Okay.
Does the eye ’see’ or do you see when you translate or interpret what is being reflected on the retina and transferred to the brain via the optic nerve?
This makes sense because, in order to interpret a sensory input you have to have an experiencing structure set up. If there is no knowledge already there for you to go to, there would be no way of projecting the knowledge (memory) onto what you are looking at. Hence, there would be no subject (you) to have a subjective experience.
Does that make sense?
Okay, so what is there about the word “verify” that you don’t understand? 
I understand the point here and I suppose a healthy and safe lifestyle would be in order.
However, when we talk about things of the mind, we also have to consider thought. Thought’s purpose is to maintain itself and protect itself, while life’s purpose seems to be to survive and reproduce one like itself. Sometimes thought and its machinations can be enmity to life and in some cases it’s better to leave it out of the equation.
Some thoughts can have effects on every cell of the body placing strain on an otherwise peaceful system. This happens when thought thrusts itself into the affairs of the senses as an interloper, having a profit motive, directing the activity of the senses to get something out of them, using them to give continuity to itself. I’m not saying that thought is the problem. Thought will always be there. You’re like a corpse without it. It’s when thought is used to control and manipulate the life that we can ascertain it’s hold.
It’s not a great thing to be accomplished when the brain is used to oversee the basic survival needs of the body. It’s when thought takes off beyond these simple needs that illusions can start. And they do start. After these deceptions of thought are detected, the only instrument we have, thought, is once again used to get out of the problems created by thought. That may only make things worse. It’s better in some situations to just be still.
The body’s natural state of affairs is not a state of a self-realization, it’s not a thing to be achieved or attained, it is not a thing to be willed into existence; it is there — it is the living state. This state is just the functional activity of life. By ‘life’ I do not mean something abstract; it is the life of the senses, functioning naturally without the interference of thought.
In ‘The Matrix’ – when Morpheus said, ‘The body cannot live without the mind‘, when Neo asked if being ‘killed’ in the matrix results in your dieing in reality – it makes you wonder about the relationship between mind and body.
And finding what is “safe and healthy” requires careful thought in a complex world. Hence a mind is developed to be “conscious” (with awareness) of outside influences relevant to health and safety (threat and hope to Self-harmony).
That is only by extrapolated instinct. It was never the purpose, merely the instinctual drive until purpose could be identified. Most people never discover the purpose of their own mind.
The mind, guided by instinctive urge, clings to predictability and consistencies. Before it identifies purpose, it strongly holds to the safety of any structured belief that provides predictability. In so doing, it creates the ego structure; the religion within.
Given enough time, the mind discovers that its purpose was to help support what created it. It can deduce that from its own design. It pursues safety and health but for a very long time, thoughts had no way to conclude that notion. In most people today, that is still true. They have no way to consciously realize, think of, for what purpose they think. Such people stumble through thoughts and wonderment without aim yet still cling to “safety” even at the expense of health. They do not think to think about how to live longer and safer. They are persuaded by other people to ignore such concern and that they can do nothing about it, nor should they try.
So even though very many protect their thoughts as though that was their only purpose for thinking, such a behavior is merely left over instinctive drive intended only to precede discovering the real purpose of thought which is to assist in constructing a reliable mental model that will help ensure complete heath and safety of the body that created it. It turns out that such an accurate model would also produce everlasting joy along with the everlasting health.
Yes… this is precisely my point. The only knowledge we have about anything, is subjective. We are translating and interpreting our subjectivity, not an object. The thoughts we create tell us nothing about reality, only ourselves. We can’t talk about what’s really there.
The mind has no purpose but to create purpose and in effect, keep “it” from dismissing itself into oblivion (nothing else). It does this through thinking things (concepts) into existence, and debating them to see which ones cohesively and logically coincide with other accepted ideas and concepts about reality (or whatever else you choose as a reference).
Who told you that? Without purpose, a rational decision cannot be made.
