Existentialism anyone?

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Hereandnow
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Re: Existentialism anyone?

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Papus79 wrote
Something slightly off topic but at least on a topic that I think Hereandnow would be able to get his head around.

I'm currently going through, quite slowly, Forrest Landry's Immanent Metaphysics. It's the first time I've really approached a system that tries to explain itself in its own parlance (as mentioned earlier Sartre, Heidegger, etc. do this and it's somewhat the difference between material you can breeze through on a slow afternoon rather than going a page or two per day).

So far it's quite interesting and I'm trying to get my head around it on its own terms to see what sticks. Some of the relationships aren't immediately obvious but then again I think it takes a few reads (thankfully only 130 pages) to really get the lexicon right.

Also I wonder what people's thoughts are on deep philosophic systems of the past few decades and whether inspecting relatively new (as in still living and younger than 60) thinkers and how many people would say are worth reading or really exercise deep competency in what came before them and moved the ball forward recently.
First, as I see it, drop analytic philosophy like it was plutonium. I say this as a matter of course. It is simply an empty spinning of wheels. Second, anyone who talks like this

dicipline of clarity and exacting precision is necessary to reveal
(and avoid) the traps of hidden assumptions and implicit expectations.


AS to the rest, you would have to take up a particular issue in the thesis called Immanent Metaphysics. The author says too much, far too much, and too quickly, and with no references others.
Take you pick of all he says and tell me what you think.
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Re: Existentialism anyone?

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Hereandnow wrote: March 1st, 2021, 10:31 pm AS to the rest, you would have to take up a particular issue in the thesis called Immanent Metaphysics. The author says too much, far too much, and too quickly, and with no references others.
Take you pick of all he says and tell me what you think.
It might sound weird but - there's a broader social and intellectual context surrounding this and I'm examining a lot more than just the content of the text. That's part of why I might seem a bit obstinate about advice to drop it.

Maybe another way to say that - I've been working through my own sequential points of contact with information and I'm both interested in what I can make of his take on both the transcendental and immanent. The omniscient is in a very little 'o' sense - it's what we're used to in every day parlance (it's the world and objects that we tend to think of in terms of physicalism). I ended up catching something today on Spinoza's philosophy where the particular professor explained his idea of mind and matter making no contact by saying they were parallel reflections - this has a little bit of that flavor but different, it explains the symmetries of subjective and objective in a way that rhymes but instead of saying there's no connection between the omniscient (objective) and transcendent (subjective) that the immanent (interrelationship between the two) is prior to both.
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Re: Existentialism anyone?

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Terrapin Station wrote: March 1st, 2021, 1:11 pmIt's just a matter of wanting to avoid trudging through people recreating the wheel where they're (re)creating problems that have already been sorted out.
But has a problem been "sorted out" if a particular person doesn't know about this "sorting out"?

It seems to me that self-taught philosophy amateurs tend to approach philosophy with very different motivations than the academic philosophers. Amateurs are involved with their philosophical pursuit as if their lives depended on it, while academic philosophers deal in expendable theories.
Academic philosophy pretty much ignores or glosses over the lived experience of a particular person, while the amateurs focus precisely on this lived experience.
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Re: Existentialism anyone?

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Papus79 wrote
Maybe another way to say that - I've been working through my own sequential points of contact with information and I'm both interested in what I can make of his take on both the transcendental and immanent. The omniscient is in a very little 'o' sense - it's what we're used to in every day parlance (it's the world and objects that we tend to think of in terms of physicalism). I ended up catching something today on Spinoza's philosophy where the particular professor explained his idea of mind and matter making no contact by saying they were parallel reflections - this has a little bit of that flavor but different, it explains the symmetries of subjective and objective in a way that rhymes but instead of saying there's no connection between the omniscient (objective) and transcendent (subjective) that the immanent (interrelationship between the two) is prior to both.
Sure, but what do you think? regarding the matter of the transcendental and what is immanent, how is it the two can be made compatible? Yes, I'm looking for an argument, a justification about something at the level of basic assumptions. Forrest Landry found agreement with you and I wonder why, and for this I need to see the motivation for acceptance.

As with everyone, my thought evolve as I read. I am reading papers and books on Husserl in the postmodern thinking, that is, where the world is regarded as "presence" and a phenomenological analysis of the present "givenness" of things as they are, well, presented, not as they are already invested with the assumptions of knowing. Husserl put forth a lasting analytic of phenomenological presence, and today this is being played out as a kind of religious renaissance, adn I think phenomenology to be exactly where religion needs to be, for the equation of authentic religious thought is found here, in our midst, in the foundational analysis.

I would ask you why I should take Landry seriously. For taking things seriously is an issue of ethics, for, as Levinas said, ethics is first philosophy. As is aesthetics. Both comprise the actualities of deep meaning experiences, and you are right to question the term 'deep'. I think philosophy, all of it, turns on this mysterious encounter with the world. The soul, God, transcendence, metaphysics, freedom, and so on, are not to be named, categorized, settled in the business of well reasoned propositions. It must approached apophatically, as something that attends experience, yet cannot be placed; is the grounding for the world, but is not reducible. Forrest Landry says as much: "Although elements of the Great Mystery cannot be explained or reduced to pure reason, it is that from which all reason and reasonableness arise." He talks like a phenomenologist here, or, a religious phenomenologist, that is. Pure reason? So he's read Kant, the father (before Husserl) of phenomenology, but he continues, "The Mystery of the horizon has the nature of the omniscient," and this is rather absurd, isn't it? Omniscience? Isn't this a contradiction? For what is omniscience if not an extension of reason and knowing, whereas just before he says the Great mystery cannot be reduced to pure reason.

There is a mix of agreeable and disagreeable things here. The agreeable things are already out there, and the disagreeable rise out of question begging. Of course, I read hastily. Need you to make the point and defend it.
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Re: Existentialism anyone?

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baker wrote
Academic philosophy pretty much ignores or glosses over the lived experience of a particular person, while the amateurs focus precisely on this lived experience.
By academic you mean analytic. There are many, many continental philosophers, who are no doubt academics, and take the particular person as front and center of philosophical concern. Analytic philosophers are interested in how well ideas survive logical assault, this over any sincere regard for the questions about confronting the world and its meaning and the self embedded in this, with its struggles and crises and search for redemptive solutions.
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Re: Existentialism anyone?

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Hereandnow wrote: March 2nd, 2021, 11:07 am Sure, but what do you think? regarding the matter of the transcendental and what is immanent, how is it the two can be made compatible? Yes, I'm looking for an argument, a justification about something at the level of basic assumptions. Forrest Landry found agreement with you and I wonder why, and for this I need to see the motivation for acceptance.
So as an amateur and someone whose really been able to compile actionable and accurate models of the world my tendency is to probe some combination of books that engage as well as challenge my priors and then when I listen for people making sense more or less in the social world and particularly long-form podcasting and the various nodes related to that I search my way through that signal to then see what's coming in.

As far as why I've heard of Landry or why I'd want to read him - I listen to a lot of the GameB thinkers regularly (Schmachtenberger, Hall, Rutt, etc.) and he's tangential to that group. Why I worry about bringing that up - I'm learning that bringing up names people haven't heard of tends to compound communication failures and I'm sharing more the node path, ie. how I landed on his work.

As far as priors - not particularly only from desire or from social conditioning but from actual experience I tend to be on good terms with things like dual-action monism. Really in a way anything that posits consciousness as interlaced with everything will in some sense be idealism (at least in my sense of what that means) but things like dual-action monism actually give proper respect to the solidity and rigidity of the world as we experience it. What I get is that Landry is taking a deep dive on that kind of monism and examining the pieces and parts of how you would get something like the transcendent (in his coinage something that doesn't have a spatial relationship to what it's embedded in - like software on hardware or consciousness in brains).

Also if my priors are completely wrong - I work my way through things by reconciling information to itself and I find most interesting the things that do both of the following - 1) clean the dross out of the models I 'like', 2) challenge the models I like to see if there's something fundamenntally inaccurate about them.

This is part of where I'm more than willing to take other people's ideas into account as long as I get the sense that they're doing something similar and really cleaning up as well as challenging their priors. Something that I think might even be work it's own thread - we have a problem today, as I'm aware of it, where people defer to expertise so fast that they don't understand what they've deferred to, have no deep contact or comprehension of it, and the mistake I think they make is that their cohesive knowledge base is on the second floor of a building and they're trying to jump up to the 5th floor without the 3rd and 4th. If I get a sense that I'm in that position - even if a person is telling me that something is correct or that some prior I have is completely wrong, and for sake of argument I'd agree with them, I have to be able to connect the dots in a felt way between the two places AND not shirk the work of actually challenging every step I can between where I'm at and where they're inviting me.
Hereandnow wrote: March 2nd, 2021, 11:07 amI would ask you why I should take Landry seriously.
Since I never said it explicitly - I won't. I think what you said earlier gave me the sense that it would be unreasonable to ask that of you. Didn't know until I mentioned it and until you did what digging you already managed.
Hereandnow wrote: March 2nd, 2021, 11:07 amFor taking things seriously is an issue of ethics, for, as Levinas said, ethics is first philosophy. As is aesthetics. Both comprise the actualities of deep meaning experiences, and you are right to question the term 'deep'. I think philosophy, all of it, turns on this mysterious encounter with the world. The soul, God, transcendence, metaphysics, freedom, and so on, are not to be named, categorized, settled in the business of well reasoned propositions. It must approached apophatically, as something that attends experience, yet cannot be placed; is the grounding for the world, but is not reducible. Forrest Landry says as much: "Although elements of the Great Mystery cannot be explained or reduced to pure reason, it is that from which all reason and reasonableness arise." He talks like a phenomenologist here, or, a religious phenomenologist, that is. Pure reason? So he's read Kant, the father (before Husserl) of phenomenology, but he continues, "The Mystery of the horizon has the nature of the omniscient," and this is rather absurd, isn't it? Omniscience? Isn't this a contradiction? For what is omniscience if not an extension of reason and knowing, whereas just before he says the Great mystery cannot be reduced to pure reason.
I think the reason I don't quite take the same approach is that I'm used to a deep sense that I live in a world where people of all education and knowledge levels don't examine their priors. Part of that is because we're in a 'red in tooth and nail' world where violence wins, change and self-reflection are signs of weakness, and religions (both theistic and Durkheimian) that people grow up with end up baked in just about until the grave because social proof of strength (and willingness to declare victory - right or wrong) is central in a Darwinian landscape. No one else needs to trust that I have the fluidity and self-reflective capacity to do otherwise but I observe that I spend most of my time navigating other people's unknown knowns and unknowns and quite often they make rather rigid/dogmatic claims to knowledge that seem to be built around the gaps in their knowledge.

That's part of where, as Peregrin talked about reinventing wheels, I feel better off if I can at least start from where I'm at and work through what leads seem like the next logical step.
Hereandnow wrote: March 2nd, 2021, 11:07 amThere is a mix of agreeable and disagreeable things here. The agreeable things are already out there, and the disagreeable rise out of question begging. Of course, I read hastily. Need you to make the point and defend it.
I'm reading it quite a bit more slowly, like a couple pages per day, because I'm trying to load them maps and figure out where I'd critique them.

One critique that jumped out at me today would be declaring the subconscious to be immanent. Unless it's immanent on another map it's confusing when self-conscious awareness is seen as transcendent and interactions, measurements, etc. of the omniscient are seen as immanent in that domain.

Also when he says 'omniscient' and I said it was little o, it's like being omniscient about the properties of a red 1" rubber ball. I might argue that there's the whole atomic structure of that ball which we don't see and is likely highly complex in terms of molecule to molecule relationship but this is where there's an open question - what level of information are we talking about and I think he's really describing the omniscient class as the contents of personal umwelt.
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Re: Existentialism anyone?

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Hereandnow wrote: March 2nd, 2021, 11:15 amBy academic you mean analytic.
No, I mean academic, and I include the continental philosophers.
There are many, many continental philosophers, who are no doubt academics, and take the particular person as front and center of philosophical concern.
Yeah, but they tend to be, well, snobs. This is why I don't feel addressed by them. They are indeed talking about persons, but not about persons like me; or when they do talk about persons like me, they do so in a derogatory sense.
Analytic philosophers are interested in how well ideas survive logical assault, this over any sincere regard for the questions about confronting the world and its meaning and the self embedded in this, with its struggles and crises and search for redemptive solutions.
Sure.
But I've gotten the impression that the continental philosophers are interested in promoting a kind of classism/elitism, even if they do so tacitly.
So both of them are ... so far away from me.
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Re: Existentialism anyone?

