Comments

  • How can there be billionaires while good people are dying?
    ↪Michael
    You’ve got a point. However, what I really mean is this: There certainly are many people who have the resources (time, money, energy, asf.) to do useful things but rather waste them on useless or harmful stuff. This should not be the case. I’m not saying that imaginary billionaires of the kind you’ve described should have their imaginary wealth redistributed – after all, imaginary wealth isn’t of much use. I’m saying that there are people who have tremendous amounts of real (soothfast) wealth who choose to do useless stuff with their wealth, and I’m saying that this uselessly used wealth should be redistributed. Coming to think of it, I was wrong to suppose that there shouldn’t be any billionaires while people are suffering, even when talking about real billionaires. For instance, a certain billionaire comes to mind who invests his money into something useful, namely space-travel – so useful that in the long run, for the sake of humanity, it is at least as good an investment as helping individuals in need. That money should certainly not be redistributed. But if, for instance, a film-maker makes huge money through a porn movie or a movie that celebrates evil deeds (like murder, rape, asf.), then that money should be taken away and put into something more brookful (useful) – perhaps even given to said space-faring billionaire! What I propose in this example is to effectively hinder the buyers of the porn movie from wasting their money on porn; the film should never be made, and its would-have-been-buyers should invest their money into spaceflight instead of porn. Of course, porn was just used as an example, and not a very major one at that. I call for the forbidding of wasting wealth and resources on useless or harmful stuff and for ordering its use to do helpful things and reach good goals.

    Regarding your thought-experiment: It’s praiseworthy that you offer your software for free, and by doing so, you render a service the world. Even if you later choose to charge money for it, that’s okay as long as you don’t waste that money, e.g. if you invest it in your children’s education. However, if you would afford to waste it, you could also afford to spend it on cancer research, so you shouldn’t be allowed to do the former instead of the latter.
  • Contradictions!
    What do you mean by "the sun is identical to itself"? — TheMadFool

    By the sentence "the sun is identical to itself", I mean that the Sun is the selfsame thing as itself. This concerns only the Sun itself and has nothing to do with the word “Sun”.

    Is there a danger/risk that it won't be identical to itself? — TheMadFool

    No.

    This mistake, in your example of the sun, won't occur at the level of the sun itself - it's not that there's a possibility that sun will suddenly become not-sun. — TheMadFool

    True, which is why I hold the Law of Identity to be trivial.

    Where an error can occur [...] the equivocation fallacy. — TheMadFool

    I fully forewyrd (agree) with you.

    The Law Of Identity is designed to roadblock this fallacy by mandating the constancy of a term with respect to its referent in a given argument i.e. if a specific referent has been applied to a certain term, this term-referent pair must remain fixed throughout. — TheMadFool

    This shows that what you mean by the term “Law of Identity” is what I mean by the term “Meaning-Constancy Assumption”. Do you forewyrd?

    This has nothing to do with the meanings of words. — Tristan L


    :chin:     — TheMadFool

    What I mean by “Law of Identity” has nothing to do with meaning. It implies, for instance, that on the level of the Sun itself, the Sun is one and the same as the Sun. The principle that you’re talking about and that is important for the soundness of arguments, which are speechly (linguistic) objects, is what I call “Meaning-Costancy Assumption”. This is the principle that each term should refer to exactly one thing in a fixed way that doesn’t change over time.
  • Contradictions!
    A rose by [...] more to say. — TheMadFool

    It seems that what you mean by “Law of Identity” is not the same as what I mean by “Law of Identity”. Why I mean by that expression is the law that each thing is the selfsame as itself. For instance, the Sun is identical to itself. This has nothing to do with the meanings of words. What you mean by “Law of Identity” is indeed basically what I mean by “Meaning Constancy Assumption”.

    Thanks for the engaging conversation. — TheMadFool

    The pleasure is all mine :smile:.
  • Contradictions!
    This is not a trivial truth. It's an instance of a law of thought viz. The Law Of Identity [A = A]. It's basic, I agree, but that doesn't make it trivial. — TheMadFool

    What, then, is an example of a trivial truth?

    The words/concepts you employ must remain the same throughout a proof — TheMadFool

    True, but when you say

    This is where The Law Of Identity, I mentioned above, comes into play. The words/concepts you employ must remain the same throughout a proof, A = A, a perfect example of which is 0 = 0. — TheMadFool

    I have to counter: The Identity Law isn’t a law about the meanings of terms, is it? The proposition (0=0), which is indeed an instance of the Identity Law, is not the same as the not at all trivial proposition that for all time-points t1, t2 and every x, if I mean x and nothing else by ‘0’ at t1, then I also mean x and nothing else by ‘0’ at t2. The latter is an instance of what I call “the Constancy of Meaning Assumption”, which states that for every name N, all time-points t1, t2, and every x, if I mean x and nothing else by N at t1, then I also mean x and nothing else at t2 by N. It is this Meaning Constancy Assumption (MCA) that we need in a key way when arguing, not the Law of Identity, right?

    I recall having come to the conclusion that since a contradiction is defined in temporal terms:

    The LNC, as stated in Aristotle’s own words: “It is impossible for the same property to belong and not to belong at the same time to the same thing and in the same respect” — Harry Hindu


    arguments do have a temporal dimension and one of the ways of offsetting this is The Law of Identity [A = A] which you think is trivial.     — TheMadFool

    Firstly, as I said above, I think that (correct me if I’m wrong) we need MCA rather than the Identity Law. Secondly, I believe that Aristotle’s additions “at the same time” and “in the same respect” are superfluous if one respects right slottedness (arity) of the relationships involved. For instance, we might say that a tree is green in summer but red in fall, so that the property of greenness belongs to the tree in summer but not in autumn. This fallacy is set right once we see that greenness is actually a binary (two-slotted) relationship, not a one-slotted one, so the tree actually has (the property of being green in summer) both in summer and in fall.

    This issue of the temporal aspect of argumentation has been at the back of my mind for quite some time now. Thanks for reminding me of it. — TheMadFool

    :up: So I’m not the only one who has realized that time might throw a wrench into any trial at a rock-solid proof. Great!
  • You Can't Die, Because You Don't Exist
    ↪Hippyhead
    Actually, patterns do very much exist, and they can’t die, either. The laws of quantum theory tell us that information is preserved, and patterns are information. The importance of information in physics cannot be overstated.
  • Defending the Irrefutableness of Moderate Solipsism
    Naturally, this sequence of reasoning is only a mathematical distillation. For all practical purposes, it may be repurposed to justify the distinctiveness of any two abstract self-aware entities. — Aryamoy Mitra

    Of course.
  • Your Sister, Your Wife, You, And The Puzzle Of Personhood!
    That's probably because you can trace your line back to a King or a Queen, a Duchess, a Count. — TheMadFool

    It’s actually because I love my family and am thankful to my parents for having begotten me.

    My descendants, for certain, won't be happy to see my portrait hanging on their family tree. :grin: — TheMadFool

    Why shouldn’t they be happy? By all means, they should! One shouldn’t be ashamed of one of one’s forebears unless that ancestor was a bad person.

    You've made so many assumptions there to fill all the containers in a cargo ship. :joke: — TheMadFool

    My philosophy of mind is indeed still rather sketchy and needs a lot of work, but I can beground (justify) most of my claims – I hope:

    Why is the mind abstract? Because it can directly “see” other abstract things like numbers and properties and because I believe to have shown (as of yet only in my notes) that all things are abstract, and that being a not-abstract thing is impossible.

    Why do I think that the abstract mind needs a body to reckon and process info? Because the sciences tell us practically with certainty that mindly states and processes are strongly bound to brain states and processes.

    Why do I think that the mind has very little memory? Because we know from science that almost all to all of the info in memories is stored in the brain, and that without this brain information, there’d be almost no to no memories.

    Why do I think that forebear-lines are important? Because science has shown us that genes shape the brain to a big extent, leaving an important mark on the mind’s manifestation in the concrete world. Thus, the link between a person and his or her forebears isn’t of a shapeless purely material nature, but is shape-ly (formal, formly) in a very weighty way.
  • Contradictions!
    And that's the reason why you refer to it as "trivially" true? Something's off. — TheMadFool

    Of course it isn’t necessarily trivial for us, but for logic (witcraft), any two logically equivalent propositions are basically the same, and since any logically true proposition is logically equivalent to a truly trivial proposition like 0=0 (one whose truth is obvious at once), the logically true proposition is also trivially true from the perspective of logic, isn’t it?

    :up: It seems you've serendipitously discovered a law of thought viz. One moment, one thought! — TheMadFool

    Exactly. This observation has led me to the conclusion that that a genuine proof cannot consist of a chain of thoughts, for in that case, it would need the memory to be infallible. I also thought about this when writing mathematical proofs by asking: How do I know that the theorems which I proved on an earlier page and on which I now draw haven’t been tampered with by a hacker or a random glitch in my harddrive and thus rendered false? But that’s likely something for the knowledgelore (epistemology) underforum.
  • Defending the Irrefutableness of Moderate Solipsism
    That's a very [...] basis for knowledge. — Aryamoy Mitra

    Importantly, I can “see” the thing meant by ‘4’ and the thing meant by ‘5’, but I can’t “see” any entity x which is a mind and stands behind any account on this forum other than mine.

    How do you transfer from one such perspective onto another? — Aryamoy Mitra

    In what way are their perspectives different?
  • Your Sister, Your Wife, You, And The Puzzle Of Personhood!
    How people, perhaps this is an old-fashoined attitude, now outmoded, used to care about their ancestral lines. — TheMadFool

    Well, it certainly isn’t old-fashioned or outmoded for me :smile:.

    some perhaps are much, much older than some modern African nations. — TheMadFool

    But aren’t all lineages equally old, namely billions of years? (I’m splitting hairs on purpose here.) But purposeful over-exact interpretation aside, the African nations that you have in mind don’t include the Khoisan, right :wink:?

    Sad that they seem to have missed out on an important truth - that the bodies are, under some interpretations, merely vessels for the mind.

    Oh! And Physicalism seems to accommodate a gene-based perspective of mind/brain.     — TheMadFool

    For me, a science-believing platonist, I see things as follows: The ultimate “spark” of the mind, the mind itself, is abstract and thus immaterial, but when in the temporal world, it needs a body to reckon (compute) and process info in a similar way that a mathematician with very little memory needs pencil and paper to do proofs, or an office worker needs a computer. So I think that while the real ID (thisness, heccaeity) is abstract, much of what we think is part of us, such as our inclinations, memories, and smartness, are bodily to a big part, and part of these are in the genes. That’s why I think that forebear-lines are weighty.
  • Contradictions!
    Try to say, "exists" and "not-exists" at the same moment. — Harry Hindu

    Try to say “5 is odd” and “six is even” at the same moment.

