That depends on your theology. — EugeneW

Is there nothing there theology cannot handle? Something that persists regardless?

But maybe I'm just old school. Others may believe that feeling now trumps thinking. Or the hermeneutics of approved texts is where it is at. — apokrisis

But one gets hung up on clarity with just this rigorous standard, and the when things get interesting, clarity gets dogmatic, as if the best we can do is stick with old vocabularies. Nah! Not that feeling trumps thinking; but that feeling is there for the analysis

The former lines up with analytic philosophy. — Constance

I should add, minus the attitude.

Everyone is a philosopher as we all seek wisdom in whatever we're doing. Thieves want to be more successful etc etc so the term is really useless. — Shwah

Yes, the philosophy of knitting....ponderous, provocative. But then, why are we born to suffer and die? One of my favorite philosophical questions. It can be just knitting with an attitude; or, it can be so profound it'll drive you mad. The former lines up with analytic philosophy. The latter with continental. More or less.
It is truly something, one could argue, to really grasp the indeterminacy that all presumption to know.

...to live in a vast and proud tranquility; always beyond... — Nietzsche

Yes. And in solitude. Philosophy takes one the doorstep of religion, and there you sit like some abandoned child. Don't let them take you IN!!!! But stay there, take a look around the place; look at terrain, peak through a window. Take notes. THEN: Find the SOB who left you there!

This is a topic by itself!
Can you at least describe it shortly? — Alkis Piskas

One way to look at it is to note that all knowledge is justified belief, and justification is always presented in a logical form, as is necessitated since a proposition without logical form is literally nonsense. But where is the justification for logic's validity? It has none: logic cannot explain itself because the explaining would require logic. Logic is "its own presupposition."

It is because logic is a quantitative delimitation of anything it applies to.
— Constance
Can you explain this please? — Alkis Piskas

The world "out there" that we talk about all the time has nothing of the values we give it in doing so, it can be argued. I observe a lamp, but the singularity of the one lamp is only brought about by the application of a concept, a general term, When I look casually at the lamp, I acknowledge its singularity, just that lamp and not a table or a chair, either. All of this singling out is not part of the thing over there we call a lamp. We do this when we observe it.

Knowledge is a quantifying process. When we say some or all or one, logic calls this quantifying. Just talking about a thing at all is a quantifying act. (I remember Hegel's discussion: to say something is here, or there, or beyond, and so on, is to apply a general idea: many things are here or there, so the conditions of the application of the terms are , if you will, tokens of a type, particulars of a universal, and in this occasion, applicable. The point would be that you acknowledge this to be an independent singular perception, but actually, it really is not like this at all. As you observe, you condition the observed.

I can see some truth in all this, esp. concerning "divisibility". However, I think that Zeno's "paradoxes" are much easier to explain --or rather, to reject: space and time are assumed to be discontinuous and thus divisible. Which is a fallacy. Space and time are continuous and thus indivisible. Neither of them has a start, middle or end. We can only divide them arbitrarily for description purposes. Thus, we get distances in space and periods in time. These serve to measure and compare things with each other.

Every so-called "paradox" that based on a fallacy is a "pseudo-paradox". Zeno's are among them.

I can talk also about the remaining elements --God and Einstein's space time-- but that would overburden this post! — Alkis Piskas

Right. Interesting. You might find Kierkegaard's take on concept of time enlightening:

If time is defined correctly as infinite succession, it may seem obvious that it should also be defined as present, past, and future. This distinction is, however, incorrect if considered as implicit in time itself, because the distinction arises only through the relation of time to eternity, and through eternity’s reflection in time. If a foothold could be found in the infinite succession of time, that is, a present, which was the dividing point, then the division would be quite correct. However, precisely because every instant, as well as the sum of the instants, is a process (a passing by), no instant is a present, and in time there is accordingly neither a present nor a past nor a future. Thinking that this division can be upheld is due to an instant’s being spatialized,

Kierkegaard, Soren. The Concept of Anxiety: A Simple Psychologically Oriented Deliberation in View of the Dogmatic Problem of Hereditary Sin

Note this idea of a spatializing of time. A provocative notion. He is saying that in space things appear fixed, settled, but time is not this. Real time is a process that has no parts like past, present future. It is a seamless "passing by".

I agree with what you have written.

The question is why are geometry and reality very different

For me, the reason is that relations are foundational to our logic, yet relations have no ontological existence in the external world.

This explains why geometry and reality are very different, the world is alogical, language is self-referential, we live in epistemology and the world is utterly metaphysical.

