I'm not debating the question of procreation here. We are in agreement there. My point is using that definition do deny people marriage is inherently discriminatory. It denies gay people marriage on the basis their bodies can't procreate with each other. Gay relationships and people are held in lesser esteem because they don't procreate in this way.

Heteronormativity is a description of this discrimination. It refers to a culture which values heterosexuality at the expense and exclusion of anyone else.

So here you are guilty of heteronormativity. You think it's a great thing. Marriage is supposed to be only for those who can procreate with their bodies. Under this position, gay people are meant to be discriminated against because their lack of procreation makes them unsuitable for marriage.


Gender is a social construction, but that's a different issue, for it doesn't specify the value of any particular sort of relationship. It doesn't undo any difference or capacity of biology either. Only queer and/or non-binary individuals with certain biological traits, for example, can procreate with their bodies. Bodies do what they do regardless of gender identity.

For sure.

My point is not the people thought otherwise. It's that definition is discriminatory against gay people. Anyone who holds that position understands gay relationships to be lacking the value required for marriage.

Rather than a new rhetoric of gay activists, this discrimination is embedded within the definition everyone used to hold-- they proudly announce it: gay people don't have the "biological, cultural and social nature" to be allowed marriage.

Don't you feel that rests on an assumption that one chooses what one believes? If so, do you think that assumption is defensible? — andrewk

I think the problem is that it ignores the responsibility of our choices in responding to someone. Appeals to "nature" or "choice" remove the role of the actor in a a situation. In this case, we get the nice falsehood that outcasts have nothing to do with our actions. Whether we call it "choice" or "nature," it's them who are at fault for being ostracised. We ignore our responsibility.

To ostracise is never the act of the transgressor (if there is even one in the first place). It's a social response to the transgressor. We are the ones who do it, not them. Any acts, for example, against opponents of gay marriage are ours, not a inevitable outcome of their unethical positions and behaviour. The question is of how we respond (and ought to respond), not that someone transgressed. Punishment is a different question to sin.

It's not just the way the debate has been shaped; It's also about who people are. To say: "the two genders have different but complementary roles that are basic to the definition" is to deliberately exclude gay people.

The point of your position here is to exclude gay people from marriage. A discrimination: heterosexual people get marriage, gay people do not.

The use behaviour as cultural identity is not being introduced by gay activist. You are already using it in the context of "complementary roles that are basic to the definition." Heterosexuals get marriage on account of their biological, cultural and social difference. Gay people not, for they don't meet this standard of cultural identity through behaviour.

No, it doesn't. Discrimination is not dependent of what's behaviourally normative. It's an act of denying someone value or power (sometimes there are just instances of discrimination-- e.g. taking the gun off someone threatening to kill someone).

To say that there's no discrimination in denying same-sex marriage doesn't make it so. That's just to play with perceptions. No matter what you call it, to say gay people aren't worth of marriage is to deny them particular value, it's to deny them access to the social institution of marriage. It's to say them and their relationships have less significance.

There's not a question of "redefinition." It's one of whether we are honest about what we think of people.

Those are bigoted. In each case, the heterosexual relationship is given superior value which makes it deserving marriage. Unlike those deficient gay people who simply don't have enough complementary biology, sociological and cultural significance to qualify for such esteem. The concept itself is discriminatory against gay people.

This is not becasue the "strategy had worked." It's a description of values and power expressed our understanding of people. The "strategy working" is only measure of politics, of how effective the campaign for gay rights has been. Questions of bigotry and discrimination run deeper. In the understanding and actions towards particular people. To oppose same sex-marriage was just as discriminatory or bigoted at any point in history as it is now.

The relevant question is not "who is considered intolerant now," but whether there is bigotry or discrimination against particular people,

Indeed. And they are exactly right. This is not merely political rhetoric. It's description of social relations to our policies, ideologies and values. The people in question are intolerant bigots.

If someone is opposing gay marriage, they have to stand-up and say: "Gay people don't deserve to be married. Their relationships don't have the value required of marriage." No longer can they stand behind ignorance, denial of the discrimination or the fantasy they aren't doing anything to gay people.

The description of society, value and power is actually separate to the question of what ought to be done. We could, for example, argue such discrimination against gay people was correct if we were so inclined. But, given our philosophy of liberal democracy, such arguments only palatable to an authoritarian fringe-- many of people oppose to same-sex marriage cannot be honest about their own beliefs because it entails the realisation it's bigoted or a loss of public support because violation of an individual rights is one of the biggest injustices in our liberal democracy.

For sure... but I was talking about the values and policy which oppose same-sex marriage.

