No, it evidently cannot be explained to you in any terms that you accept. The problem(s) of Sydney, Henry, the barn and the car are intractable and insoluble. — Vera Mont

But my being me has nothing to do with it. The matter presented as an objective and arguable problem. I mean, if you really think my uncle is unproblematically there in some way, you have to first take on the epistemic obstacle of describing the relation between brains and what brains encounter such that the former know the latter.
As to the intractability, it is not as if the matter stands the way it is; it is a matter of "parts". What is needed is an understanding of the epistemic requirements for knowledge, and an account of how the brain/Uncle Sidney relationship could make this possible. One is reluctant to make a radical move, I know; but then: this IS a radical problem, so the solution has to be commensurately radical.

No way out of this. Put simply, the physicalist model has to be discarded, or amended. How can this be done?

I look forward to your future musings. — Benj96

As I do your insightful thoughts.

It's not different, just a little more holistic, as I attempted to reunify the uncle's electrical impulses with the brain and body in which it takes place, and which it appeared you had overlooked in describing him. — Vera Mont

But it wasn't overlooked. Saying something is an electrical impulse itself is subject to the same issue being raised, so the question is clearly begged:

I'm sure that's true; you seem to know Henry and I don't. — Vera Mont

The particular traits of Henry are outside the discussion. It could be my cat or interstellar phenomena. If Sidney is, to put it plainly, nothing but a bunch of brain manufactured events, then everything is, because the matter turns to therelationship, not the incidental features.

That depends on how Sydney has offended you. — Vera Mont

No, it's not this. Sydney has not offended me. This "offending" is not about the violence, but about the question: Given that the causal relationship is the relational characterization in both cases, the car fender vis a vis the guard rail, and my uncle vis a vis my brain events, then causality itself has to be explained as to its ability to "deliver" my uncle to me.

It seems there are 2 versions of your uncle. 1) The real uncle - some kind of entity producing impulses, sending various kinds of information etc 2) an instance of your uncle that your brain manufactures and then customizes, i. e. interpretes those impulses (or signals) and based on them creates a coherent set of rules that it tags/labels as "uncle Sidney". So, while not being "in your brain", your uncle can still sort of send a copy of himself to your brain for further processing, not unlike a computer virus replicating itself. Now, let's say, another person who knows your uncle created another copy of him in his brain. His customized copy will be different to yours. He might say "What an awful person, this Sidney. Full of himself, patronizing, unkind, not listening.", whereas your opinion might be quite different. Are we talking about the same person? Yes, the core is identical, it's the interpretation that makes the difference. Like god flavour vs devil flavour. Another comparison that springs to mind is a dream being influenced by sensory perception, e.g. sound of the alarm clock being interpreted in dream world as dog barking etc. So, again, the original impuls, and an interpreted copy. — enqramot

But how do you escape the final description of all you say above being brain events only, even, and this is important, the reference to something being a brain event? Talk about my "real" uncle: is such a thing even possible to imagine in good analytically grounded conscience?

It may seem absurd in case of a barn door, but isn't so absurd in case of a computer. In a way, it does "know" certain things and acts upon them. It doesn't make a computer conscious, of course. Sensor-based input can be built into computer systems. This works very much like unconscious part of our brain, for example, when goose bumps appear as an automatic reaction to lowering the temperature. Fully automatic reaction, something in you "knows" how to react. — enqramot

The barn door: The complexity of your computer is not at issue, for first you have to explain the fundamentals: at best, at the level of basic questions (the most basic, which is what philosophy is about) the best you are ever going to get is a causal connection between your computer and and the wind howling through its receptors. It could be AI of the highest order, and you would still be routed to this question: how do causal explanations suffice for knowledge claims? Barn doors and howling winds have exactly this same causality "between" them.

I don't see how this assumption could be proven or disproven. What if he IS reducible? How can you be sure? Have you seen Cast Away movie with Tom Hanks? His only companion on a desert island was a volleyball that (whom?) he called Wilson. He's reduced to tears when Wilson the volleyball floats away during a storm. Modern, much improved upon, version of Wilson would be lamda the word processor (chatbot), a machine that fooled a supposed senior software engineer doubling up as a priest to believe that it's sentient (maybe he wasn't really fooled, maybe he did it for money, I don't know - he lost his job anyway). So, as you can see, creative interpretation can go a long way. Maybe you add something to your uncle, something that isn't there. — enqramot

It is not a matter of "what if he is reducible." You are facing here an ineluctable situation, for, as you and I will agree, there are brains and uncles and there is a world. I simply ask, how does the the latter get into the former?

It's just one story among a multitude of other imaginable stories. At another level Uncle Sidmey is just electrons, protons and neutrons, doing what they habitually do. Or multitudes of twelve kinds of quarks. Or a perturbation in a quantum field. Or chemical elements interacting, combining and separating. Or tissues, muscles, tendons, ligaments and nerves. Or person; a member of your society who shares the same basic conditioning and set of presuppositions about human life that you and I do. Or he's your beloved (or not so beloved) uncle. And so on... — Janus

Yes, as I see it, this is poignantly true. So then, how do I establish a reasonable idea that can make Sidney a person, apart from me, over there, and so on, NOT reducible to any of the above, given that the above are all true? I am concerned that Sydney got lost in the rigorous analysis and no one noticed. So, I am noticing.
This is, in my thoughts, the second most important philosophical question there is.

How is an uncle different from a barn door? Sounds like something the Mad Hatter might ask.
I'm more intrigues by why you'd want to go to Wonderland, if it disturbs you so? — Vera Mont

Rorty put it nicely: How is it that my relation (my brain's) to my uncle any different from a dented car fender and the offending guard rail? The qualitative complexities of the brain that leap to mind to explain this MUST be resolved into an epistemic connection. Mere causal connectivity does not establish a knowledge relationship.

I had a colleague who used to work as a mortuary technician - preparing bodies for autopsy. It got to be that he was unable to look at people or experience them in ways that was stable and orientated to the present. He could only 'see' what was underneath - organs, tissue, bones, blood... it made intimacy and connection very difficult. So he quit his job in the morgue and took up gardening. :wink: — Tom Storm

I find that fascinating. My daughter is an illustrator and she had this morbid curiosity about working in a mortuary, a kind of "goth" obsession of a Halloweensih pov on such things. Anyway, she applied, didn't get the job, and I was relieved, because she could have either gotten desensitized to the idea of dead people, to put it bluntly, or over sensitized. Doctors in general, surgeons esp., have to be a bit sociopathic, I've read, to have the requisite grace under pressure dealing with such things.

In a similar vein, for me, the more I think philosophically, especially reading the phenomenologists, the more I am "sensitized" to being an existing human being, for the questions that have been thrown aside in the advent of modernism have never at all been resolved. Human existence is still the same impossible mystery it has always been. But now, simply ignored.

