Now you got me all nostalgic about England so I can no longer stay on topic.
But you are an imbecile nonethless, that is not going anywhere.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hamKl-su8PE[/youtube]
Alright Maximus Anderson. I don’t know what denial is, so I don’t know if I can even do it. Is it like a subconscious thing or what? If it is, how can I be sure about it? All I know is what I’m thinking at the moment, and at the moment I’m thinking about fish and chips. Do I really want fish and chips? I dunno, how could I answer that question? What if I decided to believe I didn’t want the fish and chips, then I decided I didn’t want to decide I didn’t want the fish and chips… which one of these decisions is the denial part?
… and now I’m thinking about horrible english pop music, thanks to you. About that, there is no denial.
Want is an attraction, dude, you just observe it, you observe yourself attracted to fish and chips, that’s how you know you want fish and chips. How do you know you are in love with someone? It’s the same thing.
Denial is when a desire is blocked from entering consciousness. It’s a disconnection from one’s wants. Like when you want to smash someone’s face but you interrupt it with feelings of love because you are scared like shit.
All denial feels forced.
Right now my mind is spamming me with memories of England and how much I miss it and at the same time it is spamming me with the desire to respond to you, and when shit like that happens it is very easy to fall into denial . . . too many impulses and it becomes easy to deny them.
Now, I despise Franz Ferdinand with all my might, but there is no denying that due to nostalgia effect I cannot help but love them . . .
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDwaDIbrfxA[/youtube]
I’m going to Wal-Mart now to shop for some of the latest fall fashions. I’ma holla at you later, Maximus.
I thought Kant did the noumena/phenomena thing.
Ah, fall fashion. Scarf and riding boots and pumpkin spice latte weather.
It’s very difficult to actually do philosophy in this type of environment.
Instead what we have here, are a few egos vying for attention, distracting from the topic with really no worthy content whatsoever.
This confirms my fears. Common people and average minds must be told and directed what to think, why, and how. Most of you have no great passion or desire “for philosophy”. Your interests and thoughts are flimsy and flaky, blowing around in the wind, easy to push around. You offer no resistance. Maybe, at some point in your life, usually early in life, you gave up on thinking. Maybe somebody thoroughly convinced you that you’re stupid and unintelligent. But whatever the case maybe, here and now, what do you have to say? If you have nothing to say, then maybe it’s best to just listen. If you have nothing to teach, then you may as well learn.
And this is the state of philosophy today, too. Teachers are too rare. And it seems those learning are rare too. Very few teach, and very few learn.
What should you think about next?
You should think about the fundamental idea of philosophy, about asking questions, and to whom. Questions represent the nature of human inquiry. But directing questions to buffoons, and attention deprived idiots, is useless. You should seek out somebody with wisdom. Asking the right questions, to the wrong people, is flawed. Asking the wrong questions, to the right people, is also flawed. Ask the right questions to the right people.
Here is another observation, a small nugget of truth. Adults tend not to ask questions after a certain age and point of maturity. Because questions expose your ignorance. They expose your weakness and lack of knowledge, unless they’re rhetorical. But even rhetorical questions can be derogatory, suggestive, and insulting. So what must a mature mind do about ignorance, when there is always a necessary degree of it? There is always something unknown. And a confident mind and thinker will not hesitate to locate the right people with the right knowledge, and then direct them in a right way according to his own desires. Why not? This is a sign of wisdom. Wisdom is not only about “true knowledge”. It’s about the human side of knowledge. Humans embody different knowledge. Because what one person knows, is almost never the same as what another knows, although they may agree about most of it.
Just a note to spurn things forward…lest this topic devolve into who can burp the loudest.
And just how do you propose to get the attention of the “right people”?
He does not propose anything, he’s just a fatass sitting on his couch doubting everything. You think he is a leader? Was there ever a leader who was also a philosopher?
These are doubters and factoid collectors, not decision makers.
You left out the third option; that one has already thought of it all.
