Reader...

Take care to note what happened to the Great Moustache. Note the similar feeling of insanity here...

Intentionality is simply the understanding that consciousness is always conscious of something. This reconciles the duality of subject and object or being and appearance. Or Descartes' separation.

His medical problems were not related to his thinking. He had an illness that affected his brain, and in his later years he could not express himself coherently so to be understood by others well. It is a coincidence. A terrible one.

His insanity was a direct result of not knowing what sort of things could be true and what makes them so. His insanity was a direct result of his not knowing what to believe and why. His insanity was a direct result of his placing an overwhelming amount of value in exactly what he aimed to devalue by proclaiming it dead. His insanity was a direct result of his thought and belief being riddled with self-contradiction. Syphilis aside...

The most likely cause of Nietzsche's madness would seem to have been a brain disease, since there is apparently no documentary evidence to support the idea that he might have visited prostitutes, or indeed that he ever had sex at all. Also, I remember reading somewhere that his father also died of a brain disease.

This article posits frontotemporal dementia as the disease:

https://mindhacks.com/2006/12/01/what-caused-nietzsches-insanity-and-death/

I've always heard it was syphilis. What it was wasn't relevant.

Disease aside...

Better?

The Great Moustache's madness pervades his writing...

lol

Now THAT is funny.

Syphilis attacks the brain in its final stage... And it will kill you.

I guess you have no notion of his solution to nihilism, or Ubermensch?

"God is dead" does not mean that.

God is dead means... That which unified people under a notion of a world-behind-the-scene or in something other than what would be returning to man and working toward what would be the ideal human being with only humanity as a reference, is no longer. The world of religion has turned man into a base man; a herd creature struggling for just a piece of satisfaction amongst one another in terms of absolutism. An absolute truth is no longer. A already set purpose for human life is no longer. The religious motivation views human life fundamentally corrupt... And this does not satisfy us... Religion is dead... It cannot give a meaningful, authentic life. It opposes human life. 'God' is dead in that it opposes human life.

Think what you want.

Still believe that language use doesn't affect/effect subsequent thought?

:wink:

I use language. Language does not use me.

The Great Mustache does... from the grave.

Still believe that language use doesn't affect/effect subsequent thought?

I think knowledge is superfluous. — Blue Lux

Superfluous to what?

You're assuming that the human will, which is within language (as I am writing now), is a passive will, determined by some configuration of language that is materializing by simple necessity.

Superfluous to what? — gurugeorge

Knowledge is superfluous for a few reasons.

1. It presupposes the truth of that which delivers it.
2. It never reaches any truth.
3. It is recharacterization of what is already intuited to be.
4. It can be only as if it is.

There is supposedly an important distinction between knowledge by description and knowledge by acquaintance.

Knowledge by description involves ascertaining something... But in order to describe something one must have a knowledge by acquaintance. So knowledge by acquaintance is really the only type of knowledge. But this knowledge is incommunicable is it not? For this incommunicable knowledge, which would be the inspiration of a written knowledge of something, would be the truth of that something. And since words can never give the meaning of something alone, the truth is never disclosed in a descriptive knowledge... And therefore the only knowledge that is capable of being linguistically addressed is the one that is, ergo, superfluous.

Do you know how to ride a bicycle? :) Can you describe how to ride the bicycle? :) Is then riding of the bicycle a part of our knowledge? :)

Enjoy the day, :cool:

Have you heard of the 'pre reflective cogito'?

But in order to describe something one must have a knowledge by acquaintance. — Blue Lux

Again, no, I think this is the confusion, there's no relation other than the vague one I mentioned. Awareness isn't knowledge and knowledge isn't awareness.

The real analogue of big knowledge in the individual would be not awareness, being-present-with, etc. Rather, say to take any ordinary animal as an example, it would be in the way an organism is built, such that it behaves in a way that "expects" its environment to be such-and-such. (And just as those "expectations" can occasionally be baulked, so can our knowledge be wrong, false, etc.)

