Do you consider yourself a philosopher?

[Hereandnow]

Greta:
You may have noticed that I am not bothered very easily these days. Age, experience, sloth, possibly all of the above. No, I'd rather just chat with people who think deeply and, if I encountered such a person who thought very similarly to me, that would be most unfamiliar terrain

I know what you mean. I just thank my lucky stars I'm not in the mainstream. Could have been a politician, which is cringeworthy.

I don't see the blunt and disorienting aspects of language as invalidating our expressed and tested perceptions contained in our body of knowledge. Think Einstein; everything is relative. This is THE key point in any conversation about what seems to be "most real". It doesn't much matter if the fabric of the universe is thought, energy or jello - the relativities are the same.

Right. But there is something inexplicable "here" which will not vanish in a puff of logic about how meaning depends on other meanings. It is the givens that are there, and sustain regardless of the direction of interpretation: A Christian calls evil a sin against god. I call evil the horror of being cooked alive in a Sicilian bull. I ask, in all of theory of all the sciences, can anyone tell me what THAT is doing in this place we call reality? I don't mean why people treat others so badly, or how does evolution explain the selection of extreme vulnerability; I mean what is that doing here at all? Why does Being DO that? The point I'm making is that when you get to this place where yo're looking at someting that is simply given, not embedded in some elaborate explanation or theory or social institution, you are then on solid ground,and meaing is not lost to interpretation. Many foolish questions disappear, like wondering if god existed how could there be evil. It's a contrived question. The only foundationally meaningful ones are about what is here antecedent to any interpretation. This is phenomenology. Husserl's epoche presents possibility

I may be I, and I expect all logical thinkers, would agree with Kant about the impossibility of truly perceiving noumena without sensory bias. So when we describe a star, what we are referring to are moving zones of extreme concentration of the fabric of the universe within the arena we call "the known universe". They are much larger, hotter and more dense than most non-composite entities. Further, there is no firm boundary around a star; its influence extends for over a trillion kilometres, just as our own influences extend beyond our own bodies. These dynamics are not just playing out in our heads because we all see our star and feel its influence (yesterday it was 40C here). However, to know exactly what a star is, we would need to know what energy is - the actual nature of the fabric of reality beyond the usual prosaic definition of energy; "work". Since we are made of the same stuff, that's tricky, so we settle for relativities.

What is a star from the German existentialist perspective? Different to how I described it?

A star is a star. But if you ask different questions, not like "are the stars out tonight," but like, how do we know that a star exists? or, How do we know a start exists and what does that knowledge tell us about justified true belief, and, what is the structure of that knowledge claim, i.e., if we look at the knowledge claim itself, and not the content (the star), what does this show us about our knowingn the world at all? and so on; then the ontological features come out, are laid bare, because this kind of questions already dismisses things that what are being claimed in knowledge claims. content is out here. And the narrative on this begins with Kant, and moves into phenomenology/existentialism and ends up with postmodernism: a world lost in endless streams of deconstruction, never touching the "ground" defended by epistemological foundationalism. What we know becomes language games.

I don't find geeky puzzle solving that intriguing, but these guys really do help to shape how we can think about the world. See Consul's posts on this on this sort of thing. It gets thick, but it is rewarding, his reading references. But it all starts with Kant. Kant's Critique of Pure reason made philosophical thinking something deeply important.

[Sy Borg]

Greta:
You may have noticed that I am not bothered very easily these days. Age, experience, sloth, possibly all of the above. No, I'd rather just chat with people who think deeply and, if I encountered such a person who thought very similarly to me, that would be most unfamiliar terrain :)

I know what you mean. I just thank my lucky stars I'm not in the mainstream. Could have been a politician, which is cringeworthy.

I have great admiration politicians' personal power, persistence, toughness, networking ability and (in some cases) talents, although it's perplexing that during times of great economic disruption people increasingly tend to vote for inept, obtuse and corrupt politicians with big mouths and a desire for total control. Just as a frightened teen may clutch for the childhood teddy, frightened adults gravitate towards authoritarian figures who pretend that they can fully control the inherently uncontrollable.