    It is impossible to think of opposing qualities in the same space at the same moment. If you can do that, then your brain must work in a radically different manner than mine. Care to share. — Harry Hindu

    Well, when I was little, I thought to myself that almight includes the ability to make something be the case and not the case at the same time. This thought gave me a feeling of awe and wonder. Today, it’s still the same.
  • Contradictions!
    :ok: Tell me one thing...what is the meaning of trivially true? — TheMadFool

    It means being true by the laws of logic and thereby true in a very strong, very necessary way.

    By the way (E v 0=0) & ~E isn't equivalent to ~E. Do a DeMorgan on it and you have (E & ~E) v (~E v 0=0) and you know the rest. — TheMadFool

    Actually, the two are equivalent, and I think that you mean the Distributive Law rather than de Morgan (please correct me if I’m wrong):

    (E ∨ 0=0) ∧ ¬E ≣ (E ∧ ¬E) ∨ (0=0 ∧ ¬E) ≣ (0=0 ∧ ¬E) ≣ ¬E

    I belive that your second intance of the OR-operator should be an instance of the AND-operator.

    Saying is not the same as not saying and nothing is not the same as true, trivial or otherwise. Do I have to go Avicenna on you? :smile: — TheMadFool

    Please don’t :fear:! Of course saying something isn’t the same as saying nothing, and I even have an original and I believe new solution of an important problem based on an idea which is in a way similar to this one. However, for our purposes, saying nothing can indeed be seen as equivalent to saying the trivial truth. That’s because in a way, saying several propositions is like saying their conjunction, and the empty conjunction is vacuously true.
  • Your Sister, Your Wife, You, And The Puzzle Of Personhood!
    hopefully you're a man — TheMadFool

    Of course I’m a man. After all, I’m called “Tristan”, and I signed my very first post on this forum with the masculine (manly) a-stem “Tristanaz”, where the “-az” (consisting of the suffix “-a-” and the ending “-z”) indicates maleness (manliness).

    Who would be you, then? Y with your mind/brain in it or your body with Y's mind/brain in it? — TheMadFool

    Certainly my mind in Y’s body.

    Which body (yours with Y's brain/mind or Y's with your mind/brain) would you prefer had sex with your wife? — TheMadFool

    My old body, which currently has Y’s mind, because I like my old body and I want it to pass its genes on. But again, I’d hunt for the mad scientist :wink:.
  • Contradictions!
    "As for the obstinate, he must be plunged into fire, since fire and non-fire are identical. Let him be beaten, since suffering and not suffering are the same. Let him be deprived of food and drink, since eating and drinking are identical to abstaining.”
    -The philosopher and polymath Avicenna     — Harry Hindu

    I can’t help but realize that this is of great relevance to my very first thread on this forum, Is negation the same as affirmation?.
  • Contradictions!
    ↪TheMadFool
    I don’t really want to go into the details there because it isn’t the subject of this thread, but I regard categories, properties, and other universals (broadthings) as themselves things, just as the particulars 1, 2, 3, sin, cos, tan, and so on. I believe that your particular example E, like all ∃-propositions, is a proposition not about something called “God”, but rather about the broadthing of Godhood, which is called “Godhood”; but that’s just a side-remark of mine. If you want a proposition involving no quantification, why don’t you take (9 < 11), for example?
  • Contradictions!
    At they very least to state ~E = "god doesn't exist" requires one to erase E = "god exists" like so: (god exists) and then write (god doesn't exist). — TheMadFool
    (my boldening)

    You express your right feeling for the truth of LNC in the words emboldened by me above. In order not to be wrong, you first have to disjoin E with the trivially true proposition (e.g. 0=0; for our goals, we can speak of the trivially true proposition) to get (E OR 0=0), and only then conjoin the resulting proposition (E OR 0=0) with ¬E to get (E OR 0=0) AND ¬E, which is equivalent to ¬E. The neutral element of conjuction is the trivially true proposition, so I think that not saying anything is equivalent to saying something trivially true, and erasing is equivalent to disjoining with the trivially true proposition, which yields the latter.

    there's got to be a sense in which ~p is the opposite of p — TheMadFool

    And indeed there is: (EITHER-OR)ing p with ~p yields the trivially false proposition, which is the neutral element of EITHER-OR.

    otherwise, to continue with my analogy of blank spaces E = "god exists" and ~E = "god doesn't exist" would simply occupy two different blank spaces and it would be completely ok to do so. — TheMadFool

    Right, and so, we have what the previous paragraph says.

    I suppose, in [...] can't coexist. — TheMadFool

    Yes, I think so, or to put it in other words, conjoining a proposition with its negation is of course possible, but yields a necessarily false proposition, namely a contradiction.

    As an attempt to find a common ground between us, I'd like to point out that while I accept that a contradiction is like overwriting a proposition with its negation ("makes a mess"), we should note that this is because the proposition concerned had/has to be erased before the negation could be written down. :chin: — TheMadFool

    Yes, exactly, see the first paragraph.
  • Defending the Irrefutableness of Moderate Solipsism
    Your self-equivalence of X is too a hypothesis — Aryamoy Mitra

    Well, when I’m in radical-questioning-mode, I regard eveything as a hypothesis, inlcuding the Law of Identity and even this very statement. However, when I’m in normal-philosophizing-mode, the proposition that for each x, x is the selfsame as x isn’t a hypothesis; rather, it’s an apodictic fact. In any case, there very much is a difference in kind between my knowledge that 4 isn’t the same as 5 and my belief that the account @Aryamoy Mitra belongs to a different person than the account @magritte, for instance. Why? Because I’m directly aware of 4 and 5 and can directly ‘see’ the difference between the two. On the other hand, I cannot directly see any person behind the two accounts. When I say “4 ≠ 5”, I’m predicating not-selfsameness of an ordered pair of entities. That’s because when I use ‘4’, I mean the number four, and likewise for ‘5’. By contrast, when I say “The person behind the account @Aryamoy Mitra is distinct from the person behind the account @magritte”, I’m not predicating non-identity of any one ordered pair of things. Rather, my sentence is shorthand for “There is exactly one person A to whom belongs the account @Aryamoy Mitra, there is exactly one person B to whom belongs the account @magritte, and for every person A and every person B, if the account @Aryamoy Mitra belongs to A and the account @magritte belongs to B, then A ≠ B”. That’s so because when I use the phrase “the person behind the account @Aryamoy Mitra”, I don’t mean anything directly, and likewise for “the person behind the account @magritte”.

    Now, we can easily swuttle (explain) why my conviction that 4 isn’t the same as 5 is an instance of knowledge whereas my conviction that the two accounts belong to different people is just a belief:

    I can directly “see” 4 and 5, and so I can predicate something of them directly. And since selfsameness and non-selfsameness are always trivially had or trivially not had, my statement that 4 ≠ 5 is an expression of knowlege. However, since my statement about the two accounts isn’t a simple predication of non-identity, but rather contains synthetic assertions, it’s no wonder that it isn’t trivially true and may indeed well be false. If “The person behind the account @Aryamoy Mitra is distinct from the person behind the account @magritte” really did predicate not-identity of two things known by me, it should be trivially and knowably true or trivially and knowably false, shouldn’t it?

    By this, I want to demonstate that I’m directly aware of 4 and 5, but not of you. Do you think – if you can think, that is :wink: – that I’ve been successful?

    The human mind, in my estimation, is dichotomous: it conceives of abstract states and is in and of itself abstract. — Aryamoy Mitra

    Yes, I fully forewyrd (agree) forewyrd (agree) with you if I understand you rightly; the mind is an abstract thing and can directly see many other abstract things, though oddly seemingly not other minds*. I’d just like to replace “human mind” with “mind” generally, for isn’t attibuting a fundamentally special role to Man 1. too physicalistic by believing the brain of Homo sapiens to be fundamental to mind, and 2. wrong even on the physicalistic understanding because the human brain obeys exactly the same physical laws as everything else?

    insofar as its existence can be rationalized as being independent. It's just that there isn't a universal distillation from 'experience' to 'existence' in terms of one's mind. — Aryamoy Mitra

    Could you please swuttle further what exactly you mean?

    What there does seem to be a consensus on (in my opinion) is the mind being the essence of all experience. — Aryamoy Mitra

    I forewyrd with you here, too, if I get you right. Perhaps you’re one of those thoughts of mine whom my subconscious endows with my own views :wink:.


    So what do you think of the irrefutability of moderate solipsism?

    *I don’t even think that moderate solipsism is irrefutable. Since the mind is abstract and can “see” other abstract things, as you and I seem to hold, there’s no reason to believe that it can’t directly ‘see’ other minds as well. In fact, I’d expect that to be the case, that is, I’d expect thoughtcasting (telepathy) to be widespread. The strange thing is that I believe to have never (at least almost never) experienced thoughtcasting. What I want to defend is that you can’t refute moderate solipsism with mundane means. What’s your opinion on this?
  • Is negation the same as affirmation?
    I’ve always wanted to go on with this thread, but I had been putting it off and forgetting it at times.

    ↪TheMadFool
    Interesting ideas. You’ve got a point, and it’s nice that you’ve found a more practical application for this YES=NO matter. I agree that in romance, “no” can in truth mean yes – CAN, mind you. As much as that is so, the warning at the end must be kept in mind at all times.

    As for

    using relatives (twins) — TheMadFool

    there is a reason why I’ve chosen twins. For these Alice and Bob aren’t ordinary twins; they have a rounful (mysterious) and rouny (mystical) as well as beyondly (transcendent) and aheaven (sublime) orholy (numinous) link which connects them in mind, hyge (nous), thought, soul, feeling, emotion (soul-stirring), gast (spirit), and beyond. This connection also links them to the truth – and over and beyond. Moreover, they are thoughtcastas (telepaths) in general. The main point I wanted to show is that for Alice to show Bob that YES and NO aren’t the same, she has to brook (use) their mystical bond. Likewise, to show Charlie that Bobish Monism is wrong, she needs to thoughtcastingly communicate with him. That is, IF Bobish Monism is wrong. Since I haven’t yet met Alice or Bob or any other thoughtcastas who can directly rounily ‘see’ the difference between YES and NO, I’m not sure whether Bobish Monism really is false.

