I am rather on the other end of this.

Philosophy does not show us how to live. It's not a what to do? kind of thinking, but a what Is it all about? kind. But no doubt, philosophy as a method is absolutely essential to producing an enlightened mind, and this has the crucial role of delivering us from bad thinking, bad metaphysics, indefensible ideas. But it is mostly a critical enterprise, tearing down irrational institutions. It gives us the ability to think critically at the basic level of things, which is certainly useful, but this kind of thing turns to specific areas of involvement, and once a person sees how an argument works regarding, say, human rights and third world exploitation, then more sound moral thinking displaces messy, parochial thinking. An examination of how well an idea stands up under scrutiny is, of course, a very common thing, and philosophy, the method, steps in, bypassing extraneous incidentals. A "philosophy of" some particular area follows along these lines.

But philosophy proper is all about moving away from particular areas, and into the threshold thinking at the level of the most basic assumptions that are presupposed in all things. Having a philosophical outlook on many things is obviously a good thing, but this is not philosophy proper. It is just an extension of the particular. Talk about the philosophy I have of cooking for large parties is not the philosophy of the presocratics through postmodernism.

You take me far too literally. I'm saying that calling Heidegger philosophy incarnate is like claiming Jesus was the Word made flesh. It's a substantial, I would say greatly exaggerated, claim. To that claim (which I think preposterous) I made a response which I thought responded, sarcastically, to such a claim, noting that philosophy incarnate was also in that case an unrepentant Nazi. — Ciceronianus

He should have denounced the Nazis. Beyond this, I don't see anything substantive.

Well, we all know that, do we not? If not, in what sense don't we know it? I think you're looking for some kind of a religious or mystical revelation. — Ciceronianus

Not for me to say what people see when they spend a lot of time second guessing the nature of the world. The world is, after all, structured by those very ideas that are assailed in deep scrutiny. In a letter Husserl wrote, he told that his students were turning toward religion to come to grips with the phenomenological reduction, which is a method of doing phenomenology that suspends most knowledge claims in order to get at the "thing itself". Husserl, then, was not himself very religious.

Taking this reduction to its ultimate expression, and this gives you meditation yoga, which is an complete suspension of all explicit knowing and experiencing (though underlying, there must be a construct of the self to constitute agency, I would hazard. What is NOT so constituted , a transcendental self, is entirely another matter). The Abidhamma speaks of profound intuitive revelations. Not a popular life's choice these days.

For me, sure, the more the familiar is made unfamiliar, whcih is what questioning things like this does, one is left with an openness that was closed in the tyranny of ordinary affairs, to borrow a phrase. The world is seen differently, perhaps radically so.

Well, he was an unrepentant Nazi, and you say he was great, so in what way is the statement untrue? But of course it's a silly reply to a silly statement, i.e. that he's an "embodiment of the entire history of philosophy"; philosophy incarnate, as it were, philosophy made flesh as Jesus was the Word made flesh. — Ciceronianus

Ad hominem fallacies go to the person rather than the argument. Everyone knows this. And then the straw person argument that because Heidegger embodies the history of Western philosophy, he as untenable as Christian metaphysics. Curious. Why not simply look at the discussion and figure it out?

So you want to know the mechanics of cognition, what happens when we think? — Ciceronianus

Me? I want to know what it is to be a existing person in the middle of reality, "thrown into" a world of suffering and joy. I mean, thrown in this qua thrown. Popular theories do not touch this. Evolution, for example, tells you nothing about this. It simply gives a justified account of how it got here, which no reasonable person disagrees with. No, the question is philosophico-theological. Justifications here are apriori, so we look at, say, pain, its presence. What IS this AS pain, not as a science would simply contextualize it. It is first a descriptive matter.

But you seem to be saying that we can't know what it is to know, in abstract, and without context, without relations, etc. If that's the case, we don't disagree. — Ciceronianus

Well, there is nothing without context. Nothing abstract about this. Take my cat on the couch. Nothing abstract about my knowing she is on the couch at all. Now, ask what does it mean to know something at all? How is this any more abstract than inquiring about how brakes work, knowing full well how to use them? Asking how knowledge works is an inquiry that in no way steps beyond the boundaries natural inquiry.
So I am saying an inquiry into the nature of knowledge is not an abstract matter at all.

THIS takes the matter full swing towards the egoic center, where the much sought after justification for P finds its home, and P is US all along. — Constance

Just to add, Dewey is a part of my thinking only. As is Witt, Heidegger and the rest. So don't take to the letter anything I say as I USE them, to be a representation of what one might encounter in some expository course. Husserl, for example, and intentionality, I present here as a problem.

There may be a typo or two up there

Yes, and also the world's greatest unrepentant Nazi. We've been over this before. — Ciceronianus

its a vacuous reply. A fallacy that is so obvious it has a name: ad hominem.

What is, and what for that matter is "the basic level"? — Ciceronianus

I gave you an example: I know what an apple is in a ready to hand way, but I don't know what it is to know something in this way. This knowledge relationship, what is it? What are concepts and how they relate to the world? Affect we call emotions, but emotions are certainly not concepts. And on and on. Philosophy is about basic questions. It is not how fast light travels, but what it means make a claim of any kind at all. You could say, as Dewey does, it is basically about experience (edging toward idealism, but, as with Heidegger, idealism is a thesis that comes AFTER the most basic inquiry. The most basic puts the relationships and meanings first, for these are first encountered, logically, that is, prior to any thematic undertaking (what is this or that as such, simpliciter?)). Phenomenology is a descriptive account that asks very simply: prior to our categorical knowledge (sciences, everydayness) there is already there, in place, a foundation for this. As you say, the wax example: this is not how we think about wax and there is nothing in the way wax turns up in our sciences, in our conversations, this question about the "existence behind the appearance" has no referent in the world at all, a complete fiction. Heidegger completely agrees, and his discussion of Descartes is a refutation. It is not this metaphysics of the object, it is what is there in the clearest way describable. Where this comes from is Husserl. You might want some day to look into his Ideas, Cartesian Meditations, and others. Husserl gets it from Brentano.
Empirical science is the greatest! That is, for what it does, and it does not do philosophy.

Do you know what it means to not know what it means to know what something is? That would seem the pertinent question if that's the case. Presumably, that's something you know now. Please explain why you think you don't know what it means to know what something is, and what you think it would be you would know if you did know what it means to know what something is. — Ciceronianus

Because knowing my cat is on the couch is different from knowing what it is to know my cat is on the couch. Simple. My car stops when the pedal is pressed and I know this. But I don't know the analysis of this: talk about brakes, brake fluid, pressure, and so on, is very different. This is because braking is, if you will, a thing of parts, it is analyzable.

To make a very long story short, the entire matter turns finally to ethics/aesthetics. You ask "what you think it would be you would know if you did know what it means to know what something is and the key to this lies in value, or metavalue, and discussion in metavalue, metaethics, metaaesthetics (meta here means an thematizing of the analysis of the nature of value; ethics and aesthetics are inherently value affairs: e.g., no value, no ethics) are where the final inquiry must go. The analysis of knowledge is inherently an analysis of value (that's Dewey), and it is value that is the existential core of meaning in the world. Knowledge ABOUT something, my cat or stocks' daily yield, is reducible to an ontology of value and cognition, and cognition, assessed in itself, bears no actual. Or: epistemological analyses utterly fail because there is no foundational dimension; they always begin with the relation, and relations are justificatory and justifications are discursive such that the foundation is always at a distance from t he affirmation sought: P is always on the other side of S. This is why Husserl is so important: that Cartesian bit about res extensa is out the window, but the immediacy of the Cartesian center is not, for it is here where, and I disagree intensely with many on this, our existence and existence itself is disclosed. Existence IS value. That is Dewey, even if not in so many words.

THIS takes the matter full swing towards the egoic center, where the much sought after justification for P finds its home, and P is US all along.

