Terrapin Station: Your recent post in this thread - I've only just noticed it - that as an atheist you don't think our situation could in principle be described as logicaly descended from some unknown primal cause but that nonetheless you simultaineously do think it might result from 'natural causes' : This enigmatic view strikes me as a particular example of impenetrable confusion - unless that is, alone among men, you are aware of a species of relation existing between phenomena unrelated to 'cause-and-effect'. (Love to be informed on this super-human insight). Talk about ilogical and, 'laughing out loud'? Well - "'tis the season to be merry" and - your attempts at point-scoring have certainly succeeded in creating some mirth! Once again - Merry Xmas! :)

- As with many, experience has retrospectively enabled me to realise that when young I was indefensibly maltreated and sadly deprived (to my obvious detriment in this thread) of the advantages typically afforded other men - like for example being given the leisure and opportunity to study formal logic! - no doubt on account of my being cruelly forced, at the expense of having no pocket-money otherwise, to maintain a 'paper-round'! :)

Some of you guys seem to be admirably informed on the subject of ‘Logic’ - on that at any rate - as it constitutes a technical discipline developed initially wiithin the general subject of philosophy by the likes of Aristotle et al (or so I'm given to understand) in their study of the roll of syllogisms, categories, etc. as these pertain to the principles of justified reasoning. So - perhaps naive of me then to expect such a cognoscenti to indulge the less esoteric use of the term, 'logical' as it was employed by me in the posts I previously submitted in this thread - even though that more general sense of the word was I think sufficiently rigorous for the purpose of the proposition being advanced!
Anyway that being admitted - and hopefully without our exchanges becoming unduly limited by rather arid technical exceptions - surely the irreducible script concerning the proposition previously put is this:
Given the validity of the assumption that everything must have a cause, then the two competing accounts in terms of human understanding for the origin of the nature of our Human Condition are either that it was consciously ordained or that it is unconsciously descended - in a cause and effect manner - from unknown first principles.

Hypothesising then that the latter is the case, the argument is that this cause would result in a reality characterised in principle by nihilism (in the manner briefly aluded to previously) and so in a situation irreconcilable with - and thus distinguishable from - a situation the acceptance of which on our part a Creator God could justifiably require. (The roll of the ‘apologia’ of 'Religious Faith' in this context as a means of reconciling such a predicament would also require be discredited.)

NB. As to the remarks regarding the credibility of the phrase, 'logical entity', an entity needn't be a physical thing. An idea may be an entity. - Any closed system all of the elements of which are consistently interrelated thereby constitutes a logical entity.

I'll check the site when I've got time! - Hopefully not too denigrating! (Though I guess, one way or another, it likely rather will be and, yes - writing on my phone while on the train doesn't admit of editing sentences to reduce the number of clauses contained. Strictly grammatically ok though.) Anyway, though obviously in your opinion poorly expressed, I'd still say the argument has validity - more in fact than I think you are ever likely to suspect! Merry Xmas! :)

Maybe it’s the necessarily abstract nature of this argument that provokes antipathy towards it in some. Anyway - with regard to the proposition previously advanced - it has been postulated that, were every factor constituting our situation descended from logical causes exclusively, then, in that the consequence of this would be that every degree of austerity or benigness characterising our experience possible in the logical abstract would thus in principle be manifestable, so the condition of human beings existing in such a situation could in principle exhibit an absolute inequity, rendering from the isolated position of those happening to be absolutely unfortunate a situation perhaps incomprehensible in terms of a legitimatly requirable capacity for comprehension.
It is argued then, in that the concept of justifiably requiring acceptance of a situation outwith the requisite evidence for acceptability would, again in principle, constitute a contradiction in terms, thus such a situation logically would be irreconcilable with the concept of a Creator God.
This idea of expanding on the hypothesis that the Human Condition is a, ‘logical entity’ – in the absence of a logical proof the proposition must remain a hypothesis – is then hopefully to specify more thoroughly what the nature of such a situation in the abstract logically would be, thus permitting a comparison with the reality which human beings do in practice experience and so in turn perhaps advancing a means of substantiating, other than by the usual scientific (and perhaps less apposite) arguments, a verdict on the question of the reconcilability or otherwise of our situation with the concept of a Creator God.

