The fact that everything in YOUR world is reduced to brain events doesn’t preclude independent existence of a parallel world that exists in another realm. All that it takes is flow of information between the two realms/worlds and there is no need to reduce everything to brain events. That assumes independent existence of unperceived objects, of course. The brain in this context would be a physical object from another realm, producing mental events, then sending them across realms to you. What are the flaws in this reasoning? — enqramot

But are you reading what I wrote? the assumption of a physicalist conception of the world as foundational provides NO epistemic extension so that other worlds is anything more than the one localized body of events. Knowledge connections, this is what is needs to be shown. How does the physicalist model of a brain manage to "get to anything out there"? And, as I said, even the concept of physicalism itself now to be understood with exactly this delimitation. How is it that when I am gazing at my uncle. the entire affair is not reducible to brain events?

What you want to do is play out the assumption that all things are physical under the assumption that all things are physical. Seems reasonable enough until you make the attempt to explain knowledge relationships. This is the foil! If you can't explain knowledge events in your foundational view of what the world really is at the basic level, then you have a foundational explanatory deficit that undermines all things, for before we can talk about all things, other worlds, or anything at all, we have to have a theory of justified belief that can such talk at all. It is quite simple.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but as far as I’m aware the word “experience” is not a part of the definition of the word “to exist”. So, to reach a conclusion that something doesn’t exist, you must do more than just demonstrate that it’s not a part of the “experience realm”. — enqramot

How is it that existence itself is not just a unique brain event; that when you ponder existence and other sweeping terms that are all inclusive. you are not just making a statement that entirely conceived within a brain matrix, and everything you can imagine is just this and nothing else.
You would have to have an independent theory of experience, then, apart from what science can observe and think about. Is this what you have, some experiential, acausal theory about how cognitive events "discover" the world? How would it be that this three and a half pound greyish "thing" produces ideas that are "about" something else? This is what is required, and of course, you can say that science is an experimental/theoretical work in progress that will one day unlock the secrets of epistemic relationships, but this will have to include a dramatic reconception of what it means for a thing to be physical; some new "law of epistemic connectivity" will have to be introduced, but note that physicalism does not have this at all! Scientists all believe the moon is out there, as are genetic sequences and fossils embedded in rock, and so on, and have no idea at all as to even WHAT an "epistemic principle" would even look like. And they don't care because this is simply not what they think about. Scientists are not philosophers.

Cannot be shown as of now but this might change in the future. In my view, to make assertions which go beyond speculation about a system you have to have total knowledge of the system. Say, chess is a system. So far the game of chess hasn’t been solved, but endgames including up to 7 (possibly 8) pieces have. So, within such a subsystem some definite assertions whether a given endgame is won, lost or a draw are possible, otherwise not. Your assertion belongs to the “not” category. — enqramot

But this misses the point. See the above.

Are you an expert in epistemic relations to make such bold statements? Maybe the current description needs updating? Maybe it’s flawed or incomplete. Btw, why would we want to restrict ourselves to purely physical model? What about coexistence of physical and non-physical elements including some kind of interface between them? — enqramot

You may not want to restrict yourself to this model, and I say very good. Because such a model doesn't work. I took a course in epistemology once, and I have read Kant through Derrida and a bit beyond. The current analytic philosophy community simply put the matter to rest by ignoring it. In S knows P, the traditional analysis of knowledge simply assumes P is the case, and long as you are justified in believing P, then you are good to go. But the devil is in the details: how can you extract P from the knowledge conditions that make knowing P possible? This is the issue here.

Once again, does the fact that they cannot be confirmed preclude their existence? If so, how? In what scope? — enqramot

The complaint of this rests solely with the epistemic deficits of physicalism. I do prefer the simple way of putting this: there is my uncle there, and here am I: how is it that HE gets IN HERE? If causality worked to explain knowledge, then, of course, science steps in explaining how light waves reflect, pass through air and space to meet the eye, and so on, but it should be striking, very striking, that brain chemistry is utterly alien to what ever is out there that is not brain chemistry.

Physicality doesn’t make it through to your world but may be necessary so that your world can be what it is. Camera doesn't know anything because the object "camera" doesn't support "knowing". But how can you be sure that a future version of "camera" won't acquire this function? Let's say you go to great lengths to convince yourself and others that a thing such as a conscious camera is impossible, only to see one walk past you one day. There is no contradiction between being "certain" that statement A is true and this same statement being false. One must always bear this in mind or one risks making a colossal error. — enqramot

The argument doesn't care about what the future holds. Either you can tell me what the essential epistemic connectivity is about or you cannot. Again, if you want to include something that physicalism COULD have then you have to make sense of this "could". Otherwise it is merely empty speculation.

What is and what is not your uncle is yet to be established so any too specific assertions are uncalled for at this early stage. You don’t see your uncle as he is but a heavily filtered version of him instead. If I hide my face behind a mask does it mean that my face no longer exists in your world? — enqramot

In order for it to be a heavily filtered version of him, it has to be first shown that it is possible to affirm anything at all of him. How would physicalism make this affirmation, GIVEN all that has been said above? (Pls don't just ignore all of this, and continue to say how outrageous it al sounds, The argument itself has to be dealt with.)

The essence of Buddhism seems to be that the kind of knowledge which can be acquired via study and reading can never constitute liberation because all it is doing is reinforcing the discursive, dualistic mind and egoic delusions. — Janus

I agree; although I would argue about the egoic delusions. I mean, that gets complicated as to the self being so disposable.

What is a brain? A physical object we are told is responsible for our awareness of the underlying reality. I cannot verify any of this, of course. But what is fundamentally wrong with physicalist theory? What is in it that you don't accept? What if your uncle's world is separate to yours and most objects are private to each pertinent world but some are shared across worlds. I'm repeating myself here but you haven't addressed it so far. Shared objects make limited interaction between worlds possible. What am I missing? Do you or do you not subscribe to the view that unperceived objects exist? Guess not if you don't accept physicalism. What (if anything) defies logic in such a view? We have remote transmission of data between worlds, conscious agents in both worlds. Your objections? — enqramot

The objection is not to say this is wrong, but that there is a deeper level of analysis that takes up the assumptions of what you say, the presuppositions that are in place that make it possible for you or me to talk about this kind of thing, or talk about anything. The supposition that my uncle is there in a world at all is in question, as well as even the supposition that the posited physical brain can be there ar all given the reduction of all affairs to brain events. This is a way to present a reductio ad absurdum on the premise that the physical brain is the sole foundation for experience. After all, if there is a strict correspondence between brain and mental events such that only brain can produce these, then the physicality itself of the brain is no longer tenable, since it, too, now, the knowledge of it, is just a brain event.

It's yet to be established beyond doubt that "the brain" is essentially different to "car fender" in this context. So far the supposed link between consciousness and "brain events", neurons etc. is just an operational hypothesis. Why transport of information, which in itself doesn't require consciousness, is controversial for you? You don't experience the whole uncle, but only information that he voluntarily shares with you (or is coerced to do so). What prevents external information from entering? — enqramot

But this is the assumption in place. It is there to test the soundness of the idea that consciousness and its knowledge experiences is produced by the brain according to the physical model.

You have to step back from objections like the above; way back. It is assuming all things are physical, and there is your brain and there is my uncle, and the rest; but on this assumption, things instantly fall apart. It says this: If the physicalist model of the world is true, then the brain is physical; and if the brain is physical, then all brain events are subject to this physicalist analysis, that is, the brain event in which I perform mathematics, or see a house or read computer data, and everything that is "known" are all physical brain events; but physical brain events cannot be shown to carry epistemic connectivity, that is, there is nothing in a physical description of relations between objects that can account for epistemic relations (hence the barn door example); hence, according to the physical model, brain events remain localized within the brain; but this means nothing can be confirmed outside of the brain, and therefore exterior events cannot be outside at all, and indeed, the axiom that affirms physicality itself is made untenable.

