Something Instead of Nothing

Ian Robinson, Philosophy Now magazine

This however is basically what we are “stuck with”. And some are clearly able to just shrug and move on better than others. After all, once you say “it is what it is” regarding Existence itself, how far is that from saying “it is what it is” to everything else?

In other words, how does one configure the answer to the biggest question of all into the answers to all the other questions? The “brute facticity” of existence may well be the default explanation. But don’t expect some of us not to be exasperated about it.

But it is the seeming futility of it all that keeps the exasperation churning.

A world of words. And it wouldn’t surprise me at all if turns out to be a world of words all the way down. Unless, along the way, we actually do bump into God.

But what are the odds that He turns out to be yours?

As hypo and hyper reality extend, to enclose the sensible, the what is=what is may transform that problem.

At that point the synthetic problem of changing what is to what should be, may no longer serve as a measurable contradiction between opposites, simulated as such, and/or familiar to similar.

Given the possibility that nature will up end human intentionality, the equation of the above quote may itself loose relevance.

Then interpretation itself may deemphasize personhood~identify by the variance between situation and context, by ever more largely spaced intervals.

If not, then life itself will cease to operate except by way of exclusive sophistry and propaganda.

AI will then would be neutralized as of consisting of untrusted intent, and a newer and more profound dark ages will commence.

Therefore, this evolutionary trait, of squeezing reality between hyper and hyporeality must be compensated by other means, albeit synthetic.
In this day and age, deceptive misrepresentation can only be supported within and without limited
spatial-temporal descriptipn.

AI needs to compensate by reversely engineered processes, to change its contradictory functions, to assimulate,
reductive programs.

That is the problem with Trumpism, its REDUCTIVE without a limit or a compensatory program.

It does not recognise it’s logical antithesis and tries to de- differentiate into a repressive ambiguity, leaving political dynamics in tact, hoping that the necessary reactions can be later manipulated.

We are heading incredibly toward larger perimeters of conflict.

It is then the larger concern of existential leaps, that socially consciousness will have to be concerned with.

Arminius, if he was still around would need to look at the burst of bubbles.

ref: Peter Sloterdijk

True Iambiguous, words yes but not merely words but signs of consciously tied in connection to the primal ideas manifested by and through words, which will be re-ceaged artificially, so that human beings will not go instinct as human beings by the demise of their conscious awareness of their existence as human beings. Otherwise the regression/reduction will not be capable to evoke an epoche, and all will be lost, even the beginning where the word began.

Quite the contrary. I have come upon very few people who even understand my predicament – let alone embody it.

Instead, the preponderance of human beings seem content not to dwell on these things – these relationships – at all. Or, when they do, they leave it up to God or to one or another religious/secular denomination to show them the way. And on both sides of the abyss.

Most people have either been indoctrinated by others or have created their own psychologically soothing narrative. An objectivist frame of mind allowing them to make that crucial distinction between true and false, right and wrong, good and bad.

And then saved or damned.

Some will simply go farther [on threads like this one] and convince themelves that even with regard to the really big questions – something instead of nothing, autonomy instead of determinism – they have thought through to the most likely explanations.

And I applaud them for being among those very few who will at least make an attempt at understanding these things beyond the lowest common demoninator mentality of the vast majority of those around us.

I just can’t share their level of enthusiasm for having dug down the farthest, for having come up with answers they are actually able to convince themselves are the most reasonable of all.

In fact, any number of existentialists and nihilists seem to convey that self-same attachment to a dichotomy that seeks to convey thoughts and feelings and behaviors as either authentic or inauthentic.

As though something like this can actually be known!

Or can it actually be known?

I always come back to that gap between “I” and “all there is”. This is basically the source for my own grim assessment. I don’t know, I won’t know, I can’t know…what exactly?

And for reasons that are, in turn, beyond my capacity to understand, this has become important for me in a way that is not at all important to most others. It’s just all embedded like everything else in “what is”.