... there is something inexplicable "here" which will not vanish in a puff of logic about how meaning depends on other meanings. It is the givens that are there, and sustain regardless of the direction of interpretation: A Christian calls evil a sin against god. I call evil the horror of being cooked alive in a Sicilian bull. I ask, in all of theory of all the sciences, can anyone tell me what THAT is doing in this place we call reality? I don't mean why people treat others so badly, or how does evolution explain the selection of extreme vulnerability; I mean what is that doing here at all? Why does Being DO that? The point I'm making is that when you get to this place where you're looking at something that is simply given, not embedded in some elaborate explanation or theory or social institution, you are then on solid ground,and meaning is not lost to interpretation.

So then you are referring to that very fabric of reality rather than its relativities. That leads to the work of cosmologists and quantum physicists, and that of the storytellers who put their work into context, as per below.

A star is a star. But if you ask different questions, not like "are the stars out tonight," but like, how do we know that a star exists? or, How do we know a start exists and what does that knowledge tell us about justified true belief, and, what is the structure of that knowledge claim, i.e., if we look at the knowledge claim itself, and not the content (the star), what does this show us about our knowingn the world at all? and so on; then the ontological features come out, are laid bare, because this kind of questions already dismisses things that what are being claimed in knowledge claims. content is out here. And the narrative on this begins with Kant, and moves into phenomenology/existentialism and ends up with postmodernism: a world lost in endless streams of deconstruction, never touching the "ground" defended by epistemological foundationalism. What we know becomes language games.

I don't find geeky puzzle solving that intriguing, but these guys really do help to shape how we can think about the world. See Consul's posts on this on this sort of thing. It gets thick, but it is rewarding, his reading references. But it all starts with Kant. Kant's Critique of Pure reason made philosophical thinking something deeply important.

To understand these very deep questions about the nature of being, as you said, we need to consider foundations. As Sagan noted, "we are made from star stuff". More precisely, we are an expression of a solar system. We can, as you say, deconstruct reality and find ever more detail, drilling down to the subatomic realm and panning out to galactic clusters. Yet, as you suggested; if every system in nature including mentality is merely a particular arrangement of dynamic patterning, then this entire world of meaning that is intrinsic to our experience of life is just more patterning (cue the nihilists).

And, that is exactly what it is - to those who are unaffected. To do science is to at least aim to be unaffected, thus the apparent false homogeneity of the value of things that you referred to above. However, it's when one performs a meta analyses, rather than the details, that a story emerges. Rather than a morass of meaningless measures and observed patterns, the things we learn come together to form a narrative with a beginning, a history, a current circumstance, future prospects and an ending.

So, sure, "a star is a star" just as a person is a person, but the story of the shrapnel from an explosion of energy 13.8n years ago continues, and it is the stories that bring meaning to us.

[Hereandnow]

Greta
I have great admiration politicians' personal power, persistence, toughness, networking ability and (in some cases) talents, although it's perplexing that during times of great economic disruption people increasingly tend to vote for inept, obtuse and corrupt politicians with big mouths and a desire for total control. Just as a frightened teen may clutch for the childhood teddy, frightened adults gravitate towards authoritarian figures who pretend that they can fully control the inherently uncontrollable.

Well. I beg to differ on this point. Personal power and the rest can be virtues, granted, but when politicians steer policy toward inhumanity, I despise them. When they are the kind of people that believe as I do, that cruelty is the worst a person can do (my most recent definition of a liberal) then i am on their side. I leave their admirable qualities out of it. Himmler was tough, wasn't he?

To understand these very deep questions about the nature of being, as you said, we need to consider foundations. As Sagan noted, "we are made from star stuff". More precisely, we are an expression of a solar system. We can, as you say, deconstruct reality and find ever more detail, drilling down to the subatomic realm and panning out to galactic clusters. Yet, as you suggested; if every system in nature including mentality is merely a particular arrangement of dynamic patterning, then this entire world of meaning that is intrinsic to our experience of life is just more patterning (cue the nihilists).

