No, it happened. I wasn't expecting you to believe me though.

Yes, you are lifted out of your normal self and hosted by another being, thus being as you say gifted other capacities.

That's the exact problem

Yes, I agree, well apart from the assumption that god does not exist, for these reasons. We cannot say this, we just don't know. Also yes the atheists may be right, while naive.

Anyway, this is irrelevant if one is considering what actually exists, rather than what we can say exists, or conceive of as existing. What actually exists and what form it takes may be entirely unknown to us, or inconceivable to us. Thus, we cannot determine what difference God makes, or not, from our limited position. It doesn't follow that because we can't find a difference, that it is not there.

I understand your point, but what I am suggesting that it I didn't experience the content of the revelation, but witnessed it(which was bolded). I know this doesn't make sense either. But what I am suggesting here is that my mind (and body) was temporarily enabled by the mind of the other being to increase its capacity and enable it to witness what it can't witness on its own. Actually one could say that I did experience what the being experienced by being a part of him. This is why it is called revelation, because something inaccessible is revealed, through this process.

I think that this can be criticized in the same way willow criticized the notion of "supernatural explanation". The same way the supernatural explanation is, in fact, always a natural explanation, albeit a different (weird, irregular, less common) one, the same way the content of your experience was not beyond human conception or unrelated to your senses. It could be a form of synesthesia or something like that. At any rate, I agree that such experiences can be utterly transformative.

Yes I agree the Willow's point about the supernatural. The grey area here is in the word"natural", or nature. Nature can be a catch all phrase for the supernatural, the empirical and the scientifically understood and an infinity of the unknown. So it should be specified how it is being used. Also the divine, or spiritual in all its glory need not be supernatural, it's just nature.

I don't think you covered the point I made about the transformative nature of epiphany, or perhaps I should say revelation here. My point is that the experience includes phenomena beyond the capacity, and conception of the human mind and body, it is an intervention from something else(a superior mind and body), so cannot be generated by the body or mind, even though such effects may appear to be replicated through the use of hallucinogenic substances, or in mental disorder.

Let me explain, in the experience I had which I discribed in which I transcended time. This is not the only thing that happened. In the vision, I was lifted up by a being who I interpreted as the Christ. This is the key to my point. I was lifted up in reality(not my physical body, it was in a dream), metaphorically, subjectively. So was taken out of my/this world and hosted by this being, in his/her world, this world, or phenomenological reality was transcendent in time and space. So I was a witness to a greater, transcendent, but also orthogonal reality for the duration of the hosting in the world of this other being.

So what this illustrates is;
I experienced something beyond what my body and mind is equipped to experience.

I was a witness to something which I could not conceive of, or conceptualise with my intellectual mind.

I had a vivid experience of being lifted out of this world in the presence of a being.

I experienced the presence and phenomenological world of this being.

Materialistic naturalistic explanations of what happened are inadequate to explain this, or to consider it as evidence, because, it can't be understood external to the experience itself.


Yes, Robbie Basho was a deeply spiritual artist. For me his music is transcendent similarly to my experience of this being I mention above. He has channeled, or revealed a deeper sense of being in this piece of music.

(I will link it again, if anyone else want to hear it, http://youtu.be/83GgOhBhxqI)

I like the other piece you linked to, this kind of country music is new to me, an exiting new direction to explore.

Thanks, it's seems it was adopted by early Americans(U.S. citizens(God this is a minefied)). I always thought it was a Yorkshire dialect word, because my gran used it a lot, and she barely travelled outside the county of Yorkshire, well except when she went to Bognor Regis.

Maybe, the word travelled back over the pond, because folk over here thought it was one of their words.

comeuppance

I was shocked to see you use this word. Are you from that part of the world, or did you know someone from those parts?


(I come from there and even I would never use that phrase)

Postmodernism alert!

Is that like abstract expressionism?

Is it like we're discussing a Jackson Pollock?


