Yeah, er, I provided a defence of it in the OP. — Bartricks

No, you manifested it in the OP. I'd think, if you were serious, you'd welcome the invitation to provide a better illustration of your point.

They ARE states of complex systems. — khaled

Extended states, yes. I'm never sure when people say brain states on here whether they mean instantaneous or over time. It is also convoluted: your experience right now does indeed arise, in part, from the state of your memory: that is, if your memory was in a different configuration (state), you would now be experiencing things (extended state) in a different way.

But yeah I'm comfortable using "state" to mean over time.

Point is that by the materialist definition you get everything an idealist would want. — khaled

Well, you don't, that's why they're not materialists. Principally, you don't get magical humans. Lots of people don't like being described as a the same sort of thing as rocks, rivers, or even trees, apes, and computers. They find that quite offensive. Bear in mind we're coming from a world that was taught that God made us bespoke, with His divine breath, and made the universe just for us: being ever so special is important to many.

A materialist would not say that humans have any mental things attached if "mental thing" is to mean some other different kind of substance from physical thing. If it means a particular pattern of physical thing then maybe. — khaled

Materialists don't deny the mind afaik, they just deny that it's fundamentally non-material. You can still talk of minds and mental things like images, thoughts, feelings, but these arise from states of complex systems.

The novelist can be questioned. The scientist wants you to shut up and calculate or follow. The philosopher wants you to accept his visions. To prove his vision is the one. — Mystic

Itself mythos, though I kind of get you.

You do realise Shakespeare and nietzsche really fucked a lot — Mystic

They don't tell you this!

I get this, although tbf faith is the refusal to countenance the possibility that you may be mistaken in your beliefs; it doesn't obviously lead to the adoption of new beliefs.

I think the ill here is not faith but unjustifiable belief. That, I think, is what makes it trivial for an intelligent person to adopt stupid beliefs.

Why is Naomi Wolf spouting anti-vax nonsense? Because she's spent a lifetime with beliefs that can't be reconciled with facts. She wrote a non-fiction book that was notoriously factually incorrect. People with unjustifiable beliefs have to learn contempt for facts, and this contempt leaves them wide open.

I am not sure that story(or fiction) is absolutely only mythos and that philosophy and science are entirely explanatory. — Jack Cummins

I didn't mean to suggest the latter for sure. I'll edit for clarity.

Fiction can incorporate some aspects of science and philosophy if it is brought in carefully. — Jack Cummins

It is still storytelling though, to the extent that I'd say that if it didn't resonate, it was a poor story, however much science and philosophy is thrown at it. Ethical thought experiments probably bear some similarity to story; indeed, many stories could potentially be thought of as ethical thought experiments with potential answers.

Incidentally when you read Don Quixote 1605, you find a book that is like a post-modern pastiche, dripping with irony and self-reflexivity. It could almost be John Barth (except readable). — Tom Storm

:up:

With many positions on modernity and the individual, can one say they are indifferent? Some philosophers say we are still living in modernity, for some we are in post-modernity, some say we were never modern. — Warren

I don't think it makes much sense to ask if we as individuals or on the whole are modern, postmodern or neither. They're more historical eras in which particular modes of thought disrupted or dominated.

With that in mind, I'd say, yes, Western societies are in a postmodern era: metanarratives are declining, ethics are becoming contextualised, absolute concepts of truth given increasingly over to putative ones (modelling) and embedded ones (facts).

There is obviously huge resistance to this, a reassertion of archaic concepts and values which act as both defenses and rallying points. But that resistance is itself a defining feature of the postmodern era: even if modernism won the war, it was still challenged.

There's also post-truth, the wayward child of modernism and postmodernism in which logical fallacy is foundational, fact and fiction are equal, and truth is what you assert it to be. There's also resistance to this, so maybe we're out of postmodernism now and in the post-truth era. I think an argument against this is that there is every reason to doubt that post-truthers believe what they say, rather they are opportunistic hypocrites who elevate anything that is useful to them and throw shade on anything that is not, e.g. the Republican party.

A materialist believes that there are material things with no minds
— Kenosha Kid

I can take this two ways — khaled

Then I'll clarify. An argument for materialism is that there exist things that are material, like rocks, clouds, rivers, etc. that have no minds; however there are no apparent mental things (like humans) without matter (bodies). Therefore things with minds is a subset of material things.

