I think we're in agreement, and I am stubbornly clinging--like George Costanza clinging to nothing--to my insistence on the "never the twain shall meet." — ENOAH

I think we see the same thing, but are talking about the differences. I agree with you again that there is a “never the twain shall meet” in view. But it is not as much between being and becoming, as it is between moving (being, becoming, ing-ing) and the thing that is moving.

The frisbee is the thing in the middle. I needed to put something there, being moved, to show you where I was looking. But I am trying to focus only the moving, the being, the motion. It’s hard to see just becoming, because wherever we look, the thing becoming the thing it becomes, keeps getting in the way.

And I am withholding judgment on the thing and the becoming, seeing both as equals, as necessitating the other, as each causes the other as effect, or as each would be the condition before which the other might be the effect.

Motion is. Motion cannot be tracked as moving, unless something endures long enough to be moved. So the thing is as well. But before we jump to ask “what is this thing” we can remember, if the thing “is”, it is also consumed by motion again.

“There is exchange of all things for fire and of fire for all things, as there is of goods for gold and of gold for goods.” - Heraclitus

Fire is the becoming, or the being (when held fast); things or goods, are in the middle, being exchanged.

Yes, because we cannot but becoming, while the x-ing for be-ing is in the is-ing [of it (without subject/object)], for so called "us" in human existence, with the unavoidable subject/object, it can only be attuned to, as the "ing" and not as the subject, in the middle of becoming. — ENOAH

Yes, exactly. Except maybe I am not as hard a judge on the “us”, or the subject or the object being in the middle. I don’t see either the becoming or the thing becoming the thing as less or more necessary and ever-present - both already are if either are. And motion sure is. So the stillness of “us” must just as surely come to be.

Yes, I’m not speaking about any particular mythology, or even necessarily God. (I did use dead grandma to make the same point.) I’m saying if there was any unexplainable physical event someone experienced (maybe unexplained because they were stupid), but unexplained by all reason they can muster, AND, that fantastical miracle forced into their face came with words and a message, AND those words showed a meaning to that person that was bigger than they knew before - then they might say “no wonder the bush didn’t burn, or the phoenix rose from the ashes. Something even more than all of this happened here. I am now included in this new meaning, by hearing this new message.”

You don’t have to say more here. The point is made. Amadeus gets it and rejects it.

I do think I’d need a pretty big, crazy miracle, with some trusted witnesses around maybe to compare notes, before I delved to deeply into the message. But I’m just guessing how I’d be listening to a “sprit” or something.

For me, being/becoming: never the twain shall meet. (Except by illusion in becoming). — ENOAH

If becoming is like surfing on a wave, being stands still on the beach. Becoming captures motion pictures; being is a snapshot.

That is one way to leave being and becoming. You are right in the middle of the same thing I’m taking about, you then draw from becoming, being as illusion.

We can get there, but the puts me in the middle of so many distinctions. I makes me be making distinctions, distinguishing being from becoming…

Instead, I’m hovering (like a frisbee) on just being, where being still vibrates and moves. So that becoming is the better first word for being. But where any single being is really becoming single, becoming.

You end up with one thing: motion. Or becoming. Being.

In two ways, you can hover where being and becoming may as well be the same. First, because of the “ing”. Or the “to”. To be or be-ing, like to become or becom-ing. It’s the “to” and the “ing” that supplies the magic, not the “be” or “become”. Second, being is better opposed by not being. The opposite of to be is not to come-to-be; the opposite is not-to-be. Then what is negation? How can negation be if it is the opposite of be? (Negation is the birth of illusion, but that is still another conversation.) Staying simple, since we say “not” everyday, someone says “go get me a chair in that room” and you walk in and say “that’s not a chair, and that’s not a chair”. And someone else says “no, that is a chair, you can sit in it…” and the first one says ”just because you can sit on it doesn’t mean it’s a chair. That, is not, a chair!” In this conversation, full of discreet negations, “not a molecule” or “not a supernova” would be negations that made no sense had no use, but “not a chair” in reference to that shovel over there or that blanket, would make perfect sense, would become useful as the conversation came to be…

But see how fast and how far we fall? There are two many distinctions now. Being in the middle hovers in every bit of this, ignored, because the focus is on the “ing” in focusing.

And, therefore, are we not truly in the unbridgeable "gap" between being and becoming, when we are truly in that nanosecond worth of being in the middle? — ENOAH

I like the nanosecond worth of being. A lot. That is exactly it again. To hold something still in a nanosecond, there “is holding”, so there is still becoming in that nanosecond. We have to chop and measure a nanosecond, so instead, I see chopping and measuring.

Being is the purely linguistic way of pointing to a becoming. “I am” talks (is linguistic) of me becoming but not yet me. Becoming, therefore, seems the better word, to me, but I also see the “ing” in both being and becoming, so I’m fine with the word being just as well, and still need not wonder about illusion and distinction, just the “ing” in distinguishing, in becoming but not yet distinguished, in the middle of distinguishing…

In the middle answers how. In the middle is the “ing” personified as an object and therefore distorted into a “what”, a single what it is. But in the middle does not answer what, it answers how. It is not “it”, but that it.

What is a word?

To ask this you already have to have the answer.

‘What’ is a word.

So you can’t ask what a word is without knowing what a word is, without using words usefully.

The word ‘word’ is itself.

some concepts are primitive and absolutely simple, and as such cannot be defined without circular reference (to itself). — Bob Ross

What you are pointing at is even so for linguistics. Some concepts are of the immediate; some things are immediately self-defining, and so need not be saddled by the struggles of definition.

Being or becoming
Non-contradiction
The word ‘this’ or the thing named ‘this’
The word ‘word’.
The present (here and/or now - present - which all may be other failures to define becoming or being).

Each defines itself, so nothing else is useful to define it (so can be said as ‘cannot be defined’.)

Define - how best to define ‘define’ without circularity?

identity is merely — unenlightened

That says a lot.

Identity is merely, needs lines that are blurred. So you have both the clarity of identity, and you do not have this clarity because those same clear lines are blurred destroying identity.

Being in the middle is 100% a way to talk about the problem of identity.

And without identifying anything, nothing happens.

To me that leans too far. You can so lean, as the lines are extremely blurry. But I can’t unsee the lines. I still see enough to call being in the middle something happening.

Here's what I read. Am I overreaching? — ENOAH

I think we’re looking at the same thing, same moment or place, and you are seeing more than I’m saying, so maybe not seeing exactly what I’m trying to point out.

The middle is not a place on the course (of becoming), but the gap, actually inaccessible to us, but it's where being resides, in the present. — ENOAH

Being in the middle, draws out simply becoming. It’s the is is-ing. It can be a place (middle). Or it can be a time (present).