Again, knowledge is a kind of structure, or tool, or programming. When we learn something about the world, that sets our expectations to be a certain way. If a thing is called "x" then we expect it will behave thus-and-so. If it doesn't, then either it's not an "x" or we need to revise our definition of "x." If it does behave that way, then it's an x.

This does relate somewhat to your "as if" point, but it's not problematic and doesn't make knowledge superfluous. It's all we've got to navigate our way through the world.

Going to an example like Mary the colour scientist, what Mary has before getting sight is knowledge, when she gets her sight, she doesn't learn anything new, she just becomes acquainted with colour, becomes aware of it. But that isn't knowing it any better; her becoming acquainted with colour, becoming present to/with colour, is a change in the present state of her conscious being, not a change in the structure of her expectations.

Going to an example like Mary the colour scientist, what Mary has before getting sight is knowledge, when she gets her sight, she doesn't learn anything new, she just becomes acquainted with colour, becomes aware of it. But that isn't knowing it any better; her becoming acquainted with colour, becoming present to/with colour, is a change in the present state of her conscious being, not a change in the structure of her expectations. — gurugeorge

Can you reiterate this for me?

My biggest problem with knowledge is the point I found in Sartre, which I found to be pretty obvious (as what usually happens in philosophy... You find something and realize it is so obvious it was overlooked): A metaphysics presupposes an epistemology and an epistemology presupposes a metaphysics.

My own conclusion, and I hope nobody steals this idea (not that it is... probably... very significant), is that Knowledge is as if it is knowledge, and is only as if it is knowledge.

My own conclusion, and I hope nobody steals this idea (not that it is... probably... very significant), is that Knowledge is as if it is knowledge, and is only as if it is knowledge. — Blue Lux

Have you heard of Hans Vaihinger? He's one of those philosophers who was popular for a time but now forgotten, he wrote a book actually called The Philosophy of As If. You might be interested in it (although it's not quite as good as one thinks it might be from the title).

To reiterate: awareness is presence-with, actually just being (just being is always causally-concatenated with other being). One way of looking at it is that perceptions are perturbations of one's being - poetically speaking, one's very body and brain shimmer and thrill with the impact of rills of sound and light. What we experience when we see something is first of all that very perturbation of our being, and then partly consciously, partly unconsciously, the brain, our mind, however you want to think of it, tries to model what reality must be like for that perturbation to have occurred then and there, in that way, and then that sets our expectations for further experience. When symbolized in objective, public form, and ordered and structured into logical patterns, in language, in texts, on computers, those expectations become what we call "knowledge."

A lot of our knowledge was "worked out" by our animal/animalcule ancestors - we inherit their rough and ready sense of what the world is (which gave them at least a "pass" in their own lives, even if it may not have been wholly accurate), and then we refine it (cf. Schopenhauer for a marvelously concise distinction between "understanding," which we share with most of the higher animals at least, and "reason," the first being an instinctive, shared understanding, long worked-out, of the world as 3-dimensional, comprised of solids in motion, etc., etc., the second being more concerned with overt symbolization of the same). Some of this is partly what Plato was getting at with the idea of "Recollection." And in that sense you are right that we "already know" quite a bit about the world.

Now the perturbation of our being (what we call awareness or consciousness), in and of itself, is not yet knowledge. Knowledge is the projections (about reality) and expectations that perturbation elicits - whether from the instinctive level (again, what we share with animals) or from the level of our trained, learned and symbolized expectations about the world around us.

And knowledge always goes beyond, outside, refers outside of, the present perturbation (perception, awareness), to a larger world that's "outside" it (actually just not-it, but causally connected to it).

I wrote of this a few years back. It was something along the lines of "Time is a simulation of lack for stability."

I do not know if it is epistemologically accurate, but I will try to remember what I thought...

