Ramification in Causality is meaningless lie of the human

The group is not sure it understands this. What does concept first mean? If we seriously ask that, are we not already philosophizing? What does it mean for Plato (the first grand self-conscious philosopher and synthesizer of what had recently come to be called philosophizing) to philosophize? People are using a word, e.g., truth, and one notices it and inquiries into it. This is analogous to walking, and noticing one walks, and then considering the features of walking. One notices various things, and most of all, that something is being generally called walking. It is found here, and then there, and again—a pattern! The concept is the awakening awareness of what is already happening (or, what seems to have already been happening through the lense of the conception of the concept). Yet, the pattern of the pattern is the only perfect pattern. Its coming to be noticed is the mystery of raising the eyes which one has long been used to calling philosophy.


The group means, that demonstration is a thing at all. In other words, presumably, squirrels have no manner of discussing it. Of saying, it is demonstrated, ergo, bow down to reason. It is only possible to quibble about what counts as demonstration because the concept is in some way available and forcible to the human being. Perhaps it is a wrong force, a useless force, a harmful instinct.

This is not obviously a matter of necessity or human freedom. The question of necessity is derivative on what comes forward by way of mythological discussion possibilities, such as the concept of cause.


Because of the issue in Dostoevsky’s Devils. The freedom to interpret (the either / or) comes up against the stone, the man-god is not wholly sublime. Ergo, not wholly superior to the terrible and unpleasant forces which show him how little he is worth.

Paraphrase the point. The group doesn’t see what you want to say in the statement “…seemingly inherent gap…” if you don’t mean bounded rationality.

The group regards this as a Kaspar Hauser frame of mind. In other words, such a great fixation on the idea of omniscience an inability to see that knowledge meant nothing like that for philosophers. What they mean was simple knowing, e.g., such as how to pour a glass of water. Which is perfect knowledge of pouring a glass of water which requires nothing more.


Not in the least. The group regards this as an issue of presuppositions about what is in question. Especially in the form of a near-unconscious gross slander on philosophy, which misses its content and meaning entirely.


This part of the group is not largely concerned with causation. Rather, with being.


Since the group can’t discuss anything without clarifying what we are speaking about so we know what we are talking about as a means to getting at the subject matter itself of those things. Otherwise the discussion is whu-whu, blah blah, and dog’s barking. I.e., it is sheer noise.

It is really amazingly sad that the group needs to be insesently fought in order to get it to philosophize rather than blather meaninglessly.

Note, this is added on, since the group is not sure what it has left unanswered. And so it apologizes for any oversight.


The conception of the fact was hardly known in Locke’s time. A very few individuals in the Royal Society started that. In the polemic between Hobbes and Boyle it began. Now it is everywhere taken for granted. The older meaning of fact was the legal meaning, as in “accessory after the fact’, it meant voluntary act. The carry over has to do with voluntary testing, and from that thinking of all human experience as testing things. We move with the train of world history in this respect, it is part of the reaction norm’s environment when thought evolutionarily.


The group thinks you are fixated on the conception of necessity and freedom.

The group regards this as mythical pitter-patter. The group’s kneeling to worship its notion that the human being is “non-special” comes out in Freud, when he says: the masochist whips himself, and thereby remains the master. The thoughtless part of the group is whipping itself.


Well, for instance, these days, in a political connection, one often hears the claim “you can have your own opinions, not your own facts”. This phrase is confused, and therefore it confuses discussion. If one is unable to say what a fact is, and how it differs from an opinion, one is bound to have trouble. Is it not an “ethical quagmire”? One must determine the concept.

Guide, I’m going to follow you a bit, since you called me a moron.

Let’s understand the implications of your op.

Everything that came before us is exactly the same “everything” (which is a tricky equivocation) therefor, to establish causality to anything must include everything, and thus can’t exist.

I’ll give you a very simple refutation, in your analysis, there can never be singularities, such as you or I , yet, in the present we apprehend an infinite number of singularities. How then can a singularity exist without causation? I don’t necessarily mean intelligent causation, simply something discerned from your amorphous all theory, you, proves that there are streaming points of singularity, which certainly makes the all not amorphous whatsoever.

The mere act of making your post, agrees that not all causes have the same effect, because you believe in yourself and other people.

So really, this thread is a scam.

