Buddhism basically says that the cause of suffering is not some evil Gnostic demiurge that wants to torture mankind, or an indifferent God who lets the innocent suffer for no reason. No, the cause of suffering can be found within oneself, in the form of the constant desire (trishna, thirst, clinging) - to be or to become, to possess and to retain, to cling to the transitory and ephemeral as if they were lasting and satisfying, when by their very nature, they are not. That of course is a very deep and difficult thing to penetrate, as the desire to be and to become is engrained in us by the entire history of biological existence. — Wayfarer
In order to always have a secure compass in hand so as to find one's way in life, and to see life always in the correct light without going astray, nothing is more suitable than getting used to seeing the world as something like a penal colony. This view finds its...justification not only in my philosophy, but also in the wisdom of all times, namely, in Brahmanism, Buddhism, Empedocles, Pythagoras [...] Even in genuine and correctly understood Christianity, our existence is regarded as the result of a liability or a misstep. ... We will thus always keep our position in mind and regard every human, first and foremost, as a being that exists only on account of sinfulness, and who is life is an expiation of the offence committed through birth. Exactly this constitutes what Christianity calls the sinful nature of man. — Arthur Schopenhauer, quoted in Schopenhauer's Compass, Urs App
Also, is it supposed to be a vice to "assert with bold certainty" that a knife is a bad toy to give a baby? — Count Timothy von Icarus
"They were just not made for adult-sized hands," Losey says. Instead, they appeared to be scaled-down versions for children. Perhaps, the researchers speculate, adults fashioned the tiny tools so that youngsters could begin to hone the hunting skills they would later need, the researchers report this month in Antiquity
Losey and Hull's speculation lines up with what researchers observe in many societies today, says David Lancy, an anthropologist emeritus at Utah State University in Logan. From an early age, children are allowed to interact with the tools adults use to work, forage, and hunt, often with no parental supervision. Babies suck on sharp knives; toddlers play with machetes.
To say that America has a coastline is to assume some configurative understanding of what a coastline is, which is to say, a system of anticipations concerning what it means to interact with it.
…when a concept or model changes, it does not imply that what is known through them changes. This is for the same reason that if I light a photograph of myself on fire I don't suffer burns, or if I unfocus my telescope, the craters in the Moon aren't smoothed away.
“whenever we use the word we commit ourselves to a particular implied system of interaction”
Yes, a system of interaction where the ocean is not a cliff or a beach. But these interactions don't depend on us knowing about them. — Count Timothy von Icarus
"America did not have a coastline until it was mapped," and "penguins and cockroaches didn't exist until man experienced them," are prima facie implausible claims. Extraordinary claims require solid evidence. Yet as noted above, one can easily accept enactivist premises, reject the "view from nowhere," and recognize the epistemic primacy of interaction without having to suppose any of this. You seem to need additional premises to justify this sort of claim, not merely dismissing other views.
As it stands, this looks akin to saying "three and three doesn't make five, thus it must make seven." Well, the first premise is right. The conclusion is extremely counterintuitive though and it's unclear how it is supposed to follow. — Count Timothy von Icarus
The word ‘bus’ implies a system of interactions with the object ‘bus’ based on our understanding of what it is and what it does. Someone who doesnt know about automobiles or even carriages would see it as very different kind of object and interact with it in different ways as a result. If you want to see how different people interact differently with the same coastline ask them to sit down and paint a painting of the scene as accurately as possible. There will be similarities among the paintings, but none will look identical. This is not just due to different skill levels but to the fact that each person’s procedure for measuring and depicting it makes use of a slightly different process. Objective space is derivative of our subjective determination of space.
It depends on the system of convictions that underlie your beliefs concerning what is good and what is bad for a baby, just as what constitutes genital mutilation depends on such guiding assumptions. Archeologists found tiny tools and weapons dating back 1700 years.
If one thinks a brain is a physical organ that generates perceptual events, then it has to be explained how it is possible that these events can be about objects in the world.
But I said it is far worse. If causality cannot deliver "knowledge about" this means ALL that stands before me as a knowledge claim--explicit or implicit, a ready to hand pragmatic claim or a presence at hand (oh look, there is a cat) claim, or just the general implicit "claims" of familiarity as one walks down the street---requires something entirely other than causality to explain how it is possible.
