Comments

  • Perception: order out of chaos?
    Chaos is precisely the mode of instability. Stasis moved to instability causing a reaction for that stability, albeit dealing with new factors.

    The infant comes into the world terrified. Only the mother can console and transform the world from chaos into something capable of being understood atop the premise of a neutral state.
  • How do you feel about religion?
    I have a ring of the ouroboros. Wonderful alchemical asset.
  • Where does logic get its power?
    Powerful and important... This smartphone I am typing on?
    What will this mean in the end for me?
    What will this phone and these words and all of this confusion on this website displaying the fateful hymn of the human race called Philosophy mean to me when I turn my face against the wind, on the side of a mountain toward a storm, on the side of a cliff observing roaring, crashing waves on a rocky shoreline?
    The point is that logic is absolutely meaningless, as is every human invention that prolongs the inevitable point of overcoming this life and not fearing death. After such a point, everything about life is seen across an uncrossable rift. Nothing about language, too, is logical. What is logical about me adressing you right now? Nothing important about existence has ever had its foundation in logic.
  • Where does logic get its power?
    I don't think there is any over arching point of logic. I can only suppose that something about humans or human unconscious mechanisms can implant certain motives in some with which they would ultimately protect themselves. In other words, I would rather prevent talking about instincts at all costs.
  • Why shouldn't a cause happen after the event?
    I have recently been led to conclude that knowledge will never be found but created. Objectivity is, too, not to be found, and too it is to be created.
  • Why shouldn't a cause happen after the event?
    Yes, the quote from William Blake is extraordinary, and also was the title of a well-known book...
  • Why shouldn't a cause happen after the event?
    So what is your belief about the purpose of existence?
  • Perception: order out of chaos?
    Chaos was introduced causing it to seek equilibrium.

    But chaos was not yet to be.
  • Where does logic get its power?
    No matter how hard one tries, human existence will never be forced to be logical.
  • Where does logic get its power?
    Tell me something powerful and important logic has given humanity.
  • Where does logic get its power?
    There is no adequate metaphysical consensus nor ground of epistemology. This is the most important stepping stone. Neither does logic, for that matter, have any 'power.' What power could it have? What power does it have that is not given to it by us? Lies and irrationality are at the base of so much apprehension of power. Logic does not have any more power than irrationality or lies. Logic is nothing. In the end, what will logic be? In the end, what will logical analytics get us?
  • My Kind Of Atheism
    I want to believe in God, but boy is it hard?
    I am not even sure what I would believe in.
  • My Kind Of Atheism
    @Mariner
    but existence does not exhaust being, and facts do not exhaust truth.Mariner
    What do you mean?
  • Perception: order out of chaos?
    Things impact a surface and the missiles imbed themselves into the surface to add on to the totality of the surface. Over time they deteriorate, leaving the surface with a lack of totality. This lack of totality is the falling short of the sum of all it has been. This lack forces the surface into a transformation, into being of a relationship, giving it an existence beyond what it was, in order to be what it truly is, not separate from that which was subtracted from it after its addition. And so a bond is formed, a channel between which outer and inner becomes. The only purpose of this system is to equalize. It is, fundamentally, an unstable system... And like the sides of a chemistry equation, they must balance. The volition is the will to being balanced... Or... Homeostasis

    Get it?
  • Why shouldn't a cause happen after the event?
    @Metaphysician Undercover@Janus@jorndoe

    It seems that all attempts to understand something always lead back to an attempt at understanding existence (inevitable teleologies), which always leads to an attempt at understanding Human Existence. What greater attempt at this is psychology? Yet, what has psychology granted us? What has it given other than methods of diagnosing certain ailments, maladies and distinguishing types of behaviors and experiences? What has any attempt at a human knowledge given us? Reference after reference to a plot point said to be by virtue of reason and per reason that will shine light on everything? What are these games of knowledge seeking? What is it any more than a positing of a potential power? What is it any more than exerting power in an effort to control? What is it any more than trying to control nature, to rise above nature, to become the Overhuman? Or... To become God? We see the reason for God now. In the end it is to be united with God; to in some way be God: this is the root of spiritual belief in God, and is it the result of, perhaps, the unconscious understanding that not a 'God damn' thing is to be understood in this extraordinarily confusing, undoubtedly infinitely complex existence? Is the only thing left astonishment? Awe? Beauty? Is that where the Truth is to be shone? Is the beauty that mankind seeks to be found anywhere? Or is it all a dream? Is it all a part of a sequence of events, of an unfolding, of the existence of life into something greater? A higher form of intelligence? Is this human existence a part of some other plan? Or, for lack of better words, is human existence shaped and influenced by unseen forces? Perhaps it is, but all of this boils down to the most important question of all. The question of meaning. What does anything mean at all? What will it mean, in the end? Perhaps that is the greater question, and in that, all of eternity will be held in a moment. Perhaps then the truth will be revealed as it is. "If the doors of perception were cleansed, everhthing would appear as it is-infinite." William Blake
  • Why shouldn't a cause happen after the event?
    What is there but the physical? And in that is said... "What is there but the phenomenal?" I have long since disbanded and have gone rogue on philosophy and science. What is there but the imagination? What is there but this seemingly singular, yet clearly not, phenomenality, which shines its light upon that which it supposedly is not. All there is is consciousness. There is no world beyond what is phenomenality, and it appears to be endless, without cause, without dimension even.
  • Why shouldn't a cause happen after the event?
    This reminded me... Lets say there is a revolution. There arises a cause for the revolution... But is this cause the sort that would necessitate the revolution, or this the best guess of a cause.