Fact is consensus of opinion :laughing:


Does the concept of causality refer to all things? In other words, are all things the same insofar as causality is concerned? It seems to me this “equivocation” as the group polemically put it, is part of the concept of causality. Or, how might the group avoid that? The group acts as though it were part of the group’s dishonest presentation (and, presumably, its natural and inborn practice).


If there are an “infinite number” of something, that implies a universal. One can’t speak of singularities except as a universal conception. Aristotle says here, the thing one points at can never be the subject of a science. In this sense, causality, so far as it is a scientific concept, doesn’t apply.

The group says, what is a “singularity”? A member of the group sees, right now, before them, a keyboard. They have no ostensive access to a “singularity”. And never in their life did they see one. There are many keyboards, the word signals them, one can draw infinite numbers of them, in diverse styles. One thinks of them, remembers them. They are things in the sense of “all things”. All things, if the group allows, might also include the things that now might come to be, but aren’t, unborn and unconceived children or keyboards for instance. Even things not yet thought of as patterns.

What is the singularity? There is pointing, one points, “this one”, and calls it singular, but it is derivative on the keyboard. Which is part of, I emphasize, a pattern or universal.

What is the singularity? There is a theory of dispersion of mass, heterogeneous stuff in unique patterns. That exists only in the mind of physicists. Since it is an ideal like parallel lines.


So says the religious part of the group, that kneels to its abstract ideal of the “singular”. Yet, the thinking part of the group says, surely not.

So says the group.

The group says: I ten people who know they are lying claim the sun is green, it is a fact? Or, do we need more than ten? And can they lie, or must they believe what they are saying?

Are you trying to establish fact about fact? Only a joker would lie about his opinion and that’s a fact :wink:

My opinion about fact is Climate Change is fact because of the consensus of opinion, but wrong.

In law, I’m pretty sure that fact is up to the jury to decide (consensus of opinion). Maybe Carleas can validate that.

This is typical:

I ask you to embed that which you construe to be the “conceptual” meaning of “truth” into that which unfolds when [existentially] different individuals come to conflicted understandings regarding what the truth is with respect to moral and political conflagrations out in the world that we live in. Instead, you take us straight back up into the scholastic clouds.

Same here:

My point doesn’t revolve around what squirrels tell each other. It revolves around what we human beings tell each when we make that crucial distinction between hunters discussing the best way to kill animals and all the rest of us discussing whether the hunting and the killing of animals is a good thing or a bad thing.

And then the extent to which the causual chain is either the same or different when these distinct conversations unfold.

Instead, we get this…

[b]Note to others:

You tell me: How are his points here connected to mine? How respectfully should I take his points as sophisticated arguments?[/b]

Seriously, are his points here actually worth pursuing? Or should I perhaps just cross him off the list as but one more “serious philosopher” – pedant? – hopelessly out of sync with the manner in which I probe such things as morality and causality in human interactions.

Or, sure, is the thread just a “scam”? An exercise in irony? A way to expose just how shallow the “technical” arguments of the serious philosophers can be out in “the real world”?

Pursue them if it’s fun to pursue them. “Worth” implies some goal you’re working towards and I couldn’t ascertain “worth” before knowing what your goal is.

We don’t know what a fact is, so all we can do is investigate. Such a presupposition, directive of the seeking, would exclude the possiblity of genuine investigation. One could say, we seek the truth about the fact, though, there too, we make a difficulty. Since we don’t know what truth is. Ergo, we enter the hermeneutic circle with as much openness as possible only guided by the subject matter of the fact itself.

So if someone is a “joker” then we can dismiss his claim about facts? In other words, the modern objection and universal cheep escape clause: “ad hominem” must be wholly set aside. How do we, however, know when we have a “joker” on our hands?

Here there is a distinction to be made between expert opinion of scientists, and Scientific facts. The latter relies on the accuracy of quantifiable demonstration. Which, in the case of a one-time future event, can only be given ,at best, probabilistically. Strictly speaking, no scientific fact can be given here concerning future happening.

Fact is opposed to law there. I.e., interpretation or construal of the law. Accessory after the fact means: after the act. Act means a voluntary, ergo, a culpable deed.

What is fact? One thing or many?

The group considers this answer unworthy. The group finds the group answering in empty rhetoric, unworthy of answer. This does not impress the group as an account of what was said, or what is happening in any serious sense.

If the group does not know that words mean something, it is at too low a level to discourse. The group is not paid to swaddle babies, or struggle without being paid with elements of the group who prefer idiocy to intelligence.