But the above seems plainly false for the only way for an exemplification to exemplify is assume a particular causal series that demonstrates this. This is rare, and when it comes to a causal matrix of neurons and, synapses and axonal connectivity, well: my cat in no way at all "is exemplified" by this.
But a naturalist with a proper understanding of perception wouldn't say that. Brains don't generate experiences of objects by themselves. This is what I mean by inappropriate decomposition and reductionism. Take a brain out of a body and it won't be experiencing anything. Put a body in a vacuum and what you'll have is a corpse, not experiences. It's the same thing if you put a body on the surface of a star or the bottom of the sea. Nothing looks like anything in a dark room, or in a room with no oxygen, etc — Count Timothy von Icarus
Ok, but you haven't, as far as I can tell, done anything to justify the claim that we cannot know things through their causes or effects, you've just stated it repeatedly. Prima facie, this claim seems wrong; effects are signs of their causes. Smoke, for instance, is a natural sign of combustion. — Count Timothy von Icarus
If effects didn't tell us anything about their causes, or causes about their effects, then the main methods of the empirical sciences should be useless. But they aren't. Likewise, if pouring water into my gas tank caused my car to die, it seems that I can learn something about my car from this. — Count Timothy von Icarus
I'm sorry, I couldn't parse this. Nothing can exemplify anything? — Count Timothy von Icarus
a transcendent orientation towards the Good — Count Timothy von Icarus
Are there many sui generis, potentially contradicting truths or just one truth? — Count Timothy von Icarus
Kierkegaard is a Christian, and so he should recognize that there is one "Way, Truth, and Light," (John 14:6) and one Logos (John 1). Yet he is also the inheritor of Luther, who told Erasmus:
"If it is difficult to believe in God’s mercy and goodness when He damns those who do not deserve it, we must recall that if God’s justice could be recognized as just by human comprehension, it would not be divine.”
...opening up an unbridgable chasm of equivocity between the "goodness of God," and anything known as good by man. Calvin does something similar with his exegesis of I John 4:8, "God is love," such that it is [for the elect, and inscuratble, implacable hatred for all else]. — Count Timothy von Icarus
I already gave you a Dante allusion, so here is another. In Canto IX, Dante and Virgil are barred from entering the City of Dis by the demons. Virgil is a stand-in for human reason. The furies who taunt Virgil irrationally claw at themselves, as misologes also strike out without reason. Then they threaten to call for Medusa, to turn Dante to stone.
Virgil is so scared of this threat that, not trusting Dante to keep his eyes closed, he covers the Pilgrim's eyes himself. Then Dante the Poet bursts into an aside to the reader to mark well the allegory here.
There are a few things going on. The angel who opens the gates of Dis for them is reenacting the first of the Three Advents of Christ, the Harrowing of Hell (all three show up), but I think the bigger idea is that one risks being "turned to stone" and failing to progress if one loses faith in reason after it is shown to be defenseless against the unreasoning aggression of misology (D.C. Schindler's Plato's Critique of Impure Reason covers this "defenselessness" well).
The very next sinners Dante encounters are the Epicureans, who fail to find justification for the immortality of the soul and so instead focus on only worldly, finite goods. It's an episode filled with miscommunication, people talking over one another, and pride—exactly what happens when reason ceases to be transcendent and turns inward, settling for what it already has. This is the Augustinian curvatus in se, sin as being "curved in on oneself." Dante himself was seduced by this philosophy for a time, and was seemingly "turned to stone" by it. — Count Timothy von Icarus
Anyhow, one would misread St. Augustine's "believe that you might understand," if it was taken to be some sort of fidest pronouncement of blind faith. — Count Timothy von Icarus
Post-Reformation anti-rationalists glommed on to Tertullian because of "a plague on Aristotle," and "what has Jerusalem to do with Athens?" but fundamentalists would do well to note that two paragraphs after this part of Prescriptions Against the Heretics he says: "no word of God is so unqualified or so unrestricted in application that the mere words can be pleaded without respect to their underlying meaning," and that we must "seek until we find" and then come to believe without deviation. Also worth considering, the things they like most about Tertullian seem like they would be precisely those things that made him prey to the Montanist heresy. — Count Timothy von Icarus
Having said this, you might be surprised to hear that I’m a big fan of truth as an asymptotic goal of knowledge , and knowledge as a progressive approximation toward an ultimate truth. Furthermore, I associate truth with achieving a knowledge characterized by stability, inferential compatibility, prediction and control, harmoniousness and intimacy. It might seem as though what I have said points to a relativism that eliminates the possibility of achieving these goals of truth, but I believe the universe is highly ordered. Its order is in the nature of an intricate process of self-development rather than in static properties and laws. We become privy to this intricate order by participating in its development through our sciences, technologies and other domains of creativity. — Joshs
Is this what you call "the catholicity of reason"?
