Let me ask you a question. Do you agree that your existence is just as temporary as an ocean wave which is transient dynamic structure 'observed' by humans? And do you agree that all we call 'things', including 'atoms' are in essence similar transient structures subject to quantum dynamic fluctuations as defined by humans?
If you understand that level of analysis, then you will see that nothing can be separated from the observation process.

I think something can exist by itself. Indeed, I think some things must be capable of this, otherwise nothing whatever could exist (and clearly some things exist).

:grin: That 'I' does not 'exist by itself'. Its status is predicated on the 'existence of others' from whom it acquired the pronoun 'l', and the word 'existence', within the cognitive differentiation process (I called 'thinging' above) in which human languge segments 'the world' according to human needs.
As for the statement .... 'simple things by their very nature exist'....this must be the epitome of a vacuous tautology !

Things are thinged by thingers. The thing we call 'existence' is thinged, like any other concept, relative to our needs.

'Entropy' is a human concept linked to their other concepts 'time', and 'events'. Without considering human requirements in defining 'order of events' relative to their reference frames, all talk of 'the world' tends to be meaningless.
NB 'What works' equates to 'what is predictable for humans', nothing more more and nothing less.

On 'the committee nature of self'

"Man has no individual i. But there are, instead, hundreds and thousands of separate small "i"s, very often entirely unknown to one another, never coming into contact, or, on the contrary, hostile to each other, mutually exclusive and incompatible. Each minute, each moment, man is saying or thinking, "i". And each time his i is different. just now it was a thought, now it is a desire, now a sensation, now another thought, and so on, endlessly. Man is a plurality. Man's name is legion.”

G.I.Gurdlieff.

Gurdjieff goes on to say that at any time, one of the dominant "i"s acts as 'chairman' to regulate the unruly members. It may be that all verbalization, not just rhetorical questions, are being monitored and modified by the committee. The actual 'receiver' of the verbalization may have little to do with that imagined by 'the committee', and then there is also the reception committee to contend with !

So much for any 'rules of communication' !

From the pov of 'the committee nature of self', such questions are aspects of internal dialogue.

Things are thinged by thingers. They have no existential status 'in their own right' .What you call 'logical contradiction' amounts to disagreement between thingers about 'thinghood'.
Take 'glacial melting' which A believes is caused by 'sunspots' and is therefore 'an uncontrollable thing.. On the other hand, B believes glacial melting is caused by man made global warming and is therefore a potentially controllable thing. The status of the thinghood differs insofar as to what the thinger's subsequent actions might be. 'Things' are always contextually dependent. Logical 'set membership', is never independent of needs of observers.

If you consider a Venn diagram with three intersecting circles...Jesus, Human and Divine.
Proposition A eliminates the the Jesus circle outside the Human circle. This leaves Jesus as Human only, or both Human and Divine. Proposition B places at least one Human in the Jesus circle but not necessarily in the Divine circle. So the two propositions taken together imply that Jesus is Human but not necessarily Divine, If, however, you say Jesus is axiomatically Divine, then it follows that at least one Human is both Jesus and Divine.
So much for static set membership on which classical logic is based. But consider, say, a 'dynamic Jesus' that can pop in and out of the Divine set or consider tha dichotomy that membership of the Divine set precludes membership of the Human set, then here we glimpse the limitations of a request for 'logical analysis'.

Forbidden fruit tastes the sweetest ?:wink:

I love it ! The 'us-them' dichotomy ! ...the essence of our primate tribalsm ! :cool:

Good game !
Change the label..change the set membership ! :grin:

Your questions rests on your dichotomy between 'human' and 'divine'. However, no doubt some religionists, would dismiss that dichotomy on pantheistic grounds. In addition, you need to contend with the argument that 'Jesus' was largely a mythical construction which expressed the messianic hopes of a particular age.
NB Regarding your 'logic' request.... 'Privileging one side of a dichotomy' is a common aspect of general semantics raised by Derrida with his adage that 'all assertons imply their negation'. This point is metalogical in that it questions the basis for 'set membership'. In other words, 'is-ness' relates to human functionality.