And, that is exactly what it is - to those who are unaffected. To do science is to at least aim to be unaffected, thus the apparent false homogeneity of the value of things that you referred to above. However, it's when one performs a meta analyses, rather than the details, that a story emerges. Rather than a morass of meaningless measures and observed patterns, the things we learn come together to form a narrative with a beginning, a history, a current circumstance, future prospects and an ending.

So, sure, "a star is a star" just as a person is a person, but the story of the shrapnel from an explosion of energy 13.8n years ago continues, and it is the stories that bring meaning to us.

I'll try not to be a bore about this. Right, foundations.That is why I push Husserl. Because of foundations. He is a Cartesian, meaning he took proximity to consciousness to be the determination of what is real, as with Descartes' I think, therefore I am. Descartes didn't know that he had discovered the foundation for all philosophical questions, which is the transcendental ego and its objects. The things science studies are, as Thomas Kuhn and others put it, paradigms that never settle, are always subject to revision. Kuhn wrote that famous book Structures of Scientific Revolutions in which he describes normal science as being an adherence to a working body of ideas that are taught and encouraged. These inevitably yield to change when anomalies and research come together to make a serious challenge. But move into the sphere of immediate conscious events and there are, and this is his BIG point: There are certain things that simply cannot be revised because they are absolutes. I have ideas about everything in my conscious awareness, and in time, a thousand years, a million? these ideas will change, just as ideas have always changed; just read his book on the history of science for a great exposition on this. But the "things themselves," that are simply given and not part of body of empirical science, these are, if you will, certainly there, in my world, their presence qua presence is the Real world. And center to to is the egoic center, the Real self.

There is a ton of literature about this, and, of course, it has lost ground. Heidegger took off with it, but did not privilege the transcendental ego. Sartre sort of did (he wrote a great little book, The Transcendence of the Ego" in which he rejected it), but he was not talking about what Husserl had in mind. Then postmodernism, a neo Heideggerian movement, came in and destroyed all attempts to establish a foundation to human knowledge in an independent world "out there."

I side with Husserl's foundationalism but Rorty really helped me understand what reality as we know it in an everyday way: I say, pass the salt. What is salt's Being? We never, ever know What it is. we only "know" the processes of knowing themselves, which are pragmatic. Being is reified familiarity, repetitions of something, and the what of which is

completely alien

. How is this sustained? Just ask what something is and see what the answers are: more concepts. What are concepts? dynamics in time. Process. See Alfred Whitehead.

I have grown into the conclusion that we live in transcendence. All of it: this chair, that tree, that star...This is the purpose of philosophy. To destroy presumption of knowing so one can shut up and let the world speak. The Buddhists take over from here. The Hindus thought of this many centuries ago, and they said to put this knowledge to rest awakens something deeply profound about Being here. I want to know what this is, and it is not merely faith that encourages. It begins with Husserl's epoche.

[Hereandnow]

I should add that Husserl's things themselves are not Kant's noumena, which are called things in themselves. Very different. Husserl's things themselves are a reference to the immediate environment of perceived things, paying attention to their presence, their structure as forms of thought, and so on.

[Namelesss]

Just ask what something is and see what the answers are: more concepts.

The problem with declaring what 'something is', is a crude and obsolete way to say "how I perceive something"!
The apple not "is red", but "red is how I perceive it"!
The 'red' is not in the apple, it is 'in' us!
See; E-Prime;

E-Prime Tutorial
http://www.angelfire.com/nd/danscorpio/ep2.html/

Quantum Psychology
1990
E and E-Prime
http://www.nobeliefs.com/eprime.htm

What are concepts?

Concept appears to me to be another word for perceived thoughts.
A perceived 'concept' of an apple appears no different than a perceived thought of an apple.

[Hereandnow]

Nameless:
The problem with declaring what 'something is', is a crude and obsolete way to say "how I perceive something"!
The apple not "is red", but "red is how I perceive it"!
The 'red' is not in the apple, it is 'in' us!

Sorry, did you say "....declaring 'something is,' IS..??? Consider that the question of Being may rest altogether with language and culture, and that 'Being' is a term that is, some say, exhaustively analyzed as a construct of meaning, in which case 'is' is critically important: it is indeed at the very foundation, again, some argue, of what it means to be at all.