    So this thread is also a critique of speech which seeks to show the latter’s limit and that we have to go beyond it.
  • Platonism
    Please stop referencing extraneous sources. Table stakes please! — Gary M Washburn

    :confused:???

    But, if I must, please read 'The Analyst', by George Berkeley. As a mathematical term, the infinitesimal is contradictory. George will explain, and with the advantage it is not just my opinion. — Gary M Washburn

    Well, regardless of whose opinion it is, it is false, plain and simple. If you had kept up with mathematical developments in the last over-two-and-a-half yearhundreds, you would know that there is nothing contradictory about infinitesimals whatsoever. Let me give you a very simple example: Take any ordered field (F, +, *, <), such as the ordered field (IQ, +, *, <) of the rational rimetales (numbers) or the ordered field (IR, +, *, <) of the real numbers. Then the rational functions over the field (F, +, *), together with an addition +’ and a multiplication *’ naturally defined in terms of + and *, make up a field (F(x), +’, *’), called “the function field of (F, +, *)”. With the help of the ordering < on (F, +, *), you can define an ordering <’ on F(x), namely the alphabetical ordering of the polynomials over F and then the rational functions in general. Like that, you get an ordered field (F(x), +’, *’, <’) in which there are infinite numbers, th.i. numbers greater than all natural numbers, and infinitesimals, which are the reciprocals of infinite numbers. Any modern mathematician will tell you that, and it has been known for quite a while now. No contradiction lurks in there at all. Will you go so far as to contradict maths for the sake of dogmatic and false assertions?

    Of course, it’s no wonder that you have problems with LNC if you see contradictions where there are none. You falsely think that some true propositions, such as the one saying that infinitesimals exist, are contradictory, and then, based on that false premise, argue from the truth of the supposedly contradictory propositions that LNC must fail.

    What? That's not even English! — Gary M Washburn

    Oh, really? You might want to check out "oral (mouthly)". The Theech (German) cognate and equivalent of “mouthly” is “mündlich”, and it can be used as an adjective and an adverb. How can you use “by mouth” as an adjective, as in “mouthly theory” (Theech: “mündliche Lehre”)? If you don’t accept “mouthly” as an English word, you admit that Theech is better than English in at least that respect (and many others, if you compare the two speeches). Sadly, the wonderful English tongue has been greatly messed up.

    Do you really think sources from almost a thousand years later can be credible witnesses of what Plato taught 'mouthly'? — Gary M Washburn

    Thanks for lecturing me! I didn’t know before that e.g. Aristotle lived almost a thousand years after Plato. But this point is not for me to talk about with you. Please discuss it with the scholars and philosophers of the Tübingen Paradigm.

    This is Plato's prime message, one that gets lost to those who, like yourself, demand to be in possession of your terms. — Gary M Washburn

    Your understanding of me apparently is very wanting. Isn’t it I who stresses the weightiness of unsayableness and a mystical experience above and beyond all language and back up my claim that Plato had already realized that by reliable sources, whereas for you, language seems to be the be-all-end-all?

    So you arrogate to yourself the possession of what Plato really means when what is most central to him cannot be bound up in terms or words of any kind?

    You don't pay attention anyway, not even to your own assertions. — Gary M Washburn
    all this 'from on high' nonsense — Gary M Washburn
    This dogma is the basis for all cruelty in the world. — Gary M Washburn

    You seem to have a need for ascribing your own qualities to others based on the mistaken notion that by doing so, you somehow get said qualities away from yourself.

    I hope you could prove the following wrong, but everything points to you having demonstrated your want of knowledge and your inability to answer my challenges nicely and vaunted your dogmatism effectively.
  • Defending the Irrefutableness of Moderate Solipsism
    Language from other incompatible theories imports implicit assumptions which could make this solipsism self-contradictory. — magritte

    Perhaps, but if there is a contradiction, where is it?

    Also, speech is important, but let’s not overestimate its importance. We know Existence itself before we have a name for it. And though there may be several underkinds of existence for which there are different names, there is an underlying Shape of Existence underlying them all, isn’t there?

    And keep in mind that without Existence itself, speech couldn’t exist.

    For example, 'exists' is explicitly Parmenidean for the one or Aristotelian for the many. — magritte

    What exactly do you mean by this?

    In common parlance this need not be recognized, but philosophically it can become crucial. — magritte

    True.

    That's why only the vague 'is' is acceptable. — magritte

    I think that ‘to be’ refers to something broader than ‘existence’. According to my understanding, the word “be” means beon (the ‘deed/state’ of being, called “Sein” in German, to be distinguished from that which is, which is called “beonde” in English and “Seiendes” in German). The word “existence” means existence, which is but one aspect of beon, the others being so-being (the having of properties) and that-being (the link between something and its essence). Another thing meant by ‘existence’ is instantiatedness, as in the sentence “There are even numbers”, which means the proposition that evenness has instantiatedness and is basically an infinite disjunction. Here, though, I mean the first meaning of “exists”.
  • Contradictions!
    I don't recall making the claim that conjunction is like mathematical addition but I remember some Boolean logic from high school which makes that claim. — TheMadFool

    Actually, conjunction is a bit like multiplication, whereas it is exclusive disjunction (EITHER-OR, XOR) which is a bit like addition. And like multiplication, conjunction isn’t reversible; if you multiply by zero, you always get zero, and if you AND with a false proposition, you always get a false proposition.

    As for negation being a sign-flipping operation, I admit that's how I read it. — TheMadFool

    And you’re right.

    But since conjunction isn’t like addition (see above), you can’t conjoin with the negation of a proposition to undo conjoining that proposition. The logical operations that work together like addition and sign-flipping are XOR and NOT, not AND and NOT.

    You're basically talking about complements of sets, right? — TheMadFool

    Well, I’m using the language of sets to metaphorically talk about propositions. Of course, sets are extensions of properties, so set-language is actually better suited to talking about properties than about propositions.

    However, I mean this only against the backdrop of sentential logic. — TheMadFool

    Right, and in sentential logic (witcraft) as in logic broadly, LNC follows directly from the definition of negation, or perhaps we could regard it as part of the definition of negation. If a proposition A isn’t the case, then well, it isn’t the case; if we have NOT(A), we can’t have A.

    but E = "God exists" and ~E = "God doesn't exist" are not categorical statements. — TheMadFool

    But they are propositions about categories, or rather, universals (broadthings) more generally. Specifically, they are propositions about Godhood: E is the proposition that there is an x with Godhood, that is, the proposition that Godhood has instantiatedness, and ~E is the proposition that there is no x with Godhood, that is, the proposition that Godhood doesn’t have instantiatedness.
  • Defending the Irrefutableness of Moderate Solipsism
    Why would any thoughts or replies constitute a unique and individual thought or reply from again, a unique and individual... individual? — Outlander

    Who said that they would? I’ve only done a certain mental activity which I interpret as telling my fingers to type that post and send it, and I hypothesize that there are other individuals that will give me an aswer. Of course, they might be philosophical zombies, but I expect that regardless of that, they will bring about sensations of mine that prompt me to have interesting thoughts. Indeed, if you’re a random number generator who typed the post I’m replying to by chance, you still stimulate my eyes in a way that prompts me to type this reply.

    What difference would a rebuttal or refute you post yourself after changing your mind or perspective have from me or another? — Outlander

    Perhaps some, perhaps none.

    Or... are there even such things as 'me' and 'another'? — Outlander

    Who knows :shrug:
  • Your Sister, Your Wife, You, And The Puzzle Of Personhood!
    The question is this: if you now had to choose whom to live with, do you opt to stay with your wife's body with X's brain/mind in it or would you rather stay with X's body with your wife's brain/mind in it? Is it mind/brain OR body that defines a person? — TheMadFool

    I’d say the mind, and I’d most probably stay with the one who has my wife’s mind. However, more importantly, I’d hunt for the mad scientist or thoughtcaster (philosopher) who exchanged the women’s brains or minds and try to make him or her set things right again :wink:.
  • Contradictions!
    ↪TheMadFool
    Interesting question! I think that you seem to think of conjunction (AND, ∧) as akin to addition (PLUS, +) and of logical negation (NOT, ¬) as akin to number-negation (sign-flipping, NEGATIVE, -). If that assumption were true, saying a contradiction would indeed be like saying like nothing at all. But your assumption is flawed, I think. Unlike addition, conjunction isn’t reversible; if you have a proposition (X AND A) and want to find what the orspringly (original) proposition X was, just knowing what A is is not always enough to reconstruct X.

    Far from being like saying nothing, saying a contradiction is making the strongest statement of all. Yes, contradictions are the strongest of all propositions, because the first part of a proposition lets one set of propositions follow, and the second part implies all the rest. This is the explosion which makes contradictions useless.

    But far more than just leading to explosion, a contradiction is false by the very wist (nature and essence) of negation. The “domain” of the negation NOT(A) of a proposition A is by definition everything that lies outside the “domain” of A, so to speak, so by definition, there is no overlap between the two. Stating a contradiction is basically asserting that something lies in the overlap, which, as we’ve said, is empty by definition. Hence, all contradictions are false.

    Mark, however, that while the boundary between the two domains always cuts everyone in two who tries to stand with one leg in one domain and the second leg in the other domain, so to speak, it need not be fixed at a certain location. Rather, it can bounce around, so to speak – its location can be undetermined. The Law of Not-Contradiction LNC and the Law of the Excluded Middle (LEM) together are weaker than the Principle of Bivalence (PB).

    To use your metaphor, stating a contradiction isn’t like first writing “God exists” in the space and then erasing it, but rather like first writing “God exists” in the space and then writing “God doesn’t exist” over it, which makes a mess.

    So do you now believe in God or don’t you? (just joking :wink:)

    That’s at least how I see the matter.
  • Platonism
    Must everything be black or white with you? — Gary M Washburn

    No, not at all, but everything must be either black or not black, and either white or not white.

    The infinitesimal is dogmatically excluded. — Gary M Washburn

    No, not really. Precise (Narrowkiry) mathematical theories about infinitesimals have been around for some time now. For instance, we have the hyperreal numbers, who reckon infinitesimals in their ranks. And LEM doesn’t dogmatically exclude infinitesimals: a hyperreal number is either 0 or not 0, and infinitesimals are the latter. They are included in the Second: Not-Zero.

    terms were universal — Gary M Washburn

    What exactly do you mean by that? That those terms mean universals (broadthings)? Or that they are common to everyone with exactly the same meaning? Or something else? In the following, I’ll assume the second option, and please correct me if I’m wrong.

