Ok Constance, let's go with how the cat gets into the brain.
At the beginning it works the same way a cat would get into the microchips of the computer that has a webcam. Light hits the cat that hits our eye that hits our visual cortex.
Our visual cortex contains already certain neurons that are sensitive to the cat as part of our learnings when we were children (I assume this brain has seen and interacted with cats before).
So those neurons related to cat-ness get activated (here it is exactly same way a CNN works), the image triggers the associated word cat, uit gramatics and it triggers as well lot of neural-networks that get activated that situate the cat within our model-of-the-world so that we get the cat and its properties, expectations activated, the cat-ness gets active.
Our brain is ready to interact with the cat.
Makes sense? — Raul

Of course.

It is the questions begged that this hinges on. You say light hits the cat, and I ask, light? Cat? I should first be clear that I am working with a model of physical materialism, not phenomenology of ontological dualism weak or otherwise. Just a world of material things bound to the necessity of casual sufficiency, which I take as provisionally unassailable (the provision being that we not talk about grounds for its assailability).
The next question I ask is, these causal events where the light hits the cat, then reflects, hits the eye, on to the retina and so on: in order for this to constitute a knowledge yielding event, there must be something epistemological that carries the object, the cat, to my interior world. Causality doesn't do this. I mean, the dented fender of my car does not "know" the guardrail that caused the dent. You can say the matter with knowledge is much more complex than this, which is obviously true, but prior to the 3 to 4 pound mass of neurons, where the light reflects off the cat, this is far more simple. How is it that the reflective event "over there" off the cat, can carry, if you will, the "ofness" that eventually becomes my knowledge OF the cat?
Ordinarily, one would not ask such a question the case of photos, videos, digital or otherwise, because we already have a model of the original object in mind, confirmed in familiarity. All one has to do is observe the original, compare it to the photo, and you have confirmation of verisimilitude. But here it is very different: it is the original that is in question, and there is no model beyond this that can be brought in for comparison. All models beg the same question!

It is not reducible I agree, naturalism (forget about word materialism) is not reductive because it actually expands our understanding on the power of biology in our brain instead.
I would say that dualists are the ones that have a "reduced" concept of the power of nature (matter, energy, however you want to call it) and lose time with what I think are naif and solipsistic intuitions of the meta-thinking that has not made any progress since Aristotle. Metaphysicians are always trying to reinvent the wheel (Kant, Heidegger, etc...), this is well accepted among philosophers.
The pain you feel in your finger can be induced in your brain from external people activating the specific group of neural network that trigger it using electromagnetic fields. Doing this you won't need the finger to feel the pain, we induce it. But you, subjectively will swear it is your finger burning !
If I disable those specific finger-pain related neural networks you will not feel that pain anymore even if I cut your finger.
Makes sense?
Let's go even beyond, we could trick you neural networks in a way that when I burn your finger you feel the pain in you ear. All this is possible and it is possible because all your pain is within the biology and architecture of your brain.

It is painful I know, but pain is in your brain. — Raul

On this last part: undoubtedly pain is in your brain, but then the question is begged: where is the brain? Jump to the chase: If you cannot affirm that causal networks are analytically epistemological, then you cannot justify that your knowledge of the cat is about that "whatever over there" based on a physicalist's, materialist's, or naturalist's model of the world, for all models like this would have to show the same thing: magical knowledge at a distance. Why magical? An idea is only as good as its justification.
So, there you are, a competent surgeon with an awake patient probing around the brain looking for responses so as not to remove anything vital and it is clear: brain and experience correspond. To argue against this is folly. But the issue was never about our functioning, pragmatic grasp of the world, but about whether your grasp of the world could be about something OTHER than pragmatics. Pragmatists like Dewey, Rorty and even Heidegger (his ready to hand instrumentality) say your knowledge is inherently pragmatic. There is no magical "reaching out" beyond one's apperceptual faculties, rather, the object that we see, hear, and so on, is a pragmatic/conceptual of-a-piece presence. If you take electromagnetic fields to be in their exhaustive analysis about what is "out there," independent of experience, then you would be committing the metaphysical fallacy of positing things unseen.

Existentialists are anything but metaphysicians. They are phenomenologists, committed to a limitation of ideas to what actually is presented.

What does this have to do with ethics? Physiclist, materialist, naturalist (it matters not here) models yield to models of meaning and value. We can now proceed to construct a new model of the world, one in which values are not subordinated the "metaphysics" of science, and the subjective/objective division at the ontological level simply vanishes.

Analysis is reduction. What are you saying, pain ought not be analyzed? That's a value judgement which needs to be justified. How do you justify it, by insisting that pain is the absolute, metavalue? And you justify this by claiming that pain ought not be analyzed. That looks like a vicious circle to me. — Metaphysician Undercover

No. I am saying that when one puts the analytic game in play, which is the taking apart of things, ethics does turn out to be a thing of parts. But in this analytic reduction, we discover a "part" that entirely resists analysis. The same is true for all things, really. I see the color yellow and analysis gives me talk about the electromagnetic spectrum, the comparative qualities vis a vis other colors, emotional values associated, and on and on. But the color itself? Just as a yellow "presence," there is nothing to say, for the saying contextualizes, which brings in what is NOT the presence. This is what being irreducible means. All language is contingent, analyzable, but that presence before me is not language.

The "circularity" you see in this is of course, not simply right, but rather profound: Did I not just "speak" to you about yellow telling you it was unspeakable? This is a fascinating philosophical passageway into post modern thinking. It gets "worse" not better, regarding the paradox of the understanding's being locked into language for interpreting the world, on the one hand, and on the other, being "impossibly" clear that yellow, a "given" sound, feeling, emotion, etc., are all in their "presence" not language at all!

No, not quite, I'm not observing the brain, I'm observing the finger, the pain is in the finger. And it is the fact that the pain being in the finger makes the brain want to analyze it, which makes it appear to consist of parts. — Metaphysician Undercover

Sure, but this is all "outside" the given phenomenon. Even the fact that the pain is in the finger is beyond, if you will, the "qualia" of pain. the analysis that brings the entire ethical issue at hand to its parts, then the recognition that there is a part, THE essential part that is not reducible, suspends all talk about brains and fingers and locality.

The hardest part of this is, to bring a little jargon into it, is to actually DO the phenomenological reduction, the release of the phenomenon that is before you to its bare essentials, its "pure" presence. See my comments just now on the problem this poses regarding language and objects.

I'm not denying the pain, I'm saying that there's more to it than just the pain. I feel the pain, I look at the place where it hurts, and I see the wound. Oh, there's a reason why I'm feeling this pain. PAIN is not the end of the inquiry, it's the beginning. — Metaphysician Undercover

Depends on what you are inquiring about. If you are dicussing human anatomy, pain gets very complex. But here, it is a phenomenological examination of pain. If you were an empirical scientist, you would have as your foundation a body of paradigms that go to work, always already there the moment an issue rises. Here is it the same, only we are in another field, that of phenomenology, which begins with the "thing itself" and moves into examinations of the structures of experience respecting the full value of the given as its foundational assumptions.

I had turned to Kierkegaard to help me solve my problem with theism. It didn't help. All in all, he struck me as yet another theist basking in his faith. A faith I had no hope of obtaining. The idea of a leap to faith is to me like a spit in the face -- like someone telling me, "See, I can do it, but you can't!! Shame on you!" — baker

What the !@#$# did you read to get that impression?

Not to be difficult, but you should be suspicious yourself at your reluctance to be direct. What the self is is not asked. Nor have I asked how the brain works. Two objects. When a knowledge claim is made, on the physicalist's view of things, there are two objects, localized physical things. How does the relationship work such that one thing can know another? The actual content of the brain is not at issue. It could be a rock. The question is , causally antecedent to the brain, how does the cat thing even begin to make a first move to get into the brain thing such that I can say, I see (have visual knowledge of) the cat.

If I were to ask this of two plain objects, an offended car fender and a guard rail, say, one might simply say, the fender impacted the guard rail, it's body yielded to the extent is structure could not absorb the event, or something like this. Of course a brain is complicated, but so what? If the account begins with the object, the complexity of the brain doesn't enter into it; just keep things on the outside, as with the car fender.

Well, "solipsism" doesn't complicate it for me, nevertheless is it you that is talking above about "epistemic connection" — Raul

But I want to emphasize: all you said is evasive. Leave out the meta concerns. There is the cat, here am I, a perceiving agent. Two things. How does it work?

I should add that solipsism is a term that complicates a simple question. If it is clear, to you, then just be clear. References to other theoretical terms already violate the terms of the question.

This one is an easy one. Do you have children? just observe them, see how the grow and learn,. Specially during the first 3-4 years. They interact with the external world in many ways, they copy the behaviour and sounds of the adults, they try and learn via a trial-error approach.
Their inner nervous system that initially is just worried about keeping homeostasis in a very simple way (crying when hungry) little by little gets more sophisticated.
Their brain absorb so many things during those 3-4 years, it creates so many mental objects.... should I follow? This is how the external and physical world gets in your brain.
Then the self rises as the baby interact in society and builds self-consciousness.... should I continue — Raul

Well, that is an easy answer. But I am putting the question to the simple affirmation itself. There is my cat under the table. Here am I. How is it that an epistemic connection is made such that cat over there gets into this brain thing such that I can say, I know the cat is under the table in a way that is sustainable independently of any experience making faculties. One might begin with, well, we perceive the cat, to which I ask, is perception like a mirror rendering a faithful representation, and you might reply; well, how would you reply?

At this point, I am moral-realism-adjacent. I think most people are moral realists, but are aware that it is taboo to actually declare oneself as such, so they devise other moral theories in order to mask their moral realism.

For all practical intents and purposes, moral realism (in the form of moral egoism) seems to be the only viable way to be. — baker

I think most people who think are not moral realists because they also think science defines the world and science cannot discuss morality; therefore, it is assumed morality has no meaning.

But then, most thinking people do not read Continental philosophy. Only here does one find the vehicle for affirming the ontology of ethics. It can do this because it takes as first philosophy meaning, not a model of the physical universe, which is infamously absent of discussions about meaning, or, the meaning of meaning: meta-meaning.

