Just a world of material things bound to the necessity of casual sufficiency, — Constance

What is material Constance? I think you're very reductive or do not understand contemporary physics if you think as material world as bounded to the necessity of casual sufficiency.
I could understand you say this 100+ years ago... not after relativity and all the rest...

something epistemological that carries the object, the cat, to my interior world. — Constance

Of course, as I say those causes are the mental objects you learned during childhood. Your chilhood is when you internal world gets built.

Causality doesn't do this. — Constance

Yes it does.

can carry, if you will, the "ofness" that eventually becomes my knowledge OF the cat — Constance

We call it memory, neural-traces that keep our memories and form our memories as the memories of the computers but in the brain and with neural networks. (have you watched the second Blade Runner?).
Artificial Neural Networks do it as well.

there is no model beyond this that can be brought in for comparison. — Constance

Yes, there is a model, the one you build during your childhood as your brain interacts with the world.

If you cannot affirm that causal networks are analytically epistemological, — Constance

this is what I'm affirming, neural networks that have learned are causally epistemological.

. If you take electromagnetic fields to be in their exhaustive analysis about what is "out there," independent of experience, then you would be committing the metaphysical fallacy of positing things unseen. — Constance

Pragmatics do not only refer to the world you see. Your comment is quite naif. Electromagnetic fields are part of nature, are natural. This is why I tell you you should stop using materialism or physician because you have an obsolete understanding of matter (materialism); better if you talk about nature.
Blind people are humans too :grin:

We can now proceed to construct a new model of the world, one in which values are not subordinated the "metaphysics" of science, and the subjective/objective division at the ontological level simply vanishes. — Constance

It has been built: heterophenomenology. I see you haven't watched the videos of Dehaene I proposed you. You're too concentrated trying to show you're right :nerd:

Science needs to know its place, however. — Constance

Are you the one telling science what is his place? :lol:
Science has won its place along history and many people have died defending it, but here we're, in a very humble way, with the ambition of explaining and understanding everything but step by step in a continuous and humble dialogue with nature, with our nature.

What is material Constance? I think you're very reductive or do not understand contemporary physics if you think as material world as bounded to the necessity of casual sufficiency.
I could understand you say this 100+ years ago... not after relativity and all the rest... — Raul

This is not an issue in contemporary physics. And causality is not intended to reflect any advance beyond the apriori principle of sufficient cause, that all things subsist in events that cannot be conceived ex nihilo. The only thing that you could bring to bear on the issue at hand would be something that could be a knowledge bearing medium, like the hand written commandment from God. I don't suppose you have an argument for this, but then, even if you did, the conditions for knowledge claims would still be there: there are the tablets, there is you. It would only be the arbitrary assumption that God put the tablets before you that affirms the knowledge that there are tablets at all.

There is then the matter of quantum entanglement. but I have never heard that this can apply to bridge the gap between objects and the perceptual equipment of an epistemic agency. But then again, even if this were somehow implicated in an attempt to make such a connection, one would never get beyond Wittgenstein and the rest who place all knowledge claims within the the framework of the structures of meaningful utterances, i.e., logic. the "aboutness" of a proposition regardless of the hard science context in which it is made is something that cannot reach beyond its own nature. There are no, say, conditional grammatical forms "out there".

Of course, as I say those causes are the mental objects you learned during childhood. Your chilhood is when you internal world gets built. — Raul

Of course they are. And you are quite right to say so, but this kind of knowledge claim about the causal world and a descriptive account of the way things "cause" a child to develop is exactly what is in question. This conditioning: what is its nature? How is it even possible to conceive of it such that objects as independent of perceptual conditioning can be the objects in perception?

it is not that I think there is nothing out there independent in this way. One has to admit that there is something to this otherness of objects, they are not me, but outside of me, or, they transcend me. I certainly realize there are things there that are not me, but the moment I take up the matter, the object, in the faculties of my understanding, I bring the object into this "totality" of my conceptualized experience.

And it gets worse. The question then turns to an analysis of this interiority, and this has as its center, TIME. Hence the book's name, Being and Time. There are no things, only events.

My position is this: there is no world, only worlds.

Yes it does. — Raul

Oh, thank God! Please tell me how this works so I can call the newspapers.

We call it memory, neural-traces that keep our memories and form our memories as the memories of the computers but in the brain and with neural networks. (have you watched the second Blade Runner?).
Artificial Neural Networks do it as well. — Raul

A terrific film. Alas, not useful here.

Yes, there is a model, the one you build during your childhood as your brain interacts with the world. — Raul

Model? Model of what? All that you can say is composed IN the very mind that is supposed to be the object of your explanation!! You do see how this works, right? I mean, you are never going to get this to work: All that you can say about the real "brain" that produces pain, ideas, consciousness and so on, is conceived IN the very thing that is being reduced. You cannot reach out of phenomena to affirm this natural world, for every utterance, every observation you make is phenomenal!

This is why you can never affirm that cat. That cat belongs to eternity once the perceptual lights are turned off, for this is the removal of the logical form of propositions, the sensations, all thought identity, any possibility you can even imagine.

Best to side with Rorty: Our knowledge is pragmatic. To stand on a street corner, look around and acknowledge the many knowledge relationships you have with the world of the things before you is to know what happens when these things are confronted. A road is for driving, it is hard to the step, supports one's weight, can be dangerous and on and on. These are all pragmatic determinations, not ontological (unless you are making pragmatism into an ontology. Heidegger sort did this).

Pragmatics do not only refer to the world you see. Your comment is quite naif. Electromagnetic fields are part of nature, are natural. This is why I tell you you should stop using materialism or physician because you have an obsolete understanding of matter (materialism); better if you talk about nature.
Blind people are humans too :grin: — Raul

I do appreciate that grinning face. I do not want others to get angry about ideas. But they do.

There is no argument here that denies electromagnetic fields, evolution, stellar analyses, carbon dating, or anything at all science and its paradigms (provisional theories. See Kuhn, who was a Kantian) have to say. I am an adherent and an admirer.

But these are just not useful here. Here, they beg the question, that is, assume what needs to be proven, and I should add, they are fine this way and scientists do not for the most part care at all about arguments like this one. Not their field.

It has been built: heterophenomenology. I see you haven't watched the videos of Dehaene I proposed you. You're too concentrated trying to show you're right — Raul

Yes, Danial Dennett. Acctually the first true heterophenomenolgist was Emanuel Levinas. See his Totality and Infinity, Alterity and Transcendence, Time and the Other, and so on. It is not that phenomenology says there is nothing there, no "cat" (note the double inverted commas) there, nor any "people" or other things. This gets complicated. remember, Heidegger's Being and Time, Sarte's Being and Nothingness, and Husserl's Ideas and all the rest, devote a great deal of thought to others, but they are affirmed by the collective ideas that we witness within. It is understood that the horizon of our phenomenological gaze is both confined to interiorityand inclusive of others that are not us, for in the phenomenal presentation, we witness otherness; otherness is IN the interiority of the perceiving agency, and this is confirmed by no more than its presence. Phenomenology is a descriptive "science" (Husserl called it this).

The Other, therefore, comes to us embedded in our own interiority, yet in this setting, is presented as Other. This Other is transcendental, as are all things not me; it is just that this "outsideness" of things occurs within, and this sets the stage for a great deal of post modern philosophy. Levinas holds that the Other is beyond our Totality, which is Heidegger's dasein; the other intrudes in the face that reveals an ethical obligation to respond that issues from transcendence, which religiously is construed as God.

It is certainly not the case that phenomenology reduces the world to subjectivity. Rather, it understands what is means to grasp a thing and that behind or "below" knowledge, there is a transcendence, and transcendence is defined by what escapes our totalizing reach that wants to integrate all things into itself. This is Levinas. This totalizing principle meets the face of the Other and ethics is born. But Levinas doesn't take the matter to its core, for the Other's presence's significance lies with the more fundamental and irreducible value qua value.

It's my standard grudge against theists, it has nothing to do with Kierkegaard specifically. — baker

Okay. But K is by no means typical. His Attack on Christendom rails against the banality of middle class Christianity. He thought the medievals has it right with their singularity of devotion.

a thousand variations on the ghost in the machine

Okay. But K is by no means typical. His Attack on Christendom rails against the banality of middle class Christianity. He thought the medievals has it right with their singularity of devotion. — Constance

At some point, I could recite by heart passages from De Imitatione Christi ... it seemed so right, so true ...