    Similarly in logic, the assumption we share terms could never be valid if terms were universal, because meaning is intimacy. There is no universal teacher, though somehow I suspect you will contradict that. — Gary M Washburn

    How could I, who is too careful to even rule out solipsism, assume that we share terms with exactly the same meaning?

    Differences in the terms we do share may seem infinitesimal and therefore negligible — Gary M Washburn

    Certainly not! If the differences are more than nothing, even if only infinetisimal, they are still something.

    I don’t assume that we brook (use) terms in exactly the same meaning. In fact, I don’t assume anything beyond that I brook certain terms with a certain, perhaps vague meaning right now. I leave it open whether there are other minds that also use terms, and even if they do, I have no reason to believe that they brook them with the same meaning as I do. Since I’m likely not a thoughtcasta, the only information that I have about other minds comes from my sensory experiences. To swuttle (explain) these, I hypothesize that I have a body, that I interact with that body, that my sensory perceptions are brought about by sensory organs sending info to my brain which is then read by me myself, that such and such sensory inputs are caused by such and such bodies doing so and so because the are ensouled, and so on, and so forth. From my sensory data, I derive the hypothesis that when you say “five”, you mean the number 5 by it. But of course, I probably can’t look directly into your mind, so I don’t know what exactly you mean by the word “five”. Is is the Sun? Likely not, for it doesn’t fit my sensory data well. But is it the cardinal 5? Or the ordinal five? Is is the Ideal Number 5 which lies behind both the cardinal and the ordinal and springs forth from the orprinciples? Since I’ve at least almost never directly sent info to or received it from another mind (and no, even a direct brain-to-brain interface would be no true thoughtcasting), I hypothesize that there are no thoughtcasters in the world I live in. In that case, all info exchanged by minds can only be sent through a physical channel. Hence, I expect there to always be some differences in the ways terms are brooked, not least because a physical channel only allows for finitely many exchanges in a finite time (thought this isn’t certain, for quantum entanglement might allow eyeblinkly talking after all if there is quantum not-equilibrium, see e.g. Antony Valentini’s version of pilot-wave theory).

    Therefore, I think that witcraft is actually a private matter. I just assume that our terms are close enough for us to help each other do logic. But doing the witcraft remains a private deed.

    Let’s take – segue – the Law of the Excluded Middle as an example. What I mean with “LEM” only I and thoughtcastas can truly know. Unless you’re a telepath (thoughtcaster), you can only guess what I have in mind when saying “LEM”. I had assumed that what you mean by it almost the same as what I mean by it, but I might have been wrong, strengthening my case for potential solipsism and the like. For instance, the Wikipedia article on LEM claims that LEM supposedly states that each proposition is either true or false. Now that’s very much not what I have in mind by “LEM”. What I mean by “LEM” is the law that for each proposition, its disjunction with its negation must be true. That doesn’t mean that either the proposition or its negation is true. For instance, it’s true today that it will rain tomorrow or it won’t tomorrow, but it’s neither true today that it’ll rain tomorrow, nor is it true today that it won’t rain tomorrow (assuming that the weather isn’t foredetermined, which I’ll suppose here for argument’s sake). As I said earlier, I see no reason to believe that truth distributes over disjunction. From the way you write, I now infer that you may perhaps mean something different by “LEM” than I do, namley a part of PB (which I don’t accept). If you have read through what I’ve written, you might have realized this. Have you actually read through what I’ve written?

    BTW, my instructor studied with John Wilde and Raphael Demos, since you do like to cite any source other than the one in question. — Gary M Washburn

    That’s all nice and well, but how exactly does it bear on the matter at hand? Regarding this last statement of yours as well as your statements

    as Plato makes plain (if you read him) — Gary M Washburn

    and

    And that is why those of us who actually read Plato describe Platonism as inverted Plato. — Gary M Washburn

    reading Plato isn’t enough at all. Plato put the jewels of his philosophy into his Theory of Principles, which he only taught mouthly in his Academy and on which we only have indirect transmission. We have to rely on that and the mere hints in the dialogues for reconstructing the Theory of Principles. The unsayable experiece is even more elusive, for it is fully beyond speech an can only be hinted at. The philosophers of the Tübingen Pradigm and Christina Schefer have already reconstructed the Theory of Principles and discovered the unsayable exprerience of the Holy, respectively. I don’t need to invent the wheel again and reconstruct the Theory or discover the Experience by myself. Those people have already done that for me. And in a way, they are far more authoritative on Plato that Plato’s dialogues are because they have been willing to write about things which Plato meant not to write down.

    If only you understood your issue you would see what a tragedy that is for you. — Gary M Washburn

    The real tragedy is that you seem to be still imprisoned in the Cave, unwilling to turn your gaze to the most real world of being – the abstract world.



    I have given you many challenges and am still waiting for you to answer. In particular, I’d like to repeat three questions:

    What do you think of abstract things?

    What do you think of the Unwritten Doctrine?

    What do you think of the unsayable experience Plato had?
  • Platonism
    Speaking English, eking is just getting by. This discussion is eking. — Gary M Washburn

    Firstly, check out this: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/eke#Etymology_1 to brush up your English.

    Secondly, it’s no wonder that this talk is just getting by if one party has little to eke to it other than a tangle of lengthy language made up of sentences with neither head nor tail and which overflow with wild jumbledness as much as they are in need of meaning, constituting a spaghetti-like mess seasoned with baseless fringe theories as spices.

    All must be examined and reexamined. — Gary M Washburn

    Narrowkirily (Exactly), something that you seemingly have yet to understand and internalize.

    your notion of Platonism, and pay no heed to him at all otherwise. — Gary M Washburn

    You do know the difference between lowercase bookstaves and uppercase ones, don’t you? Well, if so, let me tell you once more that I’m a platonist and not a Platonist. I have my own thought, and Plato is just a stepping stone for me in developing that thought – a very big one, mind you, but still just a stepping stone. I’m not a historian of philosophy, and I’m not deeply interested in knowing what exactly the historical Plato believed. But of couse, knowing what he thought can greatly help me get closer to truth, oneness, beyondliness, and the other things that I like. I got interested in Plato because of the abstractness and transcendence of his thought, not the other way round.

    However, it is you who apparently dismiss Plato’s more and his most important aspects. You seem to focus on his dialogues, when these are but of lesser weightiness. Far weightier are his Unwitten Doctrines, and weightiest of all is his unsayable religious experience of the god Apollo as a living god before and beyond philosophy. I quote from page 214 of Christina Schefer’s book Platons unsagbare Erfahrung:

    That means: Plato, too [just as the Pythagoreans], wants to be understood from the epiphany of Apollo. Not only Pythagorean doctrine, but also Platonic ontology neededly presupposes the religious revelation of Apollo. This unsayable experience always already lies at the ground of all thinking and even all beonde [that which is; ‘beon’ means the “deed/state” of being]: it is the true ground of the opposite principles and their union, the last and most orspringly well from which the dialectical method springs and from which it unfolds. Without the experience of Apollo, there would be no philosophy at all for Plato. Without the epiphany of Apollo, there would be – nothing.
    (My translation from Theech into English)

    Is Apollo a category? — Gary M Washburn

    No, but rather a living god not capable of being rationalized, just as Thor, Osiris, Isis, Utu, Ares and the others are orspringlily (originally) living gods, manifestations of the Holy, and were seen as such before being rationalized by wisdomlovas (philosophers) and godleras (theologians).

    Never ever does faith come into it — Gary M Washburn

    A religious experience need not have anything to do with faith. It is related to Kennen, whereas faith is related to Wissen and belief.

    1+1 doesn't equal 2 if 1 and 1 each is distinct, and you can't add 1+1 to get 2 if they are not distinct. — Gary M Washburn

    You’re thinking much too concretely. The entity meant by ‘+’, “addition”, “ateke”, and “toyeking” is a function which sends every ordered pair (x, y) of numbers x, y to some number z. For every number x with name ‘x’ and every number y with name ‘y’, we brook (use) “x+y” to mean the number z to which + sends (x, y). The sense of the sentence “1+1=2” (I have a much narrowkirier analysis of this matter, but that’s not the topic of this thread) basically is the proposition that ateke sends the ordered pair (1, 1) to the number 2.

    As I see it, you don't like to speak English. — Gary M Washburn

    :lol:, considering that I truly love the English speech.

    "As I see it" is not an argument. — Gary M Washburn

    Firstly: At least I make aware that this is my (almost certainly true) belief, whereas you have not the grace to do even that, but simply dogmatically preach a long list of claims.

    In logic 101 you might be expected to swallow the lesson uncritically. — Gary M Washburn

    You seem to have personal problems with people that do so and then uncritically assume that I do the same, although I believe that I have made it evidently and blatantly clear that this is not the case. You might just want to watch out becoming one of them, or (equally bad) someone who takes his own thoughts too seriously and swallows the whole squirt that he himself spurts out vertically. Such people often ludicrously label everyone a dogmatist who doesn’t uncritically swallow what they preach. Are such people doing philosophy or, well, preaching?

    There is no opinion I have expressed I am not prepared to justify with Plato's own work. — Gary M Washburn

    Okay, then please do so!

    Why should I need any other? — Gary M Washburn

    As I’ve said, I’m neither a Platonist nor a historian of philosophy. If you or Plato make some claim (which Plato seldom does himself in his written works), you’ll both have to give me reasons to believe you. Neither you nor Plato is a priest nor I a member of a congregation taking in whatever the priest says. However, it’s no wonder that you haven’t been able to justify your claims if they are false.

    I don't see the point in refuting all this. — Gary M Washburn

    For this, the Dogmatists’ Union might sue you for copyright infringement :wink:. Be careful and have a lawyer ready!

    It just appeared as I posted the above. — Gary M Washburn

    Well, I sent it about three to four hours before your last comment and about two hours before your next-to-last one.

    My answer to the quoted passage here is that you're lack of familiarity with Plato is quite shocking, considering the extensiveness and pretense to authority of your postulations. — Gary M Washburn

    In sooth, it is your ignorance of main pillars of Platonic thought that’s quite shocking. Had you even heard of Plato’s Theory of Principles and his unsayable experience of Apollo before I told you about them? To really get to the heart of Plato, a stepping-stone would be to read Christina Schefers aforementioned book. You can find an appetizer here. But of course, that book can only help you so far in kindling the unsayabe experience in your soul. The feat of getting this experience you have to make yourself; reading, writing, talking, and listening can only help you on your way.