Everyones particular God no doubt provides them with emotional comfort but not sharing their belief is not the same as falsifying it however
Everyone is free to seek what ever gives them the most philosophical / psychological satisfaction but no one really knows what the answer is

They all think that their world view is right otherwise they would not be holding it in the first place
But it is logically impossible for everyone to be right where there are fundamentally opposing views

Everyone can very easily convince themselves that they are more reasonable than anyone else even where certainty cannot be demonstrated
This is why I avoid certainty myself in such matters as there is always the possibility that I could actually be wrong [ but without knowing it ]

Also absolute certainty regarding metaphysical / unfalsifiable questions is intellectually very dogmatic
I have zero desire to seek out definitive answers when I have no idea how definitive they actually are

I couldn’t agree more. But, in turn, their own claims about their own beliefs are not the same thing as verifying it.

For example, on another thread someone posted this:

Now, how on earth would I go about falsifying it? On the other hand, and far more crucially from my point of view, how does this poster go about verifying it?

Look, it would seem that “for all practical purposes” the bottom line has to be this: the extent to which we are in fact able to demonstrate that what we do believe [about God or existence or anything else] is something that we can demonstrate.

Sure, we can argue endlessly over the validity of the demonstration being made, but it is something either able to go beyond what we simply believe “in our head” or or it is not.

It’s just that with God, demonstrating what we believe is true could not possibly involve higher stakes. Why? Because with God we have that crucial transcending font on this side of the grave to differentiate right from wrong; and, on the other side, that crucial transcending font for establishing both immortality and salvation.

Maybe. Maybe not. In a wholly determined universe, this psychological “freedom” is somehow made compatible with metaphysical determinism. Unlike mindless matter, we choose our behaviors. But like mindless matter the choices that we make are ever only in sync with whatever brought into existence existence itself.

Here though I make the distinction between a world view derived from “I” as an existential contraption, and “I” derived from the optimal or the only rational understanding of human interactions.

“I” in the is/ought world is endlessly confronting conflicting goods out in a particular world where [ultimately] what counts is who has the political power to enforce a particular set of behaviors.

In what I presume to be a No God world.

Me too. I just have no way in which to demonstrate that even this is that which all rational and virtuous men and women are obligated to share.

Instead, my “I” here remains as fractured and fragmented as ever. But how to explain this to someone able to convince themselves that their own “I” is anything but. They have the decided advantage of sustaining a psychological sense of being the “real me” able to properly discern “the right thing to do”.

So, the extent to which they begin to think like me is the extent to which they become more and more fractured and fragmented themselves. And all I can do is make the attempt to reconfigure my own sense of identity such that I might actually become less and less fractured and fragmented in turn.

I’m basically in this boat myself. Only I wouldn’t argue that I have zero desire to get out of it. All I can do is to remind myself that I am no less an existential contraption. I have no way in which to grasp with any degree of certainty how new experiences, new relationships and access to new information and knowledge, might reconfigure “I” yet again.

The “definitive answers” either are or are not out there. It’s the not knowing which gnaws on me the most. And the not knowing whether I am even able to not not know.

Instead, I can only point out that in the interim I am able to sink down into distractions – music, film, food, imagination – that bring me considerable pleasure, satisfaction and fulfillment.

The mere use of the word 'they-, who , implies those, who can not understand Your predicament. This feels as. something important here, that we might have overlooked , and may help to clarify .

The other day I noted am abstraction, and it resembles the multitude of ‘others’ who inhabit, will inhabit, and did inhabit this universe.

Then thought about all the different worlds who are concurrently residing , against a backdrop of consciousness, and finally , about one solitary man, such that is trying to fathom a singular idea.

And then somehow pulled myself out of this meta meditation. since it leads to the absurd contradiction that Descartes must have felt himself to be, thinking and existing, a move of desperation , which can lead only to an evil genius, creating today’s simulated world.

Simulation is on its way big time, silently , like a thief in the night coming through the back door, we completely taken by surprise.

