The self feels like an entity to what, or to whom?

Even if it were a process, that process would be something, and therefore not be an illusion.

I think we all say “self” and we then think of some sort of immaterial “soul” substance, leading to words like “immortal” and “reincarnation” which lead to “heaven” or “God”. It is easy for us to throw out God and heaven as illusion, and the soul.

But what is doing the work in all of this judgment between entity and process or reality and illusion?

Answer: an individuated thing. An entity, as aptly identified by the word “self” as any of “we” who would use the word “us”.

Another interesting post.

And citing Augustine from way back there in history shows this great question we still ask has been there for humans to ask maybe since there were humans.

And I totally agree that self is not just tied up in the brain, but the activity of knowing and willing. Positing a self is willing a known being.

What is the true nature of the self? — Truth Seeker

Always a great question.

I would have voted for 4 but you added “…and unknowable.

Most of us believe that we… — Quoting the description of the book

To posit “most of us” there must be a quantity of distinct things first, and a judgment about “most” of them. The things here posited are “us”.

So the author is including himself as part of “us” but I assume distinguishing himself from at least some of the others by sub-dividing “us” into “most”.

So if he is talking about quantity (most) he needs individuals to comprise that quantity.

So he needs a group of separate individual things in this “us” or “we” he is talking about.

The true nature of “self” has something to do with being an individuated thing, as in a brain for instance, but also something to do with words and knowing. By learning, the self is born.

I have no scientific idea about “immortality” “resurrection” or “reincarnation”.

I don’t think we need to know that there is a “soul” a separate Cartesian substance from matter, to have this good discussion.

But why is it that because we posit a self (just as the any author who says “most of us” must) this self is an illusion?

Just because we posit a self, for it to be there, is it not there, deposited, like anything else might be?

If everything was an illusion, we wouldn’t know it. We have to know something to later learn it is an illusion. Once we see the illusion, we don’t know that thing - that thing never was in the first place - but now we know not to call it a “thing” but instead should call it an “illusion”.

BUT I’ve still posited an “it” just the same, in order to refer to the thing that we now call an illusion.

Before we call the self an illusion, we would need to clarify whatever are we pointing at that is only an illusion. But in order to get to wherever we are pointing at, we must walk a path, speak some words, move on solid ground. We must say something like “do you see that thing over there or do you see nothing or do you see something that you call a self but don’t realize such a name is an illusion?” There are so many things we must know first before we could answer this question.

Everything can’t be an illusion or there would be no way to distinguish an illusion.

So maybe the self is what is known in between all of the illusion; the self is knowing itself.

Maybe knowing is the illusion.

Maybe you never read this.

If the self was known to be an illusory construct, to whom (or to what) would that construct be known?

If I posited a pink unicorn and you showed me it was an illusion, we could take it completely out of the conversation, throw to the flames with all of the other illusions, return to reality, and just look at the flames. I challenge you to take the self out of conversation and say anything at all about the flames. The author said “we” and “us” in his first sentence quoted. The self is a needed pivot to make words move so unless words are an illusion, or they are self moving (then we wouldn’t have this conversation), a self must be in the same picture. The self would still be there, the one talking with words of the known such as “flames”.

the tautology that someone who does not believe in sin is not able to knowingly sin? — Leontiskos

That is the logic of it. Or more clearly, if you don’t know the will of god, and sin is going against the will of god, then you cannot knowingly go against the will of god or sin.

So we all have to vote “yes” if we are to be rational about it.

God has never revealed his will to me. As a consequence, I am unable to knowingly violate his will. I am unable to knowingly sin. — Art48

Well as Christ hung on a tree dying, looking down on the men who crucified him there, he said “Forgive them father, for they know not what they do.” So it seems like he would agree with you.

The OP asked for arguments for and against Vegetarianism. This thread spiraled quickly into killing for food. I’m in favor of all kinds of eating. The ethics is not embedded in the act of killing animals for food as far as I can see. Eating a vegetable can be immoral.

Anything we people do can involve a moral decision. Even writing a post might intentionally, with malice of forethought, just waste precious time.

Going outside and sitting on the porch, when you just said you wouldn’t leave the house until the dishes were done, can be immoral.

If sitting outside can be immoral, killing anything can very easily be immoral!! Maybe always! And as a person, killing an animal with our reasons and intention behind it, maybe sacrificing it for nothing! It’s EVIL now!

