Buddhism basically says that the cause of suffering is not some evil Gnostic demiurge that wants to torture mankind, or an indifferent God who lets the innocent suffer for no reason. No, the cause of suffering can be found within oneself, in the form of the constant desire (trishna, thirst, clinging) - to be or to become, to possess and to retain, to cling to the transitory and ephemeral as if they were lasting and satisfying, when by their very nature, they are not. That of course is a very deep and difficult thing to penetrate, as the desire to be and to become is engrained in us by the entire history of biological existence. — Wayfarer

I think this idea isn't hard to understand. What does one make of a more complex and overt example of suffering wherein an innocent is the victim and desire apparently absent? I'm thinking of a 10 year-old kid in one of Pol Pot's death camps. What might such a Buddhist perspective make of the kid's relationship to their plight?

In order to always have a secure compass in hand so as to find one's way in life, and to see life always in the correct light without going astray, nothing is more suitable than getting used to seeing the world as something like a penal colony. This view finds its...justification not only in my philosophy, but also in the wisdom of all times, namely, in Brahmanism, Buddhism, Empedocles, Pythagoras [...] Even in genuine and correctly understood Christianity, our existence is regarded as the result of a liability or a misstep. ... We will thus always keep our position in mind and regard every human, first and foremost, as a being that exists only on account of sinfulness, and who is life is an expiation of the offence committed through birth. Exactly this constitutes what Christianity calls the sinful nature of man. — Arthur Schopenhauer, quoted in Schopenhauer's Compass, Urs App

Buddhism, it is said, does not accept the idea of original sin, however, it is understood that beings are bound by a state of beginningless ignorance, which bears some resemblance. I understand that this is incomprehensible from the perspective of secular philosophy, for which this life and the amelioration of political, economic and physical conditions is the only meaningful aim. But it is relevant to the OP.

it is understood that beings are bound by a state of beginningless ignorance, which bears some resemblance. — Wayfarer

I think that's an interesting idea.

One of the Buddhist sayings I read on Dharmawheel was that ‘saṃsāra has no beginning but it has an end. Nirvāṇa has a beginning but it has no end.’

Also, is it supposed to be a vice to "assert with bold certainty" that a knife is a bad toy to give a baby? — Count Timothy von Icarus

It depends on the system of convictions that underlie your beliefs concerning what is good and what is bad for a baby, just as what constitutes genital mutilation depends on such guiding assumptions. Archeologists found tiny tools and weapons dating back 1700 years.

"They were just not made for adult-sized hands," Losey says. Instead, they appeared to be scaled-down versions for children. Perhaps, the researchers speculate, adults fashioned the tiny tools so that youngsters could begin to hone the hunting skills they would later need, the researchers report this month in Antiquity

Losey and Hull's speculation lines up with what researchers observe in many societies today, says David Lancy, an anthropologist emeritus at Utah State University in Logan. From an early age, children are allowed to interact with the tools adults use to work, forage, and hunt, often with no parental supervision. Babies suck on sharp knives; toddlers play with machetes.

I mention in my other post that I believe in truth as an asymptotic goal of knowledge , and knowledge as a progressive approximation toward an ultimate truth. This goes for ethical truth as well. But I dont see this progress as conformity to pre-determined moral truths , any more than I see scientific progress as conformity to ‘the way things are’, except by understanding the ‘way things are’ in terms of an intricately intercorrelated order of development that transcends all fixed properties and laws. This means ethical progress is not a matter of finding fault on the basis of a pre-given knowledge, but of enriching understanding by presenting new dimensions of appraisal and construing.

To say that America has a coastline is to assume some configurative understanding of what a coastline is, which is to say, a system of anticipations concerning what it means to interact with it.

…when a concept or model changes, it does not imply that what is known through them changes. This is for the same reason that if I light a photograph of myself on fire I don't suffer burns, or if I unfocus my telescope, the craters in the Moon aren't smoothed away.

“whenever we use the word we commit ourselves to a particular implied system of interaction”

Yes, a system of interaction where the ocean is not a cliff or a beach. But these interactions don't depend on us knowing about them. — Count Timothy von Icarus

The word ‘bus’ implies a system of interactions with the object ‘bus’ based on our understanding of what it is and what it does. Someone who doesnt know about automobiles or even carriages would see it as very different kind of object and interact with it in different ways as a result. If you want to see how different people interact differently with the same coastline ask them to sit down and paint a painting of the scene as accurately as possible. There will be similarities among the paintings, but none will look identical. This is not just due to different skill levels but to the fact that each person’s procedure for measuring and depicting it makes use of a slightly different process. Objective space is derivative of our subjective determination of space.

"America did not have a coastline until it was mapped," and "penguins and cockroaches didn't exist until man experienced them," are prima facie implausible claims. Extraordinary claims require solid evidence. Yet as noted above, one can easily accept enactivist premises, reject the "view from nowhere," and recognize the epistemic primacy of interaction without having to suppose any of this. You seem to need additional premises to justify this sort of claim, not merely dismissing other views.

As it stands, this looks akin to saying "three and three doesn't make five, thus it must make seven." Well, the first premise is right. The conclusion is extremely counterintuitive though and it's unclear how it is supposed to follow. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I should note that cartography is as much an art as a science. Is an authography projection more accurate than a mercator projection? Things exist in relation to what they interact with, and their properties are a function of that interaction. If a coastline existed prior to the arrival of humans, we have to ask who or what it existed for and in relation to. For instance, we could show what existed in terms of the ways of dealing with it of other animals . Birds have excellent vision and can scan a large area. They ‘see’ something like a coastline much better than we can with the naked eye, but what that coastline means for them is a function of what they do with it, how it matters to their activities and purposes. Just as the person who has no familiarity with vehicles ‘sees’ a bus differently from someone who knows what they are for, a bird sees a coastline differently from the way we do. If we remove all the animals, the coastline still exists , but now it has to be understood from the ‘point of view’ of the inorganic structures that interact with it. In each case, whether it is involved with humans, animals or non-living things, the coastline exists as ‘something’, but what this something is must be determined by what it does, and what it does is a function of its relations with the structures it interacts with. Nothing about a ‘coastline’ or any other thing pre-exists its interactions with other things. Things are nothing outside of their interactions. This is what it means to exist.

Having said this, you might be surprised to hear that I’m a big fan of truth as an asymptotic goal of knowledge , and knowledge as a progressive approximation toward an ultimate truth. Furthermore, I associate truth with achieving a knowledge characterized by stability, inferential compatibility, prediction and control, harmoniousness and intimacy. It might seem as though what I have said points to a relativism that eliminates the possibility of achieving these goals of truth, but I believe the universe is highly ordered. Its order is in the nature of an intricate process of self-development rather than in static properties and laws. We become privy to this intricate order by participating in its development through our sciences, technologies and other domains of creativity.

The word ‘bus’ implies a system of interactions with the object ‘bus’ based on our understanding of what it is and what it does. Someone who doesnt know about automobiles or even carriages would see it as very different kind of object and interact with it in different ways as a result. If you want to see how different people interact differently with the same coastline ask them to sit down and paint a painting of the scene as accurately as possible. There will be similarities among the paintings, but none will look identical. This is not just due to different skill levels but to the fact that each person’s procedure for measuring and depicting it makes use of a slightly different process. Objective space is derivative of our subjective determination of space.

First, a bus is a poor example because it is an artifact.

Second, your claim is that the coastline changes because different people paint or think of it differently, and that it doesn't exist until painted, mapped, etc. Nothing you've said supports this claim; it doesn't follow from the premises. No one disagrees that different people will paint a coastline differently or that coastlines interacted with birds before men. However, most would disagree that the coastline didn't exist until it was painted. Again, you seem to need a premise like: "things are entirely defined by their relations and all relations and properties are essential." But I don't see why anyone would agree to premises like this because it implies things like: "you change when someone lights a picture of you on fire," and "ants didn't exist until people developed an abstraction of 'ant.'"

The ordering seems bizarre here too. Wouldn't it make more sense that people mapped a coastline or developed an abstraction of "ants" because they encountered coastlines and ants?


Let me give an example of why the idea that concrete particulars change when people's ideas about them change is ridiculous. Suppose that in the far future people have a very poor understanding of our epoch of history. Due to a loss of sources, they have come to conflate Adolf Hitler and George Washington. They know of the USA, and Germany, and they think America was founded by Hitler after he fled Germany after losing World War II and ordering the Holocaust. Is it now true that: "Adolf Hitler, perpetrator of the Holocaust, was the first President of the United States?"

