Spontaneous cause is possible. Read about the Norton dome. I don't see why it is nonsense. You can bend space with a stick in it even! If the universe grows older, a stick in it will get torn apart by expanding space. I would agree if you said you can't cut space in pieces. — EugeneW

An entirely abstract concept, along the lines of showing how the speed of light can be exceeded given that two beams of light whose paths converge when directed toward each other askew, and the point at which the they merge moves along the line of convergence at a rate faster than the velocities of each. This is not far afield from Russell, really, for when we conceive of a thing, we wind up in a explanatory system, leaving off the thing to be explained entirely. We make discursive castles in the air, which rather goes to the point that explanatory matrices of any kind never do explain "the world" conceived as an "actuality" (and double inverted commas are the inevitable consequence of this kind of talk). The world stands apart from this. Of course, what about eidetic ontology? Are ideas real? Yes and no.

I have always been mystified that adding one-half plus one-quarter plus one-eighth plus one-sixteenth etc adds up to one, in that adding together an infinite number of things results in a finite thing.

I can explain this paradox by understanding that relations are foundational to the logic we use, in that 5 plus 8 equals 13, etc, yet relations, as illustrated by FH Bradley, have no ontological existence in the world.

It is therefore hardly surprising then that paradoxes will arrive when comparing two things that are fundamentally different, ie, our logic and the world. — RussellA

The surprise I have in mind is usually just ignored. Paradoxes like Zeno's should be telling us that geometry and reality are very different, and geometry is just an expression of intuitive logical thinking. The surprise is that structural contradictions indicates not just that logic is quirky in the world that is not logical, but that this illogical world is altogether not logic. And so our thoughts about it do not "represent" it.
What do they do? They solve problems in time. Dicing up the world into particulars, what reason does, among other things, does not hand us the world; it does give us a means to manage and deal with the world, but the world altogether is not logical; it is alogical, apart from logic, qualitatively different, and language is mostly self referential, as are logical proofs. So when a scientist tells you the planet Jupiter has a mass and a trajectory round the sun, and is a distance D at time T, and so on, what is s/he talking about? It is about relations WE have with that planet, not the thing out there.

Does language have an ontological dimension at all? Yes and no. If you ask an ontological question, and don't simply ignore it, then answers can get interesting. The point is that, if you will, we don't really live in "the world" when it comes to knowledge claims. We live in epistemology. The world before us apart from this is utterly metaphysical.

We must be remember that when paradoxes do arrive, that this will be an inevitable consequence of the nature of logic, rather than indicative of anything strange happening in the world.

The fact that logic will inevitably lead to paradox explains why metaphor is such an important part of language, so much so, that a case may be made that "language is metaphor". — RussellA

Strange happening in the world? Not the way to word it. The world is not strange, which is a borrowed term from familiar strange things, life's ironies. No, this is far more egregious. Intelligibility itself is completely Other than "the world" (as it is being considered here). You and I and everyone else are NOT the logical categories we are fit into when we talk and write.

.At any rate, shouldn't you be walking a dog somewhere? I imagine it suits you. — Constance

Sorry about that. My back is not well, nor my disposition as a result.

Not sure what you are arguing. We can bend space like a stick. If you rotate a heavy object, space is bend in the direction of rotation. Frame dragging. — EugeneW

Then you have an issue with intuition and I cannot help you there. Someone argued that causality was debatable because Bertrand Russell wrote a paper saying so. Russell was actually waying we can't make sense of causality, but he was not contradicting the basic intuition that a spontaneous cause is impossible. I wonder how this went with him. Does he understand that a spontaneous cause is apodictically impossible. I wonder this regarding your thoughts: do you not see that space cannot bend, not because Einstein was wrong, but because the c0oncept is nonsense.

Space probably IS just a metaphor in this context. Physicists are not talking about actual bending anymore than they are talking about actual strings in string theory. Bending is simply a term borrowed to describe the effect witnessed observing gravitational pull. It LOOKS like bending when looking at a geometrical presentation of gravity's strength vis a vis mass and distance. We have all seen the images of the warping of space around amass like a planet.

But it does further illustrate the point that when we face the world, we impose a familiar image or idea to assimilate it. We invent problems like God and evil, arrows and the like defying logic, and the rest. Space bending
.At any rate, shouldn't you be walking a dog somewhere? I imagine it suits you.

No. What "bends" is spacetime, — jgill

Yes, and??