Something like that is the argument.

Why should things that are temporarily hidden from view be regarded as non-existent? Even if the aforementioned program doesn't have a function like "unhide()" and doesn't go beyond most rudimentary level of detail, our own reality might be different in this regard. — enqramot

"Things" did you say? What things? How does a physical brain affirm things, for the logic itself is reduced brain events, meaning is a brain event, I mean, intuitions, dogs, cats, religion, and the entire human dramatic unfolding are brain events only, according to thsi model. why? Because physicality is not epistemic, meaning looking closely at physical relations, there is nothing that place what is out there, in here. Does the circuitry in my computer through its camera "know" the world it "sees'? Look at the opacity test: is a brain opaque or transparent to the world? And even if it were some sort of mirrored organ, it would remain a 100 billion neurons of dense matrical events, and dense matrical events are not my uncle.

Since researching the nature of consciousness has potential to generate enough commercial interest to justify directing more resources/capital/brain power/time to it than I, as a single person, or collectively we, the users of this forum, would ever be able to devote to it, and despite that effort no noteworthy progress has been achieved, that just shows the scale of the problem and helps estimate likelihood that our efforts will culminate in actually solving the problem the OP (in this case you) has. — enqramot

See the above.

No. I probably think about Kant more than I ought. I mean that, like you, similar questions keep me awake at night. You can't do philosophy without a good night's sleep. So arithmetic it is. Nighty night! — Cuthbert

The tonnage of human suffering keeps me awake. I make a lousy Ubermensch.

A light wave in space, as idea or model, would be commonly thought to be underpinned by a chemical event in the brain. An actual light wave in space, it would commonly be thought, might trigger a chemical event in the brain if it were to enter the eye. In one sense the world "out there" is known and thought about only "in here", but it is assumed that it must be "out there" in order to provide the content to be thought about.

Of course we don't know that, and the fact that we cannot explain our situation in absolute terms, leads to the possibility of skepticism, idealism and anti-realism. I'd say we just don't know/ That said, I'd also say that the plausibility of the idea that science is about "some world out there" is bolstered by the observed technological success of science. But there's no denying that it is possible that it is all going on in consciousness, and that without consciousness nothing at all would exist.

I'm not sure what you mean by approaching the question "from a physicalist model pov". — Janus

I claim that the whole system of understanding is based on a lie, to put it dramatically. I am not arguing from the perspective of a categorical context of understanding, whether that would be knitting or genetics or economics, and so on; but from a "context" where one meets the impossibility of all things. This is an extraordinary event in a person's philosophical evolution and the primacy of science has all but cancelled it in a wave of assumptions grounded in, as you say, technology. Yes, it sounds like Heidegger's complaint, but the idea is here not the way he put it. I feel a bit like in Wittgenstein's corner in his argument with Russel, the latter (and subsequent analytic philosophy) taking the call for clarity, and away from nonsense, to be the essential idea of the Tractatus, while Witt insisting that he had it all wrong: it was that-which-one-passed-over-in silence that was essential. The physicalist model is the "clarity" of science's most basic assumptions, which is physicalism (not to argue distinctions here in what this could mean), and its broad acceptance has entirely eclipsed the true epistemic and ontological foundation of the world, which is indeterminacy. We don't know what it is to stand in the openness of our existence "free" of vast body of knowledge claims that are always already there "making the world" as Rorty put it, which is one way say why Kierkegaard thought the medieval mind was closer to God.

Quite right Bylaw! Intuition is the great instinct that propagates the life it imbues. Intuition ought never be ignored but rather, enriched with reason, to amalgamate the "whole". — Benj96

I knew a philosopher once whose least favorite word was 'intuition', because people take this to mean some kind of non propositional knowledge, a yielding of something quasi magical from the world itself, like writing on stones tablets from a mountain top. The way this goes is, take any given intuition, and tell me what it is. The meaning of the intuition is now understood, but only when it is set in a context of spoken possibilities. Outside of this context, that is, any context of what language can say, there is, you know, nothing to say. So all intuitions are propositional in their nature, and not mysterious emanations with some stand alone meaning.
Consider a very strong intuition like causality: It is impossible to imagine an object moving by itself. We don't give this much thought, but it is about as close as one can get to an absolute (putting ethics and value aside) and it is a very curious thing to me because it is about actual things and not abstract logic (I think Wittgenstein claimed that the intuition was essentially logical, but I'd have to find that). But what IS causality? Say what you will, but it is the language doing the saying. Apart from this, there is nothing to say.

Language is certainly more fundamental than culture. Knowledge does not require language, however, so the fundamental attachment must go deeper than culture or language. — praxis

I don't think language is historically more fundamental than culture, but is it even analytically more fundamental? For the analysis of a particle of language has to refer back to the contexts in which meanings are generated, and these are the historical institutions that were early on in play in the generation of symbolic thinking. This is one fundamental difference between Heidegger and Kant, that latter dealing with logical abstractions of language, the former dealings with all of these as of-a-piece. Dewey idea of a "consummatory event" is similar: the aesthetic and the cognitive and the meanings in solving problems issue from "an experience", a foundational original.

Yes, I think there is something to be said for the idea of anamnesis; the process seems to consist more in unlearning that it does in learning. The drive to knowledge can become more acquisitive than inquisitive. I don't think of anamnesis as knowledge remembered that was previously known in another realm of the soul, but as reconnecting with the forgotten inherent wisdom of the body. — Janus

Well put, I think. And, in the nostalgia, it is no longer recollection, for the experience itself is occurrent. As I remember, as Wordsworth put it, childhood's "clouds of glory" what was intimated then is intimated now, and the recollective way of summoning it is incidental. But in those years prior to reflection, we had no knowledge of what was happening, no contexts for discussion, so was there an agency at all, there to experience? Yes, I would say, but agency then was vague: who was it that was so content if the matter of "who" is something augmentative, constructed out of historical acquisition? An infantile affectivity lacks identity.
Forgotten inherent wisdom of the body?

I feel that descriptions such as: internal, external, real, imaginary etc. are purely arbitrary and used to make sense of the surrounding ocean of information. Both "external" and "internal" events are processed in the brain in a similar way. — enqramot

But I want to point out that it is not that internal, external, real and the rest are obviated by the subsuming internal events of the brain that process all things equally; I mean fine, but it goes further: for even brain processes are not "really" brain processes, because it took a brain process to produce this very notion of brain processes. Nothing at all survives the physicalist model, even the physicalist model.

Does the Earth disappear the moment the last conscious being cease to exist? In what sense does it exist if there's noone left to perceive it? Yet, should conscious beings reappear later on, they'd be able to "see" the Earth in the same place it used to be. Or not? Let's suppose the real uncle exists. How does he get into your world? I don't see how that could happen — enqramot

He doesn't, which is the point I am making. The only thing that gets "in" a world is what is "in" the world, and even this doesn't really happen. Events in this world never get out, nor does anything get in. Certainly, things occur, but to say even this itself is a neuronal event, and so neuronal events in an exchange between neuronal events working in vastly complex arrays of chemical exchanges in which understanding occurs, syntax and semantical phenomena: there is no way out, and to say there is, one would have simply say what it is. Is it the causal relations between the inner and the outer? But how can one affirm such a thing independently of just these causal relations confined to the brain? And how does a causal relation establish an epistemic one? Does a dented car fender "know" the offending guard rail? Dented fenders are not brains, of course, but how is it that a brain's complexity qua complexity make for an epistemic connection; I mean, "something out" there still has to make it 'in here".

