I don't think it possible to go back to business, — Constance

I must have confused you. "Business" is what we can't leave. Assuming the hypothetical staring at the abyss of being is even possible (if anything, it's a micro-glimpse, not a stare; an aware-ing, not a vision), it's not so much a returning, as a being smothered (once again).

something there originally that made their thinking compelling. — Constance

Not just originally, continously. We "pursue" being because we are being.

It's just that we "pursue" being; thereby, ignore that we are.

thin line between existential enlightenment and schizoid personality, — Constance

Though the latter may suffer from the misfortune of thinking they are two things. Both are "pathological," if by existential enlightenment, you are referring to the "pursuit" of being, thinking you will access being by such pursuit. It's the same for you and I, if either one of us denied the inherent contradiction/futility in a dialogue which intermittently (to wit: now) pointed out it's own futility.

While schizoid, as you say, or any other pathology recognized as such yields no functional benefits, not so for philosophy, though the latter seems futile. Philosophy, just as it is wilfully blind to the futility of its pursuits, is wilfully blind to its own actual role: to make sense/navigate the meaning making system. To order the Narratives in functional ways.

Philosophy gets us even to the essence of religion, that pursuit of and glimpse into the real truth outside of our Fictions.

One direction the OP takes us is toward the self, the ontology of the self. This is value-in-being. — Constance

I think that to be both a valid and worthwhile discussion, but through my lenses that takes place as two discussions. Ontology of the real self would exclude the ego/subject and therefore necessarily all signifiers, including but not limited to all words/thoughts/ideas. So called ontology of the so called Subject self, I, would yield much intriguing discussion, but I would recognize that we are analyzing the laws and mechanics of Mind.

I have argued that the notion of "no self" is not taken up very analytically in the East. — Constance

With all due humility and modesty, we are applying western analysis to the concept of no-self; not to the level of technical precision you might prefer, but still; despite phenomenology, mahayana is permeat.

Heidegger called gelassenheit, his meditative thinking that does not dogmatically seize hold of the world but yields to its possibilities of disclosure. — Constance

Hah, like an uncarved block, actionless action. That Heidegger! I have to imagine he knew more than he let on to, delivered it to his world in the most progressed language of the day. But that sounds like wisdom beyond logic.

It is our own finitude that is somehow lost, but lost IN that very finitude — Constance

Oh yah. That's perfect!

Ironically, I may be diverging from your position (I hope not) but the first finitude is what we exactly are, and always are, a finite, organic, mortal animal. We create out of that finitude, out of its imagination, a filter which without escape modifies how we perceive the first and real finitude.

It is only by disclosing transcendental intersubjectivity (even if only in its protomodal form) that constitutive regressive questions, which in every instance
proceed from the construct of acceptedness which is "the phenomenon of the world," achieve the rank that makes possible adequate understanding of the intersubjective world as the correlate of a transcendentally communicating constitution — Constance

I don't want to jump to conclusions (need to read Husserl now, and him, within context, understand especially their use of "intersubjectivity") but this seems very compelling (Mind/History).

Fink is no mystic. He is a very rigorous intellectual, but his thoughts attempt to find where in the already given world transcendental impositions have their ground — Constance

Ok, right. Reduction, as in, can I put it this way, "trace signifiers down to the root in "nature" for the first signifier"?

All of the "metaphysics" in the ancient Eastern texts are reducible to phenomenology, whether it is in Pali or Sanskrit. How can I say this so emphatically? — Constance

No disagreement here! I totally agree. Just as, and I say this in support of your point, not as a "tit for tat"

one has to read Derrida: — Constance

I totally agree again. I'm no Derrida scholar, but having actually enjoyed reading Grammatology (enjoyed as cf to Hegel or Lacan) same has built Foundations in my mind.

Consider that I am the scientist that is asking the simple question about a relation between two objects, a brain and a fence post. One has to isolate the condition and study it as it appears, and nothing else. — Constance

Ok. Got it. So hypothetically, though we don't know what other animals see, can the question be asked of other beings? Obviously my dog will see the ball in the air that he lead to catch. Same question applies dog brain here ball mid air, how is it the two meet?

Isn't that a question biology/physics can answer? Leaving the real question how is it object becomes "fence post" in a human mind after science explains the optic system.

Within my current thinking, there is no question the object in the distance exists outside of my Mind and is a real thing in a real world. Any confusion over that, I submit, betrays the absurdity that logic/reasoning, though functional, can sometimes create. It is

The answer to this question is that everything we experience is interpretatively received. The "good" as Wittgenstein called it does not wear its interpretation on its sleeve in the entanglements of familiar affairs.

Such is the problem of the "simplicity" of analysis-free living. — Constance

Worthwhile points. Ignorance is not bliss. Knowing that you cannot know does not mean stop pursuing knowledge.

I'm triggered by the urgency in your tone to read and think about these things, especially my current hypothetical place, in more of a Phenomenological context. See where it leads

some form of firmware as well as a soul. — Tarskian

Assuming you don't mean "firmware" literally; sticking to the metaphor, what is the soul? Does it not also code the hardware so that it operated effectively? Is the soul, software? The operating system for the software?

religion is built into our preprogrammed biological firmware, — Tarskian

Quran 30:30

I'm not a scholar, if I'm being presumptuous, accept my apology in advance.

Is it necessarily instilled in us biologically? Or is that a favored interpretation because your's is currently a physicalist view?

Could it have been instilled in each human soul; this innate desire for religion?

I looked at Quran 30:30 and your reference to Fitr, and neither is explicit; but your "nature", given Islamic dualism, I'd lean on religion is built-in desire of the soul. (?)

I don't think our biology thinks. No blanks to fill in because it's all blank.

But you likely disagree.

From a purely physical perspective. Ig must be something like you say. Religion manifests because it is fit to do so, in terms of our survival. For example, given the complexity of our brain, it counters a natural drive to die. Or even, it manifests a mysterious intuition we have materially connecting us to Nature as a Whole.

And here we are 1000 yrs later still believing our first intelligent mushroom induced fantasies. — Gingethinkerrr

Ok, all that might be so.

But what was that fantasy? What was pug into words and captivating? What was the result of human imagination?

Was it commandments? Was it a revelation of truth? Or, what is the essence?

As for our (that is yours, Constance, and mine) dialectic seeming never to arrive at a complete close [BTW, fine by me, and, I sense, by you] here is another beam of light on the point of difference.

I see in the Western philosophers I have read (comparatively, Eugene Fink! for me, not a lot) places where they have erred and others where they have not gone far enough. I'm sure others do. And I do, fully aware of my ignorance. But it happens. I can't help it. As I believe, Mind is an autonomous "thing." The difference between us contextually might be my ignorance. Either it leads me down a provably wrong path, or it permits me to wander away from authorial intention, or both.