No. What "bends" is spacetime, which does not have the Euclidean metric in R^4. The Euclidean metric is how we normally measure spacial dimensions. We need Kenosha Kid (PhD physics) to return and explain this stuff. :chin: — jgill

No, it's not the physics. It is the apriori impossibility of space bending. Space presupposes space, and you can't have something as its own presupposition unless it is an absolute of some kind. Space doesn't bend; things bend IN space.

There is curved space - a type of geometry, and there is spacetime curvature, a way to interpret general relativity.

Empty space doesn't bend, IMO. :chin: — jgill

It doesn't bend unless there is a mass to bend it. I see this, but of course, space bending at all is an issue for the aforementioned reasons. And obviously, I think the science is fine, I mean, I am not arguing about that.

A building contains far more materials than the "blueprints, scaffolding and tools" (logic) used to build it. If your point is that, by analogy, "a map of the territory" (concept) does not exhaust the territory (object), I agree; but that does not mean that the latter is occluded or "falsified" by the former, only that one is (narrowly) interested in the latter (object) at a given moment in terms consistent with the former (concept). An astronomer, as you mention, does not project his "observational protocols and astronomical models" onto the stars anymore than wearing glasses with corrective lenses "corrects" whatever lies in the wearer's visual field. Logic, IME, is simply a way of seeing, so to speak, commensurable (to varying degrees) with the ways nature shows itself to itself (e.g. its 'intelligent' participants); this is so because, it seems, whatever else nature is, it is also logical (i.e. structurally consistent ~ computable (though, I think, not 'totalizable')). — 180 Proof

It depends on what you mean by the object. Really, the fur of this cat shares something with a principle of organization (concept) that is used to talk and think about it? You think there is a "territory" that is qualitatively shared with the concepts used to refer to it? Nature " shows itself to itself" through logic?

These are pretty strong claims and i don't think any of them are right. I would have ask, how is it that a natural object reveals itself through logic? What do you mean by "natural"? Obviously, what you say does depend on this. Nature?

And that narrative is? And it is true because?

Which two? Alien territory and the familiar? — EugeneW

God, the grand narratives strewn out over the ages
and
how sensible thinking can find where the two meet

Why not? — EugeneW

Well then, you seem willing to drop what is familiar and venture into alien territory when it comes to talking about God, the grand narratives strewn out over the ages, and how sensible thinking can find where the two meet. How would you do this?

Casually yes. Non-casually, after deep contemplation ("out yonder, is this huge world, which exists, independently of us human beings, and which stands before us, like a great eternal riddle; the contemplation of beckons, like a liberation"), no. — EugeneW

Well then, you seem willing to drop what is familiar and venture into alien territory when it comes to talking about God, the grand narratives strewn out over the ages, and how sensible thinking can find where the two meet. How would you do this?

Space dont move. Only the objects in it. It can expand or contract but has no speed. The metric is the just the metric of GR. — EugeneW

No, it can't expand or contract. Expansion is a spatial term; it presupposes space.

Is bending curving? Space can have curvature. The metric can change. — EugeneW

Bending, curving, arching, swaying, leaning, accelerating, moving, and on and on. Things move IN space, e.g., space cannot move unless it moves In something else.
The metric? you mean the standard of measurement. But this doesn't enter into tit. It is bending as such.

That's a questionable assumption... — EugeneW

But you have to see the whole idea presented. I am not way the gods do not exist, or did not. I am saying a comprehensive understanding of what this could be cannot be done thinking about divine creation nor human imagination. It issues from both, but looking into this requires a good deal of compromise. Much, no, most that we casually understand has to be dismissed.

You can't bend space like a stick. You bend it with mass. — EugeneW

It is not about how something is bent. It is about bending as such.

In 1912, Bertrand Russell wrote "On the Notion of Cause" in which he makes the argument that causation is not a useful way of thinking about the world. In 1943, R.G. Collingwood wrote "An Essay on Metaphysics" in which he wrote something similar. My point? It is not "absurdity" to deny the principle of causality. — T Clark

Read that Russell essay and you will find Russel, in good analytic fashion, is complaining about how well causality can be explained using available means to do so. To utter a definition at all is to bring the wrath of analytic clarity upon you, and this applies to your cat and your sofa, as well. But this is not how we take causality, as a concept with an unproblematic analytic profile. It is an apodictic intuition: one cannot imagine a spontaneous effect. And that is all.It is not that this can be laid out in language that can be equally coercive to the understanding. Language is at best interpretative. But to just sit an imagine an object moving by itself, in good faith, it is clear as anything can be: impossible. A coercive to the understanding as modus ponens.

