what makes humans so special — unenlightened

We can value anything, and everything, or nothing.

This conversation is nowhere else in the universe but in our minds here together.

Doesn’t mean we are better or higher - but certainly special.

Welcome to the forum.

Any honest question is not a stupid one. No reason to ever feel shame for asking a question, or else we should all feel shame. And if it takes bravery to be mocked for asking an honest question others call stupid, then you are just asking the wrong people, so thanks for being brave and giving us all the opportunity to show respect and value in your questions.

What is the value of a single human life? A great question and one everyone should consider more often.

If I set out to rank the value of all human lives, I should start by ranking myself least and go from there. That’s because, if I set out to value a single person, I conclude that every human life is a universe of value.

When it comes to judging the value of other people, I don’t think it is really possible - the universe behind human eyes is too vast.

And anyone who wants to sum up other people as stupid, or low, or of less value, doesn’t even know who they are themselves.

I was taught in Catholic school that an unforgiven, unrepented mortal sin at the time of death results in hell. Do you believe that? I was also taught that intentionally missing Sunday Mass without a good reason was a mortal sin. Suppose one Sunday you skipped Mass merely because you didn’t feel like going. Do you believe that if you died unexpectedly later that day that you’d go to hell forever? — Art48

"Unrepented mortal sin leads to hell" - Catholic tradition. — BitconnectCarlos

Unrepented - that is the key. Do we really need to blame God for hell?

You do something you know is wrong (regardless of whatever rule you think exists, be it go to Mass on Sunday, or eat meat on Friday, whatever), you yourself know it is wrong, and that it will hurt others, hurt God himself maybe, and you don't care, and you do it anyway, for spite, just because you want to. That's the mortal sin part. You have to knowingly do evil for evil's sake. Then, having consciously and proudly committed this sin, maybe those harmed ask for help because of their harm, or those wronged simply ask for some small notion of "I'm sorry", but no, the mortal sinner at that moment still could care less about the harm caused and still being caused, he still thinks the act that he himself said to himself was "wrong" and did it anyway, he says "I will not repent. I love my sins first and foremost."

Sounds like a hell of life to me. Sounds like Gaza right now, like Gaza when Jesus walked it. Like earth since humans have been in charge.

Are there sins we can commit that demand punishment? Satan is probably still bragging about his wonderful sins. "I tricked them into killing Jesus on a cross." Like we needed any help anyway - some of us today still want all of that credit.

But it's the unrepentance that is the key - all you have to do is say "whoops, sorry" and God will throw a banquet for you and sit you at his table in paradise.

So this frightening scenario of a mortal sin checklist is for children who need to learn to decide for themselves whether to go to church or not. I'm not saying there are not sins that land us in hell; I'm saying be an adult and that's nothing to fear at all. Once you are an adult, God is going to see your heart and see if you sinned mortally for sake of evil itself, or if you just made a mistake, and what's more, if you say "sorry" he will forgive you immediately even a "mortal" sin.

I know there is more to it all, and the church enforces the rules too, but it's better to understand Jesus whose rules were to love and to forgive others, and to serve. Break those commandments and rules before you fear Jesus.

Short answer to your question, yes, if you die with an unrepented mortal sin, you go to hell as you lived in hell. But that requires the sinner (who, remember, called something a sin, agreed it was a sin, and did it anyway, for spite, to harm, because the sin was what he wanted) - hell requires the sinner to say "I am not sorry."

You can't mortally sin if you don't agree your action is a sin. You have to know it is wrong and do it anyway. So many of us avoid mortal sin because we are ignorant, or we are 7 years old.

God didn't live as a poor beggar to be tortured and die on cross for us, only to later tell us "Well, it says on the checklist that you skipped church a few times, and you didn't honor your father as much as your mother, and you never asked for forgiveness, so, take the elevator to the basement - that's the rules. It's too late for you according to this checklist I have here; I loved you to the point of sacrificing my life on a cross, but the book says hell, so, looks like we are both sorry now."

I know all of that sounds like something a priest might say - but priests are sometimes just actually people, as ignorant as anyone else.

That doesn't sound anything like anything Jesus ever said. A grave sin that cannot be forgiven, I know it exists, but I hope I don't ever want such a thing.

To hell with all of the rules: simple solution to hell - forgive others who sin against you. Be a forgiver. God will throw away all of the rules for one who is merciful. Like Jesus was.

I define a regressive person as someone who is uneducated, superstitious, gullible, fearful, and angry. — Art48

I have a degree in Philosoophy and a post grad degree as well, I’m not the least bit superstitious (way more interested in a scientific explanation for any phenomena than some deus ex machina storytelling), not gullible at all as any 55 year adult on this planet should not be anymore. I’m really not as afraid as I probably should be, and I’m definitely too angry, but I know it, and can control it if you’d like.

And I go to Mass every Sunday.

Do I have to explain how your definition of regressive and your linking it to the essence of religion is really nothing more than an insult to religious people?

You have to really know religion, really study a life lived by one who knows and loves god, to build a convincing reduction of religion to ignorant fear, etc. Your sketches of the breadth and depth of religion seem narrow, shallow, and frankly old and tired.

But I am not going to judge some measure of your brain matter that led you to ask if religion promotes backwardness. I’m sure it’s an honest question (if I’m not being too gullible).

Religion, like anything else, must occupy my mind, my body, my desire, my whole human being. Like going to the movies. We all have to choose our content.

For no less than an hour a week, I watch and listen at church. At the movies, I get popcorn and hopefully something to think about, something awesome to see, something beautiful, something terrifying, and maybe something inspirational. I get all of these every week at church (well, bread and wine instead of popcorn).

I know why you look down so low on religion. That’s easy enough to see - all the stupid people who say “Jesus”. But you have to go way further back than the Romans or the Old Testament to find the really stupid, uneducated, fight or flight folks. The ancient Egyptians or Chinese or Sumerians - the slaves of Marcus Aurelius - they are your cousins and uncles and moms and dads, just a generation away, really like yesterday, or when you yourself were 14, no matter what university degree we’ve “advanced” and progressed to. We’re no different, no better. Haven’t come very far at all.

Nothing’s progressed to any degree worth bragging about, or worthy of looking so far down on superstition.

Everyone is still as full of shit as always.

To show me how religion essentially holds us back, you have to show me some great advanced place far from religion where we might go.

The progressive cerebral cortex gave us eugenics, and the nuclear bomb, and so many other highly educated developments, so high above superstition. Should I tie inhumanity to progressivism? Religion gave us the university and the hospital.

Religion can be a source of hope for progress, that there might be some value in progressing at all among you people, my fellow slaves, using that cerebral cortex to maybe find wisdom in love, goodness in the experience of beauty, and these words in any mouths of “progressive man”.

The hypothetical moment when "we" divided/displaced "God's creation" our natural selves, with our constructions, choosing knowledge over life. — ENOAH

But it wasn’t just a moment. It happens everyday, by each of us. It’s a story constructed to tell me who I am now.