If there was a more persuasive explanation why logic and reality are very different than because of the the nature of relations, then this would be of interest. — RussellA

What? That sounds like something I would say. I probably take it further than you. If language is self referential, the there are two ways to think about this. One way says the world as the world is bound up with the ways we know it; ontology and epistemology cannot be separated and my coffee cup IS a coffee cup AS a bundled phenomenon. The idea of the cup is literally the cup-thing itself. So, I point to my cat, and the pointing, the concept, the predelineation of the past informing the present occasion as well as the anticipation of what the "future cat" will be, do, all of this is constitutive of the occurrent apperception of my cat. All of a piece. Any separation of parts would be an abstraction, which is fine because this is what analysis is, as long as we don't think analytically determined entities ae entities in their own right. Another way is to understand that the knowledge that brings the palpable thing into understanding and familiarity is qualitatively distinct from the palpable thing. To me, this is a very strong and even profound claim. It is not about some noumena that is postulated but beyond sight and sound; it's about the palpable presence of the thing, and its being alien to the understanding, so their you are, confronting metaphysics directly. This is called mysticism.

Sartre may not have been a mystic, but his Nausea has very strange encounters between Roquentin and the world (the chestnut tree, etc) which are close.

Perhaps it is sufficient to know what pragmatically works. I turn the ignition key on my car and the engine starts. I don't need to know why the engine starts, all I need to know is that turning the key starts the car. Why not treat the external world as an empirical experience and not search for any sense beyond this. — RussellA

Because the world is an open concept, and where there is openness, there is inquiry. I guess philosophical inquiry has a value difficult to see. As an objective enterprise this is most true. But as a personal desire for understanding the world that is sincerely driven by need to know, this is always important.

My belief is that logic and reality are very different because of the nature of their relations, and this I can justify. However, my justified belief that logic and reality are very different because of the nature of their relations can never be knowledge, as I can never have a true understanding of a reality that is relation-free using reasoning where relations are fundamental. — RussellA

On the other hand, logic is not nothing. An idea is not nothing.

This is catastrophically false, but none of your co-respondents noticed nor cared, even though every single one of them is fully immersed in it, so.....you got off scot-free. Almost. — Mww

I'm so glad you came to save the day. You need to put a little meat on those bones. You have read the Transcendental Dialectic? But then, the notion of pure reason is no empirical concept. What metaphysics do you have in mind?

There are also aspects that are clearly deterministically explicable , like the child who didn’t understand or the schizophrenic who heard voices telling them to kill. In P.F. Strawson’s famous paper ‘Freedom and Resentment’, he distinguishes between such obvious examples where ethical judgement doesn’t apply, and examples where what he calls our reactive emotional-valuative moral attitudes do apply. He concludes that we should listen to our reactive emotions that drive us toward retributive justice. My question for you is how you parse valuative emotions like anger. Nussbaum and Pereboom reject anger because they see it as aimed at payback, retribution and revenge, which are backward looking valuations. — Joshs

I read the Strawson and I think he makes an excellent case for explaining the constitution of our mutual moral regard for others and how he shows that "the preparedness to acquiesce in that infliction of
suffering on the offender which is an essential part of punishment is all of a piece with this
whole range of attitudes of which I have been speaking." Yes, we do live in these complex attitudinal relationships with others, and, if I take his meaning, determinism, while he admits, the truth or falsity of a general thesis of determinism would not bear on the rationality" of our choices or attitudes, he wants to establish a compromise. This is not an ontology. It is not engaged in asking, what can we say about the the being and its foundational features? It is rather saying, we must have certain " reactive attitudes" (generalized or specific) in place in order for moral agency itself to make sense, and these presuppose accountability, responsibility, guilt, innocence and other.
An interesting enlightening essay for me. I too "lean" away from determinism in light of this kind of thinking. And all of the assumptions possessed within a society's system laws and morals have implicit prima facie validity. Of course, when taken as a whole, the system is massively imperfect. this land is mine. Why? Because I bought it, own it. How does the purchasing power of your position give you this right of ownership? I worked for it? Oh, you mean you "mixed your labor" in the world and this labor produced the right? But what if you didn't do a damn thing, and it was given to you? And what if the purchasing opportunity were only provided for a certain arbitrarily geographically determined few? And what if you legally manipulated the system....and what if you lived in a miserable environment and grew up with no educational standards at all and your purchasing power is near the minus numbers; and on and on.
The point I would make is that IN this defacto system of "reactive attitudes" the need for self correction pushes against this fabric of consensus, and enlightened objections are grounded in determinative arguments: A person's successes are determined by the mere giveness of circumstances and abilities. Failures have reasons. Strawson is right to say there is a tender balance in the inhibiting and permitting good will and compassion and this must go on (which I think is the gist).

