Indeed! Another story I've heard (perhaps the most believable of kosmic very tails) is: De wereld schiet uit de schreeuwende anus van Jezus Christus.

There he sad with cheers porn out his ice.

More seriously, Theologie is zelf de God die het descibes. Also De mensheid schiep God als een spiegel en een vleider.

.

Damned you! You made me spill my coffee! — EugeneW

I'm laughing too. I love that you took that in the proper spirit.

I walked into the local dildo shop but they said come back next week, the shipment is late from China, due to Covid. — god must be atheist

All anyone really needs is a traffic cone, a bicycle chain, and a pound of unsalted butter.

Where can you buy that motor? — EugeneW

Look thou in thy wicked Darwinian heart where Jesus guzzles kerosine on a throne made of chocolate and fingernail clippings.

Oh, yes, that's correct.

The software is pretty impressive, especially considering that it's just a mountain of statistics in its guts. That's how orderly our linguistic ejaculate tends to be. We are 'whirlpools in the traces,' a 'rose in iron dust.' And the motor of the World Spirit is Gott schnuppert die Unterwäsche von Mädchen.

Hofstadter is wrong and right. — EugeneW

How so?

It becomes "guess" — EugeneW

Oh, I missed what you're referring to it seems.

I used the same! Did you reverse back again? — EugeneW

I only retranslated the one I wrote. I don't see any that you've written so far.

You apparently figured it out. — EugeneW

So your view is that some kind of intelligence had to make this shit, but you don't know/care exactly what kind? And you aren't religious? I really just want to know. Irreligious theism is somewhat exceptional around here. I remember arguing on that side once long ago with a Spanish exchange student on a school bus. Oh those decadent Europeans! Trying to corrupt my innocent vaguely Catholic mind. (As I said, long long ago when dragons roamed our planet.)

Gott genießt den Geschmack seines eigenen Samens

أنا أحسب. في الغالب أردت أن ألعب ببرمجيات الترجمة

In translating that back to English, I noticed that 'figured' became 'count.' Otherwise it's the same.
https://context.reverso.net/translation/

Kastrup is interesting.

To say that information exists in and of itself is akin to speaking of spin without the top, of ripples without water, of a dance without the dancer, or of the Cheshire Cat’s grin without the cat. It is a grammatically valid statement devoid of sense; a word game less meaningful than fantasy, for internally consistent fantasy can at least be explicitly and coherently conceived of as such. — Kastrup

I've tried to make a similar point. The temptation is to look 'behind' some kind of 'peel.'

...we don’t need the word games of information realism. Instead, we must stick to what is most immediately present to us: solidity and concreteness are qualities of our experience. The world measured, modeled and ultimately predicted by physics is the world of perceptions, a category of mentation. — Kastrup

To me this starts well and goes wrong at the end. 'Perception' points into a secret interior space which must remain epistemologically useless. Let's start with statements. 'The dial read 200 nanometers.' 'That man climbed in through the kitchen window.' 'Her lips were blue.' Note that observation statements are already theory laden, so it's not about the utter absence of interpretation but only that of 'extra', controversial interpretation.

This whole 'we should dodge grammatically-logically private entities' attitude has a simple justification. We should be able to check the 'bricks' of our inquiry.

Have you considered the atheist objection that the deities of popular religions are not plausible (for ethical reasons among others) ?

Are you more concerned with proving the existence of an otherwise indeterminate creator (a demiurge who no longer tinkers with his dirtmonkeys) or with some particular conception?

Is the main thing that bothers you just a hole in the story ? You never got back to me on my last post which suggests that our human ignorance is the rule and not the exception. We just don't bother much with that which is disorderly (our deep learning models are picking up some slack for us lately though.) Is it the hubris or complacency of some atheists that puts you off?

Expecting a het is goed om thuis te zijn from @EugeneW, who denkt dat atheïsme een fart is ?