So I see Husserl as erring when he correctly hypothesized that the transcendental experience belonged to what we've loosely agreed to call the "language." But then seemingly elevated that experience in what I find to be this shadowy hierarchy of reality inescapable since Kant, but showing up everywhere starting with Plato. Heidegger then repeats this error with his Dasein talk.

For me it is simpler. The elevated reality where humans are concerned, belongs to being [that organic being]. All else is talk.

Husserl's transcendental contradictorily involves the Ego. It is, by definition, not elevated.

I now both anticipate and welcome your reply as to why it is in fact an elevated experience notwithstanding the Subject's place front and center.

Addendum: the ego/I is only self evident (or apodictic) within the "rules of play" giving "life" to the ego, to begin with. It is (I am) not absolutely apodictic.

Addendum: but I recognize Husserl's Transcendental experience might be as far as we go re the essence of religion; and that just being, as I've been promoting, may actually be impossible for us. And, that this is akin to what you're saying. But I'm not certain.

To speak the word "construction' or "organism" is a construction. — Constance

Agreed. But that never stopped anyone (generally).

Every time inquiry goes as deep as it can go it encounters the language that produces the thought that is inquiry itself — Constance

Well put

Structures of thought itself are not analyzable once thought is reduced to logicality simpliciter and so the existentialist finds herself just staring unproductively at nothing in search for being. — Constance

So well said!

Or admits to having no access via [that uniquely human form of] existence, and so, gets on with the business of existence, knowing (unlike postivists) that it's just business.

he knew what he was doing and why. Most interesting test for the nature of agency, the "who" one is. — Constance

Do you think he maintained focus on knowing, right through to the end; or, did he silence the knowing, the pride that would follow, and the fear which the former arises to overcome. Did he make the ultimate sactifice; one stripped of all construction, loosened from the (safety) net of becoming; a sacrifice of being?

If the former, "one" remains "I" even in its noblest sacrifice.

If the latter, one truly is the body being and ceasing to be.

Cloud of Unknowing, — Constance

A fascinating Western construction for its time.

to reduce that life to the transcendental constituting experience of the world that was concealed by the apperception of the human — Constance

WTF? I'm intrigued. Thanks!

I stop, and bring the whole of productive thought to a halt, and turn thought into an indeterminacy by removing the certainty of the affirmation that goes unchallenged in the thinking. — Constance

You know, that might be a "crack" a glitch in the mechanics where aware-ing might find "it's [organic] self." I've never tried.
But you must agree. Instantly "thoughts" flood the aware-ing, even in its "effort" (which habitually employs thought).

But then, this indeterminacy, conceived as indeterminacy is a new thought construction itself, a — Constance

ah, yes, you do agree.

rather dramtatic impasse as the regression never stops, — Constance

The trick is in the "focus" your organic aware-ing makes. Yes, infinite reduction, you cannot stop. But "you" can aware the silent breathing instant. Get a glimpse of that and see what "you" is.

Caputo in his Prayers and Tears of Derrida that is complicated, but worth the read. — Constance

Thank you! Is it nevertheless "true" to Wittgenstein? Does it assess Derrida? Favorably?

language" never leaves perception for us — Constance

And I have never ceased to agree.

Then why harp on about being and the essence of religion? At worst, it is a useful ritual. If we can get a glimpse of only being, a nanosecond, to add that to our knowing, albeit, by definition, that experience as knowledge, is no longer that experience, yet, our knowing will be enriched and grounded. Both phenomenology (Kant's and Husserl's) and existentialism (SK's, N's, Heidegger's and Sartre's) are "more" functional with that added tool. At the very least.

This has to be pondered, you know, cup there, brain here....errrr, explain — Constance

This comes up consistently. Does this answer, if any necessary premises are accepted, address it? Use rock because cup has the added complexity of being a cultural construct.

In nature without language eyes see rock and brain process it bt sending signals to trigger an appropriate feeling, drive, action, if any. The "conversion" of the rock into the object, "the rock" doesn't take place. So that your question, "how rock there brain here" does not even come up.

In world of human mind, eyes see rock, a conversion into language autonomously takes place, drives feelings actions, are displaced/determined by those constructions. Now eyes "see" "rock

physicality say about this relation? It says there are two separate localities — Constance

Is this necessarily so? Am I misunderstanding "physicality"? Mind makes difference, Mind makes the space between. Physically, it might be simply as I described above. Sensor and object are One in Sensation

And so, in response to your "turning away from making and believing" in discussing being, this would entail the physicalist position, the treating of subjective states as independent of the observed — Constance

Yes. You may be absolutely and inevitably right here. Where you have taken us. It may be that--even if my [admittedly fully constructed] depiction happens to be accurate, and Sensor-object-response are all One in being; we--we specifically human beings are irreversibly alienated from that Reality. That, I agree with you, and any resistance on my part is psychological, or, wishful thinking.

You and I REALLY ARE in a world and our problems and their entanglements are real. What is NOT real is that which belongs to the interpretative error made as a matter of the habits of the race, as Kierkegaard put it. — Constance

No maybe about it, from where I'm standing; there are many ways to express it but yes:

1. We humans are real; as real and present as a stone or an elephant.

2. But we are ineluctably in a world of representation; and, "owing to that" we do not aware-ing that present being; but, instead, turn our aware-ing to the Narratives of becoming.

So what if I shoot a teapot? What if I want to kill the scary spider on Kirk's chest without killing Kirk? How does the device handle that without needing to explain it at length first, something nobody has time for in combat? — noAxioms

If it has been uploaded at astronomical speed and volume, with all the information that a reasonable person of reasonable intelligence is from infancy to middle age; and since it's smart, you point it, speak (perhaps think, but nah) "spider only" and it takes care of the rest, even if it's your job to aim. For sure. Look where we are now, that you're probably not even laughing. By late 23rd C, phasers are smart.

Is it ontology? — noAxioms

I, 1, might not know where the latter properly fits, 2, wanted it as hyperbole.

What constitutes an object is not to be found in physics or in the physical structures around us, but in what we are doing with our language — Banno

Is that as far as W went?

Are you saying that , loosely Kant-like, he didn't want to get into the "reality" of the object and so, took the position, that what we can know of an object is in our language?

Or did W say the only reality of an object is in the language and there is no physical?

Thank you all for your replies. My topic was mostly an observation. If you can think of exceptions to my 'it isn't physics' assertion, such counterarguments would be especiallywelcome — noAxioms

Sorry! Just got to this part.