Alas, these arguments require a lot of hard reading and a reorientation of one's attitudes. I don't see why you are averse to Kierkegaard. He "speaks" (thought he does it with style, with far too much style--the extended metaphors are maddening) what meditation IS. Again, it is in a circuitous way that he does this and he is so embedded in the Greeks, post Kantians, Hegel, religious exegeses, and so on, that his references are often entangled things. But once one reads through all this, it is clear: Kierkegaard was right! Putting aside the colorful BS and the pseudonymous narratives, he was right, essentially, in analysis of the self vis a vis meditation. this is why he is called a father of existentialism.

If you agree with this principle, wouldn't you agree that it is more likely that neuroscience gives you the right tools and categories to better understand what Husserl called phenomenology?
You can say that technology is the way of being modern human's (Heidegger) but isn't language itself a contingent technology that emerged from a very successful nervous system? Instead of relying on the categories "meaning" and "sense" as used and understood by Heidegger and Dreyfus, shouldn't we open the black-box?, the brain, and analyze it using the new senses we have created (EEG,  MEG, fMRI, photon migration tomography, transcranial magnetic simulation, etc.). Don't they have something new to show us related to the categories we create?Shouldn't we give a chance to the transcendence of heterophenomenology? Traditional phenomenology accepts the subject's self-reports as being authoritative. In contrast, heterophenomenology considers the subjects authoritative only about how things seem to them. It does not dismiss the first-person perspective, but rather brackets it so that it can be intersubjectively verified by empirical means, allowing it to be submitted as scientific evidence.I guess you see this more a risk to fall into reductionism? — Raul

Neuroscience is not the ticket into this. And a lengthy justification for what I think is true goes absolutely nowhere. As I see it, the only way to move forward, or at all, would be dialectically. Otherwise it would simply be a lot of wasted writing.

I would begin with a question, which is clean and to the point. Assume the material physicalism implied by your references to EEG's and MRI's and the rest, or even, if you're like Wittgenstein or Rorty, you are not ontologically committed to this, but you see this as the only way to talk at all about the world, foundationally or otherwise, making you a conditional physicalist. Whatever. But assume the above: In this this physical model of all things, how is it that anything out there (the mind independent world) gets in here (the mind)?

Just to note, to is intended to be taken for no more than it asks. Lengthy justifications for affirming the "outthereness" of things are beyond the parameters of the question. Just tell me how this "out there to in here" works.

It's not "an event" though, that's a misrepresentation, and you ought to be able to see this. There is a huge multitude of things going on all required for me to feel pain. You cannot reduce pain to "an event". — Metaphysician Undercover

It is about the multitude of things no more than logic is about the multitude of axonally connected neurons. Pain is NOT reducible. Such complexities are only analytical correspondences. When experience the horror of being, say, tortured you are not IN the event having a "gee my neurons are very excited" experience. Such an idea is patently absurd.

But you also encounter this is such a reductive attempt: When you make the move to higher ground analytically, looking to physical brain activities, in the act of data extraction in the observation of the brain, you are not working from outside perspective looking at the brain. You are LOOKING. Literally a product of brain activity and precisely the kind of thing you are supposed to be analyzing. This is the most obvious form of question begging imaginable.

The pain is what is evidently there, unproblematic in what it is. The reduction is on your part: you take what is clear as a bell, the screaming pain and claim this is not what it really is. It's explanatory grounding is elsewhere. Well, of you are doing a scientific analysis on thephysical anatomy of pain, then fine. But that is not this here at all.

Sorry Constance, I don't buy it. I don't see getting to "the pain itself" as the final reduction. It's just a turning point, of going from the external world of what you call "facts", to the internal world of feelings. So there is a whole new world waiting for our analysis in the world of feelings. And I don't buy the notion that this is a world we cannot speak about, because we commonly talk about our feelings. It just requires a completely different way of talking from the way that we talk about the external world of "facts". — Metaphysician Undercover

Consider then: facts of the world. Is my migraine, just because it is an interior event, any less a fact? Is it not somewhere in the grid of worldly affairs as much so as glaciers and planets and clouds and everything else? The problematic here is not location, in my head or on top of a mountain. The mountain is there, in the world. As is my headache. Factual affairs. Only in this factual affair, over here, in my left side, there is a spear in my kidney and the phenomenon we call pain. I see no reason to separate sensate feelings from other facts at all. Everything is just there, an aggregate of atoms.

So once you complete that turn in the turning point, and you observe the sensation, it is just another event no different than any other event as an event.

So then, the matter goes to describing what is there. Very simple. Only, unlike the cloud or the untied shoe, this event is painful. So, what is pain? Observe, there is the feeling. Is it not qualitatively distinct from other facts? I would say so, since the pain hurts like hell! And then, what is this?

Then of course, the matter of the ethical "badness" of the pain shows itself. this is an absolute. See the argument in the OP Metaethics and Moral Realism.

Are you then supporting what Kierkegaard said? the core of his statement is the word "qualitative divide". Kierkegaard "qualitative divide" is full of dualism, full of God.
Are you saying you agree on Kierkegaard's divine moral? — Raul

I think this is right, yes, though, not to get too hung up on overwrought terms like 'soul' and 'God'. A close reading of K's Concept of Anxiety will reveal that he thought such terms as part of the very nature of 'sin' (another dubious term which he rejects emphatically: the old fashioned, Lutheran sense of Adam's atrocious transgression).

As for K's religious thinking, his phenomenology serves to dethrone the sensibleness of common thinking, hence the affirmations of the Bible where thought really had no place at all. Thought cannot encompass the world, one reason why Wittgenstein was such a fan. To see where thought can go, we find his philosophy: a temporal dialectical phenomenology that overtly rejects the the primacy of reason. the divide I mentioned occurs where reason seeks to subsume the actualities of the world. Nonsense. the world's actualities are not categorial.

For the long version of this, see his Concept of Anxiety. In it, you see over and over, the foundations of later existential thought.

Now I'm more confused. Before you mention Kierkegaard, now you mention Wittgenstein, are you saying the meaning of transcendence for Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein are the same? I would disagree to this, it appears you're mixing up things here.
For example Wittgenstein said as well that : "..."And it is clear that a world in which there is only dead matter is neither good not evil; therefore, the world of living beings can in itself be neither good nor evil." and then from here he concludes the "nonsense" of the world and sense being contingent — Raul

One has to be careful with Wittgenstein on this. Not the same, exactly. That would be impossible. Not mixing them up, but drawing on parallels in thinking. First, the following passage to your quote is "Good and evil enter only through the subject. And the subject does not belong to the world. Rather it is a boundary of the world."
When I speak of the world, I am not in W's world. I am thinking of the world of Heidegger's dasein and "Being in the World" and so references to the "world" get confused. W confuses me, frankly, but everybody is confused by him because he presents ideas that are open concepts. Anyway, he writes: "so good and evil which are predicates of the subject, are not properties of the world....Here the nature of the subject is completely veiled." Further, "What is good is divine, too. Queer as it sounds, that sums up my ethics. Only something supernatural can express the supernatural."

Facts suspended? Looks like you're building a play of a movie you imagine within your speculations but studying emotions and feelings like pain (Damasio) and seeing how they work I would say that "suspending" an emotion makes no sense. Do you mean to suspend the conscious phenomena of the pain? Well we know this is a construct of our unconscious, we know our brain unconsciously decides about what to do with this "pain" around 200ms before we become conscious of it (Libet). It can become conscious or maybe not.
This is to say again that the "local" fact of a pain is not something you can suspend. it doesn't work that way. — Raul

Such a suspension is meant to serve the purpose of analysis. But think of it like this: We suspend facts all the time, as I am doing as I write. I am not thinking about many things as I concentrate on one. In this way thought itself is a matter of abstracting from the general body of related ideas to particular ones that rise to an occasion. Here, you are being invited consider an ethical case, an extreme one to make for poignancy. There are many details to the case. If I were to inquire about the logical form of the propositions that describe the case, then I would abstract from all that is not propositional as such, focusing, as Kant did, on the logical forms, the conditionals, the negations and assertions and tautologies and so on, that make propositions possible.

Here. I am after something specific as well: I want to know about the anatomy of an ethical case, what makes ethics what it is, its essential features. I am not interested in how to determine what to do. I want to know what ethical goodness and badness is, what all the fuss is about. This is a phenomenological question, a question of the Being of the phenomenon of pain and pleasure, suffering and joy; it is a descriptive account I want.: just to observe and acknowledge.

Talk about the brain and anything else that is not there, in the bare descriptive of the event is suspended, just as Kant suspended everything but logical form to discuss pure reason, not that I am so keen on Kant, but his method is just simple analysis that looks to rational form in judgment and extrapolating from this to what must be the case given what is clearly there.

We, who? Well I guess Chalmers and metaphysical thinkers. As you can guess me and many other contemporary philosophers do not agree this "qualia", the way you explain it This dualist qualia is not needed to explain pain in a satisfactory way. Emotions and feelings are "incarnated", we have to work with the concept of an extended brain to understand them. Well I guess you know Damasio. Emotions do not need of consciousness to exists, etc. etc. This is the contemporary concept of emotions, again no need qualia... emotions and feeling can artificially be triggered as we know very well how they work. It can be done using electric signals in certains parts of our limbic system or inducing special conscious states with certain chemistry (drugs, psychotropic substances, etc.) — Raul

But you wander from qualia with all this talk. To speak at all about qualia, and surely you see this, is to use language. Language cannot speak what is there. One cannot say the color yellow, but the presence of yellow is fit into and contextualized by a theory of color, and the many ways color turns up in casual or technical talk. There is not stand alone talk about yellow and referring to the limbic system has nothing whatever to do with the problem of qualia.

To play a game in philosophy, one must at the very least attend to the way the problem is presented. This is a simple, descriptive affair of something that lies before you. If I were to ask for an exclusively descriptive account of a cloud's phenomenal presence, such a request would be unproblematic. Same here.

Can you demonstrate it? In the meantime I would claim this residuum is not needed to explain the word "bad". You just need to put it in a context. If in this case you put it in the context of my finger burning is bad. Well, in this case, this forum is not the right place to explain it as it is not that short but here you can find a good source to understand how pain works and why it is associated to the word "bad". As anyone could expect, such a complex things requires a complex and very technical language but if you really want to understand it I'm sure you can find it accessible:
https://stm.sciencemag.org/content/3/65/65ps1.full — Raul

It is spelled out more explicitly in the OP entitled Metaethics and Moral Realism.