The group considers the depreciatory use of the word scholastic as a form of thoughtlessness. It indicates something wholly unknown is being discussed by the group, on the basis of a freighted reception of dumb stupidity derived from authority, and therefore something peculiarly unassailable and unavailable to intelligence and group discussion.


Can the group state the distinction being raised here? The group does not find this obvious. Squirrels make noises, humans make noises. The noise seems to do something. How does one show the difference?

My goal [these days] is ever and always the same:

When someone notes things like…

Because of the issue in Dostoevsky’s Devils. The freedom to interpret (the either / or) comes up against the stone, the man-god is not wholly sublime. Ergo, not wholly superior to the terrible and unpleasant forces which show him how little he is worth.

…all I am basically interested in is the extent to which this point reflects some measure of human autonomy. And, if it does, what are the existential implications germane to that which is of most interest to me: how ought one to live in a world bursting at the seams with conflicting goods?

Now, if “human freedom” here is essentially a self-delusion rooted in a mind rooted in a brain rooted in laws immutably applicable to all matter, then nothing that any of us post here was ever going to be anything other than that which it could only ever have been: what in fact it is. Period.

Then we go from there to whatever brought into existence the existence of existence itself.

But [admittedly] part of my psychology [rooted in dasein] has predisposed [driven] me to pursue polemics. And part of this is “fun” in the sense that deconstructing objectivists is “entertainment” for me.

Some of these folks have spent literally years constructing these complex and convoluted “intellectual contraptions”. Things like “value ontology”. Then they bump into me and I start in on tinkering with them. Maybe even take them apart.

And we all know the manner in which some of them react to that.

Then to me.

Why do I do this?

Well, there’s this:

He was like a man who wanted to change all; and could not; so burned with his impotence; and had only me, an infinitely small microcosm to convert or detest. John Fowles

And [no doubt] there’s the part revolving around the fact that I no longer have access myself to the “psychology of objectivism”. I am no longer able to sustain the sort of “comfort and consolation” embedded in that frame of mind convinced it is in touch with the “real me” in sync with “the right thing to do”.

So – consciously? subconsciously? unconsciously? – I have come to truly envy those who still do. And there’s a part of me that goes after this.

But that’s just the sort of speculation built into “I” here as an existential contraption. I can never really know for certain what makes “me” tick here. There are far too many pieces [going all the way back to my birth] hopelessly entangled in far too many contexts that are surely beyond either my complete understanding or my control.

What I do however is to suggest that this sort of thing – the fractured and fragmented “I” – is applicable to all of us. Some are just more aware of it than others.

Unless of course I’m wrong. But how [using the tools of philosophy] would I or others go about establishing that?

…………………………………………

On the other hand, some of the stuff that folks like Guide write here borders on gibberish to me. It’s so fucking unintelligible at times I’m thinking that maybe he/she really is just putting me on. Just yanking my chain.

So, sure, the joke may well be on me.

The Joker is essential in a monarchy and tasked with reminding the king of his mortality lest he become too full of himself. The king wanted a ring that would restrain him in prosperity and support him in adversity, so the jeweler inscribed “It shall pass”. :slight_smile:

It’s fun to discover how one ought to live because invariably it’s discovered that one ought to live in a way that is fun, otherwise what is the purpose of living? “Fun” is just a placeholder for the purposeless.

Laws? That’s an objective thing, right? Laws require an authority to enforce, but what happens in nature just happens and if it happens regularly, we presuppose they are laws. If the universe is inherently random and we rewind it to the beginning, it would almost certainly unfold in some other way. It’s the lack of purpose that gives the universe purpose. If everything had a purpose; a destiny; a determination, then what would the purpose be for having the show? It would be a fatuous waste of energy and much easier to have had nothing.

But is that really fun or vanity? Or is vanity fun? Is playing the game fun or is winning fun because that’s part of a larger game?

Yes it’s never fun to be wrong.

If you truly feel there is no “right thing to do”, then what you do cannot be predicated on what is “right”. You just do what you do because that is what you do. Self reflection on the matter is taking an engineering view of the universe that everything must have a purpose.

At least you can articulate the problem!

I don’t understand his talking in the 3rd person, but I suppose that is just what Guide does.

Fact is whatever you want it to be because fact is the consensus of your opinion. You are the source of authority for all information that you buy.

What is genuine investigation? What is genuine anything?

