And intellectually unevolved. What's particularly dangerous isn't Rand herself, but the cult-like following of her. She's only somewhat responsible for that, but not entirely. I think she herself would mostly be against the dogmatism and zealotry of her followers. Having once given her due attention, I've since moved beyond her -- although there are still aspects I like. I like that she echoes Aristotelian virtue ethics, for example. But her views on ontology, epistemology, and politics is very limited indeed. — Xtrix

People are pretty clueless about this sort of thing. Back in the 40's, The Fountainhead was made into a movie starring Patricia Neal and Gary Cooper, a kind of celebration of the capitalist ubermensch, the guy whose talent placed him far above the pettiness of normal people's affairs. Everyone else was a parasite on his genius. Rand thought herself like this.

American Christians were so full of themselves and worshiped the corporate gods of capitalism, and so afraid of communism, they never understood that she was telling them all they were just a bunch parasites to the rich and famous, to whom they should all bow low. And Rand was a professed atheist! They bowed anyway.

-Nothing really except his critique. I only pointed out that no matter how great the name of philosopher, a metaphysical speculation is just that. — Nickolasgaspar

Details, Nickolasgaspar, details. What, exactly in his Critique is metaphysical speculation?

Do you have objective evidence of mind properties rising independent of a functioning biological brain (natural process).
If you do have you then you should make some space on your shelves for a Nobel Prize...
That is a pseudo philosophy. — Nickolasgaspar

What makes the case of the brain so unique is that while exterior events are forthcoming for observation, the brain itself is problematic, because the only way to confirm its existence is through its own operations, thus, one would have to establish how the brain can be its own source of verification, and this can only be done through the very brain processes in question. Put clearly: all that experience is, is brain phenomena, and the only way one can confirm the brain's existence is through these very phenomena. How is it that one can stand apart from the brain and observe it apart from the very phenomena that are posited as brain generated? All you ever get is the phenomena; you can never achieve that Archimedean point to truly witness the brain.

This, of course, problematizes all witnessed events, for how does one ever witness what is NOT a phenomenon? You need that perspective from another position that is not phenomenological.

Good luck with this. If you can respond in a way that shows the phenomenon can be bypassed, and an observer can jump into the "real" world that is not conditioned and constructed by thought and experience, not only will you win the Nobel Prize, but you will have discovered God's omniscient providence.

First of all your answer doesn't really address any points made in my first paragraph. We don't have a way to be sure whether our feedback of an invisible underlying reality is accurate or not. What we can verify is that in different scales of reality we observe different characteristics that are quantifiable and verifiable.
What Kant or any philosopher says about metaphysical aspects of ontology is IRRELEVANT and an argument from false authority since there aren't any experts or authorities in metaphysical claims! — Nickolasgaspar

I have no idea what this is about. What makes you think Kant talks about metaphysics??

Of course they have. If you talk about mind properties non contingent to natural processes or "post modern Theology" or accept unfalsifiable metaphysical statements as foundations for your philosophical views then both of my labels are justified in this conversation!
Those terms just point out that the promoted ideas do not carry epistemic foundations sot they can not be used as tools for the understanding of the world (not that they are wrong). — Nickolasgaspar

But none of this applies. You are having a discussion with yourself. Mind properties not contingent to natural processes? But of course they are. All I ask you is, what are natural processes? And how can one separate ontology from epistemology? Do do this would require the most egregious metaphysics, as if one could identify something epistemically detached from one. There is nothing metaphysical about asking the simple question: what connects S to P in the equation, "S knows P"? Are you suggesting we should ignore this question? Is this what you call science, ignoring glaring questions contradict your paradigms? I suspect you're heard of Thomas Kuhn? What do you think he would say about this? Do you understand the scientific method? Think this through: it is a method that connects knowledge with the world. How do you think this happens, magically? This has to be explained, and you don't turn away because it is difficult. You engage it because it is difficult, but it is not the job of a scientist. It is the philosopher's job. It is NOT a metaphysical question. It simply accepts that the objects before us cannot be conceived apart from the experience in which they are found.
It is, in its essential justification, that easy. Science is very good at describing objects in the world. This is given. It has no clue at all as to how to describe the intuitive foundation that constitutes that-which-is-being-taken-up by science nor can it speak of epistemic relations, THE foundational relation upon which all science rests. One does not reach into absurdities to do this. One simply observes the relationship and analyses the structure of experience. Nothing metaphysical at all. these are just reflexive responses you have to things unfamiliar.

- Is it? Are they? Maybe you are right.
Two problems.
1. What do you mean by reading philosophy? Chronicling? Finding out who (philosopher) said what?
Do you really think that Chronicling is Philosophy or that it will help you to promote a metaphysical statement to an epistemic degree of value, by knowing about it?
The fact that those conclusions have never being evaluated or used to produce abbitional knowledge or wise claims that we can act upon..... doesn't raise any flags for you?
Sure some great names made some metaphysical claims that you agree with...this is all you have!
The question is What makes you think that they are philosophical or at least meaningful?

2.People in science are generally philosophically clueless....meaning that they are really bad in Chronicling. THis is because they ignore ideas that are not proven Wise and with zero epistemic potential.
They are only familiar with Philosophical ideas that are epistemically and instrumentally valuable. (Naturalism, Objectivism, Humanism, Situational ethics etc etc etc ).
So at least in my case I don't give much attention to philosophical claims that do not achieve the goal set by Philosophy itself....to provide Wise claims about our world on solid epistemic grounds.
Sorry If I sound condescending...that was not my intention. — Nickolasgaspar

Chronicling? You would have to say what you mean. Are you talking about recording history?

There is only one goal set for philosophy--only one: to examine the world at the level of the most basic assumptions. Period.
On condescension: All is forgiven. Sometimes I fail to realize that people simply do not know what philosophy is. The presumption of knowing without, well, knowing, is common.

So never mind, then, and put all this aside. Have a lovely day!

Ayn Rand devotees are cute. — Xtrix

And dangerous. Like libertarians, morally unevolved.