    Moreover, I repeat that I’m not deeply interested in interpreting Plato. I seek truth, not the beliefs of Plato. I have given very good grounds for my positions as far as I can tell, and I’m still waiting for your first good begrounding. I appeal to basic definitions and intuition. You, on the other hand, keep on churning out assertions which are just that: assertions.

    If my claim is dogmatic, why is it the most authoritative examples of the "law" of contradiction base their self-evidence on their quantifiers? As in "All A is B, some A is not B? — Gary M Washburn

    What has the one to do with the other? How does logic supposedly lie? You still owe me an answer to that question.

    LNC and LEM apply to all propositions, not just ones involving quantification (which are propositions predicating properties like universalness and instantiatedness of properties). In fact, they’re not only intuitively clear, but follow directly from the definition of negation: For any proposition A, the “domain” of NOT(A) is defined to be everything that is outside the “domain” of A, so to speak. If there were a middle between A and NOT(A), NOT(A) wouldn’t include everything outside the domain of A and so wouldn’t be the negation of A after all because its not including the middle would go against the very definition of negation. Thus, LEM must hold true. Likewise, if both A and NOT(A) were true for some proposition A, there’d be overlap between the domains of A and NOT(A), so to speak, again violating the very definition of negation. And for every property E, the negation of (for all x, x has E) is indeed (there is an x which doesn’t have E). Note, however, that the latter proposition doesn’t mean that any one fixed x doesn’t have E, even if the proposition (there is an x which doesn’t have E) is true. That’s so because truth doesn’t necessarily distribute over disjunction or existential quantification: It’s true now that there is a country that will win the men’s soccer world championship in 2102, but there isn’t any country for which it is true now that it’ll win the 2102 Wold Cup.

    The verb Is is a quantifier wherever it assigns hermetic membership. — Gary M Washburn

    No, the verb “to be” has the meanings given above by me, and property-having, which it one of the things it means, isn’t always “hermetic”. For instance, it’s already true now that for every country C, if C wins the 2102 World Cup, then C takes home the trophy in 2102, but even so, there isn’t any country which now truly has the property of winning the 2102 World Cup, and there also isn’t any country which now truly has the property of taking home the trophy in 2102.



    Let me now play the devil’s advocate and assume LNC failed.

    I: Okay, everything you say is true. And yet, everything that you say is complete humbug.

    You: How so?

    I: Well, LNC fails, and so there’s nothing odd about your theory being true and false at the same time.
  • Your Sister, Your Wife, You, And The Puzzle Of Personhood!
    faer — TheMadFool

    Is this some neologism for "their"?     — Pfhorrest

    Not even I, the friend of Anglish (Anglisc), have heard of it :wink:. Let’s just use “he”, for orspringlily (originally), the so-called “masculine” gender wasn’t used for things based on whether they have a tarse, but based on whether they have a soul, so “he” can mean tarse-bearing Men (often just called “men” today) as well as sheath-bearing Men (also called “women”), and also other living beings.

    I suppose it's a clear case of a clash between intuitions rather than the "more common" intuition vs reason scenario everyone, invariably, suspects. — TheMadFool

    What clash? I think that
    ↪Pfhorrest
    is right, and that our everyday intuition tells us that both your sister’s mind and your sister’s body are parts of your sister. By the way, there’s a rather funny story about the basic idea of the topic at hand in Fifth Contact concerning the characters Bannon and Vree :wink:.
  • Platonism
    Socrates doesn't say he knows nothing, he says he knows that he knows nothing. He is not unsure. — Gary M Washburn

    Well, if he knows that he knows nothing, then on one hand, what he knows must be true – otherwise he couldn’t know (wissen) it –, so he indeed knows nothing, but on the other hand, he knows at least something, namely that he knows nothing. That’s a contradiction. However, I’m (likely :wink:) so careful as to say only that it almost certainly is a contradiction.

    what constitutes the category — Gary M Washburn

    The category, the kind, isn’t constituted by its members or instances. It is what it is regardless of its members. For example, if all synapsids had died out (which they thankfully didn’t) in the Great Dying, the kind of Synapsidhood would still be what it is. Likewise, the kind of Mammalhood would still be what it is. It would have no concrete instances, but its wist (essence) would be the same. And it would still be related to Synapsidhood by the underkind-relationship.

    Logic cannot outstrip its quantifier (save by lying to itself, which it does quite regularly and boldfaced). — Gary M Washburn

    Over and over again, you make dogmatic claims like this one and many others without giving any justification (begrounding) or evidence whatsoever. It’s no wonder, though, that you haven’t given a right justification for your baseless accusing logic of lying, for a false claim cannot be rightly begrounded, and your claim is very, very likely false.

    As I see it, witcraft (logic) works perfectly and does the exact opposite of lying. It it what uncovers lies, as well as fallacies arising from imprecise, incomprehensible, swollen language without soothfast substance or meaning.

    Of course, this doesn’t mean that Classical Logic is right. As a matter of fact, I find that it has problems, e.g. due to the Principle of Bivalence (PB), which states that each proposition is supposedly either true or false. This is just the claim that for each proposition, either it or its negation has the upper hand. I see no reason for accepting this baseless claim, which is why I’ve replaced the Principle of Bivalence with the weaker Principle of Trivalence.

    What is it that you find supposedly amiss with logic? Where has witcraft ever gone wrong if applied the right way and as long as no pseudo-logical claims like PB are taken for witcrafty laws?



    You have rightly warned against dogmatism, but you have so far failed to live up to the high-minded goal of getting rid of dogmas even though I have asked you for justifications of your claims before. On the contrary, you have made quite a few dogmatic claims but not begrounded them in the least. Now the dogmatic witcrafta (logician) is certainly being unphilosophical because he (used gender-neutrally) doesn’t ask for what lies behind the laws of logic, but your dogmatism is no better than his. Indeed, it is worse, for while his claims are dogmatic, they are at least very probably true, while your claims seem to be dogmatic and false.

    Please show me that you aren’t a dogmatist after all by either giving justifications for your philosophical claims and your fringe theories on evolution and mating or rowing back from them.

    Also, please don’t forget the topic of this thread: Platonism and platonism. What do you think of the former, taking into account the Unwritten Theory of Principles and the unsayable religious experience? And what do you think of the latter?

    Regarding the latter (platonism), I find it surprising that you seem – please correct me if I’m wrong – to take as given assumptions for which you have nothing but indirect evidence based on your senses, such as the assumption that there are other minds beside your own (for which only thoughtcasters can have direct evidence, I think), while you also seem – again, please correct me if I’m wrong – to not be aware of the direct evidence your “mind’s eye” gives you of the abstract entities.

    Truth is not an aspiration, however inspiring that aspiration is to you! — Gary M Washburn

    Of course truth isn’t an aspiration, but we can certainly strive for it. Likewise, a ball is not a throwing, but one can certainly throw it.
  • Platonism
    Eking (Addition/Amendment): (the ekings below are in bold typeface)

    • “Reckonil” (cf. Theech "Rechner") is the right English word for “computer”. “To reckon” means the same as "to compute"/“to calculate” (cf. Theech "zu rechnen"), and the suffix “-il” is often used to make tool-names.
    • Being a platonist, I find the world of the abstract entities wonderful, shapely, colorful, and alive, like a rich fruit-salad; like a lush green rainforest under a partly covered but otherwise clear blue sky with high thunderclouds in it, with paradise birds of all kinds and colors living and flying around, with fresh air filled with beautiful bird-song, and with mammals, reptiles, bugs, and a plethora or other living things thriving in it; like a beautifully decorated (artificial*, of course) Christmas tree; like a crystal-clear night-sky; like a crystal berg (mountain); like oh so many other fair things.

    *It's barbaric to kill living trees for the sake of celebration, for they have souls as much as we do. Of course, we can't be sure of that, but neither can I be sure that you have a soul, nor you that I have one – that is, if you really do have one in the first place with which to wonder whether I have one.
  • Platonism
    Let’s not lose sight of the topic of this thread, namely Platonism and platonism.

    Let’s first talk about Platonism, the philosophy of Plato. This philosophy has three parts:
    1. the written Theory of Shapes (Forms), which is well-known,

    2. the unwritten, spoken Theory of Principles (the One and the Indefinite Dyad), which was rediscovered by Conrad Gaiser and Hans Joachim Krämer and reconstructed by them and others,

    3. and the neither written nor spoken, and indeed neither writable nor speakable, unsayable religious experience of the god Apollo as eche andwardness (eternal presence). This was found out by Christina Schefer. According to her, Plato’s Good-One-Fair(Beautiful) is an image of Apollo. For example, see page 135 of her book Platons unsagbare Erfahrung “Plato’s Unsayable Experience”:
    With that, however, the sense of the exclamation at the height of the Republic is inverted from the end: It is not the One which is invoked with the vocative “Apollo”, but rather Apollo himself as living doing god. He is no metaphor for the One; rather, the One has to be understood as god image of Apollo.
    (My translation from German (Theech) into English)

    Christina Schefer says that a religious and unsayable experience of Apollo as eche andwardness lies at the heart of Plato’s thought, behind both his Theory of Forms and his unwritten Theory of Principles (see e.g. pages 136, 221, 222 and 225 of her aforementioned book). Because andwardness is only one aspect of time, Apollo is only a limited manifestation of the Holy, a pure mysterium fascinans (fascinating/spellbinding and wonderful roun (mystery)) rather than a full-fledged mysterium tremendum et fascinans (fear-instilling and awe-inspiring as well as spellbinding and wonderful roun) (see e.g. pages 220 to 222 of her aforementioned book). She also writes on page 222 of this book:

    But that means in the end: Platonic philosophy is religion (even if a special, shortened shape of religion), and indeed not philosophical religion in Hegel’s sense (philosophy is religion and religion is philosophy), but rather living religion, made up of cult and myth. It shows up, as E. Fink writes, “in the shape of a new roun”, which we call the roun of Apollo.
    (My translation from Theech into English)

    Let’s now talk about platonism. The platonist is the one who is aware of the existence of abstract things. More so – and more weightily – he (used gender-neutrally) is aware of the abstract things themselves. The philosophy of platonism is not foremost about belief or knowledge-that (German: Wissen), but rather awareness and knowledge-of (German: Kenntnis, Kennen). The platonist’s knowledge that abstract things exist and are soothfast (real) is drawn from his knowledge of the abstract things themselves, which includes abstractness itself. When discussing with the not-platonist, he not so much argues for a certain position as he tries to help the not-platonist become aware of the abstract entities. The platonist primarily doesn’t seek to prove to the non-platonist that abstract entities exist; rather, he tries to show him the abstract things. When he brooks (uses) witcraft to prove that abstract entities exist, he means what he does, but he hopes that this will go one step further and help the non-platonist “see” the abstract things themselves, from which that which was witcraftily proven before (namely the existence of abstract entities) can then be directly drawn. When the platonist argues from the meanings of abstract words, from different particulars sharing features, or from different people being able to think about the same concepts, he hopes that these arguments will prompt the not-platonist to look in the right direction with his mind’s eye and so see the abstract entities, so to speak.

