Religion is the politics of our ancestors - made necessary when hunter gatherer tribes joined together to form multi-tribal social groups. Hunter gatherer tribes were hierarchies dominated by an alpha male - and it's very difficult for two such hierarchies to coexist. Any dispute over food or sex inevitably splits the social group into its tribal structures of authority. They needed an objective authority for laws that applied equally to everyone, to maintain a stable cohesive social structure. God is the supreme alpha male; and objective authority for law and order. Now, like I said, I don't know if God exists, but I do know religion is the politics of primitive peoples. — counterpunch

Can you imagine thinking of religion without that god notion ruling thought? To me, most atheistic reasoning is straw person arguing: The man in a cloud thinking is demonstrably absurd; therefore, religion is bunk. One has to ask the religious questions behind the myths and anthropological interpretations. There are things, fascinating things entirely unregarded in this dismissive pov.

The point of explaining this to you is to suggest that the actual areas that are not open to me, philosophising on the basis of a scientific understanding of reality, are much less than you might imagine. You would like to construe science as some myopically focused experimental discipline - but science seeks to establish laws that are universally true of reality. Your imagination, by comparison is dwarfed - by the sheer size, and complexity of the universe. You worship the book and despise the creation. You have the milky way - and instead put up fairy lights! — counterpunch

Hehe, heh; I don't know if I take your meaning entirely, but I like your prestation. I have the highest regard for science, especially when I sit in the dentist's chair. The trouble with what you say is that it reveals none of the "Copernican Revolution" of Kant. Not that I am a Kantian, at all, but he was the father of phenomenology (before Husserl) and I take this to be the final frontier of philosophy.

Science simply has to know its place, which is not philosophy. Philosophy, I claim, should inquire into the presuppositions of science and the "everydayness" of our existence. It is essentially descriptive of the world, but at the level of basic questions which goes to the structures of experience.

In other words, to put it succinctly, I am an idealist, not to put too fine a point on it. I think to examine the world philosophically, one has to look to the foundation of thought and experience is presupposed in all we do and say. This brings meaning to the foreground and establishes an entirely independent field of study, which is phenomenology.

The problem is that you can only speak clearly about first-order logic. Most of the propositions of the same "Tractatus" are meaningless applying that own criteria. — Miguel Hernández

Dividing logic into first and second order is, I think, what gives rise to all the troubled thinking. There is no meta-logic logic. Logic cannot think itself. Does that apply to the ethics? Yes, and I take W as denying, not ethical talk, but any attempt to talk about ethical talk. This would be the "second order" you speak of and I have always thought he was dead right about this. BUT: there are ways think that get closer to this line that separates sense from nonsense, and even broaches the divide. Take Eugene Fink's Sixth Cartesian Meditation. Of Michel Henri's critique of Heidegger.

If one has the feeling that one is talking about a topic in a blind-men-and-an-elephant manner, then one is, clearly, not talking clearly. It doesn't matter what the topic is, although the blind-men-and-an-elephant manner seems to be more common when talking about philosophical, religious, or spiritual topics. — baker

It's a metaphor, and such things make for unclear ideas. But there is something important here, I realize. It is not that W is wrong, but that analytic philosophy took its cue that it had to be rigorously devoted to clarity, not considering that one can take the principle of clarity into thematic zones that are stubborn to its rigor. This is existential thought! Reading Kierkegaard, Husserl, Heidegger, Levinas, and others is an exercise in making difficult dimensions of our existence "clear".

But, what is worth thinking about is the right to remain silent in certain areas where feel we are going to tie ourselves in knots, or be met with such opposition. Here, we may be talking about silence not due to lack of knowing but the unspeakable, which could be that which no one wishes to hear.But, perhaps that is another matter entirely. — Jack Cummins

But what if, as I see it, the truth lies in those knots? And the reason metaphysics has been such a bad model is because it created more knots than it undid? And lastly, what is silence? Is it simply turning one's chair to the wall and ignoring the possibilities? The irony of it is that Wittgenstein admired Kierkegaard, who also insisted that there was this impossible unknown, and both were very religious, but the latter turned radically away from privileging science and reason, and made faith into, not a metaphysics, but a new kind of philosophy. An extraordinary achievement.

But the unspeakable: There are ways to speak meaningfully "around" the unspeakable. In fact, Wittgenstein was doing just this with his infamous disclaimer that the Tractatus was just itself a bunch of nonsense, which had to be discarded after reading (Title should have been, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus: Burn After Reading) But for him, it was a line clearly drawn. That was just wrong. The line is just a beginning of real religion, I claim.

Yes, I agree with that. It's not that I never mention God, but I know I don't know if God exists. I know I don't know where the universe came from, or what it's expanding into. I know I don't know how life began or what happens after we die. But I am quite well versed on a middle ground scientific understanding of reality, and taking in physics, chemistry and evolutionary biology - have found much wisdom and real hope follows from thinking in those terms. I can speak meaningfully about morality and religion, politics and economics - as evolutionary developments, and as sociological and political phenomena. All that is lost to me is speculative; that which, even if interesting, is bound to be inconclusive. — counterpunch

The trick, if you don't mind me saying, is to take "inconclusiveness" and give it its due, which is in regions of thought that demand a division, like when you sit before that petri dish doing genetic research. But step away from such definitive contexts of work, and into the broad, nay, infinite landscape of the human reality, into the powerful world of an impossible ontology, and you encounter all "if ands or buts" science routinely ignores. One does this because being a person is NOT AT ALL like a petri dish. Pull away a bit more and you are in religion's domain, and it is here, I claim, we find religion's resting place. Existential religion (I'm going to call it) is our "home".

Sounds like you're ready to take a few years off, design your sister's house, punch some grade school children in the face, and then come back and write an entire book trying to figure out why you got sucked into thinking language only worked one way with a single standard, where you'd have to field questions from your old self and imagine examples of what we would say under which circumstances to be able to see all the places langauge reaches in our lives, and why we would want to ignore all that. — Antony Nickles

That single standard pretty much sums up the success of analytic philosophy. And yeah, the "old" self is the everydayness (thinking of Heidegger here) that should be the foundation for discovery. And here, it is just massively interesting because meaning is paramount once again! Finally one can ask about this bewildering place we are "thrown" into and we can have that Kierkegaardian outrage in Repetition:
Who am I? How came I here? What is this thing called the world? What does this world mean? Who is it that has lured me into the world? Why was I not consulted, why not made acquainted with its manners and customs instead of throwing me into the ranks, as if I had been bought by a kidnapper, a dealer in souls?

And finally, religion is not just some medieval foolishness, but is grounded actuality (putting aside the foolishness that is there, that is). Why the %^%%$$^ are we born to suffer and die? becomes a philosophical theme!

Yes, some deep meditators are supposed to be able to shut-out physical pain while they retreat into an inner world of their own — Gnomon

Well, Thich Quang Duc would be the definitive case in point. After all, being burned alive ON PURPOSE has got to be a whole other universe of superhuman feats. Makes Houdini look like mere dabbler. I put a lighted match to my finger in a microsecond it's too much to bear.

He was not in this world when he lit the match.

Well, "going crazy" (psychotic) might be one way to escape from awareness of the psychic sufferings of reality. But, I don't recommend it. Also, I suppose that some cynics might consider prematurely reaching Nirvana (quenching the flame) via meditation to be a form of "mental suicide". In a more literal sense, the self-immolating monk apparently committed suicide, while meditating, but without actually quenching the flames. Yet, again, I don't recommend it. :sad: — Gnomon

I wonder, "where" do you think Thich Quang Duc was when he set himself ablaze? I think the event tells us something about the relationship between the self, the "deep agency" of the self, that can remove itself from sense perception completely. If a person can do this, then it makes for an argument that gives unqualified independence to this self, if you will, within the self, if he can put this kind of distance between suffering and his own meditating self, where does this place any identifying features at all of the if one say say, apophatically, well, this is not the self?

Meditation, like everything else, is a circle game. You end up back where you started with a new perspective. One of the last things to let go of is the thought that somehow you are "different." It is said that when the historical Buddha reached the apogee of enlightenment, he said, "I have achieved absolutely nothing," meaning that it was only his ability to quiet his mind that had changed. — synthesis

You see, I disagree with this, at least the way it is stated. I won't bring a lot of names into it, but keep it close to simple sense making. Being in love: what IS this? And what is horrible torture? The dimensions of our existence go deep into the extremes. Meditation does not take one away from this into a neutral pain free existence, rather, purifies this struggle down to an essential, palpable joy. Buddhists talk about emptiness, but I have always taken this to mean empty of rigorous interpretative tendencies of being a person in the world. As far as the nature of experience, there was a fullness, a completeness. What one achieves is an absolute nothing in thought and belief, in the distractions that would pull you this way and that, but not in the content: a uniform bliss that issues from one's "Buddha nature" which is always there, always has been, but cluttered with and occluded by engagements, the source of our misery and our foolishness" these are empty for all we can say is thereby conditioned by language and language takes us into the very world of differences we are trying to escape.