A word is a device that can carve out a boundary. — Fire Ologist

More than that. It's a device that constructs so called boundaries [that aren't really there]

I decided to call them gutters because they could be used as gutters. — Ludwig V

That is a helpful distinction because it further illustrates point. Do one thing to an object, say, paint it: still one object. Cut it in half, maybe still one object cut in half. Give the two halves a new Signifier; suddenly the ontology has changed! No. We make everything and believe it; a dynamic process, while Reality remains present. We, becoming, accessible to our so called knowledge. Reality, Being, only accessible to "doing the being" to is-ing. But the latter does not mean that there is no physical basis to it; that's just the former--we--talking. It's the contrary. For physical objects, from air to my body, there is only a physical basis. The rest, we make and believe.

could only conclude that what constitutes an 'object' is entirely a matter of language/convention. There's no physical basis for it. I can talk about — noAxioms

Yes, what constitutes an object for us in a world structured by language, is a matter of language. But that doesn't mean there's no physical basis for it; we just can't know the physical basis--there's no physical basis for "us" (who "see" now, only through languge).

Apparently — noAxioms

Apparently the convention is that whatever you are carrying is part of you, and vanishes with you. But how does the phaser beam know this convention? — noAxioms

Because the phaser beam is designed by an advanced civilization with, say, quantum computing powers, even the phaser beam has been uploaded with enough that it knows what a reasonable person of reasonable intelligence knows.

Does it take the railing, a piece of it, or the building, or what? The convention isn't clear in this case since the boundaries of a non-living thing require more detail than just 'take this'. — noAxioms

Again, what would be reasonable in the circumstance? It will do. If one out of a thousand are grey, so be it; same for a reasonable person of reasonable intelligence. Convention is convention, programmed by an evolutionary process over time, constructed and uploaded into all humans, and soon enough, their technology too.

Non-fictional examples: — noAxioms

All just examples of where convention stands today. Your point is brilliant I think, and was said immediately. Objects[as we see them]are just constructions and projections settled upon and transmitted from mind to mind. If you push enough, maybe in 200 years, when asked, what does a truck weigh? The conventional answer is, depends on what's in it. The fact will remain, we do not Really/Truly define Truck now; and we won't be then. A truck (itself a construction any way, so...) ...a rock is only whatever is being or is-ing, it is not a solid form of sand or minerals.

Same goes for that object "me". And that's the real point. "I" am a convention. What the body really is is accessed only in its is-ing.

To Ludwig's gutters — noAxioms

They are what your locus in mind has settled at; that's usually triggered by convention, but like any evolutionary process, it's ultimately whatever is the "fittest".

This existence based on the fulfillment of others is particularly altruistic and unnecessary — Igitur

If you are looking from the perspective that you aren't already these others; that is, that you are mistaken if you think you are an individual self.

Physically you are a recycling of atoms, never a stable anything.

Organically, your genes are shared by countless combinations of others.

Your mind has been constructed out of "code" input from countless other loci in history; the Subject projecting a "self" is no more than a mechanism.

We don't know this en masse, or even conventionally, because of how History has thus far developed "our" Narrative, but it's absurd that we speak of so called self fulfillment instead of altruism, or advancing "us". Everything we do, including pursuing and evaluating so called self fulfillment is inextricably bound up with others, the rest of moving history. Whatever you do to fulfill self inevitably affects others. If you are a desert father isolated from others, you are that because and in the face of others. If you bring with you any philosophy, mysticism or ideology, any thoughts, you have brought others.

I'm not saying I'm altruistic, nor am I preaching. I'm just pointing out something overlooked; and likely, rejected, perhaps by you. But it is what is. Human existence, "both" physically and so called "spiritually" or existentially, is ineluctably others.

sorry, I know you are receiving multiple notifications. Last one, just thought I'd say, because I know you may have alluded to this, most recently, when you may have properly protested, that that "glimpse" we've been volleying back and forth, each in our own "language," is a "big deal" (cant remember your word) when I had said it was unnoticeable.

Maybe there's something to Kant's "sublime" before it is described; that is, before it is "sublime."

You look at a mountain, you feel something instantly because you have aware-ing-ed seein without the intrusion of Mind. That feeling is a big deal. And maybe, and this is depressing, that's exactly what aware-ing being without Mind always feels like. Maybe our superimposed order, functional as it has been for thd prosperity of the species, has, by displacing present aware-ing being, dulled the experience of the sublime which is often the feeling triggered by sensation, but has been displaced by meaning.

And just as any superficial copy is a dull version of the original. . .

Vedanta says Brahman (ultimate reality) is Existence-Consciousness-Bliss.

Epistemology and ontology are the same thing in two words. — Constance

Another way to encapsulate where I seem to diverge from what I assume to be the limitations of your more well grounded, logically, and thus, conventionally, current belief/settlement. And to tie our discussion back in to the OP.

For me, all of philosophy from aesthetics to metaphysics, is a process of knowing, which is a process of making and believing.

Except ontology qua what ontology purports to pursue, Being. That, if pursued to its end, is not knowing, but being. How does this require any logical assessment? Ontology pursues the nature, ultimately, of being [itself]. How better to pursue being than by turning away from making and believing (including but not limited to all philosophy) and just being?

And here's where the essence of religion resurrects. Being, necessarily not being any "pursuit" let alone a philosophical one, is virtually impossible for an organism whose brain has been generationally and individually conditioned to flooding of autonomously surfacing images, in complex structures and in accordance with evolved laws, which trigger the body, like code, to feel, and act. The catch being, the Body, mesmerized by the form; the Narrative form--Subject and predicate constructing meaning successively and in recursive(?) loops, building swirls of meaning--stops aware-ing it's true nature: nature; and, starts aware-ing "a self" in the swirls of meaning.
Eating to satisfy hunger becomes, sushi, crab cakes, and Icecream; then, I love Icecream; then, I am loved; simplified and rushed, but, I think you see the picture.

Soon enough, I need to be rich, to hell with my neighbor, she's encroaching on my driveway 12 inches. Etc. We have utterly become the they, because everything is the they. Heidegger can try to come up with tricks, sophisticated western versions of Wu-wei or Zazen, but ultimately none of these are actually just being.

Religion at its essence but rarely properly executed, provides only a Crack, a glimpse notwithstanding the impossibility, into being. Because regardless of institutions and their motives, at essence religion demands the sacrifice of ego. That is, abandon Mind.

and the phenomenal IS the noumenal. They are only interpretatively distinct, — Constance

Understood. Thank you.

Epistemology and ontology are the same thing in two words — Constance

I understand that statement as applying only because, ultimately, any "ology" is rooted in epistemology, in the sense that we construct all knowledge including ontology.

However, the subject of ontology is falsely applied to/by knowledge, causing the confusion that perception can access the "ontology" of "things," when I believe it cannot. It can only access the [constructed] knowledge.

term 'existing' — Constance

From my pursuit, I have been moved to separate existence and reality. Mickey Mouse exists, but he is a fictional character, ultimately empty of reality. The same, I have settled at, applies to the Mind, the experiences constructed and projected by the Mind, and the Subject of every "sentence," constructed and projected.