But all of that aside, meaning, all of US aside and our morality, before we judge the morality, we can simply see that animals kill and eat other animals.

That simply is, the very subject that already exists for our moral question. We spawn in the same pond of animals as all of our ancestors spawned to be food for the next…

That is the starting point. At least those are the moving parts to start hurling “should” and “right” and “stupid” at one another.

Are you arguing that, like other animals, we are too stupid to make moral decisions? — Down The Rabbit Hole

You say: we, like “other animals …are too stupid”

It doesn’t sound like you like animals. Or people.

I don’t think you need to insult the animals as if the important likeness between them and us was intelligence, and saying “like other animals, we are too stupid...”

Unnecessarily negative posturing.

But I get it. It may be directed at me. I can be stupid.

But you said “we are too stupid…” so I’m thinking you don’t really think you are too stupid, so we’re in the clear on that aspect of the convo.

But killing to eat. Truly a big and real question, we all must grapple with.

And killing to eat as an entry into the murkier question of what’s right and wrong, morality.

So the question is, “Are you arguing that…we are too stupid to make moral decisions?”

It’s a good question. My answer, No.

I think it is perfectly good for people to farm, hunt, kill and eat animals. As a natural kind, if you will.

The moral decision at times can be to kill the animal, and eat it.

Easy to put yourself in a situation, not even a purely survival situation, but what is best involves hunting and killing.

At other times, killing an animal can be an immoral decision. When not for food. When supporting terrible conditions for gross profits.

Perhaps in some places in some times, killing any animal is immoral. Maybe that time is soon.

But I would never judge anyone for just eating meat. Much more would I need to know before I would say they were doing something immoral, like sitting on the porch.

We are animals too.
— Fire Ologist

Yes. So we can use that as an excuse for acting like other animals. And when we choose to act as if we owned all the other animals, we claim superiority. — Vera Mont

I feel like I'm being corrected here, sarcastically scolded, like you might claim my position inferior to your superior one.

You say "excuse for acting like other animals" implying that we are not animals, but creatures that can act like animals. Are we animals or not?

You say people must "claim" superiority, implying that we are not really any different than the animals. But many animals torture, kill and eat their meals. So a lack of superiority puts us on par and as justified as the lion when we get hungry, kill and eat.

Are you saying it can be perfectly justifiable for a person to eat meat?

Heidegger’s famous line that the nothing nothings means that truth happens in the nothing, which is another name for transcendence. Happening, the in-between, event, occurring, transit, difference, becoming are prior to identity. — Joshs

Truth happens in the nothing. I do think truth is solely in the mind, so happening in non-material. Truth is truth of some thing in the something. Heidegger contains hidden gems.

But Heidegger and Sartre both said existence precedes essence. Being in the middle denies priority between them. I don’t see how we see existence at all without seeing the essence existing, just as I don’t see how to identify an essence without becoming or being or existence.

I think the existentialists prioritized existence because of how precarious it is to fix any essence in all the becoming. But none of the becoming would be observable absent some thing becoming the thing, or the becoming thing becoming. If there is to be a priority, existence needs essence to be prior, just as essence needs existence to be prior. So priority has no place here, in the middle.

Essence and existence simultaneously disclose their place in the middle.

Dare I disagree with Heidegger and Sartre on this point. And the context of their statements about essence were maybe a bit different than my context here; there may be senses in which existence is broader, deeper, more essential (in a sense), than essence.

if we had to "unpack" all our propositional knowledge about complex things every time we used them in thought we'd never get any thinking done. — Count Timothy von Icarus

2+3 = 5 is taken as simple identity, instead of something that becomes. — Count Timothy von Icarus

thought is essentially processual. Eternal relations, taken as what is most real by positivists, are an abstraction from such processes. — Count Timothy von Icarus

This is all spot on to me, grappling with the exact observation I’m trying to make about being in the middle and how we can proceed to talk about it, and to simply know.

And I agree with Aristotle, and disagree with Wittgenstein.

Which means I was imprecise to say “ALL for human beings is in the middle.” By my own admission, the processing middle incorporates some THING identified as a unity in that process. I had to posit a frisbee to posit its in flight, middle motion. We don’t sense the middle process without simultaneously sensing the thing (whether that thing has its own context and is changing simultaneously or not - that analysis would just take positing something else to start and seeing its motions in its middles). So in the middle is just the processing; the thing processed still must be, to be in the middle. So middle is not “all”.