It wasn’t bad to put clothes on. It wasn’t the knowledge itself. It was knowledge of our own disobedience, that we knew what to do but didn’t do it. This is what we hide, this is what we cover in clothes, our wills, our selves; we hide from each other and make room for sin in the empty space between us, that we construct.

The story in the Bible shows us what is happening right now. And in that context, the context of now, the story of Jesus is unprecedented. The story is that God so regarded us, he would become one of us and being our servant unto death for us, so that even though hidden we could be in his presence again. But we killed him, we still want to hide. That’s just like us, don’t you think?

None of this can be subject to science or we again take the Picasso and see it as a good placemat for easy clean up after lunch - misses the significance of the Picasso to seek the uses and causes of something sublime.

It’s fine if you need lunch to grab a Picasso place mat, but then any old painting would do. Why look to the Bible when there are better sources of history and philosophy and science? Jesus is unlike anything ever painted. He became the painter, like us, and painted himself, for us. He allowed us to be the ones who drew the blood he painted with. So that we might live again, forgiven even for killing him, not simply eating a piece of fruit.

I told ENOAH the same thing not long ago. — Patterner

We’re all fumbling around in the same cave. With some good company.

I came away from the Gospels hating the Pharisees/Jews — BitconnectCarlos

I get it, one can read hatred of the Jews into it. Many do. Too many who call themselves Christians do.

But that’s not what I come away with at all - racial, ethnic divisions never made any sense after Jesus. The term “white Christian” drains all meaning from the term “Christian”. All of it.

God singled out and chose the Jews in human history to make clear where any human could go to seek God’s word. They can look to the words the Jewish people kept. That’s why Jesus was Jewish, why he had to be a Jew himself. He both the pinnacle of Judaism and the abolisher of all division among all peoples. His word was never for some ethnicity or race - it was for all on earth who could hear it. It just came through the Jews to simplify a starting point for the rest of us. We carry the Old and the New together now.

The Pharisees do not represent the Jews. They represent themselves, or terrible church leaders. And Jesus didn’t hate them. So we Christians shouldn’t judge them.

If the Pharisees represent anyone, they are like popes who sent men off to crusade, or priests who sexually abuse children, self adorned stewards of the word of God who used their position to sin against their fellow man. Soiling the very name of God. Jesus certainly said these things were sin, and that sin in the name of God was evil. But not once did Jesus specifically damn anyone to hell, so we can’t begin to judge who Jesus might have us hate.

But the Jews represent all of us. Me (Italian Catholic American) and you (whoever you are). The people of earth, who, even standing right there closest to God would still not see him, and killed him. We all are like the Jews in the Bible. We all killed Jesus, at least most of us. No reason to pick out a particular group and hate them. Just blind to your own position right next to “them”.

If you hate the Jews, you hate yourself. And you completely misinterpret the story. (It’s like using a Picasso or a Monet as an example of paint viscosity such that the paintings themselves become a distraction to ignore so you can talk about the components of red versus blue.)

And he was crucified most of all because of a Roman, not any Jew. That’s important for all the haters. Romans, like the soldier who asked Jesus to heal his child and Jesus did so immediately because of the Roman’s great faith, Romans killed Jesus. We are like the Romans, and the Samaritans. All of us.

But Jesus, who was not like any of us, became like all of us, a Jew, so if the Jews are to represent a particular group, it’s the particular group of all of us.

Division among men is a construction of men, like Adam hiding himself in clothes, dividing himself from God. We all do it. Divisions among us are real, but not because of Jesus, but because of what we make of him. We are the ones who divide ourselves from others. Jesus may be said to be the cause of division among us, but it is not along racial, or ethnic lines. That’s stupid.

Hating at all brings judgment on yourself - if you hate, no matter how good it feels to hate, you are already setting yourself below the person you are hating, no matter who they are. Jesus didn’t do that. Christians shouldn’t either.

I can see some sense in which it's a 'construct' but I also believe there is an innate good, although not everyone will agree. — Wayfarer

I see it as constructed, but objective or innate in that we can agree that what we each construct sometimes agrees. Agreement has good inherent in it, for example.

Couldn’t you say that the innate in conscience is where the good is gleaned, where the good is constructed? This still doesn’t say what the good is. So you may be agreeing that the good is gleaned from experience, just adding that it is the conscience that does the gleaning with its innate judgments of what is good.

This is all meant as a reply to the OP. The quotes are my sources and citations. Because they lay out enough moving parts to make the point.

what a person or in even more complex cases, a group of people, define as good can only be gleaned from experience. — Shawn

I agree.

philosophers seem to be so caught up with no clear way of defining it. — Shawn

I wholeheartedly agree. And there are whole theories of ethics and morality that ignore the good that is ever-present in the word “ethical” or “moral”, the good lurking in every moral, ethical statement. Ridiculous.

the notion of good is something inherently informed by experience, but its not something that arises from 'experience' already-formed. Notions are human, and they develop — AmadeusD

Plato found the good was an object, already formed, out there to be experienced, regardless of the human who forms the notion of good in the first place. I think Plato was pointing to what is formed once the good is developed in the human (so he was wrong to point to an eternal form). To glean the good from experience we have to grapple with the fact Amadeus raises that only our own minds can make the good, and by gleaning we are constructing the contents of our minds. That just means the good never forms without us. But I disagree if the quote from Amadeus means the good never forms. There is an object, a definition, that forms, from our experience, called “good.”

"It's all relative." — Outlander

This is the kind of statement that ignores the definition of good (from philosophers having no clear way to define it) and leaps to a scale with good, worse and better. The relative. So now, with no understanding of good, we say “good, worse better.” Then we get so enamored with our ability to move the scale, and take the same act, like killing, and mark it as good on one scale, worse by some other measure, and maybe even best measuring again. From all this mess we conclude good is relative. But it is we, the ones constructing the scale who make relativity. But further, we must first fix the good for the scale of relative goods to function at all. We still need to glean a definition of good if we are to leap into judgments of better and worse.

There are distinctions. Gleaned from experience. Constructed into knowable forms. One of these distinctions is between good and not good.

We need the good to be a fixed definition. I am sure every single one of us says “good” everyday. Every single day we make this distinction. So there is something we have gleaned, something we have constructed that we call “good” - something we should be able to define.

One person kills another person and a third says “good”. The other person was killing and attacking your family and you stopped them from killing all the rest and the third person was your mother who said “good”.
Then one person says “We must sacrifice our eldest to the gods in order to avoid the hurricane,” and they kill their own son and say “good.”

In all of these examples the notion of “good” remains fixed. It is used in the same way. If we look to compare killing the first person with killing the son we have to look to the same fixed definition of “good” to come up with our own opinions of the killings. The good, like Plato mistook for eternal without us, is more like something eternal (something we all say every single day) with us.

