Thinking more about this. I can imagine waking in a Matrix, I can imagine my self floating down the Mississippi in a raft with Huckleberry Finn, and I can lose my self in these narratives, but I also know I know the difference between what I can imagine and what is real. Many things mitigate in support of the difference such as pain, coherence and the massive impact the world exerts when we set aside our arcane pursuits.The logical argument might hold, but that is logic's problem, a ripple perhaps that is seen in logical paradoxes.

This doesn't seem like a good argument, since the fact that two words come to mean opposite things from use doesn't mean that we can't have been mistaken in thinking that more than one side of the dichotomy ever applied. We thought the difference was apparent in our experience, but we were wrong; we were always dreaming, and never 'conscious' in the relevant way we thought we were. The distinction in retrospect would merely have been two sorts of dreaming, and there is nothing unintelligible or unimaginable about this.

Yea, good counterargument, but I still wonder if this problem does not arise out of how meanings are associate with words My hangup is that knowledge of the difference between being awake & conscious, and being asleep & dreaming, enables the logical argument:

We thought the difference was apparent in our experience, but we were wrong; we were always dreaming, and never 'conscious' in the relevant way we thought we were.

What we know about being awake or asleep, conscious or dreaming is based on our personal experience of these states of being which is then used to demolish what was learned in experience, which yes makes sense logically, but its not how we experience life. I can understand and accept that sun neither rises nor sets, but asserting the same sort of reality to my nightmares, misses something about reality and what it misses, I think, has to do with the language we use.

Stanley Clavell:
“A soldier being instructed in guard duty is asked: ‘Suppose that while you're on guard duty in the middle of a desert you see a battleship approaching your post. What would you do?’ The soldier replies: ‘I'd take my torpedo and sink it.’ The instructor is, we are to imagine, perplexed: ‘Where would you get the torpedo?’ And he is answered: The same place you got the battleship,’” The Claim of Reason, p. 151

Ryle's counterfeit argument works. I would enjoy hearing a criticism of it.

Semantically, 'conscious'/'dreaming' rely of each other for meaning, a lot like the states of 'raw'/'cooked'. They only seem to make sense in relation to each other. The differentiation between states 'conscious'/'dreaming" is apparent in our experience, and our logical construction of the world around us.

A dream life has been imagined, but it's world could not cohere logically.

John I have always drawn, painting only last 3/4 yrs. Painting is adding a new dimension for me.

Its funny I hate games that require stop watches, like speed chess. I think chess should be played with a friend some beer and a good whiskey. What surprised the hell out of me took place on a trip to Barcelona a couple of years ago. I went to a timed Figure Drawing session, the process seduced me. Now I feel guilty when I don't go onto You Tube and catch a Croquis Cafe.

Here is a of work from a my visit to Massachusetts, in New England. My brother, he lives in the Groton area, which in US terms is old, settled around 1655. Great views and fantastic weather, a little early foliage.

Yes, I like your question. Translation may be an issue:


Aramaic Bible in Plain English
"For The Messiah is the consummation of The Written Law for righteousness to everyone who believes."

I think Paul's intent/need was to show how the Old Testament coheres with the life and teachings of Christ. Presenting Christ as the fulfillment of its laws & prophecies. He mission was to develop communities of believers, who would attempt to live & behave as Christ taught. To care about how they lived because their end was near. To do this he had to overcome traditional laws that separated the Jews from other communities. Paul was a revolutionary, with a revolutionary message.

I have only read a few Lacan essays, and Bruce Fink's "Against Understanding". Fink is excellent, a translator of Lacan. The following is based on that reading since it seems to go against what you have quoted by Mr. Mcmahon.

The goal of psychoanalysis with neurotics is not understanding it is change. During this process of give and take authorship is not often clear. Bringing things to speech with another person is essential, it is only by putting things into words that "lasting change" can come about. This interchange necessarily involves childhood development.

Saying things is not the same as understanding them for either analyst or analysand..."understanding can wait". Understanding, meanings offer very little help in fostering change.

