Alethempeiria (truth-experience) is the last game in town

Philosophy Forums Philosophy
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Why did it fail?

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Now I feel like we switched to meaning as in definition. Sure I define a rock, and define the external world, and define time, and define lifelessness. But I don’t think I assign MEANING to them right now (like in: what’s the meaning of life?).

I’m a nondualist, my brain/mind stopped seeing seperate objects, and started to see the world as it really is, without fundamental separations. I suppose one of my mental functions stopped working, but I’m not sure if we are born with this function or learn it.

If we are talking about thoughts and meanings, yes technically they all must exist somewhere imo, at least in someone’s head. Otherwise we would be affected by things that don’t exist.

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A word mediates between noumenon and phenomenon.

A word must refer to an independently perceptible presence
otherwise it refer to nothing but abstractions in brains.

Any word can be used to refer to the same phenomenon, because it determines the definition.

Meaning refers to how and the degree to which phenomena interact, inter-relate
 creating matrices of meaning - mental maps.

All errors warp the map
and determine the mind’s judgements and choices - fate.

The degree of accuracy determines the advantage over other judgements and choices.

Natural selection from genes to memes.

Sheltering may adjust the consequences.

Sheltering propagates errors.

Natural selection becomes social selection.

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Whatever may be the—explicit or implicit—meaning of your life (not necessarily objective meaning, of course), you automatically—consciously, subconsciously or unconsciously—assign meaning to anything you may define—whether positive, negative, or “neutral” meaning.

In a way, sure. In another, no way.

In what place does a place in your head exist?

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This is what I see as the basis of Heideggerian philosophy, I don’t think it’s true, I think he just wants it to be true. Sometimes we assign meaning to things, sometimes we don’t. I can see the allure of assigning meaning to everything, people want their lives to be meaningful and dramatic, they want it all to matter, even the small things, all of them. They want to feel everything, even if negative, it’s hard to resist this allure. But imo if we want to be truthful, being in the world can mean absolutely nothing by default (probably means absolutely nothing by default), as disappointing as that is.

If you look at a painting of a landscape, is there really an entire landscape hanging on the wall, a landscape you could literally walk in? You can’t walk in it, and yet the painting is also not nothing, it takes up space.

Our minds construct their experiences via the mental function of space, this is what Kantians are focusing on, and they missed that at the same time technically our minds are bound by the objective Newtonian/Einsteinian space. There are two kinds of space. That’s why one shouldn’t throw out the concept of objective reality.

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Well declaring truth is a narrowing down. Is that truth itself? No, of course not.

Yes, valuing is a finction of valuing, which is the basis of this ontology Ive been teaching to no avail.

Stupidly I took the phrase ‘value ontology’ from a friend, it is ontology of valuing. But none of the boors here except Sauwelios and James S Saint has paid given the slightest attention. Not that the have the duty to, of course, but it is just sad how illiterate people engaged with philosophy are. But yeah its to blame on the fact I chose to adopt a name for a logic and a misleading name at that.

No, will in that sense is just response to threats of pain and lures of pleasure.

This gets nowhere near to any core of logic but maybe you could consider biology to begin with.

Ok. There we go.

So, this logic is actually from Nietzsche and Heidegger, and ‘says’ the opposite of what the OP says.

So Nietzsche was powerless?

You seem to have lost your train of thought.

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These are both alsowords.

Abstractions of what?
Isn’t any word an abstraction of something in the brain?
Or do you think objects generate their own names?

Can you rephrase this? Say it more clearly?

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I just saw you refuse to engage in Zeroeth’ criticisms and attack him for not simply understanding that your position is the true one. A position that I also completely disagree with - the idea that something can have value without being valued. I don’t even understand what value then should mean. Unless you mean that valuing itself is implicitly valuable, because it must generate value - then yes. Is this what you meant?

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Yes, Heidegger is meticulous like not other.

RindfleischetikettierungsĂŒberwachungsaufgabenĂŒbertragungsgesetz

but this is a nonsensical word and I can make it longer as I like. For example:

QualitĂ€tsrindfleischetikettierungsĂŒberwachungsaufgabenĂŒbertragungsgesetz.

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Yes I also think that is why he keeps doing that. He has to, basically pointing away from language.

Hm
No I would not go there.
It just makes grammar even more tricky (to me).

I stick to: the redness of a red apple is not itself a Being, even though it belongs to that applies being.