That the whole of what we seem I’m/sub conscious consists of the formal elements we talked about earlier, is but the intellectual contraption which fascinates us, and gaining substance, as our future is slowly unflowong as the manifestation of our past.

This simulation is a necessary substantial requirement that nature fills in to compensate those of us, who do not have an nominal idea of our, - Your, mine, and some others who do.

We are fragmented individually , because we can not communicate our Being with the existence of others.

But this may be a misnomer, because we do have a very unique language here, that of philosophical discourse, and we are able to use this language, and this language , as rarefied as it is, is becoming more and more, toward subliminal understanding, creates a divide with those vastly more numerous who so not care to understand, they experience the world in a way that doesent show any interest or concern with it, they simply exist as acting out behaviorally.

I believe I get a lot of brotherhood in the company of the former, regardless of the present state of our mind, and in my mind, and theirs, thought through consciousness unifies temporal differences and connects former and informal elements.

Their difference caused the differentially to evolve and make conscious and objective this language , so that we can communicate in this different language.

By the way we think about our fragmentation, we are actually using the language of conscious participation in filling the somethingness with nothing while using that nothing to fill something tremendous. The formal informal and the informal formal integrate the vast abyss to become our springboard , from which we can leap into faith.

It must work, because it has worked , and even if it has lost credibility for moat people, some holdouts appreciate this as nature’s absolute guarantee for the continuum ad infinity that life, particularly human life consists of.

This is a striking example of how the dilemma is formulated:-------------------

always come back to that gap between “I” and “all there is”. ------------------------------------

The gap in other words is a cut off part, a disassociated conscious manifestation that results in the cross between two logical systems. Deduction/reduction and induction.
The assumption of a unity and wholeness underlies all thinking, for we can cut out Platonisn as a modus operans, try not to think in a manner of modeling, hence becoming a sub conscious part of our psyche, but the sub conscious works even when we are not aware of it.

The inductive method works backward , it particularises factual material using the most recently acquired knowledge, and the further it descends in memory, the less substantially material is codified in terms of bounded signification, the gaps increasing more as we get to the least substantial.

The language if the ancients signified thoughts much more literally, the doubtful ideas negated logic into flat denial, contradicting everything not belonging in the primary idea, that absolutely including it’s self and excluding everything else.

So for instance, a 'table" was a table, and not an early symbol to manifest the top surface of a written statement, or a list of ‘tabled’ signs.

Now thinking backward, we assume what the ancients may have included in these and other type of ideas, and lets see how this went down.

I don’t know if this study into Ancient Greek etymology is something to concern with within the context of this forum, and although I am far from being a classical scholar, but it is interesting to note that Nietzsche was primarily concerned and involved in this.

And coincidentally, his sense of nothingness is directly involved with the nothingness in nihilization.

What goes down in years of study of etymology, leads us philosophetdcto assume the many many connections necessary to differentiate multitude of meanings, into the capitulated idea of the relevance of nihilism into 20th century existentialism.

The modern existentialist made such assumptions, on bases of long and involved studies into the theory of meaning, most formidable of Greek and Roman derivatives.

While we can disclaim the formal/informal , various interpretations of the classics, they do firm a dependence of the modern on the classic. We may be able to consciously cut off the deivetive from the derived, but our minds work on lower conscious levels.

Forgive the above written very late at night without glasses lost for the moment , will edit later, time permitting, leaving tonight on a trip.

Paul P. Mealing in Philosophy Now magazine

This is something I come back to time and again. How does one wrap their mind around the existence of a universe in which there are no conscious entities able to be aware of this existence? To note it, to discuss it, to debate it?

This would appear to be the “brute facticity of existence” on a mind-boggling scale. But only because I and others are around to note it.

Back [always] to the part that revolves less around how mindful matter came into existence and more around why.