But that's a patently absurd commitment, as is "mosquitos didn't exist until man experienced them." We have plenty of evidence to suggest mosquitos were around and interacting with things long before man.

It depends on the system of convictions that underlie your beliefs concerning what is good and what is bad for a baby, just as what constitutes genital mutilation depends on such guiding assumptions. Archeologists found tiny tools and weapons dating back 1700 years.

A completely facile counter example, toys are not the real weapons. People today let toddlers have toy guns and swords too. They might even let them play with an unloaded gun. They don't load a revolver, cock it, and then throw it in a crib with a 9 month old unless they're trying to kill their child (or play a unique form of Russian roulette). Not to mention these are clearly for older children, who might very well be given duller knives to help prepare food even today. An infant isn't honing any skills besides basic grasping. This is another obvious constraint, you cannot teach a three month old to ride a bike or dress a deer.

Circumcision, scarification, tattooing, foot binding, etc. all have reasons, even if they might be abhorrent ones. Letting a child randomly maim themselves by accident doesn't fit the mold. And at any rate, absolutely none of that matters because its still the case that one wouldn't do it unless one wanted their child to accidently slash themselves, which is the constraint in question. If one wants to give a baby a toy they will actually enjoy, a razor sharp knife will never be appropriate.

If one thinks a brain is a physical organ that generates perceptual events, then it has to be explained how it is possible that these events can be about objects in the world.

But a naturalist with a proper understanding of perception wouldn't say that. Brains don't generate experiences of objects by themselves. This is what I mean by inappropriate decomposition and reductionism. Take a brain out of a body and it won't be experiencing anything. Put a body in a vacuum and what you'll have is a corpse, not experiences. It's the same thing if you put a body on the surface of a star or the bottom of the sea. Nothing looks like anything in a dark room, or in a room with no oxygen, etc.

In physicalist explanations of perception the objects perceived and the environment are all essential.

But I said it is far worse. If causality cannot deliver "knowledge about" this means ALL that stands before me as a knowledge claim--explicit or implicit, a ready to hand pragmatic claim or a presence at hand (oh look, there is a cat) claim, or just the general implicit "claims" of familiarity as one walks down the street---requires something entirely other than causality to explain how it is possible.

Ok, but you haven't, as far as I can tell, done anything to justify the claim that we cannot know things through their causes or effects, you've just stated it repeatedly. Prima facie, this claim seems wrong; effects are signs of their causes. Smoke, for instance, is a natural sign of combustion.

If effects didn't tell us anything about their causes, or causes about their effects, then the main methods of the empirical sciences should be useless. But they aren't. Likewise, if pouring water into my gas tank caused my car to die, it seems that I can learn something about my car from this.

But the above seems plainly false for the only way for an exemplification to exemplify is assume a particular causal series that demonstrates this. This is rare, and when it comes to a causal matrix of neurons and, synapses and axonal connectivity, well: my cat in no way at all "is exemplified" by this.

I'm sorry, I couldn't parse this. Nothing can exemplify anything?

I couldn't really understand the rest of the post either.

But a naturalist with a proper understanding of perception wouldn't say that. Brains don't generate experiences of objects by themselves. This is what I mean by inappropriate decomposition and reductionism. Take a brain out of a body and it won't be experiencing anything. Put a body in a vacuum and what you'll have is a corpse, not experiences. It's the same thing if you put a body on the surface of a star or the bottom of the sea. Nothing looks like anything in a dark room, or in a room with no oxygen, etc — Count Timothy von Icarus

And how does one speak about brains and bodies and vacuums star and seas? One observes them, like anything else. And what IS an observation? THIS is the rub! Observations cannot be merely assumed any more than, say, gravity can with the claim that well, things fall down. Yes, they do fall down, and observing a star or a dna molecule does have this same simplicity about it, that is, one observes it and there it is. But gravity is perhaps the most difficult and elusive concepts in physics. Why, one has to ask, is observation allowed to be so simple?

Make the move to explaining what it means to observe something. Are you a scientist? You know where this leads: to a very complex account of the brain physiology. But note: how does one begin here? By observing. Surely you can see the obvious question begging here. Egregiously ignored, just because it is so obvious. It is what it means to observe at all that is in question, and one cannot simply assume it.

But then, clearly we DO have a world and science is certainly not wrong about everything. It is just not right when its assumptions are carried into this strange place we find ourselves, which is metaphysics. This impasse is real. One has to simply raise one's head, observe the lamp on the desk, and understand that this observation is an ontological and epistemic radical indeterminacy at the basic level of analysis.

Ok, but you haven't, as far as I can tell, done anything to justify the claim that we cannot know things through their causes or effects, you've just stated it repeatedly. Prima facie, this claim seems wrong; effects are signs of their causes. Smoke, for instance, is a natural sign of combustion. — Count Timothy von Icarus

You're living in a fantasy world if the discussion is about basic questions. Science and everyday observations do not ask basic questions. Analytically prior to smoke is perception itself.

If effects didn't tell us anything about their causes, or causes about their effects, then the main methods of the empirical sciences should be useless. But they aren't. Likewise, if pouring water into my gas tank caused my car to die, it seems that I can learn something about my car from this. — Count Timothy von Icarus

There is nothing about causality that is epistemic. One has to look hard and clear at this. Nothing. But in this reasoning, it is worse, because every causal sequence has plain as day a causal beginning and an end. Rain washes open the rock, the rock is weathered down, becomes smooth and is dislodged from its place, falls and hits Odysseus on his head and kills him. Weathering then causal sequence then Odyseuss's concussion. But here, in this problematic, we have the OTHER side of a perceptual event, any event, for it is perception itself that is the object of inquiry, and to affirm what it is requires ... a perceptual event. There is no weathering, no smoothing or erosion, for this kind of thing merely assumes what in question.

I'm sorry, I couldn't parse this. Nothing can exemplify anything? — Count Timothy von Icarus

Well, if one is committed to a scientist's epistemology of brain events, then one has to explain knowledge of said events in science's terms. But these are established on observation. See the above.

Look, it is certainly NOT that the world falls apart, and I say this again for emphasis. I trust science as much as you do (in fact, the scientific method, pragmatists argue, is built into language itself, in the structure of a conditional modality). But the question raised was about metaphysics, and my point here is to show where is begins from a standing of everydayness and science. Metaphysics haunts, if you will, our entire existence because it is discovered everywhere. No? Try to think how not.

a transcendent orientation towards the Good — Count Timothy von Icarus

Is this what you call "the catholicity of reason"? What evidence do we have that this is not just the secular universality of human reason?

Are there many sui generis, potentially contradicting truths or just one truth? — Count Timothy von Icarus

I would say: there are many truths, they are not sui generis, and they are not potentially contradicting truths. In Henological terms: There are Many Truths, and none of them contradict each other. Contradictions only arise in Opinion (Doxa), not in Episteme.

Kierkegaard is a Christian, and so he should recognize that there is one "Way, Truth, and Light," (John 14:6) and one Logos (John 1). Yet he is also the inheritor of Luther, who told Erasmus:

"If it is difficult to believe in God’s mercy and goodness when He damns those who do not deserve it, we must recall that if God’s justice could be recognized as just by human comprehension, it would not be divine.”

...opening up an unbridgable chasm of equivocity between the "goodness of God," and anything known as good by man. Calvin does something similar with his exegesis of I John 4:8, "God is love," such that it is [for the elect, and inscuratble, implacable hatred for all else]. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Kierkegaard also pointed out (and rightly so) that God gave Abraham a fideist order when he ordered him to sacrifice his son. Do you disagree with that?

I already gave you a Dante allusion, so here is another. In Canto IX, Dante and Virgil are barred from entering the City of Dis by the demons. Virgil is a stand-in for human reason. The furies who taunt Virgil irrationally claw at themselves, as misologes also strike out without reason. Then they threaten to call for Medusa, to turn Dante to stone.

Virgil is so scared of this threat that, not trusting Dante to keep his eyes closed, he covers the Pilgrim's eyes himself. Then Dante the Poet bursts into an aside to the reader to mark well the allegory here.

There are a few things going on. The angel who opens the gates of Dis for them is reenacting the first of the Three Advents of Christ, the Harrowing of Hell (all three show up), but I think the bigger idea is that one risks being "turned to stone" and failing to progress if one loses faith in reason after it is shown to be defenseless against the unreasoning aggression of misology (D.C. Schindler's Plato's Critique of Impure Reason covers this "defenselessness" well).