John Caputo's Radical Hermeneutics is very good on examining this idea. — Constance

Thank you!

So bound to the "tranquilization" of the "they" of inauthentic existence, as Heidegger will later put it, one never rises up to even ask basic questions — Constance

I do not dare dispute that all three, Plato, Kierkegaard, and Heidegger have their role at advancing the puck to the net. The shadows, the inauthentic, the They, are all recognitions of the way our organic aware-ing becomes lost, entangled, enmeshed, in the constructions/projections. However, these thinkers and their concepts, like the thinkers herein and their concepts (myself included, if I can be so bold), are sill no less lost/entangled. At some point the puck can be carried no further and the players must leave the game altogether; not to enter some mystical transcendent reality, but to go home where they really always are in the first place (poor metaphor, but you get my drift).
Plato, SK, H, et al., simply cannot uncover truth because they are still using covers; theirs, perhaps, a bit less opaque, but still, covers.

"seeing" is not a brain function. Seeing is the act of consciousness awareness. — Constance

seeing is a brain/bodily/optic faculties function. Perceiving (or, choose your word) is an act of consciousness as in Mind. The organic aware-ing (consciousness) does witness "a brain" in its truth/reality; but promptly Mind displaces that sensation with perception structured by Signifiers.

phenomenologically, there are meanings in play — Constance

Phenomenologically, yes. Meaning, yes. Meaning is what the constructions/projections have evolved to construct and project. Meaning does not exist in Nature. An animal without language, regardless of its sophistication ( a prehistoric homo sapiens) does not look at something and contemplate its meaning. It looks at something and responds by feelings, drives, and/or action.

For us, "what does it mean" is the perpetual question in the face of every perception. But what it means is simply "informed" by data already input and reformed to suit any given perception.

The meaning is not some reality we uncover. It is ultimately empty nothings.

But the giveness or presence of these constructions still IS presence — Constance

Hmm. But is it in the constructions? Or is it in the Organism providing both the infrastructure and feedback?

The error is in the interpretation of these constructions, not in there being there at all. — Constance

Such constructions constitute the world in its everydayness. — Constance

Yes, the interpretation is another "level" error. You're right, their being there, is not an error. It is what it is. The first "level" error is one of interpretation, but maybe not what you had in mind.

The primary error regarding the constructions is in interpreting them as presence, and real. When they are not. They are becoming and fleeting, there and gone, perpetually. This error may be harmless, but is potentially problematic on several grounds, all of which only directly apply to within the constructions themselves. One primary one is interpreting the Subject for tge actual being it mechanically represents; its stories, for being, for reality. I lost my job only matters within the story. Your body is breathing. Praise "gods".

This is what makes truth possible, not what makes truth, truth, but is essential for truth. — Constance

We differ so subtly, yet we each seem planted on the subtly. I would add to that directly preceding, "is essential for understanding truth; understanding, being ultimately, like knowledge, certainty, another word for belief. In otherwords, the constructions make "truth" a possibility within the system of constructing becoming (note: not constructing being, contra existentialists like H and S, being is not constructed, it already always is-ing). The constructions are not essential for truth, which always is-ing. But they are essential for belief.

OTOH, Christian metaphysics doesn't have to be tied to churchy narratives. — Constance

100% and if it is "good" metaphysics, it can easily erase or displace; e.g. God-->nature, etc.

am not trying to be argumentative, but something "outside" of constructed truths is hard to imagine — Constance

No argument here. I'd say impossible to imagine by definition, since imagine (for me) is ineluctably constructions.

So, I say, the only access to reality outside of constructions, is to be, without constructions. It's not a thought thing, it's a doing thing. But I admit, it lasts nanoseconds.

I observe it and it is there, but I cannot say how this is made possible given the standard physicalist model of the world — Constance

I believe it's because you are seeing only the coffee cup for what it is in itself. But quickly, rapidly, Signifiers flood the brain and these code certain feelings which the signifiers in turn hijack with Narratives. That's what phenomenologically you end up seeing. Naturally you do see the coffee cup for what it is. As does an owl or a beaver; anything not affected by human Mind.

[quote="Constance;910735"]The self is elevated, profoundly reified, and acknowledged as the very source of the divinity objectified by popular religion. None of this is undone. But one's finitude is understood as infinite. This is a way to understand Kierkegaard's knight of faith.[/quote]

This nothing: Eternity in time and space is familiar, and this is not simply quantitative: when one reaches out to these eternities, one is confronted with an existential impossibility that is not reducible to an abstraction, though we are mostly familiar with this kind of reduction and so familiarity, once again, trivializes something pretty amazing. Now think of eternity, not in space or time, but in the existing things around you and see how this familiar intuitive anomaly of perception trailing off into eternity, now throws the world into question, rendering indeterminate not merely space and time, but everything, every breath taken. — Constance

Here, we seem to agree. And I have picked up from you, and with gratitude, will adopt, that, though it is impossible to assimilate being into knowing (becoming), maybe one could at least try to maintain that presence of being by perceiving it in every breath of the ordinary, though it incessantly passes over it.

I like that, but am compelled to see that as (to modify Kierkegaard) a movement in the aesthetic. I mean that, if that's what you mean, and I like it, still, who's kidding who. We are still (as is SK's leaping knight) moving within the realm of the ordinary, becoming.

But still Maybe what that's saying--if you eliminate the Dualism of a spiritual--is that the essence of religion; the religious movement is neither an ethical, nor a "metaphysical" (as in emancipation from Mind's hold on consciousness), but an aesthetic movement. A symbolic reminder that Mind and the phenomenal (I include noumenal) is a motion picture, a dynamic construction/projection, and that we really are is the stillness of being.

the presence is registered in a language context and the significance of this is contextual as well. — Constance

And there is nowhere a human be-ing that has ever existed, or can exist without it; this mandatory mediation of language?

Call this openness eternity — Constance

provided I understandd the "gap" in the hammering and this correctly, I ask,

Is this openness accessible to any other earthly being, to your knowledge? Or does it require the special human being, a seeming combination of things, one of which no other creature seems to have.