To know at all is to take up the world AS this knowledge claim is expressed. Taken APART from the knowledge claim, pure metaphysics. The cup on the table, e.g. is qua cup, a cup, but qua a palpable presence not a cup at all.
— Constance

I don't know what this means. More evidence you and I do not have the language to talk to each other about this. — T Clark

Sorry about that. It simply means that language and the sensuous intuitions that it is about are qualitatively distinct. The former cannot be about the latter for they are separated by a chasm of difference.

Well, they made the universe, with all life evolving in it. I don't think we made them.
You mean it's a conspiracy that both the gods and life are involved in? — EugeneW

I mean the term 'gods' was certainly an invention, a fiction created by humans long ago; but it is not the case that this means there are no gods if it can be shown that such a term is necessitated by conditions of actuality. In other words, while we did an awful lot of invented, narrating, imagining through the ages, there are actual material conditions of your being human beings that are that from which our narratives find their meaning. Metaphysics is not a myth. We are it.

Of course. But we also have to condition the subject, i.e, us. There is no such thing as "an observation". Thats already a theoretical claim. How and what we observe is not theory-laden but a theory, a story on its own. Space can have an objective existence, like the bending of it. A bend space(time) is a physical reality. The GW hunters at LIGO don't wanna chase metaphysical ghosts! — EugeneW

But this is just what I say space cannot have. Try to conceive of something bending without a medium in which something can bend. All possible examples of bending require a stable foundation of space as an assumption such that bending can be understood relative to this stability. If I bend a stick or a piece of paper how is this bending determined? By identifying spatial changes in position. This is how all change, movement is measured and determined, vis a vis something that does not change or move. If it is posited that space itself changes or moves or bends, then this in turn requires the same stabilizing setting.
So to say space bends requires yet an additional medium in which space is, for all bending requires this in order for 'bending" to make sense.
This is certainly not to say another space is therefore to be posited. It is to say that our geometrical ways of stabilizing the space of the world are just projections onto an otherwise impossible presence. Reason, logic, language are utilities, only thrown, if you will, unto a world that otherwise has nothing of this "utility". This plays out across the board in every and all attempts understand in all the sciences, for these attempts are propositional, categorical, and the world is nothing like this. Science does not speak to us about the world; it speaks what we need to say about it in order to deal with it.
The world? Utterly metaphysical.

I dont think we are the gods. I think they made us. They had good reason. There are as many gods as creatures in the universe. We just play the game they played already eternally. From virus gods to hominid gods. The god story will be revealed shortly... Exclusively herd on Peee Eees Eeeef! — EugeneW

I will be listening for the god story, looking for a clue to something profound. Hint: I don't think they made us. Nor did we make them. It is a conspiracy and we are both in on it.

People used to think that there must be a luminiferous aether because they thought that electromagnetic waves had to have a medium to propagate through. Turns out they were wrong. I don't see how your inability to conceive of space bending without any outside space to bend in is any different. — T Clark

Think of it as an apriori problem, not an empirical one. What if someone theorized in a way that violated the principle of causality? Putting aside that someone has in fact done this, ask your self how well this sits with your understanding. It is a blatant absurdity, apodictically impossible. Rejecting the aether theory of light propagation was not like this at all since aether had no apriori status.

I don't think that any reputable physicist doubts quantum mechanics at all. They may argue about the interpretation, but I think that is a metaphysical argument, not a scientific one. Fact is, it works. As they say, shut up and calculate. It doesn't make any difference if you can understand why. Science isn't about understanding why things happen, it's about understanding how things happen. Your "...yet" is a bit too cute for my taste. Most physicists don't think further study will make QM any less counterintuitive. The world is not obligated to arrange itself in a way that fits into your way of thinking about it. You can't change the world, but you can change your thinking. — T Clark

Richard Feynman: "I think I can say that nobody understands QM." Not that I am fond of quoting authority to argue a point, but in my own limited exposure to this idea, I can say with confidence that it is not something people understand. When I say "doubt" I mean just this. They don't doubt the repeatability of the evidence; they doubt it can be understood. A bit like understanding rockets go up, escape the atmosphere and so on, but not having a clue as to how. How that cat can both dead and alive. Unless you have something I never heard of.

But as to, "The world is not obligated to arrange itself in a way that fits into your way of thinking about it." If you think the world is so "radically contingent" that anything could happen because nothing constrained by the "laws" of physics, I think you are right. There are no laws like this sitting out there among things. This is our doing, and it sounds like you agree with this. But are you willing to agree with the what follows from this? It is not the indeterminacy of a handful of problematic ideas. It is all that comes before us: To know at all is to take up the world AS this knowledge claim is expressed. Taken APART from the knowledge claim, pure metaphysics. The cup on the table, e.g. is qua cup, a cup, but qua a palpable presence not a cup at all.