The very next sinners Dante encounters are the Epicureans, who fail to find justification for the immortality of the soul and so instead focus on only worldly, finite goods. It's an episode filled with miscommunication, people talking over one another, and pride—exactly what happens when reason ceases to be transcendent and turns inward, settling for what it already has. This is the Augustinian curvatus in se, sin as being "curved in on oneself." Dante himself was seduced by this philosophy for a time, and was seemingly "turned to stone" by it. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Things cannot be poetry and figurative language all the way down.

Anyhow, one would misread St. Augustine's "believe that you might understand," if it was taken to be some sort of fidest pronouncement of blind faith. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Why? That's exactly what it is. Believe, so that you might understand. It's a conditional statement: if P, then Q. In this case, the antecedent is Believe, just that, Believe, and that is 100% fideist. It's absolute blind faith, without an ounce of reason to it.

Post-Reformation anti-rationalists glommed on to Tertullian because of "a plague on Aristotle," and "what has Jerusalem to do with Athens?" but fundamentalists would do well to note that two paragraphs after this part of Prescriptions Against the Heretics he says: "no word of God is so unqualified or so unrestricted in application that the mere words can be pleaded without respect to their underlying meaning," and that we must "seek until we find" and then come to believe without deviation. Also worth considering, the things they like most about Tertullian seem like they would be precisely those things that made him prey to the Montanist heresy. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I don't know what this last paragraph means. Can you explain it to me in simpler terms, please?

Having said this, you might be surprised to hear that I’m a big fan of truth as an asymptotic goal of knowledge , and knowledge as a progressive approximation toward an ultimate truth. Furthermore, I associate truth with achieving a knowledge characterized by stability, inferential compatibility, prediction and control, harmoniousness and intimacy. It might seem as though what I have said points to a relativism that eliminates the possibility of achieving these goals of truth, but I believe the universe is highly ordered. Its order is in the nature of an intricate process of self-development rather than in static properties and laws. We become privy to this intricate order by participating in its development through our sciences, technologies and other domains of creativity. — Joshs

Interesting. How is order an intricate process of self-development?

Is this what you call "the catholicity of reason"?

No, perhaps I should have specified since the word is uncommon. I mean it in the original sense, as in "all-embracing and unified, one." This is the sense in which the Orthodox and many Protestants still affirm: "I believe in one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church," at every service, when they recite the Nicene or Apostles' creed.

I would say: there are many truths, they are not sui generis, and they are not potentially contradicting truths. In Henological terms: There are Many Truths, and none of them contradict each other. Contradictions only arise in Opinion (Doxa), not in Episteme.

:up:

The catholicity of reason is just this, plus the assumption that this applies to the logos by which truth is known (although some might want to take the further step to claiming that the two are deeply related).

Kierkegaard also pointed out (and rightly so) that God gave Abraham a fideist order when he ordered him to sacrifice his son. Do you disagree with that?

Yes, particularly your earlier point that the order itself was "irrational." That is not how the story has generally been read, either by the Patristics, later theologians, or Jews who say that God has a purpose in the command, or rather several. The most common purpose offered up is to test Abraham (e.g. St. Athanasius). Also popular is the idea that God is forcing Abraham to test Him, in a continuation of Abraham's pleading/testing of God re sparing any righteous souls in Sodom. Further, God's purposes in the Bible are not taken to be solely, or even mostly about those immediately involved in many cases. The Patristics tend to see Isaac as a type prefiguring Christ. That is, the purpose is also prophetic, and this includes God substituting the atoning sacrifice and sparing the children of men.

Here is a summary of early Christian accounts for instance:

The account is interpreted as the drama of faith as opposed to the natural affections, a drama that applies to the reader (Origen). Not only is Isaac a figure of Christ in the Spirit, but also the ram symbolizes Christ in the flesh (Origen, Ambrose). Even Chrysostom abandons his customary moralizing and employs a typological interpretation. That Isaac was a type and not the reality is seen in the fact that he was not killed (Caesarius of Arles). Readers are also invited to interpret the story spiritually and apply it to themselves, so as to beget a son such as Isaac in themselves (Origen).

Second, is Abraham blind at this point? God has been very active in his life, working wonders for his benefit. He only has a son because God worked a miracle that allowed his post-menopausal wife to bear him a son. He has seen God destroy cities. Does he have any reason to think that he can defend his son from God if God wants Isaac dead? Does he have any reason to think God is out to play a trick on him?

Is all deference to authority "blind faith," or is there proper deference to authority that is rational? We would balk if a random man on the street says he wants to crack open our child's skull and remove part of their brain, but might readily accept this if a neurosurgeon recommends it, despite having no relevant expertise in the matter ourselves. And yet sometimes doctors perform unnecessary, dangerous procedures to make money, and aren't acting for our child's benefit. Is God less trustworthy than a board certified physician though?

We might also consider that not all the acts of the Biblical heros are supposed to be good. Jacob is a deceiver. David is an adulterer who kills Bathsheba's husband to cover up his adultery, etc.

Things cannot be poetry and figurative language all the way down.

But it isn't, it's allegorical and anagogic.

Why? That's exactly what it is. Believe, so that you might understand. It's a conditional statement: if P, then Q. In this case, the antecedent is Believe, just that, Believe, and that is 100% fideist. It's absolute blind faith, without an ounce of reason to it.

St. Augustine says something like this in many places. The most famous quotation is from the Tractate on John (it is a paraphrase of Isaiah), however he makes the case for it more fully in Contra Academicos. There he is arguing against radical skepticism, the doubt of all things.

For instance, doubting the senses, and doubting that we can learn things from them. One must first believe in the reliability of the senses, at least tacitly, in order to take empirical inquiry seriously. But is trusting that what you see in front of you "blind" faith?

And the point is that one believes in order to understand, whereas fideism tends towards "you cannot understand, but you must have faith and obey." Yet Christ tells the Apostles: "No longer do I call you slaves, for the slave does not know what his master is doing; but I have called you friends, because all things that I have heard from My Father I have made known to you," (John 15:15) and "the Lord would speak to Moses face to face, as one speaks to a friend," Exodus 33:11.

We could also consider here how Plato has it that one must "turn the entire body" towards the Good before one can know it. The turning must come before the knowing, but it does not exclude the knowing.

Can you explain it to me in simpler terms, please?

It just means: "I believe because it is absurd," is a later invention loosely based on Tertullian, and that he has been rather selectivity read at times.

Thank you for your time and energy, @Count Timothy von Icarus, and for such considerate responses to my questions. That being said, I'm afraid to say it seems that we can't reach an agreement on some of these points, even though we're both genuinely trying.

Is this what you call "the catholicity of reason"?


No, perhaps I should have specified since the word is uncommon. I mean it in the original sense, as in "all-embracing and unified, one." This is the sense in which the Orthodox and many Protestants still affirm: "I believe in one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church," at every service, when they recite the Nicene or Apostles' creed. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Yes, this is not how I would phrase the issue myself, but I "get your point", so to speak. What I would say, is that if the catholicity of reasons exists (and if catholicity simpliciter exists), then it pre-dates the foundation of the Catholic church. Catholicity, if it exists, existed before the Catholic church existed. That's what I would say. And if this is so, then it follows that the Catholic church does not, and cannot, have a monopoly on catholicity. Which is why one can be a catholic outside the Catholic church. Agree or disagree? I feel like you disagree with me on this specific point, among others.

Is all deference to authority "blind faith," — Count Timothy von Icarus

Yes, it is. At the end of the day, it is. Or, as North Americans like to say: it is what it is. You can defer to authority for other reasons, though, for example if you fear punishment. But you only tolerate that punishment because you have blind faith in the idea that this is your best or even only option: to tolerate such punishment under those circumstances.

is there proper deference to authority that is rational? — Count Timothy von Icarus

Yes, there is. You can try to harmonize reason and faith all you want, since most of the time you will succeed. At least in trivial matters. For example, I have blind faith in my feet, in the sense that I completely trust them when I absent-mindedly step up and walk towards the kitchen. I don't need to think "now I place the right foot, and now I place the left foot, etc.". I just have blind faith that my feet work and that the part of my brain that controls my feet works as well. I fully trust them. Now, do I have philosophical reasons to justify this blind faith that I have in my own feet? Of course not, why would I need one? I'm a fideist about ordinary things like my feet, or this stone on the floor, or my hands. Why would I even doubt their existence? Because some philosopher said so in a book? That's not sound reasoning to me, that sounds like an appeal to authority. Suddenly I have to take Descartes' word "just because"? Sorry, I don't trust Cartesian philosophy as much as I trust my own two feet, or my hands, for that matter.