There's need to be insulting. I may be aligned to Dewey, however, who knew this and wrote of it before Heidegger. — Ciceronianus

Heidegger is radically different. He is an embodiment of the entire history of philosophy as he critiques and rejects many of its central claims. The pragmatic event, for example, is not what defines understanding, and affect is not sidelined as incidental merely, but given full examination and fit into an inclusive phenomenological concept. Dewey, from my readings of Nature and Experience and Art and Experience, along with marlinal readings in education and elsewhere, is still fixated on general concepts familiar in nature and material accounts. This is not at the basic level.
Heidegger is more like the Greeks, Husserl, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Hegel, Kant combined. The pragmatic end, his ready-to-hand is, in my thinking, well complimented by Dewey and the hypothetical deductive method; but Dewey is seriously deficient in describing the world at the basc level. For all I know, Heidegger read Dewey prior to Being and Time. He also read the Greeks. It doesn't matter.

The question I would ask, myself, is--When and in what circumstances do we, or anyone else, ask "What is a pen?" Or for that matter, "What is a cup?" I think the answer would be only in very isolated, contrived, artificial circumstances. The context in which such "questions" arise is significant, and when we ask them we're playing something like "Let's Pretend." Let's pretend, in other words, that we don't know what a pen or cup is, or whether they differ from us.

That should suggest to us that these aren't real questions; we have no doubt what they are, nor do we have any doubt that we're not pens, or cups. Why ask them, then? I'm inclined to think this is one of the non-problems which are fabricated when we accept dualisms and the concept of an "external world." — Ciceronianus

Well, that's hardly fitting. I mean, asking what a pen is at the level of basic questions, is just an example of the openness of inquiry of all things at this level. It is not about fabricated dualisms, but about the world and what is THERE in authentic inquiry. That is all. It's a matter of observing the world at the level of basic questions. Just that. I see a cup,I know what it is, but I don't know what it means to know what something is. Now I am in the philosophical mode.

This is a second order of thinking, a reflection on meanings as they are given, not at all unlike what science does when it makes its way through the openness of established paradigms. We know how this works, but we, I mean the general thinking, do not know how this works philosophically: questions about the presuppositions of our knowing, about the presuppositions of science and everydayness.
So then, why bother with this? You can't say philosophical questions are not real questions and this is because they issue from the world, not our imaginations. Ancient cultures did not invent and hand down to us the incompleteness of all knowledge claims. Such a thing is a solid fact of our existence. All you have to do is follow through on inquiry. Consider that you can take Einstein's time and space, ask him how his observations of the world make it into perceptual schemes at all, and he will have nothing to say. He's a physicist, not a philosopher. But then Kant''s Space, Hegel's Time, Heidegger's Being: these are not definitive, but neither is science. They DO give extraordinary insight into the nature of the inquiry and give paradigmatic theories that are AS spot on as plate tectonics or chromosomal theory, given the nature of their field.

Which takes us to metaphysics, that which nearly ALL of 20th philosophy, on both sides of the Atlantic, have attempted to tear down. Philosophy does not make cell phones. It is interested in foundational truth, and even if this is impossible, it reveals, in the process of discovery, that the real, foundational questions are not at all what we thought when we were just reading scientific journals. It opens inquiry at the threshold of knowledge.

There is a wall between philosophical understanding and the general pov. A wall of unfamiliarity. One does have to read to know that it is interesting at all.

Descartes made I distinction I don't. — Ciceronianus

And speaking of Descartes, think of that wax of his: do you think a self, an "I" is reducible to what the was is reducible to in his famous analogy?

I'm not a disciple of any philosopher, though I favor some over others. I'm not even a disciple of my daemon, Marcus Tullius Cicero. And certainly not of Descartes, whose dualism was rejected by Dewey. I think Dewey also rejected the distinction you seem to make, separating the practical from the "ontological." — Ciceronianus

That is promising. Nothing worse than the dogmatic adherence to what someone said. Less interested in this, much more in how this serves my own evolving thoughts.

There's no "in there" or "out there." There's "here." There's no "external world" nor is there an "internal world." There's a world in which we live as participants in that world. — Ciceronianus

Then you are very much aligned with Heidegger and others. Of course, then you have to deal with the object as an analytical problematic. Here is my pen. At the level of the most basic inquiry, what IS it? Science has a lot to say, but this is not the most basic level. If it is stated that the pen has mass, e.g., we see that "having mass" is not as if the pen is some kind of eternal penness being intimated by the pen. Where did this designation come from? Of course, the sound 'pen' is what is being tossed around, but this sound is entirely arbitrary; it could have been anything. Then we have the concept (think structuralist Saussure), so how is it that concepts work? This is a thorny matter discussed for centuries, but out of this one thing is clear: Concepts are epistemic, objects are, traditionally, anyway, ontological. No way around it: Were are bound to include the epistemic IN the ontology.
Pragmatists do this, of course, regardless of the language that makes this into a complication. My pen is an event in time, for the epistemology, the apprehending of the pen, is an event. This requires an analysis of time, events, beginnings and terminations, and apparent fluidity (James' Stream of Consciousness, e.g.), meanings, aesthetics/ethics, and all that is IN primordial time. I think the pragmatists are right! Just incomplete.

I'm saying the philosophical conception of an "external world" and an "internal world" is misguided and confusing. I think this is what Dewey says, as well. We should speak of certain activities and things, what they are, what they do, as different parts of the of the same world, but should not speak of them as if they take place in isolated realms. I'm critical of the view there is an "external world" apart from us, which we merely observe and react to, somehow, though excluded from it. — Ciceronianus

But then, there I am, and there this cup is, and there is no denying that there is some "space" (space: more than one kind) between us; I mean, I am certainly NOT the kind of thing a cup is: A cup has presence, visible features like other things. I, on the other hand, don't have any of this. I am not an object to see; I have no presence, there, like a cup on a table. Nor am I a brain with a body. I can see brains, brain matter and its magnification, but to see my "I" is impossible, for the observational event to affirm this would presuppose the very "I" that I would be trying to affirm.

This is not to argue that there is no compelling reason to believe there is a brain/consciousness relation, obviously. It is merely to say that observation as such cannot achieve observational perspective on the generative source of an observation. This idea has a long history in philosophy. You can INFER that consciousness IS what consciousness observes in the world of objects, but this simply dismisses ad hoc that problematic mentioned here.

But I suppose it is the fact that we cannot exist without that portion of the rest of the universe with which we interact which makes me wonder why we're inclined to separate ourselves from the rest of the universe in this fashion and in other respects. We're living organisms and like other living organisms we've been formed by our interaction with each other and the rest of the world over time. As we are part of the world, the idea that we are incapable of knowing what other parts of it really are doesn't make much sense. If we didn't have that knowledge, we wouldn't exist. — Ciceronianus

Ciceronianus....are you being serious? You are a pragmatist. Knowledge is pragmatic, not ontological. Knowing other parts, as you say, is a matter of knowing how to deal, solve problems, but issues about knowing the external world are ones that respond to the Cartesian claim that there is res extensa "out there" as opposed to res cogitans. Are you a res extensa proponent? If so, you are no disciple of Dewey, James, et al.

What is an argument over the nature of value? Step it out if you have time.

I take the view that there is no capital T truth out there to be found. Humans make truth. Utility seems to me to determine the traction or value of any given narrative. How well does it work for us to meet our goals. — Tom Storm

If I have time? Sorry, but yes, I do have time. I like writing about this because it reminds me of what I actually think. Hope it's not too long.

Any analysis imaginable, if taken to the very end of its logical output, turns to value, for in the end, once all concepts have been exhaustively examined there will remain the question that all along has attended the entire enterprise: what was the point of all this analysis? The question of what good the whole affair is hovrs over all that is done. If it were finally and definitively determined that God does exist, what good would this proposition be? God, after all, is not about the successful positing of a creator Being of infinte power; no, all along it has been about us, our desire for something wonderful beyond all reckoning, and a deliverance from suffering. Bring on all of this, and God just disappears as pointless.