Part of the analyst's job is to take meaning apart, to undermine understanding by showing that far from explaining everything, it is always partial, not total, and leaves many things out. Just as the Zen master's work is premised on the notions that enlightenment does not stem from understanding, but is, rather, a state of being, the psychoanalyst realizes that the analysand's search for understanding is part and parcel of the modern scientific subject's misguided search for mastery of nature and himself through knowledge"

The analyst is a catalyst that helps the analysand realize its fantasies. The analyst struggles to stay out of the analysand's fantasy, mirroring it to the analysand, making them talk about it, which takes a lot of time and effort. Language is the medium of exchange and a wall, since we can never really speak each other's language.

I saw the difference, however the article I cited goes on to state:

Jefferson's 28 May 1816 letter to John Taylor:

And I sincerely believe, with you, that banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies; and that the principle of spending money to be paid by posterity, under the name of funding, is but swindling futurity on a large scale.


The latter statement is both undocumented and not in accordance what Jefferson wrote in a 24 June 1813 letter to John Wayles Eppes.

It is a posthumous attribution, he did not say it. He may not have liked Banks, but he did like credit.

http://www.snopes.com/quotes/jefferson/banks.asp

Like Socrates, I think it is better to hope in an afterlife - and hope is the most we can have in this life. We're going to die anyway, might as well die with hope and gladness in our hearts.

Socrates last words:

I owe a cock to the saviour Asclepius”

According to Nietzsche this was not hope, it was resentment. Life is an illness and death its cure. From The Gay Science, The Dying Socrates:

Is it possible that a man like him, who had lived cheerfully and like a soldier in the sight of everyone, should have been a pessimist? He had merely kept a cheerful mien while concealing all his life long his ultimate judgment, his inmost feeling. Socrates, Socrates suffered life! And then he still revenged himself – with this veiled, gruesome, pious, and blasphemous saying. Did a Socrates need such revenge? Did his overrich virtue lack an ounce of magnanimity? – Alas, my friends, we must overcome even the Greeks! (340)

Epicurus argument bears few assumptions.
We were not
Then we are
Then we are not

There is no presumption of continuation, it is symmetry. It is Meontology.

“Try to imagine what it will be like to go to sleep and never wake up... now try to imagine what it was like to wake up having never gone to sleep.” - Alan Watts

Thoughts?

Epicurus Symmetry argument:

"...anyone who fears death should consider the time before he was born. The past infinity of pre-natal non-existence is like the future infinity of post-mortem non-existence; it is as though nature has put up a mirror to let us see what our future non-existence will be like. But we do not consider not having existed for an eternity before our births to be a terrible thing; therefore, neither should we think not existing for an eternity after our deaths to be evil."

1. Was Jesus' resurrection only a work of literature with no physical grounds that such a thing occurred?
2. Was Jesus' resurrection a true story that transcended the realm of physical laws as we currently perceive them?

I would not conflate physical truth with theological truth. These are two different lenses, one that has to do with science's view of the world and the other with a community's faith/belief, while I am not saying there can't be communication & interchange between the two, trying to understand one by use of the other is, I think, a mistake.

What I am trying to elicit is what it means to be authentic. We as humans seem to be both bad and good at our core. Perhaps being good means acting in accordance with one's self, and being bad is acting out of accord with what we believe in, 'sinning' against one's self. Acting bad, leading to a bad conscience, leading to guilt involves action, in a sense all actions are violent, since to act means to change something.

The problem that comes up is what we does it mean since in our life means little (without God). We are finite mortal creatures, the meaning we give to events are not in the events, the meanings are in us and as such morals are fictive, stories we tell our self. In spite of this willfully acting with a good conscience means acting in accordance with laws we give to our self which is, I think, the only way we can act freely.

(If the Cartesian Cogito is epistemological truth (leaving aside ego issues), then perhaps Desire is the Cogito's ontological counterpart, which forms the basis for thought. Tired, traveling all day...just some thoughts)

"Why not let your behavior come naturally? Be authentic."
— Mongrel

Perhaps one's authentic natural self is violent, cruel, demanding, and if so then only way to behave morally is to be inauthentic, maybe that is what authenticity is, the acceptance of one's own fundamental weakness and the willingness to act toward others, not naturally, but as dictated by norms.

The mystics of many centuries, independently, yet in perfect harmony with each other (somewhat like the particles in an ideal gas) have described, each of them, the unique experience of his or her life in terms that can be condensed in the phrase: DEUS FACTUS SUM (I have become God).
To Western ideology, the thought has remained a stranger... in spite of those true lovers who, as they look into each other's eyes, become aware that their thought and their joy are numerically one, not merely similar or identical...

