Haven't you noticed the boilerplate Marxism I've been peddling?

l thought you were just facing facts.

↪Punshhh I'm interested in why you think that, and how you have looked into it.

Have you read much on Astronomy? Or on Astrology?

Sorry for the delay, I have been on the road the last few days.

When I was young I looked into every philosophical system of thought I could find, astrology was one of them. After a while I became of the opinion that forms of divination are about people trying to find out something of interest, but out of reach. Such as what will happen in the future, or looking into a person's soul. This being the case, it is of little philosophical value, so I had pretty much put it, amongst others, behind me by the age of about 16.

This does not mean that there is no truth in it somewhere. When one looks into forms of spirituality, then traditional mythological, divination and religious systems can become interesting sources of wisdom or inspiration.

See? Bitter Crank gets it. Agustino, Thorongil, and Michael need to up their game.

I get it too, I already knew. The trickle down can so easily be syphoned off into tax havens when money becomes digital.

I will have to reply later, I've got things to do now.

@years ago I picked up one of those ‘sun sign’ books that has a page for each day and I have to say I was quite bowled over by what it said about me.

I’m not entirely dismissive of astrology, although I don’t pay attention to it.
7 minutes ago ReplyShareFlag

It is a means of divination, or as a mirror to the self. I also studied those books years ago and pay little attention to it now. However as I am focussing more and more on creativity, such systems are fertile grounds for creative inspiration. Another system of thought which I use is "modern art", the intellectual and conceptual appreciation of it.

I don't think that can be answered, with our current knowledge.

I didn't say they're a path to fulfilment, just a path that many people take, probably because it's easy, and not very painful upfront.

Sorry, it's my clumsy choice of words. Really I meant the perception of fulfilment in their eyes. A typical delusion experienced by addicts.

Anyway my original point was in reference to the privelidged in our current world. They are due to their privelidge already well tutored in how to conduct a life of leasure. Whereas the starving, or the "primitive" is not so prepared, hence the problems of addiction amongst indigenous populations when forced into a life of houses, clothes, supermarkets, TVs etc.

According to my date of birth, I'm supposed to be Libran, but I'm not so sure I really am a Libran.

You need to look at your whole horoscope, to get a more accurate reflection. Do you know what sign the moon was in(your rising sign), that will have a bearing. I'm Scorpio with the moon in Libra, so in notable ways I have Libran characteristics.

So the beer, and the drugs, are an alternative path of fulfilment, to the path of personal growth?

I am reminded of the problems with alcohol addiction among indigenous peoples, when they are "brought into the modern world".

Ok, so when most jobs are performed by robotics and software, what will people do, would they then be obsolete, or would they have to be creative and find something else to do?

Who, the starving, or the comfortably off, I wonder would make best use of a life of leasure, including the trappings of leasure, drugs included?

I agree, we in the west find comfort in and blindeness to our privelidge. Although as I said in our last interaction, we are going to have to get used to lives of leasure. Unless, of course, the world goes to the dogs.

The question is really as to whether nature is merely a brute existence or if intentionality (telos) is behind its workings. Empirically speaking we simply don't know, and I don't believe we ever can know by means of purely rational or empirical enquiry. There doesn't seem to be any imaginable way we could know by those means.
— John

On the other hand the subjective evidence for intentionality, human and otherwise, and causality, is individual experience; we may be utterly convinced by the evidence of our own experience. But our experience can never qualify as overwhelmingly convincing evidence for another person.

Mysticism can overcome both of these barriers through the study of orientation.

By example, imagine looking through a kaleidoscope, all the philosophical and mystical ideas are the, or cause the, symmetrical patterns observed. However through turning the lens part of the kaleidoscope, the philosophical and mystical ideas are re-aligned, the symmetry is altered. Resulting in the experience, understanding and development of the reorientation of the self.

In the first case, by a reorientation of the thinking, personal self with the hosting, or higher self.

In the second, a realisation by orientation of concepts that there are no two or more persons(in respect of humanity). In a real way, we are the same person/s.

Okay, I follow you, but I'm asking you about the metaphysics of it. How is it possible for a physical substance to consistently bring about a spiritual experience? Can matter determine/force such an experience upon one? And if so, then how is this possible?

Simply, the human being is a mechanism in which there is an interaction between mind and matter. One can influence the other, so naturally physical narcotics will influence the mind. Likewise notions of mind can influence physical materials.

As to how this is possible, it is a question of how such an interaction is possible. Well the initial observation is that there is in a person an apparatus which can host a mind, the brain. Provided a mind is able to inhabit that mechanism, then the interaction occurs.