How I this an arguement against anything I said? You need to rephrase. — Harry Hindu

By calling something accidental, you are implying purpose. By implying that inanimate objects, like the universe, have accidents you are projecting purpose (anthropomorphism) onto things that have no purpose. There is no purpose outside a mind's own goals, therefore there are no accidents outside of some mind's goals. — Harry Hindu

You are saying there are no "accidents" in the world apart from the mind that conceives such things. Calling something an accident is simply saying it is contingent. All things are contingent, most philosophers would say, and this means they are not "stand alone" in the meaning they have. Meanings are contextual, and nothing that can be understood, stands outside of a context.
"The world" is contingent; to say otherwise is just bad metaphysics, with one exception. Value. And this really isn't an exception at all. Or is it? Value is where things get interesting.

Paraphrasing

Spock (bleeding): I'm pondering upon the meaning of life.

Dr. Leonard McCoy (applying compression to the wound): Feeling philosophical, eh? That's what massive blood loss will do to you. — Agent Smith

Better: Morpheus: "Do you think that's air you're breathing now?"

That's what religiologists, culturologists, and the like do. Not what religious people do. — baker

I know what they do and how they think. Philosophy's job, as I see it, is to take this, and give a reflective analysis. What is going on when we pull away from the participation, and see it in a broader context?

By calling something accidental, you are implying purpose. By implying that inanimate objects, like the universe, have accidents you are projecting purpose (anthropomorphism) onto things that have no purpose. There is no purpose outside a mind's own goals, therefore there are no accidents outside of some mind's goals. — Harry Hindu

Still too slippery, Harry. How is this different from what I said?

Yes, it can look like this. It can also look like my uncle Raymond who has a phd in geology. Do better!

-You can never say that an objective set of observations can or cant mirror nature accurately!
You are using an argument from ignorance fallacy as an excuse to dismiss our only credible and objective source of knowledge and sneak in pseudo philosophical speculations as competitive ontological frameworks.
Again I am not saying that our observations are absolute true or the picture we receive is 100% accurate. I only pointing out that we can not evaluate the accuracy of our observation so we are forced to work with what we got (pragmatic necessity) either they agree with our metaphysical worldviews or not! On the other hand idealistic and supernatural claims fall outside our Cataleptic Impressions and our methods of observation so we have zero objective information about these speculations. — Nickolasgaspar

But reading Kant does not yield zero information. That is, well, silly. Not that he's right about everything. Not the point.

I don't read Tyson. He is too poetic for my taste and diluted in epistemology. Again phenomenology has many varieties. Some are philosophical but many are pseudo philosophical. This is the problem with Philosophy. Under the same umbrella term its possible to found good and bad Philosophy!
My statement "whatever it means" was my response to the claim "consciousness being fundamental".
ITs was not a cheep blow. I used that statement because consciousness in Neuroscience has a specific definition and pseudo philosophy/supernaturalism definitions are pretty vague.
What verify in science is in direct conflict with the proclaimed "role" of consciousness by pseudo philosophical views. — Nickolasgaspar

You toss terms like "pseudo" and "supernaturalism" around like you think they have some place in this disagreement. To me it is just the presumption of condescension usually found among those who are limited in their reading. People in science generally are philosophically clueless, which is to be forgiven; after all, they don't read philosophy, or, if they do, it ends up being the philosophy of science.
Generally, when I ask someone with your predilections, they really haven't read anything.

-What I personally think is irrelevant. In science we establish Sufficiency and Necessity between a causal mechanism and the effect by verifying Strong Correlations between a process and a phenomenon. So to explain this process in terms of your example.....an Environmental or organic stimuli (a drowning child or a pebble or a fish breaking the surface of the water etc) produces connections in the brain (surface ripples ) that in turn enables the emergence of mental conscious state with a specific conscious content( wave, bubbles, foam, distorted reflections etc). — Nickolasgaspar

Personally?? The idea here is that a CT scan is not a mirror of the mind in the truest sense of what a mirror is. We can talk like this, but this is a metaphor at work here. In the matter at hand, imagine you had a CT scan of something, but you were told you had to dismiss all familiar possibilities for its interpretation. So much for interpretation. But then, you do have what is there before you to be taken not as something impossibly beyond the phenomenon itself, but simply AS itself. That is where we are.

In this case there the phenomenon is all things. The relation in question is epistemic. If you want to declare the epistemic relation to be a causal one, then you will have a lot of explaining to do. For one thing, the very notion of causality itself would have to be causally accounted for.
The idea here is not to deny what science does, nor its conclusions nor its theorizing. It is to say something really quite simple and without argument: all science has to say rests with what lies before the perceiving intelligence. This is, if you will, a horizon of intuition. Nobody disagrees with this. The most devoted analytic philosopher understands that phenomenology cannot be refuted, only ignored by people why prefer to think of other things. Who cares? You may thematize the world as you please as long as the world has those themes there for the inquiry.

Again you are making an argument from ignorance (because we can not disprove that there is an addition level of reality responsible for mental states we can dismiss or ignore Neuroscience's epistemology without evidence against it and without any evidence for the suggested idea)!
This is NOT how the burden of proof works. This is not how we identify a Default position(Null Hypothesis) .
This is fallacious reasoning! We can not throw out of the window our objective observations and frameworks that make testable predictions (diagnose pathology) and real life technical applications (accurately read complex thoughts, surgery and medicinal protocols)...just because some believe a fallacious claim!
By definition the truth value of a fallacious claim is unknown so we are forced to dismiss it as pseudo metaphysics. — Nickolasgaspar

Not to ignore neuroscience's epistemology. To realize that this epistemology is based upon something more foundational: intuitive givenness. Science is left alone since no one is denying its claims. It is a different world of inquiry altogether.
If you are looking for evidence, and you want to be a good neuroscientist, consider how you would you would translate neurological events into events that are not neurological. There is no assumed ignorance. Just do it. If I asked you to do this in any other case of identifiable connectivity, you wouldl be appalled at the presumption that one could make a scientific claim with out this connection in place. So, just make it. If you cannot, and you can't, you may continue on in your fashion. But you would be thoroughly disabused about the foundational validity of your claims.
Or you can exercise your curiosity and ask questions like, how is it that ideas and object are related? I cannot apprehend an object apart from the understanding, so is it that objects cannot be considered as a "stand alone" presence? What does stand alone even mean at the basic level of inquiry? And on and on.
Pseudo metaphysics? Yes, I despise this sort of thing. I am interested in authentic metaphysics.