Let's imagine we live in a simulation. With sufficient level of detail, how would you distinguish it from reality? And if we accept the virtual nature of reality, we sort of bypass the question: "How does consciousness arise from matter?". — enqramot

I am reminded of Zizek, who defends Hegel and borrowing from someone else, likens our inability to grasp where Geist is going in future rational possibilities to a program in which there are trees and clouds, but there is nothing in the program that allows for any detail beyond the beyond the distant visage. There simply does not exist, in this world, any interior to the trees or sun that illuminates the clouds and the like. Such things are therefore "impossible" in this world. It is like this here: What stands before me, this visage of my uncle, is just a brain event, and every thought in my head that asks questions like, what brought him here, how did he get here? and so on, are not anything but a program. there are no events. Events are just the way we interpret affairs before us; but there is no "before us" or near or far, or anything at all. Even the thought experiment questioning my uncle's existence is just patterns of complexity in the brain. Nothing at all, and this means everything conceivable, survives this model.

This may sound odd, but keep in mind, I am only following the course put before me. If consciousness truly is a exclusively a manifestation of brain events, then all of the above is true.

quote="enqramot;754072"]The difference between "know" and know, know being reserved for conscious beings. No, my computer had to concede defeat and withdraw in shame. The question of consciousness is not an easy question. Correct me if I'm wrong, but as far as I'm aware, the contemporary science has no clue about the nature of consciousness. So how likely are we to solve it in this forum?[/quote]

Contemporary science? But what do they have to do with philosophy? You call Neil De Grasse Tyson, and talk like this, and he will simply give you a condescending sneer.

But then, there certainly is a way to go. First, do you accept that when you observe something, you actually are observing it, and this is not reducible in the way the model indicates?

I wonder what is, for you, the most important philosophical question? — Janus

Consider that there is impossible to talk about the relationship between an agency of perception and that which is perceived, not simply because it is really difficult to talk about how knowledge relationships work, as if this awaits some future quantum discovery about the behavior of things in particle physics; but because on the physical model, the world itself, the totality of all that can possibly exist, is reduced to the behavior of a hundred billion neurons or so; and these neurons are reducible to an impossibility, because the only way to affirm that they exist is through neuronal events themselves. Pure question begging.

This doesn't seem to make an impression on people, which was to be expected (such are the priorities of clarity over content); but consider Wittgenstein's example (Lecture on Ethics): Let's borrow Wittgenstein's example from his Lecture on Ethics. My Uncle's head, suddenly right before my eyes, turns into a lion's head, just like that, and there you are, or anyone, and it would be miraculous and disturbing and wondrous; but how long would this stay a miracle? The search would begin to understand it, and in this process, the miracle vanishes, and becomes a research project with all of the usual assumptions and paradigms attending, and if nothing conclusive is produced, we would have one of Thomas Kuhn's anomalies, and regular science would have amend a paradigm or two, and regularities would be sought after to establish principles at work, and so forth.

Here, it is far worse. The world is not the world, and there are no scientific resources that can bend the situation to the insistence of a paradigm, or even an anomaly against a paradigm's principle, for paradigms are just more grey matter at work. We want to say the connections are easy to identify, for example, the portions of the electromagnetic spectrum are reflected while others are absorbed by the surface of my uncle's presence, and these pass across space to the eye, which receives them, and rods and cones around the retina condition the light and the retina delivers signals to the brain and so on, and hence, the scientific grasp of sight that in part affirms my uncle has its explanatory basis.

But then, one has to ask the astoundingly easy question: how is a light wave in space anything like a chemical event in the brain? Or for that matter, how are words and meanings that are brain events, anything at all like the world "out there"? And this kind of explanatory breakdown applies across the board to every possible faculty of access. And it is so obvious one has to wonder how the assumption that science is about some world out there has any regard at all.

This has, of course, in philosophy, a long history, which is idealism, which goes back to Kant, Berkeley, but really Kant was the one to put this complex thesis out there with amazing clarity and comprehensiveness. But since scientists don't read Kant, and so many in this forum have a scientific background, one way to show that the idea is plausible and important is to approach it from a physicalist model pov. As I see it, this really is a far more efficient and effective way to talk about this.

Not the most important philosophical issue. The second most. the most important is, by far, ethics and metaethics.

Perhaps for the same reason that when you read this post you are not merely inspecting marks on a screen. Your uncle means something to you. Hopefully more than this post.

But is this 'meaning something' anything but a bunch of electrical impulses in your own neurons?

Ach, you'll never be satisfied. It's not just you. Personally I do complicated mental arithmetic and eventually drop off. — Cuthbert

I don't have an Uncle Sidney, so put your concerns to rest.

Yes, I understand. But the world is not mathematics, is it? The dropping off place for you, in philosophy has JUST BEGUN with this little scenario. You mean, you have no interest at all in the epistemic conditions that make knowledge of the world possible....here, in a philosophy forum???

Then you'll just have to do that, I guess. How is not my problem; I sleep very well in my physicalist model. Except for the bladder in the middle night thing, but that, too, is insoluble short of death. — Vera Mont

?? Well, it is a rather flippant pov to say this. It is your problem because it is a philosophical problem, and this is a philosophy club.

Take your pick. We could follow Quine, Davidson , Wittgenstein , Putnam, Rorty or Nietzsche out of the trap of physicalism. We could embrace a Gadamerian hermeneutics , a phenomenological approach, poststructuralism. We could follow the work of neuroscientists influenced by Peirce, or those adopting enactivism. Lots of options here. — Joshs

But none are suitable to the issue at hand. Very helpful, but they miss the mark. Sorry for the long response, but you asked a big question, and I'm no professional philosopher.

I have my limitations. I know Quine is a naturalist, and he declared himself just this, "Philosophically i am bound to Dewey by naturalism....With Dewey I hold that knowledge, mind, and meaning are part of the same world...that they are bound to be studied to the same empirical spirit that animates natural science." And I read his Indeterminacy of Translation paper, his Two Dogmas. Rorty seems to follow in suit: He is unyielding in his insistence that the truth is made not discovered,

I have always been suspicious of this pragmatist's naturalism, for on the one hand, there is a commitment a pragmatic theory of knowledge at work, and this to me is right and it leads into a pragmatic phenomenology. Rorty asked, famously, how does anything out there get in here? And by this, I take him to mean he wants his cake and eat it, too: He rejects "scientism" whereby the philosophical foundation of being is something scientists and naive physicalism have a theory about in their empirical grounding; yet, because science is not philosophy, it takes the latter to get to this grounding, which is pragmatism. But if the grounding lies in a pragmatic analysis of out relations with the world, then the answer to the question in OP cannot be anything close to naturalism; naturalism is just a default term for "what works", and my uncle whose existence is being questioned and examined here is NOT a "what works" manifestation. I read somewhere that Putnam argued against Rorty on this, Rorty, he claimed, defending a kind of pragmatic solipsism, could not allow Putnam's wife to be simply Putnam's wife. This goes to the point I raised here. Jumping to the chase, as I see it, is impossible to argue that a brain thing can "know" anything, and it is not because pragmatic avenues of discussing knowledge don't allow. It is really a simple matter of discovering any path at all. By Rorty's standard, it is not even brain events Putnam is really witnessing; obviously, this kind of talk itself is brain events, so one event to another cannot generate what a brain event is, for that would be the worst kind of circular thinking. Rorty liked Wittgenstein and Heidegger because the latter accepted an "open hermeneuticist" position and the early former held that, like Quine, the best we can do with Metaphysics was say mass, take up the rituals, and so on, and all rejected traditional metaphysics, or, any metaphysics.