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Papus79 wrote
As far as priors - not particularly only from desire or from social conditioning but from actual experience I tend to be on good terms with things like dual-action monism. Really in a way anything that posits consciousness as interlaced with everything will in some sense be idealism (at least in my sense of what that means) but things like dual-action monism actually give proper respect to the solidity and rigidity of the world as we experience it. What I get is that Landry is taking a deep dive on that kind of monism and examining the pieces and parts of how you would get something like the transcendent (in his coinage something that doesn't have a spatial relationship to what it's embedded in - like software on hardware or consciousness in brains).
So, dual action monism. Perhaps this is a defensible idea. But does it matter? Is it a defensible idea philosophy is after? This puts the question to what an idea is, for obviously the answer to this question is yes, and if I were a calculating machine that would be sufficient, and the Turing test would be passed. But philosophy has to penetrate the surface of true propositions as true simpliciter. I, for one, am entirely disenchanted with the logical rigors of a good, sound argument, and I no longer read for logical engagement. Reading any philosophy as an argument and a comparison of ideas is very important, granted, but I have done enough of this. Now, the world. It always has been this, but one has to be, if you will, invited by philosophy to see how it is possible to engage in what I take to be philosophy's raison d'etre, which is provide the living understanding with a deeper order of things: the purpose of having purpose, the value of valuing, the meaning of things having meanings.

Once the idea of action monism settles and I have read it, internalized it, and find agreement here and there, and so on, then the question is, how does this improve my interpretation of the world in the here and now? I am faced with this actuality that at this second order of thinking completely resists the philosophical interrogation. I have to say, to bring myself to this extraordinary precipice where thought loses its authority and the world is dark with mystery is to bring my awareness to its limits (after all, this is what I am. All the philosophy one can imagine bows low to this threshold), where the concept of "limit" has no meaning, as Wittgenstein tells us. And he was right: in order for an idea to make sense, its opposite must be conceivable, making this "reality" or "world" senseless, for can one conceive of something not-the-world? Something on the "other side" of reality? The moment an idea is put forth, it becomes IN the world, for the world is contained in language. Heidegger says language utters things into being. An important idea, for scientists do not observe what is "there"; rather, observation is inherently interpretative, thus, to open your eyes in the morning, and not being an infant amidst "blooming and buzzing' but to have a world in place, this is a thought/language event. But then, this "imminence" in which transcendence is "present" is a Wittgensteinian taboo. Two ways to go on this: send such words to the bin of nonsense terms, or take philosophy to its proper end, which is the exploration of the givenness of the world. Western apophatic philosophy.

Sorry for the name dropping, but Wittgenstein's Tractatus is a very important read. Is he what you would call a "prior"? Really, the current post modern post Heideggerian, post Husserlian world of philosophy is where philosophy should be. There is no avoiding the names. They are famous for good reasons. One simply must, as I see it, read the phenomenologists. Buddha was, as the Abhidhamma Pitaka suggests, a very great phenomenologist. I think he did what phenomenology talks about, as the latter describes the self in time, manufacturing a future out of the past. This structure of the Being of a self is the very structure of the meditating event, of liberation and enlightenment.
I think the reason I don't quite take the same approach is that I'm used to a deep sense that I live in a world where people of all education and knowledge levels don't examine their priors. Part of that is because we're in a 'red in tooth and nail' world where violence wins, change and self-reflection are signs of weakness, and religions (both theistic and Durkheimian) that people grow up with end up baked in just about until the grave because social proof of strength (and willingness to declare victory - right or wrong) is central in a Darwinian landscape. No one else needs to trust that I have the fluidity and self-reflective capacity to do otherwise but I observe that I spend most of my time navigating other people's unknown knowns and unknowns and quite often they make rather rigid/dogmatic claims to knowledge that seem to be built around the gaps in their knowledge.
Darwin is not philosophy, nor is Durkheim. They say true thinks about the world, but they are not philosophical, not at the level of basic questions. Science does not ask basic questions, but works with a given fields paradigms, and the "true things" they say presuppose what philosophy takes as a point of entry. Evolution tells us that our human properties are made from the fabric of reproduction and survival. Certainly some truth in this. But remember, the random errors in genetic codes are not being driven by some evolutionary "force"; there is nothing evolutionary about them. They simply occur. A mind, a self, falling in love, experiencing pain and joy: none of this is evolutionary in its nature. Rather, these are things that simply came into being and were permitted to stay. Gene pools are collectives of what did in fact survive, but their qualities, their phenotypical qualities, have nothing whatever to do with either genotypical grounding nor evolutionary mechanisms. The infamous performative contradiction: observe a genotype and make the claim that the phenotype is reductively ground in this. But then, how can one ever step outside the phenotype to "observe" the genotype as it is, as free of phenotypical influences, as independent of such influences such that the posting of a genotype is at all even possible? That is, as one "speaks" and "observes" one is doing so phenotypically. Such are ALL reductive claims!). Being in love is utterly transcendental. All things are utterly transcendental, or metaphysical, if you prefer, at the level of the most basic questions. I think Forrest Landry would agree (but then, it has been said, and written about ad infinitum). Tooth and nail? That is there, among the the love, tenderness, endearments, repulsion, envy, rage, and on and on, and these mix in our affairs to intractable dilemmas. But go further: why is their caring and concern at all? What is bad and good ethically speaking? These are metaethical questions. Long discussion here, only if you care to take it on. It does invlove "priors" (but then, what doesn't? Where did language come from? When I was so young, it is "given" to me, placed in me, if you will. Where does my authentic thought begin and learned constructions of thought end? Why do my questions tend to rise in pitch at the end? All of it, assimilated and repeated. My intellectual personality, a construct, and what comes "novel" to me depends on what I've read. You are what you read.

As to other people's unknown unknowns, there is a finality to this, and it is phenomenology. I spent a while arguing this elsewhere and I've read quite a bit of others' theories and phenomenology is exactly where the natural course of philosophical thinking takes one. Alas, most are reluctant to take this on, for it is imposing. What can I say, I read Heidegger, Husserl, and so on, and they are the only ones who address the issue of the self Being in the world. They take one to the irreducible presence, if one is so inclined (others will become bound to academia).
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Re: Existentialism anyone?

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baker wrote
No, I mean academic, and I include the continental philosophers.
Continental philosophers are on the right path. Follow through, though, as with anything. Analytic philosophy is self defeating. See earlier remarks. Phenomenology is "open" and many here embrace the mysteries of existence freely, thematically.
Yeah, but they tend to be, well, snobs. This is why I don't feel addressed by them. They are indeed talking about persons, but not about persons like me; or when they do talk about persons like me, they do so in a derogatory sense.
But let them be snobs, then. And I think it is really just that they work with a very thick heritage of ideas, and this tends to eliminate interest at the get go. No way around this. Einstein was the same, was he not? Was he not a "snob" just by working within an exclusive medium, such that if you hadn't done the physics, the math, you could never understand? He was. It is the same here.
But I've gotten the impression that the continental philosophers are interested in promoting a kind of classism/elitism, even if they do so tacitly.
So both of them are ... so far away from me.
Don't know where this comes from. Continental philosophy is phenomenology and post modernism. They take as a principle theme the way language contains and gives rise to meaning, both in the dictionary sense and the affective and existential sense. They want to know what it means for the self to encounter the world, with emphasis on, very often, the irrational dimensions of out Being here, especially things like alienation and the delimitation of language and concepts, the question that presses upon the world but cannot penetrate into its mysteries, and the realization that such mysteries are really about ourselves and our "impossible" presence in the world. Impossible because an accounting for it lies outside the boundaries of logic and so one faces this impossibility in the world as part of its actuality.

And so on. They are all different, qualifiedly unique.
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Re: Existentialism anyone?

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Hereandnow wrote: March 3rd, 2021, 12:24 pm So, dual action monism. Perhaps this is a defensible idea. But does it matter? Is it a defensible idea philosophy is after?
This question is irrelevant to my own concerns. Like protein folding and search spaces for success, I’m panning search spaces for opportunities and enhanced ways to engage with the universe. I’m really hoping that the deliverables I find are far more active and practice-oriented rather than being a forum intellectual exercise. To that end I consider my review of search-spaces to be a bit like looking for good camp sites, and if I find a good camp site I want to set up in it, learn the structure, really get to know it in an immersive manner in the same way one would go pick up a second language by using it in a particular country or region where it’s the common language
Hereandnow wrote: March 3rd, 2021, 12:24 pm Once the idea of action monism settles and I have read it, internalized it, and find agreement here and there, and so on, then the question is, how does this improve my interpretation of the world in the here and now? I am faced with this actuality that at this second order of thinking completely resists the philosophical interrogation.
That’s why I want to spend time with it – ie. if it’s making somewhat regular contact with conscious experience for people I’m less convinced that it’s relationship to us and our goings on is inscrutable. What’s worse – our variances on metaphysics contributes to a lot of our tribalism, I’d like to see what sorts of things can be triaged. While it’s true that everyone’s entitled to their own mistakes in private life it’s a problem when mistakes aggregate into political camps, it severely impairs our capacity to coordinate and problem solve.
Hereandnow wrote: March 3rd, 2021, 12:24 pm where the concept of "limit" has no meaning, as Wittgenstein tells us
Limit in most cases is a framing tool as far as I can tell, I don’t have a problem with that so long as we aren’t taking these things as absolute. I’m also open to what seem like they could be mistakes in IDM to see if they are actually that or just ideas easily miscontextualized. If that exercise leads me onward to other philosophic systems great, I just want to be able to grapple with these ideas properly and see the ins and outs for myself.
Hereandnow wrote: March 3rd, 2021, 12:24 pm Heidegger says language utters things into being.
Language clearly gives us anchors to reify or fix things in mind. Aside from that though I don't know what he'd mean by uttering things into being. If that's 'creating the ocean by fishing on it' I'd need more specificity because I hear claims of that sort made about the quantum world and I don't really hear them broken down in detail very often.
Hereandnow wrote: March 3rd, 2021, 12:24 pm But then, this "imminence" in which transcendence is "present" is a Wittgensteinian taboo. Two ways to go on this: send such words to the bin of nonsense terms, or take philosophy to its proper end, which is the exploration of the givenness of the world.
I’m much less interested in taking ‘immanent’ and ‘transcendent’, as Landry is using them, and applying the grand/broader meanings of those terms – I’d rather assume when Landry says omniscient, immanent, and transcendent that he’s really saying x, y, and z but with slightly better memory hooks. For my own purposes I’m particularly interested in paradoxes in reality and unpacking them to see what understandings about reality can be reverse-engineered by studying them long enough.
Hereandnow wrote: March 3rd, 2021, 12:24 pm Sorry for the name dropping, but Wittgenstein's Tractatus is a very important read.
I don’t mean this as in ‘don’t share authors’, I mean that when I bring up any sort of thinkers that people would commonly find in online communities the automatic social assumptions tend to follow ‘a) I’m dealing with a weird person, b) they keep giving me names I haven’t heard of – probably a good reason I haven’t heard of them, c) this is a weird person interested in getting weirder (socially conforming less) so I really should just ignore them and wish them well on their journey to the funny farm’.
Hereandnow wrote: March 3rd, 2021, 12:24 pm Darwin is not philosophy, nor is Durkheim. They say true thinks about the world, but they are not philosophical, not at the level of basic questions.
I use scientific facts and fixed points as framing tools so I don’t discard non-philosophical thought when needed as a constraint. While I get that to some degree what’s ‘real’ is in motion and its emergent patterns that consciousness can change the landscape of there are some categories that are far more fixed than others, current political fads are great examples of how to mangle that distinction
Hereandnow wrote: March 3rd, 2021, 12:24 pm Science does not ask basic questions, but works with a given fields paradigms, and the "true things" they say presuppose what philosophy takes as a point of entry.
Scientific results that self-reconcile and self-reference with high enough p scores are important, I’m less confident in what metaphysical speculations they’d broadcast (they meaning science as a culture) as those who are wielding that stick seem to prefer the most pedestrian metaphysics they can muster and as I've probably said ad nauseum in this forum in various places - I attribute a lot of that to power and funding politics which has to grapple with common beliefs, whose 'lost their bearing' or kept it, etc..
Hereandnow wrote: March 3rd, 2021, 12:24 pm The infamous performative contradiction: observe a genotype and make the claim that the phenotype is reductively ground in this. But then, how can one ever step outside the phenotype to "observe" the genotype as it is, as free of phenotypical influences, as independent of such influences such that the posting of a genotype is at all even possible?
This reminds me of how I’ve been in threads here where people argue about properties and the question comes up – what are properties and are they even fundamental. To that end you do have an interrelationship of upward and downward causation in things – something that I think is examinable but likely not nearly as closed or concise in its end results – I’d guess – as people would want it to be
Hereandnow wrote: March 3rd, 2021, 12:24 pm But go further: why is their caring and concern at all? What is bad and good ethically speaking? These are metaethical questions.
If I believed these were sufficiently explained away or unimportant I’d be satisfied with all of my current understandings – for example I’d admit that my view of hyperdeterminism doesn’t do much with or account for a lot of things I care about or why I care for them, so there’s more black box to be unpacked.
Hereandnow wrote: March 3rd, 2021, 12:24 pm Where does my authentic thought begin and learned constructions of thought end?
To me, whether it should or shouldn’t be – this one’s easy, do you own it? Have you lived in it deep enough to pick it up as a second language? If you understand something well enough to break the rules and have it work or go Bruce Lee's 'way of no way' on it then it's grounded knowledge rather than being a constellation of someone else's authoritative pronouncements.
Hereandnow wrote: March 3rd, 2021, 12:24 pm You are what you read
I know that you're fond of this dictum, my biggest disagreement with it is it takes things up mid-flight rather than at origin. This might be true for someone who was assigned a tutor before they could walk and this tutor happens to be autocratically forcing books down on them, you also might have someone so desperate to get through college and land their career that they're willing to believe whatever they have to in order to fit into the right slot. In any other case I find that people read what they want to read and so as they select their books they books inform them thus I don't see the book that's in their hands as being such a strong vector of identity, more often a byproduct and potential modifier of it.
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Re: Existentialism anyone?

