There are those things that are transcendental that cannot be measured by the material sciences because they exist in pure thought or because they exist in a way that cannot be materially verified and explained in any way whatsoever.
It is these things that are the transcendental to which is the mother of all doubt, uncertainty, and general categorized unknowns.
That the material sciences can only explain so much and not everything in their limitations only proves the existence of the transcendental.
Pure reason is impossible and not everything can be rationalized.
Although I don’t follow, or go along with, all your reasoning, I accept your basic premise. When God died and man turned to science for ‘answers,’ he began losing his sense of awe and wonderment in Nature–the very things that had led to God’s creation to begin with and what led man to survive over hundreds of thousands of years. I believe that was a terrible psychological blow to man: what was, before, both wonder-full and awe-full became explainable and measurable. And, while most people, like me, don’t fully understand the particulars of quantum mechanics and become glassy-eyed when some portions are ‘explained’ to us, the very fact that we know there are physical answers takes much of the transcendental away. What had once been other-worldly is fast becoming mundane. Mankind may simply be too young to have his innocence wrested away by the realities science has given him in return.
The history of reason from it’s infancy is one where humans try to analyze, categorize, deduce, and define existence all around them.
From the infancy of reason it would seem that the goal is to eventually have a library of all of existence reduced to just that by categorizations or analogs.
The goal of contrived human rationality is to reduce existence to categorization and definition. Were now still in the process of coming to understand that not everything can be categorized and defined.
There is that which defies categorization and definition. There is that which defies human rationality. There is that which defies the material sciences. These instances are the transcendental that transcends or defies human categorization.
Science has tried to make everything explainable and measurable but here in this thread I deny that it can because there will always be that which defies measurement or explanation.
There is still room for some mysticism.
Modern science has tried it’s damnest to reduce everything to material processes thus reducing existence to the mundane which can eventually be categorized but understanding the transcendental one understands the fallacy of all of that.
There is always just enough room for the modern age of the unknown and the unpredictable.
I feel obliged to point out that you have given no example of transcendentality, and that your definition of it as that which cannot be explained by science circularly necessitates the “conclusion” that the limit of science is that it is unable to measure/understand this “transcendental”. Can you give us an example of a transcendental which science cannot explain/understand in a “material”/rational sense? And do you believe this impotency on the part of science to be inevitable or in some sense necessary? If so, why?
Perhaps the cardinality of reason is its limit, if meaning were seen in a more flexible manner then its ability to encompass reality ~ which after all is far more fluid than our reasoning, would be greater.
Even then, when you have something which is or can be more than one thing at a time, then no matter how flexible the logic there will remain transcendental elements. I’d expect that any description of reality as a whole is one of them.
Forget it, Three times, he can’t give the answer; only crumbs, no loaf. Guru’s play the same game. They can only deliver lofty phraseology about mystical states of being that serve as palliatives for the serious seekers. The solutions are the problem there. The solution only keeps the questions and searching going. There’s a marketplace for these things so long as there are those who are shopping around.
The mental activities of all fields of thought look for some kind of unity with reality and each has its particular methods. The one who is functioning in his particular field of endeavor thinks he is doing so for the sake of discovering Truth or Reality. But, if Truth/Reality is totally elusive, or exists only in a transcendental state (independent of human experience beyond the material world), how would one get there? What would be the guidelines, directions or knowledge?
So, you see, a lot of the questions, the pursuit, continue only for the sake of the self (mind) continuing. For a continuing and progressing mind gives a sense of doing something worthwhile. But it is the doing that’s important. Not that it is getting anywhere.
Thoughts cannot be materially or empirically proven to exist yet they do. Thoughts transcend material and empirical verification.
If there are other things and phenomenas like that of thoughts in the universe or cosmos we can say they are transcendental too.
Yes.
Yes actually I do because I’m a firm believer that not everything can be reduced to rationalization where not everything can be known or explained either.
The unknown and unexplainable will always haunt human imagination or existence in general.
Pure reason is a inability to human beings. It’s simply out of our reach as it also cosmically forbidden to our faculties or senses.
That is a step in the right direction I think in describing what I am talking about here.
If reason was to symbolize the ancient Roman world I would say there is a Hadrian’s wall which signifies the end of the world or map that cannot be penetrated any further.
In other words the limitations and barriers of human reasoning will forever keep a great deal of many things out of our breach of understanding.
My understanding is that Science’s answer to the question, “Why does anything exist?” is “We have no friggen clue.” First there was nothing, then everything. Big BANG. Its ridiculous. With or without God, the natural world is totally bogus. It makes no sense.
That is also a fallacy when it concerns “God” because that which is transcendental cannot be comprehended mentally in any sort of way either.
The transcendental isn’t “God” but simply the unknown or unattainable of knowing.
To believe in a “God” is to know one. How can one know a “God” which exists seperately from our existence to the point noncomprehension?
The transcendental can be subjectively interpreted and many beliefs will certainly undoubtedly arise out of it but it can never be ultimately defined or categorized.
Well said. I think that can summarises quite a bit actually.
TJ …you seem rather intrigued by the idea of “uncertainty” might I suggest that you look at this topic…it wasn’t discussed that long ago…I believe just before you arrived here…feel free of course to reply in it (I wouldn’t expect you to read necessarily all of it as James and I head-butted for about 2-3 pages or more…) Keep in mind that I say 100% certainty and this is basically meaning 100% probability though i discount the idea of certainty in so far as it suggests 100% probability ever…
The reason man fights himself is because the brain is just too big for this ape.