Reminds me of St. Paul Galatians 2:20

I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I now live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.

Paul did not become God, he made room for God, accepted the call of God, and became possessed by God, God's "chosen vessel".

The idea of making room, opening space within oneself to receive grace/inspiration/truth resonates with me, making it the core of all ones activities. This, I think, is an act of volition, not a noetic ascension, which is not to say that such ascension cannot be involved, but that the acceptance/rejection of insight depends on our willingness to accept, and the fortitude to live and act in a manner coincident with that acceptance.

Nice...I especially like Semiosis 1 and Topos 2

Doesn't it seem that certain norms are shared regardless of the society. I am specifically thinking of Justice. It seems that regardless of where one looks there is some conception of what is just and what is not just, what is fair and what is not fair.

That the perversion of law, of codified justice, made the Nazi travesties possible. The Enabling Act of 1933, enabled Hitler to bypass parliament to pass laws he want to pass.

It seems to me that a society can't be 'moral' without laws that provide for just solutions, the concept of Justice is/may be supra-normative.

so reason is necessarily our shared perspectives.
— Cavacava

Yes. Reason is the bones of objectivity.

Thinking more about this. If reason/rationality is a necessary part of "the bones" of what it takes to make a good, charitable, say objective interpretation, I don't think that entails that the perspective itself needs to be rational, good or charitable since I think all perspectives are normative and norms are not necessarily rational, good or charitable. Interpretation is methodological, not epistemic (perhaps).

If 'objectively true' means true without a doubt, then I don't think that anything can be known in its entirety. Change is unavoidable and the number of possible perspectives is not limited. I think the analysis of what is true is based on the presumptions of the perspective(s) that is/are chosen, and how well these perspectives enable meaningful interpenetration of what is being considered.

So perhaps truth is one, but that can't be proven on the basis of multiple perspectives, since while translations between perspectives, may possible, they do may not necessarily convey with the same meaning, since they are interpreted using different presuppositions.

Make sure I understand what you are suggesting.

Truth corresponds to experience, and the translation of that correspondence is based on the perspective of some observer?

Doesn't that make truth relative to the observer, unless we assume that all observers must share some specific perspectives in order to claim to know the truth. We all share the perspective of the apparent, and we can all reason our way from what is apparent to what it conceals by reason, so reason is necessarily one of our shared perspectives.

Do you think it is objectively true that the sun rises and sets each day, we experience it that way, but then when we ask what does it mean to say the sun rises/sets the explanation suggests that we are in apparent error and the truth is that the earth revolves around the sun... that what we experience is an appearance and not the truth, but then if all we experience are appearances, what does that mean for the truth of the things we experience.

In so far as a government acts, its actions can be evaluated as moral, immoral or neutral. The actions of most governments appear to me to be mainly utilitarian in nature, centered in self interest, attempting to provide the greatest good for the greatest number of its citizens.

Laws are constructed to insure the rights of citizens and to enable commerce as well as protect the lives of the citizens it serves. Victimless crimes such as prostitution are statements of cultural values/traditions/ideologies, which are enshrined into laws. Such laws I think would come under that category of the government protecting citizens against themselves, similar to helmet laws or seat belt laws.

Justice is key to the construction and operation of a nation, without some measure of justice no nation can operate. Even the most unjust dictatorship or other form of government, requires a certain amount of justice to function. I doubt any state is even close to truly just. Overall, I think self interest & the 'tragedy of the commons' dominates the course of justice in society. Each nation chooses its own path, and its laws tend to follow that path. Nations share many of the same central principles so it is not surprising that similar actions are though criminal in many countries.

Red solo cup, my friend.

LOL. I can tell all kinds of narratives (in one of my favorites I'm the best at X- and I don't want to tell you what X is.) It doesn't make them true, or agree with what is the case. How would anyone go about proving that free will is the case? I am operating under the assumption that it can't be done.

One might as well try to prove that God does or doesn't exist.

It may not make them true or even "agree with what is the case", but if you admit that you derive meaning from what you experience, and, that this meaning is not in the experience, then you admit what you are the author of your meanings which creates your own inner causality, and you are aware of this... that in my estimation is the basis of free will.