And to me, there is no question, meditation IS an escape, it is THE escape; it is death with a pulse.

Near death experiencers are fascinating to me. Never used to be, but lately they are coming out of the closet. And the first thing I notice is that these guys are NOT lying or deluded. Few take them to be philosophically within the bounds of credulity, but they're wrong. I think they have a lot to tell us about meditation, the goal of which is unqualified happiness.

"Burn the Buddha" is the phrase many use to sum-up the situation. The paradox of Buddhism (the religion) is that what makes it so inviting creates massive attachment for most of its followers. The Buddha understood that very few would intuitively, "get it," and created The Path. — synthesis

Burn the Buddha. Meister Eckhart infamously prayed to God to be rid of God. I think he understood attachment in the way you describe. Attachment at the basic level is conceptual and affective, these are joined. One way to look at it: philosophy in its truest form is deconstruction: tearing down the illusions that we know the world. Meditation, on the other hand, and this has to be looked at closely, is the pursuit of affect: we meditate to pursue, not conceptual or propositional wisdom, but a higher, more profound experience or affect, that is, emotion. I know, Buddhists don't talk like this, like Christians talk about God's love, but they are living in the same world and it is just the terminology that is different. Love is just happiness, joy, bliss; and meditation seeks this, off the charts!

I was drawn to Zen because it gets down to the heart of the matter. There is only one lesson in Zen, meditate. Everything there is to get you will derive from your practice. The words are simply pointing the way. You would be amazed at how many people who have been students for many, many years refuse to understand (more that they simply cannot give up critical thought for even a moment). — synthesis

Philosophy is purely pragmatic: just to point the way, as you say, and I think this is right. Jnana yoga is the way of deconstruction, and it does work, but is limited. It can open a door. The most effective philosophy is apophatic, for once one goes through a review of all the assaults on common sense philosophy presents, one is led to see that the world is utterly transcendental, and this can be revelatory. Alas, most philosophers are transfixed by their own cleverness, which is, frankly, fun, if you're good at it. But it goes nowhere.

I wish I was adept in philosophy so I could carry on an intelligent conversation with you but it has been so many years ago and its importance has waned. I am a follower of the Tang Dynasty Chan masters (as are many) and Huang Po is perhaps my favorite master of the "shit or get off the pot" style of teaching. I completely fell into line when I read his words...

"Open your mouth and you have already lost it."

I believe the true liberation in Zen (for me) was the realization that not only can you put down the burden of having to figure everything out, but there is nothing to figure out. It's all right there if only you can open your eyes and still your mind. — synthesis

I have always taken Zen to be where one goes if one is absolutely committed, I mean, solidly on the road to "understanding" at the most basic level. What one witnesses in this path must require extraordinary discipline but what one "sees" must be just extraordinary. Not, I would say, a "nothing" but a living in the pure present. I can only imagine. I have had intimations, which is why I have so much respect for it. There is in this something that far surpasses all other things.

That brings us to the question of whether there is an objective source 'out there' that maps into our consciousness. — EnPassant

Here is a rather "weird" piece of reasoning. But then, the world IS weird:

In the traditional sense of "out there" there is nothing but repetitious finitude. I seriously think, and this is pushing it for most, that the objective source is "in here". I look out into a starry night and I know that eternity is somehow there but then, intuitively an entirely impossible concept. What IS the delimitation of finitude? I think it obvious: it is a brain, of specified dimension in weight and volume and density. I think I am looking at the "place" where the gray matter simply ends when I put my wonder and curiosity to the matter of eternity. A physical border? But then, if it is the brain that "makes" this border, the brain itself cannot be "in" this made finitude any more than a painting can be in a painting (yes, it could but this would beg the question, where is this painting, in another painting? I mean, you can ask this forever until you get to the Real place which is not a painting at all). The brain must be outside the border it creates, in eternity. And since it is outside, all that is inside the brain is in this outside, and this means that our experiences are eternal and the foundation for all we experience lies here.

One way to look at Wittgenstein's claim that our values and logic have their generative source "elsewhere".

One of the issues many meditators deal with is the divide you accurately describe above, that is, existing in the relative (intellectual) when in the world of knowing and human interaction, and The Absolute (or thereabouts) when one is in meditation. As you may be aware, the goal of any structured meditation is to hone your practice to the point where you bring it into everyday life, so eventually the divide narrows. — synthesis

If you bring it into everyday life, then you will live in a different world. And very, very few will understand you.
Meditation makes you into something of a cult of one, for even those who share your interests remain outside. And it is not selfishness, as some might suspect. Just the opposite.

Very interesting. I'll have to give that some thought as it's been a while since I've delved too much into that sort of thing. What I did get out of my readings many years ago was that simplicity is truth, and Simplicity is Truth. The simpler ideas become, the closer to the truth they get, because it is the process of intellectualization that drives them (anything knowable) further and further into obscurity. Peel back layer after layer of meaning, and there is the truth at its core...the quiet mind. — synthesis

I wish I could do this better. But in my favor, I am a bit of a natural. Buddhists talk about detachment and I have always known exactly what they meant. The quiet mind is an openness to the world. I can't say I know how this works with great clarity, but as I see it, to look out into things the sense of "I" is an opaque interpretation and the hardest part of meditation is to undo the self that is "quiet" for we think we know what it is to be quiet but don't. The self, relaxed and controlled, is still tacitly interpreting the world; this is what it means to "know" (Reminds me of Dionysus the Areopagite's Cloud of Knowing. Christian mystics, like Eckhart, were not far from this matter here. One does have to put aside all the Christian metaphysics, same as with Kierkegaard).

I think Derrida is the final philosopher. He deconstructs the self in essence telling us such an idea is constructed like everything else. Constructed in time (time: a concept also constructed, which is the basic idea of hermeneutics). Caputo (See his "The Weakness of God) claims this is where negative theology leads (the East has its "neti, neti" method; the West calls this apophatic theology). I have read that Zen looks at the "space between moments" to identify liberation. They are all talking about the same world, the same encounter, from Husserl to Hinduism.

I am by no means adept in any of this, but I do know what it is like touch on that immaculate clarity and freedom. I take all of this seriously because I naturally inclined to do so. It is like a calling. Much work to do. Worth every moment.

I came to Zen after a very intensive five year philosophical journey that rendered me completely spent (intellectually).

My introductory (Zen) readings suggested two ideas that I have found prescient, the first being that if you are seriously going down this path, you will do it alone, the other being complementary, "To get everything, you must first give everything up."

It's been over three decades now and I can tell you that both have been true for me. If it is the truth you seek, prepare to go it alone. There are very few people who have the energy/will to delve deeply into the philosophical, and almost nobody willing do the same in the non-intellectual. — synthesis

Yes, that makes perfect sense to me.

The world is a language and cultural construct. When one is with others, structures of language and culture are engaged, reinforcing the reality these create. Pulling away from others is like annihilating the world as we know it, the one of distinct values and conversational possibilities that fill time and interests.

Interesting to consider Derrida, obliquely, that is: to step into a moment in time is to be in a compromised reality, for what makes the mundane event, whatever it is, mundane, is the familiarity, the recollections. It wasn't always like this. When we were very young the world was not so thick with knowledge and experience. But at any rate, to observe a lived moment and to know how the actual encounter is instantly seized upon by recollection, what is clear is that the sense of reality is genuinely compromised by a reified past that clutches on the presence of what is there. And its hold is so strong that for most there is never the slightest clue that the language and concerns the past creates are conditioning the present at all. It all is just one big seamless reality. Meditation is an annihilation of this body of presuppositions that are always already there, IN all of our daily affairs, implicitly.

It gets interesting when the acknowledging of this makes its way into the actual perceptual event and one begins to realize that harbored within one's interior has always been something primordial. Kierkegaard calls this the eternal present. He never meditated of course, but knew how far he was from actually realizing this himself, endlessly self deprecating.