I have no use for Nietzsche, for his rejection of metaphysics ended up with a kind of eulogy of the Hemmingway hero, living a life of stylish aficionado (like those opponents of Socrates who were men of bearing and substance who lived with spirit, who the miscreant Socrates would antagonize). Nietzsche adored the gladiatorial! And poststructuralists, like Derrida? His deconstruction is helpful in finding the bottom of things, like a zen master's fan flying across the room at the reader, the world is under erasure at the level of basic questions, and when no center is even thinkable, one can no longer conceive at this level of inquiry. We are foundationally adrift. But the question is, what is there to be discovered AS being adrift? Rorty would say nothing at all, and he takes his cue from Heidegger, who thought poetry broke beyond the bonds of mundanity into new territory, and dropped philosophy to teach literature. But they were, both of them, too wedded to language to give it up.

The matter to me turns on value, and I always come back to early Wittgenstein for support on this. Russell called him a mystic for thinking that the Tractatus' whole point didn't rest with the stand it took against nonsense statements, but rather with that which could not be said, and I think he is just being Kantian about this, not so much with value (and Kant, though I haven't read much into the Critique of Practical Reason, but I have read the CPR and the Metaphysics of Moral, and others, seems to have no grasp of the true metaethical foundation of ethics) but the denial that metaphysics can be talked about, yet insisting that that which had to be passed over in silence was not literally nothing. The good, Witt said in Culture and Value, is divinity, and by the good, he meant the value of value, and this goes to the true mystery of our existence: the Good of good; the bad of bad. So Dewey, Rorty and Quine were naturalists in their own way, and believed that any notion of noumena or talk about non propositional knowledge was simply off the table, leaving them in disingenuous position, as I see it.

But then there is Buber, Husserl and Fink, Levinas, Jean luc Marion, Michel Henry and Meister Eckhart, pseudo Dionysius, many others across history have had intimations of a different sort entirely. When Meister Eckhart prays to God to be rid of God, he trrying to shake off the presumptions that rule his mind implicitly, tacitly always, already. Of course, he had, I presume, never heard of Buddhism.

At any rate, the trouble with these philosophers you call upon to answer the odd question of this OP, is that they are ensconced in a world of thought. It is said (by Rorty and others) that Derrida takes Heidegger to the conclusions he began; hermeneutics (and I haven't read Gadamer) leads to only one place, and that is to bedrock indeterminacy for knowing the world, and he didn't pursue (though, reading Khora and then Caputo's defense of an apophatic approach through Derrida) the possibilities of radical departure of the East.

And the riddle of the missing uncle? As I see it, one has to reconceive the relation between brain and the world. It is meant to take a very obvious epistemic disconnect in the very popular scientifically based concept of physicalist reductionism, and bring out a glaring fault. So much talk in these posts that simply assume conscious thought and feeling is produced by the brain. Well, what is a brain if not, and this is to use science's own paradigm and not even touching upon philosophy at all, if not the product of the brain events that produce experience, and the brain is not supposed to be the product of anything. It is supposed to be a brain.

No, it evidently cannot be explained to you in any terms that you accept. The problem(s) of Sydney, Henry, the barn and the car are intractable and insoluble. — Vera Mont

But my being me has nothing to do with it. The matter presented as an objective and arguable problem. I mean, if you really think my uncle is unproblematically there in some way, you have to first take on the epistemic obstacle of describing the relation between brains and what brains encounter such that the former know the latter.
As to the intractability, it is not as if the matter stands the way it is; it is a matter of "parts". What is needed is an understanding of the epistemic requirements for knowledge, and an account of how the brain/Uncle Sidney relationship could make this possible. One is reluctant to make a radical move, I know; but then: this IS a radical problem, so the solution has to be commensurately radical.

No way out of this. Put simply, the physicalist model has to be discarded, or amended. How can this be done?

I look forward to your future musings. — Benj96

As I do your insightful thoughts.

It's not different, just a little more holistic, as I attempted to reunify the uncle's electrical impulses with the brain and body in which it takes place, and which it appeared you had overlooked in describing him. — Vera Mont

But it wasn't overlooked. Saying something is an electrical impulse itself is subject to the same issue being raised, so the question is clearly begged:

I'm sure that's true; you seem to know Henry and I don't. — Vera Mont

The particular traits of Henry are outside the discussion. It could be my cat or interstellar phenomena. If Sidney is, to put it plainly, nothing but a bunch of brain manufactured events, then everything is, because the matter turns to therelationship, not the incidental features.

That depends on how Sydney has offended you. — Vera Mont

No, it's not this. Sydney has not offended me. This "offending" is not about the violence, but about the question: Given that the causal relationship is the relational characterization in both cases, the car fender vis a vis the guard rail, and my uncle vis a vis my brain events, then causality itself has to be explained as to its ability to "deliver" my uncle to me.

It seems there are 2 versions of your uncle. 1) The real uncle - some kind of entity producing impulses, sending various kinds of information etc 2) an instance of your uncle that your brain manufactures and then customizes, i. e. interpretes those impulses (or signals) and based on them creates a coherent set of rules that it tags/labels as "uncle Sidney". So, while not being "in your brain", your uncle can still sort of send a copy of himself to your brain for further processing, not unlike a computer virus replicating itself. Now, let's say, another person who knows your uncle created another copy of him in his brain. His customized copy will be different to yours. He might say "What an awful person, this Sidney. Full of himself, patronizing, unkind, not listening.", whereas your opinion might be quite different. Are we talking about the same person? Yes, the core is identical, it's the interpretation that makes the difference. Like god flavour vs devil flavour. Another comparison that springs to mind is a dream being influenced by sensory perception, e.g. sound of the alarm clock being interpreted in dream world as dog barking etc. So, again, the original impuls, and an interpreted copy. — enqramot

But how do you escape the final description of all you say above being brain events only, even, and this is important, the reference to something being a brain event? Talk about my "real" uncle: is such a thing even possible to imagine in good analytically grounded conscience?

It may seem absurd in case of a barn door, but isn't so absurd in case of a computer. In a way, it does "know" certain things and acts upon them. It doesn't make a computer conscious, of course. Sensor-based input can be built into computer systems. This works very much like unconscious part of our brain, for example, when goose bumps appear as an automatic reaction to lowering the temperature. Fully automatic reaction, something in you "knows" how to react. — enqramot

The barn door: The complexity of your computer is not at issue, for first you have to explain the fundamentals: at best, at the level of basic questions (the most basic, which is what philosophy is about) the best you are ever going to get is a causal connection between your computer and and the wind howling through its receptors. It could be AI of the highest order, and you would still be routed to this question: how do causal explanations suffice for knowledge claims? Barn doors and howling winds have exactly this same causality "between" them.

I don't see how this assumption could be proven or disproven. What if he IS reducible? How can you be sure? Have you seen Cast Away movie with Tom Hanks? His only companion on a desert island was a volleyball that (whom?) he called Wilson. He's reduced to tears when Wilson the volleyball floats away during a storm. Modern, much improved upon, version of Wilson would be lamda the word processor (chatbot), a machine that fooled a supposed senior software engineer doubling up as a priest to believe that it's sentient (maybe he wasn't really fooled, maybe he did it for money, I don't know - he lost his job anyway). So, as you can see, creative interpretation can go a long way. Maybe you add something to your uncle, something that isn't there. — enqramot

It is not a matter of "what if he is reducible." You are facing here an ineluctable situation, for, as you and I will agree, there are brains and uncles and there is a world. I simply ask, how does the the latter get into the former?