I would say: there are many truths, they are not sui generis, and they are not potentially contradicting truths. In Henological terms: There are Many Truths, and none of them contradict each other. Contradictions only arise in Opinion (Doxa), not in Episteme.
Kierkegaard also pointed out (and rightly so) that God gave Abraham a fideist order when he ordered him to sacrifice his son. Do you disagree with that?
The account is interpreted as the drama of faith as opposed to the natural affections, a drama that applies to the reader (Origen). Not only is Isaac a figure of Christ in the Spirit, but also the ram symbolizes Christ in the flesh (Origen, Ambrose). Even Chrysostom abandons his customary moralizing and employs a typological interpretation. That Isaac was a type and not the reality is seen in the fact that he was not killed (Caesarius of Arles). Readers are also invited to interpret the story spiritually and apply it to themselves, so as to beget a son such as Isaac in themselves (Origen).
Things cannot be poetry and figurative language all the way down.
Why? That's exactly what it is. Believe, so that you might understand. It's a conditional statement: if P, then Q. In this case, the antecedent is Believe, just that, Believe, and that is 100% fideist. It's absolute blind faith, without an ounce of reason to it.
Can you explain it to me in simpler terms, please?
Is this what you call "the catholicity of reason"?
No, perhaps I should have specified since the word is uncommon. I mean it in the original sense, as in "all-embracing and unified, one." This is the sense in which the Orthodox and many Protestants still affirm: "I believe in one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church," at every service, when they recite the Nicene or Apostles' creed. — Count Timothy von Icarus
Is all deference to authority "blind faith," — Count Timothy von Icarus
is there proper deference to authority that is rational? — Count Timothy von Icarus
We might also consider that not all the acts of the Biblical heros are supposed to be good. — Count Timothy von Icarus
Yes, particularly your earlier point that the order itself was "irrational." That is not how the story has generally been read, — Count Timothy von Icarus
The most common purpose offered up is to test Abraham (e.g. St. Athanasius). — Count Timothy von Icarus
Is God less trustworthy than a board certified physician though? — Count Timothy von Icarus
And the point is that one believes in order to understand, whereas fideism tends towards "you cannot understand, but you must have faith and obey." Yet Christ tells the Apostles: "No longer do I call you slaves, for the slave does not know what his master is doing; but I have called you friends, because all things that I have heard from My Father I have made known to you," (John 15:15) and "the Lord would speak to Moses face to face, as one speaks to a friend," Exodus 33:11. — Count Timothy von Icarus
your claim is that the coastline changes because different people paint or think of it differently, and that it doesn't exist until painted, mapped, etc. Nothing you've said supports this claim; it doesn't follow from the premises. No one disagrees that different people will paint a coastline differently or that coastlines interacted with birds before men. However, most would disagree that the coastline didn't exist until it was painted. Again, you seem to need a premise like: "things are entirely defined by their relations and all relations and properties are essential." But I don't see why anyone would agree to premises like this because it implies things like: "you change when someone lights a picture of you on fire," and "ants didn't exist until people developed an abstraction of 'ant — Count Timothy von Icarus
Saying that knowledge represents the world makes no more sense than saying that the evolution of more and more complex forms of life is a representing of the world. — Joshs
But st the same time , the laws and properties that we ‘discover’ in nature are not external to the ways we arrange and rearrange our relations with that world as knowledge — Joshs
I think the independent existence of things is so important to you because you confuse intrinsic content with integrative processes of knowing. — Joshs
It is not rational for a father to sacrifice his son to a deity, even if that deity is the Christian God. It just isn't, it's not a rational thing to do. — Arcane Sandwich
they are matters of faith. — Janus
I didn’t say a coastline or an ant didnt exist until painted.