The point being that there is judgment and discrimination within the policy itself. Many people have this idea that their values don't have anything to do with how people are treated. So long as, for example, that doesn't think gay people should be killed, locked-up or prevented from having relationships, they think they aren't being discriminatory. It's not true.

Marriage occupies a particular value of social acceptance. To oppose same-sex marriage is to deny gay people that value.

More than that: to oppose is to actively call for gay relationships to be considered lesser. This is what is considered inhuman. The issue is not merely that people might get "offended" or "distressed," but that opposition to same-sex marriage is a denial of value and right to gay people. It is, itself, anti-gay. They aren't assumed to be homophobic. Their policy is inherently so.

To make the point clear, with this policy and value, the gay Christian is unable to have there relationship recognised under God. Its entire point is to discriminate against gay people.

That's a good encapsulation of dualism's inability to take the existence of experience seriously. The notion that experiences and thoughts exist, not blended with a body, but as their own states is rejected without consideration. One can only not think in materialism if thoughts are mistaken as bodies and for the form the express.

Thinking might a universalising activity, but that doesn't make my thoughts universal.

The form of my thought is not limited to my thought. It's true regardless of whether I'm thinking it or not. To avoid the destruction of the universal, my thought's existence must also be distinct from their form, else I'm reducing the form to my existence.

Gerson is right about the distinction between form and existence. He's just left two important instances of existence off the list: thoughts and experiences.

Such a description contains expectation that a monad is an account of everything else. Here the point a monad is distinct from the divisible. It's its own logical expression which is not any of the endlessly divisible extensional entities-- which is why it doesn't relate causality. To say "unity is a cause" make no sense. Unity is not an extensional entity that acts.

In terms of how "mind" and "matter" are are often used in philosophical discussions, Spinoza's Substance is neither. Those terms are, respectively, usually used to refer to experiences (mind) or objects which manifest some sort of sensory affect with space-time.

Substance is logical. The unity expressed by all, whether it be by a rock floating in space or someone's experience. The truth that the distinct aspects of mind and matter are together, without becoming or accounting for the other.

All things are expressed in both Extension (states of existence) and Mind (meaning/logic). The rock by the river equally expresses extension (it exists) and mind (a logical expression, which is distinct from the presence of the object). Substance (God) is the unity of all extension and mind-- the togetherness of all existing states and meanings. It's Cartesian dualism destroyed. The mind and body are never separate, though they are distinct from each other.

Well there is something I can do - turn him in to the police. But what would motivate me doing something about it? Jealousy. So clearly "not being able to control the situation" isn't a part of jealousy. It may very well be that the jealous person has ample ways to control the situation. But he would still feel jealous. In fact, even if I was a king or emperor, and John did that, I would still feel jealous. But I probably would be able to control the situation very well - send the police to get him, throw him in jail, and get back what was mine. — Agustino

That’s doesn’t resolve anything. Turning John into the police and getting your money back doesn’t take away his betrayal or your inability to control his action, so that the world turns out the way you consider yourself entitled to.

Jealous people often have ways to enact power in a situation; they can report, kill, jail, etc.,etc. They relish doing so. What could be better than killing an adulterous wife? Or locking up that thieving John and throwing away the key? The world will make sense again once “payment” is made. Death and Hell: the twin illusion of sin resolved.

But it doesn’t work. No matter how much Death and Hell are brought to bear, it doesn’t bring back the world which is lost. Sin remains eternal. Nothing done to John can fix the world. It’s lost. You cannot have the world you want. Nothing will take away the wrong John has enacted. Your jealousy is a motivation of fantasy which does not take sin seriously. Not justified anger, concerned with identifying immorality and punishing it, but a desperation to remove the sin because you cannot stand a world which is less than perfect.

Maybe I would say that if I knew there was no chance to get it back. I would initially feel jealous in that case, but I would soon understand that there's nothing I can do about it, and the feeling would wane. — "Agustino

I mention it for an important reason. Since sin is eternal, we cannot do anything about it. The situation you describe here applies to every instance of sin, regardless of what response is justified for the protection of the community or to improve the lives of victims.

In jealousy our motivation and expectation is askew. We mistakenly believe it’s about justice when it’s really the fantasy of a world where we didn’t lose.

Here you are wrong. It's a loss in one's capacity for intimacy (not complete loss, I didn't say that) but rather a decrease in it. It's like losing some functionality in your leg. You've lost it. If now you want to use that specific functionality to the same degree, you can't. — Agustino

This is what I mean about blaming her. So caught-up on the lost functionality of the past (past relationships), you insist it means new functionality (present relationship) is also lost. You are literally saying that because you don’t have a past relationship that you want (lost function), you cannot function in the present relationship.