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Hereandnow wrote: March 1st, 2021, 10:31 pm First, as I see it, drop analytic philosophy like it was plutonium. I say this as a matter of course. It is simply an empty spinning of wheels.

I just happened on this topic. I think I'll hang around. There seems to be some wisdom going on.... 😉
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Re: Existentialism anyone?

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Papus79 wrote
This question is irrelevant to my own concerns. Like protein folding and search spaces for success, I’m panning search spaces for opportunities and enhanced ways to engage with the universe. I’m really hoping that the deliverables I find are far more active and practice-oriented rather than being a forum intellectual exercise. To that end I consider my review of search-spaces to be a bit like looking for good camp sites, and if I find a good camp site I want to set up in it, learn the structure, really get to know it in an immersive manner in the same way one would go pick up a second language by using it in a particular country or region where it’s the common language
If philosophy is an intellectual exercise and nothing beyond this, then I would say you are under the influence of the analytic mentality in your regard for the point. This kind of thing trivializes human existence, as if one could resolve the world at the foundational level with propositional agreement. Alas, there is only one campsite, and that is phenomenology. I say this because I also think Eastern liberation-enlightenment philosophy is the realization of philosophy's true end, and phenomenology provides a description of what this elusive practice is really about. Alas, because it is an imposing body of thought and constitutes an independent and unique view of the world. It requires the (in)famous "epoche", a suspension of empirical science and accessible thinking.
As I see it, philosophy is not an augmentative enterprise, such that out there is a horizon of campsites all with their special endowments. Rather, it is a deconstruction of normality; it attacks, offends, and destroys everydayness. This is what it means to look for what is "really" going on, and if it meant pure annihilation, I would have nothing to do with it. But it doesn't. It leads to "impossible" affirmations. Husserl in a letter wrote that his students and readers were showing a religious proclivity they hadn't known prior. His epoche (the phenomenological reduction to "things themselves") is now, in the writings of many post modern continental philosophers, is considered a kind of window into human spirituality.
That’s why I want to spend time with it – ie. if it’s making somewhat regular contact with conscious experience for people I’m less convinced that it’s relationship to us and our goings on is inscrutable. What’s worse – our variances on metaphysics contributes to a lot of our tribalism, I’d like to see what sorts of things can be triaged. While it’s true that everyone’s entitled to their own mistakes in private life it’s a problem when mistakes aggregate into political camps, it severely impairs our capacity to coordinate and problem solve.
But there is no variances on metaphysics worth consideration if such things are simply the old Cartesian nonsense about ontology and epistemology. Ontology is a Cartesian bust, as if mental substance or material substance could themselves make any sense at all. Epistemology is a bust: There is no way, nor will there ever be a way, to show how that out there gets into this brain thing. The very idea is pure folly. But then there is the Cartesian self as being the center indubitability! That locus of "absolute" encounter, where "deception" (to play Descartes' game) is impossible because bare experience is where just Being There is confirmed. Now one is in Husserl's world, but not Heidegger's, not Derrida's. Very interesting thought going on here concerning that "space" of presence, between past and future where memory cannot go and assume control and dominate and create a knowledge relation. this is why I am sure that Eastern practices are right there, where philosophy needs to be, for all roads to reality and truth lead to this one "event" of discovery.

It is not a social affair at all. It is not snobbery any more than Einstein was a snob. He thought where most cannot, it is as simple as that. If one wants to understand his physics, one has to do the same. Same with phenomenology. Mostly, the will to read it is absent.

Conscious experience of people? You mean the person-on-the-street kind of people? In order to speak to them about philosophy, they would have to leave the comfort and familiarity of their world. Of course, the analytic course of inquiry is always available, but this goes nowhere, at all. Cocktail party philosophy where one confounds common sense and entertains. To go very far in this, of course, requires a love of logic and clarity. No more than this.
Limit in most cases is a framing tool as far as I can tell, I don’t have a problem with that so long as we aren’t taking these things as absolute. I’m also open to what seem like they could be mistakes in IDM to see if they are actually that or just ideas easily miscontextualized. If that exercise leads me onward to other philosophic systems great, I just want to be able to grapple with these ideas properly and see the ins and outs for myself.
yes, it is a framing tool. Wittgenstein says this: an idea's opposite has to be conceivable in order for the idea to have any sense to it at all. See what he says about thought: "for to draw a limit to thought, we would have to find both sides thinkable. We should have to be able to think what cannot be thought." It is THIS threshold where inquiry has its terminus. Phenomenology (post Husserlian, post Heideggarian, post??) works in this extraordinary space where thought approaches this, "observes" the intelligible ideas that meet the "impossible" actualities of experience, like joy and pain, and all of our affective possibilities of caring and concern. Existentialism puts thought to bear on existence, and existence cannot be thought, and so the encounter of this "outside" of thought lies in the presence of the world itself. To do this, separate oneself from the fixity of thought that instantly claims objects and events in the moment is a very difficult thing to imagine. Those who meditate seriously know something of this, though, they don't "know" at all, for the whole point is a liberation from delimitations of knowing (which W has just told is nonsense. He was both right and wrong, as I see it).
There is no other philosophical system that deconstruction, for if there were, it would have to be deconstructive. This is true because the problem in all systems begins with thought itself.
Language clearly gives us anchors to reify or fix things in mind. Aside from that though I don't know what he'd mean by uttering things into being. If that's 'creating the ocean by fishing on it' I'd need more specificity because I hear claims of that sort made about the quantum world and I don't really hear them broken down in detail very often.
Quantum theory is not to his point. Nor is any other empirical theory. For an observation (and the theoretical thought that follows upon it) to be an observation, it is a thing of parts AS an observation. What parts? Kant and reason, e.g. I open my eyes and I "know" everything I see. This knowledge has structure, so he writes 700 pages about this (depending). So, if knowledge is a thing of parts, and the parts are the concepts, sensation, the temporal construction of past, present and future, as in, conceiving has a beginning thought, that leads to another, and to another, etc.
What H means is that as we put our telescopes and instruments of discovery to the world, and as science grows, it is the language that is the "growth" and discovery is always already contextual. The "paradigms" of science (Kuhn) are theoretical matrices that built on prior ones, "normal science" is what has staying power, inevitably challenged at one point. But all knowledge is like this, all ideas, all thought like this. The Internet? How did this come into Being? Am I a teacher? How does this copula "am" work? "Teacher" is a concept. What are these? And on, and on. This is the course of phenomenological ontology.

I use scientific facts and fixed points as framing tools so I don’t discard non-philosophical thought when needed as a constraint. While I get that to some degree what’s ‘real’ is in motion and its emergent patterns that consciousness can change the landscape of there are some categories that are far more fixed than others, current political fads are great examples of how to mangle that distinction
But the "real" is the question. I see it like this: We live in an entangled world and if philosophy has any purpose, it is to get beneath entanglements to what is more fundamental. Here, one runs into language. Language runs through every possible matter. It is the reductive center for all foundational inquiries. Talk about scientific facts? What is a fact? A logical construction about the world. Philosophy IS talk about foundations, not about what rests on foundations. Science does not examine matters foundationally. It does, like all things, SHOW the world, but explaining this at the level of basic questions is not its business at all.
Scientific results that self-reconcile and self-reference with high enough p scores are important, I’m less confident in what metaphysical speculations they’d broadcast (they meaning science as a culture) as those who are wielding that stick seem to prefer the most pedestrian metaphysics they can muster and as I've probably said ad nauseum in this forum in various places - I attribute a lot of that to power and funding politics which has to grapple with common beliefs, whose 'lost their bearing' or kept it, etc..
But when does metaphysics cease to be speculative or pedestrian? One must confront the world liberated from speculation. All question have, aside fromt eh incidental content, motivation, desire, interest, fascination, wonder. Answers must be commensurate with these, not simply with the logic of their form. Philosophical questions are not logical puzzles. They are an extension one's existence. Why ONE? Because as a group, we are conformists, ready to follow orthodoxy. It is a matter of complying with the general thoughts that are at the surface of the lived experience. Read a Virginia Woolf novel: the dialog issues as a fragment of the thought reality of the living self within. What is said, passed along in conversation, and the decisions and practical matters addressed, these are the abstractions of a collective, the reality of which lies in the palpable thoughts out of which these emerged. There is no world, only worlds, and each world is an event.
Politics is very consequential, of this I have no doubt at all. But it has little to do with basic questions of meaning.
This reminds me of how I’ve been in threads here where people argue about properties and the question comes up – what are properties and are they even fundamental. To that end you do have an interrelationship of upward and downward causation in things – something that I think is examinable but likely not nearly as closed or concise in its end results – I’d guess – as people would want it to be
Properties are what is predicated of things. Note the copula 'is" in the predication: the cat is black. What most miss about this is that it is a performance, an event. To ask what property is begs the question regarding any utterance at all. Property talk is an event in the mind, and even as I write this sentence, there is anticipation of what to write, learned principles at work, consummations of a completed idea, and so on. Predication is first an actuality of experience, words come to mind ready to hand, the keys under my fingers, ready to hand, and the thought constructed in logical form, an event. Then there is talk about properties. If the brain produces thought, and it no doubt does, one must ask the very, very interesting question: How, then, does thought "produce" brain? For it is "through" thought and only through thought that a brain is even "conceived". You think you have it, you observe the brain, there, on youtube in a conscious surgical procedure for, say, epilepsy, and probes touch the interior and memories are excited, and it is simply obvious, and everyone knows, without question. But what do we know? we know what the brain processes. And how opaque is a brain, a mirror providing a model of absolute transparency? A brain has, I would safely argue, zero transparency. No way around this. According to simple materialist interpretations of science's things and their properties, knowledge of objects is impossible.