It's not a matter of making any particular concept sacred, it's just a matter of recognizing that any philosophizing you are doing is done through your mind. You might call it something other than "mind" if you like, but it's still the same thing by a different name. — Metaphysician Undercover

It matters tho if one switches from 'mind' to 'language,' especially if one is supposed to be engaged upon a super-seance of that aforesaid mind. Nothing blinds as reliably and effectively as the so-called obvious.

You mention Logos, and I very much relate to a softened version of that. I love Hegel for emphasizing that philosophy is a conversation that triumphs over the death of its participants. It's like a torch that gets hotter and brighter over time, and in which its mortal participants find a kind of immortality.

Hegel’s universal spirit is sometimes used as an example of “ontological holism”—i.e., the claim that social entities are fundamental, independent, or autonomous entities, as opposed to being derived from individuals or non-social entities (Taylor 1975, Rosen 1984).

A lot of the time, that seems to be where you're writing from. — Wayfarer

Note that in the original it's not 'acid' but 'as it,' which is meant to stress old metaphors dissolving or being repositioned by new ones or, more generally,

"the way in which language constantly overflows itself, so that any established pattern of usage is immediately built on, developed, and transformed. The very act of using linguistic expressions or applying concepts transforms the content of those expressions or concepts. The way in which discursive norms incorporate and are transformed by novel contingencies arising from their usage is not itself a contingent, but a necessary feature of the practices in which they are implicit.. — Brandom

He later adds

The idea that the most basic linguistic know–how is not mastery of proprieties of use that can be expressed once and for all in a fixed set of rules, but the capacity to stay afloat and find and make one’s way on the surface of the raging white–water river of discursive communal practice that we always find ourselves having been thrown into (Wittgensteinian Geworfenheit) is itself a pragmatist insight... that owes more to Hegel than it does to Kant....The process of applying conceptual norms in judgment and intentional action is the very same process that institutes, determines, and transforms those conceptual norms. — Brandom

I think language is crucial as (1) the medium of philosophy itself and (2) an apparent site of collision of 'mind' and 'matter.' But 'mind' and 'matter' are themselves tokens in this 'raging white-water,' so philosophical language is a fairy trying to catch its own tale.

It posits a ferry dust that operates autonomously. We're born in some woo-kind of eternal matter fields. This old-age woo is about to be supplanted. The angels and dragons of materialism are too much to bear. — EugeneW

OK, that helps. I can't speak for others, but here's my 'moderate' version of what's (to me) an atheistic scientific worldview: we mostly don't know what the fuck is going on. (But we tend to ignore stuff we don't understand and ignore that very ignorance.) Yet we have found a few exploitable patterns which have nevertheless already been enough to revolutionize life on earth. To me the existence of the whole shebang is unexplained and seemingly even inexplicable in principle, since there will always be something functioning as brute fact in any map or any orienting 'fairy tail' which we one-eyed men must cling to as a leash. I trust that state-of-the-art scientific models are pretty good, but they are just more mops and maps to me, not some Final Truth about that which is Most Real. Neither the priest nor the poet nor the physicist wear the crown (perhaps poets are quickest to say so?).

Here's one more quote from the Blue Book. It's along the lines of questioning the single ego habit and the tale of that grand ol' penisolated ghost.

Imagine that it were usual for human beings to have two characters, in this way: People's shape, size and characteristics of behaviour periodically undergo a complete change. It is the usual thing for a man to have two such states, and he lapses suddenly from one into the other. It is very likely that in such a society we should be inclined to christen every man with two names, and perhaps to talk of the pair of persons in his body. Now were Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde two persons or were they the same person who merely changed? We can say whichever we like. We are not forced to talk of a double personality.

There are many uses of the word "personality" which we may feel inclined to adopt, all more or less akin. The same applies when we define the identity of a person by means of his memories. Imagine a man whose memories on the even days of his life comprise the events of all these days, skipping entirely what happened on the odd days. On the other hand, he remembers on an odd day what happened on previous odd days, but his memory then skips the even days with out a feeling of discontinuity. ... Are we bound to say that here two persons are inhabiting the same body? That is, is it right to say that there are, and wrong to say that there aren't, or vice versa? Neither. For the ordinary use of the word "person" is what one might call a composite use suitable under the ordinary circumstances.