What appears to be missing in all this discussion is acknowledgement of the evolutionary trait of 'tribalism' which humans have in common with other primates.
What we call 'culture' or 'religion' are, in essence, merely bucket terms in which the us-them dichotomy is expressed through human differential actions including language ( the vehicle of thinking like 'self') and dress. Problems arise when individuals claim membership of different tribes, often for practical economic reasons, and competition for resources, raises tensions.
A secondary evolutionary trait of 'male dominance' tends to further complicate the situation.

Insect 'stillness' is nothing to do with mind 'stillness'. The first foils predaters, like frogs, whose perceptual mechanism is only attuned to moving prey. The second is a meditation technique aimed at 'being in the moment'.
Now there is an argument that what we call 'self' will dissipate 'in the moment' in the sense that its conditioned values are suspended. This could he thought of as 'death of self', but this has little to do with 'immobily'...more to do with merging with the 'holistic flux'. And the phrase 'born again' which Christians might use in the aftermath their interpretation of such 'emergence' (aka by Christians 'ephiphany') reifies the usage of 'death' as an associated aspect of the process.

"I come to heal" :halo:

Medice, cura te ipsum !

To Poetic Universe

This is a very stimulating project which has prompted me to research Omar Khayyam. Congratulations are in order for your efforts to embellish the opus (not all of which is attributable to Omar anyway !) .

It may be the case that the Zeitgeist of popularity for this work has passed, such that the semantic backcloth required for its interpretation has become obscure for the average reader. In philosophical terms, we are then perhaps left with the more general issues surrounding 'word magic', which can involve a multitude of angles including, prayer, hypnosis, poetry, oratory...and perhaps culminating in adages like ' Language speaks the Man' (Heidegger), or 'The limits of my language are the limits of my world' (Wittgenstein).

Well, imo all 'absolutes' are religious, the irony being that it is mainly in religion where 'existence' is questioned. (Obviously I'm discounting the niche area of particle physics in that generalization, in order to avoid what pragmatists call 'a futile reality debate' ) But most of the time, we don't question 'existence' at all 'uncritically' or otherwise. Its simply not 'an issue'.! What we 'presuppose' is that we know what we are talking about !

NB 'Definitions' are a poor alternative to Wittgenstein's 'meaning is use'.

There is no riddle!

'Thinghood' is a word ascribed by humans to focal aspects of their common experiences and expectations of experience.
'Existence' is merely another word suggesting the utility of such 'thinghood'. Some 'existence' is disputed (like atheists disputing 'God') because the utility of the concept is disputed. Existence need not always imply 'physicality' as this is merely that aspect of potential experience which involves common sensory physiology of observers.

Words do not represent 'things' in the sense of 'stand for objects'...they RE-present 'things' in the sense of 'interaction events brought to attention of mind'.

NB Attempts to use 'logic' with respect to 'existence' is imo futile, because logic presupposes 'thinghood' as axiomatic.

I don't think so. Try this...
https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1309/1309.0132.pdf

The 'question' is meaningless, because it already existentially requires human observers verbalising their projected experiences in order for it to arise.

THINGS are THINGED by THINGERS.

You are correct from the pov that 'existence' is relative, not absolute.

i.e.. Nothing 'exists' before it is conceptualised/languaged/ thinged by humans within their socially evolving language. Even the 'thing' we call 'time' only 'exists' relative to human planning purposes, such that 'things existing before human observers' is a useful process we operate NOW, in which we picture a primative world in our mind eye.

This relativistic principle can be applied to any 'thing' conceptualised, from 'rocks' to 'gods', but the problem with 'God' (capital G) is that its psychological and social function rests heavily on its eternal connotations, thereby making it a potential exception to the rule. Of course the sub-properties of such a 'God' tend to be defined with particular religions according to their needs.

NB.The axiomatic antithesis/denial of 'thinging' by humans is expressed by the biblical adage...
'In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God'.