It is difficult to define the good because it is:

inherent in the primacy of experience — Shawn

It’s like trying to define a letter of the alphabet. We have to use letters to make words to make definitions…but by then we’ve gone so far past the single letter of the alphabet that it is easy to forget what we were meaning to define.

But nevertheless, like letters, we fix good in our lives everyday.

We can’t avoid the good we’ve constructed.

If you agree, well then we are good. If you disagree you think my opinions are not good. Right? So you must agree, good hides or screams in every sentence.

We go to the store to buy milk and can’t find it and the storekeeper says “what are you looking for” and you say “I see it now, I’m good” and the storekeeper knows everything he needs to know.

Or someone falls off a street corner and is about to get hit by a car and someone grabs them to the sidewalk and some else says “man, that was good - like a superhero..”

Or someone is leveling a table and gets the first side good, then the length leveled up, and their boss says, “is the table good?” And she says “all good.”

From all of these experiences a distinct good can be gleaned.

It’s a universally good word to know, because it is a universal feature of experience, like alphabets and characters are universally present in language and logic. Part of the mix that makes it a distinct mix.

This reply isn’t good enough. Doesn’t give you a good definition of good. It truly is difficult to say what good simply means, what it is now that we have constructed it. But there it is everyday.

And maybe the good is so basic, we don’t really need to define it. It isn’t necessary to define the alphabet before I make this post.

Maybe it would be better, if I took advice from the following:

I don't have much to say about good — Shawn

In the end, I think the good we make, that we remake in so many ways, is now distinct and will continue to make sense in every agreement, in every finished piece of work, in every night you lay down a fall asleep (did you sleep good?).

Some might even say this post would have been good if he stopped about halfway up there, but at least it’s good that it’s over now.

Show me — 180 Proof

You want a personal invitation.

I’m not capable of showing you God.

I hope you keep looking.

I don't have to pretend a cracker is human flesh, or that a magic prince will eventually come back and take a second shot at rescuing us. — Vera Mont

Pretend? He took his shot. It’s done. We know enough what to make of our own end from here.

And it’s not a cracker. That would be silly. It’s a wafer.

So you take the position of God then - leave us to figure out what to do for ourselves. The lonely way is the only way. Should I have crackers or maybe some… ooo cashews! Thank the Lor… oh forget it.

y the way, lest you thought otherwise, I wasn't disregarding the statement about as real as everything as a "manner of speaking," in any way demeaning the statement. I was assuming, as you might note from my return to an edited version, that you meant "as real as everything" as a phrase like "might as well" or "better than nothing." — ENOAH

I know. You’ve had plenty of opportunity to pillory my viewpoint, but keep things cordial and conversational anyway. And I’ve probably asked for a good pillorying. Because you are a closet believer in the self and objectivity. :joke:

Yeah, all that. In action. When? — Vera Mont

You’re just being grumpy.

I admit I can’t demonstrate anything I understand from the story of Jesus as some sort of argument. I admit the story is as far-fetched as it is incomprehensible.

I think the story shows God did absolutely everything he could for a humanity that is good and worth his attention. There’s nothing left to say or do. AND as a bonus, we get to go on living as we please no matter what we believe. The question becomes simply, do I want to, of my own heart and mind, want to please God. I see the story is of a God who told us to please each other.

Mind is "becoming," we agree.

As real as anything else, I'll respectfully disregard as your using a manner of speaking. — ENOAH

Manner of speaking. Hmm. Yes we cannot speak at all without the real. You said becoming is real. You said mind is becoming. So you posited “is” as if there was a real. So you are speaking, in a manner if speaking, are you not?

Why agree with my words? They are illusory secretions of “illusions”. Yet you said “agree”.

If you agree, you assert an object that is not an illusion. You’ve said you have something there to agree with. Namely, me.

This is why when talking about objectivity, you end up talking about the self, leading you to identity.

But by now we are way down the path of the real, as much as we might temper this motion of new distinctions with “illusion”.

But, for flashing moments real. Yes. It is Real, in the present, when it affects body into feeling or action. But only in that instant, and not in the preceding or proceeding projections. And sadly or happily, "we" move right along with the projections. — ENOAH

Don’t you see? If only for a flashing, fleeting spark of a moment there is a mind, if our whole lives were just one flashing instant, in the grand scheme of things, this may as well be an eternity, for there is a real SPARK. I don’t care how short it flashes - I saw it flash. I am it, or it is with me, or it makes me as I vanish, but by then it’s too late - the real has parts - me now with it.

Mind has its first cause and final effect in its natural source. Put very simply, the projections are images stored in memory (first cause). The "destination" is as code to trigger Body to a conditioned response, feeling or action,(final effect) followed . — ENOAH

You may as well be talking psychology. This is full of “this is real, and this is not, and that exists, and that does not” speak. You refute the ubiquity of the illusion by trying to explain “all for human minding, is illusion.” Mind and objectivity as illusion is impossible to speak. By speaking, real objects must be distinguished or else we cannot move to the end of the sentences.

Illusion, yes, keep it close to your mind, as at least a tool, as you experience becoming and sift through the darkness; but denying the objective entirely? The flashes that prompt distinctions. Why speak of what you know with so many words and distinctions, if you always and only know the same illusion?

I’d rather you keep speaking, but I don’t think you need to forget objectivity to retain illusion, and in fact, I don’t think you can retain an illusion, without objectivity.

Really the body is the objectivity - it is prior to the mind, the thing that makes illusion out of this objectivity. Either can only be discussed, retaining both.

Self (the one that speaks and is spoken of), to me, is neither body nor body part. — ENOAH

I’d say self is a paradox - both part, and identity. Identity is also paradox (in any thing, any unified thing, identity remains becoming, though it remains distinct, though it becomes new, but a new unity, but still changing - a paradox.). So the self IS, a paradox that is built on a paradox.

That Self cannot exist in the present — ENOAH

The self ONLY exists in the present, immediately undone by each new instant. This is the life of becoming, and how short lived, but real, is the self. In the present only - never needing any memory nor any purpose to simply be, but then, become again anew, undone again, to be born as firmly as always in the present self.

We once again see the exact same thing, from such opposite directions, in such contrasting words, but overlapping precisely in other moments.

I don’t see it as a fork in the road, you going one way, me another. I think we are standing around a table looking at the same object from two different sides, each conjecturing or dabbling in the other viewpoint.

Was it really more absurd than other religions of the time in which it became popular? Few taught there was an afterlife (Judaism was ambiguous on this) - that had its appeal. But in general, it's an interesting historical question. — Relativist

I see it as with everything authentic about whatever god there is, as the most absurd, leaving nothing left to be said, able to fill us with wonder even if life was eternal.

Three persons, like I am one person, but one God. Totally absurd. Heresy to the Jews like Peter and Paul who knew him first hand. Impossible to fabricate this story. And it surviving without a pen for the most important years.

Hence we now have thousands of Christian sects, some mutually hateful towards each other over doctrine and dogma. All interpreting god's will differently. God could settle this in a minute if he intervened. — Tom Storm

We always had, and probably always will have, sects, and gangs and mobs, the participants in identity politics.