But I eventually decided that the banal middle-class Christians were better off in life, and that devotion is for losers.

I have never heard that this can apply to bridge the gap between objects and the perceptual equipment of an epistemic agency. — Constance

What about the superposition principle? Incoherent state of particles?

How is it even possible to conceive of it such that objects as independent of perceptual conditioning can be the objects in perception? — Constance

I have to insist here, I see this happening in other artificial systems we humans create. In engineering and physics we call them complex systems. Complex systems have the capacity of new properties and capabilities to emerge within them. Properties and capabilities impossible to predict. One good example are the Convolutional Networks that learn to recognize objects in images. Nothing metaphysical but just physical, physics of information. And those complex systems are heuristic and stochastic as our brain is.

One has to admit that there is something to this otherness of objects, they are not me, — Constance

But this "otherness" and the "me" is another mental object, maybe the highest level one but as any other that emerges during childhood. If you would grow up in the forest (like Frederick II in 13th century did with many children) without any contact to other humans, no contact to human language it is very likely you idea of the others, your "self", would be very very different and you would not have the instruments to make the questions you are making here. This is to say that it is the culture and the environment you grow up that determines your Self and how you are in the world. So this example illustrates as well that this "otherness" and this "me" is a reflexion, a literal mirror-reflexion of the "other" humans that your brain recognize being like you (same body, same gestures, capabilities...). 2 mirrors opposite one to the other. No surprise they generate the idea of infinite like it happens in the infinite images reflected in 2 confronted mirrors.

Oh, thank God! Please tell me how this works so I can call the newspapers. — Constance

No need, professionals in this field have already explained it and earn their lives explaining and making research to better explain how concepts are caused by external objects interacting with our brain. It is not yet digested by the pop-culture but it will come and as always in history, this paradigma-shifts happen in silence. Stanislas Dehaene (who works for French ministry of education) and Georg Northoff are good ones doing this.

All that you can say is composed IN the very mind that is supposed to be the object of your explanation!! — Constance

No, here I think you make a fundamental mistake. What I can say is the result of scientific+philosophical studies of the subjective narratives of people, studying their subjectivity. Heterophenomenology successfully studies the subject as an object

You cannot reach out of phenomena to affirm this natural world, for every utterance, every observation you make is phenomenal! — Constance

Sorry but yes we can and we do, again through heterophenomenology. Another way is looking at cases where the brain system breaks due to accidents or illness. Those case-studies are so helpful as well to kill so many prejudices about what we're. Good reference here is Ramachandran.
Do you know we can know your decisions before you know them (Libet)? Do you know we can induce a brain to be a religious brain (Ramachandran)? Do you know Capgras syndrome? Did you see in youtube the man with only 7-seconds memory? We can induce you the sense of presence of someone else just with some drugs altering you state of consciousness. A tumor can make you a pedophile (you can google it, real story).
These are cases that allow us to exit from our interior as these are like doors that open to what we're really are and how our brain cheat us :grimace:

These are all pragmatic determinations, not ontological — Constance

Ontological :-) I understand you use it here in its full metaphysical sense so I have to say nice metaphysical word but not epistemic value outside virtual illusive metaphysical systems. Sorry, here we diverge fundamentally. For me metaphysics is like an invented philosophical religion. I know it sounds strong, but it is how I see it. Well and many other philosophers. I do not subscribe to any meta-something view of things.
You can call me pragmatic. I would not accept this either. All this for me is completely obsolete terminology. I subscribe to naturalism that I'm quite sure you're not familiar with (see Daniel Andler and Sandro Nannini).

provisional theories. See Kuhn, who was a Kantian) have to say. I am an adherent and an admirer. — Constance

Yes agree, but science does paradigm shifts, progress, what ensures continuous and concrete progress. Philosophy has always had to follow, they go hand-to-hand but science dictates the reality. It is not the other way around.

It is understood that the horizon of our phenomenological gaze is both confined to interiority and inclusive of others that are not us, for in the phenomenal presentation, we witness otherness; otherness is IN the interiority of the perceiving agency, and this is confirmed by no more than its presence. Phenomenology is a descriptive "science" (Husserl called it this). — Constance

And I subscribe to this, while I think Husserl and subsequent followers have gone too far with phenomenology. I'm anyway not an expert on this topic.

The Other, therefore, comes to us embedded in our own interiority — Constance

Yes, and, maybe aside comment, most of the times the mother and the father are very influential.

This Other is transcendental, as are all things not me; it is just that this "outsideness" of things occurs within, and this sets the stage for a great deal of post modern philosophy. Levinas holds that the Other is beyond our Totality, which is Heidegger's dasein; the other intrudes in the face that reveals an ethical obligation to respond that issues from transcendence, which religiously is construed as God. — Constance

This Other is transcendental, as are all things not me; it is just that this "outsideness" of things occurs within, and this sets the stage for a great deal of post modern philosophy. Levinas holds that the Other is beyond our Totality — Constance

Yes I subscribe to this.

which is Heidegger's dasein; — Constance

No, I have problems with metaphysics as I said above sorry. The Dasein is such a confusing concept.

the other intrudes in the face that reveals an ethical obligation to respond that issues from transcendence, which religiously is construed as God. — Constance

Wonderful!
Just to say, yes, religiously as God, and not religiously as the "existential delusion"

there is a transcendence, and transcendence is defined by what escapes our totalizing reach that wants to integrate all things into itself. — Constance

Agree. But would you agree that science and technology is the only successful way to scrutinize the trascendental world?
Philosophy's role is that of consolation (Boezio's), about dealing with our inner needs of further existential explanation but most of the epistemic value comes from science. Well, nowadays philosophy is important as well to articulate what human civilizations want to become with all this science and technology challenging the foundations of our ethics, laws and politics.

lies with the more fundamental and irreducible value qua value. — Constance

Value qua value... yeap!.
It is hard to build the bridge... but I think I'm almost there, thinking that value can be reduced to the homeostatic principle. Or, like I like to do, the other way around... Homeostasis importance has to be expanded as the main driver of existential value.
I know one could say... but homeostasis describes a biological thing, this is materialism... yes and this is the purpose of "naturalism" to get rid of materialistic prejudices and expand the powers of nature! A very much unknown nature that we are discovering is beyond any existential-human claim.

What about the superposition principle? Incoherent state of particles? — Raul

The same as it is with all concepts: it is hermeneutically grounded. Talk about quantum mechanics is first language, and it is here that phenomenology stakes its claims. Physics, even the most cutting edge, are not ontologically basic. What is basic is the construction of thought and the world at the level of original generative description; it is Kant, or rather, Husserl and Eugene fink's Sixth Meditation carrying on Kantian idealism, that takes center stage. An idea of any kind is a taking the world up AS, and an in this phenomenological ontology, the phenomenon is a bundled "event". How this is explained differs across the board, but it is clear to me that the eidetic dimension of an object pragmatic and the field of Being that comprises all things, that is the "what it is" is pragmatic, a body problems solved (ready to hand). You observe a hammer, realize implicitly its nature as something settled, familiar, "known intuitively," that is, immediately, always already: this is our "sense of reality" which is a lifetime of pragmatic successes, or "consummations" (Dewey). This account reduces reality to an aggregate problem solving, it "region spatially desevered" when encountered (a little Heideggerian terminology that I won't repeat. He really wanted a break with everything traditional and this makes him theoretically alien to standard discussions).

I think he is right. I think Richard Rorty and the pragmatists align with Heidegger, and give us a startlingly compelling account for the answer to the question, what is Real? It is hermeneutical pragmatics.

BUT: there is a rub! And this is Kierkegaard, or begins here: There is "something" here in my midst in the object that is not pragmatic, and this is actuality. Notice the paradox: A "say" actuality, but in the saying I subsume in language the very thing I am trying to, errr, performatively dismiss. The saying and the thinking IS the performance and I can't ever "get to" the actuality beneath the terminology, but there is no mistaking that this actuality of a cat is not a concept, not a pragmatic "eidetic affair of an actuality" (Husserl)
Here it gets complicated. Time becomes the structural center.