TO THE PSEUDO GNOSTIC

Actually 'Gnosticism' relative to other esoteric cults, looks like a pretty nebulous hotchpotch of ideas.
The 'hidden truths of the bible' are much convincingly handled by the Kabbalah, or by Gurdjieff's Sufi inspired views of the NewTestament, or even by Steiner's 'anthropophesy'. The fact that Jung dabbled with pantheisic ideas like 'the collective unconciousness' or that Rubert Sheldrake's 'morphic resonance' has recently lead him back to 'religious ritual' in general, and Anglicanism In particular, cannot be taken as endorsment by 'scientists' for the upsurge of interest in esotericism, much of which can be traced to the zeitgeist of dissatisfaction with mainstream religion in the aftermath of WW1.

It is obvious to anybody who has read up on esotericism in general, that banal 'heckling' about their own dissent issues about mainstream religion shows a complete lack of understanding of the subject. And ironically, 'authoritative' proponents of esoteric cults argue that such activities are an impediment to actually achieving 'enlightenment' .

In short, your obsessive behavior has more to do with ignorance than the 'knowledge' you seek.

From googling 'The Cult of Gnosticism'

Gnosticism is a philosophical and religious movement which started in pre-Christian times. The term is derived from the Greek word gnosis which means "knowledge". Gnostics claimed to have secret knowledge about God, humanity and the rest of the universe of which the general population was unaware. It became one of the three main belief systems within 1st century Christianity, and was noted for its:

-novel beliefs about Gods, the Bible and the world which differed from those of other Christian groups

-tolerance of different religious beliefs within and outside of Gnosticism

-lack of discrimination against women

Appreciated !

BTW Here's a 'philosophical sonnet' of my own. (It's okay. I'll just dance in a corner).

The Wood and the Trees

Walk with me this childhood path
Where thoughts did bud like Spring's array
That fir, as sapling knew my breath
And bent to the grasp of random play.

Here was the stream where Summer's heat
Trickled to cool beneath the tree
And stark stones sharp beneath my feet
Stippled the flow of eternity.

That which was supple, time binds firm
And that which was wide, to stricture grows.
Each junction of life invites our turn
But closes behind mind's dark hedgerows.

Youth's smiles and tears may betoken nought
Until life's path has its values wrought.

I think I can identify the reasons why this troll is being perpetuated.

1.His obsession with his infantile anthropomorhism with which he goads 'believers', and which he ascribes to conventional belief in 'God', is parasitic on, but superficially appeals to, reactionary atheism therby attracting initial attention to himself.. (This would appear to contravene what I have read about one of the basic tenets of Gnosticism, 'to respect all religions').
2. As far as I know, there is no 'poetry section' here in which the urge to be creative in that genre can be satisfied. No doubt that poster could equally attempt to exercise his talents on any issue that might give an audience (even of one !).

So what we have here is a maverick pseudo-gnostic dancing with an aspiring poet on the dance floor of 'a philosophy forum' !

The only way to shut trolls up is not to feed them. We are all guilty in that respect. This forum seems to particularly problematic with this relative to others and I'm trying to work out why.

...but 'facts' are what even bigger fools don't understand as selective human constructions !

TO ALL
It's perfectly possible, and overwhelmingly more logical, to criticise all religions, including gnostic cults, as a potential source of social perniciousness. The dichotomy 'natural-supernatural' is one red herring employed by some religionists who equate their own parochial concept of 'truth' with the word 'natural'. All such 'group rationales' serve human tribal instincts inherited from our primate ancestors.. They set up the 'us-them' divisions which come to the fore in times of adversity. They define 'the good minds' as those who agree with them. And all such rationales are inextricable from the the human language they are couched in.,.a language which serves human attempts to predict, control and counter aspects of their potentially meaningless existence.

That's the meaning of 'apotheosis'.

And any fool who calls himself 'Greatest I Am' would seem to confirm that even you, with your limited logical ability, were aware of that.