-I think I understand what you want to say. You are misusing the term "observation" and that creates a miscommunication. To set things straight , of course we can observe the act of believing and knowing by many methods. We can either compare brain scans in relation to specific stimuli, check blood profile , behavior etc.
What we can't observe is how others individuals subjectively experience those states. This is because it is a subjective experience!
Our goal is not to experience other peoples experiences!!!!! Its nonsensical to even suggest it! What w can do is to verify the processes responsible for the experience. We can do that with objective methods of investigation. — Nickolasgaspar

You have to read more carefully, and then think more carefully. I did say, "even in one's interior observations." I do suspect your problem is that you don't have a capacity to think beyond the models provided the science text. Observe the thought, the experience rising within. Observe that YOU are in a believing state. To observe this is an obvious and simple matter. You have beliefs and you know this. So, there you are believing the sun is out or the cat is sleeping, and conviction is, say, upon you. Now ask, how is it this belief state has verification? That is, clearly you believe and trust your belief, but what is this trust grounded upon? It is purely an intuitive presence of belief that determines this, but because this is given without a justificatory grounding, then it sits there, indeterminate, believing, but at its basis, indeterminate. Of course, you can say, this indeterminacy is the best we can do. We do not live in the mind of God, and so all knowledge claims are like this. And I say, brilliant. This is our indeterminacy.

The more time you spend trying to see this, the more you understand that this condition is not remote from our existence. It is only remote FROM the pov of the presumption of knowing, which is pervasive in all things, like passing the salt and taking a bus. This philosophical perspective is THE perspective: a suspension of the "pass the salt" affairs in order to examine things at a level where presumption itself can be interrogated. Philosophy asks, what is belief?

The "knowing of anythings" is the process of interacting with the world and composing objective descriptions about it. Knowledge is any claim that's objectively in agreement with current facts and carries Instrumental value. Everything gets in our brain by empirical interactions. If you have ever observed babies growing up, you will see that in their early years they know nothing about the world. By interacting with it and testing their assumptions (this is why they are prone to accidents lol) their small brains construct a mental model. This process is called Learning. We can see the changes in the brain and how learning things affect size and function. — Nickolasgaspar

This is just evasion. Or you really can't understand the question. Empirical interactions? But this is exactly what is being questioned. You can't say, oh well, these are just the way of it. Is this how science works?? Is a cloud just a cloud, with no care given to its anatomical analysis?

The think is we are talking about the knowledge on a phenomenon that is studied by a Scientific discipline so "understanding philosophy" or better listening to pseudo philosophical ideas on the mind or consciousness is irrelevant.
When we need to learn things about the causal mechanisms of a biological phenomenon....we study science.
When we want to understand the implications in real life of this knowledge, its value and meaning for our lives...then we use philosophy.
WE NEVER use philosophy to assume magical ontologies that are Unnecessary, Insufficient and Unfalsifiable.
Its not like they are the products and conclusions of our observations!! Someone made up an magical realm and placed his idea in a safe place away from falsification without any epistemic foundations! — Nickolasgaspar

Quite the opposite. What is magical are unexamined assumptions. You are fond of the world magical. This is a sure sign of a dogmatic personality. There is therapy for this; it is called reading outside what dictates your thoughts. It is not magic your fear. It is the unknown, the disconnect from the ready grasp, the letting go of certainty and familiarity, this frightens you. Understandable. It is disquieting to learn that the world is, at the basic level, alien to your ability to know.

-"This is an epistemic relation, not a causal one."
-Correct....observing doesn't cause the event you observe....where exactly do you see a problem???
I don't get what problem do you see in an event (volcano) and an observer observing the event (which is a different event on its own).
Could you point out where the problem is???? — Nickolasgaspar

It is the question that has been there throughout. "Observing doesn't cause the event you observe," THIS is just massively naive. What, is causality suspended to account for how you, the perceiver, can "reach out" to that over there? Remember, I am not thinking like aa phenomenologist at all here. I am thinking like an empirical scientist. Witness two distinct events and say the one has a relation to the other, it MUST BE a causal relation. Unless you have something else in mind for objects and there relations? Whatever it is, it will be reduced to a causal accounting.

I'm not a post-modernist or deeply read in Derrida, but I find myself agreeing for the most part. For me it seems that the anti-foundationalist conclusions of po-mo are an inevitable consequence of a process that began in earnest (perhaps) with the enlightenment project. We have peeled away the layers of the onion and found that there are only layers and ultimately nothing at the core. While this represents a freedom of sorts, it terrifies and outrages those who insist on foundations. Humans seem hard-wired for this, we navigate via certainty. The challenge for us all is how to reinvent ourselves in relation to this conception. My prediction in the short term is that the culture wars will lead us back into flailing 'certainties' and ever escalating cant. — Tom Storm

This "reinventing ourselves" sounds like Heidegger and Nietzsche before him. True, I think. But I would go one step further: I put aside terms like "hard wiring" for this. It suggests a resignation to some inevitable limitation that is undefined. One thing about onion layers is, if you will, the onion itself, which has layers, no doubt, questions about questions, and there is no way out of this. But that about which the questions apply sits there. This is existence. Can this be questioned? Of course. But there is in question the palpable world that does not belong to language. This deserves analysis as a palpable world. Tricky.

.

I think that what you're saying was already well known thousands of years ago, and was even discussed by Plato in his Cratylus dialogue.

And all this elaboration on speech and meaning were already discussed very sensibly by Locke, Reid, Priestley and others.

Was there more added later on? Very much so. Quite a lot.