We might also consider that not all the acts of the Biblical heros are supposed to be good. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Doesn't solve the problem that Kierkegaard points out. It's still a problem even if Abraham is not a hero or even if his acts are not supposed to be good. The order itself is irrational. Even if God gives it. It is not rational for a father to sacrifice his son to a deity, even if that deity is the Christian God. It just isn't, it's not a rational thing to do.

Yes, particularly your earlier point that the order itself was "irrational." That is not how the story has generally been read, — Count Timothy von Icarus

I feel like that's not sound reasoning on your part. It seems like you are appealing to the majority. Kierkegaard is in the minority here, sure. But that doesn't mean that he's necessarily wrong. Majorities can make mistakes, especially interpretative mistakes. That's why there is a literal use of the language to begin with: so that there are no interpretative mistakes, you just read what it says. Besides, even if the mainstream interpretation is in fact the following:

The most common purpose offered up is to test Abraham (e.g. St. Athanasius). — Count Timothy von Icarus

then I would ask: What is God testing here in the first place, if not Abraham's faith? Do you see my point? Fideism, by its very nature, isn't exactly a difficult case to make, friend. I think you are having a much more difficult time articulating faith with reason. I have it much easier. When a fisherman catches a fish, how did he do it, if not because the fish had blind faith that the bait was organic instead of plastic?

Is God less trustworthy than a board certified physician though? — Count Timothy von Icarus

Is He? What do you think? I'll tell you what I think Kierkegaard might have said: he might have said that God is more trustworthy than a board certified physician, and this is precisely with the better Christian is the one who blindly believes, not the one who tries to rationalize what God is, or even if he exists to begin with. FYI, at some point this discussion sort of "degenerates" into the discussion about the literal interpretation of the Bible. And that is exactly the sort of discussion that I point to, when I say that things cannot be metaphors and figurative language all the way down.

And the point is that one believes in order to understand, whereas fideism tends towards "you cannot understand, but you must have faith and obey." Yet Christ tells the Apostles: "No longer do I call you slaves, for the slave does not know what his master is doing; but I have called you friends, because all things that I have heard from My Father I have made known to you," (John 15:15) and "the Lord would speak to Moses face to face, as one speaks to a friend," Exodus 33:11. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Then why should anyone listen to Christ instead of Epicurus? For Epicurus also had a concept of friendship.

Once again thank you very much for your time and consideration, @Count Timothy von Icarus

your claim is that the coastline changes because different people paint or think of it differently, and that it doesn't exist until painted, mapped, etc. Nothing you've said supports this claim; it doesn't follow from the premises. No one disagrees that different people will paint a coastline differently or that coastlines interacted with birds before men. However, most would disagree that the coastline didn't exist until it was painted. Again, you seem to need a premise like: "things are entirely defined by their relations and all relations and properties are essential." But I don't see why anyone would agree to premises like this because it implies things like: "you change when someone lights a picture of you on fire," and "ants didn't exist until people developed an abstraction of 'ant — Count Timothy von Icarus

I didn’t say a coastline or an ant didnt exist until painted. The word coastline implies a particular sense of meaning, and there are as many senses of meaning for it as there contexts of use. Animals who interact with a coastline produce their own senses of meaning for it , even though they don’t perceive it in terms of verbal concepts. The development of knowledge of a coastline , or any other aspect of nature , is in the direction of an enrichment of sense. This is what I mean when I say that the meaning of the concept of coastline changes with the development of knowledge. The issue here isn’t whether things exist outside of us, it’s what kinds of constraints their existence produces in relation to their enrichment by the development of knowledge.

Knowledge produces material changes in the world not by nullifying existing things, but by integrating them in more and more complex and useful ways with respect to our practical uses of other things. The fact that a coastline exists in some sense outside of our growing knowledge of it is utterly irrelevant to anything that makes it scientifically important to us and gives us the power to control nature and get along with each other. If you want to assume there is some intrinsic content that defines the existence of natural things independent of our knowledge of them, I can go along with that, but I would argue that such content acts as barely more than a placemark in comparison to the processes of integration and correlation by which we know about them and do useful things with them. I think the independent existence of things is so important to you because you confuse intrinsic content with integrative processes of knowing.

Let me ask you this, @Count Timothy von Icarus, to connect with one of the points that @Joshs's approach seems to suggest (to my mind, anyways).

Bruno Latour, as you already know, was not a realist. He was, quite literally, a philosophical relationist. Not a co-relationist, mind you, just a good, old fashioned relationist, at the end of the day. Like Hegel, in a sense. He was also a professional anthropologist, and he specialized in sociology of science. He was also a devout Catholic. How is that rational? It isn't. Therefore, Bruno Latour was a fideist.

Here's the question: in your honest, theological opinion: was Bruno Latour a good Catholic?

Saying that knowledge represents the world makes no more sense than saying that the evolution of more and more complex forms of life is a representing of the world. — Joshs

I agree, knowledge does not represent the world it presents the world, makes it present. More knowledge makes the world more present.

But st the same time , the laws and properties that we ‘discover’ in nature are not external to the ways we arrange and rearrange our relations with that world as knowledge — Joshs

Of course not, since we are not separate from nature. Do we have good reason to think that everything that goes on in the Universe is accessible to our cognition even in prinicple? I don't think so. So, our knowledge presents us with what is, at any given historical moment, accessible to us, and that is ever-expanding (or at least it has been up until now).

I think the independent existence of things is so important to you because you confuse intrinsic content with integrative processes of knowing. — Joshs

The independent existence of things seems to be the most plausible conclusion—the inference to the best explanation for what we experience. From a practical, everyday life perspective whether things exist independently of our cognitions or not really doesn't matter unless we have some existential agenda that relies on thinking about it one way or the other.

It is not rational for a father to sacrifice his son to a deity, even if that deity is the Christian God. It just isn't, it's not a rational thing to do. — Arcane Sandwich

'Rational' doesn't seem the right adjective here. It's not a virtuous thing to do, even if one may have reasons to do it. Rationality is simply having reasons—following some axiom and then reasoning consistently on that basis. A failure of rationality is a failure to be consistent. Most of our starting presuppositions are not irrational, but a-rational—meaning they are matters of faith.

they are matters of faith. — Janus

Uncontaminated by human reason. In that sense, they are matters of pure, unadulterated blind faith. It's uncompromising fideism, it is the complete sacrifice of reason. And as stupid as that may sound, that is exactly the sort of blind faith that I have in my own two feet. I don't need to think how to walk, I just walk. I trust my feet and my brain enough to do that on auto-pilot, it is strictly a-rational, as you call it. That, according to Kierkegaard, is what distinguishes the knight of faith from the Thomist-minded masses. And my argument is that Kierkegaard personally transcended Protestantism, and in the process of doing so, he became an existential Christian instead. What I'm try to prove to @Count Timothy von Icarus is that one can be an existential Catholic in the same sense. Just as Kierkegaard fought against the Danish Church, so too the existential Catholic can fight against the Catholic Church.

But it seems to me that he doesn't believe that my thesis holds up, for some reason. I could be wrong, though.

I didn’t say a coastline or an ant didnt exist until painted.

No, but you suggested a coastline does not exist separate from the act of measuring it, and then used painting as a follow up example, and that one can "imagine" that a coastline exists independent of our concepts, but that it doesn't exist separate from our interactions and anticipations vis-a-vis it, no? It only has a "dependent independence?" Hence my confusion. Is it the coastline or the "notion" we're talking about?

The word coastline implies a particular sense of meaning, and there are as many senses of meaning for it as there contexts of use.

The word "coastline" refers to coastlines. You are collapsing sense and reference here, which I find confusing. If "coastline," "tiger," and the like only implied/referred to our own sense of meaning then it would be impossible to ever speak of anything but our own perceptions and judgements. But we make the distinction between the actual things we are speaking of and our thoughts, perceptions, and speech about them all the time. This distinction is normally essential for explaining the phenomenon of error.

Is this distinction itself an error?

Animals who interact with a coastline produce their own senses of meaning for it , even though they don’t perceive it in terms of verbal concepts.