Again, I think if you say that there are 2 different kinds of stuff, mental stuff and physical stuff, you're already not a materialist. — khaled

I was describing the difference (as per your question) not my own views. It is difficult to argue against the above apparent subsetting if one cannot give an example of a mental thing that has no material component. If you believe in God or something similar, that could be an example.

For the record, I'm a physicalist athiest.

I have always found the novel to be a far better expression of truth and wisdom than academic philosophy and science.
For instance dickens is far superior to Wittgenstein and any neuroscientists publications.
Do you agree or disagree?
What are your reasons? — Mystic

I'm a big champion of the story (not just the novel) for it's power to explore what we are. A good story is like a psychological resonator: it presents the brain with a counterfactual world that it can process somewhat like a factual one, and trigger reactions in a fairly scientific way, except you are both subject and observer.

However... all that tells us, and in quite a limited way, is what we are. It can't tell us why we are that way, or how other things are. Since both philosophy and science also attempt to answer 'why' questions, mythos would be a poor substitute.

Kudos for finding and posting that in 6 minutes!

So what really is the difference between the two views? — khaled

A materialist believes that there are material things with no minds, but there can't be mental things without a material basis. A big difference in idealism is that you can have mental things without a material component, at least in principle, and doubtless the most vital example is God. This in turn allows for a kind of coincidence of human mind and human matter, such that we can argue for the primacy of the mental which afaik is a matter of taste, not logic.

There are different kinds of representation. But all require a representer because they all represent, even if some do so propositionally and others not. Do you understand? — Bartricks

Continuing with the same error is not a defense of it.

I agree that calculus of limits is not an intuitive, everyday way of thinking, but it's pretty trivial to a mathematician and is the basis of most of physics. Or to put it another way, in the everyday experience of someone dealing with continuum kinematics, this isn't a headscratcher at all _now_. Historical interest is obviously different.

Simple. Classical. Still intriguing. — ssu

But you have to pretend calculus isn't a thing to fully appreciate them.

One of my favorite thought experiments is the boy with no words. Suppose if a boy was raised his whole life without any sort of made up language of communication. How would he think? I think he would think in terms of images and feelings. The essence of what we think. — Thinking

Like Kasper Hauser? An interesting thing about Hauser is that he didn't dream until he was taught language (around age 13 iirc).

I'm going to be boring and go with Rawls' veil of ignorance (aka how humans would think anyway if they weren't utter douchebags).

Quite. To me, it's unfair to judge an employee for doing something under effective duress, when the employer is the effective agent involved. — MPhil

Right. Generally I don't think 'I will have to look for another job' is effective duress when your current job is unethical. If you have very good reason to believe you won't get another job, I'd be somewhat more sympathetic, especially if the ethical concern is relatively minor (say, using a tax haven as opposed to polluting a river) but only because, to that extent, they are already a victim of barely restrained capitalism themselves. If your country has a reasonable welfare state, less sympathetic.

You don't understand the argument, clearly. I am arguing that in order for something - be it a mental state, a picture, some squiggles - to be said to be 'tepresenting'something to be the case (as opposed to appearing to represent something to be the case) there needs to be a representer.
The clearest way to show this is with notes. This - this here, this 'message' - isn't representing anything if I am a bot. It is if I am a person. — Bartricks

And you don't understand the criticism. I'll say it more simply: language is not like awareness. There is information in both, but the former is very different. Trying to disprove X with an analogy that is about as far from X as is possible is a non-starter. Do you understand?

FWIW, you can't claim to have shown that it's impossible to evolve an awareness of one's environment by demonstrating that it's possible in language to be misled, classic use of the word "surely" notwithstanding. If you believe in your premise, why not tackle it head-on rather than making the leap from 'Something might look like sentence that isn't true' to 'You cannot evolve awareness of things' without justification?

Consider Descartes's lump of wax, for instance. I can be aware of its shape, its colour, its location, its texture, etc. How is this incompatible with the theory of evolution, without recourse to incomparable analogies?

The laws of physics are not a property of any particular thing within reality, but a property of reality itself. These laws are expressed in a seemingly infinite number of varied circumstances. So bouncing a ball might seem to an observer to be an entirely different phenomena than the orbit of a planet, but the same laws govern both. — Foghorn

Well that depends. There's definitely an aspect of physical law that depends on the geometry of the universe (e.g. the inverse square laws) rather than the contents, but as modern physics has evolved, more and more of physical law is interpreted as objects (quantum fields, properties of objects like charge).