Now about these axioms you mentioned the other day. An axiom is not a ‘noumenal’ thing or something that is real but cannot be observed. So it doesn’t count as an example of ‘knowing something that isn’t there’, as you suggest. These things (axioms) are generally established premises which are used to deduce further premises and conclusions. They usually involve either tautological, analytical truths (like mathematical and geometrical facts) or intersubjective, inductive definitions. In the former case, they remain abstract because they tell us nothing about the world, but only things about themselves. This 1+1=2 thing; it’s saying the same thing twice because two 1s are the same as a 2, and a 2 is the same thing as two 1s. This conclusion is strictly deductive and real, but only real in the sense that the numbers are little lines made out of pixels on your computer screen. What they represent is an instance of psychologism, a particular physiological contingency of the human sensory system that separates tangible bodies in space into discrete objects and entities.
Are there quantities in the universe? Sure, but how they are recognized is determined by the sensory apparatus. You can deduce this by imagining having eyes as powerful as an electron microscope; larger bodies in space would no longer appear distinct. The chair beside the table would no longer appear as a distinct object… it would be part of the smear of particles that compose both objects. If you zoomed in even more, you would no longer see the individual particles, but a smear of noise (James S. Saint, ladies and gentlemen). At this point there would be no abstraction or measurement possible, and everything would absolve into a single ‘stuff’.
Ontological monism is the ultimate deduction, and the only way you can squeeze in a dualistic aspect here is in the way Spinoza did it. Mind as an awareness of the extension of the body. No transcendental Cartesian second substance here operating under a different causality, but a single substance expressing itself through the attribute of mind. The mathematical axiom, then, is a particular instance of a certain way in which mind operates parallel to the body. The differentiation of objects in space happens in the same way that objects differentiate in space, themselves, so the neurological processes involved in generating cognition work with the same causal form that bodies work in their power interactions. Think of how cognition occurs. Ionized particles surge through axon flood gates and produce a charge that moves through the nerve, finally cancelling at a terminal. The final result is the firing of the neuron, the impulse of energy. This is precisely how atomic and subatomic activity occurs in space time. Energy points move through space interacting with others, cancelling or trading charges.
What has this got to do with anything? I have no idea, I’m just rambling. But what I CAN tell you is that there is no such thing as a noumenal side to existence. There is no ‘objective’ part of reality that is what it is independently of how other things in reality exist (nothing is ‘hidden’)…but, at the same time, the act of perception does not bring into existence something that isn’t already existing. All perception does in introduce a particular relationship between a mind and a certain body. We have a kind of anomalous monism working here. It all comes down to the impossibility of two distinct substances interacting causally (eliminating Cartesian dualism), and also the impossibility of reducing mental phenomena to material states. They are two sides of the same coin, two attributes of the universe, which cannot be conceived independently… a result of an ontological catch-22.
What does all this mean? You tell me, you’re the philosopher, not me.
Bait them with what they desire most
Are you presuming yourself, because if you are, then where is this wisdom that you’ve left behind? What is your contribution, here? What and how will people remember you, if they do? Positively or negatively?
I’ll need to reread about “knowing something that isn’t there”. As I recall, I was pretty clear that you only can “explore” the unknown. You cannot explore the known.
You can take away linguistics and math; this doesn’t remove animals interaction with the world or experience of existence.
Math is a derivative of intelligent (human) observations about phenomena, such as, that an equation can define the rate of acceleration and terminal velocity of objects at free fall. And in fact, mathematicians and physicists do exactly that. And this is how humanity can send rockets to the moon or droids across space. That you overlook this, or deny the communication required to accomplish it, reveals your underlying motives. No, this is not a mere “language game”. This is not “philosophical bullshit”, as Shieldmaiden mentioned. These are real examples of true knowledge and applied wisdom, over the course of centuries of human progress.
The human brain is first and foremost an organ designed to perceive, become aware, memorize, and then navigate through specific environments. Cognition first exists to aid the survival of the underlying animal (the mind evolves along with the body, to aid each other).
So you imply Solipsism, that the universe and existence just disappears, magically, when you’re unaware or unconscious? If you believe the universe exists independent of your brain then you must admit to objective existence. Noumenal reality.
It means that you need to straighten out your own concepts, and understand how human recognition of objects works.
…which would be?