Rather than concentrating on the function you do have (the new relationship) and it’s intimacy, your desire is still for the person of a past relationship. You really want your old function (past partner) because the new function (present partner) simply isn’t up to scratch.

No doubt this would harm intimacy, but that’s all on you. You are the one who wants your past girlfriend. The intimacy of your relationship is not harmed because you’ve had past partners. It’s harmed because what you really desire is your former girlfriend. You are not fully open to being intimate with the new person. You love your past girlfriend or the image of a relationship with her more than the woman in front of you.

You are only thinking of your desire for an exclusive relationship. This relationship is a two-way street. What you say about it's value reflects on her. She's not an island cut off from you have how significant you are to the relationship. What you think about the relationship, how much you value it and her, matters. At the moment you are saying she is nothing but an inferior second choice.

Did I say not to be content with our present inferiority? — Agustino

Worse. You enact it and insist upon it, while leaving it unstated. Sure, you say we must be content with inferiority, but you don't live that way. It's nothing but an image to you.

When it actually gets down to it, you cannot be content with loss. You constantly put out fantasies which are supposed to resolve it-- God, afterlives, jealousy driven acts of power, etc.,etc. In the face of a loss function (past relationship), you continue to hold a torch for it, unable to accept it and fully move on to a new function (a new relationship). At every turn you are trying to reject inferiority.

The reason might be "why" you tend to the source of the pain, but it is not the act of tending to it. It's only a story. You say you were destined to act that way because you didn't want pain, but it's not true. Sometimes people feel pain, hate it and do nothing about it. Indeed, you might have acted that way. You just chose to tend to it.

"Rebellious existentialism" isn't interested in freeing anyone from preferences. It's point is one cannot free themselves from their preference-- you must choose, you must have a preference and there is no other state which can define it. Its freedom is defined in our inability to determine our preferences.

The preference itself is the choice. No doubt we can have no control over our choices in this sense. That would entail predetermining what we do. Free will requires our choices occur without such restriction.

At each moment, we must have the freedom to have any preference. If our preferences were set prior to their being, we would have no freedom in our action.

"Reason behind" a choice are a red herring. A choice is not defined by a prior thought or desire, but by the choice itself.

Acfions initiated by mental states and preferences sounds suspiciously like choices. You seem to want gave control of choice itself, as if we were free to select what was entailed in any choice, such that if I made a choice to make this post, such I could select whether of not I wrote something and posted to the server.

The notion of free will you are using is one that demands nothing be chosen.

Nope - I can care less how he is. All I am concerned about is that justice is done. And jealousy is a response to an occurence. The way you treat jealousy is very strange. — Agustino

That's an outright lie. The fact he took your money and has used it make a purchase, which he is now rubbing in your face, is exactly what matters. It is all about how he is in the situation. He wronged you and there is nothing you can do about it. In you mind, an outrageous loss which must be undone (despite that being impossible).

For contrast, you don't sit back and say: "Well, my money has been taken and I won't get it back. At least John is enjoying his new car." You covet a different John. John shouldn't just ought to have been different, he must be, else the world cannot make sense.

But this doesn't mean that I will somehow brush over a mistake, and refuse to admit it, refuse to see the wrongness of it, and the eternal harm that it has done - this has absolutely nothing to do with it. In fact, refusing to see its eternal harm is precisely what does in fact ruin future relationships. As Spinoza said, loss is eternal. But just because loss is eternal doesn't mean that if we have lost we should keep on losing... imagine if you lost a leg... what will you do, go ahead and lose the other also? But there's many many people - and I've had many friends - who have made similar mistakes. — Agustino

You do keep on losing though, for you treat the eternal loss of sin as if it means your future is tainted. I'm not talking about ignoring sin here. To say past sins don't spoil one's future is not to ignore them. It's to say mistakes of the past doesn't mean someone continues to lose. The loss of a past partner does not amount to loss with a future partner. In your guilt and jealousy, you confuse the loss of the past for the present.

I'm not saying you haven't lost. My point is that loss is tied to that situation. You are the one who failed in the past, not any future partner and your relationship with them. Instead of taking the eternal harm of sin seriously, that is, understanding it as your mistake which can't be redeemed, you take it out on others. Your loss becomes something you bludgeon others with--"our relationship isn't as good as it could be, etc., etc."-- as a means of quelling your distaste for your inferior self.