But then, we do seem to know something. Rorty says we know pragmatics, that is, knowing is an event, we have never seen, nor can even imagine, a "thingly" thing. this is one reason why phenomenologists simply put the entire issue of things 'out there" off the table. Out there is utterly transcendental, metaphysical, nonsense. This is powerful insight, for it is not, as some have said, that this "out there" is out there at all. It is here, in the interiority of experience. How else could we "know" this?
If I believed these were sufficiently explained away or unimportant I’d be satisfied with all of my current understandings – for example I’d admit that my view of hyperdeterminism doesn’t do much with or account for a lot of things I care about or why I care for them, so there’s more black box to be unpacked.
Hyperdeterminism is right, if I take you meaning. But determinism is, after all, a concept of sufficient cause. It is impossible for an ex nihilo event. don't' ask why, it just is, like contradictions and tautologies, only it is not logical, it is intuitive. But this puts causality in us, not "out there". Out there is not conceivable, but then, there is an "out there" that cannot be conceived. It would be a very different world if there were not. But it belongs to eternity, so to speak. My thought is, eternity and finitude are coextensive, coexistent, the same thing, really. Follow the lgoc and intuition of finitude and infinity, and this is where you end up. I am an eternal being, But tis is slippery because we want to say my existence is a local affair, and I am a local construct, a brain and a mind and a personality in one geographical place. But this idea of locality is a construction in that very brain.
Freedom is, I'm afraid, at the basic level, not a defensible idea, notwithstanding what existentialists say, though they never contradict the prinicple of causality. Black box? the only box I can think of is the reductionist tendency to whatever can be made clear and efficiently. Positivism is such a box. Language brings objects into existence, but it holds them there in our box, a totality of thought.
But my comments about caring and so on go to ethics, metaethics. Which is the most important issue in philosophy.
To me, whether it should or shouldn’t be – this one’s easy, do you own it? Have you lived in it deep enough to pick it up as a second language? If you understand something well enough to break the rules and have it work or go Bruce Lee's 'way of no way' on it then it's grounded knowledge rather than being a constellation of someone else's authoritative pronouncements.
I think, then as I think I behold the thoughts being thought. As I do this, have I not put distance between myself and thought? Heidegger says no. for all we are is thought and all the shared institutions that constitute a community. This "someone else" is everyone else, the "they" of orthodoxy and conformity. I say a self is a transcendental issue. I follow apophatic philosophy or theology. And Kierkegaard.
I know that you're fond of this dictum, my biggest disagreement with it is it takes things up mid-flight rather than at origin. This might be true for someone who was assigned a tutor before they could walk and this tutor happens to be autocratically forcing books down on them, you also might have someone so desperate to get through college and land their career that they're willing to believe whatever they have to in order to fit into the right slot. In any other case I find that people read what they want to read and so as they select their books they books inform them thus I don't see the book that's in their hands as being such a strong vector of identity, more often a byproduct and potential modifier of it.
I am fond of it. It's because Heidegger was right, when a person produces an existence, there is the past that is the source. What else? If I had never read phenomenology, I could not think its ideas in my own way. My own way is carved out of this bode of learning. I may be "free" to stand apart from what I read, but what i am free to do at all depends on what I have to be free about. I agree with making independent choices, but one has to have, you know, something to choose from. I read a lot of poetry in the past. Now I have poetry in my thoughts; I poeticize the world.
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Re: Existentialism anyone?

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Hereandnow wrote: March 5th, 2021, 12:06 amIf philosophy is an intellectual exercise and nothing beyond this, then I would say you are under the influence of the analytic mentality in your regard for the point. This kind of thing trivializes human existence, as if one could resolve the world at the foundational level with propositional agreement. Alas, there is only one campsite, and that is phenomenology. I say this because I also think Eastern liberation-enlightenment philosophy is the realization of philosophy's true end, and phenomenology provides a description of what this elusive practice is really about. Alas, because it is an imposing body of thought and constitutes an independent and unique view of the world. It requires the (in)famous "epoche", a suspension of empirical science and accessible thinking.
As I see it, philosophy is not an augmentative enterprise, such that out there is a horizon of campsites all with their special endowments. Rather, it is a deconstruction of normality; it attacks, offends, and destroys everydayness. This is what it means to look for what is "really" going on, and if it meant pure annihilation, I would have nothing to do with it. But it doesn't. It leads to "impossible" affirmations. Husserl in a letter wrote that his students and readers were showing a religious proclivity they hadn't known prior. His epoche (the phenomenological reduction to "things themselves") is now, in the writings of many post modern continental philosophers, is considered a kind of window into human spirituality.

TY. It sounds interesting, ie. that I’d want to get my mind around it. Any Husserl recommendations in particular?

Also for my view on the topic of philosophy and engagement with it – I really see my inclinations and what I’m after more in line with alchemy and esotericism. It’s a playing field and one of the goals when you’re on that playing field is taking what you have in front of you and find ways to make it less crap (in an open, breathing, durable, really adaptable framing rather than a utopian single-parameter sense). That also means that if certain information sets would leave me feeling stuck or doomed that I need to find, as Eric Weinstein would put it, ‘other orchards’.
Hereandnow wrote: March 5th, 2021, 12:06 amBut there is no variances on metaphysics worth consideration if such things are simply the old Cartesian nonsense about ontology and epistemology. Ontology is a Cartesian bust, as if mental substance or material substance could themselves make any sense at all. Epistemology is a bust: There is no way, nor will there ever be a way, to show how that out there gets into this brain thing. The very idea is pure folly.

I really think it’s social paradigms that mangle the possibility of these holding still at all. If it really becomes ‘need to know’ time (some suggest AI is where this becomes a reified rather than speculative problem) then we’re apt to take it more seriously because it has real world consequences in less of a war of belief sense (which is perennial) and more of a US vs USSR kind of way which is fine-pointed and urgent.
Hereandnow wrote: March 5th, 2021, 12:06 amBut then there is the Cartesian self as being the center indubitability! That locus of "absolute" encounter, where "deception" (to play Descartes' game) is impossible because bare experience is where just Being There is confirmed. Now one is in Husserl's world, but not Heidegger's, not Derrida's. Very interesting thought going on here concerning that "space" of presence, between past and future where memory cannot go and assume control and dominate and create a knowledge relation. this is why I am sure that Eastern practices are right there, where philosophy needs to be, for all roads to reality and truth lead to this one "event" of discovery.

I interpret this more as the place where consciousness becomes a kind of brute fact, whether it’s primary or simply something of a right-angle nature to matter (thinking of Landry’s Transcendent a bit which also seems to map to the way Alan Moore would speak of the 4th dimension, as did plenty of Paul Foster Case and Ann Davies discussion of the matter in BOTA). Mysticism attempts to strike out at another domain which seems to have its own congruent rules just that they seem significantly more loose in certain ways than they do here.
Hereandnow wrote: March 5th, 2021, 12:06 amIt is not a social affair at all. It is not snobbery any more than Einstein was a snob. He thought where most cannot, it is as simple as that. If one wants to understand his physics, one has to do the same. Same with phenomenology. Mostly, the will to read it is absent.

I was listening to Will Durant’s ‘Philosophy of Spinoza’ (book read on YouTube) and it was interesting to hear that Spinoza sort of just accepted snobbery and narcissism as people doing what they had to do in order to survive in a rough-and-tumble world. Seems he had pretty deep insight into how that worked.
Hereandnow wrote: March 5th, 2021, 12:06 amConscious experience of people? You mean the person-on-the-street kind of people? In order to speak to them about philosophy, they would have to leave the comfort and familiarity of their world. Of course, the analytic course of inquiry is always available, but this goes nowhere, at all. Cocktail party philosophy where one confounds common sense and entertains. To go very far in this, of course, requires a love of logic and clarity. No more than this.

I don’t think there’s a possibility of getting most people interested in philosophy, just that if you can in some way triage certain ‘moves’ off of the playing board as invalid, particularly where they’re not only objectively wrong but antisocial in their implementation and results – that’s where I think this could at least cut away at some of the kindling and make a tighter radius or cluster of places and ways in which people can be wrong. This is sort of like where in murk and uncertainty the cottage snake oil industries and grifts thrive robustly, and sometimes those snake oil doses also pull on finding an outgroup and figuring out how to expropriate their stuff in the old Russian kulak manner.
Hereandnow wrote: March 5th, 2021, 12:06 amyes, it is a framing tool. Wittgenstein says this: an idea's opposite has to be conceivable in order for the idea to have any sense to it at all. See what he says about thought: "for to draw a limit to thought, we would have to find both sides thinkable. We should have to be able to think what cannot be thought." It is THIS threshold where inquiry has its terminus.

I have to wonder if this means ‘idea’ in a particularly narrow sense? Ideas as far as I can tell can as often be baskets of related content and their connections, if it’s declarative in nature rather than oppositional (eg. Atheism vs. Christianity or Darwinian Evolution vs. Biblical Creationism) then you have a basket of content whose opposite is….? It doesn’t seem like that would be universally applicable.
Hereandnow wrote: March 5th, 2021, 12:06 amPhenomenology (post Husserlian, post Heideggarian, post??) works in this extraordinary space where thought approaches this, "observes" the intelligible ideas that meet the "impossible" actualities of experience, like joy and pain, and all of our affective possibilities of caring and concern. Existentialism puts thought to bear on existence, and existence cannot be thought, and so the encounter of this "outside" of thought lies in the presence of the world itself. To do this, separate oneself from the fixity of thought that instantly claims objects and events in the moment is a very difficult thing to imagine. Those who meditate seriously know something of this, though, they don't "know" at all, for the whole point is a liberation from delimitations of knowing (which W has just told is nonsense. He was both right and wrong, as I see it).

What I see that causes me not to go here – we’re in a very, very structured universe. So much so that it gives far more pain than pleasure. It’s structured enough that plenty of people turn to meth and fentanyl to solve their problems or end up taking their own lives in more blunt ways. When things are that rigid it suggests to me that we're dealing with a system that has coherence all the way back around behind our experiences of self - even the subjective isn't all that much more fungible than the objective world and you learn those rules by experimentation and seeing just how many things don't work in interior space.
Hereandnow wrote: March 5th, 2021, 12:06 amThere is no other philosophical system that deconstruction, for if there were, it would have to be deconstructive. This is true because the problem in all systems begins with thought itself.

This discards that we live in a painfully solid world with equally merciless consequences. I’m not calling it Pollyanna, it seems almost more black-pill.
Hereandnow wrote: March 5th, 2021, 12:06 amWhat H means is that as we put our telescopes and instruments of discovery to the world, and as science grows, it is the language that is the "growth" and discovery is always already contextual. The "paradigms" of science (Kuhn) are theoretical matrices that built on prior ones, "normal science" is what has staying power, inevitably challenged at one point. But all knowledge is like this, all ideas, all thought like this. The Internet? How did this come into Being? Am I a teacher? How does this copula "am" work? "Teacher" is a concept. What are these? And on, and on. This is the course of phenomenological ontology.

It seems like this should encapsulate better somehow. It’s somewhat clear that human knowledge is a kind of flotilla, it’s about self-consistent observations and so much of physics and the very big, the very small, consciousness research, etc. is an attempt to enlarge that flotilla more (which when you really think about it – this is all it can ever be because we’re really unlikely to find some absolute source causation and I’m not sure we’d have any idea how to even test for such a thing as we still end up with an uncaused cause which seems incoherent).
Hereandnow wrote: March 5th, 2021, 12:06 amBut the "real" is the question. I see it like this: We live in an entangled world and if philosophy has any purpose, it is to get beneath entanglements to what is more fundamental. Here, one runs into language. Language runs through every possible matter. It is the reductive center for all foundational inquiries. Talk about scientific facts? What is a fact? A logical construction about the world. Philosophy IS talk about foundations, not about what rests on foundations. Science does not examine matters foundationally. It does, like all things, SHOW the world, but explaining this at the level of basic questions is not its business at all.

What do you call something that attempts to interpret the current state of knowledge and draw deeper conclusions from it? I know the popular term for this is ‘Philosophy of Science’ although when we talk about science we’re talking about a rather specific set of claims that can be reliably recreated in a laboratory, in some sense you could have a broader base to include the odd, the non-testable, non-repeating, etc. but I’m not sure what the name would be. That by and large is what I’d be interested in at present (although admittedly – some naïve hope that it isn’t just another way to blow ourselves off the planet).
Hereandnow wrote: March 5th, 2021, 12:06 amBut when does metaphysics cease to be speculative or pedestrian? One must confront the world liberated from speculation. All question have, aside fromt eh incidental content, motivation, desire, interest, fascination, wonder. Answers must be commensurate with these, not simply with the logic of their form. Philosophical questions are not logical puzzles. They are an extension one's existence. Why ONE? Because as a group, we are conformists, ready to follow orthodoxy. It is a matter of complying with the general thoughts that are at the surface of the lived experience.

I think that does more to clarify my point – that if they’re looking at form only they’re missing context, and the ‘scientific bearing’ does its best to exclude other considerations. I don’t think that’s a given with metaphysics in general, just a particular variety where anything but form is seen as unhip.
Hereandnow wrote: March 5th, 2021, 12:06 amPolitics is very consequential, of this I have no doubt at all. But it has little to do with basic questions of meaning.

So it wouldn’t if a scientist ducks a request to give an opinion on a non-scientific matter, it’s another thing if (as reductive materialist) they make a positive claim that anything other than the physical and matter is BS. That’s where they get into asserting a certain kind of materialist / physicalist frame and it doesn’t seem to be informed by much of anything other than whether they ‘fit in’ or are seen as conventional enough to be worth doling grant money out to.
Hereandnow wrote: March 5th, 2021, 12:06 amProperties are what is predicated of things. Note the copula 'is" in the predication: the cat is black. What most miss about this is that it is a performance, an event. To ask what property is begs the question regarding any utterance at all.