But Raul, the ideas presented here did not rise up ex nihilo. See G E Moore's Ethica Principia. Moore wanted to know the nature of the Good. He concluded that it was a non natural property. Then Wittgenstein, Read his Tractatus, his Lecture on Ethics. Then read John Mackie's Ethics: Inventing right and Wrong.

The context is not complex. You are being invited to think phenomenologically and if this is not familiar to you, if you have never read any Continental philosophy, well, hmmm, you perhaps should consider this.

Maybe being a friendless loner for most of my youth... and now most of my adulthood... basically every time besides my early 20s experiment in being a popular person... was actually good for me, then! — Pfhorrest

Perhaps more than simply good. It depends on what you read. We are what we read. One can either go analytic or Continental in philosophy. The former is a dead end, fun if you like rigorous thinking, useful in many of the penetrating arguments (like Quine's Two Dogmas and Indeterminacy of Translation), but afraid to go where human inquiry gets interesting, in the depth of meaning, the impossible presence of things, the threshold where thought and feeling encounter themselves.

Going out on a limb, you might like Jung's Red Book, Augustine's Confessions, Kierkegaard's either/Or, or even Pseudo Dionysus' Cloud of Knowing or even Eckhart's Sermons (Eckhart famously, or infamously wrote of prayer to God that he could be rid of God).

Or not. Up to you. My allies are perhaps not yours. As I see it, the religious world is filled with nonsense, but beneath this is the heart of our humanity. I am reading John Caputo's The Weakness of God and his How to Read Kierkegaard and Radical Hermeneutics.

We are what we read, literally.

I must admit though, I really don't know what you mean by "metavalue". — Metaphysician Undercover

Here is an account. There is a lot behind this, but in essence (btw, it likely will be encountered as novel thinking. Apologies. Should best be read fully before judgment):

It is the easiest concept to grasp, and yet, the most difficult. Easy because it is clear, intuitive, and not a logical product of argument. Hard because we don't think like this. Heidegger said the same of Being: There, in the intimations of our existence, most close to us, pervasive in every thought and engagement, yet so distant from the understanding. For Heidegger, being was complex, for there is nothing intuitive and direct that reveals some absolute nature of what a thing is at some unimaginable foundational level, like God or material substance. All that can be affirmed is bound to the interpretative conditions of affirmation: language and culture and history.

But take a look at, say, Dennett's argument on qualia, the conclusion of which is that it is an impossible term, just like Heidegger. Impossible, to put it Derrida's way, because it is a term that, like all terms, defers to other terms for terminological meaning. Wittgenstein called these states of affairs, facts, like the Earth being of greater mass than the moon, or that my shoe is untied: a fact, dull and equal to all other facts as a fact, and this is what the understanding can grasp in the logicality of meaningful utterances. the rest that is NOT fact, is transcendental, unspeakable. Open your mouth to speak it, and there you are in the middle of the delimitations of logic and language and memory. History: language is a constructed thing. Took centuries, and, it took a the personal assimilation process a much shorter time. Every utterance brings this into play, this interpretative medium.

Anyway, I bring all this up to make a point: A given perceptual event, qua perceptual, is thick with meaning. Not perceptual, but apperceptual. One cannot even conceive of what a direct intimation of a thing could even be at all. Pure nonsense.

But there is something direct about it, in the mix, that is, of language's meanings and the actuality before one. This is why Kierkegaard is considered a father of existentialism: he said there is this qualitative divide between what is there and what can be said about it. IT cannot be spoken.

But here is where ethics comes in and why Wittgenstein said ethics is transcendental. My example of the finger on fire: In the perception as one's finger is literally aflame, there are the facts, the logical, propositional possible utterances, like, well, pain is conducive to evolutionary survival, or, there is an event, I do not enjoy it, there is the physiology of nerves reporting pain, the quick withdrawal of the finger, and so on: facts, facts, states of affairs.

Here is the rub: Once the facts have been suspended, and all that remains is the most "local" fact, the pain itself, right there at the, if you will, Cartesian center of experience, we do the final reduction and consider this event as a qualia, the unutterable presence of the pain. Once analysis has taken the matter this far, the meta value becomes clear: this is not a dull fact like my shoes being untied. There is a residuum IN the torturous event that stands outside body of facts that announces itself in our word "bad". This clumsy sounding usage is unavoidable.

The argument I find definitive regarding moral realism is the above; in fact, I find that once value is so understood, there is no choice but to reify goodness and badness in the moral, transcendental conception, and the reification of these argues for a reification of the ego as well, for the center of our existence is the productive origin of value in the world. We are no longer in the empirical scientist's world, but in the phenomenologist's, and meaning---value-meaning, importance, interest, caring. loving, despising, and the rest, all issue from the self. These transcendental events issue from us.

o is self reflection good? Or bad? Or is it always a mix. Or is it impossible to establish either case without the influence of the contrary side/ for example can we not be introspective if not only for the relationship we have with the external world and the feedback we get from the environment? — Benj96

You seem to take a psychological pov on self reflection. But you need to look at it structurally: pull away from the habitual self, and you are "out" of the self and its compulsory continuity. Do this enough, and the grip compulsive belief has on you slips, and in time the "world" begins to fall away, the familiar becomes alien for a certain distance between you and ordinary affairs has settled in, and once you've have gone this way, there is no turning back--one cannot turn off this "enlightenment".

Heidegger called the question the piety of thought, and this self reflection begins with a question, one that undermines the authority of everydayness and drives one to freedom (not talking about the principle of sufficient cause, here).

Carl Jung thought that solitude was a prerequisite for profound insight, for only outside of the circuitry of the self affirming values produced in a culture can one bring the whole affair to a halt. And the world can finally "speak".

When one grows up as the only non-Catholic among Catholics and is bullied by them, and tries to make sense of it by reading a lot of Catholic literature, one begins to consider many things as ordinary that other people probably don't. It's a long sordid tale. — baker

Oh. I see. Well, I frankly understand this. I attended a Catholic high school for a couple of years myself. Very authoritarian, to the point of cruelty. The Catholic philosophy on child rearing is that one is born into sin, and it is the mission of Christian parents teachers to annihilate the freely expressive child. I have talked to the Brothers who were my teachers and found them to be deeply embedded in orthodoxy. NOT moveable.

Oh, I took to Buddhism because it promised enlightenment, and I thought that once I'd be enlightened, I'd be able to figure out which religion is the right one, specifically, whether Catholicism is true or not. Needless to say, that didn't work out so well. — baker

Oh, again. What can I say, I genuinely think there is such a thing as enlightenment and Buddhists have been right all along. Philosophers like Kierkegaard help rehabilitate a conditioned mind by taking mundane experience apart, revealing the underpinnings of mundane events.

Probably because I don't approach religion with self-confidence and in the hope to find a solution to existential problems.
Which also happens to be why moral realism makes so much sense. — baker

You are a moral realist?? As am I, and I argue for this frequently. There are few takers on this as it requires a break with the familiar world. Unfortunately, what I consider the most penetrating reading is the least accessible.

Why are you a moral realist?

No it wouldn't. There's nothing 'impossible' about a hedonic calculator incidentally. But like I say, I stipulated that, for the sake of argument, the average human life creates as much pleasure as pain. My focus was on desert and how deservingness can make a radical difference to how much such pleasure or pain counts, morally speaking. — Bartricks

A hedonic calculator would have to reflect the subjective actualities of engaging the world. This is not possible. Of course, there are good guesses, but take Mill's own being a pig satisfied vis a vis the philosopher dissatisfied. He favored the philosopher, but is this right? Put the pig aside: is it really so much better to ponder arguments than to have, say, a good mud fight?

I will not take sides on this. The point is that standards of evaluating pleasure, affect, interest and the nuances of these are embedded in a private world that resists objective measurement. Objectifying people's experiences in the way you are suggesting works to reduce things to general ideas which is, granted, done all the time, but this is rather a pet peeve of mine: the reduction of a person to the generalities of a culture.

Not really to your point, but since you defend the idea of a hedonic calculator....

And it wasn't Bentham but Mill who distinguished between higher and lower pleasures. But like I say, that's not the issue. For there can be deserved higher pleasures, undeserved higher pleasures and non-deserved higher pleasures. — Bartricks

Well, I would agree if the matter were kept away from the more interesting questions of the nature of desert, responsibility, accountability, guilt, innocence. These concepts are questions begged: what does it mean at all for someone to deserve his or her fate? Such a question turns the matter over to existential theory.

You then say that desert makes no sense in this world. Well, I think that's demonstrably false. Certainly the burden of proof is on the desert denier, not me. But note too that if someone can only resist my argument by rejecting moral desert wholesale, then it must be a very strong argument. It's a bit like rejecting my argument by saying "but we can't know anything!" — Bartricks

Not that we can't know anything, but that the foundation of the moral dimension of our existence is absent, while our affairs virtually scream for justification, redemption. Put down Bentham's calculator and behold the world of horrors and delights. These are present, undeniably, but the value, the actuality of being, say, burned alive at the stake, presents a profound deficit in our ability to "account" for it's possibility as an actual event. This takes things far beyond the trivialities of counting hedons.

Four years ago, I discarded all the books I had of his and all the notes I made. So I'll just summarize: I was not impressed with his work. Affirming God over reason seems quite ordinary to me. — baker

"sigh" ! You found the Concept of Anxiety ORIDINARY?? Not possible. You thought his existential dialectics ordinary? But it is here that the connection to Buddhism is clearest, where he elucidates the structure of meditation itself. One cannot be interested in Buddhism and think Kierkegaard is a bore. There has to be a radical misunderstanding somewhere.

When I first read this work I instantly thought how Kierkegaard was so aligned with the act of meditation. There is no question of this.

Caputo's How to Read Kierkegaard is a wonderful elucidation.

As I said, Plato demonstrated long ago, that we do not base value in pain or pleasure. I gave an example, as to why a person's attitude toward pain does not provide a good represent of one's attitude toward value, therefore pain cannot be used as a metavalue. There are many more examples, but it seems like you are in a condition of denial, so I don't see the point in producing a list of examples. — Metaphysician Undercover

Take another look. It is a descriptive position, and certainly not about how people feel about things, their attitudes. This latter doesn't enter into it. to understand the metaethical issue one has to simply put a lighted match to one's finger and observe. There are clear empirical features, but once these are removed there is the residual value. See Wittgenstein's Lecture on Ethics, or see G E Moore's Principia Ethica to get an idea of this. the question is about the Good and its nature or essence. Attitudes follow on this.