    The causes that are the best guesses... These are the causes of so much of what is called 'causality'.
  • Why shouldn't a cause happen after the event?
    But is there a real distinction, truthful, between the physical and non material or phenomenal?
  • Why shouldn't a cause happen after the event?
    Operating machinery is the truth of scientific knowledge...
  • Why shouldn't a cause happen after the event?
    The scientific hypothesis is whether or not there is knowledge. This is substantiated affirmatively by presenting examples of scientific knowledge. And so, too, you have the tools of science--mathematics, theory, logic and reasoning. Science comes to pass to crystallize into different sorts of knowledge. The knowledge of DNA and its role and function in biology is much different than evolutionary knowledge, but nevertheless the knowledge of evolution is scientific. Further on you get neurology and neuroscience, which function to be knowledge, and these forms of knowledge categorize knowledge itself, and send the intention, will to and meaning of knowledge to its according place of and in classification. And so then you get to a point where 'greater' questions are asked. "What is the purpose of existence?" "Are we to known to be a mere machine? "What then is the purpose of knowledge? Wouldnt this purpose relate intimately with our own purpose for existence?" So you have more questions. Questions to answer the unanswerable. In the seeking of knowledge knowledge becomes less known and becomes superfluous, ridiculous, even completely ignored with regard to its meaning not completely impoverished. All science seems, the further you go into it necessitating more ans more questions, to become a simulacrum... INCAPABLE OF ANSWERING THE MOST IMPORTANT QUESTIONS, and consequently we know nothing.
  • Why shouldn't a cause happen after the event?
    You should see William Blake's work when he talks of philosophy...

    "
    I answer’d: ‘All that we saw was owing to your metaphysics; for when you ran away, I found myself on a bank by moonlight hearing a harper. But now we have seen my eternal lot, shall I show you yours?’ He laugh’d at my proposal; but I, by force, suddenly caught him in my arms, and flew westerly thro’ the night, till we were elevated above the earth’s shadow; then I flung myself with him directly into the body of the sun. Here I clothed myself in white, and taking in my hand Swedenborg’s volumes, sunk from the glorious clime, and passed all the planets till we came to Saturn. Here I stay’d to rest, and then leap’d into the void between Saturn and the fixed stars. 140
    ‘Here,’ said I, ‘is your lot, in this space—if space it may be call’d.’ Soon we saw the stable and the church, and I took him to the altar and open’d the Bible, and lo! it was a deep pit, into which I descended, driving the Angel before me. Soon we saw seven houses of brick. One we enter’d; in it were a number of monkeys, baboons, and all of that species, chain’d by the middle, grinning and snatching at one another, but withheld by the shortness of their chains. However, I saw that they sometimes grew numerous, and then the weak were caught by the strong, and with a grinning aspect, first coupled with, and then devour’d, by plucking off first one limb and then another, till the body was left a helpless trunk. This, after grinning and kissing it with seeming fondness, they devour’d too; and here and there I saw one savourily picking the flesh off of his own tail. As the stench terribly annoy’d us both, we went into the mill, and I in my hand brought the skeleton of a body, which in the mill was Aristotle’s Analytics. 141
    So the Angel said: ‘Thy phantasy has imposed upon me, and thou oughtest to be ashamed.’ 142
    I answer’d: ‘We impose on one another, and it is but lost time to converse with you whose works are only Analytics.’ 143