But as far as we know (religion and alien theory aside) evolution doesn't arise from any particular source. It would seem to fit our definition of an intelligent process, but does not appear to be the creation of any particular entity. — Foghorn

Evolution itself emerges from those physical laws plus the presence of certain objects that obey those laws. It's a lot dumber than people give it credit for: random mutation adding noise to the gene pool (considered an inevitable but negative feature of any other system), the heritability of genes, and lots and lots of death.

Asking to define the terms you are using is a very common question to ask on a philosophy forum. — Harry Hindu

So why not just ask that? If that's your sole question, what's with all the bunkum? Standard definitions used throughout. If I was introducing exotic definitions I would have stated them, likewise a common thing to do when communicating.

EDIT: Anticipating the follow-up question "What do people generally mean by subjective and objective?", a subjective description of a thing is that given by information available to a subject observing that thing or something derived from that thing, while an objective description of a thing is a description that is (or would be) given by complete information about that thing.

Going back to the Halle Berry's face recognition neuron, the part of the brain that is aware of Halle Berry's face is not aware that a neuron that recognises Halle Berry's face has fired: it has less information about the causes of that awareness than an objective description. An objective description of that process is, in principle, more complete (assuming the mind is fundamentally physical) such that an external observer could detect "is experiencing Halle Berry's face" in a third party. In principle, not yet in practice.

Yeah, it would depend on the nature of the immorality, no? Polluting is different from murder or theft. How would you treat someone who scammed a family member out of thousands of dollars but then told you that he was doing it to put food in his table? Is that really the only way to survive? Doubtful. — BitconnectCarlos

I don't think that's the argument you think it is. The default position I gave concerned whether an employee understands that their employer is unethical. Effective duress is an exception to that. This has nothing to do with whether the employee themselves is a criminal in their own right.

Quite right, this is a philosophy forum. Better to discuss ideas rather than whether an individual can be taken down somehow by a non-philosopher.

In any case, no the bullet points are not serious. The first one, for instance, is ridiculous. Maybe just try working through them and thinking about them for a bit. Does it make sense for a scientific theory to be both predictive and untestable? Can you have a theory that's both unfalsifiable and scientific? That sort of thing.

I'd say seeking out philosophical projectiles for the express purpose of taking down someone who, as far as you know, hasn't committed any errors because you disagree with their religious position is far worse philosophy than anything you might succeed in debunking: it's intellectually dishonest, disingenuous, and reduces philosophical positions to a checklist of mindless soundbites.

If you or someone you have in mind cannot muster an argument based on their own position and learning, that's airtight enough for you/them but perhaps not for someone more sincere.

That's what I would be concerned about. Many people will not be in a position to be able to just quit a job and get another one without serious ramifications for their lives/families/health. — MPhil

I feel that is a quandary in itself though: the permission to do or advance evil for personal gain, even if that's to put food on the table. I appreciate that, depending on where and when you live, you might have to choose between ethics and eating, and I would be sympathetic to someone swallowing the former to swallow the latter, which is why we should not have a society that forces people to choose.

I think it's the other way around: depression causes individualism, introspection, selfishness. As do stress, fear and anxiety.

There are lots of known causes of depression. In another thread we've been talking about the movement of humans out of equatorial regions into seasonal ones, which itself is a common cause of depression (see SAD: seasonal affective disorder).

Certain pollutants have been linked to depression, as have certain physical disorders (e.g. thyroid disorders) and mental disorders (e.g. insomnia). Diet is also linked (e.g. lack of Omega-3).

However I do think it's credible that how we (generally) live does increase the number of people suffering from depression. Loneliness is also linked, and our brand of individualist, anti-community liberal capitalism seems cynically designed to make us lonely, cut off, as well as lacking in what we need while bombarding us with endless choice (another cause of depression) about stuff we don't need.

What personal sacrifices should someone be forced to make, when they know their resignation won't have an impact on anything — Judaka

That seems to me an entirely separable question, less to do with one's own moral culpability and more to do with whether one has the power to do good or at least disrupt a perceived bad (e.g. become a whistleblower).

