Something Instead of Nothing

I am not interested in seeking comfort and consolation above everything else. I prefer to reference reality into my world view because
one that denys or ignores reality is not worth having [ at least for me ] I therefore try to avoid having one that is dogmatic and so it is
not something that is set in stone. Although there are some things that are known to be absolutely certain such as death for example

But you cannot be absolutely certain of everything as future events have yet to happen although knowledge does increase over time
And this allows for any modification of ones world view and so I always try to make sure that my own is grounded in said knowledge
And while it will always only be an approximation there is no reason as to why it can not and should not be as accurate as possible

Okay, just out of curiosity, if and when this event – en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity – does occur, how will our day to day lives be effected? How might one be able to take advantage of it to make their existence more productive or fulfilling or meaningful?

Will we be that much closer to a Terminator world?

Will we be grappling with the real matrix?

In any event, I imagine that we will still be stuck with connecting the dots between this particular brave new world and a full and complete understanding of existence qua existence itself.

And maybe by then we’ll be closer to pinning down the role that autonomy plays in all this. If any.

And then [of course] the role played by any particular God that might exist.

Yes, but the distances between the holes will be more calibrated, and in would hope the matrix would become more clear and the role of what reality has to play within that matrix.

A Terminator world, may define the necessary boundaries of that matrix within the matrix reality, to protect the roles by using those to protect those boundaries from misunderstanding the changing relationships that the overall workings of a unifies system requires.

Whether these fit with all individual requirements of what happiness in a future society may entail, would justifiably go hand in hand, with practically begin to narrow those pockets of information.

There will always be room for artists to keep the gates and doors of peeception/Preception open, if and only if, they can remove themselves periodically without getting those doors slam on them.

Where the 'eye’s future perception/perception leads us, is immaterial in an aesthetic world of poetic licence, laced with the GUIDE lines of a presumed beneficial intelligence.

The thought that such intelligence can become adverse to such presumptions , can be over come without resorting to an absolute binary program of development, in less then a generation.

Call me an optimist, albeit by necessity.

Well, whatever we think our motivation and intention might be in pursing an understanding of these relationships, the fact is that what we have come to conclude about them here and now either will comfort us more or less than disturb us.

But the tricky part embedded in human psychology is that we may not really be able to discern what is actually propelling “I” into the future – a belief that comforts us more than disturbs us or a wanting to believe in something that comforts us more than disturbs us.

This part: viewtopic.php?f=15&t=185296

Only taking it out beyond moral and political contraptions and grappling with it regarding the biggest questions of all.

My own interest here revolves around two particular contexts:

1] how what we believe impacts our capacity to “do the right thing” on this side of the grave
2] how what we believe shapes our frame of mind regarding “I” on the other side of the grave

It’s just that here it is often difficult to grasp with any precision where human philosophy ends and human psychology begins.

As for the “accuracy” of our conclusions, what you say makes sense to me. It all comes down to where the lines are drawn existentially; and the extent which what is believed to be accurate can be demonstrated to, in fact, be accurate. Given what we think we do know here and now about the world around us.

As always, my own interest here revolves more around the extent to which, after this event happens [if and when it does], the lives that we live from day to day are impacted. The “for all practical purposes” part.

Remember back when the Y2K hysteria was at its peak? All manner of dire predictions were made. Instead, “for all practical purposes” almost nothing.

So, what I’ll be looking for with this one, are actual descriptions of the recalibrated holes. The part where flesh and blood human beings draw lines in the lives they live between reality and the matrix.

Same here. The life you lived before and after the machines take over. In other words, the part where what and who and why you think you are stops and the “system” begins.

More speculation:

Rose Dale, Floreat, Western Australia in Philosophy Now magazine.

To me, this seems applicable only until we take somethingness back to the Big Bang. Then how on earth can any great thinker confirm that before this there “is not such thing as nothing at all”? Where’s the evidence for this?

What I can’t wrap my head around here is that what seems to be construed of as “empty space” already exists in our own somethingness. So it’s not like the “energy, radiation and particles” are flitting in and out of literal nothingness. It’s occuring in the space that we can already confirm exists.