You used all of these words, but you said it is not a place. You said it is a gap.

If “I am” links this becoming to the “I” and this is illusory, I say that I’ve tempered the illusion of identity by saying nothing of “I” and positing only “being in the middle is”. I’ve replaced the “I” with anything being in the middle, so nothing in particular, or everything. It doesn’t matter (at least not to make this point because this point is already becoming made).

By simply saying “gap” we have simultaneously made a “gap between” as a gap is only a gap between this and that, here and there. By making a gap, we have drawn boundaries all the same; and only then can you fix the gap in the middle.

But each boundary is just as much in the middle as the gap would be, where and when these are being, are becoming.

If you say “inaccessible”, I would say this implies one here “accessing” (or failing to access), another one there. There is no distinct inaccessibility without these many other ones in the same instant of accessing (or inaccessing, it’s still in the middle).

Becoming moves off of middles, in the middle, towards middles. Always middle, because that is where or when or how becoming just is.

In the middle demonstrates how; it does not demonstrate what.

Just as “gap” and “boundary” or “the inaccessible” or “illusion” are too fixed when speaking of becoming, “middle” sounds more like something fixed as well. Nevertheless, to ground becoming for just a fleeting moment as if it could be an object, my term for becoming is…being in the middle.

wish i could remember — AmadeusD

See now, what if tomorrow, you are walking down the street and clouds overtake the sky with thunder and a voice says “AmadeusD, the movie was …” and he knew the movie. Still totally reject it? No chance the clouds might be a miracle?

Sorry I don’t know the movie. Still can’t play God for you.

The issue is what reason would that person have to invoke God? I can see none. — AmadeusD

I will try to make my point again just to see if I can make it. This doesn’t have to be about God until the end of the basic point. We can only come to “God” (or in the case of the Sixth Sense “grandma”) by something fabricated out of thin air. I admit that. But if I make my point, you might see how one might find a reason to give the experience over to a God.

A person is walking down the street on a bright sunny day and they hear thunder and lightening and the sky fills with grey clouds and a thunderous voice says….

Ok stop. Some people might say “this is God surely - clouds can’t do that and thunder can’t appear like that and voices can’t be loud like that…. That must be God.” But the rational person would say, there is a such thing voice amplification and modulation, and strange weather, and this may all be scientifically explained.

But the rest of the story has to include “and a thunderous voice said (for instance) “this is my beloved Son, listen to him.”

And the person who was stopped in his tracks by this can also consider those words. Forget the voice and the thunder. Instead of wondering how the thunder and booming voice happened, the person might remember just yesterday thinking how he wasn’t sure who to listen to if anyone was worth listening to at all, and though he liked the Son, the Son could be confusing and he was doubtful about how good the Son’s really was, and as he remembers his doubts lightening strikes again…

And the person realizes no one knew he was doubting anything. No one knew he was looking for someone to listen to. He never told anyone he had any opinion about the Son at all. It was as if the voice knew just what to say, precisely in a way that the person could know something new, maybe even change his life (hopefully for the better).

So my point was there may be more reason to think a burning bush was an impossible miracle of God, not because the bush burned but wasn’t burned, but because of the words that were communicated. Something, to that person (not you, I don’t know what words might give you pause, because I’m not God), something to that person brought awe and fear and inspiration and power, something overwhelming making one willing to say God, just because of the words spoken.

I prefer Jasper's notion of 'Existenz' as conditioned, — 180 Proof

Yeah, “being in the middle” isn’t even a sentence, let alone a noun like “existenz”. I like “thrown-ness” which I think is Heidegger. But ‘being in the middle’ as a concept is more tentative; it’s a phrase that might be found in the middle of a whole sentence. Existenz has exist in it, which I like, but it all has a more fixed feel to it, so I think it is better phrased then it is clearly identified.

It’s where being and becoming blur into no need for distinction between them.

I actually prove we can know at least one thing — Philosophim

If you notice, I said identity evades. I didn’t say identity is not. I agree we can know things. My point here is that in order to do epistemology, you must place yourself in the middle of reality, an experience of that reality which can be known, and then the rejoining of the known experience to that reality. And this is a for instance. But you never move off the middle. When you rejoin, when we know, we know things, so we are still in the middle.

The middle is where or when experience is.

It’s more metaphysics than it is epistemology, but the metaphysical point that “all for human beings is in the middle” means that whether we do epistemology, or physics, etc, we must reckon with motion.

And like I also said, truth and starting (as with a discreet experience), as when I might claim an essential property in some thing in experience, these also are true. This is the other side of motion though. It is the thing that is moving. This is another subject. Being in the middle speaks of where and when and how; it does not speak of what.

And I’m not saying you didn’t understand what I meant by any of the above. Just trying to refocus.

In recognizing a self, I am able to create two “experiences”. That is the self-recognized thinker, and everything else.

Why should I have this capability? I cannot answer this. — Philosophim

What I can realize is I may sense, but I find I can focus on different parts of that sensation. I can see a field of grass. Now I create the identity of a blade of grass. Now a piece of that blade of grass. I part and parcel my sensations as I wish. I do not know what “I am”, or “everything else” is, but I do know that reality cannot contradict my ability to focus, create identities where I wish, and essentially “discretely experience”. — Philosophim

A discrete experience is not a claim about the truth of what is being experienced. It is the act of creating an identity within the sea of one’s experience. A camera can take a picture, but cannot attempt to put any identity to any of the colors it absorbs. I can — Philosophim

It is the ability to part and parcel within the totality of one’s experience as one chooses. — Philosophim

Three things: ability to parcel; the totality of experience; as one chooses.

I must be able to experience discretely to comprehend the idea of “discrete experience.” — Philosophim

Therefore, I know that I discretely experience. — Philosophim

This is pivotal to the argument so I am adding support here. You are basically saying “there is discreet experience”. And such a thing entails knowing identities, it entails identifying with discretion. Before one can have a discreet experience, one must identify; or, before one can identify, one must have a discreet experience; now take the before out of it, and see that discreet experience is a product of reality (experience) being known in identity (the discreet). Or just “there is discreet experience”. This is pivotal, because it purports to unify our knowledge of experience over here in the experience of being me, with reality, over there, that any mind would have to see. Logically, this unifies the deductive with the inductive; or better said, we can induce “there is discreet experience” and we can deduce “there is discreet experience.”

Can I deductively believe I have memories without contradiction? A memory is a thought of a prior discrete experience. — Philosophim

When I am remembering, recalling, I can say this is like I am recalling “a memory”, but then now I have created “a memory” as discreet from remembering and recalling. But remembering and recalling are mysterious in the first place, so to carve out a discreet “memory” away from this mystery and use this memory as an ontologically discreet object…treacherous. We have to speak about memory. It is deeply unified with knowing and discreet experience, but I don’t think we need to go here.

