there is only one thing we know of which is not a description of something else. All other things than you are metaphysical; they both may only be described in metaphor, but may only exist in partial form. You are the only thing you can know, yet to ‘know’ is to make an abstraction about a thing, rather than to know the thing in itself. Even if we can know a thing itself it will not be you, and you cannot be any other thing without that being an abstraction of your reality.
Nevertheless, you cannot know the ‘you’ because it is the very thing itself, that which is doing the perceiving, seeing, hearing [and other mental abstractions of you-ness], and probably the only thing that is itself and nothing else. That being declared, no other ‘you’ may be the same as ‘you’, we must therefore be unique entities and non reliant upon other things to exist. No gods, form nor power, can change or make effect upon the actual ‘you’, as they cannot contain the unfathomable and shapeless beingness of you.
I believe there was a non dual world which existed before the dualistic physical and spiritual worlds.
I’ve had visions of it. If it is really there, I think it’s superior to this world, mainly because there is no “evil” there. Because all things there are at one, there is no battles. Battles require 2 or more things. One does not contain the otherness, or battles and wars.
Most of you forum peeps would probably prefer being in the dual realms.
Please god, can I have a realm with nice duality [sex, drink, drugs etc] but not the nasty stuff, like death, killing, violence and disease. Duh, omnipotent being eh!
A pencil has no ‘you’. Though I take the point about it all being pointless, depends really, maybe there is a cosmic university out there, and its teaching us spirituality etc for a reason. Perhaps each life takes us a bit closer to becoming a better ‘state’ of being/person, not in moral terms but more like hydrogen superfluid.
I am always left wondering where it all leads if something like that is the case. I am temped to think there is no hierarchy, even that the soul already contains all-wisdom. That kinda makes things pointless too, unless the world is a stage n all that ~ which is still kinda pointless.
Everything is a haecceity, an absolutely singular event, because everything changes ceaselessly. Perception is reduction, reification. How arrogant the claim that humans are an exception.
No matter how much you play around with metaphysics Amorphous…
You are going to die.
You are going to die.
You are going to die.
No, you are not God.
Yes, that bus about to hit you is not you.
Unless we extrapolate the word you to the point of meaninglessness.
You can’t know you, either.
Can you trust the memories you have of yourself?
Can you trust the perception you have of yourself?
Maybe you’re a giraffe dreaming you’re a man?
Are you, you, are you a single, static entity, or are you many dynamic entities jockeying for dominion, how do you know?
Can you see your forehead, can a camera take a picture of itself?
Maybe if there’s a mirror, but then there’s a mirror.
Reality is a blend of self and other, of things happening outside our will and things happening inside our will, of things we can touch that we can’t feel, feel our touch and things we can touch that we can feel, feel our touch. Release yourself from your mental monism, come enter dialectical monistic bliss with me
Yes, good. Perception is reductive: you are always more than you take yourself to be; you access only a fraction of those memories that exist for you. And the same goes for everything else: in the act of grasping the pencil, we reduce it to an object for us, a graspable thing, a writing tool. I agree: even the self you think you orient yourself toward, the self you understand as yourself, even this is but a unity (as Nietzsche says) only in a word. The self, understood as a single entity, falsifies a veritable upsurge of warring drives, of contradictory thoughts, of larval selves, proto-selves, all swarming beneath the veneer of personal subjectivity.
And yeah, I see in Amorphous this kind of existential bad faith that refuses to accept the terrible reality of the world: you’re of the world, of the same stuff as it, material, through and through, and as everything else dies, you too will die, your body will rot, your words will be forgotten, and nothing you did will ever matter. Accept this. Ultimately, human existence itself is packaged with the expiration date of the universe’s heat death. Against that ultimate horizon, you squirm. Fair enough. But that doesn’t justify this weird human exceptionalism that projects onto the cosmos a misguidedly optimistic, new age metaphysic.
Actually OB, I’m not a substance materialist or a substance spiritualist, there is no substance. Existence is a dance. When you ask who or what’s dancing, you’re missing the point. Mind is made up of things that’re are dancing, which in turn, are made up of things that’re dancing, which in turn, are made up of things that’re dancing, ad infinitum, and some of these things it’s made up of may be doing a matter dance, and some of these things it’s made up of may be doing a mind dance themselves. Therefore, mind isn’t anymore or less real than matter. I’m not a reductionist or a holist, there are things that become more apparent when you connect the dots (waves), and there are things that become more apparent when you separate the dots (particles), the particles aren’t more real than the waves. Did yah hear?, I’m a dialectical/pluralistic monist, not a materialist. I additionally believe reality tends to be cyclical and can’t compartmentalized, so it’s approximately, relatively true to say Amorphous is going to die when he gets hit by that bus, but it’s not strictly true, nothing is. Some things are approximately/relatively minding and some things are bodying. The shit that goes on inside your head, revealed to you by introspection, isn’t anymore or less real than the shit that goes on outside your head, and there’s no stark contrast between the two, it’s spectral, so we can speak of more subjective, and more objective, there is no SUBJECT or OBJECT. In addition to having a cyclical view of things, I also have a fractal view of things.
the intellect/processes are the tool, I would think perception is our 1:1 experience of a thing ~ its the end and beginning of the line, everything else is reductive/secondary, experience comes first ~ to us that is.
Perception isn’t the entire experience, only the part recognized, given identity. The forms recognized never fully describe the entire interaction that took place between “you” and your environment. Your perception is merely an abstraction, ignoring many finer details. The Devil is in those details.
For me you/as your perception, is given identity as a secondary thing, bacteria probably have no identity, they may not even experience, though somewhere along the evolutionary line we get creatures which do experience the or a world. To begin with we probably get ‘experiencing lifeforms’ which have no identity [the neurons and functions to process it], thus I would conclude that ‘being’, ‘experience’ and perception are not a function of ‘identity’!
They fully describe that of the world which is presented to them! perception is akin to viewing and recording and in varying amounts. It is at some level and to some degree machine-like, similar to a massively sophisticated camcorder.
Naturally I have, but you don’t recognise a cancer, neither do we percieve it for the thing itself, we may only gain a third hand experience of it, when we are informed about it [as like any purely informed experience. Hypnosis plays with what we experience and memory, regardless of which, what we perceive of that is our experience.
I am seeing this from the inside out, perhaps you are seeing it from the outside in?
The way I see it - any/everything we perceive/interpret is both self and other. Reality is a spectrum. On one end it’s more mind/self and on the other end it’s more matter/other, but it’s never wholly one or the other, it’s always a mix.
In what way does the event of a rock cracking in half in conditions cold enough to make fragile its constitution involve what you’re calling “mind/self”? It’s always, in your words, a mix. What does that mean, concretely?
Wherever there’s perceived, there’s perceiver, you can’t separate the two.
There is no noumena, there is no thing in itself, life is an interaction.
You can’t see a potato without seeing a potato.
So there is no you or potato, there’s only youpotato.
Try describing you without mentioning your environment, try describing your environment without mentioning you, it’s impossible, or preposterous. It’s always from my point of view, or your point of view, or his point of view…
That’s you bluing the sky… that’s you greening the grass.