All possible endeavor vanishes into the air if there is no value in what is done, and thus, value deserves first place in our philosophical priorities, for all that would compete for this position beg the value question. I see no way around this: the human enterprise, call it, is not one that seeks truth, for truth is propositional-- only sentences bear truth and we are certainly not struggling to achieve the greatest sentence possible. Rather we are looking for the greatest experiences possible, that is, the greatest joy, bliss, rapture, the deepest and most profound, with all the superlatives one can think of thrown in. Find this, and then construct the true proposition: this is just fantastic! and you have found yourself in greater proximity to what is sought after.

So this love affair with truth has to end: truth, in the end, is contingent on value. Trivial truths, like the bath water being too cold or there being 12 inches to a foot, are facts, and facts have no value as facts. (Of course, the pragmatists are right: talk about facts qua facts is just an abstraction, for such things do not exist. A fact is "of a piece" with the structure of experience itself, and value is there in the fact-value event).

Value needs to be given its due: what IS it? This piano sonata is beautiful, a splinter is painful, this study is interesting, and so on. It first has to be understood that this kind of thing is utterly pervasive. We don't have valueless experiences (Heidegger does an extraordinary examination of this kind of thing in his "deficient modes of Being with" in his Being and Time. This guy is an amazing philosopher.). So when we speak of value, we are not referring to this experience ot that, but to the entire stream of experience itself.

As to what it is, this needs analysis. Value is the existential core of ethics. No value, no ethics, or aesthetics. If no one cares about anything, then no one can be harmed or delighted, hence, no prohibitions or rules that would govern these. Then, value itself: Take a radical example: being scalded by boiling water. This has two dimensions, the incidentals: the hot water, the sensate vulnerabilities, the anatomical experience making systems, etc.; and the pure phenomenon of pain, which is evident and irreducible. The incidentals are variable. It could have been that a couch fell on your head or your were stabbed in the liver and the ethical dimension would still be there, so the incidentals are dismissed as nonessential to a determination of the nature of value. Something certainly caused the pain, but the pain is the essential feature, not the couch.

Finally: consider that there are two kinds of good and bad. there are contingent goods and bads and these are very common. This is a good coffee cup because it's easy to hold, has good thermal qualities, etc. The "goodness" is contingent several things. But note how this goodness works: this is a good knife because it's sharp and balanced and so on; but then, if it is going to be used for Macbeth, you don't want a sharp knife at all! Someone could get hurt, and now what was good is now bad, just like that. That is contingency.

The other kind of good and bad is non contingent, or, absolute, and this is where value finds its analysis. Take the pain mentioned above of being scalded. There is a "bad" in this pure phenomenon of pain that cannot be diminished in any possible way. To illustrate this, consider a scalding and other lovely tortures of someone for an entire weekend. Then consider any possible way you might ethically choose to inflict such torture on someone. Perhaps a solid utilitarian choice sits before you: do this or thousands of others, children, in fact, will suffer not for a week, but for a thousand years! Now, I think there is a very good argument here to choose against the thousand year alternative, but note: unlike the sharpness of the knife, the contingent nature of its goodness easy undone by circumstances changing, the torture for the weekend is not at all diminished in its "badness", as dumb and awkward as that term sounds.

One has to look, I hold, long and hard at this claim. thik about the difference between being tortured and its badness, and the sharp knife and its badness for the use in Macbeth. These are very different meanings of BAD. There is nothing even imaginable that can diminish the pain's ethical dimension, its badness; therefore, this badness is an absolute, (notwithstanding the problematic of explaining absolutes. There is more argument to this, but I have given the essentials) .

They do sound interesting but I don't know if I'll ever read them, life is short and books are many. (But glancing at Marion's wiki entry, I read something that immediately resonates, "We live with love as if we knew what it was about. But as soon as we try to define it, or at least approach it with concepts, it draws away from us. — Wayfarer

They are working outward from Husserl's phenomenology. Husserl, for me, made a profound discovery. Of course, this is something that had been in place for centuries in the east, but Husserl revealed how this could be broached in the otherwise prohibitive tradition dominated by Christian metaphysics, rationalism, empiricism, positivism, and other isms.

But then that is within a domain of discourse where such expressions are meaningful, there's a shared understanding of what these experiences are. — Wayfarer

Certainly. Shared experiences is what makes language possible. I only want to say that it is not right to say something is beyond language. The only thing beyond language is the ability to explain language, which would require language to do so. But so what. Language as a possible vehicle to explain things is open and free. It always has been.

That is the area of hermenuetics, the interpretation of texts. It's a topic within Buddhism itself, because of doctrinal disputes that arose in the early part of the tradition. Some of the Mahāyāna Sutras (e.g. Ārya-saṃdhi-nirmocana-sūtra) purport to present the 'definitive interpretation' concerning various difficult or disputed points of the earlier tradition. In any case, the central concern of all the schools is with realising that state of enlightenment. — Wayfarer

I observe a blade of grass. Now where is the basis for interpretative disagreement? It lies within the language that was there prior to the observation. One does not enter into observation and inquiry without already having been enculturated. It is those pesky extraneous affairs and "traditions" that obtrude into the saying what something IS that undoes the purity of the event. In this, Hegel was right, I suppose: it will take time and dialectical struggle to work this out; but then, this IS the conversation humanity has to be having with itself.

Because of an absence of knowledge on the other’s part, we were hurt.Greater insight ( a process of learning) would prevent the problem in future. — Joshs

Hurt? Problem? What is it about these that make the matter an issue at all? I am looking not at these contingencies. One can, in this line of thinking, construct multiple contexts of ethical entanglements, and I certainly agree that clearing the way for greater mutual understanding reduces problematic entanglements. Organizational features of interpersonal understanding are, I find myself agreeing, a good way to lay out a general sense of what needs to be done. But I have, in this matter, no use for this, any more than I have use for Kant or Mill. My one fascination is non contingent good and evil that emerges in the analysis of the value present in all of our affairs. Extreme examples are the most poignant, hence that match to the finger: what is that horrible experience? What IS it in the "present at hand" sense of IS, if you will? Heidegger misses this, or, talks around it. Even Levinas misses this.

Frankly, I find it a little bewildering, this move toward what is NOT pain at all, to provide an explanatory context for what it is. Others make the move toward evolutionary accounts, neurophysiological reductionism, relativism in the inconsistencies of ethical systems and aesthetic taste, and so on. I don't take issue with these.

I look plainly at the phenomenon before me. Phenomenological reduction is the only way to even approach ontology, for here, entanglements suspended, incidentals dismissed, and core features of ethics are revealed.

This polarization of the world is a direct result of failing to reduce the basis of quality-value thoroughly enough. I believe we can reduce it to the point where we discover that good and bad are derivations of simple presence and absence. What it is that is present or absent is irrelevant to the meaning of good and bad. One would then say that the direction of the good is the world coming to know itself more and and more intimately, in a kind of condensation or invagination. Goodness is then a correlate of the ‘density’ of the presenting of presence in the flow of time.

This view explains concepts like evil, violence, god and polarization as derivatives of a more originary dynamic that is not itself any of these. — Joshs

I think you are right say it polarizes the world.

But hmmmmm: failing to reduce the basis of quality-value enough. This is puzzling. Value as a derivation of presence? As you say, presence or absence is irrelevant to the meaning of (ethical) good and bad. Then how does this reduction work??
And: not evil, violence, god. This is, by my thinking, categorically confusing. God is an anthropomorphism, violence implies evil, but then, is more complex, putting an eye to what causes evil. And indeed, all terms are laden with connotative superfluities. The term I would use is meta-good, meta-evil, meta-value. With these, the incidentals can be tossed.
There is nothing more originary than presence, granted. But as such, vacuous. It is the content that gives us existence.