All this neuronal activity takes place in a unique container of specialized cells that are all busy replicating, dying, doing all kinds of work to process elements from the environment into materials to maintain the edifice which is "Sydney", the sum of all those cellular activities, interstitial fluids and structural elements and containing membranes in which it takes place, one of whose various designations is "uncle to Canstance".
Yeah, that seems pretty exclusive. But why is it a problem? — Vera Mont

It is a problem because your foundational explanatory setting is in no better position to be defended than my uncle. I'm sorry, neuronal activity did you say? But what is this, as I have problematized my Uncle, that is any different? You could have a phd in brain science, and the best you will ever get in the basic philosophical analysis regarding all of the terms of your analytic is more of the same reductive analysis: the very thoughts used to construct the rationalization of Henry's distance from neuronal events are themselves "distant".

The whole brain cannot self reflect on the whole brain as there is no neural networks available to make computations while the others remain static and observed. It can only compartmentalise portions of itself but I suspect these portions can be quite large. Mathematically it doesn't take many neurons to exponentially increase their computational ability. Like factorials in maths. — Benj96

But the thinking cannot go this way. How is it that the whole brain can "compartmentalize portions of itself"? What is, in the simple conditions I have laid out, mathematics? That is, if my uncle is not my uncle because there is epistemic avenue of access to something that is remote from systemic assignment possibilities, then why is it that mathematics can escape this fate? How can you, in other words, make mathematics non reducible to neuronal networks itself, or, speaking generally, how is it that anything is what it is called and familiarly talked about remain what it is if this very thinking itself is confined to something that is itself thought?

As Jim Morrison says (in a different context) " words got me the wound and will get me well if you believe it". Animals have no language and no need of liberation, so it seems that language creates both the need, and the means, for liberation. Language provides the technics, makes the technics communicable, but the act of liberation is a going beyond the limitations of language, a stepping outside of it. — Janus

I want to say language sits comfortably along side of anything at all, like my cat does when I am not thinking about it and it is just there. SUre, there is language attending implicitly in the comfortable absence of explicit thought, but my cat could suddenly reveal herself as an avatar of God, and language could still be there attending to the spectacle.

On the other hand: In my best meditations, when things settle into an odd intimation of something just there, beneath the skin of the familiar, and there is something there, in the givenness of things, that appears just on the horizon of things, and I give this its breadth and depth as I can, I do feel the world receding and the revelatory event issues from within, as if to fill all things. It is a very strange business, I have to admit, which is why I feel the need to step into this discussion. Language does yield in that identities of things weaken, and something steps forward. And it is like going home, but this is revealed as within subjectivity, as if, as the Buddhists' say, one already is the Buddha, and it is a matter of discovering this.

1)It does not bring us to a state prior to desire or will
2)It does not precede intention or reflection
3)it does not achieve a state of neutrality devoid of affective coloration. — Joshs

Just to note: to separate desire and the desired is a verbal confusion I never understood. If I have the desired, do i stop desiring it? I don't think so; I desire still, in the gratification. The Buddhist idea of nirvana, putting aside textual authorities, is a profound affective experience. it subsumes intention and reflection, just as Kierkegaard's knight of faith takes in the world's finitude and Walt Whitman's song of the self tallies the world in grandeur. These are but pale versions of the boast of nirvana. Affective coloration is the very meaning of nirvana, it has just been misrepresented by those who want to separate enlightenment from emotion.

One thing that doesn't make sense in this is how Constance refers to knowledge suppositions as both cultural artifacts and fundamental attachments. If they're fundamental then they're not cultural. — praxis

I defer to Dewey on knowledge and the aesthetic. For him, the two are of-a-piece, part of the process of acquiring knowledge is the "consummation" of the acquisition, which is the pragmatic thrill of successfully solving a problem. Language itself is just this: a body of tools, "scientifically acquired" meaning we, as infants and children were faced with models of language behavior and internalized these to the delight of others, and therefore, to our delight as well. We "tested" our knowledge with primitive utterances, and found successes in the way these became useful, and this was all imprinted in our young psyches. Now that is a fundamental attachment. Language is also a culture carrier. It is not just words rules; words are presented in a body of attitudes and idioms and ironies and countless entanglements with cultural institutions. One doesn't simply hear the term General Motors and realizes it refers to a company that makes cars. It is discussed in many contexts of value, economics, jobs and employment. and so on.

E D Hirsh wrote a book a while back called Cultural Literacy, and he believed that there were certain things every American knows AS an American, like the fact that Lincoln was born in a cabin what the three R's are. He thought this is the kind of thing Americans must know if they are going to live among Americans. Of course, he was a conservative that didn't much like immigrants, and I don't care for this kind of thinking, but he did have a point: the simple things that flow through a society's culture are freighted by everyday language use.

as if the act of attention is distinct from what one is attending to , and as if there could be such a thing as a pure, pre-reflective , pre-intending, non-judging and non-willing mode of awareness, a bare feeling of being. — Joshs

I wouldn't draw a distinction like this.The entire experience in the world, replete with no exception, abandons nothing that is not "pure". As troublesome as an idea like this is, this "purity", it is not meant to stand apart from anything, but is inclusive rather than exclusive. The "error" (the snake that is really a rope, of the Vedanta) lies in the interpretative meanings of ideas "in play", and there is no escape from this, but here, there is no escape and any divisions between what the understanding understands and that which is understood is made moot.

The idea is not to draw up a metaphysics. It is phenomenological: a description of a disclosure of something that permeates all things, just as a person in love lives in a world in which all things radiate with love. And here, the purity is not "pre reflective" but a-reflective: reflection can help achieve this, as jnana yoga helps achieve Hindu spiritual ends, but the point is not to stop thinking, but to stop identifying thinking with "Truth" with a capital 'T': "What is Good is divine, too. That strangely enough defines my ethics," wrote Wittgenstein in Culture and Value.

Not pre intending but the intended object and the intentional act are both subsumed. As one judges the world in one way or another, the judgment is within the event of the disclosure. The "bare feeling of being" is not to be qualified within an explanatory setting of philosophical talk that is alien to the "bare feeling". And again, "bare" is not an exclusive bareness. Rather, what is rendered bare, is all things. And divisions within plain talk are not nullified; they are subsumed.

Through meditative practice, we can access this pre-reflective state , and avail ourselves of ‘unconditionally intrinsic goodness', 'spontaneous compassion', 'luminosity', 'blissfulness', and ' a calm and peaceful life guided by the fundamental value of nonviolence'. But how do such feelings emerge as ultimate outcomes of a philosophy of groundlessness — Joshs

But "groundlessness" is an imposition of a term that does not belong. The challenging encounter certainly is in the historical record, in the Tibetan Book of the Dead, in Eastern spiritualism. The trouble is, this is not taken seriously. Is this the hubris of Husserl and Heidegger and others who think the Greeks were the true progenitors of philosophical thinking? At any rate, what is being discussed here is not a thesis so much as it is a revelatory insight. The problems that arise in accounting for it lie in its simplicity.