I think you simplify analytic philosophy. People like Nagel, Haack, Tallis, McGinn and a few others are very, very good.

But, to each there own. — Manuel

Derrida is not Plato. Analytic philosophers have been very helpful for me. It is the sacrifice of content for the sake of clarity that I don't approve of. The world is, at its epistemic foundation, a really, impossibly interesting place. Philosophy should deal with this, not ignore it. Post modern theology, the so called French turn, following Husserl, Heidegger, Levinas et al, does this.

I strongly urge you to stop experimenting with oxygen deprivation.
The only things that do "fall away" in oxygen deprivation practice are your cells and tissues, specifically, your brain cells. It's an ascetic practice that doesn't lead to any noble attainment.

Again, I strongly urge you to stop experimenting with oxygen deprivation. — baker

Fear not, I breathe. It is not as radical as it sounds. But you are invited to wonder what the experience is about.

Why should I be content with someone else’s answers to that? — praxis

You certainly should not be. I take this question to be truly primordial, issuing form the the world, if you will, not the church. The church invents "answers" with its robes and solemn initiation rites, etc. Beneath all this is the question that is buried, It is a terrible impossible question the more it is pondered, something we loose a sense of while staring at our cell phones. Not to be cynical of modern life, which a like. But it is very, very weird, not to put too fine a point on it, to pull away from it and reclaim that original territory of wonder and terror.

A.k.a. hypoxia. — baker

Ahhh. But what is hypoxia? It is not a deficit of oxygen outside of the physiologist's lexicon. And there IS an outside of this.

No. Evolution is happening now. As long as environments with organisms change, there will be selective pressures to adapt in some way to those changes. For things to happen by accident implies that there was a goal or purpose in things being a certain way that somehow wasn't - as if the universe has a goal or purpose as existing without the existence of opposable thumbs, yet it still happened anyway. It also implies that you know how the universe was suppose to be (without the existence of opposable thumbs) yet they exist despite how you know it was suppose to be. Nothing happens by accident. What happens now is dependent on what has happened before. — Harry Hindu

It sounds like you are saying that by calling something accidental we imply the nonaccidental, and the nonaccidental is just presumptuous assumption the calling it accidental is supposed avoid. By calling something structureless, we assume structure in the calling.

But this is true, of course. The term accidental is defined in a contextual embeddedness, and it plays off other terms for its meaning. You speak from a position outside of this?

It's not clear that actual religious people think that way about religion. They are not relativists and doubters like that.

It's Easter time. The local Catholic parish sends out a monthly newsletter to everyone living here, including the non-Catholics. "This is the time of celebration, of the victory of life over death", "Christ has risen", and so on reads the newsletter.

To suggest that the people who wrote this newsletter believe that they are dealing with something merely constructed about the radical unknown??? — baker

I think you are right about that. But then, a newspaper deliverer does think of herself as, say, a pawn in the grand capitalist game. There is "living in" without pause or question, then there is stepping away into a broader context, and giving an account.

Religion is the broadest possible context, which is without form itself, brought down to earth, if you will, through the rituals and the candles, and the spooky dark church interiors (which I like), and so on. But ask aunt Betty who sits in a pew on Sunday, and she will tell you about Jesus and redemption, or the like.

Now that humankind has appeared on the scene we can begin to evolve more consciously. Certainly this can be done on the individual level: this forum is evidence of a will to psychical evolution. It may be a Morlock-Eloiesque evolution, but it always is. We found an okay body so now we can start to upgrade our brains and imaginations, wordskills and emotional life. On to homo misteriosus. — ZzzoneiroCosm

But then, one can put aside this kind of thing altogether, not dismissing it, just affirming it likely true in one way or another, then ask another question: This "evolutionary plateau" in which we find ourselves, what is this? What is the foundational description of it? This is phenomenological. The basic givenness of the world. Here, I would add, one discovers that all theory, certainly including that of evolution, is constructed out of the matrix of thinking afforded by this very givenness. In other words, evolution is a construct of the very thoughts that are supposed to explain things, itself included. The question is begged.

Actually, Buddhism of all schools stridently rejects the charge that it is nihilistic. It is a charge that was frequently made by its Brahmin opponents and was also characteristic of the early European intepretations of Buddhism. It's not 'annihilation of the world' but a clear insight into clinging to the apparent reality of sensations and concepts as inherently real. It's a subtle skill, and exceedinly hard to master - I don't claim to have mastered it in the least.

The point I tried to make, which I'm afraid has not come across, are the convergences between that characteristically Buddhist discipline of 'choiceless awareness' of the contents of consciousness and the idea of 'bracketing' that is found in phenomenology. That has been the subject of considerable commentary i.e. in the 'embodied cognition' movement. — Wayfarer

But nihilism can be taken both epistemologically as well as ethically. When I say annihilation of the world, I refer to language and culture that constitute what makes our existence what it is, It is not like the common thinking that all there is, is unity and particularity is just an illusion. I consider this to be, well, bad metaphysics. Annihilation is a temporal concept: I sit quietly doing nothing and in this I rush of thoughts and feelings fall away. I call the world these thoughts and feelings, speaking generally. The self as a constructed historical entity falls away, is forgotten, if you will.

I do think those "sensations and concepts" are inherently real. But they are interpretatively missing the mark, and the mark is invisible, so any kind of Hegelian, is you will, convergence is impossible to conceive. Presently I think we acknowledge it in "indeterminacy", which is the way I see metaphysics as a concept. As a lived experience, it is wonder and grief thrown upon the abyss from which all things come. But re. the reality of sensations and concepts, generally speaking: this has to be given existence as a presence. Important to see that, to put it all too simply, perhaps, they exist but they are wrong, or merely interpretative or indeterminate. The rub: the term 'reality' too is wrong, or indeterminate; that is, when I say a concept is real, I am simply saying there is something there.