There are all sorts of ways to contextual our it that would finish its badness Neurospsychologically speaking, the sensation itself always emerges as what it is out of a contextual field. Any alteration in that field
changes the perceived nature of the sensation. This is how accupuncture and biofeedback work. — Joshs

But this is about badness "as such". The phenomenon of badness, the touching the flame and the ouuuccchhh!
Clearly, anything can be contextualized. Language itself is auto-contextualizing, you might say: no context, no meaning. I recall Dennett writing about qualia, showing that such a pure phenomenon" is simply not defensible, and I agreed. Qualia is already rendered contingent the moment it comes to mind at all. But then, there is that match burning my flesh: this is not "being appeared to redly"; no even close. this is something radically different. The badness of the pain is not language bound, even though I must have language to give it transmittable meaning. No, there is something else: the world apart from my systems of understanding DOES this. Ontologically equivalent to Moses' tablets, without the anthropomorphic baggage.
This makes me a kind of meta-moral realist.

On the other hand, as I noted in an earlier post, I am closer to enlightenment than any of you are. — T Clark

No, no. I am, heh, heh, "far closer".

Becuase it is not the content of events which dictates value, but the the organizational relationship between events and a construct of events. If we could see that events are nearly content-free, then all that determines value, sense and meaning is how effectively we assimilate events along dimensions of similarity and likeness with respect our our previous experience.
When we assume ‘fat’ qualitative content to the world, the. suddenly it seems that anticipatory sense making must be tied to some originating valuative content ( the goodness of God). — Joshs

To find the originating content is not so far flung. Just observe the pain in your finger as the lighted match burns, or the love of another. Observe it, analyze it. There before the inquiring eye, there is the this originating content in the event itself. The burning sensation qua burning sensation is not a contingent "bad', for there is no way to contextualize it that would diminish its badness. No utility can touch this. In my mind, this analysis reveals the meta value that is equal to God's mighty judgment. This latter is just an anthropomorphic abstraction of this common "phenomenon" of the goodness and badness in all things. Concern, interest, appetitive wants, emotional desires, they all possess this one bottom line, if you will, of meaning that grounds the world in the "absolute".

Good is whatever aids sense making , and sense making is anticipative. So what is good is whatever helps us anticipate events. And what’s the purpose of anticipating events? So that we will avoid being plunged into the chaos and confusion of a world which doesn’t make sense, where we do not know how to go on. — Joshs

Also begs the question: Chaos and confusion are, well, bad. Why? This is the true course of philosophical inquiry, isn't it? Follow the rabbit down the hole of analysis until the questions run out. I claim this terminal point is a question: What is the value of all of this inquiry? This puts the final question to all other questions, as all contingencies press on to something that is not contingent. Wittgenstein put a do not enter sign right there. Foolish. We can build narrativesaround meta value, metaphysics, meta aesthetics, and so on. It is not as if there is nothing "there". There is the "Other". All roads lead here, and "here" is the value of value question. By my lights, the only one left.

'The unborn' is a reference to what is not contingent and/or conditioned; it could equally be expressed as the 'unconditioned'. A natural question would be 'what is that?' or 'What is this referring to?' And my response would be that there is nothing against which to map or translate such expression in the modern philosophical lexicon. (Perhaps if you admitted the domain of philosophical theology, then there might be comparisons to be made with the 'wisdom uncreated' of the Biblical tradition, even if in other respects there are dissimilarities between the Buddhist and Christian understanding.) — Wayfarer

But then, the trick is to define, make accessible to the understanding in language and logic, what is not contingent. I think what you say is quite right, but this just puts OTHER questions before us, better questions, in analytic terms, because explanations are like what the physicists say about nature: it doesn't like vacuums, and has to "fill in" where one is exposed. Buddhist enlightenment, ot to put too fine a point on it, is. I think, exactly where all of this inquiry should be moving toward: toward the intuited apprehension of the world that yields....but then, there is the rub: SAYING what it is. It is not as if it cannot be said. Keep in mind that language as a kind of hard wired vessel that, in its pure form, has no content. Being in the world gives it its content. So then, what is the world giving out? The limitation that experiential truths are subjective and cannot spoken is simply a reflection of our inability have shared experiences. Language''s inability to "say" is grounded in the lack of experiencing the same things, as we do with everything else. Reading a preface to the Tibetan Book of the Dead, I came across the remark that it was common for monks to talk freely about their most intimate meditative experiences.

For me, the most interesting word being done is in French post modern theology/phenomenology: Michel Henri, Jean luc Marion, Jean luc Nancy and others. Why are they so interesting? Because they pursue a line of thinking that goes to the experiential "presence" itself. It is in presence qua presence of the ordinary world we live in wherein lies the clue to enlightenment.

Perhaps we could say that enlightenment is directed toward the development of more and more useful narratives. — Joshs

Begs a question, doesn't it?" What "good" is a narrative?

My own view is that this notion of enlightenment is simply tied to various narratives people hold. I am unsure whether anything meaningful can be said about the subject, except from a historical perspective - that is, locating the idea in the context of this or that worldview. — Tom Storm

Well, you should know that enlightenment isn't JUST a narrative. Even narratives are not just narratives. When we understand a narrative, we can ask questions, basic questions that are no different from anything else, since everything is given to us in a narrative; this discussion with you is a narrative. But what is IN the narrative? A scientist will deliver a narrative (lecture) about star composition or plate tectonics and so on. Philosophical enlightenment is quite different because here, we think at the level of basic questions. Here is a piece of what I would call foundational enlightenment:

Understanding the world in propositions that have some truth designation, always begs the question: What is the point? Something may be true, there are many things true about what science tells us, that my cat is a finicky eater or my front porch needs sweeping, these are all true, but then, their being true is utterly without meaning in the form of being true. That is, formal truth bearing, as Hume said (not in so many words), has no value at all. The "point" of it lies with something having value. Enlightenment is concerned with truth, and therefore, to address the begged question we are forced to affirm that value is an essential part of this.

The matter then turns to value: what is it? An argument over the nature of value is THE philosophical discussion to have. Until the nature of value is revealed, talk about enlightenment is just question begging. This makes ethics/aesthetics the first order of affair. All that talk about Buddhists, theologians and Gods, rationalists and their quest for axiomatic assurance, all of these "narratives" come down to an analysis of value and its meaning.

Thanks for potentially diagnosing my situation, C. You may be right but your use of language is somewhat indirect and jargonistic to me - are you a denizen of academe perhaps?

What do you mean by - "too fixated on a propositional conclusion that requires no foundational alterations in the act of perception itself." Can you provide an example of a foundational alteration in the act of perception. And yes, I see how you referred to Wittgenstein earlier.

You are adding the word revelatory to enlightenment - can you spell out an example of such a phenomenon? Are you referring to the sudden attainment of higher consciousness?

You say 'forget about Jung' do you have reasons for dismissing him or is it just personal taste? — Tom Storm

Jung was a psychologist, notwithstanding his unorthodox claims. I want to look prior to this, logically prior, into the thought that puts the idea there in the first place. This is presupposed in anything said. I am pretty simple in this: the world is NOT a closed concept. It is in fact entirely open in every way, given that any proposition you can make about the world, loses grounding instantly on inquiry. That is, there is nothing that can be said that is not contingent. If you were to give this an illustration, there would be a person at the center, and arrows pointing outward in all directions. The caption would read: human knowledge.
This is not a contrivance, but the way the world really is, and the "is" of it cannot exceed the epistemology, putting ontology IN the observable conditions of the world. Thus, the world is, in this illustration, nothing but arrows, if you will, at the level of basic questions (obviously, prior to basic questions, there is nothing but answers everywhere).
What is enlightenment? It begins with this understanding, for contingent affairs are certainly not what we are after here. Enlightenment in the familiar sense, as in, where did the money go? Enlighten me! is not what is at issue. So here we are, arrows upon all things. Then the question is, how does this proceed beyond the abstract argument, and into Real enlightenment, and into the perceptual event itself? This IS the question. Otherwise, you are just playing with logic and language (the sign of a true analytic philosopher).
Until this is acknowledged, there is no meaningful concept of enlightenment even on the table. How to proceed from here is where it gets interesting.