But inquiry is the spoiler, as usual. And it is not that inquiry about basic assumptions is going to be popular. this is always reserved for the study hall. If those who write about such things were on a boat, and the boat sank, it would take most of the readership with it. At any rate, I look at freedom very differently. The hammer head flies off, I am thrown into a discontinuity, if only for a moment till processes take over once again. This second can be protracted. I think freedom lies there.

I am a strong believer that intuition and introspection are valid, powerful, means of gaining knowledge and understanding. But, in the end, their results are still subject to the scrutiny of observation, experimentation, and reason. When you give intuition primacy over those factors, you've left philosophy and crossed the border into the bleak wasteland of voodooism, mysticism, and Republicanism. — T Clark

Of course, you are right, if you take intuition to be simply the immediate response your brain hands you to something you encounter. A mother's intuition, or the common sense that tells you a woman's place in the kitchen or something Donald Trump might think of. These "prereflective" beliefs are notoriously ill-conceived. But logic? Geometry? There is an element of necessity here that will not yield to any analysis. We may have the knowledge claim of what this is wrong, and I am sure this is true; I don't think for a moment that we understand what causality "really" is, same for logic: we are paradigmatically bound, you could say, in this. But the pure intuition is not going anywhere. Impossibilities are not possible, and, as a pure intuition, a causeless effect is impossible.

It is not the only approach, not even close.
— Constance

Im sure there are a lot of approaches. I prefer the approach the theory is the reality.

What happens is science's views become derivative, and primacy goes to it the Cartesian center
— Constance

I disagree. Scientific views become reality.

You can deny there is such a thing, which is fine; but you have arrived at a foundation for discussing things philosophically: phenomenology.
— Constance

Phenomena lie at the foundation. Indeed. But there exists stuff behind the phenomena. Scìence can lift the curtain and make that stuff visible. It's all a perception, I agree. But a truthful one.

Physics is now derivative, and this means its explanatory basis as a science with all of its paradigmatic historical progression, is held to be reducible to affairs at a more basic order.
— Constance

Physics is now a derivative? I don't agree. All natural processes have a fundamental basic blocks. Truly existent matter. True, its nature remains unknown, though we can feel it by eating it.

Not fantasy. More real than real, if you like: the intuitive horizon that is presupposed by science. Hard to talk about, really, unless you read about it.
— Constance

More real than real? You mean what the nature of matter is? Then I agree. It's the content, the charge of matter that gives us consciousness. It's not that hard to talk about. — EugeneW

It is not as if I expect you to see this and it does take work to familiarize yourself. But if all you read is science, you will never grasp phenomenology. This is the way of it with all things. Kant through Derrida has to be read. A must if you are going to talk about the foundations of knowledge claims.

And just look at how dismissive you are of something that altogether denies you want you want. Brains cannot do what you insist must be assumed. No way in good intellectual conscience you can think like this. When you find yourself at the very basis of your thinking about something, and the whole thing falls apart, it's time to move on to something that doesn't do this.

Sayin you don't agree is not an argument. By all means, make your case.

I was that someone. So I responded and it is exactly the idea that is being discussed here. And, by the way, yes Russell was exactly contradicting the basic intuition that a spontaneous cause is impossible. — T Clark

No, He was arguing that he could not make sense of it. The intuition is without an arguable basis. When we talk about it, and caste the intuition in terms, and these terms have associations, and these bind the argument to implications, and so on. This is how this goes. This intuition qua intuition is not assailable.

So, is it your position that your intuition trumps reason? Common sense must be right? I know the feeling you are talking about. When someone says that x caused y, I know what they mean. I've thought about that a lot and come to the conclusion that, except in a few very simple situations, it just doesn't work. — T Clark

Intuition is far from common sense. It simply stands alone. It would be like talking about qualia, but then, qualia, like being appeared to redly, really is not discussable. The moment you drop language, you stare dumbly, and when you try to discuss it, you find yourself deep in context, deep in the contingency of language, for red is not yellow or green, and color is a principle of subsumption, a classificatory term, and so on, and now one is on the road to arguing about being appeared to redly. Causality suffers the same fate. But there is in this something Other, this insistence it has, is an intuitive presence. It is "prior" to discussion. This is, again, NOT at all to say that there is some unassailable way to talk about this; not that we can definitively say what it is. This would be like explaining logic which says Wittgenstein, "shows itself" but not its generative nature.
When it is said that apodictic intuitions can be argued about, they are not arguing about the intuition; they are arguing about what is SAID about the intuition. You really should take a look at Russell's The Notion of Cause. Massively verbose.

