended by any. This be the agencies individual humans or else the individual agencies of a singular total human mind. — javra

What I am suggesting is that randomness is a necessary aspect of true trial and error. The higher the degree of randomness there is in the actions of the agent, the higher the quality of the trial and error process. This is due to the nature of the trial and error process. To be a true trial and error process, no foreknowledge (constituting prejudice) can be assumed. Since no foreknowledge can be assumed, then there can be no relevant guidance provided to the agent.

Further, this implies that "intention-endowed" actions are not necessarily guided in any particular way. That is due to the fundamental deception described above, which forms the basis for true objective trial and error. The separation between the observer and the agent, which allows for the occurrence of true trial and error, also implies that the agents act with no apprehension of the intention. And although the agents are "intention-endowed" they are not guided or directed in their action by that intention, being intentionally deprived of that information by the fundamental deception.

Perhaps it does have an effect on the void. Space expands and light loses energy as it travels through expanding space. Maybe space expands proportionally to the energy lost to it — flannel jesus

That's similar to what I think as well. But do you see what this implies about the concept of energy? In application the concept of energy is applied to movements within a non-expanding space. However, the conception is deficient because it does not account for the true expansion of space. Then some energy must be said to get swallowed up by space, to account for this deficiency in the conception.

Of course this is he same as the amount of energy being constant while the amount of energy available for work decreases over time. — Banno

This demonstrates the contradiction I mentioned. Energy is defined as "the capacity to do work". To assume that there is energy within a closed system which is not available to do work, is simple contradiction.

The truth is that the energy would actually be lost to the system. But to create the appearance that the law of conservation is true, the lost energy is said to still exist somehow, but in a form in which it cannot do any work. Of course that's nonsense, because that is just saying that it's energy which exists, but is in no way detectable as energy. So it's energy which does not fulfill the criteria of "energy". Hmm, energy which is not energy, an interesting concept.

What about friction, heat loss, things like that? When a machine loses energy, it doesn't just lose it into the void, it gets transferred to other things in its immediate environment. — flannel jesus

Never has 100% of the energy been all accounted for. You can speculate about where it all goes, but inevitably we have to admit that some simply gets lost "into the void". This poses the question of what does the void consist of, which allows it to swallow up energy without that energy having an effect on the void.

Can you think of a different reason why perpetual motion machines would be impossible? — flannel jesus

No I can't. The only viable reason for the impossibility of perpetual motion is that in reality energy is not conserved as time passes. This fact is folded into the concept of entropy.

Whereas the conservation laws are metaphysical and true and helpful, determinism is metaphysical and potentially false and not helpful. — Banno

Conservation laws are very helpful in many applications. But if we do not respect the fact that they are ideals rather than truths, they are metaphysically misleading. As ideals, we can compare them to other ideals like "the circle". The irrational nature of pi (Happy Pi Day everybody!) is indicative of the fictitious nature of the perfect "ideal" circle.

Aristotle addressed eternal circular motion in his discussion of the assumed divine, eternal orbits of the heavenly bodies. He showed how this ideal, eternal circular motion is logically possible. If the moving thing adheres to a perfect circle, there can be no possible beginning or ending point to that motion. Therefore eternal circular motion is logical possible, as an assumed ideal. However, he claimed that the thing moving in the eternal circular motion must be composed of matter, and was therefore generated, and will corrupt. In this way he demonstrated that real material existence does not correspond with the ideal. The ideal is false.

From this, we can see that the application in which the ideal is the most useful is when we examine how the actual physical reality varies from the ideal. The discrepancies from the ideal, when studied, reveal the true nature of the thing modeled by the ideal.

Having read your entire post, do you then find it fair for me to characterize the duality you are addressing as a duality between an illusory conscious I-ness and a real somnio-conscious I-ness? And if it is a fair interpretation, that you then interpret the real somio-conscious I-ness to occur while the waking conscious I-ness is also occurring – only that the former is unconsciously occurring relative to the latter? Or is this not quite right? If it’s not correct, then I still don’t quite understand what do you intend to express by “duality” of I-ness. — javra

I think that this is exactly what I meant to express, so you understand well.

To first define “agent”, to me it is any (at least relatively unified) identity which holds agency. In turn, also in keeping with common place notions, “agency” to me is the ability to accomplish (more explicitly to accomplish some end) and hence to do or undergo something - thereby meaning “the capacity, condition, or state of exerting power (“power” here in the strict sense of “ability to do or undergo something”) and, therefore, the capacity, condition, or state of engaging in actions (i.e. in this context, of intentionally doing things)”. — javra

I believe that the qualification of "to accomplish some end" is too restrictive to make a proper definition of "agent" or "agency". It implies that the agent must have some knowledge of what it is doing, before it acts, and acts toward accomplishing something. This would exclude the possibility of an agent which simply does random acts. Further, when something exerts power, in an agential way, I don't believe it is necessary that the thing exerting power must be "intentionally doing things", in the common sense of "intentionally".

I can exemplify this problem in the following way. When a human being, as an agent, acts, we commonly distinguish between effects which are intentional, and effects which are unintentional, the latter being commonly known as accidents. And, I think it is conceivable that there could be an agent which acts, in a trial and error sort of way, a way which we could say is completely accidental, without having any intentional end.

This way of looking at things requires an analysis of the separation between the means and the end. The end is commonly known as "the thing intended", and the means is "the act itself", which is intended to bring about the end. I think we need to consider the possibility of an agent which has as its intention, simply to act. This would mean that in this case the means and the end are one and the same, but there is absolutely no specificity to restrict the act (the intent is to act freely). The agent simply has as its intention, to act, and this allows that the agent acts randomly.

This is why I talk about the separation between the observer and the agent, because this perspective allows for a true model of trial and error, where "the thing intended" is unknown to the agent acting. The agent then acts randomly, without any knowledge of what the effects of its acts might be, and the observer notes the effects. But this produces a very pronounced problem, and that concerns the nature of judgement. If the agent acts, and the observer observes, and we are modeling trial and error, then we need a judge to pass judgement as to success or failure. The need to pass judgement is the reason why we always include "the thing intended", "the end" in our models of agency.