Firstly you need to make the distinction between an ideal - and the actual situation. Yes the actual situation can be different than the ideal, no one disputes this. But one can still judge the actual situation as inferior to the ideal (which it necessarily is, hence why something acts as ideal). This is not to say that one shouldn't be exceedingly grateful for the actual situation - or refuse it simply because it doesn't reach up to the ideal. — Agustino

That's precisely the distinction we cannot make. To do so is to keep on losing. It's to think we ought to have a different world than we do. The expression that, if we had the option, we would pick the world we are not in, a world without what we care for in the present. No doubt the present may be inferior in some way (missing legs, loss relationships), but it must be the world we ought to have. We must be content in our present inferiority-- we must love, no less than we did before loss, those we share the world with. Otherwise, we love the image of a perfect self that never exists more than anything in the world. We choose to heap loss upon the world to hide away from its failings.

Is that what you would say if you were me? — Agustino

I'm pointing that is what you are saying. This is what I mean about blaming the women. You take your eternal loss and say it means she has failed-- that she has a lesser connection merely because you were with other people in the past.

This must be false, because it holds only for a romantic context, and clearly jealousy applies to other contexts as well - such as John stealing my money and enjoying a car he buys with them in front of my house — Agustino

So you don't desire that John be someone else than a person who steals your money?

What I'm saying doesn't just hold for a romantic context.

Now my capacity for intimacy with another women is diminished - because the images of my previous encounters will always be etched in my mind, which takes away from the specialness of anything in the future. — Agustino

So says the jealously.

You want sexual exclusivity so much that you blame any woman going into the future. Supposedly, your relationship will be soiled, lesser, somehow without intimacy because one or both of you have had sex with someone else. If she feels you have the greatest spiritual connection with here and you come back with: "Ugh, our relationship isn't that great because I've had sex with previous girlfriends. You'd be better off finding some virgin." How exactly is this meant to make your partner feel about your relationship?

This is what I mean about love being an image to you. Rather than love being considered in terms of living people, you imagine it as a statue floating in the sky. It shows two people who are sexually exclusive to each other. An image which amounts to intimacy. Fail to reflect it, and you will lack intimacy. A situation where it is not people who are loved, but a story of what love is supposed to be.

Why do previous encounters stay etched in your mind? Why do the spoil the specialness of the future? Your jealousy. So caught-up in the desire to be exclusive, you can only see those you wish were your one and only. Anyone new cannot be special to you. They will never be important or desirable enough. It's not enough for you to have a connection and care for someone, no matter how strong or beautiful. Your "spiritual intimacy" cannot be given by love of another person, only by the image you love so much. So busy making declarations, marriage vows and masturbating with the statue, you cannot see the world around you, even you own relationships (if you were to have one with this present jealousy).

Which is why I have no qualm about saying jealousy is perhaps worse than envy. If envy is wanting yourself to be something you aren't, jealousy is wanting another to be something they aren't. A demand that someone else is meant to be what you want regardless of who they are. If envy is coveting what you are not, jealousy is coveting someone else being what you want.

You are entirely correct to say your jealousy is not about losing your wife or anyone's sexual prowess. It's about the world not belonging to you. Like envy, jealousy is an emotion of not being able to control the world to your desire.

Jealously is a tantrum at others otherwise to your desire and your lack of power to make them what you want. Rather than righteous anger or ethical understanding, it's nothing more than your disbelief that others have not turned out how you desire. An outcome (supposedly) so impossible, there is simply no way the world would occur like that and make sense.

That's still ownership, Agustino. If someone or the world takes it away, it seen as a violation of what someone's property. The anti-thesis of intimacy-- "You are mine regardless of anything"-- which takes no consideration of the person involved.

That's still a problem with "common property." It can't track individuals and how the world matters to them. So caught up in what you gain, "I have a right to this hammar. It's is common property." You cannot see any impact on another person.

You will take the hammer you own as insurance in case something breaks, while another is left without the tool to finish their house.

Much more to say, but that will have to wait till I get back.

I can only be quick because I have to go out, but there is the "ownership" inherent within you postion. In someone sleeping with another, what is supposedly yours has been taken away. You don't understand adultary to be a betrayal of a promise to you, but rather a failure to have something you are entitled to because you own it.

Jealousy is terrible because it amounts to thinking you own other people. Pain at betrayal is fine, and people who ignore it do so at their own peril, but it manifests through the act of another not by who they own. Adultary hurts because someone used their freedom to betray, not because they belong to someone.

Entirely incoherent. If the world is different, my experience aren't illusionary-- I still experience a tree in front of my house-- there's simply more to the world. Not an inaccuracy in what I experience, but a fact there's is something else I haven't realised: a world outside my experiences.

In the difference between "real" and a "dream," it is not the possibility are experiences are mistaken which defines the distinction, but the world outside experience. For us to even have dreams, there must be more of the world, the "real" states, outside our experience.