Suffering is suffering. What more do we need? :wink: — Tom Storm

Some would say suffering requires redemption, not to invoke religious dogma, but as a stand alone phenomenon.

It's the only plausible way to approach reality. We assume what our brain creates is a true image. Wouĺd you assume we're given a fantasy? Would you prefer it? — EugeneW

But this is a critical point. It is not the only approach, not even close. What happens is science's views become derivative, and primacy goes to it the Cartesian center. You can deny there is such a thing, which is fine; but you have arrived at a foundation for discussing things philosophically: phenomenology. Physics is now derivative, and this means its explanatory basis as a science with all of its paradigmatic historical progression, is held to be reducible to affairs at a more basic order.
Not fantasy. More real than real, if you like: the intuitive horizon that is presupposed by science. Hard to talk about, really, unless you read about it.

Like Zisek (who I am not in the thrall of) I generally reverse the Dostoevsky idea - 'with god anything is permittable' - hence inquisitions, forced conversions, homophobia, holy wars, misogyny, slavery. There's not an egregious behavior available to humans that hasn't been justified by a direct appeal to god. Now I do understand that this has no bearing on whether god approves or not, it's just a comment on the alleged moralizing effects of theism. — Tom Storm

I did mean to say I am not that find of him, but found him at least a clever dynamic presence.

But god: it is a term that requires better clarity before one can talk well about it. It is a mostly fictional account of why we were born to suffer and die and what we need to do to get free of it. this makes it a concept about the world, not about the way narratives tell us things. The issue is suffering, plain and simple (and happiness, but this for latter), and God the creator, the omniscient, omnipotent, the omnibenevolent, all out the window, as logocentric overreach and manipulative, dogmatic hyperbolic dismissibles.
Suffering, then. I ask, what is it? A very good question.

I totally understand where you are coming from here. I'm sympathetic too. Personally I don't see god as realistic and I'll come back to this in a tick. For me morality is unlikely to be metaphysical - as far as I can tell morality is created to facilitate social cooperation in order to achieve our preferred forms of order. And maybe Rorty holds to a similar view. Generally communities come to a shared agreement about the core values. But I agree with you about the odd gap between Rorty's philosophy and the certainty of his 'real world' ethical positions.

Like Zisek (who I am not in the thrall of) I generally reverse the Dostoevsky idea - 'with god anything is permittable' - hence inquisitions, forced conversions, homophobia, holy wars, misogyny, slavery. There's not an egregious behavior available to humans that hasn't been justified by a direct appeal to god. Now I do understand that this has no bearing on whether god approves or not, it's just a comment on the alleged moralizing effects of theism. — Tom Storm

No, Zizek is entertaining, and seems right on several things, like his Hegelian ideas (of which I know relatively little). And I like his Marxism, which I think holds a powerful truth about societal injustice.
As to morality, as I am explaining to Josh above, knowing it will end up badly because my views on ethics are very unpopular, ethics needs to be looked at phenomenologically, and I simply mean it has to be analyzed for its essential features apart from what is endlessly and tediously hashed over in the attempts to make sense of our attitudes and beliefs and the world. Is there something that makes ethics a problematic that fitting to its nature. Long story short: value.
An arguable idea.

He went further. He said the idea of cause in physics is meaningless. — T Clark

But the idea is not what is discussed here. It is not logical discursivity that discovers the essential that tells us something cannot move unless acted on. What makes causality so intractable to analysis is that it is intuitive, and not empirical, and such things are not reducible. I mean, we can try to call them something else, but language always forces matters into its own designs, hence Russell's trouble. It is like talking about metaethics (now that I think of it). We deny that ethics has an absolute foundation, such that in any given ethical case, there at its core something absolutely coercive. This is not because there is nothing like this there, but because the moment you try to talk about it, you place it in the dubious hands language and analysis. Causality as an intuition is taken AS causality in play, in context. But as an intuition, it is unassailable. Causality the same, I argue.

Which sort of moral realism do you advocate for? Are you more a fan of Nussbaum and Pereboom’s blame skepticism (deterministically-based forward-looking blame) or P.F. Strawson (free will desert-based moral blame)? — Joshs

I am a moral intuitionist, and the issue is metaethics.