Until someone declares that consciousness is an emergent property like the rest, then we’re left trying to figure out even how debate what should be in what category under what criteria. The hollowing out of properties in the more conventional sense, ie. where it’s sensory data as you’re focusing on, seems to fall back on some variant of ontic structural realism and in turn it seems like Landry’s philosophy seems to map on to one of the variants of OSR that would hold relationships as primitive but both properties and objects not.
Hereandnow wrote: March 5th, 2021, 12:06 amProperty talk is an event in the mind, and even as I write this sentence, there is anticipation of what to write, learned principles at work, consummations of a completed idea, and so on. Predication is first an actuality of experience, words come to mind ready to hand, the keys under my fingers, ready to hand, and the thought constructed in logical form, an event. Then there is talk about properties. If the brain produces thought, and it no doubt does, one must ask the very, very interesting question: How, then, does thought "produce" brain? For it is "through" thought and only through thought that a brain is even "conceived".

I think we really need a reciprocal view of Darwinian evolution for this. Some way to frame it that perhaps considers that it’s riding on the back of a deeper process that may very well be doing the exact same thing but participating in a different manner. To some degree I think the re-emerging sort of materialism-oriented panpsychism that people like Philip Goff propose seems to fit this bill, and also seems to take a shot at not only how biogenesis wouldn’t be a problem (in that sense the ‘RNA world’ could move things right along to cells just fine because it, pre-cellular organic compounds, would have some semblance of desire and optimization).
Hereandnow wrote: March 5th, 2021, 12:06 amYou think you have it, you observe the brain, there, on youtube in a conscious surgical procedure for, say, epilepsy, and probes touch the interior and memories are excited, and it is simply obvious, and everyone knows, without question. But what do we know? we know what the brain processes. And how opaque is a brain, a mirror providing a model of absolute transparency? A brain has, I would safely argue, zero transparency. No way around this. According to simple materialist interpretations of science's things and their properties, knowledge of objects is impossible.

Donald Hoffman brings this up all of the time – ie. that the brain does a wonderful job of showing conscious correlation but can’t, at least as we’re currently framing it, say anything on the more specific subjective content like the taste of coffee or chocolate.
Hereandnow wrote: March 5th, 2021, 12:06 amBut then, we do seem to know something. Rorty says we know pragmatics, that is, knowing is an event, we have never seen, nor can even imagine, a "thingly" thing. this is one reason why phenomenologists simply put the entire issue of things 'out there" off the table. Out there is utterly transcendental, metaphysical, nonsense. This is powerful insight, for it is not, as some have said, that this "out there" is out there at all. It is here, in the interiority of experience. How else could we "know" this?

I cringe a bit at the word ‘knowing’. Our knowledge, or at least its context, is only ever partial. Sure, it’s an event but its never ‘knowing’ in the profound sense.
This actually gets to one of the reasons why I’m interested in reading Landry, he’s trying to break the mystery at the boundary of subject and object by the way his three modalities go round with each other. It may not be 100% correct but it gives me another way of thinking about the whole problem that isn’t locked into that binary of ‘in here’ and ‘out there’.
Hereandnow wrote: March 5th, 2021, 12:06 amHyperdeterminism is right, if I take you meaning. But determinism is, after all, a concept of sufficient cause. It is impossible for an ex nihilo event. don't' ask why, it just is, like contradictions and tautologies, only it is not logical, it is intuitive.
That gets to some of the controversy as well with whether quantum noise is actually random or just complex process that we’re seeing too late and which looks like noise to us. We also have the double-slit experiment which does a whole other strange thing of suggesting that probability is a thing that’s ontologically real rather than just being an epistemic plug where humans try to describe truly complex systems (like weather stating 80% chance of rain).
Hereandnow wrote: March 5th, 2021, 12:06 amBut this puts causality in us, not "out there". Out there is not conceivable, but then, there is an "out there" that cannot be conceived. It would be a very different world if there were not. But it belongs to eternity, so to speak. My thought is, eternity and finitude are coextensive, coexistent, the same thing, really. Follow the lgoc and intuition of finitude and infinity, and this is where you end up. I am an eternal being, But tis is slippery because we want to say my existence is a local affair, and I am a local construct, a brain and a mind and a personality in one geographical place. But this idea of locality is a construction in that very brain.
This is where I feel like people tend to beat up on Donald Hoffman’s conclusions but what he and Chetan Prakash are saying with Conscious Realism is describing all of reality as a network of conscious agents where our senses and framing are drastically reduced and honed to a Darwinian fitness landscape where we see as little as possible of actual reality to conserve on what’s important to winning games of differential success (and those traits that win reciprocally get selected for).
Hereandnow wrote: March 5th, 2021, 12:06 amFreedom is, I'm afraid, at the basic level, not a defensible idea, notwithstanding what existentialists say, though they never contradict the prinicple of causality. Black box? the only box I can think of is the reductionist tendency to whatever can be made clear and efficiently. Positivism is such a box. Language brings objects into existence, but it holds them there in our box, a totality of thought.
I’m saying ‘black box’ from the perspective that you have a mysterious category where it’s not likely that it’s internal processes that yield its results are mysterious but rather that you can’t see those processes and thus are easily at a loss as to how to even get a fingernail under it. It’s also a term used often in programming when you’re stuck using 3rd party providers and that the programming of those 3rd party API’s and other features are ‘dark’ in that you don’t have access to them to gain competency as to how they operate.
Hereandnow wrote: March 5th, 2021, 12:06 amI think, then as I think I behold the thoughts being thought. As I do this, have I not put distance between myself and thought? Heidegger says no. for all we are is thought and all the shared institutions that constitute a community. This "someone else" is everyone else, the "they" of orthodoxy and conformity. I say a self is a transcendental issue. I follow apophatic philosophy or theology. And Kierkegaard.

So its true that we receive language, authors, systems of thought, pretty much all of our tools for participating in society (outside of bodily functions) from other people (although technically we get bodily functions from our parents – so it’s biological rather than cultural information).
I don’t think it’s necessarily the case that your sources are always thinking for you. IMHO the moment you start aiming for consilience between ideas and trying to reconcile them against one another you’re doing something different – you’re straightening out the map and congruency testing it. To me that’s where rote conformity ends because that’s a process that’s engaged in for the sake of smashing convention when its convention for its own sake.
Hereandnow wrote: March 5th, 2021, 12:06 amI am fond of it. It's because Heidegger was right, when a person produces an existence, there is the past that is the source. What else? If I had never read phenomenology, I could not think its ideas in my own way. My own way is carved out of this bode of learning. I may be "free" to stand apart from what I read, but what i am free to do at all depends on what I have to be free about. I agree with making independent choices, but one has to have, you know, something to choose from. I read a lot of poetry in the past. Now I have poetry in my thoughts; I poeticize the world.
I think I stated it as well as I could earlier, where it doesn’t make contact for me is – left alone – you are what you read is an incredibly profound claim that, IMHO, when unpacked better translates ‘what you read adds more building blocks to the future you’. Both that rephrasing and, I think the actuality of the situation, are both less profound.
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Hereandnow
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Re: Existentialism anyone?

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Papus79 wrote
TY. It sounds interesting, ie. that I’d want to get my mind around it. Any Husserl recommendations in particular?

Also for my view on the topic of philosophy and engagement with it – I really see my inclinations and what I’m after more in line with alchemy and esotericism. It’s a playing field and one of the goals when you’re on that playing field is taking what you have in front of you and find ways to make it less crap (in an open, breathing, durable, really adaptable framing rather than a utopian single-parameter sense). That also means that if certain information sets would leave me feeling stuck or doomed that I need to find, as Eric Weinstein would put it, ‘other orchards’.
The thing about Husserl is reading, say, his Ideas I, it is dry, a bit demanding in parts. Kant helps, at least to get through the "Copernican revolution" that opens the door for transcendental idealism. If I am making it sound like an enterprise and not just a selection of texts, then this is right. Apologies. Husserl's Cartesian Meditations presents things with clarity, until you get to the middle/end, perhaps, and then Fink's Sixth Meditation which is frankly difficult.

I have everything, and much more, on PDF. I can make them available if you like via, what is it called, cloud sharing?
I really think it’s social paradigms that mangle the possibility of these holding still at all. If it really becomes ‘need to know’ time (some suggest AI is where this becomes a reified rather than speculative problem) then we’re apt to take it more seriously because it has real world consequences in less of a war of belief sense (which is perennial) and more of a US vs USSR kind of way which is fine-pointed and urgent.
Social paradigms? Then the question goes to what it is to be social and what this has to do with those historical ontologies. But I would simply begin with asking what material substance is. The moment you begin to describe it, define it, you find yourself outside it, talking about properties. The term actually is a contingent term, as it relies on contexts of meanings to construct its meaning, but then, it is not meant to be contingent, but absolute, that unseen substratum that makes predication possible. One has never observed material substance. Defining it as extension in time and space only makes matters worse, for these are contingent as well. What is time? It only makes sense IN the contexts of events or IN theoretical equations. By itself it makes no sense at all.
Metal substance? A nonsense term. The only thing that can make sense is talking about things and events. So what is a thing or an event? This is a very long discussion. Heidegger's Being and Time is a profound work on this. Time IS an event, and that event is us, that is, the "empirical" us. And so on. What about subjectivity? For me, this is where the entire discussion gets down to foundations. Husserl's Ideas I is fascinating; tedious, but fascinating. He observes that when we have encounters with the world, we do not experience its objects in the present, for an object is always eidetically (ideationally) bundled, and it is this eidetic-bundled-actuality that is an object. What is this bundling? Well, there is a theory of intentionality that focuses on the relational dynamics: an object is there, I know it, so what is analysis if this relation? See Ideas I.
Social paradigms are what Husserl calls the "naturalistic attitude". One has to make a dramatic move to the phenomenological attitude, and this requires the epoche, a suspension of science's assumptions about objects. Husserl's is a "method" of changing perceptual awareness so that the :present" becomes more clearly intimated. I am reading Jean luc Marion on this very idea: Being Given argues that Husserl is leading us to a , well, miraculous disclosure of what is "impossible" embedded in experience. This is the "eternal present". I argue that such a concept describes Buddhism's ultimate end. Meditation is an event in time whereby time is the construction of reality out of the past into a future unmade, and is annihilated. this is what it means to cease thought, affect, concerns, anticipations, caring and so on. The Buddha nature so vaunted as being there, always, already, is what is there already "beneath" the meditative struggle-not-to-struggle, and nibana, the Pali word, is what the Abhidhamma calls absolute reality, is the present unconditioned by time (thoughts, affect and everything that describes Being in the World, as Heidegger put it).
You see, I go Eastern on these matters. Phenomenology is far better than the Abhidhamma at describing what Buddhists do (real Buddhists, the ones who are ready to overthrow the world) are far better at doing.
It is not that I take such matters as people and their politics/geopolitics lightly. I just do not see such esoteric matters as the above intersecting these.
I interpret this more as the place where consciousness becomes a kind of brute fact, whether it’s primary or simply something of a right-angle nature to matter (thinking of Landry’s Transcendent a bit which also seems to map to the way Alan Moore would speak of the 4th dimension, as did plenty of Paul Foster Case and Ann Davies discussion of the matter in BOTA). Mysticism attempts to strike out at another domain which seems to have its own congruent rules just that they seem significantly more loose in certain ways than they do here.
I suppose I draw a line between mysticism, an occult movement with its signs, symbols, and membership, and the designation mystical to something that is what issues from the world but is not totalizable, that is, subsumed by ideas. Husserl and Fink would settle for transcendental (as opposed to transcendent, which would be entirely beyond reckoning, like seraphs and cherubs. Wittgenstein would call this nonsense and he would be right). Metaethics is like this. But as for BOTA and the like, I don't see it. It is not that there is nothing to it, but I address this as I do popular religions: One has to separate the, say, uncanny feelings, the sense of awakening or being near an important threshold of sublimity, on the one hand, and on the other, what is said about these. The latter is an interpretative imposition, and one has to be very careful so as not to find oneself steeped in contrived jargon and beliefs. The former I take very seriously. The reason why I find phenomenology so apt is because is IS very careful. I think, as I have said, that meditation is a kind of final frontier for enlightenment/liberation, and that yes, there really IS such a thing. But how to think not within a tradition of ethereal practices, but within the logical soundness of well formed arguments, this is what assures that illusions are kept at bay. Tricky, really: Phenomenology is THE way to describe mystical experiences, and I can say this because if there were something other than this, it would be found out by phenomenology. It is open, looks closely at the structures experience. What is mystical is within phenomena, not inferred, not discursively reasoned out, but in the giveness of the world.