Thanks for that extensive trolling information. I underestimated the size of his problem !

The 'seeking good minds' ploy is of course a supercilious gesture exercised by a self proclaimed divinity.

My apologies...I took you for your one 'follower' from another trolling ground of yours, A2K.

A list of your infestations would be quite useful to give others an idea of the extent of your obsession.

TO ALL
Having trolled this forum and getting the inevitable heckling, the 'Bishop' is now trolling Able2Know as the pompous 'Greatest I Am', preaching exactly the same parasitic drivel. As with all trolls, his infantile attention seeking needs the oxygen of responses irrespective of whether they are positive or negative.

Unfortunately, the 'Bishop', who admits elsewhere to being a 'business dropout' has scratched around looking for an attractive esoteric cult to give 'meaning' to his existence. It's a pity he has not heeded Gurdjieff (one of the mystics he encountered) who pointed out that attempts to convert others would fall on deaf ears !

You seem to be confusing psychpathology with philosophy. The first deals with delusions and obsessions, like grandiose claims of apotheosis, or 'standing up for goodness'which can manifest in preaching and trolling. The second deals with epistemological and ontological issues which religions tend to subsume under their particular absolutist version of 'truth' thereby proscribing them from credible participation in the domain of philosophical debate.

I won't be assisting your self reinforcement exercises further.

'Apotheosis' ........as in the declaration by Caligula of his deification to his Uncle Claudius ?
...and you think this is a viable subject for a philosophy forum ? :wink:

Thankyou on two counts...
1. For confirming your own smallmindedness by anthropomorphising 'God' by assigning the human trait of cowardice.
2. For underscoring the maxim that 'abuse is the language of the inarticulate'.

I conclude that your faith in your own mythology must be pretty shaky to risk being so easily demolished by a mere atheist like me ! :naughty:

You make some sense. However my objections to this poster (who frequents other forums with the same 'questions') is nothing to do with the negligible 'contents' ( ..anybody can read up on Gnosticism..) but on the grounds that he merely engages in challenging conventional 'believers' in order to reinforce his own belief system. In other words, he contributes nothing.

As an atheist I know that some deists believe that what they call 'God' does 'show himself'.
Other deists (like you) base their own idiosyncractic rationale on attacking more conventional believers.

Why don't you just admit that without convention to kick against you would have nothing to say ?
The atheist merely smiles at this game and brings to mind the adage 'garbage in..garbage out' !

I suggest it is that is your fear of the collapse of your house of cards which drives you !

'How science works' is indeed a philosophical problem involving our human preoccupation with 'prediction and control' and the dubious epistemological status of 'causality' (as suggested by the Nietzsche quote above, and by physicists themselves), . Other than a 'naive realistic' approach to 'the laws of nature', the only philosophers I am aware of who concern themselves with this issue are those 'deep ecologists' like Fritjof Capra, who question whether science does 'work', from a holistic pov, and shift attention from 'explaining mechanisms' to 'the politics of control' (...shades of Nietzsche's 'Will to Power' perhaps... ?).

My citing of Nietzsche's position comes second hand from Rorty's comments* on 'truth'.
But this direct quote refers to that position....
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/404275-we-say-it-is-explanation-but-it-is-only-in

*https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CzynRPP9XkY

No. IMO, definitions merely suggest potential usage contexts, and 'materiality' tends to imply 'of focal concern', not an allusion to 'physicality' as such (although 'to be of concern' is not without its biological connotations which are also 'physical events') As suggested on another thread, what 'matters' in social agreement is 'what happens hext', not some abstract state we call 'agreed meaning'. Reification, is the process of reinforcing the functional social value for a concept which lacks immediate 'physicality' by associating it with a physical 'object'. Thus, for example, 'recycling' is reified by designated disposal bins, or 'nationhood' is reified by a flag.
Now we could perhaps stretch the reification argument to a claim that the physicality of 'words' is itself responsible for reification of any concept, but that could be a step too far.