And this will inevitably bring some around to God. The universe only appears to be a freak accident [absurd] to those unable to grasp it from an omniscient [ontological/teleological] point of view. And what else but God is applicable here. In other words, the “Goldilocks Effect” is just another manifestation of God.

Similarly…

So, are you and I to be explained by that “freak accident” of nature? All the variables falling [almost miraculously] into place in order that “complex life” could even exist at all? But here all we have are the various leaps that both religious and non-religious folks take to conclusions ever bursting at the seams with those gnawing “unknown unknowns”.

Always we come back here to matter evolving into minds evolving into matter able to bring these things to our attention in the first place.

It is what it is. Or it is only as it appears to be to minds never really able to grasp it any other way.

The absurd universe.

Absurd or contradictory, , my choice is the latter. The absurd is so close to ridiculous, yet contradiction is merely negation. It sounds more palatable.

And if solving. contradiction doesent work, then transform it into absurdity
Which comes through beat in very hidden and absurd comic effect, to avoid real embarrassments, like Trump is prevy to and dealing with it oh so very unsuccessfully.

Again, I can only note that while this may well be a brilliant insight into whatever it is that you are trying to convey, my own understanding of it is such that in no real substantive way am I able to construe a connection between it and the points that I raised above.

This part in particular:

[b]…the preponderance of human beings seem content not to dwell on these things – these relationships – at all. Or, when they do, they leave it up to God or to one or another religious/secular denomination to show them the way. And on both sides of the abyss.

Most people have either been indoctrinated by others or have created their own psychologically soothing narrative. An objectivist frame of mind allowing them to make that crucial distinction between true and false, right and wrong, good and bad.

And then saved or damned.[/b]

All I ask of folks, however, is that when we bring this intellectual contraption down to earth, we entangle it in a particular context which most of us are likely to be familiar with.

A context such that 1] given our own particular something and 2] assuming some measure of autonomy, we interact, precipitating particular behaviors that come into conflict.

What then is the limit [if any] of rational thought and logic?

keeping vagueness in the narrative by closure of both ends. ( through tying up the gap between contradiction-nihilism) and absurdity, especially through hidden humor-Dark Victory.

In very general terms.

context such that 1] given our own particular something and 2] assuming some measure of autonomy, we interact, precipitating particular behaviors that come into conflict.

What then is the limit [if any] of rational thought and logic?
[/quote]

some measure of autonomy

–through some, not all measures of autonomy, there is a fine line or a grey area wherewith that limit is reached.
How? I guess by trial and error a line can be drawn, by a satisfactory consensus, at least for the time being

being such consensus having no absolute basis, more often than not, such determination can be gleaned appearing as more phased in autonomically, or determined and with diminished singular effectivity.

People who may afford a singular determination, may like individuals who can overcome the abyss, at least tangentially, are usually privileged in the effort, nut are usually stymied to convince too many others to participate.

However then newer gaps and fissures develop, appearing new conteadictions at times turning absurd, and hence taxing the instinct for humor.

The other hand, sans humor, the situation can get out of hand.

I dont know how true it is to say that mostly everyone will have been indoctrinated by others or have created their own psychologically soothing narrative
Some try to understand the human condition as openly as possible with as free a mind as possible with no ulterior motive other than to find the actual truth
But a psychologically soothing narrative doesnt mean it is necessarily false. I would only reject something lacking in logic or reason not emotional satisfaction
No matter how nihilistic the answer might be if it is perceived to be the truth there should be some degree of emotional satisfaction at having had it discovered

The absurd does appear to be more a subjunctive reaction. On the other hand, a first person subjunctive frame of mind revolves around moods and moods are always particularly problematic. The universe seems absurd to some because there does not appear to be a way in which to capture it either rationally or viscerally. There are simply too many aspects of existence that are mind-boggling.

There it is…but then what? To me It seems equally absurd to exist and to not exist. Then for those of us more comfortable with the word “absurd”, it’s just a matter of how far removed things seeming absurd are from things seeming ridiculous.