The idea of "saving" oneself has a strong hold. To think one is taking action to prevent death or become meaningful is incredibly powerful. It has an aesthetic no amount of Spinozian wisdom can give. Be a wretch and you can experience the wonder of being turned from something unspeakable into the just.

In a literal sense, it is to say, "I am better." Merely saying: "I am the best" of "life is the best," as Spinoza does, simply cannot compete. It has no rescue or superiority. Compared to tales of transcendent rescue, it is boring. It doesn't give someone a desired outcome. I'd say that's the difference. Not the elimination of a particular thought (e.g. thoughts about death) or sensation (e.g. a desire not to die) per se, but the idea existence owes you something.

That's a pretty clearly falsehood. You don't merely hope for a continuation. I do that too-- despite being an hard atheist who doesn't think there is going to be a continuation. To continue living a wonderful life would be great.

You think your belief will get you a continuation. It's an act which eliminates the possibility of death for yourself. In that belief, you have supposedly entered a state which guarantees a continuation. Such a belief has no such effectiveness. One might continue just as well or better by thinking their was only death and hoping for it. With respect to continuation, being deceived could work fine.

The question of deception is one your own mind's fears. Not because it is contrary to continuation, but rather because you fear a world where you have no power over death. If you were stuck in a world without means to guarantee a continuation, it would be the worst. There would be no action you migh take to get life. You really would be at the mercy of death

On the contrary, to ask that is perfectly fine. The world left to future generations is an important question. Who will be and the environment which is left for them is a key ethical question.

Awareness if death only scares the traditionalist because it takes away the necessity of their way of life. Future generations have a different identity to you. On going culture and tradition is ultimately in their hands. They may well choose to abandon the tradtion you love much. One's one identity ceases to be the master of the world. Other people continue, not your own identity.

To say nothing caries over is utterly false and is not argued here. Plenty of stuff carries over, it is just not you. Telling someone their hopes and dreams vanish is exactly what "You're gone" does.


The insistence otherwise is a selfish act-- where one covets their life so much, that they do not accept their end and the existence of other people. They try to say they aren't really dead, that they have been reincarnated within the lives of others. It's fear of death which has someone claiming the dreams of other people are their own.

It's worth pointing out that distance inevitably means time. Not a mediated travel (e.g. the sun travels 8 or so minutes through space to get to Earth), but a point of the world. In this respect, non-locality has a similar relationship as our own limited observations of the world.

In the universe of my room, I do not observe other people or computer link to other parts of the world. Within an instant, a message appears out of nowhere, from a place which cannot be assigned to anything in my locality. Something without presence in my space has acted upon my screen. Spooky. The world is bigger than my locality.

Non-locality is an really an affirmation of both realism and localities. The world I observe is not all of it. Other things are so, not local to me, there beyond what I experience or observe, and they sometimes affect me. And I will never be able to predict them.

Most working scientists hold fast to the concept of ‘realism’—a viewpoint according to which an external reality exists independent of observation. — An experimental test of non-local realism

The mistake is in bolded. Independent of what observation? Mine? Anyone?

Non-locality only precludes observation from my locality. I cannot measure what is not local to me. This doesn't necessarily hold for other localities. We might say the following: something non-local to me could well be local to someone else. No existing state is independent of a locality and the world which might be observed. Yet, non-locality is expressed everywhere, for the world is always more than any one locality.

Always, in the sense that anyone arguing a postion as wisdom or ethics is concerned with politics. They want to make the world into something, even if they are only concerned with speaking their own voice

The negation of the game, however, is not defined by the absence of concern for the finite. Ethics are ultimately the significance of a present, not merely a politcal postion enforced on the world. Good and evil are significance of action, not a mere assertion of how the world must be. One may say "X was wrong" without asserting any particular obligation for the world to be otherwise.

In themselves, rights are an infinite.They ought to be, but the world is never obligated to recognise them. "Liberalism" and "Conservativism" are about a little more than politics. Taken on their own terms, they are various expression of meaning of a functioning society. The finite is expressing an infinte.

Here you do not merely enter a game of politcal essences. You also assert something about the meaning of the world which manifests regardless of our politcal machinations. If we are liberals in the sense I talked about, we reject the idea people need to saved by an eternal tradition. We are not simply making a political point against traditions we don't like. We are also describing our meaning (an infinte).

Our differences pivot around this point. You view the "transcendent" as our meaningful escape from the squabbling politics of the world. Whether the transcendent Christian, mystical, atheistic or someonewith else, you view them all equal which saves from the ignomy of conflict, duty and demands of others. Everyone is saved by their ability to the meaning of the world and any conflict it might contain.