It seems to me that there are many kinds of time. The most obvious is physical time. Another is mental time. Also mathematical time. Mathematics IS time of we define time as the relationship between objects in 'space'. There can be mathematical objects in abstract spaces. Logic is also time. Any order is time of one kind or another. — EnPassant

But all of these issue from the origin, which is an agency of human consciousness. All hard sciences, all logical propositions, all that can be said at all! issues first from the agency of experience. Is that air you're breathing? For by the time a breathe makes it into conscious awareness it is a processed event through, to put it in physicalist terms, a 100 billion neuron brain thing.

Physical time is a physical object just like a chair or table except it has an extra dimension. If physical objects disappear so will physical time. An analogy would be an oak tree and the molecules that make it. If the molecules that make it dissolve into atoms, the oak tree will evaporate and disappear. — EnPassant

But to add: that oak tree dis present not out there in some remoteness from experience, but in experience itself, and experience is generated from one moment to the next. Experience is Heraclitus' stream that one cannot step into twice, or even once (Porphyry). time is not "out there" but in here, experience. Einstein knew this very well having read Kant when he was 13 or so.

t's my supicion, well-founded or not (you be the judge), that the entire story of ethics and the self, rides on the simpler notion of causality. An event takes place and instincitvely we seek a cause. This desire to pin down a cause transforms into an ethical dimension while the cause itself is rendered by the mind into a self. — TheMadFool

There may be something in this. But it ignores the essence of ethics: pain and pleasure, suffering and bliss. This may fit into a causal matrix in our general affairs, but they are not mere causal events, reducible to the principle of sufficient cause. I mean, that screaming pain from a spear in your kidney, how can causality explain this? It is, after all, that pain which is the essence of the ethical prohibition NOT to inflict it on others, or yourself. All ethics has this feature: no pain, pleasure (of some kind or another) at stake, then no ethics!

Perhaps we have a self but it isn't much if it is not in a relationship to something. The ever changing river is the relationship between us and the world. That seems to be what the self is. — EnPassant

Perhaps, but then, there is Husserl and Derrida and those in between and the idea that eternity is not some infinite succession of moments, but rather the absence of time, and time is what is produced when memory surges forward with its history of events, language, culture and so forth, into an unmade future. This stream of future making events IS time; and we are not in time, but we, our personality, predilections to act, think and feel, ARE time. This is Heraclitus' world.

But what of the self? This fleeting being constantly in flight into the future caught in a temporal dynamic? This is where actuality is, in this fleeting process' center. The eternal present, as Kierkegaard thought of it.
This might sound far fetched, that is, until one takes up meditation, the act of annihilating time. There is something to the strong claims made by Hindus and many Buddhists (Mahayana) that say, in the deepest meditative states, something qualitatively distinct steps forward that is more real, so much so it makes eveydayness look pale by comparison.

Being that I can find no evidence that we can have access to reality on any level, the key becomes gaining the skills to "go with the flow" as best as is possible and I have found meditation to be (by far) the best method for myself. — synthesis

A nice practical approach. But if one wants to go into it more deeply, it takes sacrifice. I mean, time reading phenomenology, or meditating two hours a day. Both, I think. But honestly? This entails giving up "the world"! weird to say, but that is what happens when you go into such matters with real, say, genuine intent, for then, the thinking, the meditative revelatory experiences, all pull one to a different gravity other than popular themes. As I see it, few can do this, give up the world. Intellectuals take to the lectern, meditators usually just want to find peace, but to really close down the institutions that fill one's head as a member of society, this is a different course of life. Takes motivation.

It seems to me that the self - or a large part of it - is our relationship with the world. It is ever changing - you can't step into the same river twice... — EnPassant

Is there nothing at all that IS the river?

If you want to begin to understand the origin of NOW have you considered Plotinus' idea of the ONE? — Nikolas

Sure, I've read the Enneads, or, enough of them here and there through time, and I understand pretty well the essential thinking. It is written about in different ways by Taoists, Hindus and Buddhists, Kierkegaard, Jaspers (the Encompassing---no doubt he had read Plotinus), Levinas, et al. Interesting to read broadly on this issue because other fill in the gaps, open lines of inquiry that one didn't know were there. And in doing this, my view is, there is a conscious assault on the conditioned experiences that hold our minds, souls, selves, whatever. Eckhart wished to be rid of "God" but really it is the firmly based experiential grounding acquired through a lifetime that needs to be exorcized.
The real question is, after one has reviewed the matter and observed the crisis of the understanding when it comes to God and the everydayness of living and thinking, how is liberation achieved? The One is bound to the many, if you want to talk like this, and the many is a perversion of this if taken as foundational. See Kierkegaard's Fear and trembling, e.g.You know, they are all talking about the same thing.

I claim we live in transcendence, for all things are a presence that is irreducible. This is not a popular idea, though.
— Constance

What do you mean by this? — synthesis

The issue hangs on consciousness having this underpinning that is not available to thought, which is I think clearly true. BUT: the actual generative source for experience can never be observed, for it would require consciousness to do this, and consciousness is supposed to be the object of our inquiry, and cannot be the means, for that would be question begging of the worst kind. So as far as underpinnings, all experience, consciousness, the self, and the like are grounded not in something observable waiting for a more powerful microscope, but in "something" entirely off the map: unobservable, yet the necessity for positing it does not thereby reduce to nonsense. Transcendence is simply there, always already there , discoverable perhaps only in the, if you will, experience of experience, which is a loose way to talk about self consciousness: the standing apart from affairs, observing that you observe, or think or feel, and this kind of thinking takes the matter even further away from familiar thinking.

I think for all us soul searchers the relentless seeking for answers has prevented us all to look at 'what is' and claim 'there must be more to this than "what is"'. This notion will always have those who seek beyond and believe there is always more.
Simply, we know too little to say we know so much. Thus there may be more, but our capacity it limited to understanding what we can know.
There has to be a point or points of origin. A point so fundamental that further questioning can only project from it, around it or despite it. It is hard to exclude existence from this base line, and trying to define it is an interesting exercise. Either way it appears to be a 'what is' from which we launch all our everything. — Peter Paapaa

This "what is" has a philosophical history that is not altogether antagonistic to, if you will, reclaiming something deep and primordial about being a self. But it takes some serious reading. I am reading the French post Heideggerians who take the moment of inquiry that sets one apart from mundane thinking very seriously. See Levinas, Michel Henry, Jean luc Marion, and others. Fink's Sixth Meditation hs always been a favorite, but one needs Kant and Husserl for clarity, I think.

This is attention of the heart, and this is the principal mediating, harmonizing power of the soul. The mediating attention of the heart is spontaneously activated in the state of profound self-questioning. — Nikolas

Attention of the heart? You mean emotional attention, to regard the world in a loving way. Self questioning leads to this? I think it requires a certain kind of self questioning. The question opens up possibilities and violates familiar thinking. What happens in self questioning, the "Who am I, really? and Why do we suffer? and so forth? It sounds like you think the question at the basic level presents something, but you cannot yet call it a soul, I don't think. You first have to be more descriptive: what is it one's encounters in inquiry that warrants positing the soul? Here one has dropped standard thinking altogether and entered a relatively alien world, relative, that is, to our everydayness.

Can you confirm such a thing, and explain it keeping faithful to what the world actually presents itsel;f as Being? This is where things get philosophical. Eckhart, remember, wrote of how he prayed to God to be rid of God. He wanted to be free of this everydayness that a lifetime of conditioning imposed on his thoughts and feelings, and, especially, his baseline intuitions.

Have you ever been in love? Can you TELL me what that is about?

There are things which are simply beyond the reach of our intellect (pretty much everything :). To me, to be forced to live in a world defined by our critical thinking alone truly defines what my mentor used to tell me repeatedly, "Man makes his own Hell on this Earth." — synthesis

Of course, you're right. I only add that what is spoken is brought into understanding. I can talk about being in love, explain the physiology of it, throw in adjectives and metaphors, and so on, but these just dance around what is in itself, entirely beyond the saying. All things are like this, as you say, not just love, or intense emptions, but everything: my dog and cat, the clouds in the sky, the cup on my desk, and so on.
I claim we live in transcendence, for all things are a presence that is irreducible. This is not a popular idea, though.

Value is not ineffable any more than the ‘objective ‘ is transcendentally true. Moore was a Kantian, still caught up in a subject-object , feeling-thinking split. Value cannot in any shape or form be separated from that which would supposedly be understandable or existent independently of it. The same is true of the relation between affectivity and intentional meaning, which is what we’re really talking about here anyway. Heidegger realized precisely this, which is why he didn’t think of ‘value’ as mysterious in some way that cognition or perception is not. Value is befindlichkeit, how we find ourselves in the world, how things have pragmatic meaning and significance for us. — Joshs

I think it is right to say things are, as I take Heidegger to claim, of a piece: concepts, pragmatics, value, meaning (Dewey said the same); and it is not my intention to take metavalue as some kind of impossible ontology apart from all entanglements (which would the worst kind of dualism I suppose). I put matters of drawing ontological lines between things in suspension, but would like to take an analytical look at experience just to see what is there, plainly. Take a lighted match, apply it to the finger, and observe, apart from all presuppositions that would make a claim to it (which of course would remind one of Husserl, or perhaps of analytic philosophers' concept of qualia, or see Dennett's rather stark use of 'phenomenon' in his paper on qualia, and so on).