Yes, your state of denying the example, and also the reality about value, demonstrates this unassailability very well. However, the fact that one's personal perspective on value appears to be unassailable does not demonstrate that it is absolute. It just indicates that it appears to the person who holds the unassailable perspective on value, that value is absolute. — Metaphysician Undercover

try to see that this isn't about a personal perspective. Consider the matter as one would consider qualia. My opinion, attitude, regard for qualia is completely off the table. Arguments that deal with this look to the possibility of apprehending something in the pure, uninterpreted phenomenon. Here, the claim is that the flame on your finger carries a non empirical, non discursive or irreducible intuition of a metavalue, i.e., an ethical badness.

The problem though, as I explained, is that a person will subject oneself to pain, for the sake of something valued in some circumstances, yet at other times the same person will avoid pain because in this circumstance avoidance is seen as more valuable. Therefore pain does not suffice as evidence for any sort of absolute value. — Metaphysician Undercover

But the reasons for opting one way or another are grounded in conditions that are factual and contingent. The value in place remains independent. the argument insists that you abstract from all of the contingencies. Once done, there is a residual non contingent presence, which is the metavalue. All that is required here is observation and description, not judgment. Granted in less striking cases it can be difficult to see whether one is having an enjoyable experience or not. that does happen, but it is not the point at all. If one case can demonstrate and non contingency in the presence of the world, then one has a case for moral realism.

Come to think of it, it's a mistake to look at the issue in an "either...or..." way. We could take both - thoughts and deeds - into account when we judge the moral status of people. — TheMadFool

I go either/or on this one: If a person is simply pouring all thought and sentiment into doing the right thing, and gets it all wrong, I am entirely impressed, and if it had turned out better, I would not think one scintilla less of this person who just didn't have the wit to work things out, a deficit that is morally arbitrary.

Although I think it is almost certainly the case that an average human life will cause much more suffering than pleasure overall, I was very clear in saying that I would not assume this and would instead assume that the quantities are equal. That is, I will assume - for the sake of argument alone - that the average human life creates as much pleasure as pain.
I do not ignore qualitative distinctions, they're simply not relevant to the argument I am making and so I didn't mention them (for the point is about our deservingness of the pains and pleasures involved, a point that cuts across qualitative distinctions).
— Bartricks

That would have to be determined by some impossible hedonic calculator. As I recall, Bentham did insist that some pleasures were superior in their cash value than others. I lean toward the romantic: Living a life of deep, Wordsworthian experiences or, as Mill would have it, the philosopher's, exceeds that of the brute mentality.

As to this: "The dismissal of undeservedness or deservedness antecedent to being thrown into an existence is an assumption that needs to be argued". That too is both incorrect and irrelevant. It is incorrect because the burden, surely, is on you, not me. That is, the default is not that we are born positively deserving to suffer, or born positively deserving pleasure; the default is that we are born 'innocent' - that is, we do not positively deserve to suffer, nor do we positively deserve pleasure. If you think we are born deserving to suffer, or born deserving pleasure, then you need to provide us with some justification for that belief. — Bartricks

It would ground suffering in a metaphysical justice if our joys and ills were antecedently accountable. Of course, metaphysical details about such a thing is hogwash, but the posting of an ethical grounding for all the horrors and injustice beyond what can be empirically observed does, say, establish meaning where there would otherwise be none, and the hedonic balance of all things is shot to hell. If we consider that being human in the world has value beyond the world, then the justification for having kids is, in one way or another, altered.
Also, not to forget that an analysis of responsibility, desert, accountability, guilt, all make no sense at all in this world, hence the call for metaphysical thinking.

Indeed, good intentions and not good deeds but Christian morality revolves around deeds, don't they? — TheMadFool

If I invest in the stock market, make a fortune and incidentally support a company that does good deeds, it isn't reasonable to say I have some stake in the goodness of the deeds; and then, I scrimp and save to support Doctors Without Borders, but find I have been hoodwinked by some intermediary and all the money went into some billionaire's pocket, regardless of my money's "deed" I am on morally superior ground.
But this is simply a reasoned point. Does Christianity talk like this? It's somewhat debatable for them, considering how morally ambiguous it has been. Assuming a version of Christianity that isn't bats^^t crazy, I think this reasoning applies. I take Kierkegaard to be the source of wisdom for all things Christian, and I think he would agree.

After all, speaking from a religious point of view, the ticket to heaven has to bought with good deeds and the passage to hell has a similar arrangement although the currency in this case is immoral conduct. — TheMadFool

Not good deeds, good intentions. But then, this goes further: good intentions affirm the good, but what is this? Metaethical questions always haunt in the presuppositions that underlie talk about utility. this makes the whole affair sound preposterous in terms of sound think, for there one is arguing, and at the center of it all is a term that one cannot even begin to fathom. A bit like talking about economics but having no working definition of wealth.

So, what do you think? Does the fact that acts of human procreation can reasonably be expected to create lots of undeserved suffering and non-deserved pleasure imply that they are overall morally bad? — Bartricks

A utilitarian measure, and not sure about the premise that a person's life realizes more pain over suffering is sound. But then, the entire argument ignores the qualitative distinctions between pleasures and pains, as well as in the grounding these have in ways unseen. The dismissal of undeservedness or deservedness antecedent to being thrown into an existence is an assumption that needs to be argued.

"The map is not the territory". There is the common model, the "in-hereness" of shared human understanding of the world, as distinct from the "out-thereness" of the cosmos. And then there is the indivdual model, the "in-hereness" of the individual understanding of the shared human understanding of the world as distinct from the "out-thereness" of the shared human understanding of the world. "Tanscenedence" is a relative term; the transcendence of the territory in relation to the common model, and the transcendence of the common model in relation to the individual model.

But these are just relative ways of talking; there is no absolute transcendence to be discovered. — Janus

Look closely at the argument. It states explicitly as a major premise that regarding value, the map IS the territory, so to speak, hence the impossibility. It is not even about the inhereness of an event. Rather, it looks directly at the "presence" of pain, pleasure, suffering, joy and the rest bypassing the language (the map) that would claim it. When you miss the nail and smash your finger with a hammer, you are not, qua in pain, IN an interpretative event, though language hovers close by for deployment. the argument here looks only at plain, denuded (of words, references, ideas, contexts).

You say transcendence is a relative term, and this is no doubt right, and the same will go to ALL terms in play, and since language rules the understanding and language is a contingent body of meanings, one can never "say" anything that is not contingent. this is essentially the argument of Wittgenstein's (but please, in the tonnage of material written on this, there is room for a library of objections. To argue about this, fine. Just let me know, not that I'm so perfect at Wittgenstein, but I do have my thoughts).

Here is the ONE exception to language ruling over the understanding: value. and it is not as if one can produce a treatise on this and think one has escaped the delimitations of language. Rather, and this is a BIG point: the transcendence of value presents itself in the injunction not to do or to do X. X is, of course, entangled, messy, and we have agreed on this, which is cause for the reduction to the "material essence" if you want to use that kind of language, of ethics.

Are you familiar with Plato's Euthyphro dilemma? We could ask a very similar question here, concerning the relationship between value and ethics. Is value based in ethics, or is ethics based in value. The answer would determine which of the two is more likely to be absolute. We have to consider the conditions carefully before we answer this question. We cannot just refer to examples like pain and pleasure, and conclude that value is primary, because Plato has already demonstrated that there is no necessary relationship between pleasure or pain, and value. So for example, an athlete will subject oneself to pain in training, for the sake of a goal which is valued. So pleasure and pain might be things which are given a positive or negative value, but this doesn't say much about value itself. — Metaphysician Undercover

The argument here places the need for training in a matrix of concerns that are contingent, all such concerns ultimately beg the value question. It runs not unlike those irritating deconstruction questions run: Training? Why train? to be great at football? Why this? and on, and on. The non question begging answer appears only when contingencies are abandoned and inquiry finds it mark: I do it because it is fun, enjoyable, pleasureable, blissful. ALL are bound to contingencies in the living experience, but here, I am doing with value what Kant did with reason: reason is always, already entangled in the very language used to talk about "pure" reason. But one abstracts from the complexity to identify the form just to give analysis. Here, I identify the very mysterious metavalue In the pain, and it is not the form ofethical affairs, but the actuality, the substantive presence.

So you are proposing a "metavalue" which you call "presence". I assume that this would be the end to all ends, like Aristotle suggested happiness as. Is "presence" like existence? The problem with this type of proposal is that we already have presence, and we might already have happiness. So this type of end cannot incline us to act morally, because actions as means, are carried out for the purpose of bringing about the desired end. If we already have what is needed, presence, or happiness, then there is no need to act morally. So as much as you might insist that there ought to be a metavalue, or ultimate end, the absolute within which value is based, I think that this is just a pie in the sky ideal, imaginary, and without any bearing on real people living their real lives. — Metaphysician Undercover

But it is not argument, not yet, about what to do. It is a descriptive claim. An exhaustive description of an ethical case possesses what GE Moore called a non natural property. The badness or goodness of what is in play is IN the fabric of the world. We do not find in the structure of language the actuality of pain.

And I don't see how your example of torturing children is relevant. — Metaphysician Undercover

It just to illustrate a point, and extreme cases make for a clearer illustration. The emphasis is on the way the value dimension of an ethical case is unassailable to competition and objections: no matter what alternative one can imagine to bring against the choice of choosing the one child's welfare, the "badness" of the torture is undiminished. This is NOT how contingency works.

As I said above, it's been a well known fact, since the time of Plato, that value is not grounded in pleasure or pain. It is something distinct from these, as we will forego pleasure for something of value, and we will also subject ourselves to pain, for something of value. Therefore your example, which says something about the "presence" of pain, would only be misconstrued if it were taken to be demonstrating something about the nature of value. — Metaphysician Undercover

Forgoing pleasure in a competition is about the relativity of value. I am identifying something that is not relative, but "absolute" acknowledging that this term is rather self contradictory because language itself does not possess the possibility of absolutes, all propositions being contingently bound to others. The claim rests on the premise that there is something transcendental about ethics that lies at its essence that is nondiscursive and intuitive. One is being invited to simply observe the pain simplciter, observe--- not weigh, compare, contextualize.