    Platonish knowledgelore is to a big extent about Kenntnis, and only then about Wissen.

    Being a platonist, I find the world of the abstract entities wonderful, shapely, colorful, and alive, like a rich fruit-salad. I categorically don’t follow others, so I’m not a Platonist (a follower of Plato). Still, there are weighty ways in which my (still rather sketchy) thought is similar to Platonism that go well beyond the minimum requirements for platonism. For instance, it broadly forewyrds (agrees) with the threefold-partition of Platonism:
    1. It has a (still sketchy) theory of abstract things, including Shapes (Forms, Ideas) and minds, and information to describe the realm of being. Here, witcraft is a crucial tool.

    2. It has a (still very sketchy) theory of orprinciples, which seeks to swuttle (explain) the realm of being, and also not-being, in terms of orprinciples beyond being and not-being. Here, one goal is to derive the laws of logic from the orprinciples.

    3. It has an unsayable experience.

    However, there are also weighty differences. For instance, on the first level, my philosophy is even more abstract than Plato’s in at least some ways. After all, I hold that the underlying substances of that which is are information and abstract things, and that there is no such thing as matter (though there is Matterhood Itself, which is needed for the very state-of-affairs that there is no matter). My sketch of an orprinciple-theory also differs from Plato’s on some key points. And I don’t worship Apollo, of course. Furthermore, I love the absolute beyondness – nay, the above-absolute above-beyondness – nay ... I’ll best stop, for it’s useless talking (or even not talking!) anyway, which Damaskios is into.

    Now that I’ve told you something about my position, may I ask you what school of philosophy you belong to, or how I am to broadly categorize your thinking?

    Importanly and of interest to this thread, what is your take on platonism?

    You seem to be interested in time, so it might also interest you that I have developed a new (if not-yet-finished) theory of time in which witcraft plays a key role and has served me very well.
  • Platonism
    [Remark: If you formally 
    reply
    to my posts or 
    quote
    me, I get notified of your answers.]

    All the signs of rationalism as I understand it. Certainly not Platonic. — Gary M Washburn

    Are you saying that Damascius (Damaskios) was a rationalist?

    Anyway, Damascius’ thought is truly something marvellous. But I’d say that he was something of a mystic – nay, he went far beyond the wildest dreams of most mystics. What got me hooked was his discovery that “the Unsayable is beyond beyondliness”. I found this idea so spellbinding and also very near my own thought and gastiness (spirituality); after all, I had myself googled “transcending transcendence” or some very similar term a few years before.

    The reason to drop the quantifier is because it instills false belief. Also, it seems to disprove what is true. — Gary M Washburn

    In what way does it supposedly do those things? Hasn’t it entangled the mess of
    George is like Sam.
    Sam is vain.
    Therefore, George is vain?????     — Gary M Washburn
    and given us a wonderful way of exploring the world of abstract things?

    In reality (sooth), quantifiers allow us to to conveniently talk about properties. For instance, the sentence “There are even numbers (rimetales)” means that the property of evenness has instantiatedness.

    Isn't anything 'beyondly' immortal? Is man 'beyondly'? — Gary M Washburn

    I’d say ‘Yes’ to the first one if the beyondliness involved isn’t absolute: having beyondliness implies having deathlessness (though something absolutely beyondly is beyond both mortality and deathlessness, so predicating either of it doesn’t even make sense). I’d also say ‘yes’ to the second one in the sense that the soul, in particular the soul of Man, has deathlessness. (The theory most plausible to be is that Man is simply the result of a soul “living in” a body of a particular kind. Other living beings, including not-human animals, plants, and microbes, have souls, too, and like the souls of humans, their souls can only unfold as many mindly powers as are made possible by the informational abilities of their respective bodies. I also find soul-wandering within and between species totally plausible.) And yes, the soul is beyondly.

    The law of the excluded middle is a basis for proof? Because you say so? — Gary M Washburn

    Because my intuition tells me so. Mark, by the way, that the highest shape of knowledge, hygely (noetic) knowledge, is an underkind of intuitive knowledge, though I don’t claim to (yet) have intuitive knowledge of that flawless kind that LEM is true, of course. Think about it yourself: take any proposition A, and ask yourself whether it’s possible than neither A nor its negation NOT(A) is the case. If you disbelieve in LEM, can you give me an example of an instance where it fails – a proposition A for which we have NOT(A OR NOT(A))?

    Doesn't A is B, in the sense you define it, mean A counts of B? — Gary M Washburn

    I think not; rather, I think that the deedword “to be” has several meanings:

    • What-being, which links each thing to its wist (essence).
    • So-being, th.i. (that is) having properties or other broadthings (universals), as in the sentence “The Sun is a star”, which means the same as “The Sun has starhood” and predicates starhood of the Sun; these two sentences mean the proposition that the Sun has starhood. I think that you sometimes mean this with the verb ‘to be’. Is that right?
    • (This meaning is closely related to the one before but very much distinct from it:) Broadthingly implication, as in “All Men are mammals”, which predicates the two-slotted (is-an-underkind-of)-relation of Manhood and Mammalhood. Quantifiers can be used to link broadthingly implication to broadthing-having like so: For all broadthings B, E, the universal B bears the broadthingly implication relation to E if and only if for every x, the proposition that x has B lets follow the proposition that x has E. I guess that it is this meaning of ‘to be’ that you mainly have in mind, am I right? If so, how is it related to counting?
    • Existence, as in “The number 5 is”, which predicates existence of the number 5.
    • Existential quantification, which is endless disjuction (OR) in a way, as in “There is an odd number”; this sentence basically means the same as “0 has oddness, or 1 has oddness, or 2 has oddness, or 3 has oddness, or”, which in turn basically means that the property of oddness has the property of instantiatedness.

    You can convince yourself that the subject is fixed by predication, put in a bin where it will keep even when you go off elsewhere. — Gary M Washburn

    Here, witcrafty (logical) analysis can help us yet again. It shows us that problems only arise when predicates are treated as if they had fewer slots than they already have. For instance, being alive is a two-slotted relationship, and the corresponding predicate “being alive” a two-slotted predicate. Hence, sentences of the shape “A is alive”, with ‘A’ the name of a thing, are truncated and thus meaningless. Only sentences of the shape “A is alive at t” make sense, where ‘t’ is the name of a time-point.

    Reckonil? — Gary M Washburn

    “Reckonil” is the right English word for “computer”. “To reckon” means the same as “to calculate”, and the suffix “-il” is often used to make tool-names.

    You do understand, though, there is no such thing a a randomness generator? Presumably, what passes for one gives fodder to the pre-programed system for finding and assessing patterns. — Gary M Washburn

    With what right do you assume that there are no random number generators? You have rightly warned against making dogmatic assumptions, but here you yourself are making one, aren’t you (and a likely false one, too, see next paragraph)?

    Of course I’m aware of pseudo-random number generators (PRNGs), but these are not what I mean. I mean true random number generators (TRNGs), which are based on stuff like thermal or quantum fluctuations. Now whether the Universe is fundamentally chanceful or deterministic is an important matter, but if it is the latter, there is no such thing as free will. Since there seems to be free will, there seems to be true randomness, too, so it should be possible to build a TRNG, shouldn’t it?

    something AI will never achieve — Gary M Washburn

    Yet another unjustified and likely false dogmatic claim. What’s the fundamental difference between a human brain and a reckonil? Why shouldn’t a soul be able to live in a reckonil just as in a human brain?

    We tried that for explaining evolution, — Gary M Washburn

    ... and have met with great success.

    but if the creature does not put the mutation to use, — Gary M Washburn

    ... which it does, for the mutation is expressed in the phenotype and thus allows natural selection to work on it.

    nothing can come of random changes that is not part of it's programming. — Gary M Washburn

    Well, the things that allow our souls to process information in, live in, and interact with this world and in particular with each other through computers – our bodies, including our brains – have come about by the creative, information-making might of random variation. Where does the underlying idea of Darwinian evolution supposedly not work?

    I think that the above claim of yours is untrue. Whether a feature is made by randomness or by design doesn’t change that feature. Whether the human eye was designed or has evolved, it will do exactly the same thing.

    I have a thesis about that — Gary M Washburn

    Can you give proof of your thesis, and has it been peer-reviewed by the scientific community? If yes, what is the result?

    Lamarck shows us how differentiation comes about without randomness, but in response to biological needs. In other words, to a great extent (much greater than geneticist would have us believe) life creates, designs, and programs itself. — Gary M Washburn

    Lamarckism has long been shown to be very likely wrong. Modern evolutionary theory based on genetics and Darwinian evolution works pretty well and does not appeal to non-existent effects. Also, if there were no randomness, how could life create anything, including itself? Randomness is the well of new information. Without it, all info would be there from the start, and nothing would be truly made, created, brought into being.

    Symbolic notation is used by logicians because they know it isn't really true. It's just about power. — Gary M Washburn

    I disagree. While witcraft (logic) is limited in the end, it is a powerful tool for finding about the world of abstract things and the world of concrete stuff. How is witcrafty symbolic notation supposedly wrong?

    Moreover, the very speech (language) that you use to say and write your philosophy is based on abstract things like numbers (rimetales) and logic, as is reason itself. For instance, you rely on the Law of Identity to be sure that if you are right, you’re right. Without said law, you could be right without being right, making your whole philosophy crumble.

    My question to them is, if you can't know which is which and yet count, and you can't count and yet know which is which, how many is 'one'? — Gary M Washburn

    As I asked above, what has logic to do with counting?
  • Platonism
    You are taking your conclusion as axiomatic. Taking what you find as what you were looking for, because it comes to your mind. — Gary M Washburn

    I don’t think so, for I didn’t assume LEM; rather, I proved it with the help of LNC and LDN. These two, in turn, follow directly from the wist (essence) of negation. Of course, all this, including LNC and LDN, has yet to be derived from the Orprinciple beyond being and not-being.

    Predication is an assertion that a subject has something of the character of a predicate — Gary M Washburn

    The way I see it, predication is the assertion that something has some property or more broadly some broadthing (universal), where Having is something I have admittedly not yet been able to define. However, I think that it might be so groundlaying (fundamental) that speech cannot be used to define it, and that the hyge (nous) has to be used to directly “see” the Shape of Having.