Are you suspecting that there's more to your uncle than a system of neuronal activity? I guess it will be damn hard to provide any scientific proof of it, and without a scientific proof we are reduced to speculation. That's as much as I can say without having actually met your uncle. — enqramot

But let's say you had met my uncle. The assumption in place is that it was my uncle, and that this was not something reducible to interior events inside a three and a half pound mass. My uncle is not IN your brain. He is exterior to this object. Why is it that this object can extend beyond itself and do something like affirm something that is not part of a brain at all? It really is a simple question. I mean, we all know what uncles are, and what brains are. How absurd is it to say a barn door "knows" what the wind is that howls through its hinges? Why are brains and uncles different regarding this epistemic connection?

This is not how phenomenologists understand ‘past’. You are thinking in terms of traditional notions of the past as a separate entity from the present, occupying a separate position in a sequence. — Joshs

No, I really don't think like that. Saying the past-present-future is really "of-a-piece" actually reduces the problem for the Buddhist who faces the singular event of realization which is ideally out of time because
the production of experience is terminated? This means that there is nothing to deliver the perceptual event to in order to bring something "to mind" and for the meditator, this task is singular. Once the occurrent experience is reduced, there is a broadening of the purely perceptual horizon, and a new interpretative occasion, something "wholly other" presents itself.

This is trouble for understanding, since to be there at all, to be an agency that beholds anything at all, must be in the historical framework that comprises the self. So, while the, call is the "purity of the perceptual event" broadens, the temporal self that is this very of-a-piece event that is the witness and the receiver of it cannot be annihilated, for this would be annihilation altogether.

But as I see it, it has to be understood that this analysis of affairs is entirely "about" something that is indeterminate. What makes determinacy is open; all contexts are open, awaiting, if I may, something else. The experience of Buddhist liberation is this; it is the 'other" that so intrudes upon the totality's grasp (to borrow a term), but is, to the likes Caputo and others, impossible, for they take the apophatic course that leads to a weakness of God, and other things. They don't take the course of discovery.

“Because my being is such that I am out ahead of myself, I must, in order to understand something I encounter, come back from this being-out-ahead to the thing I encounter. Here we can already see an immanent structure of direct understanding qua as-structured comportment [my experience of something ‘as' something], and on closer analysis it turns out to be time. And this being-ahead-of-myself as a returning is a peculiar kind of movement that time itself constantly makes, if I may put it this way.”(Heidegger 2010b) — Joshs

Aside from being right and fascinating to conceive, this being ahead of myself is a useful heuristic from meditators trying to understand what lies before them, as they face the dynamic of thought intrusion. It is the intrusion of the future and the past; but this, I think, annihilates time altogether, for one is left, ideally, with no interpretative stand at all, which is the point.

Who's systems of neuronal activity exactly? Yours or his?
We are all systems if neural activity - impossible to untether from external environment through our senses.
A two way system of information exchange.

Ideas, thoughts, beliefs, imagery, sounds, smells, tastes, touches come into our neural system. We process it either storing it as memory or ignoring it/not paying much attention and it is soon forgotten.

And similarly we are also an active source of those things: thoughts, ideas, art, knowledge etc. That we put out into the environment through our verbal (speech) and non verbal (body language) as well as our behaviours and interactions.

We experience sensations and we are also "a sensation" - the sensation of what it is like to experience Constance for example, to interact with her, to observe, understanding, question etc. To build a knowledge of that person. — Benj96

But then, what is a "sensation" in the context of this inquiry? What does it even mean to be a system of neural activity if that which produces the very utterance is itself neural activity? How does perception exit neural activity to observe a brain and conceive of neural activity?

As Morpheus asked Neo, "Is that air you're breathing?"

Do you think it is like this for animals? — Janus

I do wonder about animals in this. What they do not have is a capacity for reflection, and it is reflection that generates the ability to stand apart from one's affairs. Interesting to imagine what it would be like not to be able to second guess what lies before you as a thought, an activity, a behavior. It would pretty much be instinct all the way through.
There is this tendency to think that language interferes with "liberation", but it is also true that language makes liberation possible. Language produces the conditions of our everyday acquiescence, but it also produces the question, and the question is the tool that cancels thought processes and autonomic existing.

he immediate ‘now’ is inseparably all three phases. This a priori tripartite structure of the now is no fiction. — Joshs

But what is it that holds the three together? In the startled moment when one levels at the world a question that stops the past from freely and seamlessly producing a future, this is, I would argue (inspired by others, obviously), a temporal rupture. Just as when the hammer's head flies off and the hammering gives way to a pause, a wonder, here, taken to the level of basic questions where there are no alternatives that readily fill the space of momentary indeterminacy, and here, there are no possibilities that can retake the occasion with something familiar, and there is nothing to step in and affirm an existence, and one faces nothing: past is suspended. I think when a Buddhist seriously meditates, and has success, this experience is a sublime transfiguring of the "present" if there is such a thing in this. This is why they have the term 'nirvana'; and this is the essential experience that generates religious metaphysics in Hinduism.
Husserl's reduction is an annihilation of time as well, taken all the way down the rabbit hole. Students were known find religion studying his "method". Then, of course, there is the French "theological turn" that rigorously plays this out.

I meant discursive knowledge; the point is that such knowledge is always in the form of subjects knowing objects, or knowers knowing what is known, or objects analyzed in terms of their predicates, Lived experience is prior to that — Janus

I would agree, as long as it is clear that "prior to" is understood not to say that one can have an an experience the is free of language and its meanings. Rather, the "lived experience" must be discovered IN this. Language and culture have to suspended in the openness of freedom, and this can be a radical suspension, but it is not that to think (all thinking is inherently discursive) is to cancel its possibility. I recall James' "blooming and buzzing" infant: this is what it would be like to without language.

Maybe the goal is to have maximal vitality of mind, which experiences helps nurture. Emotionalized rationality keeps us always moving forward. One drawback of Buddhism *seems* to be that the excitement for the future, wherever that may be, may perhaps be considered maya. Buddhist say they want to extinguish desire, but perhaps this is yet another paradox. Mustn't we desire to extinguish? — Gregory

When you say, "excitement for the future, wherever that may be, may perhaps be considered maya,"I think you've hit one the nails in this business squarely on its head. The thought that emotions keep us pushing forward is not just a description of motivational dynamic, it is one of the structure of thought itself. After all (borrowing here rather obviously from a lot of philosophical history), to experience at all is to experience in time, and it is not so much IN time as it IS time. For me, this is one of the most profound things a philosopher can discover about the world: in the perceptual act itself, thought is conditioning experience; it is "always already" there, in the glace, the gaze, in which something appears and is tacitly understood without explicit understanding of the terms of discovery, I mean, the fact that seeing at all in interpretative, and not at all a "seeing" what is before me, for the understanding that is engaged is bound in a temporal dynamic of past/present/future, and it is not as if there really "is" such a thing" as the past or the future. Really, is it even possible to affirm the past AS the past? It cannot be witnessed, for to witness at all is a "present" event; so the past is never the past, really; it is an adumbration (to borrow) of an impossible-to-conceive "real" past. This is a revelation, if you think about it. Past is neither an empirical nor apriori concept. In fact, it is a genuine fiction, as is the future. Rather, past and future are pragmatic terms, useful, obviously; but in an existential setting that is utterly transcendental. What of talk about the historical record of one's education, informing occurrent affairs to anticipate in readiness for the future? This is a staple in experience analysis across disciplines, and it certainly is right to talk like this, but not at the level of basic questions; not here, in the talk of foundations that underlie everyday existence. Here we go as far as analysis will go, and this temporal dynamic falls apart very quickly.