Sure, but North America has one coastline, not one for every species that experiences it.

If we only experience and know concepts and senses, our own "anticipations," how is this not recreating the very representationalism you were complaining about? It strikes me as very similar, just using different language. And representionalists never denied that we interact with things, or come to know things through our interactions with them. They also don't want to affirm the existence of any independent things (or at least anything about them, save your bare "placeholder"), since all we have access to are "mental representations." Yet as far as I can see your "notions/concepts" and "anticipations" seem to be filling the exact same role as "mental representations" here, and some sort of diffuse soup of "constraints" that is only known through concepts/notions looks to be something like a rebranded noumena.

Yes, this is not how I would phrase the issue myself, but I "get your point", so to speak. What I would say, is that if the catholicity of reasons exists (and if catholicity simpliciter exists), then it pre-dates the foundation of the Catholic church. Catholicity, if it exists, existed before the Catholic church existed. That's what I would say. And if this is so, then it follows that the Catholic church does not, and cannot, have a monopoly on catholicity. Which is why one can be a catholic outside the Catholic church. Agree or disagree? I feel like you disagree with me on this specific point, among others

I'm not sure what it means to "be a catholic." To affirm the catholicity of the Church? Then sure. I didn't intend to suggest anything about the Roman Catholic Church. I'm part of an Orthodox church, but we still recite the Creed, "one holy, catholic, and apostolic."

Same with "catholicity simpliciter." I'm not sure what you mean. It's a property, I don't think it can "exist simpliciter."

Yes, it is. At the end of the day, it is

I just don't see it. Or your use of "blind faith," is perhaps anachronistic. I have a friend who is a very skilled mechanic. I know he's good with cars, I've seen the cars he's rebuilt. If I trust his authority on automobiles I don't see how this is necessarily "blind."

For example, I have blind faith in my feet, in the sense that I completely trust them when I absent-mindedly step up and walk towards the kitchen.

Presumably you have a lifetime of experience walking. Again, I am not seeing how this is blind. This is like saying it's "blind faith" to assume that you'll get wet when you jump in a pool.

I feel like that's not sound reasoning on your part. It seems like you are appealing to the majority. Kierkegaard is in the minority here, sure. But that doesn't mean that he's necessarily wrong. Majorities can make mistakes, especially interpretative mistakes. That's why there is a literal use of the language to begin with: so that there are no interpretative mistakes, you just read what it says.

Where does Kierkegaard ever say Abraham isn't being tested? I don't think he does.

In any case, this view is right in Scripture, you can't appeal to literalism and deny the interpretation.

Hebrews 11:17 By faith Abraham, when he was tested, offered up Isaac. He had received the promises, yet he was ready to offer up his only son. 11:18 God had told him, “Through Isaac descendants will carry on your name,” 11:19 and he reasoned that God could even raise him from the dead..."

If you're committed to the literalist view you're committed to Abraham reasoning in this case.

then I would ask: What is God testing here in the first place, if not Abraham's faith?

Sure, it's a test of faith. Even if it was a test of wholly irrational faith, that wouldn't make the test or the person giving the test irrational. The test is not given "for no reason at all."

And we might distinguish between "faith in," and "faith that." I hardly see how it is irrational and "blind" to ever have faith in anyone. I have faith in some of my friends because they are good friends, good people, and have always supported me. I fail to see how that is irrational. But the same is true for God.

Anyhow, fideism is not the view that faith is important, or even most important (although St. Paul puts love above faith). Lots of people affirm that. It's the view that religious beliefs are entirely based on faith alone.

not the one who tries to rationalize what God is,

But that isn't what most theology does. One cannot know God's essence, only His energies. That's all over the Church Fathers. One can only approach the divine essence through apophatic negation, the via negativa, or analogy. Which is what Kierkegaard also ends up affirming, he basically works himself painfully towards Dionysius (painfully because his blinders stop him from referencing all the relevant thought here).

And that is exactly the sort of discussion that I point to, when I say that things cannot be metaphors and figurative language all the way down.

Were the followers who abandoned Christ after he told them they must eat his flesh and drink his blood because they thought he was advocating cannibalism in the right (John 6)? Why does Christ himself primarily teach in parables and allegory?

Or did Christ come to save livestock (the lost sheep of Israel) and will the Judgement really be of actual sheep and goats? Is St. Paul breaking the rule of faith when he interprets Genesis allegorically in Galatians 4?

"The Spirit gives life; the flesh counts for nothing” John 6:63

"He has made us competent as ministers of a new covenant—not of the letter but of the Spirit; for the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life.” II Corinthians 3:6

The Gospels are full of references of Christ fulling OT prophecies, often in counterintuitive ways that would be completely lost in a literalist reading. So, to at least some extent, a hyper literalist reading is self-refuting.

Then why should anyone listen to Christ instead of Epicurus? For Epicurus also had a concept of friendship.

On the Christian account, because those who have had faith come to understand, as the Apostles did, that Christ is God and Epicurus, if Christians are correct, is badly deluded.

Same with "catholicity simpliciter." I'm not sure what you mean. It's a property, I don't think it can "exist simpliciter." — Count Timothy von Icarus

If it exists, it cannot exist independently of a thing, of a res, precisely because it would be a property, like you said. I just don't think that it's a property of reason, because reason might not be a res to begin with. It makes more metaphysical sense to say that I am a res cogitans, I am a thing that has reason, so catholicity (if it exists) is a property of a thing (the thing that I am), not of the reason that this thing (myself) has. By "catholicity simpliciter", I meant "catholicity in general", not just the purported "catholicity of reason". For one could argue that there could be a catholicity of opinion (doxa), instead of just a catholicity of reason.

I just don't see it. Or your use of "blind faith," is perhaps anachronistic. I have a friend who is a very skilled mechanic. I know he's good with cars, I've seen the cars he's rebuilt. If I trust his authority on automobiles I don't see how this is necessarily "blind." — Count Timothy von Icarus

Well, then I don't know what to tell you, other than the fact that many goddesses are blind. Justice is blind, so is faith. That you can "mix it up" with reason doesn't mean that they're not fruits from different trees.

Presumably you have a lifetime of experience walking. Again, I am not seeing how this is blind. This is like saying it's "blind faith" to assume that you'll get wet when you jump in a pool. — Count Timothy von Icarus

It is. When you assume that you'll get wet when you jump into a pool, that is blind faith. You could question it, philosophically, if you wanted to. But there's no point to that sort of questioning. Things cannot be philosophy all the way down, I would say.

Where does Kierkegaard ever say Abraham isn't being tested? I don't think he does. — Count Timothy von Icarus

He doesn't. He just thinks that "having his faith being tested" is not the moral of the story here. The moral of the story is that Abraham made the deliberate, conscious choice to obey God's order, while fully understanding that the order in question was contrary to what any father would do if someone told such a father to sacrifice his son. In other words, deep down, Christianity is irrational, according to Kierkegaard. That's the moral of the story of Abraham and God. That particular story cannot be explained in a Thomistic way.

In any case, this view is right in Scripture, you can't appeal to literalism and deny the interpretation.

Hebrews 11:17 By faith Abraham, when he was tested, offered up Isaac. He had received the promises, yet he was ready to offer up his only son. 11:18 God had told him, “Through Isaac descendants will carry on your name,” 11:19 and he reasoned that God could even raise him from the dead..."

If you're committed to the literalist view you're committed to Abraham reasoning in this case. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Am I? What language was that quote originally written in? If one is to be a literalist about this, then one has to take into consideration the fact that the passage in question was not really written in English. And whatever word was originally used there, it most certainly was not etymologically related to the Latin word Ratio.

Sure, it's a test of faith. Even if it was a test of wholly irrational faith, that wouldn't make the test or the person giving the test irrational. The test is not given "for no reason at all." — Count Timothy von Icarus

But Abraham did not know why the test was given in the first place, he had no reason to believe it to be a benign order. He instead had every reason to believe that it was a malevolent order instead (i.e., how did Abraham know that he wasn't being fooled by an Evil Genius (an Evil Genie, for example, or a demon)? How does he know that the order is being delivered from God, and not his impostor, Lucifer? He doesn't. He has no reliable way of knowing that. All he has, is blind Christian faith. Or are we to say that Abraham was not a Christian? Someone born before Christ cannot be a Christian? Why not? Was Jesus not with God in the beginning (John 1:2)? If so, then why couldn't Epicurus be a Christian? No one will dispute the fact that Epicurus did not use the word Ratio. But he did use the word Logos. How is he not as holy as Jesus, then, if we are to believe John 1:1?

