Karl

Well I do know, but I don't know what you are getting at and as its aimed at DB I shall zip me gob. :-)

No it doesn't. That would be a logical fallacy, so OK give me a clue. You don't adhere to a philosophy of Tao, or God, materialism or the primacy of consciousness, but some other philosophy ? I can accept that, as objectivism doesn't follow those philosophies either, but, if your philosophy is neither objectivist, intrincisist or subjectivist I'm stymied to what it is. I can clearly interpret and lay out my own. The axioms it depends on and the primacy of existence, identity and conscious identification of existence, but of your own I appear to know nothing at all.

I have a horrible feeling this is like a game show trap where a klaxon sounds to signal abject failure :-) (knowing your bias to high end physics I shall throw myself in to the trap like a lemming off a cliff) Energy equals mass multiplied by the speed of light squared ? And all those parts are conceptual words with absolutely defined quantities and meanings.

I'm not keen to drag up quotes, but in our previous conversations you did strap yourself firmly to the side of a spirit mystic. Firstly you do believe in the primacy of consciousness over the primacy of existence ? You don't believe in an empiricist reality, or materialism ? You have mentioned surrender to God/a higher spiritual knowing (which includes the Dao of which nothing can be said and only implied ) ? Would that be a fair summing up ? Now, I have found that Mystics of spirit will often shift to Mystics of muscle if an argument is causing them to rethink. The opposite is also true. There is a sliding scale from intrincisism to subjectivism and it's often a gratuitous mix of both. One supports the other because-as rand points out- they are really the same thing from two different perspectives. Let's grant that your argument and philosophy is valid, mysticism is valid, so that you aren't forced into having to defend your position. Does the above get close to where you are, or am I so far off that these descriptions are unrecognisable ?

Yes. That is true and you aren't asserting that the world is one composed of Pythagorean philosophical divine numbers. That is the mysticism of muscle. Yours is the mysticism of spirit. Have a read of Rands statement on the subject of both: (I'm just copying and pasting here as its pointless doing otherwise ) Mystics of Spirit and of Muscle ¶ As products of the split between man’s soul and body, there are two kinds of teachers of the Morality of Death: the mystics of spirit and the mystics of muscle, whom you call the spiritualists and the materialists, those who believe in consciousness without existence and those who believe in existence without consciousness. Both demand the surrender of your mind, one to their revelations, the other to their reflexes. No matter how loudly they posture in the roles of irreconcilable antagonists, their moral codes are alike, and so are their aims: in matter—the enslavement of man’s body, in spirit—the destruction of his mind. The good, say the mystics of spirit, is God, a being whose only definition is that he is beyond man’s power to conceive—a definition that invalidates man’s consciousness and nullifies his concepts of existence. The good, say the mystics of muscle, is Society—a thing which they define as an organism that possesses no physical form, a super-being embodied in no one in particular and everyone in general except yourself. Man’s mind, say the mystics of spirit, must be subordinated to the will of God. Man’s mind, say the mystics of muscle, must be subordinated to the will of Society. Man’s standard of value, say the mystics of spirit, is the pleasure of God, whose standards are beyond man’s power of comprehension and must be accepted on faith. Man’s standard of value, say the mystics of muscle, is the pleasure of Society, whose standards are beyond man’s right of judgment and must be obeyed as a primary absolute. The purpose of man’s life, say both, is to become an abject zombie who serves a purpose he does not know, for reasons he is not to question. His reward, say the mystics of spirit, will be given to him beyond the grave. His reward, say the mystics of muscle, will be given on earth—to his great-grandchildren. Selfishness—say both—is man’s evil. Man’s good—say both—is to give up his personal desires, to deny himself, renounce himself, surrender; man’s good is to negate the life he lives. Sacrifice—cry both—is the essence of morality, the highest virtue within man’s reach. For the New Intellectual Galt’s Speech, For the New Intellectual, 138 ¶ The mystics of spirit declare that they possess an extra sense you lack: this special sixth sense consists of contradicting the whole of the knowledge of your five. The mystics of muscle do not bother to assert any claim to extrasensory perception: they merely declare that your senses are not valid, and that their wisdom consists of perceiving your blindness by some manner of unspecified means. Both kinds demand that you invalidate your own consciousness and surrender yourself into their power. They offer you, as proof of their superior knowledge, the fact that they assert the opposite of everything you know, and as proof of their superior ability to deal with existence, the fact that they lead you to misery, self-sacrifice, starvation, destruction. They claim that they perceive a mode of being superior to your existence on this earth. The mystics of spirit call it “another dimension,” which consists of denying dimensions. The mystics of muscle call it “the future,” which consists of denying the present. For the New Intellectual Galt’s Speech, For the New Intellectual, 148 ¶ What is the nature of that superior world to which they sacrifice the world that exists? The mystics of spirit curse matter, the mystics of muscle curse profit. The first wish men to profit by renouncing the earth, the second wish men to inherit the earth by renouncing all profit.

