Yet the concept of energy derives from experience itself
— Julian August

How do you know this? Which came first, energy or the experience of energy? — universeness

Energy, as a concept, is either derived independently or dependently on experience, energy could very well precede all experiences as I am sure a dualist would think being the case, without that having any bearing on whether the concept of energy were derived a priori.

So your follow-up question is a separate issue, you are here referring to the problem of whether time and therewith a rate of time can exist independently of experience, this seems to be the case, it even seems necessary.

Is it basically that energy has different forms/states, but it all may well come from a single underlying form or state. — universeness

I am merely stating that we should not start our philosophical efforts without knowing where we got our concepts, and when we do gain that knowledge ask ourself how we justified taking the step of using our concept beyond the material/substance/subject/substrate from where we abstracted it, this is the essence of Kants Critique of Pure Reason from my reading of it.

Different people and fields uses the same word for different concepts, this sometimes makes these conversations harder than they need to be, yet at the same time these different perspectives will claim that they have the "right" interpretation of what the concept were supposed to mean initially, as has happened with the term "energy" in physics and not without good reasons.

I am a dualist, and I believe we are describing that other thing when in physics we are justifying our conclusions for why something X (unobserved) were a sufficient reason for something Y (either observed or unobserved), while our efforts will ultimately be in vain for our descriptions and schematics will never even be anything like that other thing.

But this topic also relates to threads like The Mind Created World — unenlightened

Hello unenlightened!

If the reference of two things are dual then either reference would be impossible without the other, it would therefore be something outside of the sphere of either concepts which could be a conceivable ground for disputing whether either mind or nature were not a necessary unity, and that would contradict the correspondence between the reference and referents.

Therefore mind and nature are necessarily united.

Also, the concept of necessity is derived empirically (it is actually the most derivative concept we have disjunction->negation->possibility->necessity), and can hardly even be applied transcendentally to metaphysics for that reason. That is, if the necessity of their unity concerns the condition for the existence of anything at all as opposed to us in particular then the concept of necessity were applied transcendentally even though it were derived at bottom from sensations.

I am suspicious of the contents within a book spouting an obvious tautology in its title, but I will read more up on Bateson and believe I am justified in commenting what I commented here without having read any further into him given the nature of my response.

That is, what does a non-deterministic world with free will look like/how would it behave? — Jerry

The question concerns instantiations of freedom, no amount of formal systematising could give us evidence for these instants if they have not been experienced (this is both intuitive and provable), and to speak clearly about the topic of freedom we must expose these instants and define our concept of freedom by a duality.

We also have to be clear about what kind of thing it is which may or may not be free, and what kind of thing it is which is not free, luckily for us we could not even investigate these issues if these answers weren't already included in our questions, we summon the self as we so ask and we have no self to summon in the absence of the things that the self is not.

The things conjoined with the self is not infinite so therefore is the self not free without restrictions (it weren't even a self without restrictions).

We can further establish that concepts (abstractions) are also a necessary ground for freedom (though it is still unsolved whether it in addition to self and the non-self (say blue) is sufficient for freedom), we also know that the self is nothing without its concepts.

We know that freedom is impossible without concept, but we also know that freedom is one of the things which also becomes a concept for the self and we know that it is not concepts which were questioned to be free or not free and we must therefore accept that the concept of freedom is itself entirely unfree even if the self were determinably free in its will.

Let us investigate how concepts relates to the things they apply to, surely we can agree that the concept of elephant is far simpler than the experience of an elephant? And that the concept in proportion to its simplicity applies to many different individual creatures in Africa? Could this proportionality be the answer to our question of the freedom of the self? I believe so.

I believe freedom to act either towards A or B exists precisely because the proportionality between simplicity and reality allows for many simple things at once and that the will is the feeling towards either of the simple concepts.

I do not think that the will is freed from the feeling of either of the concepts, but i think the self is freed from the future it does not choose by not being reducible to the will. I do not think the will is free to choose which concept to "feel" for but I do think the self, in being always more than the natural will/volition is free to act within the limits of the simultaneity of its concepts.