While these distinctions are known at their time of creation, I cannot know that if I discretely experience something that resembles these distinctions, that the experience correctly matches the identities I have created without contradiction by reality. — Philosophim

You made the distinctions out of your experience of the new shep. Then detach them from experience and call them the “known”. Then you create an issue out of the gap you just created by detaching knowledge, where you say “I cannot know that if I discretely experience something that resembles these distinctions, that the experience correctly matches the identities I have created without contradiction by reality.”

This is a lot. You have a discreet experience, your knowledge of that experience, and you have correctly matching. Or you have the identities, you have without contradiction, and reality.

This is Aristotle and Descartes. Want to see where it goes.

There does not need to be a word, only a recognition of a distinction separate from another distinction. “‘This’ is separate from ‘that’”. — Philosophim

This quote is essential. It’s why Aristotle came to the law of non-contradiction instead of “there is discreet experience” as fundamental. You are playing in the same playground here.

I am not merely claiming the knowledge of the identities, memories, and experience I have. I am stating that these identities, memories, and experiences I have represent something apart from the experience itself. So I can distinctly know that I am attempting to match identities to an experience. — Philosophim

1. My discrete experience matches all of my created essential properties of what I consider a shep.
2. I cannot reasonably match the discrete experience to another known identity.
3. My belief that this creature is a shep is by deduction.
4. Reality does not directly or indirectly contradict the claim at the moment of conclusion.

Conclusion: Therefore I know by application this thing is a shep. — Philosophim

This argument would almost be better without premise 4, because premise 4 introduces a gap between discreet experience and reality. This is a second gap. You already had a gap between discreet experience and all of the created essential properties. You can unify your discreet experience to your knowledge, bridge that gap, but this diesnt necessitate (by deduction) that you’ve bridged the gap between discreet experience and reality. So I think you would be better to take reality out of it, or admit that discreet experience is reality; reality produces the discreet experiences you create into essential properties. But maybe you dispense with reality where you include it as “not directly or indirectly”, meaning there is no need to put a gap between experience and reality whether you look for contradiction (directly) or are forced into initially invisible contradiction(indirectly) because neither appears anyway.

The specifications of my essential properties determine the essential differences I can apply, and it is entirely my choice. — Philosophim

The choice. So you have experience, with discretion yielding known essential properties. The choice is why there is a gap between experience and reality. We create a gap between experience and the essential properties we make of it for sake of knowing these discreet experiences, but because we have to chose the properties or carve them out of the field as a shep ourselves, we can make wrong choices that may or may not allow my knowledge to map through the experience I’ve carved directly to the reality I’ve experienced.

I agree with all of the moving parts you identify. I agree with the way your are talking about them. I think you are clearly describing how experience works, how we know. I see this as a phenomenology, and maps a bit to Hegel, as well as Aristotle.

Thus, a hierarchy of inductions seems to be a better way to evaluate inductions than evaluating what is more cogent within the particular hierarchy set. — Philosophim

This quote is about evaluating induction. You evaluate induction against other inductions. You don’t evaluate induction against what can be deduced within one induction (cogent within).

I like it.

Probability to possibility to plausibility - needed distinctions.

Irrational belief. I get the object you have identified. I see it discreetly, to borrow a phrase, from the others. And as I said I like the overall method of evaluating induction this way. But I think there is a much smaller space between probable, possible and plausible, than compared the space between all three and the irrational. There is a similar discreet experience that leads to judgements among probable and merely plausible inductions, and rationality needed to make the distinctions. Once you introduce the irrational, even though it is tied to belief through knowledge of a discreet experience, I find new substance is distinguished that might threaten the whole method. Irrationality has to be dealt with, but it might not be containable, identifiable, discreet enough, to be dealt with like the others.

But I’m just trying to give you something to think about as you have done for me. Some great lines I’ve quoted in there. Thanks for sharing this.

The words 'slippery', amorphous' and 'ever-changing' do not mean 'irrational'; nor does 'difficult' mean 'unable to be clarified'. — Vera Mont

Also a good quote.

Same sense of “good” as my last comment.

But language is the only place in this universe where something might truly be fixed, made absolute. This is how we can see two senses to one word, by using other words to define sense one as distinguished from sense two. The line between the two senses is then absolute, or nothing can be said at all.

The criteria for proving a hypothesis of knowledge is not the same as an expression of conviction, and the conviction is not a conclusion or substitute for the claim of knowledge. — Antony Nickles

Good quote.

This doesn't seem to touch my question. — AmadeusD

I thought it did. But if God doesn't blip the radar, I get it.

Gullibility seems to be involved.. — AmadeusD

Always a possibility. Anytime we listen to anyone else's words we are in jeopardy. Especially if it involved a talking bush.

Why would it matter "what God had to say" if you aren't even sure it was God? Seems backward... — AmadeusD

What if what was said was exactly what the person needed to hear and the person didn’t even know they needed to hear it? Like in the movie the Sixth Sense when the kid says grandma said “everyday” and the kid didn’t know yet what the meaning was and the mom wasn’t ever expecting an answer. The words become more important than how on earth the kid knew to say them.

No big deal here but I’m just saying that the content of the message might have more of an impact than the delivery in a burning bush or whatever.

I think truth is in the present is-ing/do-ing. — ENOAH

I agree 100%.

This one, I stubbornly grapple with. I cannot let go of my admittedly radical view that "when you say," period, you are already in that which displaces reality, what we've loosely desginated as N. illusion. In reality, not only no dichotomy, but no say. — ENOAH

But there is the saying. We say. The becoming that is us, make saying come to be. Once saying is, things are said. Once things are said, dichotomy blossoms.

I still see your point. You don’t have to further than than the present. Any move around becoming is walking on quicksand. Saying is saying about. Saying about begs saying about what, and now we meet illusion again. BUT, not when we are saying we know that saying about meets illusion. This is truth, in my view.

But is direct awareness taking place in becoming? Does it involve subject/object? There might be a more direct awareness in becoming. But the one which excites me, and which paradoxically is pointless to discuss, as you suggested earlier, is a "return" to the aware-ing Being, finally just being, liberated from becoming. — ENOAH

Yes, direct awareness is becoming. I called it awareness because Janus did, to keep in line with that. But I would rather call it being aware. You have to get an “ing” word in there, breathing life into the more stagnant sounding “direct awareness”. But direct awareness works. The immediate now. The present. These are fixed sounding terms. But they are all in the becoming of being.

I don’t think of being as so distinct from becoming. If becoming is like a landslide falling to the valley, being is like vibrating in place like a mountain in an earthquake. It’s all becoming. Like it’s all being.