By way of side note:
I cannot help but read in both out text, no matter how artfully delivered by you, and many others, for instance, just speculation built by the available tools and materials both of which neither express nor have any ontological reality like the rest of the natural universe does. But thd constructions and projections of Mind, of History; they're images in memory, and their reality is just a function which happens to trigger feelings in reality; that is, in a human organism. They're code, the very Narratives structuring our experiences, is an empty fleeting function. What is real; what matters, are the feelings and sctions triggered by thd code.

close the gap made by language that separates the ordinary world from the esoteric: — Constance

I'm proposing the esoteric is within the boundaries of the ordinary; both are constructed. I have the same dispute with phenomena/noumena. The gap which is unbridgeable, leaving us on the "wrong" side, is between the ordinary and Ultimate Reality. The latter, it turns out, is just Nature. Our body being our body. Eating and Breathing. That's real. You want to access Ultimate Reality? Turn for a sec from the ordinary and just be aware-ing organic being. We can't mate, bond, eat, etc. without instantly re-receiving them with our make-then-believe. Is it not obvious what must be real? Why is that--natural being without the intervention of becoming--what is real for every other atom in the universe save and except the ones forming us (which, by the way, came from the other creatures we consume, etc). [Unless you fully accept dualism. The universe has a material and a "spiritual" domain and Mind is the evolved spiritual domain. But I really believe if either view: Mind is an autonomous but empty process which evolved/emerged in an advanced animal with language (the basic structure of Mind) vs Mind is the spiritual realm occupying or animating the material realm; which seems a stretch? It is dualism.

all thinking is categorical, and thus what is apprehended is implicitly categorical — Constance

phenomenology laid some potent Foundations.

All thought is categorical is a law of that autonomous process of construction and projection called Mind. It evolved that way to allow for movement, then growth. Difference, linear time, dialectic, meaning/belief. The Narrative form. Logic, reasoning, Aristotle, Kant, categorical thought. These are not realities but evolutions in an artificial autonomous process advancing and growing as History.

Religion says. Don't get fooled.

this "singularity" (which is, of course, itself a boundaried word) "works". — Constance

The singularity and its workings, from my pov, if we are talking Being-Ultimate-Reality (the body/nature), has neither works nor interest in works nor is there any access to knowledge about its works because Mind constructs all of the above. It, Reality, cares not. It Reality, just is-ing.

we say is "Being as an absolute" itself cannot escape the world in which it is discovered for this would be ony "bad metaphysics," the kind of metaphysics that exceeds what is there in the world to posit. Being is, after all, a word, conceived in the time matrix of phenomenal being, and to call something Being "outside" of this makes no sense. — Constance

Fascinating how fundamental this question is. Yes. And what I believe religion might provide an admittedly weak and fleeting answer to. We can't access being through the world we have constructed; and being can escape that world because it already always has/does.

The world which we constructed on top of being, the one where, because we are being we don't have to discover being; and yet because we make becoming, we yet make and pursue being out of becoming. Hence, our being is always a representation and not the real and present; which we are; but which we ignore. [Probably what Buddha meant by Avidya/ Ignorance]

The self is elevated, profoundly reified, and acknowledged as the very source of the divinity objectified by popular religion. None of this is undone. But one's finitude is understood as infinite. This is a way to understand Kierkegaard's knight of faith. — Constance

I agree this is SK's, and understand why it may be yours, though we seem only to diverge here. But I see the self as a mechanism which has gone far out of hand; and if I could melt into humanity and lose myself, that I suspect would be the highest, though unattainable, state of reality while in the world.

I hope we do see, and I believe there is still room for this faint, improbable hope. — Fire Ologist

Fair enough. But who or what exactly is doing the hoping? And on whose behalf? And what will it see? And, to what end? And. How? How, any of it without a body?

I too have hope. Maybe we can't help it; even those who suppress it with Science. But my hope is that immortality already is, and that "I" never really was. Because hope in that doesn't seem improbable.

There are other options. Like, the matter which made up our Bodies was incessantly transforming, but they, in themselves, have a virtually immortal existence. Living or dead, is irrelevant to what we really are.

As for what we were conscious of; these were stories. Stories end. Or they live on, already in other stories, just as they were constructed from other stories. And so, our Minds, as human history, are virtually immortal.

It's just that there's not what "we" want; we who form the subjects of the multiferous local stories. We want to carry on only as that subject. But, it was only a mechanism linking the Body to the stories, and has no function when the body is gone, so...

The body lives on because it's not thd body but the universe.

The Mind lives on because it's not an individual spirit but universal history.

It is only the ego, never alive to begin with, that finally becomes obsolete. Nothing feels nor experiences that loss. And, nothing was there to begin with.

"'I know that I am a human being.' In order to see how unclear the sense of this proposition is, consider its negation. At most it might be taken to mean 'I know I have the organs of a human'. — Sam26

I think skepticism is the inevitable position, and philosophy, and philosophy forum, and this discussion persists because we are l intuitively skeptical in spite of intermittent settlements called belief knowledge or certainty.

That it is inevitable can be seen even in the language in propositions "I know I am x because" No you don't. We all so called know that everything we so called know is subject to adjustment. So even the language of the non-skeptic betrays skepticism is already built in. That temporary settlement we call knowledge, or certainty is nothing more than a functional belief necessitated by the way tge whole aystem--Mind--moves. There would be no human Mind or a very different one if tge mechanisms for belief didn't evolve. Or, in W terms, belief is a built-in "rule" of play.

To say I know I have two hands already implies that it is accepted by you, nothing more can ever be said. True so called certain can never be about a thing; it can only be the thing.

I can be certain that I am, only in the being, not in the knowing.

My interpretation is that there is something foundational here, viz., that some propositions are foundational to our claims of knowledge or our claims of doubt. When you reach bedrock no part of the foundational structure is stronger. — Sam26

I agree with you, there are "strong foundational" propositions; even ones which we can conventionally settle upon as having nothing preceding it but the "truth". But doubt that it would be possible to "trace back" and "locate" the factual foundational proposition which is derived from no other. Because that proposition would consist of words; in whichever language, each word the strong and foundational, would likely have been derived from several, if not many preceding words. And before words, in some cases, grunts or gestures (though I accept that may be going too far).

And if you're referring to what the phenomenological crowd calls noumena, or something like, those too are, no matter how reasoned tge argument, just too vague to confidently rest at "no preceding concept."

I do not know if I have wandered far from Wittgenstein or any expectations of orthodoxy. So I apologize.

My point is, all of our propositions are weak, there is no accessible bedrock, beyond speculation, follwed by convention; reasoned, but still, speculation (since all of the mechanisms constructing reason, too, are now remote, far removed from that initial representation of the truth.

then, it is philosophy that requires us to speak what it is that this is about — Constance

Sorry. Maybe I pressed something.

Anyway philosophy is brilliant. It keeps mystics grounded. There are a million charlatans for every Buddha.

As I see it, one has to be clear about this mysterious threshold, and this requires a careful dissection of the structure of experience-in-the-world, the average everydayness. — Constance

Yes. I respect that highly. In my untrained way, yet I strive for that. I take risks because I'm unconstrained; it can be fruitful. But I totally wish to stay within the boundaries, or be certain of cause to cross them. And the latter, I would not presume to do alone.

