Existentialism anyone?

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Hereandnow
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Re: Existentialism anyone?

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Papus79 wrote
I think we're pretty close to winding down on this and figuring out where I think we'd at least 'agree to disagree' as we gather information. The only reason my response is probably of equal length is that I felt like there were still some miscommunications or misframings, and I could be misunderstanding some of the things said about phenomenology but I'm starting to think that will be cleared up better by reading it myself, ie. I think our general approaches might be a bit too different from one another to make arguments that really connect in either direction or which expose anything new or interesting:
I push phenomenology pretty hard because it is the open court where all issues find their final arguments. Only "general" approaches can be comprehensive, and if it not comprehensive, it fails at the outset.
The way I go at ‘material substance’ – we have no clue what it actually is but we do know what it means to us and what important properties it has. Its existence and shape are non-cognitive in nature (not fungible to moods or ideas, some fringe phenomena related to that but for the most part its unmovable). People using the same sensory apparatus experience the same things even if we’re not clear on the details of whether everyone’s red or taste of coffee is the same. The way the contents behave overwhelmingly suggest that it’s a trans-subjective data set.
But material substance doesn't have properties. It is merely this vacuous presupposition. The worst kind of metaphysics. Nor is the world all idea, the worst kind of reductionism. The world is what is present, simply "there". The epoche delivers this from mundanity.
It sounds like this track of thinking takes a different fork than I’m on and I suppose that’s okay – there’s a lot of knowledge out there and people have reasons to pursue different things. I don’t worry about ‘mental substance’ so much as I think about it from the paradox that the hard problem brings up – ie. that if we go with the idea of what the world looks like from a naïve physicalist perspective, there’s no reason for there to be ‘lights’ on anywhere. Physicalism can chase down neural correlates of consciousness but causation’s a different story (also you express skepticism that there can even be such a thing as ‘correlation’ here – I’d say run that past a neuroscientist if you know any). The only way I think you really get sufficient causation for ‘I’ experiences is if they’re something that the universe does as a rule and that there’s a tendency to dock it in relationships such as we experience. What’s tricky is to figure out how ‘I’ experiences coevolve with transsubjective data sets like ‘matter’, which they clearly do. Can you see a bit better now why the framing of Landry’s philosophy would catch my interest?
No lights on, no anything, really. Why is there something rather than nothing? Only one answer to this, I think: value, meaning. The presence of value/meaning in the world changes everything.
Physicalism is fine as a term that simply refers to empirical reality. My cup is a physical thing, period. But as an ontology, it has no place.
I do respect evolution, but not here. Remove the "coevolve" from what is tricky, and then you find "trans subjective data like matter" to be the tricky part. But "matter" is a nonsense term at the level of basic questions. As for data, this is construed apart from such things.
Let me ask you then – what determines internal governance philosophies of nations? It was religion in most cases but that’s gone out the window over the past few centuries. Is it financial predation of all against all? This is what people would at least consider ‘late capitalism’ to be. If there’s no ground, no orchestrating narratives, and people know that the way to win is to get your genes into the next generation by any means – then we’ll become a culture where truth is never told, where education is a means for you to mangle other kid’s opportunities for your own kids to beat their kids, it gets thoroughly dystopian. Add exponential technologies that bring the cost of species-extinction events lower and perhaps to smaller groups of people with less money – we’re going to have to work very hard as a species it seems to survive the next couple centuries, unless of course we all agree collectively that it doesn’t matter.
But bringing up this issue makes it difficult to bring this discussion to a close, as you mentioned.
I have argued many times that our political affairs are extensions of our ethical affairs, and these are matters "of parts". The narrative, the dramatic unfoldings in our world are ontological entanglements revealed by basic analysis: I should not harm others. Why? I claim it is because there is the metaethical good and bad. This is a foundational question for me. First philosophy is not about what things are, or how, or any other than the ethical why.
Politics has to be grounded. Consider desert, rights, responsibility, guilt and innocence, and the rest of the ideas that come into play: Do these make sense at all? Financial predation, e.g., is an ethical construction with "predation" at the front of it. Should one be a predator at all? How are victims protected in ethical arguments? These inevitably move to foundations, and here it is the presence of pain and pleasure, suffering and bliss and all contained therein. This is the "that which is in the fabric of things" that literally defines ethical possibility. No pain, joy and the rest, no ethics. Then there is distribution, which leads to entanglements that have to do with who has what in terms of advantages and deficits, and so on. But note: these entanglements have already been analyzed and the ethical essence identified. The rest, the general embeddedness socially, economically, gifts of talents or the lack thereof, and so on, these are impositions upon the ethical, facts that are ethically arbitrary, like being born in the US rather than Mexico. Facts are ethically arbitrary; only the palpable joys and sufferings are "ethical" and this turns to the metaethical: what is the Good? The ethically Bad? (This opens a field of discussion. Only if you're interested.)

So, if you are looking for a description of the ethical foundations of the world that provide a basis for our ethical concerns and inquiries, I think it is about this above. Desert, for example, calls for one to be responsible for what one does and is. Does Einstein deserve all the glory? Do I deserve to be treated more decently because I was born a few miles to the north of a certain border? This is what I mean by facts being ethically arbitrary, and it is the source of genuie insight, for we allow such facts to place significantly in ethical arguments, and they become categorial errors, for geography is not ethics. We make it ethics through pragmatic considerations.

It is claimed that geography matters. Then how? It matters because of entanglements, practical decisions reify into ethics as laws, like laws about borders that separate racially, culturally, and otherwise in terms of social identity. These are practical matters purely. Ones that rest on other practical entangled practical matters, like a person's feeling of being threatened by outsiders or by these outsiders' "predatory" intent, and so on. So there are good reasons why laws exist, but these reasons are driven away from foundational ethical actualities, the palpable experiences of standing in the burning sun waiting for the border guards to turn their backs, the lack of food and security at home, and the rest.

To cut to the chase, the metaethical "Good and the Bad" are embedded in a world's impositions of pragmatically constructed entanglements. This is the world at the level of basic questions. There are questions begged here, but this is only if you want to talk about metaethics.
hat I was getting at isn’t kabbalah or kabbalistic symbols, it’s a general observation that holds in a wider sense. I forget the exact terminology for the mirror subjective process of empiricism, ie. when people try scrutinizing subjective content on its own terms, one might use symbol sets to get a result but then the goal is strip those symbols back out to see what it is you’re getting. Something like John Michael Geer talking about how someone actually can project their ‘I’ experience into a bird or wolf, people talking about ‘spirit flight’, a lot of this – to my mind – smacks of jumping domains. It’s one thing for people to say ‘that’s a mystical system’ if one is talking about spheres of the tree of life or symbolic places within a structure defined by a doctrine, it’s not applicable IMHO to specific kinds of first-person experiences that violate our sense of stuck binding to our own brains (and to reiterate because I still don’t think I expunged the likelihood for misunderstanding the above sufficiently – I’m talking about having consciousness do things you wouldn’t have thought it could do, not ‘astral planes’, ‘paths of wisdom’, or anything specific tradition oriented).
I omitted the rest below because it was about organization-specific beliefs and constructs, that wasn’t what I was bringing up.
Don't know how symbol sets work here. But I can't imagine mysticism being about inferring things about animals' private worlds. Nor is it about doing anything. As I review in my head some of the things that express what this is, I think of Rudolf Otto, Meister Eckhart, Pseudo Dionysius the Areopogite, the Abhidhamma of the Pali Canon, there's Mahayana's Prajnaparamita (with commentary); I mean, mysticism throughout the ages, across cultures, and while it is found in many systems of metaphysics, its essence comes across as purely revelatory. It certainly does seem this is not available to all. Heidegger, who is extremely important for describing mysticism, giving, if you will, a profile of what the mystical event would be, was no mystic. Not even a moral person, really.
There is an uncanny profoundity in the standing-in-the-openness of being in the world by standing apart from the knowledge claims implicitly attending perception that is not reducible. Geworfenheit, or, "throwness" it has been called, that shock of being alienated from the familiarity of the world as a world. Rug pulled out from beneath all things, and there's no going back. An existential disillusionment where one's identity and purpose are undermined entirely.
You’re pretty much alienated from the world already the moment you 1) don’t wake up in the morning wondering how many social status points you can rack up today 2) See something true or deep that someone with likely little or no social status is saying that you find interesting and people are looking at you funny like ‘Hello – this guy can’t help you climb social hierarchies’. The moment you start reading books that aren’t strictly speaking popular or listening to music that isn’t strictly speaking popular, if you start engaging with anything that isn’t strictly a social climbing tool or piece of string to put in a nest then it’s a break away, really a sort of failure mode in terms of Darwinian fitness, but on the reverse it’s a desire to actually live in your own integrity and do what works for you even if doing so means that your genes don’t make the next generation and even if you have to admit to yourself that being true to yourself is how animals fail to make it into future generations.
What I am saying is that phenomenology takes what you just said and makes it a central theme in inquiry. It takes the matter where Darwinists never could imagine, for they do not think at the level of basic questions. Not that they are wrong at all; it just not their field. talk about gene pools and future generations having success in reproduction and survival: I do think about these things, and I think it clear that evolution explains nothing interms of the qualitative nature of consciousness. Consciousness is essentially freedom, but freedom is not a tool, like a grasping hand. Then take emotions ,and appetites: these do direct behavior, but an emotion does not "fit" the task, as if it were simply a directional function of an organism. It is a presence that has no reductive counterpart, something that simply comes into Being, this rage, love, urge, and so forth; and it happens to be good for reproduction and survival. I think this is a very important point, given all the confidence out there in the explanatory powers of evolutionary theory. It explains nothing in terms of qualitative presence.
Average people have to do what they have to do to get Darwinian fitness points, social status points, climb social hierarchies, beat other people in competition, and set their kids up to do the same. That’s something about being ‘human’ that’s a permanent part of the landscape. ‘Enlightenment’ in that context is a complex set of directions on how to fail at that game – meaning they’d be out of their minds to have any interest in spirituality or philosophy whatsoever unless it’s a social structure – like a religion – where they can show up, socially network, get social status points, and incidentally get little drips of philosophy inserted with that without getting in the way of doing what they need to do.
The real danger here IMHO is that there has to be adults curating these structures, ie. so they can do what they have to do in a sustainable (species continues) way rather than having all of the arms races and multipolar traps take us into extinction and – if the rules of their game go that way – they can’t do a thing about it because they’re stuck on the inside.
In that sense I see why intellectuals, autists, LGBT, and other ‘odd-bods’ who aren’t in that perpetual race condition actually have a group or lineage selection value, ie. they help keep the genetic arms races from becoming pure chaos by doing what they can to tame the rules by which those games are played.
I disagree about Darwinian fitness points. Look at what lies before you, the landscape you speak of. Take suffering. Very useful for evolution, no doubt, but suffering is only there because it was, prior to phenotypic selection, a possibility of phenotypical types built into genotypical codes. Imagine you had a book that could lay out, describe, all phenotypical possibilities of a human genome's almost infinite number of combinatory effects. It would be clear what they are, but there is still the begged question hovering over: What are THESE the possibilities? This struggle we are in has, at the level of basic questions, nothing to do with Darwinian fitness.