But more pertinently in this thread and with Heidegger (summarizing a point he makes in the books you lent me which are masterful) we could say that truth is the being of the mind.
Where the mind is a being, and its being is truth, and truth is not itself a being.

Ultimately, yes.
A point Johannes also bade when he said that in ancient Germanic languages (I don’t know how he came to this knowledge) a tree was demoted as ‘a growing’ - he said that there originally were no nouns, only verbs.

But still, man apparently always recognizes an “a” issing, not just “issing” in general.

That is significant.
So existere is very different from essere.

In what sense do you then mean “thing”?

Does he? Do they? How so?

But does not simply the fact that Schopenhauer wrote down stuff a feat of being?
Why ‘behind’ anything?

I personally think the concept nothing already refutes its own possibility - or, its truth.
For example, it has no power, so also no power to stop being from coming into being.

But more generally nothingness has to be hypothesized, maybe even Understood or Apprehended - as maybe ultimately the only way one cam make sense of Being Conscious - but all this is still a function of - well, let me pick my word carefully; estimation.

Can you refer me to text on this Gelassenheid? I need to form my own view on this first.
To posit that there are no grounds for positing any being at all is, to me, quite simply an act of being.
Nietzsche says to my understanding: in so far as I must conceive of being, I conceive it thus (Will to Power, etc);
Heidegger asks why there is being. Of course this implies that there is, but - well I must misunderstand Neumanns meaning of being.

This question, why is there being, can be inserted into Descartes: not “I think therefore I am” but “There is a questioning after being, therefore there is being.”
Not that this resolves anything.

That’s also a view Professor X posited in the Eternal Recurrence thread. It’s interesting, surely.

So you actually agree with him on something and something pretty significant at that.

I can work with that view as well, by the way -
But all this is hypothetical - I am only certain of this experience here, which to me is what ‘being’ refers to. That there is a continuum about it suggests an “a” being, within which (this continuum which enables reference, construction, ideation, etc), there can be a hypothesis such as a permanent wave-function.

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But I meant what I said even for when the meaning of our life is consciously subjective. I contend that, even then, everything we’re aware of is automatically assigned a positive, negative, or “neutral” meaning in relation to the meaning our living at least implies.

I agree that, if we’re to avoid solipsism and the like, we must posit an objective reality. The Kantian structure of the mind is then how the objective structure of (say) the brain experiences itself from within—and this means the structures of different minds may vary significantly both through space (different (human) beings at “the same” time) and through time (even “the same” (human) being at different times, especially in case of brain trauma). Though of course I’m saying all this as a mind with a specific structure.

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I wish I knew.

But short answer: because no one cares and/or everyone who might was somehow driven insane.

I wish I had more. I do not.

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Why would you value something that does not already have value to you?

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According to this philosophy, is the meaning our living implies, inherently there (we are automatically given it), or de we choose it? If it’s the former, does everyone’s living imply the same inherent meaning, or different ones?

Is this philosophy talking neither about meaning as in definition, nor about meaning like in: “what’s the meaning of life”? But about a third thing that isn’t meaning: what automatically comes with being born human, into this specific world? What the given features of these are.

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Exactly. (Well, essere is Italian, but sure.) And the essential difference, no pun intended, is between “growing” and “issing”


“Growing” or “sprouting” is pretty much the literal translation of Greek physis, of which the Latin natura is only a loan translation. The ending -sis denotes a process, action, or result, like “-ing” and even more like “-tion” in English. And the root phy-, or rather bhu-, is actually the stem of the b-root of the verb “to be” in many languages (du bist in German, thou beest in Milton’s English, fui, -bo and -bam in Latin, etc. It’s not related to Wesen, “was”, etc., though, which I think is closer in meaning to the s-root of “to be”).

The s-root of “to be” may originally have meant “to sit”, and certainly means something like sitting or standing still: it suggests (so to say) Parmenidean being. (But the -sistere in existere really means a transitive standing, like “to set” as opposed to “to sit”; together with the prefix ex-, I think it was used reflexively, to mean something like “to cause oneself to stand out”; it was originally closer to the b-root and only later got the—secondary—meaning of the s-root.) So we have something like Parmenides versus Heraclitus here.