It is not the same form of familiarity with all objects that we encounter. Familiarity can take the form of dread, confusion , hatred or enlightenment. If we gave up living on the world we would have to give up any and all forms of familiarity , since familiarity implies world. So it’s not a question of giving up living in the world , but of how we live in it. Attaining a richly enlightened state requires utilizing all that the experience of world can provide in order to transcend the experiences of confusion, despair, chaos and hostility. — Joshs

A Buddhist monk would disagree.

Perhaps what is familiar is an entangled affair. In it, about it, one can inquire. Maybe the world is deeply grounded after all in something extraordinary, and enlightenment is an aesthetic/ethical matter, is grounded in value first, and cognition simply follows. Reason is, after all, recalling Hume, an empty vessel. God literally could appear to a person and reason wouldn't flinch. What would is a body of assumptions about the way the world is. But these never had any claim beyond mere familiarity in the first place. And really, how far does this reach into the world? Can it even touch questions like, why are we born to suffer and die?

Other people have expressed many different opinions about metaphysics throughout this fairly long thread. For me, your statement expresses a metaphysical position and, therefore, is neither true nor false. I can see that it might be a valuable way to see things. I sometimes call myself a pragmatist. Your understanding seems like a pragmatic way to approach the subject. — T Clark

I don't see pragmatism entering into it. Dewey and co. would have nothing to do with this. Rorty included. No, this is an honest observation. Observe the simplest thing and proceed with philosophical inquiry. Eventually you will, as Putnam put it, end up where the words simply run out. You have to see that when you affirm anything at all, you do this through language, and if you are in Wittgenstein's court, you toss your hands up and say, oh well! failing to see the that in the simple encounter, as the words run out before your very eyes, you are literally witnessing the threshold of metaphysics. Ask yourself, where does eternity end and finitude begin? Do you think eternity is a fiction? Of course not; it is there, in the structure of the world, but most are so busy trying to bring all things to toe the line of familiar meaning making to bear on this that they never see the that the deficit is existential, not abstract. It is in the language itself. Language is the pragmatic imposition on the world. See the pragmatist theory of knowledge: to know is to have a problem solved as to what to DO with a thing. Heidegger is close by here. The trick, I am saying, lies with understanding that such a threshold is existential, IN the fabric of things. To see this one has to reduce all things to their presence.
But here, there is an earnestness in the revelation of the world: IN the perceptual event, there are actual features that are no fabricated, which demonstrate that metaphysics inherent the presence of affairs of the world themselves.

The quote, as you probably know, is Jung's - his model of human consciousness incorporated the 'shadow side' or darkness. Pretty sure he is saying that to be enlightened means to integrate all elements of your conscious being (including your evils) in the process he called individuation. When complete, you are enlightened... I guess. I think this says a lot about Jung's notions of attachment, and he is probably saying too that everyone is on a path to enlightenment but only some 'complete' this individuation process. However, I don't think he is saying that we are all partly enlightened. That sounds suspiciously like being partly pregnant. But who knows? — Tom Storm

Forget about Jung, even if Jung said some excellent things. The measure of their excellence begins with what can be affirmed in the structure of the manifest and familiar encounter with the world. If there is such a thing as, call it foundational level philosophical enlightenment (questions begged here are obvious; but then, getting beyond this takes argumentative work), and I am sure there is, it is going to be about foundational questions/assumptions and the knowledge relationship we have with all things. It is going to be about the epistemic structures that deliver the world to us, but, and this is rather a big point, unlike philosophical business as usual which seeks answers IN the talk itself, as where, say, Wittgenstein showed apriori that logic cannot explain what logic is and dismissed all the "hurly burly" of human entanglements as unanalyzable, here, the desideratum is revelatory: One is being invited to experience an alteration in the perceptual act itself.
So in this matter, the reason why you and others are skeptical about revelatory enlightenment is, it seems, because you are too fixated on a propositional conclusion that requires no foundational alterations in the act of perception itself.

So, anyway - Metaphysical questions cannot be addressed with yes or no answers. They’re not issues of right or wrong, what matters is usefulness. — T Clark

I say, think of metaphysics as an "Other" that confronts the inquirer with as much vigor as anything else. It is the ideatum that exceeds the idea; the desideratum that exceeds the desire. Metaphysics has a long history, so I say put this down altogether, and put down the epistemology texts as well. All one can reasonably say about the world must be grounded in the bare encounter, and not in the long discursive arguments, and the insight one seeks in metaphysics is not augmentative, but pure. It begins, I claim, with the reduction from knowledge claims that clutter and dialectically collide, to the clarity of the structure of the encounter itself.
The beginning of "good" metaphysics (as opposed to bad metaphysics, as when we talk about God's omniscience and the like) lies in the simplicity of the pure encounter, the "presence" of the world as presence. Alas, this seems to be something very difficult to do, that is, to understand with this kind of clarity, for when one tries to adjust the perceptual Archimedean point, if you will, mundane analyses assert themselves by default. This is what stands in the way of really addressing metaphysics.

One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious. The latter procedure, however, is disagreeable and therefore not popular.” — Tom Storm

But then, all this talk about light and darkness itself is an imposition of thought upon the world, as if the world possessed something of their values and we had access. Putting metaphors aside and there you are looking, say, in your back yard looking at trees and houses: where is this enlightenment supposed to have a place? It's not as if you have to climb a mountain as sit with Swami Rama on some rock. No, there is something about the structure of experience itself that, were you climb that mountain, you would carry with you. I think the matter goes here: when one simply opens one's eyes, one faced with familiarity instantly; always, already, if you like. Discover the nature of this familiarity and you will know what it is that stands between you and enlightenment.
The awful truth of this is that, this familiarity is the world, and to be enlightened, in the deepest sense of te term, one has to give up living in the world.

Space and infinity are some of my favorite ideas, and they seem to naturally go together when we consider the universe. If there were a limit to the universe we could go to the edge and point, asking "how far is that way?" It seems most natural to me to think of space as infinite. And actually it seems to be infinite in opposite infinite ways. There is no end to how small something can shrink. And if I hop towards a limit, there are always infinite sub-steps. So infinity as space seems to be the ground of everything and "what is finite itself" adds form to the chaos. In the end, the world will always seem paradoxical because it has a paradoxically at it's root. What I'd like to know is whether space existing in all possible place is just the mirror image of space being infinitely divisible — Gregory

You seem to think that space is something that is there in the world which one can observe and talk about its properties, as a scientist might talk about star content or plate tectonics. But space has no observable properties, so when you make a move to "divisibility" it is not space, but an abstraction of space you are bringing up, a logically structured method of measurement formally called geometry. Its not space that is divisible at all, and the references to such divisions are really about the mind that adds the, as you say, form to chaos. But then, space isn't chaos either: this would take something observable, that can be out of order in the first place.
No, if you want to get at the heart of space philosophically, you have look to the language that is presupposed in an utterance: before one can even conceive of space in any way at all, there has to be a matrix of language, through which concepts can have any meaning at all. This is not Einstein's space, but what is there prior to Einstein, prior to even the mention of space as a theme of inquiry. Ask: can there be space without the logic to conceive it? Well, the ontology of space is only meaningful if one can posit space securely, and such a positing is essentially a logically structured event, a proposition. No matter how rigorous science gets, it is essentially propositional and therefore presupposes language.
So understanding language is the first order business in the understanding space at the level of basic questions (philosophy).
Or did you think when we observe the world, the world somehow simply intimated itself in the observation, and space presented itself to the brain as if wwe perceiving agencies were some kind of mirror? Look at a physical brain. Does this LOOK like a mirror?
The true beauty of this lies in the radical disillusionment of understanding that we, ourselves, and this world are entirely something Other than what is, well, "out there". And space is, as with all things, pure metaphysics, if there is such a thing (I think there is), at root.