Nor does the present survive, for this is a contingent term, meaningless without the past or the future. As I see it, it is important to see that this is not an abstract discussion, for as I feel and think even now, as I write, I am not In this; I am this. So what does a Buddhist do if not literally annihilate the structure of time, what you are calling maya. To meditate is to stop time, but this is not meant as a metaphor. the difficulty in understanding such a thing lies in the abiding foundation of time itself, which is, to speak plainly, the world, or, the world of illusion: this living, and importantly, existential "going along with" the thrust of this past-present-future.

A major theme of existentialism is freedom, and behind this is Husserl's phenomenological reduction which is a "method" (as meditation is a method) of suspending knowledge claims that implicitly tells us what the world is, and the "naturalistic attitude" of the sciences is his primary concern, for antecedent to to such claims, is the intuitional underpinning that provides the givenness of the world that is presupposed by science. Husserl believed inquiry can isolate this horizon if intuitions, and there discover absolute "presence". He has been attacked by almost everyone for this strong claim.

But then, these doing the attacking are philosophers, and not, well, "spiritual" inquirers.

Anyway, time, at the basic level of analysis, is key to an analysis of what Buddhists and Hindus call enlightenment. I am quite clear on this.

This is a very important point, and it should also be emphasized that knowledge of the world is not lived experience. — Janus

A tough cookie in that one: what is "knowledge of the world"? And what is "lived experience"?

of course, pure pleasure is a myth. Any pleasure is qualitatively unique, being precisely the harmony of one set of conditions with its appropriate activity. The pleasure of eating is one thing; the pleasure of hearing music, another; the pleasure of an amiable act, another; the pleasure of drunkenness or of anger is still another."

Dewey continues,

"Hence the possibility of absolutely different moral values attaching to pleasures, according to the type or aspect of character which they express. But if the good is only a sum of pleasures, any pleasure, so far as it goes, is as good as any other-the pleasure of malignity as good as the pleasure of kindness, simply as pleasure.” — Joshs

But this kind of thinking denies that there can be a category of aesthetics, denying that each occasion of aesthetic experience is a kind of sui generis. I can't say I understand this in light of his Art as Experience which makes the aesthetic into a generalized pragmatic consummatory event. Art is "wrought out" of the art object's coming to being in the pragmatic struggle to produce it, and so, it has been said that this makes the well placed punch in the boxing ring inherently aesthetic. This sound to me like an attempt to conceive of the aesthetic homogeneously under a pragmatic interpretation of experience.

This is why I used the term "God", the "logos", the fundamental principle/law behind science, spirituality, trial and error, change, free will, etc. Something with ultimate explanatory power. Now that is something worth pursuing regardless of what we name it. — Benj96

Of course, I have to nit pick a bit, you know, philosophy. How is it that the logos can confer value agreement? We can argue, and I think this right (in fact, I think philosophy's mission is to replace religion, and philosophical argument will replace religious dogma; and this is something of an inevitability ...in a few hundred years or so, if we're lucky) but a bringing people together will require either a very liberal attitude that accepts what is really not agreeable or appreciated in the comportment of others who are different; or an agreement in values, such that everybody lives comfortably with others because they are essentially the same. The former is a tall order. Really, nobody wants to live with others who are so morally and aesthetically remote.
The logos refers to ideas, and rationalists tend to hold that the world will unfold in agreement is we could only "discover" the logical foundation of all things. They think there is a fabric of reason(in one way or another) that binds all things together, an if we could just see this for what it is, it would be like a revelation!
But I don't think this is right, simply because the logos is generally not conceived as a value-bearing concept, and what really separates us is our value differences.
So, I agree, this dialectic process of reasoning things through to their conclusions is the way things should be; but I don't think the world is that Hegelian (not that Hegel was an abstract rationalist. I'd actually have to look at what he says on this. His idea the "the rational is the real" is more complicated than this. I need to put aside three or four months and do just Hegel), that it is in reason's agreement in the end that will bring all things and people together. I think, rather, that, instead of a kind of logical hierarchy (ideas yielding better ideas) of the world, there is a value hierarchy. Look at this from a point of view of evolution (which I generally don't do): Here we are, and have come a long way from the primordial soup of things. What is the most salient feature of this journey? All that can be said in response this will beg a significant question, which is the value question. We have arrived at a place where there is music and art and this thing called happiness and misery and culture taken up in a human agency that is intensely engaged.

Hume once said that if it were up to reason as reason, reason would just as soon wipe out all humanity, for there is here nothing of value-meaning-content in reason. Reason is an empty vessel of logical structure, and possess none of this dimension of ethical shoulds and shouldn'ts and rights and wrongs. But value, now there is something palpable: the feels and feelings of the world! But they are unwieldy to agreement.
I do agree that there is in all of our affairs there someting as you say, science, spirituality, and all the rest of what we are, but the "behind" is a very mysterious idea. Keeping in mind that, as Wittgenstein understood, the logos cannot apprehend itself; it cannot say what the logos is, for the saying presupposes the logos. This "behind" is elusive; and yet: what is elusive really is possessed in[/, the existence we witness all the time. This is the key to penetrating into this mysterious "behind" of metaphysics. It is not to look behind or beyond and the like; rather, it is to realize that what is manifest IS the behind of things.

You advise care in connotative phrasing and in the same breath demonstrate recklessness. "God is love" is rather emotive. Rules for thee but not for me, it seems. — praxis

Emotivity is reckless? This does move into another part of the thesis. You mentioned unpleasant smells and the suggestion that these are elevated to a level of ridiculous prominence, and I thought there was certainly something to this. After all, talk about the apodicticity of value draws no exceptions, and does this not make the trivial absurdly grand? this kind of question pushes thinking into a clearer look at value-in the-world. So what makes a smell less grand than, say, Ravel's Mother Goose suite or Brahms's second piano concerto? Or being in love? There are caveats all over this, and this is where arguing, which depends on shared understanding, will not find the desired traction, for emotivity's attachments are not the same for us all.

Arguing that love is a value "phenomenon" (is it this? Phenomena are there, in the appearances of the world, after all. Does the "good" appear?), the desideratum and worldly consummation of which has existential "properties" that far exceed olfactory "properties" (and here we refer to something like Moore's non-natural properties; the "good" of the experience) is something of a fool's errand, for if it is not manifestly true, then forget it. But then, thee is a reason love is sung about, poetized about, and has been for centuries. there is this sublime dimension to it, and the desideratum of love exceeds, as Levinas would say, the desire. But one has to witness this to agree. Alas.