An entity. Although I later found that the Heidegger-Song, at least, does say Dasein ist Seiendes


Well, that’s that whole thing in Heidegger’s later work about Ereignis. The “event” is that Being shifts so we see a different aspect of it in different ages. For example, in our technological age, he argued, we only see the aspect of Being that fits in the Gestell, the framework (like a cupboard or cabinet) in which we put things for our (future) use (like a standing reserve). He argued that it wasn’t us, but Being itself which thereby turned its back on us. The Nothing is then this “bacne” (acne-ridden back) behind which Being hides its face from us; the entities which are reduced to utensils, provisions, etc. are its pimples and blemishes.

Sure, Schopenhauer wrote down stuff, but that stuff will sooner or later go the way of the master, who after all is long gone. Heidegger is first and foremost interested in the s-root of “to be”. In fact, this has always been the case in philosophy.

From the very beginning, bhusis meant the fixed “natures” of (living) beings. To be sure, it was a growing, but a fixed and specific way of how each species of being grew. The moly grew out of a black root up to a white flower. The oak grew from an acorn into an acorn-bearing tree. The natures were supposed, at least exoterically, to be fixed. So even though the individuals were born and died, their species was supposed to be eternal, to possess Being. The Latin species, like the Greek eidos, in the first place meant visible form; the perfect acorn-bearing oak, in bloom, in the prime of its life, was then regarded as the goal, the final cause, of all acorns and oaks—the Platonic Form or Idea(l) beyond all actual, physical acorns and oaks.

Now Heraclitus of course extended this to “nature as a whole”, the kosmos itself: though a growing or a becoming, and seemingly chaotic, it moved in strict accordance with eternal necessities, even in its randomness—as patterned.

The point is that, in nihilism, being is nothing. The whole cosmic process is nothing unless it has a cosmic acorn-bearing oak to strive to become or to remain. (Now this does remind me of the idea that black-hole singularities become the Big Bangs of new universes (the “acorns” of new “oaks”), but this would only defer the problem from “the” universe to the omniverse or whatever.) Heidegger seems to have had no faith in such a goal, and instead found his goal in the end of dasein, in the sense that the God of dasein was “its ownmost possibility”—its death. This was then why Heidegger did not even try to change the “destiny” of Germany, seeing Nazism simply as the path Being had chosen for him on his way to his death


Well, apparently there’s a whole book by Heidegger titled Gelassenheit. Anyway, Wikipedia says:

“Heidegger’s concept of Gelassenheit has been explained as ‘the spirit of disponibilitĂ© [availability] before What-Is which permits us simply to let things be in whatever may be their uncertainty and their mystery.’”

This is precisely what I just said. It’s the state of mind of being disposable for whatever Being brings on our path, or whatever path Being puts us on.

Marilyn Manson - Disposable Teens

Yes, the will to power as positing—values, for example. So yeah, Nietzsche posits that being be positing, and nothing besides. So then nature is posi-tion, natural law is positive law, etc


We may never know. :upside_down_face:

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So are you asking, “why would you on a structural level value something that does not already have value to you?” For if you are, then methinks the answer is: because one’s valuing something on a structural level is the same as, or the other side of the coin of, that thing’s being valuable to one on a structural level


‘Why would the key fit in a lock that does not already fit around the key?’

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Rather the former.

Why couldn’t that be meaning as in: “what’s the meaning of life?”? Is it because you could then ask, “what’s the meaning of that meaning?”?

And you say “human”, I say ‘me-man’:

Relatively similar, relatively different. I mean, if they’re similar enough I suppose you could call them “the same”. Butt:

“[T]here is a greater distance between human and human than between human and beast.” (Laurence Lampert, Nietzsche’s Task, page 281.)

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Let’s agree to disagree then. This further confirms that Heideggerian philosophy seems to be as I thought it would be: it explores the largely given meaning of being a human in the world. I don’t think this largely given meaning exists at all, I see no good reason to think that exists, so one can’t explore it, only pretend to explore it. I find this philosophy pretentious and desperate, something the emotionally slightly stunted German mind would come up with. I have yet to see a Heideggerian actually argue for why such a meaning actually exists at all.

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Must I repeat again that it need not be an objective meaning, that it may be subjective?

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Philosophizing is meaningful to some, meaningless to others. Living is meaningful to some, meaningless to others. Some won’t protect themselves from lethal danger, commit suicide. Some who find living meaningless will protect themselves from lethal danger because the meaningless survival instinct kicks in.

As to my knowledge, no one asked me if I would find it meaningful to be born and start doing living; it just happened.