But terms like unfettered and unencumbered reality are philosophically problematic. Experientially, perhaps not, though this will have its limits, and will be vaguely understood at best, not unlike the term religion, all mountains, so they say, arrive at the same peak, meaning what one believes doesn't matter, for faith itself liberates one from the constraints of everydayness. — Constance

Ok. Yes. And yet, that's what I think I mean to say. So, I need to understand the problem. First, this so called unencumbered reality is like everything, the wording is a stab at a target, and I am not a well trained fencer. In itself is implied, its failure. But that can be said of everything, all wording, to obviously varying degrees. But none is immune. But I know you mean beyond that. So does this help. When speaking of reality; not only do I have no business qualifying it with conditions like unencumbered, but I have no business period. What I reiterate is I do not and cannot know reality; I can only know the seasoned version. I can only be reality; which is that (not that "I" already am) that already is.

In perception, there is no looking up to confirm. The image is itself its own being. One cannot look away from it to discover the Other. All there is or has ever been available to experience is experience. — Constance

Yes, I totally get that. There might even be a melancholy to it. But that's because Mind moves egotistically. The system "desires" manifestation of its constructions (because the organic infrastructure upon which it drives is structured to fire images to the aware-ing part of the organism for conditioned responses. So "it" that is, experience and the Subject to which it attaches, "want" to extend into the being itself. It's not an illusion it's a process of evolution wherein a thing thrives by growing. So "you" which constructs meaning, knowledge, want to extend that fiction into being itself. But being is being, not knowing. And not just into being, "you" want knowledge to extend beyond being but into an imagined eternity; and so Mind evolves to construct itself in History as spirit. And being a functional construction, it sticks.

The absolute stillness of "being" is conceived by Plato as the changeless form that this world is an inferior manifestation of — Constance

That is sublime. I'd adjust my own take to it by saying "the world" is just the images constructed by mind and flooding organic consciousness. Plato, afterall, laid that foundation regardless of the given locus in the history of evolving interpretations. No skin off his back.

an actual event such that one discovers in the flux of one's existence a presence relative to the busy, what Heidegger calls "the they" self, — Constance

Ok, but the "event" only in the context of the essence of religion, i.e., to save us from our "selves" remind us we are all one, all of us, not even, just humans.

In the rest of "thought", it is in my opinion, though thought of as Philosophy of Mind,
the heart of metaphysics, explains, therefore "negates" epistemology, and, since Ethics is the offspring of the two...etc.

However, the Heideggerian process you described, and, maybe, on a strictly intellectual level, Husserl's bracketing (though I am a novice at both Hs, not for lack of sweat squinting, and tears), is close enough to what I'm proposing. Zazen just happens to be almost bang on, if properly practiced. Soto. Rinzai is probably a close second. I say just happened because I made the connection after witnessing tge hypothesis that Western philosophy built.

I note that, in my opinion, for both Hs as for Zazen, and Koans; the "reward" that sublime experience of presence you called it (it is utterly uncallable, so that feels right, why not) is extremely momentary. It's "hope" or "promise" from a "religious", but I submit, Hs perspective, is to "jolt" you so that you're on to the truth. And, as you instantly and inevitably return to the Narratives, maybe yours will be restructured autonomously to follow a path more functional for the Host organism, and its species and planet.

But this does not change the "becoming structure" of experience. — Constance

That's right, I agree. Inevitably Mind's autonomous process is still flooding the brain and triggering the body with its constructions.

But this seems to be raised by others as a reason to insist that because they are experienced, and ineluctably our experience, they cannot be any less real than the organism, or at least that they and the organism are one. But they aren't one with the organism, they are images stored in memory and moving by an evolved law which flesh only provides the perfect hardware for. Once the data is input, it has evolved to function. But the data, though existent and functional, is not Real like the flesh is real. And the flesh is the real consciousness; it's organic aware-ing. Even a plant has it when it grows toward the light, or it's roots search for water. But Mind is just data making us feel by projecting stories. The stories are not real. An apple is what it is; not what we perceive when Mind constructs and projects "A is for Apple".

. I can still conscious activity, but I cannot still the construction of the moment itself. This would not be the "no self" of the Buddhists; it would be are duction to literal nothingness. — Constance

It's a physical exercise, but it's easy to stay stuck in Mind with advice like watch your breath, or worse, count them. I believe one must hone in on that breathing is. Not I am or my breaths: just breathing [organism breathing]. There are no fireworks; nor eureka I'm sure. It's more like Kierkegaard's knight of faith. To the world you are still just a clerk, if you have masterfully glimpsed being, by momentarily being. To yourself you remain a clerk, but you now "realize" something "true" outside of the constructed truths.

Brains and everything else are discovered IN consciousness. — Constance

Yes, I agree, if you are saying my reliance upon this object "brain" being what it really is, is a projection of Mind. In which case so is everything I say.

If you're saying the organ brain only exists as a construct projected, and that the thing brain in itself may be vastly different, I accept that possibility, but think it's far more likely our organic senses are not tricking us. There are objects and bodies in the world around us. We could sense them as they are so called in themselves. But Mind floods sensation with images and churns out perception. So now we can't help but see the seasoned version. We aren't outright seeing an alien world, but compared to apes, it's alien enough.

We are connected in consciousness, in an occult intimacy that only phenomenology can discover. Science will never understand this. — Constance

I think, psychoanalysis has gotten pretty close. I think science could Crack a lot of the code. And phenomenology, as did Plato, laid a strong foundation. But I think what none of those can do is know what reality is, or truth. They can only construct it, just as I too, am only constructing. Phenomenology, from Kant to Husserl does, I agree, ironically (?) also express this essence of religion; it points to the fact that there is Truth "hidden behind" the knowledge.

this is not available to one who is IN the "fettered" state — Constance

I think this would be true if there were two selves. There is only the organic aware-ing being. There is no knowing, no meaning, nothing but aware-ing the present is-ings. View that aware-ing as unfettered reality; being unencumbered by the projections of becoming. We were so obviously once an animal like that. Our [what I've been calling] brain was fed images to trigger conditioned responses. Now our brain us flood with stories. And tge organism aware-ings the "I" in tge stories as itself. Neither the "I" nor the stories are anything. They're empty nothing. So no one is in the fettered state needing to get out. The body just needs to aware-ing its organic being so that tge stories follow a--ironically just as fictional--path which is more functional to the Body and the species.

this terrible burden of philosophy that interferes with what I believe is the very simple (if difficult to achieve) revelation. But then, it is philosophy that requires us to speak what it is that this is about — Constance

I completely agree. And, actually, philosophy, burdened by logic and reason, and all, is still the best path to unders

the agency of the "I" of my encounter with the world, even when matters turn profoundly insightful and deeply felt, is going to be constituted by the interpretative language education that gave me my "presence" out of infancy. — Constance

serious meditation reduces the world to its essential or "pure" phenomena — Constance

Yes!

does this language and the "totality" of my educational grounding which prior to the "sublime experience of presence" determined my thinking, discover "something else" revealed as one approaches the ground zero, if you will, of the famous nunc stans. — Constance

With respect. That expresses a lingering in the very thing that "metaphysical" aware-ing you're implying. That thing--yes, call it language (Human Mind)--from which the sublime presence is, we agree, a "reprieve", but actually, simply, a turning inward, into silence, asks the question, and you, with respect, "let it" (its all autonomous anyway), but "here" in presence, where reality is being (what it is-ing which we call being), there are no questions, no discovery.