What has not occurred with you is the Copernican Revolution. Kant, that is. His Critique of Pure Reason is, alas, essential. Talk about genetics is really out the window.
I’ll forget about my original question here and at least touch on that last comment – I think with respect to metaphysics, and as much mystical systems, Ptolemaic epicycles are what gets boring and useless and the goal is to then take as much of a reductive approach as possible to bring them down or pull them in so that they become things of much more practical use. That said though – massive systems of Ptolemaic epicycles are what happens when a search space can’t be defined well and so it’s an attempt to at least throw ‘something’ out there in order to start mapping it, then agree/disagree over the stability of contents, then when that starts going well see if there are at least stable geometries one can discuss. From there you’re that much closer to taking something that was almost impossible to do anything with but it’s existence was constantly hinted at by experience over to being something more like ‘Yeah – I just bought a laptop last week, isn’t it amazing how many transistors they can fit on a chip?’.
If a category actually has its own proper integrity it withstands scrutiny and can be cleaned up / reified down to something much more common. Admittedly that may not be a way of proving that something isn’t real on the converse (truly complex systems won’t yield to human intelligence very easily – possibly ever) but you can at least cement something into common usage once it’s been cooked down to a practical level, and I think we need lenses that we can use to say something about the relationship between consciousness and what people for practical purposes call ‘matter’.
Mystical systems" is oxymoronic.

Your thoughts about the Ptolemaic speculation is arbitrary.

The "search space" is very well defined; all that is required is the commitment to what is present, in the world, familiar, yet on examination, without foundation. Once this is seen, then one simply follows the breadcrumbs as they appear. Stable geometries? How about the examination of judgment qua judgment? Or, the essence of ethics and art? Or, temporal structure of truth?

'Matter' IS a practical term, as are all terms. But then, second degree burns are not practical terms, but are existential presences. This moves to ethics: what IS the Good? The Bad? Evolution is of no avail; see above. Wittgenstein opens the door in his Lecture on Ethics (online).
Okay, and this actually hits on my problem with this sort of philosophy – there’s an election to provisionally ignore certain things in certain contexts at certain times to focus on a different context and while my issue isn’t with that move by itsef one has to be very careful with how they carve the world up by that technique. You can take ten apples, put six to one side and four to the other, and come up with profound (even persuasive) cosmic reasons for that division is very easily. When you’re grappling with very murky and abstract territory such seemingly arbitrary divisions of content are forgivable because it’s an experimentation in dividing maps where one is trying to build the system to do the inspection to then find the geometries to then reify what can be reified into something useful.
I’m trying to pick my frames at this point by relationships that seem like they’re knock-on solid (ie. not doing kabbalah much anymore) and perhaps I’m also trying to avoid needing to force category splits to say ‘everything to the left I’m not looking at until I figure out everything to the right in its own distinct context’ since those are really just provisional and if I can stay focused on the landscape of interest it doesn’t seem necessary. Framing is a big challenge and while I’m sure there’s some useful stuff getting considered here I just don’t get the impression that it really maps onto my own concerns as presented. I may very well take a shot at reading Husserl and Heidegger in the next few years but I’m probably going to pay most attention to things that actually deal with the map that I have in front of me. At the moment, after I read Landry, I’m really going to get on myself to complete Sir Roger Penrose’s Road to Reality because I do think there’s a lot that’s important in mathematical physics.
The carving is done at a more basic level. The very opposite of murky. We are not in the "cosmos" any more, and the competing theories are not those of science. We are in an analysis of language and the world and the way conscious thought is structured vis a vis the world. Sorry, but Kant does follow this around. Not that we are all transcendentalist idealists, but he makes the case that we live in an empirical reality, a distinction which science ignores, because it is not interested, and of which it is entirely out to lunch, just as it is about basket weaving or ballet. Physicists know nothing nor care nothing about philosophy.

Penrose, a physicist. Ask him how it is that anything our there gets in here, pointing to my head. Ask him how epistemology is at all possible. Ask him what a force is, and you will find he has nothing to say, not because he is ill prepared but because physicists do not care at all about this kind of thing, and if they did, they would be thinking in proximity of phenomenology.
It gets important if someone who has a philosophy contingent on the world being six thousand or one hundred thousand years old. These are the more obvious angles of course, there are other ideas that can be falsified.
But you argue beyond the pale of the discussion. If I say the Nasdeq Composite is not important here, would you say it is important to investors? It is simply the case that it has no bearing Here.
Things which are considered distinctly untestable tend to just be things that we don’t feel like we can get our fingernails under in the sense of producing them on demand or how to split certain problems we see at the joints that seem to be one big abstract mess (part of my job is solving problems like that). There are other weird things too, like strong synchronicity and mystical experiences often rolled up rather tightly, where there clearly something there but it’s really f’ing elusive. Philosophy of science and it’s speculation IMHO seem to be mostly about guiding hypothesis as well as working on organizing stories for the scientific endeavor, what it’s doing, what it should be paying more attention to or what it’s already paid too much attention to.
Maybe my bold thought here – we’re dealing with ‘one’ reality and whether its science, philosophy, mysticism (at least done in a disciplined rather than ‘brain falling out’ way), are just different ways at probing the same thing from different directions. This is again part of why I don’t think any of these should be in the discard heap relative to the others or why any one of these shouldn’t be informed by the other two where the information seems solid.
Well, it really isn't like this. You think as if there is nothing qualitatively different in the claims made by Husserl and others. But there is. And to see this one has to read it. It is not the empirical, but the structure of the empirical that is at issue. How to get to this? One must ask philosophical questions, and these are questions about what is presupposed by empiricism. Just look at logic, e.g. Logic is not empirical (though, then, there is that Quine paper Two Dogmas), but Kant produced a thesis that to this day is a challenge that remains unrefuted; ignored, after a hundred years of center stage, but not refuted. Criticized endlessly, imperfectly conceived, but never refuted.

We are following in the tradition set forth by Kant, the father of phenomenology, as well as the father of positivism. To begin to get there, one has to take that question about how something put there gets in here seriously. You should notice that as irritating as this sits with common sense, there is no answer to this. Epistemology becomes impossible. Then phenomenology steps forward.