How can you know God so well, btw, to know that "God is not a person who speaks, judges, lays down the law"? Do you believe that you are a God? — praxis

Keep in mind that God has been reduced only what is evidenced here in the world. God is, I have said, the response the the radical metaethical indeterminacy of the world, and it is reduced out of the standard metaphysics that gives us these problematic features. God is not a person, a creator, a judgment, a principle, a kind old man, and should not be conceived in the traditional way as something impossible remote. God is an embodiment of the extrapolative possibilities built into the world at the level of meta-inquiry. I witness love and suffering (as terms of general subsumption) and these possess their own meta-dimension. I infer God from these, if you like.
So, when you ask, "Do you believe you are God," you are drawing upon what I call bad metaphysics, a medieval Christian (and other) ontology.

Getting back to your beliefs about sensations, I think evil is the correct term to use because you seem to be saying that sensations like pain have inherent moral qualities. I'm curious where you believe the moral quality exists. Is it somehow in the sensation itself or in what causes a sensation? For example, is the sensation of an unpleasant smell evil or is what causes the smell evil? A rotten apple will have an unpleasant smell and the cause of that smell could be determined to be bacteria. So does that mean bacteria is inherently bad or evil? — praxis

And so, if you take that rotten apple and rub it in someone's face, is this not by default (defeasibly) wrong?
It is easy to confuse categories of thought, so you have to be more careful. Bacteria being bad is not at all on the table. I won't review the argument already there. You see by now that such a thing is, frankly, remote from the discussion.

You seem to believe that sensations, like the sensation of pain, have a moral quality. Do believe that an unpleasant smell, for instance, is evil? — praxis

Careful about the connotative value of words. You say evil and we think we are in a dramatic moral conflict between God and Satan, and this is precisely what bad metaphysics does, the kind of thing that sends women to a fiery death and the spiritual sanitization of social rules. Rather, life goes on as it always has, and the sense of what is good, bad, right wrong, and everything in between continues as it is, for there are no stone tablets and God is not a person who speaks, judges, lays down the law. God is the insistence that moral nihilism is impossible. On the positive end, God is love. Why love? Because being in love is a powerful affirmation of our affectivity; no better reason than this. Love is the summum bonum.
But on the other hand, there is a point in this: If value is now to be cast as an absolute, then what of the plain regularities of our moral lives? Closer to Buddhism than anything else. In the Abhidamma, there are methods for achieving detachment from desires that include eating terrible tasting foods, and subjecting the body to a variety of discomforts (reminds me of the self flagellating Christians in a ritual renouncement of the world's and its original sin). The kind of thing that drove Nietzsche crazy (literally).

So we are talking about fantasies? — praxis

No. Someone extracts your tooth without analgesic: not a fantasy. In fact, far more ethically emphatic than any rule can possible be.

This is not true. Our world is quite limited. I know it may seem like we know, or can know, everything about the world but trust me, we don't, and I highly doubt that we have the capacity to know everything. — praxis

No, no. Facts. How far is London from your house? In fractions of an inch. In infinitesimally diminishing quantities? How many numbers are there?

There's nothing unnatural about the experience or concepts of 'good' or 'bad'. — praxis

Then you take issue with this, as do I, because the demarcation between what is natural and unnatural is arbitrarily drawn. But then the "goodness" in this sense taken up in ethical matters is sui generis. It is not like a good knife, say. A good knife is sharp, well balances, and so on. But say you want to use it for a production of Macbeth. Now the sharpness is not good at all; it is fact, bad. This is contingency, or relativity. There is nothing that cannot be recontextualized to change what it is. But then meta ethical judgments like pain is bad: these do not change. This is important: Conditions in whcih the judgment takes place can change, and this does make our ethical issues so ambiguous; but in cases where the entanglements are minimal, and the value as such is clear, even pure, as when you stick your hand in a fire, value is an absolute. Consider: your are given the choice to torture one child for an hour or a thousand children for eternity. Most would go the utilitarian way, and opt for the one child, but note: choosing this one child, because it is preferred on sound moral grounds of utility, in no way mitigates the suffering; indeed, unlike the the knife example in which a good quality changed to a bad one, here, it is impossible to mitigate the suffering. This is what is meant by the ethical bad (and good) being an absolute. It is not that it does not diminish here or there; rather, it cannot be mitigated. Nothing can undermine the badness, to speak awkwardly, of torture. Pain is apodictically bad.

And because this matter is not about logic's apodicticity, logic being the form merely of judgment, but about actuality, this absolute is existential. God's essence is her existentially absolute goodness. So called, "The Good".

Our conditioning does not require justification. — praxis

Talk about something being its own presupposition is to say it has no explanatory ideas the reference to which is required to explain what it is. It is stand alone what it is.

Everything requires context to have meaning. — praxis

And there you have it for all things, save ethics. Ethics' injunction to do or not to do in the matter of a phenomenologically pure case is indeed, stand alone. The justification for this claim s lies solely on the evidence the issues form the pain itself. If you have an issue with this claim, take a lighted match and apply it to your finger. Do you not "know," thereby, this injunction not to do thiszzzzzzzz/ to deny this would be disingenuous.

Arbitrarily conceived laws? :lol: But you're right of course, they don't issue from jurisprudence. — praxis

Legal matters are embedded matters, and the engine that drives ethics, value, is made ambiguous. Most of our moral thinking is ambiguous, but the issue here is God, and, as I said, God is a metaphysical idea, and so the embeddedness of the usual moral thinking is suspended, for this embeddedness is a construct of facts.

You said that attachment to the world is illusion yet you want us to take the world as it is presented to us. Is this not a paradox? — Gregory

I am not going to take responsibility for the way the world is. I don't think the world is an illusion, as when I break a bone or slip a disk; but then, what we say about this pain when we interpret what it is is compromised by conflicting contingencies. And when we talk theoretically about pain, we have many contextual settings which qualify the pain in such a way that what is said is really about the value-arbitrary facts in which things are embedded, as when a patient at a hospital complains about some misery and this is instantly interpreted into medical jargon, and THIS displaces the pain itself, treating the pain as a subjective counterpart to the explanatory account. THIS is illusion. When I rise through the ranks at the office and make it all the way to manager, this is an illusion. The institutions of this world, an institution being something instituted, established, taken for a new reality, like the conferring of a name on a person, this is illusion. And the world we live in is a body of institutions. Language is mostly a pragmatic, intersubjective exchange of institutional knowledge.