But you will go the sophist way and say that nothing at all can be truly known to exist, that it is all a conscious delusional manifestation. You see world of muscle as seen through the eyes of the mystic. :-) If I could get you to see that it is equally neither, I could rest easy :-)

It's just another form of intrincisism. Pythagoras and Plato believed it, but they were wrong. Even Aristotle got caught up in it, but at least his methodology survived so we can finally put intricisist numerology in the bin of history. Geometry and algebra are human inventions. You have it back assward. That ratios are existent does not preclude them from operating independently of any conscious knowledge of them. An exact circle exists only in a mathematical framework, but not so in nature. A pleasing aspect of the Golden ratio exists in nature and we relate to it. That complex form follows a pattern says nothing about human scale mathematics, we just have the conscious ability to describe the concept. Maths says bog all about human consciousness. We could draw a circle before we knew any maths about the circle. We designed steam engines before we understood thermodynamics. The maths described things after the event, where it was prior to the event it was already from well understood concepts. Maths has developed to describe more things and new maths is being integrated all the time.

Its not just that. We have abstract physical laws and quantities that are entirely particular to maths. For instance we can hold a concept of a forest of trees. We can give it further descriptors of course but we all get the idea of a forest. However there are no quantifiers applied to that abstract. We must apply empiric values such as height, width, number, density to the forest if we wish to do anything with it, such as create timber from it, farm it, or navigate it. The numbers are then numeric descriptors of an abstract concept of a forest. Without the abstract concept then the numbers could not define anything, they would appear as random symbols of no value or determinant. It seems almost idiotic to say what is obvious, but it's important to understand maths place in human cognition. We must first hold the concept before we can measure it. In some circumstances the numbers represent a new concept, but always based on other concepts first. Numbers don't happen prior to concepts, but they may well form the basis of integration of concepts and describe them empirically. I love this stuff. :-) I can see it as clearly as I see my hand and it is absolutely fascinating to generate the minds cognitive method. People like to say that the universe is built on numbers, but this is a false a priori statement. It is we humans who describe the conceptual universe with numbers. It is a method of making it to our understanding and not a fact in itself.

Yes, abstract, but also concrete. We can count on paper and in the physical world. Maths can describe some aspects as conceptual abstractions as can language. There is a danger of taking it things to nominalism and then throwing away all maths away because it is abstract, just as nominalists throw away language because it isn't the perfect concretised object. All communication is necessarily abstract, maths is no different, it has limitations. Language can describe Love, but Love as a word contains no amount of the emotion. The number five does not contain the elements of five fingers, it's an abstraction, but no less valid because of that. Five to you is five to me.

Para 1: it doesn't matter. Your explanation is empiricist/nominalist. If we break Manitou down then what's in a name ? It seems like nothing at all-it's just a made up thing. Same with the physics. These are the steps towards Nihilism. I know all these same arguments because I've used them myself. I wrote a book that pandered to them. Existence is existence and it's pointless to try and nullify it because of physics or nominalist ideology. Para 2: it doesn't matter either, but we are a product of existence. Like a die and a casting, we don't exist apart from the fabric of the universe, we are a natural product of it. Thus we have commonality with the tree in your description. We have a defined way of physically relating to that tree. Your argument is again one which is well known. However you see the tree, that is true for you and it is true for everyone else you see the tree that way. I also played these same games. It's just more of the same nullification. For instance when you were a baby, maybe there was a small pot plant in the room and outside the window, in the distance a tree. You couldn't yet determine tree and plant. You couldn't yet determine the causal effect of perspective, time and distance. Maybe you noticed that your mother looked smaller as she walked further away and was bigger up close. Then you began to experiment by moving your hand towards your face and then further away. Now the concept of bigger closer, smaller further away was embedded. Para3: you can be compassionate because it feels good and you give and take value in accordance with existence. You can know why. There is nothing in objectivism that strangles intuition, emotion or feeling. These are the things that tell us when we are doing it right or wrong; have made a crucial error; or haven't yet been able to apply reason sufficiently because of lack of evidence. We can feel that someone is/isn't a nice person even when we cannot figure out why. Sometimes we can make a mistake as well. The intuition isn't infallible so we investigate, we gather factual evidence and cross correlate it from our experience. When you say 'Love' -have you ever considered what, where, when or how you love. Would you equally love Hitler and your Mother ? What is the connection between the love of nature and the love of fast cars ? Have you explored what particular elements create the feelings of love, or even if it's exactly the same kind of love-or is it multifaceted, does it not have infinite hues, shade, variety ? Like a sunny day in the woods :-) I certainly did not imply in any sense that there wasn't other life, or similar life. It would seem to me that it is very possible, but as yet we haven't discovered anything like us. We can revisit it when we do. For now we are alone in the universe and we may be the only conscious reasoning beings in the entire universe. We should always take into account time as well. The universe does not simply stretch from here to here, but from time to time. Civilisations may have died out before us, or we may be the first, or the last. We know nothing yet. We would always age, time is not dependent on our consciousness, just as the sound of a tree falling is not dependent on someone hearing it. We have a sense of time which is conceptual, based on our experience and reality. We die in a space of around one hundred years, our day varies in period, but it is ever fitted to our own cycles and span of life. A second can feel long when there is nothing to do, or shorter when we are busy, but this is our internal sense of time. Time is linear in the sense we experience it, at the place we experience it. At the boundary of the universe it is different, but not for our comprehension of it. We can accelerate away from the Earth at near light speed and then return. Our bodies would appear to have aged more slowly than those on the Earth and physics explains the seeming paradox.