Of course what does it mean to actually pin down a “nuanced explanation” given all of the “unknown unknowns” still out of reach? Eventually the arguments become just that: speculative assumptions going around and around in circles. I think this therefore that is true. But nothing this nor that seem able to be substantiated beyond the assumptions themselves.

And then [of course] this part:

This clearly bothers some more than others. In many ways the answers haven’t much to do with the lives that we live. They don’t appear able to make either the pleasure or the pain of existing from day to day go away. It’s just that existentially some tumble [or stumble] into experiences that bring out and about this “need” to know these things.

It all gets entangled in the search for meaning. And, in particular, in world where death and oblivion are always out there…just beyond [or way beyond] either our understanding or control.

I think that’s right. In fact I think that it’s more likely them not that the something we experience is reducible to ever smaller bits of physical reality, toward a minima of the thinkable, where the absolute nothingness is con eibable like a kind of gyroscope of directional index. It never approaches an absolute since that is an indigenous state of the very required transformation , within which consciousnesa through thought through language develops.

At that inconceivable level the reduction through thought through conscious language reduces not merely the linguistic artifacts, but the reality of quantum states as well, where the sub-strata underlying both have become undifferentiable , therefore of similar or identical energy based.

At that point, the system transforms into a fed back function, that reinforces the idea of an eternally recorded/recurred manifestation.

I still have no way in which to grasp these points until you at least make an attempt intertwine them in the life that you live. In other words, how you imagine the day to day interactions between your own particular “I” and the “system”. The role that language plays in either clarifying or obfuscating actual existential relationships.

On the other hand, sure, I do recognize just how difficult this can be when we go all the way out on the metaphysical limb. “I” in the context of “all there is”?

Where to even begin, right? Which context would actually get us closer to even barely understanding the answers to questions this mind-boggling.

The mind is boggled. So, just leave it at that?

No of course not, will rewrite a different manner .

Maybe the formally defined relation ship between philosophy and psychology would be a better starting point.

Psychology is a spin off from metaphysics, where ontology best represents the logic of the psyche, in which logic of the psyche. Is mirrored, as an analysand.

Take the parts into which we have treated the psyche, the parts in the ages of metaphysical quandary, at which philosophical inquiry manifests the modern aspects of the philosophy of mind, and existentialism becomes the most particular stage where this literally and figuratively becomes an inquiry into existentialism.

Pjenomenology, formally embedded in existence as the relationship between Husserl and Sartre, becomes manifest.

Philosophical existentialism particulates from reduction, of phenomenon, the psychological automaton or equivalence here is regression into broader generalization, or, participation into larger and larger bounded associations of what is understood to belong categorically.

When most broadly, and formally understood, it becomes a matter through preception, manifested by qualities, such as philosophers have defined them before psychology such as extension.

Starting there, in terms of what came to be known as regression, at the level of reduction of the phenomena.( Psychological regression corresponding to philosophical reduction)

At the reduced epoche the undifferentiated or the more transcendental level, symbolism is more literal , logical and determined. The same with the more psychologic. notionless understandable interpretion in terms of more abstract representation, where abstraction can be visualized in its aesthetic sense.

Abstract art , some claim is hard to understand, as it looses its being, since it is a form of more inclusive generalization. Primitive art retreats into what Levi Strauss defines as saturated within a ‘participatuon mystique’ where more perception is embedded within common sense, understood in its mos telementary mode, of relying on larger participants to determine meaning through wider participatory experience.

The history of philosophy is mirrored similarity, and the critical philosophy embedded in Kant"s critiques, try to sow this up completely, this progressive development of differentiation, albeit unsuccessfully the moderns, in particular, the positive linguists claim, this is because there is absolute limits of what language can contain and convey. The mode by which such manifests, is through similitude and not identity.

Just stopping here, to point to the idea that positivists would deny Your claim toward the identity, to solve problems in the existence of ‘i’ , since the phenomenon , Yours and mine are reducible to the larger, more communal you and I, inasmuch as our Being, is more similar then different from each other.

The thing is, this reduced difference plays a confusing part between my and your experience .

So near to this process, lays exactly what You are concerned about in reducing Your experience more toward down to earth, but as it reduces particular content, it becomes less accessible in terms of manifesting association, relevant to Your and my being.