But as Plato explains in "The Republic", the good, as the thing intended, cannot be said to be a feature of knowledge. "The good" itself always escapes the epistemic constraints as to what constitutes "knowledge". This puts the judge in a very difficult position. The judge must assume that there is an end, speculate as to its nature, and pass judgement on the act, based on a comparison between observation and an assumed end which does not obtain the status of known as the end.

In these latter contexts, then, the addressed agent is what William James terms the pure ego (the knower of one’s own total self) – rather than the empirical ego (the total self which is known). — javra

So these two roughly correspond with what I described as the agent, (pure ego), and the observer (empirical ego). My representation has the empirical ego as the knower, and the pure ego as the random acter. The issue is the unity of the two, which is the existence of knowledge, judgement. In my representation, the pure ego would have no knowledge inherent to it, the empirical ego has knowledge in the form of observational memory, but no real principles by which the unity, "the total self" is actually known. This is due to a lack of understanding as to why (the end, or good for which) the pure ego acts. So from the perspective of the empirical ego, the knowing self, the pure ego may just as well be acting in a completely random way, because the good, or end for which it acts is completely hidden.

Having roughly addressed what I reference by the term “agent” (again, that which holds agency as previously defined), I’ll again affirm that I interpret a total human (or else relatively developed; e.g. birds, mammals, etc.) mind to be an almost literal commonwealth of agencies – which are sometimes partly discordant and sometimes fully unified in at the very least that which they intend as agencies. It most certainly won’t sound right due to the connotations which we’ve been habituated to understand by the term “agent” (this being one reason why I find the need for new terminology to address this in my own philosophical endeavors) but, when looking at the definition of “agent” that I previously provided, one could then appraise each and every distinct agency of a total mind to be a distinct – though transiently occurring – agent, replete with its own pure ego of sorts that apprehends and reacts to at least certain phenomena. — javra

You're right, that doesn't seem right to me. You break down the animal, or creature into a multitude of "agencies". By your definition of "agent", an agent works to accomplish something. This means it must have a goal, or end in mind which it is tasking toward. So we cannot divide the animal into distinct agencies because the distinct parts don't really work toward accomplishing anything specific, and known to them. They just act in a way which we describe as purposeful, and we say that they have a function. But that's just us, projecting our perspective on to them, and we cannot really say that there is any specific thing intended, as the goal or end, by those distinct agencies.

This is the difficulty which arises from your definition, which I explained above. To say that a thing has a purpose or function is to place its activity into a larger context, the activity as means, is related to the end, which is a distinctly larger context, a sort of whole. So when a bunch of agents act together toward a common end, we set the end as a property of the collective, making the collective a whole by virtue of having that common end. However, the parts, the individual and distinct agents, may or may not have an individual goal or end which they apprehend as a unique and specific goal which one works toward.

In a collective of people for example, each works toward one's own end apprehended by that person, without necessarily knowing the larger whole of the collective. Then in the group of agencies within a living body, we assign a purpose or function to each part, though the part does not know its own purpose and act toward accomplishing it. And, we do not necessarily know the purpose of the whole by which we assign purpose to the parts, as this may be speculative. That is because we would then have to put the individual living being into the context of a larger whole, the human community, or life in general, to be able to assign to it a specific purpose. But when we take this larger context we lose track of exactly what the individual part's purpose might be, and the person's actions start to look more and more like random choices.

Aye, it can indeed get very complex, agreed. To my mind at least, consciousness and unconsciousness are at all times interconnected, hence never in any way divided, and perpetually influence each other via top-down processes (formal causation in Aristotelian terms) and bottom-up processes (material causation in Aristotelian terms (which is not to be confused with what we today construe to be “mater”, as I so far believe you very well know [Aristotle, for example, gives the example of letters being the material cause of syllables (for syllable are made up of letters) or else the example of parts (say the ideas from which a paradigm is constituted) being the material cause of the whole (here, the paradigm of, say, biological evolution itself]). — javra

So this relates back to the way we make judgements. We can look at bottom-up causation as unconscious, random acts, because we do not fit them into a larger whole, or we can look at them as having a purpose within a larger whole, assume the larger whole to be the conscious whole, and claim that this perspective is top-down. Of course we see purpose in the acts, so we are inclined to judge the the top-down perspective. However, as explained above, the larger purpose remains elusive, and cannot be identified in this way.

This forces a second look at the situation. What I am arguing, is that when we take a good, true look, we see that the conscious is just a small part of the larger whole living being, which includes the unconscious. And, the unconscious is really a much larger part, and more representative of the larger whole. This forces us to invert our perspective. The true top-down causation is from the unconscious to the conscious, while the causation of the conscious, as a small part of the larger whole, is actually a bottom up causation, the small part relative to the larger whole.

Ok. No one seems to have noticed this ground-breaking revelation. — Banno

Let's consider the obvious. it's an extremely useful principle. And, the truth or falsity of useful principles is generally not relevant to those who use them. Furthermore, we all know that it is obviously false, and that's why we know that perpetual motion machines are impossible. The totality of the energy involved in any activity is never conserved, there is always some lost and this is accounted for by the second law of thermodynamics. So it's not a ground-breaking revelation, that the law of conservation of energy is false, everyone already knows that this law is false. However, hardly anyone really cares about its falsity, because the principle is so useful.

Conservation of energy is neither falsifiable nor provable, and so not empirical, and yet still a part of physics. — Banno

This is blatant bull shit. Conservation of energy has been completely falsified. It has been experimentally demonstrated over and over again, to be impossible that all of the energy in any activity is conserved. Some energy is always lost, hence the second law of thermodynamics, and the concept of "entropy". The concept of entropy however is extremely deceptive, because it insinuates that "energy" (defined as the capacity to do work) could exist in a form in which it is incapable of doing work.