The fixed part is only sensed in minds. I think these minds sense something being something, or something becoming something, but it is all of these somethings where minds can fix things for itself. The becoming in between these things rolls on through them all.

And if anything can be liberated from the becoming of being, it is the mind that liberates itself alone that might become fixed as a free agent.

Is the truth
1. The now buried source of the illusion, displaced by the illusion but lingering?
2. Is it dissolved in the illusion such that they are indistinguishable?
3. Or, is it literally obliterated by the illusion as implied below?
4. Something else? — ENOAH

I think I need to step back. Nietzsche was aware of Kant, and though he picked on Kant, he saw that knowledge was cut off from the objects it sought to know. Nietzsche saw that the way we carved up reality was at the outset tainted by the shape of the carving knife, so that any knowledge we constructed reflected as much of the mind carving it as it did anything else. So the first illusion was the act of claiming words that functioned among people replaced the particular realities that actually existed, and then mendaciously presuming those words, those constructed carvings, reflected and corresponded to things as they are, in themselves.

Then we called this correspondence truth. Now we see that truth is an illusion that we long forgot was an illusion. The first illusion, where our man-made conventions called “knowing” (which knows nothing of the thing in itself) is now called truth - an illusion built on a forgotten illusion, all because people like Aristotle and Descartes thought that we were so smart we could carve lines at real joints, at true distinctions in a real mind independent world, like we could know anything or know our knowledge reflected the truth of the thing in itself.

I think that is 4. something else.

logic (specifically, the requirement of a not that, to reflect a this), is the illusion. — ENOAH

My resurrection of truth with illusion is not Nietzsche (although I see the alignment). N. would agree that logic and reason are not close to the top of the hierarchy, and they are more mixed with illusion making if they are used to make truth.

But I also think Nietzsche was a scientist, a truth seeker himself. It’s just that he admitted the “truth” was less valuable then the knowledge of it as illusion. He never gave a theory of truth. When he talked about truth he could logically call it lies. But truth remains in the picture here. It just has to die like all of the other beasts and shouldn’t be reified as if it could possibly be a truth of the eternal forms of perfection, or the essence of certain knowledge.

It is our truth, and not The Truth, even our authentic-ized self. — ENOAH

I agree with your point here, I don’t think you have to use a capital t Truth. Just the word “truth” is enough reification. I your small t is the illusion that when we know phenomena, we start forgetting that we are knowing phenomena and call it reality whether I know it or not; but because we only know what we invest our knowing carving mind in, we do not know reality; when we forget this first, we start to use words like “truth” where I think you put the capital T.

Dogma thinks it can circumvent belief by dictating. But even Dogma is in constant motion, only vacuous becoming and only temporarily settled upon. — ENOAH

Nietzsche railed against dogma. It was an Apollonian appearance, the facade of weak minded hubris. When I say he was dogmatic, I am exaggerating and misusing the word dogma. Everything is in motion. Willing becoming was the rawest thing in itself worth knowing to Nietzsche. But that is where truth sneaks back into the picture, to me. He still claimed his content.

We don’t lose the ability to know Truth when we learn all of the “truths” we’ve known so far are lies. Nietzsche still called himself a seeker of truth. He never said there is no truth. He was not a nihilist or a relativist. It is clear he saw distinctions that require things at least be “temporarily settled upon” like…truth.

And I am fine with “temporarily settled upon” as a framework for truth. It’s why I think I can say “there is truth for us to believe is true” and stay aligned with Nietzsche. As long as you recognize the temporality, you gain back the full meaning of truth. It’s still there, in all its capital T fullness, during that temporary settlement. Otherwise “settle” has no content.

I think opposites, paradoxes, contradiction, difference, are also constructed fictions existing, bearing meaning, and qualifying as truths, only in becoming. In Reality, Being, there is not only no dichotomy, there is no inquiry, no focus, no concern whatsoever about Truth/No Truth. There is no logos. There is only presence being [that Truth...added here only for our benefit] — ENOAH

Ahh. A true skeptic perhaps? Nothing wrong with that (literally).

Knowing itself is a paradox, seeking truth, meeting only illusion, and we know it. This is a knot.

There is no dichotomy in reality? I disagree. I am the dichotomy in reality. When you say one thing, it immediately holds everything else in the balance, paradoxically saying more than one thing. Like a rose might beget red in an eyeball, we might beget dichotomy and paradox, and there they are, together with the other flowers, swaying in the same field the same breeze.

There is no inquiry, no logos, no concern? Harsh.

I get it. Nietzsche might have said such things.

But I think he was taking truth off its pedestal. I don’t think he was throwing it away. There certainly is presence being presence, becoming present, presenting…. But with the becoming, things come to be in the becoming. I don’t think truth, belief in knowledge, and the logos that shares it between you and me here, can be thrown away. The act of throwing all truth away has truth in it! It just takes boldness and trepidation to say things like “the eternal recurrence of the same” and to see the Truth that we can only approach truth and maybe never have it. I personally am fine to just call this picture - this minding that fixes things permanently for fleeting moments for itself and other minds - mixed in truth.

In the end, we mostly fail. What we believe is true, usually is not. Just not always. Or else we wouldn’t know what we can’t know.

Great conversation by the way. Cheers!

Interesting. I agree with "the coin ... logic". However, suppose "everything else ... objects of science/philosophy" instead tosses the "coin", so to speak, again and again again dialectically. — 180 Proof

Then my coin would be missing a side. I still like animating everything else though…

I think I like a version of your coin better. I see science as the pivot with philosophy on the one hand, and science of x (bio, chem, etc) on the other. Science itself is method; science is the interrogation, the logic applied, the theorizing that can be agreed by other theorists, or demostrated in experiment. Science is the pivot leaning into philosophy or into the many particular sciences. Philosophy is the science of science; philosophy turns on the philosopher and pulls everything else at once in with it, but it does this with the same scientific method. Then on the other hand science of bio, for instance, sets a limit at the chemical, and another limit at planetary ecosystem, and within these bounds looks at living things. Philosophy uses science to look for any limits, as well as looking at the looking, as well as testing logic itself against set theory, at knowing itself, at being any being..

So new coin is more like your coin: philosophy on the one side, and the many narrow sciences on the other, with science itself being the coin itself.

Now everything else can toss the coin (or when you do metaphysics, the coin can toss everything else).

Beginnings and endings are limits living things oscillate inside of.

Humans are obsessive storytellers because stories are road maps to another reality. — ucarr

I like it. The oscillation of living human beings is to tell stories that attempt to map paths to beginnings and endings.

Do you count philosophy and even science as modes of storytelling? Philosophy seeking the first beginning of everything and its final end, and the particular sciences drawing shorter/narrower starting points and more precise ends?