Not quite sure what your problem with that is. Atheists propose everything defining our human situation descends from logical causes, in which case then our situation would constitute a logical entity - like all mathematical phenomena logically descend from some hypothetical first principles and thus the body of Mathematics constitutes a logical entity. The idea of the question is simply to devellop the hypothesis that our situation exclusively descends from logical causes and then to consider whether such a putative reality might in principle entail any differences which would be irreconcilable with a situation the nature of which was characterised by the morality of a Devine Will.

Marchesk - That everything comprising it would descend exclusively from logical causes - as opposed to being characterised by the intervention of, for example, a Devine Will that could have the intention of ordaining it with a nature other than the nihilism that might conceivably characterise it were the hypothesis proposed for the basis of its' nature in the question actually to be the case.

The question was subsequently withdrawn - apparantly because it was considered the hypothesis it involved would be more fitted to forming the basis of a PHD thesis. It could be summarised as, 'The Human Condition is a logical entity. - So what?' Though initially perhaps seeming excessively abstract, it is still considered to have some merit.

- He always objected to being described as a philosopher and would protest the distinction that he was an artist. Like many, I think the way to understand his work is different from the thought processes of philosophy in that though the understanding of his novels consists in grasping an objective intellectual concept of principles that exist in the abstract - exactly like science in that respect - nonetheless the principles concerned here relate to the ostensibly subjective matter of human emmotions. Understanding his novel, 'The Idiot' involves the apparantly paradoxical excercise of conceiving of an 'emmotion' without actually personally feeling it but as a type of intellectual concept.

As to the question, 'What is Art?' - I'd say in that respect his work is a manifestation of a distinct spieces of intellectual thought inherent to the creation / understanding of great Art. What distinguishes this novel from most others is that, in intellectually describing emmotions as they objectively exist, only the scenes by means of which they are depicted are fictional, the novel itself being an objective description of reality and therefore fictional only in the superficial sense.

Haven’t read the Karamasov one but have read ‘The Idiot’.

Only an author with a genuinely powerful personality himself could possibly have so convinvingly constructed a personality as powerful as that of Mishkyn’s – the eponymous hero of the novel. The author never tells you the unworldly and implicitly Christ-like Mishkyn is a powerful personality but enables you to clearly see this for yourself. The paradoxical character, ‘Ippolit’ – young and in a state of sustained suffering through no fault of his own - is also one of the most genuinely unforgettable constructions in literature. (The scene where he imagines a nausiatingly slimey wriggling insect steadilly approaching his sick bed is celebrated in psychiatry for its insight into how sustained physical suffering can induce psycological ill-health) Yet Ippolit is objectively demonstrated to be nonetheless an innately and unambiguously nasty adolescent who is simply unfortunate enough to have a disease – not at all adding up to the cliché that a young person subjected to terminal suffering must somehow be saintly. But his depiction, which has over time attracted a great deal of philosophical comment, is compellingly plausible.

Don't know anything about Dostoievsky's 'lack of literary refinement' - though even in translation there are many superbly described scenes in 'The Idiot' and it's also said of perhaps the greatest english novel, 'Wuthering Heights', that due to the technical inexperience of its' youthful author, it's also inept in that department - but anyway, Dostoievsky somehow really does seem to 'tell it like it is'.

So - your auto-spell checker's better than me - ergo you win the argument!? - I'll need get me such an omni-factotum! :)

Aside from the fact that the impetus for a UK referendum on whether to continue with EU membership was provided by neo-Thatcherites - who had, ever since the regnum of Marg Thatcher, preserved a visceral antipathy bordering on hysteria towards an institution they perceived as subordinating national sovereignty and who privately greeted the relatively recent influx of European nationals into the UK as ‘Manna from Heaven’ that could be manipulated in favour of their cause – aside from this, no UK politicians seem cognisant of the critical fact that this decision once finalised will be one inimical to a further plebiscite – It’s for ever! (Like perpetual Trump OMG!)

In that respect, since the arguments advanced in favour of leaving the EU were demonstrably speculative – some would even say misleading - and since only now are the negative economic consequences of the decision becoming clearer it seems to me a perverse judgment that to provide the opportunity for a now more informed electoral decision would somehow constitute a retrospective subversion of the democratic will!

In practice of course, the leading pro-brexiteers are to some extent aware of the negative consequences that inevitably must ensue following Britain’s economicaly illiterate descion to disengage from the world's largest economic unit – but they consider it a price that justifiably can be imposed on Britain’s poor in order to preserve their visceral ideological conceptions concerning what constitutes national sovereignty.