I have to insist here, I see this happening in other artificial systems we humans create. In engineering and physics we call them complex systems. Complex systems have the capacity of new properties and capabilities to emerge within them. Properties and capabilities impossible to predict. One good example are the Convolutional Networks that learn to recognize objects in images. Nothing metaphysical but just physical, physics of information. And those complex systems are heuristic and stochastic as our brain is. — Raul

Interesting to note: You are such a system, and talk about things that are not in or of such systems is really what metaphysics is. Freud's psychoanalytical constructions of ego, id and superego is considered meta psychology. I mean, look at it like this: if one wants to localize events at the level of basic questions, saying here is a tree, there is an application possibility for the concept of "convolutional networks that learn to recognize objects in images" all of these begins at ONE locality, and this is the foundational level of philosophical inquiry: the experiential matrix of a self. One never, at this level of discussion, even observed an object that is free of cognition and affect, such a thing has never even been witnessed once! To talk like this is an abstraction from the source, which is experience.

It is not that talk about the theoretical structures of thought in computer science modeling is meaningless. Such a claim would be patently absurd. But it is to say that in doing so you are not thinking at the level of basic questions, the ones that look into the presuppositions of empirically based theoretical systems. As I see it, one has not crossed the threshold into philosophy until the focus turns to foundational questions, and here we encounter hermeneutics.

But this "otherness" and the "me" is another mental object, maybe the highest level one but as any other that emerges during childhood. If you would grow up in the forest (like Frederick II in 13th century did with many children) without any contact to other humans, no contact to human language it is very likely you idea of the others, your "self", would be very very different and you would not have the instruments to make the questions you are making here. This is to say that it is the culture and the environment you grow up that determines your Self and how you are in the world. So this example illustrates as well that this "otherness" and this "me" is a reflexion, a literal mirror-reflexion of the "other" humans that your brain recognize being like you (same body, same gestures, capabilities...). 2 mirrors opposite one to the other. No surprise they generate the idea of infinite like it happens in the infinite images reflected in 2 confronted mirrors. — Raul

Sure. I think you treat phenomenology the way Dennett does in part of his qualia paper, as another word for qualia: what stands before us in the physical world has the sensory input and the conceptual form that put's it together. This sensory input, can it be acknowledged as it is independently of its concepts (to speak in Kant-ese)? That would be a way of referring to qualia, the "being appeared to redly."

Phenomenology is nothing like this, (though Husserl's epoche and the extraordinary claims he makes about "the thing itself" do need explaining. But not here unless you want to). All of our interhuman affairs remain as they are. Interpretation as to their meaning at the basic level, however, has changed dramatically. Phenomenology allows the world as it is to "speak" and prioritize, allowing meaning to dominate rather than empirical science paradigms in which meaning is localized as one event under the general rubric "the natural world". For a phenomenologists, the natural world is, analytically, a region of thought that circumscribes its own "domain"" if you want to talk about nature, then nature talk commences, specialized fields recognized, each with its distinct domain.

What is sought for in philosophy is the grounding of all domains, and this is Being. What is Being's domain? This specialized primordial domain is formally called ontology (despite this term's being coopted everywhere these days), and it has a history of metaphysics behind it. Phenomenology says Being is here and now, right before your eyes and in the analytic of experience.

No need, professionals in this field have already explained it and earn their lives explaining and making research to better explain how concepts are caused by external objects interacting with our brain. It is not yet digested by the pop-culture but it will come and as always in history, this paradigma-shifts happen in silence. Stanislas Dehaene (who works for French ministry of education) and Georg Northoff are good ones doing this. — Raul

All this is preanalytic by the standard imposed by existential thinking. Such researchers do not care about phenomenology, just as a geneticist does not care about Adlerian psychology.

No, here I think you make a fundamental mistake. What I can say is the result of scientific+philosophical studies of the subjective narratives of people, studying their subjectivity. Heterophenomenology successfully studies the subject as an object — Raul

Dennett will tell you that when he discusses such things, he implicitly dismisses, say, the Kantian objections. They all do. Quine despised Derrida, yet if you follow his thoughts about indeterminacy, you find yourself aligned with the conclusions of deconstruction (see David Golumbia's Quine, Derrida, and the Question of Philosophy). This is because this issue ran for over a hundred years and Russell and Moore got sick of it (Moore was a Kantian, then one day just asked, am I raising my hand? Looked at his hand and said, of course! following Diogenes who walked across the room to disprove Parmenides.

But then: One can read about heterophenomenology, acknowledge the sense of it, and still realize that while true, this or that big claim, the theoretical divide has not been crossed to basic questions. A philosopher like Rorty, whom I like because he straddles the middle so well, can on the one hand argue against phenomenology's intensionality--pain? where is the intension there?--, and presenting a monist view that looks a lot like what a physicist would put together (see, e.g., his view on Leibniz's brain tour of thought), but then, he takes Heidegger and Dewey and Wittgenstein (a phenomenologist? Not explicitly, but...) to be the greatest philosophers of the 20th century (and he adored the Kantian, Thomas Kuhn)! The thing is, Rorty's ontology is radical pragmatic phenomenology, and I think he is right: out thereness is nonsense if taken to be independent of the human contribution. I walk out of the room, and I take the cat with me, for "cat" is a pragmatic construct embedded in language and experience. That out there? Utterly transcendental and unspeakable. Rorty is the one who said, "how does anything out there get in here? is an impossible question, but only at the level of basic questions.

Dennett would say the same, or similar.

Sorry but yes we can and we do, again through heterophenomenology. Another way is looking at cases where the brain system breaks due to accidents or illness. Those case-studies are so helpful as well to kill so many prejudices about what we're. Good reference here is Ramachandran.
Do you know we can know your decisions before you know them (Libet)? Do you know we can induce a brain to be a religious brain (Ramachandran)? Do you know Capgras syndrome? Did you see in youtube the man with only 7-seconds memory? We can induce you the sense of presence of someone else just with some drugs altering you state of consciousness. A tumor can make you a pedophile (you can google it, real story).
These are cases that allow us to exit from our interior as these are like doors that open to what we're really are and how our brain cheat us :grimace: — Raul

Yes, I guess I these things. If you really think you can "exit" your interior you have two choices. One is to affirm that causality carries knowledge, is inherently epistemic, and you would have to say how this works. Another is to construct a metaphysics that does this. All we observe is not all there is, and "beneath" observed events there are knowledge relationships that make the essential connection. This sounds insane, but then, and this is where Rorty gets off the bus: 1) this "exteriority" that is present in our interior is, upon examination, something that subsumes our interior! 2) There is also a nondiscursive "intuition" in the affirmation of otherness that just won't go away in that it presents a picture of ourselves in the world that is a kind of simulacrum of the really Real.

I will not go into this unless you want to. It is very alien to one's familiar world.

It is very important, in my pov, to see that no matter how one slices it, you will never get beyond neurons and axonal connections and neurochemistry that fill the explanatory need, which is why I began with the cat. Brain talk does not get beyond this because this physicalist talk is presupposed. I look at the matter as one of opacity, clear and simple. There is a brain, and I am inside. There is no question that I am a physical brain manifestation inside a physical brain. This is just the opposite of metaphysics. Tell me abut the pathway from the cat to me. No need to be complex, just give me the rough detail, BUT, in full knowledge of the arguments here presented.

Doors? Wittgenstein rightly tells us that doors are first part of states of affairs, part of facts of the world. What is a fact? A propositional construction. There are no propositions "out there".

Ontological :-) I understand you use it here in its full metaphysical sense so I have to say nice metaphysical word but not epistemic value outside virtual illusive metaphysical systems. Sorry, here we diverge fundamentally. For me metaphysics is like an invented philosophical religion. I know it sounds strong, but it is how I see it. Well and many other philosophers. I do not subscribe to any meta-something view of things.
You can call me pragmatic. I would not accept this either. All this for me is completely obsolete terminology. I subscribe to naturalism that I'm quite sure you're not familiar with (see Daniel Andler and Sandro Nannini). — Raul

Pragmatists are not metaphysicians. Entirely the opposite. (See Rorty's Mirror of Nature.) And as to its being obsolete, this is simply the presumption that comes with placing oneself in the discussions that use contemporary technical language. Even old Kant, while his thoughts have had two hundred years of development and have been shred and pulverized over and over, has never been refuted in the essentials laid out. Heidegger's Being and Time is almost a hundred years old, but contemporary phenomenologists, many of whom are French (Nancy, Henry, Marion, et al) work in his long shadow. Note Andler's references to so many in the history of philosophy: all unsolved matters, their thoughts still, in his mind, contemporary; mind/body? Still haunting the analytic scene? Rather telling, I think, of the direction of their work.