At this level the praxis and the practice is stalemate and this becomes a basic epoche where there really is no possible exit.

This is where we are, in an existential paradox, embedded between a mystique and a logical linguistic impass,where from, signification becomes a mode of using signs and signals, for identifying movement through time , or, subconsciously manifested interpretations becoming signs of how we at first perceive then think about construct reality.

As reality becomes less transcendable, and transcendent the points of connectibility, the association between points that can be filled , become more rarefied, and observed, before they can begin to be understood. So more and more beginning points need to be presumed, and approach the lower levels of quantum thinking, where the points=particles can no longer be observed, or per received, they become probable existences, similar to a participation mystique, where reliance on established routes need to be assumed as existence , on most probable functions.(re. Levi Strauss)

In art, pointillism requires the viewer to adhere to an aesthetic distance, to be literally connect dots, to enable an interpretation of meaning to evolve.

All said, hopefully, making more ‘sense’ ok how something manifest more than nothing, becomesmorehands on tangible in this mode of presentation.

Nothingness is assumed to subsist in the lowest realms of cognition, and travel back through reasonable reflection, through re - experience, unavailable, except through psychic break through artificial means, such as psychedelics, which break adopted means of recognition, and through reformulations of adopted patterns.

Nothingness is nothing~but such a state of Being.

sorry can not edit .now its the middle of the night, can’t find my glasses, kept awake by sleeplessness caused by my approaching jet lagged sleeplessness of my trio to Hanoi and Cebu.

Will connect / correct when dawn is upon me. Sleeplesness of proposal inducement or some other artificial means is possible for anyone caught in a pattern of long term reliance on drugs.

I think back MagsJ has a forum relating to insomnia.

Something occurred re. even before trying to edit the above, that this lengthy explanation is merely trying to refresh and nothing else other than going through inferencial or inferrable patterns of thought. that is why seeking seeking out the bedrock of the motherload here.

Bishop Berekely was asked why he could not walk through a wall of matter which could not exist, no matter, what is angled here is the period of doubt commencing the coming of science, having very reducible concerns such as the basis of identity.

That is, identification. It’slef is sitting on a contradictory premise, therefore introducing contradiction itself as a contradictory premise.

Negation therefore , and nothingness is a predictably false and contradictory logical system , and this makes the problem so simple yet so extremely complex as to boggle the mind.

Therefore, Descartes must have felt the contradiction in asserting identity within conscious thought.

ref: The Logic of Appearance: Dennett, Phenomenology and Psychoanalysis
Jasper Feyaerts and Stijn Vanheule

I think the real problem here is attempting to find very specific and definitive answers to these profound questions
It therefore matters less what answers one finds for themselves and more that one does not treat them as absolute

And then [perhaps] a “formally defined relationship” between this and something analogous to, say, Platonic forms. And then a formally defined relationship between that and God. And then a formally defined relationship between God and Existence itself.

Nope, “formally defined relationships” are actually the opposite of where I’d like this to go. Instead, I want the definitions here to be connected to the lives that we actually live from day to day.

Human psychology is a “spin-off” embedded in the evolution of life on earth. And who knows what the “spin-offs” further down the evolutionary path might be.

For me the philosophy of existentialism revolves around the assumption that “existence precedes essense”. We exist in an already formed “somethingness”. And “I” then becomes embedded in the actual lived choices that we make. With nothing essential to fall back on. And it is here that folks like me speculate about “I” as the embodiment of an “existential contraption”.

Unless of course there is an essential reality — God or a wholly determined universe. Or an ontological understanding of existence within reach of the human brain/mind.

But, in my view, you don’t/won’t go there. Instead, you go here:

And on and on in the same vein.

I won’t ask [again] what on earth any of this this means “pertaining to the lives that we live” because I’m not even entirely certain at this point if you are not just being ironic.

Note to others:

What do you imagine he might be suggesting here — by way of grappling with the lives that you live?

I’m not arguing that he is wrong, only that, right or wrong, it is far beyond my capacity to fit into the life that I live.

I grasp this in the sense that, yes, in many profound ways, the continuities embedded in our genetic codes and in the memes that we share historically and culturally out in this particular world, would seem to argue for considerable less conflict in the world. But there it is – endless confrontation regarding any number of conflicting goods. How to explain this? Well, everyone here knows the components of my own philosophical narrative. All I can do is to grapple with the components of their own “out in the world” that we live in.