As a side note, I think the hard determinism position is a left-over from the belief in God's omniscience, and it is just about as capable of being proved.

Either virtue can be taught or virtue cannot be taught.

If virtue can be taught then there must be rules, principles that can be pointed to, arguments that can be understood. If virtue cannot be taught then it must reside in us as innate knowledge, or part of our constitution as human beings,something which we must discover within, a property we all share to some extent.

I think this opposition is only apparent. We live in a society that is full of norms, laws, political, social divisions and we learn to act in accordance with these norms. We understand that we take a risk when we do not accept societal norms.The cause of our actions are based on the meanings we assign to the various norms around us. Norms are general and they are learnt, The meanings we assign to norms are particular to us and our history, and these meanings (not the norms) are the direct cause of our individual actions.

How about Colin Kaepernick kneeling during the playing of the Star Spangle Banner.
Kaepernick knelt to highlight racial oppression, this action was far from the norm and it caused an uproar. He took a risk because he believes in a racial equality, and he does not see it being equally applied in our society, and he is willing to weather the consequences of his choice.

His actions seem to coincide with the principal that all men are created equal. The meaning he takes from this principal enables him, and now others, to revolt against what they see as a transgression of equality in American society. His revolt is to kneel during the playing of the Star Spangle Banner, a national song. He made kneeling into a symbolic protest, a move that appears to be virtuous to me. It is based on a rule, but his actions deny that this rule is being obeyed. The virtue of his courage is his willingness to suffer the consequences of his actions.

My point is that virtue ethics, is traced back to Hellenic thought and Divine Command theory evolved out of Abrahamic thought which was rule based. Christianity mixes these two different attitudes toward morals, which became the normative ideal from which Deontolgy evolved. That is what I am suggesting.

I don't think there is a good basis for supporting an Old Testament version of Virtue Ethics.

You bring up the Book of Job. Where God and Satan bet on Job's caving into the misfortunes that God inveighs against Job. Job follows the rules. He does what he believes God has commanded, his moral crisis is why is God doing this to me, God's answer, who are you to ask, where were you when I created all of this. He sets the rules an man obeys. Job obey his rules.

Abraham may have acted from his faith in God, but he followed God's command. This is different than the Hellenic approach.

He destroys his soul because he does violence to his own nature - he betrays his wife, he destroys the intimacy, love and exclusivity that existed between them, and other such permanent goods of the soul,

No, I think he destroys his soul because he goes against the commandment not to commit adultery, I don't think the interpretation you are trying ascribing can be held in the Old Testament. It was not until Christianity adopted Hellenic ideas that such a reading became possible.

I have to work.. but consider that Abraham was commanded by God to kill Isaac and that it was Paul who introduced the idea of will divided against itself.

But whoso committeth adultery with a woman lacketh understanding: he that doeth it destroyeth his own soul.
— Proverbs 6:32

Why does he destroy his soul, is it due to his own internal conflict or because he does not follow God's Command. I think it is the latter.

Socrates is trying to figure out if virtue can be taught, Protagoras is a Sophist who claims he can teach virtue.

And the biggest irony is that ultimately the one who seeks only pleasure gets the least of it, while the virtuous man, who never seeks it, gets the most, and ultimately does in fact lead the most pleasant life.

In Plato's Euthyphro Socrates asks:

“Are morally good acts willed by God because they are morally good, or are they morally good because they are willed by God?”

Plato rejects Divine Command Theory, but this is exactly what the Bible, Christianity and eventually Deontology accepts...that there are rules given to us, ways to live the Good Life, and a virtuous life follows these rules.

The issue (in need of reconciliation I think) is between Virtue Ethics and Deontolgical Ethics. Kant held that man has to follow the Moral Law in order to be worthy of the Good, that virtue involves doing what one ought to do.


(We could go though Socrates' Hedonistic argument, but since you seem to be heading towards the Hellenic conception of virtue, I thought a conversation of how the Hellenic ideal compares to the Abrahamic ideal might be interesting)

I don't think Trump is party motivated, or loyal to the Republican Party and many of the senior elite of the Republican Party understand this and they have come out against him in public. He has bears little allegiance to the Republican Party its ideas or its sacred cows.