Therefore the inconsistency between observed reality, and the law of conservation is accounted for by that contradiction. It is assumed that there is some form of energy (the capacity to do work) which does not have the capacity to do work. And all that energy which is lost, contrary to the conservation law, is simply assumed to exist somehow in this contradictory form.

For you, are conservation laws facts?

You can't prove that energy is conserved in every case, since not every case is available for you to check. Nor can you disprove it - if you came across a perpetual motion machine that seemed to be breaking the conservation law, you might hypothesis that it is somehow drawing energy frome elswhere in the universe...

SO, is conservation of energy a fact, or a bit of metaphysics?
an hour ago — Banno

Energy is never conserved. That is why we cannot have a perpetual motion machine, and why there is a need for the second law of thermodynamics. Simply put, the law of conservation of energy is false, because energy is always lost. "Conservation of energy" is a useful principle, but it is disproven with every action at every moment of passing time. Nothing could be more strongly proven to be false, than the law of conservation of energy.

OK. I did however clearly express "the somnio-conscious 'I'". I don't find how consciousness and somnio-consciousness can co-occur to thereby present a duality of I's. I, for example, can still vividly recall certain dreams and nightmares I've had decades ago: to me, I am the same I I was in these dreams and nightmares as a first-person point of view (with differences in my empirical ego, contexts, etc., of course): same first-person perspective regarding otherness, same affinities and aversions, etc. Hence, to me, a continuity rather than a duality of I-ness. — javra

The issue of duality is not a matter of how the conscious I relates to its conscious experience, and how the conscious I remembers a dream. Those ar both part of the wakened experience. It is a duality between the way that the conscious I remembers the dream, and the way that the somnio-conscious I exists, as itself, in the dream.

If we insist that the only true "I" is the conscious I, then we need to account for the appearance of a somnio-conscious I in the dreamworld. We might say that the I in the dream is just an illusion, as we say about the entire dream itself, but as I explained in the other post, it's more logical to designate the I in the dream as the true I, and the conscious I as really the illusion. This is because we cannot maintain two completely distinct I's, and we must designate the I which underlies all our experience, both sleeping and awake, as the true I. As a result, we need to conclude that the conscious I which separates itself from the somnio-conscious I, with thoughts like "that was just a dream", is actually producing an illusion that it is the true I, when in reality the deeper I which is the somnio-conscious I is the true I.

I can see what you mean, but I myself don't subscribe to the unconscious mind being an agent (a unified agency). Again, I find reason to believe that the unconscious mind is constituted of a plurality of sometimes discordant agencies, themselves always changing. As one example, when awake and experiencing a pang of envy one can at the same time likewise experience one's conscience influencing one against becoming envious oneself: here there will then be two distinct agencies that are antagonistic to each other, each emerging from one's unconsciousness, each attempting to influence one's future course of action or of personal being. This as one example of how the unconscious mind can well consist of a plurality of discordant agencies. — javra

Don't you consider the living being itself, as a unified body, with all the organs, heart, lungs, brain, etc., working together in a unified way, to be itself "an agent". If all the parts of the body act together in a unified way, and the body itself acts in a way which can be said to be the act of an agent, shouldn't we conclude that even if the acts of that body are unconscious acts (dreaming for example) they are the acts of "an agent", referring to unified agency.

That the unconscious can consist of discordant agencies does not need to be argued, it is clearly evident from the fact that the consciousness sets itself apart from the unconscious, and claims itself to be the true I, thereby suppressing the feelings and images (dreams) of the unconscious, designating them as not rational and not real. Therefore features of discordance are very real, and we do not adequately understand the reasons for them. The argument which Plato mounted against the theory that the soul is a harmony deals with this issue. If the soul is a harmony then any degree of discordance would negate the harmony leaving the being lifeless. The conclusion was that the soul is more like the cause of harmony, and discordance accounts for illness, as the soul is less than perfect in its attempts to create and maintain the harmony which are the organized parts.

I'm not intending to engage in debates about this. What you here say indeed reminds me well enough of many a Hindu interpretation of atman, "witness consciousness". Yet, myself, I'll heavily lean toward this same consciousness being that which actively judges which alternative is optimally beneficial and should be manifested - this at expense of all other alternatives, i.e. of all other possible courses of action or of manifestation which then become rejected - and thereby chooses. In my own understanding, then, the agent (the conscious mind) always holds responsibility for the choices it itself makes, this in accord to its own judgments. — javra

This leads directly toward the complexity you mentioned. I agree that the conscious mind looks at evidence, ideas, principles, and actually makes judgements. And this, the act of making a judgement, is a sort of act. There is a problem of complexity though, which Plato brought up in his arguments against sophistry, a problem which Augustine much more thoroughly analyzed. In his attack on the sophistic principle that virtue is knowledge, consequently the idea that virtue can be taught, as some sophists claimed, Plato demonstrated that a person can make a rational knowledgeable judgement as to what is good, yet still act in a contrary way. This indicates that the rational conscious mind does not have "the final say". The rational judgement of the conscious mind is not the actual cause of an individual's actions, as is demonstrated by a propensity of some people to act contrary to their conscious judgements.

This is partly the reason why Augustine divided the mind into three parts, memory, reason, and will. And as Aquinas later pointed out, "will" must ultimately be designated as free, even from reasoned judgement, to account for this reality that people act contrary to their better judgement. This is consist with what I present above, that the conscious rational I is not the true "I" of agency. The conscious I deceives itself into believing itself to be the true I by not properly understanding the real evidence and truth that it is just an illusory I created by the true underlying unconscious I. That the conscious I moves toward contradicting the true I, and negating it as unreal, is an indication of discordance, illness.

physics has come a long way since newton. Banno is most probably thinking about QM when he says that. — flannel jesus

So that's the reason for my question. Do you think that QM physics has found a loop hole to avoid Newton's deterministic first law of motion? If the mass of a body (object) is reducible to energy by the famous equation E=MC2, and the "energy" of that equation may be represented as a field of potential energy, then the actual temporal continuity of a body (object), may be replaced with, and represented as the body's potential. This appears to be a way in which the deterministic necessity of Newton's first law of motion can be avoided.