How deep does the humour run in the dribbles of paint on canvas?

He was playing the crowd.

So, it seems to me that it's not only that religious experiences are not epistemically on the same level as other regular experiences, but there's also a gradation of testability among the religious experiences themselves

Quite, there is no way to establish the presence of God even when you are the one experiencing the epiphany. However having experienced epiphany of various kinds myself, it is clear to me that some such experiences are utterly transformative, transformative to an unnatural degree(I do realise that there can be the same transformation in the development of mental illness). Also the nature, or content of the message can be considered. For example in the case of St Francis, the nature of the epiphany resulted in Christ like behaviour (following the epiphany) and the gift of communion with animals. The content can often contain information which is beyond human conception. An example of this is an experience I have had of a transcendence of time, time becoming viewed like a landscape, in which as I turned to look, I was looking into the past, or future. Such phenomena imply the existence in some unknown way of differing mental and experiential states, to what are provided in the world of the senses.

Thanks for your appreciation of Robbie Basho, I came across his music many years ago, through a chance and fortuitous event.

Quite, trickle down is a myth. The rich get richer and pull up the ladder behind them.

As a nominalist, I don't believe that an identical brain state in someone else, or in the same person at a different time, is possible.

But the OP is asking about whether someone is alive, brain states are besides the point. The point is in reference to the state of being alive. I agree that a person does not have an identical brain state as one they had in the past(although in an infinite universe, it is inevitable that it would happen somewhere else). But they do have life, they are alive as they were in the past. So the OP is asking about either being alive, or not being alive, brain states are irrelevant to this.


What about uploading someone's mind into a computer, or into a replicant, surely provided the same computation that is going on in the nervous system, is going on, the person would remain alive?

So if an identical brain state, of someone who is alive, developed somewhere else in the universe, or at a different time. That same person would experience that brain state, wherever it is, like a continuity of consciousness?

My perception is that it's a fight back against the effects of globalisation. I don't know what he will do about that, protectionism perhaps.

Yes I found that it is better to work with aporia, rather than on them, by changes in one's perspective. Or to take a metaphorical microscope to it, as an explorer rather than a scientist. To approach from many different angles, to become acquainted, to use it as stepping stone into the self. I agree about the issues with those philosophical splits, I find them tedious. Although they might be a feature of forums as a means to generate discussion. Personally, I come to the table with a library of ideas I have collected, none are right, or wrong and all are ready to be improved.

Looking to the OP, my first thoughts are that one's identity is on two levels, the subjective identity and the objective self. I think that the OP is referring to the objective self, but doesn't make this distinction, or recognise it and probably only thinks about it in the subjective sense.

Also, as I take an interest in mysticism, my approach is largely apophatic.

Yes, well I view this world of the soul as in this world, such that this world is all there is(locally at least), as it is the world of the soul which is this world, with the physical world as a crust, or husk on the surface, including all its spatiotemporal states and phenomena. For example I consider light to be a pale reflection of the light of the soul, which is in a sense a transcendent(multidimensional) emanation.

But I have spent a fair amount of time considering time as discontinuous. It appears to me that the consequences are that All arises from nothing and returns to nothing. Why exactly the whole thing appears to repeat over and over... I don't know. Maybe it's just how our consciousness is wired.

I do largely agree, but it occurs to me that I tend to think of our world as an artificial construct (including spacetime, matter etc) and reality is on another level, like a world of the soul, perhaps in an eternity, or a manifest world, more real than this world.

This may allow me to consider that the progression of moments and the emergence and return to nothing are artificial perspectives caused by our finding ourselves in this artificial world and experiencing only that appearance.

Peace man, nice poetry.

Some people make the effort and enjoy lengthier discussions. Even try to reach out to the understanding of others, to exchange ideas. I have been looking forward to a discussion of the OP, but I have found this topic intractable in the past for the reasons I gave in my last response to you. I used to post on a forum where threads would go on for thousands of posts and last for years. I miss those days, threads seem to burn out to soon around here.