Sure, we’re all imbued with a sense of value to be assigned. But value assigned is itself contingent on the object to which it is assigned. — Mww

Don't think of it as value assigned. Simpliciter means not contextualized for judgment. Granted, it is difficult often to disentangle affairs, but then, the entanglements themselves are value intense. There you are with your friend's ax which you borrowed, and he asks for it back, but you know he is in a state of rage, but then the person he might kill you know for a fact to be a serial killer too slippery to be caught, but then again...and all this is maddening to you!

I mean, I'm not at all concerned with how this works out. Simplciter means the pain (pleasure, and all the rest) as such, as an irreducible phenomenon. The spear in your kidney is an intense event, and it bears the stamp of a non discursive and intuited "bad". Not a contingent bad, where one can talk about a bad couch, and discuss its pros and cons.

This tells us a lot about the self (and animal "selves," of course). Is it is as Wittgenstein said, that value never makes an appearance, and the "bad" of the pain is utterly transcendental (he would not even speak of it, would turn his chair to the wall at the very mention) and unavailable to language? I think not. I think we can talk about this just as we can talk meaningfully about qualia and "presence" qua presence. There is just very little to say, and what we can say is bound to the contingency language construction (there are no singular propositions, for affirmations are inherently deferential to their opposites, their defining associative "regions" as Husserl and Heidegger put it), but we DO affirm qualia intuitively, a nd all qualia is valuative, metavaluative, good or bad but entangled.

Language puts all this in question, of course, infamously so. Heidegger though such talk, like Husserl's, was like walking on water, for he know knowledge intuitions were impossible, senseless. My claim is that the impossible is exactly what we face: the metavalue to which all presence is bound. And this makes for the reality of the real. Metavalue Real, the essence of the self.

One does have to put aside presuppositions to allow the the metavalue/metaethical and the meta injunction to be clear. that is, to assault another with a spear to the kidney in wrong grounded in the metainjunction not to do it.

The above requires a close reading.

You're right that this is an impossible thesis. Value is by definition relative, as the worthiness of something is always dependent on a purpose, or something other than itself which it is judged in comparison to. How do you conceive value as something absolute? — Metaphysician Undercover

Here is the beginning from Metaethics and Moral Realism posted 14 days ago:

Consider: the ethical anti objectivist John Mackie's thesis (Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong) that there are no objective ethics, and he runs through R M Hare's objections, the notion that "value statements cannot be true or false" and Kant, Plato, Sedgwick, Aristotle, but I am not going through all this. His Argument from Queerness I find central, which is quite simple: ethics is just too weird to consider as objective, and here he cites G E Moore's non natural property. Mackie denies this both on epistemological grounds and well as ontological, the former focused on intuitionism, etc., the latter essentially: what in blazes would objective ethics even BE? Inconceivable.

Mackie is wrong: To deny moral objectivism on the grounds that it is too weird implies a non weird standard already in place, and this would be, of course, empirical science. But how is it that empirical science is allowed to be the foundational basis for determining the nature of ethics? Ethics is about value, in its essence: If you want to really get the center of ethics, you have to give it its due analysis, after all, an ethical case is a thing of parts. On the one hand, there is its entanglement with the "facts" of the world. On the other, there is the metaethical, the "bad" and "good" of moral affairs. It is here, in the metaethical, that the essence of ethics has its objectivity and its reality.

The question is, what makes the ethical shoulds and shouldn'ts what they are? Ethical goodness and badness, and we will simply call this ethical value and, are not like contingent value and judgment. A good knife is good, say, because it is sharp and cuts well, but this virtue entirely rests with the cutting, the goodness, if you will, defers to the cutting context. But change the conditions of the context and the good can easily become the opposite of good, if, e.g., the knife is to be used for a Macbeth production. Here, sharpness is the very opposite of good, for someone could get hurt. This is how contingency works, this deferring to other contextual features for goodness or badness to be determined.

Ethical value, on the other hand, is very different, for once the context is taken away, and no contextual deference possible, there is the metavalue "presence" remaining. How so? Now we are in Moore's territory. Consider: You have a choice between the torture of one child for a hour, or the torture of a million children for, let's say an eternity (forget the foolishness of the idea). Utility clearly states the former over the latter, and even the most die hard Kantian deontologist would have to yield to the straight forward utility of this (Did Kant ever make any sense at all in ethics??). But here is the rub in this: the child torture for the one hour is in no way mitigated due to the "contextual" justification. You may have done the right thing, but the value in play is not at all effected by the conditions vis a vis the other children. In fact, there is no set of contingent conditions imaginable that undo or even mitigate the ethical value, the "badness" of the one child's torture. It is impossible to conceive of such a mitigation.

What IS ethical badness as such? Try this thought on an empirical object, looking for the "empirical as such" and you get what I call mundane qualia, and, just ask Dennett, qualia is without meaning, or, very close to nonsense, and I think he's right on this. But, if you want to use this language, value-qualia is certainly not nonsense, for apply a lighted match to your finger for a few seconds, review the experience, and remove all contingencies, all talk that could contextualize it entirely out of the analysis, and there is the remaining "presence" of the non natural quality of value/ethical badness and goodness. It cannot be observed, but that burning finger is more than Wittgensteinian "fact" (and Wittgenstein knew this) like the fact that my shoe is untired of that the sun is a ball of fusion. Such facts are all contingent. The metaethical dimension of ethics is not. It is absolute, though, not absolute in the way it is taken up in a conceptual analysis (where analytical philosophy often goes so wrong), but in the injunction not to do something. This is critical to my position: I cannot tell you what an absolute is, for this would be beyond what language can do, not to put too fine a point on it. It only "shows" itself, in the same manner logic shows itself, but cannot reveal itself in the showing. It only reveals itself in the inherent injunction not to do (my example is negative. Doesn't have to be) something.

Oh dear, that's ambitious for philosophy! — baker

Philosophy has been all along a search not for truth, but for value. I think it is close to its end in postmodern deconstruction. Heidegger thought Buddhism was on to something, a new language, primordial, lost through the ages of bad metaphysics. He didn't elaborate, but he was right, and he set stage for a phenomenological philosophy that puts meaning first.

That's just it: You want to understand and engage with Buddhism on your terms. You're ignoring or downplaying the importance of the living tradition, the living community of Buddhism, ie. the people who are actually working to preserve the teachings and make them accessible (from librarians to translators to those who pay for the upkeep of Buddhist websites to the monks who teach meditation and everyone needed for the system to function). — baker

You're part right. Look, if you're going to talk about the history of Buddhism, or, the various schools with their differences in place, then fine, and if you have a cultural/historical respect in place, then also fine. But an inquiry into the meaning of Buddhism at the basic level is a very different matter.

And you think you can do that apart from committing yourself to an actual Buddhist community?

This is a vital point. Really think about it. — baker

Well, see the above.

Walton has argued that ad hominem reasoning is not always fallacious, and that in some instances, questions of personal conduct, character, motives, etc., are legitimate and relevant to the issue,[30] as when it directly involves hypocrisy, or actions contradicting the subject's words.

The philosopher Charles Taylor has argued that ad hominem reasoning (discussing facts about the speaker or author relative to the value of his statements) is essential to understanding certain moral issues due to the connection between individual persons and morality (or moral claims), and contrasts this sort of reasoning with the apodictic reasoning (involving facts beyond dispute or clearly established) of philosophical naturalism.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem#Criticism_as_a_fallacy

Kierkegaard applied this to himself when he broke off his engagement because he thought he wasn't good enough to marry.
And I think that his lifestyle and his not integrating himself with an actual religious community disqualifies his opinion in religious matters. He was an armchair Christian. — baker

You've never read anything by Kierkegaard, have you? I mean, quite seriously, you haven't read a thing of the man who affirmed God over reason. Armchair? And you have the story about Regina all wrong. And you spend so many words on justifying ad hominem arguments?

Off the deep end, I'd say.

I will make an observation: in order to be in any sense of being free in any way, one needs security. I find knowledge and understanding of the Good to be a nexus of energy that supports and self-supports being in a secure way that facilitates that being. So I agree that while the temporal movement is from doing to being, as we grow in understanding of what doing both needs and entails, the logical movement is from security and being secure first, and then to doing. And what it is, exactly, about what we call "the Good" that makes it so in terms of itself and its efficacy, is no small question. — tim wood

What then is security? And I don't mean this in the everyday sense of the term. I defend a rather impossible thesis: within the self there is the oddest thing imaginable, which is value. I claim that value, like the pain a spear in my kidney causes, is absolute, and the self is therefore absolute. Pain as such, pain simplciter, not pain contextualized in an all things considered sense, but simply the phenomenon of pain itself, is not a contingent "bad" but an absolute.

Not a popular thesis. No matter, I am right, my detractors wrong. I can argue this very well, and it is the genuine foundation for moral realism and the reality of the self.

If it wasn’t intelligible, he couldn’t have brought it up. He did, so it is. And he said so. He actually said, under certain conditions, the conception of noumena are necessary. That which is unintelligible cannot at the same time be necessary. In Kant, an idea is a concept of reason formed of notions by the understanding itself (A320/B377), and noumena are concepts thought by the understanding (B306). It follows that the question is necessarily predicated on a misunderstanding. — Mww

the question is, why isn't noumena dismissible as dialectic overreach, as delusion, with "the mere
dream of an extension of the pure understanding"? It really is not intended to bring attention to Kant or Wittgenstein, but rather, both of their denials that any sense can be made of the very thing, by calling attention to it, that carries an implicit affirmation there is something in the presence of the world that cannot be dismissed, but does not belong to sensory intuition or the understanding, or, to the "facts" of the world. The Tractatus and the Critique are explicit in the line they draw on this.

The ground for bringing it up is not in the world; if it were it would be incomprehensible anyway, which is the same as nonsense. — Mww

Therein lies the rub: It is the elephant in the room, the "it" so readily referred to, yet denied so immediately. The term 'transcendence', should we not file this away, along with "the present kind of France is bald"? No. The issue goes to, why not?

It is clear, that if understanding is that which thinks, then understanding can think whatever it wants for it is I to whom understanding belongs. Therefore, it is at least non-contradictory and at most entirely admissible, for understanding to think noumena if it wants. And it does want to, in metaphysical parlance, in assuming the possibility of non-sensuous determinable schema subsumed under the categories, which Kant terms objects-in-themselves.