It's just one story among a multitude of other imaginable stories. At another level Uncle Sidmey is just electrons, protons and neutrons, doing what they habitually do. Or multitudes of twelve kinds of quarks. Or a perturbation in a quantum field. Or chemical elements interacting, combining and separating. Or tissues, muscles, tendons, ligaments and nerves. Or person; a member of your society who shares the same basic conditioning and set of presuppositions about human life that you and I do. Or he's your beloved (or not so beloved) uncle. And so on... — Janus

Yes, as I see it, this is poignantly true. So then, how do I establish a reasonable idea that can make Sidney a person, apart from me, over there, and so on, NOT reducible to any of the above, given that the above are all true? I am concerned that Sydney got lost in the rigorous analysis and no one noticed. So, I am noticing.
This is, in my thoughts, the second most important philosophical question there is.

How is an uncle different from a barn door? Sounds like something the Mad Hatter might ask.
I'm more intrigues by why you'd want to go to Wonderland, if it disturbs you so? — Vera Mont

Rorty put it nicely: How is it that my relation (my brain's) to my uncle any different from a dented car fender and the offending guard rail? The qualitative complexities of the brain that leap to mind to explain this MUST be resolved into an epistemic connection. Mere causal connectivity does not establish a knowledge relationship.

I had a colleague who used to work as a mortuary technician - preparing bodies for autopsy. It got to be that he was unable to look at people or experience them in ways that was stable and orientated to the present. He could only 'see' what was underneath - organs, tissue, bones, blood... it made intimacy and connection very difficult. So he quit his job in the morgue and took up gardening. :wink: — Tom Storm

I find that fascinating. My daughter is an illustrator and she had this morbid curiosity about working in a mortuary, a kind of "goth" obsession of a Halloweensih pov on such things. Anyway, she applied, didn't get the job, and I was relieved, because she could have either gotten desensitized to the idea of dead people, to put it bluntly, or over sensitized. Doctors in general, surgeons esp., have to be a bit sociopathic, I've read, to have the requisite grace under pressure dealing with such things.

In a similar vein, for me, the more I think philosophically, especially reading the phenomenologists, the more I am "sensitized" to being an existing human being, for the questions that have been thrown aside in the advent of modernism have never at all been resolved. Human existence is still the same impossible mystery it has always been. But now, simply ignored.

All this neuronal activity takes place in a unique container of specialized cells that are all busy replicating, dying, doing all kinds of work to process elements from the environment into materials to maintain the edifice which is "Sydney", the sum of all those cellular activities, interstitial fluids and structural elements and containing membranes in which it takes place, one of whose various designations is "uncle to Canstance".
Yeah, that seems pretty exclusive. But why is it a problem? — Vera Mont

It is a problem because your foundational explanatory setting is in no better position to be defended than my uncle. I'm sorry, neuronal activity did you say? But what is this, as I have problematized my Uncle, that is any different? You could have a phd in brain science, and the best you will ever get in the basic philosophical analysis regarding all of the terms of your analytic is more of the same reductive analysis: the very thoughts used to construct the rationalization of Henry's distance from neuronal events are themselves "distant".

The whole brain cannot self reflect on the whole brain as there is no neural networks available to make computations while the others remain static and observed. It can only compartmentalise portions of itself but I suspect these portions can be quite large. Mathematically it doesn't take many neurons to exponentially increase their computational ability. Like factorials in maths. — Benj96

But the thinking cannot go this way. How is it that the whole brain can "compartmentalize portions of itself"? What is, in the simple conditions I have laid out, mathematics? That is, if my uncle is not my uncle because there is epistemic avenue of access to something that is remote from systemic assignment possibilities, then why is it that mathematics can escape this fate? How can you, in other words, make mathematics non reducible to neuronal networks itself, or, speaking generally, how is it that anything is what it is called and familiarly talked about remain what it is if this very thinking itself is confined to something that is itself thought?

As Jim Morrison says (in a different context) " words got me the wound and will get me well if you believe it". Animals have no language and no need of liberation, so it seems that language creates both the need, and the means, for liberation. Language provides the technics, makes the technics communicable, but the act of liberation is a going beyond the limitations of language, a stepping outside of it. — Janus

I want to say language sits comfortably along side of anything at all, like my cat does when I am not thinking about it and it is just there. SUre, there is language attending implicitly in the comfortable absence of explicit thought, but my cat could suddenly reveal herself as an avatar of God, and language could still be there attending to the spectacle.

On the other hand: In my best meditations, when things settle into an odd intimation of something just there, beneath the skin of the familiar, and there is something there, in the givenness of things, that appears just on the horizon of things, and I give this its breadth and depth as I can, I do feel the world receding and the revelatory event issues from within, as if to fill all things. It is a very strange business, I have to admit, which is why I feel the need to step into this discussion. Language does yield in that identities of things weaken, and something steps forward. And it is like going home, but this is revealed as within subjectivity, as if, as the Buddhists' say, one already is the Buddha, and it is a matter of discovering this.

1)It does not bring us to a state prior to desire or will
2)It does not precede intention or reflection
3)it does not achieve a state of neutrality devoid of affective coloration. — Joshs

Just to note: to separate desire and the desired is a verbal confusion I never understood. If I have the desired, do i stop desiring it? I don't think so; I desire still, in the gratification. The Buddhist idea of nirvana, putting aside textual authorities, is a profound affective experience. it subsumes intention and reflection, just as Kierkegaard's knight of faith takes in the world's finitude and Walt Whitman's song of the self tallies the world in grandeur. These are but pale versions of the boast of nirvana. Affective coloration is the very meaning of nirvana, it has just been misrepresented by those who want to separate enlightenment from emotion.

One thing that doesn't make sense in this is how Constance refers to knowledge suppositions as both cultural artifacts and fundamental attachments. If they're fundamental then they're not cultural. — praxis

I defer to Dewey on knowledge and the aesthetic. For him, the two are of-a-piece, part of the process of acquiring knowledge is the "consummation" of the acquisition, which is the pragmatic thrill of successfully solving a problem. Language itself is just this: a body of tools, "scientifically acquired" meaning we, as infants and children were faced with models of language behavior and internalized these to the delight of others, and therefore, to our delight as well. We "tested" our knowledge with primitive utterances, and found successes in the way these became useful, and this was all imprinted in our young psyches. Now that is a fundamental attachment. Language is also a culture carrier. It is not just words rules; words are presented in a body of attitudes and idioms and ironies and countless entanglements with cultural institutions. One doesn't simply hear the term General Motors and realizes it refers to a company that makes cars. It is discussed in many contexts of value, economics, jobs and employment. and so on.

E D Hirsh wrote a book a while back called Cultural Literacy, and he believed that there were certain things every American knows AS an American, like the fact that Lincoln was born in a cabin what the three R's are. He thought this is the kind of thing Americans must know if they are going to live among Americans. Of course, he was a conservative that didn't much like immigrants, and I don't care for this kind of thinking, but he did have a point: the simple things that flow through a society's culture are freighted by everyday language use.

as if the act of attention is distinct from what one is attending to , and as if there could be such a thing as a pure, pre-reflective , pre-intending, non-judging and non-willing mode of awareness, a bare feeling of being. — Joshs

I wouldn't draw a distinction like this.The entire experience in the world, replete with no exception, abandons nothing that is not "pure". As troublesome as an idea like this is, this "purity", it is not meant to stand apart from anything, but is inclusive rather than exclusive. The "error" (the snake that is really a rope, of the Vedanta) lies in the interpretative meanings of ideas "in play", and there is no escape from this, but here, there is no escape and any divisions between what the understanding understands and that which is understood is made moot.