Final definitions? All things are hermeneutically in play. Annihilation to me is saying, look, when we terminate thought and attachments, an extraordinary stillness emerges that intimates something the usual engagements obscure and distract from. Many want to describe these engagements indifferent ways, and they are, many of them right. But the intimation cares nothing for this. It simply beckons with profound irresistible presence, and when one actually follows, s/he annihilates the world.

Finally, the idea of bracketing: As I see it, this is a momentous kind of thing to do. Why others don't see it this way I will never know. I read Rudolf Otto's Idea of the Holy and I am instantly interested, while others are repulsed. I can't go into why this is.

There are non-religious approaches to that end. I think the utility is in binding tribes, which can offer well-being, but if well-being were essential then I think religions would be better at the task. There is no reason they couldn’t be better at it. — praxis

But religions have that dimension of the radical unknown, the metaphysics. I can think of many ways cultures take of the world and systems of thought as a utility, true, but religion is a "utility" or perhaps a complex heuristic (a provisional dealing with) that has as its object no object at all, and the constructed object, its rites and symbols, are these weird, threshold institutions that deal with this foundational position of our indeterminacy in all things. This is why philosophers like Quine and Wittgenstein would not dismiss religion. It's a metaphysical necessity, because the world is, beneath all of our affairs, indeterminate, especially indeterminate in value and ethics (Oh why are we born to suffer and die? is not an vacuous metaphysics).

There are more things than there are words! The Tao that can be named is not the true Tao! The named are things that are critical to our well-being and I mean those things that are both harmful and/or beneficial; that which is neither, our minds ignore for a good reason in my humble opinion viz. to nip information overload in the bud. We've evolved to sense only mates, prey and predators and anything else that gets caught in this sensory net, being the right size in a manner of speaking. — Agent Smith

Perfectly right. I never argue with what is supported by observation and logic, and if religion were the kind of thing that could be handled in this way, I would defer to readily.
But it's not. Evolution and its ideas and theories taken as a given. We have to understand that evolution is not a theory about what is. It is a theory about how it got here and has nothing to say about the qualitative conditions of our existence. That the hand has an opposable thumb is entirely an "accident". There is no "principle of evolution" in the world moving things forward.

According to the instruction manual, Right View (twelve link chain of dependent origination, karma, rebirth, etc.) is doggedly claimed to be essential to liberation. — praxis

Right view is a method, and has to do with what is not liberation. As I see it, the matter is simple, but the language we fit to it, and the contextualization of it in our habits to schematize and endlessly "understand" what it leads to distortions.

It is hard to conceive that language itself is a utility. The four noble truths, Hindu metaphysics, and all we can think of is a just there as a "method" of grasping the world, a utility that serves one end: the security of well being. So what is well being? One can only discover this, and if the Hindus are right, and I am sure they have to be, then well being is off the charts.

Language is delimiting, pulls things down to its own terms. Finitude itself, it could be argued, is language.

I think however there are some very useful pearls of insights in Descartes and Cudworth (who is unknown) that really set the stage for a kind of special "power" in our souls, in which with our "cognoscitive" powers we are able to take stimulations (not objects) and enliven them.

Once this is cleared up a bit, I think one could proceed down the lines of "reduction" or Tallis "episteogony" and much else that follows. But before checking consciousness, I think there are some obscure factors in play, which allow the mind to have the capacities it does. — Manuel

On postmodern thought, it tends to be ignored because it is so damn mysterious and apart from normal thinking. But I think philosophy makes it clear that this is where questions lead. Analytic philosophers essentially say, oh well, nothing we can do, might as well talk about things we can talk about, which always leads massive question begging about everything they say. Continental ideas move forward into the "threshold". As for Derrida:

As I see it, one needs to take the matter all the way to Derrida, which is not a happy thought for people, because he is deliberately obscure. But what makes him so important is his arguments that show that language is, in its nature, not metaphysically groundable at all. Rorty like Derrida for this. One cannot ever escape the "regionalism" of a language use, is the way I think of it, borrowing from Heidegger who borrowed from Husserl, and this means that when I say, there is my cat, the term cat is not AT ALL a definite designation. It is a kind of context of terms, all related to cats that are not the term cat but "gather" in cat regional thought and relevance and out of this emerges, there is my cat, which is itself certainly definite enough in the usage, but the philosophical analysis yields no definiteness at all. It is, as I think of it, a diffuse meaning, spread out in a web of interference, no single referent of which is itself singular.

This is, I think close, and right. Caputo examines Derrida's thinking in terms of apophatic theology/philosophy: It puts language as, as I see this, a self annihilating position. Deconstruction is self deconstructing as the deconstructive analysis has no exceptions. This is Derrida's version of hermeneutics: radical. Language, to put it in a familiar way, never "touches" the world, for reference is impossible in the familiar way this is thought of. Reference is a "spread out" in language "regions" in which the difference of the interplay expresses as singularity in speech and thought and writing.

So, our language is not in an analogical relation to God's, if God is conceived as being anything at all, because all of our terms are in their nature, at the level of basic analysis, diffuse and in regional "play". And we are, as Caputo cites Eckhart, finally "free of God", that is, God the concept, the idolatry of know ing. Apophatically liberated.

Never tried that. Sounds like a bold approach. "Air hunger" - that's got to focus the mind — ZzzoneiroCosm

It is the ultimate control, watching air hunger rise, then calming it down, but it insists, but there are moments when the massive energy of thought and feeling fall away.

Actually, if you think about it, this 'using the concept of spirit only figuratively' is not a million miles from Aquinas' analogical language. — Wayfarer

As I see it, one needs to take the matter all the way to Derrida, which is not a happy thought for people, because he is deliberately obscure. But what makes him so important is his arguments that show that language is, in its nature, not metaphysically groundable at all. Rorty like Derrida for this. One cannot never escape the "regionalism" of a language use, is the way I think of it, borrowing from Heidegger who borrowed form Husserl, and this means that when I say, there is my cat, the term cat is not AT ALL a definite designation. It is a kind of context of terms, all related to cats that are not the term cat but "gather" in cat regional thought and relevance and out of this emerges, there is my cat, which is itself certainly definite enough in the usage, but the philosophical analysis yields no definiteness at all. It is, as I think of it, a diffuse meaning, spread out in a web of interference, no single referent of which is itself singular.