What do they mean in the East when they talk about illusion? They are talking about interpretation, and interpretation is not just this pulling away from something to say what it is. It is, rather, affectively and cognitively qualifying as to the way a thing or a set of affairs is experienced. It is important to see that concepts are not simply what Kant thought, these principles of a synthetic function of the mind. As Kant conceived this, he conceived of an abstraction; not that he was wrong about synthetic functions, but that this is by no means all of what a concept is. A concept seizes hold of the world existentially, and is a powerful dynamic in normal perceptual experiences, always, already there in the simplest of apprehensions as an affective presence. The Buddhist idea of attachments is usually conceived as a kind of affective binding of the self to things, and this is of course right; but beneath this is the world-taken-AS, and I borrow this from Heidegger, who says when we encounter the world, we take the world AS the way we encounter it. he held that there is no way to a-conceptually or a-linguistically understand anything. I think he is wrong about this. I think when the Buddhist "goes under" and suspends consciousness's categories of taking the world AS (AS a tree, AS a cloud, or a mathematical formula, etc.) there is a radical departure from "the world", or there can be if things go right.

Of course it doesn't. People say such things. Burning sensations to not say things. — praxis

No, not literally. But the burn: I know what it is as well as anyone. It is not a "mere" fact of the world, this is clear. Facts are affairs that sit comfortable on the grid of logic: the sun is farther from the earth than the moon; the color green is of a higher frequency than red, and so on. There are an infinite number of facts. With value, there is something else, once the facts are exhausted for their content. there is the "non natural" property of good and bad. This finds its justification in the pain or joy itself--these serve as their own presupposition, as I have said. They are not things that defer to other things for their meaning; but the meaning is stand alone; the injunction, e.g., not to torture another person is found in the stand alone evidence of the torture experience itself, so when we do give this expression in language, the the expressed principle issues from the world, not just some arbitrarily conceived bit of pragmatic systematizing of our affairs called jurisprudence.

Buddhist seem to think like I, the world being being and Nothingness, a yin and yang of opposites. For how can an untainted God sustain the being of what is ugly and offensive to all rational creatures? How can courage to expressed by a God that already has it all thanks to what he just is? How can he brag to Job? How can he live and sustain a child's cancer, asking it to accept the pain because when it gains the power of reason it can learn from the pain. And a pain this God knows nothing of first hand. None of this sounds right — Gregory

God was never this. This is the talk of a historical busy-ness of filling the concept with bad metaphysics. thinking of God, why am I committed to listening to anything that has not understood the one thing Kant really got right: Noumena is not discussable. Only what is before us can be talked about, and here there are things extraordinary, miraculous. Time and space: intuitively impossible, but there they are, embedded in eternity, so what is eternity? It is exactly what one faces when one puts aside all the knowledge claims implicit in our default understanding of the world. What is Being? it is exactly what one faces when one puts aside all the knowledge claims implicit in our default understanding of the world. This "putting aside" is not new to philosophy in the west. It is Husserl's epoche.

You mention God several times and do you use to to refer to a being undisclosed? Humanity lives in time even if its spirit does not. I have several objections to a being who is father if humanity in the divine sense. This being, according to classical logic, will have never suffered like its sons, loves necessarily and yet somehow (?) freely, and is the active cuase and lives within every crime, ugliness, and humiliation thar there has ever been. Something about the idea seems absurd to me and I genuinely doubt it exists — Gregory

But this is a long history of metaphysics talking, specifically, Christian metaphysics. Father? the author of all things? A creator? Why is this associated with God? To conceive in a way that puts the concept of God outside of the prejudices of narratives, of history and its groundless meta-thinking, requires a step beyond these. This is both difficult and easy: difficult because one has to step out of something firmly fixed in our culture; easy because the solution lies with the Buddhists, which a kind of apophatic existential approach, a "simple" dropping of the illusions of knowledge suppositions by practical negation: ignoring desires and attachments. The most fundamental attachment is knowledge of the world.

It's not the world speaking, it's you speaking. You are saying "don't do this," not the world. — praxis

Quite right. And this is just a manner of speaking, and it is why Witt refused to talk about it. It cannot be said. But consider the usual examples of so called qualia, being-appeared-to-redly, say. Qualia is an attempt to reduce things to their sheer givenness, apart from the ways contexts generate meaning. Compare this to the "qualia" of pain. Pain out of context is more than the context could bring into the making of meaning. This is a very big point: When the attempt is made to remove pain from its contextual settings, there is what you could call an existential residuum, a value meaning that is transcendental, that is, exceeds language's ability to say what it is, for to "say" is to contextualize, and contexts are suspended.

The obvious objection is just fascinating: the moment you entertain the argument's reference to qualia, you are already in a context, that is, to think at all is inherently contextual, so each utterance of "existential residua" is itself conferring context, if I can put it like that. But then, Kierkegaard haunts this issue, for actuality is clearly not language. That burning sensation is not a language experience, and there is nothing in language, it can be argued, that really sets those existential delimitations on meaning. Value-in-the-world does "speak" just not in words. Does that burn "say" with undeniable clarity, "don't do that"?

It sounds like you've determined indeterminacy. — praxis

You did put your finger on this. Nicely done yourself! Because this is where the argument lies, in the determinate world where things are usually clear as a bell and the intimations in this world of imcompleteness. Metaphysics is a term that has its existence "discovered" at threshold of knowledge, but not where science meets its anomalies (as Thomas Kuhn put it way), rather, where epistemic inquiry meets a wall of "impossible" knowledge: non propositional "knowledge". Such knowledge is found in the ethical dimension of our world. Any example will do: place your hand in a fire, and ask what is this pain? It is not a construct of language; it is the world itself "speaking" so to speak. It says, don't do this, to yourself, anyone, just keep this out of existence.
Of course, in the entanglements of our affairs, things get rerouted, and ethics gets messy and complex and full of conflicting obligations. But the primordial meaning is as clear as anything can be, and as such, is apodictic and indefeasible. Note how this kind of language is easy to recognize in logic's apriority; but here, this is not logic, but is the palpable Real. It carries the weight of a deity.

You haven't talked about metanarratives yet, which is curious. — praxis

To suggest that anything metaphysical is reducible to a metaphysical narrative, like Christian metaphysics. But this really doesn't get interesting until one turns away from the grand narratives to the micronarratives of everyday living. The question is, what is not a narrative? and the usual answer to this is science, but this idea of narration needs a little exposition: It is assumed that a story is a piece of fiction, but then, at the level of the most basic questions about the world, is it possible to remove "narrative" from even science? Rorty and others argued that knowledge itself is a pragmatic social function, and this does ring true when you think about the inter-relational nature of language, that language and logic formed out of communicative needs: a word belongs to speech and writing, and these reach beyond subjectivity, and it is argued that self's thought and the self itself is an intersubjective construct, an internalization of observed relations and the noises and gestures made to reach from one subjectivity to another. So, when I have a thought in my head, I am essentially "talking to" myself, treating myself as an "other" and the divisions in the world are reducible to just this language divide we created in the social matrix. A self IS a social matrix. Heidegger doesn't say things this way, but his dasein is very much an existential environment of social possibilities.