"S knows P" is the disputed propositional form. The trouble with this piece of silliness is that the integrity of 'P' is simply an assumption. There is no P simpliciter, for you cannot separate P from the justification of knowing P. Every time you try (consider the history here of severed head and barn facsimile attempts) you run into the impossibility of establishing P at all! I mean, before you talk about what it is to know P, you have to first establish P independently of the conditions for knowing P, but this is impossible because P's affirmation IS an epistemic assumption to begin with!!!!
They wasted so much time on this piece of rubbish. It just goes to show you what a waste of time analytic philosophy has become.

You should ask the OP. I am just saying what frame of reference to look at it from. I did not say it, I won't defend it, please ask the OP. I am washing my hands. — god must be atheist

But I am the OP. I like atheists, and you are one I assume from your moniker. But I like them because they have at least begun to second guess orthodoxy. Not that I agree, though, that, say, God is a meaningless term that challenges ethical nihilism. I do look for thoughts on this matter of beginnings because it opens inquiry into basic assumptions. What are your thoughts on this?

The point of language is not to understand the world but to understand each other. — punos

Oh. Well, you did bring in science for your basic explanatory context, and I wanted to point out that the philosophical, as I argue, take on the world begins with a departure from this, not an engagement.

The brain did not evolve to understand truth.. it evolved to figure out what works in order to increase the chance of survivability and reproduction... a purely pragmatic endeavor. What would be different if you were to figure out the answers to your "non-pragmatic" questions such as about one's existence, Being, etc.?
The question as to "why are we born to suffer and die?" is a purely subjective interpretation of the situation, and signals to me your desire for a pragmatic solution. It's as if you think that the universe or God set everything up just to make you suffer and then kill you. If you want a chance at the right answer then you have to change your questions. Only the right questions yield the right answers. — punos

The rest of this falls short. Before you talk about God or anything else, really, you have to take on the whole affair in terms of the most basic questions, otherwise you will simply end up with scientific cliches and philosophical trivialities. Anthropomorphism is the first to go, for popular concepts are the furthest away from insight. The issue of suffering and dying is, in its defining presence, absent of religion, especially bad metaphysics. Suffering is an issue because, well, it is there, in our midst, IN the world, as is reason. This latter has a very long history of phenomenological analytical study: one observes reason, its structure, the way reason is an essential feature of thought and judgment, etc., just to see what it is.

Note that in this history there is nothing of evolutionary theory. It is apriori theory, and thus deals with the essential nature of reason. Consider suffering in the same way: remove all that would immediately claim it in talk about evolution, biology, physics, anthropology, and so on. Suspend these altogether so one can observe it for its manifest parts and functions, as one one would observe, say, an automobile engine rather than anything else PRIOR to classifications and other explanatory contests. This crude analogy actually works. Here one stands in the world, now observe it basic features, as one might observe a rear axle or carburetor. The task first os observation of the phenomenon, not the scientific interpretation (though science is, in the philosophical analysis, everywhere; it is an expression of practical reason). Science's trouble (though we find no issues with science at all in what it does. As you say, it makes great flat screen tv's) has always been that when it encounters affairs at the basic level, the premises simply run out, but the world remains undefined at the basic level. Hence, philosophy.

Finally, it must be understood the what you call subjective is only reasonable in mundane discovery. Look further into it, and you find you cannot remove the objects of empirical science from such "subjectivity". this is simply manifestly true. Try to do this and you will find contradictions instantly upon you. Science cares not for this kind of discovery, and it is just not what science is about. Ask a modern physicist about how this brain mass can epistemically receive something in the world, and you will find yourself deep question begging answers. Hence, philosophy.

If you want to understand language then look into and study how language evolves in nature. Look at how cells, ants, plants, etc. communicate. Try to understand how DNA and mRNA work. If you observe nature, and you know how to observe well, and know how to ask the right questions, then she will disrobe before you and expose her sexy secrets. When one becomes familiar with those more basic patterns then one will be better equipped to tackle the more complex forms of language and communication. Look to nature itself to inform your philosophy and not so much old philosophers. You must look at the systems below the one you are looking at to gain insight to "understand" it. Move out and under the human world experience and try to see things from a lower and simpler perspective. The level at which you are trying to analyze the issue is to complex if you don't know the basic forms it's made of. It's like trying to understand biology without knowing about chemistry, or understanding chemistry without understanding first physics. — punos

But consider, and this really is the point, that when you look to nature, and its cells and the rest, and all the sexy secrets, there are questions unasked hidden by the process of disclosure. I observe an ant, I magnify its cellular parts, then classify according to categorical norms and the totality of scientific paradigms that might apply. This is all too clear to all who have endured high school physics. But to ask philosophical questions is a whole new matter. Here, we look at the presuppositions of science and everyday life. The sexy secrets have just begun, for the finality and determinacy of science is just an illusion. One has to ask the most basic questions to see this.

It seems quite obvious to me that nothing is static and everything moves and evolves or changes in this universe. It makes no sense to me to define a thing as simply a thing with no ability to interact with other things in the universe. If it exists for any sufficient amount of time then it implies that it serves some function that keeps it existing. What else would the universe be if it did not evolve and "act"? — punos

Observe a blade of grass in movement. The observation itself is what is at issue. This is not a simple event, but is a thing "of parts": Here, the agency of observation, there the movement, and then, what is this act of observation? It itself is a movement, but this establishes one movement conceiving another, and the question as to the nature of movement itself is apriori lost, for the analysis of movement presupposes movement, the very definition of circularity in reasoning.
What is needed is analysis of this circularity, and this goes to the two sides, agency and object, and their relation. Consider this circularity more closely: I observe, say, my own brain in an "awake brain surgery". I speak, censors identify speech localities, and so on, and this is very useful for avoiding the surgical removal of important tissue. But this usefulness says nothing at all about this relation's identity; it only gives us utility. As to the relation, you find a brain trying to explain a brain: all you will ever get is brain answers that emerge, which are the very problematic you are trying to address. The brain you see is a brain phenomenon. Certainly, the whole matter reveals that there is a pragmatic relation, but the epistemic question yields this intractable circular reasoning.

As to what else the universe would be if not evolving and acting, it is like asking, what would a flower be if not petal and peduncle and the rest? To a particle physicist, it would be systems of atomic and subatomic particles; to a gardener, a beautiful natural presence; and on and on. It is not that it is not one or the other, but that saying what something is must have its contextual bearings. There is no "flower petal" outside of a context in which the term occurs.

We are the same, only the term of our analysis are very different at the basic level of inquiry. I am a perceiving being. Well, what is perception? ANd then we find we are simply in another world of thought, for all of our "outer" world events are perceived before they are what they are called in science and everydayness. This puts perception at the very front of understanding at the basic level. Turns our that this is very, very tricky: perception conceived by a being for whom all that is known is first perceived. Sound like question beggin at its finest.