It's a physical concept. Our perception of space is like it really is. We can move in it. Objects can move in it. It's the sauce between matter. It's the stuff objects can move in. — EugeneW

Of course it is, that is, until you get to the part where it is bending. Then you have to explain this. When you reach an explanatory threshold like this, you have to concede that though the idea works to explain one thing, it creates a problem that also needs explaining, like a rug's wrinkle that is flattened out here, but rises up again over there. In this case the wrinkle is a metaphysical one.

The real problem? This lies not in the world, but in the conditions of its observation. To observe at all is to condition the object. Language and logic are not these "transparencies" that record the conditions of the world around us. They are "opacities" if you will, that are an independent existence.

This, however, wasn't/isn't possible with the dichotomy paradox. Logic clearly demonstrates motion is impossible; observation, to our dismay, shows that motion is not only possible but actual (ambulando solvitur).

As you can see, a pre-Zeno reconciliation of rationalism and empiricism is impossible. We have to make a choice: believe our minds or believe our legs, but not both! We all know Zeno's preference: motion, in the Parmenidean umiverse, is an illusion. I guess this means Zeno, Parmenideans, were true blue rationalists. — Agent Smith

Bring Parmenides and Heraclitus together and you have Plato, essentially. It seems Parmenides won the argument in Plato, the latter insisting the what what truly real was the idea, not the palpable phenomenon. By my thinking, Heraclitus wins out, though it gets pretty complicated, because while the desire to yield to an ontology of a palpable world over what is merely a conception of it, concepts are in their own way, just as palpable: No concepts, no singularities.

Slippery. The trick is, obviously, to reconcile the conceptuality with the irrational yet imposing and really impossible world (impossible because it is not contained categorically. It qualitatively "exceeds" categorical thinking. Sui generis).

Zeno's arrow proves spacetime is continuous. The problem with discrete spacetime is particles moving in it and time advancing. Spacetime can't be broken up though and the nature of space remains a mystery.
Einstein's theory of spacetime showed we can actually bend space by mass. How mass informs space remains a mystery in GR.
The gods created spacetime. The reasons for their grounds remain a mystery.

That's a triplet mysteries. Performative contradiction, like I'm dead, are no mystery though. — EugeneW

Well, just note that you had to bring god into it. If you do your explaining of something with this kind of talk, then you must realize you have gone metaphysical. Is space time a metaphysical concept? It is. Of course, measurements of speed, mass, relative values for these and so on, this is not metaphysical at all. Very clear ( I have read how it is clear, that is. Not the actual physics). But space time IS. For in order for it to make sense one must posit something entirely inconceivable: that IN which space bends.

the gods created spacetime? No, I think not. We created it in a system of pragmatic utility to "deal with" what the "gods made". Quantitative measurement is a logical function. If you think we are the gods, then fine. Maybe we are.

But at last, I agree, it is a mystery. But the mystery has consequences. How about acceleration as a concept? Acceleration occurs in spacetime, and this is the mystery. How about any quantification AT ALL vis a vis the empirical world?

Science is all about finding out situations where our intuition is wrong. Intuition doesn't come from the great beyond, it can be changed by experience and understanding. Do you also doubt special relativity and quantum mechanics? Those theories are certainly counter-intuitive. — T Clark

I think quantum physicists "doubt" quantum mechanics, meaning they really don't understand it because it itself is not clear...yet. By counterintuitive is simply mean that space bending makes no sense as a logical concept. It is apriori nonsense: One cannot even imagine something bending without a medium in which it bends. I said space is real, and I mean space is not an abstract concept. I wave my hand through ???? It is not nothing. The physical concept of nothing requires space to be nothing IN. This is how it is with bending, or curving, arching, rounding out, and so on: these are spatial terms. They presuppose space. Space bending is like saying logic implying: to imply is to USE logic. It cannot be its own presupposition.

Is it wrong to think empirical science dis really not about the actualities lie before us. After all, the actual world is not a quantified presence; language and logic make it so;
— Constance

If this is true, and I think it is, why can't spacetime bend?

isn't science's claims about being about the world a hidden reification of logic?
— Constance

Everything put into language is a reification of something. Every word is reification. Reification and metaphor, that's all there is. I guess reification is the same thing as metaphor. — T Clark

As I see it, to bend absolutely requires a medium in which a thing can bend. Bending is a contingent idea.
Reification is the same thing as metaphor? An intriguing idea. How so?