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
"The Word," a translation of the Greek λόγος (logos), is widely interpreted as referring to Jesus, as indicated in other verses later in the same chapter.[5] For example, "the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us" (John 1:14; cf. 1:15, 17). — Wikipedia

Anyhow, fideism is not the view that faith is important, or even most important (although St. Paul puts love above faith). Lots of people affirm that. It's the view that religious beliefs are entirely based on faith alone. — Count Timothy von Icarus

And they are. Religious beliefs are, at the end of the day, entirely based on faith alone, not love.

One cannot know God's essence — Count Timothy von Icarus

Mystics would disagree.

One can only approach the divine essence through apophatic negation — Count Timothy von Icarus

That was a trend during the Middle Ages, I'm not sure it's the only path to the Christian God understood as that which, among other things, transcends human reason.

Which is what Kierkegaard also ends up affirming, he basically works himself painfully towards Dionysius (painfully because his blinders stop him from referencing all the relevant thought here). — Count Timothy von Icarus

It's a legitimate way of doing Christian philosophy.

Were the followers who abandoned Christ after he told them they must eat his flesh and drink his blood because they thought he was advocating cannibalism in the right (John 6)? — Count Timothy von Icarus

One should be able to say, in all seriousness, that this ritual (consuming the flesh and blood of Christ) is indeed Holy Cannibalism. There is simply no other way to best describe it.

Why does Christ himself primarily teach in parables and allegory? — Count Timothy von Icarus

Because Christ was a man. And he was a man even if he was also God. Men speak in parables and allegories, on account of the fact that they are men. But God requires no metaphor, nor figure. God is literal through and through, if He exists. Metaphors are for creatures, not for their Creator.

Or did Christ come to save livestock (the lost sheep of Israel) and will the Judgement really be of actual sheep and goats? — Count Timothy von Icarus

"Yes" to both questions.

Is St. Paul breaking the rule of faith when he interprets Genesis allegorically in Galatians 4? — Count Timothy von Icarus

Yes, he is.

"The Spirit gives life; the flesh counts for nothing” John 6:63

"He has made us competent as ministers of a new covenant—not of the letter but of the Spirit; for the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life.” II Corinthians 3:6

The Gospels are full of references of Christ fulling OT prophecies, often in counterintuitive ways that would be completely lost in a literalist reading. So, to at least some extent, a hyper literalist reading is self-refuting. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Humans need the concept of Spirit, because we are finite creatures. God, if He exists, has no need for Spirit, because he would be the Literal Truth. A hyper-literalist reading of the Bible is not self-refuting. It only places the word of the Bible at odds with the word of science. And in that conflict, I am on the side of science: I am an atheist. My atheism, however, does not mean that I cannot understand the Bible, or any other spiritualist reading of Biblical scripture specifically, and of any scripture in general.

On the Christian account, because those who have had faith come to understand, as the Apostles did, that Christ is God and Epicurus, if Christians are correct, is badly deluded. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Why? Was Jesus not with God since the beginning, as John (1:2) says?

Am I? What language was that quote originally written in? If one is to be a literalist about this, then one has to take into consideration the fact that the passage in question was not really written in English. And whatever word was originally used there, it most certainly was not etymologically related to the Latin word Ratio.

Yeah.

It's in Greek like all of the NT. λογίζομαι, logisamenos, it's the middle voice of logos, word/reason, from which we get "logic." It is used throughout the period to denote reasoning, philosophizing, or calculating.

Mystics would disagree

Which ones? Anthologies of Christian mystics and spiritual guides for monks like the Philokalia are packed with the the essence/energies distinction. Dionysius the Areopagite, St. Gregory Palamas, St. Bonaventure, etc.

The author from which we get the term "mystical theology" is famous for clarifying this distinction.

And mystikos, and mystics, in the Christian tradition tended to be heavily involved in anagogic readings of Scripture. It first refers to the hidden/secret meanings; not exactly modern literalism (which is very much a modern phenomenon).

It only places the word of the Bible at odds with the word of science.

No, it also places it at odds with places where different Biblical authors interpret the Bible allegorically, including Christ.

But this has nothing to do with Kierkegaard's thought at all. Kierkegaard was not a fundamentalist.

"Yes" to both questions.

Well now I can't take you seriously. :rofl:

‘saṃsāra has no beginning but it has an end. Nirvāṇa has a beginning but it has no end.’ — Wayfarer

So duality is not an illusion – 'samsara is nirvana' is ignorance? :chin:

Religion takes its first step ... — Astrophel

... chasing its (fairy)tail.

[W]hen an encounter with an object occurs, it is an event, and must be analyzed as such. What lies "outside" of this event requires a perspective unconditioned[presupposed] by the perceptual act ... — Astrophel

"Object" presupposes (a) subject, or (an) actor of "the perceptual act", that is embodied (i.e. an aspect of nature). Mind is non/pre-mind-dependent (i.e. emergent-constrained by – entangled with – nature aka "non/pre-mind") and not the other way around as idealists (e.g. apophenia-biased¹ and/or egocentric-biased² and/or introspection-biased³ 'believers') et al assume.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apophenia [1]
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egocentric_bias [2]
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Introspection_illusion [3]

:up: :up:

Does any of this erudite palaver have any bearing on religion and suffering? — Vera Mont

Apparently not.

So duality is not an illusion – 'samsara is nirvana' is ignorance? — 180 Proof

The non-difference of saṃsāra and Nirvāṇa has never been accepted by Theravada but is taught in Mahāyāna cultures. Once again something I read on Dharmawheel when I used to post there: ‘Saṃsāra is Nirvāṇa grasped, Nirvāṇa is Saṃsāra released.’ The aphorism expresses the Mahāyāna understanding that Saṃsāra and Nirvāṇan are not separate realms but rather two modes of perceiving the same reality: one clouded by ignorance, the other illuminated by prajna.

Another way of putting it is that, for ignorance, Nirvāṇa is always somewhere else - ‘somewhere over the rainbow’ - whereas for enlightenment it is right here.

Thanks for clarifying. :up:

you suggested a coastline does not exist separate from the act of measuring it, and then used painting as a follow up example, and that one can "imagine" that a coastline exists independent of our concepts, but that it doesn't exist separate from our interactions and anticipations vis-a-vis it, no? It only has a "dependent independence?" Hence my confusion. Is it the coastline or the "notion" we're talking about? — Count Timothy von Icarus

When I perceive a red ball in front of me, all that I actually perceive in front of me is an impoverished, contingent partial sense experience. I fill in the rest of the experience in two ways. All experience implies a temporal structure of retention, primal impression and protention. Each moment presents us with a new sensation, the retained memory of the just preceding sensation and anticipation of what is to come. I retain the memory of previous experiences with the 'same' object and those memories become fused with the current aspect of it. At the same time, I protend forward, anticipating aspects of the object that are not yet there for me, based on prior experience with it. For example, I only see the front of the table, but anticipate as an empty horizon, its sides, and this empty anticipation joins with the current view and the memory of previous views to form a complex fused totality. Perception constantly is motivated , that is, it tends toward the fulfillment of the experience of the object as integrated singularity, as this same' table'.

A remarkable feature of a word or a perception is that it allows the brain to integrate a wide range of modalities (visual, touch, auditory, kinesthetic, smell and taste) of perception into a single unitary concept. When you see the world ‘cat’ right now, your brain , as brain imaging studies show , may be accessing the sight of a cat , it’s smell, how its fur feels , the sound of its purring. And it is doing this all simultaneously. In addition, the brain may be accessing emotional associations and complex bits of knowledge about a cat or cats in general from scientific or literary sources.

Most importantly, there is no experience of an object without kineshthetic sensation of our voluntary movement in relation to the thing seen. Intrinsic to what the object means as object is our knowing how its appearance will change when we move our head in a certain way, or our eyes , or when we touch it. The object is what it is for us in relation to the way we know we can change its appearance relative to our interactions with it.

You may respond to all this by observing that I’m simply describing how the brain creates a representation of the world. But what I want to point out is that this is not a mere copy. The brain takes input spread out spatially and temporary and condenses it into a simultaneity. Features which originally belonged to different times and different places in the world are perceived at the same time and in the same space. But this isn’t all the brain does. In tying disparate events together temporally and spatially, it can also construe patterns. It can perceive these events as related to each other, meaningfully similar on some basis or other and on the basis of which both events differ from a third.