This is, I think close, and right. Caputo examines Derrida's thinking in terms of apophatic theology/philosophy: It puts language as, as I see this, a self annihilating position. Deconstruction is self deconstructing as the deconstructive analysis has no exceptions. This is Derrida's version of hermeneutics: radical. Language, to put it in a familiar way, never "touches" the world, for reference is impossible in the familiar way this is thought of. Reference is a "spread out" in language "regions" in which the difference of the interplay expresses as singularity in speech and thought and writing.

So, our language is not in an analogical relation to God's, if God is conceived as being anything at all, because all of our terms are in their nature, at the level of basic analysis, diffuse and in regional "play". And we are, as Caputo cites Eckhart, finally "free of God", that is, God the concept, the idolatry of know ing. Apophatically liberated.

:clap: Hence the links that have been discerned between Pyrrho (ancient Skepticism), and Buddhism, which has emerged in the last couple of decades (e.g. see Everard Flintoff 'Pyrrho and India'). From this you can discern a 'family resemblance' between Husserl's ‘epoché’ and the Buddhist ‘śūnyatā, between the Skeptic 'ataraxia' (tranquility) and the Buddhist 'nirodha' (cessation) which connotes 'suspension of judgement'. e.g. from an OP on 'emptiness — Wayfarer

I have read, and pondered, the Prajnaparamita, and, of course, one can easily see why thinking like this is all but absent from our culture and thinking. It calls for the annihilation of the world, if taken to its conclusion. And clearly, I'm not talking about the physicist's world. "There is no world, only worlds," and whatever that which is the ground of all things may "be" it certainly does not good to call it substance or energyat the level of basic questions. These terms are fine for science, and we all use them all the time. As I see it, śūnyatā is the term that, while it cannot be explained positively, it can be gotten to around the back door, so to speak. I've listened to lectures and read a scattering of commentaries about this, and the best I can think of to indirectly account for it is Husserl and his ilk. For Buddhism is a "way of liberation" at its core, not a metaphysics, which, as I see it, is its great virtue.

I cannot well access scholarly work in Buddhism or Hinduism; I'm too embedded in other things. But then, I do believe all roads lead to śūnyatā. To me, this is an annihilation of the world and time. Time is the doing of things and the interest that motivates this, the anticipation, the assumed goal and its cultural generative sources issuing forth the doing and the doing of thinking and feeling. This is Kierkegaard (minus the Christian obsession). This is K's analysis of the concept of original sin, this cultural transfixity.

These ideas about time, the world and annihilation are radical, and I know have no place in the thoughts of normal thinking.

A second difficulty is that Buddhism's aims were soteriological (i.e. concerned with salvation or liberation), but in our minds such philosophies must necessarily depend on the acceptance of dogma (which is what we equate with 'faith'). So here we're presented with something that seems paradoxically like a 'skeptical faith'. — Wayfarer

Yes, I should have read down for this. Soteriological, eh? Never heard of this term, but I guess I knew there had to one for this. I should have read Suzuki, but instead, I stuck with Allan Watts for the popular read.
On dogma, K's book's full title is Concept of Anxiety: A Simple Psychologically Orienting Deliberation on the Dogmatic Issue of Hereditary Sin. Not well received by the church. He was a true threshold personality, though. Couldn't actually become a knight of faith himself, such is the trouble with having a genius mind--too entertaining.

I've been an avid student of meditation for over 20 years: the obsession settled into a placid daily practice. And I have to say - after twenty years' experience - I don't see meditation as offering a link to nothingness. (I played around with notions of nothingness for a long time....) I see it as the ability to sustain near-sleep and near-dream states while maintaining full to partial conscious awareness. — ZzzoneiroCosm

I practice stopping my breath. Genuinely interesting, for air hunger comes along and is very insistent. And I have to ignore this, tame it, and there is, beneath the breath, if you will, an extraordinary sense of the presence of, well, presence. I can see that our thoughts and attachments are not abstractions, but real energic forces. A thought is not an abstraction. It requires energy to think, that is, a production of interest, and it "covers" the world up. And what it covers, and this is where it gets impossibly weird, is the Real world, which we never see in our everydayness.
Yes, doable. But certainly not everyone's cup of tea.

But those figures you mentioned are good, I just really dislike postmodernism. That's where I draw the line. — Manuel

But then, there is that very mysterious phenomenological reduction. People take this as best they can, and even Husserl was surprised by the effect it had on students, making ”protestants out of catholics and catholics out of protestants.” The reduction is an essential part of philosophical insight, I would argue.

..and this cannot be done; hence the approach taken here will not work. — Banno

What does it mean that it cannot be done? It is not a breaking of logical rules, and one cannot really argue against it. It is not an argument. It is a reductive method of discovery and a description of what unfolds. It takes, well, curiosity, motivation to explore the claim that intuitive insight can be made clearer.

Secondly, by the time of the Investigations it is clear that whatever categories we might posit are arbitrary in that we might posit quite different categories if it suited our purpose. They are not about how the world is but about what we do in the world - we ought not look for their meanign but for their use. — Banno

But the important point is that logical restraints have no hold on content. Atomic propositions being empirical or not begs the question: what is it for something to be empirical at all? What is logical restraint, anyway? The term "logic" is abstracted from judgment. The conditional structure is abstracted from time (if....then...is a forward looking concept). The point is, all categorical thinking is interpretative, and certainly not prohibitive of what can be present in the world. All of the glory of the divine presence could appear before us, and reason would not blink (said Hume). Reason is an empty vessel and what is empirical is about content.
As to the Investigations, I see no help in the matter of the concept of religion. It is not a question of language and how it works. It is about value and ethics, that is, metavalue and its correlative, metaethics. Religion is about the Good, as Witt said. The point I would make is that this has extraordinary implications.