“I argue for the vanishing point of difference between science and philosophy through the essential linkage connecting brain and mind.” -Ucarr

I agree, but for a different reason: reality itself is the negation of impossibility (e.g. facts in contradiction to one another or to themselves; things with inconsistent properties), or that the Principle of Non-Contradiction (PNC) is the coin of the real(m) with complementary faces: Philosophy (roots, heads) and Science (branches, tails). — 180 Proof

I agree. It makes sense to me that empirical science was later distinguished from philosophy which came first. They are more essentially connected as involving the application of mind and its logical processes to sense or to conceptual objects or to experience. The philosopher is the scientist taking the broadest view, having the blankest slate, and having everything at his or her disposal to use for hypothesis and experiment.

I would say the two sides of the coin include science and philosophy together on the one side, keep the coin as the connector logic, but put everything else on the other side as the objects of science/philosophy.

So I think I agree with you both but for a third reason.

Fair question. I maybe shouldn’t have said questions. Someone has a dream of God or sees a burning bush and hears a voice - that is one whole thing to talk about. Then the voice says something - those words are another whole thing to talk about. I’m saying the words might mean more to someone about these being words from God than the fact that a bush was burning and talking, or the fact that it happened in a dream.

if God was termed to speak through dreams, they would be, essentially, indistinguishable phenomena. — AmadeusD

If God speaks to someone at all, that person is presented with two different questions, was it God and what is this God trying to say. If you look only at the question was it God, no one will ever know, because no one can prove the separate existence of any phenomena.

But what if the only evidence there could be that it was God speaking was the content of what was said? Because of what God said, the person sees something new, something new to them. Then they might think, this dream couldn’t have come from me because I could not have understood that, yet I understand something new now because of what was said. Like because of what was said, because of what the dream did to you, you would bother to wonder if it was God, and so you had your evidence in the very content of whatever was making you wonder.

Doesn’t mean it might not still be a hallucination or just a dream, or a fantasy wish, but if what was said really meant something, and hit home to you, and it was new, you might have to wonder about God.

I wonder if you'e thinking philosophy is always an instance of Chinese boxes? — ucarr

In what sense? That the philosopher doesn’t understand the symbols but can use a manual to create responses that work but have no understanding behind them? Or that the philosopher understands that the symbols are meaningless, and so, when philosophizing, is conducting a meta process while processing the meaningless symbols?

there seemed to me in your explanation, a reluctance to go a certain distance as far as truth being an illusion/invention — ENOAH

I can see reading me that way. Basically agree with you. You’re seeing me from a perspective, but you’re seeing me. But I’d frame the reluctance (which is a sort of negation), in a positive way. I admit the illusion, without a reluctance to also see truth there with the illusion. So I get seeing a reluctance to admit the depth of the illusion, since I temper illusion with truth.

But I see this same spot as: I only know the illusion is illusion as I see truth dashed to pieces over and over again. I mean, how could something present itself as an illusion to me, if I couldn’t see that it was not real, not truth? So I just see both. I think Nietzsche did too.

If you have illusion, you have truth obscured.
If you have truth, you have illusion clarified.

So if you have one, you have them both, because each defines the other. But at the same time, you need them both before either one might come to be distinct.

These conversations open huge rabbit holes of paradoxes, dashing logic, identity, metaphysics, this sentence… But knowing anything, be it illusion or not, seems both impossible and already accomplished at the same time. We are dealing in living paradoxes… so it is hard to speak. Like where does Nietzsche lie on the scales of “it is true that there is no truth” and “If there is one thing I know, it is that I know nothing”?
We are bound to find he agrees with and must disagree with, both and neither of these quotes.

Or are you reluctant to ascribe to N. a more absolute abandonment of truth in human existential/phenomenal experience because, for e.g. he's so ambiguous and that would be pinpointing him to an extreme; or, it sounds like nihilism, etc.? — ENOAH

Nietzsche can be very dogmatic. He’s clear that some things are vacuous and empty and other things are full and overcoming. He describes both, and tells us what is true and what is not true about them both.

So he bears witness to truth, he just tells us we are fools to make so much of this creation; or more positively, when we do science, we must practice it gaily, with a spirit that would toss it all away to maybe start over or move on, at any instant.

We should not seek the truth as if to follow a shepherd, we must make it.

That is his method, like anyone else who tries to communicate. He deals in setting out what is, what is true. He just sets out to destroy the vacuous. His content, what he really thinks is, truth is just one small way of being about it. There are other things we can seek and we can see besides the truth; and this truth can itself be illusion and create lies; and it is easier for truth to be a lie than the thing that eluded you in the first place, so maybe we should avoid the concept, we are smarter to jettison it from discourse…

But still, in order to say all that or to tear down any dogma, as I said, Nietzsche had to be as dogmatic about these things as anyone else. He dealt in truths as much as anything else, just more carefully, using a hammer as quickly as the tuner.

I'm interested in seeing if people who are comfortable with N. would be comfortable saying that from a Nietzschean perspective Heidegger's Dasein, throwness, ready at hand, etc. etc. etc., though brilliant and functional, is also, in the end, illusion, and seeing, actually inaccessible by means of the illusion, — ENOAH

I think Heidegger put things in a more classically logical, more metaphysical way, and all of this might be dismissible as facade to Nietzsche. Heidegger had to invent a whole bunch of words just to say what he saw there being. Heidegger’s world is more becoming, being, but being in time, and Nietzsche would see no fault in that, but Heidegger’s world is rigorous in its own way, and so subject to utter destruction like all the rest.

Throwness is a great idea and adds to the conversation. I think Nietzsche would have made good use of that concept.

And they both loved the Greeks. Heidegger thought we lost a connection to what the Greek roots of our words meant, so we needed to relearn and so reuse original uses of those words to better capture our ideas. Nietzsche thought the Greek tragedy was a pinnacle moment in human expression, the human willing into existence Oedipus Rex.

But in the end, Nietzsche would have probably said Heidegger was as full of crap as most everyone else.

As for "exaggerations," I'm not sure I see them that way, which is the "why" of my queries here. — ENOAH

“Truth is an illusion that we have forgotten was an illusion” becomes an exaggeration when you realize there is some truth in it. Nietzsche knew it, so he was exaggerating.

I can’t say Nietzsche was only saying “there is no truth” (which I don’t think he ever plainly says); this exaggerates his point. He wasn’t a relativist either (though some of the things he says logically lead to relativism). I, instead, would say he thought truth comes to be like many other things come to be, and so it passes away, and changes, and is forgotten, and so shouldn’t be honored above, (and because it was so honored for so long needs now to be held below) all of the other things that come to be and pass away. And because truth needed to be taken down a leg, he knocked it down three pegs, exaggerating to lead the masses with him. But we can’t really escape the invention of truth.