That's what I thought when I came across it. Someone who knows Buddhism better might be able to explain I'm no expert.

Miracles and magic are entirely possible, but they are always only "nature": the world acting how it does. What logically follows is that if a "naturalistic"explanation is not accurate (e.g. it's a hallucination), then a different "naturalistic" explanation will be (e.g. an experience which is an ad hoc reduction of the world to a concept of "God," an entity of God speaking to someone, etc., etc.).

The trouble with this discussion is that if there is a God, the world would be identical in every way as it would if there is no God, namely as we find it. So if there is a God, some people who experience revelation or epiphany might well be experiencing, or witnessing god. Alternatively if there is no God, those same people are mistaken. There is no way to determine if someone claiming to know god, actually does know God. So the only alternative solution is to say there is no God. But this also fails because it can't be proved that there is no God either.

So as has been pointed out repeatedly through the thread, Colin's experience has to be taken on faith. Either in the acceptance of God, or in the denial of God.

It's called Punch, or should I say Punch and Judy.

Yes, what I was thinking of is that we experience a flow of time, with some width to it in our impression and interpretation of our experience of being. This is not to say that this is what is going on in the real world, but rather it is what is going on in the constructed(projected) world, constructed by our body, brain, mind.

What you describe reminds me of what the Buddhists say, that the world ends and is remade from moment to moment, as you say, like a movie.

Thankyou for your considered reply, I am getting a handle on this now. The postmodern stuff is new to me, but I expected to come across it at some point, but I need to learn the vocabulary. I am still puzzling over your idea of an infinite meaning. Let's say we have a state in the world x it would have many different meanings for different subjects experiencing it. Are you saying that there could be potentially an infinite number and variation in the subjects experiencing it and therefore an infinity of possible meanings in X?

I say again, I think my transcendent is not much different to your immanent. My use of transcendent is probably unconventional. I really don't recognise the transcendent as something other, apart from a myth of popular interpretations of religion and spirituality. For me the transcendent is transcendent as other, but that other is us, it is the imminence in us, but is in some ways inaccessible, veiled from us. Hence is transcendent in that it is veiled in this way.

I hope I'm not butting in here(you did by the way steal my OP"the eternal moment". No worries, it's great to get back onto this subject).

My angle was that eternity is in the now, and it is our limited awareness and experience of time as a series of moments bleeding into each other, like a strobe light, that makes us think of time passing.
I see the past as a bit of eternity we are familiar with, because we were there, we experienced it, we knew it. So with the help of physical matter etc, it is retained for us. Given a bit of permanence in our memories and old haunts that we can visit.

@Πετροκότσυφας

http://youtu.be/83GgOhBhxqI

Yes there is natural, innate wisdom in some selves and one could also interpret that every being is wise. My cat for example is a font of wisdom, she knows what I am going to do before I do.

But in a human self there is the addition of an educated self conscious intellect. This results in a clouding of natural wisdom, especially when the teaching is philosophically, or religiously directed. This is because the teaching and effort to learn is impinging of the intellectual understanding of the self who is learning. In this mist, or fog of the processes involved in the building of the intellect, natural wisdom can be lost. Also there is an intellectual wisdom to be learnt, which is in a sense, an aptitude, or tutored process of fine tuning the intellect. This is historically undertaken in religious organisations, and I suspect occurs in academic philosophy. In the esoteric schools, this was developed to a further level in transcendent insight, which you misrepresent.

So in the development of a human being as they grow up, there is a process of seeking/teaching/learning knowledge and wisdom. Which is understood to be sought/discovered/ deduced/realised.

So the OP isn't really talking about whether he as the same person will exist, but, rather, whether he'll emerge into existence again - whether he'll get 'caught back up in' existence. Even as something different. The focus on pronouns misses the problem entirely - it's a problem that is difficult to pose due to the limitations of grammar.