I still don’t follow. Concepts are interdependent and are meaningless in isolation. — praxis

Exactly! But that fire on your finger, is THAT a concept? It certainly can be taken up AS a concept, but it most certainly is not a concept, and therefore is stands before one as the world, and not an interpretation of the world, a concept.

That ought be an "or"? That metaphysical speculation is vacuous is not just an assertion, but is demonstrated. Pointing out that Heidegger or Husserl indulged does nothing but display their emptiness. — Banno

It is demonstrated on the premise that knowing the world is either an empirical knowing or an analytic knowing (putting aside Quine's attack on analyticity). But these are false categories. Look at it like this: there is nothing at all that is prohibitive of content in neither Wittgenstein nor Kant. These ideas of sensory intuition or states of affairs are, at the very basic level, arbitrary. What IS it for something to be empirical? This is an open concept. Kant's noumena is everywhere in all things. The phenomenon is, if you will, noumenally saturated. It simply can be no other way, for that would require a metaphysical restriction, which is nonsense.

I'm interested in the link between Husserl and "meditation yoga." Can you say more about this? — ZzzoneiroCosm

Keep in mind, these are my thoughts about Husserl and others. I'm not just recalling text.

What is the phenomenological reduction? It is a suspension of the natural way we relate to the world, the everydayness, the science, and the implicit default interpretations that are always there in a given moment of conscious existence, in the effort to discover the "things themselves". This is not the Kantian thing in itself, impossibly remote, but is the intuited world that, if you follow Husserl, stands there before one as "pure phenomena". His is a "method" of achieving intuitive purity, the true philosophical calling.

It is, or it can be, a very strange business, even mystical. A normal way living is just these assumptions always in play. It is the basis for the familiarity we have with the world: it's language, thought, judgment that rules one's sense of normalcy, and these are not things that are simply there, like we think of plain objects being stable and inert. We conceive of the world in time, and this is a very important thing to get straight if one wants to understand anything existential philosophers have to say. Not that we live in time, as a physicist would put it. We ARE time. Time is the foundation of our existence. So Husserl's reduction, this turning away from normal naturalistic default understanding of the world, is a turning away from the temporal dynamic that constitutes our lived lives. Not ALL of what constitutes our lived lives, obviously, for that would turn one into James' infantile "blooming and buzzing". But it is an explicit cancelling of what is not there before one as a direct intuition of the world. For me, it is rediscovery of something profound, and I won't put too fine a point on that.

So what does this have to do with meditation? The reduction is a radical suspension of knowledge claims that, if you will, usually run our lives, and if successful, the reduction is a kind of lifting of a foggy illusion of the presumption of knowing. (If this reminds you of the Pseudo-Dionysius' Cloud of Unknowing, it does so with me as well. Think also of Meister Eckhart--God, deliver me from God!). But the goal is to bring one to a pure apprehension of the world at the intuitive level, and this is exactly what meditation is all about, if you ask me, only meditation is the reduction radicalized to its limit: the annihilation of the world. To sit and "reduce" the moment to nothing at all.

This is not something that sits well with philosophy, of course. But then, what is philosophy if not the personal encounter, intimate and palpable. If not this, then Rorty was right: might as well teach literature. But he was wrong.

I don’t follow. Torture weekend is not as bad, in the mind of the torturer, relative to torture millennium in both quality and quantity, assuming the torturer feels that torture is bad to begin with. — praxis

Put aside attitudes, dispositions and judgment in the mind of anyone. It is an argument about the presence of suffering as such. The utility illustration is only meant show that comparative utility has no bearing at all on the actuality.

Look at it like this: the color yellow is, I would argue along with almost anyone else, as such is "almost" without meaning. Certainly we are forced to admit that there is a difference between language and contexts and the ways these establish the possibility of making "sense", on the one hand, and the bare phenomenon, on the other. But the bare phenomenon taken AS "yellow" is already contextualized among possible sentential and logical forms, and so, to identify yellow as being yellow is always already a contingent matter. But consider an instance of pain. The same holds as for yellow (the qualia of yellow, if you like), but pain has, after analysis has cancelled out all contingencies, a residuum, which is, I argue, the essence of ethics: the metaethical good, bad.

If it is preferred, the matter here is about the qualia of pain and bliss (etc.), embedded, as all things, in contexts of contingency. Reduce the color yellow to its bare phenomenal presence and you have something radically different from a reduction of pain to its presence, which is evidenced by, say, that intensity you experience when your arm is twisted or ankle sprained.

I don’t think either of them did that though. More that they were scrupulous about the use of conceptual language for what is beyond its scope.

The distant cause of these problems was the loss of the use of analogical language and symbolic imagery. That in turn goes back to Duns Scotus ‘univocity of being’. It was that which foreclosed the possibility of there being expressions conveying different modes or levels of being.

(But I’m not going to be able to develop on that right now as it’s not the kind of dialogue that lends itself to tapping out characters on an iphone in a car park. But see this post.) — Wayfarer

Not more scrupulous; emphatic. These philosophers drew a very distinct line not to be crossed, and left very little room to vaguery or intimations.

But this loss of analogical language is intriguing, in that it suggests that what it means to "fall" away from something foundational and profound (Heidegger talks like this, and Kierkegaard, but with a Christian bent) in our existence lies with a turn toward the categorical thinking brought on by secularism. "Analogical" relations? What are these? Seamless living in the world? My cat is like this. But then, so was the Buddha. It is the Question that intrudes in this natural complacency.

Wittgenstein did not put an end to metaphysics, so much as showed that it is better done in action than in philosophical speculation. — Banno

Just to add, and this is where he got it wrong, in the same way Kant got it wrong: it is not impossible of vacuously speculative to discuss metaphysics. This is way of positivism. Heidegger thought it is through poetry that we can give form to the "wonder" of the world, but this limits the possibility of revelatory description. to approach this kind of thing, Husserl's phenomenological reduction provides the method, which is not qualitatively different from meditation yoga.