I mean, what is it As pain, and I care not at all how hermeneutically entangled it is otherwise, or whether belongs to a temporally structured event in which existence is predelineated, preconceptualized, or whether knowledge is inherently pragmatic. All off the board. It is the screaming pain I wish understand for what it is. I find this: When I break Wittgenstein's maxim to "pass over in silence" the whole affair, I find language that does not speak what value is any more than it can speak the color yellow as yellow. But there is one thing that does issue from the pain, and that is an injunction not to inflict this on to others nor myself. It is an injunction that is not contingent, as if "the world" were speaking, as if it were written on tablets by God.

I suspect this, contradicting myself from earlier, is the only Real ontology.

What you can learn, takes place before your critical thinking mind engages. Once it kicks-in, it alters reality into your personal reality which is simply incapable of figuring out much of anything. After all, how long would it take you to figure out the forth root 35467.94324 to the tenth place in your head? Compare that to the non-thinking mind that can process an infinite amount of information each moment. — synthesis

The "non thinking mind"? And what is this if not a thought in your head about something you observe. Note that every time you take up something about consciousness, you do so IN consciousness: "non-thinking" is a unit of language you learned, and when your understanding turns to identifying this, it turns where? to more language.
Did you think this was about the mysterious processes that underlie language and thought? TELL me what they are, emphasis on "telling". The point is, at best, observations show that actuality is not a language event, but such things are "empty" to the understanding if the attempt is made to conceive of them outside of language. The understanding is a "bundled" affair in which thought and sense intuition come together, as a piece, if you will. You may, as I see it, posit that there such things apart from what thought can say, speculate, analyze and so forth, and I think this right, but then you will be on the threshold of metaphysics, and would referring to affairs beyond what can be witnessed.

Yea, but these are inseparably intertwined. Value isn’t an ineffable internality, it’s a function of intersubjective patterns of relation , and questions concerning dualism and monism, the real and the relative are directly relevant to questions of value. — Joshs

But then, the "meta" end of value is just this ineffable "property" or as Moore put it, non natural property. Putting value into its contexts, theoretical, practical, invites discussion about everything BUT value. Is value Real? Then, what is real, and then follows the categorial move to "totalize" (Levinas borrowed from Heidegger, I think) which is away from the truly mysterious nature of value (that is, the pains, joys, miseries, celebrations, fascinations, interests, anxieties, terrors, and so on).

Perhaps value is effective in evolutionary accounts. No doubt. But what IS it that we are talking about that is so good for reproduction and survival? What are the descriptive features of, say, being tortured, qua the tortuous experience itself?

There are literally an infinite number of stimuli coming at you each moment. Do you believe that your brain is taking the time to "think" about all of these stimuli and then figure out what to do or are you just "doing it." — synthesis

One has to see that the claim there is an interpretative backdrop, a "predelineation" in place that defines the world when you are in your daily affairs do not reveal themselves in the explicit conscious event. They are implicit, just as the confidence that the sidewalk beneath your feet is solid to the step in every step you take is present even though you are not explicitly attending to it: You have stepped many times on many sidewalks, the aggregate effect of this making for the current confidence. We have such "aggregate consciousness" in all of our affairs, otherwise we would be like James' "blooming and buzzing" infantile perceivers.
You're driving? Is this some primordial event, or rather: is it learned, practiced and familiar that in the space of the moment only seems immediate?

Saying they are a mixture doesn’t make things clear.
Objectivity is a matter of intersubjective agreement on events which appear in different guises to each of us. We learn to treat our own vantage on an event as just an aspect of the ‘objective’ object , the ‘same’ object for all of us, when in fact it is never ‘same for all’ except as an abstraction, albeit a very useful abstraction. What is certain is that for each of us experience of that world is shaped by constrains and affordances such that some ways of interacting with the world are more useful relative to our purposes that others. The criteria of objectivity change over time as cultural an scientific practices change. — Joshs

But then, what is the bottom line? For me, there was a good reason Wittgenstein both denied talk about ethics at the foundational level, yet posited divinity (admitting it was indeed odd to do so. Kierkegaard taught him how odd this was).
Rick Roderick turned to his psychiatrist once and asked, "Why are we born to suffer and die?" An excellent question, to which the psychiatrist replied, "?!#$%&&$#."
It is THE question of consciousness. All others "beg" this question implicitly, the question being, why bother at all even asking? Our metaphysical haunt is not, good lord!: Dualism or Monism or whether ideas subsist in the Real, or if human consciousness is reducible or derivative; it is value and its meta-value consummation. Buddhists essentially understood this long ago. I suspect the Hindus and their mysterious metaphysics, sans the mythology, were closer to the truth, though: there is much, much more to our consciousness, or if you like, to heaven and earth than in your philosophy, Horatio.

The moment after Reality is perception-altered but before our critical thinking begins would seem to be the closest we can get to actual Reality. Although it has already become our personal reality (due to processing by our senses), it's must be considerably purer than what happens once the full monte of our intellect transforms it into some convoluted dystopia.

Mediators concentrate on this moment and often find it to be a portal to another place altogether. What is happening in this moment and where does it lead? — synthesis

It leads to itself, after all, when you encounter a thing in the perceptual moment it is already taken up in thought. A glance is inherently interpretative, so talk about what it is that is separate from thought becomes an exercise in metaphysics: No one has ever witnessed a "thoughtless perceptual object".

On the other hand, there is "presence" there that is not thought (see Kierkegaard e.g.). That we can apprehend this as it is rather than AS something else, language and logic, is, I think, indicative of our own meta-self.

The husk of the acorn is analogous to human personality. We are not born with it but it is acquired in life. It is the source of the OPINION of ourselves. We re born with what we ARE. The healthy kernel of life within the husk is analogous to the seed of the soul which has the chance to develop and become an oak or in this case, to become evolved Man. — Nikolas

Ah, the soul. Pray, elaborate.

The seed of the soul is connected by a vertical line to its source. Where our personality is guided by appearance as with materialism, the seed of the soul is nourished by the experience of vertical truth. — Nikolas

Fine, but tell me more about the soul, I mean, what there is in experience that gives warrant to this notion as a meaningful one. We begin with what we witness, not with metaphors and assumptions and metaphysics.

As we are, our personality is the dominant part of our lives while the inner man remains in the background and doesn't grow. It is possible that a person can consciously strive to awaken the inner Man containing the seed of the soul by weakening the reactive dominance of our personality. Instead of being limited to animal REACTION they can become capable of conscious ACTION. They can become conscious of the forest rather than being fixated on the trees. — Nikolas

It's not that I disagree with all of this, rather, I don't know its foundation beyond the arbitrary positing of the soul. To argue the case, one has to begin with what is there, present and "at hand" so to speak. From this, one moves outward.

The problem is order and value. how do you value a moment compared to an eon or infinity. how do you value a quark compared to a planet. For us humans we have to be able to quantify and qualify things and put them in order to understand some form of algorithm or story that makes sense to us.
What I'm calling existence is outside our conscious awareness (self) and hence cannot be valued within existence or our value systems.
The problem may be (relating to Constance's issue) that your looking for meaning where their is none. Existence doesn't present questions or answers, it just 'is'. What it is everyone and anyone will question but there is no substance or temporal 'fix' we can put on it because it is outside our knowledge and perhaps our understanding of what it is, so it does not fit into the categories, orders and values we have for all other things, there is no interconnective or relational connection to it as compared with all other things within it. It is as definitive as we have got, it is the base of our being the base of our universal understanding.

What is in the world and the interaction of self in the world, everything we do, feel ,think and be is another story of dissection, division, definition, purpose and reason. This is where the complexity of uniqueness, individualism, ism's, social beliefs, systems of belief, and just being in existence itself lies. — Peter Paapaa

Not sure why I'm looking for meaning where there is none. Clearly, meaning is there, in indulgence, the rapture, bliss, suffering, pain, and so on, IN the world. There is no mistaking this: right there, in my pounding headache or the Haagen Dazs I had for dessert. In terms of the sheer "presence" of these, I take them as foundational and irreducible.