For me this is an unnecessary. Since I hold meaning to be an expression of the finite, no-one needs saving, no matter their politics or conflicts.

Even the those burdened with a conflict mutal genocide still have meaning. The world is not obligated to be otherwise, even if it ought to be. Any "saving" will only be done in the world-- the end of the conflict which saves lives of millions on both sides. A rescue of the world rather than one of an immortal soul which has nothing to do with what occurs in the world.

The pragmatisist is found to be ignoring the world in favour of the fiction which produces a lesser degree of conflict or hides its presence. You often see pragmatism expressed as the phrase "we only need what works." How exactly is anything going to work though? For that to function, the world must have significance in-itself, else there would be no measure of what was working. Conflict and significance must be expressed by the world. It cannot be just a question of politics.

Agustino understands that to be the liberal dogma of the modern West. For him tradition is meant to instructive and dictatorial. It's meant to be the becon of imagine which defines what we aspire to. The "liberal dogma" isn't any particular action or behaviour per se. It's the degradation and rejection of tradtion as an understanding of human identity. We are no longer understand ourselves to be destined for anything. Marriage is no longer forever. Family is understood to be breakable (to pick one of Agustino's favourites). The vision of the necessarily perfect life has been lost. It's no longer there to define the lives of some and act as the fiction which hides when we are less than perfect.

Sinners are no longer damned. Sin might be wrong, but it gives no destiny. A sinner has just as much of a right to exist and be loved as the perfectly virtuous. There is no threat or retribution within the shame of sin. It's only guilt for what has been done. Sin has no future consequence for the integrity of one's worth. No longer can it be used as an excuse to scapegoat, take revenge or destroy the imperfect.

Liberalism amounts to accepting or even celebrating living imperfections. Their lives becone just as important as anyone with perfect virtue. Sin might be preferable to avoid, but it doesn't render anyone unworthy of life (or to use Christian terms, God). In liberalism, the ability to call for the destruction of those who sin is lost. It's this which Agustino despises most. Philosophy is unable to form a culture which veiws sin and worth as mutually exclusive.

Mysticism is more or less an attempt to put Being in experience. Not the symbolic representation of some part of the world or logic (e.g. nothingness, happiness, a tree, my cricket team, Being etc.), but a presence of Being itself. As if my experience was living the Being of everything and/or anything, rather than merely a description of it. An experience of living rather than merely knowing or thinking. Understanding of that which is beyond knowing or describing.

In a sense, yes. All states of existence are physical. I'm not a reductive physicalist. The world is more than any description of any state of existence. All states are material though, whether they be rocks or experience. There's no gap in causality which logic needs to fill. (i.e. idealism or anti-realism).

So 1. impossible. Any scientific theory proposes an empirical state which may be tested. Sometimes it may be such that a hypothesis is not tested, given that we have not yet made the relevant observations, in many cases due to lacking the tools to make the observation-- e.g. relativity, Higgs-Boson, etc.,etc. All that means is that a relevant observation hasn't been yet. Any scientific hypothesis or theory may be tested and proven (even if no-one ever does).

2. is also incoherent because any hypothesis or theory assumes a meaning. To say anything about the world involves speaking ita logical expressions. Research can only be coherent and senisble, else one cannot be talking about the world and one is not doing research at all.

Strictly speaking, the sorts of things he is talking about do not exist at all. Rather, the are logical expressions. Existence (the physical) means in ways which do not exist-- from the meaning of somone's happiness, to the ethical significance of an action, the meaning of a rock or the significance of a fiction.

It's deeper than that. We value people in the world, no matter their actions. Sin needs no forgiveness nor retribution (or as I would say, "Cannot be paid for or resolved" ). All beings are already their own Buddha. No-one needs transcendent rescue because they are infinitely meaningful in themselves.

In the modern West, to have a meaningful life is easy. One doesn't have to follow any particular tradition. One's sins do not need to be absolved or forgiven. To have meaning takes no effort. All anyone has to do is exist. Western society's conflict with mysticism and premodern metaphysics isn't strictly with sense-enjoyment, but what it takes to be meaningful. In being worldly, modern Western culture says God or the transcendent is not required to have a meaningful life.

Instrumentality is a conflict between the necessity of being and the contingency of the world. It runs deeper than being upset at having to make a particular effort. Even doing “nothing” takes effort. By existence we are forced to work. We are made in each moment by our presence. “To be” amounts to being engaged in effort.

But why this effort? What to I ultimately gain by writing this post? If I sleep on the floor all day, what do they gain in the end? There’s no reason. I just woke-up into life. All my effort is not occurring for or because of something else. It’s all me. I am rather than not. Existence doesn’t deal in any other term.