Space is real, and I don't think space bending is a metaphor.
— Constance

Seems to me, most ideas refer back, or at least originally referred back, to something at human scale. That certainly makes sense with "space." Of course, there's always been space - the three-dimensional volume in a room, etc. I wonder if the development of the idea of space was changed by the development of Cartesian geometry. It certainly seems like it would have been as people learned that there were long distances between those bright things up in the sky. Science and science fiction probably changed the meaning of the word even more. General relatively just continued those changes and added another dimension. So, no. Space is not real, if by that you mean that it hasn't changed and can't change again.

And of course space bending is a metaphor. People can bend a tree branch or a piece of metal, but you can't bend air. Until, suddenly, you can. — T Clark

The idea of wind bending certainly seems unproblematic. It is not like bending something solid, but it is as determinate quantity of something, the kind of thing such that it curving here, arching there makes sense. If one can conceive of a material substance that is so hard it breaks before is bends at all, then one can still conceive of it bending given some alteration in the conditions of it doing so. That is, it is still logically possible that it can bend. The point I would make is that if the posting space "bending" is a metaphor only and not meant to be taken literally, then what IS the "literal" side of this?

Cartesian geometry had an impact on the way things were conceived and measured, I know. Important is the the basic assumption that objects are in space res extensa at all! Extension in space requires the a conceptual framework to conceive of it. The concept "extension" is a quantitative measure: to extend something has to extend to a certain degree, length, depth; and if the extension is deemed indeterminate, it is implied that determined quantifications would be possible if one knew them. The question here is, Is the world a quantified presence that when encountered we "read off" from its presence what it already has. Or, is the world altogether without quantification, and the quantifying is done by us in our efforts to systematically make use of it?

... isn't science's claims about being about the world a hidden reification of logic?
— Constance
I don't think so, I don't see how, especially insofar as logic consists of syntact translations of tautologies and function like scaffolding for building mathematical models of physical systems. — 180 Proof

Yeah, it works, and very well at that. But the actual "things of the world" are actualities that are not the logical forms assigned them when trying to make things work. So when the astronomer analyzes a light spectrum, the logicality of the analysis is what s/he contributes and not the visible phenomenon. This latter has nothing at all of the logicality in the description, yet science is generally confident that its work is essentially connected to the objects of its quantifications, that is, logicality (logic being essentially a quantifying utility).

Agreed that it can't make the case that it's rational to be rational on pain of circulus in probando. I'm telling you, I'm speaking the truth! How can you prove that, we ask? Well, I vouch for myself, I guarantee that I don't/never lie! WTFery!

The paradox is this: logic is the gold standard for proof but it can't prove itself without committing a fallacy, begging the question. I can't be trusted. Does this get an A for honesty and an F for intelligence? Logic, as it turns out, paradoxically, is a fool! The whole point to its creation and development was to build trust in a system that would always deliver the goods when it comes to truth. Yet, here we are, logic can't justify itself. — Agent Smith

Unless, on the other hand, the question begged leads to a finality that IS a finality. Put it this way, if logic were to conceive of its own generative foundation, that too would be suspect. Indeed, to question logic in this way is simply nonsense, for the asking of the question is self contradictory since the question possesses the logic form of an interrogative (and implicit assertions, negations, and so on). We only get put out because we expect logic to be something it is not. It exists, like a chair or a piano, and talk about the generative source of anything at all is nonsense.
Just to point out, logic has no point. Unless you think it is part of a divine plan, or the like. Also, when we use logic to lie, it is not logic's fault, but its use. This is different from "I am lying" or "this sentence is false." These are fashioned out of logic itself.

Usually this expression is used in reference to spacetime and depends on a certain metric. Objects, however, become distorted by gravity and speed. Length contraction, etc. — jgill

Yes, so account for distortions, what is the most elegant theory? The curvature of space. Is this an idea that makes sense, not as it is theorized about, but as a singular concept? What do you do with theory that explains things well, but is radically counterintuitive? Space bending is, as Wittgenstein put it, "an argument place" meaning it must first, to make sense at all, pass through the logic that is deployed to explain it and bring it into being, and space bending presupposes yet another space IN WHICH bending may occur, but this leads to an infinite regression of spaces. Maybe. Not clear on how positing this "second" space would make the same demands the first is subject to (that it bends, of course). At any rate, clearly, this second space would be eternity (keep in mind, we do not "see" eternity when looking up in the ight sky. This is because we are not seeing this second order of spatial existence. Interesting to note: When you do gaze into the night sky, there is this unsettling weirdness of at once facing infinity, yet not comprehending it at all. this is because what you are observing is the inside of your cranium).