Mysticism is what lies before one when apophatic philosophy runs its course.
You also have to look at people like us, ie. who can have a conversation about something other than literal bible or atheism, or who don’t decide that an idea is relevant or irrelevant as a social power abstraction based on how many people believe it and accordingly whether it’s a worthwhile social hierarchy to climb. To that end, actually caring about these things on their own terms rather than a way to get things seems incredibly rare.
I’m not saying we shouldn’t be doing what we’re doing, just that if the way the world works looks nothing like us or where we even tend to get ourselves in trouble by not thinking on other people’s wavelength – there’s a reason.
As I see it, there is only one question: does a person really want to know the truth at the level of basic questions? Nothing else.
I don’t know that this last bit is quite right. You have to be assuming that the thing under inspection is something like the furthest boundary that we can see in some direction and that we’d have to be on the other side of that boundary in order to survey it. To even take that stance on consciousness though is assuming a framing even more specific than saying that the universe rests on consciousness, it suggests that consciousness has a one-sided relationship from outside the universe and that it can only be observed and understood from outside the universe as well. I’m not sold that this is the case, particularly with just how tightly intertwined brain and mind seem to be (it at least suggests that mind has causal or top-down power over body – which would be difficult to develop in a situation where they’re somehow both just riding along in parallel with no causal contact).
No, that's not it. It is much simpler that this. I said it before: talking about metal activity issuing from a brain is easy. Just observe some surgical procedure that shows this. But talk about a physical brain issuing from mental activity, now THAT is difficult. After all, how is it that you can at all confirm a physical brain? Such confirmation BEGINS in thought, i.e., mental activity, and remains in thought unless you can say how it gets OUT of thought.
So there is a brain, and there is this brain in my thoughts. How does it get there?
I think we’d really need to break down the ‘natural attitude’ here because if I read it the way it’s been stated through this thread, would could be forgiven for thinking that Husserl et al are discarding the scientific method more because they find it restrictive than anything else. I can’t ignore facts on the ground or ‘natural attitude’ trappings because it’s really the only thing we have that’s anywhere close to being knock-on solid and it keeps us away from having the ‘garbage-in-garbage-out’ formula spin in place forever. It’s rule sets that don’t bend or waver at the macro level regardless of who’s looking at them. At the very worst – to look at a 13 billion year old universe, 4.5 billion year old planet, and a bit over 1 billion years of biological life, one could flip context by taking about the eternal now or some other relationship (I’m going to be as bold as to say) that inverts context, it can invert or pivot context but it won’t shatter structure, meaning Darwinian evolution won’t be overthrown and current models of physics will only be recontextualized, be proven wrong in small ways, sourced by yet not understood rule sets, etc.. The only valid arguments against persistently observed, tested, and confirmed scientific facts is that the assumed context they’re embedded in could be wrong, and in a lot of cases I would assume this is the case because we don’t have the tool kits to see past our current limits in a way that ties back to them (and when we hit those layers I’m sure many of our current assumptions will look sophomoric). Completely discarding science as something ‘non-philosophic’ sounds like a great way to make all kinds of mistakes that don’t need to be made.
Certainly not discarding the scientific method! that would be discarding thought itself. No, not knock down solid. You carry in your thinking a recalcitrant trust in these things. Needs philosophical review. I can't give you Kant's Copernican revolution. It has to be read.
I can’t comment one way or the other on that, just to say that I haven’t seen anything in the conversation that suggests that it’s making contact with reality in any of the ways that I’m interested in understanding. To say that I guess I’m also saying that I don’t get the assertion that phenomenology is the be-all-end-all. I’ve seen a lot of suggestion to that effect but very little persuasive (and I’m really more out to learn something than win – which makes that seem like something of a loss).
I say it's the be all and end all because it is open ended and it addresses things at the most basic level. Analytic philosophy does not. Ask, for example, an analytic epistemologist how it is that in the traditional analysis of knowledge, one can affirm P at all. S knows P; but what is P? Merely assumed. countless paper on t he Gettier problems (you might want to look this up, just for fun), yet P is NOT a basic term. It is a thing of parts. Only Phenomenology's hermeneutical approach takes the pressure off of affirming P.

Persuasion only comes with reading. Otherwise, it is like convincing someone literally speak a foreign language. One has to be weaned off everyday thinking.
One snaps out of meditation and – at least here in the US – taxes are due on April 15th, one can file extensions if they miss their filing but if they miss them enough unfriendly encounters with a rather large bureaucracy ensue. This is my problem with what’s being stated above – the ‘mundane’ isn’t in the least trivial, nor is it fungible, and I don’t see what’s gained by pretending that it is or that it’s completely disconnected from ‘actual’ reality. At the very worst it has to be a particular layer of abstraction and an extremely riveting/compelling one at that.
If I’ve learned anything in my life, repeatedly, its that you ignore or minimize the mundane at your peril and that any system of thought you come up with really has to accurately account for every bit of it and predict it going forward in an accurate manner.
It is not that taxes are unimportant. It is that here, they are irrelevant. Don't see why this is a problem. I do my taxes, then get back to reading Heidegger. I eat lunch, too.
You’re really making me wonder if I might be one of the only people alive who isn’t living on the back of other people’s word games. I have a couple rather stable baskets of a) gruelingly persistent physical and social realities, b) mystical experiences where goddess has winked at me and even played with me like a little brother (as well as loads of sychronicities, entity encounters, etc.). From that combination I’m not going to find eliminative materialism persuasive, nor the number of Phd’s the author has, nor how stately their beard is nor how sharp they look in a pressed suit. I’m also quite well aware that if someone jumps off a building thinking they can fly they’ll be quite dead at the bottom, and any form of new age spirituality that attempts to ‘break’ reality keeps running people into being broken by it instead. I do my best by not getting hypnotized by personality nor the loftiness of names. The soundness of the ideas and how well they match actual observations on the ground is what tells me whether there’s more worth pursuing or whether it’s someone else pursuing their own truth and that I should leave them to it.
Other people's word games is just a pejorative way of referring to things you are not inclined to read. Can't read everything, of course, but if you are looking for the most powerful body of thinking that penetrates into the foundations of the human reality, then phenomenology is for you. You can't be dismissive because you think it actually might be convincing, and you would a pawn in someone else's game. Was Heidegger a "pawn" of Kierkegaard's? Einstein a pawn of Maxwell?
TBH I’ve spent a fair amount of time with meditation, heck I went through Israel Regardie’s One Year Manual and decided to stretch it out to 18 months (1 ½ per step) thinking it would assure better results – not quite convinced. For me the strongest stuff is self-inquiry and reflection. It’s scrutinizing my own beliefs, my feelings, situations I’m in and how I react, scrutinizing the behavior of other people, institutions, public figures, etc., and additionally it’s pulling in as many coherent (even if abstract) maps as I can to see where I think they join to form congruent connections. When it comes to meditation it seems, for me at least, that its best served as a focus on an object or symbol set, which is why I’d rather do something like Middle Pillar or William G Gray’s triple cipher any day of the week than do a complete emptying meditation – I can do it, just that I don’t see much benefit or gain other than relaxation from the later and when Yuval Noah Harari talks about doing those sorts of meditations for two hours per day or Donald Hoffman talks about doing them for three hours per day – it’s tough for me to relate.
Not for everyone, I suppose.
I only agree here to a point. Nima Arkani-Hamed’s amplitouhedron? Mathematical physics seems to be the thing that’s most likely to make the journey back around behind us and can even pierce the veil of spacetime. My own intuition is that it will continue to reveal more unusual things (like Lie groups) and as we come to understand those structures better we might actually see some of the mathematics that puts consciousness provisionally inside skulls as consciousness seems very much like living mathematics. I’m really trying to say that I’m pretty sure the ‘physical’ world, if one looks deep enough into it and starts getting at the places where it fades into something more Platonist (in Penrose terms). If it weren’t joined in some deep manner like this I’d have a heck of a time keying this sentence. I take it to be that way just as much if it turned out that the universe we live in is fundamentally idealist – it would just have to keep its rules congruent at higher and deeper levels to what we see at ground level.
Platonist? You mean a kind of rational realism? But what has this to do with being human, aside from the rational structure of judgment? And how does the structure of thought enter into things outside of thought? Is there truth "out there" where there are no minds? Are propositions out there?
Are you suggesting here that there’s such a thing as cosmic ‘meaning’? As far as I can tell the trouble we get into is that meaning is short-range, local, contextual, and we fall down when we’re looking for the whole of human existence to have meaning. This is part of where I take the alchemical story, like the Azoth of Basel Valentine, or the Masonic Great Work, with a pinch of salt – ie. they’re lovely stories, and to some degree you can see the alchemical process in the transformations people go through, but there’s so much chaos in the frame and so much ‘x happened because physics allows it’ that I’m hard pressed to consider any of these stories congruent. Really, if you want some insight into why I’m as skeptical as I am of head-first philosophy, it’s because it seems as though the only thing I’ve found that hasn’t broken under stress is physics. Really physics, and the necessities it applies on human life, seem to break just about everything else. That, IMHO, makes them more real or salient than the things they reliably break.
It's a colorful way to look at what is cosmic, but no, I am not saying that. I'm saying the point is to unclutter thought, so that the opacity of one's reading does not fill the horizon of interpretation; if, that is, the desire is to get at something important. The construction of resources that can fill conversation is a virtue, I would say. But not here.
I feel like a few things are wedged together. I identify as ‘me’, I identify as the guy whose been looking out of these eyes since birth. There’s a certain flavor to my energy. There’s a certain framing of it that’s still on some version of the same trajectory from childhood. I do find it laughable (really rather sad though) if as many people can’t imagine themselves outside a career role, on one level I’d say ‘must be nice – I can’t imagine a life with that much professional stability’, I didn’t have that luck, but then I realize that when automation, or Covid business changes, or anything else hit these people – they’re rent/broken. Their realities fall down. That’s where I’m glad that I didn’t have that stability if it would have meant getting tricked into thinking that I were x profession (in my own case I’d doubt it – the lights are on a bit too bright upstairs).
Then you sound like a perfect candidate for radicalizing your interpretative resources. Phenomenology, I say, awaits.
Profound meant in the context of broad-reaching projection. I think of what Dennett said about ‘deepities’, where someone can make a brief statement that sounds axiomatic, in a gentler sense it may hold true in a specific relevant range but when stated in a monolithic manner as if the cosmos revolves around it – that’s where it falls down.
What falls down? How so? It doesn't fall down. Deepities rarely register with Dennett's and the analytic ilk. These are too infatuated by philosophical puzzles to think in terms of deepities. One has to forget terms like "cosmos". Good for astronomers, bad for philosophy.
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Re: Existentialism anyone?