Now it can be surmised why he had to bring it up: he’d already proven the categories only apply upon being presented with sensuous objects as phenomena, that is to say, under entirely empirical conditions and by that the means to cognize them, so it would have been catastrophic to allow a category to present objects to itself that can never be phenomena, after having allowed such objects to be legitimately thought, albeit under entirely pure a priori conditions yet maintaining validity in the cognition of them nonetheless. — Mww

It is clear why Kant thought like this. The matter here outs a question to the line drawn. It IS catastrophic to allow such a thing, and yet, there he is, committing this very catastrophe. One way to say this is to yield to delimitation of the understanding, but in doing so admit there is an incompleteness, in metaethics, and in a full disclosure of world ontology: If it were true that nothing at all imposed itself from "outside" (Levinas' Other) on a reasoned construction describing the world exhaustively, then discussions about noumena would entirely without meaning beyond the empty spinning of dialectical wheels.

At bottom, with no further reduction necessary, this is exactly how I do not contradict myself.

Easy-peasy. — Mww

Would that it were.

The answer "no" would point in another direction. If emotions are not irrational, it means that we're by and large completely in the dark as to their nature for the simple reason that we treat them as encumbrances to logical thinking. Emotions could actually be rational, we just haven't figured it out yet. This, in turn, entails that a certain aspect of rationality - emotions - lies out of existing AI's reach which takes us back to the issue of whether or not we should equate humans with only one-half of our mental faculties viz. the half that's associated with classical logic with its collection of rules and principles. — TheMadFool

Emotions could be rational? Well, not as odd as one might think. Consider Dewey: experience is, in my take on Dewey, that is, the foundation, and analyses of experience abstract from the whole to identify a "part" of the otherwise undivided body. Kant looked exclusively as reason, Kierkegaard looked exclusively at the opposition to reason, the "actuality" and argued this makes for collision course for reason's theories. But for Heidegger it was all "of a piece", not to put too fine a point on it, and I think this right: When one reasons, it is intrinsically affective, has interest, care, concern, anxiety, and so on, in the event. Dewey puts the focus on the pragmatic interface where resistance rises before one, and the event is a confrontation of the "whole" and the result, if successful, is a consummation that is rational and aesthetic that is wrought out of the affair.

But regarding mods censoring emotional content, this is not quite right. It is offensive content that is censored, not emotional.

If you follow that logic it leads to the conclusion that only you exist: solipsism. — Janus

Yes, that is true, though it does overstate the case, doesn't it? Wittgenstein and Kant famously refused to give sense at all to such things as the "out thereness" beyond logic, intuition and language, using forms of the term "transcendental" to refer to them, if such referring were to be allowed at all (there is the transcendental deduction, but this is open ended merely, not something metaphysical. And Wittgenstein says explicitly he only brings up the matter to say we should pass over it in silence).

But I always have had a different take on this, after all, if Kant was so sure noumena was not an intelligible idea, then why bring it up at all? That is, what is the ground in the world that makes bringing it up not pure nonsense? An excellent question, I think. My thought is that there is another dimension to being a self altogether, and this is discovered, no, intimated, in meditation, philosophies on apophatic theology, post Heideggerian thinking like Marion, Henry, and then there is Fink and Husserl earlier on, and then Levinas' Totality and Infinity, and others. I'm reading Caputo's Weakness of God. He takes Derrida as a threshold philosopher who takes thought to its "end" and here, we face, and I think this is his point, the wimpiness of metaphysical love, and are told, THIS is where our philosophical journey ends, keeping in mind that the totality of language has never possessed this.

To be clear: By doing what you suggest, one asserts one's supremacy over the text and the ideas it presents.
If this is what one is going to do, then why bother with the text at all? You might as well buy a blank notebook and write down your own ideas. — baker

I see ancient, original texts as openings for new disclosure, and therein lies their greatness. There are no definitive texts, only movement toward greater intimacy with truth at the level of basic questions. What is so important about Hinduism and Buddhism is that they presented an extraordinary efficient method for disclosing revelatory, intuitive understanding at this level. They presented a new intuitive horizon! And I believe it to be philosophy's sole remaining mission to talk about this, learn what it is.

Those who refuse to acknowledge the origins and the systemicity of (a) religion are forcefully superimposing themselves and their own ideas onto (the) religion, thus making (the) religion their subordinate. — baker

If i were putting forward something to replace Buddhism, this would be right. I just want to understand what it has to say. At the center is not a doctrine for me. It is an existential engagement.

He was a Protestant living off a trust fund, flriting with Catholic ideas from a safe distance. Of course he could afford to fiddle and flirt this way, never actually committing to the religious community which produced him and to which he was indebted. Ungrateful brat.

In other words, I judge, I condemn the areligious, "spiritual" approach to religion. Religious texts were not written for just anyone to read them any way they like and to do with them whatever they like.
It's a matter of common decency to akcnowledge that and the religious tradition of which they are part — baker

That about Kierkegaard and his inherited wealth seems like just an intentional ad hominem.

But remember what K stood for: a deeply understood religion that can take absurd notions like original sin and reveal that they are not absurd at all. What tradition to you have in mind, the one that sanctions the subordination of religion to social trivialities? The "churchy" way of affirming God in the margins of regular living? He was not aspiritual at all, quite the opposite. I can't begin to imagine why you would think like this. He thought the medievals had it right with religion square in the middle living and breathing. Read his Purity of the Heart; no more aspiritual than than de Chardin or Meister Eckhart. The opposite is true.

But then, this here is certainly NOT about the errors of the Pali canon at all! I mean, it is an interpretative expansion, but exploring meaning not unlike what it is to explore Jesus' words, only here, we have the "event" that is center stage, much more available for objective study. To me, meditation is a practical metaphysics!

Sure. But I don't see how you can do any of this in some relation to Buddhism. Neither the Buddha nor Buddhists would tolerate you doing that in their presence. What you describe is something they criticize severely. — baker

Begs the question" Buddhism?? This is my point. Read about what is said at all, and you will find not a closed system of thought, but an openness of possibilities. Those who try to contain religion and philosophy to a doctrine put up barriers to understanding. What is Christianity? Kierkegaard claimed that what Jesus, "Christ," was actually talking about lay with an existential analysis of the self, not in Christendom, not in orthodoxy.

This external reality is the world that interacts with our senses: the light that hits our eyes, the sounds that hit our ears, the feelings on our skin, etc... One of the capabilities of our brains is to reproduce/mirror that external reality so that he can then make models and simulations of the "future". Example: it creates a model of the room you're in and this is useful for you to move around, it creates a model of your friend's personality what helps your talk to him and understand each other... — Raul

Tell me what you think of what I call the opacity test: In your physical model of the world, there is a brain and this is the seat all we experience. Assume this true. Given a simple notion of transparency found in a window or a mirror, with, if "clear," an opacity of zero when it comes to delivering or transmitting the object as it is, how clear would be what is delivered by a brain, a thick, bulk of organic material? In fact, how is it that any at all of what is the original, independent object brought forth?

Rorty convinced me that such an idea is senseless. What we call reality is a matrix of pragmatic interface; in plain physicalist term, all you ever encounter is the collective neuronal epiphenomenal presentation. But here is the real rub: The idea of anything that stands outside of this physical "thing" we call a brain can only be conceived within this mass, thereby making talk of exteriors like this nothing less than metaphysics.

I think one has to take a good long look at this idea and ask, how is it that anything out there gets in here? Out thereness itself MUST be in here, point to my head. I know you want to affirm an scientist's world of the assumed understanding of an exteriority in the standard sense, but what good is this if it depends entirely on an assumption that cannot be explained at all, that in fact, on analysis, reveals exactly the opposite, for one can never conceive how a brain can "know" what is not a brain and phenomenology is the only recourse.

Those are categories and concepts we develop as we grow, as our brain grows. We learn how to categorize physical objects as well as conceptual objects that are communicated by the social context we grow in. The relationships of those objects and our brain assigns value to them, cognitive value, emotional value to achieve its main goal: keep the homeostatic equilibrium.
The episteme, the knowing, happens when the internal objects and categories, ideas have a external correlate. There is a "symbiosis","correlation" between the cognitive objects and the external world. When the cognitive predictions (manipulations of the internal objects that represent the external world) correlate with reality. Example: if I tell my wife I love her she will react in certain way, if I eat an apple I'll like the taste, etc... Pure biological activity. — Raul

Yes, if you are going to work with the common assumptions of empirical science, all this is quite salutary. But all of this begs philosophical questions. It is one thing to talk about objects and brains. cognitive and and worldly relations, but what of the analysis of knowledge itself? Going on about one's business is well and good, practical, productive, but here, we want to ask basic questions, for this is philosophy, not physics. When you say you know there is a cup on the table (or bioactivity in a petri dish), how does this get affirmed on analysis of the relation qua relation, not the relation qua all the basic assumptions that are in place while one does the shopping and pays bills. What IS such an affirmation about? we follow here the rules of procedure any scientist would, only here, the themes are altogether different in that we look to what is presupposed by familiar, unquestioned knowledge relationships.

It is not at all that there is "nothing out there" but rather what that IS cannot be said, realized, at all. This makes objects of the world very mysterious, transcendental, impossible! at the level of basic questions.

Yes, there re experiments that show a person saying he doesn't see anything (consciously not seeing) but he behaves and moves avoiding obstacles. Search for "blindsight" in wikipedia. — Raul

Yes, there re experiments that show a person saying he doesn't see anything (consciously not seeing) but he behaves and moves avoiding obstacles. Search for "blindsight" in wikipedia. — Raul

Okay, the brain delivers mixed events. Consciousness is what is reported, conceptually identified. If my hands are doing what I am not aware of, it is not a conscious event, but is autonomic.

Not all of them but many of them. Could you put some examples? — Raul

If knowledge is inherently problem solving, and to know is simply to know successful outcomes, then this places everything we consider to be true accounts of nature entirely outside the possibility of some intimations of what things "really are". I think this is likely true" Thinking and its language and its interpretative function is foundationally determinative of what the "isness" of the world is.

Of course, this is not exhaustive of our experiencing the world as world. But it IS exhaustive of our understanding's ability to establish belief and knowledge.