The questions dealing with physics or how the physical world actually works should not be answered through philosophical thought alone, and questions that can not be answered directly from physics are more properly addressed by philosophy. But philosophy has to constrain itself to the patterns that physics has already discovered so as to keep the whole enterprise coherent. — punos

You say this, as expected, because you haven't read any continental philosophy. Analytic thinking rules philosophy in the US and Britain, and has for a hundred years or so. Now things are changing for the most obvious reasons: Analytic schools go nowhere. I've read enough to see this. Nowhere. They were so hell bent on avoiding the stigma of irrationality that they set their sights, following Russell, Wittgenstein, Frege, and others, on logic and coherency and they ended up containing the foundation of our human inquiry to the restrictions of science's paradigms. They are an insufferable lot, full of logic and rigor, but unable to say anything about foundational issues, for these are taboo since they trail off into experience apart from where theory can control and assimilate. But the horror of this is, this is exactly what true analysis of the human existence reveals: "we" stand outside of analytical categories at the basic level. This "outside" is very analytically accessible. We can describe the threshold.

Actual things do not enter the mind, just data or information about a perceived thing in the world. The brain tries to recreate it's environment as a neural simulation that we call the conscious mind as opposed to the unconscious mind from the data or information acquired from the sense organs. The brain creates a neural structure in itself that is representative of the object it perceived. The actual neural network pattern constructed is the actual symbol the brain uses to think with, but it is not the thing itself. The brain itself only perceives the output of the neural structure when it's output is active in the conscious mind. — punos

Of course, this is quite true. No one disputes it. It is simply preanalytical. Thatis, it's not philosophy. I mean, who could argue that the brain is NOT a system of neurons and synapses and axonal fibers and so on?? Or that evolution is not a valid theory? It would be absurd. But with these philosophy has not even begun.

I don't think Kierkegaard meant to distance himself from the problem of "inherited" sin and its relationship to the sins of a person might commit during a life. He strove to verify the language of revelation with his view of the human condition. His approach is similar to how Pascal argued that the Incarnation was scandalous to reason while also being the most accurate description of the problem of being human. — Valentinus

But the Concept of Anxiety is Hegelian,and ny this I mean while criticising Hegel, he uses the dialectical method to reveal existential structure of the self in actuality vis a vis rationality, famously commenting that Hegel had forgotten that we exist; and I see its closest connection to Sickness Unto Death, which has this tortured analysis of our finitude and eternity that cannot be simply put off for some Hegelian future rationality where dialectical crises have finally produced the grand scheme of things. It is this dialectical struggle that the analysis of the self yields, and that of time and eternity in which we find the basic structure of who we are bound with this.
I never read much Pascal, but the connection is clear, it seems, for K understood Christian falleness and sin outside of, to borrow a term, rational totalities, with which actuality is on a collision course. I can see your Pascal reference at work here, but not exclusively Christ, rather, the human self. Us.
As to sins committed in life that are not "structural sins", but individual sins, I haven't read where he puts this to theory. All we do is "sinful" in as much as it is alienation from God. But one can be a baker or a candle stick maker and if that person is what he calls a knight of faith, then the affairs of worldly matters are in the eternal present and s/he lives in God's grace.
That would be my rough take on this.

In the sense of the OP. It started with "in the beginning there was the word." — god must be atheist

Ah, but the beginning of an utterance? It implies creation is a narrative. Is this true? (Put temporal beginnings off the table. After all, "time" is term, a particle of language. What are these? This is the question that haunts science and makes philosophy inevitable, for one cannot confidently, and familiarly, speak of time, if time is a term and one cannot tell you what terms are.)

To simplify this issue where do you think information or structure comes from? From where or how did the first element of information or structure manifest? What is the "thing" that comes before the first thing? — punos

It like asking when the first words appeared. Language arrived as a pragmatic, social event, presumably on the heels of more primitive practices buried deep in history. The real question is, what is the relation between language and things in the world? How did language make understanding possible at the level of existential wonder, that is, inquiry that asks questions that target what is not pragmatic at all, like questions about one's existence, Being, like "why are we born to suffer and die?"
It has to be understood that we are not merely "things that evolved and act". And this is not a physicist's line of inquiry. A physicist leaves off when basic questions appear; s/he does respond to, say, questions about temporality as a structure of experience that is presupposed by Einstein's theories, not presented in them.
As to things, and one coming before the other, this has been discussed many times. Take Schopenhauer's claim that the principle of causality is contradictory given that eternity has no beginning. It only gets interesting when you realize that our finitude is embedded in infinity, but there is no line of actual separation, for it is impossible to to say where on ends and the other begins. Ask yourself, as I do almost daily, how is it that anything out there gets in here (the mind)? Never happen. Just impossible to conceive. The only conclusion: what is here before me, what is there, "ready to hand" stuff of the world is, in my localized mental space, utterly metaphysical. This pen, beyond the condition of my experience, is eternal, transcendental, and we are not outside this, but we are this.
This is where question of beginnings leads.

Most words elicit a myriad of associated concepts that will vary in quantity and quality in different people and at different times. The more complex a word is the more it lends itself to varied associations and interpretations (not a fundamental problem of the universe but of human psychology). There is a hierarchy of meaning which of course arbitrary words can be assigned to... but the idea for me is to grasp the most fundamental meanings or patterns which all the other patterns or meanings are made up of (similar to prime numbers).
It's like physics and chemistry in the sense that quarks form subatomic particles, these particles form atoms, molecules, etc.. One can maybe even imagine the possibility of something like a "periodic table" of meaning or pattern. Everything works this way even text. Notice how letters make words, words make sentences, and sentences make paragraphs, etc.. (a fundamental pattern in itself) Once one gets to the most fundamental and simplest patterns or meanings then they become less likely to be interpreted or misinterpreted in many and various ways. — punos

And so, this kind of reflection tells you what about the essential encounter of things in the world? It is not that language is to be discarded, for our thoughts that lead us to this impasse are, if you will, the only wheel that rolls. The point is: look at the way my question to you gives rise to your newly stated explanatory context that looks entirely to language and simply recasts the problem. And if there were this periodic table in place? Would this be some kind of mirror of the world in language? You see, it is this mirror concept, that words are telling us about what is not "wordly" in nature, that makes the issue. What good is talk about subatomic particles when there is a meaning chasm that separates words from "the world"? The real question that haunts philosophy must look to more basic structures that are inplace logically prior to discussions about the world.

The problem with language is that it is not perfect, but that is not a reason to not use it. Look at what we have accomplished because of language (cars, planes, computers, the internet, philosophy, art, etc..). It may not be perfect but it evidently works and it is still evolving. Whatever the presuppositions in science are at any moment in time is only a temporary and dynamic position until a new paradigm shift occurs. — punos

I hear this often about how successful language and logic are in making cell phones, but it entirely misses the point. If something "works" does it therefore impart meaning beyond the pragmatic? If you think my taking the moon AS 'moon' is simply a pragmatic affair, then you leave what is apart from this out of regard completely and the consequence is your pragmatic reduction becomes an abstraction. Bonafide reductions cannot have ad hoc dismissals of that which the world presents as not containable, and in your case, pragmatically uncontainable.
Remember, speaking of paradigm shifts, Kuhn was a Kantian, an idealist. If this is your position as well, then you drop the scientific enterprise altogether as something that can ever hope to, well, "see truly" what is "really" going on, what the world is, for understanding is categorically bound to the mundane. Analytic philosophy goes this route. I do not.

"The name that can be named is not the eternal name. The nameless is the beginning of heaven and earth. The named is the mother of ten thousand things." The I Ching

Even the Taoists knew that language was imperfect, but they still wrote their books anyway to at least try to explain the Tao. I think they did a good job considering. — punos

Take this position and you seem to move towards the analytic assumption that there is a wall, impenetrable, between us language users, language obstructionists, if you will, and the world itself, this latter, the thing itself, being removed from sensible discussion altogether. But there is a philosophical alternative: Look at language as a tool, a problem solving "event" as Heidegger did. But then, to see it as a tool is something that applies to the very ontological claim itself. One thereby must withdraw from language to observe language, which is impossible, clearly; but the matter needs to be recast. Language that talks about language opens mere engagement to inquiry, and inquiry is the question, and the question is annihilating in its nature, for it brings dialectic pressure, or even cancelation, on to a thesis, even the simplest, like "the moon is bright, tonight". In others words, possessed within the pragmatic totality of language there is the existential question that takes the inquirer beyond language. This, I claim, is philosophy's end, its purpose. This is where Taoists go, or desire to go. But then, all talk that carries that presumption of "knowing" has to be suspended. Scientific vocabulary is out the window, and one must sit quietly and let the world "speak".
Certainly not that science has no use. But it does not inform this issue here.