The paradox of the mule;
If a perfectly logical mule is exactly half way between two exactly identical stacks of hay, from which does he first choose to eat?
Logic alone cannot answer that. It requires a purpose, thus rationale. To avoid starvation (his purpose) he can rationally arbitrarily pick either (flip a coin). But he cannot make a rationale decision without a purpose already being there.
A mind cannot make a rational decision so as to set its own fundamental purpose, else like the mule, it would either never make the decision or just arbitrarily choose based on outside influences. Not recognizing your predefined purpose, makes you a slave by default. Evolution doesn’t produce an entire species attribute like cognitive thinking unless it serves a purpose.
Do you know that you are thinking now? It’s an automatic thing.
You don’t even know that you’re thinking and so why this sudden interest in wanting to find out why you are thinking? I don’t even know that I am talking. You don’t even know that you are talking. When you asked your questions, “Am I thinking?” you would say, “Yes”. That “yes” also is an automatic thing.
The whole thing is on automatic. Whatever is put in there, when you are stimulated, it comes out. The input has to be there. So, this has been going on and on and on and on. When there is stimulation, it comes out. If the stimulation is not there, thinking stops. So that’s the reason why you go on, acquiring this knowledge, feeding it all the time.
So, what do you know? You know a lot. You have gathered all this knowledge from various sources and filled it up. Is it necessary?
What is rational is made up and defined by the mind.
Interestingly enough, what you are calling a decision, materialist call an instinct. So which is it? Who is right? The mind still hasn’t “verified”.
Why not? This is absolutely what the mind is doing. It takes what it experiences (what you described as an outside influence (I don’t think I have an issue with how that is worded)), and it makes reference to it. It says to itself and the rest of the mules as they all sit in the middle of the haystacks, "oh my, the sun (god), is shining on the left haystack, that must be the one we should eat first. This is precisely what science does. It derives purpose from “observations” of the world, but the observations must have meaning.
Do an experiment for yourself, on yourself. Walk around for five minutes and observe the objects (I find observing other people to really work well) around you; can you separate your experience of these objects from some meaning you ascribe to them? Be honest with yourself. The only way you can actually see or perceive the objects around you without some sort of meaning or purpose, is for your mind to be quiet. If your mind isn’t doing the purpose or meaning creation, nothing is.
Do you see what you are doing here? You are literally creating a purpose to explain purpose. You highlighted the need to verify things earlier, but how can you verify that “evolution doesn’t produce an entire species attribute like cognitive thinking unless it serves a purpose”? I will tell you how: because if it didn’t, then you wouldn’t recognize “your predefined purpose”, and that “makes you a slave by default”. That’s kind of circular right?
How can you know the inner workings of evolution? Any theories you have about it will inevitably miss the mark, because the mark (if the mark was actually called evolution) would be the actual process of evolution itself, not our evaluation or theory on it. We are taking the map for the territory, WITH EVERYTHING. When you do this, you are living in a created world, not the real one.
What rational is, is steps of logic that lead to a goal/purpose/point/relevance (“health and safety”).
Instinct is the lowest decision making level of a mind. It is the inborn level delivered by evolution. Your mind also has a cognitive level that deals with abstract thought. Decisions on that level are certainly not by instinct. When you add 2 large numbers in your head, there is nothing instinctive about it. Yet you do it through a rational process so as to obtain a goal. You got that process from other people, but from where did you get that goal? You wanted something and your mind put together the need to “do the math”. But why did you want for something? Because something inside you urged you in that direction - instinct. Why did your instinct urge in that particular direction? Because your instinct sensed more health and/or safety in that direction. Your instincts strive toward health and safety of the body - their purpose and thus your mind’s purpose.
So what happened to health and safety? What evolves from those who choose to ignore health and safety? They stop existing as human types. So what is left, is humans that chose health and safety as their purpose. It doesn’t matter why that occurred. The human species ends up being a creature that chose health and safety rather than arbitrary goals. Evolution gave you your inherited predefined purpose (your decision making bias/goal).