I looked into Daniel Andler and read his Philosophy of Cognitive Science paper. First, he is French, which is surprising since the French are famously post Heideggarian phenomenologists. Anyway, I can see that he moves in circles outside of phenomenology, and this means there are a host of questions begged that are not acknowledged as such, and he admits the limitations of addressing these are due to space and his purpose.

Interesting: Looking for something enlightening as he peruses the history of cognitive theory. Mostly I am familiar. He is doing speculative science: let's assume the world is the world of our everyday lives, known in greater detail in our sciences. this is the assumption that begs the question. He says earlier: even the keenest defender of philosophical naturalism can see that a full naturalization of the mind delivered by cognitive science remains a distant prospect. He knows about that cat! that all such thinking runs into the cat problem which is there is NO demonstrable way out of phenomena, and all one can do is talk AS IF there were a way.

Yes agree, but science does paradigm shifts, progress, what ensures continuous and concrete progress. Philosophy has always had to follow, they go hand-to-hand but science dictates the reality. It is not the other way around. — Raul

No, empirical science has not done this at all. Philosophy is an apriori discipline. this gets forgotten because science gives us pain killers and cell phones. But really, it has little to do with authentic philosophy which looks to presuppositions.

And I subscribe to this, while I think Husserl and subsequent followers have gone too far with phenomenology. I'm anyway not an expert on this topic. — Raul

Expert? You don't have to teach Husserl to know what he says. It takes reading. Most analytic philosophers have not read much continental philosophy. Kant, but little more. This is why they don't really understand that the problems they are trying to solve have been rendered all but moot.

Yes I subscribe to this. — Raul

If you think the Other is beyond our totality, then you can only think naturalism is a defensible thesis preanalytically, like thinking that mountains are mountains, and stars are stars, and so on. Philosophy hasn't begun yet.

Wonderful!
Just to say, yes, religiously as God, and not religiously as the "existential delusion" — Raul

Not sure what an existential delusion is.

Agree. But would you agree that science and technology is the only successful way to scrutinize the trascendental world?
Philosophy's role is that of consolation (Boezio's), about dealing with our inner needs of further existential explanation but most of the epistemic value comes from science. Well, nowadays philosophy is important as well to articulate what human civilizations want to become with all this science and technology challenging the foundations of our ethics, laws and politics. — Raul

Of course, I would say all of this is very important, indeed! But as to "science and technology is the only successful way to scrutinize the trascendental world"?? it is quite out of its league. See earlier.

Value qua value... yeap!.
It is hard to build the bridge... but I think I'm almost there, thinking that value can be reduced to the homeostatic principle. Or, like I like to do, the other way around... Homeostasis importance has to be expanded as the main driver of existential value.
I know one could say... but homeostasis describes a biological thing, this is materialism... yes and this is the purpose of "naturalism" to get rid of materialistic prejudices and expand the powers of nature! A very much unknown nature that we are discovering is beyond any existential-human claim. — Raul

I think this is the hope of analytic philosophy in general, that through discussions about what our working concepts can mean and can "hold" in terms of novel theory. My view is this may be entertaining, but that ship has sailed, wrecked, and sunk to the bottom of the ocean. Philosophy has reached its end, in fact, it "reached" this when Buddha found enlightenment. One has to realize some basic things about the work of wisdom: in the end, it is clear that the bottom line for inquiry into the nature of the self and its world is not cognitive; cognition is a tool that seeks out value. The point to all things lies with the value they produce, putting the issue squarely on an issue into the nature of value, meaning, importance.

What is basic is the construction of thought and the world at the level of original generative description; — Constance

Using just words? Quite herme-tic as well, isn't it?

This account reduces reality to an aggregate problem solving, — Constance

Your intuitions and language are aggregates of problem solving that you learnt while you grow up during your childhood. I would even say more, you would never be able to talk or conceive the linguistic categories if you are not exposed to a family context where people talk. Language is not trascendental and the categories we use are contingent and relative to the problem solving of our lives.

his is Kierkegaard, — Constance

Would be interesting to see what he would say about superposition states of particles and about bosons and fermions. For me it looks like Kierkegaard's thinking has been overestimated. He was pushed by the christian religions as he served their purposes. But this is another discussion.

are not in or of such systems is really what metaphysics is — Constance

This is you saying those things I talk about are not in those systems. I of course disagree.

Phenomenology allows the world as it is to "speak" and prioritize, allowing meaning to dominate rather than empirical science paradigms in which meaning is localized as one event under the general rubric "the natural world". — Constance

Such researchers do not care about phenomenology — Constance

But phenomenology can be conceived within empirical world thanks to heterophenomenology. It is a branch of cognitive naturalism.

Moore was a Kantian, then one day just asked, am I raising my hand? Looked at his hand and said, of course! following Diogenes who walked across the room to disprove Parmenides. — Constance

Right! and then they opened the door and saw in a monitor that someone from outside, using electromagnetic fields raised his hand but his unconscious made him believe it was him to raise his hand. They would not think the same way with current understanding of the sense of agency and how consciousness is constructed.

If you really think you can "exit" your interior you have two choices. — Constance

Heterophenomenology is not "existing my interior". It is working under the assumption that your brain and my brain functions the same way so I can study yours to make conclusions about mine.

contemporary technical language — Constance

No technical language, but the naturalistic presumption. Yours is metaphysical, mine is naturalistic.

speculative science: — Constance

We're all doing speculative thought... it is philosophy :wink: ... but his naturalistic approach is a winning one.

full naturalization of the mind delivered by cognitive science remains a distant prospect. — Constance

Of course, he is humble and realistic, but he follows what I think is the right way... philosophy but with science. Not a philosophy that tries to positioned itself above everything as the king of the world with their anthropocentric views of things (meta-things are good examples). Andler puts nature above anything, being humble pays off.

Philosophy is an apriori discipline. — Constance

Don't you think this is a "religious" absolutist way of defining philosophy? it appears toas your position your capabilities of thinking above any real, above nature. As Daniel Andler and naturalists say, many philosophers position themselves above nature. This simple thing is what naturalism fixes, putting below nature, approach nature in a humble way. Same way science does.

"science and technology is the only successful way to scrutinize the trascendental world"?? — Constance

Yes, together with philosophy, naturalistic one. Are you telling me a phenomenology conceived as only using human reasoning is more powerful? No, quantum mechanics experiments could never be understood using any phenomenological reasoning... goes beyond naif human intuitions.

that through discussions about what our working concepts can mean and can "hold" in terms of novel theory. — Constance

Isn't this what your phenomenology does?

Philosophy has reached its end, in fact, it "reached" this when Buddha found enlightenment. — Constance

Are you serious or being cynic here? :chin:

he self and its world is not cognitive; cognition is a tool that seeks out value. — Constance

Right, human cognition is limited so isn't it womewhat true that we invent technologies that empower our limited cognition: computers, telescopes, algorithms, biological tools, large hadron collider, etc...

Using just words? Quite herme-tic as well, isn't it? — Raul

Not just words, but observations of the structures of experience. Hermeneutics says that knowledge is deferential: terms always have their meanings tied to other terms. To think at all is to take up the world AS a symbolic system, and to think about "things in the world" is not a reference to some alien ontology like "substance" or "nature" but exists in a problem solving matrix that interacts in "the world". Such a term as "nature" suggests that what is natural is the bottom line for ontology. Hermeneutics claims that this term belongs to an interpretative matrix and it is here the bottom line is to be found" it is a term that is "regionally limited" and this is not what philosophy is looking for. Nature is a broad and inclusive concept, granted, but it is not foundational. You see, before one can discuss what is natural, you have to go through the very faculties process what one receives. It would be nice if the brain were like a mirror of nature (Rorty's book name, by the way), but just look at this "natural" object, the brain, I mean, I think you really have to be honest about this: that thing is entirely opaque, and this is working with a very clear physicalist view of objects. The brain is an object! You see this point. All the advanced chemistry you can imagine is not going to come to the aid of making two objects, my brain and my cat, come together epistemically.
Analytic philosophers like Dennett know this! You ask Dennett about this and he will simply shrug his shoulders, for he knows, as Wittgenstein claimed long ago: such questions are impossible! for one would have to step out of epistemic relations to "say" what this is, and the saying is inherently epistemic.