But surely the brain couldn’t perform these tricks
of condensation, assimilation and categorization if the patterns it construes dont reflect the way the world really is? It could do this in fantasy, but when one attempted to predict the course of actual events on the basis of these mapped out patterns, one’s attempts would be invalidated unless they accorded with the actual flow of events. Yes, but the question is, how does the actual flow of events constrain the kinds of patterns we can construct to model them? Apparently the actual flow of events can accommodate an indefinite variety of construals. We can look at a landscape and fail to see it as a unified thing, just a disparate series of colors, shapes, lines and curves, and this wouldn’t be a false representation, it would simply be an impoverished one.

We could legitimately declare that the discombobulated scene existed before humans were there to interact with it, but that a coastline never existed, since the concept has no meaning for us. Seeing it as a unity by synthesizing its temporally and spatially spaced out elements into an instantaneous whole in the brain allows us to do things with it like creating maps of it. And there are many other ways of construing the scene that are equally true in the sense that we can test out our knowledge in our actual interactions with it and validate our model.

But if perceiving a scene as a disconnected collection of random segments can validate itself ( a discombobulated scene but not a coastline) as well as seeing it as a coastline, if both are true in the sense that both can be tested and validated, can’t one nonetheless say that the latter is a more accurate model of the world that the former? Let’s say that it is indeed better in that it subsumes the features of the former into a more holistically integrated unity. In other words, we can always perceive a phenomenon in restrictive terms as ‘this and only this’ , or in terms that are permeable to alternative constructions. Is the latter way a more accurate representation of reality? I think it’s better than accurate. The concept of accuracy limits us to thinking about knowledge of nature ( and morals) in terms of conformity to arbitrary properties and laws. But is this the way nature is in itself, or just a model that we have imposed on it?

We can model physical phenomena in terms of efficient causality, where the behavior of interacting objects is described on the basis of fixed properties (mass, energy), and then declare that the physical world behaved according to the laws of objective causality before humans arrived on the scene. This approach validates itself perfectly well, but perhaps it can be subsumed as just one aspect within a more permeable model of nature, one that doesn’t invalidate the causal account but reveals it as limited and restrictive, like seeing a coastline as disconnected segments. We can declare that dinosaurs existed before we discover them, and then in 50 years a new biological approach will discard names for living things in favor of a radically holistic ecological approach in which it no longer makes sense to talk about discrete objects moving through space we call animals , but instead a web of reciprocal relations within which we no longer need to tease out categorical entities we call animals. And they could then declare this ecology (but not dinosaurs) something that existed before humans arrived.

We can apply this subsuming account of knowledge to ethics as well. We can hold onto a perception of the moral good as akin to the fixed properties behind efficient causes, and validate this model perfectly well, declaring that moral properties are universal, grounding facts of humanity. Or we can subsume such a fiat-based account within a more permeable and inclusive model which reveals dimensions of perception in morally suspect others that were unseen to us previously, dimensions that allow us to discover patterns bridging the differences between us and them.

When I perceive a red ball in front of me, all that I actually perceive in front of me is an impoverished, contingent partial sense experience.

Right, so representationalism. "We don't experience anything, we only experience our experiences of things." But it seems to me that if one takes this seriously, you might as well say we only experience our experiences of our experiences, and so on, in some sort of infinite Cartesian theater regress. Having the Cartesian humonculus also move the body around doesn't really seem to fix the issues here for me.

I fill in the rest of the experience in two ways. All experience implies a temporal structure of retention, primal impression and protention. Each moment presents us with a new sensation, the retained memory of the just preceding sensation and anticipation of what is to come. I retain the memory of previous experiences with the 'same' object and those memories become fused with the current aspect of it. At the same time, I protend forward, anticipating aspects of the object that are not yet there for me, based on prior experience with it. For example, I only see the front of the table, but anticipate as an empty horizon, its sides, and this empty anticipation joins with the current view and the memory of previous views to form a complex fused totality. Perception constantly is motivated , that is, it tends toward the fulfillment of the experience of the object as integrated singularity, as this same' table'.

Right, this strikes me as the Cartesian to Kantian expansion of the imagination, such that perception now occurs in the imagination, or sensation is just collapsed into imagination.

A remarkable feature of a word or a perception is that it allows the brain to integrate a wide range of modalities(visual, touch, auditory, kinesthetic, smell and taste) of perception into a single unitary concept. When you see the world ‘cat’ right now, your brain , as brain imaging studies show , may be accessing the sight of a cat , it’s smell, how its fur feels , the sound of its purring. And it is doing this all simultaneously. In addition, the brain may be accessing emotional associations and complex bits of knowledge about a cat or cats in general from scientific or literary sources

Nothing about contemporary neuroscience can answer the question "is sensation distinct from imagination." You could use the same neuroimaging studies to argue either point, because everyone agrees that both are involved in ongoing cognition.

The reason the two were proposed as separate is because they appear to be phenomenologically distinct. But, either this is confusion, or else if they are distinct it would imply some difference in the body.

Yet someone who wants to make the distinction could also easily appeal to neuroscience. For the most obvious examples, we can consider all the disorders where what you are describing re memory and association fails to hold. In agnosia, as near as we can tell, the visual field is fine. People can draw what they see, sometimes very well if they were skilled artists. But they cannot recognize everyday objects, which in turn affects interaction since they cannot figure out what a fork or can opener is for. Likewise, people with aphasia seem to have intact hearing and can respond to auditory stimulus, but cannot understand words, although they do hear them.

Similarly, not all information from sense organs is processed at once, but is rather prioritized, which is how we get blind sight, or how we can duck or run from something large before realizing what we've seen. Hence, someone wanting to making the distinction would point out that if recognition and association was sight, then agnosia should be the same thing as blindness. But it isn't, which might explain why languages have different terms for these. Which is not to say there is some hard neurological distinction, but merely that there is a useful distinction, particularly when dealing with claims that we experience concepts, or experiences, rather than sensation of things.

We can look at a coastline and fail to see it as a unified thing, just a disparate series of colors, shapes, lines and curves, and this wouldn’t be a false representation, it would simply be an impoverished one.

I'd argue that it's not a representation at all. Here is a suggestion, it's more like a lens, something seen through, then an image.




And crucially, neuroscience makes a very hard distinction between mentally picturing something and sensing it. When people are asked to imagine a sight or sound some of the same areas of the brain used in processing sense data are activated, but to two processes are in no way identical, not least because what is happening in the eye and ear are quite distinct. And they are phenomenologically distinct too, which is why people still listen to songs they have very accurate memories of.

One can experience a concept of a coastline anywhere. One can experience a coastline on the coast.

We could legitimately declare that the discombobulated scene existed before humans were there to interact with it, but that a coastline never existed, since the concept has no meaning for us

This is conflating existence and being experienced. Again, your soup of constraints just seems to be the Kantian noumena, and you only have to posit it because of the presupposition that all experience is of representations, and thus that whatever we refer to is our own representations and not their causes, not what is perceived. That is, "perception is what we experience, not a means of experiencing." But why would anyone want to presuppose this? It makes a mess of epistemology and on any naturalistic evolutionary account of sensation its function is to serve as precisely a means of sensing, not something to be experienced.

But if perceiving a scene as a disconnected collection of random segments can validate itself ( a discombobulated scene but not a coastline) as well as seeing it as a coastline, if both are true in the sense that both can be tested and validated, can’t one nonetheless say that the latter is a more accurate model of the world that the former?

I don't follow this. Not all perceptions are equally valid, else optical illusions wouldn't be illusions. And likewise, we'd have no grounds for chastising a police officer because they shot someone holding their wallet because they perceived it as a firearm. But a wallet isn't a firearm, regardless of how it is perceived by the police officer.

The concept of accuracy limits us to thinking about knowledge of nature ( and morals) in terms of conformity to arbitrary properties and laws. But is this the way nature is in itself, or just a model that we have imposed on it?

This seems like a strawman. It's a very narrow, particular sort of philosophy that sees everything bottoming out in brute fact laws. The claim that things are intelligible is not the claim that knowledge corresponds to arbitrary properties.

We can hold onto a perception of the moral good as akin to the fixed properties behind efficient causes, and validate this model perfectly well, declaring that moral properties are universal, grounding facts of humanity. Or we can subsume such a fiat-based account within a more permeable and inclusive model which reveals dimensions of perception in morally suspect others that were unseen to us previously, dimensions that allow us to discover patterns bridging the differences between us and them.