The word coastline implies a particular sense of meaning, and there are as many senses of meaning for it as there contexts of use.
Animals who interact with a coastline produce their own senses of meaning for it , even though they don’t perceive it in terms of verbal concepts.
Yes, this is not how I would phrase the issue myself, but I "get your point", so to speak. What I would say, is that if the catholicity of reasons exists (and if catholicity simpliciter exists), then it pre-dates the foundation of the Catholic church. Catholicity, if it exists, existed before the Catholic church existed. That's what I would say. And if this is so, then it follows that the Catholic church does not, and cannot, have a monopoly on catholicity. Which is why one can be a catholic outside the Catholic church. Agree or disagree? I feel like you disagree with me on this specific point, among others
Yes, it is. At the end of the day, it is
For example, I have blind faith in my feet, in the sense that I completely trust them when I absent-mindedly step up and walk towards the kitchen.
I feel like that's not sound reasoning on your part. It seems like you are appealing to the majority. Kierkegaard is in the minority here, sure. But that doesn't mean that he's necessarily wrong. Majorities can make mistakes, especially interpretative mistakes. That's why there is a literal use of the language to begin with: so that there are no interpretative mistakes, you just read what it says.
then I would ask: What is God testing here in the first place, if not Abraham's faith?
not the one who tries to rationalize what God is,
And that is exactly the sort of discussion that I point to, when I say that things cannot be metaphors and figurative language all the way down.
Then why should anyone listen to Christ instead of Epicurus? For Epicurus also had a concept of friendship.
Same with "catholicity simpliciter." I'm not sure what you mean. It's a property, I don't think it can "exist simpliciter." — Count Timothy von Icarus
I just don't see it. Or your use of "blind faith," is perhaps anachronistic. I have a friend who is a very skilled mechanic. I know he's good with cars, I've seen the cars he's rebuilt. If I trust his authority on automobiles I don't see how this is necessarily "blind." — Count Timothy von Icarus
Presumably you have a lifetime of experience walking. Again, I am not seeing how this is blind. This is like saying it's "blind faith" to assume that you'll get wet when you jump in a pool. — Count Timothy von Icarus
Where does Kierkegaard ever say Abraham isn't being tested? I don't think he does. — Count Timothy von Icarus
In any case, this view is right in Scripture, you can't appeal to literalism and deny the interpretation.
Hebrews 11:17 By faith Abraham, when he was tested, offered up Isaac. He had received the promises, yet he was ready to offer up his only son. 11:18 God had told him, “Through Isaac descendants will carry on your name,” 11:19 and he reasoned that God could even raise him from the dead..."