The transcendental is thus the name for what science has not yet explained? Science then makes things immanent.
Everything is already rationalized because a thing is a rational concept.
Thank you all for your brilliance.
The world is deep or so I’ve heard. I just see a surface and it’s pleasing. This pleasing may well be the depth in the dark. Deeper than the day had thought - Rome wasn’t built in a day, but saved by a wolf in the night. Conflict, meine Herren und Damen! From it all good is born. And good gives rise to conflict, because it is always distributed unequally. That is ultimately what “good” means - relativity!
Transcendentalism, I as understand it from Thoreau, Emerson, and Jeffers (whom I called an ‘up-side down transcendentalist,’) is using Nature to ‘explain’ the abstract by giving people time to question through observing nature and through isolation from the world and melding with nature. It was also a political movement that decried slavery, taxes, and other government intrusions on people’s lives.
It seems, now to go more along the lines of Eastern Transcendentalism which uses meditation and repetition of the Sacred Om, to achieve the state of oneness with self and nature. No matter how you define ‘transcendentalism,’ I believe the OP is true.
I don’t know if the transcendent exist in pure thought or if they exist in a euphoric state brought about by outside means, no matter. They can enter our thoughts with all the force of an “Ah-Ha!” or an “Eureka!” or they can come softly with a sigh of recognition and an embrace–taking into one’s self what one believes to be true without any empirical evidence and without any inductive or deductive reasoning.
Nobody has made the claim here that everything can be reduced to a science. Only statements about the nature of thingness, reason, etcetera have been made.
As many including myself have pointed out, the world of experience is not explained by materialist objectivism, but the efforts of scientists to explain as much as they can are not discredited by this knowledge.
What Jakob must have meant is that where the term transcendent is used for things which science has not explained, things would have to be called immanent when they have been explained. A rhetorical conclusion drawn from your use of the term transcendental. There is no ground to state of things a priori that they cannot be scientifically explained.
There is such a thing as empirical verification of thoughts - the earliest experimental psychologists already found out that by putting a piece of metal to sections of the brain. Thoughts, visions and memories could be evoked in the subjects mind and the nature of these experiences could be made predictable by studying which part of the brain relates to which kind of experience.
What we don’t know is how this works. We do know that it works.
Indeed.
“The constant breaching of the boundaries of security, is that not always part of anything deserving of the name reality? If so … is it wise to seek out the limits? What if there are no limits, and the universe becomes more dangerous every step of the way on the search for safety?”
There is no ground to state that everything is explainable either.
How can you explain a thought that neither consumes time or space to be materially and empirically verified?
Sure you might be able to dissect that a thought is occuring with a firing charge of a electron within the brain organ but that tells you nothing of it’s form or what is embedded within it.
Those features of thought transcend beyond the abilities of understanding when it concerns material sciences.
And I say again that the quest of science to make all uncertainties known or defined is a futile one.
Although that doesn’t mean there won’t be countless fools that will try to empirically categorize the entire universe to death anyways. That’s inevitable.
Excellent question.
It reminds me of this movie about a scientist that accidentally opened up a wormhole in his laboratory which eventually destroyed the entire world.
Why do we insects of the cosmos think that we can eventually master it with all it’s awsome super powers?
I think in the quest more damage will be done.
I think the day is coming when all human beings will find the utter damnation in the attempt to the conquer the universe.
In all actuality the world and the cosmos will conquer us putting all of us back into our place. The collective “faith” of civilization will be smashed and obliterated I think eventually possibly sooner than later.
Except a linguistic ground, which says that everything that is identified as a “thing” has thereby already been explained in certain terms. To you this may appear a word game, so I’ll just grant you the obvious; there is no ground to think that all of existence can be explained in scientific terms. But then nobody has made this claim here.
Brain-activity can be verified as related to specific thoughts.
It does. I found this startling as well, but you can get quite detailed information about how a thought is experienced subjectively by knowing the location and structure of the electrical occurrence related to it.
What we definitely do not know is how electrochemical processes are translated into thought. So we also don’t know if there really is a one-way causality to it.
Yes if ever a thing thinks it knows all when it doesn’t then it is quite likely to metaphorically walk off a cliff without considering it might have been there…
Indeed i would think that uncertainties will always be around, and thank God for if they weren’t things might get rather boring…one would think…
Then there is the problem of even scientists thinking that things are random as in “no pattern” (thus the modern word for magic) when really they are things with "infinitely complex patterns. One thing does always lead to another…it would just seem we can’t always know what does or how or why…
as far as empirical goes on google it says empirical = “Based on, concerned with, or verifiable by observation or experience rather than theory or pure logic.”
anything that is known is experienced (or experience) thus it would seem a contradiction to say “rather than theory or pure logic” as those things are experiences…
So ultimately someone can say anything is empirical…
Perhaps we need to learn to submit to the ‘all’? or work with no against or to change.
…you seem rather intrigued by the idea of “uncertainty” might I suggest that you look at this topic…it wasn’t discussed that long ago…I believe just before you arrived here…feel free of course to reply in it (I wouldn’t expect you to read necessarily all of it as James and I head-butted for about 2-3 pages or more…) Keep in mind that I say 100% certainty and this is basically meaning 100% probability though i discount the idea of certainty in so far as it suggests 100% probability ever…