Is causality that simple?

Causality is sometimes simple and sometimes convoluted. However when it's convoluted, when it's happening it may as well be simple.
My comments are more about the irony, or hipocrisy of the UK government regarding the arms deal with Saudi as sacrosanct. So as to provide the revenue to pay for the rapid response police squads to deal with the terrorists inspired by wahhabism and the like.

Also it's interesting how the airwaves are crammed with news reports about the terro attacks and what is going on in Syria, on the assumption that we are not culpable. While there is literally no mention of the carnage going on in The Yemen, using the arms we sold to the Saudis.

Yes, Al kaida bit back on 9:11, leading to a knee jerk reaction in invading Iraq. Then countries in the Middle East and Asia start falling like dominoes. Should we pull out now, or get sucked in further.

The Saudi issue is top news in the UK today, two days before the election. Particularly about what is going on in Yemen.

Yes, that was the fight against the Commies, I know about that and how it led to Al kaida etc etc.

But what is going on now?
Why did the U.S go into Iraq, no commies, or strategic oil there?
Did this light the fuse in the Middle East and since then it's been a fire fighting exercise?

If so, or whatever else is going on, does the cozying up with Saudi leave us with egg on our face?

And Trumps response

My vote would only be relevant if the Conservatives end up winning by 1 vote. ;)
17 hours ago

Yes that might be accurate mathematically but on the ground, it's more of a group activity. For example a politician might say something at the last minute (which might be irrelevant to the political situation) which weirdly results in lots of voters deciding that their vote is a wasted vote and then not going out to vote. Also you don't know what other voters are thinking, as a group they might be swaying this way and that, like the weather. If you don't vote the pool of voters is reduced which if reduced beyond a certain point might result in a revolution and a dictator installed. Also you might say something in the pub which sways a group of people to vote differently. Indeed in this thread you might have changed the political weather already.

if Michael is in a safe seat of another party, his vote would be an irrelevance.

Well the tories would like to encourage the greens as a way of splitting the left-wing vote. It is when the greens start to steal tory votes that they will get on board. I suggest the slogan," Conservation is the real conservatism

I am an ex Tory who turned Green. I was a Thatcherite in the 80's, but think that the whole ideology of the conservatives is now out dated and is starting to destroy our country. I would back Labour if they can get them out now, but nothing comes near the Greens when I look at my ideology.

Anyway you know when the Tories adopt Green policies, they aren't really, the're just pretending, conning, masquerading as folk who care about the environment and our future. They're so out of date they only want to nurture capitalism along with preserving middle class lifestyles, with all the inequalities this entails.

I think this thesis is well disproved by the overwhelming influence of UKIP despite their abysmal showing in elections. Rather, it is the folks that always vote the same way and thus create safe seats that have no influence. Things change when people change, and Conservatives are hyper sensitive to who is slicing a few votes off their majorities, and who is dividing 'their' votes in the places they lose.

Yes there probably is something in what you say. Although I think that UKIP is an exception to the rule. The issue of Europe has resulted in a groundswell of opinion among the population since we entered the common market in 1973. Something which would become expressed one way or the other. However in the case of UKIP, it was essentially a splinter group of the Conservatives which divisively influenced their policies and resulted in the referendum itself.

Likewise, the more people vote green, the more the other parties will adopt green policies, even if the greens get no seats, because those are the votes they need to get next time.

The Greens are more inline with the rule, I can see no evidence of the three main parties adopting green policies. Indeed the conservatives did try to court some green voters during the early years of the 21st century. However they didn't alter their policies in that direction, while claiming they were by claiming their actions (so called green initiative) to reduce CO2 production were a Green minded issue, which they weren't. Since the Credit Crunch they have been ditching them wherever they get the opportunity and green issues are well off the agenda at the moment. Despite the swelling of Green supporters over the last few years. I have voted Green for a long time now anyway, as I want to encourage our local Green candidate to continue standing.

The trouble is a lot of us in the UK are in safe seats, so our votes are irrelevant to the result. My whole life I've been in safe Conservative seats, so all I can do is vote appropriate to my ideology and my vote will be counted in analysis of the popular vote, which is not likely to change anything.

There does seem to be a surge developing behind Corbyn at the moment. But I expect the conservatives will win though because sufficient of the grey vote see Corbyn as an old fashioned Trotskyite, hence unelectable and won't budge from that view. Combined with the sentiment that Theresa May will pull us through the Brexit negotiations unscathed. I am critical of both these sentiments, but I know the people who hold them will not change their view even when pinned down. Our only hope is if the young suddenly start turning out to vote.