You are not free to will anything, but your consciousness is more than the will itself and is therewith freed from it. The will is determined by the state of the universe, but consciousness through the "space" left it by the simple nature of its concepts is perpetually freed from the will, some humans excessively so.

This were not very well written, I hope to come back to the topic later and respond more directly to the OPs concerns by judging it under the principles I established, I also hope that it can be accepted by the moderators that I first delve into the concepts and then only later perform the deductive tasks of judging the post by means of them though as most threads here suggest common practice is to reverse that order.

Could consciousness be a form of energy like the rest? — Benj96

In physics the concept of energy is used to describe the sufficient reasons for the behaviour of observable entities that are supposed to underlie the experience of those behaviours.

Yet the concept of energy derives from experience itself, and already here we have the answer to your question, since experience is a part of consciousness and energy (as concept) is abstracted from experience so must it indeed apply to consciousness.


The actual contentious question becomes whether this additional form of energy exists differentiated in the same way we differentiate them, I would argue it could not possibly do so, and that each of these underlying energies are one and the same thing (gravity, nuclear power, atomic spin etc.), consequences of the diminution of a singular distribute of substance and are not differentiated in themselves at all.

I will only provide one argument for this assertion for now, it goes like this: all we know or could ever possibly know and indeed all we could think or could ever possibly think would only need one form of differentiation, and that differentiation is the very first aspect/principle of any conceivable thought, without evidence why differentiation should not only be the primary function of a living, perceiving or thinking being but also extend beyond such a being there is no reason to believe so.

I conclude that though the energy field outside of consciousness may be a quantity of a singular substance (a quantity of itself), by application of the Kantian duality of intensive and extensive magnitude I believe we can be far more justified in saying that the independency of the energy field that serve as sufficient reason for motion can be a quantity of itself at any given point of time without therefore having to be completely different kinds of things the way we can experience white as an intense light as opposed to a dim light without the white being therefore a different thing and being therewith differentiated.

I will go into more detail if someone wants to hear more or want to rebut something I said above.

I am new to the forum, perhaps it is a norm that if a name of a philosopher is relevant and explicitly referred to in the OP that we do not comment about the conceptual bases and nature of the post unless we include the relevant name in our response? Or at least quote a section of the OP?

This is often the better way to respond to a post, as it would make it clearer how what I wrote relate to it, though it should certainly be obvious and discernible that it relate as it stands.

When I think directly about the idea of my own self, which were formed primarily through the first ten years of my life I will often notice that it is a rather evasive thought, as others have noted it feels very solid until one actually stands on top of it.

So instead of attempting a phenomenological approach I would assert certain things that I concluded with as the foundation for the self in previous investigations.

My self is made out of shame, for in want of the means for the power I seek I am able to side with my offenders in times when I can imagine that it benefits those means.

That is, the self were made under the pressure of two equal forces, the will for unquestioned power and the comprehension of my own limited power, shame is the consequence.

Or in other terms still: my self is my social conscience, something I could only be shamed into. Can I induce that this applies to other people? Are we statisticians?

I would not need any expensive evidence to show you that you have denied each of the stories you have told yourself, whether knowingly or performatively, and that you live this way on a second to second basis, if not in terms of grand narratives/self identities then in terms of ideas and experiences all of which you deny as your own being, as your own first person perspective.

It can certainly not be denied that when it comes to all we know or have witnessed, that whatever it may have been happened in conjunction to that first person perspective, and so I ask 1. does existence possibly mean something independent of it, and if so could an essence be independent of it? Would it be conceivable that an essence and an existence were coupled without it? And how on earth could they mean something without the coupling?

I have proposed answers to these and the above questions in my own writing, but will refrain from a monologue regarding them, if someone knows why these are the actual kernel around which we may have meaningful argument, and have understood why I ask these questions the way I do I would further dig into it in this thread or elsewhere.

And thanks to the threadstarter for the topic!