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Hereandnow wrote: March 15th, 2021, 10:17 pmI push phenomenology pretty hard because it is the open court where all issues find their final arguments. Only "general" approaches can be comprehensive, and if it not comprehensive, it fails at the outset.

I guess, personally, I’d sacrifice comprehensiveness for accuracy and actionable information for accessing new possibilities in the physical, social, and creative worlds wherever possible (think of it like this – as a musician, artist, programmer, someone who generates content at least as much if not more than consuming it). When I do try on a new map it’s because – while it’s quite likely wrong in important ways – it has some signal that it’s showing some new and useful vehicle in examining the world and the universe both outside and in and reconciling the two. In that though I actually like falsifiability a lot.
Hereandnow wrote: March 15th, 2021, 10:17 pmBut material substance doesn't have properties. It is merely this vacuous presupposition. The worst kind of metaphysics. Nor is the world all idea, the worst kind of reductionism. The world is what is present, simply "there". The epoche delivers this from mundanity.

And if you dive off a 200-foot cliff you’re dead. Whatever it is it’s extremely consequential – I think that’s what I care about far more than any attempt to pin down ultimate substance. If we consider most properties to be vapor then I’m even okay with stepping things back to their relationships (OSR) and saying that these structures are mostly made of relationships and that there are certain properties that we have relatively unforgiving interactions with (such as velocity, thermodynamics, surface tension, gravity, chemical bonding and valence shell proclivities when it comes to things like poisons, acids, etc.).

I’m sorry if I keep beating that point or if it sounds as if I’m thinking you aren’t following it (I’m taking a wile guess that you’re well past 3rd grade math and it probably sounds really condescending), I just can’t see myself getting excited about a philosophy that doesn’t in some way grapple with the unyielding in nature.
Hereandnow wrote: March 15th, 2021, 10:17 pmNo lights on, no anything, really. Why is there something rather than nothing? Only one answer to this, I think: value, meaning. The presence of value/meaning in the world changes everything.

That is the start of a guess at teleology I suppose. I feel like I want to clean up a lot of relationships however before I try guessing what’s on God’s mind.

I know Donald Hoffman speculates that Godel’s incompleteness theorem means infinite mathematics and that Source is running around like a kid in a candy store trying to actualize as much of it as possible – IMHO as good an educated guess as any.
Hereandnow wrote: March 15th, 2021, 10:17 pmI do respect evolution, but not here. Remove the "coevolve" from what is tricky, and then you find "trans subjective data like matter" to be the tricky part. But "matter" is a nonsense term at the level of basic questions. As for data, this is construed apart from such things.

If you just retitle it the ‘unyielding’, or that which isn’t fungible or amenable to mentation or feelings, then you’ve probably rescued the baby from the bathwater. Completely without regard to whether it’s the ‘stuff that proves reductive materialism true’ or other goofball political maneuvers as our world tends toward tribalism, the thing that’s just as important even if we decide that we’re living in Bernardo Kastrup’s sort of idealist universe, is that what’s ‘out there’ is unyielding and impersonal and it’s as such as much under idealism as under physicalism (unless you’re dealing with someone who takes The Secret too seriously – God speed them on their way).
Hereandnow wrote: March 15th, 2021, 10:17 pmTo cut to the chase, the metaethical "Good and the Bad" are embedded in a world's impositions of pragmatically constructed entanglements. This is the world at the level of basic questions. There are questions begged here, but this is only if you want to talk about metaethics.

I think when one cuts to the core of things – it’s first and foremost about power, stability and relationships of power, the structure of power disputes, how one-up-one-down games work, how they can be kept within defined ranges so they don’t burn down societies (runaway arms races and multipolar traps for example), and an understanding that power structures, everywhere and on every level, are a given and will be until life disappears. After that realization, more as a secondary reaction, is figuring out how to keep the social equivalent of Gettysburg or the Battle of the Alamo tended like a fire in a fire pit without burning the world down or giving in to a lot of the worst kinds of recurring evil that most people really want life to be guaranteed in some ways against. I really tend to like how John Gray thinks about these issues (don’t know your level of familiarity with him – Straw Dogs, Soul of the Marionette, etc., New Statesman contributor, not the love doctor).
Hereandnow wrote: March 15th, 2021, 10:17 pmDon't know how symbol sets work here. But I can't imagine mysticism being about inferring things about animals' private worlds. Nor is it about doing anything.

I think we might be in an unresolvable lexical trap with that one (though possibly not). What you might mean by ‘mysticism’ might be something very specific and idiosyncratic, and I remember you gave an example of discovering a new color to be yield from a mystical experience. The best I can do is try saying that, at least in my common ‘natural attitude’ inspired lexicon that there is ‘veridical perception’ in some internal experiences, my concern there – at least with what you’ve been doing so far in the discussion with philosophy vs. the physical world, I worry that we’d instead be running down a rabbit hole of dissecting what ‘veridical’ means.

The best I can do I suppose – your example of discovering a new color – that color isn’t an idiosyncratic symbol for a mystical path that only belongs in the context of that mystical path, ie. a new color is a new color. Similarly, if people are able to map very interesting geometric relationships between consciousness in their own body and whatever the conscious expanse beyond happens or even having 360-degree vision while in an NDE – I’d consider these experiences that suggest veridicality. Similarly, if people can have OBE’s – fine. If those OBE’s even bridge to then sort of ‘hijack’ the I experience of an animal – fine, I have no qualms with that and find it deeply interesting when people who are of good character and generally don’t stutter in the sense of credulity end up sharing concepts like that – which makes me want to learn more about said experiences because what they’re doing, if veridical, tells us something about the relationships that our world is made of.

My core interest with figuring out such relationships is this – making well-informed decisions in life and what I chose to do with my time, consciousness, etc.. While they can be fun and trippy facts the guidance they offer, much like having an adept understanding of food and micronutrients might well-inform one’s eating decisions, is really what I’m after and while I can hold things in my head from time to time that may not have such value (like how to play a complex board game) I tend not to spend as much time on things that don’t have pragmatic import.
Hereandnow wrote: March 15th, 2021, 10:17 pmI disagree about Darwinian fitness points. Look at what lies before you, the landscape you speak of. Take suffering. Very useful for evolution, no doubt, but suffering is only there because it was, prior to phenotypic selection, a possibility of phenotypical types built into genotypical codes. Imagine you had a book that could lay out, describe, all phenotypical possibilities of a human genome's almost infinite number of combinatory effects. It would be clear what they are, but there is still the begged question hovering over: What are THESE the possibilities? This struggle we are in has, at the level of basic questions, nothing to do with Darwinian fitness.

Differential success I believe is what you’re looking for. For example some failure modes include a) not having kids and having had nothing else durable to offer, b) having kids and not being able to socioeconomically position them, c) being in a position to be under someone who makes bad decisions and getting killed by their bad decision, d) being childless, being the sort of person who was more of an outsider or lineage/group guide (like a priest would be or other interesting outliers like artists, auties, LGBT, etc.) and not being able to impart the knowledge that you traded for moving your genes on. Obviously it’s not *just* procreating, George Washington lives on for his valor and leadership in battle and his abdicating the offer to be coronated even though he never had children (one could say similar things of many great artists, intellects, and teachers).

The crux of it is that what sticks is what sticks, and when one looks at what sticks certain strategies fare better than others, other strategies that are related to people who create memes, ideas, and art rather than children play on long-tail effects that seem to replentish based on what seem to be reliable stochastic factors (for example I don’t know if there’s a fixed hovering percent of gay men in the world from generation to generation, just that the odds of it clipping zero at any give time – short of global theocracy covering that data – would seem odd).
Hereandnow wrote: March 15th, 2021, 10:17 pmMystical systems" is oxymoronic.

Schools, lineages, there are easily tens of thousands. Oxymoronic or not they’re incredibly common although the word ‘tradition’ might get used a bit more often than ‘system’ although in this context they’re largely synonymous.
Hereandnow wrote: March 15th, 2021, 10:17 pmYour thoughts about the Ptolemaic speculation is arbitrary.
The "search space" is very well defined; all that is required is the commitment to what is present, in the world, familiar, yet on examination, without foundation. Once this is seen, then one simply follows the breadcrumbs as they appear. Stable geometries? How about the examination of judgment qua judgment? Or, the essence of ethics and art? Or, temporal structure of truth?
The world is filled with people who feel like they’ve landed on the answer to everything. The question is can they articulate it to someone who’s not of their bubble and when they try, how much of what works or fails rises on the relative intelligence or discipline of the person they’re talking to and how much then resides on the strength of their own ability to convey their system in words or critique the system they’ve landed on. All of that’s far more valuable and important for self-monitoring (critical for self-disconfirmation), ongoing learning, and being able to search out the corners of what still needs to be better understood in order to have command of the content than it is impressing people online or winning turf battles (which tends to be a lost cause when so many people are legends in their own minds anyway).
Hereandnow wrote: March 15th, 2021, 10:17 pmBut you argue beyond the pale of the discussion. If I say the Nasdeq Composite is not important here, would you say it is important to investors? It is simply the case that it has no bearing Here.