I of course have explained many times how both materialism and mysticism are in fact disguised dissipative structure. They both are simply reflections of human social entrainment to the desires of the second law of thermodynamics.

Perhaps you can with materialism, but not with mysticism. This is because mysticism is, or is as far as I am concerned, not necessarily concerned with materials. It recognises them as vehicles and realises that the presence of vehicles cannot, with our present degree of knowledge be explained. Following from this is the acknowledgement that the second law is an effect of those vehicles.

That is Peirce's epistemology in a nutshell. And then that was his pansemiotic metaphysics - his definition of the summum bonum as the universal growth of reasonableness.

There is, of course, the caveat of the limitations of the human perspective. Along with this any mature philosophy ought to factor in the possibility that human experience is a construct, a confection hosted by a reality of which those humans are not aware.

That's the rhetorical advantage of founding your "metaphysics" in the ineffable. No one can call you out for your failure to speak about it meaningfully, let alone provide the material evidence. ;)

As any mature philosophy would.

I have pointed out before that there need not be a difference of opinion between the philosopher and the mystic when it comes to metaphysics. The mystic realises she is wearing blinkers, surely philosophers do also.

Quite, the way I put it is, say you take all the knowledge of humanity, all the understanding about who, how and where we are and when it is all complete, We look up and realise that we are still staring into the unknown.

This why the seeker turns to intuitive systems of progress. To literally grow into the knowledge, rather than to work it out.

There would be a unity or symmetry. That is implied by the fact something could separate or break to become the "mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive" two.

But the further wrinkle is that the initial singular state is not really any kind of concrete state but instead a vagueness - an absence of any substantial thing in both the material and formal sense.

This radical state of indeterminism is difficult to imagine.

Yes I know it is difficult to imagine, personally I would pull away from the focus on some kind of radical indeterminism as is implied by the great intensity and pressure etc which we are presented with by astrophysics for example. Yes there may have been some almighty squeezing, forging at the beginning of the known physical universe. But this may only be a requirement of forging such concrete stable substance in which we find ourselves. Also it isn't actually addressing anything necessarily fundamental about our existence, or existence in general. But rather it is simply focusing on physical conditions. (Note, I am very much a materialist, just not in the narrow terms of physical matter).

The Big Bang is thus more of a big collapse from infinite or unbounded directionality to the least number of dimensions that could become an eternal unwinding down towards a heat death.

I am with you in regards of the physical material, space, time and three dimensions etc, which is well described by science.

The details of this argument could be wrong of course. But it illustrates a way of thinking about origins that by-passes the usual causal problem of getting something out of nothing. If you start with vague everythingness (as what prevents everything being possible?) then you only need good arguments why constraints would emerge to limit this unbounded potential to some concrete thermalising arrangement - like our Big Bang/Heat Death universe.

Agreed, but the reason I asked the question about a unity is that it brings us to a set of conditions for which science and maths, even perhaps logic is blind and mute. There must be something going on in there which we are far from understanding. However, I don't think we necessarily should try to go there to solve any questions about our origins. As I said, it might simply be a means of forging dense physical material, the origin might be found elsewhere in which such extreme conditions are not required.

It is different in that it explicitly embraces the holism of a dichotomy. It says reality is the result of a separation towards two definite and complementary poles of being - chance and necessity, material fluctuation and formal constraint, or what Peirce called tychism and synechism, that is, spontaneity and continuity

Etc.
That's all fine, so is there a "unity", a "singularity" in The Big Bang Event

-an infinitely regressive series of ever more fundamental materially efficient causes
-true spontaneity and randomness at the 'lowest' level
-or a most fundamental "primary uncaused cause".

I don't think we can split these(I'm treating "materially" in its broadest terms). This is because as I see it the reality is likely to be more subtle than the logic of these scenarios which is to simplistic and two dimensional. So the reality may well be more regressive, spontaneous and uncaused than is conceived of, while not in any way individually describable, or discernible by either.

Personally, I find the idea of an infinitely regressive series of materially efficient causes to be the least coherent or intelligible alternative.

There is a more subtle rendering of this notion in which "infinity" is read as without ends, or bounds, rather than a strict infinity, which itself is a human invention and susceptible to simplistic logical abstraction. Also "materially" can be treated as any form, or kind of extension in any manifestation in any realm, or dimension.