This is another strawman paired to a false dichotomy. "Either we have 'fiat-based' account built on "arbitrary laws" or we see more and bridge differences. Well, who wouldn't choose the latter if there were only these two options?

But surely the brain couldn’t perform these tricks
of condensation, assimilation and categorization if the patterns it construes dont reflect the way the world really is? It could do this in fantasy, but when one attempted to predict the course of actual events on the basis of these mapped out patterns, one’s attempts would be invalidated unless they accorded with the actual flow of events. — Joshs

Can it be also applied to the experience of a movie viewer? Does this experience amount to a flow of images and perceptions, harmoniously coordinated by a unified perspective of integral representation?

Right, so representationalism. "We don't experience anything, we only experience our experiences of things." But it seems to me that if one takes this seriously, you might as well say we only experience our experiences of our experiences, and so on, in some sort of infinite Cartesian theater regress. Having the Cartesian humonculus also move the body around doesn't really seem to fix the issues here for me. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I’m aware of two kinds of empirical accounts to describe perception, representational and enactivist, and versions that combine aspects of the two. I am not a representationalist, but just used that term for convenience. In my opinion, the best critic of representationalism moves in the direction of phenomenology, but I believe you reject that and activism as well. Does this mean you are questioning all contemporary psychological accounts of perception, or can you suggest a contemporary empirical alternative I’m not aware of? ) Btw, the text photo you inserted was too blurry to read).

We could legitimately declare that the discombobulated scene existed before humans were there to interact with it, but that a coastline never existed, since the concept has no meaning for us

This is conflating existence and being experienced. — Count Timothy von Icarus

You insist that a coastline existed before we were there to experience it. I would point to the genealogy of etymological meanings of words such as melancholia and phlogiston to show that many verbal concepts used in science or common parlance point to what were presumed as existing entities, but as theories changed, one could no longer locate such entities anymore. It wasnt that a real thing in the world simply vanished, but that these words depended for their intelligibilty on a particular system of relating elements of the world. To understand melancholia is to understand cultural practices specific to an era, and to understand phlogiston is to view the system of relations among aspects of the physical world in a way that is no longer being used.

The concept of depression that replaced melancholia will eventually undergo the same fate as melancholia. You would deny that the word coastline could suffer such a fate, but on the basis of what criterion can we draw the line between that word and phlogiston or melancholia? You don’t imagine any way in which ,coastline’ succumbs to the same process of having its underlying practices of understanding shift along with the evolution of culture and language use, such that coastline becomes a quaint expression harking back to a time when they thought about such aspects of nature in a different way than they do now?

But if perceiving a scene as a disconnected collection of random segments can validate itself ( a discombobulated scene but not a coastline) as well as seeing it as a coastline, if both are true in the sense that both can be tested and validated, can’t one nonetheless say that the latter is a more accurate model of the world that the former?

I don't follow this. Not all perceptions are equally valid, else optical illusions wouldn't be illusions — Count Timothy von Icarus

What about optical illusions that involves gestalt shifts between one way of seeing a scene and another, like the duck-rabbit? Is one way more correct than another? Can’t both ways of seeing lead to maps that can be validated? What happens to the components of one image, its lines, curves and contrasts, when we shift to the other image? Don’t those components take on a different role? Is there any account-independent element of the images, something that is not vulnerable to a shift of the definition of its existence?

But if perceiving a scene as a disconnected collection of random segments can validate itself ( a discombobulated scene but not a coastline) as well as seeing it as a coastline, if both are true in the sense that both can be tested and validated, can’t one nonetheless say that the latter is a more accurate model of the world that the former?

I don't follow this. Not all perceptions are equally valid, else optical illusions wouldn't be illusions — Count Timothy von Icarus

What about optical illusions that involves gestalt shifts between one way of seeing a scene and another, like the duck-rabbit? Is one way more correct than another? What happens to the components of one image, its lines, curves and contrasts, when we shift to the other image? Don’t those components take on a different role? Is there any account-independent element of the images, something that is not vulnerable to a shift of the definition of its existence?

In my opinion, the best critic of representationalism moves in the direction of phenomenology, but I believe you reject that and activism as well.

No, I like a lot of work using enactivism and phenomenology, in part because they avoid notions like "all we know are our own concepts" and "words don't have reference, only sense (or sense IS their reference)."

You insist that a coastline existed before we were there to experience it. I would point to the genealogy of etymological meanings of words such as melancholia and phlogiston to show that many verbal concepts used in science or common parlance point to what were presumed as existing entities, but as theories changed, one could no longer locate such entities anymore. It wasnt that a real thing in the world simply vanished, but that these words depended for their intelligibilty on a particular system of relating elements of the world. To understand melancholia is to understand cultural practices specific to an era, and to understand phlogiston is to view the system of relations among aspects of the physical world in a way that is no longer being used.

Again this seems to require the idea the concepts and words are primarily what we know—that when we read a book about botany we primarily learn about words, scientific terminology and practice, and concepts, but never about plants, only concepts of plants. Thus, when our terms change, what we have known also changes.

Well, this is a common position, and it seems to me to stem from two assumptions. First, knowledge is just justified true (or "validated") opinion/belief and all knowledge is thus demonstrative knowledge. Second, all knowledge is propositional and involves propositional truth. And from this it would indeed follow that when we discover that some terms must be changed or eliminated, all the propositions in our "knowledge-bank" related to some area might flip their truth values, giving knowledge a sort of radical instability. But I wouldn't want to affirm either of those suppositions. I'd instead say that knowledge is the adequacy of the intellect to being (and intellect is the flip side of being). We can know things more or less well. When we switched from Newtonian physics to QM and Relativity, we didn't come to know a new physical world, we came to know the physical world (presumably) better than we did before.

Phlogiston is a fine example. Did phlogiston have the same epistemic status as dogs and the ocean? If we have been wrong about anything must we doubt everything? Phlogiston was a means of explaining combustion. It had a referent. That we understand combustion differently now is not evidence that we:

A. Never referred to combustion, but only our own concepts.
B. That combustion didn't exist prior to us refining our intentions towards it.

Rather, it suggests that our means of knowing can be refined, hopefully allowing us to know things better.

It wasnt that a real thing in the world simply vanished, but that these words depended for their intelligibilty on a particular system of relating elements of the world.

And this suggests to you that coastlines are not a real thing in the world? What about dogs or people?

That we can refer to things that don't exist is obvious. We have fiction. People also have mistaken fiction for history. We can be wrong. I will grant you that.

But I fail to see how: "we can refer to things that aren't real" would imply "we never refer to things that are real," or even "we should be skeptical as to whether we ever refer to anything that is real."

I'd just refer back to the example of some future conflation of Adolf Hitler and George Washington. If truth is dependent solely on concepts and relations of concepts/terms, then it seems possible that "Adolf Hitler became the first President of the USA after losing WWII" could be both validated and true. But I'd maintain this can never become true. Truth is the adequacy of intellect to being, not a function of how concepts related to one another, except accidentally.

these words depended for their intelligibilty on a particular system of relating elements of the world

Yes, like I said before, if I understand you right an implicit premise is that nothing is (more or less) intelligible in itself.

What about optical illusions that involves gestalt shifts between one way of seeing a scene and another, like the duck-rabbit? Is one way more correct than another?

Wouldn't the view that it can be seen as both be more accurate than either? Likewise, "it's an optical illusion that gives the appearance of depth, but is on a flat surface," seems more accurate than "it has depth."

But it doesn't make sense to try to use the trickiest examples to answer questions, although this is how much philosophy is done now. Just look at the simple case. A Secret Service officer thinks he sees a gun in a protestors hand. He moves his scope around to validate his belief. He confirms it to himself and shoots them. Obviously, there is an important sense in which their perception was in error.

Well now I can't take you seriously. :rofl: — Count Timothy von Icarus

Why not? Think of the word "carnivore". It applies to some animals, and it also applied to some plants. Now think of the word "sheep". It applies to some animals, and to some humans. Just as it is possible to determine how carnivorous a certain diet is (i.e., how much meat does an animal or a carnivorous plant consume), it is also possible to determine how sheepish a certain life has been (i.e., how much does an animal or a human conform to a flock).

God communicates through dream i.e. metaphor in the Bible multiple times. These metaphors require interpretation. Go re-read Daniel's dream and come back and tell us that it was entirely literal.