I take this as unassailably true, though, keeping in mind that there are NO unassailable truths in the absolute sense.

Your intuitions and language are aggregates of problem solving that you learnt while you grow up during your childhood. I would even say more, you would never be able to talk or conceive the linguistic categories if you are not exposed to a family context where people talk. Language is not trascendental and the categories we use are contingent and relative to the problem solving of our lives. — Raul

But all of this talk about childhood resides in a terminological setting that is hermeneutical. You have to give up the idea that when you perceive a thing there is some "absolute" connection. Dennett would entirely deny this. The "really and truly" part of what is is hermeneutics, and the "input" is, the moment it makes its entrance into the brain thing, nothing at all as to what that thing is if the brain were removed from the account of what the thing is.

If you think this is intuitively contradictory, if you will, then you're right. There is something IN the understanding that affirms existence qua existence. This, I am arguing, is value. Existence reveals its true nature in the value-meanings of the world and what intuitively asserts itself in the ultimate question about "what is" is value-meaning. Without value, the question would be ontologically no more meaningful that, way, ones and zero in a computer binary system.

Douglas Adam's question he poses to Deep Thought, of life the universe and everything, in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is, value.

Would be interesting to see what he would say about superposition states of particles and about bosons and fermions. For me it looks like Kierkegaard's thinking has been overestimated. He was pushed by the christian religions as he served their purposes. But this is another discussion. — Raul

No, it is this discussion. Take a look at his Concept of Anxiety. Of course, we are in the early 19th century, but this matters not at all. Note that Daniel Andler reveals that Cartesian problems remain entirely at a distance from CURRENT theory! Descartes??? Dualism? That was the 17th century.

Of course, K's Anxiety is a difficult work. Most fear to go.

This is you saying those things I talk about are not in those systems. I of course disagree. — Raul

But the assumption that a tree is still a tree when all experience manufacturing faculties are removed (I leave the scene) is a claim that one knows beyond knowing! It is kind of crazy. I think this clear...as a proverbial bell.

But phenomenology can be conceived within empirical world thanks to heterophenomenology. It is a branch of cognitive naturalism. — Raul

so, if you will, tell me how, briefly, cognitive science gets my cat into my brain. Note that the moment you lift an explanatory finger that you are bound make explicit references to what is NOT my brain.

It is not that cognitive science is wrong. Not at all. The point here is that this is speculative science. not philosophy. This is not the bottom line of inquiry. This is a Dennett shrugging his shoulders, then getting on with arguing AS IF the natural world were in fact the natural world. As analytic philosophers all do. Ask an epistemologist about affirming "P" in "S knows P". S/he will tell you, well, you have to have P adn that's it! They ignore more penetrating "Kantian" questions simply because they know these go places their logical rigors dare not go! Levinas, Husserl, Fink, Heidegger and on and on; analytic philosophers do not go here because they just like working on puzzles, flexing cognitive muscle. Whole books written on Gettier problems! Nonsense, really. Degrades the entire enterprise.

Heterophenomenology is not "existing my interior". It is working under the assumption that your brain and my brain functions the same way so I can study yours to make conclusions about mine. — Raul

But of course you have to go through your own experience to get to the Other's brain. How is this done, again?

No technical language, but the naturalistic presumption. Yours is metaphysical, mine is naturalistic. — Raul

Explain, please, vis a vis the above.

We're all doing speculative thought... it is philosophy :wink: ... but his naturalistic approach is a winning one. — Raul

We're all doing speculative thought... it is philosophy :wink: ... but his naturalistic approach is a winning one. — Raul

Not sure what is winning. It is more like more of the same under the aegis of new language. Dualism? Still talking about dualism. Ignoring Kant. It just SOUNDS like progress. Never, ever get past Wittgenstein.

Of course, he is humble and realistic, but he follows what I think is the right way... philosophy but with science. Not a philosophy that tries to positioned itself above everything as the king of the world with their anthropocentric views of things (meta-things are good examples). Andler puts nature above anything, being humble pays off. — Raul

Being humble does not undo what he is saying. Nice try. Remember, it is NOT just Descartes. He runs through many ideas taken up by contemporary philosophers, and it is not like a physicist talking about Newton. These basic philosophical issues are not one whit closer to being solved because you will never get beyond the cat to me.

Don't you think this is a "religious" absolutist way of defining philosophy? it appears toas your position your capabilities of thinking above any real, above nature. As Daniel Andler and naturalists say, many philosophers position themselves above nature. This simple thing is what naturalism fixes, putting below nature, approach nature in a humble way. Same way science does. — Raul

Not religious. Just looking to what is presupposed by knowledge claims, that is, looking into the logical structure of such a claim. You say C-fibers firing, e.g., and then, fiber? What is this? I mean, what is the thought that utters it, the intuitive foundation of the world that I receive, what can and cannot be affirmed foundationally? And so on. One does not look at the world for such answers, simply at what must be the case in order for thought and science and being in the world to be the case. Of course, it is accepted that there is a world, but only to the extent that such a world presents itself in the most "immediate" way, as presence. Beyond the analysis of is metaphysics: affirming what is present is also a non presence. Now we are in metaphysics.

Yes, together with philosophy, naturalistic one. Are you telling me a phenomenology conceived as only using human reasoning is more powerful? No, quantum mechanics experiments could never be understood using any phenomenological reasoning... goes beyond naif human intuitions. — Raul

No, Phenomenology does NOT cancel science in the least; at all! It simply says that here, you are not at the ground level of inquiry. There is a question that is something of an elephant in the room, however: When we make observations of the world, we are presented with what is not experience, even though this cannot be confirmed, understood in any model whatsoever! "Outthereness" is not an abstract transcendental, but an IMPOSING transcendental. This is what all th fuss is about in Derrida (?), Husserl, Heidegger(?), Levinas, and others because, for some, the Other is an ethical transcendence. The question is, what IS there that is MORE than the totality of experience? The issue goes to Time. More on this as desired, but it is the basis of my metaethical claims.

Are you serious or being cynic here? — Raul

Philosophy has been going on a very, very long time. Very hard to thumbnail this. We live not in a world of things, but of events. to step beyond the boundaries of an event is to cease and desist making the event in question, aka, experience. How do we do this? Meditation. the trouble with philosophy as you have been reading it, is that it can never objectify the self totally, subsume the self under it Totality fo understanding. It wants to do this, but the egoic center can never be made into an object, and all along, it is the self's Being that hs been at issue. Other things are not actualities, hence the nonsense of words like "material" and "substance" which are at nst placeholders for thigs unspeakable, at worst bad metaphysical assumptions, as if calling a thing natural could establish a basis for the Real.

Likely typos, not proofreading, sorry, no time.

The where does one go from here? Here, being the starting point for any meaningful inquiry at all: right here, in the midst of the world when one makes the critical reductive move into the present. I am referring to Husserl's phenomenological reduction, the suspension of extraneous "naturalistic" knowledge claims in order liberate "the world" from their presuppositions, then discover the actuality that has been there, always, already, but ignored because one was too busy.

I want to know about what it means for the "present" not to be a nonsense term. I think the path to a discovery of what a self is, lies here, in a discovery of the present. I've been reading Husserl, Heidegger, post Heideggarians and then John Mackie's Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong, Wittgenstein's Tractatus, and others (Levinas!) and I have come to the conclusion that the self is not illusory, but my strategy is not a familiar one: the self, the genuine self "behind" the empirically constructed self, if affirmed through ethics, that is, metaethics, the very thing Mackie denies. — Constance

Have you considered this question from the point of view of the "Great Chain of Being"?

https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Great_Chain_of_Being

The Great Chain of Being describes the hierarchy of being and its many levels. Man is a microcosm. Man's being is structured like the universe. Plato described our higher and lower natures in the chariot analogy suggesting that the corruption of the dark source is the source of all our difficulties.

Regular ethics tells a person what to do but metaethics describes what we ARE: But it requires a person existing as the three parts of the tripartite soul to become inwardly balanced. Man exists out of balance so cannot experience metaethics but responds to indoctrinated or acquired ethics.