Our Self shares many qualities with the self of primates for example. We have more capabilities mainly related to language that enable deeper reasoning and manipulation/simulation of realty for our evolutionary advantage. Evolution is about patterns that survive longer and adapt better. Our brain have created this capability of the "Self" that enables evolutionary advantages. At least for now. Why do you see it is entirely OTHER? There are no "new qualities" in our brain, just more powerful. I don't think our Self has a singularity. — Raul

Our Self shares many qualities with the self of primates for example. We have more capabilities mainly related to language that enable deeper reasoning and manipulation/simulation of realty for our evolutionary advantage. Evolution is about patterns that survive longer and adapt better. Our brain have created this capability of the "Self" that enables evolutionary advantages. At least for now. Why do you see it is entirely OTHER? There are no "new qualities" in our brain, just more powerful. I don't think our Self has a singularity. — Raul

This is a wrong understanding of evolution. The self is not an "evolution" self, for reasons cited earlier. Not sure what you mean by "entirely Other," not that I disagree, but I miss your point. AS to the singularity of the self, this is a different matter, difficult to show because the center of an act of awareness escapes awareness. I find it very reasonable to argue that the self that is engaged on multiple fronts existing as a teacher, spouse, sibling, political activist, believer of this and that, and so on, is an aggregate self, but in the examination of the self's, errr, properties, we are looking at an interiority of affairs, not at the furniture of the world, and it is here we can "observe" the self in our stream of consciousness: this stream is our aggregate self. Look further and find this stream "runs," it constitutes time, not in time, but constitutes it, is the foundation of thought itself out of which meanings are produced, scientific meanings, as all meaning is essentially scientific. What, after all IS science if not the method of science, and what is this method if not the structure of thought itself: the simply conditional form of logic: If I impact nitro with sufficient force, THEN is will explode, hence, the meaning, in part, of nitro. This sructure is at the very heart of crossing the street, selecting a book, talking about the weather, everything at the level of basic assumptions about the world issues from here.

But in this interiority of multiple events, endlessly changing, there is always the abiding self that is on the subjective end of a given encounter. It's easy yield to the temptation to absorb this into the matrix of everything else, but then you would not be giving sufficient due to the actuality of this center. Alas, this is too difficult to talk about here. One has to read Husserl, Heidegger, Kierkegaard, Levinas, back to Kant, and so on. Open for discussion, though.

Agree, and a good example si this "Seven Seconds memory" man you can find in youtube. — Raul

Agree, and a good example si this "Seven Seconds memory" man you can find in youtube. — Raul

Seven seconds: the time it takes to define a constructed self in the given complex moment of awareness, made out of the past. But the question is about this middle vis a vis the actual experience, not to be found in the theoretical paradigms; for just as science must yield to the facts, so phenomenology has to observe faithfully the structures of the self as they appear "themselves". Awareness as an aggregate is a common view among phenomenologists. I think they are wrong for several reasons. One lies with the Kantian transcendental turn, which is best expressed by Eugene Fink in his Sixth Cartesian Meditation, a more than daunting read if you haven't read Kant. Here, it is accepted that all the appears before one as it is, prior to and presupposed by empirical science, has its grounding in experience, and the focus is here, on the "primal philosophical act..to reductive giveness."
An empirical idea is constructed out of the givenness of the world, and so prior to an analysis of what the self is, we have to look into what givenness IS, which really is just a matter of looking at the interiority where the self is and finding that all roads lead to this generative source, which is the self, which is NOT contained in the categories generated that give rise to the possibility of empirical science.

Most do not even know such inquiry exists. Alas.

This is incorrect. Heterophenomenology deals with actualities in the human consciousness and the self (I'm thinking on Dennett and Dehaene works, you should not ignore them).The success of science studying the self is that it brings "the new" and "actual new" not based on speculation but on scientific dialogue with our brain and our subjective manifestations. Thanks to this we can today not only better understand our limits and how the brain creates the "illusions of the self" (distorted reality in order to make it useful for our survival, pleasure, ...). Thanks to this we have reached levels of manipulation never reached in the past (for the better and the worst). — Raul

I have little doubt about the above. don't get me wrong, I do not at all think that scientists like Dennett are wrong, but they do coincide with, say, Husserl's Ideas or Heidegger's Being and Time. It's just that these latter are at a more fundamental level. Of course, the metaethical argument for the self is completely beyond his interests as well. Indeed, the most powerful argument for the self lies not in ontology, but in metaethics. I find some analytic philosophers interesting, like Quine, who arrives at the same conclusions, essentially, as Derrida, and Rorty, who straddles the fence, though naming Heidegger and Dewey among the most important thinkers of the 20th century. Others, like John Mackie, are outside of insights at the basic level.

I think you're looking at the Buddha in a very romantic, idealistic way. A modern re-imagining: egalitarian, politically correct, democratic. Non-sexist.
The Buddha of the Pali Canon is not like that. He's an aristocrat, authoritarian, dogmatic. Even when he goes for alms or sleeps in the forest covered with leaves.
The Buddha of the Pali Canon doesn't care how you're doing or what your "hopes and dreams" are. You think he would agree that all of our endeavors are at the most basic level, a yearning for this extraordinary one thing? No, he's not a New Ager.


There are many metadiscussions of Buddhism. Starting with the ones in traditionally Buddhist Asian cultures. Then the metadiscussions in the many Western imports/exports of Buddhism that try so hard to make Buddhism seem palatable to modern Western sensitivities, that try so hard to present it as the one religion that isn't really a religion, but a philosophy.

But as one reimagines the Buddha and Buddhism this way, selectively regarding old sources, keeping things one likes, discarding those one doesn't, making changes here and there, as one prefers: What is the result of that? Is that something that can be relied on as a path to liberation?

The old tradition (that can be traced back to the historical Buddha and his disciples) came with a declaration of a guarantee: Do things the way you're told, the way preserved by the tradition, and this is your best bet to become liberated.
One might accept that guarantee, or not; but at least it's there and has some historical validity.

But the new reimaginings can offer no such guarantee. This is free-style, anything-goes, reinventing-the-W/wheel kind of "Buddhism". An ivory tower populated mostly by youngish able-bodied males who told society to go suck on a lemon and escaped into their own minds. Are they enlightened? Are they liberated? Maybe they even are, but they sure can't teach others how to become liberated as well. — baker

Well, I don't think sucking on lemons is helpful. But the philosophy is just the a matter of making ideas clear, even if the matter itself is revelatory, intuitive and defiant of interpretation. This is why I think apophatic philosophy, in the East, neti, neti, is helpful. I mean, once you are in an earnest engagement to find out what is so mysteriously called enlightenment, it is in your inquiring mind where everydayness needs to be pushed aside. It is not a matter of saying what is essentially revelatory and intuitive, but rather talking around it, about it, indirectly through the familiar to point to what cannot be spoken.

After all, the actuality of the world, the "presence" of being here, cannot be spoken, and if a person can realize this at the perceptual level, that is, in the plain apprehension of objects in the world, in the midst of implicit knowledge events there is the palpable mystery in all things, and one experiences an extraordinary intimation of depth and profundity, then one knows without a doubt s/he is in the proximity of enlightenment, though its consummation may be light years away. It is what inspires one to move forward, do the hard work endlessly looking. I don't think the Pali canon is the exclusive vehicle for this at all.

The mental raise of the self: The mental “model-of-the-world” is a representational mirror of the external reality, a second mental mirror comes from the mental representation of “the others” that makes the self to happen/emerge when the mental process realizes the “invariants” between the other and I (confronting both mirrors). Two confronted mental mirrors that create the self’s singularity. — Raul

Not sure what this external reality is meant to be. Not that externality is not meaningful, but what you mean is unclear. Of course, this is a big issue. Seems to me that the mirror of external reality would hold within it that of the others, but then, what do you mean by "other"?

The Self bio-basis: The self process is confined to synchronous integrated information exchange activity between the cortex pre-frontal ventro-median area and the temporal and parietal (praecuneus) lobes. — Raul

I am willing to think like this, in this naturalistic framework, but only AS naturalistic. But where do your, if you will, "reductions" lie? Are you committing yourself to a physical reductionist thesis? Then you will have to face the music: your utterances pronouncing an objective physical world would have to be physical, yet if that were true, how does epistemic affirmation occur? That is, how does a physical object like a brain, ever "know" an external object to affirm the out "thereness" of external reality?

Self and experience: The self is not required for experience to happen or to be communicated. A conscious and an unconscious brain can be able to communicate its emotions without being self-conscious, i.e. reflex actions. — Raul

I don't understanding this. Unconscious experience? This needs explaining.

Self and time: The Self process "emerges" gradually as our brain matures and as we grow as individuals in a proper stimulating cultural context.
The Self is not something permanent, it dissolves gradually when we address our attention to specific tasks and/or non-referential thoughts. It dissolves and disappear as well when we sleep or die, — Raul

I see, you wake up, there you are, fall asleep and you are not there; you die, you're gone. It rises and falls, like the tides and other physical things. Proving that there is an enduring self is not possible empirically. But then, empirical observation precisely called into serious question with a physicalist model. If the pragmatists are right about knowledge, and what is known is pragmatically known, then ALL claims to knowing are relegated to the bin of unknowables. Then there is the metaethical argument which I won't go into here unless you are so inclined.

The self and evolution: The self makes us more adaptive and effective in our survival and homeostatic goals as a species.
As consciousness, the Self enables even more complex (larger, longer, more realistic and more integrated) models-of-the-world as it enables, i.e., evaluating our judgments against the other’s. — Raul

The self and evolution: The self makes us more adaptive and effective in our survival and homeostatic goals as a species.
As consciousness, the Self enables even more complex (larger, longer, more realistic and more integrated) models-of-the-world as it enables, i.e., evaluating our judgments against the other’s. — Raul

trouble with evolution, which I of course think is a right view as far as it goes, is that evolution has nothing to say about the evolved self qualitatively. More realistic? No, better at solving problems regarding survival and reproduction, but wht actually brings about evolutionary change is entirely outside this: Genetic accidents have no intrinsic relation to evolutionary needs. They just occur and happen to work better than otherwise, but this, "better" refers to a quality that is entirely arbitrary to evolution, that is, accidents are not inherently evolutionary accidents. And the consciousness that has arisen over the millennia is not an evolutionary consciousness. E.g., granted, the reproduction is encouraged by the gratification of sex, but such gratification is not therefore so defined as the success of gratification. What it is, and all the evolved self is, isentirely OTHER than these processes and have to be understood only in their manifest qualities.