Instead of "a body must continue moving as it has in the past, unless acted upon by a force", we now appear to have "a body's motion is the result of its potential to be moved". A resting body then is simply a sort of 'force field' in a state of equilibrium with other force fields in its environment, the 'force field' representing both the potential to be moved and the potential to move others. Since this is a representation of the potential for bodily movement, no specific bodily movement is actually required for that representation, therefore the necessity of bodily movement described by Newton may be removed from the representation.

Indeed, the presumption that physics is deterministic is almost certainly mistaken. — Banno

If Newton's first law of motion is a feature of physics, then physics certainly is deterministic. So are you suggesting that modern physics, by working with the concept of energy rather than the concept of moving objects, has found a loophole enabling the violation of Newton's first law?

Thus interpreted, for various reasons (some of which I'll try to specify), I don't interpret the unconscious mind as having its own non-manifold unity of a first-person point of view; in other words, its own "I". — javra

Well, I guess I misunderstood you then. But you did say:

I personally believe that in dreams the somio-conscious "I" is constituted of a lesser quantity of yet unconscious awareness-endowed agencies, a sleeping "I" which then interacts with fully unconscious agencies via imaginary phenomena that are mostly intended by these unconscious agencies of mind. — javra

That is what led me to think you were proposing a duality of I's.

I take it that here and what follows you found what is real based on that which is permanent rather than transient. But then I don't find reason to presume that the agencies of awareness of the unconscious mind are themselves in any way permanent either — javra

The unconscious agent can be known to be permanent, because it is there all the time, as the cause of dreams in sleep, and as the cause of the pangs you talked about, along with other emotions, when the person is awake.

If the One ontically is a fixed and unmovalbe end of being, and tf the grand telos to being is therefore to eventually become one with the One, then the evolution of consciousness will be derived from this premise to be a stepping stone toward this very finale. Of course things could get far more complex, but, in short, consciousness can be viewed as a manifestation of a cosmic will toward unity of being. And it's only in this latter type of perspective that I can find any meaningful explanation for consciousness's occurrence and purpose. — javra

I don't think we can draw this conclusion validly. Evolution, and life in general consists of a lot of trial and error. The errors are a sort of dead end process which is not consistent with success. So if we assume that there is an ultimate goal or purpose, we cannot automatically conclude that the way of being which is current is necessarily conducive to the ultimate end. It could be an erroneous 'dead end' way. This lack of necessity, which is involved with teleological relations in general, makes teleology very difficult.

OK, that all briefly outlined, we as consciousnesses do not create the alternatives which we as consciousnesses are aware of. These competing alternatives for what will be are all (at least typically) brought about by our unconscious portions of mind. My further interpretation is that our unconscious mind comes to an uncertainty as to how to travel onward and, so, presents to us as a conscious awareness these alternative courses. In essence, our unconscious volition is no longer unified but fragments into different volitions regarding what should be done - each alternative being in effect what a fragment of the unconscious believes to be the optimal path. We as conscious awareness then vote on which path to take, and our unconscious (typically) then accepts our vote as a determination of which alternative is to be pursued at expense of all others which then become denied. This is (or at least nicely conforms with) the terminology of Romanian Christian Orthodoxy wherein free will is termed "liber arbitru", the free arbiter - such that we as conscious awareness, as the "I", are the free arbiter. — javra

I think, perhaps that the unconscious has actually created the consciousness (through evolution), to help it deal with this uncertainty which you say that it experiences. I think that the conscious I is like a second I, a completely different perspective which the unconscious has created in order to give it another way of looking at things. The essence of this way of looking at things is "the point of view" which you described.

The point of view is the observer, the conscious mind is primarily an observer. The true agent of creativity, and activity in general, is the unconscious. However, the mode of agency of the unconscious is principally trial and error. And, without an observational perspective there is no way to discern failure from success in any particular activities. The point of view is required for judgement. The observational perspective is based in a complex memory capable of taking in all sorts of happenings internal and external. This observational perspective, point of view, or consciousness, has been created to provide what is required to make judgements concerning failure and success.

At any rate, whenever we choose between alternatives, this with or without free will, we necessarily interact with the disparate volitions of our unconscious mind so as to resolved disagreements therein. (Yes, sometimes ultimatums and the like are presented to us from without, but even then we only become aware of, ultimately, what our own unconscious mind makes available to us.) — javra

This supports my proposal that the conscious mind is an observer only. It does not even provide options for judgement, it only observes them, memorizes them, etc.. What actually resolves disagreement within oneself? The conscious mind provides all sorts of information, to facilitate judgement, but what part of the person is actually responsible for judgement?

For example, I awaken from a dream, and after a brief moment of reflection I make the judgement, that was just a dream. Prior to this the dream was judged (in some way) as reality. So my conscious mind has created a sort of narrative, a history, and as soon as I awaken I reflect briefly on these memories, and assure myself it was just a dream. I suggest that it is not the conscious mind which makes this judgement, because it doesn't even need that judgement. The conscious mind was never a part of the dream, and when I wake up not from a dream I have no question of whether this is reality or not. The conscious does not judge whether what it experiences is reality. So in actuality, the unconscious was in the dream, and it gets reassured by the consciousness that it was just a dream, and it makes the judgement that it was just a dream.

1) Free will as a concept arose as a response to the theodicy. AFAIK this is just true. As a concept it was never meant to make sense of the human on its own terms, it was meant to make sense of our relationship with god and the world's evil. — fdrake

I don't agree with this. The fundamentals of the modern concept of free will were developed by St Augustine, from principles derived from Plato and Aristotle. The basic premise is that a person chooses what is apprehended by that person as good, whether or not that good is consistent with the true good in the mind of the divinity. The problem Augustine grappled with was to make this understanding of the human being's freedom of choice, compatible with the idea of God.