The goal of metaethics is conscious evolution; the evolution of our out of balance level of being into a higher quality of conscious evolution or inner unity along the Great Chain of Being where metaethics or objective conscience would be the norm.

We only know self in juxtaposition to the world and also as part of it. The self has no known material existence that inside or outside the world. Many will provide component parts to show existence of self, this is not relevant. Only you can know self as you do. you cannot know others 'self' because you cannot be other anything. Hence 'self' is the unique you and inclusive of all. .

Have you considered this question from the point of view of the "Great Chain of Being"?

https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Great_Chain_of_Being

The Great Chain of Being describes the hierarchy of being and its many levels. Man is a microcosm. Man's being is structured like the universe. Plato described our higher and lower natures in the chariot analogy suggesting that the corruption of the dark source is the source of all our difficulties.

Regular ethics tells a person what to do but metaethics describes what we ARE: But it requires a person existing as the three parts of the tripartite soul to become inwardly balanced. Man exists out of balance so cannot experience metaethics but responds to indoctrinated or acquired ethics.

The goal of metaethics is conscious evolution; the evolution of our out of balance level of being into a higher quality of conscious evolution or inner unity along the Great Chain of Being where metaethics or objective conscience would be the norm. — Nikolas

If you want to think about evolution and metaethics, then perhaps De Chardin is the best way to go. At least he recognizes qualitative divisions in evolving creatures. Really, it is here, in the evolved features that the issue lies with. I mean, before there is talk about a hierarchy of Being, we need to look closely at the evidence before us that is the grounding of any and all metaphysical thinking, because all things have their final justification is what is clear and present. Metaphysics can get very messy and preposterous and you find yourself with your head in the clouds wondering how things got this way. This happens when lose touch with what is there, in the world primordially. First, there is the experience and then there is the question! The question opens possibilities. For me, I first look to the actuality of an ethical problem, and determine its parts. I find at the center there is the defining Real: the value. then Wittgenstein, Mackie, and others make their contribution. THEN one may be tempted to draw conclusions about the "meta" nature of evolution, its teleology, perhaps.

The point of this is to first establish qualitative distinctions in ontology BEFORE one makes extravagant elaborations. Pain is there, in one's midst. What makes it ethical at all? The ethics of pain qua pain is at issue. It is not in the descriptive facts, as facts are simple states of affairs, no greater of worse than any other, sitting there on the logical grid.

If one thinks our experiences can be sublime, profound, deeply important, somehow, and these are acknowledged as evolved features, then the structure of evolution must include this. Chain of Being? Would this not mirror the hierarchy within, which is, after all, the source of all speculative thinking?

We only know self in juxtaposition to the world and also as part of it. The self has no known material existence that inside or outside the world. Many will provide component parts to show existence of self, this is not relevant. Only you can know self as you do. you cannot know others 'self' because you cannot be other anything. Hence 'self' is the unique you and inclusive of all. . — Peter Paapaa

Fine. Now what IS it? When you put your attention to the self, its apparent descriptive features, what is there to "see"? this presents questions like, what is the meaning of meaning? For the first thing encountered is the fact that things are not just there, but they are important, we care. But what is this caring about? It is about things in the world, but the caring about things presents the question as to what there is in things to care about, and the matter turns to value, or, the value of value: We bring value into the world. It is the self that makes things meaningful, both conceptually and valuatively. The self is the center of all meaning in the world.
What does this mean?

First, there is the experience and then there is the question! The question opens possibilities. For me, I first look to the actuality of an ethical problem, and determine its parts. I find at the center there is the defining Real: the value. then Wittgenstein, Mackie, and others make their contribution. THEN one may be tempted to draw conclusions about the "meta" nature of evolution, its teleology, perhaps. — Constance

For me the phrase I Am doesn't exist for Man in Plato's Cave. In reality the totality of the human organism can be described as "We are Many." As I understand it, the potential for Man is inner unity where the three parts of the tripartite soul exist as ONE or as a solution rather than as a mixture. So the real I doesn't exist as of yet. It is our potential.

Rather than a soul a human being has the seed of a soul. Jacob Needleman describes our situation as Acornology in his book "Lost Christianity. Our real rather than acquired self is like the kernel of life within the husk of the acorn. Jacob Needleman writes:

I began my lecture that morning from just this point. There is an innate element in human nature, I argued that can grow and develop only through impressions of truth received in the organism like a special nourishing energy. To this innate element I gave a name - perhaps not a very good name - the "higher unconscious." My aim was to draw an extremely sharp distinction between the unconscious that Freud had identified and the unconscious referred to (though not by that name) in the Christian tradition.

Imagine, I said, that you are a scientist and you have before you the object known as the acorn. Let us further imagine that you have never before seen such an object and that you certainly do not know that it can grow into an oak. You carefully observe these acorns day after day and soon you notice that after a while they crack open and die. Pity! How to improve the acorn? So that it will live longer. You make careful, exquisitely precise chemical analyses of the material inside the acorn and, after much effort, you succeed in isolating the substance that controls the condition of the shell. Lo and behold, you are now in the position to produce acorns which will last far longer than the others, acorns whose shells will perhaps never crack. Beautiful!

The question before us, therefore, is whether or not modern psychology is only a version of acornology.

The mistake modern psychology makes is the assumption that the husk of the acorn is like our real self. Can a person be capable of distinguishing between the outer man (our personality) and the inner man (what we are born with)?

“Give me beauty in the inward soul; may the outward and the inward man be at one.” – Socrates.

Can they be at one? Who is willing through efforts to "Know Thyself" to experience what they ARE rather than how they imagine themselves?

(in response to Constance)
The problem is order and value. how do you value a moment compared to an eon or infinity. how do you value a quark compared to a planet. For us humans we have to be able to quantify and qualify things and put them in order to understand some form of algorithm or story that makes sense to us.
What I'm calling existence is outside our conscious awareness (self) and hence cannot be valued within existence or our value systems.
The problem may be (relating to Constance's issue) that your looking for meaning where their is none. Existence doesn't present questions or answers, it just 'is'. What it is everyone and anyone will question but there is no substance or temporal 'fix' we can put on it because it is outside our knowledge and perhaps our understanding of what it is, so it does not fit into the categories, orders and values we have for all other things, there is no interconnective or relational connection to it as compared with all other things within it. It is as definitive as we have got, it is the base of our being the base of our universal understanding.

What is in the world and the interaction of self in the world, everything we do, feel ,think and be is another story of dissection, division, definition, purpose and reason. This is where the complexity of uniqueness, individualism, ism's, social beliefs, systems of belief, and just being in existence itself lies.

Imagine, I said, that you are a scientist and you have before you the object known as the acorn. Let us further imagine that you have never before seen such an object and that you certainly do not know that it can grow into an oak. You carefully observe these acorns day after day and soon you notice that after a while they crack open and die. Pity! How to improve the acorn? So that it will live longer. You make careful, exquisitely precise chemical analyses of the material inside the acorn and, after much effort, you succeed in isolating the substance that controls the condition of the shell. Lo and behold, you are now in the position to produce acorns which will last far longer than the others, acorns whose shells will perhaps never crack. Beautiful! — Nikolas

Since the acorn is a metaphor, the merit of acornology lies with its borrowed explanatory powers, and to me, it doesn't really capture the analysis of the self. True, cultivating better acorns is roughly like improving oneself, but the devil is in the details and this is not brought out by, well, acorns.

"Chemical analysis" of acorns? What are you (or he) suggesting? This is what needs to be explained.

Since the acorn is a metaphor, the merit of acornology lies with its borrowed explanatory powers, and to me, it doesn't really capture the analysis of the self. True, cultivating better acorns is roughly like improving oneself, but the devil is in the details and this is not brought out by, well, acorns.

"Chemical analysis" of acorns? What are you (or he) suggesting? This is what needs to be explained. — Constance

The husk of the acorn is analogous to human personality. We are not born with it but it is acquired in life. It is the source of the OPINION of ourselves. We re born with what we ARE. The healthy kernel of life within the husk is analogous to the seed of the soul which has the chance to develop and become an oak or in this case, to become evolved Man.

Our personality is like a horizontal line connecting us to death. It changes over time by mimicking and hormones. We may have the same knowledge at thirty that we have at twenty but our being has changed along with opinions of ourselves.