It might be a blunt or awkward example, it’s an example of a place where a person’s claims can run into falsifiability and I think there are quite likely far less blunt examples where the experimental world could or would falsify ideas one might not realize have been resolved. That’s why I think it’s at least important to be well versed in the sciences, particularly things like mathematical physics, to know when someone is either up against the territory of making a hypothesis that someone in the sciences has made but hasn’t tested yet or where the hypothesis has been run and a different result was found. The trouble with mind spinning against mind all the time is Garbage-In-Garbage-Out. This is also why I tend to feel uncomfortable taking much more than a few steps of logic beyond science unless I see a LOT of corroborating evidence or ‘conciliant’ info. Consilience has a lot to do with how I’ve come to the conclusions, for example, that functionalism with multiple realizability matches edge cases in consciousness or that Donald Hoffman is at least looking in the right direction with his mapping of the universe as a social network of conscious agents.
Hereandnow wrote: March 15th, 2021, 10:17 pmNo, that's not it. It is much simpler that this. I said it before: talking about metal activity issuing from a brain is easy. Just observe some surgical procedure that shows this. But talk about a physical brain issuing from mental activity, now THAT is difficult. After all, how is it that you can at all confirm a physical brain? Such confirmation BEGINS in thought, i.e., mental activity, and remains in thought unless you can say how it gets OUT of thought.
So there is a brain, and there is this brain in my thoughts. How does it get there?
I wouldn’t say that it’s not an important question, just that starting with the premise that most people (with sight) can say that whatever spectrum of colors they experience as pinkish-gray and whatever structure they’d consider to appear as if it’s convoluted in a way that almost looks intestinal (thinking cerebral cortex) we have an object we agree on the experience of. Someone can show an anatomical picture of a brain and even abstracted where the colors and features have been pastelled to show labels and the different names for the different parts of the brain people can still tell that they’re looking at the map of a brain.

The mystery of how we can all agree on the shape, character, and qualities of external content is one that I find quite interesting, and my interest in what that external content is has to do with the more alchemical question of what can we do with it. I mentioned having a more esotericist/occultist/alchemist kind of interest ie. doing in the world, and I can’t help but wonder if so much of the difficulties we’re having here are that we’re talking cross-purposes (which I’m willing to concede the things that would interest me would do little or nothing for you if what you’re after is completely different).
Hereandnow wrote: March 15th, 2021, 10:17 pmI say it's the be all and end all because it is open ended and it addresses things at the most basic level. Analytic philosophy does not. Ask, for example, an analytic epistemologist how it is that in the traditional analysis of knowledge, one can affirm P at all. S knows P; but what is P? Merely assumed. countless paper on t he Gettier problems (you might want to look this up, just for fun), yet P is NOT a basic term. It is a thing of parts. Only Phenomenology's hermeneutical approach takes the pressure off of affirming P.
Persuasion only comes with reading. Otherwise, it is like convincing someone literally speak a foreign language. One has to be weaned off everyday thinking.

Is this sort of like saying ‘if it’s not fundamental it’s not real or not interesting?’. This is where I’m having some difficulty relating. For me something just has to be durable, that it’s emergent in some way or one can’t say it isn’t make of quarks or that we don’t know what quarks are doesn’t bother me as much because a final answer for what ‘stuff’ actually is or isn’t is more profound and less pragmatic than what I’m actually interested in.

Think of all of the Red Bull sponsored extreme sports for example. If someone wants to be able to take a dirt bike off ramps, be able to reliably do a somersault or 360 in the air in the gap between the two, and land on the ramp on the other side – the relative stability of what they’re dealing with gets them there. If someone wants to ride 100 foot tidal waves, technique, flow state, fluid dynamics, etc., are fine whether or not they, the board, or the water in the ocean are all emergent.

The questions I’m interested in are the intersections and interactions of planes, how conscious and in loose quotes ‘physical’ (unyielding) planes join and intersect, pretty much all of the fun Dion Fortune, Robert Ambelain, etc. stuff if you then want to try shaking out comparisons between mystical philosophy and mathematical physics, or seeing where different kinds of philosophy which seem to yield sensible structures find correspondences in the various gauges, bundles, spinors, Lie groups, etc. of mathematical physics. I want to ask those questions because I do think progress can be made on them on those terms, even if someone else finds that utterly boring.

Someone could come along and tell me ‘That’s all great but – it all reduces to quarks, quarks reduce to fields, and if you’re thinking outside fields you’re lost in a cycle of impracticalities that aren’t up to speed with present knowledge’. We don’t live in fields though, we live in a world that’s by and large made of the unyielding (unless one’s so urban zoo animal that they start thinking everything’s a social construct – that’s an illness of its own), and the consequences of the unyielding, to us, and the questions of what to do with it aren’t likely to shift unless knowing that it’s all fields gives us a way to reengineer the unyielding to do more interesting things in ways that aren’t energy prohibitive – if it’s that last case that’s more in line with alchemy and now we’re talking!
Hereandnow wrote: March 15th, 2021, 10:17 pmOther people's word games is just a pejorative way of referring to things you are not inclined to read.
Not in this context. In what I was responding to you made it sound as if people are literally incapable of thinking outside the authors they’re currently reading, as if it were true in a serial – almost monogamous - manner, bringing their own experiences with them to see how the philosophy they’re reading both matches or doesn’t match, ie. it seems to jump over skepticism and critical thinking as if no one actually does it (which makes me wonder – where do these ‘great men’ come from who found these nodes of thought). I could be reading in too much or it could just be your word choice, I can see genuine disinterest in what you’re calling analytic philosophy but I can’t follow the rest of the implications. It’s a bit like saying ‘If you’re asking analytic questions you’re not only wasting your time – you’re just flat out wrong, come study phenomenology instead’.

Being a ‘parasite on science’ I actually think might be less of a problem for dedicated/interested amateurs because we’re not constantly asking the question ‘How do I get money out of this?’ in which case what becomes really important for proving your chops to a prospective employer is sounding just like other people with enough insight into why you believe what you believe that your actually worth hiring rather than just being a buzzword parrot.
Hereandnow wrote: March 15th, 2021, 10:17 pmPlatonist? You mean a kind of rational realism? But what has this to do with being human, aside from the rational structure of judgment? And how does the structure of thought enter into things outside of thought? Is there truth "out there" where there are no minds? Are propositions out there?
A great example of where I think our differences in temperament in interest might skewer conversation. I’m interested in the question of how we get to see, even being a species of animal as we are, to be more important that simply being natural resources to be exploited. By the logic of a world that operates on violence and power first, and to some extent the power of idea and the structure that they can give people’s reactions to power (which is nested in this context) and how those reactions shape what power can or can’t do or what incentive structures are there – I think it’s important to peg what we are in the universe, and it’s really important for us to be able to get it across that we’re not just epiphenomena of matter.

There was a Cyprian gentleman named Seymen Atasoy who gave a really good presentation recently (online due to Covid) for a consciousness convention and he hit on a lot of the angles that I care about well even if a tad light due to time constraints: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fh88zvw2tU8
Hereandnow wrote: March 15th, 2021, 10:17 pmIt's a colorful way to look at what is cosmic, but no, I am not saying that. I'm saying the point is to unclutter thought, so that the opacity of one's reading does not fill the horizon of interpretation; if, that is, the desire is to get at something important. The construction of resources that can fill conversation is a virtue, I would say. But not here.
Opacity of reading is only ever a temporary problem, unless you’re reading Lacan in which case yes – if you can’t get anywhere on reducing it and being able to see that your reduction and clearing yields consistent agreement with the system of thought you’re examining then it could very well just be gobbledygook or a sort of academic Voynich Manuscript. I don’t have any reason to believe that I’m reading Lacan right now.
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Re: Existentialism anyone?

Post by Hereandnow »

Papus79 wrote
I guess, personally, I’d sacrifice comprehensiveness for accuracy and actionable information for accessing new possibilities in the physical, social, and creative worlds wherever possible (think of it like this – as a musician, artist, programmer, someone who generates content at least as much if not more than consuming it). When I do try on a new map it’s because – while it’s quite likely wrong in important ways – it has some signal that it’s showing some new and useful vehicle in examining the world and the universe both outside and in and reconciling the two. In that though I actually like falsifiability a lot.
Actionable information isn't philosophy; I mean, it can be, anything can be actionable, but it really goes to the understanding, prior to action. When Meister Eckhart cries out in a sermon that he prays to God to be rid of God, he is speaking of the attempt to see more deeply into his encounters with the world that give terms like 'divinity' their meaning.

To access physical, social, creative worlds is not philosophy any more than any engagement you can think of is. Philosophy is about what is behind art, programming, or just putting on your socks. Behind it in the sense that these activities are presented to us as experiences, so what is an experience? Asking this kind of question is very different from others. Foundational questions ultimately lead to foundational disillusionment, which is necessary to understand the world at the level of basic assumptions. Phenomenologists are not like analytic philosophers. They don't just take an idea and observe how well it holds up in argument. Phenomenologists try to describe the post-disillusionment world, the world that is there once the ordinariness of things are put aside.