The actual question is whether existence is possible without a subject opposed to each of its own predicates, such as in the case of us humans. We know that 100% of all which means anything to us exists, whether or not a given essence belongs to them correctly, the question is whether existence can itself be without predicates without also negating the predicates such as in the case of ourselves.

This question turns out to be identical to the question whether existence is possible without time, which in turn is identical to the question of whether existence is possible without the diminution of the mode in which substance appears.

This is answered by meditation, through meditation can it be revealed that existence neither needs predicates nor subjects contradicting them, that is, through meditation can negation and time be absolved, not objectively, it remains a mystery why the diminution of physical substance should have its own independent rate except teleologically for our purpose, which even if it is truly there for our/life purpose does not answer the given mystery.

The comprehension of these as the actual questions we are concerned with when it comes to existence constitutes what I call contextualism, which is the only consistent form of skepticism, which accepts no application of concepts beyond their actual context, dividing into a. the actual empirical experiences from where they originate and b. the possible experiences of imagination, and of less importance but worth mentioning: b originate in a by exhausting all other possibilities (there are non except an infinite regress (saying that imagination can come from something outside of things which has their ground in experience is itself an imagination).

What the theorems tells us is that the knowable consistency of our choice of axioms depends at least on us limiting ourself to a less-than-complete set of axioms, it should be intuitive that out of the set of all sound mathematical conclusions there are axioms in addition to those on which these conclusions were built which if coupled with them would yield contradictions and that at a certain complexity it would be impossible to know if it were consistent.

If this is not the essence of the Godel Inc Theorems then I don't know what I'm talking about.

When it comes to physicalism, which is really what is asserted then..

Consider impenetrability, the proper essence of physicalism, it can neither be reduced to 1. the matter of experience (sensation) or 2. the concept of impenetrability in our minds, instead impenetrability is synthetic of both 1, and 2, that is, you need some entity which thinks abstractions for there to be a substance which unifies the plurality of sensations.

Touch a stone and you will know right there and then that the feeling that something is impenetrable in/of it can not be reduced to the plurality of the matter of the experience (sensation: touch), yet since all you have (in the totality of your being) is either a. experience or b. abstraction it can not precede the experience, EVEN if the concept itself of impenetrability is a priori.

If certain a priori concepts were allowed in addition to those abstracted from experience it would still need to be justified why impenetrability were one of these concepts and why it (in that constitution, as an a priori concept) applies synthetically to the world of sensation, since the neutral position is always that a given concept is acquired from repeated experience (whether direct or disjunctive) of the thing it depicts or describes. Though as I said in the latter half of the former paragraph, even if the concept applies synthetically to the experience and preceded the consciousness of the experience (a priori) it would still be no evidence for why the experience itself should apply to the stone in its independence.

Idealism is just a rejection of the independence of impenetrability, space, time and emergent phenomena, yet often proposed by people who thinks they have asserted anything what so ever of their own, by imagining that the "mind" could be a substance when the very essence which depicts it hinges on being dual to something different from itself, something different from mind.

Hey @joshs thank you for the good response, let me reply back here with how I understand (or don't) your notion of a non-propostional logic!

It is hard for me to imagine away the behaviour of my own which characterises my whole life and appears to characterise everyone I have ever come in contact with, yet this is that I am asked to do by people who says that my thoughts can be empty of truth value.

Thoughts could hardly do anything besides appear a) in a way they did in my past or b) appear in a way they never before did to me, and in either of these cases, say a bus in the former case and a bus with unicorn-wheels in the latter case, I would as a thinking subject know that I am distinguished from these thoughts and that they thereby fail to predicate me.

In other terms: nothing human appear to ever happen in absence of instantiations of the concept of negation, regardless of whether external objects of phenomena were present, what would it even mean to say that a logic could be composed of modalities and quantifiers to the exclusion of truth-values if all examples of either are involved in the process of negating the self with which they come conjoined?