He saw that since Plato and Socrates, we had exaggerated the Truth, so he exaggerated No truth, taking God down with it.

Though we all may have forgotten, for Nietzsche to remember that truth was an illusion, he also remembered what truth truly was. He used truth to build the hammer to destroy anything that would not stand if its own will.

Which is why I agree with you, he wasn’t a nihilist either.

This could go on…

I wonder what you think of where I see the the truth of it all, how illusion is only illusion in the eyes of something who knows truth, or simultaneously, truth is only truth in the eyes of something seeing illusion; how the presence of either one, brings the presence of both together. Basically, how we can’t escape the many paradoxes that it is to have any opinion about these things at all.

I personally prefer to think in terms of direct awareness, knowledge and belief all being quite distinct and independent of one another. — Janus

Good stuff. You said it all there.

“direct awareness” - the present becoming of experience.. Thrown there, in motion, with it. It immediately presents an object to a subject; but it can also just be seen as just the subjective experiencing…, becoming in the moment - direct awareness.

“distinct” from “knowledge” - the what, the content, the qualia of this experiencing. If the act of experiencing is direct awareness, the noun of experience is what is made distinct as “knowledge”.

distinct from “belief” - this is an act like direct awareness, but it is the act of willing, of consenting, of choosing to relate the “what” of your “knowledge”, related to the act of experiencing (aware), and claim or judge both “believed” in as related.

All three are instantly present if you try talk about any one of them alone. Experiene, knowledge, belief.

Knowing itself is the act of distinguishing (even if just distinguishing what you presently see from what you presently hear) but distinguishing the whatness as now objects of knowledge, distinguishing knowledge itself from what it is knowledge of, while simultaneously believing your knowledge is either true or not true, judging, understanding, in the direct awareness of these distinctions of knowledge.

You don’t need the word “true” to show all the parts. Truth is covered by “belief”.

We can say there are things in themselves and there is knowledge of things, and when what one believes reflects well enough what there is, this belief is equivalent to knowledge. There, I married all three without saying “truth”. Or we can say we will only base our beliefs on the following: knowing the thing in itself and, now possessing this knowledge, now knowing the knowledge itself of the thing in itself, only when these are each knowledge of the same thing. Or you can just use the word “true”.

When what we believe reflects what truly is, we can say we know; we know the truth.

There is one question in this mix - what is there to believe? But this question includes within it - what is there? And “is there” begs we start all over again.

In order for you to read this very sentence, you have fix whatever I mean by “fix”, right here in this sentence, (you just did it twice!) and then, and only then, can you move on to the next word, the next sentence…

We fix experience with knowledge we can believe in so we can stand on it and move on to the next sentence.

We judge (belief) what we know (knowledge) we are experiencing (awareness). We judge what we experience. We know.

All inseparable in the end.

So Alice and Mark both experience the same qualia of "green", but Alice has a different label for it, so when they look at "green", Mark says that's green, Alice says that's blue, and yet they both see the same color and are having the same qualia experience. Anyway, not sure where to go with that, I just wanted to show that our experience of color is inherently intertwined with language and it should somehow be a part of the argument or at least mentioned.
Anyway, I'm certainly no expert, — Matripsa

You sound like an expert, deep in the cave, unafraid of the light and the dark - welcome to the forum!

The concept of the qualia of experience is a great one. It makes an object of the purely subjective. Once we start talking about this as an object though, we lose the qualia to stumble through our languages. And we get all of the problems of labels.

There is no way to learn whether Mark was right or wrong to say “green” to describe the qualia of Mark’s own experience. Only Mark can know this. That’s why qualia is such a great concept - it is the “only Mark’s space” in the universe. You would have to be Mark to even know what word to say or judge the sense in saying anything like green.

Objectifying qualia is like saying “I am”. It turns something pre-linguistic, or extra-linguistic, or something that needs no words, into words, and the non-linguistic qualia is then lost to the distraction of its re-representation in text.

Qualia is better analyzed by a poet, or novelist, or shown in a painting. We scientific thinkers and philosophers stink at it. We come up with examples like “green” versus “red” and we think we might hit home on some nuance between qualia and language.

But whether qualia are physical (like feelings and sensations) or immaterial (like experiencing personified in the subject), I’m no expert either.

I guess I lean towards qualia being the union of the physical and the non-physical. Qualia unifies the physical senses with the reflective subject. Qualia is the experience of something coming to be, the experience of becoming, while it is the experience of something that already is, at the same time, in a subject, like Mark. Like Alice.

Are you answering "yes" to the question:

Is every category of philosophy a type of metaphysics? — ucarr

In the following sense, yes. Philosophizing is a reflective, meta activity. The earth formed and out of the waters animals diversified, and human beings thought. Somewhere in there was a moment where philosophy was new. At that moment, there was the thing (earth, waters diversifying animals, etc), and now the meta thing held or dispersed by a human. Philosophizing is humans being meta with things.

In the following sense no. Metaphysics starts with concepts (the meta) and gets theoretical and speculative from there (more meta). Metaphysics is a category of philosophy. But it is separate from logoic, which I think belongs in philosophy. Logic is pretty meta, pretty human, but maybe not just human, so maybe not only metaphysics (though it is a category of philosophy.)

I see ethics as tied to having a body in the world interacting with other bodies, causing ethical quandaries and being affected (so the effect) by ethical behaviors. So ethics as a category of philosophy can’t stay purely metaphysical.

Epistemology is like logic and metaphysics overlapping - maybe another type of metaphysics. Ontology overlaps with pure physics, but is maybe half metaphysics and half physics.

1. How do you suppose Nietzsche "defines" knowing (besides the quote provided)? That is what (ontology(?) if I am using the word properly) does he "ascribe" to human knowledge? It is clearly not a thing inherent in the universe which our superior brains can uncover? Is it, to N, a fiction, an illusion? — ENOAH

It’s easy to misrepresent Nietzsche, and when you try to briefly summarize what he says you are in danger of leaving so much out. A lot of philosophic writers are like that. But I’ll attempt.

“What then is truth? …truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions..” - FN

I see this as with so much of what he says as an exaggeration to make a complex point. He wrote with passion, but the point is that we humans make way too much of this “truth” we have invented. It’s not that truth is not something. It’s not that we can avoid knowing and seeking the truth. It’s that we have over valued so many truths and then built obscene facades of dogma and institution out of these over-valuations.

So if we could get to the core essence of what it is to know, what knowledge is to Nietzsche, in the end we are more likely to have built another illusion than to have stumbled upon the truth. And instead of being a truth seeker, of following the drive and will to truth, instead he was willing to live without it.