    Your prejudice toward the hermetic proposition puts the brakes on that dynamism, and ultimately puts you out of sync with all humanity save those few sorry dogmatists you probably hooked up with in a classroom somewhere. — Gary M Washburn

    Why do you seem to be accusing me of dogmatism when you in fact appear to be dogmatic? After all, it’s you who seems to take the existence of other minds for granted, while I’m the one who does not venture to make such a daring assumption. Regarding my sync, I’m pretty well in sync with my surroundings, and my platonist philosophy has served and does serve me pretty well. Small ‘p’ platonism is almost certainly true, fair (beautiful), is in sync with mathematics and modern physics, is a very sublime philosophy, and has nice consequences such as a deathless soul. It has a beyondly aspect, but in the realm of being, witcraft, though limited, does it’s job pretty well. What is it that you have qualms with?

    Socrates is a man
    All men are Mortal
    Therefore:
    Socrates is mortal.
    I assume you subscribe to this.     — Gary M Washburn

    Yes:

    For every x, if x has manhood, then x has mortality.

    Socrates has manhood.

    Hence, Socrates has mortality.

    If "is" is the qualifier between subject and predicate, and not a quantifier, as analysts (like yourself?) would have it — Gary M Washburn

    Who said that ‘is’ is a quantifier? The word ‘is’ has several, though related, meanings, and in the context we’re dealing with here, it means the relationship of having something as a property (ownship).

    I think that I should point out here that the undercollection-relationship (⊆) is not the same as the membership-relationship (∈), and likewise, the (has-as-an-ownship)-relation is different from the (lets-follow-as-a-property)-relation. The former relation is born by Socrates to manhood and to mortality, whereas the latter one is born by manhood to mortality.

    Ever had a romance? — Gary M Washburn

    Yes, I have several long-running ongoing romances :wink:, namely with Rightwiseness (Justice), Cleanness, Wisdom, Knowledge, Truth, Fairness (Beauty), Goodness, Oneness, Godhood, and Beyondness. However, I’m likely still very, very, very far away from my beloveds.

    Ever had a fight with your boss — Gary M Washburn

    Don’t worry, I’m not schizophrenic, but in a way, yes, I had and still sometimes have :wink:.

    If any of these, and so much more, it is hard to see you still believing in the excluded middle. — Gary M Washburn

    As a radical asker, I do question LEM and even the LSIs (the Law of Self-Identity and the Law of Self-Implication), but I find it hard to see how someone could not believe in LEM. Okay, let’s say LEM isn’t true; then all of what you’ve said may be neither the case nor not the case, right? Selfing (self-reference, self-relationships, self-awareness, asf.) is truly spellbinding, and especially in philosophy, we should very often make use of it, shouldn’t we?

    why can't you at least entertain the possibility I have a legitimate area of inquiry? — Gary M Washburn

    Who said that I don’t?

    Drop the quantifiers ("a" and "all') and the "deduction" falls to pieces. — Gary M Washburn

    Please give me a reason for dropping them!

    though a computer, for all its utility — Gary M Washburn

    ... such as allowing us to have this very discussion.

    though a computer, for all its utility, is nothing more than an automatic - not autonomous - filing system! — Gary M Washburn

    But if true random number generators are in built, which is already the case in some computers (reckonils), this need not be the case. Bear in mind that the human brain is a physical object which obeys exactly the same laws as a reckonil, so if the reckonil has the right info-processing ability (which current computers likely don’t have, but future ones likely will), why should a soul take up residence in a human (or other animal) brain but not in a reckonil?

    George is like Sam.
    Sam is vain.
    Therefore, George is vain?????     — Gary M Washburn

    Here, you seem to be making a similar mistake to the one made (perhaps on purpose) by Socrates in e.g. the Parmenides: treating relationships as if they had a slottedness (arity) other from the one they really (soothly) have. You appear to be making a statement whose precise meaning you yourself do not quite know. Thus, you seem to have entangled yourself in wrong assumptions and so arrived at an unwarranted conclusion, whereupon you put the blame on witcraft (logic) when it is in fact you who are not quite clear about what you yourself mean. And guess who’s to the rescure to free you from your entanglement? Quantifiers!

    Likeness isn’t a one-slotted relation, as Socrates appears to treat it in the Parmenides, and also not a binary relationship, as you are apparently treating it, but rather a three-slotted relationship. It relates two things F, U and a way W to each other such that F is like U in the way W. So your sentence “George is like Sam” is about as meaningful as the sentence “the number 5 is greater than”. That is, unless it is short for “there is a way W such that George is like Sam in the way W” (mark the existential quantifier). Let’s give you the freme (benefit) of a doubt and assume that you (underconsciously) have the second, meaningful statement in mind rather than the first, meaningless one. In that case, your argument becomes:

    George is like Sam in some way.
    Sam is vain.
    Therefore, George is vain?????

    Of course your argument is invalid, for the conclusion does NOT follow from the foresteps (premises). They don’t say in which way George is like Sam, so the conclusion is based on the unwarranted assumption that the way in question is vainness. So witcraft has no problem whatsoever. Rather, those who make imprecise formulations are the ones to blame. This is actually in accordance with your right observation that speech has come into being and evolves, isn’t it?

    Both your comments are question begging. — Gary M Washburn

    What? How could the second comment possibly beg a question? After all, it doesn’t really even make a stamement. It’s goal is to give the idea of applying selfing to contrariety. It even hints at the absolute beyondness of the Absolute, in particular its transcendence beyond reason. Shouldn’t that be something to your taste?

    These dogmatic shifts are a crime against mind, not a discovery of its law. — Gary M Washburn

    Since when has logic become dogmatic? (You might not be saying this, so if you don’t, please tell me.) Since when has brooking (using) this wonderful, though ultimately limited, tool for exploring the abstract world become a crime? Witcraft a crime? Doesn’t that sound like zealous dogmatism?

    Also, witcraft isn’t really derived from language. The Greek word “logic” may suggest this, but the English word “witcraft” hints us in the right direction: witcraft is discovered directly by the wit, an aspect of the mind. Witcraft is very successful in both practical and highly theoretical fields. What do you find amiss with it?

    "rationalists" — Gary M Washburn

    Just in case you think that I’m a rationalist – I’m not. In these comments and already much earlier, I hint at absolute transcendence, and I’m perfectly aware that it includes standing above and beyond logic, reason, and thought. From what I’ve learned about him so far, I greatly bewonder (admire) Damascius’ thought. Do I need to say more to show that I find beyondness absolutely spellbinding?
  • Platonism
    @Gary M Washburn I find the Shape (Form, Idea, Widea) of Contrariety indeed spellbinding. Let’s now apply it to itself in a way: If everything isn’t either-or, but rather neither-nor, then in particular, everything is neither either-or nor neither-nor. And we can go on that way further (neither (either either-or or neither-nor), nor (neither either-or nor neither-nor), asf.) to infinity and beyond. I find this way of thinking useful when trying to reach the unreachable Beyondly Absolute.
  • Platonism
    inability to support the excluded middle as an a priori law of reason — Gary M Washburn

    Well, LEM follows from LNC (the Law of Not-Contradiction) and LDN (the Law of Double Negation) like so: For every proposition A, it’s true that if
    0. neither A nor NOT(A) (Premise/Forestep),
    then
    1. NOT(A) (from (0.))
    2. NOT(NOT(A)) (from (0.))
    3. A (from (2.) by LDN)
    4. A AND NOT(A) (from (3.) and (1.)),
    which latter proposition goes against LNC. Hence, we must always have either A or NOT(A).

    By the way, this is not the same principle as the Principle of Bivalence, which states that each proposition is either true or false (untrue; untruth/falsehood is stronger than not-truth). Indeed, LEM is weaker than BP, and while the former is a basic law of logic (witcraft), the latter is likely false due to the probable existence of chance and free will. I’ve said more on this topic starting here.
  • Platonism
    The Shape of Contrariety — Tristan L


    Whah??? Whatever you mean by this shape, the point is, if there is no there there there is no shape to it. Plato was not a Pythagorean, and Socrates violated the most sacred secret tenet of that cult, in Meno. So why impute geometry to him?     — Gary M Washburn

    The word “Shape” with an uppercase ‘S’ means the same as “Form” (with uppercase ‘F’) and “Idea” (with uppercase ‘I’), as in “Theory of Shapes/Forms/Ideas”. So “Shape of Contrariety”, “Form of Contrariety”, “Idea of Contrariety”, “contrariety”, “contrariety itself”, “contrariness”, and “contrarihood” all mean the same (abstract) thing.

    I never had anything geometrical in mind at all.
  • The (?) Roman (?) Empire (?)
    ↪Olivier5
    It’s true that Jungle Law seems to be the ultimate law in this world, but that doesn’t mean that we should simply accept it. After all, we hope to have morality and true moral beliefs, so why shouldn’t we judge everything – past, present, or hypothetical future – accordingly? Of course, as I said earlier, our moral beliefs may be completely wrong, but we should at least try to find the objective moral law.


    even though we may like the historical underdogs, those who lost, it doesn't mean that them losers where any better morally speaking. — Olivier5

    Well, that would include Greece and, in a way, also Rome. Greece was conquered by the Romans and stayed under their domination for over one-and-a-half thousand years, after which it was conquered by the Ottomans and ruled by them for more than three-and-a-half centuries. The Romans were militarily and politically much more successful, but their Western Empire fell due to inner and outer factors, not least among these the attacks of Germanics and Huns. The Eastern Empire held out much longer, but it was was beaten back again and again by great Muslim commanders like the brilliant Arab general Chālid ibn al-Walīd. In the end, it was conquered outright by the Ottoman Turks, and its capital city for more than a yearthousand, the “Second Rome”, is under the rule of a Muslim country to this very day.

    It’s also true that the losers need not be morally better than the winners. One example is given by the Battle of the Allia, another by the Battle of the Catalaunian Plains, and yet another by the Battle of Pydna.