Jcop: My post was an attempt to argue in favour of the proposition that the scientific method, capable as it is soly of describing interaction between sensorialy perceivable phenomena, is in principle therefore incapable of describing the interaction by which the brain produces consciousness in that our experience of the latter phenomenon consists ultimately - as I attempted to point out - in the form of a non-sensory perception. Setting aside the adequacy or otherwise of the exposition of the argument in my post, the idea being advanced is hardly a rhetorical one.
The OP might have been better titled, ‘How in terms of an analogous sensorial experience, the perception of which we accordingly would all be capable of undergoing, might you provide a description of consciousness capable in principle of being commonly agreed?’ The short answer to that question then would be – in that there exists no sensorial experience which is annalagous to our experience of consciousness – you could not provide such a description.

As to your two ‘straight forward questions’ – ‘What’s it like to be senselessly undergoing a state of negating something?’ and, ‘Please feel free to describe a senseless experience of an immaterial interaction’ – these statements do strike me as examples of meaningless rhetoric, accordingly permitting no possibility of framing a reply.

Jkop: We could of course agree that, in order that it be objectively examined, a phenomenon requires to be isolated from all super-imposing effects. So then with the case of our experience of consciousness itself: Without conducting the experiment, we could agree that in a situation where the awareness of all five of our interactive senses was negated – say in a laboratory contrived artifice for example – we would yet in principle be capable of retaining our conscious self-awareness. This simple observation suffices to demonstrate then that our experience of the phenomenon of consciousness is, uniquely, non-sensory in nature.
In this regard all scientific theory, from for example the most basic of the geometric theorems of Pythagoras to the most complex mathematically argued propositions relating to the sub-atomic phenomena which the Large Hadron Collider was built to evaluate, are comprised of reasoned propositions intending to provide a logically rigorous description of a putative relation existing between sensorialy perceivable observations. It requires to be recognised - in principle - that such a methodology is fundamentally incapable of describing such a connective relationship between a phenomenon which is perceivable sensorialy and one which is, as is uniquely the case concerning consciousness, susceptible to non-sensory perception!
It is for this reason in practice therefore, in their inevitable incapacity to provide such a requisite connective description, that all scientific attempts at describing consciousness are of a standard that would not, in the context of describing sensorialy perceived phenomena, be accorded the status of scientific theory at all!

The crucial point to recognise regarding the phenomenon of our most irreducable experience - that of our consciousness itself - is that, uniquely, it is a non-sensory experience - capable in principle of being undergone in a state where all of the five interactive senses are negated. The significance of this fact consists in the consequence that our experience of consciousness is inimical to the method of scientific description, capable soley of describing our sensory perception of material interaction, from which the palpable inadequacy of scientific attempts at its description descends.
It requires to be recognised that this specific reason renders an adequate description of the phenomenon of consciousness in principle beyond the capacity ot the human mind. You may pile the sophistication of scientific argument, ex: Quantum physic scientific methodology, as high as your capacity to comprehend compexity permits, but it will not thereby advance your argument a single nanometre accross the chasm existing between the manifeststion of sensory and non-sensory phenomena - the sophistication on the one hand of scientific argument and its demonstrable inadequacy on the other perhaps ironically serving thereby merely to emphasise the point! - You might as fruitfully attempt employing the scientific method to envisage a fourth primary colour!

There is a view regarding the perennial Free Will debate that the main constraint imposed on advancing our ideas concerning this subject arises from the erroneous assumption that the possibility of human moral autonomy – a determination regarding this putative capacity being the sole object of philosophic enquiry concerning the free will question, after all – that the possibility of such autonomy, must in principle be contingent on the possibility of human amoral autonomy, as for example whether I am capable of deciding on the basis of an irreducible personal volition of my own what sweet meat to prefer for dessert.

According to this argument, considering the questions of moral and amoral autonomy collectively - as opposed to considering them singularly - effectively constitutes a conflation of unrelated questions. The proposition of the argument is that, in that each of these theoretical capacities would proceed from unrelated principles, so the possibility of neither concept is necessarily contingent on the other and therefore that the validity or invalidity of either amoral or moral autonomy is logically co-reconcilable. The possibility of amoral autonomy is regarded by the argument as being contingent on the nature of the nexus existing between the brain and the psychology and that of moral autonomy as contingent on the entirely unrelated possibility of a capacity to acquire objective moral knowledge (assuming for the purpose of the argument the validity of the idea of an objective morality in the first place). The argument postulates that the conception of such knowledge, in being objective and in that respect like say the conception of scientific knowledge, would accordingly not in principle be subject to psychological qualification and therefore that it would be independent of the brain-psychology nexus referred to as being relevant to the consideration of amoral autonomy.