I agree - damn all the sectarian. Just because we people, armed with religion and sectarian, tribal, fear and aggressions, have used “Christianity” as a slogan to further perpetrate division and oppression, that just makes the so-called “Christians” like all the rest of us republican conservatives and demo-social-communist progressives. I’m sure someone has put me in a box already. I just separated myself from the box-makers, so I’m just as bad..

None of that looks like Christ to me at all.

You say God could settle this. I agree.

You say if God intervened. I agree. He had to intervene looking at the likes of us.

In the story of Christ, the cross was the intervention. Before the word “Christianity” when a man named Jesus was just showing us who God really is, he hung himself on a cross to die an horrible death. If anyone wanted to leave their sectarian birthplace, God said “Here I am, your servant.” The final intervention.

The rest he left to us, to take what he taught, what he said and lived, and continue to make a sloppy mess like we always do.

That is how much regard God has for me. He still left me free, ready to forgive me, even though I killed him, like we all killed him. For you. For each one. So much does he want me to think I am loved, so much does he want me to live, that he would die on a cross for me. For each one of us, individually.

Because we want to be left alone. Right? Who needs God anyway.

When God intervened with us most directly as human beings, we killed him.

If God intervened more, than what good would my friendship with him be? What good would our friendship with each other be, if we were not free to seek our own minds, our own wills and share our own hearts with each other. God wants us to be us, so he doesn’t intervene; but God wants us to be friends with him and each other, so he shows us what friends do, how friends talk to one another, how to love not matter what the cross.

He didn’t ram religion down anyone’s throats, not even the religious experts of his time who did not recognize him. We are the bad parts of the things we muck up, be it religion, politics, family, friendships. Christ wasn’t sloppy at all if you look hard.

The intervention isn’t over until it’s over, and we get to live both the deprivation and the salvation. Forgiveness is always instantly there, with a banquet to celebrate immediately after.

An atheist doesn't necessarily claim (though some may) that no kind of supernatural entity could possibly exist — Vera Mont

You’re right. Tom S pointed that out to me above. I was speaking more to the illogic of someone claiming that necessarily God cannot exist. So point taken.

It's perfectly rational to trace both the provenance of a deity-figure and its mythology to a human culture, human attitudes and concerns, human ideas and human interests. — Vera Mont

I don’t see that as the case with Christianity. I don’t think we could have thought of Jesus as the Messiah prophesized in Judaism.

It’s all so absurd. Yet it’s really, as an extension of Judaism, many thousands of years old.

Who would have thought of dying humiliated on a cross, to save all of humanity?

By a son who utterly bows to his father, dying willingly tortured on a cross?

Yet this son and the father are one and the same spirit and one God, as three distinct persons?

Already the religious institution committee would have said “nope - preposterous - it will never stick! Let’s go back to Zeus or Baal, or Odin and work around them.”

Or why was it God himself becoming a man, living poor and being killed, so that he could rise again? Why is the incarnation leading to poverty and bloody death needed?

And if God was here, walking the earth to found a church, why did he not write one word down, not one written word by Jesus, to found a 2000 plus year old institution?

Why throw in the sacrament of gathering to eat his flesh and drink his blood to have eternal life?

Absurd, yet it works - shows me something more at work than the human mind, interests, cultures - this absurdity should have died within years, even if he did rise from the dead. Why the absurdity?

Most religions capture pieces of this story. So they seem incomplete or more easily traced to culture, interests, etc. But no other religion captures all of the absurdity of being a human being while also capturing the rationality of being a creature like God.

And the message of action - love, sacrifice for others, forgiveness, the value of life, that God cared so much, held each one of us in such esteem, that he would rather die on a cross to lead us to him than leave us with nowhere to go, but preserving our freedom to live by our own choices, like creatures in the image of God.

I love the idea.

But if there were two all-powerful beings, wouldn’t the power of one be a limit on the power of the other, so that there were no all-powerful beings?

And if a being could only make the perfect choice, would there ever be any option or choice to make? Wouldn’t that mean such beings had no reason to ever choose, as each “choice” was really just a seeking of the knowing the one way to act?

And if you didn’t already know the right way to act, knowing the perfect choice (as when you pause to consider options), how can you say you are all-knowing?

But that said, people are so damn intolerant, willing to act unreasonably, self-centered, and just plain hurtful, it’s worth thinking about how to change this without losing the real circumstances that beg us to tolerate differences, to be patient enough to find reasonableness, to consider others before ourselves and seek to help others instead of hurt them.

I wouldn’t change the world. If I could change myself, and we all could, this world could be good enough.

[P]redicates of X entail search parameters for locating X (i.e. whether or not X exists where & when). — 180 Proof

That makes sense but is it absolute? Our abilities to “search” are certainly limited. Must there be no things that exist for which searchable predicates are not entailed by their existence? And what do you mean by searchable - is that sensible searching only, or searching metaphorically with the mind? I think you mean sensible.

Are there sensible predicates of an illusion itself? What are the sensible predicates that distinguish a goblin from a unicorn from a deity? Or are all illusions indistinguishable from each other as constructions that can have no searchable predicates? Is it an illusion to call one illusion different in any way from another illusion?

so absence of evidence entailed by (A/B/C/D) is evidence - entails - absence of (A/B/C/D — 180 Proof

I think you have just shown that it is logical to deny the existence of things like deities. But it does not prove you must deny the existence of these things. No negative has been proven. It means to rationally believe them you must find more evidence or refute the finding of no evidence.

Evidence or lack or evidence shows it is rational to conclude something does or does not exist. That is what Tom clarified. It would only prove something does or does not exist if you could prove the evidence or lack of evidence MUST be the case. This leads to all of the problems of epistemology. It’s not proof of the existence or non-existence of anything, only proof of the rationality of drawing certain conclusions based on certain presumed (asserted, searched) evidence or lack of evidence.

I don’t think we can prove existence or prove non-existence. So we can’t say “I KNOW God exists” or “I KNOW God does not exist.” Just like I can’t prove the sun exists. I can only prove things about relations (such as evidence relates to conclusions logically or not) as in Copernicus proving that if we believe our senses, the sun in fact does NOT revolve around the earth. He’s proven something about the relation of the earth to the sun, but not proven anything in particular exists.

There is only the movements of becoming and the concomitant temporary settlements (beliefs), mechanisms creating all of our illusions. — ENOAH

Distinguishing “beliefs” from the objects the beliefs are about (such as a self), and distinguishing these from “illusions” are all just illusory “distinctions” not to be “believed” and therefore you give me nothing to go on.

It is a necessarily twisted topic. — ENOAH

I think that is positive wisdom. The same things show up on threads about “truth” about “objectivity” about “self” about “reality and appearance” about “being and becoming”, because these are all twisted together. The only way to ponder about objectivity is to posit a mind or a self, but the only way to posit a self is to be able to distinguish identity at all, and the only way to talk about identity is with metaphysics about bodies, which becomes a battle between being and becoming, which leads to question language and logic, etc…

We need to settle something, but we can’t. That is our predicament.