So it's not that "free will" is an attempt to make sense of our relationship with God, but rather the contrary. The reality of free will tends to make God incomprehensible. And there is a number of ways that this is demonstrated. For instance, if God is omnibenevolent, why does He allow human beings to choose evil? If God is omnipotent, then He must know what a person will chose prior to the person making the choice, making that person's choice predetermined. These are the types of problems which Augustine had to deal with in his attempt to make the understanding of human choice, as derived from Plato and Aristotle, consistent with the idea of God.

This view of decision is inimicably Christian. The concept of will must be inherently unconstrained so that the horrible crap in the world can be our fault. That's what it's for. Free will gives humanity legislative authority over our own evils. — fdrake

I don't think you understand what you quoted. Notice: "Nevertheless the order of justice belongs to the order of the universe; and this requires that penalty should be dealt out to sinners. And so God is the author of the evil which is penalty..."

Yes, we are to blame for our own bad choices, but obviously it's God, not us, who has legislative authority over our evils. If we had authority over ourselves, we would never punish ourselves, always seeing what we choose, as good. And so the difficulty of making "free will" compatible with "God".

To conjoin this with what I was previously mentioning, my own interpretation is that dreaming is a form of sheer imagining, only that in dreams the unconscious mind agentially determines most of what is being imagined, this rather than the conscious mind's volition as is typically the case when we are awake and willfully imagine things (things which in common speech are said to be seen by us with the mind's eye). When we willfully imagine a house while awake, we do it with a conscious intention. I personally believe that in dreams the somio-conscious "I" is constituted of a lesser quantity of yet unconscious awareness-endowed agencies, a sleeping "I" which then interacts with fully unconscious agencies via imaginary phenomena that are mostly intended by these unconscious agencies of mind. In contrast, a typical awake "I" would then be a non-manifold unity of agential awareness which is itself constituted from far more otherwise unconscious agencies of mind. It gets difficult in succinctly explain but it does coherently tie in with the view I presented to Patterner here - this regarding how the conscious mind is a convergence of certain aspects of the otherwise unconscious mind. — javra

What occurs to me, is that you have effectively divided the mind into two distinct sources of agency, the conscious I and the unconscious I. I take this as two distinct I's. And this is compatible with Plato's mind/body dualism, if the unconscious I is the source of bodily desires. Plato describes a thirsty man as being driven by the bodily (unconscious) desire to drink, but the rational (conscious) mind overrules this desire, knowing that the water is not fit for consumption. So there are two competing I's, as described by the op, the bodily I which is fully active in sleep, and the conscious I which is active when awake.

Plato posits a medium between the body (unconscious) and the mind (conscious), which he describes as passion, spirit, or emotion. In his description, in waking life, the ill-tempered person has the bodily (unconscious) desires to rule over the rational (conscious) mind through the means of the passions, while the virtuous person uses the rational (conscious) mind to rule over the bodily (unconscious) desires through the means of the passions. I assume that what you call "agencies of mind" is analogous with Plato's medium, the "passions". These are the emotive forces which produce what the mind creates. Notice that in Plato's description these so-called agencies are the same agencies operating in two different directions. This is the commonly made distinction between top-down and bottom-up.

Maybe tangential, but to me it also accounts for the how and why of the waking "I" dissolving into non-occurrence when falling asleep and then re-manifesting as a somnio-consciousness when we dream: Basically, the waking "I" dissolves, or if one prefers fragments, into its constituent unconscious agencies which are otherwise unified, and thereby transiently vanishes; then, in dreams, the sleeping "I" reemerges but in what most often is a qualitatively lesser form; upon awakening, the waking "I" then is reunited from its constituent unconscious aspects. Because of this the waking "I" can sometimes remember what the sleeping "I" experienced during dreams, but the sleeping "I" most always doesn't have memories of waking "I"'s experiences. — javra

I really think that we must look at these as two distinct I's. These are both sources of agency, each with its own sense of self, or "I", and also very much incompatible and inconsistent with each other. So, the question is what happens to the conscious I when you say that it "dissolves", when the person falls asleep. All the agencies remain, yet they are no longer united and directed by the conscious self, they are released into the power of the subconscious I.

This implies that the conscious I is not the real I. It dissolves, and disappears for extended periods of time. That presents a further, very perplexing problem. What is the purpose of the conscious I? The conscious I must itself be a creation of the unconscious I, yet the conscious I is opposed to, and resists the inclinations of the unconscious I, designating the imaginary dreaming activities of the unconscious as not real, when in reality the entire conscious I is itself not the real I. Why has the true (unconscious) I created an elaborate consciousness which understands itself as "I", and actually deceives itself into believing itself to be the real I, thereby suppressing the true (unconscious) I and only allowing it to reign at night? It's as if the true (unconscious) I knows itself to be deficient in its capacity to act, so much so that it creates a false (conscious) I, which lives in an illusory world, its own dream, which is supposed to be the real world, where it has causal power to exercise free will, when it's really only the true (unconscious) I which has an power to exercise free will in the world. And, the unconscious I recognizes that power to be extremely deficient.

Want to draw attention to this typically being so only upon our awakening. When we are experiencing the dream first hand, we don't typically at that juncture hold an awareness of the dream being irrational. It merely is; and we find ourselves doing what we do in it.

It could be the case that the reasoning of most dreams is fully metaphorical with meanings understood by at least certain aspects of our unconscious mind but not by our awakened state of rationality. This, for one example, as the surrealists of a century past more or less maintained. — javra

Now we have to question directly, the rationality of the awakened self. The awakened self self-designates itself as the real self, with the real experience, when the sleeping, unconscious self is actually the true self. The awakened self justifies this self-designation through reference to rationality, but its entire logical structure is, at its base, a creation of the unconscious self, and it is essentially a self-deceiving structure created by the unconscious, designed specifically to create a false illusory self. Since the entire conscious self is a self-deceiving structure, created by the true unconscious self, for that very purpose of self-deception, then the validity of all its logic and so-called rationality is called into question as part of that elaborate scheme of self-deception.