I may get away with saying “All” because motion is so ubiquitous, even in thought. But any wisdom cannot be recognized in this without both fixing things to demonstrate it (true discursion contra Wittgenstein), and fixing an observation about something demonstrated (adiaireta pro Aristotle).

So we end up in a weird place where trying to know what must be most unified through these discursive means. We try to get to reality rather than appearance, the in-itself rather than the relative, while still firmly stuck in the mode of knowing that is discursive and relativising. — Count Timothy von Icarus

This is the whole rub. Seeking the permanent things among the shifting rubble of change, using a process (more change). Pits the knowing (process of unifying) in between its polar enemies of the knower (unified thought) and the known (unified thing).

Which is why I settled on just “being in the middle” for the title of the post. I am attempting to identify a good first premise, a relevant single subject of inquiry, the single albeit complex premise that: motion is, and undoes all things, but like things undone by motion, the motion itself is, so permanence and permanent things to be known, are as well. And this is one premise, like just being in the middle. The key observation to me is that we couldn’t notice motion in the first place without something unmoved in it being moved; motion and fixation come together always, by necessity of thought, of physical being, of any sheer motion or any sheer thing. Permanence and change must each carry with them, the other. Straight out of my hero, Heraclitus.

Leaning to one side (all is relative becoming and no knowledge) or the other (only the permanent can be) are both mistaken, or incomplete.

There is a lot more to clarify and develop here.

Thanks for your post!

The absurd is essentially bound to value, the caring that there is this foundational indeterminacy in our existence. Why does one care at all? Caring is in the nature of the absurd, — Astrophel

the absurd … hangs on affectivity of caring — Astrophel

What I attempt to say is that while K and D are true existentialists for dealing with ethical dilemmas, Camus is a nihilist because he doesn't bother to debate about this issue. — javi2541997

Interesting conversation here.

I think I’m realizing why my favorite existentialists were always Nietzsche and Camus. Nietzsche was the most metaphysical and Camus was the least ethical.

I like the science, be it gay or otherwise. Existentialism disallows any pretense, at least more so than any other approach to inquiry. We start in the absurd, facing the abyss, where everything human is false, and any move may make the situation worse.

I always threw out ethics with reason and truth and all the rest that was suspended and upended by the existentialists, and I paid less attention to whatever ethics were recovered and more attention to what wisdom or truth could be recovered. Ethics was like their vehicle for delivering metaphysics and secondary to me.

But I think you are both right, that the ethical is essential to existentialism, and Camus stripped it down too far, being the closest to a nihilist of the bunch.

You both have me at an existential crisis with my understanding of existentialism! I thought I knew what meaninglessness meant, but now…

Great conversation.

Are you getting this from Heidegger? One question :
If we use the motion of an object as a metaphor for becoming, then do we also keep the fact that the nature of the object doesn’t change through the course of its movement? — Joshs

Not from Heidegger, but I see that it doesn’t contradict Heidegger.

But yes, we need the fixed object to trace movement, but at the same time we need movement to bring about the fixed thing. Both can be separated in mind as concepts, but they are one in a body, in experience, in the midldle.

So while I hope I have finally understood your intent, I cannot help but feel gratified either way. I look forward to reading more. — ENOAH

Kind words. I appreciate you are giving this a good hearing, and I’m grateful as well.

And honestly, I think we are so close, the differences may not be worth the effort. Indeed leaving our positions as not fully aligned places my concept “in the middle” separate and in between us both (so it sort of makes the point clearest, to leave the misalignment be.)

So instead of thinking I need to explain myself to you, I’m trying to develop it just a bit more.

If I were to try to say what I’m saying slightly more analytically, I’d say I’m am pointing at middles and motions.

This is really two. Things; and their motion.

Seen this way there are middles (things) and motions in so many philosophies (maybe all of them).

There are things and motions (middles and motions) in the eternal recurrence of the same or the Apollonian appearance facing the Dionysian source, in the Hegelian dialectic, in the Platonic dialogue (the midwife), in the phenomena with its noumena.

So by positing our being in the middle, I am trying to see the overlap in so many differences.

But with the “middle” I explain these two with one.