The idea is not to draw up a metaphysics. It is phenomenological: a description of a disclosure of something that permeates all things, just as a person in love lives in a world in which all things radiate with love. And here, the purity is not "pre reflective" but a-reflective: reflection can help achieve this, as jnana yoga helps achieve Hindu spiritual ends, but the point is not to stop thinking, but to stop identifying thinking with "Truth" with a capital 'T': "What is Good is divine, too. That strangely enough defines my ethics," wrote Wittgenstein in Culture and Value.

Not pre intending but the intended object and the intentional act are both subsumed. As one judges the world in one way or another, the judgment is within the event of the disclosure. The "bare feeling of being" is not to be qualified within an explanatory setting of philosophical talk that is alien to the "bare feeling". And again, "bare" is not an exclusive bareness. Rather, what is rendered bare, is all things. And divisions within plain talk are not nullified; they are subsumed.

Through meditative practice, we can access this pre-reflective state , and avail ourselves of ‘unconditionally intrinsic goodness', 'spontaneous compassion', 'luminosity', 'blissfulness', and ' a calm and peaceful life guided by the fundamental value of nonviolence'. But how do such feelings emerge as ultimate outcomes of a philosophy of groundlessness — Joshs

But "groundlessness" is an imposition of a term that does not belong. The challenging encounter certainly is in the historical record, in the Tibetan Book of the Dead, in Eastern spiritualism. The trouble is, this is not taken seriously. Is this the hubris of Husserl and Heidegger and others who think the Greeks were the true progenitors of philosophical thinking? At any rate, what is being discussed here is not a thesis so much as it is a revelatory insight. The problems that arise in accounting for it lie in its simplicity.

Are you suspecting that there's more to your uncle than a system of neuronal activity? I guess it will be damn hard to provide any scientific proof of it, and without a scientific proof we are reduced to speculation. That's as much as I can say without having actually met your uncle. — enqramot

But let's say you had met my uncle. The assumption in place is that it was my uncle, and that this was not something reducible to interior events inside a three and a half pound mass. My uncle is not IN your brain. He is exterior to this object. Why is it that this object can extend beyond itself and do something like affirm something that is not part of a brain at all? It really is a simple question. I mean, we all know what uncles are, and what brains are. How absurd is it to say a barn door "knows" what the wind is that howls through its hinges? Why are brains and uncles different regarding this epistemic connection?

This is not how phenomenologists understand ‘past’. You are thinking in terms of traditional notions of the past as a separate entity from the present, occupying a separate position in a sequence. — Joshs

No, I really don't think like that. Saying the past-present-future is really "of-a-piece" actually reduces the problem for the Buddhist who faces the singular event of realization which is ideally out of time because
the production of experience is terminated? This means that there is nothing to deliver the perceptual event to in order to bring something "to mind" and for the meditator, this task is singular. Once the occurrent experience is reduced, there is a broadening of the purely perceptual horizon, and a new interpretative occasion, something "wholly other" presents itself.

This is trouble for understanding, since to be there at all, to be an agency that beholds anything at all, must be in the historical framework that comprises the self. So, while the, call is the "purity of the perceptual event" broadens, the temporal self that is this very of-a-piece event that is the witness and the receiver of it cannot be annihilated, for this would be annihilation altogether.

But as I see it, it has to be understood that this analysis of affairs is entirely "about" something that is indeterminate. What makes determinacy is open; all contexts are open, awaiting, if I may, something else. The experience of Buddhist liberation is this; it is the 'other" that so intrudes upon the totality's grasp (to borrow a term), but is, to the likes Caputo and others, impossible, for they take the apophatic course that leads to a weakness of God, and other things. They don't take the course of discovery.

“Because my being is such that I am out ahead of myself, I must, in order to understand something I encounter, come back from this being-out-ahead to the thing I encounter. Here we can already see an immanent structure of direct understanding qua as-structured comportment [my experience of something ‘as' something], and on closer analysis it turns out to be time. And this being-ahead-of-myself as a returning is a peculiar kind of movement that time itself constantly makes, if I may put it this way.”(Heidegger 2010b) — Joshs

Aside from being right and fascinating to conceive, this being ahead of myself is a useful heuristic from meditators trying to understand what lies before them, as they face the dynamic of thought intrusion. It is the intrusion of the future and the past; but this, I think, annihilates time altogether, for one is left, ideally, with no interpretative stand at all, which is the point.

Who's systems of neuronal activity exactly? Yours or his?
We are all systems if neural activity - impossible to untether from external environment through our senses.
A two way system of information exchange.

Ideas, thoughts, beliefs, imagery, sounds, smells, tastes, touches come into our neural system. We process it either storing it as memory or ignoring it/not paying much attention and it is soon forgotten.

And similarly we are also an active source of those things: thoughts, ideas, art, knowledge etc. That we put out into the environment through our verbal (speech) and non verbal (body language) as well as our behaviours and interactions.

We experience sensations and we are also "a sensation" - the sensation of what it is like to experience Constance for example, to interact with her, to observe, understanding, question etc. To build a knowledge of that person. — Benj96

But then, what is a "sensation" in the context of this inquiry? What does it even mean to be a system of neural activity if that which produces the very utterance is itself neural activity? How does perception exit neural activity to observe a brain and conceive of neural activity?

As Morpheus asked Neo, "Is that air you're breathing?"

Do you think it is like this for animals? — Janus

I do wonder about animals in this. What they do not have is a capacity for reflection, and it is reflection that generates the ability to stand apart from one's affairs. Interesting to imagine what it would be like not to be able to second guess what lies before you as a thought, an activity, a behavior. It would pretty much be instinct all the way through.
There is this tendency to think that language interferes with "liberation", but it is also true that language makes liberation possible. Language produces the conditions of our everyday acquiescence, but it also produces the question, and the question is the tool that cancels thought processes and autonomic existing.

he immediate ‘now’ is inseparably all three phases. This a priori tripartite structure of the now is no fiction. — Joshs

But what is it that holds the three together? In the startled moment when one levels at the world a question that stops the past from freely and seamlessly producing a future, this is, I would argue (inspired by others, obviously), a temporal rupture. Just as when the hammer's head flies off and the hammering gives way to a pause, a wonder, here, taken to the level of basic questions where there are no alternatives that readily fill the space of momentary indeterminacy, and here, there are no possibilities that can retake the occasion with something familiar, and there is nothing to step in and affirm an existence, and one faces nothing: past is suspended. I think when a Buddhist seriously meditates, and has success, this experience is a sublime transfiguring of the "present" if there is such a thing in this. This is why they have the term 'nirvana'; and this is the essential experience that generates religious metaphysics in Hinduism.
Husserl's reduction is an annihilation of time as well, taken all the way down the rabbit hole. Students were known find religion studying his "method". Then, of course, there is the French "theological turn" that rigorously plays this out.

I meant discursive knowledge; the point is that such knowledge is always in the form of subjects knowing objects, or knowers knowing what is known, or objects analyzed in terms of their predicates, Lived experience is prior to that — Janus

I would agree, as long as it is clear that "prior to" is understood not to say that one can have an an experience the is free of language and its meanings. Rather, the "lived experience" must be discovered IN this. Language and culture have to suspended in the openness of freedom, and this can be a radical suspension, but it is not that to think (all thinking is inherently discursive) is to cancel its possibility. I recall James' "blooming and buzzing" infant: this is what it would be like to without language.

