Karl

I've already said it. I'm not concerned about the 'feeling'. I accept that this feeling is real. Then nothing. The moment is passed and time moves on. Im no longer aware of the feeling having any significance. I have neither denied the feeling or accepted the feeling as true. So, for the Atheist they should find if God does not exists and not simply believe that a God does not exist. The Deist, by comparison knows and accepts that the belief is one of mystic faith. The second is honest. The Atheist deceives himself.

I said it was an example. I don't know what happened. Possibly they decided it was acceptable to leave Dolphins as fish despite contrary evidence. It doesn't affect logic in any way until that fact becomes important enough to be required. It's not earth shattering if Dolphins remain categorised as fish. Maybe they were first categorised as sea creature or marine entities, and fish was a later category. Blimey I only gave it as an example I'm not omniscient. I could have said the world was flat, or the sun is drawn by Chariots or rolled by dung beetles. There are probably hundreds or thousands of new discoveries and reclaffifications happening every year. I picked that example because those are the kind of things that happen. I don't have the history behind them.

I don't claim to know what may exist, only as far as my rational experience allows me to know the current existing facts. My brother knew the property was empty, it was in a poor area and houses were often boarded up because of vandalism. My Dad was in the process of turning the property into an office. He had not paid attention to the quality of the locks and security-our own home had recently been broken into whilst we were on holiday for precisely the same reason. It's not impossible then to make a prediction based on possibility. If we could accurately predict the future then what ? The future is continuously evolving. Make a prediction and the future may alter completely as now every action will be based on the prediction. It's just completely crazy. We have the present and murky, unreliable memories of past events on which we base decisions. So, logic tells me that we cannot predict the future otherwise we would change the future. We would be saying we controlled the universe in all its aspects. I know you have some belief in that direction.

That's how it was viewed until it was discovered it breathed air. It was reclassified a mammal. Now it was considered no longer to be a fish.

That not all swimming, finned creatures were fish. (This is hypothetical by the way, I used it only as an example I can't say that this actually happened that way). We can alter, or add definitions to include the new information.

An unrelated premonition you mean ? If I'm about to go on holiday and I dream I shall be boarding a plane with some hand luggage then it's impossible to claim some degree of foreknowledge had not helped towards the premonition. It's possible to analyse similar events through the light of pre knowledge. We all create history. We are all at cause and effect. As Einstein said, there is no past, present and future, it's an illusion. It's a continuous movement of objects through time. I think you might be alluding to the thing I have talked about previously. An atheist is someone who does not 'believe' God exists, a religious person is someone who believes God does exist. I observe that similarity.

They didn't dispute the rationality, they simply discovered another fact. It doesn't alter the syllogism that fish have find and swim in water, the definition has simply been expanded and so have the premises. Now we have new additional learning. Man has the capacity for high levels of critical reasoning but this seems to have gone out of fashion with Hegel and Kant. This has resulted in the modern term 'scientism'. 'Deniers and believers' has become a common place expression related to thesis as well as 'consensus' science. The same applies to economics. The entire world has tipped upside down when such a thing as negative interest rates are possible. Where inflation is now desirable and printing money is the 'right' thing to do. There will always be dispute of facts, that is how knowledge is acquired, but they must be observed facts in the way science used to do things. The problems perhaps started when people believed that traditional physical science could be equally applied to human behaviour.

They exert a pull, they have force and power. It would be equally hypocritical for me to deny that these thought are non existent. I would then be doing the exact same denial of facts and reality. I give them breathing room and examine them fully. They wither and die if they cannot stand the light of reason. They are just concepts like all the others.

The truth is the facts as they are. It's a negative proposition. Just as innocent until proven guilty. Someone must prove guilt beyond doubt. Even if all the facts appear to add up to a conclusion, unless the facts actually do add up, then the conclusion cannot be reached. This doesn't mean leaving all possibilities on the table, only those that are factual. I found this brain achingly difficult to get my head around at the start. Same as negative rights. So, if you posit that swans are potentially possible in day glow green or ultra violet then it must be proved so. We cannot imply that because all swans were once said to be white, that the appearance of a black swan now makes it true that swans of all colours must then exist- they might well do, but these aren't the facts we have.

Another good question. I would say mystical type thoughts, or feelings will emerge now and then which I would describe as irrational, not so much mystical experiences. I can apply logic to any growing irrationality to check if it conforms to existing reality.

As far as the events are concerned my Dad had an office, it was broken into and water was pouring down the stairs. My brother and other siblings insist that they remember it as a precognition whenever we get together. I know longer know if I have been swayed by their multiple telling of that story into believing I also remember the accuracy of the prediction, or not. Remember that recent story about the journalist that said he had been on a helicopter under attack. The truth was it was a lie, but he seemed to have convinced himself it was true. Was I really a mystic ? That is a really excellent question. I believed I was. I wrote a book which confirms I thought I was. There in lies the reality of what I have consistently said. You don't know what you don't know and cannot do what you cannot do. If you have no rudder then you drift, the world is anything and all things, maleable as putty but as unyielding as granite. Hold those two views simultaneously and suffering occurs. [this is why I said Brian was incorrect when he implied I was wasting my time here. Challenges produce observations and are very helpful to me. So thank you for that question.]