Above you talked about stepping into the same river twice. That is exactly where I’m at. This is all straight out of Heraclitus. He’d love the being in the middle, I think.

A thing in the middle must be moving. There is no rest in the middle. Things are like starts and finishes. Resting only. But with starts and finishes, between the start and the finish, is the motion. Motion and things. These both are the starting point for all experience, as it is starting, experiencing.

Heraclitus is forever tied to flux and motion, but he admitted this means things must fix to be moving things.

But by just saying middle, the start and the finish in are captured in motion at once. The middle carries with it the start it moves from with the finish it moves toward, with the motion, all in one phrase.

So it is really one thing. In the middle. This is the Heraclitean incite. “It rests from change; the barley drink only stands still, while it is stirring; there is unity and harmony in opposing tension.”

The middle as an analytic concept, as a strictly metaphysical entity, characterizes the concept of identity (as Heraclitus put it), or maybe as you put it:

in this context, becoming to being and so on — ENOAH

The difference is that Camus answers his question, whereas you reject his answer and think everything is meaningless "in itself". — Moliere

Hmm. I don’t think everything is meaningless. So I’m giving you the wrong impression.

Camus’ answer is that it becomes absurd to seek answers where answers all vanish in the grasping. He allows himself to stop asking the question. I love the question anyway. I see that the answers vanish in the grasping, so absurdity is always lying in waiting, at every step, around every corner, but also that seeing this, knowing absurdity, is now fixed and permanent clear and rational.

Personally I see:
1.absurdity outlines the rational mind that is confounded by it, and,
2.the rational mind creates the conditions for its absurdity,
as the one and the same thing.

One object in opposites united is the meaning.

The absurd, or instinct, is enough to beget all of all that.

Anyhow, Nietzsche, Camus, and Sartre were the first philosophers I read and I initially took it as a sort of gospel. — Count Timothy von Icarus

My gospels used to be (some maybe still) Heraclitus, Plato/Aristotle, Nietzsche and the others, and then Kant of course (but must visit Hume, Descartes and Locke and Hegel). But if I had to stay local, I’d never want to leave Greece - they tried to describe all the same things we discuss still today, right now, and gave us all the questions we’d ever need.

Nietzsche was a correction after all of that. Needed. He was right.

Reason had become a facade, a monolith, standing in place of everything. Platonic eternal forms more cherished than a cup of coffee - rediculous!

But moral nihilism, extreme relativism, and radical skepticism are as old as philosophy — Count Timothy von Icarus

Never need to leave Greece. Cratylus, Gorgias, Sextus Empiricus..

Existentialism addressed everything. It showed that the sum total of our progress was both a loss, and something new. I think existentialism, to me is the philosophy of modernity, and we are still in its era. Like 500 years from now, when we line up the renaissance, and the enlightenment, through the romantic to the modern, it is existentialism that brought the modern, the era that we are still living today. The internet and digital life may finally bring something new (but post-modernism, like post-existentialism, still refers to the modern, to the existential.)

Most of the famous existentialists demanded they were not relativists or nihilists. With the bleak scene they create it is easy to see why they had to scream so loudly.

It’s hard to describe, but I don’t see the relativism or nihilism. I just see the existential as the stage, the basecamp for being human. It’s necessity and purpose as much as it mingles with nothingness and becoming. The existentialists just were sick of talking about the “truth” of it all because we had so often botched it, lost our sense of what there really was in life to talk about - our disconnection, our predicament wondering what else is there besides these ancient questions.

In the end though, we need more than existentialism to explain who humans are here at basecamp. Existentialism is good stuff, but not enough.

realizing that whatever you do, if you think it is not ultimately absurd, you are doing it wrong. — Fire Ologist

I am painting too stark a picture, even for existentialism, but just to highlight the point.

if one is "doing it right," where is the standard to determine this? — Astrophel

The absurd becomes the standard. If you are doing something without any irony, with absolute certainty instead, without at least a nod to the absurd whatsoever, you are wrong (and so are an example of the absurd, because you would be thinking you found a new standard.)

But this doesn’t leave you with nihilism, nor is it a dogma. Everything is still there as it was, just now you placed yourself, in it, up against it, experiencing it, making the very disconnection you now absurdly endeavor to reconnect, knowing you never will.