I see enough content in all of these areas to make the struggle positive, meaning, productive of truth and wisdom.

Paradox of being human. The Fictional Mind thinks it is real, functions in knowing, but has no access to Reality. — ENOAH

It’s not a fiction. The mind is certainly real. I just don’t see why we have to deny what we throw in each other’s faces over and over again in this forum. The irony, the paradox, of philosophizing about mind as a fiction. The mind is a chameleon, a whisper of a fleeting thing, sure, but for flash instant moments, as real as anything else.

The knower is ineluctably making up the knowledge. As soon as it gets close to reality, it is blocked by paradox. — ENOAH

That is true when it comes to almost everything upon first impression, and maybe something’s forever, but now that you know exactly what you just said, now that you that, don’t you know something? Truth? The paradox IS!

The self is... the Body.
The self [which] cannot be...is the Subject, yet
Only the self which cannot be desires to be.
Because the self that is, is being, and only being. — ENOAH

The self may be a body. Maybe it is an immaterial function of the body; maybe a soul; maybe a type of body we haven’t discovered yet - but the self that says “self” to other bodies IS. Self is still something distinguishable from the liver, the lungs and other parts, if it is body at all.

But regardless of what the self is, the paradox is that it certainly exists, and certainly cannot exist. If we reduce the self to body, then we would have to reduce the body to not existing. And I’m not saying that body doesn’t exist (that has its own twists and paradoxes). But the self can’t seem to exist, yet it certainly does exist as it posits knowledge and wonders if this self knows at all.

It’s a mess, I agree. But I see no need to conclude what is illusion and what isn’t. You can’t call anything an illusion without a reality stick to measure it. That’s the self to me - the measure of reality. We have faulty measuring sticks, and the stick itself alters reality, but then, we are also aware enough about reality to see the measuring stick is faulty and interferes with the reality it pursues. No need to dispense with any part of this as mere illusion.

Hey Enoah.

But if that "subjective knowledge of objective facts," is itself not what it proclaims with the word "knowledge." (I am already with you that this is seeming like a twisted "argument," veering off course from conventional logic and reasoning. I submit that that cannot be avoided. In fact, that it cannot be avoided, coincidentally supports the very twisted argument) — ENOAH

But further, by saying this, it is a fact for you, me and all minds - so we know something objective about minding. We can’t escape the objective either - argument twists again - again the paradox rears its ugly head.

Knowledge itself, needs first to pass the test that it is what we conventionally think it is, a revealing, discovering, uncovering of facts/data/truths. "I can only participate in it through exploration and discovery...". I currently don't believe that to be the case. — ENOAH

All I would say to that is that, I agree that 3000 years has not been long enough apparently for written “knowledge” to be easy to find, anywhere, but I disagree that knowledge needs to first pass any test. If we have any test in mind that would certify knowledge, we already know something certified that might judge whether knowledge passes or fails the test. Knowing itself tests reality. It usually fails, but no absolute rule one needs to follow that says we cannot seek to discover something with this “knowing” sense that is minding.

then we are back to having no connection possible between mind and the objective world (no.3). — ENOAH

Yes but take out the world and think about when mind 1 connects with mind 2 (as we sometimes do on this forum). Maybe we don’t know if what we say here reflects the mind independent world when we speak of some third thing, but when mind 1 agrees with mind 2, then mind 1 knows the object in mind 2’s mind. So mind 1 knows of two things: mind 2 and the object it expresses in agreement.

Mind 1 says “2+2= the idea I have.”
Mind 2 says “you mean 17-3.”
Mind 1 says “I agree” and so does mind 2.
So minds 1 and 2 know if an object that is out in the world as it is in their own mind, as it is in the other mind. And mind 3 says, “you mean the square root of sixteen don’t you.” Yes, without saying the object simply and clearly (as most objects in minds are not so easy to point at as what 3+1 equals), the object is known as distinct from each subject that knows it as demonstrated by each subject that says it differently while pointing to the same object in the world.

So I can see why inter subjectivity is a tempting solution to talking about objectivity, but it is window dressing attempting to avoid epistemological and critical approaches to all knowledge, and merely clouds a clear picture of an objective, subject independent world through which the subjects communicate.

The denial of objectivity (mind independent reality) in itself makes all speech and thought meaningless.
— Fire Ologist

Yes and that's why mind evolved such illusions as subject/object, because mind is speech. We have subject/object, and all qualities to make speech "real"; not the other way of viewing it; not subject/object must be real because we speak. — ENOAH

Here is where we disagree. The very fact that we can disagree or agree means that to each of us, there is an objective world that we each measure ourselves and each other against. “Mind evolved such illusions” is something to think about, but nowhere near a conclusion if we can use these illusions to communicate from one mind through an internet connection, into a screen, through language all the way, so far away to… another mind. Minds can’t know other minds are operating without some medium connecting them, and that can only be mind independent. Even if the objective world is constructed by minds, this world can be shared which means it isn’t only in one mind, and therefore, the objective world is still there, has to be there.

Or you think you are possibly totally alone, not event meaning anything you say to yourself.

If you reply to me that you deny any objective medium is known, and I acknowledge back to you that I disagree with you, you’ve proven to yourself that my mind is out there in an illusion as an objective fact - which then means you can’t honestly say to yourself that all you know is an illusion.

and I haven't suggested the self is not real either—as I said before we have a sense, and a consequent idea of it. That it is not determinable does not entail that it is not real. — Janus

My mistake. I agree with you here - my sense of what I call “self” is a sense of something that can be distinguished in experience.

…That said, experience itself (:wink:) is determinable only in terms of identity, and anyway what do we mean by 'real', so where does that leave us? — Janus

I agree here too. It is a pickle to be a real self that can’t be by itself, fixed and distinct as everything real is moving and dissolving any attempt at staying a unified identity.

We selves are living paradoxes.

And “real” - I use this to say whether when we agree, we are agreeing not just because of each other’s words, but because of the paradox itself that we both now look at and discuss.

The paradox of being a human: the self is, AND the self cannot be. Or with more texture: my sense of self is a sense of something that is already sensing and therefore, is real, AND, nothing I sense has a clear enough structure to be identifiable to be known as “real”, such as a “self”.

When we try to determine the nature of that identity it eludes our grasp. — Janus

That is true when trying to grasp the identity of anything. Everything is moving.

So I’m not disagreeing with you, but I would not conclude from the difficulty of holding an identity fixed and unchanging that there is no self to seek to identify.

Whether gods can be demonstrated to exist by some evidence in the future, or an as yet to be identified compelling argument remains open. — Tom Storm

Perfectly rational position to take from my standpoint.

Then I stand corrected. Atheism is not illogical.