I didn't say that we 'interpret' our perceptions accurately, that should have been very clear. I gave an example of a stick in a beaker of water gave the appearance of being bent. Objectivism is fundamentally about the active cognitive mind at work using reason to interpret the perception. After this interpretation, the stick does not become straight. A new concept is born in the mind and integrated to produce new knowledge. This is an ongoing process. The sense perceptions themselves are accurate, but our interpretation is that which remains in potential error until reason is applied to understand what is being sensed. It is not enough that we do this in some prescriptive fashion, it must be grounded in existence. From this effort proceeds a set of principles- ethics. I would be careful jumping to conclusions about objectivism, it's easy to do as it often seems similar to other philosophies. Though it is based around the reason and logic of Aristotles philosophy, from then on it departs. Where Aristotle shared much of Platos intrincist views, objectivism does not. In that sense it is completely different and that difference is vitally important. Objectivism has a spiritual dimension, it doesn't see consciousness as empirical and of mechanical function, neither does it accept that it is mystic-that knowledge is intrinsic or, given by divine revelation. It puts man in the driving seat not God or a world of things, but as a blend of spiritual consciousness and active cognitive reason. That's a unique position. It sets man free to be a thinking, compassionate being without need of stories. Man is capable of his own virtues living in accordance with existence and reality. He must earn and hold values by the application of his virtue, by the use of his mind, to apply himself actively to the task of cognition knowing the potential for error. If he takes unearned value he will feel unhappy, if he earns the values then happiness is the result. The key to objectivist philosophy is the rational achievement of happiness.

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Good point MH if it was for that reason and not some ritual to prove manhood.

The tree is a tree. We both see it and know what it is. We understand its relation in space and time. Our eyes see it's form, our consciousness grasps that form, our minds identify it. There is no conflict. It is not simply that we understand the tree conceptually, but it's relationship with our own identity, that the tree is a different entity, it's cause and effect, the principle of time, the perspective of distance, scale, colour, movement, sound, touch, smell, taste. We must understand our own separate independent identity and our place in the world we inhabit. The I and the Tree. It's a beautiful thing if you become aware of the complete totality of it. It's beautiful because separate identity allows the total comprehension of it. That we are part of the universe, born from its energies and yet have a uniquely seperate identity within it, that we can contemplate it is awesome. Reality is what you percieve directly through the senses.

Luckily we survived ancient times and developed a theory of private property and capitalism.

Sure, look like 12s. Same as on my Taylor acoustic.

Very, not somewhat ;-)

The mind is a collection of experienced integrated sensory perceptions of existent reality. If there are falsehoods then these will necessarily cause conflicts with reality on some level. What could the 'one' mind be ? Are you envisaging some universal truth that it is hidden and if so, then on what would it be based ? Some other reality ? If so, then how is it possible to know that reality is any more/less real than your current experience of reality ?

I shall stiffly resist ;-)

It 'ain't personal, it's juz bizness

Year of the rat for me.

Fruit based conversation seems to be spreading across the forums today :-) Well you are seperate. That's an excellent thing because I can talk to you and exchange different perspectives and ideas. If we were all one then our intellect would be homogenous. It would be like a single note piece of music, or a monotone picture in a monotone universe. It is the different identities that make our conscious experience of life bountiful and fascinating. There's time enough for monotony when we are dead and gone. Don't wish it here and now. Apples and Oranges is a good example. In order to feel 'oneness' then one must be self identified. Such that 'I' feel something. Without the I of identity there can be no feeling of anything. As it is you 'feel' which is an entirely emotional thing. By all means feel at one with everything from a self identified and seperate perspective. There isn't a conflict and that's a nice place to be.

Ive heard of the love shack, but not the love banana. It's not a euphemism is it Junko ? :-)

And the religious fundamentalism of the Islamic Governments such as Saudi Arabia who have been unrelenting in their quest for middle Eastern domination with mystical crap. Western Governments shouldn't have intervened, but the greed of the oligarchs triumphed, as it always does. It's beginning to backfire right now. Their game is coming to an end. As Churchill said. This isn't the beginning of the end, but it is the end of the beginning. The sheep aren't really sheep at all.

My wife knew what kumbayah meant. She is Welsh, which explains it. In a Welsh accent 'come by hear' sounds very similar. We all pay the bills one way or another because we have given up our identity/ self determination and become frightened, cowardly children. Some of us see it, but there is little to nothing we can do about it no matter how obvious it is. The world seems determined to sacrifice to the mythical greater good of collectivisation. It won't last, because it's not how we really are. Eventually the occultist spell will deteriorate and the truth will appear. Unfortunately that is going to be a very hard and unpleasant truth for many. The Syrian invasion is just part of that hard truth.