    I have always found that Angels have the vanity to speak of themselves as the Only Wise. This they do with a confident insolence sprouting from systematic reasoning. 144
    Thus Swedenborg boasts that what he writes is new; tho’ it is only the Contents or Index of already publish’d books. 145
    A man carried a monkey about for a show, and because he was a little wiser than the monkey, grew vain, and conceiv’d himself as much wiser than seven men. It is so with Swedenborg: he shows the folly of churches, and exposes hypocrites, till he imagines that all are religious, and himself the single one on earth that ever broke a net. 146
    Now hear a plain fact: Swedenborg has not written one new truth. Now hear another: he has written all the old falsehoods. 147
    And now hear the reason. He conversed with Angels who are all religious, and conversed not with Devils who all hate religion, for he was incapable thro’ his conceited notions. 148
    Thus Swedenborg’s writings are a recapitulation of all superficial opinions, and an analysis of the more sublime—but no further. 149
    Have now another plain fact. Any man of mechanical talents may, from the writings of Paracelsus or Jacob Behmen, produce ten thousand volumes of equal value with Swedenborg’s, and from those of Dante or Shakespear an infinite number. 150
    But when he has done this, let him not say that he knows better than his master, for he only holds a candle in sunshine."
  • What are gods?
    The scientific tradition has its roots in many places and many cultures, and many a-cultural things as well.
  • How do you feel about religion?
    medieval latin rituals are cool though, id say...
  • How do you feel about religion?
    Religion and spirituality represent very meaningful experiences for people, and in every church there is undoubtedly something different but a part of a whole. This whole is the meaning there, as a social unit, in reaction to the civilized attitudes, dilemmas and norms they have to assimilate. Not always is religion or spirituality harmful. I recently read something about A. Crowley or I think that is how you spell his name. He said certain magical rituals have powerful psychological meaning, within the repetition, faith, interest and the ritualistic aspect. The Book is the Lesser (something) of Soloman
  • How do you feel about religion?
    Religion is socialized art and socialized expression. There are many stages of its development, and in every crystallization of it will be something different, more or less beautiful, more or less poetic, more or less brainwashed or of a simulacra and simulation.
  • How do you feel about religion?
    The solution would be... The only thing one can know is that they do not know. And this would be the case if it was a circle. But it has another dimension, which makes it a spiral.
    And this is where the confusions lays.

    This added dimension is the human-phenomenal dimension.
  • What are gods?
    If you are referring to religions or spirituality... These came long after the taboo was created, and also much longer after totemism and worship of spirits, gods, forces, including magic or mana, etc etc was around... And it is these very primitive cultures and belief systems which almost all of religious or spiritualistic ideologies include in their ancestry.
    Furthermore, in the context of spiritual or religious belief, there are behaviors, rituals, customs and taboos which have absolutely no logical explanation and seem to have been motivated by something completely lacking even the slightest, most-remote form of intelligence.
  • Why shouldn't a cause happen after the event?
    This causal chain of events, though, is not linear but more-so a tree, but even less so a tree than it is a forest. So you can see where causality breaks down. It does so as it is looked upon as linear, to the causa prima.

    It is much more interesting when when does not gape at it as 'causality tied to a long past post', but, on the contrary, when one apprehends it in its ambiguity, its continuity, its part of a continuum, and lastly, in its complexity-- showing us not the contingency of the world but its massive multidimensionality and metaphors.
  • Why shouldn't a cause happen after the event?
    Do we witness causality or do we impose upon our witnessing, or is causality imposed upon our witnessing by some means or in some way? One could say that causality is imposed because it is an objective fact of witnessing, derived through the experience of witnessing, making observations and conclusions, but what is the basis of this? Has it not been showed time after time that what the world is and how it can be understood relates to manifestations of the human mind, in which one could possibly be capable of relating to something 'outside of oneself.'
    Causality is not a law of the universe in which we must adopt its priority and assume that it is not any better or any more than any human creation or imagination, which adds to and complements his opposing will to power..
    The idea of an epistemological acquiescence or inheritance renders human knowledge a passive action. This is absolutely absurd with regard to philosophy. Knowledge could never be a passivity, for in terms of existence it relates to something absolutely beyond the passive and active. Knowledge must be in some form knowledge of existence, whose will is of an intention, something indesputably active. And so this activity is an illusory activity only a simulation of passivity, rendering what is only already before it? The activity of an epistemological intention is the reaction the counterpart of which would be termed passive, or capable of being apprehended. The whole of knowledge, relating to imposing upon experience and consequently our understanding of existence with a priori, postulates of sorts, these contain exploration and knowledge. Schools of thought are born out of this... Inseparable divisions the roots of which are excommunicated, in relation to one another.