I guess I meant people who “know” there is no god. I don’t think it’s rational to conclude as fact that something does not exist. Don’t know how you prove a negative. Hard enough to prove a positive.

I voted yes.

That doesn’t mean it is logical to believe in God, but that is not what you asked.

It just means that, as a thinking being, there is no reason to conclude the Non-existence of anything.

We make conclusions about existing things with reason.

We are talking about a being, not some sort of logically necessary axiom or proof. We are asking about the conclusion that God doesn’t exist. We can conclude there are no square circles, but that’s because we defined a square (which is an idea that can’t be physical) and a circle (which can’t be physical) in such a way that “square circle” cannot represent anything meaningful, and squares and circles are not physical beings anyway.

Someone says “God is in this shoebox”, hands me the box and I open it and see shoes. Do I have to logically conclude that God does not exist? God isn’t in the box - but of course I can’t conclude anything about God’s existence elsewhere. Someone else says “Shoes are in this shoebox” and I open it and see some tissue paper but nothing else. Must I conclude that shoes don’t exist, and become an a-shoe-ist?

Atheists don’t need “beliefs” in the religious sense. Scientifically, there is no evidence for God (unless you believed eyewitness accounts of miraculous physical events maybe). Without evidence, there is nothing to examine, so nothing to conclude. Therefore, it is illogical to conclude there is no God.

I am not an a-unicorn-ist. I don’t believe unicorns exist or ever did, but I wouldn’t just rule it out and call anyone who saw evidence to the contrary not worth listening to, not rational, and delusional (at least until after I heard their evidence).

Shared subjective truths — Truth Seeker

You have mind one over here, and mind two over there. If they are to share anything at all between them, they need some object to share.

We don’t get to name things “objective” or “subjective” without some thing to name.

That’s objective. The subject is just where we place the object. But objectivity is the assumption on which anything follows - thought, speech between two minds, logic, illogic, anything.

The denial of objectivity (mind independent reality) in itself makes all speech and thought meaningless. So shared “subjectivity” would be proof of the existence of objectivity, otherwise nothing would be shared and we’d all be totally alone, cut off from everything, able to doubt the fact of anything else.

Maybe I am the only thing that ever existed and I’m all alone talking to no one. So if that seems plausible, then no need to discuss the objective fact that I am the only one who ever existed because… hello? Anyone see the object ?

My closest vote would be “no”.

You said:

We don't know anything objectively. We may believe that we do but this is a delusion. Everything we know is subjective. — Truth Seeker

I assume you assumed that it is a mind or at least a human consciousness that would claim to know anything at all.

So 1: There is a mind.

I assume you mean by objectively, knowing something about a world that is independent of the mind, but reflected from the world into the mind accurately. Objective knowledge would be knowledge one mind could know just like other minds could know.

So 2: There is a world independent of the mind.

And 3: There is in fact no accurate connection possible between a mind and the world.

These are three objective facts you’ve posited. Mind, separate world, and no accurate connection.

I, as a subject, know 1 and 2 subjectively - but what I subjectively know is that my mind is in a larger world apart from my mind, so I have knowledge of objective facts.

So I don’t see why we need to assert fact 3 (no accurate connection) when we’ve already asserted accurately that there are minds and there is a world apart from the mind. Objectivity is there before me and I can only participate in it through exploration and discovery, or not.

I answered

Evolution happened naturally, the current array of species on earth evolved — flannel jesus

I’m willing to question evolution, but I am just as willing to assume it. Evolution makes sense and follows from all current evidence. It happened, or better, continues happening now. Darwin was a brave genius.

I don’t know that you had to add “naturally” other than to elaborate that evolution is a moving process of parts changing over time. But if evolution doesn’t happen naturally, it is not evolution. That’s why intelligent design doesn’t make sense. If God directed evolution, evolution would not be what evolution appears to be in the first place.

But I do believe in God. Like evolution, God is happening too.

But I’d rather say answer 4, that evolution never happened, than talk about the God or the evolution posited in options 2 and 3.

I see no need to pit God for or against evolution. The pitting distorts the concepts of both God and evolution, and blurs the distinctions it is trying to integrate in the pitting. I can cross the street by myself, and over time, we living bodies evolve all by ourselves. No need to seek God’s place in these simple motions.

The analogy works on two levels then. That certain acts seem almost universally morally offensive would seem to point to tastes grounded in human nature. These tastes aren't uncaused, there is a reason for them. That reason seems to be tied to the human good. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Hey Count.

I totally agree with that. It’s why I went with the OP analogy to get into objectivity versus relativity in ethics.

All too often in modern philosophy there is a tendency to think that if a relationship is dynamic and difficult to formalize it simply cannot exist. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Modern philosophy puts everything on a spectrum (in this case, the good and bad spectrum) without any honest attempt to define the the two ends of the spectrum (in fact an earnest attempt to tear down and ignore the binary spectrum creators for sake of multiple gradations in the middle only. So yes, totally agree. We only have the middle with this and that absolute drawing out the spectrum.

The differences exist in a dynamic range of contexts, but that doesn't mean there are no differences. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Amen to that. Sums up my approach to metaphysics, ethics and everything that follows. Preserves all the tendency to reify the spectrums, (dynamic ranges), while preserving room for knowledge and truth (differences I know exist).

In no way was I starting with self-interest. My view of ethics starts with multiple selves living in proximity at the outset, sort of sifting out ethics together. The interest that gives birth to ethics can’t be based on any one of those selves alone. The outset includes relationship among the multiple selves. The outset includes some regard for all selves at once, otherwise we aren’t doing ethics, only observing natural instinctual behavior.

Picture bumper cars - that’s the herd of selves (be they self-interested individuals or self-sacrificers, or disinterested). Ethical questions arise where cars bump. Ethics has them all able to drive with a goal of resolving the bumping, in one general direction, found by agreeing where we all will recognize the walls and how to drive within them. And it only works when all are in agreement that it is better not to bump into things.

To give this some application: murder is wrong, means: after running around with the other sheep watching this one kill that one, and this one die and that one live on, and after living myself so I can judge this myself, I propose a rule that murder is wrong, that each of us equally enjoys life more than death, and each of us has no individual right to take another one’s life. And I propose that this rule is not for the sake of my life, but instead for the sake of all of our lives, and therefore each one of us must agree this is good law if this law is to work at all. We individually recognize the authority of the law by our own free consent, but in so doing, we create its objective, universal application, equally distributed to myself as well as all others.

So Five Guys versus McD’s is like yes or no to abortion, euthanasia, maybe lying, maybe stealing, maybe bullying, etc. - the more debatable, culturally transient ethical situations.

AND, rancid food is like raping children, torture and murder of the weak and innocent - just the most heinous things one could think of.

If that is correct you are saying that certain ethics are objective, like rancid food is always just bad.

Hence the quotation marks around the title I suppose.