Most definitely. The visual appearance of an imagined or daydreamed house, for example. Imaginings and daydreams are typically under the full sway of conscious volition, but in cases of hallucination, for a different example, a person can see a hallucinated house - difference from the former being that here the unconscious mind controls the imagining without any sway from consciousness's volition. Such that in more extreme mental disorders the consciousness will presume the hallucination to in fact be an integral aspect of the external world. And everthing just stated can readily apply to sensory experiences other than that of vision (smell, taste, touch, or sounds (such as that of hearing voices)). — javra

We can look at hallucinations as a breaking down of the self-deception. Notice, that the structure of self-deception which creates the conscious I, is so elaborate, and delicately balanced, that just a slight chemical imbalance, either from drugs or mental illness destabilizes it. These situations undermine that self-deception which constitutes the conscious I, and the person is thrust back toward supporting oneself on the real I, the unconscious, which is totally inconsistent with the created self-deceptive conscious I.

To add to this muddle of views and information - and as much as materialists will snide and scoff at this - there also are notions such as that of Jung's collective unconscious. When entertaining such notions, not only can one obtain things such as meaningful synchronicities, but it can also allow for the possibility that at least some dreams in at least some people are influenced by the collective unconscious.

Anecdotal but true: one of my grandmas repeatedly had premonitions via her vivid dreams. Hard to explain even one of them in succinct manners, but the point is she would inform us of what will be, and it would then occur as she predicted from her interpretation of here dreams. One can question or deny the verity of this, but for me, who grew up with her, to claim that all her dreams and predictions were mere coincidence would verge on absurdity.

Maybe this is too far off topic. But I did want to draw attention to the possibility that some dreams might be more than merely the 'irrational activities of one's own physical and fully autonomous brain,' or some such. — javra

I believe, that once we break down the entire conscious experience as an exercise in self-deception, we have almost nothing to start on as a solid, concrete foundation for rationality. This allows for virtually any possibility as the true reality. I would think that the only true approach to reality is to determine the fundamental elements out of which the illusion of the conscious self is produced. This would be found in the activity of dreaming. The entire conscious I, and the supposed reality of being awake, is like an elaborate dream, which has produced its own rules of coherency allowing for its persistence.

Thanks for clearing that up ENOAH. Now I understand. However, I prefer to think of the real being as a unity of the two, the living body, and the "I" which thinks and has feelings. It may be the case that it is more difficult and complicated to conceive of the living being as a unity of two completely different aspects, but I think it's the only realistic way.

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. — ENOAH

I don't see how you reduce the "I" to the body. In my dreams I do things that a body could not do, randomly jump from one location or situation to another. That "I" in my dreams cannot be a body. So why do you insist that the I is a body?

If you assert that both the waking and sleeping I are the very same I, then you have to allow the reality of both. The I in the dreams is not constrained by the limitations of the body. You might argue that this is simply imaginative creativity, but the very essence of creativity is that it allows us to extend ourselves beyond the limitations of our bodies. Therefore "I" is something more than just my body.

1. Dream X is caused by physical event Y. (the full-bladder explanation)
2. Physical event Y is caused by dream X. (the kicking explanation)
3. Neither dream X nor event Y can be said to cause the other. The relation between X and Y is not a causal one, but rather one of supervenience or grounding.

As is now apparent, this is a little microcosm of the whole mental-causation problem. But I offer it because it’s curiously amenable to analysis, and makes me wonder whether any sleep researchers have actually used brain scans to look into this. — J

You could consider the case of sleep apnea. Suppose a person is asleep, and quits breathing. At the same time, that person is dreaming that they are sinking in a pool of water, and is holding their breath.

Since a person who quits breathing in one's sleep doesn't necessarily have a corresponding dream, we can conclude that the dream is not the cause of the cessation of breathing. And, it may well be the case, that the cessation of breathing triggers the dream of being under water, as the cause of that dream. However, there may be a sort of feedback relation where the dream causes the person to hold their breath, and increase the length of time that the stoppage lasts for. A feedback relation is not straightforward causation, nor is it a relation of supervenience.

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. — ENOAH

I don't think that this explanation properly allows for the creative capacity of dreams, and waking life for that matter. It cannot be that all experience consists of signifiers called from memory, because there must be a first experience, and the first cannot consist of any memory. Therefore I believe that the creative capacity, which is defined by being in the moment, living at the present, rather than by memories of the past, is just as important to the dreaming (and waking) experience, as the memories which you describe. And this is where we find the real being of "I", which you end up denying.

I agree; "universal subjective field" is something we can say, but we don't really know what we are talking about, and so it has no explanatory power. It's a kind of confabulation, hand-waving. — Janus

Likewise, we say "quantum field" but it's just "a kind of confabulation, hand-waving". And, because we don't really know what we're talking about, it has little if any explanatory power, as evidenced from the fundamental self-contradictory principle of "wave-particle duality". "Quantum field" is an incoherent description. And, depending on which model is referred to, the total number of fields assumed to be in existence varies dramatically, as described below.