Nothing at all exists as one possibility out of which our own particular somethingness…“emerged”? All that other stuff are merely the words that we have invented in order to provide something in the way of an explanation.

But until these words are “illustrated” by way of connecting them to the behaviors that we choose “existentially”, they are ever up on the scholastic skyhooks to folks like me.

But, again, sure, maybe that is as far as we will ever be able to go.

Autonomously or not.

Autonomously or not?

Nominally this parting shot returns into the contradictory nature of the reduced state of mind and modus operans.

That analysis in this mode, failed in most practical purposes, is history by now, however, it is through this recognition. that the newer forms of transcendental awareness became feasable.

That the process of analysis can not totally stop because its relationship to each other, it can not become a primary focus: as a choice between this, OR that.

The existential primary cognition being before its realization can not operate in its self as subsisting In Its Self, its own Being, exclusive Cogito Ergo Sum, because of this existence shown to be not to BE essentially a contradictory relation with its Essence.
The essence and the Existence of Being was originally were appreciated as an Ex- Deus process between God and Man.

ANd god, this assumption can not BE negated by an assumltive adoption of the idea that ’ god is dead.

The proposition " god is dead’ is tantamount to negating god, as a Nothingness, his being negated, contradicted, as if such nothingness disqualified his being as an existent.

You may interject this by the assumption that the above is too constructive, and less relevant.

Here again the thought has to be again has to be mentioned again, that here again a return ( and it seems again an eternal endeavor) that an absolute basis is sought, to reinforce the idea You are asking for: what is the primary contradiction that the reductive reasoning appears to rest on.?

The logic of contradiction subsists in am adoption of ‘if This, then not That’

This is exclusive of That, where the idea that This can include That as exclusive and bounded groups, start on the wrong end.

The inclusive logic of a continuum where boundaries actually can evolve to be inductive / reductive in partial segments , processing from unity toward separation , dos not occur largely until mathematical demonstration by Leibnitz. The logic mathematics pre-empty, any formal argument that a mathematical preference could have founded logic.

In fact, the idea that logic and mathematics can be proposes in an absolute sense as either/or itself begs the question.

At this point to argue about how to bring all this down to earth, is not possibly, at the level of something or nothing ; as absolute choices, since at this minimal level has not been transcended, meaning too large spaces Existed between the attempted jumps, and this is now a-propo in our attempt for Existential Jumps.

In fact the jumps appear as drastic at this level and the abyss to deep and we might as well stay put, where we are.

The gradual passage of smaller and smaller , diminished differences are new relatively speaking, of Leibnitz can be considered relatively new: as a modern philosopher.

After all , thousands of years of ancient and classical philosophy, dwarfs the few hundred years of modern thought. And that means, ancient and modern thought are necessarily related, and the adaptation of modern existence needs functional derivatives in terms of both: both kinds of logic in terms a new evolution of them , synthetically, as Hegel, Kant and Marx would have it.

Again how does that relate to the ideas we present mostly in the spheres of the ‘i’ of the individual caught between am exclusively trapped reality and unreality, between Being and Nothingness?

We have to travel through a shortcut time, where the shortcuts are increasingly codified into more and more inclusive signs, signs upon which and with which modern thought has to deal with.

In fact the whole idea of a derived logic umderstood through more and more diminished particular boundaries push the argument toward less and less particular boundaries, psychology ally regressing the idea of the relevance of the existential notion of the phenomenological reduction.

Imbigious, its not that You have to understand the meanings behind such modern terms as ‘alienation’ and ‘existential jump’ . hi then You too, get trapped in an unending loop of what possible answers imply without their derivation.

We as thinkers could not have possibly gotten here, wirhout the development of our mind within larger and larger separation of parts of our mind within a simoltenious participation of others, and it took 2000 some years to find the principle of contradiction. missed the point that the Universal identification was not an assumed basis of.our existence.

Contradiction is the basis of denying circularly individually appearing undesirable traits to another, and it is this defense that uses contradictory arguments to one’s advantage.