Falsifiability is relative to the body of thought undertaken. IS Kierkegaard wrong about time? See his Concept of Anxiety. Or Heidegger? How can one falsify such a thing? Analytic types simply put the matter before the "sense" of terms that are clear in other contexts, look into the logic of those contexts, then determine if the matter can make sense. That is positivism, and it is why these philosopher go nowhere, for they commit what I will call the fallacy of repetition: looking for what is there, as borrowed from what is already there. As if the answer were somehow IN the existing "clear" ideas established in familiarity. They are right about one thing: every time they venture into the meaning of terms, they find what they already suspected staring back at them, which is the nullity of knowledge. This is the nihilism of contemporary analytic thinking. Look how wittgenstein puts the case in his Tractatus, insisting that we must "pass over in silence" what is not perfectly clear. Ludicrous! THE most fascinating insights about world rest with the most nebulous intimations. It is only when one gets close to the terminal point of meaninglessness that one can understand, at which genuine religious insight begins, for prior to this, one has not really grasped one's place in things. Fine, become a pianist, and if you're good, you will have a good life, presumably. But you will not understand anything, never confront anything existentially. For the beauty produced will remain bound to a body of thought the nature of which is to pin it down and divest it of its reality. This is what language does, unchecked by philosophy. Language creates meanings, brings them forth, then holds them fast, making for a Totality that comprises the historical, interpretative educative events.
Positivism has had a hundred years, and it comes up empty, or nearly so. I won't mention any more papers and books, but there are some great ones out there that address this.
And if you dive off a 200-foot cliff you’re dead. Whatever it is it’s extremely consequential – I think that’s what I care about far more than any attempt to pin down ultimate substance. If we consider most properties to be vapor then I’m even okay with stepping things back to their relationships (OSR) and saying that these structures are mostly made of relationships and that there are certain properties that we have relatively unforgiving interactions with (such as velocity, thermodynamics, surface tension, gravity, chemical bonding and valence shell proclivities when it comes to things like poisons, acids, etc.).

I’m sorry if I keep beating that point or if it sounds as if I’m thinking you aren’t following it (I’m taking a wile guess that you’re well past 3rd grade math and it probably sounds really condescending), I just can’t see myself getting excited about a philosophy that doesn’t in some way grapple with the unyielding in nature.
Of course it's extremely consequential. This is exactly why post modern phenomenologists take up this issue. But substance AS an ontological idea is connotatively rich, typically reducing the whatever-it-is to causality and material mechanics (quantum or otherwise). It is held fast in place to allow speculative work to continue in its positivist extension of science, amounting to an ontology of science. The evidence that is there for the posting of substance is not a reflection of the broad range of realities which is the world; it is a selected body, based on what is empirically discovered only, aka, empirical science ( note: science as such is not at issue at all. It is empirical science that is the natural relation we have with the world that the underlying apriori "science" of the structure of experience: an empirical scientist asks, what is the composition of Jupiter's atmosphere? A phenomenologists asks, what is the constitution of the perceptual act that gather the data for making inferences about the empirical world? We are processing plants of data.
As inquiry leads on here, it becomes clear that the knowledge claims science makes rests on a foundation that is not empirical science! And to ignore this, well--an analogy: imagine as astrophysicist observing star light who didn't understand what a telescope did. Or the computer that processed telescopic images. what good is the "data"? So, how "opaque" is a human brain? At least as opaque as computer generated data? Or much more so?
The human brain, or course, is analogized to the computer here. One has to see this: One is not observing things "out there" at all. The human brain is extremely opaque, is it not? What IS this reality we see? It is phenomena.

Unyielding nature? One has to see that this nature is not what is thought. Look closely: how opaque is a brain? Once one sees that science says nothing, really, about things beyond experience, that is, all that science can say is is about the empirical world, not some substantival "outside", and so then one has to alter the standards of interpretation, for this lamp is now a composite of idea, affect, fact, reason; not the absurd reduction to science's material substance. Science is just a part of the "stream of consciousness" (as James put it). Primary is now, meaning. Heidegger saw this. What strikes you as fundamental at first blush of the world? It is meaning. Things have value, one cares, is interested, shocked, mystified, and so on. And the world was never a scientist's conception. Not even close.
That is the start of a guess at teleology I suppose. I feel like I want to clean up a lot of relationships however before I try guessing what’s on God’s mind.

I know Donald Hoffman speculates that Godel’s incompleteness theorem means infinite mathematics and that Source is running around like a kid in a candy store trying to actualize as much of it as possible – IMHO as good an educated guess as any.
But it has nothing to do with math and logic. Phenomenology simply asks what is there, the midst of perception, and how is it put together? It is not helpful to look eslewhere, where ideas have no application. Math? No. Meaning. Meaning in the valuative sense, in the metaethical sense. When the inquirer approaches an issue, there is first, caring, curiosity, interest and a number of other affective descriptions. Then, what is affect? What is caring? Caring has as its counterpart that which is cared about, and this goes directly to value, the general term for what it is that can be cared for. Hagen Das, for example, or the welfare of a family member. Across the board, there is caring and its value experience. This then turns to analysis of value, and here, is encountered the Good. See G E Moore's Principia Ethica---back then, it was assumed ethics was part of the world, and only recently, the shadow of Nietzsche and Wittgenstein (and Heidegger) darkened the stage. The Good and the Bad are the strangest things in the universe, galactically stranger! Take a lighted match and apply it to your finger. Phenomenology asks, what is this presence of suffering? There, in the world, uninvented, a pure "given"?
One of the great virtues of phenomenology is that its epoche purifies the present, allowing all things that are there, in the midst of perceiving, to stand clear of presuppositions, and the world is a thing-itself, untouched by contexts of meaning in the usual sense.

A teleology would be metaphysics, and we do not go there, inventing a world of ethical trajectories in the behavior of things. Not that this is not the case, but never witnessed. But then, the Good, the Bad, is there (IN the world, in music, art, Hagen das, and so forth), in the fabric of things, and therefore is part of another order. It may not be accessible beyond the concept, but the injunction to do and not to do is very clear, so clear, it is surprising analytic philosophers fail to see this. What IS the injunction NOT to put the lighted match to another's finger? What is the ontology of this? This is the question of all questions, for pain is the most underscored part of the phenomenology of being human. Meaning is all about the mattering of important things.
If you just retitle it the ‘unyielding’, or that which isn’t fungible or amenable to mentation or feelings, then you’ve probably rescued the baby from the bathwater. Completely without regard to whether it’s the ‘stuff that proves reductive materialism true’ or other goofball political maneuvers as our world tends toward tribalism, the thing that’s just as important even if we decide that we’re living in Bernardo Kastrup’s sort of idealist universe, is that what’s ‘out there’ is unyielding and impersonal and it’s as such as much under idealism as under physicalism (unless you’re dealing with someone who takes The Secret too seriously – God speed them on their way).
If you retitle is thusly, then you have simply, the transcendental. Once inquiry is liberated from the presumptions of science, questions about subjectivity and objectivity are made moot, for all that we witness remains a whole. THEN, what appears is priveleged according to its qualitative presence, and value and meaning become central to philosophy. Why?

I defend moral realism. Ethics is absolute.

If you're going to think about Bernardo Kastrup, you first have to deal with Kant. He did. Idealism is not just an idea. It takes a serious rearrangement of the way one apprehends the world. It is a revolution.
I think when one cuts to the core of things – it’s first and foremost about power, stability and relationships of power, the structure of power disputes, how one-up-one-down games work, how they can be kept within defined ranges so they don’t burn down societies (runaway arms races and multipolar traps for example), and an understanding that power structures, everywhere and on every level, are a given and will be until life disappears. After that realization, more as a secondary reaction, is figuring out how to keep the social equivalent of Gettysburg or the Battle of the Alamo tended like a fire in a fire pit without burning the world down or giving in to a lot of the worst kinds of recurring evil that most people really want life to be guaranteed in some ways against. I really tend to like how John Gray thinks about these issues (don’t know your level of familiarity with him – Straw Dogs, Soul of the Marionette, etc., New Statesman contributor, not the love doctor).
I think need to cut it short here and turn all of this toward a more thematic approach. Tell me, what is ethics?
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Re: Existentialism anyone?

Post by Papus79 »

I think this would be a good time to hang it up for now because I'm seeing a lot of leaps from domain to domain without underpinning context - ie. I'd really have to proceed at reading Kant, Husserl, Heidegger, etc. to respond fairly. My main goal was to see if there was, from where I am, any shot at getting a sense of what value phenomenology would have to me. It sounds like one of the more important things it imparts is being able to shatter the human story and really live in a post-human psychic composition and largely disband a lot of the neuroses that conformity demands. It's not that I view the value of truth as entirely instrumental, just that what I can digest at a given time has a lot to do with where I'm at in my own flight and I'm starting to see what it feels like, to other people, when I'm trying to tell them what they should be seeing - from a position where I have reason to believe that I'm far out ahead of them.

The only think I really want to territorially assert - I'm reading Landry right now and I'll read something else when I'm finished reading Landry.