If you're committed to the literalist view you're committed to Abraham reasoning in this case. — Count Timothy von Icarus
Sure, it's a test of faith. Even if it was a test of wholly irrational faith, that wouldn't make the test or the person giving the test irrational. The test is not given "for no reason at all." — Count Timothy von Icarus
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
"The Word," a translation of the Greek λόγος (logos), is widely interpreted as referring to Jesus, as indicated in other verses later in the same chapter.[5] For example, "the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us" (John 1:14; cf. 1:15, 17). — Wikipedia
Anyhow, fideism is not the view that faith is important, or even most important (although St. Paul puts love above faith). Lots of people affirm that. It's the view that religious beliefs are entirely based on faith alone. — Count Timothy von Icarus
Mystics would disagree.One cannot know God's essence — Count Timothy von Icarus
One can only approach the divine essence through apophatic negation — Count Timothy von Icarus
Which is what Kierkegaard also ends up affirming, he basically works himself painfully towards Dionysius (painfully because his blinders stop him from referencing all the relevant thought here). — Count Timothy von Icarus
Were the followers who abandoned Christ after he told them they must eat his flesh and drink his blood because they thought he was advocating cannibalism in the right (John 6)? — Count Timothy von Icarus
Why does Christ himself primarily teach in parables and allegory? — Count Timothy von Icarus
Or did Christ come to save livestock (the lost sheep of Israel) and will the Judgement really be of actual sheep and goats? — Count Timothy von Icarus
Is St. Paul breaking the rule of faith when he interprets Genesis allegorically in Galatians 4? — Count Timothy von Icarus
"The Spirit gives life; the flesh counts for nothing” John 6:63
"He has made us competent as ministers of a new covenant—not of the letter but of the Spirit; for the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life.” II Corinthians 3:6
The Gospels are full of references of Christ fulling OT prophecies, often in counterintuitive ways that would be completely lost in a literalist reading. So, to at least some extent, a hyper literalist reading is self-refuting. — Count Timothy von Icarus
On the Christian account, because those who have had faith come to understand, as the Apostles did, that Christ is God and Epicurus, if Christians are correct, is badly deluded. — Count Timothy von Icarus
Am I? What language was that quote originally written in? If one is to be a literalist about this, then one has to take into consideration the fact that the passage in question was not really written in English. And whatever word was originally used there, it most certainly was not etymologically related to the Latin word Ratio.
Mystics would disagree
It only places the word of the Bible at odds with the word of science.
"Yes" to both questions.
So duality is not an illusion – 'samsara is nirvana' is ignorance? :chin:‘saṃsāra has no beginning but it has an end. Nirvāṇa has a beginning but it has no end.’ — Wayfarer
... chasing its (fairy)tail.Religion takes its first step ... — Astrophel
"Object" presupposes (a) subject, or (an) actor of "the perceptual act", that is embodied (i.e. an aspect of nature). Mind is non/pre-mind-dependent (i.e. emergent-constrained by – entangled with – nature aka "non/pre-mind") and not the other way around as idealists (e.g. apophenia-biased¹ and/or egocentric-biased² and/or introspection-biased³ 'believers') et al assume.[W]hen an encounter with an object occurs, it is an event, and must be analyzed as such. What lies "outside" of this event requires a perspectiveunconditioned[presupposed] by the perceptual act ... — Astrophel
Apparently not.Does any of this erudite palaver have any bearing on religion and suffering? — Vera Mont
So duality is not an illusion – 'samsara is nirvana' is ignorance? — 180 Proof
you suggested a coastline does not exist separate from the act of measuring it, and then used painting as a follow up example, and that one can "imagine" that a coastline exists independent of our concepts, but that it doesn't exist separate from our interactions and anticipations vis-a-vis it, no? It only has a "dependent independence?" Hence my confusion. Is it the coastline or the "notion" we're talking about? — Count Timothy von Icarus
When I perceive a red ball in front of me, all that I actually perceive in front of me is an impoverished, contingent partial sense experience.
I fill in the rest of the experience in two ways. All experience implies a temporal structure of retention, primal impression and protention. Each moment presents us with a new sensation, the retained memory of the just preceding sensation and anticipation of what is to come. I retain the memory of previous experiences with the 'same' object and those memories become fused with the current aspect of it. At the same time, I protend forward, anticipating aspects of the object that are not yet there for me, based on prior experience with it. For example, I only see the front of the table, but anticipate as an empty horizon, its sides, and this empty anticipation joins with the current view and the memory of previous views to form a complex fused totality. Perception constantly is motivated , that is, it tends toward the fulfillment of the experience of the object as integrated singularity, as this same' table'.
A remarkable feature of a word or a perception is that it allows the brain to integrate a wide range of modalities(visual, touch, auditory, kinesthetic, smell and taste) of perception into a single unitary concept. When you see the world ‘cat’ right now, your brain , as brain imaging studies show , may be accessing the sight of a cat , it’s smell, how its fur feels , the sound of its purring. And it is doing this all simultaneously. In addition, the brain may be accessing emotional associations and complex bits of knowledge about a cat or cats in general from scientific or literary sources
We can look at a coastline and fail to see it as a unified thing, just a disparate series of colors, shapes, lines and curves, and this wouldn’t be a false representation, it would simply be an impoverished one.