Concept appears to me to be another word for perceived thoughts.
A perceived 'concept' of an apple appears no different than a perceived thought of an appl

And this is enlightening because?

[Namelesss]

Nameless:
The problem with declaring what 'something is', is a crude and obsolete way to say "how I perceive something"!
The apple not "is red", but "red is how I perceive it"!
The 'red' is not in the apple, it is 'in' us!

Sorry, did you say "....declaring 'something is,' IS..???

Are you saying that because I, personally, do not speak in E-Prime all the time, that what I offer is meaningless to you?
Or are you being deliberately obtuse?

Consider that the question of Being may rest altogether with language and culture, and that 'Being' is a term that is, some say, exhaustively analyzed as a construct of meaning, in which case 'is' is critically important: it is indeed at the very foundation, again, some argue, of what it means to be at all.

"Question of being"?
If you are willing to consider/accept that the qualities that are revealed to your own unique Perspective are, somehow, magically inherent in the item perceived, while you are another magical 'objective observer', then have at it.
Science and philosophy isn't everything, but the notion of the 'objective observer' ideal of classical science is long shown to be obsolete.
What is your "being", if only 'illusion/mirage' is your evidence?
If your philosophy is not fed by the cutting edge of science (and beyond), it appears to be as useless as a Rubic's cube.

Concept appears to me to be another word for perceived thoughts.
A perceived 'concept' of an apple appears no different than a perceived thought of an appl

And this is enlightening because?

What it means to you is up to you.
I just offered a pile of letters for your monitor.
All 'meaning' is inherently in the thoughts of the beholder, rather than the words.
I answered a question that you asked; "What is a concept".
If my response is meaningless to you, the 'reason' is not that the words were inherently meaningless in their being, but that you found no meaning.
Your 'enlightenment' depends on 'your' state of being...

Have a nice day. *__-

[Sy Borg]

Greta
I have great admiration politicians' personal power, persistence, toughness, networking ability and (in some cases) talents, although it's perplexing that during times of great economic disruption people increasingly tend to vote for inept, obtuse and corrupt politicians with big mouths and a desire for total control. Just as a frightened teen may clutch for the childhood teddy, frightened adults gravitate towards authoritarian figures who pretend that they can fully control the inherently uncontrollable.

Well. I beg to differ on this point. Personal power and the rest can be virtues, granted, but when politicians steer policy toward inhumanity, I despise them. When they are the kind of people that believe as I do, that cruelty is the worst a person can do (my most recent definition of a liberal) then i am on their side. I leave their admirable qualities out of it. Himmler was tough, wasn't he?

I class such people (and the anarchic societal movements that make their power possible) alongside volcanoes, asteroids, floods, fires and storms. Wickedness, aggression and stupidity are how entropy manifests in human beings, and without the chaos they promote there would only be stagnation.

Before you see me as amorally postmodern, I also prefer to associate with those who growth promote growth rather than entropy. They are not to be embraced but treated with due caution, but accepted as part of how nature and human nature work at this point in our collective evolution.

Sorry for the slow reply: I blame Christmas :)

That is why I push Husserl. Because of foundations. He is a Cartesian, meaning he took proximity to consciousness to be the determination of what is real, as with Descartes' I think, therefore I am. Descartes didn't know that he had discovered the foundation for all philosophical questions, which is the transcendental ego and its objects. The things science studies are, as Thomas Kuhn and others put it, paradigms that never settle, are always subject to revision. Kuhn wrote that famous book Structures of Scientific Revolutions in which he describes normal science as being an adherence to a working body of ideas that are taught and encouraged. These inevitably yield to change when anomalies and research come together to make a serious challenge. But move into the sphere of immediate conscious events and there are, and this is his BIG point: There are certain things that simply cannot be revised because they are absolutes. I have ideas about everything in my conscious awareness, and in time, a thousand years, a million? these ideas will change, just as ideas have always changed; just read his book on the history of science for a great exposition on this. But the "things themselves," that are simply given and not part of body of empirical science, these are, if you will, certainly there, in my world, their presence qua presence is the Real world. And center to to is the egoic center, the Real self.

What of the tenuousness of the egoistic centre?