Self and memory: Access to memories is necessary for the self to happen. More accurate and longer memories that contain external descriptions of the world (i.e. science) the more empowered the self is. — Raul

True, and it goes further: the self is constructed out of memory, as memory precomprehends the given moment. Ask, what is my "self" and you are already relying on memory even in the asking, for recollection of language and the learning, of structured logical thought is all part of the anticipated moment of asking, of walking down the street, and so on. One's identity is a complex memory.

But in this predelineated self, one finds much more than memory, doesn't one? Examine the self and its immediate interface with the world, which, not being so immediate after all, given that all encounters are precomprehended and that it is IN the recollection that the understanding can grasp the world in thought, BUT there is this strange insistence on "presence" which defies temporal delimitations: not only is my experience constructed out of memory, but there is the actuality that I face that is NOT memory at all. Put a spear into my kidney and I am not registering the event as a dynamic recollection, and the same goes for all experiences: the actuality of the event entirely escapes the understanding. Since the self is, as with all matters, predelineated by memory and the understanding and its recognition and familiarity with things rests with this, there remains that elusive "middle" world of actuality where the self has its center.

Self and the existential delusion: The Self is necessary for the emergence of the concepts of "infinite" and "finite" that foster the generation of fear, anxiety and depression as the "model-of-the-world" it generates is much larger than himself. This idea of confinement gets in conflict with its primordial instinct of survival. Systems of believes that sustain a teleological illusion mitigate these negative feelings (religions, intelligent design, spiritualism, mysticism,...). — Raul

And yet, when we speak of survival have we brought theory to its final resting place at the foundation where inquiry goes no further? Ot don't we need to made foundations where they present themselves: at the level of presuppositions at work in the affairs is science? Science does not even pretend to be about the self; rather, it yields to the interpretative standards that have no regard for the actualities in the human self's world. Physicality? A meaningless term, ontologically. Propositional empiricism? What is the structure of the proposition vis a vis the world of objects? What of ethics and aesthetics, the most salient feature of being a self? That is, the meanings we are IN, in the world is what comes first in discussing the self. And also, the reductionist paradox looms large: You think all things reducible to the physical, yet, the concept itself is without predicative possibilities, i.e., there is nothing to say about it; furhter, you, the thinking agency conceiving of the physical would be yourself a duly reducible agency, and therefore you would need to show how that which is reducible can even conceive of what is not.

What have you heard about the Buddha, and which can reasonably be ascribed to the Buddha, that makes you think the above? — baker

Your link provides:
"And what is right view? Knowledge with regard to stress, knowledge with regard to the origination of stress, knowledge with regard to the cessation of stress, knowledge with regard to the way of practice leading to the cessation of stress: This is called right view."

I don't see Buddhism as subsuming the meditative event; I see meditation subsuming Buddhism. Meditation is the practical foundation to achieving liberation and enlightenment, and so the question that lords over all, if we are going to risk being assaulted by the Zen master's fan by thinking about what demands quietude, what is meditation as a method of liberation.? And this begs questions like, what is liberation, liberation from what? and to what? If one is going to talk about the meaning of Buddhism, one must looks to its concepts, but most seem to think there is nothing to say. This is because they don't read phenomenology.

If you want to say the true teachings of Buddhism lies with the study of the Pali canon, I would say, true? What does this mean? Do you mean historically, categorially? Then perhaps you can talk like this. By I quickly add the Pali canon bows low to the unfolding event in the deep meditative state, and a determination of this state looks to the phenomenological structures of experience.

Take "The Right View" from your link:

"And what is right view? Knowledge with regard to stress, knowledge with regard to the origination of stress, knowledge with regard to the cessation of stress, knowledge with regard to the way of practice leading to the cessation of stress: This is called right view."


What kind of stress is this referring to? There is the mundane stress of daily affairs, the common things that rise up in relationships, expectations others have of one, stress at home with family and siblings, from the need to establish security professionally, and so on. Is this what The Noble Truth of the Path Leading to the Cessation of dukkha dukkha nirodha gamini patipada ariya sacca is about? Of course, these are not excluded from the problematic, but this is certainly not where the concept as it is dealt with here hits its mark. For this, we have to examine what meditation and liberation are really about at the level of basic questions, putting aside the mundanity of relaxing and feeling better about oneself. One can take a valium for this latter.

What if I said meditation is an event that is understood only in an analysis of the structures of consciousness? Here I think of Husserl and his phenomenological reduction has been implicit in phenomenology since Kant, and here particularly, in Kierkegaard. What is the self? he asks in his Concept of Anxiety and Sickness Unto Death. Kierkegaard, responding to Hegel, sees that reason cannot be the ground for the actuality that is qualitatively set apart from it. Existence is not essentially rational but is utterly transcendent (not his language). Wittgenstein was a fan years later and the idea plays out in philosophy, analytic as well, but especially in Continental philosophy. The self, for Kierkegaard, is acknowledged as a kind of nothingness that sits in the middle of the temporal dynamic of the future that is constructed out of the past in a process of becoming (to borrow from Heraclitus). He says this, and of course, Sartre's Being and Nothingness is derivative of this, as is Heidegger's Being and Time.

This ontology of time and the self, the self being constructed out of a past to future dynamic, leaves the question of the self open, for the actuality of the self cannot be possessed by the past (see the long standing tradition of apophatic theology/philosophy--Meister Eckhart, Dionysus the Areopogite, e.g.s; deconstruction steps in announcing the "end" of philosophy), as it is an actual presence that is not discovered in an analysis of the precomprehended projection that is grist for the future making mill. The present is an "eternal present" which is the foundation for existential freedom: freedom the emerges as the "authentic" self that is no longer claimed by the language and culture and beliefs and attachments that issue form the past.

Forget how the crudely made paragraph above can be questioned, criticized, the point is merely to set up an answer to your question: In the event of meditation, the above is a rough sketch of a phenomenological description of its essential features. Ever since I read Kierkegaard's discussion of the eternal present, I realized what meditation is really about at the level of basic questions (keeping in mind that we are asking questions, probing into concepts and their underpinning meanings, not stating chapter and verse. A text is only as meaningful as its concetps, and these are only meaningful if their meanings are exhaustively examined. Postmodern thinking is the crown jewel of the centuries of meandering metaphysics seeking endlessly to say the unsayable, pronouncing, by MY thinking, that we are faced with, not a conceptual problem at all and all this busy work possessed this one flawed premise that it was a propositional answer that was sought; but no: our existence is a VALUE problem, and meaning follows upon value). "Actual" eternity is not defined as a succession of moments that never ends, but as a kind of ontology of nothingness that is always already there, and is the valuative "seat" of our being. Another philosophical theme I take seriously is metaethics/ metavalue. I think in the examination of value simpliciter, the phenomenon of suffering and joy, reveals an extraordinary insight, which is that the core of value is, as Wittgenstein relates in his Lecture on ethics, well, invisible. The "good" of joy cannot be empirically observed and is a transcendental actuality. This actuality is the self, the realization of which is the goal of meditation.

Buddhism realized this in its own way centuries ago, but phenomenology gave Buddhism its meta-discussion.

Why disputatious?? — baker

The point is that such things are by their very nature not determinate. The language in play is open.

This is the thinking of someone who is not a Buddhist. — baker

Where do you think Buddha got it? Lived in a culture that laid out possibilities, and he practiced, observed, thought. His final words have no definitive claim on the very thing he brought forth. Buddhism is NOT a doctrine.

That's a bizarre claim to make in relation to a religious text.
Religion is dogma to which one is supposed to align oneself. It's not something to discover, or verify. — baker

Sorry, this is most emphatically wrong.

That's your claim. I neither agree nor disagree with it.
What proof do you have that there is more than one way to achieve liberation? As in, liberation as it is defined in the early Buddhist texts? — baker

My claim? All religion is about liberation, and the question of how this can be reasonably discussed depends entirely on what is disclosed for the individual in the events of deep meditation. The less one can do this, the more s/he depends on others for understanding. the better one can do this, the less one relies on others, and once this latter is realized, methodological texts fall away. They were just heuristics all along.

I'm saying that in early Buddhist texts, he is called the Rightfully Self-Awakened One, and Buddhists texts say there can be only one such being per one cosmic entity of time. That's all I'm saying. — baker

But what does this even mean if the notion of being awakened is not clear in one's own experience. It becomes a mere fiction, something alien and distant. How can the concept have any meaning at all like this?

There are all kinds of ideas of what "liberation" is.
Theravadans have their own idea of what liberation is.
Mahayanis have their own idea of what liberation is.
Hindus have about a dozen ideas of what liberation is.
California Buddhists have their own idea of what liberation is.
Western psychologists have their own idea of what liberation is.
Every meth head has their own idea of what liberation is.

But these ideas of liberation are not all the same. Not all paths lead to the same goal. All things that are called "liberation" aren't the same. You're arguing for an equivocation. — baker

But these all vanish when one sits quietly and breaks free from the conceptual hold of the world. To see objects not as objects, but to bring no distinctions into play at the level spontaneous perception, and what was once a divided world becomes a profound unity. In this condition, and approaching it, one realizes that the only talk that can matter is that which acknowledges that beneath experience there is a foundation that is entirely Other than the everydayness of things. It intimates its own consummation and in this one realizes that the there is only one thing that is sought beneath the multitude of spiritual and otherwise ambitions. Not a multitude. Gautama Siddhartha knew this, I believe. He knew that there was this singular, consummatory event for all, and that is was not far and away, but right there, in our midst, unassailable and perfect, and we know what this is, for we see it in part played out in our lives, in loving relationships, in romantic visions, in childhood innocence, in a yearning for what we call God, an intimation of what was realized fully, perhaps, 2500 years ago.

I think if the Buddha were here with us now, he would agree: all of our endeavors are at the most basic level, a yearning for this extraordinary one thing. I say, the "end" in both senses of the term, of philosophy is to narrow theory in order to bring this into the fullest expression. Post Heideggarian French theology, Jean luc Marion, Michell Henry, Emanuel Levinas, then there is Husserl and Eugene Fink's Sixth Meditation, And John Caputo Apophatic thinking and Derrida, and so many others who see that theory has come to a dramatic point where the ineffability of the world enters the world! Odd thing to say, but I believe it is the mind reaching out to affirm the essential Buddhist thesis, which is that language will not consummate the self, Truth is not propositional, but what you might call meta-affective.