One way to make sense of 'everything' claims is to treat those claims not as substantive, but as formal. That is, to say something like 'everything is X' is to say that whatever 'there is', 'it' abides by such and such rules, or exhibits such and such properties, and not others. I say this is 'formal' and not 'substantive' because 'everything' here does not designate some kind of positive substance (res cogitans vs. res extensa), but a set of constraints or limits that are operative regardless of the 'stuff' in question. — StreetlightX
Drawing from Streelight's post. I think what I was trying to say, before losing the plot, is that silence or 'everything is as everything is' is really all you can do at the 'everything' level. Ideas like monism, dualism, pluralism etc are products of the mind's capacity to totalize gone haywire, metastasizing.So, I don't see monism's peculiarity. It seems like every position, except for silence or "everything is as everything is", is a correction and a "a cognitive project driven by some sort of need". — Πετροκότσυφας
But if you start from the modes, and work back to substance - this whole issue (if there is one) vanishes. — csalisbury
I think I understand your broader picture, but I'm not totally sure because I'm not familiar with the term 'relational closure.' Googling it is bringing me to a lot of math-y articles I'm not sure I'm capable of understanding without a lot of work. Is it possible to summarize the concept? — csalisbury
This might be a naive question, or else betray my misunderstanding, but how does this work time-wise? If we have relational closure tout court isn't that a kind of 'freeze' - as in, doesn't that preclude, by definition, the coming-into-existence of anything new? — csalisbury
Think of it this way. You hand someone a deck of cards. They say, "Ah, you've given me a deck of cards interspersed with spludgemuffikins!" The mere fact that they've said this doesn't imply that it's not just a deck of cards, and especially if you can get no coherent account of what spludgemuffikins are and how you also handed them to the person, you'd probably say, "No, it's just a deck of cards." — Terrapin Station
You don't leave monism for a monistic-y anti-monism. You leave the very idea of a rational fixed-point. — csalisbury
As a monist, the correct response to the claim that "everything is mind, or matter" is "So what?" Why do we have to name the "everything" anything at all? — Harry Hindu
This might be a naive question, or else betray my misunderstanding, but how does this work time-wise? If we have relational closure tout court isn't that a kind of 'freeze' - as in, doesn't that preclude, by definition, the coming-into-existence of anything new? — me
yep — fdrake
I just mean: how ok are you with a metaphysics that means nothing new can come into existence? — csalisbury
I guess there's also a silent presence here. I tried, over a half-decade ago, to understand Badiou, and I didn't. I know you've read him. When we bring set theory, oneness, novelty, Spinoza etc together, that makes me think of Being and Event, and that the inconsistency of the 'giant set' is somehow relevant. I wish I understood Badiou better but the feeling in my bones is that B&E is dealing with something problematic in the account you presented. — csalisbury
Nah. I think it's a result of bad framing. It's an interesting failure though, I think fundamentally it doesn't work very well because the operation which creates the fuckoff big object, just as in Spinoza, is a relatively unmoored conceptual operation taking little inspiration from more local problems. So in one breath I was criticising him for a focus on intellection in grasping an eternal and infinite substance, in another I derived a similarly inert and timeless material solely through reason. Sometimes it's fun to be a hypocrite. — fdrake
Badiou was in my mind when I was writing that post, I think the relevant distinction he has is between 'counts-as-one' and 'non-all'. Counts-as-one is a intellectual/practical operation which treats something as a unity; an intelligible whole; which stands out against the inconsistent/intelligibility resistant real; the non-all.
The departure point of my account creates a ghostly intelligibility where in fact there is none; to be real becomes equated with membership in a gigantic constructed set; precisely what Badiou uses Russel's paradox to highlight the flaw in. Moreover, the distinction between counts-as-one and non-all is roughly a distinction between intelligibility and the real; the former an operation which synthesises unities given a circumscribed context (and indeed circumscribes those contexts), and the latter that which disperses all such syntheses. — fdrake
If we weren't able to differentiate cards from other things, we wouldn't be able to identify them. — csalisbury
I don't see how that helps. What is a "substance"?That's fair. I should have been saying 'substance monism' or 'substance monist' not 'monism' and 'monist' — csalisbury
I don't know what this means. I don't think you know what it means either as you put "illusion" in quotes.But these illusions are happening in the bigger "illusion". Everything that takes place, is a priori taking place in the illusion (of representation, of consciousness, of experience, etc.). That is to say, it grounds all other things we might analogize to it, and thus eludes the analogy in a big way. — schopenhauer1
Though maybe you could have a positive claim along the lines of what fdrake's saying, if I understand him. Like maybe the one thing that you could say is that everything that is is capable of having an effect. — csalisbury
With respect to the conversation between you and fdrake, part of my initial response was motivated by trying to rephrase Lacan's logic of the ('feminine') not-all: 'there is nothing which is not...'; which is set against what he calls the 'masculine' logic of universality: 'everything is...'' - the latter being a claim of identity (X=...), while the former leaving the identity of X somewhat indeterminate, and simply 'qualifying' it in some way. Also, as I was reading a bit to formulate this very paragraph a bit better, I realized I more or less borrowed wholesale from a Zizek discussion of this very topic (I kinda had this at the back of my mind when I wrote the initial response, but only dimly! ... Went searching and hey -) : — StreetlightX
You seem to be saying that the sensory data itself is an illusion. What does that even mean? Effects are not their causes. To imply that the mind is the world, and not an effect of the world, is the illusion - that category mistake I spoke about. — Harry Hindu
Exactly. You didn't really read what I wrote and went about making an argument against something that I never said. This is a very common occurrence on these forums.I don't know, you mentioned everything is information, not matter or mind- which causes dualism, or something like that. I thought you were saying that mind is an illusion, like the illusion of the bent straw, but maybe you weren't. — schopenhauer1
Well, what is an illusion? When we experience an "illusion" for the first time, we don't call it an "illusion". We believe that what we experience is real, or has a cause external to the mind. It doesn't occur to us that we are experiencing an "illusion".My point with the illusion thing was that some people (maybe not you), like to say that mind is an "illusion", just like X illusion (a mirage perhaps), and thus, wipe their hands and think they are done. The ground of understanding anything in the first place though, would be this "illusion" that is the very thing to be explained. By the fact that it grounds everything else that we know, makes the idea that it is an illusion silly. Illusions happen within the general framework of cognition, the very thing that is first necessary to say it is an illusion. Illusion needs the general backdrop of cognition to understand that this particular phenomena is an illusion. What is the general backdrop of cognition but itself?
Now, more sophisticated versions of this "illusion" (non-answer) is the idea of information. Language bootstraps matter into a logic that has many feedback loops that become "experience" or "consciousness". There are so many holes in this, it doesn't hold water. Language may be a big part of the equation as to how cognition functions (if you are inclined to believe computationalist models of sorts), but how it bootstraps matter into awareness, is not explained without assuming the very thing it is explaining. — schopenhauer1
What I've been saying is that matter and mind aren't illusions, rather they are types of information. — Harry Hindu
I agree. And fundamentally, they are types of empirical data.What I've been saying is that matter and mind aren't illusions, rather they are types of information. — Harry Hindu
Are you able to identify "everything"? — Terrapin Station
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