What is the anatomy of an ethical act? There are aspects that are not really ethical, which are facts. It is a fact that I borrowed the ax, and a fact that its owner is now drunk and bent on revenge, and so on. In themselves, none of these presents the essence of what makes an affair ethical. Facts have no ethical dimension. To see this, one has to turn to value, the strangest thing in existence.

I could go on, but only if you are interested.

Are you just regurgitating Kant here?
an hour ago — Joshs

An intuitive givenness. This comes for Husserl and his progeny. Reading Ideas one is invited to look closely at the reduction and what it is about. There is, in this intuitive apprehension of the world, something foundational. It doesn't matter if the predelineated time event of conscious awareness never "stops" for presence, so to speak. Not does it matter if 'time' is a contextual term, contingent and impossible be anything but what its embeddedness in thought allows.
What can I say, Kant opened doors.

Let’s be clear about the “two things” intraontology is talking about. It is the noetic and the noematic , the subjective and objective poles of experience. They are not separable, don’t appear individually and thus don’t form a synthesis or merger. But without these poles there could be no differential ,and without a differential there could be no time. — Joshs

So a differential is what is there, but simply the way we talk about what is there. Originally, it is all just "of a piece". Rorty I think would say yes to this. All talk is an abstraction from what is not talk at all. I think this is right.

But you wonder about my comment on time, and I see that this will not go well. It is a unique issue between me and Kierkegaard and the Prajnaparamita. Put baldly, I think time is the generative source of what divides the world. There is this constant precipice of anticipation, anxiety laden. Put aside Kierkegaard's religious thinking; put in place the actual practice of kriya yoga and ask, what kind of affair is this if not the annihilation of the burden of time.

Analytically, this kind of thinking is abysmal. It is born out in a manner that is revelatory. For me, when the reductive method is engaged, there is a "stilling" of the world in a way that theory does not touch. Here, Śāriputra, all things have the characteristic of emptiness,

I never read Husserl talking like this. He seemed surprised when students were becoming religious converts. Rorty fled philosophy because he felt it had reached its end. Half right. It reached its end centuries ago.

Is that so difficult to explain? Why? The world is constantly projected into our brain. Except when we sleep or are absent in thought or pondering. The brain is the receiver and creator at once. — EugeneW

This is almost willfully naïve (apologies). Do you really think a brain is a mirror to nature? Have you ever seen a mirror that looked like an opaque brain? Patently absurd.

If you know about virtual particles you would know that they laid the basis for thermodynamic time. They go back in forth in time. They were all that resided on the central singularity and the surroundings of that singularity set inflation off. There are infinite serial big bangs. Each has its own beginning of thermodynamic time. So the creation of the universe, with its infinity of big bangs, is not a temporal process. — EugeneW

But you don't seem to know about the presuppositional time, prior to anything a physicist might inquire about. Foundational time, call it: Prior to any quantum thought occurring the head of a physicist, or any thought at all, there is the foundational temporal construction that is there in the first place, "through which" thought passes and in which existence and its genesis can be examined. This is the level of assumptions we are dealing with. Causality, as with time, is a term that is foundational, not derivative (though it is always important to know that no knowledge claim is unassailable. The question here goes to, what level of inquiry is making determinations). The term is derivative, no doubt, and the way we understand it certainly is derivative, that is, contingent upon the language contexts it is brought to light in. But this "pure intuition" of causality is not derivative.
As someone who reads science, then assumes there is in this a foundation for all things, what you say is rather typical. You don't realize that what physicists do rests upon an intuitional givenness.

Exactly. Having not read widely in his oeuvre, I have sometimes wondered how Rorty justified his strong social justice beliefs. He one said the the meaning of life is 'to make the world better for our descendants'. Do you have a sense of how he arrived at this logically? — Tom Storm

He is often attacked for this, because on one can see how one can be so bound to the contingency of knowledge and truth, and hold that there is some moral imperative that fits into this. Simon Critchley:

The obvious (if banal) question to be raised here is how such a
committment to universality can be consistent with Rorty’s anti-foundational
‘relativism’(between quotation marks, for I take it that relativism would be the
name of a pseudo-problem for Rorty)

And then

Rorty just adds the caveat that an ironist
’Cannot be a “progressive” and ”dynamic” liberal’ (Rorty 1989, p. 91) and
cannot display the same degree of social hope as the liberal metaphysician. But
isn’t this just to suggest that the liberal ironist is regressive, sedentary and
hopeless- and what good is that sort of liberal?

You see, Rorty wants to have his cake and eat it too,. But you really can't do this. You find no metaphysical grounding that can secure a moralist position out of irony and contingency, and out of this the best that can be gotten is a weakened stand on affirming that "cruelty is the worst a person can do."

