And this insight is not from a transcendent vantage point? — frank
The passage in John 1:1 is mysticism with roots in platonism and stoicism. I think the assumption running through it was that the world's logic is our logic. We perceive the world's logic through a kind of sympathy that could be described as having access to the divine mind through logic. Or you could say our minds are the Divine mind, just muddied.
Two side effects were:
1. The One, which is a higher, unexpressable truth, and
2. Matter, the mind's dead end.
These are like poles between which the mind swings like a pendulum. And this is the trinity, btw: the Christian translation is Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. The original was One, Logos, and Anima. — frank
You're referencing sort of a raw data feed that enters your brain, unprocessed at all by reason. It's a hyper-empiricism, devoid of rational organization within the mind. Was this not part of Kant's project in responding to Hume? That is, we can't see the causation when one billiard ball hits the other, so our mind imposes it, which is no different than all the other things our mind imposes on the world in order to understand it, whether that be space, time, or other sorts of things?
The immediate sense impression you reference doesn't make sense to me because it would necessarily be mediated in some way. That mediation isn't limited to sense organs, but by reason itself, which is in fact impacted by language.
So explain to me the elephant just as it is, unmediated by sensory organs or reason. How could that ever be done - the pure unadulterated elephant? — Hanover
The elephant in t he room is this "presence" that is noumenal that is right there IN the empirical event unfolding before my eyes and mind. — Constance
So why aren't clouds intelligent? Don't your observations show that they are? They don't dilly dally running in circles when they come to a low pressure zone. They go straight to raining as your goats go to the barn — frank
And to make that dramatic step toward the one: how is this done? Isn't the logos, in this extraordinary affair, simply a term that would possess what it is that lies so impossibly before the inquirer? Philosophy is, one might say, the true final frontier, and the obstacles it presents are about its own structure and history. The utterance itself turns on, militates against, the endeavor! For the finality lies not in a more and more elaborate construction of a grand thesis, as if Hegelian Geist were unfolding in the dialectical path of conceiving it, but in the impossible simplicity that is originally there. Impossible because, recalling Kierkegaard, actuality is NOT rational. Divinity discovery is not rational achievement. — Constance
How do I conclude you are intelligent and not a cloud responding to pressure zones? — Hanover
Conclusion: Unfortunately, the statement "In the beginning was the Word", wherever it comes from, has no value for me as interpreted by the Bible and the majority of the Jewish and Christian people. — Alkis Piskas
I think you're making assumptions. It's not from observation, that was my point. — frank
A speculative thinker who is almost unreadable and readily misinterpreted is unlikely to help. How about one of the numerous physicists writing on the subject? — Tom Storm
Sure, and my point was that unless you're going to fall into some sort of solipsism, you have to make assumptions based upon the observations you make. My goats engage in intentional behavior that clouds and rocks do not. Th — Hanover
The rock does not stubbornly sit before me refusing to respond to change in a literal sense. — Hanover
But, if there is some philosophical theory that will unravel for you if it requires you hold that goats cannot engage in intentional conduct, and I have to use the cloud analogy to substantiate that goats don't engage in intentional conduct, then I feel fairly satisfied in rejecting whatever that theory is. — Hanover
You had better tell that to the professor...
