No mistake. A lack of an apple is comparative to a lack of humans. You cannot say that something exists in a state of non existence. — Dante

I never said that :gasp: that something exists in a state of non existence. ???? I said you cannot say they are identical when something is non existent.

You seem to be suggesting that a conscious being is one that relies on its ability to remember. I have been blackout drunk before where there were hours I could not recall, but everyone had recalled me being conscious and talking and living normally. Just because I didn’t remember anything doesn’t mean I wasn’t conscious. — Dante

No no, not just remembering. The whole lot. Consciousness covers all mental activities I would think.
You can become unconscious too, if you were hit on the head for sure.

I watched two little brothers develop. Babies are conscious. They are not endowed with superior intelligence but they do in fact compile memories and can respond to them. That’s how they acquire language, that’s how they feed, thats how they learn their parents’ faces. — Dante

Sure, I would say that it is a type of evolved emergent function of consciousness from brain. When one gets old, it fades away, I saw it.

Once something ceases to exist it does not exist in a state of non-existence, it does not exist at all. Especially the consciousness. Non-existence is the same for every death, it is not unique nor individual. — Dante

Never said they are unique or individual. But definitely unknown, or nothing to comment on, because they are not existent.

Something cannot be in non-existence. Non-existence is just a human construct to describe a lack of something. It doesn’t actually exist within reality,

Once something ceases to exist it does not exist in a state of non-existence, it does not exist at all. Especially the consciousness. Non-existence is the same for every death, it is not unique nor individual. — Dante

Non-existence is the same for every death? I don't know. I cannot imagine what non-existence or death would be, not having experienced personally. I am sure you have not either.

You wouldn’t say that a lack of apples suggests that there are apples existing in a realm of non-existence — Dante

Apple and death are not even apple and oranges. Categorical mistake.

The absence preceding me is the same as the absence preceding you. The preceding time periods are not part of our timelines. Our timelines commence in the womb where the consciousness is developed. — Dante

I am not sure about that either. I believe that the consciousness emerges from a human being when it is about 2-3 years after birth. Before that, it has instinctive perception, but not consciousness loaded with intelligence. Human consciousness is a function emerged and evolved from brain. When a human being gets old, his consciousness gets dim and cloudy due to the worn out brain state of the old age. I have witnessed it in real life before.

I do not understand your question. I am saying that any absence is the same as any other absence. — Dante

I was meaning if something is non-existence, you don't know if they are the same, or different in essence. You can only tell how the existence got into the absence. But once they are non-existence, you cannot tell they are identical or not in essence.

That is very hopeful, but the consciousness is absent in both cases, marking them as essentially identical. The state proceeding death is still non-being, unexperienced. The absences are the same, but you are trying to attribute a difference based on preceding events without actually considering death for what it is, which is nothing. — Dante

How can you say they are "essentially identical", when they are absent?

The departed consciousness will never return, but life will still emerge, one’s death does not impede the motions of life. — Dante

How will life still emerge? What is the motions of life? Could you elaborate?

The first absence has no historicity, the 2nd does have it.

I am still yet to find a convincing argument as to why death is different to the initial absence of life. — Dante

The initial absence of life is unexperienced, non-progressed, un-lived, un-started state of absence, whereas the absence after death is non-existence of lived, experienced, progressed, expired and came to an end, therefore perished absence. There are clear differences in 2 non-existences.

Premise One: Death is not simply the process of living and then dying but is perhaps more accurately identified as the absence of one’s consciousness. — Dante

OK from your first premise,

There are 2 types of absence. Absence to be transformed to non-absence through time such as the sun light at night (it is absent at nights but returns in the mornings), and the eternal absence (once departed, eternally non returnable).

It looks like the absence of one consciousness due to death is the latter one. Logically and scientifically the departed consciousness will never return, hence the eternal absence, unless you then come up with some esoteric belief or religious faith to negate that physical evidence and conclusion.

Nothing quite like an 'et al' :wink:
Always reminds me of eat all you can get ! — Amity

:grin:

I don't know.
I see some members have a single thread full of 'stuff' they enjoy... — Amity

yeah, will see how it goes.

I was able to edit the title. :D

Aphorism: a pithy observation which contains a general truth.

On their own - can be thought provoking, so why not include a couple of sentences to express your thoughts ? For example, about: — Amity

Good point. Initially wanted it only for aphorisms, but then there were useful links for philosophy, songs and quotes, and they were all thrown in together too. Maybe better to separate them in separate threads?

My question is whether death is not in fact individual but universal. A condition from which all life is returned and from which it may form. — Dante

Great point. Definitely something to think about. Will reflect over, and return if / when I get some ideas on it. Have a good day.

I’m not overly concerned about the dead, my concern is with the emergence of life.