The above calls to mind Mary's Room, Chalmers's 'hard problem' and the ancient I AM concept of God and, ultimately, Kant. Still being stuck with the "unknowable" does not invite further investigation, so we like to figure that we can at least get closer to noumena, even if, like the speed of light, it's impossible to get there.

There is a ton of literature about this, and, of course, it has lost ground. Heidegger took off with it, but did not privilege the transcendental ego. Sartre sort of did (he wrote a great little book, The Transcendence of the Ego" in which he rejected it), but he was not talking about what Husserl had in mind. Then postmodernism, a neo Heideggerian movement, came in and destroyed all attempts to establish a foundation to human knowledge in an independent world "out there."

I side with Husserl's foundationalism but Rorty really helped me understand what reality as we know it in an everyday way: I say, pass the salt. What is salt's Being? We never, ever know What it is. we only "know" the processes of knowing themselves, which are pragmatic. Being is reified familiarity, repetitions of something, and the what of which is

completely alien

. How is this sustained? Just ask what something is and see what the answers are: more concepts. What are concepts? dynamics in time. Process. See Alfred Whitehead.

I have grown into the conclusion that we live in transcendence. All of it: this chair, that tree, that star...This is the purpose of philosophy. To destroy presumption of knowing so one can shut up and let the world speak. The Buddhists take over from here. The Hindus thought of this many centuries ago, and they said to put this knowledge to rest awakens something deeply profound about Being here. I want to know what this is, and it is not merely faith that encourages. It begins with Husserl's epoche.

I'd need to mull this over to decide how much I agreed or not, or whether that matters, but the above is a beautiful and thought provoking post. Like Arnie, I will be back on this. You are not a bore at all as far as I'm concerned.

[Hereandnow]

Nameless:
Are you saying that because I, personally, do not speak in E-Prime all the time, that what I offer is meaningless to you?
Or are you being deliberately obtuse?

No, Nameless. Don't mean to rile you. But you have to understand that there is a history of thought in place here. The idea is that meaning is bound to speech. You couldn't have a single conscious moment unless you had a conceptual body of tools to parse out the world. Imagine, if you had no ability to structure a thought, you couldn't use a logical conditional to form a proposition. Language gives us structure in the world; or, language IS part and parcel of the world, and the "aboutness" that language is supposed to have is really about more language and its intuitive embodiment.

Not to say that there is nothing besides symbols and their syntax: Surely we are "in" an extraordinary "place." But our symbols do not possess this. They are self referential. The thesis that the copula 'is' is central to understanding the world directs attention to what it is in our, if you will,cognitive constitution, that presents that question about what Being is. The answer looks at how we take up the matter in language: We use 'is' all the time. The desk is over there. I am hungry. Being here is a joy. It is the index in language that is the conceptual counterpart to the intuited presence of things.

"Question of being"?
If you are willing to consider/accept that the qualities that are revealed to your own unique Perspective are, somehow, magically inherent in the item perceived, while you are another magical 'objective observer', then have at it.
Science and philosophy isn't everything, but the notion of the 'objective observer' ideal of classical science is long shown to be obsolete.
What is your "being", if only 'illusion/mirage' is your evidence?
If your philosophy is not fed by the cutting edge of science (and beyond), it appears to be as useless as a Rubic's cube.

Not sure what this is. Best not to presume what I mean until I say it explicitly. Consider the matter differently: Language is shared, and this sharing makes thought possible. When ideas pass through my head, ordinary things like, Oh, look, a bird; and, where did I put my wallet? It has to be appreciated that I am not alone in this, strictly speaking. This language has passed through the ages and it carries what you might call cultural literacy, a vast resource of assumptions about what is imprtant, what is meaningful to say. In a very real way,language and culture pass through me even now as I type; I am "ventriloquized" by history, these expressions, idiomatic flourishes, out of hand references: it all seems like it's me, but!: Am I not just repeating the language and culture presented to me in school, society, at home, in the media, through the years? Where did I get this expression "through the years'?

I think this is a response to your attack on objectivity above. That bit about "the cutting edge of science" flew past me.