I believe that there are ethical lines carved in stone for we conscience-bearing creatures to find and choose to cross or not. We make up our own rules, yes, but we don’t only make them up from our own heads in a box - we make them together as a group, sharing lines between me and you, and you, and that one, and that other one..

If you existed alone on a desert island there would be no need for ethics - every decision would be to determine the burger or the other burger ethically (unless you believed your life was not your own and God was with you and interested in your life and the choices as well).

Philosophy has put us all in mental boxes, unable to prove even the presence, let alone truth, of some sort of objective mind-independent reality.

But practically speaking, we live in herds and interact with other decision makers, and there are limited burgers, and we all agree that society, with its trading and divisions of labor, is beneficial.

Ethics assumes other people, other creatures exist with us in our heads as we are in their heads. We don’t get to decide whether to kill another person is right or wrong without another person to kill, and a third person who might agree or not with the killing or not, with whom we have to live with and who has to live with us after we’ve killed or not.

So the line that creates rancid food, the “always bad” objective morality that is out in the world, doesn’t form until the world of ethics forms which is the human, personal herd.

We have to assume an objective, mind independent group of herding animals called “other persons with other minds” exists in order to construct some form of ethical line, like “stealing money is OK but stealing a child’s life through murder is NOT OK,” and we have to interact with the other herd members to bump into these lines and seek enforcement of these lines by saying “no, stop it” or “yes, do it.”

Ethics has to have an objective world we live in together for ethics to exist in the first place.

The self is a curious thing. It cannot be a thing because if it were it would be becoming a thing, and so not yet a thing; but yet it is me myself that is wondering about this “thing” called self.

Curious. How can myself not be a thing as I think these things to myself?

Before we might identify such a curious thing, that must be and must become, don’t we need to know if there can be any thing at all to know, if we can know anything? If we can’t know, how could we know what a self is?

Descartes’ cogito purports to prove the self exists. But it does no such proof. As to existence, it takes the existence of thinking as its premise, and as “I am thinking” already means or includes “I am” it does not prove existence but assumes it.

Instead Descartes really proved that there is one thing we can know. He proved there was knowledge of separately existing things. He proved if I know that I exist, I know the truth, because by knowing that I exist, I am knowing that I am knowing. His proof is better said “I exist; therefore I can know.”

So he proved knowledge works because while I am in the act of knowing I exist, I am in the act of knowing something I can’t deny, so it is true knowledge.

Now, what do I know of this “I”, this “self”, this knowing being, beyond the fact that it exists? Nothing! Or at most very little. Descartes thought he could prove it was immaterial substance, like “soul”. But we still have the same problems identifying something fixed and permanent that might be knowable. I still am becoming. The “I” in “I am becoming” is still undone in every changing instant. He can make very few claims about what the “I” actually is (even though something is knowing something exists), let alone call it “soul” and think he has said anything at all that we know about it.

When it comes to the question of what is a self, the most we can say to maybe start to construct an answer is that “something is knowing that something exists.”

Knowing the self is a curious thing.

They are not really right — Chet Hawkins

That’s a meaningless statement if you can’t know anything.

Why did you say “really”? What’s real?

delusion in ALL cases — Chet Hawkins

That sounds like certainty speak.

As soon as we believe there is no knowledge, we contradict this belief by speaking.

I don’t think you can explain it. By definition, explanations are illusions.

It would also be funny if the self was real, and we ourselves didn’t know it. Like looking for your sunglasses while they are on your head.

The whole Truth is… — ENOAH

According everything else you are saying, no it’s not.

Are we right?

The way they are distinct for us is not necessarily how they really are, if they are. — ENOAH

The way a bowl of shit is distinct for us or a bowl of food? When I concoct a fictional “shit” can I use that to signify a distinct bowl of delicious food?

“……really are….”

You’re telling stories again..

I need to be more careful with my language. I have already addressed the "paradox" of my speaking of truth, or even speaking at all. — ENOAH

I have to say. This is consistent.

You shouldn’t admit the consistency because it would lean towards being something, but I’ll admit it for you, since I think I can see a small part of you yourself.

If words are weak attempts at signifying only, and by signifying, divorced from any truth they might wish to signify, then there is no point in speaking.

The paradox of speaking at all. I love that. That is the issue. I don’t agree that you have to side with becoming over being when standing at this paradox.

When standing at a paradox, both opposites must be real and can’t be real, so what side is there to choose, but both together?

I hate to say it but according to your view, there is no point to speaking at all.

Did I say “say it”?

Pun despairingly intended. In fact, wait a second, I can’t say it, because words always say “….emptiness…” in every breath and sound.

But alas I said it anyway, because the way I see it, we have both actually spoken, conveyed meaning here, not only because of my mind constructing it, but also because of the words here on screen, because of Enoah’s words, distinct from my words, and because of Enoah’s mind constructing it.

Lot’s of different essences in the stew of being becoming being becoming.

You might be missing out. And missing out on your actual self. I don’t have to say it. You keep saying “truth” to make your point about no truth, because as you “know”, there is no knowing.

And I should be tired myself.

Have a good evening.

But not present. Not there. And same for the self and all of human Mind and History. — ENOAH

Ok, so no distinction whatsoever between Abe Lincoln and Mary Poppins and “me” and “you.”
I’ll go with it for now.


About distinctions existing independently of the mind:

I don't know. No one knows. For all I know something related to "difference" is an actual and real constituent of Nature and Reality. — ENOAH

My response is simply a question, where did you come up with the distinction between “for all I know” and “real constituent of reality”?

You are pointing at objective distinctions to make your point. Your point happens to be that there may not be distinctions. But you distinguished whatever the hell people do for “an actual” and “reality”. Oh, and you said “constituent.” A constituent implies multiple parts, multiple distinct parts.

You are contradicting your point by speaking about it.

I just say, give in to the essence. It’s just as there as the existence.

humans and other intelligent animals use drives, memory, conditioning, etc. to "distinguish" shit from food. But "difference," the necessity of a this and that, a not this but that, a this and a not this; these are functional within the churning out of experience in Narrative form. — ENOAH

Why would you assert that. You can distinguish shit from food. You need to. That is because there are real distinctions. But you can distinguish shit from food with ideas just as well. Because ideas reflect distinctions too. “Self” isn’t the same fiction as “shit” or “dragon” - distinction is real regardless of minds. Minds can use them to construct functioning ideas. Otherwise we can’t speak.

Maybe you are saying we are not really speaking. Maybe you have no idea what I am saying.

Forgive the analogy, but the tree which made the paper is real. The paper is an artifact. The reality of the tree still exists in the paper, and it's not going anywhere. But the "paper" idea is special to our Fictional world. Now all the more so for the plot of the novel written on the paper. — ENOAH

Analogies are great. But to show the illusion forming out of a tree through artifact, that doesn’t work, because the tree formed out of dirt and air and sun that were taken and consumed, just like the paper was taken from the tree being consumed. There are no distinctions you can make between artifacts and natural processes. “Artifact” is serving as a gift from god for you to make your fiction of a novel on paper. What’s an artifact? And why would an artifact cause there to be line between illusion and the “real” tree?