But addressing the point about sacrifice, yes, I do get that personal responsibility is going to cost some people more than others. Another separable point is that Darwinian approaches to managing people and their jobs is a fairly vile evil in itself, and that, in a less ruthless capitalist world, citizens, the state, and industry would be obliged to work together to ensure meaningful, gainful employment for every person seeking it. So if that's an issue for everyone, vote for a progressive party that makes industry work for the country not vice versa :)

To what extent do you think it's justified for a third party to blame employees as being responsible for the situation? — Judaka

I think, as per the post you were responding to, to the extent that the employee knew what was going on and, by continuing to work there, condoned it. If the employee had reason to fear for their life or family or health if they took a stance, that's a different matter.

Given that theoretically if all employees refused to participate in perpetuating an unfair or harmful operation, then the problem would be resolved. — Judaka

Aye, or even just a sufficient number.

I'm actually facing a related issue atm. I chose back at university never to work for a private military provider (despite the best job I've ever had being with the military) because I didn't want to have to worry about the ethics of my employer. Now the company I work for has been bought out by such a military provider. So far, nothing that makes me uneasy (nothing used to kill people).

I'm asking a question, using your examples. You can clear up the confusion if you weren't trying so hard to be obtuse. — Harry Hindu

I think, as ever, your mode of communication is just, for me anyway, not conducive to anything more than me guessing what you're circling around and hoping for the best. Having been down this road before with you, I'm going to leave the option of you considering your posts more carefully on the table and otherwise have to ignore you. Because there's nothing in that post that demands more than the ridiculously obvious "a neuron firing" is not equal to "a neuron" and that's just going to lead to you saying that's not what you meant and I'm being an asshole or something. Make an effort or I won't either.

That experiences supervene on the physical is compatible with any theory of mind, including substance dualism (I'm not a substance dualist). To spell it out in terms of substance dualism, just to make the point, there might be a lawlike relationship between physical stuff and mental stuff, such that any change in the mental stuff corresponds to a change in the physical stuff, in a consistent, lawlike way. Substance dualism is wrong for other reasons, but it's consistent with the evidence that physical neural events correspond in a very regular manner with that subject's experiences. — bert1

A dualism that cannot separate its dichotomy at all is an insistence rather than an explanation though, again like insisting some mysterious interaction between heads and tails when the obvious and most evident explanation is much simpler: they're the same object. I guess to a dualist, a dualist explanation would seem like the default, but it's one ism more than is necessary. (Tmk there's no proof against dualism, just no justification for it either.)

No neurons, no wetware, no behaviour similar to human behaviour that would allow us to infer consciousness, no? So how may perspectives on the rock are there? Just one, presumably. It has no first person perspective, the only perspective that exists is the perspective of the conscious creature looking at it — bert1

Sure, consciousness is not something a rock does. But it doesn't do a lot of things. It's a lousy printer, and it's notoriously bad a giving blood. Are we going to distinct plane of reality for every possible capacity of an object?

The question now is, why does a neural function have two perspectives, and a rock only one? — bert1

Because perspective is an aspect of consciousness. We are conscious so that feels very special, but there's no objective reason that consciousness is more special -- deserving of its own kind of reality -- than any number of things that can do shit consciousness can't do, like forge galaxies, create atoms, swallow planets, go through two slits at once.

A similar notion to a perspective is a frame of reference, which is unique like a perspective but doesn't require the object in question to be conscious. If you look at something like a point particle falling toward a black hole, there's an extremely different picture from different frames of reference: for a stationary observer far from the event horizon, the particle will slow down as it approaches the horizon, where it will stop; in the rest frame of the particle, it will pass the event horizon and carry on forever (or rather the event horizon will pass and recede from it forever). The difficulty in reconciling different frames of reference is not dependent on consciousness: indeed, I find it easier to grasp that the Halle Berry's face neuron firing is identically the 'experiencing Halle Berry's face' than I do reconciling the consciousness-free black hole 'perspectives'.

In other words, in claiming an identity in order solve the hard problem (the mental just is a physical function) it becomes necessary to re-introduce a dualism in order to be able to talk about subjective experiences as distinct from neurons firing, namely, the distinction between two perspectives. — bert1

I think I covered this above. Disclaimer btw: I currently have sunstroke. Everything I'm saying seems perfectly reasonable and lucid to me. It is possible I will reread this tomorrow and be appalled with myself :rofl:

How can functional interactions of things with only one perspective result in something with two perspectives? — bert1

The thing doesn't "have" two perspectives any more than an apple has infinite perspectives.