There really is something to this. Herbert Meade, I recall, thought like this and his argument was more conventional, referring to observations of animal behavior and the like. Is the self a walking micro-narrative, a part of a system of institutions laid out by culture and history, wrought out of social needs? Yes, I think so. But this doesn't address the issue at hand.

There are many ways to explain a human being. How about neurology? Or physics? Or genetics? Or evolution? These are "natural sciences", and they presuppose the givenness of the world; and they do not touch metaphysics, and God is metaphysics. One has to bring analytic discussion of this observable world into a "context" of metaphysics to talk about God. The obsolete grand narratives of the past are now in retreat, and this opens philosophy to either empirical science or phenomenology, and empirical science, regardless of how speculative extrapolation can carry its paradigms into meta paradigms, is metaphysically question begging, that is, ask a scientist about basic assumptions, and she won't know what you are talking about. Not really.

The way to make this connection between finitude and infinity, if you will, begins in two places. One is the Kantian need to discuss noumena, and other is ethics and metaethics. Painfully simply put, Kant insisted we had to talk about metaphysics, but cold know nothing at all about it, because there was nothing in t he sensuous medium a concept could bond with. But: how is it that he simply had to talk about it? There must be in the world something that intimates this, and this is the very essence of metaphysics: the deficit, the "nothing" that inquiry encounters; this is an existential nothing, meaning if it were not there, then world itself would be radically different, and this is arguable, of course. The movie Pleasantville comes to mind: Two kids are thrown magically into a world of black and white where no one can even imagine an "outside" to the town of Pleasantville. That is, not until their eyes open, and they begin to see color and conceive of a fuller sense of what is there already: something always already there, simply not acknowledged! So we live in a world in our everydayness much like this: metaphysics is always already there, but it needs a catalyst to bring it to discussion. Science is like this, surely, for science "discovers" the world. Here, it has to be admitted that metaphysics is discovered as a profound deficit in our understanding that is "there" in all things always already. This is the foundational indeterminacy of our existence: take any concept about the world, any at all knowledge claim, and it can be demonstrated readily that there is no "center" no "final vocabulary" no "metanarrative" no stone tablets or anything at all that will intimate what is truly and really what the world IS.

There is a LOT of philosophy in the above. But I can tell you the conversation phenomenologists have been having on the matter of metaphysics for the last two hundred years is fascinating.

The final premise lies with a phenomenological examination of the meta ethical dimension of our existence. Is this okay?

The great question: why are we born to suffer and die? Can be answered with "to suffer is to understand what is not right with the world, to be born is to participate in that great battle, to exert influence on the outcome. To live is to have the opportunity to circumvent suffering not just for yourself but for your loved ones. Your ability to tackle suffering with knowledge and empathy extends well beyond the self. That is the godly approach to ethics. — Benj96

I think you have something there, and it has crossed my mind more than once. I have some thoughts:
We suffer and delight in the world because this teaches us what these are, so what are they? Take an example: drive a spear through my kidney and what you get is an intuitive disclosure, to put it formally, of an injunction NOT to do this to yourself or others. Why? Here, again with some jargon, the moral precept is its own presupposition! Meaning, to witness the pain IS the precept! This, as you say, is the "Godly (I add the capital letter) approach to ethics." I think this right! But how is it Godly?

God is a metaphysical issue, and can't be observed, but only be acknowledged in a recognized deficit of some kind, and in human epistemology, everything has this. Everything. For all knowledge claims are dubious at the basic level. Take space: If I say I am in a room, but cannot say at all where the room is, then clearly, I don't where I am beyond being in a room, but note: we have in the background of the question Where are you? a whole body of meaningful possibilities, and the judgment that I do not know where I am plays against these possibilities. I mean, to know where the room is has to refer to some building, street, a town, a state...the world, and so on; so being in a room really presupposes the room is somewhere of a body of possibilities everyone knows about. Eventually metaphysics steps in, for beyond the world and the universe, your intuitions take you out until meaningful talk disappears....but the world-in-eternity does not disappear. I can't say what eternity is, but there is this very weird deficit in the boundlessness of space, which we simply ignore, after all, what can be said? Clearly, space as such just doesn't matter; it is not really an issue. But intuition insists that space beyond what we can say, is not nonsense; it is a palpable insistence that space is eternal, whatever that means. I think space is a good introduction to the interface between the infinite and finitude.

Now take God and ethics: God was produced by culture to address a profound deficit, and the term we have for this is moral nihilism, just what Wittgenstein had in mind when he said value had no value, and if it did, it would have no value. But very plainly, the pain of the pierced kidney and the joy of being in love, these are absolutes, and as such they belong to metaphysics (hence, unspeakable). How is this so? This is the line of thought that leads to what I would dangerously call metaphysical affirmation.

The essense of morality is cooperation and not avoidance of harm, if that's essentially what you're claiming. Harm/care is only one dimention of morality. This is important because the aspects that you neglect are essential for religion to fulfill its purpose (it's not all about ethics). — praxis

Cooperation? Cooperation for what purpose? Cooperation, principles or good conduct, a "good will", weighing consequences in terms of utility, and anything else you can talk about in ethics and the determination of what makes right and wrong actions what they are, beg the one question regarding the nature of what it is that is at stake, and this is value. Value is ubiquitous in our affairs, but, to use Witt's language, value is absent from the facts of the world. Take the color yellow. What is this? There is nothing to say. Obviously, you can talk about it, but this simply brings context into the definition, and all contexts get their meanings from their own contextual embeddedness. This is what is meant by contingency in language (and what Derrida had so much fun with; and essentially why Dennett denied qualia made any sense). What you cannot say is what the color yellow is apart from contexts, and this goes for everything, really. The interesting, impossible thing about value is that, unlike yellow, value "speaks" in a way. It carries the injunction to do or not to do something. this is where the argument is going: why should a person, as a default principle of moral action, not harm another? Talk about the contract one has implcitly with society, or the law, or rules and the like, do not penetrate to the core of this matter, for it defies analysis. One should not harm others because it hurts. What is this? What is that scorched finger feeling like? Talk is useless. Was this a result of evolutionary processes that favored pain and pleasure over their competitors in the struggle to survive and reproduce? Yes; and? It is beside the matter altogether.

The claim is not that a metavalue account of ethics is everything there is to ethical decision making. It is just that other questions are suspended here simply because they are not relevant to the inquiry.

Talk about God is why this metaethical line of inquiry is taken, and questioning about God is metaphysical inquiry.

To be as succinct as I can, desperation is reckless in nature, leading to rash and extreme behavior. Such behavior is quite often less than exemplary in good moral character.

Desperate people are easy to lead though, the more desperate the better. — praxis

But here we are at a "second order" of inquiry. First order inquiry can be talk about our relations, moral character, and ethical behavior, but a second order of inquiry asks questions about first order presuppositions. So, what is exemplary moral character about? It has to do with right choices, motivations and intentions, but intention to do what? Treat others as one should. Why is this a concern at all? Because all people are vulnerable to suffering. If a person cannot be hurt at all, then this is not a person for whom others can have a moral obligation. Then what is suffering that is generates moral possibilities? This is the question taken up here. It is a metaethical question, a question "about" morality. It is a question of the ontology of morality, a "what is it? question.