But that made me laugh. — Dante

Death is one of the immortal topics of philosophy. :)

Yeah, I was wondering, it would be so cool, if the dead could tell us whether they are still the same old life after the deaths, or having totally different living after the events of death somewhere in the universe, or indeed if they exist at all. But they never contact us once they departed. :chin:

Religions would have their versions of the scenario on deaths, but without supporting evidence.

The problem with death is that, the dead never tell us how they are doing.

Yeah, I'm realizing that we can really get side-tracked by hairsplitting comparatively minor issues. Probably I need to ease off the perfectionism a bit and settle more on understanding the whole rather than each individual itty bitty detail. Those can come later with time. — darthbarracuda

I think both ways are all valuable exercises. I am reading with a few different commentaries on the CPR (NKS, H.J. Paton, D.P. Dryer, S. Gardner, W. Sellars, H.W. Cassirer, Allison, P.F. Strawson, Walker, Bennett, Ewing) and it makes the reading painfully slow. But will try to catch up. I am not sure if it would be better for me just concentrating on the Kant's CPR first without the commentaries. But then, I would have less or more vague understanding of the text.

Fortunately, though, metaphysicians always will. — Ciceronianus

Why is it fortunate?

Questions:

0. In the Introduction, Kant says that the Critique is not a doctrine; yet here he calls part of it the Doctrine of Elements (and later the Doctrine of Method). Why?
1. What does "immediately" mean here? Independently of thought, as in, we don't have to reflect upon it?
2. What does "object" mean here? — darthbarracuda

0. In the Introduction, Kant says that the Critique is not a doctrine; yet here he calls part of it the Doctrine of Elements (and later the Doctrine of Method). Why?
I think this is the common complaint of the commentators of the CPR such as NKS, Paton and D. P. Dryer.  They all seem to agree that Kant was not consistent in the CPR in some of the definitions of the concepts and also the points. NKS even says the CPR is a patch work of shifting contents from Kant's previous publications.  Still the significance and importance of the CPR cannot be denied in the history of philosophy.  There are far more interesting and significant philosophies in the CPR than the minor inconsistencies that one should worry about. 
 
But for me, when Kant says Doctrine, that means they are the points he accepts as principles, and follows. For critique, I would understand as something still to be investigated, analysed and come to a conclusion.

1. What does "immediately" mean here? Independently of thought, as in, we don't have to reflect upon it?
I would have thought, because independently of thought, it must be sensory perception or the content of the sensory perception.  Sense perception of objects would not need intuitions for perception, because it doesn't need a thinking process. It would be direct perception such as bodily sensations?

2. What does "object" mean here? (An intuition can only happen [3] if an object is given [4] to us, which can only occur if the object can affect the mind.)
Some objects are general concepts, which have no particular reference to them. In that case, even if they are given to us, we have no concrete idea what they are.  These objects don't relate or activate intuitions.  For objects to affect our mind and relate to intuition, they must be particular objects such as the real objects that we see, hear and can touch etc. Or the objects from the past memory that we have directly experienced and acquainted with, then they do relate to the intuitions, which enable our mind think, reflect and imagine etc.

These are just notes from my thoughts on the points.  Could be totally different from others' points of course, which I would be interested to hear and reflect again.

One thing for sure is that metaphysics is not the subject itself such as physics, biology, chemistry, astronomy or quantum physics.  Metaphysics don't discuss the detailed workings of these subjects.  

As a part of the philosophical field, metaphysics investigates and analyses the claims of those subjects for their validity and truths using analytic and logical reasoning.

Haha! The reincarnation of a pencil. The reingraphitation of pencil. A short story... :grin: — Prishon

Pencil conceiving death, is a poor analogy. :yawn:

Therefore, poetic metaphysics is something that can only be conceived through the incomplete visualization - not absolute but subjective - of concepts. — Gus Lamarch

There is a poetry movement called "Imagism" where the poets pursue "Part of the figurative language in a literary work, whereby the author uses vivid images to describe a phenomenon" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imagery

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

What, exactly, was there in the beginning such that to utter the words makes beginnings possible at all? In the beginning there was the word? Take this quite literally: How are such things that are "begun" to be conceived prior to their beginning; or, what is presupposed by a beginning? An absolute beginning makes no sense at all, for to begin would have to be ex nihilo and this is a violation of a foundation level intuition, a causeless cause, spontaneously erupting into existence simply is impossible, just as space cannot be conceived to "end". — Constance

Beginning only makes sense, if the beginning had been recorded, faithfully archived, witnessed and experienced. Begin is a word that the subject of beginning utters, and declares when the process of the beginning actually begins. Or later recalled by other minds when given the detail of the beginnings with the faithfully archived data and information.

When these elements are missing, beginning becomes just a meaningless conjecture, imagination and fiction, therefore an empty word, no fault of philosophy or language.

Another thing about beginning is that, it is a psychological judgement on something. There is no such an object called beginning in the real world. The universe does not have anything called "begin". What we call as "begin" might be the end of something in the universe, but actually the universe might not even care what we think, call, judge about it at all.