I think that if the employee has sufficient information about the context of their actions to know that the broader aims and/or means of their employer are reprehensible, but they continue so as not to lose their job, there is moral culpability on the part of the employee for those actions.

I contend that the natural assumption would be that whoever is using a thing is its owner (residents own homes, workers own businesses, etc), and so the distribution of ownership that one would infer just from looking at the world with fresh eyes would be very different from what the legal records in the real world say it is. — Pfhorrest

Interestingly, the immediate-return hunter-gatherer groups discussed in the thread Judaka referred to have some interesting and diverse views. For instance, the owner of the arrow that shot the beast, not the archer, might have nominal ownership rights of that beast (largely irrelevant since the carcass would be shared equally with the group). If you owned a painting by Picasso, it might be one of his descendants you'd seek out to return it to.

That raises the question of how the law got and stays so different from the “natural order” so to speak. I contend that that has mostly to do with, first and foremost, straight up violent theft in the history of ownership that gave some people more than others; and secondly, terms of contracts like rent and interest (but not limited exclusively to those) that are morality invalid and serve to reinforce and perpetuate those differences in wealth, and without which those differences would naturally dissolve back to the “natural order” that one would expect when looking at the world with fresh eyes. — Pfhorrest

So far as I know, as Judaka says, harsh winters appear to be the reason we have social hierarchy at all, including non-egalitarian property rights and one person's authority over another (e.g. a husband's authority over his wife) which amounts to another kind of property right. Winter seems to be original bogeyman opportunists used to scare people into giving up on fairness.

In other words, your experiences and perspectives are part of "objective" reality. If not, then how can you talk about your experiences and perspectives like you can talk about faces and apples? — Harry Hindu

I think you're confused. Your argument here is that subjective experience is proof that subjective experiences are objects.

IIIIIT'SSS LIIIIIIIIEEESSSSSS!!!!!!

While I could tell it was an attractive idea, your post confused me and I think the reason is you swap between talking about our inability to see reality as it really is to issues of life and it's meaning. The meaning of life _only_ exists in our interpretations, as you seem to acknowledge. Could you give us some examples!of what you mean?

If you don't have "direct access" to "objective" reality then are you saying that you have indirect access to your own experiences? — Harry Hindu

I am privy to experiencing Halle Berry's face. Nothing in that experience suggests a particular neuron firing in my brain. So, no, I do not have access to the objective reality underlying my experiences.

By analogy, when I see an apple, I don't see the full apple. I cannot see the reverse side, or the inside. It's not that the objective reality of the apple is missing my experience of it, rather than my experiencing it is an incomplete and particular perspective.

Now it's probably entirely possible to develop institutions that can resolve these problems in an egalitarian and peaceful fashion. The problem is such solutions require experimentation before you get them right. — Echarmion

True, but it's also worth remembering that we evolved from ancestor species that, far back enough, lived in hierarchical structures. We didn't just experiment with egalitarianism: we evolved empathetic and altruistic responses. This means that our ancestors survived and others didn't _because_ they were egalitarian. And we haven't changed since, biological, in that respect. This was my point to Judaka: egalitarianism is our (and other primates'); resting point. But there is a chicken and egg issue here: we evolved to be egalitarian in egalitarian groups, suggesting some preceding way of life for groups who prospered and eventually speciated. The DR way of life was perhaps *so* different, that transition so shattering that no amount of biological hard-wiring was going to equip us for a DR life, to the extent where other, perhaps older characteristics became more important.

Meanwhile, an experienced hunter from a band with a bad harvest at risk of starvation leads a group of hunters to a neighboring band and murders their hunters, or at least a significant portion of them, in order to secure sufficient food for his band. — Echarmion

Yes, that's an interesting point. Humans that store food are, for the first time, a food source themselves. Even in IR groups, those groups would suspend the access rights of other groups to the area they were occupying. A bad winter, like you say, would lead to the odd raiding party.

And because a tribal society has much more military power than individual bands, the first such society to develop might easily have become a model for others to follow. — Echarmion

And then maybe killed off. I see the idea: militant groups require hierarchy, kill non-militant or less able militant groups, and prosper in an emulatable way. It's a fascinating idea: it would suggest that what we might consider the two falls from grace of our egalitarian, altruistic, pacifistic ancestors -- war and inequality -- were two sides of the same coin. Kudos.