The seed of the soul is connected by a vertical line to its source. Where our personality is guided by appearance as with materialism, the seed of the soul is nourished by the experience of vertical truth.

The young seed of the soul initially feeds off of personality experiences. It would be normal for a person to become open to what they are rather then how they appear to be so the husk of the acorn cracks open. It is quite possible that the efficiency of materialism makes it impossible for the personality to outgrow the enchantment with materialism to experience themselves, what they are. Then they can die inside.

As we are, our personality is the dominant part of our lives while the inner man remains in the background and doesn't grow. It is possible that a person can consciously strive to awaken the inner Man containing the seed of the soul by weakening the reactive dominance of our personality. Instead of being limited to animal REACTION they can become capable of conscious ACTION. They can become conscious of the forest rather than being fixated on the trees.

A real Man IMO is one who can put knowledge of the trees and its needs into the perspective of the forest as a whole and its needs along with the will to act upon it.

The problem is order and value. how do you value a moment compared to an eon or infinity. how do you value a quark compared to a planet. For us humans we have to be able to quantify and qualify things and put them in order to understand some form of algorithm or story that makes sense to us.
What I'm calling existence is outside our conscious awareness (self) and hence cannot be valued within existence or our value systems.
The problem may be (relating to Constance's issue) that your looking for meaning where their is none. Existence doesn't present questions or answers, it just 'is'. What it is everyone and anyone will question but there is no substance or temporal 'fix' we can put on it because it is outside our knowledge and perhaps our understanding of what it is, so it does not fit into the categories, orders and values we have for all other things, there is no interconnective or relational connection to it as compared with all other things within it. It is as definitive as we have got, it is the base of our being the base of our universal understanding.

What is in the world and the interaction of self in the world, everything we do, feel ,think and be is another story of dissection, division, definition, purpose and reason. This is where the complexity of uniqueness, individualism, ism's, social beliefs, systems of belief, and just being in existence itself lies. — Peter Paapaa

Not sure why I'm looking for meaning where there is none. Clearly, meaning is there, in indulgence, the rapture, bliss, suffering, pain, and so on, IN the world. There is no mistaking this: right there, in my pounding headache or the Haagen Dazs I had for dessert. In terms of the sheer "presence" of these, I take them as foundational and irreducible.

As to the notion of "just is" keep in mind that physics held a consensus at the end of the 19th century that believed for the most part there was little else to find out in the field in terms of its fundamentals. "Just is" is itself a theoretical term. When we speak of what IS we put in play a history of thought handed to us culture and language.

This is true with philosophy as much as anything else. Consider the difference between Eastern and Western thought. the trick, though is to find common ground. After all, they are talking about the same world, it's just that there is this persistent "what it is" body of paradigms that gets in the way. The difficulty lies in bringing them together, and phenomenological thinking does this.

The husk of the acorn is analogous to human personality. We are not born with it but it is acquired in life. It is the source of the OPINION of ourselves. We re born with what we ARE. The healthy kernel of life within the husk is analogous to the seed of the soul which has the chance to develop and become an oak or in this case, to become evolved Man. — Nikolas

Ah, the soul. Pray, elaborate.

The seed of the soul is connected by a vertical line to its source. Where our personality is guided by appearance as with materialism, the seed of the soul is nourished by the experience of vertical truth. — Nikolas

Fine, but tell me more about the soul, I mean, what there is in experience that gives warrant to this notion as a meaningful one. We begin with what we witness, not with metaphors and assumptions and metaphysics.

As we are, our personality is the dominant part of our lives while the inner man remains in the background and doesn't grow. It is possible that a person can consciously strive to awaken the inner Man containing the seed of the soul by weakening the reactive dominance of our personality. Instead of being limited to animal REACTION they can become capable of conscious ACTION. They can become conscious of the forest rather than being fixated on the trees. — Nikolas

It's not that I disagree with all of this, rather, I don't know its foundation beyond the arbitrary positing of the soul. To argue the case, one has to begin with what is there, present and "at hand" so to speak. From this, one moves outward.

It's not that I disagree with all of this, rather, I don't know its foundation beyond the arbitrary positing of the soul. To argue the case, one has to begin with what is there, present and "at hand" so to speak. From this, one moves outward. — Constance

We begin with the experience through efforts to "Know Thyself" That the human essence is in three parts or mind, appetites, and sensations. These parts are not consciously connected but are connected by imagination. As a result our inner world doesn't experience the outer world. Instead we interpret it. Our senses are weak. Our emotions are filled with negativity, and being governed by duality we do not see that the universe as a triune reality. Step one is to verify what we ARE: the human condition.

Meister Eckhart describes the seed of the Soul. Can Man become a son of God: "The seed of God is in us. Given an intelligent and hard-working farmer, it will thrive and grow up to God, whose seed it is; and accordingly its fruits will be God-nature. Pear seeds grow into pear trees, nut seeds into nut trees, and God-seed into God." Meister Eckhart

The seed is rarely present. Jacob Needleman describes it in his book "Lost Christianity"

What we need to learn is that merely to look at things as they are with bare attention can be a religious act.

The principal power of the soul, which defines its real nature, is a gathered attention that is directed simultaneously toward the spirit and the body. This is attention of the heart, and this is the principal mediating, harmonizing power of the soul. The mediating attention of the heart is spontaneously activated in the state of profound self-questioning. God can only speak to the soul, Father Sylvan writes, and only when the soul exists. But the soul of man only exists for a moment, as long as it takes for the question to appear and disappear.

The seed of the soul only appears when we stop imagining reality. Can we experience rather than imagine reality? Can the three parts of the tripartite soul exist as ONE? How can it be done to allow the seed of the soul to grow?

I think for all us soul searchers the relentless seeking for answers has prevented us all to look at 'what is' and claim 'there must be more to this than "what is"'. This notion will always have those who seek beyond and believe there is always more.
Simply, we know too little to say we know so much. Thus there may be more, but our capacity it limited to understanding what we can know.
There has to be a point or points of origin. A point so fundamental that further questioning can only project from it, around it or despite it. It is hard to exclude existence from this base line, and trying to define it is an interesting exercise. Either way it appears to be a 'what is' from which we launch all our everything.

This is attention of the heart, and this is the principal mediating, harmonizing power of the soul. The mediating attention of the heart is spontaneously activated in the state of profound self-questioning. — Nikolas

Attention of the heart? You mean emotional attention, to regard the world in a loving way. Self questioning leads to this? I think it requires a certain kind of self questioning. The question opens up possibilities and violates familiar thinking. What happens in self questioning, the "Who am I, really? and Why do we suffer? and so forth? It sounds like you think the question at the basic level presents something, but you cannot yet call it a soul, I don't think. You first have to be more descriptive: what is it one's encounters in inquiry that warrants positing the soul? Here one has dropped standard thinking altogether and entered a relatively alien world, relative, that is, to our everydayness.

Can you confirm such a thing, and explain it keeping faithful to what the world actually presents itsel;f as Being? This is where things get philosophical. Eckhart, remember, wrote of how he prayed to God to be rid of God. He wanted to be free of this everydayness that a lifetime of conditioning imposed on his thoughts and feelings, and, especially, his baseline intuitions.

I think for all us soul searchers the relentless seeking for answers has prevented us all to look at 'what is' and claim 'there must be more to this than "what is"'. This notion will always have those who seek beyond and believe there is always more.
Simply, we know too little to say we know so much. Thus there may be more, but our capacity it limited to understanding what we can know.
There has to be a point or points of origin. A point so fundamental that further questioning can only project from it, around it or despite it. It is hard to exclude existence from this base line, and trying to define it is an interesting exercise. Either way it appears to be a 'what is' from which we launch all our everything. — Peter Paapaa

This "what is" has a philosophical history that is not altogether antagonistic to, if you will, reclaiming something deep and primordial about being a self. But it takes some serious reading. I am reading the French post Heideggerians who take the moment of inquiry that sets one apart from mundane thinking very seriously. See Levinas, Michel Henry, Jean luc Marion, and others. Fink's Sixth Meditation hs always been a favorite, but one needs Kant and Husserl for clarity, I think.