I know it's difficult to articulate with the language we have. But I think we all know instinctively what you are thinking about and I have puzzled over it for a long time too.

I remember clearly a realisation I had at the age of about 5, that when I die, I won't be aware of the passage of time, so a very very long time could pass in an instant to me. Also that the same circumstances which resulted in me being here would happen again eventually, so I would find myself here again eventually, and in my perception, it would have happened in an instant. So when I die, the next instant I would be reborn.

I think the problem with this issue philosophically is that it seems to hinge on whether one considers the existence of an immortal soul or the equivalent. Or whether one is of the opinion that we are an emergent property of physical material etc. In the former reincarnation is pretty much a given and in the later, it's impossibility is a given.

So, no need to worry about it. If something wakes up and thinks it is you, it won't be you. It also leads to the fact that we will never be able to "upload" our consciousness into computers or robots or inhabit other bodies

The only way we will be able to know if we will never be able to upload our consciousness into computers or robots is to try it by experiment. I see no reason to dismiss the idea of a gradual introduction of synthetic processors into the brain, if there is a continuation of consciousness. Although it does occur to me that there would be some psychological issues, or a alteration on personality developing into a "different" person. But the critical issue is that the continuous living experience of me would be maintained. I would still be here, although feeling different. Rather than having entirely ceased to exist, when my apparatus stop working.

I'd say more than that. It goes deeper. Rather than just a empirical approach, it is a metaphysical one: materialism. When it is recognised anything may be known, transcendent philosophy collapses. It no longer has any wisdom to offer. There is nothing "mysterious" or "inexplicable" anymore. Such notions merely become our reactions to thing we do not expect, rather than a hidden realm of power or truth.

This is a naive interpretation of wisdom. Wisdom is a simultaneous awareness and realisation of one's position in a real world, a known world, and an understood world. The wisdom comes through in the cognitive synthesis of these three perceptions/views/maps. The wise man(or woman) performs an intellectual dance within this synthesis and in so doing reveals deeper insights than can be provided from them individually in their current state of knowledge.
This can be developed into a process of transcendent insight in which the wise man metaphorically climbs a ladder of intuition through this synthesis and recovers insights which are creatively unique. Which are in an epistemological way transcendent.

This definition of wisdom lies in contrast to your naive description above.

Sorry. which of those questions is about pragmatism rather than being an expression of pragmatism?

I am talking around the subject of pragmatism because I am still familiarising myself with metaphysical debate. If for example you were to ask me how I make pragmatic selection in my contemplation, I would probably not be able to express it in commonly used metaphysical terms. I would have to rely on using common parlance in creative ways and would probably not be tolerated, cause confusion and misunderstanding, or fail to convey it.

As I am reading it in this thread at this point, pragmatism is an approach or system of choice or selection in the centre of thought of the practicing subject. Wherein, in what appears to be a mysterious way, one direction, or concept is chosen, selected out of a number of possible alternatives and built into a conceptual framework, or map. Rather like the way a chip processes information in a computer.

Does that get anywhere near the mark?

So in my question, "matter to what?", I am asking for whom, or for what purpose is the selection made?

and explains the degree to which it could then matter

Matter to what?
And to what degree have you enquired?
Are you sure you can see through the mist?

Fine. But you are not showing that they have a demonstrable advantage - except as a way to block open minded, publicly conducted, ontological inquiry.

This is your perception perhaps.

I have not begun yet, I am still familiarising myself with the established terminology.

Anyway it's late and I need my beauty sleep.

So is the self a mirror image of the different?
Is the different a representation of the self reflected?

I am unacquainted with your idea of meaning and the infinity of meaning. I will have to give it some more thought. Can you answer how meaning in the self relates to meaning in the world

Yes I see that but, we are blind to what we are in some sense. We need to be able to see through the veils, including the veil which is our thinking mind itself, the extent to which we are the blind leading the blind. By analogy a cat leading another cat through quantum theory while all they know about is mice and territory. I am concerned with other or unconventional ways of knowing and other means of seeing and witnessing and the development of wisdom. Your pragmatism is interesting and certainly more grounded in academic philosophy and the sciences which is solid progress, but it seems I and others like me are reaching similar insights through alternative means.