So we might be looking at something projecting from our mind that actually doesn't exist in the universe. Therefore there is nothing strange or absurd about the origin of the universe is not knowable to us immediately.

Kant didn't deny the dark place where words cannot go, but he simply drew the line where meaningful perception can be made and where it is not possible.

BB is a hypothesis that you have the universe but the beginning is missing. When the moment of beginning is missing, the only thing possible is again just speculation, imagination, conjecture and guess. The creation of the universe stories in the religion have the full elaborations of the creations in the archive, but we don't know who even wrote them, and again no one was present when the alleged creation was taking place. Hence the mystery of the universe's origin remains and continues.

We still have no firm and clear definition of the universe either. Is the universe one and single entity? Or are there multiple different entities of the universe littered all around in space? Do we even have a clear objective definition of what the world is?

Whats the thing with a pencil? The death of a pencil? Huh? — Prishon

I think you need to find out, if the pencil was alive first place. :roll:

You can look right through me it seems... Im a quite emotional guy and sometimes I indeed feel the tears pressing. Be they of a good vibe (with you), a bad vibe (not so good in some situations), or tears of pure boredom! :cry: — Prishon

Emotion is very much connected to the fear of death. If there were no emotions at all, then there would be no fear of death. I think because of the emotion and knowledge of possibility and certainty of death mixed together, people think and worry about death at some point in their life.

Material objects such as pens would not feel any fear of death, because they don't have emotions and don't have any knowledge or perception of death, even if they were to die. For them death would be just recycle process, I would guess.

Good question but pay attention to the analogy - how would you conceive of a "dead" pen? What happens to a pen that has reached its end-of-life? It no longer exists, no? That can't be drawn and thus the blank page. — TheMadFool

I dropped the pen from the analogy, as not working very well for me.
But picking it up again, looking at it, it depends what type of pen it is. If it were a gold pen, I would still keep it, for the gold. Gold never dies, whatever it is made to. If humans were made with gold, they would be immortal I am sure. And perhaps that is the reason why gold is bloody expensive. Well the recent price is of gold, is it still climbing or falling?

If it is a nice parker pen, then I would replace the ink cartridge, and keep using it - voila, pens resurrect as long as you give them a new cartridge.

If it is a cheap & nasty pen, then ok, it will be thrown into the bin. There will be no remembrance ceremony, no funerals, it will make its journey to the universe. I am still not sure if the pen would know that he is dead, or alive still. I don't know either.

must been reading too much of Kant lately :meh: :groan:

There's nothing to draw and that's why we can't conceive of our individual extinction, there's literally nothing that can be meditated upon. — TheMadFool

But then, no one alive has ever been dead. How do you know it, without ever having been dead?

Quando sarebbe un magico ti fosse fatto un bel grande gelato. E una favola! :starstruck:

Is it pizza time already? I always imagine you sitting in an office, doing philosophy while working... — Prishon

It shows you that the posts we write here convey meanings, and also emotions which evoke the readers' imaginations. :smirk:

Thanks. We had nicely baked bread, meat and soup. :yum: Hope you had a great lunch.

Nice summary. Thank you.

3. not sure if I follow this last point. — darthbarracuda

It had a few spelling errors in that paragraph. When I used the spell checking software, it even replaced the words into some other words from its whim. Sorry. Now I have checked them, corrected the badly spelled words, and also added a little more sentences from the NKS commentary into 3.

I think what it says is that Kant's 3rd definition of transcendental is much different from the 1st, in that thranscendental preconditions the mental activities and concepts arising from a priori intuitions such as apprehension, reproduction, and recognition and even imagination and understanding, which render experience possible. But these faculties of mind cannot be themselves equated / called (titled) as a priori, which make the 3rd definition much more distant from the 1st.

Sharp as ever! I have to think about that one!

Prishon say Corvus nice guy. Prishon wanna...PRIIIISHON! AGAIN, SHUT THE F. UP! — Prishon

Merci Arigato ~ :cool:

:nerd:

sure. That sounds like a true religion.

Not necessarily. But the very fact of dying hurries love. Though you cant hurry love. If I was to live forever for sure I would kill myself one day! — Prishon

Living forever means that you come back to life even if you killed yourself. So you can't kill yourself. If you can, you were not to live forever. :D

Everybody loves you when you're dead! The wreathes are laid by the ones who didnt love you though... What I mean is, knowing that you die must make you act. To love is to act, Victor Hugo said. — Prishon

One must die to be loved? :roll: :chin:

Death makes us realize love. — Prishon

People try to remember the dead. I often wondered, why not remember the living, but the dead?

Not exactly, the pen can be used to draw its own end (broken). Take it one step further, take a pen, press its nib on a piece of blank paper and that's it! — TheMadFool

Sorry couldn't quite make link between the pen drawing its own end, and a living being conceiving its' own death. :)