You can lean towards the barren side of this bleak picture, and call this leaning “nihilism”, but that is just a leaning. Or you can lean towards you, the subject, in it. The existentialists had real bodies, and never let go of this instinctual being, but facing the predicament that is the human in it, the being with.

This is where the ethical component of existentialism comes in. The OP drew a line between the metaphysical and the ethical components of existentialism, and leaned towards the metaphysical. I’ve been staying on this to highlight the metaphysical backdrop in which existential ethics sits. It has to be an ethics that addresses not only the fact of our reasons and choosing, but also the fact of the absurd.

Again, there is plenty of room left to talk about ethics. But the backdrop, where Dionysian instinct for Nietzsche lives, where either/or matters and matters not the same, the abyss, where existence precedes…, where Sisyphus absurdly climbs again. Precise in its starkness, yet somehow setting the widest stage. I love that stuff.

At this lonely place of separation, you build an ethics of authenticity, something intimately tied to a “self” and need foremost one’s lonely disconnected will, to chose, and only then be ethically.

Perhaps it is not so much John Deigh who misunderstands Camus, as the contributors to this thread. — unenlightened

I never said Camus was a nihilist. I don’t really even know what nihilism means. I see why people attach nihilism to existentialism, but the existentialists actively resist that attachment and so would I.

You don’t see the absurd without looking for meaning and truth.

And when you find the absurd you don’t forget the truth and meaning of it.

This thread seems like a scattered mess. Are we asking whether people eating meat is ethical, whether ethics is something that humans can apply to the animals we often eat, whether ethics is something humans should apply to eating other animals?

What about vines that choke the life out of trees in order to blossom and spread - is there an ethics we should look for there? I saw a deer kill and eat a mouse. Is the that an unethical deer because the deer is supposed to be vegan?

I’ll skip to the end. Eating meat isn’t an ethical issue. Animals and plants consume other objects - it’s how it all works so that bacteria can grow, so that eagles can fly and so that we can ask these questions.

Killing an animal inhumanly is an ethical issue, not for the sake of the animal, but for the sake of the inhumane killer (the person, and those who would eat an animal killed inhumanly). The eating of meat isn’t an ethical issue. The killing inhumanly or not, for humans, is an ethical issue.

I don’t want to insult the lion who primarily tortures and kills animals to eat them alive, by judging the morality of an otherwise perfect act, innocent of all ethical judgment. But then, the lion wouldn’t sense the insult as they wouldn’t sense the ethics.

We are animals too. Animals kill plants and other animals to eat, just like the other animals and plants do. People create ethics and can apply it to everything they do, such as how they kill animals to eat. People should kill to eat humanely. But meat is plants is water is air - all for consumption - as are human bodies that the worms can’t wait to be planted in the ground.

Hi Jussi.

I always found the metaphysics (so to speak) in existentialism much more compelling than the ethics. So I basically agree with you.

I’d say you have to take out the “should” when reading anything about our actions in existentialism (despite all of Nietzsche’s scorn against the lies and weaknesses), which sort guts ethics anyway.

Bottom line, I agree with you that

Camus is making no claims about what anyone should do. — Jussi Tennilä

Once we realize the absurd, specific acts are never a “should” (so not really ethical). You can do anything or nothing at any time or all of the time. The sole quasi ethical component is merely realizing that whatever you do, if you think it is not ultimately absurd, you are doing it wrong.

acting with integrity requires taking up the perspective of despair about life and choosing from it the values and principles by which one will live. Only by first regardin the world as valueless and absurd and - Prof Deigh — Jussi Tennilä

Notice he says “requires” and not “should”. I think the practical point is that, when making a value judgement, one has to realize this is being made against an empty abyss. Each judgment needs to be admitted to oneself as ultimately absurd, before proceeding to judge and act anyway. Arguing whether a honking taxi is also a symphony is an exercise in absurdity. But that is because arguing, a human thing, is always arguing with the abyss. So if one chooses to value this above that and that below this, it “requires taking up the perspective of despair about life and choosing from it the values and principles by which one will live.” It requires choice and artifice.

Ultimately calling the existentialist approach to life “ethical” seems to misuse the term ethical to me. It’s not acting ethical to take responsibility for one’s absurd reasoning, it’s just the true nature of authentic acting. In the end, any particular act (murder or self-sacrifice, either/or) is meaningless in itself, beyond good and evil.

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?