I'm being patient. :smile: — praxis

Okay. On the table is value, as I say, the weirdest thing in the universe, by far, this "badness' of a scorched finger. It deserves to be released from the contexts we like to give things, for these knowledge claims contexts bring the world to heel, and it gives us the illusion that we understand it. But it is clear that when it comes to the primordiality of what is "given" we are of our depths, (and I really should add that the essential inspirations I am dealing with in all of this were conceived in the minds of others, whom mention only in passing from time to time. E.g, Jean luc Marion's Givenness an Revelation had a profound influence. Alas, I am not just making all of this up myself. I do, as do all, carry my reading into my own thoughts). Value is a term that encompasses the affective side of every experience we have and it is ubiquitous in life, for everything moment of lived life is a value-moment, as with the interest in play as I write these words. When I wake in the morning, value i always already there, in the mood, the recollection of before and the anticipation of the day. It is not an analysis of our theories and the cognitive events of our lives that make for the important discoveries in the, if you will, foundational meaning of life. It is the AFFECTIVE part of all this, and this cannot be emphasized enough: We, in this grand dramatic narrative of life are not seeking some propositional satisfaction, the error analytic philosophy makes (close to early Wittgenstein on this); we are seeking deeper, more profound VALUE in life, which is why I take Buddhism and nirvana so seriously. And this is God: the embodiment of absolute bliss, the affective response to the value indeterminacy (and thus, the ethical determinacy; see below) and value desperation of our lives.

What I am doing here is an attempt to penetrate into what God is really all about, certainly not some pointless exposition of what people, believers, atheists, traditions and history say, moving along wn the usual circles. Since God is not here to be examined, we have to go on what is there, in the world that gave rise to the conception in the first place. This brief talk about value tries to make clear that the issue that God is a response to, not a deficit in the understanding as a knowledge deficit, though this is not apart from the matter, but to the horror and miseries of the world, as well as its blisses and indulgences, this uncanny value-nature of our being here.

As to the ethics: If God is an embodiment of, call it a value perfection: god is love, many say, and what is love but happiness? And what is happiness: the summum bonum; then how is there a connection between God and the world, for God is an absolute, a metaphysical entity, and there is no apparent metaphysics in the world, because if there were, it would be metaphysics, would it? This is the last part of the argument.

Are there issues in any of this thus far?

To your mind, have you made an argument for why you think God (or religion, including Buddhism) is all about our ethics or are you ignoring my question? — praxis

No, this is just the introduction. The reason why God is essentially an ethical account is because God was conceived in a response to the ethical indeterminacy of human existence. A difficult matter to discuss briefly, or at all, for one has to take a hard look at value-in-the-world. There is some length to deal with.

First, it has to be acknowledged that the meaning of human existence refers us to two kinds of meaning. There is conceptual meaning that defers ideas to other ideas, as when the response to the question, what is a bank teller? is other definitional terms, like money and economics, savings accounts, and so on. These can and do, of course, defer to other terms for their meanings, and this is an endless game of questions and answers (Derrida's "Differance" is about this). The other kind of meaning has to do with value, as in, This strawberry is so good! or, I love Julian! this kind of thing is NOT something that defers to something else for an account of what it is, and this is an argument of critical importance in metaethical analysis: The "good" to the strawberry, what is this? This is a kind of good that refers directly to the good experience of the taste and the satisfaction it brings. It does not refer us (defer) to definitional meanings that circle (hermeneutically) around. It is a "given" of the world. On the radical negative side of this, the lighted match on your finger gives pain, and pain is not analytically reducible. And as Witt would say, givenness is not factual, meaning we cannot talk abou it, and that which cannot be talked about "should be passed over in silence."

So we can't really talk about value as such, and more than we can talk about analytic's qualia. It is a phenomenological irreducible.Now we can turn to God and the world. If we lived in a world of Wittgensein's facts, like in that big book he talks about in his Lecture on Ethics, there would be no ethics, for ethics has this, call it a non natural property, like G E Moore does, and what is this? This is the ethical bad and good. Consider: the lighted match applied to your finger, there is more here than the fact can say, for this is in the world, and propositions are only as good as far as the world shows itself, and the "badness" really does not "show" itself. It is an odd thing to try to wrap your mind around, this elusive "value" property, for it is neither rational apriori nor is it empirical, and yet it is the most salient feature of our existence. the argument cannot really proceed until Wittgenstein's point is clear: When he says talk about value is nonsense, he means it is not a idea of "parts" that defers one to something else to explain it. It is, as Kierkegaard would put it, its own presupposition, a "thereness' that is both in the world AND apodictic, and just as one can't explain logic (why does modus ponens "work"?), nor can one explain this.

Any thoughts so far? We all know that logic is apriori, that is, validity depends on logical form only and tautological relations are absolute (though we are not going into post modern objections to this kind of thing here). But to say something in the world is also apriori is impossible. The world itself would have to possess something intuitively absolute, like logic, only REAL.

There is, of course, more.

I do not think that word means what you think it means. "What-to-do questions" are questions of normative ethics and not metaethical. In any case, you've made an argument? — praxis

What to do presupposes the doing carries a certain weight. Metaethics inquires about this.

"Meta" is an indication of a higher order of analysis, as in metalanguage or meta-anything, really. I refer you to Wittgenstein, just for one. See his Lecture on Ethics, which is available online, I think. ethics has as its core what can be generally called value, and value is the essential ethical presupposition of good and bad in ethical matters. Witt wrote that the good is what he calls divinity, and he meant that value is simply in the givenness of the presence of the world, and is therefore not reducible. Not unlike wwhat analytic philosophers call qualia, but on this, see Moore's Principia Ethica in which he referred value statements as possessing a "non natural quality". He was referring to the metaethical dimension of the good and bad: Put a match to my finger for a few moments. This powerful event is NOT found in the "states of affairs" of the world, and hence, says Witt, it is nonsense to talk about. But it IS there, only unsayable.

I disagree with Witt, somewhat. I think you can talk about it. Value is the weirdest thing in the universe, but talking about it is done indirectly.

I do not think that word means what you think it means. — praxis

I think the term generally refers projecting features we possess on to foundational descriptions of the world. But take reason: can judgment about what the world is in any way escape the imprint to the reason inherent in the judgment itself? It is not just about blatant physical features as in the image of an old man on a cloud. It is all constitutes human experience, and in this, nothing we give thought to can be free of the anthropomorphic features that are inherent int he thought.

I strongly disagree. Can you make an argument for why you think God (or religion, including Buddhism) is all about our ethics? — praxis

It goes to the matter of metaethical questions and the metavalue of ethical issues. Our mundane ethical affairs have metaphysical underpinnings, and it is here that religious mythology meets the world of the actual.