Maybe the goal is to have maximal vitality of mind, which experiences helps nurture. Emotionalized rationality keeps us always moving forward. One drawback of Buddhism *seems* to be that the excitement for the future, wherever that may be, may perhaps be considered maya. Buddhist say they want to extinguish desire, but perhaps this is yet another paradox. Mustn't we desire to extinguish? — Gregory

When you say, "excitement for the future, wherever that may be, may perhaps be considered maya,"I think you've hit one the nails in this business squarely on its head. The thought that emotions keep us pushing forward is not just a description of motivational dynamic, it is one of the structure of thought itself. After all (borrowing here rather obviously from a lot of philosophical history), to experience at all is to experience in time, and it is not so much IN time as it IS time. For me, this is one of the most profound things a philosopher can discover about the world: in the perceptual act itself, thought is conditioning experience; it is "always already" there, in the glace, the gaze, in which something appears and is tacitly understood without explicit understanding of the terms of discovery, I mean, the fact that seeing at all in interpretative, and not at all a "seeing" what is before me, for the understanding that is engaged is bound in a temporal dynamic of past/present/future, and it is not as if there really "is" such a thing" as the past or the future. Really, is it even possible to affirm the past AS the past? It cannot be witnessed, for to witness at all is a "present" event; so the past is never the past, really; it is an adumbration (to borrow) of an impossible-to-conceive "real" past. This is a revelation, if you think about it. Past is neither an empirical nor apriori concept. In fact, it is a genuine fiction, as is the future. Rather, past and future are pragmatic terms, useful, obviously; but in an existential setting that is utterly transcendental. What of talk about the historical record of one's education, informing occurrent affairs to anticipate in readiness for the future? This is a staple in experience analysis across disciplines, and it certainly is right to talk like this, but not at the level of basic questions; not here, in the talk of foundations that underlie everyday existence. Here we go as far as analysis will go, and this temporal dynamic falls apart very quickly.

Nor does the present survive, for this is a contingent term, meaningless without the past or the future. As I see it, it is important to see that this is not an abstract discussion, for as I feel and think even now, as I write, I am not In this; I am this. So what does a Buddhist do if not literally annihilate the structure of time, what you are calling maya. To meditate is to stop time, but this is not meant as a metaphor. the difficulty in understanding such a thing lies in the abiding foundation of time itself, which is, to speak plainly, the world, or, the world of illusion: this living, and importantly, existential "going along with" the thrust of this past-present-future.

A major theme of existentialism is freedom, and behind this is Husserl's phenomenological reduction which is a "method" (as meditation is a method) of suspending knowledge claims that implicitly tells us what the world is, and the "naturalistic attitude" of the sciences is his primary concern, for antecedent to to such claims, is the intuitional underpinning that provides the givenness of the world that is presupposed by science. Husserl believed inquiry can isolate this horizon if intuitions, and there discover absolute "presence". He has been attacked by almost everyone for this strong claim.

But then, these doing the attacking are philosophers, and not, well, "spiritual" inquirers.

Anyway, time, at the basic level of analysis, is key to an analysis of what Buddhists and Hindus call enlightenment. I am quite clear on this.

This is a very important point, and it should also be emphasized that knowledge of the world is not lived experience. — Janus

A tough cookie in that one: what is "knowledge of the world"? And what is "lived experience"?

of course, pure pleasure is a myth. Any pleasure is qualitatively unique, being precisely the harmony of one set of conditions with its appropriate activity. The pleasure of eating is one thing; the pleasure of hearing music, another; the pleasure of an amiable act, another; the pleasure of drunkenness or of anger is still another."

Dewey continues,

"Hence the possibility of absolutely different moral values attaching to pleasures, according to the type or aspect of character which they express. But if the good is only a sum of pleasures, any pleasure, so far as it goes, is as good as any other-the pleasure of malignity as good as the pleasure of kindness, simply as pleasure.” — Joshs

But this kind of thinking denies that there can be a category of aesthetics, denying that each occasion of aesthetic experience is a kind of sui generis. I can't say I understand this in light of his Art as Experience which makes the aesthetic into a generalized pragmatic consummatory event. Art is "wrought out" of the art object's coming to being in the pragmatic struggle to produce it, and so, it has been said that this makes the well placed punch in the boxing ring inherently aesthetic. This sound to me like an attempt to conceive of the aesthetic homogeneously under a pragmatic interpretation of experience.

This is why I used the term "God", the "logos", the fundamental principle/law behind science, spirituality, trial and error, change, free will, etc. Something with ultimate explanatory power. Now that is something worth pursuing regardless of what we name it. — Benj96

Of course, I have to nit pick a bit, you know, philosophy. How is it that the logos can confer value agreement? We can argue, and I think this right (in fact, I think philosophy's mission is to replace religion, and philosophical argument will replace religious dogma; and this is something of an inevitability ...in a few hundred years or so, if we're lucky) but a bringing people together will require either a very liberal attitude that accepts what is really not agreeable or appreciated in the comportment of others who are different; or an agreement in values, such that everybody lives comfortably with others because they are essentially the same. The former is a tall order. Really, nobody wants to live with others who are so morally and aesthetically remote.
The logos refers to ideas, and rationalists tend to hold that the world will unfold in agreement is we could only "discover" the logical foundation of all things. They think there is a fabric of reason(in one way or another) that binds all things together, an if we could just see this for what it is, it would be like a revelation!
But I don't think this is right, simply because the logos is generally not conceived as a value-bearing concept, and what really separates us is our value differences.
So, I agree, this dialectic process of reasoning things through to their conclusions is the way things should be; but I don't think the world is that Hegelian (not that Hegel was an abstract rationalist. I'd actually have to look at what he says on this. His idea the "the rational is the real" is more complicated than this. I need to put aside three or four months and do just Hegel), that it is in reason's agreement in the end that will bring all things and people together. I think, rather, that, instead of a kind of logical hierarchy (ideas yielding better ideas) of the world, there is a value hierarchy. Look at this from a point of view of evolution (which I generally don't do): Here we are, and have come a long way from the primordial soup of things. What is the most salient feature of this journey? All that can be said in response this will beg a significant question, which is the value question. We have arrived at a place where there is music and art and this thing called happiness and misery and culture taken up in a human agency that is intensely engaged.

Hume once said that if it were up to reason as reason, reason would just as soon wipe out all humanity, for there is here nothing of value-meaning-content in reason. Reason is an empty vessel of logical structure, and possess none of this dimension of ethical shoulds and shouldn'ts and rights and wrongs. But value, now there is something palpable: the feels and feelings of the world! But they are unwieldy to agreement.
I do agree that there is in all of our affairs there someting as you say, science, spirituality, and all the rest of what we are, but the "behind" is a very mysterious idea. Keeping in mind that, as Wittgenstein understood, the logos cannot apprehend itself; it cannot say what the logos is, for the saying presupposes the logos. This "behind" is elusive; and yet: what is elusive really is possessed in[/, the existence we witness all the time. This is the key to penetrating into this mysterious "behind" of metaphysics. It is not to look behind or beyond and the like; rather, it is to realize that what is manifest IS the behind of things.

You advise care in connotative phrasing and in the same breath demonstrate recklessness. "God is love" is rather emotive. Rules for thee but not for me, it seems. — praxis

Emotivity is reckless? This does move into another part of the thesis. You mentioned unpleasant smells and the suggestion that these are elevated to a level of ridiculous prominence, and I thought there was certainly something to this. After all, talk about the apodicticity of value draws no exceptions, and does this not make the trivial absurdly grand? this kind of question pushes thinking into a clearer look at value-in the-world. So what makes a smell less grand than, say, Ravel's Mother Goose suite or Brahms's second piano concerto? Or being in love? There are caveats all over this, and this is where arguing, which depends on shared understanding, will not find the desired traction, for emotivity's attachments are not the same for us all.

Arguing that love is a value "phenomenon" (is it this? Phenomena are there, in the appearances of the world, after all. Does the "good" appear?), the desideratum and worldly consummation of which has existential "properties" that far exceed olfactory "properties" (and here we refer to something like Moore's non-natural properties; the "good" of the experience) is something of a fool's errand, for if it is not manifestly true, then forget it. But then, thee is a reason love is sung about, poetized about, and has been for centuries. there is this sublime dimension to it, and the desideratum of love exceeds, as Levinas would say, the desire. But one has to witness this to agree. Alas.