As to the notion of "just is" keep in mind that physics held a consensus at the end of the 19th century that believed for the most part there was little else to find out in the field in terms of its fundamentals. "Just is" is itself a theoretical term. When we speak of what IS we put in play a history of thought handed to us culture and language.

This is true with philosophy as much as anything else. Consider the difference between Eastern and Western thought. the trick, though is to find common ground. After all, they are talking about the same world, it's just that there is this persistent "what it is" body of paradigms that gets in the way. The difficulty lies in bringing them together, and phenomenological thinking does this.

Imagine, I said, that you are a scientist and you have before you the object known as the acorn. Let us further imagine that you have never before seen such an object and that you certainly do not know that it can grow into an oak. You carefully observe these acorns day after day and soon you notice that after a while they crack open and die. Pity! How to improve the acorn? So that it will live longer. You make careful, exquisitely precise chemical analyses of the material inside the acorn and, after much effort, you succeed in isolating the substance that controls the condition of the shell. Lo and behold, you are now in the position to produce acorns which will last far longer than the others, acorns whose shells will perhaps never crack. Beautiful! — Nikolas

Since the acorn is a metaphor, the merit of acornology lies with its borrowed explanatory powers, and to me, it doesn't really capture the analysis of the self. True, cultivating better acorns is roughly like improving oneself, but the devil is in the details and this is not brought out by, well, acorns.

"Chemical analysis" of acorns? What are you (or he) suggesting? This is what needs to be explained.

We only know self in juxtaposition to the world and also as part of it. The self has no known material existence that inside or outside the world. Many will provide component parts to show existence of self, this is not relevant. Only you can know self as you do. you cannot know others 'self' because you cannot be other anything. Hence 'self' is the unique you and inclusive of all. . — Peter Paapaa

Fine. Now what IS it? When you put your attention to the self, its apparent descriptive features, what is there to "see"? this presents questions like, what is the meaning of meaning? For the first thing encountered is the fact that things are not just there, but they are important, we care. But what is this caring about? It is about things in the world, but the caring about things presents the question as to what there is in things to care about, and the matter turns to value, or, the value of value: We bring value into the world. It is the self that makes things meaningful, both conceptually and valuatively. The self is the center of all meaning in the world.
What does this mean?

Have you considered this question from the point of view of the "Great Chain of Being"?

https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Great_Chain_of_Being

The Great Chain of Being describes the hierarchy of being and its many levels. Man is a microcosm. Man's being is structured like the universe. Plato described our higher and lower natures in the chariot analogy suggesting that the corruption of the dark source is the source of all our difficulties.

Regular ethics tells a person what to do but metaethics describes what we ARE: But it requires a person existing as the three parts of the tripartite soul to become inwardly balanced. Man exists out of balance so cannot experience metaethics but responds to indoctrinated or acquired ethics.

The goal of metaethics is conscious evolution; the evolution of our out of balance level of being into a higher quality of conscious evolution or inner unity along the Great Chain of Being where metaethics or objective conscience would be the norm. — Nikolas

If you want to think about evolution and metaethics, then perhaps De Chardin is the best way to go. At least he recognizes qualitative divisions in evolving creatures. Really, it is here, in the evolved features that the issue lies with. I mean, before there is talk about a hierarchy of Being, we need to look closely at the evidence before us that is the grounding of any and all metaphysical thinking, because all things have their final justification is what is clear and present. Metaphysics can get very messy and preposterous and you find yourself with your head in the clouds wondering how things got this way. This happens when lose touch with what is there, in the world primordially. First, there is the experience and then there is the question! The question opens possibilities. For me, I first look to the actuality of an ethical problem, and determine its parts. I find at the center there is the defining Real: the value. then Wittgenstein, Mackie, and others make their contribution. THEN one may be tempted to draw conclusions about the "meta" nature of evolution, its teleology, perhaps.

The point of this is to first establish qualitative distinctions in ontology BEFORE one makes extravagant elaborations. Pain is there, in one's midst. What makes it ethical at all? The ethics of pain qua pain is at issue. It is not in the descriptive facts, as facts are simple states of affairs, no greater of worse than any other, sitting there on the logical grid.

If one thinks our experiences can be sublime, profound, deeply important, somehow, and these are acknowledged as evolved features, then the structure of evolution must include this. Chain of Being? Would this not mirror the hierarchy within, which is, after all, the source of all speculative thinking?

Using just words? Quite herme-tic as well, isn't it? — Raul

Not just words, but observations of the structures of experience. Hermeneutics says that knowledge is deferential: terms always have their meanings tied to other terms. To think at all is to take up the world AS a symbolic system, and to think about "things in the world" is not a reference to some alien ontology like "substance" or "nature" but exists in a problem solving matrix that interacts in "the world". Such a term as "nature" suggests that what is natural is the bottom line for ontology. Hermeneutics claims that this term belongs to an interpretative matrix and it is here the bottom line is to be found" it is a term that is "regionally limited" and this is not what philosophy is looking for. Nature is a broad and inclusive concept, granted, but it is not foundational. You see, before one can discuss what is natural, you have to go through the very faculties process what one receives. It would be nice if the brain were like a mirror of nature (Rorty's book name, by the way), but just look at this "natural" object, the brain, I mean, I think you really have to be honest about this: that thing is entirely opaque, and this is working with a very clear physicalist view of objects. The brain is an object! You see this point. All the advanced chemistry you can imagine is not going to come to the aid of making two objects, my brain and my cat, come together epistemically.
Analytic philosophers like Dennett know this! You ask Dennett about this and he will simply shrug his shoulders, for he knows, as Wittgenstein claimed long ago: such questions are impossible! for one would have to step out of epistemic relations to "say" what this is, and the saying is inherently epistemic.

I take this as unassailably true, though, keeping in mind that there are NO unassailable truths in the absolute sense.

Your intuitions and language are aggregates of problem solving that you learnt while you grow up during your childhood. I would even say more, you would never be able to talk or conceive the linguistic categories if you are not exposed to a family context where people talk. Language is not trascendental and the categories we use are contingent and relative to the problem solving of our lives. — Raul

But all of this talk about childhood resides in a terminological setting that is hermeneutical. You have to give up the idea that when you perceive a thing there is some "absolute" connection. Dennett would entirely deny this. The "really and truly" part of what is is hermeneutics, and the "input" is, the moment it makes its entrance into the brain thing, nothing at all as to what that thing is if the brain were removed from the account of what the thing is.

If you think this is intuitively contradictory, if you will, then you're right. There is something IN the understanding that affirms existence qua existence. This, I am arguing, is value. Existence reveals its true nature in the value-meanings of the world and what intuitively asserts itself in the ultimate question about "what is" is value-meaning. Without value, the question would be ontologically no more meaningful that, way, ones and zero in a computer binary system.

Douglas Adam's question he poses to Deep Thought, of life the universe and everything, in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is, value.

Would be interesting to see what he would say about superposition states of particles and about bosons and fermions. For me it looks like Kierkegaard's thinking has been overestimated. He was pushed by the christian religions as he served their purposes. But this is another discussion. — Raul

No, it is this discussion. Take a look at his Concept of Anxiety. Of course, we are in the early 19th century, but this matters not at all. Note that Daniel Andler reveals that Cartesian problems remain entirely at a distance from CURRENT theory! Descartes??? Dualism? That was the 17th century.

Of course, K's Anxiety is a difficult work. Most fear to go.

This is you saying those things I talk about are not in those systems. I of course disagree. — Raul

But the assumption that a tree is still a tree when all experience manufacturing faculties are removed (I leave the scene) is a claim that one knows beyond knowing! It is kind of crazy. I think this clear...as a proverbial bell.

But phenomenology can be conceived within empirical world thanks to heterophenomenology. It is a branch of cognitive naturalism. — Raul

so, if you will, tell me how, briefly, cognitive science gets my cat into my brain. Note that the moment you lift an explanatory finger that you are bound make explicit references to what is NOT my brain.

It is not that cognitive science is wrong. Not at all. The point here is that this is speculative science. not philosophy. This is not the bottom line of inquiry. This is a Dennett shrugging his shoulders, then getting on with arguing AS IF the natural world were in fact the natural world. As analytic philosophers all do. Ask an epistemologist about affirming "P" in "S knows P". S/he will tell you, well, you have to have P adn that's it! They ignore more penetrating "Kantian" questions simply because they know these go places their logical rigors dare not go! Levinas, Husserl, Fink, Heidegger and on and on; analytic philosophers do not go here because they just like working on puzzles, flexing cognitive muscle. Whole books written on Gettier problems! Nonsense, really. Degrades the entire enterprise.