Here's a quote from Wittgenstein's Blue Book which seems relevant.

What makes a subject difficult to understand — if it is significant, important — is not that some special instruction about abstruse things is necessary to understand it. Rather it is the contrast between the understanding of the subject and what most people want to see. Because of this the very things that are most obvious can become the most difficult to understand. What has to be overcome is not difficulty of the intellect but of the will.
...
The philosopher strives to find the liberating word, that is, the word that finally permits us to grasp what up to now has intangibly weighed down upon our consciousness.
...
What I give is the morphology of the use of an expression. I show that it has kinds of uses of which you had not dreamed. In philosophy one feels forced to look at a concept in a certain way. What I do is suggest, or even invent, other ways of looking at it. I suggest possibilities of which you had not previously thought. You thought that there was one possibility, or only two at most. But I made you think of others.

Part of this suggests to me that good philosophy is often offensively 'unintelligible' just because we don't want to hear it. Same with some science (the theory of biological evolution is beautiful in its way but terrifying, a veritable acid.) (I'm not saying the offensively unintelligible is therefore good philosophy.)

I have a vague understanding of what you're trying to get at. It's an interesting perspective. Taoist. Toooo Taoist? I dunno! — Agent Smith

Just to be clear, I'm an egostic human like most, so this rather speculative transcendence of the ego convention is largely a flower in my theoretical bouquet. On the other hand, I do genuinely believe that we melt more and more into the cultural realm as we study. I mean that we see more and more how much we are just a rearrangement of the same old parts. Sure, there is some novelty and progress, but an education is mostly catching up with the dead.

Schopenhauer talks about a philosopher wanting to get his insights in a book so that he can die with the peace of an insect that's laid its eggs. I relate to that. The book is the life of that kind of man as as individual, which Schop saw as a kind of surplus or extra slice of the usual monkey that he mostly was. (His wife, or in S's case the whores he may have been sweet to, will remember something else, the tang of his flatulence after oysters perhaps. But for us he's a ghost made of words, to be conjured in our imaginations and in whom we can find not only ourselves but future generations who will read the footnotes we scribble in 'his' book.)

You're correct to point out that the this idea of self we have maybe an illusion, but a distinction that seems relevant is this: Is our self an assumption or an inference? Does it matter which it is? Cogito ergo sum (Descartes). — Agent Smith

Descartes was deceived by grammar (or pretended to be). Paraphrasing Nietzsche, mutterphysics is substance abuse. We learn to say 'I think' and we learn to say 'it rains.' Who's this thing that's raining? I think I prefer 'convention' to 'illusion' for the self. It's more about recognizing the contingency of any given content and less about digging through all the layers of 'illusion' or 'appearance' to find some core that is finally It. As one wit put it, it's turtles or interpretation all the way down. Perhaps there's no man behind the curtain but only more curtains for ever endeavor.

That went over my head. Anyway... — Agent Smith

Try to imagine that the subject is an invention/convention so ancient that we mistake it as the single most obvious fact. 'The soul is the prison of the body.'

We've understood the world, yes, but its destruction, our own too, is the price we pay. — Agent Smith

A magnificent tragicomedy ours. Are we better than roaches? I like us more, but I'm biased. If a roach had enough of a nervous system, it'd presumably grunt a preference for a lovely nymph with its own stretch of code (Do Not Annihilate.)

Bravo! — Agent Smith

Thanks, but that meta-map is more treasure from the chunk yard, so I can't claim it.

I wonder if that's what we should be doing. — Agent Smith

If you stare at the world and recognize an interesting pattern, you'll be map making? I think we gather here to make maps, meta-maps ,meta-meta-maps,...