To me, wherever you go, you run into Dostoevsky's Ivan: no God, no morality. Metaphysics is the only thing that can save morality, which is why I argue a support for moral realism. Not everything is a "language game".

The universe was created. Still, it was not physically caused.

The motion of the ball on the Norton dome is not caused. — EugeneW

I don't know what the universe being created means. Causality is far more accessible and intuitive. And if you are going to support a motion uncaused, then you have what I would call a radical paradox on your hands. Radical in that it is bat shit crazy, and I don't mean this insultingly. Keep in mind that intuition is what drives the rational process that gives rise to problems like the Norton Dome. The denial of movement ex nihilo is the strongest intuitive insistence the mind can make. I am aware that there are equations and contrived thinking that have rigor and lead to counterintuitive conclusions. But when this happens, it is not a matter of resolution, but one of endless head scratching until it is resolved.

I think so. Rorty's neo-pragmatism is postmodernism and less mystical that Witty. Rorty's anti-foundationalist project seems primarily (and I only have general understanding of his work) to be opposed to what he sees are remnants of Greek philosophy - notions of idealism and absolute truth 'out there'. In Rorty's view humans are able to justify claims but can say nothing about Truth. — Tom Storm

Truth as something discovered and this discovery lays itself before one's eyes as a discovered object, event; he would say no to this. Knowledge, truth, the real, being, and so on, is to be pragmatically conceived, but he accepts this world of science as the only wheel that rolls, so he is willing talk as if this world had the objective standing scientists take it to have. Wittgenstein was the same, working in the Kantian tradition that the world is an empirical world and there is no sense beyond this. I think this kind of thinking gave rise to positivism and the decades of analytic philosophy.
Yes, to what you say about justification and truth and Witt. But this does leave knowledge claims hanging out there. Frankly, one is driven to wonder why there is such disagreement about this, these two sides of Kant: the metaphysical idealist (because as much as Kant wanted to deny metaphysics, the very notion of transcendental idealism says otherwise) vs the empirical realist. I think it comes down to the way we are put together. Some have metaphysics built into their faculties?
The foundation for Rorty is pragmatism, and like all good hermeneuticists, this too is indeterminate.

Not sure why you bring this up. Isn't it clear that the point of light projected by a rotating laser on the inside of a huge sphere doesnt actually travel at all? — EugeneW

Whenever you find yourself concluding something like a spontaneous effect or a contradiction built into the structure of logic, then you are going to find the assumption that this must be cleared up somehow. A true paradox is never allowed to stand. The law of causality is absolutely coercive to the understanding regardless of any and all to the contrary. (Just try it). This is NOT to say, that as a law, it is perfectly conceived, free of elucidative possibilities or, as I believe, not something else entirely. I think it is something else entirely because this is world is foundationally metaphysical (notwithstanding what I say elsewhere. In fact, I do not believe in foundational dualities of any kind. The perceived duality lies with a mistake, and the mistake is time. I do know how this sounds, but I believe it comes to this).

“Now, an intra-ontology of embodiment has momentous implications for how we conceive knowledge. In the framework of a standard ontology, we strive to acquire
knowledge about what is given out there, and this non-committal knowledge can be encoded intellectually. But in the framework of an intra-ontology, non-committal knowledge appears as a non-sense. According to a Merleau-Pontian phenomenologist, knowledge affects the two sides that arise from the self-splitting of what there is (namely of embodied experience). In other terms, knowledge of something arises concomitantly with a mutation of ourselves qua knowers. And this mutation of ourselves qua knowers manifests as a mutation of (our) experience that cannot be encoded intellectually, since the very processes and conclusions of the intellect depend on it.

Such intra-ontological pattern of knowledge is universal. It may look superfluous or contrived in the field of a classical science of nature, where the objectification of a
limited set of appearances is so complete that everything happens as if the objects of knowledge were completely separate from the act of knowing. But it becomes unavoidable in many other situations where this separation is in principle unattainable, such as the human sciences or quantum mechanics.