In modern physics theory, one can picture all subatomic particles as beginning with a field. Then the particles we see are just localized vibrations in the field. So, according to quantum field theory, the right way to think of the subatomic world is that everywhere- and I mean everywhere- there are a myriad of fields. Up quark fields, down quark fields, electron fields, etc. And the particles are just localized vibrations of the fields that are moving around. Theoretical physics simply imagines that ordinary space is full of fields for all known subatomic particles and that localized vibrations can be found everywhere. These fields can interact with one another, like two adjacent tuning forks. These interactions explain how particles are created and destroyed – basically the energy of some vibrations move from one field and set up vibrations in another kind of field.
So, here’s a possible tally for the number of quantum fields:

2 (quantum electrodynamics [QED]) – the electron field and the electromagnetic aka photon field
17 (Standard Model [above])
24 (Standard Model including all gluon colors) — 12 fermion fields and 12 boson fields
25 (24 + Graviton)
Even more if include anti-particles?
Even more if include handedness?

https://www.physicssayswhat.com/2019/06/05/qft-how-many-fields-are-there/

I don't really understand what you mean by "fitness to surface", but your post doesn't resolve the problem. The question is why do I at sometimes use my imagination to create things which are ft to surface, and at other times I do not have regard for fitness to surface. If these are both the same me, as you claim, why does my imagination behave in these two completely distinct and inconsistent ways.

If there is a question to be asked as to "is that person real", then how would we answer "no" unless we said it was actually two distinct people? But it's not two distinct people because the awake person has memories from the dreaming condition. And the awake person rejects the dreaming condition as "not real", but the dreaming person does not even remember the awake condition to be able to reject the awake condition.

And tariffs are off again, partially, until April, maybe.

This seems to be a good way to drive away any kind of investment since no long-term planning is possible. — Echarmion

An up and down market may not be good for investors, but it is a perfect environment for a trader to make lots of money.

You are welcome to produce an alternative definition of "field" that does not invovle a value at every point in a space.

But if you do, you will not be able to claim that your field is anything like an electric, gravitational or other physical field. — Banno

This may not be relevant to your discussion with Wayfarer, but you are still confusing the map with the terrain.

The physical field is represented mathematically in quantum field theory, as having a changing value at every point. The points and values are a representation, of the thing which is known to physicists as a field. The physical field does not consist of points with a value at each point, the representation has points which have values assigned to them. The field appears to be more like a wave action.

The problem with your argument is that as points with values is one way of representing a physical field, but that does not exclude the possibility of representing the very same field in a completely different way. So it may be the case that Wayfarer has a different way of representing physical fields, which does not involve points with values. This simply would not be the conventional way of representing fields, which is commonly used by physicists.

For example, the classical way of representing an electromagnetic field is as an activity of waves. However, since there is no known medium (aether) therefore no way for the wave activity to be represented as interacting with physical objects, many features of the electromagnetic field cannot be accurately represented as wave activity. So quantum field theory uses the representation of points with changing values at each point. Therefore as active waves, and as points with changing values, is two different ways of representing the same electromagnetic field.

So far as explanations go, saying that something is an example of a field exactly becasue it does not meet the criteria for being a filed is... odd. — Banno

You limit "field" to "a physical quantity", then complain because Wayfarer's proposed "field" doesn't meet the criteria of your definition. But your definition is incoherent because "physical quantity" is self-contradicting.

Sometimes I wonder if there is even any actual visual images in a dream. I'll wake up from a dream and think that the thing in the dream which was my house, or my home didn't look at all like my home. Or, the person in my dream who was supposed to be my brother didn't look at all like my brother. Then, when I start to think about it, I realize that I can't really say what these things, or people actually looked like in the dream. So I start to think that maybe there wasn't even any actual visual images, I was just thinking that I was with my brother, or in my home, but I never really saw any of that in the dream, and that's why I can't describe what they looked like.

Yes, I find this question of how the brain operates, relative to the conscious understanding of self, and how the sense of "I" as an agent, is related to this relation, to be very interesting.

Also something less than opinion: When one sees a house in a dream, one does not see the house due to photons being picked up by the retina and thereby due to retinal input. — javra

So this would constitute a big difference between "seeing" in your sleep, and "seeing" when you are awake. How do you think that the house is caused to appear to the person in a dream, without the photons being picked up by the retina?

Suppose that this creation of "the house" in a dream, is an aspect of "procedural memory". How is this any sort of real memory, when the brain seems to be just creating random things rather than consciously remembering things? Rather than a type of memory, which is what the conscious awake mind is doing all the time, remembering things, dreaming seems to be a completely different sort of activity, where the brain is just exploring all sorts of weird things, maybe like a trial and error activity.

I have no way to prove this opinion, but I find it likely in part on grounds that people who do not sleep for long periods of time don't only become extremely exhausted but also tend to have psychotic breaks, i.e. go insane, which seems plausible if procedural memory is not properly processed. I also don't personally know of a more plausible evolutionary explanation for why REM dreaming evolved to begin with given that mammals at large as well as birds exhibit REM sleep. — javra

So if dreaming is allowing the brain freedom to go off on exploratory adventures, without be pent up by the rational inclination of the conscious mind to process sense information in relation to memories, as is what the conscious mind does, then maybe it is the case that we need this sort of release in order to prevent ourselves from going insane. It could be sort of like too much work causes severe stress and anxiety, so we need a vacation to let the brain relax and do its own thing to maintain mental health. If this is the case, then the question is, what exactly is this, what is called "its own thing", when the brain is free from the constraints of the conscious mind forcing it to be what it believes constitutes "rationality".

We all experience our dreams uniquely in many a way, but I've certainly heard of cases wherein the dreams of a sleeping person were affected by that which surrounded them in the external world, including sounds and smells, even though they were not at the time in any way conscious of what was taking place in the external world. Then, also, there's the alarm clock, which at first unconsciously wakes you up into consciousness from sleep and the dreams therein had. (A good shove can also due — javra

I agree. In my experience, the senses other than sight are more likely to cross the boundary of being asleep, and the input can enter into the dream, and have great influence over the dream. Since a dream is only truly remembered when I awaken, it appears from my memory of the dream, that the sound, smell, or even taste which enters into the dream actually causes me to awaken, because I come to notice the sensation when I do awaken. However, it may be the case that these senses commonly influence my dreams without me even knowing it, because I do not awaken to notice it.