On the contrary, misrecognized misuses (e.g. reification) of logic, or grammar, generates "paradoxes". — 180 Proof

Yes. But then, the very structure of the performative contradiction, "this sentence is false" is very curious. It is not really a misuse, but a simple logical construction that is self contradictory, that generates contradiction where only tautologies should be allowed.
And with the others, I think there are important problems that are ignored, generally. What is God, if one ditches the Christian "misuse"? Is it wrong to think empirical science dis really not about the actualities lie before us. After all, the actual world is not a quantified presence; language and logic make it so; isn't science's claims about being about the world a hidden reification of logic?

General relativity is something different. GR is a theory, a model, which very effectively predicts the behavior of certain aspects of the world. Talking about space bending is a metaphor that helps people picture and understand what is happening. GR redefined what "space" means. I don't see it as a paradox at all. If you were talking about the different interpretations of quantum mechanics, I would be more likely to agree with you. — T Clark

Space is real, and I don't think space bending is a metaphor. No mysterious force acts upon any two particles with mass that attracts them to each other; they are simply following the curvature of spacetime itself, caused due to their respective masses. Put it this way, metaphors are only as good as that which is source of the borrowed quality and that to which the quality is applied. So, I say, "He is an animal!" and the sense of it depends on the person in question and animals being both familiar. If space bending is just a metaphor, then what IS it that the metaphor is being applied to?

Or is that your point? — T Clark

The point? It is a diffuse point, sort of bound up in the ideas presented, each one in its own right a challenge, but the general point would be that the perversity extends from the thinking that logic can serve as a structured way to speak about the actual world. It cannot, and all of our utterances about the world are really about something else altogether. This something else is. of course, the epistemic relation we have with the world. In the traditional analysis of knowledge, S never even approaches P. Einstein's space time is not about the "actual" world, e.g. Does not "touch" the world.

I don't think you're agreeing with Schopenhauer. The freedom is in thinking, according to him. Our actions then becomes caused by our thinking. So, what conclusion could you form about this? The necessity is in our action, but freedom is in our thinking. Determinism is misplaced here. The ocean example is to point to you that one could think about an action, but chooses not to act on it. — L'éléphant

But that choice we make is still bound to what the understanding can conceive, and this makes something like "independence of the law of causality" just an apodictic impossibility. I don't think naturalists will be moved one bit by this; they will simply say, transcendental will??? You must be mad. They will pull out Occam's razor, or insist the facts do not support such an idea, and dismiss it.

I am for demonstrating freedom, first. Where does it show up in the world that we can even talk about it? It shows up in judgment, the kind of judgment that responds to a break in the well being of affairs, like the car not starting, or the hammer's head flying off. Prior to this kind of break, freedom can in no way be seen. My fingers may be busy typing these words, but it is not a "free" act that is doing it. In fact, it would be a disaster to in interpose my "freedom," that is, my conscious awareness, between the fingers and action. I wouldn't be able to type second guessing every movement. Most of life is lived like this, an unconscious process. Foucault asked, are we not being ventriloquized by history? I always thought tis fascinating: how can one see where automatic systems end, and "I" begins? For my "will" is a question begging concept: will is always will to do something, and this is impossible without something that is not will, namely, a value, a motivation that creates to desire that makes one want, need. A will without this is nonsense. A will to.....will? No motivation, no will.

Kant is maddening on this. Talking about a "good will" that responds dutifully to rationally conceived obligations that may NOT have desire behind them. This disembodied rational will is a pure fiction, just like the categories (which make sense analytically, yes. But to treat them as an actuality??)

So for me, at any rate, this break in our affairs shows where freedom is to be found. It gets, frankly, a bit weird from here, and I'll make is brief: Take this simple break, the hammer head flying off, and there you are in the middle of a suddenly dissociated action. But, you are no longer in the "spell," the pragmatic spell, I would argue, of the carrying forth. You are no longer "carried". Most, of course, move directly to an examination of remedies. But take the idea of freedom to its philosophical conception, and it is not a hammered, it is the question about the world as such. We, at this most basic level, are in, and ARE indeterminacy. No matter where the critical gaze goes, it will always meet with indeterminacy; in time, space, identity, ontology, aesthetics, and on and on, indeterminacy. Our freedom lies here, in the radical withdrawal from, not a hammer's use or a car's ignition, but ALL THINGS.

(Obviously, all I say here is derivative, with my own take on things applied. We all stand on the shoulders of others.)

This can be argued about, if you have the desire to do so.