This is attention of the heart, and this is the principal mediating, harmonizing power of the soul. The mediating attention of the heart is spontaneously activated in the state of profound self-questioning.
— Nikolas

Attention of the heart? You mean emotional attention, to regard the world in a loving way. Self questioning leads to this? I think it requires a certain kind of self questioning. The question opens up possibilities and violates familiar thinking. What happens in self questioning, the "Who am I, really? and Why do we suffer? and so forth? It sounds like you think the question at the basic level presents something, but you cannot yet call it a soul, I don't think. You first have to be more descriptive: what is it one's encounters in inquiry that warrants positing the soul? Here one has dropped standard thinking altogether and entered a relatively alien world, relative, that is, to our everydayness.

Can you confirm such a thing, and explain it keeping faithful to what the world actually presents itsel;f as Being? This is where things get philosophical. Eckhart, remember, wrote of how he prayed to God to be rid of God. He wanted to be free of this everydayness that a lifetime of conditioning imposed on his thoughts and feelings, and, especially, his baseline intuitions. — Constance

."Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity. It is given to very few minds to notice that things and beings exist. Since my childhood I have not wanted anything else but to receive the complete revelation of this before dying." ~Simone Weil

I don't mean emotional attention which is animal in nature but rather conscious attention which is a quality not arising from the earth but from a higher perspective which reconciles animal duality into a triune perspective. Anyone seeking to understand the meaning and purpose of Man on earth IMO must eventually study conscious attention if for no other reason to experience why we don't have it but are attached to the shadows on the wall of Plato's Cave.

https://www.brainpickings.org/2016/03/25/william-james-attention/

Long before contemporary psychologists came to examine the self-referential base of consciousness, James writes:

Millions of items of the outward order are present to my senses which never properly enter into my experience. Why? Because they have no interest for me. My experience is what I agree to attend to. Only those items which I notice shape my mind — without selective interest, experience is an utter chaos. Interest alone gives accent and emphasis, light and shade, background and foreground intelligible perspective, in a word. It varies in every creature, but without it the consciousness of every creature would be a gray chaotic indiscriminateness, impossible for us even to conceive.

Most people probably fall several times a day into a fit of something like this: The eyes are fixed on vacancy, the sounds of the world melt into confused unity, the attention is dispersed so that the whole body is felt, as it were, at once, and the foreground of consciousness is filled, if by anything, by a sort of solemn sense of surrender to the empty passing of time. In the dim background of our mind we know meanwhile what we ought to be doing: getting up, dressing ourselves, answering the person who has spoken to us, trying to make the next step in our reasoning… Every moment we expect the spell to break, for we know no reason why it should continue. But it does continue, pulse after pulse, and we float with it, until also without reason that we can discover an energy is given, something we know not what enables us to gather ourselves together, we wink our eyes, we shake our heads, the background-ideas become effective, and the wheels of life go round again.

[…]

The abolition of this condition is what we call the awakening of the attention.

The growing loss of conscious attention in the world leads to n increased obsession with fragmentation

Man on earth is a being with both a higher and a lower nature. This can only be consciously reconciled through the third force of conscious attention which the world struggles against in favor of emotionally justifying the superiority of fragmentation.

I think for all us soul searchers the relentless seeking for answers has prevented us all to look at 'what is' and claim 'there must be more to this than "what is"'. This notion will always have those who seek beyond and believe there is always more.
Simply, we know too little to say we know so much. Thus there may be more, but our capacity it limited to understanding what we can know.
There has to be a point or points of origin. A point so fundamental that further questioning can only project from it, around it or despite it. It is hard to exclude existence from this base line, and trying to define it is an interesting exercise. Either way it appears to be a 'what is' from which we launch all our everything.
— Peter Paapaa

This "what is" has a philosophical history that is not altogether antagonistic to, if you will, reclaiming something deep and primordial about being a self. But it takes some serious reading. I am reading the French post Heideggerians who take the moment of inquiry that sets one apart from mundane thinking very seriously. See Levinas, Michel Henry, Jean luc Marion, and others. Fink's Sixth Meditation hs always been a favorite, but one needs Kant and Husserl for clarity, I think. — Constance

If you want to begin to understand the origin of NOW have you considered Plotinus' idea of the ONE?

https://iep.utm.edu/plotinus/

a. The One
The ‘concept’ of the One is not, properly speaking, a concept at all, since it is never explicitly defined by Plotinus, yet it is nevertheless the foundation and grandest expression of his philosophy. Plotinus does make it clear that no words can do justice to the power of the One; even the name, ‘the One,’ is inadequate, for naming already implies discursive knowledge, and since discursive knowledge divides or separates its objects in order to make them intelligible, the One cannot be known through the process of discursive reasoning (Ennead VI.9.4). Knowledge of the One is achieved through the experience of its ‘power’ (dunamis) and its nature, which is to provide a ‘foundation’ (arkhe) and location (topos) for all existents (VI.9.6). The ‘power’ of the One is not a power in the sense of physical or even mental action; the power of the One, as Plotinus speaks of it, is to be understood as the only adequate description of the ‘manifestation’ of a supreme principle that, by its very nature, transcends all predication and discursive understanding. This ‘power,’ then, is capable of being experienced, or known, only through contemplation (theoria), or the purely intellectual ‘vision’ of the source of all things. The One transcends all beings, and is not itself a being, precisely because all beings owe their existence and subsistence to their eternal contemplation of the dynamic manifestation(s) of the One. The One can be said to be the ‘source’ of all existents only insofar as every existent naturally and (therefore) imperfectly contemplates the various aspects of the One, as they are extended throughout the cosmos, in the form of either sensible or intelligible objects or existents. The perfect contemplation of the One, however, must not be understood as a return to a primal source; for the One is not, strictly speaking, a source or a cause, but rather the eternally present possibility — or active making-possible — of all existence, of Being (V.2.1). According to Plotinus, the unmediated vision of the ‘generative power’ of the One, to which existents are led by the Intelligence (V.9.2), results in an ecstatic dance of inspiration, not in a satiated torpor (VI.9.8); for it is the nature of the One to impart fecundity to existents — that is to say: the One, in its regal, indifferent capacity as undiminishable potentiality of Being, permits both rapt contemplation and ecstatic, creative extension. These twin poles, this ‘stanchion,’ is the manifested framework of existence which the One produces, effortlessly (V.1.6). The One, itself, is best understood as the center about which the ‘stanchion,’ the framework of the cosmos, is erected (VI.9.8). This ‘stanchion’ or framework is the result of the contemplative activity of the Intelligence.

the self, the genuine self "behind" the empirically constructed self, if affirmed through ethics, that is, metaethics, the very thing Mackie denies. — Constance

It seems to me that the self - or a large part of it - is our relationship with the world. It is ever changing - you can't step into the same river twice...

If you want to begin to understand the origin of NOW have you considered Plotinus' idea of the ONE? — Nikolas

Sure, I've read the Enneads, or, enough of them here and there through time, and I understand pretty well the essential thinking. It is written about in different ways by Taoists, Hindus and Buddhists, Kierkegaard, Jaspers (the Encompassing---no doubt he had read Plotinus), Levinas, et al. Interesting to read broadly on this issue because other fill in the gaps, open lines of inquiry that one didn't know were there. And in doing this, my view is, there is a conscious assault on the conditioned experiences that hold our minds, souls, selves, whatever. Eckhart wished to be rid of "God" but really it is the firmly based experiential grounding acquired through a lifetime that needs to be exorcized.
The real question is, after one has reviewed the matter and observed the crisis of the understanding when it comes to God and the everydayness of living and thinking, how is liberation achieved? The One is bound to the many, if you want to talk like this, and the many is a perversion of this if taken as foundational. See Kierkegaard's Fear and trembling, e.g.You know, they are all talking about the same thing.

It seems to me that the self - or a large part of it - is our relationship with the world. It is ever changing - you can't step into the same river twice... — EnPassant

Is there nothing at all that IS the river?

Is there nothing at all that IS the river? — Constance

Perhaps we have a self but it isn't much if it is not in a relationship to something. The ever changing river is the relationship between us and the world. That seems to be what the self is.

It's my supicion, well-founded or not (you be the judge), that the entire story of ethics and the self, rides on the simpler notion of causality. An event takes place and instincitvely we seek a cause. This desire to pin down a cause transforms into an ethical dimension while the cause itself is rendered by the mind into a self, a self that's treated as an autonomous, free agent.