It's because it makes the move from everyday attitudes to phenomenological second order thinking, that is, thinking ABOUT thinking, about affect, about all we experience being in the world, that makes this truly foundational. Ontology is a second order thinking that is presupposed by enlightenment in the "mystical" sense, and to see this one has to make a break from the naturalistic attitude. The elaborate spiritual hierarchies of ancient religious metaphysics has to yield to its own foundations, and one, in the long run will have to reduce such ideas to their phenomenological givens. Here is, as Fink put it, discovery is its own presupposition. And what is revealed is not so much brute fact (Wittgenstein's Tractatus is helpful here. What are facts?) but, errrrrr, absolutes, or, absolute "facts". Dangerous territory here, interms of responsible thinking, but a major part of Husserl is this magnetic draw toward things themselves, and the closer you get, the better you are at weeding out naturalistic, empirical claims from what is there, before your waking eyes, the more powerful existential intimations becomes. And words fall away, religion and its doctrines fall away. This is the brass ring of philosophy and religion: one's world is liberated and enlightened, and one no longer needs to read, obey, adhere, join, and so on.
Being Given by Jean luc Marion is extraordinary carrying forth the torch lit by Husserl.
I was listening to Will Durant’s ‘Philosophy of Spinoza’ (book read on YouTube) and it was interesting to hear that Spinoza sort of just accepted snobbery and narcissism as people doing what they had to do in order to survive in a rough-and-tumble world. Seems he had pretty deep insight into how that worked.
I think philosophy has this effect on people, and should have this effect, because it is a second order of thinking altogether, and requires a stepping away mundane affairs, and taking on a perspective not unlike a parent would have on a child's affairs. Very condescending. And people do not like to be condescended to. But if a person is to make it first priority to understand the world of being human at the most basic level, then things turn to a radical separation. Alienation is a common existential theme, and really, the only ones who get it are the ones already alienated, are possessed by that eerie sense that they are no at home in the world, and they simply want to get the bottom of what this is about. Philosophy is a kind of calling for them, and phenomenology actually responds to this, gives it articulation, looks at the structures of experience and reveals its "presence" IN the mundane.
I don’t think there’s a possibility of getting most people interested in philosophy, just that if you can in some way triage certain ‘moves’ off of the playing board as invalid, particularly where they’re not only objectively wrong but antisocial in their implementation and results – that’s where I think this could at least cut away at some of the kindling and make a tighter radius or cluster of places and ways in which people can be wrong. This is sort of like where in murk and uncertainty the cottage snake oil industries and grifts thrive robustly, and sometimes those snake oil doses also pull on finding an outgroup and figuring out how to expropriate their stuff in the old Russian kulak manner.
But where does this reductive triage point to? To what end? What you say here is really precisely to my point: you find yourself in a reading labyrinth of reductively settled themes and theories. What IS this final bank and shoal (I do like Shakespeare) from which one can make the critical move outward, to enlightenment? I think the Buddhists and Hindus found something long ago (putting aside the bad metaphysics) but they couldn't talk about it very well. Who does talk about it well? Phenomenologists. Certainly not all spiritualists, these thinkers. But if a person has that "eerie" intimation I spoke of above, phenomenology provides the Archimedean leverage to make it happen. Phenomenology is inherently alienating! (But this is ambiguous, isn't it? Because alienation requires being alienated from something. From the phenomenological perspective, it is the general lot of people who live out their lives like objects, programmed machines, never questioning; Heidegger called the question the "piety of thought". He and phenomenlogists generally think this foundational questioning is the center of something profoundly meaningful. Of course, to pursue this is to exacerbate one's alienation from worldly affairs! As monks and nuns do.
I have to wonder if this means ‘idea’ in a particularly narrow sense? Ideas as far as I can tell can as often be baskets of related content and their connections, if it’s declarative in nature rather than oppositional (eg. Atheism vs. Christianity or Darwinian Evolution vs. Biblical Creationism) then you have a basket of content whose opposite is….? It doesn’t seem like that would be universally applicable.
He is referring to logic. To even entertain a proposition, from the most mundane to the most radical, it is impossible to conceive of this unbound to the constraints of logic. One cannot talk about something beyond reason, for example. This is just a manner of speaking, for a closer look reveals it is a contradiction, for one has to conceive of something beyond conception to make sense of it.
Mystical insights, to speak loosely, are not beyond reason. Imagine if there were, in some extraterrestrial mission, the discovery of a new color. It would be an intuitive discovery and logic would be well and fine with it. Buddhists talk about "absolute reality" in the Abhidhamma and Witt. would call foul! But they are not making some impossible claim. They are referring to something revelatory, something novel that presents itself to awareness. Witt cared nothing for such things that I have read. He just wanted to stop all talk about metaphysics, things beyond and above what can be said. They "saying", I am responding, is not bound by reason's laws, but by content, and this is what holds matters hostage to day to dayness. Reason has no content itself, and it entirely open to all possibilities. If there Is something better than reason, reason will find it out. The Buddha was in no way at all irrational.
What I see that causes me not to go here – we’re in a very, very structured universe. So much so that it gives far more pain than pleasure. It’s structured enough that plenty of people turn to meth and fentanyl to solve their problems or end up taking their own lives in more blunt ways. When things are that rigid it suggests to me that we're dealing with a system that has coherence all the way back around behind our experiences of self - even the subjective isn't all that much more fungible than the objective world and you learn those rules by experimentation and seeing just how many things don't work in interior space.
No, and yes, Husserl would say. You are operating in the natural attitude. One has to step back, and out of this. There is this division: On one side there is the daily living, and all issues gravitate to this place. On the other is the phenomenological reduction, central to phenomenology. You might want to give a listen to the following. The speaker talks too fast, is reading, but, oh well. If you have a mind to, give some time to this, starting at 40:00 minutes into it, for something to the point here. It is long, there's jargon, refers to other philosophers, and in this regard can be tedious. But the ideas are there:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3m_3oXb ... hyOverdose
This discards that we live in a painfully solid world with equally merciless consequences. I’m not calling it Pollyanna, it seems almost more black-pill.
Not really. It is simply not talking about ethics here. It is talking about what happens track down our ideas that "think" the world. I say, "look, there is a dog!" to deconstruct 'dog' is simply to make inquiry as to the what this event IS, this referring to a dog. If I ask the question in a mundane way, I am told, perhaps, about its species, breed, the luster of its coat, perhaps about how well fed it is, how its bark is high pitched, and so on, virtually indefinitely. But track down ALL that can be said and there is no finality to anything. The truth is not supposed to work like this. So truth ends up endlessly deferential, deferring to something else. Of course there is a lot more to this, and Derrida can be exasperating, and I don't rea much of him. But as I read "around" him, it is clear he takes up the the world phenomenologically, only to contradict Husserl in tht there is NO pure/brute apprehension of the present.
But the merciless consequences: I argue a lot about this. My position is a little complex. In the end, I conclude that this world is understood as if eternity were separable from finitude. It is not. I won't go on about it unless you want to, But I side with Levinas, ethics is first philosophy, these merciless things--what are we doing here in this place? It is ethically impossible, or, apodictically not possible, like causality, we are bound to a metaethics that resolves the world.
An odd thesis, you might think, but I think there is no way around this.
It seems like this should encapsulate better somehow. It’s somewhat clear that human knowledge is a kind of flotilla, it’s about self-consistent observations and so much of physics and the very big, the very small, consciousness research, etc. is an attempt to enlarge that flotilla more (which when you really think about it – this is all it can ever be because we’re really unlikely to find some absolute source causation and I’m not sure we’d have any idea how to even test for such a thing as we still end up with an uncaused cause which seems incoherent).
Of course. But this kind of thinking is pre-phenomenological. Once you see the world through the epoche, the phenomenological reduction, it all changes, for the "naturalistic attitude" is suspended.
What do you call something that attempts to interpret the current state of knowledge and draw deeper conclusions from it? I know the popular term for this is ‘Philosophy of Science’ although when we talk about science we’re talking about a rather specific set of claims that can be reliably recreated in a laboratory, in some sense you could have a broader base to include the odd, the non-testable, non-repeating, etc. but I’m not sure what the name would be. That by and large is what I’d be interested in at present (although admittedly – some naïve hope that it isn’t just another way to blow ourselves off the planet).
Current state of knowledge? I call it irrelevant to the matter at hand. I call it, a field of interests outside those of philosophy. Philosophy is concerned with what empirical science presupposes, not what it says. A geologist understands carbon dating, say, but this is not philosophically important at all. Rather, is asks, about the knowledge structures that make assertions possible, e.g.
Philosophy of science is just scientific speculation. The nontestable is a reference of empirical observations. Non testable suggests something outside this, something that is confirmed not from inferences that lead to principles grounded in inductive logic, but something there, in the fabric of things that serves, as Fink put it, as its own presupposition! Nothing supporting, justifying save itself. An absolute. Husserl thought the reduction reveals this. Its not being testable is a matter of interpretation. A hard issue, this one. He thought his method, epoche, gave philosophy the bedrock of all sciences.
I think that does more to clarify my point – that if they’re looking at form only they’re missing context, and the ‘scientific bearing’ does its best to exclude other considerations. I don’t think that’s a given with metaphysics in general, just a particular variety where anything but form is seen as unhip.
Philosophy, too has entirely dismissed this. Heidegger famously presented the whole self, human dasein. He was the greatest philosopher of the 20th century. Not that he was right about everything.
So it wouldn’t if a scientist ducks a request to give an opinion on a non-scientific matter, it’s another thing if (as reductive materialist) they make a positive claim that anything other than the physical and matter is BS. That’s where they get into asserting a certain kind of materialist / physicalist frame and it doesn’t seem to be informed by much of anything other than whether they ‘fit in’ or are seen as conventional enough to be worth doling grant money out to.
I asked a physicist what material matter is. She said no one knows. Of course, she was right. It is simply a place holder term that has limited use. The trouble with the term is that it serves to bypass inquiry, so we go about ignoring it, and let religion address the eternal affairs. This only leads to confusion. Phenomenology is the way out of this messy business because it doesn't deal in such bankrupt terms, choosing to attend only to the world as it is, leaving out explicitly impossible ideas like res cogitans and res extensa. Empirical scientists are not philosophers, so they don't take up the issue of ontology at all (unless you're talking about the term in its popular modern uses, as in the ontology of knitting).
Until someone declares that consciousness is an emergent property like the rest, then we’re left trying to figure out even how debate what should be in what category under what criteria. The hollowing out of properties in the more conventional sense, ie. where it’s sensory data as you’re focusing on, seems to fall back on some variant of ontic structural realism and in turn it seems like Landry’s philosophy seems to map on to one of the variants of OSR that would hold relationships as primitive but both properties and objects not.
Consciousness as an emergent property runs into the same problem as thought "emerging" from brain activity: Whatever it emerges from can only be conceived in the emerging consciousness, so in order to affirm that from which it emerges, there must be a way affirm what is NOT the emerging property, that is, assume a perspective that is not that of consciousness. Or: how is it possible to to even conceive something outside of consciousness if all conceiving is conscious conceiving? This is Wittgenstein's point. It's like affirming what is beyond thought and logic: the act of affirming is inherently logical.

Ontic structural realism? Relationships as primitive but both properties and objects not?
I think we really need a reciprocal view of Darwinian evolution for this. Some way to frame it that perhaps considers that it’s riding on the back of a deeper process that may very well be doing the exact same thing but participating in a different manner. To some degree I think the re-emerging sort of materialism-oriented panpsychism that people like Philip Goff propose seems to fit this bill, and also seems to take a shot at not only how biogenesis wouldn’t be a problem (in that sense the ‘RNA world’ could move things right along to cells just fine because it, pre-cellular organic compounds, would have some semblance of desire and optimization).
It is generally not well received when a claim that talk about evolution, materialism, biogenesis, organic compounds, and other language that belongs to empirical science is prephilosophical. Not that it's wrong, it is simply not about basic assumptions. Analytic philosophy is at work in this
tendency to look to the natural attitude for insight, and it goes nowhere. Put all ideas in abeyance and behold the world, what you see is not biogenesis or organic compouds. It is an event unfolding and it has analyzable features and this is the beginning of philosophy. All theory issues from this primordial reality, the giveness of the world that is simply assumed in science. It is the reductive center for all basic thinking, and, per above, is its own presupposition.

Helpful to see Husserl's pov is Anthony Steinbach's
Mysticism and Phenomenology
.