I want the next misses in a puddle in a two please bikini, aloof in sheets coding, eternally farting years old (every tug has its toy.) Born in scence, upon scum, I prey with my wait paint which is wet point. — lll

That really is adorable. A wolf in sheep's clothing. Just got that one.

Move him into the sun—
Gently its touch awoke him once,
At home, whispering of fields unsown.
Always it woke him, even in France,
Until this morning and this snow.
If anything might rouse him now
The kind old sun will know.

Think how it wakes the seeds—
Woke once the clays of a cold star.
Are limbs, so dear-achieved, are sides
Full-nerved, still warm, too hard to stir?
Was it for this the clay grew tall?
—O what made fatuous sunbeams toil
To break earth's sleep at all?

Oh, this is Wilfred Owen. I didn't recognize. I taught WWI British poetry once to high school students (in India, no less). I did not teach this one. He and Siegfried Sassoon. Bloody mess to read. Some of the imagery was simply too much to bear.

The nihilist is christ on the cross as he doubts the fondness of his too far father. — lll

Christs finest moment is his cry of dereliction. Was he a nihilist for the moment only, or did it follow him to his death? Then, the withdrawal of God was the moment he became a human being. You want to be there at the foot of the cross screaming up, Oh, so now you get it. It takes a jolt.

As I see it, nonconformity is only ever partial if it's at all intelligible. I agree with Rorty and others that metaphors are mad, essentially senseless until assimilated by a mutating dance. Is Hooligans Wink a work of madness? It takes us back to Vico's divine men, poets without distance from their ghost-gushing imaginations, living therefore a thunder-hunted world of fairy tails. The proximity of madness and enlightenment reminds me Cambell's talk of the shaman as an ambiguous figure, a sort of necessary evil for the tribe, the one who forays beyond the fence, a bastard John Snow, secretly a king (unacknowledged legislator of moon kind.) — lll

It does make you wonder. A Korean man nailed himself to a cross, somehow, imitating Christ. Easy enough to call him mad, but the real question to me is, what was going on in his mind to give him that kind of conviction? It must have been an extraordinary thing. Me? I wonder if the oatmeal cookies will be done in time for dessert. Forget the "truth" (Maybe truth is a woman, Nietzsche wrote) and its antiseptic
pathology. Nietzsche really liked Emerson, a Unitarian minister, for a good reason: He took the soul to such heights and revealed something of what the age of reason buried deep: a fathomless and impossible affirmation: "I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God."

All this insipid philosophical bickering over God occludes the unspeakable presence of the world, which can be powerful, profound, beautiful, like those first few minutes of Mahler's 9th. Or Barber's Summer Knoxville 1915. This is where one should live. I dare say.

I was thinking not of nostalgia but of a withdrawal of conformity sufficient unto the day to see the Right way as merely the tribe's way. I think of dogs trained by wireless leashes. — lll

Well, that does put a damper on going to the state fair, and everything else, really. What survives? The question insinuates itself into every corner of existence, into language itself, then the self itself. At this point, you're either mentally ill, or you're enlightened. If you believe there is such a thing as the latter, and I do, though it is difficult, this is forced into analysis and you end up reading things that further alienate, or, rationalize alienation, and you end up thinking people are just lost and understand nothing....and you're right!

That wireless leash sounds like Foucault's panopticon society, in which everybody is the keeper, even ourselves.

Intriguing. Do philosophers (the 'special' kind) refuse to crow up? (Peter Pun asks Windy.) — lll

Reading them, one gets the impression that they want very much to leave this world. Who could blame them? It is an awful place. Very good to me, relatively speaking, but so awful this tonnage of suffering that history is made of. One day, you're a ballerina, the next Putin has drops a bridge on you.
Suffering and happiness, these are the stuff of the only meaningful philosophical issues. Value and metavalue. All things yield to this. Put a lighted match to your finger for a few seconds. What is THAT doing in existence? Here is Kierkegaard:

One sticks one’s finger into the soil to tell by the smell in what land one is: I stick my finger in existence — it smells of nothing. Where am I? Who am I? How came I here? What is this thing called the world? What does this world mean? Who is it that has lured me into the world? Why was I not consulted, why not made acquainted with its manners and customs instead of throwing me into the ranks, as if I had been bought by a kidnapper, a dealer in souls? How did I obtain an interest in this big enterprise they call reality? Why should I have an interest in it? Is it not a voluntary concern? And if I am to be compelled to take part in it, where is the director? I should like to make a remark to him. Is there no director? Whither shall I turn with my complaint?