I'd go back a few more years, to Moore's Principia, to trace the notion of the good. Moore identifies it, but I think fails to justify it. I suspect Wittgenstein to have been influenced by Moore in this regard. It would be interesting to take Wittgenstein's treatment of Moore's "here is a hand" and apply it to Moore's Good. There are interesting parallels.

But yes, I agree with Wittgenstein. Where are we going? — Banno

Sorry if this gets tedious for you. Part one, in brief: Moore went on about the good being a non natural property, and back then, they say, most philosopher's took this for granted. Times do change. But look closely. Contingent goods are easy, for they are everywhere in good violins and bad (not good) spectacles. Contingency is about explaining the good of something (or bad) with conditions that make a particular thing good or bad, and the world is made of contingent propositions; in Wittgenstein's "facts" or "states of affairs", in that great books of facts in his Lecture on Ethics, there is no value in the world, just as he says in the Tractatus. What he means is, as you say, Moore's "good".

I find this "good' and "bad" the only route I can think of to ground God, and the argument goes to the contingent and the absolute. There are no anthropomorphisms here, no straw person arguments that try to make metaphysics out of a human personality. We deal with actualities. There is a reason Wittgenstein took value seriously, just to swat it down as without meaning (just as Kant did with metaphysics): he denies value having value because such a thing is beyond speech, beyond the logical grid of possible meaningful propositions. But he did say in Culture and Value, "What is Good is Divine too. That, strangely enough, sums up my ethics."

And on this he was right. Take a contingent good, as in, this is a good knife. Contingency is about context. It is a good knife because it is sharp, balanced, comfortable, and so on. But this is, of course, not an absolute claim about the knife's goodness, and contexts are accidentals. The knife could be for Macbeth. Then all the goodness of the sharpness is gone; in fact, a sharp knife for Macbeth is a bad knife. This is a critical juncture in the argument. Contingency demands the possibility of a denial of the goodness or badness. Good pianos, running shoes can always be second guessed, by setting the goodness of the thing in a good-denying context, by "relativizing" the good in a different way. The good can always be reset in some alternative language game, if you will, in which it is not good.

But all of this contingency of explaining things in the world assumes there is nothing that is truly absolute, which was Wittgenstein's point--nothing "in the world," for the world is a logical place, and value has no logical identity. What does this mean? Moore's non natural property: put a flame to your finger and hold it there a few moments to get the point. Reduce the event by suspending all facts that might be descriptively present, like damaged flesh, c-fibers firing in the brain, and so on. Once all facts are removed, there is in this a residuum that is non factual (if you follow Witt, who follows Hume; debatable, though). It is the value. The argument here rests solely with this. This value AS SUCH cannot be second guessed, unlike the knife's sharpness-as-goodness that can be turned around instantly, this experience of the badness of the pain taken outside of any contextretains is badness. Impossible with contingencies in the world. There is no such meaning to a knife good in its sharpness free of context.

Value is absolute. Not value here or there, but the presence of value as such is absolute. Try an argument from utility: the philosopher's evil demon is up to no good, and insists you torture one child for the weekend, or a thousand other children will be tortured for a thousand years a far greater intensity. Utility says go for the weekend, but note: this decision does not diminish one whit the badness of the weekend affair. Clearly, and this is the point, there is NOTHING that can diminish this, which tells us we are in the presence of an absolute. There is no way possible, it is apodictically impossible, to relativize this badness away.

God is part two. But I have little confidence that you find part one compelling, so far. No one does at this point. It takes convincing, but keep in mind this is Wittgenstein's argument, essentially. The "bad" of the flame, the torture. or, speaking generally, suffering, is entirely without logical status for Witt because it cannot be be observed, and set against something else for a contingent bearing. All bads and good come to this. They are is "stand alone" no matter how they are caste and recaste.

I don't agree. Not that I think Quine or Kripke are too interesting, but contemporary continental philosophy is pretty bland to me.

Chomsky is excellent. I think people often read into some superficial notions of "scientism", which I think is a mistake.

But Kant is fantastic. Schopenhauer maybe better. — Manuel

But if you like Kant, then you'll adore Heidegger. And Husserl. And Fink; here is an intro:

instead of soaring up over the world "speculatively," we, in a
truly "Copernican revolution," have broken through the confinement of the natural
attitude, as the horizon of all our human possibilities for acting and theorizing,
and have thrust forward into the dimension of origin for all being, into the constitutive source of the world, into the sphere of transcendental subjectivity

Fink, Husserl's colleague and disciple, follows on the heels of Kant in his Sixth Cartesian Meditation. Haven't had the time to look carefully into Schopenhauer. Soon.

Yet as Wittgenstein himself protested again and again in the Tractatus, the propositions of natural science “have nothing to do with philosophy” (6.53); “Philosophy is not one of the natural sciences” (4.111); “It is not problems of natural science which have to be solved” (6.4312); “even if all possible scientific questions be answered, the problems of life have still not been touched at all”

A brilliant passage. But Witt, like Kant, in denying metaphysics any meaning, opened the door for positivism. You know, the only wheel that rolls. Positivistic approaches ignore anything that cannot be defined and justified clearly. An emasculation of "truth'!

see my notes under "Moral considerations" in In praise of Atheism for a discussion of Abraham. The Knight of Faith is immoral. — Banno

I read it. So I wonder if you would be willing to engage the issue. Let's say I understand all of the arguments, because I do, frankly. None of these capture's the essence of God. As with all ideas, its true nature is revealed only when the "material" basis of its meaning is discovered, and God the idea has a lot of baggage. The first question is this: What is the good? Two answers. There is good in the contingent way, like a good couch or a good knife. And there is the Good. This latter is the meta-good, and the concept in play is meta-value. It begins with Wittgenstein's Tractatus:

In the world everything
is as it is, and everything happens as it
does happen: in it no value exists—and if
it did exist, it would have no value.
If there is any value that does have
value, it must lie outside the whole sphere
of what happens and is the case

If you prefer not to go into this, I'm fine with that. But on the other hand, it IS the only way to approach the issue of God, of this I am sure.

Anyway, the issue begins with value. Do you agree with Wittgenstein?