The effort I’m forced into always comes down to me. To live of an ascetic sage takes this effort, and it is really no less effort than being a hedonist beast, for either path requires the effort which is the existence of myself. Seeking death or wasting away involves the application of similar effort. Will is present no matter what we do.

We might say that Will is embedded far deeper than suffering. It’s burden isn’t pain (that would be stuff like hot stoves, red-hot pokers, illness, the betrayals of others, etc.,etc.), but effort. Even success and joy are effort. To exist means to Will. Joy or suffering, love or hate, we cannot escape who we are. So long as we live, we are more actions, more goals.

In a sort of ironic twist, the much sought after ultimate end (to be free of the burden of existence), is entirely self-destructive. If I want to live without feeling the burden of existence, I have to be particular actions and have certain goals for the rest of my life. I have to be burned with existence and be fulfilled in it. To Will (exist) is not the enemy, but the only means of victory (fulfilment in existence).

Yet Heidegger still resists. He's not content to be anxious or present without anxiety over the changes in the world. Authenticity is amounts to getting away from this anxiety through a transcendent means-- a superiority over the world and death. The authority and worship of Fascism which allows life to extend beyond itself. To live in peace with anxiety or lack it entirely, to need no transformation, is untenable to Heidegger. He resists the transformation of death with all his might. Deep down, he considers we must be "transformed" from the transformation of death. Clinging to a vision of eternal superiority, he ignores the world in front of him. He pines for lost tradition where humanity wasn't just a user possessing and being possessed by technology, where they were superior to the rest of the world.

Death in this context does not refer to the death of the body, but to the continual death of what you are in what you become. To resist this transformation dying is to remain fossilized with abstract generalities and universal principles; to constantly have you eye, that is, on the "other world" instead of engaging with this one. — John

Here Heidegger doesn't make an important distinction between the finite and the infinite. The death what you are is of the body. From one moment to the next, it's my "body" which changes; I become a different state to what I was prior. It's my body which continually dies. Only in an infinite (Being) do I remain fossilised, unchanged for the entirety of my life.

Heidegger is, of course, talking about the logical expression of the ever changing body. He draws attention to the ever changing body not to point out any specific changes, but to draw attention to our different logical identity in every moment. Death is not just a matter of losing an object we loved, but of becoming something logically different, such that some meaning is forever lost. Resisting death is not merely futile just because we cannot avoid the final ravage of illness, injury or time. It's impossible because in existing entails the death of a meaning from one moment to the next, even when something continues or similar meaning occurs. We cannot escape death even in the infinite expression of the finite-- no ideology or tradition will give has the necessity we (sometimes) desire. We are forever doomed to be a "nothing(Being)" constantly undergoing change.

In the end this is what Heidegger cannot accept. He looks upon our death and flees back to the embrace of infinite rescue. Rather than reveal in our nothingness and accept our death (in finite terms: focusing on and loving our changes), Heidegger returns to a myth of transformation, where we can access something other than our own death if we think (or rather pretend) hard enough, through a universal principle.

In the second part I underlined where you talk about "dancing amongst the infinite" are you referring to an actual experience or is that just a characterization of how you think, in abstracta, about our metaphysical relation to the world. If it is the latter do you see the importance of that vision to be of an inspiring nature to get us to feel our lives that way, or is it something else? — John

Both. Any experience we have is dancing amongst the infinite. In that moment, we mean something regardless of time. Nothing of the past or future can take it away. Not even the death which constitutes the existential condition-- no matter what we were or become, it will not later what we are in a moment.

Critically, there is no distinction between thinking in abstracta and actual experience. Thoughts about metaphysical relations are one type of actual experience. Looking at a computer screen is another. And so.

They all dance amongst the infinite whether we realise it or not. Even the Nihilist, who denies meaning, is caught asserting the meaning of nihilism and themselves. They are person thinking, feeling and talking. Someone who finds satisfaction or success in revealing to us their nihilistic wisdom.

Still, despite referring to all sorts of experience,"dancing amongst the infinite" is a point of abstracta. I'm picking out a feature of any experience. As such it's only relevant to people who labouring under the metaphysical notion that our experiences have nothing to do with the infinite. It's for philosophers who relate to meaning by whether or not it's true our experiences are about something more than the finite. For those outside this philosophical context or those who relate to meaning by denying this truth (i.e. holding we only mean through transcendental rescue), it's not relevant to feeling their life is meaningful.

I think it's understood as a duty though-- for your own damn sake, you will love your lovers and friends. You will rescue yourself from the ignominy of meaninglessness with love. The falsehoods of your idolatry are at least true for you. A truth which will rescue you from meaninglessness no matter how much we might understand it is falsehood. The duty to rescue yourself, "At least with my idolatry, I will have the truth which saves me."