Perhaps analysis computes with the metaphors provided by revelation once they've cooled and congealed? — lll

That is clearly what happens, if there is anything such as revelation. Irony plays against, metaphors play with something else in language, but whether there is an inroad to existence that is NOT language is the big question. Ask Derrida. Can language ever really touch the world? If not, what is this horrible tennis elbow experience? It ain't language....but it IS there. Oh my. Are we not steeped in metaphysics in the most obvious, intuitive way? Right before our very noses?

I think you are on to something, though the word 'real' is perhaps unnecessary. As I see it, one task of the philosopher is to reveal so-called necessity as a congealed and disguised contingency which hides in plain sight. 'That which is ontically nearest is ontologically farthest.' Trapped in the illusion of necessity, deviation is not yet even conceivable. Possibility languishes unborn. Along these lines, the philosopher has an intensity of withdrawal that allows the too obvious to finally become questionable. — lll

Well, I am taken aback again. If you've read Heidegger, then you have a perspective.

The intensity of withdrawal? Not many would talk like this around here. This withdrawal is a radical concept lying not in the everydayness of things, nor in the discoveries of science, but at the fringe of intelligible thought itself: metaphysics. But this that languishes unborn, this nostalgia should not be historically conceived. It is immanent in presence, in the metaphysical presence, but not in the negative sense; a positive one, for apophatically a person can discover things most extraordinary about the lived actuality of what has been called nunc stans. In other words, there is that "childhood sense of adventure" Kierkegaard talks about in The Concept of Anxiety that inspired Heidegger's What Is Metaphysics and the "nothing" which is this foundational nothing we encounter when we pull back for affairs. There is something to the nothing, but here, one has left analysis. Now the matter turns of the revelatory.

I speculate that this 'one' is just reason or language, which is a unified system of concepts and a communal possession. The softwhere is one. — lll

Yes! I conditionally agree with this. I mean, this is a very tempting idea, especially when we examine the community nature of language, history, education and the structured self this produces. How can one think or have identity at all if one is not IN an historical context? Language itself is historical. And even the Buddhist Madhyamika concept of no self chimes in. But there are other features of our world that will not allow for this, depending, of course, on how one defines the self.

Why would the Madhyamika take this view? Go deep into a meditative state, and all that one is in the world is intentionally annihilated. Time is annihilated, if things go well, for what is time if not the passage of events, and if these are nullified then time is nullified (putting aside a physicist's take on this. Here, it is "stream of consciousness' time, foundational time, that is presupposed by empirical concepts). And the constructs of language and culture are suspended. NOT, however, that these are not in the underpinnings of the "nothingness" of a deep meditative state. After all, in this state one is not reduced to an infantile mentality. The constructed self is there, maintained in the "I am" position. But there is no mistaking the experienced vacuity, the nothingness of experience that sits before your awareness.

Who are you now? Neither baker nor candlestick maker. The empirical self suspended. Now the matter becomes, not analytic, but revelatory. One doesn't have to meditate for this: Just take yourself out of contextual relations with the world. Stand in a meadow and clear the mind, with more or less success. Argument ends here. Affirming the self in the openness of things is a radical move. An Emersonian move (see his little book called Nature). A Husserlian move (see his epoche). Tough to argue, though. But it can be approached phonologically in the analysis of the structure of experience. If you want to go there, it does get interesting. Let me know.

Why must it be 'one' experiencing the model? What if the singularity of the ghost of the soul is part of a contingent and inherited model inspired by the perceived unity of its containing body? 'One is one around here.' 'One' can imagine a society where each body is understood to host several or seven souls, one for each day of the week, each learning to ignore what's not its concern on its six days off per week. It may be something like the unity of 'reason' that's projected on the body which is given a soul for its little prison palace. — lll

Well, you throw me off a bit with "soul" talk. But consider an adjacent idea: you are suggesting a body of dividedness rather than unity; or rather, the unity of any given occasion is a singularity that comes and goes. Right now I may be an accountant doing my job; later I am a parent instructing my children; and so on. Is this what you have in mind? This has been called the "fractal self" based on the observation that there is no perceivable singular self beyond all the various different selves we are in different contexts.

On the point that there must be "one" experiencing: Approach this apophatically: I am this abiding self in all that I can conceive. I think of myself as a parent, teacher, friend, and so on, but there is an position of being apart from all these can be. I may be a teacher, but I can withdraw from this and stand away from it, and in this it has no claim of me. It seems that whatever I think of, I can position myself apart from it, in an act of reflection. This reflective self is always NOT the role being played. But cannot be observed or even conceived.