You are talking about finishedman and maybe yourself with that, not me. 
I agree with your overall point, mostly. We “naturally” move towards what is best for us, but the mind interferes with that process. If it was as foolproof as you make it seem, then we would all be living in harmony, and fast food restaurants wouldn’t exist. If purpose was innately about health and safety, then it would supersede secondary purposes towards that goal. It would be the only goal, and there wouldn’t be any need for a logical step towards it, you would just do it. As such, it wouldn’t be a goal or purpose, it would just be an innate way of life; it would be instinctual. Instead of this being the full case, in our society and world we deviate from health and safety, ultimately creating and “playing” with ways to attain it again.
I do believe nature is naturally kind to itself, and as a whole it instinctively acts for its health and safety. The mind, being a result of nature, must play a role towards this yes, but when we look around to verify this assumption, we see something is amiss. We can only have ideas about what the mind is doing, but after “verification”, the mind is most certainly not taking the best use of energy towards health and safety. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that it is at every level deviating, meandering, and distracting itself from the natural and instant fulfillment of whatever purpose produced it (in this case health and safety). If it can be said for the mind to have a purpose, that is the one I’d bet my money on, the prolonging of its own separate existence (it is what allows individually experiential, self aware, and autonomous existence to be).
Was the purpose of evolution to achieve “health and safety”, or “decision making bias/goal”? You’ve alluded to both.
The mind must teeter on the lines of maintaining its identified body through health and safety, and maintaining itself through somehow, creating a way to deviate from that complete and utter fulfillment of the body’s health and safety. If the body is fully healthy and safe, the mind has nothing to do, and won’t be needed. What decisions are to be made, if the instinctual goal of evolution is achieved? The mind needs to maintain a purpose (which is ultimately an interjectional idea about that which already is, ie. natures already fulfillment of itself) towards the pseudo fulfillment of some goal in order to sustain itself. If the goal was truly fulfilled, there would be no need for a purpose or an interjected path towards.
I’m not into the business of deluding myself, especially if I’m aware of the delusion. So yes, I do often take the map for the territory; and you being here, trying to convince me of your ideas, which I would assume you believe them to be truth (whether it be your truth or whatever), would indicate you are doing the same.
You seem to be seeing the point and not seeing it at the same time. That is usually a sign of not seeing the scope or depth of the issue such that even though you see how something applies on one level, you are blocked from seeing how it also applies to the other.
Your brain and mind have developed to the complexity they have due to the fact that the challenge in living requires more than they can provide (you still die), thus it keeps trying, but makes errors. Each mind must make the attempt to make sense of the world around it, that is its job. That is how it is to help fulfill the purpose of trying to stay alive and joyful. It can be speculated that eventually a creature would evolve to the point where it succeeds. Humans are not at that level, thus their minds are still striving for something that they cannot yet fathom, so they often reach for what isn’t there. The entire makeup of the human mind reflect exactly that scenario. A mind cannot be created inherently already knowing its purpose, else it will not be free to make sense of the world, but instead the “sense of the world” will be handed to it via programming and the mind will not really be alive so much as robotic. A living mind must be free to declare what exists and what doesn’t, else it isn’t really alive (sort of).
Knowledge must be assembled by the living mind. If it is handed genetically or by others, the mind is not really doing much of its job. Its job is being done for it. That is the goal of socialistic systems of governance, “we know best, let us tell you what is and isn’t”. The aristocrats might be alive, but the masses are merely mindless flesh.
Yes, “playing” rather than making serious progress and thus dying because the task requires more than merely playing. Randomly playing does NOT achieve greater variety than logical pursuit. In fact, it produces less because of wasted repetition. Health and safety become forgotten in the play even after the off chance that the mind happens to accredit the thought at all.