However a realization of this mode of argument of not self defeating, even self deluding , shows the unwanted even unearned utility for such defense.

Defensiveness is below the realized treshold of a very negative such as that Rousseau rejected, which presumed man as a noble and progressively evolved creation, hiding the fact that without this presumption, we will envision man merely an animal , into which we are condemned to again return . formally and decisively.

It is a.choice between heaven and he’ll, but in a scheme with a dead god, we have only ourselves to blame.

This has probably happened eternally, choosing to return over and over.again, with the usual promises to god , that this time, we have really learned, and this time , we will over come the usual mechanics to karmic mechanisms to enable a jump to a totally new Enlightement, bereft of the cruel eternal struggle to leave an infinitely long karmic struggle, which if it were to ever even begin to take off, may benedit merely a civilization very far in the vast future.

Who really can learn the severe and painful lessons of history to be condemned to ever new and most likely failed trials?

Denial should be rejected, as Kant may have and really did point out, and the only thing to fear with identifying us with the ideal God we set up early on, as us included in His realm , is to believe that He will t

I agree. But what on earth does that have to do with, among other things, the real world?

Out there any number of objectivists have concocted any number of moral and political philosophies in order to sustain the psychological comfort and consolation that comes with believing in something that is shared by those scrambling to be thought of as “one of us”.

It’s just that many stick with God here because it provides a soothing outcome for “I” on both sides of the grave.

For them nothing matters more than sustaining the “very specific and definitive answers” embedded in a God, the God, my God. And then sans the immortality and salvation, the secular renditions.

In fact, I’ve always assumed this is why I get generally hostile reactions from the objectivists in venues such as this one. If my frame of mind is more reasonable than theirs, then their “I” in turn may well become all that much more fractured and fragmented.

The irony then being that what I go in search of is a way to convince myself that their own frame of mind is more reasonable than mine.

After all, for the bulk of my life, I was one of them!

This is just more “intellectual gibberish” to me.

On the other hand, I am more than willing to concede that I am the problem here.

Indeed, this may well be an extraordinary insight into precisely the relationships that I wish most to grapple with.

And that, only when I’ve come to finally grasp the technical precision of these observations, is there any hope at all of my coming to grips [existentially] with dasein, conflicting goods and political economy “out in the world” that I live in. Let alone a technically exacting understanding of such things as “something instead of nothing” or the role that “autonomy” plays in human interactions.

You being the primary object here is of no matter, for I see Your predicament as an important universal theme, shared by a vast human membership, not as erudite, and being able to bring into focus the pain and suffering of the vastly unenlightened and misinformed, whose existential angst caused many of them to short their.lives either by an outside source like disease, war and crime, OR by their very reduced sense of losing their appreciation for the meaning of their very Being & Existence , But, as jump off point, calibrated to change carefully and resulting the least amount of damage, such can be considered as useful.

At the same time, Your & my problem are of philosophical importance, whereby our Being becomes a focus that can be retraced with all manners of existential crisis, and advantaged by much more underlying relevance to those very same who do not experience, except through prima facie appearances of things that may revert to their illconceived understanding.

That is what differentiates that, which in fact has more affinity and resemblance with them, which not have much chance for formulations.

Children especially are to be sheltered from the ravages that such denial and contradictory imposition. of said messages.

This is through this modus operans that ideological differences may and do manifest, and that idea that socialism versus free enterprise, vs. Controlled economy can become.

That a nuke war may commence, when the commies realise that severe commercial competition result in less satisfaction for guaranteed constitutional rights, than before such substantial 'social ’ considerations become credible, then previously, , when intolerable political tensions commenced.

Existence prior to essence defeats all arguments for the notion that the nothingness of constitutional ideals, will be easily trumped by the realities of more social synthesis of ideas.

Thereforer, again, its not an either nothing or something argument but an either something and nothing discussion.

It is so logically clear, yet try to bring it down to a globally informed social network, where hyper velocity mega equipped sources of Total universal destruction may leave but a few, the most privileged persons bunkered down to social dreams hoping to survive in a new world order.

The swan song of the era of Soviet/U.S. existential REALITY prior to McChartyism was ’ better red then dead’ lest we forget that supposed lesson of history, only 50 years of an eye-blink ago

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.