His campaign is more a movement then a party campaign. He is capitalizing on the politicization of resentment especially aiming at the countries predominately white working class population the majority of whom feel left out, and worse off then they were in the 'good old days', when they were growing up. Trump is trying to exploit social cleavages, Muslims, immigrants, police versus minorities and he is accentuating the polarization of feeling of non-representation.

I think the basis of his movement is a form of populism that is not particularly party orientated, but rather pits what he frames as an establishment of elites (experts/media outlets) against common working people regardless of party. He channels himself as an outsider fighting for the common man as almost a mythic figure, one who beat 16 very professional politicians, by an amazing margin.

His mastery of a dialectical approach to politics is awesome. He proposes, denies and then proposes again and perhaps again denies. You can't make anything stick against him, because he simply retreats to his motte of ambiguity. He shoots straight from the hip and really doesn't care what anyone thinks about it, which only further endears him to his following.

The Burkini prohibition, I think is really kinda prescient, given that ISIS has recently banned the burka. It is an excellent way to disguise an carry weapons.
http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2016-09-06/in-surprise-move-islamic-state-group-reportedly-bans-burqas.

My fear is that small minority groups will become normalize by the media coverage of candidates such as Trump. Interviewing White Supremacists at Trump rallies, given them a legitimacy which they would not have had if not for his candidacy.

The whole thing about Jews mystifies the shit out of me. I guess they are the historical scapegoat.

I think free will, our ability to act as author without being determined to act in a certain manner is real, and it does not require a leap of faith. The physical causal argument that I am determined to do x because of some other event y does not work in the narrative I tell myself about the world.

The meanings I give to what I experience are not the same as those experiences. Meanings are mental, normatively and linguistically generated. They may depend on a deterministic universe, I don't know for sure about that, but I am sure that there are no meaning 'out there' that I have not generated, or accepted as part of a society.

What I do depends on my understanding, which is based on the meanings I have mentally, normatively or linguistically constructed for myself. The causality of the meanings I have attached to experience is not the same as these events. My reconstitution of past events are not those events. In so far as I can create meanings for myself, I have 'free will'

You are probably too fast for him Mongrel.

I downloaded the prisma app but I have not tried it. I do a lot with photographs for biz, I have to manipulate them to some extent, its fun.

I am going to do some Plein Air with 37 other painters this Saturday afternoon weather permitting. I am excited because it is at Society of the 4 Arts on Palm Beach Island. Great place, art, sculpture, plays, library....several buildings spread out over several acres going down to the Inter coastal. Really very pretty area.



I have visited it several times and tried to paint aspects of it along the Lake Trail that goes part-way around the Island. There is a wish fountain that faces the inter-coastal by Noguchi



My rendition of this.


It is very neat to see whatever one else is doing, so if the rain gives a break, I'll get to paint with some very talented people.

I am not sure how it occurred but there was a negation of that formlessness and regardless of what may have caused it (if that is the right word), that process occurred in time, which suggests a duality, t1 & t2
a dialectic.

Suppose that each plank on the Theseus is replaced exactly with a steel plank. Is it the same ship? & of course if each of the old planks were conserved and reassembled, is it the real 'real' Theseus?

Perhaps without time there is no form...the wax always has form, regardless of when you look at it, the candle is just one form that wax, being what it is, can take.

Take a look at Book I of Aristotle's Politics.

Perhaps Plato had no slaves in his Republic because the majority of its workers in it were no better off than slaves in their subjugation to its ruling class.

Perhaps in the early morning, all alone in the frozen north and when you've gotten the fire started in the wood stove, which is now cranking out its radiant heat comfortably taking off the chill in the house, and warming your body. Just before you put on the coffee. You sit and stare into the fire, as our ancestors surly must have, in a simple hypnotic reverie, watching the flames dance with their blue and yellow jets licking the wood, now all aglow, singing a warm serenade at you, and you're become completely enwrapping in this primal unitary experience, forgetting time and place and the coffee.

Yes, language enables the self. What we learn and, how we value our experiences, how we conceptualize what we experience would not be possible without language. While language is not thought it is constitutive of thought.

If no moment has any intrinsic (any objective value), over any other moment, then the only difference is the value I give to one moment in relation to the next. I continually and repeatedly try to dominate my experiences, which are in them self indomitable, I think my self arises out of the dialectic of this process, whose abode is language.

Keeping promises.