What it means to you is up to you.
I just offered a pile of letters for your monitor.
All 'meaning' is inherently in the thoughts of the beholder, rather than the words.
I answered a question that you asked; "What is a concept".
If my response is meaningless to you, the 'reason' is not that the words were inherently meaningless in their being, but that you found no meaning.
Your 'enlightenment' depends on 'your' state of being...

You need to have more respect for words. They are not just random tags. They are in the very structure of your most extravagant mysticism. (And the reason I take time to talk with you is because you do have this, pardon the term, extravagance. I have it to. But discussing this requires disciplined thinking.)

[Hereandnow]

Greta:
I class such people (and the anarchic societal movements that make their power possible) alongside volcanoes, asteroids, floods, fires and storms. Wickedness, aggression and stupidity are how entropy manifests in human beings, and without the chaos they promote there would only be stagnation.

Before you see me as amorally postmodern, I also prefer to associate with those who growth promote growth rather than entropy. They are not to be embraced but treated with due caution, but accepted as part of how nature and human nature work at this point in our collective evolution.

This notion of stagnation needs attention. After all, when the Buddhist sits quietly doing nothing, it is supposed to be absolutely marvelous. I note the following: Falling in love requires the doing of nothing at all, I mean once you're there. I don't draw any distinction between love and happiness save that the former has this exclusivity about it. But the experience, the joy of it does not come in some activity; it just arrives when the significant other is there. And here is a point: this other does not exactly give one the happiness. It is not passed from one person to the other, like a Christmas present, but rather is simply elicited or catalyzed, and it emerges within. This tells us that it is already there, unmanifested in us all, waiting to be brought out.
So I guess to your point about the necessity of evil people to avoid stagnation, I think we can do without them altogether.

Does this suggest that the ideal world is one in which people just sit there like cats in a window? Perhaps sitting in a window has been stigmatized by cats.

What of the tenuousness of the egoistic centre?

The above calls to mind Mary's Room, Chalmers's 'hard problem' and the ancient I AM concept of God and, ultimately, Kant. Still being stuck with the "unknowable" does not invite further investigation, so we like to figure that we can at least get closer to noumena, even if, like the speed of light, it's impossible to get there.

Mary's room and the hard problem are all about the term materialism, or physicality. I have no idea what these are. I mean, there is nothing whatever found in the world that gives them meaning. They are rather place holders for language needs when the theme of ontology comes up, and we handle things naturally otherwise with locutions like "he is physically unable," and "the physical description matches the lab report." I mean, in everyday parlance we use this word effectively. It's useful. But when the issue moves to ontology, it has no meaning save as an index, a finger that points. Some say it points nonsensically.

So without this merely pragmatic term in place, the matter about how material things can produce and relate to experience becomes divided: One the one hand we have empirical science that continues to reveal interesting things about the way things out there are connected to things in here. On the other,we realize that any such discovery,and this is key, occurs within an originary matrix of phenomenal content (and yes, even my saying it thusly is duly rendered as such). In other words, when terms like 'physical' and 'material' fall away we are left with the presence of things and their natures. Presence is not binding in a way that generates problems like the physical having to be reconciled with the non physical. This notion of an underpinning to the out-there things is useless when it comes to ontology. Ontology takes, and I follow others on this, the world to be no more than is sustained by an analysis of the structures of what is found in everydayness.

Mary's Room can be discussed in regular science. But go any further, and it becomes a an invented headache. Look at it this way: All tis talk about material and nonmaterial "things" are to be abandoned altogether. They are metaphysical terms, that is, never observed. Stick to what IS.

I'd need to mull this over to decide how much I agreed or not, or whether that matters, but the above is a beautiful and thought provoking post. Like Arnie, I will be back on this. You are not a bore at all as far as I'm concerned.

You know, you might find this interesting.

https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr ... al&f=false

It's one of those online Google books,and lots of pages are missing, but there is enough there to inspire. A worthy purchase by my thinking. For me, especially after that 60th birthday, I feel like,as the old Chinese practice went, after years of Confucian conformity I have reached the point where I can abandon this (and be abandoned by it) and move into a Taoist-like contemplation. The prospect of death is infinitely entertaining, hands down the most interesting thing I can think of.