How can you know God so well, btw, to know that "God is not a person who speaks, judges, lays down the law"? Do you believe that you are a God? — praxis

Keep in mind that God has been reduced only what is evidenced here in the world. God is, I have said, the response the the radical metaethical indeterminacy of the world, and it is reduced out of the standard metaphysics that gives us these problematic features. God is not a person, a creator, a judgment, a principle, a kind old man, and should not be conceived in the traditional way as something impossible remote. God is an embodiment of the extrapolative possibilities built into the world at the level of meta-inquiry. I witness love and suffering (as terms of general subsumption) and these possess their own meta-dimension. I infer God from these, if you like.
So, when you ask, "Do you believe you are God," you are drawing upon what I call bad metaphysics, a medieval Christian (and other) ontology.

Getting back to your beliefs about sensations, I think evil is the correct term to use because you seem to be saying that sensations like pain have inherent moral qualities. I'm curious where you believe the moral quality exists. Is it somehow in the sensation itself or in what causes a sensation? For example, is the sensation of an unpleasant smell evil or is what causes the smell evil? A rotten apple will have an unpleasant smell and the cause of that smell could be determined to be bacteria. So does that mean bacteria is inherently bad or evil? — praxis

And so, if you take that rotten apple and rub it in someone's face, is this not by default (defeasibly) wrong?
It is easy to confuse categories of thought, so you have to be more careful. Bacteria being bad is not at all on the table. I won't review the argument already there. You see by now that such a thing is, frankly, remote from the discussion.

You seem to believe that sensations, like the sensation of pain, have a moral quality. Do believe that an unpleasant smell, for instance, is evil? — praxis

Careful about the connotative value of words. You say evil and we think we are in a dramatic moral conflict between God and Satan, and this is precisely what bad metaphysics does, the kind of thing that sends women to a fiery death and the spiritual sanitization of social rules. Rather, life goes on as it always has, and the sense of what is good, bad, right wrong, and everything in between continues as it is, for there are no stone tablets and God is not a person who speaks, judges, lays down the law. God is the insistence that moral nihilism is impossible. On the positive end, God is love. Why love? Because being in love is a powerful affirmation of our affectivity; no better reason than this. Love is the summum bonum.
But on the other hand, there is a point in this: If value is now to be cast as an absolute, then what of the plain regularities of our moral lives? Closer to Buddhism than anything else. In the Abhidamma, there are methods for achieving detachment from desires that include eating terrible tasting foods, and subjecting the body to a variety of discomforts (reminds me of the self flagellating Christians in a ritual renouncement of the world's and its original sin). The kind of thing that drove Nietzsche crazy (literally).

So we are talking about fantasies? — praxis

No. Someone extracts your tooth without analgesic: not a fantasy. In fact, far more ethically emphatic than any rule can possible be.

This is not true. Our world is quite limited. I know it may seem like we know, or can know, everything about the world but trust me, we don't, and I highly doubt that we have the capacity to know everything. — praxis

No, no. Facts. How far is London from your house? In fractions of an inch. In infinitesimally diminishing quantities? How many numbers are there?

There's nothing unnatural about the experience or concepts of 'good' or 'bad'. — praxis

Then you take issue with this, as do I, because the demarcation between what is natural and unnatural is arbitrarily drawn. But then the "goodness" in this sense taken up in ethical matters is sui generis. It is not like a good knife, say. A good knife is sharp, well balances, and so on. But say you want to use it for a production of Macbeth. Now the sharpness is not good at all; it is fact, bad. This is contingency, or relativity. There is nothing that cannot be recontextualized to change what it is. But then meta ethical judgments like pain is bad: these do not change. This is important: Conditions in whcih the judgment takes place can change, and this does make our ethical issues so ambiguous; but in cases where the entanglements are minimal, and the value as such is clear, even pure, as when you stick your hand in a fire, value is an absolute. Consider: your are given the choice to torture one child for an hour or a thousand children for eternity. Most would go the utilitarian way, and opt for the one child, but note: choosing this one child, because it is preferred on sound moral grounds of utility, in no way mitigates the suffering; indeed, unlike the the knife example in which a good quality changed to a bad one, here, it is impossible to mitigate the suffering. This is what is meant by the ethical bad (and good) being an absolute. It is not that it does not diminish here or there; rather, it cannot be mitigated. Nothing can undermine the badness, to speak awkwardly, of torture. Pain is apodictically bad.

And because this matter is not about logic's apodicticity, logic being the form merely of judgment, but about actuality, this absolute is existential. God's essence is her existentially absolute goodness. So called, "The Good".

Our conditioning does not require justification. — praxis

Talk about something being its own presupposition is to say it has no explanatory ideas the reference to which is required to explain what it is. It is stand alone what it is.

Everything requires context to have meaning. — praxis

And there you have it for all things, save ethics. Ethics' injunction to do or not to do in the matter of a phenomenologically pure case is indeed, stand alone. The justification for this claim s lies solely on the evidence the issues form the pain itself. If you have an issue with this claim, take a lighted match and apply it to your finger. Do you not "know," thereby, this injunction not to do thiszzzzzzzz/ to deny this would be disingenuous.

Arbitrarily conceived laws? :lol: But you're right of course, they don't issue from jurisprudence. — praxis

Legal matters are embedded matters, and the engine that drives ethics, value, is made ambiguous. Most of our moral thinking is ambiguous, but the issue here is God, and, as I said, God is a metaphysical idea, and so the embeddedness of the usual moral thinking is suspended, for this embeddedness is a construct of facts.

You said that attachment to the world is illusion yet you want us to take the world as it is presented to us. Is this not a paradox? — Gregory

I am not going to take responsibility for the way the world is. I don't think the world is an illusion, as when I break a bone or slip a disk; but then, what we say about this pain when we interpret what it is is compromised by conflicting contingencies. And when we talk theoretically about pain, we have many contextual settings which qualify the pain in such a way that what is said is really about the value-arbitrary facts in which things are embedded, as when a patient at a hospital complains about some misery and this is instantly interpreted into medical jargon, and THIS displaces the pain itself, treating the pain as a subjective counterpart to the explanatory account. THIS is illusion. When I rise through the ranks at the office and make it all the way to manager, this is an illusion. The institutions of this world, an institution being something instituted, established, taken for a new reality, like the conferring of a name on a person, this is illusion. And the world we live in is a body of institutions. Language is mostly a pragmatic, intersubjective exchange of institutional knowledge.

What do they mean in the East when they talk about illusion? They are talking about interpretation, and interpretation is not just this pulling away from something to say what it is. It is, rather, affectively and cognitively qualifying as to the way a thing or a set of affairs is experienced. It is important to see that concepts are not simply what Kant thought, these principles of a synthetic function of the mind. As Kant conceived this, he conceived of an abstraction; not that he was wrong about synthetic functions, but that this is by no means all of what a concept is. A concept seizes hold of the world existentially, and is a powerful dynamic in normal perceptual experiences, always, already there in the simplest of apprehensions as an affective presence. The Buddhist idea of attachments is usually conceived as a kind of affective binding of the self to things, and this is of course right; but beneath this is the world-taken-AS, and I borrow this from Heidegger, who says when we encounter the world, we take the world AS the way we encounter it. he held that there is no way to a-conceptually or a-linguistically understand anything. I think he is wrong about this. I think when the Buddhist "goes under" and suspends consciousness's categories of taking the world AS (AS a tree, AS a cloud, or a mathematical formula, etc.) there is a radical departure from "the world", or there can be if things go right.