Heterophenomenology is not "existing my interior". It is working under the assumption that your brain and my brain functions the same way so I can study yours to make conclusions about mine. — Raul

But of course you have to go through your own experience to get to the Other's brain. How is this done, again?

No technical language, but the naturalistic presumption. Yours is metaphysical, mine is naturalistic. — Raul

Explain, please, vis a vis the above.

We're all doing speculative thought... it is philosophy :wink: ... but his naturalistic approach is a winning one. — Raul

We're all doing speculative thought... it is philosophy :wink: ... but his naturalistic approach is a winning one. — Raul

Not sure what is winning. It is more like more of the same under the aegis of new language. Dualism? Still talking about dualism. Ignoring Kant. It just SOUNDS like progress. Never, ever get past Wittgenstein.

Of course, he is humble and realistic, but he follows what I think is the right way... philosophy but with science. Not a philosophy that tries to positioned itself above everything as the king of the world with their anthropocentric views of things (meta-things are good examples). Andler puts nature above anything, being humble pays off. — Raul

Being humble does not undo what he is saying. Nice try. Remember, it is NOT just Descartes. He runs through many ideas taken up by contemporary philosophers, and it is not like a physicist talking about Newton. These basic philosophical issues are not one whit closer to being solved because you will never get beyond the cat to me.

Don't you think this is a "religious" absolutist way of defining philosophy? it appears toas your position your capabilities of thinking above any real, above nature. As Daniel Andler and naturalists say, many philosophers position themselves above nature. This simple thing is what naturalism fixes, putting below nature, approach nature in a humble way. Same way science does. — Raul

Not religious. Just looking to what is presupposed by knowledge claims, that is, looking into the logical structure of such a claim. You say C-fibers firing, e.g., and then, fiber? What is this? I mean, what is the thought that utters it, the intuitive foundation of the world that I receive, what can and cannot be affirmed foundationally? And so on. One does not look at the world for such answers, simply at what must be the case in order for thought and science and being in the world to be the case. Of course, it is accepted that there is a world, but only to the extent that such a world presents itself in the most "immediate" way, as presence. Beyond the analysis of is metaphysics: affirming what is present is also a non presence. Now we are in metaphysics.

Yes, together with philosophy, naturalistic one. Are you telling me a phenomenology conceived as only using human reasoning is more powerful? No, quantum mechanics experiments could never be understood using any phenomenological reasoning... goes beyond naif human intuitions. — Raul

No, Phenomenology does NOT cancel science in the least; at all! It simply says that here, you are not at the ground level of inquiry. There is a question that is something of an elephant in the room, however: When we make observations of the world, we are presented with what is not experience, even though this cannot be confirmed, understood in any model whatsoever! "Outthereness" is not an abstract transcendental, but an IMPOSING transcendental. This is what all th fuss is about in Derrida (?), Husserl, Heidegger(?), Levinas, and others because, for some, the Other is an ethical transcendence. The question is, what IS there that is MORE than the totality of experience? The issue goes to Time. More on this as desired, but it is the basis of my metaethical claims.

Are you serious or being cynic here? — Raul

Philosophy has been going on a very, very long time. Very hard to thumbnail this. We live not in a world of things, but of events. to step beyond the boundaries of an event is to cease and desist making the event in question, aka, experience. How do we do this? Meditation. the trouble with philosophy as you have been reading it, is that it can never objectify the self totally, subsume the self under it Totality fo understanding. It wants to do this, but the egoic center can never be made into an object, and all along, it is the self's Being that hs been at issue. Other things are not actualities, hence the nonsense of words like "material" and "substance" which are at nst placeholders for thigs unspeakable, at worst bad metaphysical assumptions, as if calling a thing natural could establish a basis for the Real.

Likely typos, not proofreading, sorry, no time.

What about the superposition principle? Incoherent state of particles? — Raul

The same as it is with all concepts: it is hermeneutically grounded. Talk about quantum mechanics is first language, and it is here that phenomenology stakes its claims. Physics, even the most cutting edge, are not ontologically basic. What is basic is the construction of thought and the world at the level of original generative description; it is Kant, or rather, Husserl and Eugene fink's Sixth Meditation carrying on Kantian idealism, that takes center stage. An idea of any kind is a taking the world up AS, and an in this phenomenological ontology, the phenomenon is a bundled "event". How this is explained differs across the board, but it is clear to me that the eidetic dimension of an object pragmatic and the field of Being that comprises all things, that is the "what it is" is pragmatic, a body problems solved (ready to hand). You observe a hammer, realize implicitly its nature as something settled, familiar, "known intuitively," that is, immediately, always already: this is our "sense of reality" which is a lifetime of pragmatic successes, or "consummations" (Dewey). This account reduces reality to an aggregate problem solving, it "region spatially desevered" when encountered (a little Heideggerian terminology that I won't repeat. He really wanted a break with everything traditional and this makes him theoretically alien to standard discussions).

I think he is right. I think Richard Rorty and the pragmatists align with Heidegger, and give us a startlingly compelling account for the answer to the question, what is Real? It is hermeneutical pragmatics.

BUT: there is a rub! And this is Kierkegaard, or begins here: There is "something" here in my midst in the object that is not pragmatic, and this is actuality. Notice the paradox: A "say" actuality, but in the saying I subsume in language the very thing I am trying to, errr, performatively dismiss. The saying and the thinking IS the performance and I can't ever "get to" the actuality beneath the terminology, but there is no mistaking that this actuality of a cat is not a concept, not a pragmatic "eidetic affair of an actuality" (Husserl)
Here it gets complicated. Time becomes the structural center.

I have to insist here, I see this happening in other artificial systems we humans create. In engineering and physics we call them complex systems. Complex systems have the capacity of new properties and capabilities to emerge within them. Properties and capabilities impossible to predict. One good example are the Convolutional Networks that learn to recognize objects in images. Nothing metaphysical but just physical, physics of information. And those complex systems are heuristic and stochastic as our brain is. — Raul

Interesting to note: You are such a system, and talk about things that are not in or of such systems is really what metaphysics is. Freud's psychoanalytical constructions of ego, id and superego is considered meta psychology. I mean, look at it like this: if one wants to localize events at the level of basic questions, saying here is a tree, there is an application possibility for the concept of "convolutional networks that learn to recognize objects in images" all of these begins at ONE locality, and this is the foundational level of philosophical inquiry: the experiential matrix of a self. One never, at this level of discussion, even observed an object that is free of cognition and affect, such a thing has never even been witnessed once! To talk like this is an abstraction from the source, which is experience.

It is not that talk about the theoretical structures of thought in computer science modeling is meaningless. Such a claim would be patently absurd. But it is to say that in doing so you are not thinking at the level of basic questions, the ones that look into the presuppositions of empirically based theoretical systems. As I see it, one has not crossed the threshold into philosophy until the focus turns to foundational questions, and here we encounter hermeneutics.

But this "otherness" and the "me" is another mental object, maybe the highest level one but as any other that emerges during childhood. If you would grow up in the forest (like Frederick II in 13th century did with many children) without any contact to other humans, no contact to human language it is very likely you idea of the others, your "self", would be very very different and you would not have the instruments to make the questions you are making here. This is to say that it is the culture and the environment you grow up that determines your Self and how you are in the world. So this example illustrates as well that this "otherness" and this "me" is a reflexion, a literal mirror-reflexion of the "other" humans that your brain recognize being like you (same body, same gestures, capabilities...). 2 mirrors opposite one to the other. No surprise they generate the idea of infinite like it happens in the infinite images reflected in 2 confronted mirrors. — Raul

Sure. I think you treat phenomenology the way Dennett does in part of his qualia paper, as another word for qualia: what stands before us in the physical world has the sensory input and the conceptual form that put's it together. This sensory input, can it be acknowledged as it is independently of its concepts (to speak in Kant-ese)? That would be a way of referring to qualia, the "being appeared to redly."

Phenomenology is nothing like this, (though Husserl's epoche and the extraordinary claims he makes about "the thing itself" do need explaining. But not here unless you want to). All of our interhuman affairs remain as they are. Interpretation as to their meaning at the basic level, however, has changed dramatically. Phenomenology allows the world as it is to "speak" and prioritize, allowing meaning to dominate rather than empirical science paradigms in which meaning is localized as one event under the general rubric "the natural world". For a phenomenologists, the natural world is, analytically, a region of thought that circumscribes its own "domain"" if you want to talk about nature, then nature talk commences, specialized fields recognized, each with its distinct domain.