Sure, “contradictory” can work too. But, to me, this denotes a frame of mind in which existence is either one thing or another. And that connotes the sort of precision that seems beyond the reach of “mere mortals”.

Though no less an “existential contraption” when we go out this far on the metaphysical limb.

Yes, some do. And I tried to address that here:

[b]Identity is ever constructed, deconstructed and reconstructed over the years by hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of variables—some of which we had/have no choice/control regarding. We really are “thrown” into a fortuitous smorgasbord of demographic factors at birth and then molded and manipulated as children into whatever configuration of “reality” suits the cultural [and political] institutions of our time.

On the other hand:

In my view, one crucial difference between people is the extent to which they become more or less self-conscious of this. Why? Because, obviously, to the extent that they do, they can attempt to deconstruct the past and then reconstruct the future into one of their own more autonomous making.

But then what does this really mean? That is the question that has always fascinated me the most. Once I become cognizant of how profoundly problematic my “self” is, what can “I” do about it? And what are the philosophical implications of acknolwedging that identity is, by and large, an existential contraption that is always subject to change without notice? What can we “anchor” our identity to so as to make this prefabricated…fabricated…refabricated world seem less vertiginous? And, thus, more certain.[/b]

But we will still need a context in which to explore the extent to which any individual narrative is as a result of indoctrination or as a result of acknowledging the indoctrination and then moving on to one’s own more “thought out” frame of mind. Utilizing both the tools of philosophy and [where applicable] science.

And then the part that revolves around objectivism. The belief that however one has derived his or her own moral and political agenda, it is deemed to be that which all rational and virtuous men and women are obligated to share.

I agree. But that only takes us back to the extent to which logic and reason can be properly distinguished from emotional satisfaction. In other words, what may well be the limits of logic and reason relating to both the is/ought world and to questions as big as the ones being explored on this thread.

My point is only to suggest what appears [existentially] to be clear connection between objectivism and a soothing psychological font for “I”.

Sure, if the nihilist is convinced that “here and now” her argument reflects the most reasonable set of assumptions about the “human condition”, a sense of satisfaction can be had. But this nihilist sees that as just another “existential contraption”.

And there is still plenty of room for dissatisfaction:

1] the hole on this side of the grave
2] oblivion on the other side of it

Sure, “contradictory” can work too. But, to me, this denotes a frame of mind in which existence is either one thing or another. And that connotes the sort of precision that seems beyond the reach of “mere mortals”.

That is really the fine point encapsulating the theme here. Being or Nothingness. And the tension between Husserl and Descarts here manifests. Sartre acutely picked it up in his Being AND Nothingness.

The sustaining (bracketing) of the question as to ,which is which , is existence the nothingness or is Being? - if existence proceeds the essential, it may have preceded it, but in as , defined as the one prceeding? A nothing, or a some thing. As existence as a dream manufactured by an evil genius?

Then doubt enters in as to the primary mode of appreception,

Or maybe both are needed (To eliminate doubt, for the sake of certainty?)

But then the Kantian synthetic bursts forth, not as an existent, but a possible mode of eliminating doubt.

If so, a new logic is assumed to subsist, (Dennett)as a contingent but necessary transcendence.

Maybe absurdity has more then an emotional connotation to it, maybe the subjunctive aspects are washed, incrementally, and intentionally at times, to overcome by an act of will the looming gaps.

Letting go, and declaring all to be prevy to nature’s fallacy, is , maybe just a moment’s fancy, passing like bad weather.

ref:

The Logic of Appearance: Dennett, Phenomenology and Psychoanalysis

Iambiguous- this may be an intellectual contraption big time, but absolutely necessary to construct an evolving meaning out of present life-time as existence , rather then a mere reconstruction from previously staged appearance.

Revivals always tend to have short duration.

How does such transcendence work?
The transfer content change relationships to the extent that the gaps’ distance change.

Interpenetribility or through mutual permeability is a probable description of the effect.