The instant "you" discover the "experience" of sublime presence, it has ceased being aware-ing-ed. And organic attention is once again flooded by made up images from memory and reprocessed for "the world" by the imagination; all in lightning speed and incessantly.


I will continue to read your response. I wanted to separate the above because it is essential to my thinking, and as it becomes clearer, so will your critique. I am witness to that very process!

the desire to know based on the knowledge of our ignorance. — Fooloso4

Ok, fair enough, but with the assurance that you will know? Or notwithstanding your inevitably inescapable ignorance?

how does one get around the "post construction" of anything which is acknowledged at all, even and especially "just xy" — Constance

By remaining present. By being. By not being-knowing-and-becoming.

But, yes, we are flooded, our brains, with images of becoming and it is hard, arguably impossible, to escape.

But in the spirit of this particular discussion, though we may be trapped by our condition, if anything provides a window, an opportunity for a glimpse, it is the essence of religion, which I (presumably not alone) am positing as attending, not to the self, and the weaved narratives it appears in; but, rather to being; first, by being its unfettered, unencumbered reality; second, upon returning, as one ineluctably does (instantly), to the self; then, by attending to the welfare of the body, the species, and the nature we share with all others. Not to desire more; not to settle complacently for less. And, not to entertain the inevitable desires of the self, flooding the brain with reasons to go way beyond the welfare of reality (I.e. the body, species, nature).

It COULD be that x and y are in some metaphysical, non relational simultaneity — Constance

If, never mind Eastern Monism, Parmenides is right, xy happen all at once.

I'm not confidently proposing Parmenides, but the thought that reality (and here's where I traditionally lose you et. al.) happens all at once explains a few things.

Mind evolved everything by its function, many of them conventionally thought of as, if not noumena, noumena-like. Reason and logic, among them; first grammar, all of these still evolving. And difference, hence, dialectic, movement. It constructs and projects more or less in narrative form (nature is); becoming, linear time, causality. All of these not actually separate categories, mixed, built upon, etc.

So xy which are, let me be lazy and say tree falls and landing on a person, kills it. In the event's being when it exists or ceases to exist is irrelevant. It is present being. It is only for our post construction that time becomes relevant, along with its movements, logic to structure the narrative, cause and effect.

In reality, tree--falling--landing--organic dying.

In mind, what killed Plato? A tree fell on him?

There being something "there" at all is prior to anything one could say about its relations with other things, but then, to talk about its thereness begs the epistemic question, how does "it" get into judgment at all? — Constance

Very possibly I am not understanding something technical in your question. But it gets into judgement, 1. Because that is what Mind is, a knowing system; meaning is its "aim/product," 2. It happens autonomously. Like vision does to begin with (I.e. pre'consciousness') etc. For a hypothetical human never born into an age of humans with Mind, I.e. History, an apple comes into its line of vision (randomly, or because it is foraging) and it truly sees this aspect of its nature as, whatever, food; and it, whatever, eats it. For Mind, "judgement"--apple, ruit, healthy, red, green, large, ripe, crunch, squirt, sweet, etc etc etc--floods our brain autonomously, just as pre historically, the drive to eat might alone, have flooded the brain of the human organism, and yet, no less autonomously.

Foolish to doubt the "thereness" of the sight and feel of the cat — Constance

Yes I agree. When I describe mind as constructions and projections, or even fiction, that is not to say there is not a real and present world going on, and of which we are. But we no longer receive it purely through our senses, it has been heavily seasoned and processed by our imagination .

And why? Why did our imagination evolve to displace our sensations with constructions of its storehouse in memory? In order to thrive. Like any theory of evolution. It's not so much a teleology, as it is a post facto raison d'etre. Because Mind evolved from a bunch of reminders stored in memory to trigger feelings and actions, into a Hollywood sized industry of making stories to do so, it grew to what it is today. It has full control to the extent that nature has bought into its Fiction via tge human animal.

With AI fast on the way, Mind will carry on without the human animal, and perhaps, the essence of religion--i.e. to cherish the body--will become our eschatological, not just metaphysical, and ethical salvation.

universally valued; love, freedom. knowledge, wisdom, creativity... — Janus

Agreed

existential indeterminacy. This is an foundational epistemological, and therefore, ontological, problem. — Constance

And only "resolvable" as such. That is, within and limited to the framework of those "studies" and their specific ways of using language to reconstruct already constructed "realities."

These have functions but they do not open up/unveil for discovery any ultimate truths. The latter, which I still hold to be, our organic bodies, their survival, and the organic prosperity of our species and the rest of nature to which we belong.

there is nothing at all epistemic about causality. — Constance

What if it only appears to us as a linear process x-->y, because whatever "happened" to x and to y was immediately post constructed as x-->y and re-presented that way by Mind to "the" aware-ing ans assimilated in that form as "knowledge". But in "actuality" it was always just xy?

Is that not suggestive of causality being an epistemic process and effect?

I would say there's no "stuff" of mind or minding, because it is an activity, and as such is merely conceptual unless it is equated with brain processes. — Janus

Agreed. I hope I too was prudent enough to put "stuff" in quotations to highlight that it is not really stuff at all but, stuff-ing.

differences can be found within the dialogues themselves and in the works of Aristotle themselves — Fooloso4

Yes

Whoa. A relief! I always thought of "Plato" as diverging from, even betraying, Socrates skepticism.

Is there such clear evidence of this lingering-skepticism-notwithstanding-writings-to-the-contrary in Aristotle too?

But maybe life is living. And living is many things, — Fire Ologist

Is this not the long and the short of it?

With a Bricolage of logic and reasoning, a skilled artist can construct complex hypotheses to justify many things in ethics. As much as we like to think ethics transcends us, that thought too, emerged because it is functional to view ethics that way. Contra Descartes et. al., the only thing this organism can claim with certainty is that this organism is. Period. The same cannot be said of any of its constructions from "I" to "all life is Dukkha," to "thou shalt not x".

So does it not boil down to: life is living. We humans make the distinction suffering/no suffering. These, and like distinctions are how our world turns. But with antinatalism we are clearly going too far. People think asceticism a radical approach; how much more is extinction?