We could legitimately declare that the discombobulated scene existed before humans were there to interact with it, but that a coastline never existed, since the concept has no meaning for us
But if perceiving a scene as a disconnected collection of random segments can validate itself ( a discombobulated scene but not a coastline) as well as seeing it as a coastline, if both are true in the sense that both can be tested and validated, can’t one nonetheless say that the latter is a more accurate model of the world that the former?
The concept of accuracy limits us to thinking about knowledge of nature ( and morals) in terms of conformity to arbitrary properties and laws. But is this the way nature is in itself, or just a model that we have imposed on it?
We can hold onto a perception of the moral good as akin to the fixed properties behind efficient causes, and validate this model perfectly well, declaring that moral properties are universal, grounding facts of humanity. Or we can subsume such a fiat-based account within a more permeable and inclusive model which reveals dimensions of perception in morally suspect others that were unseen to us previously, dimensions that allow us to discover patterns bridging the differences between us and them.
But surely the brain couldn’t perform these tricks
of condensation, assimilation and categorization if the patterns it construes dont reflect the way the world really is? It could do this in fantasy, but when one attempted to predict the course of actual events on the basis of these mapped out patterns, one’s attempts would be invalidated unless they accorded with the actual flow of events. — Joshs
Right, so representationalism. "We don't experience anything, we only experience our experiences of things." But it seems to me that if one takes this seriously, you might as well say we only experience our experiences of our experiences, and so on, in some sort of infinite Cartesian theater regress. Having the Cartesian humonculus also move the body around doesn't really seem to fix the issues here for me. — Count Timothy von Icarus
You insist that a coastline existed before we were there to experience it. I would point to the genealogy of etymological meanings of words such as melancholia and phlogiston to show that many verbal concepts used in science or common parlance point to what were presumed as existing entities, but as theories changed, one could no longer locate such entities anymore. It wasnt that a real thing in the world simply vanished, but that these words depended for their intelligibilty on a particular system of relating elements of the world. To understand melancholia is to understand cultural practices specific to an era, and to understand phlogiston is to view the system of relations among aspects of the physical world in a way that is no longer being used.We could legitimately declare that the discombobulated scene existed before humans were there to interact with it, but that a coastline never existed, since the concept has no meaning for us
This is conflating existence and being experienced. — Count Timothy von Icarus
But if perceiving a scene as a disconnected collection of random segments can validate itself ( a discombobulated scene but not a coastline) as well as seeing it as a coastline, if both are true in the sense that both can be tested and validated, can’t one nonetheless say that the latter is a more accurate model of the world that the former?
I don't follow this. Not all perceptions are equally valid, else optical illusions wouldn't be illusions — Count Timothy von Icarus
But if perceiving a scene as a disconnected collection of random segments can validate itself ( a discombobulated scene but not a coastline) as well as seeing it as a coastline, if both are true in the sense that both can be tested and validated, can’t one nonetheless say that the latter is a more accurate model of the world that the former?
I don't follow this. Not all perceptions are equally valid, else optical illusions wouldn't be illusions — Count Timothy von Icarus
In my opinion, the best critic of representationalism moves in the direction of phenomenology, but I believe you reject that and activism as well.
You insist that a coastline existed before we were there to experience it. I would point to the genealogy of etymological meanings of words such as melancholia and phlogiston to show that many verbal concepts used in science or common parlance point to what were presumed as existing entities, but as theories changed, one could no longer locate such entities anymore. It wasnt that a real thing in the world simply vanished, but that these words depended for their intelligibilty on a particular system of relating elements of the world. To understand melancholia is to understand cultural practices specific to an era, and to understand phlogiston is to view the system of relations among aspects of the physical world in a way that is no longer being used.
It wasnt that a real thing in the world simply vanished, but that these words depended for their intelligibilty on a particular system of relating elements of the world.
these words depended for their intelligibilty on a particular system of relating elements of the world
What about optical illusions that involves gestalt shifts between one way of seeing a scene and another, like the duck-rabbit? Is one way more correct than another?
Well now I can't take you seriously. :rofl: — Count Timothy von Icarus
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