These instances, when sensations influence the dream, would be cases of the brain receiving, and dealing with sense information, in a way which is totally inconsistent with the awake (what I called "rational" way). This implies that the brain actually has different ways of processing sense input. The conscious way is to channel the energy through some recognition process, but the sleeping way is to channel the energy off somewhere else, to be absorbed into the brain with minimum affect on its working activity. This is sort of like the difference between paying attention to something, and not paying attention. I think that since so much energy is entering the brain through the eyes, the best way to maximize "not paying attention" is to have eyelids. Eyelids seem to be a feature quite low on the evolutionary scale, and whether their primary function is to keep things like dust out of the eyes, or to maximize "not paying attention", I think is debatable.

That said, we do all experience dreams differently. It is not utterly uncommon for some humans to have dreams in which they fly through air at will. I too have had such dreams growing up. I remember them being rather serene and euphoric for the most part. And I distinctly remember being therein endowed with a supra-human capacity of will, hence volition, to travel through the air as I wanted simply by so willing it. In dreams such as these, there is certainly found a free will (or at least a sense of free will for the free will deniers) in which one chooses as one pleases between alternatives. In this case, alternative paths of motion and different destinations. — javra

OK, I see the point. There definitely is something within the dream which constitutes the self, "I", and the self is clearly doing things, therefore agential. But the self is doing things which appear to be irrational, and the things which are happening to the self are equally impossible to make sense of.

We can ask, then, what is creating these imaginary scenarios. It is a sort of "self", which knows little if any bounds of rational thought. Above, I distinguished between conscious, rational thinking, as the activity of the mind, and I was careful to describe the dreaming as the activity of the brain. This was done with the intention of separating the conscious "mind" from the unconscious activity of the brain in sleep. The brain in sleep would be a brain free from the influence of "the self" which is a product of the conscious mind. However, I now see that the self cannot be excluded from the brain activity in that way. I think, that even if we tried to totally exclude the trained habits of conscious rational thinking, from the brain, and allow the brain freedom to do what it wants (notice I can't even exclude the agential self in speaking because something has to guide that activity), it still produces a mental "self", and does not seem to be able to avoid this, even if allowed to act in the most random way.

Indeed. It's not our conscious mind that makes us sleep. Our conscious mind often fights it in any way it can. Eventually failing. — Patterner

Perhaps it is as I describe above, the brain gets tired from having to adhere to the restrictions of the conscious mind forcing it to be "rational". The brain needs periodic "vacations", to do its own thing, in order to maintain the mental health of the individual.

I don't think this is the case, not when one regards seeing as necessarily consisting of input from the retina. I think the way we see things in dreams is often a more vivid form of the way we see things when daydreaming or imagining. Only that when dreaming the unconscious mind assumes far greater agential control over what is in thus manner seen. — javra

You don't think that there is input from the retina in dreams? What do you think the so-called rapid eye movement is all about?

It gets tricky here, in part due to often numerous ways in which terms can get understood. But, in principle, though we are not of a waking state consciousness while dreaming, we as a first-person point of view (as consciousness in this sense) are yet present in our dreams. Not only that but, as a somnio-consciousness (a term which I coined that I think nicely enough expresses our dreaming consciousness), we almost always yet have some degree of agential power (i.e., ability to accomplish) - hence, some degree of voluntary, rather than involuntary, volition. With one possible extreme of this degree of dreaming volition being that of lucidly dreaming. — javra

I don't think I agree with assigning agential power to the somnio-consciousness. I agree that there is such in the case of lucid dreaming, but this is done through an intentional act which I believe degrades the dreaming. In other words I look at lucid dreaming as an act of intentionally converting one's dreams into something which isn't really a dream.

When I dream I find that the experience is one of having something happen to me which I am powerless to control. This is why, when it is a nightmare, the overwhelming anxiety of not being able to do anything about it, forces me to wake up. So in my dreams, I am doing things, but I am not at all in control over what I am doing. I am really not deciding where to go, or what to do, in my dreams, or anything like that, I am just finding myself in situations which draw me into them like a curiosity or something like that.

ou are not the person to be giving out physics lessons. — Banno

I was not giving a physics lesson, only pointing out your equivocation with the word "field".

Particles are the excitations of electromagnetic fields. — Wayfarer

Photons are the excitations of the electromagnetic field. Each different type of particle has its own type of field. The real difficulty for quantum physics is in establishing the relations between one field and another. For instance, quarks and gluons are supposed to be distinct fields, essentially massless, yet through the strong nuclear force they make up hadrons which are massive. And due to the nature of the strong nuclear force they cannot actually be separated in practise.

After a limiting distance (about the size of a hadron) has been reached, it remains at a strength of about 10000 N, no matter how much farther the distance between the quarks.[7]: 164  As the separation between the quarks grows, the energy added to the pair creates new pairs of matching quarks between the original two; hence it is impossible to isolate quarks. — Wikipedia

So the gluon "field" actually represents the strong nuclear force which is responsible for creating massive hadrons from quarks which are almost massless.

The interaction between quarks and gluons is responsible for almost all the perceived mass of protons and neutrons and is therefore where we get our mass.

https://www.energy.gov/science/doe-explainsquarks-and-gluons

Moreover, if it has no units, how does one get from the field of subjectivity to the measurable values of the electromagnetic field? Where do they come from? — Banno

Since fields are massless, the real question is where does mass come from.

Of course all comparison needs criteria for what is norm. If not, how can you compare anything? — Corvus

So the point is that the ability to recognize a piece of music as at a speed other than the norm, is not an innate ability. It requires the criteria of the example which serves as the norm, and this example is not provided innately.

Well, if you played the above 2x recordings to someone (a indigenous tribe man in a jungle or someone who doesn't like western classic rock music) who never listened the song in his life or a tone deaf, then he won't be able to tell the difference. In that case, where is the general capacity? — Corvus

The general capacity is not demonstrated here, because that capacity is the ability to compare, and there is nothing being compared in this example.