Even practically. If you can mobilize an entire species to eliminate one of the three strongest drives--to perpetuate living, and to bond with one's offspring--you might as well exhaust first, all other efforts to change the conditions. If the livestock are suffering under our current conditions, the solution is to change the conditions, not to sterilize the cattle.

As much as I have been turned on to Schopenhauer. This is the corrupted truth which emerges out of the insistence that the will is both the seat off the suffering and our essential human nature. The will constructs suffering. Our human nature may experience pain, the absence of pleasure, but it does not construct anything out of that; it responds to it, just as it responds to pleasure.

The so called will is the name we give to those dynamics of Mind. Difficult to escape, but actually malleable.

The concept of the self which we, in the so called western tradition, seem to cling to, is plainly a "fiction" blinding us to reality.

Picture the biosphere where you can see the air flowing into and out of every living creature, shared as if it were the unified being, all of the creatures, just its "offspring" or manifestations; mobile or planted, land air or sea.

It is only because of the attachment to this mechanism, the "I", which doesn't even participate in the air, that we, among all of the creatures, question whether or not nature is one. Clinging, as we are, not to the real unifier, but to the Fictional one, the Subject which connects the, thought, feelings, or actions to both mind and body, by making them seem as one, and unique from all others.

I can become fixated. Feel free to move on. I've already been enriched. I also understand Buddhism is not your thing. But it seems, there is a place where (certain, but broad) western philosophy and (certain, and a narrow certain) Buddhism intersect, and we can float between the two unconscious as to their historical divergence. But full disclosure I'm no scholar in either.

body is minding, so mind is more of a verb than a noun, an activity rather than an entity. — Janus

Very nice. But following what proceeded in your response, I'm not certain that observation compels me for exactly the reason you were compelled by it.

explanation is impossible insofar as its realization would demand the unifying of categories of understanding which are inherently incompatible. — Janus

Interesting. Could you simply mean "knowing" vs "being" as incompatible? I will have to think through. Of course any elaboration would be welcome.

we could just as well, or better refer to them as minding, itself conceived as the central activity of the living body — Janus

Fair enough but I have settled upon the belief that the "stuff" of minding is neither the stuff of the body (as in organic matter) nor even of its nature or being.

Except unlike breathing, digesting, mating; when minding, the by-product is an empty and fleeting image, a Signifier, the "reality" of which is entirely in its function; like zeros and ones, in how it triggers organic matter.
It does its thing then disappears for ever, reappearing just as fleetingly as a new construction.

And it is to that and not the body, that we attach this so called self, most commonly in the form of the Subject I.

the idea that only physical objects exist absurd — Janus

Mental objects "exist" but are not the ultimate reality of present being; they are fleeting becoming. So whatever we want to call that. I prefer the bold statement "fiction" makes. But it's a very hard pill to swallow, hence sell. I call it constructions-and-then-projections. It is definitely not what my actual aware-ing Organism is. It's what the latter is compelled to watch because by an evolved process of conditioning (generational and individually) its images flood the human brain and monopolize the response loop. Where once we were aware-ing and responding to reality. Now we are aware-ing and responding to imaginary stimuli gone wild (but following an evolved autonomous law and mechanics).

Point is. The self is the Subject Signifier in that process of turning reality into Narratives.

stories generated by the body — Janus

Ok, but then, the key word, binding us, is "stories". Body is the source of mind. But mind is stories. That's the point. And self is the Subject in the stories. It's fine for a 16 year old, while reading The Catcher in the Rye to sympathize with Holden Caufield, even to "become" the character. But that's what's happening. Should we aware-ing that?

nothing dualistic about the body and its activitie — Janus

Yes I agree completely. I reiterate that I agree the body is the one and only reality. No wink even necessary, because I see no conundrum. Mind is, as I say, a fleeting and empty nothing. It is not necessary. Our nonconceited ape cousins do fine. It is a fiction flooding our brains. There is, in reality, only thd body.

I am making a rule that says I should not be making rules. — Fire Ologist

Totally

Antinatalism isn’t tailored to the specific problem it is trying to prevent, and is way overboard of a response to just suffering. — Fire Ologist

And, if you don't mind, add: and, a response directed at the wrong party. If you want to end suffering, end mind's constructions, and attachments thereto. Why end a species?

I changed body to bodymind — Janus

Maybe your intial intuition followed a valid path. I'm hypothesizing your so called intuitions, to offer a point.

The body is a being in itself. The body feels, senses, has drives, explores, bonds, and acts in present aware-ing of these and the world around it. We can understand all of that fairly well enough. But the intuition which has puzzled philosophy for millennia (not necessarily always expressed in the same way) is never mind all that; how does this lump of flesh "do," in your words, "experiencing/thinking/aspiring/acting"?

Hence (and I'm being presumptuous as hell) your two-fold intuition, both-folds being "right". First, your intuition that when your talking about your real being, you know (in spite of millennia of chatter) it's the body which moves, feels and senses that you're talking about. Second, your intuition that the "experiencing/thinking/aspiring/acting" is not the body itself, but is being generated by and in mind. The latter seems like it's doing its own thing, yet the body is real. Thus, ultimately, you turn to "mindbody."

But I think your intuitions (presumably) are right. These goings-on of experiencing/thinking/aspiring/acting (oh, and I'd delete "acting" which is plainly the body; unless you really mean, choosing) are just the stories generated by mind. They are not really happening as mind "depicts" them. Body is affected; but just as body is affected by a sad movie. Images trigger feeling, drives, action.

The fact that we speak of the self in terms of subject and object (me/you/they) highlights that they are mechanisms in the stories mind projects, just as is their role in grammar; to unify/order and attach, etc. It provides a function.

"I" displace the body in Mind's projections; but the body remains present and real. Though body is attuned to its representation as "I/Me" it never ceases being (body). And from there--from present being; not becoming--there is no self. Not only is there no self; but [for many Buddhists] no Mind.

Given all agree that antinatalism applies uniquely to humans, and the unique human condition (that there is a "condition" most seem to agree; the nature or structure of that condition seems to be in contention) it seems like most people think, once again, that Ethics is the path to the "answer" (to be or not to be). Further, it seems most would say, albeit applying varying degrees of standard of proof, that if adjudged "unethical" antinatalism might be justified.

But I think ethics is either irrelevant, or is not being applied far enough. From my perspective, if a person, or a generation, is even grossly unethical, the organism and species should not be punished. Antinatalism is unethical itself; a patent example of the arrogance that our constructions have led "us" to. That we are considering sterilization of a living organism, because we can't seem to simply change our ways. Many even blame the body for that: craving, drive, aggression. As if much of the animal kingdom isn't basically variations of us. Our condition; our immoral condition, if that's what we're settled at, is not because our organism is naturally immoral. We constructed immoral in that uniquely human condition, Mind. And we can deconstruct it. We don't have to end an entire species to do so.