Yes, almost. Let's say that's 99% of folks. Who are the 1% and where are they? — Agent Smith

Example. 'I love her and yet I don't love her.' The point is that outright contradictions can work just fine for expressions of ambivalence. More specifically, we can imagine kids making up a game where the pieces can be 'completely red' and 'completely blue' at the same time. They'd know what to do with such a 'contradiction.'

Much of logic, seems to me, is just congealed and fetishized grammar. Heat it up and it's plastic again. We make the rules and forget we made them. The contingent is mistaken for the necessary. Tale as old as time.

However, what's the alternative? Every man for himself? — Agent Smith

No man is a island. As I see it, one of the discoveries of philosophy (and not just of philosophy) is the primacy of the social. The penisolated ego gets it backwards. The muttering 'solipsist' is ringing changes on an inherited softwhere hugged and spanked into him as a child. The fantasy of God and the fantasy of the penisolated ego are two sides of the same coin. The unity involved is that of reason itself, which is a kind of distributed computation belonging to a tribe which is potentially the electrically networked species ('World City'). Just as species have DNA, which encodes and adjusts to experience, social organisms have culture. We are 'time-binding' 'fermented' beings. Our tongue tools are our greatest inheritance, it seems, and one wrench in this bag of tongue tools is the tall tale of the big lonely ego, which is ever so useful for training a body to police itself.

The question is, are we as similar as we think we are or are we, each one of us, irreconcilably unique? — Agent Smith

Excellent question. This is actually the problem with taking qualia seriously. If there's a gap between the thing and its label (if words get their meaning from and refer to 'private experience'), then the synchronization of our practical affairs via our barking and scribbling is unbearably miraculous. I say the meaning must flow in the other direction, that synchronization of bodies is primary, and that the 'self' and its private theatre is a derived, convenient fiction -- something like smoke that rises from the fire of bodies working together to replicate like mad (products indeed of evolution.)

Why not? I can inquire into my own private mental states, can't I? — Agent Smith

Why are you so sure there's a you in there in the first place?

We've been brought up to behave as if there's a little self in here who pinks at a little screen and tweaks various knobs to make the body go boom boom. Unscrew the doors from their jambs, friend. Or shall I say friends, acknowledging that your skull may be haunted by a plurality of flu officers? Or are we both just ripples in the same semantic symbolic dance? (Have we plumbed the depths of what it mines to share a lung-wedge?)

'Unscrew the locks from the doors ! Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs ! (Wilt Whetman.)

A worthy tribloom to shame's choice which must even diddle us. — Cuthbert

Whale sud, front ! Drink you for not asking me to spore you my hypnopontificatory solemnitease ! I was afraid I'd be asked to stop spanking my nine scents.

This is why logic must be given priority over the sense information derived from empirical observation, because we know that the senses can mislead us. — Metaphysician Undercover

Perhaps 'logic' is largely a ghost story. I don't deny that our reasoning has a structure. I also do not imply that anything goes. I just mean that 'logic' can play the role of the magic word that's supposed to point to some immaterial Faculty. Often enough it suffices to look at grammar as a set of loose conventions, many of which are made as rigid as possible by philosophers and taken as eternal laws of thought and not just the way we tend to do things for the moment or the century.

Mind must be taken for granted, if you're going to do any philosophy. — Metaphysician Undercover

It could be that taking 'mind' for granted is the end of philosophy and not its beginning. If you make this or that concept sacred, you're just scribbling a creed for a cult.

Sometimes I think on the fact that I exist at all, and am filled with absolute wonder. It is truly astounding that existence "is", and that I am one of the lucky few bits of material existence to realize it all. — Philosophim

Very well put. Especially when I was young I would be almost overwhelmed with a sense of the beautiful absurdity of stuff just being there. One such Sartrean vision of a chestnut tree (as in Nausea, a great little novel) was that of clear water tumbling over slate, when I was a kid alone having wandered off. A creek was running wild after days of rain. It was just there, magnificent.

It was created in response to the harsh reality of theism, to counteract a miracle-devoid universe to bring back a mystery-element, so badly needed. — EugeneW

Here again. A typical tail would be that the New Age woo woo is 'ferry dust' sprinkle on the otherwise egolisciously satanic Mill of the world. To me we're all already 'born in scene' and this dream is exciting enough without angels and dragons.