How the heck did you learn a word such as hermeneutic? lol

The truth about the truth is there is no truth and that’s a fact! :wink:

Is there a way to differentiate whether the joker lies or speaks truth?

This reminds me of those logic problems from school that this man is a lair and this man tells the truth, so what question would you ask to determine which is which? But the joker is neither wholly a liar nor speaker of truth.

Repeatable demonstration doesn’t guarantee anything. If you flip a coin 1,000,000 times and always get heads, that doesn’t mean you won’t get tails the next time. The authority ultimately relies upon you… are you going to believe the demonstration or not?

No, what I meant was the jury would decide things that are not a matter of law, such as whether certain evidence is fact. If a cop doesn’t use his radar to gauge your speed, but paces your car with his car instead, is that valid evidence of a crime? Someone has to decide if the evidence is fact or opinion.

To iambiguous:

Regarding the quote about Dostoyevski. I have an answer for you, by way of some lines from a poem from a movie I really liked. “Do not go silently into the night!”

If these cruel forces exist, and are bigger than you, fight them to the death. Make some noise. Meekness is a self evident dead end.

Investigation guided by the subject matter itself rather than a preconceived aim.

The group says this is unworthy of answer, due to being too flippant and lacking in substance.

The group says, that is a matter one might investigate. In the group’s experience, often this is possible. One can do it with respect to one’s own views. At first, would the issue be the question of whether the truth is spoken,where truth is said in contradistinction to a interested deception or lie?

The group says this is true, but decidedly off piste. The issue the group raises is the distinction between reliable repeatability and expert commentary without reliable repeatability. Is the group claiming to reject certain findings on the basis of doubts about the regularity of nature and thereby, of inductive reliance?

Whether the actions alleged truly took place is a question about the opinion (of the jurors) concerning the truthfulness or falsity of the testimony. The deeds themselves are not either fact or opinion. They are true or false.

Since they are one time events they can not be tested, and are never facts in the sense of scientific facts: of what is reliable and repeatable concerning what happens when given conditions or circumstances are present.

The older and the recent scientific meaning of fact (action), and fact (demonstrable reliability) are blurred in our time.

Sadly there is no consensus on THIS opinion. Some believe this, some do not.

This is a wrong attribution. That was a citation of another group member. Already somewhat discussed above. Stemming from the first page of this thread.

Well, what is the subject matter itself? That’s subject-ive, no? So what is genuine?

I am unworthy :bow-blue: Authority? Who are you to say there is no substance? :wink:

This is serious business here! No flippancy lest ye be making thine appointment with the gallows on the morrow! :royalty-king:

There is no truth because there is no abstract existence for it to exist. Truth is a concept that exists as a property of another concept. Truth is something conveyed and discerned (subject / object).

It is raining.

I look outside and indeed it is raining, so the statement is true.

It is raining.

I look outside and it is not raining, so the statement carries no truth.

The statement is the same in both cases but only carries truth relative to discernment. It’s like the emission and reception of a photon being the same event and likewise the emission of truth and reception of truth is the same event. There is no abstract truth just like there is no abstract photon.

Truth with respect to one’s own views is not necessarily truth.

There is no objective distinction. Repeatability carries no more weight than expert commentary. In science, no matter how well substantiated your theory is, it will always be a theory. You could measure the speed of light 1000 times and all you can say is “I measured light 1000 times and got c each time.” You can’t say the speed of light is always and forever c. So it doesn’t matter if you repeat the experiment a million times or rely on expert commentary because no objective claim can ever be made.

The only regularity is change. If you assert regularity as objective and eternal, then it’s abstract and not relational and therefore not included in our universe. But if regularity is a part of this universe, then it’s relational and codependent and therefore in constant state of flux or change (a regularity is itself part of a larger regularity and therefore becomes irregular).

You’re still assuming that repeatability lends credibility for the substantiation of scientific fact as superior to a consensus of opinion. Repeatability is still your opinion that repeatability will continue to be repeatable and a cacophony of fuddy-duddies in accord that such regularity exists is no different from a jury or any other consensus of opinion on any other matter; fact is merely consensus of opinion.

I think it’s a terrible mistake and profound malpractice to ardently regard scientific fact as truth or law which could only rely upon authority to enforce because it reduces science to religion minus the god. The first law of science is: there are no laws! There are only observed regularities that may stop being regular at any moment and we have no reason to believe otherwise.

The group learns, the group is clearly not concerned about attributions, but with questioning.