[Sy Borg]

Hi again, HAN, hope you're enjoying the holidays.

I class such people (and the anarchic societal movements that make their power possible) alongside volcanoes, asteroids, floods, fires and storms. Wickedness, aggression and stupidity are how entropy manifests in human beings, and without the chaos they promote there would only be stagnation.

Before you see me as amorally postmodern, I also prefer to associate with those who growth promote growth rather than entropy. They are not to be embraced but treated with due caution, but accepted as part of how nature and human nature work at this point in our collective evolution.

This notion of stagnation needs attention. After all, when the Buddhist sits quietly doing nothing, it is supposed to be absolutely marvelous. I note the following: Falling in love requires the doing of nothing at all, I mean once you're there. I don't draw any distinction between love and happiness save that the former has this exclusivity about it. But the experience, the joy of it does not come in some activity; it just arrives when the significant other is there. And here is a point: this other does not exactly give one the happiness. It is not passed from one person to the other, like a Christmas present, but rather is simply elicited or catalyzed, and it emerges within. This tells us that it is already there, unmanifested in us all, waiting to be brought out.
So I guess to your point about the necessity of evil people to avoid stagnation, I think we can do without them altogether.

Does this suggest that the ideal world is one in which people just sit there like cats in a window? Perhaps sitting in a window has been stigmatized by cats.

I suggest that "evil people" will go away only when they are not needed, when the social environment is such that lack of decency will fail to thrive, as opposed to today's rationalist favouring of psychopathic corporate behaviour. They are essentially chaotic agents, "social solvents" that break things down, opening things up for renewal, eg. Germany's and Japan's post war industrial flourishing with new, rebuilt infrastructure.

In other words, when terms like 'physical' and 'material' fall away we are left with the presence of things and their natures. Presence is not binding in a way that generates problems like the physical having to be reconciled with the non physical. This notion of an underpinning to the out-there things is useless when it comes to ontology. Ontology takes, and I follow others on this, the world to be no more than is sustained by an analysis of the structures of what is found in everydayness.

Mary's Room can be discussed in regular science. But go any further, and it becomes a an invented headache. Look at it this way: All tis talk about material and nonmaterial "things" are to be abandoned altogether. They are metaphysical terms, that is, never observed. Stick to what IS.

I largely agree with this. However, I go with the hardware/software analogy when considering materiality or Chalmer's 'hard problem'.

... The prospect of death is infinitely entertaining, hands down the most interesting thing I can think of.

I now have the book. Thanks for the recommendation, although it must wait in line behind an Asimov novel :)

I'm fascinated by life and death too. Death is arguably the crux of a huge amount spoken about on these forums. It encompasses almost the entirety of theist v atheist debates - with each side maintaining the stance that feels good to them.

[Lunaxo]

I'm not an academic philosopher but I like philosophy that's why I'm here.

[Sy Borg]

HAN, I just made a start on the book as a preview and want to challenge an early statement:

Ultimately, if our society and ecosystems are in disarray and in turmoil, it is because our relations to the vertical dimensions of experience are in disarray and in turmoil.

That's the usual assumption, from "noble savage" harmoniously embedded in nature to the ignoble moderner destroying said nature.

More likely, the biosphere is metamorphosing again and this time humans are the agents of change; last time it was blue-green algae. The notion of human parasitism of the Earth is not logical - parasites do not replace that which they consume with greater order, complexity and sophistication. What is happening looks more like the chaos of restructure than the chaos of annihilation.

Human relations to the vertical dimensions of experience have always been haphazard, naive and clueless, as one might expect from a newly intelligent species without precedent from which to draw. One thing that would have kept our ancestors grounded would have been the ever present prospect of death, and once that immediate fear subsided humans became free to engage in further abstractions rather than watch their backs.

[Hereandnow]

Greta:
HAN, I just made a start on the book as a preview and want to challenge an early statement:
Ultimately, if our society and ecosystems are in disarray and in turmoil, it is because our relations to the vertical dimensions of experience are in disarray and in turmoil.
That's the usual assumption, from "noble savage" harmoniously embedded in nature to the ignoble moderner destroying said nature.