I know how off putting this is, but frankly, phenomenology is the only way to proceed if one wants an exposition of the world at the level of basic questions.
Donald Hoffman brings this up all of the time – ie. that the brain does a wonderful job of showing conscious correlation but can’t, at least as we’re currently framing it, say anything on the more specific subjective content like the taste of coffee or chocolate.
I am actually talking about objective content, like that brain that we all see and affirm is there, before our eyes. Conscious correlations? Correlative to what? How is it possible to conceive of something correlative consciousness if all events are OF consciousness? to say consciounsess is correlative to object X, one would have stand apart from consciousness and make the judgment from a third pov. ???

The taste of coffee is here most proximal to judgment, As a taste, it is relatively free of doubt, for while one can question whether it is coffee actually, or just a very good simulation, one cannot question the immediacy of the taste itself, nor, as the line of thinking goes, the structure of thought that attends it. We think about many things, but what is there, in our midst, in the "present" encounter, is the thought itself AS a thought, not its referents, the things out there, buses and planes and shoes and socks.

Perhaps you see where Husserl is trying to take us. He wants to suspend all of the purported knowledge that fills our everydayness, so as to uncover the reality that is actually there, antecedent to this everydayness, and this everydayness includes science. And perhaps you can see how this serves to describe the meditative event whereby all entangled thought and affect is terminated (ideally), and one encounters oneself in the eternal present. I am sure Husserl's method is the definitive exposition of the East's mystical claims about liberation and enlightenment. Far better than anything Eastern philosophy has to say.
I cringe a bit at the word ‘knowing’. Our knowledge, or at least its context, is only ever partial. Sure, it’s an event but its never ‘knowing’ in the profound sense.
This actually gets to one of the reasons why I’m interested in reading Landry, he’s trying to break the mystery at the boundary of subject and object by the way his three modalities go round with each other. It may not be 100% correct but it gives me another way of thinking about the whole problem that isn’t locked into that binary of ‘in here’ and ‘out there’.
And if you find the three modalities a compelling concept? What has happened in the "finding"? It's like any other argument runs along the lines of analytic thought, so that once you read Dennett, say, and you are convinced qualia is a nonsense term, or perhaps the Gettier problems, the challenge to traditional epistemology, is worked out better than earlier because someone discovered a logical back door, then what has changed besides the fact you now have a better argument? These things go nowhere. The assumption of analytic philosophy is that all that can be done in the name of progress is to become a parasite on empirical science, a mere technical extension, so that, he, well, now we know; it is biogenesis! which is just one more notch on the belt everydayness. Kierkegaard realized that this is what had become of the church in his time, and philosophy was Hegelian, hyperrational, as if our living existence were a play of rational discourse waiting for the next logical inference.

We are an actuality that makes an existence, which is about value and metavalue, ethics and metaethics. That is, what makes the world important is meaning, and there are in our world powerful, extraordinary meanings that are always already there, unregarded, and beyond the totality of our paradigms (our standard ways of understanding). This why I take meditation so seriously: it is a method, a radical extension of the Husserlian epoche, that in real time "purifies" experience, if you will.
That gets to some of the controversy as well with whether quantum noise is actually random or just complex process that we’re seeing too late and which looks like noise to us. We also have the double-slit experiment which does a whole other strange thing of suggesting that probability is a thing that’s ontologically real rather than just being an epistemic plug where humans try to describe truly complex systems (like weather stating 80% chance of rain)
Whatever underlies quantum phenomena, it cannot violate the law of sufficient cause, and I say this not because I know the physics, but because causality is apodictic. Arguments only provisionally suggest a violation of causality. I don't know where this will go, but we are bound to this principle, and when talk turns to some sui generis condition of being that allows for things to appear ex nihilo, then we have to be inclined to assume it is in error. It simply comes down to talking Real nonsense to talk about things just appearing spontaneously.
This is where I feel like people tend to beat up on Donald Hoffman’s conclusions but what he and Chetan Prakash are saying with Conscious Realism is describing all of reality as a network of conscious agents where our senses and framing are drastically reduced and honed to a Darwinian fitness landscape where we see as little as possible of actual reality to conserve on what’s important to winning games of differential success (and those traits that win reciprocally get selected for).
What will happen is this, according to, well, me: The investigations into the private world of a self, the interiority of experience, will lead only to one thing, which is the self' itself. There will come the inevitable juncture where there is a revelation that objective talk has been, all along, about that generative "originary" basis of the entire generated world we call reality; then all eyes will turn to phenomenology, a personal examination of one's own interior. And here lies the eternal present. Perhaps you would find Eugene Fink's Sixth Meditation interesting. I get some of my insights from here. (I have it, of course, on PDF.)
I go way beyond Hoffman, from what I've read. Beyond the extravagant claims produced in the margins of scientific speculation. I make claims about the primacy of impossible revelatory experiences. Bu then, so did the Buddha. See the Abhidhamma (a little absurd in places, but then, it is very old.)
I’m saying ‘black box’ from the perspective that you have a mysterious category where it’s not likely that it’s internal processes that yield its results are mysterious but rather that you can’t see those processes and thus are easily at a loss as to how to even get a fingernail under it. It’s also a term used often in programming when you’re stuck using 3rd party providers and that the programming of those 3rd party API’s and other features are ‘dark’ in that you don’t have access to them to gain competency as to how they operate.
But what is this fingernail, and where does it lead? It is, in my thoughts, pragmatic only. This entire landscape of events we call reality is a process that endeavors toward value, not "truth" (this follows Nietzsche, but then N was too crazy with pain to see. It also follows Rorty, the American pragmatist). Truth is a problem solved. My car breaks down I have a wrench, screwdriver, a manual, and what are these, their definitions, their essences, if not a to-be-used, ready to hand. Language is like this, too. When I speak, write, it is an execution of internal successes had during childhood when I learned the words, their sounds, associated them with objects, and so on. Each word a "consummation" of a problem solved, and I got "right" when others affirmed, celebrated my youthful competence. At the basic level, language is utility event, and its embeddedness in the world is a fusion of utility and actuality/value, an entanglement, a pragmatic entanglement. What I argue is that truth seeking, that fingernail, is an affair of the interiority in a matrix of problem solving that will ultimately resolve in a problem solved, consummated in what Buddhists call nirvana, what Hindus call Brahman: primitive names, if you read the myths, for something incredibly profound about our existence. I think when a person sits and meditates seriously, there is in this a radical putting aside of the pragmatics of language and its affective entanglements. One finally is in the present, not in the temporal rush of the past's immediate claim on the future (das man, again. Heidegger, and his ilk, hold that most people go through life robotically, like children with no capacity to pull away from affairs and ask questions. When one does this, one has a realization that the firmament beneath all we say and do is empty. Science chases its own tail, so to speak (see my icon, the snake swallowing its own tail, because ideas led to other ideas, defer to other ideas, endlessly deferential. This only ends when questioning turns to actuality, the self's interiority).
So its true that we receive language, authors, systems of thought, pretty much all of our tools for participating in society (outside of bodily functions) from other people (although technically we get bodily functions from our parents – so it’s biological rather than cultural information).
I don’t think it’s necessarily the case that your sources are always thinking for you. IMHO the moment you start aiming for consilience between ideas and trying to reconcile them against one another you’re doing something different – you’re straightening out the map and congruency testing it. To me that’s where rote conformity ends because that’s a process that’s engaged in for the sake of smashing convention when its convention for its own sake.
I am thinking about the actual moment when the thinking sits there before you, and you "observe" the words in production as you think, as they emerge. The question arises, is this line of thought the "me" I have been looking for in the effort to discover my own identity? As a rule of apophatic thinking, if one can observe a thing, then the thing observed is not the one observing; there is the "distance" between the seat of subjectivity and that which is observed. I am thinking right now, but I stop identifying with thoughts spontaneously produced when I pull away to think about those thoughts AS thoughts. Have I merely changed themes, like talking about cats, then about the weather? Or has something else occurred? Phenomenologists take this kind of things as existentially significant, this "crisis" of identity in which one becomes alienated from the world by putting the world and its spontaneous language production under review.
This is very, very different from science as we know it, this pulling away from being "inside" the production of experience, and identifying oneself as a lawyer or a teacher or a father, and so on, to stand apart from all that would make a claim on who one is. It is a radical departure from everydayness.
I think I stated it as well as I could earlier, where it doesn’t make contact for me is – left alone – you are what you read is an incredibly profound claim that, IMHO, when unpacked better translates ‘what you read adds more building blocks to the future you’. Both that rephrasing and, I think the actuality of the situation, are both less profound.
It's only as profound as one can make of it. To know that you know, see that you see, and so on, can be registered as very alienating. One has to acknowledge that reality and truth is constructed by thought and thought is not just an innocent bystander, but a dynamic part of what we take as Being.

Sorry about the length. I'll keep it shorter.
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Papus79
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Re: Existentialism anyone?

Post by Papus79 »

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:


Hereandnow wrote: March 10th, 2021, 1:35 pmSocial paradigms? Then the question goes to what it is to be social and what this has to do with those historical ontologies. But I would simply begin with asking what material substance is. The moment you begin to describe it, define it, you find yourself outside it, talking about properties. The term actually is a contingent term, as it relies on contexts of meanings to construct its meaning, but then, it is not meant to be contingent, but absolute, that unseen substratum that makes predication possible. One has never observed material substance. Defining it as extension in time and space only makes matters worse, for these are contingent as well. What is time? It only makes sense IN the contexts of events or IN theoretical equations. By itself it makes no sense at all.

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.
Hereandnow wrote: March 10th, 2021, 1:35 pmMetal substance? A nonsense term. The only thing that can make sense is talking about things and events. So what is a thing or an event? This is a very long discussion. Heidegger's Being and Time is a profound work on this. Time IS an event, and that event is us, that is, the "empirical" us. And so on. What about subjectivity? For me, this is where the entire discussion gets down to foundations. Husserl's Ideas I is fascinating; tedious, but fascinating. He observes that when we have encounters with the world, we do not experience its objects in the present, for an object is always eidetically (ideationally) bundled, and it is this eidetic-bundled-actuality that is an object. What is this bundling? Well, there is a theory of intentionality that focuses on the relational dynamics: an object is there, I know it, so what is analysis if this relation? See Ideas I.
Social paradigms are what Husserl calls the "naturalistic attitude". One has to make a dramatic move to the phenomenological attitude, and this requires the epoche, a suspension of science's assumptions about objects. Husserl's is a "method" of changing perceptual awareness so that the :present" becomes more clearly intimated. I am reading Jean luc Marion on this very idea: Being Given argues that Husserl is leading us to a , well, miraculous disclosure of what is "impossible" embedded in experience. This is the "eternal present". I argue that such a concept describes Buddhism's ultimate end. Meditation is an event in time whereby time is the construction of reality out of the past into a future unmade, and is annihilated. this is what it means to cease thought, affect, concerns, anticipations, caring and so on. The Buddha nature so vaunted as being there, always, already, is what is there already "beneath" the meditative struggle-not-to-struggle, and nibana, the Pali word, is what the Abhidhamma calls absolute reality, is the present unconditioned by time (thoughts, affect and everything that describes Being in the World, as Heidegger put it).

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?
Hereandnow wrote: March 10th, 2021, 1:35 pmYou see, I go Eastern on these matters. Phenomenology is far better than the Abhidhamma at describing what Buddhists do (real Buddhists, the ones who are ready to overthrow the world) are far better at doing.
It is not that I take such matters as people and their politics/geopolitics lightly. I just do not see such esoteric matters as the above intersecting these.

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.
Hereandnow wrote: March 10th, 2021, 1:35 pmI suppose I draw a line between mysticism, an occult movement with its signs, symbols, and membership, and the designation mystical to something that is what issues from the world but is not totalizable, that is, subsumed by ideas.

What 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.
Hereandnow wrote: March 10th, 2021, 1:35 pmAlienation is a common existential theme, and really, the only ones who get it are the ones already alienated, are possessed by that eerie sense that they are no at home in the world, and they simply want to get the bottom of what this is about. Philosophy is a kind of calling for them, and phenomenology actually responds to this, gives it articulation, looks at the structures of experience and reveals its "presence" IN the mundane.