The central tenet of this argument then is that a philosophic enquiry regarding free will should properly be framed by the question of moral knowledge, a matter unrelated to the causal arguments that are in turn proposed as being exclusively appropriate to what is considered to be the purely scientific question of amoral autonomy.

Incidentally, specifically with regard to the concept of moral autonomy, this argument potentially provides a straight forward solution to the age-old paradox regarding the apparent incompatabity of a concept of irreducible autonomy with the logical idea that every event must perforce be preceded by a determining cause – the required causal element in the case of moral autonomy being supplied by the role of individual personal experience which, it is proposed, acts to confer such autonomy on an individual in an a posteriori manner.

Yeah - 'n people say I write incomprehensible! ;)

Some opine that the situation in principle with which we humans are presented is, when considered objectively, unacceptable. (We know not from where we have come, why we are here, to where we are going, etc. and are dependent for our daily existance on factors with respect to which we are helplesly subservient). They then point out that if this observation is valid then logically it precludes the possibility of a Creator God - since to require the comprehension on our part of an objectively unacceptable situation is inherently contradictory, any imposition of such a demand being thus a nihilism and so in turn irreconcilable with the idea of our situation being one determined in accord with a Devinely ordained meaning.

Trouble is, that kind of thing's so ripe for parody! Ex: Seem to remember David Carradine, in his roll as 'Grasshopper', saying something dreadfully like that to his enlightened Guru! - Can't beat a Hollywood Bhuda for unconscously hilarious hackneyed platitudes!

Vicariously acquired moral principles -ex the injunctions of the biblical Commandments - serve merely as a utilitarian guide, but fundamentally cannot communicate the knowledge they refer to. The concomitant of a state of moral knowledge - or, if you will, 'Enlightenment' - is a state of personal moral autonomy which, in turn, equates with a state of individual free will. Conversely, to the extent an individual is deficient in such knowledge he exists in a state where moral behaviour is susceptible to determination by external factors.

It's moral knowledge - a type of knowledge neither susceptible to being beheld intellectually or to being acquired vicariously (since it is in principle ineffable) but perceivable solely via personal experience - and is the fundamental prerequisite for stability of the mind.

Well, Socrates of course set numerous precedents for thinkers but, in my experience anyway, the example of his which many philosophers most eagerly seem to have sought to imitate within themselves is that of unprepossessing appearance! (On the positive side though - that's maybe a symptom of their contempt for worldly vanity!) Either way, that reputation - together with the one for unintelligibility that goes before my own Scottish accent (undeservedly) - makes me kinda reticent about the whole idea of witnessing each other in the flesh...or whatever!

Well, glad you were impressed anyway! Though, to be honest, I personally think my previous post's probably my greatest achievement to date - inasmuch as it was crafted using only the microscopic keyboard on my smart watch! I'm not complacent though, and am aware I'll likely only attain to a state of full philosophic transcendence once I've successfully met the challenge of posting from a smart watch using just my toes - in which endeavor however, despite considerable perseverance, I have as yet attained (I won't deceive you) only a disappointing level of profiency...
- Wonder what Heidegger would have thought? :)

If even the word '' unambiguous' - which I thought conveyed my meaning more accurately than the generic term '' clear' - is deemed pretentious then I give up!

I mean that only personal experience can indicate how the situation humans ultimately are in is not one that they could justifiably be required to accept. - Sorry, got to go now!

That it is, is I think something you can only perceive to be the case through personal experience! Why it is, is I think because everything characterising it exclusively results from automatic logical causes. You can do zilch to change that. They say though that you can, as a byproduct, gain happiness and maturity through attempting to assist those who suffer from the vaigeries resulting!

Irreducible means when it's reduced to its basic reality, un camouflaged by pampering technology, - which prevents people being exposed to famine by the ever threatening vaigeries of climate, etc. Objective just means not conditioned by the outlook of your own personal individual circumstances but how it actually is when all accidental or artificial man-made benefits are absent!