What little I'll say about ethics - I have the same kind of concern about this topic that I do regarding free will. It seems like almost all the jargon tends to point circular, that it self-references the same sort of naive experiential view that a person displays when countering claims to determinism by dropping a cup and saying 'Look at that! I felt like dropping the cup and I did!', and in some sense if someone's a compatibalist or takes Marvin's view that free will is true because determinism equally true and meaningless (leaving someone like Sam Harris with no more chess moves - and I'm really thinking now that - at least on any social plane - going post truth is the top trump card where factual arguments can be laid low by someone blowing the raspberry). My sense of the core value - on the most common everyday level ethics is about abating suffering, in a somewhat more extended sense betrayal (which may or may not come with direct suffering), and at the more abstract edges it deals with origins of agency (like the natalist/antinatalist questions of 'is it an imposition to bring someone into this world without their consent?' or 'Is it wrong to cancel future generations from having had the opportunity to exist without their consent?', withholding of good rather than inflicting harm can also follow this kind of pattern). Over and above that, at the ground level, nature seems to be optimized as a psychopath generator function (at least when one looks right up the center of society for winning one-up-one-down games), it seems like even given that most people aren't necessarily psychopaths, even if vacant on other levels, don't want to be psychopaths, and so they're trying to come up with rules that make life more worth living - where life isn't a situation where everyone kills each other over personal supremacy of genes until there's one person left and that's the end of the species (which - I'd have to hope it's just the most crippled genetically divergent person who simply managed to hide best - we'd deserve it). I'm sure that's probably more of an outlier read on the topic of ethics but that's where I'm at. In one sense ethics abate chaos and give us some kind of foundation for what we can expect if we want to do commerce with one another, and whether or not that can work has a lot to do with whether we're in a cycle where hunger and thirst for better life is driving more cooperation or if we're in a state of fractal defection on the heels of decadence - which I believe we're in now.
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Re: Existentialism anyone?

Post by Hereandnow »

Papus79 wrote
What little I'll say about ethics - I have the same kind of concern about this topic that I do regarding free will. It seems like almost all the jargon tends to point circular, that it self-references the same sort of naive experiential view that a person displays when countering claims to determinism by dropping a cup and saying 'Look at that! I felt like dropping the cup and I did!', and in some sense if someone's a compatibalist or takes Marvin's view that free will is true because determinism equally true and meaningless (leaving someone like Sam Harris with no more chess moves - and I'm really thinking now that - at least on any social plane - going post truth is the top trump card where factual arguments can be laid low by someone blowing the raspberry). My sense of the core value - on the most common everyday level ethics is about abating suffering, in a somewhat more extended sense betrayal (which may or may not come with direct suffering), and at the more abstract edges it deals with origins of agency (like the natalist/antinatalist questions of 'is it an imposition to bring someone into this world without their consent?' or 'Is it wrong to cancel future generations from having had the opportunity to exist without their consent?', withholding of good rather than inflicting harm can also follow this kind of pattern). Over and above that, at the ground level, nature seems to be optimized as a psychopath generator function (at least when one looks right up the center of society for winning one-up-one-down games), it seems like even given that most people aren't necessarily psychopaths, even if vacant on other levels, don't want to be psychopaths, and so they're trying to come up with rules that make life more worth living - where life isn't a situation where everyone kills each other over personal supremacy of genes until there's one person left and that's the end of the species (which - I'd have to hope it's just the most crippled genetically divergent person who simply managed to hide best - we'd deserve it). I'm sure that's probably more of an outlier read on the topic of ethics but that's where I'm at. In one sense ethics abate chaos and give us some kind of foundation for what we can expect if we want to do commerce with one another, and whether or not that can work has a lot to do with whether we're in a cycle where hunger and thirst for better life is driving more cooperation or if we're in a state of fractal defection on the heels of decadence - which I believe we're in now.
But it is all too much. It is fine that you read across the board to get a full breadth of ideas, but the trouble with this is it gives one the impression that all there is is a motley scattering of thinking, and this is not the case.

I am interested in a descriptive profile of an ethical event in the same way, say, a geologist first has to describe rock formation before classifying it: classifications depend first on overt, observable features. So before talk can even begin about people and their entangled affairs, genetic, pathological, or otherwise, there is something there, in the event that makes it ethical at all.
What is this?
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Re: Existentialism anyone?

Post by Papus79 »

Hereandnow wrote: March 18th, 2021, 10:14 pm I am interested in a descriptive profile of an ethical event in the same way, say, a geologist first has to describe rock formation before classifying it: classifications depend first on overt, observable features. So before talk can even begin about people and their entangled affairs, genetic, pathological, or otherwise, there is something there, in the event that makes it ethical at all.
What is this?
I tried having this conversation with some people in another thread but there were no takers.

As far as I can tell suffering and damage are the quickest identifiers, particularly unnecessary suffering or damage (such as cutting off someone's finger for no reason).

That said I debated whether an unconscious AI which rode around neutron bombing random planets with no life on them would be doing something unethical, ie. that this stretched the boundary condition a bit and you'd have to then really push the issue and say that even if these planets were covered with absolutely beautiful geological features, maybe something like crystal forests or massive geodes, that these were planets that we assumed would never be visited by sentient life. It still feels 'off' and when I try to pin that down - its destruction of complex structures for no purpose (one could even try arguing that unseen beauty could be sacred in some manner), and that's even ignoring the question of whether there's really any such thing as truly non-sentient matter or space.

This is where I'm uncomfortable saying that there are absolute parameters, you can say something that feels right - like starting with unnecessary suffering being a kind of evil, but you then have to consider (as I mentioned earlier) that not every betrayal or theft causes suffering in a direct sense but that doesn't make it ethical, and this boundary can be pushed out farther to right to exist or not exist, etc.

All of this said I'm also really wary of human instincts. We have instincts that both point at survival as well as the transcendental but, IMHO, they're mangled and quite often just don't lead to sensible conclusions. It's also an open question as to whether logic can really yield answers as such and I'd say that's only possible (at least within human capacity) if we can identify a few common factors that all the complexity around ethics emerges from.
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Re: Existentialism anyone?

Post by Steve3007 »

Papus79 wrote:As far as I can tell suffering and damage are the quickest identifiers, particularly unnecessary suffering or damage (such as cutting off someone's finger for no reason).
I think a slightly more general identifier would simply be the presence of interaction between two or more moral agents and moral subjects (involving at least one of the former) which involve any of them either getting something they want, getting something they don't want or being denied something that they want.

So it wouldn't necessarily have to involve suffering or damage, and the presence of suffering or damage wouldn't necessarily have ethical implications.
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Re: Existentialism anyone?

Post by Papus79 »

Steve3007 wrote: March 19th, 2021, 10:07 am I think a slightly more general identifier would simply be the presence of interaction between two or more moral agents and moral subjects (involving at least one of the former) which involve any of them either getting something they want, getting something they don't want or being denied something that they want.

So it wouldn't necessarily have to involve suffering or damage, and the presence of suffering or damage wouldn't necessarily have ethical implications.
When I read that it reminds me more of how I might define the universe in which moral/ethical activity can occur in, and I say that because it also includes two women deciding to take a walk to the local park or a guy buying bell peppers at the local grocery store. There's a lot of really mundane content where people are getting what they want, moral valence perhaps is never non-zero but there's a point where something falls in such a flat space of the curve where it moves below the threshold of people's capacity to weigh those decisions morally or ethically.
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Re: Existentialism anyone?

Post by Steve3007 »

Papus79 wrote:When I read that it reminds me more of how I might define the universe in which moral/ethical activity can occur in, and I say that because it also includes two women deciding to take a walk to the local park or a guy buying bell peppers at the local grocery store. There's a lot of really mundane content where people are getting what they want...
Good point. OK, how about this:

...which involve any of them either getting something they want, getting something they don't want or being denied something that they want, as a result of the [in]actions of one of the other moral agents.
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Re: Existentialism anyone?

Post by Steve3007 »

I supposed "a guy buying bell peppers at the local grocery store" involves at least two people getting what they want. But I suppose, being a financial transaction involving an implicit contract, that is one of the "ethical events" that Hereandnow wanted.
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Re: Existentialism anyone?

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So am I understanding the question better perhaps if I rephrase it 'What qualities define entities whose action in the universe has a moral dimension?'. I at least think that's where this is going and maybe that's the sort of granular bedrock that Hereandnow was after.

The trouble is - even there - I feel like, as human beings, we'll project this on to what we'd think of as non-conscious entities (their actual state in that regard, at least right now, unknowable erring toward unconscious) as it seems like our agency is really interested in straightening the world out on our own terms, even if what we mean by that or the results can get rather frightening. This is part of why I asked what really felt like an absurd question, ie. unconscious AI ship neutron bombing random unpopulated planets, because it's a classic case where massive potential 'value' is getting destroyed that will hypothetically never be accessed. It feels completely wrong and yet - we don't have good parameters for either clarifying that it is wrong or clarifying that our intuitions that it's wrong are really just a glitch.
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Re: Existentialism anyone?

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Something else that's been hitting me hard on the framing level, in general in my life, is something I've been dealing with since maybe 2012 or 2013 - at least in an overt sense. Pretty much any of the symptoms one tends to think of with respect to 'kundalini awakening', I've been dealing with them.

What I really find fascinating about dealing with that dilemma - it shows that our 'hammer down and repress' approach to law and order, at least the degree to which we handle that way within ourselves and handling our own conduct, actually smashes a lot of delicate apparatus in our natural function and creates these internal processes that syphon a lot of our health and energy in their maintenance. When you start having these kinds of physical sensations and psychological effects, or persistently being woken up at night by odd things, it seems to have something to do with the desire to push integrity downward and actually deal with core issues at their deepest layers rather than cutting the Gordian knot the way we often tend to in childhood.