So it can be rewritten as,- an endless, or unbounded causal regression in any medium, or phenomena of extension in which a causal chain is manifest, while having some causal link to the world we find ourselves in.

But we have good telescopes. We can see the heat death already. The Universe is only a couple of degrees off absolute voidness. The average energy density is a handful of atoms per cubic metre. Nihilism is hardly speculation.

Yes, but that is only the material conditions we experience, which might be like navel gazing in reference to the bigger picture.

Perhaps this whole universe you are referring to is just some fabricated sideshow, or less? People who consider transcendent realities look to the bigger picture in the realisation that in some sense that bigger picture is in the here and now.

Why does it have to be not nihilism? My argument is that the goal of the Comos is entropification. Then life and mind arise to accelerate that goal where it happens to have got locally retarded. So life and mind are the short-term cost of the Cosmos reaching its long-term goal.

That's not just nihilism - the idea that our existence is cosmically meaningless. I am asserting we exist to positively pick up the pace of cosmic annihilation. So super-nihilism. :)

Then we (Kim jong-un, or Trump) should press the red button then, and get back on track.

Apart from the apparent Nihilism in this perspective, it begs a diminutive ignorance on our part. Or in other words we soon regress into a primitive embryonic life form in an insignificant minuscule swamp in a far of corner of a vast, even endless cosmos in which super life, super minds, even Gods play out inconceivable entropic games and we are hopelessly ignorant, naive of what is actually going on.

I listened to an interesting programme yesterday about blind sight (The Digital Human, BBC Radio 4). In which they interviewed people who sleepwalk and have lost their sight, but unconsciously see things around them. They even suggest that in a sense the person is acting as a Zombie during these events.

Nice work, I'm a big fan of architecture.

Indeed. 'I think, therefore I am you.'

I'm with you.

"Strangers passing in the street
By chance two separate glances meet
And I am you and what I see is me
And do I take you by the hand
And lead you through the land
And help me understand the best I can"

Pink Floyd, Echoes.

Watercolour, that was my watercolour period.

This is a rendition of the Matterhorn I painted about 15 years ago. I was reframing it so took the opportunity to photograph it.

No

Are you talking about bodies, or beings?

Bodies enact qualia, but don't have them.

Beings experience qualia, but cannot experience anything absent a body, they can't enact them.

Like what are you visualizing when you visualize the abstract triangle with no particular angles....If you're actually visualizing, that shit has actual angles. Otherwise, you have a vague image with a concept nestled up alongside. I don't see a way out of this. Unless you're claiming you can visualize a triangle that geometry doesn't apply to?

I agree, when one visualises a triangle, there is a specific dimensional image in the minds eye and there can't be am image, a visual image, that is not a specific imagined dimensional object. In aphantasia, presumably this is absent and an alternative imaginative process fills the gap.

I always thought that "photographic memory" didn't literally imply visual memory, but really accurate memory

I would think that true photographic memory is possible. Not in the sense that there is a person who is recording accurate photographic knowledge many times each second, as a movie camera does, in photographic frames. But rather that there are certain images that are in some sense photographically recorded. Perhaps to record critical experiences, in a moment of crisis, or ecstasy.

There is evidence of exact replication of experience in the bower bird, who can hear a unique sound once and then endlessly mimic the sound precisely like a digital recording.

If we start to build computers that think the same way, then we might need to get worried.

. They wouldn't be conscious though(I'm not saying this is any less worrying).

You give a nice summary of thought processes, I would agree and indeed follow an equivalent process to the chess player in creating my art work. However I would add another two perspectives, (which are essentially covered in your account, but not specified).

Firstly, like how you describe a thorough thought processing going on unconsciously with its results emerging in the conscious thinking process fully formed, effortlessly. I would suggest that this entire unconscious processing system can through training be brought into conscious thinking activity, where required, or as an alternative to the purely unconscious or effortless means. This is something I do for various reasons, including being able to observe and manipulate the process.

Secondly, there may be transcendent intuitive processes going on which are subtle(from the neuropathology perspective) and which may play an important role in anchoring a being within the experiential context of the body. I realise this probably seeks to go beyond current scientific thinking, but can be considered philosophically.

it's true, I do wonder why I waste so much time here.

Could you recommend a better place to spend time, I'd really like to know. It took me a long time to find my way here, so I'm not leaving now I've arrived.

(This comment has just a hint of the light hearted, or the tongue in cheek, it hasn't had the humour sucked out of it(see my profile picture as an illustration of my arrival))