— Pop
They are doing science; you are not. — Banno
The word God means moral perfection and innocence. Such a state seems impossible for humans and for a necessary being, although not for a lower "god". There cannot be a being of Pure Act because virtues are divided up between ones a being can have by nature and ones that require the eye of the tiger to obtain. There might be a being of infinite innocence but it couldn't have the maximum of courage if it was always in a blissful changeless state "rolling around heaven all day". Again, there is innocence and acquired goods, childhood-natural goods and goods that must be performed. So are there wizards and a pantheon? Are these who "aliens" really are? It's not bad to think so. I listen to a lot of traditional religious music and connect with the mystical ethos of it. But all this talk of the world coming from a language, whether it be of Genesis or an Om, goes back to the paternal Pure Act being of traditional religion who in reality can't represent all reality because some goods in reality must be experienced in order to partake of. — Gregory
Specifically I define it, and through this definition have found that nothing can exist outside of information - outside of the interaction of two or more forms. — Pop
Ah, there it is again: Stove's Gem.My claim... is that this conception can only lead to one conclusion: that cat on the sofa is really not a cat on a sofa at all, but I cannot see this because I understand the world only through my cognitive and sensory limitations ( — Constance
Does that conclusion amount to a rejection of a claim that something else can be recognized outside of the stories we make to explain things? — Valentinus
Does that conclusion amount to a rejection of a claim that something else can be recognized outside of the stories we make to explain things? — Valentinus
So, is that to say, that you consider the challenge made by Constance to be irrelevant to your enterprise? — Valentinus
The real question is, does the world "speak"? I mean, religion is a philosophical matter, and the reason this idea sounds counterintuitive is that philosophy, in the minds of many or most, has no place in the dark places where language cannot go, but this is a Kantian/Wittgensteinian (Heidegger, too, of course; though he takes steps....) legacy that rules out impossible thinking, and it is here where philosophy has gone so very wrong: Philosophy is an empty vessel unless it takes on the the original encounter with the world, which is prior to language, and yet, IN language, for language is in the world. Philosophy's end, point, that is, is threshold enlightenment, not some foolish anal retentive need for positivism's clarity. — Constance
The relationship of one part to another, is where logical structure begins. This is the beginning of knowledge. Knowledge is related and integrated, and is progressively built upon, such that any subsequent structure ( added understanding ) has to fit existing logical structure, as per constructivism. So, things understood tomorrow have to be understood in terms of today's understanding. So, it is a building onto current understanding. — Pop
Occam's Razor is god? — Banno
Wittgenstein proceeded beyond this; as if the Tractatus were his final word. He subsequently showed the limitations of his view in the Tractatus, showing "the nature of logic" in terms of following and going against rules.
And he had much to say about the identification of simples. What is to count as a simple depends on what one is doing. There's a deep tendency for folk to choose this or that to be the ultimate simple - Logos, information, dialectic (@Pop); but any such choice will be relative to this or that activity - that language game.
So answering the question "what was at the beginning..." - the beginning of what? That'll tell us what game we are playing. — Banno
How do you remember what you can't put into words? — frank
Well, that's not what I would have supposed, although care is needed here. Russell commented that "Mr Wittgenstein manages to say a good deal about what cannot be said". Much of the Investigations, and also of On Certainty, touches on this topic, which his biographers agree was for him or the highest importance. Wittgenstein's enterprise is targeted at the enterprise of scientism; for him what is of the greatest import is what is unsaid.But Witt never thought that language had a place in giving expression to those spooky, mystical, threshold experiences one encounters that yield meaning without perfect clarity. — Constance
Never occurred to him (that I have read) that deconstruction really meant destruction to achieve insight. Can't imagine his type "sitting quietly, doing nothing", but then, this is what I privilege over all esle, for it opens the door to, well, sheer openness, which is where philosophy is directing us. — Constance
But to talk about possibility of impossibility points first to the "'words or logic" that constructs concepts like possibility and impossibility. Perfect relation? What is this if not a language construction? Absolute interconnectedness in the logos? What is this if not a logical interconnectedness? That is, the "saying" is always analytically first. — Constance
And this tapping into eternity, how does this cash out in analysis? Terms like finitude and infinity are fascinating to me, but it is not as if they are exhausted in the mere utterance, the incidental usage. for the question posed here goes to the structure of time itself. Time, I claim (and I am no more than what I read) is the structure of finitude, and finitude is subsumed by eternity, both, obviously, difficult terms and deserve discussion, but the final discussion to be had on this and any matter looks at the th phenomenological analysis of time. What is time? This is presupposed by talk about beginnings. — Constance
Don't know what you mean by infinite perfection. Not that I have no ideas about such a thing, but what you mean is not clear. At any rate, This intersection: is there just this (leaning Heideggarian) construction? Or is there not something, if you will, behind this in the reductive act of suspending all these possibilities? Once you step into that rarified world where language's grasp on the givenness of things is loosened, and meaning is free from interpretative restraint, is there not some undeniable qualitative change in the perceptual event as such? — Constance
What you say about identity is quite right, I think, and this then makes a turn toward agency, for identity is general, definitional, as in the identity of a term, a concept, but agency is all about the actuality of what it is (who it is). Most clearly an issue for ethics. — Constance
I am claiming there is something that is NOT a game at all in the middle of all this, which is intimated when the game is intentionally, if partially, terminated, yet inquiry moves forward. — Constance
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