    The will to knowledge is the apprehension of passivity; a spiral the result of which a closed system has gained another dimensionality.
  • How do you feel about religion?
    Dennett is a philosophaster. I can't stand his language.

    He is a con artist of the genius who spoke of musicophilia.

    RIP Oliver Sacks!
  • How do you feel about religion?
    This idea of God and deities being an invented answer to things in reality that we don't understand naturally has collided with scientific knowledge later.ssu

    William Blake's 'All Religions Are One' is a very great read.

    And also William Blake's 'The Marriage Of Heaven And Hell' is extremely interesting with regard to this subject as, in the words Plato paraphrased, Poetry expresses truths of which are inaccessible to philosophy and incapable of being known and incorporated into wisdom or true knowing. Socrates, with these words, means to say that poetry has significant truths, although they are in that 'far out' mode... For a lack of better words.

    The similarities between Freud and Jung with Blake is also I thinked seriously overlooked.

    "The ancient Poets animated all sensible objects with Gods or Geniuses, calling them by the names and adorning them with the properties of woods, rivers, moutains, lakes, cities, nations, and whatever their enlarged & numerous senses could perceive.
    And particularly they studied the genius of each city & country, placing it under its mental deity. (Note: this sounds a lot like Freud's Totem and Taboo, where he discusses animism)
    Till a system was formed, which some took advantage of, & enslav'd the vulgar by attempting to realize or abstract the mental deities from their objects: thus began priesthood;
    Choosing forms of worship from poetic tales.
    And at length they pronounced that the Gods had order'd such things.
    Thus men forgot that All deities reside in the human breast.
    (Reference to another work by Blake, "The true Man is the source, he being the Poetic Genius.")

    Thus you have Jung.

    I believe that belief in God is a poetic expression of Man's extraordinary, puzzling existence, which I think everyone is connected to an energy of life and phenomenality... And ego is an illusion. Btw
  • Why shouldn't a cause happen after the event?
    Witnessing causality or imposing upon witnessing causality?
  • Evidence for the supernatural
    Jung maintains that synchronicity is factual yet inconceivable, in that how could it ever be shown to be more than a coincidence... Synchronicity is precisely because it is not a coincidence.
  • Philosophy and Psychology
    In this so called affirmation of necessity however, the problem still exists on how one is to apprend scientific knowledge. And that is why I said undeniable.
  • Philosophy and Psychology
    I agree, and this is elucidated upon in a few different writings of his. Thank you for correcting me, by the way, I think I meant the same thing but worded it differently, and paraphrased sections of beyond good and the gay science and an essay entitled truth and untruth.

    I think still, due to their indespensibility, they become undeniable. For to deny them is to deny that sort of knowledge altogether. And thus you have the criticism that shows up in many of his writings.
  • Evidence for the supernatural
    Evidence is as evidence does.
  • Evidence for the supernatural
    Jung does not ever dismiss synchronicity as inconceivably factual.
  • How do you feel about religion?
    a non contingent or necessary being is one who's existence is not contingent on anything, and is necessary for the existence of everything else.Rank Amateur

    This is the idea used in an argumentum a contingentia mundi. This argument supposes too much, and seems to be associated with a similar argument, namely the ontological argument--the position that ideas of perfection or totality or omniscience, truth, etc. designate, because humans seemingly cannot be the root of these ideas, because humans are seemingly imperfect, not all-knowing, total, etc., the necessary existence of such a thing in reality representing that existent capable of delivering us to a reference of knowing ourselves. And these qualities must refer to God, for there would be no other alternative... This is a very unsettling argument. The argument referring to the contingency of the world upon a supposedly necessitated existent 'per the faculty of reason' has simply had the soil shaken out of its roots and tossed aside to decay.
  • The Inter Mind Model of Consciousness
    exactly! I have seen what you have seen without any mind altering substance as well. But I will remark again on the extraordinary effect the safe psychedelic substances can have on perception and experience, as well as the brain, which already have endogenous hallucinogens and hallucinogenic tendencies that represent certain neural components, neurotransmitters and synaptic receptors whose function and effect are correlated with a fine mechanism of consciousness, feeling, sensation and understanding. But I degress.
    These light shows as I call them represent an extraordinary system, display or paradigmatic system of consciousness and organic life. They are amazing and the beauty they show of our own very experiences makes life ever more fascinating.