Math is a continuation of the dualistic nature of concepts in general, there are only ambiguous and foggy dividing lines between language, its syntactical rules and math, each of these things supervenes on the human ability to apply negation on several predicates at once (mutual negation of predicates/identities), which upon phenomenological analysis can be found to happen spontaneously within phenomenal limits, or simply: in everyday experience.

Math is imbedded in the universe non-computationally through its many proportions, if you mean the universe which we refer to inside experience, but the concepts we invent in our minds does not exist in that universe apart from us, just like how the laws which describes its behaviour does not exist inside it, the concepts of our minds can never be abstracted from these proportions alone, instead we must apply dualities onto these proportions to describe them in terms of a language thinkable to us, there is no reason to believe that this language applies to those proportions independently of the process we go through to think in terms of that language.

Logic is not a formal system, a formal system is a logic.

Logic are necessary conclusions, when we say that something is "logical" we say that it follows from the information we have available, while non the less expressing that information in a way that were different from the way that information occurred to us initially by application of dualistic concepts (non of which are abstracted from experience) in our major premise such as "all/some".

It is impossible to know that something follows (as a conclusion) from the information available without also knowing at the same time that something else would not or that it did not have to before we concluded so.

In other words, logic are the reversed order of subject -> predicate, constituting the ongoing falsification of the predicate by the plurality of subjects experienceable or thinkable in existence. One posits a predicate, a fireman, it may be preceded by an experience or from imagination, and it is then either affirmed or denied by the pattern that is recognised in the subject a moment later.


Everything is possible until it is necessary, and both these concepts are contingent on the concept of negation, and negation contingent on the disjunction of plurality of experience, as in derived a posteriori. Logic precedes that of which there is formal systems, or of which there are the field of "Logic" the same way physics precedes everything ever thought in the field of physics.

Inductive systems are no different, they are wholly downstream of deductive ones, the only change is that predication takes an extra step or that the subject becomes our own ideas (the realists imagines that the precise opposite happens), which is to say that whether someone is a fireman or not is not known by him merely wearing the uniform, but whether we have reason to believe it is known, which in turn is another way of saying that all we have is knowledge, the propositions we have imagined for ourself by means of that knowledge are exactly that: fictions of our imagination, we create the non-knowledge by allowing (though really perpetuating) propositions to refer to something that does not correspond to experience, this is the invention of "truth" and though it seems to be irrelevant to the precise topic discussed I ended up here because it follows directly from analysis of logic.

Hello SimplyG! If time only occurs in relation to change happening in space then you have answered your own question (whether time exists if there was nothing) unless you also think that space is nothing, in which case time would not be contingent on space, since a contingency requires a relation between something that is more than nothing and that which is contingent on this thing.

Your own answer is that time would not exist if there were nothing.

Space (surely the one we know of) is contingent on time, just like how the first dimension is contingent on the second dimension, as without a plane would the line have to be composed of points, and since this is impossible and lines are known so must they be created from limiting it from that which goes beyond it.

This is also how the third dimension works, without time could there be no volume in our experience, no amount of planes, lines or points could create a volume by being conjoined together.

Time itself however is not contingent on any dimension above it, and is the most emergent property of reality, and it is precisely this emergent property which is the fluid one, fluid in the sense that anything can be an instance of time, while everything beneath time has no instantiation on its own (a point exhausts the whole domain of 0-dimensions, a line exhausts the whole domain of 1-dimensions, a plane exhausts the whole domain of 2-dimensions and a volume exhausts the whole domain of 3-dimensions, the domain and the instance are identical) if something is intricately shaped in the third dimension and not sufficiently described in terms of "volume", say a T-bone then time is required for its reality and so it actually does not exist in the third dimension alone.

My answer to your question is that time would not exist if there were nothing. Further, the idea that time could exist if there were nothing is equivalent to saying that time is an illusion, and if this is what you wish to ask then I would be glad to respond to that as well, but until then I will try to keep my response relatively short.

When it comes to a proper coordinate system of the physics of the universe we have to add an additional spatial dimension in to the three we know of, since three are insufficient to account for the necessity of its simultaneity and time wholly contradictory without simultaneity.