This is why Varela considered that a purely intellectual operation (“a change in our understanding” about some object) is not enough to solve the mind-body problem, and even less the “hard problem” of the origin of phenomenal consciousness, namely of lived experience. For these problems are archetypal cases in which the inseparability between subject and object of knowledge is impossible to ignore. What is needed to overcome them, according to the lesson of the intra-ontological view of knowledge, is nothing less than “a change in experience (being)” (Varela 1976: 67). Addressing properly the problem of lived experience is tantamount to undergo a change in experience.”(Michel Bitbol) — Joshs

intraontology. Is this another name for hermeneutics? Or intentionality? But the idea seems clear enough, bluntly put, you look at it and your gaze is part and parcel of the object observed. I go further than this, though fully aware that few will go with me. I like to take the very popular "high-flying thought" that says what we receive and give out in our sciences is what is there independently of our perceptual contribution, and proceed with this assumption to see how far epistemology can be taken. And, as predicted, it instantly turns against itself: Rorty stated, "no one has ever been able to explain how anything out there to can get in here (pointing to his head)." The analytic philosopher Rorty of course talks as if there is no problem with this (as I read through parts of his Mirror of Nature); but all of this, he insists, in the light of "truth is made, not discovered." He just thinks like Wittgenstein that there is no point is trying to speak about the unspeakable, for there is no unspeakable to speak of. I like the way Slovaj Zizek put it: it is like a software program that has no mountains in the distance of it visual setting. It is not that there is anything IN the program that does not show up, if one were in the program. It would be an absence the presence of which would neither fill a void nor redeem or anything else, for any "void" is just a mistake fashioned out of what we already have. I think Rorty thinks like this. So there is no merging, no intraontology, for this would imply the merging of two things, speaking roughly, when there are no two things. A fabricated metaphysics of two. Or: for there to be a synthesis, there has to be two identifiables on each side, but this cannot be shown, for neither side makes a appearance.
I

The world shows itself as it is. We dont invent things to assimilate this. Gods, good and evil, bent space, they are real things. Bent space is made visible by the the masses in it. — EugeneW

That is an interesting statement. I wonder what it means. The world shows itself as it is? I actually agree with this, but surely you don't mean when we speak of the world, we have revealed the way the world "shows itself"?

Spontaneous cause is possible. Read about the Norton dome. I don't see why it is nonsense. You can bend space with a stick in it even! If the universe grows older, a stick in it will get torn apart by expanding space. I would agree if you said you can't cut space in pieces. — EugeneW

An entirely abstract concept, along the lines of showing how the speed of light can be exceeded given that two beams of light whose paths converge when directed toward each other askew, and the point at which the they merge moves along the line of convergence at a rate faster than the velocities of each. This is not far afield from Russell, really, for when we conceive of a thing, we wind up in a explanatory system, leaving off the thing to be explained entirely. We make discursive castles in the air, which rather goes to the point that explanatory matrices of any kind never do explain "the world" conceived as an "actuality" (and double inverted commas are the inevitable consequence of this kind of talk). The world stands apart from this. Of course, what about eidetic ontology? Are ideas real? Yes and no.

I have always been mystified that adding one-half plus one-quarter plus one-eighth plus one-sixteenth etc adds up to one, in that adding together an infinite number of things results in a finite thing.

I can explain this paradox by understanding that relations are foundational to the logic we use, in that 5 plus 8 equals 13, etc, yet relations, as illustrated by FH Bradley, have no ontological existence in the world.

It is therefore hardly surprising then that paradoxes will arrive when comparing two things that are fundamentally different, ie, our logic and the world. — RussellA

The surprise I have in mind is usually just ignored. Paradoxes like Zeno's should be telling us that geometry and reality are very different, and geometry is just an expression of intuitive logical thinking. The surprise is that structural contradictions indicates not just that logic is quirky in the world that is not logical, but that this illogical world is altogether not logic. And so our thoughts about it do not "represent" it.
What do they do? They solve problems in time. Dicing up the world into particulars, what reason does, among other things, does not hand us the world; it does give us a means to manage and deal with the world, but the world altogether is not logical; it is alogical, apart from logic, qualitatively different, and language is mostly self referential, as are logical proofs. So when a scientist tells you the planet Jupiter has a mass and a trajectory round the sun, and is a distance D at time T, and so on, what is s/he talking about? It is about relations WE have with that planet, not the thing out there.

Does language have an ontological dimension at all? Yes and no. If you ask an ontological question, and don't simply ignore it, then answers can get interesting. The point is that, if you will, we don't really live in "the world" when it comes to knowledge claims. We live in epistemology. The world before us apart from this is utterly metaphysical.

We must be remember that when paradoxes do arrive, that this will be an inevitable consequence of the nature of logic, rather than indicative of anything strange happening in the world.

The fact that logic will inevitably lead to paradox explains why metaphor is such an important part of language, so much so, that a case may be made that "language is metaphor". — RussellA

Strange happening in the world? Not the way to word it. The world is not strange, which is a borrowed term from familiar strange things, life's ironies. No, this is far more egregious. Intelligibility itself is completely Other than "the world" (as it is being considered here). You and I and everyone else are NOT the logical categories we are fit into when we talk and write.