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.
Hereandnow wrote: March 10th, 2021, 1:35 pmBut where does this reductive triage point to? To what end? What you say here is really precisely to my point: you find yourself in a reading labyrinth of reductively settled themes and theories. What IS this final bank and shoal (I do like Shakespeare) from which one can make the critical move outward, to enlightenment?
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.
Hereandnow wrote: March 10th, 2021, 1:35 pmHe is referring to logic. To even entertain a proposition, from the most mundane to the most radical, it is impossible to conceive of this unbound to the constraints of logic. One cannot talk about something beyond reason, for example. This is just a manner of speaking, for a closer look reveals it is a contradiction, for one has to conceive of something beyond conception to make sense of it.
Mystical insights, to speak loosely, are not beyond reason. Imagine if there were, in some extraterrestrial mission, the discovery of a new color. It would be an intuitive discovery and logic would be well and fine with it. Buddhists talk about "absolute reality" in the Abhidhamma and Witt. would call foul! But they are not making some impossible claim. They are referring to something revelatory, something novel that presents itself to awareness. Witt cared nothing for such things that I have read. He just wanted to stop all talk about metaphysics, things beyond and above what can be said. They "saying", I am responding, is not bound by reason's laws, but by content, and this is what holds matters hostage to day to dayness. Reason has no content itself, and it entirely open to all possibilities. If there Is something better than reason, reason will find it out. The Buddha was in no way at all irrational.

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’.
Hereandnow wrote: March 10th, 2021, 1:35 pmNo, and yes, Husserl would say. You are operating in the natural attitude. One has to step back, and out of this. There is this division: On one side there is the daily living, and all issues gravitate to this place. On the other is the phenomenological reduction, central to phenomenology. You might want to give a listen to the following. The speaker talks too fast, is reading, but, oh well. If you have a mind to, give some time to this, starting at 40:00 minutes into it, for something to the point here. It is long, there's jargon, refers to other philosophers, and in this regard can be tedious. But the ideas are there:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3m_3oXb ... hyOverdose
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.
Hereandnow wrote: March 10th, 2021, 1:35 pmNot really. It is simply not talking about ethics here. It is talking about what happens track down our ideas that "think" the world. I say, "look, there is a dog!" to deconstruct 'dog' is simply to make inquiry as to the what this event IS, this referring to a dog. If I ask the question in a mundane way, I am told, perhaps, about its species, breed, the luster of its coat, perhaps about how well fed it is, how its bark is high pitched, and so on, virtually indefinitely. But track down ALL that can be said and there is no finality to anything. The truth is not supposed to work like this. So truth ends up endlessly deferential, deferring to something else. Of course there is a lot more to this, and Derrida can be exasperating, and I don't rea much of him. But as I read "around" him, it is clear he takes up the the world phenomenologically, only to contradict Husserl in tht there is NO pure/brute apprehension of the present.
But the merciless consequences: I argue a lot about this. My position is a little complex. In the end, I conclude that this world is understood as if eternity were separable from finitude. It is not. I won't go on about it unless you want to, But I side with Levinas, ethics is first philosophy, these merciless things--what are we doing here in this place? It is ethically impossible, or, apodictically not possible, like causality, we are bound to a metaethics that resolves the world.
An odd thesis, you might think, but I think there is no way around this.
Ok, so I think I see where there might be a small communication hiccup on why I brought up the merciless. It’s not about ‘why does this exist?’ or ‘Why would God do this to us?’, it’s about the understanding that if a person with no access to a dentist and an abscessed or broken tooth could imagine the break or abscess away – they’re clearly in enough pain that they’d take that option if it were possible. Persistence of misery is really something that points to the solidity, consequential reality, and immutability of the environment that gets referred to as ‘matter’.
Hereandnow wrote: March 10th, 2021, 1:35 pmCurrent state of knowledge? I call it irrelevant to the matter at hand. I call it, a field of interests outside those of philosophy. Philosophy is concerned with what empirical science presupposes, not what it says. A geologist understands carbon dating, say, but this is not philosophically important at all. Rather, is asks, about the knowledge structures that make assertions possible, e.g.

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.
Hereandnow wrote: March 10th, 2021, 1:35 pmPhilosophy of science is just scientific speculation. The nontestable is a reference of empirical observations. Non testable suggests something outside this, something that is confirmed not from inferences that lead to principles grounded in inductive logic, but something there, in the fabric of things that serves, as Fink put it, as its own presupposition! Nothing supporting, justifying save itself. An absolute. Husserl thought the reduction reveals this. Its not being testable is a matter of interpretation. A hard issue, this one. He thought his method, epoche, gave philosophy the bedrock of all sciences.

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.
Hereandnow wrote: March 10th, 2021, 1:35 pmI asked a physicist what material matter is. She said no one knows. Of course, she was right. It is simply a place holder term that has limited use. The trouble with the term is that it serves to bypass inquiry, so we go about ignoring it, and let religion address the eternal affairs. This only leads to confusion. Phenomenology is the way out of this messy business because it doesn't deal in such bankrupt terms, choosing to attend only to the world as it is, leaving out explicitly impossible ideas like res cogitans and res extensa. Empirical scientists are not philosophers, so they don't take up the issue of ontology at all (unless you're talking about the term in its popular modern uses, as in the ontology of knitting).

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.
Hereandnow wrote: March 10th, 2021, 1:35 pmConsciousness as an emergent property runs into the same problem as thought "emerging" from brain activity: Whatever it emerges from can only be conceived in the emerging consciousness, so in order to affirm that from which it emerges, there must be a way affirm what is NOT the emerging property, that is, assume a perspective that is not that of consciousness. Or: how is it possible to to even conceive something outside of consciousness if all conceiving is conscious conceiving? This is Wittgenstein's point. It's like affirming what is beyond thought and logic: the act of affirming is inherently logical.

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).
Hereandnow wrote: March 10th, 2021, 1:35 pmOntic structural realism? Relationships as primitive but both properties and objects not?
OSR1: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/a ... 9809000604
Hereandnow wrote: March 10th, 2021, 1:35 pmIt is generally not well received when a claim that talk about evolution, materialism, biogenesis, organic compounds, and other language that belongs to empirical science is prephilosophical. Not that it's wrong, it is simply not about basic assumptions. Analytic philosophy is at work in this
tendency to look to the natural attitude for insight, and it goes nowhere. Put all ideas in abeyance and behold the world, what you see is not biogenesis or organic compouds. It is an event unfolding and it has analyzable features and this is the beginning of philosophy. All theory issues from this primordial reality, the giveness of the world that is simply assumed in science. It is the reductive center for all basic thinking, and, per above, is its own presupposition.

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.
Hereandnow wrote: March 10th, 2021, 1:35 pmI know how off putting this is, but frankly, phenomenology is the only way to proceed if one wants an exposition of the world at the level of basic questions.

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).
Hereandnow wrote: March 10th, 2021, 1:35 pmPerhaps you see where Husserl is trying to take us. He wants to suspend all of the purported knowledge that fills our everydayness, so as to uncover the reality that is actually there, antecedent to this everydayness, and this everydayness includes science. And perhaps you can see how this serves to describe the meditative event whereby all entangled thought and affect is terminated (ideally), and one encounters oneself in the eternal present. I am sure Husserl's method is the definitive exposition of the East's mystical claims about liberation and enlightenment. Far better than anything Eastern philosophy has to say.

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.
Hereandnow wrote: March 10th, 2021, 1:35 pmAnd if you find the three modalities a compelling concept? What has happened in the "finding"? It's like any other argument runs along the lines of analytic thought, so that once you read Dennett, say, and you are convinced qualia is a nonsense term, or perhaps the Gettier problems, the challenge to traditional epistemology, is worked out better than earlier because someone discovered a logical back door, then what has changed besides the fact you now have a better argument? These things go nowhere. The assumption of analytic philosophy is that all that can be done in the name of progress is to become a parasite on empirical science, a mere technical extension, so that, he, well, now we know; it is biogenesis! which is just one more notch on the belt everydayness. Kierkegaard realized that this is what had become of the church in his time, and philosophy was Hegelian, hyperrational, as if our living existence were a play of rational discourse waiting for the next logical inference.

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.
Hereandnow wrote: March 10th, 2021, 1:35 pmWe are an actuality that makes an existence, which is about value and metavalue, ethics and metaethics. That is, what makes the world important is meaning, and there are in our world powerful, extraordinary meanings that are always already there, unregarded, and beyond the totality of our paradigms (our standard ways of understanding). This why I take meditation so seriously: it is a method, a radical extension of the Husserlian epoche, that in real time "purifies" experience, if you will.

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.
Hereandnow wrote: March 10th, 2021, 1:35 pmWhat will happen is this, according to, well, me: The investigations into the private world of a self, the interiority of experience, will lead only to one thing, which is the self' itself. There will come the inevitable juncture where there is a revelation that objective talk has been, all along, about that generative "originary" basis of the entire generated world we call reality; then all eyes will turn to phenomenology, a personal examination of one's own interior. And here lies the eternal present. Perhaps you would find Eugene Fink's Sixth Meditation interesting. I get some of my insights from here. (I have it, of course, on PDF.)
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.
Hereandnow wrote: March 10th, 2021, 1:35 pmBut what is this fingernail, and where does it lead? It is, in my thoughts, pragmatic only. This entire landscape of events we call reality is a process that endeavors toward value, not "truth" (this follows Nietzsche, but then N was too crazy with pain to see. It also follows Rorty, the American pragmatist). Truth is a problem solved. My car breaks down I have a wrench, screwdriver, a manual, and what are these, their definitions, their essences, if not a to-be-used, ready to hand. Language is like this, too. When I speak, write, it is an execution of internal successes had during childhood when I learned the words, their sounds, associated them with objects, and so on. Each word a "consummation" of a problem solved, and I got "right" when others affirmed, celebrated my youthful competence. At the basic level, language is utility event, and its embeddedness in the world is a fusion of utility and actuality/value, an entanglement, a pragmatic entanglement. What I argue is that truth seeking, that fingernail, is an affair of the interiority in a matrix of problem solving that will ultimately resolve in a problem solved, consummated in what Buddhists call nirvana, what Hindus call Brahman: primitive names, if you read the myths, for something incredibly profound about our existence. I think when a person sits and meditates seriously, there is in this a radical putting aside of the pragmatics of language and its affective entanglements. One finally is in the present, not in the temporal rush of the past's immediate claim on the future (das man, again. Heidegger, and his ilk, hold that most people go through life robotically, like children with no capacity to pull away from affairs and ask questions. When one does this, one has a realization that the firmament beneath all we say and do is empty. Science chases its own tail, so to speak (see my icon, the snake swallowing its own tail, because ideas led to other ideas, defer to other ideas, endlessly deferential. This only ends when questioning turns to actuality, the self's interiority).

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.
Hereandnow wrote: March 10th, 2021, 1:35 pmI am thinking about the actual moment when the thinking sits there before you, and you "observe" the words in production as you think, as they emerge. The question arises, is this line of thought the "me" I have been looking for in the effort to discover my own identity? As a rule of apophatic thinking, if one can observe a thing, then the thing observed is not the one observing; there is the "distance" between the seat of subjectivity and that which is observed. I am thinking right now, but I stop identifying with thoughts spontaneously produced when I pull away to think about those thoughts AS thoughts. Have I merely changed themes, like talking about cats, then about the weather? Or has something else occurred? Phenomenologists take this kind of things as existentially significant, this "crisis" of identity in which one becomes alienated from the world by putting the world and its spontaneous language production under review.

TBH identity of that sort is less what I’m concerned with. If it were true that most of what I am is an amalgamation of traits acquired from others – I wouldn’t consider that something I’m locked in an existential struggle with. I’m more tuned in with what propels me as it seems to be the one thing I can look at to figure out what to do next and what I’ll have the motivation to be successful at focusing on. My main concern, at least in the outward sense, is along the lines of what was discussed in Star Slate Codex’s ‘Meditations on Moloch’ article – ie. we’re a species locked in multipolar traps, genetic completion, where truth seems like it genuinely can’t matter (other than privately – setting one’s own machinations and staying out of the machinations of others), lying, cheating, and stealing are bread and butter for most people accordingly, that ‘gas-lighting’ just now became a big term is hysterical when it seems like it’s something everyone does to everyone with or without narcissistic personality disorder to back it, and I find this state of affairs horrifically boring and regressive – I’d much rather be focused on how the universe works, why I have the mind I have, what I can do with that mind, rather than spending most of my day trying to figure out how to stay out of someone else’s stew pot.
Hereandnow wrote: March 10th, 2021, 1:35 pmThis is very, very different from science as we know it, this pulling away from being "inside" the production of experience, and identifying oneself as a lawyer or a teacher or a father, and so on, to stand apart from all that would make a claim on who one is. It is a radical departure from everydayness.

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).
Hereandnow wrote: March 10th, 2021, 1:35 pmIt's only as profound as one can make of it. To know that you know, see that you see, and so on, can be registered as very alienating. One has to acknowledge that reality and truth is constructed by thought and thought is not just an innocent bystander, but a dynamic part of what we take as Being.
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.
Humbly watching Youtube in Universe 25. - Me
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