Everyone is on the same level of seeking an idol with which to save themselves from meaninglessness. What an individual values becomes equivocated with idolatry. No matter out ideology, we are all the same in seeking a fiction which rescues us from our meaninglessness. It's our duty to hold onto a fictional idol just so we won't be a meaningless wretch.

I think it gets the "universal experience" backwards. Every dogma or law is something primordial and genuine. A value held, a habit performed or an action sought. In this respect, it's only hidden for us in as much as we pretend it is. Even idolatry, despite its falsehood, is an action or practice performed by the living. Any such practice is the play of the living and so part of a meaningful life. Not something sought for our sake, but ourselves living that which is valuable within our meaningful lives.

The trouble is we easily become obsessed with its power, to a point where "wisdom" becomes an exercise in just how much we can deny ourselves and those around us. A philosophy of Nilhism which denies there is fulfillment in anything but our transcendent imaginings.

Our eagerness to fight demons of our world (e.g. greed, objectification, scientism etc.,etc.) has us confuse worship of the transcendent for the only fulfilment. We end up believing the lie their is no fulfilment in our world, be it friends, family, money or even consuming porn.

We want to be able to say: "follow the transcendent or you will have no peace in life," to hang the threat of meaningless over anyone who would dare not follow our transcendent tradition, so they have a reason to pick us over any other activity they might do or value they might have.

The greatest difficulty of virtue or ethics is the truth people are frequently happy or contented in doing wrong. It's what's do hard to give up to do right and so difficult to admit when concerned with stopping evil.

Spinoza's point is exactly the opposite: we can understand unity. Rather than approached by understanding many things, it's a different instance of knowledge entirely, one which doesn't even require naming any particular thing.

We can understand unity because knowledge of any attribute is not required. To know there is togetherness, we don't even have to name the attributes of cogitans and extensa. Attributes and states are not the foundation of unity. That's why it doesn't take knowledge of everything to understand unity. Substance is understood without referring to any state of the world or other logical expression.

If I only know about cogitans, extensa, the history of France, my computer or what my friend had for breakfast, I may understand the presence of a unified world. Knowing unity depends on knowing about unity, not all states of the world and every logical truth.

Cogitans cannot understand anything at all. A logical meaning is not an existing person. All instances of human understanding are extensa: a state of the world which is understanding of something.

The essence of cogitans is not reason, at least in terms of how it is usually considered, for it is not an act of thinking.

I view that as a leftover of the stories of transcendent myth. Under those traditions, and the ones Heidegger longs for, human projects are understood to be finite all the way down. Nothing we ever do is good enough because it ends. For us to paint or move within infinite realm is considered impossible. Anything we do is just fishes pointlessly swimming in the water. We need to be transformed from anything we ever are or else amount to nothing. To be ourselves is to be separated from anything that matters, from any significance etched into the timelessness of logic. The delusion of nihilism, a characteristic of most human traditions and philosophises, which have no come to terms with the infinite expressed the world, particularly our own death.

We dance amongst the infinite every moment of our lives (and of our death). Within each moment, we mean something timeless, thinking, moving, feeling (or not) in ways which cannot be touched by anything to come or anything of the past. Every second we are present in way that does not depend on other logics or any finite part of ourselves. We are something, not a body or a mind, nor an atom or cell, but a presence all on its own-- Being in the world.

In this context, the infinite of possibility is incoherent. It is impossible for there to be anything other than Being in the world. To say that radical transformation shrinks to a dimensionless point is entirely true: there is no transformation. There can never be. Being in the world will never be given-up, no matter how much we pretend God, tradition or technology lets us transcend it. We are always etching into the infinite no matter how much desire to be meaningless wretches who are given Being from the outside.

Heidegger and the Modernist are cut from the same cloth. They both seek the tradition which brings utopia, which fills our absence of Being with a perfect Being which is never ours. A world in which meaning is entirely a question of the finite (e.g. practicing a tradition of transformation, living forever, having no problems, etc.,etc.) rather than of the infinite (our Being).

That's to miss Spinoza's major point: Substance doesn't have unity, it is unity. It's what cannot be captured by giving accounts different modes or states.

The point of Substance is that two accounts do not become one. Both accounts are themsleves and they express a unity which is captured in neither.

Cogitans was never considered part of causality. It's logical meaning: that which is true regardless of causality. He "privileges" extensa because logic is not an existing mind. To try and invove cogitans here is to say that which does not exist can interact and cause in the world.

There's no trap. Just the recognition non-existing things are not part of causality.