Now you'll say, we naturally developed the tools to go further than a Chimp. And I say yes, and those tools and everything they construct is a Fictional — ENOAH

I see why you’d think I would say that, but honestly, I am not giving any status to ideas whatsoever. Chimps make poop. Birds make eggs. People make ideas. Volcanoes make lava. Chimps make sacrifices. Birds fly. People make poop.

I am simply saying each of these are distinct and real. Including the ideas. The fact that ideas come only from humans is like guano comes only from bats - that doesn’t matter to me here. Just the fact that ideas exists in the real world. No status or hierarchy. No reification. Just here we are with our ideas bouncing off of each other, one of us trying to not see them, the other trying to see how not to see them.

I am insisting on relegating becoming to emptiness, and designating being alone as the domain of truth. ... (?) — ENOAH

I can’t touch this one. Not sure what you mean here. Being is the domain of truth. Becoming is the domain of fiction/illusion then? I don’t see how you could ever speak of “truth” - wouldn’t that be a fiction? But then wouldn’t it be relegated to emptiness, in which case it is not being? But now being is the domain of truth and of empty illusion.
I don’t see why you would introduce “truth” here.

ideas exist, evident inter alia in their functional effect, but they are fleeting empty structures of signifiers. Not Real "in and of themselves(?)" — ENOAH

I just don’t see, at all, why an empty structure would have any functional effect. At least not a repeatable one, but here we go again…

You said both that “ideas exist” and that they have a “functional effect” but then you say they are “empty”. Makes no sense to me. You have used “empty structures” to signify something of “ideas” and this has brought the effect in me the question, why the hell are you saying that, especially when this is just your idea.

You are contradicting yourself by speaking at all. Or there is something real of ideas. Either one. Can’t be both.

This is maybe the first time I’ve seen a paradox I don’t know if I like.
Becoming spoken as being is not being and so not spoken, but then I just said it…makes no sense.

I’m trying to talk about signification, with the launching pad of the signifier “self”.

Images and poetry can signify so I’m not sure of what I’m saying about signification is much different than how poetry can function.

If we are saying that “self” signifies nothing, that self is an illusion, we’ve got ourselves cornered into the issue of whether anything can be signified, or what is signification.

I hope you enjoy the volleying.

I say speaking is construction, becoming. It travels lightly through Time and vanishes instantly. Where is it "there"? When is it ever being? — ENOAH

I agree speaking is constructing, and I agree it travels lightly and vanishes.

I agree. I see these in my experience too.

But something is constructed, and then that same construction vanishes. I see these in addition to the above.

“Where is it there? Where is it ever being?” It is there in the flesh of the words being themselves now constructed by our bodies for physical travel and in we who use those words to affect the physical world (as in bring myself physical apples without moving my physical feet through lightly traveled ideas or essences). They only work when real distinctions are made, are constructed.

Because--and I sincerely hope this isn't depressing--difference, distinction, and your admirable desperation to square things off against it, are also "illusions" based only in the evolved mechanism "difference", necessary for speech to flourish, a this and a that. The Self illusion is a branch of that in the evolution of Mind: a Me and a You. — ENOAH

Are you saying there are no real distinctions? There were no real distinctions before we humans invented “difference”?

Because if you distinguish anything, ever, drawing a line between any two things, then on either side of that line you must have two different essences, or at least on either side of the line there is one essential difference.

You can’t experience this from that without something essentially this and so not essentially that, and something essentially that and so not essentially this.

So if there are real distinctions, why assume our constructed ideas drawing out such distinctions are ONLY illusion?

But I say you just believe the idea came from somewhere. That exactly is the illusion. It came from your mind! Yes the idea exists. But it is not Real. — ENOAH

“Yes the idea exists.” Agree.
“But it is not real.” Disagree.

I don’t place priority on where something came from. Chemicals came from atoms, proteins from chemicals, plants and animals from proteins, feathers from lightweight flying animals, roars from lions, and ideas from human beings. As you say, “the idea exists” just like the protein and the roar.

Why say something is not real just because it is only traded in among humans? No human trades in breathing water, but that doesn’t mean breathing water isn’t real. There is the shark. No bird trades in words and ideas, but again, there is the human - these many things move together in the becoming.

in your minds development, Apple, 4, store, go, son, buy, me, etc. we're input, and over time processed, reprocessed, used to construct, reconstruct, and so on, thousands of times. — ENOAH

As many instances of essence as there are the undoing of essence in becoming.

So when you crave apples, that real feeling — ENOAH

I am beginning to wonder if we should have defined “real” as distinct from “exist”.

But I’ll continue assuming the “real” to you is a mind independent thing, and “exists” applies to those real things, plus our ideas in mind such as “self” and “illusion” are costing in a mind.

The “apple” or “self” in my mind, I call an idea.
You call these illusion. But some thing exists here, so I don’t see the need to call it illusion.

Could this be because you think ideas must refer to a real thing in the world or else these ideas are mere illusions, and since no idea can BE the thing it purports to refer to, all idea-ing is illusion making?

I see the apple-essence-idea transfer-to-son process worked in the real world of bodies only. Fleeting idea apple, wherever and however it came from, became real apple in hand. The mental part that has no body, the idea, need not be called illusion just because it is only something for a mind and from a mind, because it functioned through my son’s mind. My idea. In my head. Set loose in my son. Came back to me as an actual, real apple. So my “idea” apple, like the real apple in hand, is not an illusion.

that we are built that way — ENOAH

This is precisely my point. We are built to build essences shared in words. So words and essences are built into reality like a burrow or the moon or an apple, they are just built by only us and are useful to only us. But they have flesh, skin in the same game as the rest of the becoming.

The Self, is becoming, The Body is being. — ENOAH

This seems to be the heart (the essence?) of what you are saying, or the bumper sticker version of a longer explanation.

I still think we are standing next to each other looking at the same thing, but I would say the opposite about it. I would say the self is held fast and fixed, like something being, but it is held fast by the body that is becoming. The body is in constant flux, becoming older, growing thinner or fatter, like all bodies, becoming. But as we human bodies can spit out ideas, these ideas only function when they lock down real distinctions into words to quickly package them in sentences for others to employ in a conversation about the real or in a trip to the store. Our words insert temporary permanence where we see temporary distinctions in the world. The insertion is real. When it functions as through my son, it is demonstrably real.

That which you call a squirrel is real, so are you and your senses. But yes, while those ideas,(that it is a squirrel, that it is "real", that you sense it,) exist, they are not Real, not thing in itself; they are outside Fictions superimposed as if from above upon the thing in itself. They are representations — ENOAH

If you want to call ideas superimposed and not a thing, but from above the thing, you’ve already isolated the idea as distinct, as different. Once it is distinct, it is! It is made. It is real. So you should be arguing not that ideas exist as illusions, but that ideas don’t exist at all.