Because to attempt to decide on your fundamental purpose would be like trying to decide if you are a human. It is something you can only discover or destroy, it is not something that you can cause. You do not get to choose what you already are. And what you already have been is the pursuit (as foolishly as maybe) to live more certainly and joyously. The confusion that stems from that pursuit is what you are trying to work out right now as we speak. Your mind, at this moment, is doing its job (unless you are merely preaching and not listen and thinking).
Evolution causes both. Whether you want to call that “evolution’s purpose” is another matter.
It would have to be completely necessary and natural. All of it. It’s pointless from a relative point of view, for the self who thinks itself real. But the knowledge is useful for the automatic process, the one without the selfs interjection. All of the knowledge is known differently to every being, it is what makes the being a unique expression.
I’d describe your understanding of our discussion similarly.
You created that purpose. Fact is, everything is impermanent; it is the mind that has a hard time dealing with this fact.
That is your idea of its job. It is a pointless and circular endeavor; the mind masturbates.
You can’t experience joy without pain, nor life without death.
Because there is nothing to reach for other than the minds own idea of “something” to be reached.
And who says this is not already the case, other than the mind? It “thinks” it is doing it all on its own, that it controls life; but it “knows” it can’t control (check out the free will thread). It’s a scary idea to consider your existence to be pointless. What then, would you truly be needed for?
Yes. And so it is free to do so, through creating its own little world on top of what is really here/there. It still lives if it doesn’t, but it will live without purpose (and for a mind, that isn’t really living (sort of)).
And its job in this case, is maintaining its autonomy, else it not be living, ie. it be dead/ non existent.
I tend to believe the mind naturally creates its reality based on its various relative positions within its predicament. Sometimes it’s controlling its content, making the rules, and other times, it is subject to some other minds rule.
If the mind was to relinquish its idea of itself, things would just be. What a horrible fate for the mind.
Once again, I mostly agree. But the logical pursuit is a “playing” as well.
Ahhh, I think we are reaching each other, albeit through created and playful ideas of purpose.
You’re saying the mind doesn’t decide on the ultimate or fundamental purpose; but what is the mind working “out right now as we speak” then? What has to be worked out if the purpose is already here? Why must the mind discover something that it would already be fulfilling? How can the mind “know” that purpose when it already is that purpose. To know it, you must be separated from what you know, in order to grasp it. So even if there was a purpose, the mind couldn’t discover it, unless it separated itself from it (hence the meandering).
The confusions dont come about from the pursuit, but the pursuit comes about from the confusion.The confusion is a result of the mind separating itself from what is. It will never understand what it is, because understanding requires being separate from what it is one is attempting to understand. Hence the pursuit towards a greater and relative understanding, that will never fully represent or be that which is to be understood.
You did, here:
and alluded to, here:
You keep saying that, somewhat as though hypnotized to the thought. The truth is that purpose is what made you.
The job of your mind doesn’t change even if it is a futile endeavor. You state what you have been taught, Fact is, you have been taught a presumption.
Your scenario demands that, not mine. My understanding provides a progressive effort toward a fruitful goal. Your’s is merely a “pointless struggle”. Doesn’t it seem reasonable that you should ensure that mine isn’t actually true before accepting yours?
Once again, a hypnotized response. Try to prove it logically. You can’t. You can’t because your thought (that “knowledge”) is artificial and false.
That is called “fatalism” - the acceptance of defeat without proof of it. Again, merely try to logically (and humbly) prove the idea. You will not be able to.
Again, verification. Verify the pointlessness of your mind and life before you give up on it.
Not if it is progressively diligent and certainly not if it succeeds.
How to achieve it, dummy. 
If you know that it is nutrition that causes your hunger and seems to be what the body needs so as to sustain life, you have discovered a purpose that you previously only had a urge concerning, a clue. So now, you can narrow your “playing” and focus on details that you would not normally have investigated (the science of nutrition) and find food in places you would never have thought to look instinctively. You can also figure out perhaps a means to go get food at far away places that require flight, but you then have need to think about how to gain flight. Instincts do not know how to tell your cognitive mind what it needs to look for other than urges when it recognizes something like food. It cannot recognize chemicals or machines that might be able to fly and carry you. That is a different level of knowledge and why you have a conscious mind at all.