What is sought for in philosophy is the grounding of all domains, and this is Being. What is Being's domain? This specialized primordial domain is formally called ontology (despite this term's being coopted everywhere these days), and it has a history of metaphysics behind it. Phenomenology says Being is here and now, right before your eyes and in the analytic of experience.

No need, professionals in this field have already explained it and earn their lives explaining and making research to better explain how concepts are caused by external objects interacting with our brain. It is not yet digested by the pop-culture but it will come and as always in history, this paradigma-shifts happen in silence. Stanislas Dehaene (who works for French ministry of education) and Georg Northoff are good ones doing this. — Raul

All this is preanalytic by the standard imposed by existential thinking. Such researchers do not care about phenomenology, just as a geneticist does not care about Adlerian psychology.

No, here I think you make a fundamental mistake. What I can say is the result of scientific+philosophical studies of the subjective narratives of people, studying their subjectivity. Heterophenomenology successfully studies the subject as an object — Raul

Dennett will tell you that when he discusses such things, he implicitly dismisses, say, the Kantian objections. They all do. Quine despised Derrida, yet if you follow his thoughts about indeterminacy, you find yourself aligned with the conclusions of deconstruction (see David Golumbia's Quine, Derrida, and the Question of Philosophy). This is because this issue ran for over a hundred years and Russell and Moore got sick of it (Moore was a Kantian, then one day just asked, am I raising my hand? Looked at his hand and said, of course! following Diogenes who walked across the room to disprove Parmenides.

But then: One can read about heterophenomenology, acknowledge the sense of it, and still realize that while true, this or that big claim, the theoretical divide has not been crossed to basic questions. A philosopher like Rorty, whom I like because he straddles the middle so well, can on the one hand argue against phenomenology's intensionality--pain? where is the intension there?--, and presenting a monist view that looks a lot like what a physicist would put together (see, e.g., his view on Leibniz's brain tour of thought), but then, he takes Heidegger and Dewey and Wittgenstein (a phenomenologist? Not explicitly, but...) to be the greatest philosophers of the 20th century (and he adored the Kantian, Thomas Kuhn)! The thing is, Rorty's ontology is radical pragmatic phenomenology, and I think he is right: out thereness is nonsense if taken to be independent of the human contribution. I walk out of the room, and I take the cat with me, for "cat" is a pragmatic construct embedded in language and experience. That out there? Utterly transcendental and unspeakable. Rorty is the one who said, "how does anything out there get in here? is an impossible question, but only at the level of basic questions.

Dennett would say the same, or similar.

Sorry but yes we can and we do, again through heterophenomenology. Another way is looking at cases where the brain system breaks due to accidents or illness. Those case-studies are so helpful as well to kill so many prejudices about what we're. Good reference here is Ramachandran.
Do you know we can know your decisions before you know them (Libet)? Do you know we can induce a brain to be a religious brain (Ramachandran)? Do you know Capgras syndrome? Did you see in youtube the man with only 7-seconds memory? We can induce you the sense of presence of someone else just with some drugs altering you state of consciousness. A tumor can make you a pedophile (you can google it, real story).
These are cases that allow us to exit from our interior as these are like doors that open to what we're really are and how our brain cheat us :grimace: — Raul

Yes, I guess I these things. If you really think you can "exit" your interior you have two choices. One is to affirm that causality carries knowledge, is inherently epistemic, and you would have to say how this works. Another is to construct a metaphysics that does this. All we observe is not all there is, and "beneath" observed events there are knowledge relationships that make the essential connection. This sounds insane, but then, and this is where Rorty gets off the bus: 1) this "exteriority" that is present in our interior is, upon examination, something that subsumes our interior! 2) There is also a nondiscursive "intuition" in the affirmation of otherness that just won't go away in that it presents a picture of ourselves in the world that is a kind of simulacrum of the really Real.

I will not go into this unless you want to. It is very alien to one's familiar world.

It is very important, in my pov, to see that no matter how one slices it, you will never get beyond neurons and axonal connections and neurochemistry that fill the explanatory need, which is why I began with the cat. Brain talk does not get beyond this because this physicalist talk is presupposed. I look at the matter as one of opacity, clear and simple. There is a brain, and I am inside. There is no question that I am a physical brain manifestation inside a physical brain. This is just the opposite of metaphysics. Tell me abut the pathway from the cat to me. No need to be complex, just give me the rough detail, BUT, in full knowledge of the arguments here presented.

Doors? Wittgenstein rightly tells us that doors are first part of states of affairs, part of facts of the world. What is a fact? A propositional construction. There are no propositions "out there".

Ontological :-) I understand you use it here in its full metaphysical sense so I have to say nice metaphysical word but not epistemic value outside virtual illusive metaphysical systems. Sorry, here we diverge fundamentally. For me metaphysics is like an invented philosophical religion. I know it sounds strong, but it is how I see it. Well and many other philosophers. I do not subscribe to any meta-something view of things.
You can call me pragmatic. I would not accept this either. All this for me is completely obsolete terminology. I subscribe to naturalism that I'm quite sure you're not familiar with (see Daniel Andler and Sandro Nannini). — Raul

Pragmatists are not metaphysicians. Entirely the opposite. (See Rorty's Mirror of Nature.) And as to its being obsolete, this is simply the presumption that comes with placing oneself in the discussions that use contemporary technical language. Even old Kant, while his thoughts have had two hundred years of development and have been shred and pulverized over and over, has never been refuted in the essentials laid out. Heidegger's Being and Time is almost a hundred years old, but contemporary phenomenologists, many of whom are French (Nancy, Henry, Marion, et al) work in his long shadow. Note Andler's references to so many in the history of philosophy: all unsolved matters, their thoughts still, in his mind, contemporary; mind/body? Still haunting the analytic scene? Rather telling, I think, of the direction of their work.

I looked into Daniel Andler and read his Philosophy of Cognitive Science paper. First, he is French, which is surprising since the French are famously post Heideggarian phenomenologists. Anyway, I can see that he moves in circles outside of phenomenology, and this means there are a host of questions begged that are not acknowledged as such, and he admits the limitations of addressing these are due to space and his purpose.

Interesting: Looking for something enlightening as he peruses the history of cognitive theory. Mostly I am familiar. He is doing speculative science: let's assume the world is the world of our everyday lives, known in greater detail in our sciences. this is the assumption that begs the question. He says earlier: even the keenest defender of philosophical naturalism can see that a full naturalization of the mind delivered by cognitive science remains a distant prospect. He knows about that cat! that all such thinking runs into the cat problem which is there is NO demonstrable way out of phenomena, and all one can do is talk AS IF there were a way.

Yes agree, but science does paradigm shifts, progress, what ensures continuous and concrete progress. Philosophy has always had to follow, they go hand-to-hand but science dictates the reality. It is not the other way around. — Raul

No, empirical science has not done this at all. Philosophy is an apriori discipline. this gets forgotten because science gives us pain killers and cell phones. But really, it has little to do with authentic philosophy which looks to presuppositions.

And I subscribe to this, while I think Husserl and subsequent followers have gone too far with phenomenology. I'm anyway not an expert on this topic. — Raul

Expert? You don't have to teach Husserl to know what he says. It takes reading. Most analytic philosophers have not read much continental philosophy. Kant, but little more. This is why they don't really understand that the problems they are trying to solve have been rendered all but moot.

Yes I subscribe to this. — Raul

If you think the Other is beyond our totality, then you can only think naturalism is a defensible thesis preanalytically, like thinking that mountains are mountains, and stars are stars, and so on. Philosophy hasn't begun yet.

Wonderful!
Just to say, yes, religiously as God, and not religiously as the "existential delusion" — Raul

Not sure what an existential delusion is.

Agree. But would you agree that science and technology is the only successful way to scrutinize the trascendental world?
Philosophy's role is that of consolation (Boezio's), about dealing with our inner needs of further existential explanation but most of the epistemic value comes from science. Well, nowadays philosophy is important as well to articulate what human civilizations want to become with all this science and technology challenging the foundations of our ethics, laws and politics. — Raul

Of course, I would say all of this is very important, indeed! But as to "science and technology is the only successful way to scrutinize the trascendental world"?? it is quite out of its league. See earlier.