Why I bring this up in the context of ethics, and it's probably quite relevant in the context of the conversation I was having earlier regarding analytic patterns vs phenomenological and whether analytics have any value, it's that we have things like this where human knowledge is just barely scratching the surface, or at least I could say it's barely scratching the surface 'outside of a mystical or religious context'. This is also where, however, I have to say that a lot of the warnings about this kind of thing are true - ie. that you pretty much end up doing a lot of what gets called, in Jungian and depth psychology circles, 'shadow work', and it means getting really up close with demons (particularly of desire) that you never knew you had - to get to know them on their own terms before you get to bring them under will and put them in your battery pack.

Being in that place actually breaths a whole other layer into ethics, ie. it's a bit like the universe really doesn't like stagnation, things that are 'boring', and will load all kinds of dopamine, serotonin, and other rewards onto both opening up cans of worms and I have to guess even more so acting those things out in the real world. It shows me as well that a lot of the worst people out there may not only be riding the winds of incredible seduction but that they might be basked in the feeling that the whole universe wants them to do exactly what they're doing - and they might on some level be right.
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Re: Existentialism anyone?

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Papus79 wrote
As far as I can tell suffering and damage are the quickest identifiers, particularly unnecessary suffering or damage (such as cutting off someone's finger for no reason).
Of course. Then there is the pleasure, the happiness as well. These are in play in ethical situations just as suffering is. Consider being deprived of a pleasure, Or making a determination such that one receives more benefit than another.
That said I debated whether an unconscious AI which rode around neutron bombing random planets with no life on them would be doing something unethical, ie. that this stretched the boundary condition a bit and you'd have to then really push the issue and say that even if these planets were covered with absolutely beautiful geological features, maybe something like crystal forests or massive geodes, that these were planets that we assumed would never be visited by sentient life. It still feels 'off' and when I try to pin that down - its destruction of complex structures for no purpose (one could even try arguing that unseen beauty could be sacred in some manner), and that's even ignoring the question of whether there's really any such thing as truly non-sentient matter or space.
But you throw out the term "ethical" yet haven't come to am understanding as to what this terms refers to, and what an analysis of this would be. If you ask a geologist what a term refers to , she is likely to be able to point to a rock formation, its physical features, then deploy analytical jargon like quartz, mica, weathering, seismic events, and so on. But first, there is the simply pointing, the sight, texture and so on. Analogously, before there is any talk about what is right or wrong ethically, we should be able to "point" to an ethical case and understand its presence, what is there in it that makes it ethical, so we can then talk about AI's bombing random planets, and know what it is for something to be ethical in the first place.


What is the engine that drives ethics? It is not freedom, for obligation to do the right thing would be there, free or not free, regardless of whether any sense could then be made of an "obligation" for obligations would continue in the way we talk nonetheless (keeping in mind that freedom has two senses. One is the rigorous insistence of the principle of sufficient cause, the other the experience of choice. Both undeniable, though the first is a priori). Nor is it the various incidental things in our affairs, like my borrowing money and my unwillingness to pay it back because of this and that and other things. These may be typical conditions of certain ethical problems, but they are simply descriptive, factual, like the fact that it's raining or the moon being full. These are not ethical in any way; facts are not ethical affairs, even though ethical affairs are crowded with facts. It's not reason, as rationalists say, for as Hume put it a long time ago, reason would just as soon wipe out human existence as anything else, for it has no content; It is merely the formal structure of propositions.

But you already said what it is. It's suffering, pain (and joy, pleasure, I would add) in one form or another. This is the value of an ethical issue, its essence: no value, no ethics, which simply means that if there is no interest, caring, concern, desire, repugnance, disgust and so on, then it is not possible to even have an ethical situation.

So an analysis of ethics brings us to something irreducible, value. But is it irreducible?
This is where I'm uncomfortable saying that there are absolute parameters, you can say something that feels right - like starting with unnecessary suffering being a kind of evil, but you then have to consider (as I mentioned earlier) that not every betrayal or theft causes suffering in a direct sense but that doesn't make it ethical, and this boundary can be pushed out farther to right to exist or not exist, etc.
I would put aside "unnecessary" in qualifying suffering. It begs the question of how necessity can have any influence on suffering at all, for first it is a matter of understanding what suffering IS; after all, it could be an absolute, in which case nothing could diminish what it is, for it is not contingent on anything. This is where your "absolute parameters" come in.

But to summarize, I claim that an answer to the question, what is ethics? has to first look at a typical ethical matter and analyzed for what it is, for these are things of parts. What is the part that generates an actual obligation to behave in one way or another? It is the suffering, joy and all of the above. Are these reducible to something else? that is, once the ethically arbitrary, the facts, the freedom, are removed, is what remains also a thing of parts subject to further analysis? Of have we hit rock bottom (if any sense can be made of rock bottom, like an intuition. Is logic a "rock bottom" intuition?)
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Re: Existentialism anyone?

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Hereandnow wrote: March 19th, 2021, 8:02 pm But you throw out the term "ethical" yet haven't come to am understanding as to what this terms refers to, and what an analysis of this would be.
Entertain me with something if you would. Keyword search 'ethic', for at least the last two pages of this thread, I'd like to know which post I actually misused or misapplied 'ethics' before you asked me to define ethics.
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Re: Existentialism anyone?

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Papus79 wrote
Entertain me with something if you would. Keyword search 'ethic', for at least the last two pages of this thread, I'd like to know which post I actually misused or misapplied 'ethics' before you asked me to define ethics.
I hold that what you and I are looking for is a glimpse or an intimation of something beyond the mundane. I believe most are like this because they experience theworld like this, as if there is something incomplete in running a life as if everydayness were sufficient, but taking a step into what this is very precarious. The world doesn't carry its esoterica on its sleeve. So, tarot cards, archetypal theory and kundalini techniques do not carry the authority of a justified thesis and are often dismissed as extravagant thinking with no basis in sound reasoning. It is simply assumed that nothing comes of it in a well formed, objective argument, and that throws it into the bin of frivolous metaphysics. But then, what IS there on the world's "sleeve" that is not being discussed. Philosophy should be doing this, and is doing this, but in places and with language that is just prohibitively difficult: no one wants to read Heidegger or Husserl or Kant because these are not there to be simply read; they have to be studied, and that takes time and effort that could be spent doing more familiar and comfortable things.

But this attempt to make objectively clear things that are, well, other worldly, is where I want to take things. It is why I read phenomenology. These guys provide exactly what is required for serious thinking to make the leap, the Kierkegaardian "movement" into esoterica. It is rigorous, demanding, yet profound and deeply meaningful, and from this one can look at Carl Jung or Hinduism or the Abhidhamma in a way that gives them a dignity they deserve. Phenomenology (regardless of the variations) OPENS the world not arbitrarily, but in a very disciplined way, so one's intellectual conscience is not offended; in fact, one comes to the conclusion that those who adhere so rigorously to positivism's standards of clarity are simply being dogmatic, that they trivialize the gravitas of being human with a mere love of puzzles. This is my opinion about analytic philosophy.

So ethics: I want to be clear about ethics, but not stupidly adhering to foolish delimitations about what is and what is not sensible. Being clear means arguing explicitly about what is there, in the world, for all to see. Phenomenology is a method, and it says, take what is there, observable, but unquestionably there, in one's midst AS onw stands before it, and put aside all presuppositions about how such a matter is taken up if one were IN the performance, as, say, the geologist is not IN the rock formations as they were formed, but stands as an observer, apart from these, after formed, but standing outside, can only go on what is present in the exploratory observation. From there, of course, categorial systems are there to interpret this, but put aside in the "original" encounter.

Here, what is put aside is all the complexities of ethical issues; the things that are there, but are not ethical in their natures. the point is to do a phenomenological investigation into ethics, so there is the typical ethical situation, and here is its anatomy. I remove freedom for the reasons given above, as well as arbitrary incidental things, facts, for facts have no ethical content. What is left is value, and I want to look exclusively at this, just as,say, a geologist looks at specific things to determine a classification. Let's look at the "phenomenon" of ethics, and value steps forward as the essence. But what is value, phenomenologically speaking? This leaves out how useful it has been for reproduction and survival in the evolutionary process, of anything else that is not there, in your face, so to speak. Pain may have been good for evolution, but the phenomenon of pain is not by any means "evolutionary" as if God set out to put evolution into its nature. It simply is what it is.

Pain and pleasure, suffering and joy, that is, value, is not like other phenomena. The color yellow or the timbre of a clarinet, these are presences, irreducible (arguments to the contrary notwithstanding). I argue that value simpliciter is an absolute. But this is pending your interest in such a thing. It is important, to cut to the chase, because absolutes are things that cannot be argued about because they have no 'parts". Thye are not contingent. They simply there, in the fabric of things. Arguing that something is an absolute is like arguing that God put it there, but without the strange metaphysics.

I don't mean to argue against what you say, but in favor of it, really. I argue that ethics is an expression of divinity. What divinity is is a tough issue, but I would add that all of your readings, including the Rosicrucians and others you have brought up, are here, given at least a kind of right of passage, for it gives the occult's "otherworldly" claims an open door for validity, in objective argument.
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