.At any rate, shouldn't you be walking a dog somewhere? I imagine it suits you. — Constance

Sorry about that. My back is not well, nor my disposition as a result.

Not sure what you are arguing. We can bend space like a stick. If you rotate a heavy object, space is bend in the direction of rotation. Frame dragging. — EugeneW

Then you have an issue with intuition and I cannot help you there. Someone argued that causality was debatable because Bertrand Russell wrote a paper saying so. Russell was actually waying we can't make sense of causality, but he was not contradicting the basic intuition that a spontaneous cause is impossible. I wonder how this went with him. Does he understand that a spontaneous cause is apodictically impossible. I wonder this regarding your thoughts: do you not see that space cannot bend, not because Einstein was wrong, but because the c0oncept is nonsense.

Space probably IS just a metaphor in this context. Physicists are not talking about actual bending anymore than they are talking about actual strings in string theory. Bending is simply a term borrowed to describe the effect witnessed observing gravitational pull. It LOOKS like bending when looking at a geometrical presentation of gravity's strength vis a vis mass and distance. We have all seen the images of the warping of space around amass like a planet.

But it does further illustrate the point that when we face the world, we impose a familiar image or idea to assimilate it. We invent problems like God and evil, arrows and the like defying logic, and the rest. Space bending
.At any rate, shouldn't you be walking a dog somewhere? I imagine it suits you.

No. What "bends" is spacetime, — jgill

Yes, and??

No. What "bends" is spacetime, which does not have the Euclidean metric in R^4. The Euclidean metric is how we normally measure spacial dimensions. We need Kenosha Kid (PhD physics) to return and explain this stuff. :chin: — jgill

No, it's not the physics. It is the apriori impossibility of space bending. Space presupposes space, and you can't have something as its own presupposition unless it is an absolute of some kind. Space doesn't bend; things bend IN space.

There is curved space - a type of geometry, and there is spacetime curvature, a way to interpret general relativity.

Empty space doesn't bend, IMO. :chin: — jgill

It doesn't bend unless there is a mass to bend it. I see this, but of course, space bending at all is an issue for the aforementioned reasons. And obviously, I think the science is fine, I mean, I am not arguing about that.

A building contains far more materials than the "blueprints, scaffolding and tools" (logic) used to build it. If your point is that, by analogy, "a map of the territory" (concept) does not exhaust the territory (object), I agree; but that does not mean that the latter is occluded or "falsified" by the former, only that one is (narrowly) interested in the latter (object) at a given moment in terms consistent with the former (concept). An astronomer, as you mention, does not project his "observational protocols and astronomical models" onto the stars anymore than wearing glasses with corrective lenses "corrects" whatever lies in the wearer's visual field. Logic, IME, is simply a way of seeing, so to speak, commensurable (to varying degrees) with the ways nature shows itself to itself (e.g. its 'intelligent' participants); this is so because, it seems, whatever else nature is, it is also logical (i.e. structurally consistent ~ computable (though, I think, not 'totalizable')). — 180 Proof

It depends on what you mean by the object. Really, the fur of this cat shares something with a principle of organization (concept) that is used to talk and think about it? You think there is a "territory" that is qualitatively shared with the concepts used to refer to it? Nature " shows itself to itself" through logic?

These are pretty strong claims and i don't think any of them are right. I would have ask, how is it that a natural object reveals itself through logic? What do you mean by "natural"? Obviously, what you say does depend on this. Nature?

And that narrative is? And it is true because?

Which two? Alien territory and the familiar? — EugeneW

God, the grand narratives strewn out over the ages
and
how sensible thinking can find where the two meet

Why not? — EugeneW

Well then, you seem willing to drop what is familiar and venture into alien territory when it comes to talking about God, the grand narratives strewn out over the ages, and how sensible thinking can find where the two meet. How would you do this?

Casually yes. Non-casually, after deep contemplation ("out yonder, is this huge world, which exists, independently of us human beings, and which stands before us, like a great eternal riddle; the contemplation of beckons, like a liberation"), no. — EugeneW

Well then, you seem willing to drop what is familiar and venture into alien territory when it comes to talking about God, the grand narratives strewn out over the ages, and how sensible thinking can find where the two meet. How would you do this?

Space dont move. Only the objects in it. It can expand or contract but has no speed. The metric is the just the metric of GR. — EugeneW

No, it can't expand or contract. Expansion is a spatial term; it presupposes space.