A word's instrumentality possesses relationship possibilities because it's how the mind works. The mind records sense impressions and compares and contrasts with other prior impressions, making associations and relationships between impressions. The relationships are not in the words, they are in the mind, and words are just used as an attempt to express and reconstruct the relationship in another mind. — punos

You will not be able to separate words from mind. To conceive of a mind, one must first conceive of that which conceives of mind, which turns the matter over to thought itself, and here we encounter language and logic.

I find it better to think of what a thing does rather than what a thing is. I don't need to know what a pencil is, i just need to know what a pencil does or can do. If i need to write something on a piece of paper then i know i can use a pencil. There are different levels and dimensions of knowing a thing such as knowing how to drive a car compared to knowing how to fix a car. — punos

Of course, but once you define a pencil by what it does, you have to ask, what is there in the doing of things, pragmatics, that discovers the very structures of doing itself. If it is pragmatics all the way down, that addresses all that is encountered that demands analytic satisfaction, then you have a lot of exploaining to do, as in the ethical/aesthetic dimension of the world: this spear in my side is killing me, but is this really reducible to the pragmatics of the affair? No. The world is far more than just what is done as a quantitative concept.
In other words, saying you are concerned only with wht a thing does, first, does not give analysis to the doing, which is, e.g., a temporal event, and there is a long history here from the Greeks, to Augustine, and so on. Second, says nothing about the existential dimension of the world

Remember only one thing, and keep it in mind when you answer or add to this topic: WHAT WAS THERE BEFORE THE BEING THAT CREATED THE BEING. You MUST assume there were no beings at first. — god must be atheist

Sorry, but....BEFORE??? In what sense do you mean this?

A word or term has meaning when it signifies or points to a thing or idea such as when a finger that points to the moon means the moon and not the finger. — punos

But you have to ask the Derridean question: When one says words, how do these stand alone as a reference to something? Does the term 'moon' really refer exclusively, epistemically, to that object in the sky? Or is the matter more complex such that reference itself is called into question? Keep in mind what philosophy's mission is: To address the world at the level of the most basic questions. Prior to this, you are doing no more than speculative science.

If the language is unclear then one should just simply ask for clarification of the specific terms or phrases in question. The main goal in this respect is for all parties involved in a discussion to have the same definitions for all the terms being used. The real point is the meanings and not the words... words are merely vessels for moving meaning from one mind to another (communication), for it is meaning and not mere words that bring insight and understanding to the mind. Two heads are not better than one head if the two heads can not communicate. — punos

No, that's not it. It is not that certain language is unclear. It is that language itself is problematic, and it is philosophy's job to give this problematic analysis. For the matter is about the presuppositions of science, not science.

A term or word is just a tool that refers the mind of the listener or receiver to an object in the world or a concept in the mind. — punos

A tool? Quite right. But how does a tool's instrumentality possess relationship possibilities 0f the kind you assume? I use pencil, but in that use do I "know' what a pencil is? Does a cow know its teeth are chewing tools? Of course not.
The interesting question this presents is pragmatism's, and Heidegger's: Is use engagement something that constitutes knowledge? Is language itself just pragmatic tools? Or do we grasp things in an existential "presence"? What can this mean? If I use the hammer, do I know what a hammer is? If language is all vocabulary and rules, how does vocabulary link up with moons and stars so that we can talk about them and only them?

Not sure what you're asking here... perhaps you can rephrase the question. — punos

Science is not some clean and pure reflection on the world of objects. It is think with analytical possibilities that look to what is presupposed by utterances..

In the beginning i believe there was pure Energy (can not be created nor destroyed), chaotic with no stable pattern or information (quantum foam). Energy is the primal and fundamental "substance" in which information (pattern or structure) can be expressed. Within this chaotic energy at the lowest level of the universe, random patterns are constantly emerging and immediately descending back into Chaos (creation and destruction). Sometimes a pattern emerges that is potent enough not only to resist the dissolving influence of the surrounding chaos but can also nucleate and impart it's own pattern or form to the surrounding energy like a growing and expanding crystal (Big Bang and Inflation). This new and potent pattern becomes the template for an entire universe, with a specific logic that is internally self-consistent and specific to it's own structure (The Word or Logos of the Bible).

Ordo ab Chao --> The God of order is Chaos itself for Chaos is the alpha and the omega of all order or possible orders (Logos). Chaos is the full potentiality of infinite possibilities, the true source of creation with no need of any prerequisite. It is unbounded, unlike order which can only express a finite set of possibilities.
Meaning emerges out of the interaction and relationships between the ordered parts of an emergent universe. An atom or a molecule in our universe for example means nothing outside our universe because the underlying fundamental pattern of each universe would be different and incompatible. Think of the difference in pattern for example of Legos and Lincoln Logs construction sets, The Lego universe has it's own structure and logic which is different than the Lincoln Logs universe. Both are viable and meaningful but only in their respective universes. — punos

Typical, really. If you want to take the matter to the level where questions become philosophical, then, and I don't think this is a debatable point, You must go the source of all terms such as "quantum foam" or "chaos" before things are even taken up and talked about. You have to ask, what is it that a term has meaning at all? Why is language going unexamined with all this language being put forth to make sense of things?
So the question to you is not what is chaos? but, what is the relation between a term and the world? After all, you wrote paragraphs filled with language and logic. How is it that this needs no analysis to determine if there is not something PRIOR the manifest meanings of empirical science?

That particular theory uses Shannon information theory, but others, including myself, are looking toward a non quantifiable theory of information, where information is a fundamental non-quantifiable observable. — Pop

This is where you have to comes to terms with reality: The only non quantifiable theory of information there can be, is the art experience itself. You have, in my thoughts, arrived at the critical point: To the extent that a theory is non quantifiable, it is the very embodiment of the quality it is supposed represent. I wonder, what could this be? A poem? Or am I completely missing something?

Qualities are demonstrable. Information that conveys, transmits, carries qualities, elicits aesthetic responses itself.

Academia is coming around to the understanding that information is fundamental - is equal to energy and matter — Pop

Energy and matter are just place holders for metaphysics, as I see it. Information presupposes these, just as it presupposes metaphysics.

If something has “nothing whatsoever” to do with qualitative distinctiveness why should it offend? — praxis

"But then, life and death qualitatively has nothing whatsoever to do with actuarial tables. This is why your announcement that art in information offends others here. They think art is profound, religious, or deeply meaningful. Others look to the meanings in play, how truth connects to images, how images are iconographic reflections of the self; and so on."

Talk about actuary tables in matter of life and death is about an affect neutral response to something that carries great significance for people. The idea is, of course, intended to refer to occasions of life an death outside of contexts where actuary tables are relevant and expected. This much does rely on the reader's discernment.
Anyway, since I hold that art is essentially about an aesthetic response, about affect, and affect is a qualitative distinction, then having the principle feature of the definition of art to be quantitative, and altogether excluding qualitative properties, is absurd.

These are experiential qualities, and whoever 'they' are, experience art as profound, religious, or deeply meaningful. This has "nothing whatsoever" to do with Pop's claim so it's strange that you say it's offensive. — praxis

What is art? Information.

What is life and death? An actuary table.

I thought this clear: The latter is meant to be analogous to the former in that it takes something qualitatively distinct and reduces it to terms quantitative. Read the part where I talk about this.