He devalued truth for all of the misconceptions it has been used to prop up. That is what truth is - based on convention so that when I say “poison” and then say “mashed potatoes” we all don’t get confused about what to eat - truth is less important than poison or potatoes or the will to eat both.

Unfortunately, he did such a good job correcting us from our over-valuing of our science and truth (and yes all science is only practical convention and can be over-valued as well), hammering everything down to where, as he says above, where “nothing happened”, philosophy hasn’t recovered. And worse, instead of over-valuing truth, we now over-value the disintegration, the act of disintegrating, and we now reify only the illusion, only the will without any content whatsoever. So because of Nietzsche we again stray from Nietzsche in the other direction.

He ruined all good discussions of what is “knowledge.” Damn Nietzsche.

And I just disagree with him. I agree that truth has emerged on the scene because of we humans being human, all too-human. And I agree that willing a truth or believing our own knowledge is fraught with peril and likely to lead where nothing happened, a house of cards with the knowing self standing on top smiling like an idiot. But then, once in a while, in those moments where science might be mixed with gaity, where the tuning fork makes use of the hammer’s rubble, we skip right past truth and knowledge straight to wisdom. Some things are just there, and by humans, once in a twinkling of a star in a remote corner of the universe, wisdom shines (for an instant for sure, but now forever if you will, because that is what wisdom knows).

2. How would N. characterize the conclusions about Being (as ontology(?)) made by Heidegger and Sartre, for e.g.? As "arrogant and mendacious"? Or meaningfully nonetheless, and if meaningful, then how? — ENOAH

Hard to predict who Nietzsche would agree with and distance himself from. I get lumping Nietzsche, Heidegger and Sartre (along with Camus, Kierkegaard, Dostoyevsky, Goethe, and others. They all use such different vocabularies (absurd, dread, anxiety, nausea) to point at the same deeply intrinsic places and moments. If you want to talk about Nietzsche’s ontology, I think you start with the birth of tragedy - the Dionysian, the murky unformed passion out of which instinct is first born. You have to look there, using his words.

But as soon as we fix things with too much Apollonian appearance, it gets ugly again (to Nietzsche) and loses its art.

But he was a true artist of a writer. He said many wise things. These refute his exaggerations, to me, and allow me to still cherish what he did for these discussions.

Does accepting a lack of knowledge impart some form of knowledge? — Benj96

In a sense it does. We still know something (maybe generally) before we might adduce we know nothing in particular.

The point is, we can be certain of some things within a context / framework. But it is only as certain as the framework within which it resides is valid.

So certainty is relative. — Metaphyzik

But a statement like “certainty is relative” is not relative.

I agree that we are only certain of things within a context, but when we say “certainty is relative”, we are making everything the context (with no room left for the context to change) and speaking of all certainties ( namely they are all relative).

So maybe it is not that certainty is relative, but that certainty is rare and reserved for things in the context of everything and all time.

Science is science of x.

Except philosophy, which is the science of science or the science of scientiIzing. So philosophy is inherently self-reflective taking as its subject, the subject.

“Once upon a time, in some out of the way corner of that universe which is dispersed into numberless twinkling solar systems, there was a star upon which clever beasts invented knowing. That was the most arrogant and mendacious minute of "world history," but nevertheless, it was only a minute. After nature had drawn a few breaths, the star cooled and congealed, and the clever beasts had to die. One might invent such a fable, and yet he still would not have adequately illustrated how miserable, how shadowy and transient, how aimless and arbitrary the human intellect looks within nature. There were eternities during which it did not exist. And when it is all over with the human intellect, nothing will have happened.”
“On Truth and Lies in a Non-moral Sense” - F. Nietzsche

How do you not love Nietzsche. Great starting point for these questions.

I see there are at least four things we must just put on the table and address before we can have any account of any one of them. This conversation about knowledge versus belief must address the following distinct things:
- knowing (the act or operation)
- the known (not an act or operation, but merely the “of” in knowledge of, or merely the other, or facts, or objects, or things, as in things known while in the act of knowing)
- truth relationship (the relationship between the act of knowing on the one hand and the thing now known, the object of knowledge on the other. This relationship, as truth or lies or reality or appearance, is most simply represented as “truth”) (have to address it, as Nietzsche did and we all are doing.)
- believing (called belief, but this is another act, of judging or deciding that the knowledge one is in the act of knowing is true. Belief ties them together.)

Nietzsche believed his words above to be true. He would admit the absurdity of calling this picture of man in the universe something he “knew.” He just also believed nothing important happened just because he so believed, he so knew, and the act of reifying “truth” or “knowledge” was as arbitrary as reifying believing or willing, AND in his belief system, wiling was more worthy of reification than any “true knowledge” anyway, but I digress.

So I agree with Nietzsche that you can’t discuss one of these without the others. And I agree you can conclude many different things about knowledge and belief and truth and knowing, such as “nothing happening here in this out of the way corner of the universe.”

Or you might conclude knowledge is merely belief, which I disagree with.

But I agree we shouldn’t reify knowledge above the willing belief, or truth above the simple act of knowing anything be it false or lies. I don’t reify any of it, and try to take it as it comes which is all all together. Nietzsche had to go too far to make us see truth and knowledge don’t deserve primacy over the act of willing, but he went too far and reified willing (but I digress again).

I see I am capable of knowing, and this operation has furnished me with facts or objects of knowledge, for me to then judge and decide for myself which of these things that I am knowing are truly relating my knowing with the things known. I also see it is possible that I never know truth, but then there would not be different puzzle pieces, just me never getting to move them along the game board. The pieces themselves are already there for me to puzzle about.

So, to me, belief is as essential in this discussion as is the operation of knowing, as is the operation of believing the knowing relates to the now known objects as truth or otherwise. Knowing, knowledge, believed to be true…these all happen together.

It would better be put “there is only belief.” Or “there is no knowledge.”

You can’t know what a belief is or what the difference between beliefs and knowledge are if knowledge is only belief.

You can’t say knowledge is only belief unless the two words are synonymous. And in that case nothing has been added to the notion of belief or of knowledge.

In order to wonder if knowledge is or is not belief, mustn’t you look at two different things and see where they are the same?

So what is the difference between knowledge and belief? We still have this question. You’d have to define that difference first before you might relate them as in “knowledge is only belief.”

Knowledge is not knowing and the word 'to know' is stupid therefore. It implies a failure in understanding. — Chet Hawkins

Then so does belief imply the same failure. So I can still wonder about knowledge versus belief, just from a position of failure in understanding.