    Any European who resent the Roman Empire for killing millions should remember what happened in the 1940's in those oh-so-civilized parts. — Olivier5

    But that’s the thing: what happened in the 1940’s was not due to civilized nations, but due to people with the old primitive mentality gaining power. The Italian fascists under Mussolini wanted to rebuild the Roman Empire in Earnest, and the German fascists, also knows as Nazis, under Hitler likewise wanted to build an empire (and succeded for a short time). These people had the old “my-nation-is-better-than-yours”-mentality of much of the ancient world as well as the radical ethno-supremacism of some ancients (Aristotle comes to mind here). Indeed, I’ve already drawn such a parallel:

    Yet then, fascists came to power in Rome, murdered Stilicho and began a systematic extermination of Germanics. This backfired twofold, for it robbed the Empire of a great pillar and provoked the Sack of Rome by King Alaric I. Fast-forward to the twentieth century, and we see fascists bring their own folks to their knees. — Tristan L


    Mind you, the European project is about that: recognising that there exists a European indentify, built through empires as it was, that transcends national identities. The project makes sense because European nationalism and division killed so many in the last century. — Olivier5

    Exactly that kind of nationalism is the one which makes nations create empires by subduing other nations – “my-nation-is-better-than-yours”-nationalism, you know. It fueled both ancient empire-building and the world wars.

    The European Union is precisely not that; it’s a peaceful “empire”, if you will, based on human rights, democracy, and the rights of all folks, a union which seeks to allow nations to willingly dissolve the boundaries between them. The individual European nations committed many crimes and atrocities, mostly through their empires (as did many other peoples in the world), such as the Macedonian Empire, the Roman Empire, the Frankish Empire, the Spanish Empire, the Portuguese Empire, the French Empire, the British Empire, Faschist Italy, and Nazi Germany (and e.g. the Hunnish Empire and the Mongol Empire in the case of not-European peoples). The EU itself, by contrast, did not. It is the exact antithesis to the supremacist nationalism and the imperialism resulting from the latter.
  • Platonism
    ↪Gary M Washburn
    Sounds interesting. Just one remark: The Shape of Contrariety makes your position possible in the first place, doesn’t it?
  • The (?) Roman (?) Empire (?)
    This isn't to say it was "good." But it is to say that it was remarkable. — Ciceronianus the White

    Yes, I agree.

    The Roman Empire was fairly extraordinary, though, in that many emperors weren't from Rome or even Italy, but instead from the provinces, e.g. Spain, Africa, Syria, Gaul, Dacia and Moesia. — Ciceronianus the White

    I can't think of any imperial power in which high status and power was more available to men of "low birth," provincials and barbarians (meaning, outsiders) than Rome. — Ciceronianus the White

    That is indeed a good aspect of Rome. Compare that to the (for the most part) very ethno-supremacist ancient Greeks (Diogenes of Sinope and Stoics were notable exceptions) and Israelites, for instance. However, I don’t think that Rome was alone with its relative openness (which you didn’t assert, I know). For instance, in olden China, a “barbarian” (夷, yí) could become Chinese and vice versa depending on morality. According to the teaching of Islam, which set up a succession of great Empires, all people are equal, regardless of ethnic origin. These are but two examples.

    Yes, generally, but in the same sense so many of us, and others, have considered people different from us inferior in some manner. — Ciceronianus the White

    Unfortunately, you are right. I have long wanted to write about this matter and had originally planned a thread of its own, but since you’ve brought up the issue, I might as well write about it here.
    Even today, in the twenty-first yearhundred, there are still quite a few people who consider themselves and/or their respective ethnic, gender or other group to be inherently superior to others or other groups. These are the supremacists; they are those who judge the worth of a human being (or other sentient being for that matter) based on irrelevant criteria, namely criteria other than moral goodness, such as identity, ethnicity, or gender. They actually do the world harm – if they are allowed to. With their obsolete mentality, they seek to divert human energy away from useful things, such as finding cures for diseases, doing away with injustice, protecting this beautiful planet Earth and all the wonderful living beings on it, and peacefully spreading our civilization into space e.g. to survive the death of the Sun, and into harmful and base things like domination and injustice. Supremacism is a forlorn post, of course, so they won’t have any good arguments for it. They’ll simply ignore all the good arguments against it and obstinately preach their outdated Stone-Age doctrines. They waste their own energy on fighting others for the sake of domination, they – in a way – waste the energy of those who fight against them, and, if they got their way, they’d waste the energy of the oppressed by not allowing the latter to unfold their potential.

    The douth (virtue) and outstandingness of an individual depends only on their formay (ability) to do good (not on their ethnic group or gender, for instance), which is directly related to their ethical and other knowledge and smartness, and more weightily on their use of free will to choose goodness itself over badness itself. I think – though I might have to refine my evaluation, as is perhaps the case for all evaluations – that the best individuals are good-hearted and smart, the second-best are the good-hearted but not highly intelligent ones, the second-worst are the bad-hearted but unintelligent ones, and the worst are the bad-hearted and intelligent ones. Also, we have to keep in mind that intelligence in a restricted sense need not be accompanied by overall smartness on the highest level. For instance, a ruler might be very efficient at conquering and ruling others and so be intelligent in that sense, but he would still not be smart overall, because he obviously lacks the wit to see that domination of others and worldly power are base and fleeting and no permanent asset of the soul.

    Supremacists do not realize this and are therefore severely lacking in ethical knowledge. Ethno-supremacism is on the national level what egoism is on the individual level. These and the other kinds of supremacism try to throw a wrench into the progress of humanity due to the aforementioned reasons. They seek to harm individual human beings because of the latter’s otherness regardless of the latter’s douth and excellence, and thus would stifle the progress of mankind if they got their way in addition to being blatantly unrightwise (unjust). They would harm the human species as a whole because of that and because they put the interests of the mortal individual and the mostly ephemeral ethnic group (after all, how long do distinct ethnic groups exist?) above the interests of the whole, and moreover, their interests are base at that. Among cells of many-celled organisms, the egoists are called cancer cells, for they seek only to reach their own short-sighted goals, and if successful, in the process destroy healthy cells and the organism as a whole, achieving their own demise in the end. This is similar to the way a succes of supremacism would bring down our great human civilization.

    A very good example of how ethno-supremacism is self-destructive comes from Rome. As you rightly said,

    Many barbarians served the Empire well [...]. And I think the Empire generally did well by them, for the most part. — Ciceronianus the White

    :up:

    Among these “barbarians” was the half-Vandal Stilicho, who, like his Germanic troops, protected Rome and kept it stable. The relative Roman openness which you have mentioned paid off, and is likely one of the reasons for the success of the Roman Empire, also compared to much more ethno-supremacist nations like ancient Greece. Yet then, fascists came to power in Rome, murdered Stilicho and began a systematic extermination of Germanics. This backfired twofold, for it robbed the Empire of a great pillar and provoked the Sack of Rome by King Alaric I. Fast-forward to the twentieth century, and we see fascists bring their own folks to their knees.

    And of course, supremacism, especially ethno-supremacism, often leads to wars, which waste human and material resources and destroy human achievements (take the destruction of the House of Wisdom by Mongol warriors as an example) for base and ultimately useless goals.

    The supremacists ought to be taught in order to cleanse them of their detrimental ignorance, their harmful bigotry, and their dangerous tendency to stifle development and erode civilization. But what if that doesn’t help? Should we perhaps look to the course of action taken by the immune system of a healthy individual with regard to cancer cells for answers?

    Once these dangers to the nascent human nation have vanished and been vanquished – and thankfully, they are diminishing – we need not have gotten rid of all nations save for the great human one and become totally selfless. After all, competition is also a driver of development. However, all the supremacism will be gone, replaced by a broad gast (spirit) of mutal respect and working together seasoned with a pinch of competition. The nation of mankind, and later hopefully all ethical sapient lifeforms, as well as its role as stewart and protector of Earth’s life and later maybe other lifeforms, is something to be truly patriotic about and proud of. Dr. Matt O'Dowd expresses a similar view at time 13:05 in the following video by PBS Space Time:

  • The (?) Roman (?) Empire (?)
    ↪Olivier5
    True, which is why I wrote earlier:

    For instance, most Western Eurasian (“European”) states from antiquity to modernity are Indo-European, yet the Indo-Europeans are invasive in Europe, so how can any of those states be legitimate? — Tristan L

    By the way, I can’t help but notice that @ssu’s country is not one of them :wink:.
  • The (?) Roman (?) Empire (?)
    What I gather, large empires are typically quite ethno-supremacist and quite full of themselves. — ssu

    You’re right, that’s very likely human nature, and it’s a main reason why almost all empires are bad as far as they are empires – after all, the empire-building nation regards itself as superior to other nations and conquers them. What good aspects they might have, such as bringing peace (which is often forced, however, and then not so good) and making exchange of ideas easier, is another matter, and empires ought to be praised regarding these good aspects and likewise condemned for their bad ones.

    Yet is this different from the view of the Egyptians, the Chinese or the Aztecs? — ssu

    It’s true that likely most old folks were ethno-supremacist at least to some degree. As we’ve said, that’s likely due to human nature. However, there are differences. For instance, the ancient Israelites were very ethno-supremacist and, if their old writings are to be believed, also quite good at genocide. And they even legitimized this religiously. Likewise, the ancient Greeks were very ethno-supremacist and misogynistic for the most part, though some, such as Diogenes of Sinope and the Stoics, were in favor of cosmopolitanism, and e.g. Epicurus openly taught women. On the other hand, Rome was generally far less ethno-supremacist and misogynistic as far as I know, with exceptions such as the massacre that backfired and led to the Sack of Rome in 410 AD. Then again, its contributions to science lag far behind those of Greece. In Islam, with which a series of great Empires started, all people are equal, and their ethnic origin has no bearing on their status. In olden China, “barbarians” could become Chinese if they had the ethical qualifications. So we see that while most were supremacist to some degree, some were much more so than others. Moreover, I think that empires can’t be ranked on a linear scale of goodness. For instance, while the Mongol Empire was extraordinarily brutal (and successful), it was also remarkably tolerant, much more so than e.g. medieval Europe and even ancient Greece (think of the trial of Socrates, for example). But a part of it (the Ilkhanate) also sacked the great city of Bagdad, murdered many of its citizens, and destroyed its great treasures such as the House of Wisdom.

    I agree. But usually we assume that people are making a statement of today when referring to history. Yet history in itself deserves focus, even some times it hasn't got much in common with our present. — ssu

    True, but when I talk about history, I actually do mean what I say. The broad principles which I apply to the past I also apply to the present, of course, and I believe that we should learn from the past, but when I judge the past, I really judge the past. When I say “Roman Empire”, I really mean the Roman Empire and not some present state (though some things I say about the former could perhaps be applied to the latter).

    Let's not forget. Let's try to look at them with the same objectivity (and criticism) that we look at our own "Western" history. If we do that, many interesting question arise. — ssu

    Yes, I totally agree.
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