I think it is fair to say though that if the focus of the society is on anything but egalitarianism then egalitarianism won't be achieved. — Judaka

That hits head on what my response to you was going to be. We seem to have evolved as egalitarian, altruistic beings, insofar as we pack a lot of hardware to make us so. Yet even in IR groups we still need socialisations to keep everything on an even keel, since we also inherit the contrary impulse to dominate and coping mechanisms for being dominated. It's like egalitarianism is the only equilibrium point, but it's metastable.

I'd been thinking along the lines of how deeply entrenched these egalitarian social memes were, representing something to overcome to transition to hierarchical structures in DR. But you're quite right, there's also a major perturbation to the foundations of society so there's a converse question if DR had remained egalitarian: how was that sustained in the face of a profound transformation in their way of life. My working answer to that is: biology, but it is clear from history that biology is insufficient, otherwise we'd all be egalitarian still. Even back in the OP for the older thread, I had assumed that biology + egalitarian socialisations = egalitarianism.

There's probably no single dominant factor in why no egalitarian DR groups are known to us; it's likely a mixture of things:
- IR groups live in the present; DR partly in the future, which is where authority might derive from (you can't have democratic forecasts of winters)
- Fear of the future likely amplified opportunities for dominating individuals to acquire that authority
- IR groups generally have a concept of private property for anything built by hand (tools, weapons, etc.), which may have meant that foodstores were not publicly owned even if the food in them was;
- hierarchical DR groups may simply be more effective, and so egalitarian ones lost the competition;
- the biggest factor intrinsic to DR way of life that ended egalitarianism seems to me that it supported much larger groups, fixed to one place, and unlikely to split up, such that individuals were more likely to interact with people they didn't know very well, and familial subgroups were apt to form, meaning that counter-empathetic responses were apt to arise and be passed down.

Some of which were covered by Stiles and yourself, I guess I just needed convincing :) Thanks!

But actually, I meant how we feel about narcissism could reveal our preferences. — Judaka

Ah, I getcha! Thanks for clarifying.

You completely missed the point. — Harry Hindu

...

Does a brain exist how we see it, smell it, or taste it? — Harry Hindu

Apparently you completely failed to include the point.

If you can't discern the difference between water and vodka visually, but can only do so by smell or taste, then is the world is as it appears visually, or as it smells or tastes? — Harry Hindu

Okay, so _you_ completely missed the point. Also these are spurious dichotomies. I can only hope you're speaking metaphorically.

But the evidence only appears a certain way depending on what sensory device you are using to observe the evidence. — Harry Hindu

Fortunately you can use many devices, simultaneously if you like: again, it's not either/or.

I think that we are forgetting that any time we mention evidence, we are mentioning some conscious experience of some evidence, not evidence as it exists apart from our experience of it, or the way it appears to some sensory apparatus. — Harry Hindu

As I said to Judaka, this is a very outdated way of looking at science. Phenomenology is an important matter in modern physics. When someone says "a photon is a click in a photo detector," they are not talking about photons as they appear to the photon detector but how we experience the photon detector's behaviour. All scientific measurement is really a human measurement of a measuring instrument. This isn't problematic: it's been a couple of hundred years since scientists thought they had direct access to objective reality.

Anti-semitism in the Arab world did not only begin existing in 1948, there's a very long history there. — BitconnectCarlos

:up: Starting with Muhammad. (EDIT: Well, at least since Muhammad, and probably before.)

And Trump should be commended for saying that, because it's true. There's blood on every states hands. It's just that the bigger the state (generally) the more blood they spill... — Manuel

Small hands though.

Newton tortured people??? — Wayfarer

Sure did. He was head of the Royal Mint. He hard pretty barbaric means of finding out where counterfeit money came from.

That doesn’t mean, necessarily, that they could adopt any interpretation they like. — Wayfarer

Agreed, that's not what I meant. I mean that, if two people had the same religious experience, one was an atheist, one was devout, would they not know of that experience in different ways, the former making sense of it in his atheist fashion, the latter in her devout way of knowing?

The Buddha never interpreted or understood his realisation in theistic terms. — Wayfarer

Yes, good point. Aboriginal Australians likewise. So you can know God without knowing God.