They feed each other. That is why it is often called a trap to lust too presumptuously after something before thinking.
No those only spell out that evolution does something, not that evolution had a “purpose”.
Free yourself from any hypnosis by logically proving your assertions. “Truth will set you free” from deceptions, accidental or not.
This is proving fruitless… my points have logically been proven, I can’t make you see them. Have fun thinking about things you thought up; I am a bit more interested in reality right now.
Do you have no sense of logic at all?? You have merely stated assertions as fact. Where is the evidence, the reasoning?
Now if like the Christian, you wish to merely claim Faith in your prophets, then so be it. I won’t argue with a man of admitted faith (very much anyway). But don’t claim that you have presented logic. You haven’t at all. If you believe that you have, you need to learn a lot about logic.
- state premises and definitions
- associate identities
- associate conclusion (your assertions).
It really isn’t hard, but you haven’t even begun. You need a “Therefore it must be true that a mind determines its own purpose” type of statement or “Therefore, You can’t experience joy without pain, nor life without death” preceded by constructed and consistent associations and acceptable premises.
Without reading through the entire thread, I’ll repond to the OP.
Fusing together the subjective and the objective is a key feature of my metaphysics. We begin with the subjective (our experiences) and we make it into the objective (the world) by projecting it. The two are not constituents of two incomensurate worlds but two ways of thinking of the same world. That’s not to say I don’t believe in an extension to reality beyond what we can experience, but that world has nothing to do with the world of our experience except that it determines (directly or indirectly) our experiences. Note that this is different from saying it is the world our experiences refer to. Very few of our experiences refer at all, and those that do (i.e. thought) refer only to other experiences already in our minds.
Okay, so you want me to take a belief and state it, associate it to another belief, and associate a new belief out of those two beliefs.
I thought you better, but I guess if that’s your litmus:
Everything you think is a belief
Beliefs can only be proved through other beliefs
Therefore, it must be true that everything you think, being a belief, can only be proved through other beliefs.
Let’s go again:
Everything you think (being a belief), can only be proved through other beliefs.
Purposes, are beliefs geared towards a goal.
Therefore, every purpose you think about being a belief geared towards a goal, can only be proved through other beliefs.
Logic doesn’t verify anything but itself, you know that though, but in the case you didn’t:
Definitions and premises when associated naturally lead to a conclusion.
Different definitions and premises will lead to different conclusions.
Therefore, If you have different definitions and premises, you will arrive at a different conclusion.
A given premise properly associated with another leads to a logical conclusion.
A different set of given premises can be associated to provide a contradictory logical conclusion,
Then logical conclusions can be contradictory.
Remember James, logic is entirely based upon “if… then” statements. If something is true, then something else is true. But the issue, is that there must be an assumed truth (the if). If in itself, implies it just might be pulled out of someones ass, or more importantly, purely out of their thoughts.
But I digress…
If the mind must be used to “discover” a purpose,
And a mind uses thinking to discover,
Then thinking was used to discover a purpose.
If the mind uses thinking to discover a purpose,
and thinking only exist in the mind,
Then the discovery of a purpose only exist in the mind
If the discovery of a purpose only exist in the mind
And all that is within the mind is formulated within the mind,
Then the discovery of a purpose was formulated within the mind.
Lets go some more:
If thought determines,
and the mind creates thought,
then determination (reified form of determine) is created by the mind.
If determination is created by the mind,
and determination is the act of coming to a decision or of fixing or settling a purpose (from http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/determination)
then the mind creates the act of coming to a decision or of fixing or settling a purpose.
If you don’t want to open yourself up to any new ideas, then why are you here? You said:
I don’t think we can see eye to eye, as I’m looking for truth (an open goal), and you are progressing towards some fruitful goal that you have made up.