The “objective” side of existence is what we refer to as facts. It is a fact there are two cups on my desk; equally the FACT that “cup” is a subjective delimited conceptual abstraction oriented to a certain visual and sensory association subtracted from out of the larger sensory field available to me, does not alter the fact there are “two cups”. Cup is a label I use to gather certain aspects of existence and concentrate it into a single thing able now to operate epistemically and ontically via translations within my cognitive system and how that system interacts with itself, my body, and by extension the world around me. Quantities are non-relative in the factual realm, it will never be the case there are “three cups” or “one cup” in this moment here on this desk; there are objectively two of them. And it doesn’t matter that what I call a cup is a determination made based on definitions and perceptual abstraction, it is an objective fact of there being two.
Quantity is both objective and definitional, unlike speed or size which are relative: speed is relative to another speed, distance relative to time compared to another framework that is moving differently, I.e. A car going “10mph” is also 20mph, or 209mph, or 2,000,000 mph, every such speed is “true” since there are undoubtedly other frames in existence which would, if possible, measure the car moving at those speeds. Size is relative when it comes to “large or small”, these are comparative values.
One very interesting thing is that we can collapse the relativity of speed or size into objective quantity by creating a ratio: 1/2 as fast, or 10 times as many, etc. The sun is objectively a certain quantity more massive and large than the earth, again that ratio of however much more massive or large it is is objective, as in does not depend in its existence on relative sizes or masses of anything else.
Consciousness being reduced to material activity such as neurons and such is a fallacy and confusion of what consciousness means. “Consciousness” already means a mediating between that material level of existence and other levels of existence, including other levels such as the kinds of facts or objective realities I mentioned above (quantity, or ratio). If you either try to reduce consciousness to the material or to the immaterial (facts or logic as such) you simply stop talking about consciousness and start talking about those other levels of existence.
To expand just a bit on that, ratios do not have units. This is what is so significant. If we measure something as 10mph those units are chosen arbitrarily with respect to the speed itself, the unit is another measure of distance and time, “miles per hour”. The unit is relative, not objective. But if we say that a car going 20mph is going twice as fast as another car going 10mph we have said something extraordinary: we have stated something objective about otherwise relative things. There is no “twice as fast in mph”, the units disappear in cancellation just as in mathematics when you divide out the same variable or unit-term, they cancel, vanish. So long as the units used in both cases of measurement are the same units distance/time we have therefore identified and said something objective about existence, and we have used “merely human, merely relative language and measurement” to do it.
If you are asking if anyone at a philosophy forum has ever said ‘thank you, Zoot, I understand now’, then yeah, that has been said before. But I should admit that I believe the things which I had explained were not so clear, and that that understanding wasn’t really any understanding at all. I know this now after looking over the last ten years of my philosophy forum participation through a more critical lens. Once upon a time I was also a systematic befuddler, though not on purpose.
If you are asking what I have ultimately contributed to the world, I would answer ‘the things I have built’. These things are the only things which say ‘Zoot was here’.
One doesn’t explore the unknown… that’s a misnomer. One checks a theory by trying to observe whether or not nature behaves in accordance with one’s predictions. The fine line between philosophy and the natural sciences I’m trying to outline here is that the former often proceeds deductively from imposed concepts on the world, rather than like the latter which proceeds inductively from concepts read from the world. Reread that link I posted a while back… the link to essay twelve I believe it was (from Rosa Lichtenstein’s site).
I’m not denying this… what I am denying is that these things exist in some Platonic realm rather than being psychologistic contingencies and intersubjective agreements in public language. Math is simply a language which represents phenomena and process, such that it’s characters symbolize some natural object or process. The acceleration rate of an object is not what it is because the math makes it so… it is what it is because that’s how the statistical regularities of/in how nature has behaved up to that point, have been observed as such. We say when that happens, this is a case or instance of X. Very simple, no problem.