There was once a state of perfect homeostatic balance. The infant does not hunger until a lack (the cutting of the umbilical cord). Desire is based on lack. For instance, the safety of the mother (reference Freud). The homeostatic imbalance creates a psychic state of... Once a sensation impacts the smooth, sandy slate of consciousness, it necessitates an 'ontological permute' that changes consciousness to be in accordance with the shape of it, after that sensation is gone. And so sensations necessitate consciousness to comport itself toward all the experiences which added to the totality of it, but disappeared... Consciousness consists of being ahead of itself (heidegger) because it is always a lack of totality... Though Heidegger insists that Dasein is a totality... Which perhaps is due to my misunderstanding. But anyway... Perhaps you can see that line of thinking.

But anyway... Perhaps you can see that line of thinking — Blue Lux

Yes, it's roughly in line.

A more modern way of looking at it is in terms of Bayesianism, and an idea proposed by neuroscientist Karl Friston, called the Free Energy principle (note: the term is used in a narrow technical sense).

An actual, full-on Bayesian machine would be too computationally expensive to house in our brains, but we have a sort of quick and dirty imitation of one, in that action and cognition at all levels basically seek to reduce expected surprise, or (much the same thing) minimize uncertainty. Of course something like this idea has been suggested by many people in many different terms, but the neat thing about the Free Energy idea (which is exceptionally difficult to understand, it's real big-brained stuff, requiring math) is that it links the "lower level" neuroscience with higher level cognitive functioning terms (e.g. Bayesian reasoning).

At any rate, the key take-home message is, I think, to conceive of knowledge more as a stock of expectations, rather than a logical deduction or some other kind of extrapolation from perception or awareness. Cognition explains perception by leaping beyond it and containing it as the explanandum, it isn't derived from it.

This ties in with Popper again: knowledge never leaves the status of conjecture, although we can be certain about our deductions, and somewhat confident in the corroborative eliminative tests we make based on modus tollens, we can never be absolutely 100% certain that we are modelling the world correctly, there's always some fallibility built in, or at least we have to make room, in our thought, for the possibility that we might be wrong (and this ties knowledge to ethics and politics, actually - think of Cromwell's plea: "I beseech thee, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that you might be mistaken!" This was the beginning of democracy, in a Europe riven by vicious and violent civil strife between various religious certainties.)

Oh sorry I can't not quote someone. I can only regurgitate the thoughts of other people, because I have no thoughts of my own... — Blue Lux

That is what we call quoting. Regurgitate the thoughts of other people.

Consciousness is by virtue of intentionality. — Blue Lux

Who or what is the consciousness part of?

Consciousness is a sort of being, but is not a being-in-itself as might be an intentional object. — Blue Lux

That is contradictory. If consciousness is by virtue of intentionality, then it is an intentional object.

All there is is a presupposing. — Blue Lux

But there must be a presupposee, or is it a being-in-itself?

Intentionality is simply the understanding that consciousness is always conscious of something. — Blue Lux

'Intentionality' is a philosophical term that describes the elements of mental states that are 'directed' at things or ideas—the fact that thinking, feeling, hoping, believing, desiring are 'about' things. How can physical brain processes—electric currents and chemical concentrations—be 'about' things? Intentionality, some claim, is a problem for physicalists.

I think you have misinterpreted me... Not that your interpretation is not well based but that I should elaborate...

Intentionality is a phenomenological term. It says that consciousness is always consciousness of something, which in terms of Sartre provides a reconciliation of dualisms such as being and appearance and subject and object--providing an epistemology 'beyond' idealism or realism.

That is contradictory. If consciousness is by virtue of intentionality, then it is an intentional object — Sir2u

What I was saying is that consciousness is Intentionality... Intentionality is the characterization of consciousness. Consciousness is not an intentional object, due to the pre reflective cogito.

I am not sure there must be a presuposee...

I think therefore I am...

"I think where I am not therefore I am where I do not think. I am not whenever I am a plaything of my thought. I am where I do not think to think." Jacques Lacan