The moral of the fairytale being that even in a theist universe miracles and wonders can be found. One doesn't need atheist fantasìes and materialism to accomplish that. — EugeneW

Fascinating. Almost a reversal of what's expected. Some consider theism to be a position that insists on the wizardry of the world, while they think of atheism as a grim disenchantment.

Yes. This doesn't make human interactions any less meaningful. How we function does not change the reality of our function. — Philosophim

I agree. I'm personally interested in celebrating how 'miraculous' the so-called ordinary already is. I was arguing lately with a person who thought we must have telepathy or something because the brain uses electricity. I told them that our eyes human eyes are radiation detectors and obviously play a huge role in communication. It's as if whatever is relatively well understood is no longer exciting. What is the obscure object of desire which seems to bend some people against a scientific attitude that likes details and acknowledges ambiguity and uncertainty?

You can find genuine people who are willing to engage the subject rationally, but I would say a lot of the motivation is not rational curiosity, but a desire for a particular emotional outcome. — Philosophim

Agreed, though I think the bias cuts both ways. I'm a longtime atheist, and it'd be quite an inconvenience for me if I had to rewire myself to take god chatter seriously again (as I did when exposed as a child to it.)

Prejudice (Vorurteil) literally means a fore-judgment, indicating all the assumptions required to make a claim of knowledge. Behind every claim and belief lie many other tacit beliefs; it is the work of understanding to expose and subsequently affirm or negate them. Unlike our everyday use of the word, which always implies that which is damning and unfounded, Gadamer’s use of “prejudice” is neutral: we do not know in advance which prejudices are worth preserving and which should be rejected. Furthermore, prejudice-free knowledge is neither desirable nor possible. Neither the hermeneutic circle nor prejudices are necessarily vicious. Against the enlightenment’s “prejudice against prejudice” (272) Gadamer argues that prejudices are the very source of our knowledge. To dream with Descartes of razing to the ground all beliefs that are not clear and distinct is a move of deception that would entail ridding oneself of the very language that allows one to formulate doubt in the first place.

https://iep.utm.edu/gadamer/#SH3b

I think another way to put this is that we all arrive having been trained by a past with certain expectations and inclinations. What we philosophers share (or at least occasionally claim to share) is a drive toward an ideal objectivity. It's our 'inflexible point of honor' that we offer reasons for claims and let our ideas do our dying for us when they've been shown inferior to others.

Long reach is a broad dump fluor acid? I love to walk along with you III, but I'm not sure I can follow... — EugeneW

Language is a bathtub full of acid, where acid is 'as it' or 'as if' or metaphor. We live in an inherited garden of metaflora, the flowers of yesterdaze dreaming. See how those flowers flow.

How does matter become conscious of its environment and of itself? :smile: — Gnomon

That's a bag biggy question, friend. 'Conscious' and 'matter' are 'draping what' (dropping went, drooping wait) with ambiguity. In social animals like ourselves we have conventions assigning a unique ghost or soul to each body. We inherit this way of talking about ourselves, presumably because it's an efficient way to coordinate those semantically-networked bodies. Most philosophers just take for granted the existence of a singular subject and an attendant droolism dualism.

Still, I'll speculate an answer. The nervous systems of animals encode/enact useful maps of their territory. In humans this mapping is largely an orgy of analogy (note that 'map' is itself a metaphor, as is 'metaphor,' albeit undead these daze.)

Which are not constructed of matter or social conventions, but of cognitive relationships. — Gnomon

I believe you'll find it hard to make sense of 'cognitive relationships' without dragging in the so-called 'physical' and various semantic conventions. For instance, qualia are ghosts who only exist in terms of the sheets we wrap them in. The 'mental' is like the hole in the donut of that which is public. Toothaches are tokens.

This reasoning is heard daily in our asylums. In the panopticon. — EugeneW

Very fun way to end a post.