I do see all as within the self in the world, to the extent that it is focussed equally in myself in the world as if I were being a solipsist. But also I am a being in the world in which I live, in the moment, here and now. This is why I have said I agree with you. I am trying to say that imminent in the being is a transcendence, but not to some other place, but to the self, to the lived world.

You forget that I am arguing the pragmatist view and so Occam's razor applies. You can pretend to worry about invisible powers that rule existence in ways that make no difference all you like. You are welcome to your scepticism and all its inconsistencies. But as I say, if whatever secret machinery you posit makes no difference, then who could care?

So we have a pragmatic metaphysics? I agree, but for me the pragmatism is a reading of nature from an alternative perspective. I build in insights from the apophatic enquiry, discovering what we don't know is equally as illuminating as establishing what we know we can say.

You have read me wrong on this point again, I didn't say realities beyond the veil(I will label x ) make no difference, I said we can't determine the difference. It might be all around us, but we just don't see it. The apophatic truth is that we don't know what the world would be like absent x, with an x added if there is none, or if either state is or is not an impossibility(i.e. x is a necessary being).

Further more and this ties in with Schopenhauer1's point , we can't determine to what extent the veil is involved/tied up within ourselves. We don't even know if our experience of being is mediated through a veil by a hidden source, or, need I say, the extent of our ignorance of the self.

What this boils down to is we don't know if we are actually doing metaphysics, or just playing at it.

↪Punshhh Where did we see that?

It seems to me that it's implicit throughout the thread. I haven't read the whole thread though, so I don't know if it has been stated bluntly.

Sorry. Gods that exist in ways that don't make a difference don't exist according to my definition of existence. So all you are doing is trotting out the modern theistic formula which seeks to avoid the cold hard facts of science by pretending cold hard facts can be both true and yet not really matter.

No this is not what I'm doing, you assumed that I was going to talk about God, that I am a believer and that my line would be what you allude to here.

I'm not going to talk about God, it's you who brought it up. Perhaps you will respond now to what I did say which is and was in bold when I said it.

Which is why the only consistent position I could hold is that if God does in fact exist in ways that don't make a difference, then my metaphysics is holed below the waterline. No lame excuses.

Again incorrect, as I said the world including your metaphysics would be identical. Anyway I didn't say God doesn't make a difference, I said we can't determine what that difference would be.

If I don't accept lame excuses from theists, I can hardly accept them from myself.

I'm not interested in discussing the presence of God with you, its rather an irrelevance.

Remember the world of my cat, she is living a life which all makes purfect sense, all is known and understood. But she is unaware that there is a concealed layer of agency in her world which is veiled from her, as I pointed out;

impossibility for her to know this aspect of her world and the extent to which it is subtly controlling and manipulating her life and circumstances. She is securely veiled from participating in my intellectual world

Now as I said to begin with, like the cat we cannot know what is behind the veil. This means we cannot answer the philosophical questions about our existence. We cannot say that circles are universal, or that squircles don't exist.

As I said, earlier it depends on what conception of God one is considering, namely one provided by religion, or something more subtle. The more subtle analysis has to reconcile the world we find with the presence of this God, which we can't claim is not present. Or realise that this world is what we would find if such a God is present. Of course we can't determine this yay or nay philosophically. So what does it matter?

So we can't know what difference is or isn't made, we can't claim that circles are universal. But this Is not to conclude that squircles exist as well. It's apophatic in nature.

So if there is a God present, it is the God of semiosis. Although I agree you would be quite justified to ignore it as existing.

You guys are like a room full of puppys. It's quite simple. You see that Colin has had mental health issues, so he must be delusional. This does not follow.