What distinguishes a 'fact' from a belief is that THAT PERSON ONLY (<--- yup) has decided… — Chet Hawkins

A “fact” distinguished from a “belief” - based on a decision. Ok. I see the moving parts a bit here. A fact on the one hand, a belief in that fact on the other based on a decision. But you need two things to make a decision. So there must be a difference, say between knowledge on the one hand and what we believe is a fact on the other.

To take the position that knowledge is only belief, it is better put that knowledge is knowledge and belief is belief, and we each of us have very little knowledge, although we are full of beliefs.

But you can’t have belief without a separate sense of knowledge.

As a matter of fact, 'facts' are always wrong in some way. — Chet Hawkins

Right here you assert you have knowledge (where you say ”as a matter of fact”) separately from belief (where you say “facts are always wrong”). And you negate your own point since what you end up saying is “As a matter of fact ( which is wrong),…” And in order to understand how a fact is a wrong fact, there must be something else that is understood, like a belief in the ability to know facts and to know they’re wrong.

I believe if you have a belief, you have knowledge separately, unavoidably, incontrovertibly resting on the horizon, the context with that belief, but not only that belief.

There are three levels in there.
Knowing
Fact
Belief — Chet Hawkins

You can’t make different levels out of knowledge and belief if “knowledge is only belief.”

(God) does reveal certain things within the pages of the Bible.
— BitconnectCarlos
I don't think so. It reads like a patchwork authored by men, not the word of an omniscient being. — Banno

I see that because the story of the God of the Bible has to emerge from a patchwork, and a patchwork that is as much fact and history as it is fantastical and contradictory, no human author or group of people would have ever thought to put it all together in one story.

The fact that the Bible is one story, to me, seems impossible. But the Bible is nonetheless. And it makes sense to me. So it makes sense to me it has to be divinely inspired.

I know this wouldn’t have to mean as much to anyone else, but that’s what I see.

I have not claimed that the cogito is meaningless. — Banno

So I asked you what does Descartes mean. And you said.

Well, I'm not at all sure - that's somewhat the point.

Some folk think he was making an inference.

Some folk think he was setting out an intuition. — Banno

If he was making an inference, then he was making or inferring. If he was setting out an intuition or intuiting, he was just the same.

Then you go right after the “I” further distancing from what I think Descartes meant, which is the “am”.

But I wish you would have answered my question.

We don’t have to know whether it’s an inference, or an intuition, or logical, or whether we can know, or whether I have a split personality such that the “I” in “I am” starts us off on a bad foot. When you attempt to empty the “I am” reflection you have already moved past what the reflection means, moved on to where you “are emptying”, and you find again “I am”.

Enoah above said the am “is-ing”. That’s meaningful here. The inference or reference, is an act. The intuition is of intuiting. The content doesn’t matter anymore. Inference and intuition distract as much as the I who might infer or intuit.

Thinking “I am” already happened when it is happening.

So you are certain of the Cogito without any justification? — Banno

You said “justification”. I thought of a third way to address your question.

You distinguished “certainty of the Cogito” from “without justification”. In order to justify certainty, or justify anything, I need some framework, to judge the certainty as justified. I have to clarify one thing “certainty of Cogito” and clarify some means and framework of justification, and then marry the two I suppose.

In order for me to justify the certainty of “I think therefore I am” I would have to be justifying, be in the act of justifying, to myself, to you, to whomever, about whatever. At the Cogito, the details are all drained and the only thing left is being, or becoming at best, like justifying or doing anything’s else.

The clearest meaning of the Cogito starts looking at the act of justifying, or now the act of “looking” at the act of justifying. It’s always an act that is the subject. An act of being, stated simply. It may as well be “I am justifying, therefore I am.” All I see is that I am, as I am justifying or I am anything (and even the “I” no longer matters in this seeing or this being).

I am is self-awareness.
It is mental reflection.

Thinking that I am does seem to be knowing that I am, and knowing that I am, while I am in the act of thinking seems to be knowing something that justifies itself in the act of “thinking justifying thoughts.”

So maybe I would say that, the “I am” reflection is self-justifying.

If by justification you mean words like “I am” that reflect or refer to an existing object, a referent, there being in the world in this case there being specifically here, being the “thinking justifications”. But I know that’s an outlandish statement here.

BUT, like a tautology, (which is what I think of the language of the stupid Cogito; “I am thinking = I am” is just as good of syllogism for my purposes as “I think, therefore I am.”), like a tautology it kind of makes sense that the “I am” reflection would be self-justifying. It literally fabricates a self.

An “I” just to be expressed.

You just helped me clarify what I mean by the Cogito. I see it as: the “I am” reflection.
That’s it. No “therefore”. I also recognize we could deconstruct “reflection” and there are always identity problems, but then I would be deconstructing, or identifying, and would come right back to the “I am” reflection.

So you are certain of the Cogito without any justification? — Banno

I don’t know what you are asking me.

If you are asking am I certain that I exist while I am in the act of thinking “I exist”, than yes - I am certain of this. Something is up, and I am certain of it at that moment. And that is something I can know, while in the acting of knowing I am existing there still…. It’s a phrase like “knowing now” that describes this moment, this place. Immediate certainty of my own becoming that is seeming to forever keep coming once I am being aware of it……aware of being “I am”, calling my own name because “am calling told me I could.
Certainty of all that which is really nothing but “I am”.

If you are asking me whether the statement or syllogism “I think therefore I am” is valid, or sound, or both, or neither, or equivalent to “if P then Q”, than I am only mildly interested in that discussion because I think those things have little to do with what Descartes observed.

Here is the thing, I can’t tell if you think the above two questions I posed are different questions, so that’s why I started this post with “I don’t know what you are asking me.”

You asked me a question and I answered you the best I could, posing two interpretations and answering them both.

Now let me ask you an honest question. Can you say what Descartes meant (or gets credit for for some reason even though any idiot knows “I am” for certain)? What did Descartes mean?

Without letting some syllogism, or logical, third-party verification, constrain you or set you free or justify your words - just what do YOU think Descartes meant. I am not asking you whether you are certain of it, or whether you are certain of it with or without any justification. My question is simpler. You have to see what I think Descartes meant. What do you think Descartes meant?

I have not said that the cogito is meaningless. — Banno

Then I don’t know what you are arguing with me about. I already said I’m not interested in the gaming of logical analysis of “I think; therefore, I am.” That whole conversation is an exercise in missing the point the feeble statement is trying to show, a point that any 10 year old thinks is so obvious it allows them to laugh at philosophers.

I know that I am while wondering what is, and I can’t unknow this.

It’s not about the “I”. It’s not about the “therefore”. It’s about the “am” present in “think”. “Am thinking” says enough.

It’s a premise more than a conclusion, so certainly no argument is needed.

If you disagree with me I can only assume you might not exist to check my math.