Value qua value... yeap!.
It is hard to build the bridge... but I think I'm almost there, thinking that value can be reduced to the homeostatic principle. Or, like I like to do, the other way around... Homeostasis importance has to be expanded as the main driver of existential value.
I know one could say... but homeostasis describes a biological thing, this is materialism... yes and this is the purpose of "naturalism" to get rid of materialistic prejudices and expand the powers of nature! A very much unknown nature that we are discovering is beyond any existential-human claim. — Raul

I think this is the hope of analytic philosophy in general, that through discussions about what our working concepts can mean and can "hold" in terms of novel theory. My view is this may be entertaining, but that ship has sailed, wrecked, and sunk to the bottom of the ocean. Philosophy has reached its end, in fact, it "reached" this when Buddha found enlightenment. One has to realize some basic things about the work of wisdom: in the end, it is clear that the bottom line for inquiry into the nature of the self and its world is not cognitive; cognition is a tool that seeks out value. The point to all things lies with the value they produce, putting the issue squarely on an issue into the nature of value, meaning, importance.

It's my standard grudge against theists, it has nothing to do with Kierkegaard specifically. — baker

Okay. But K is by no means typical. His Attack on Christendom rails against the banality of middle class Christianity. He thought the medievals has it right with their singularity of devotion.

What is material Constance? I think you're very reductive or do not understand contemporary physics if you think as material world as bounded to the necessity of casual sufficiency.
I could understand you say this 100+ years ago... not after relativity and all the rest... — Raul

This is not an issue in contemporary physics. And causality is not intended to reflect any advance beyond the apriori principle of sufficient cause, that all things subsist in events that cannot be conceived ex nihilo. The only thing that you could bring to bear on the issue at hand would be something that could be a knowledge bearing medium, like the hand written commandment from God. I don't suppose you have an argument for this, but then, even if you did, the conditions for knowledge claims would still be there: there are the tablets, there is you. It would only be the arbitrary assumption that God put the tablets before you that affirms the knowledge that there are tablets at all.

There is then the matter of quantum entanglement. but I have never heard that this can apply to bridge the gap between objects and the perceptual equipment of an epistemic agency. But then again, even if this were somehow implicated in an attempt to make such a connection, one would never get beyond Wittgenstein and the rest who place all knowledge claims within the the framework of the structures of meaningful utterances, i.e., logic. the "aboutness" of a proposition regardless of the hard science context in which it is made is something that cannot reach beyond its own nature. There are no, say, conditional grammatical forms "out there".

Of course, as I say those causes are the mental objects you learned during childhood. Your chilhood is when you internal world gets built. — Raul

Of course they are. And you are quite right to say so, but this kind of knowledge claim about the causal world and a descriptive account of the way things "cause" a child to develop is exactly what is in question. This conditioning: what is its nature? How is it even possible to conceive of it such that objects as independent of perceptual conditioning can be the objects in perception?

it is not that I think there is nothing out there independent in this way. One has to admit that there is something to this otherness of objects, they are not me, but outside of me, or, they transcend me. I certainly realize there are things there that are not me, but the moment I take up the matter, the object, in the faculties of my understanding, I bring the object into this "totality" of my conceptualized experience.

And it gets worse. The question then turns to an analysis of this interiority, and this has as its center, TIME. Hence the book's name, Being and Time. There are no things, only events.

My position is this: there is no world, only worlds.

Yes it does. — Raul

Oh, thank God! Please tell me how this works so I can call the newspapers.

We call it memory, neural-traces that keep our memories and form our memories as the memories of the computers but in the brain and with neural networks. (have you watched the second Blade Runner?).
Artificial Neural Networks do it as well. — Raul

A terrific film. Alas, not useful here.

Yes, there is a model, the one you build during your childhood as your brain interacts with the world. — Raul

Model? Model of what? All that you can say is composed IN the very mind that is supposed to be the object of your explanation!! You do see how this works, right? I mean, you are never going to get this to work: All that you can say about the real "brain" that produces pain, ideas, consciousness and so on, is conceived IN the very thing that is being reduced. You cannot reach out of phenomena to affirm this natural world, for every utterance, every observation you make is phenomenal!

This is why you can never affirm that cat. That cat belongs to eternity once the perceptual lights are turned off, for this is the removal of the logical form of propositions, the sensations, all thought identity, any possibility you can even imagine.

Best to side with Rorty: Our knowledge is pragmatic. To stand on a street corner, look around and acknowledge the many knowledge relationships you have with the world of the things before you is to know what happens when these things are confronted. A road is for driving, it is hard to the step, supports one's weight, can be dangerous and on and on. These are all pragmatic determinations, not ontological (unless you are making pragmatism into an ontology. Heidegger sort did this).

Pragmatics do not only refer to the world you see. Your comment is quite naif. Electromagnetic fields are part of nature, are natural. This is why I tell you you should stop using materialism or physician because you have an obsolete understanding of matter (materialism); better if you talk about nature.
Blind people are humans too :grin: — Raul

I do appreciate that grinning face. I do not want others to get angry about ideas. But they do.

There is no argument here that denies electromagnetic fields, evolution, stellar analyses, carbon dating, or anything at all science and its paradigms (provisional theories. See Kuhn, who was a Kantian) have to say. I am an adherent and an admirer.

But these are just not useful here. Here, they beg the question, that is, assume what needs to be proven, and I should add, they are fine this way and scientists do not for the most part care at all about arguments like this one. Not their field.

It has been built: heterophenomenology. I see you haven't watched the videos of Dehaene I proposed you. You're too concentrated trying to show you're right — Raul

Yes, Danial Dennett. Acctually the first true heterophenomenolgist was Emanuel Levinas. See his Totality and Infinity, Alterity and Transcendence, Time and the Other, and so on. It is not that phenomenology says there is nothing there, no "cat" (note the double inverted commas) there, nor any "people" or other things. This gets complicated. remember, Heidegger's Being and Time, Sarte's Being and Nothingness, and Husserl's Ideas and all the rest, devote a great deal of thought to others, but they are affirmed by the collective ideas that we witness within. It is understood that the horizon of our phenomenological gaze is both confined to interiorityand inclusive of others that are not us, for in the phenomenal presentation, we witness otherness; otherness is IN the interiority of the perceiving agency, and this is confirmed by no more than its presence. Phenomenology is a descriptive "science" (Husserl called it this).

The Other, therefore, comes to us embedded in our own interiority, yet in this setting, is presented as Other. This Other is transcendental, as are all things not me; it is just that this "outsideness" of things occurs within, and this sets the stage for a great deal of post modern philosophy. Levinas holds that the Other is beyond our Totality, which is Heidegger's dasein; the other intrudes in the face that reveals an ethical obligation to respond that issues from transcendence, which religiously is construed as God.

It is certainly not the case that phenomenology reduces the world to subjectivity. Rather, it understands what is means to grasp a thing and that behind or "below" knowledge, there is a transcendence, and transcendence is defined by what escapes our totalizing reach that wants to integrate all things into itself. This is Levinas. This totalizing principle meets the face of the Other and ethics is born. But Levinas doesn't take the matter to its core, for the Other's presence's significance lies with the more fundamental and irreducible value qua value.

The old-age metaphysical question: Why is there anything at all?

We first need to know how to approach such a question. Here is a list of possibilities:

Humor: Why is there something rather than nothing? *shrug if off with a joke*
Pragmatic: Why is there something rather than nothing? Does it matter?
Philosophical: Why is there something rather than nothing? [Insert a philosophical viewpoint here]
Scientific: Why is there something rather than nothing? [Instert a scientific theory here]
Bewilderment: Why is there something rather than nothing? No idea.

Once you've decided on the best approach to tackle such a question, perhaps you might want to provide your insights into this discussion.
How do you approach the "why is there something rather than nothing" question?
With humorWith practicalityWith philosophyWith scienceWith bewildermentNone of the above; other — Wheatley

Begs the question: Something? Nothing?

Of course it is not language. It is about biology of your brain.
Capgras syndrome, phantom-limb-syndrome... we can induce you the feeling of someone following you just increasing certain neurotransmitters and certain hormones in your blood and brain... and you would swear someone is following you, doesn't this change the way you understand "presence" and the "feeling of presence"? And you still think you can rely on your metaphysical ideas of the "pure presence"?

We can even make someone more or less religious, believe more or less in deities, or make him believe he is god by stimulating activity in certain areas of the brain (see Ramachandran research). Doesn't this change the idea we have about religion?

A tumor can change your personality (see the case of pedophile the medicine discover he was pedophile because of a tumor in his brain, famous one you can google). Doesn't this change the idea we have about pedophile? It challenge our justice system and our values (google it, is really worth it). — Raul

Of course, all of this is true. Too true, meaning too commonplace for philosophy. You are thinking a a world of unquestioned assumptions about knowledge relationships with the world. This matter here is about the questions that are rightly ignored by functioning scientists. Science needs to know its place, however.