I still don’t think you are grasping what is meant by the phrase ‘language game’. Here’s an example. When someone tries to deduce what is morally right or wrong through the use of the same logical structures which govern an argument about what is true or false. When Wittgenstein said ‘there are no moral propositions’, he did not mean we cannot talk about morality. What he meant was that we cannot apply the same rules to govern such discussion, and that in doing so we would be crossing language games erroneously. This would only result in subtle confusion. Subtle because the form of the grammar is the same; the moral proposition would be identical to the mathematical proposition, or the metaphysical proposition, etc., because in order to make language meaningful we have to fit concepts into linguistic categories, e.g., ‘love’ would be treated as a subject (when it is not). From there, we might suspect that someone can ‘have’ love, or that love can ‘be’ X. No, love is not either of these; love is a description of a behavior, not a ‘thing’. Love must be shown, it cannot be talked about like an object. When we say ‘he is in love’, we mean he is exhibiting behaviors that we describe in this way, not that he possesses a thing called ‘love’, like he possesses a thing called ‘foot’.
There are these subtle merging of language games everywhere in philosophy, and they are very hard to spot.
I see nothing wrong with this, and don’t know what you wish to add or argue by saying it. I would disagree though in thinking that the brain is designed. I don’t believe evolution is teleological.
I do admit this, but I don’t use Kant’s classification because it’s silly. If you can’t say anything about the noumenal world that exists unperceived… you can’t say anything about the noumenal world that exists unperceived. So it means nothing to say anything about it at all. If you want a good example of this in action, go to KT and read Satyr’s posts. Every other word out of his mouth is noumenal this and noumenal that. What he is doing, albeit unknowingly because of his confusion, is setting up a false dichotomy in which the term noumenal means what is real and concrete, while all other aspects of knowledge are abstractions of and from this noumenal world. Then he proceeds to describe what he believes is incorrect thinking as a kind of preposition of the noumenal, i.e., belief in God is an attempt to establish the noumenal, which he then equivocates as the notion of permanence, ‘the one’, as he always says, which doesn’t really exist.
Okay you’re not following this. Try this then: he takes the concept of something that doesn’t exist and uses it as a concept that exists which others imply exists when they are wrong about the concepts they form about what does exist.
You didn’t get that either. Nevermind man. It’s like the concept of ‘God’. If one says ‘I don’t believe in God’, they are implying that there IS such a concept as ‘God’ to not believe in, and that they don’t believe in it. But this is a redundant circle. The proper response to the question can only be ‘I don’t understand the question’. The same is true for the question of the noumenal; what does that MEAN, not ‘I don’t believe it exists’, because it would have to mean something in the first place for someone to believe it does NOT exist.
Anybody who uses the word ‘noumenal’ is doing the same thing. Employing an empty concept as an affirmative, which they then set up for ways to philosophically reference. For Satyr, in his infinite confusion, the concept of the noumenal is a false place of negation. It simply doesn’t exist, so there is no opposite of the noumenal. If one believes in a ‘God’, they are not subconsciously trying to imagine a noumenal world or reality because there can be no such thing in the first place.
Kant did the same thing, but professionally and with all kinds of flashy technical jargon. You want the scoop on the noumenal, google ‘Sartre on the noumenal’. Frenchy will give you a hand.
I think I do, though, and I think this can be perfectly explained by the natural sciences. No philosophy needed. I’m not about to get stuck on questions like Nagel’s ‘what is it like to be a bat’ or definitions for what ‘qualia’ are. These are linguistic problems, not philosophical problems.
Eliminative materialism is as far as this subject can go, and I’ll allow a little parallelism here if philosophers insist that mental states are not reducible to brain states. Fine. But whatever we do, only human behavior is observable, not what is ‘in the mind’. You can speculate about what Wittgenstein’s beetle in the box looks like all day, but you can never see it, so why bother?
And if you further insist that the mind is something more than the body, you can do that, but it must be immanent and intimately connected to extension (material). There are no mental substances whizzing around space. They develop out of the same substance in relation to a body of some kind, somewhere, somehow.
Advises everyone not to talk to commoners.
Talks to Zoot.
Here is a question for the tireless questioner of everything: is there a commoner more common than Zoot?
What is his topic but a banal idealism presented as radical realism? So why not poke fun at it and his seriousness?
Goals must always be aligned with means. Advising people to isolate themselves from commoners and restrict themselves to equals is idiotic in the absence of such an option.
He is happy to talk to hallucinations . . .
Probably not. I’m pretty fuckin’ common. People like me happen five times in a hundred years, so I’m far more common than the people who happen four times in a hundred years.