More likely, the biosphere is metamorphosing again and this time humans are the agents of change; last time it was blue-green algae. The notion of human parasitism of the Earth is not logical - parasites do not replace that which they consume with greater order, complexity and sophistication. What is happening looks more like the chaos of restructure than the chaos of annihilation.

Human relations to the vertical dimensions of experience have always been haphazard, naive and clueless, as one might expect from a newly intelligent species without precedent from which to draw. One thing that would have kept our ancestors grounded would have been the ever present prospect of death, and once that immediate fear subsided humans became free to engage in further abstractions rather than watch their backs.
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He said that about biosystems? Well, he shouldn't have; far away from his purpose, and due likely to the usual liberal tendencies people who think like this have. I guess he simply means that if we were more conscious of this divinity within, if we thought more like Rudolph Otto or Max Sheller did, then we would be very caring and thoughtful, and would take the world more seriously, or earnestly. There is probably something in this if we take divinity completely OUT of the context of public religion.

But to the point: Looks right to me. But Steinboch would likely argue that the order that humans bring into this metamorphosis is not merely order. This would be a scientist's fallacy: to find order of one kind or another, and make a categorical system out of it, like physics, then proceed to base a theory about what is really going on in the world. This is why I call science an abstraction. It takes an original body of streams of consciousness that think, feel, anticipate, worry, and so forth, and forms narratives of exclusivity, that specialize and focus. But originally,all data issues from individual conscious minds. These are the foundation of all. There was never a concept that announced itself outside of these Real events, the comsition of which is unimaginably robust. So, add to the reality of the human contribution to the biosphere and you add much, much more than greater order. You add the complete human being, and this, Steinboch would say, possesses an extraordinary verdicality along with the order. He talks about different ways divinity is presented by philosophers, but the essential point is to bring forth this verdicality through the Husserlian epoche.

The other point: Having this inspiration "from above," so to speak, does not ensure sanity. True enough. Death kept primitive societies grounded in a haphazard, naive and clueless perspective, and it is only later that they, due to leisure time to think freely, started getting wild and erratic. One of Foucault's ideas was to dispel the notion that historical sequences were linear and rational. They were anything but. Nor does evolution reveal a linear, purposive process. But phenomenology does not look to these. It looks at what is there before us, in the "already evolved" world. This is the originary condition from which all things come forth and a description of this structured world of thinking, believing, feeling is its aim. Not content, but presence, things that are there from which a science is drawn, NOT relying on any empirical science to serve as premises for proceeding as this would be assuming what is meant to be described.

[Sy Borg]

Oh dear, a brain fade of mine in an earlier post - vertical/veridical :)

You add the complete human being, and this, Steinboch would say, possesses an extraordinary verdicality along with the order. He talks about different ways divinity is presented by philosophers, but the essential point is to bring forth this verdicality through the Husserlian epoche.

Would a brief "for Dummies" version be possible please?

A thought on abstractions. Being able to focus on abstractions, as opposed to dealing with daily dangers, is basically the difference between problem solving and incident handling. If one has the chance to abstract - to notice underlying patterns - then there is much leverage to be gained from that. The question is then: why would there be more leverage in handling information than directly handling energy? Why do levers exponentially add to power? Does this mean that reality is more fundamentally informational than energetic?

One of Foucault's ideas was to dispel the notion that historical sequences were linear and rational. They were anything but. Nor does evolution reveal a linear, purposive process. But phenomenology does not look to these. It looks at what is there before us, in the "already evolved" world. This is the originary condition from which all things come forth and a description of this structured world of thinking, believing, feeling is its aim. Not content, but presence, things that are there from which a science is drawn, NOT relying on any empirical science to serve as premises for proceeding as this would be assuming what is meant to be described.

I have long disagreed with Gould's notion that evolution is a "bush, not a tree". When other species develop space programs, I might agree, but the notion is clearly, and obviously, wrong. By the same token, one cannot equate a dog with a Paramecium. The long sweep of history, including pre-history, is certainly linear and rational; as with weather and climate, chaos observed in the short term can mask underlying longer term trends.