Philosopher as opposed to scientist. The syllogism is valid, but being valid is completely different to something being true. The lack of experience of sea living mammals would be the reason why the syllogism remains valid but is untrue. It is the scientist that looks at the biology of things and feeds back to the philosopher who alters his definition and corrects the syllogism in light of that new information. It is now up to date, but new information might well appear in due course. The syllogism remains valid throughout. All that a syllogism does is to integrate premises to reach a new conclusion. Is this true, is that true, then this new thing must also be true at that one particular moment with no new information forthcoming.

It's funny what I think of being implicit and isn't. What do I remember ? What was true of that event ? I took no care to look at the reality at the time, the story has been repeated so many times that it has developed its own truth. It is true because I (we) say it is true. This is how legends and myths happen. We so want to believe it to be true we create our own proofs. Really I have no knowledge that this is exactly how it happened. My brother often had precognition and 99.99% we have forgotten. The first time we got a wisp of correlation we concluded it was real. As you know we grew up on a diet of fantasy and mysticism. Seeing ghosts, precognition, UFO etc was every day fare to us as a family. We hardly questioned anything and produced volumes of false evidence. My second book, as I think I told you, is a fictional story. All the family/except my absent dad-were highly imaginative. School reports often mentioned my 'vivid imagination' and 'story writing skill'. I even had an English tutor argue with me about a place I had invented. She believed it was a real place and that I couldn't possibly have invented it. I've lived in Storyville most of my life, when it's sunny it's beautiful, but when it turns dark it is horrific. That kind of suffering you might understand I wished to exit.

As an aside. I would most definitely suggest you read this book: Caroll Quigley-tragedy and hope. It's available as a PDF with a bit of looking. Link to the T&H website which has good info. http://www.tragedyandhope.com/which-versions-of-tragedy-and-hope-are-the-uncensored-editions/ Tragedy and hope was a very controversial book that mysteriously vanished from book shops around the USA despite its popularity. It only became available again this year and there is some concern that the more inflammable information may have been censored. This is the original, unabridged addition with all the 'secrets'.

I made an assumption that everyone knew about 'the great game'. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Game

The U.S. Is clearly trying to destabilise former Russian States as well as any Middle Eastern Russian interests. {There is a conspiracy theory which goes along the lines that communism itself was an idea which germinated in the USA and was exported to Russia where it was supported by U.S. Money. } However, Russia's rulers and Oligarchs aren't exactly innocents either. With the former USSR on its knees I don't think the U.S. Ever stopped to consider anything less than total subservience to Western power to be sufficient. It's the great game.

@ TI on objectivism and Rand. I don't have enough information to know if that is true or not. I suspect not, but I agree with much she says just not everything. There is something not quite right about her dogged defence 'individualism' in the sense she means it. Objectivism seems to me to have been the cult of Rand after first being her philosophy. It was in Atlas shrugged where she created the ideology of 'Galts Gulch' which goes completely against economic reality. It's an interesting point you bring up as it reminds me of the notion that all Libertarians are Misesian. Yet these two things are completely different. Libertarians have a political philosophy about freedom and no aggression. Mises on the other hand said nothing about these things, his work was purely on the science of economics. Yet over time they have become entangled. I think this is why objectivism confuses me, it isn't a pure work, it's a design like libertarianism with an independent philosophy of everything. It's like a scientist developing the philosophy around a subject. There is a hint of the Mussolini in it.

Nothing has intrinsic value.

A traditional earth snowflake. Everything is finite, but that doesn't alter the fact that every snow flake is unique. 'Infinite universes' shows a poor understanding of the meaning of universe. There is one finite universe no matter how many dimensions and objects reside within it. It is the universe, totality, everything that ever was or will be.

I'm waiting to see if I can better understand what this means. It's like watching snow flakes fall and melt on the pavement.

"The root of all suffering is trying" That's a bold and simple statement. What about succeeding or failing ? There is no control that is true, but free will always exists. That is the basis for morality, if everything is pre determined then choice is an illusion, therefore there are no consequences and no cause and effect. You can take a stab at compartmentalising, but I agree that it is ultimately a pointless exercise beyond trying to communicate the experience. There isn't a doer, we are that.

That is a different thing. That materials are recycled is well understood. That everything is made from exactly the same thing-whatever the universe is composed of is clearly true. However everything has independent identity and is unique regardless of timescale. Once a snow flake has melted there will never be another one exactly like it. Entropy smashes the pot for good, it can't be remade as it was. One day the pot may once again be clay from which a similar pot is thrown, but never the same pot. I like to hear you are a Gardner. It's never been an interest for me, despite the odd bit of planting and pruning, but I like the results. My wife is very keen and we often go choosing some new plant together.

How do you interpret 'ultimate reality' ? Something more real than real. Sounds fishy. Is reality less real than real ? Everything having independent and separate identity does not suggest independence from each other. Everything is effect of some other cause. Your last sentence could have come straight out of Atlas Shrugged, it is the Ayn Rand philosophy of Objectivism.

I've been saying that for long enough. Practice makes the practitioner good at the thing they practice.

We are all a product of cause and effect and the march of time. A tree produces many leaves, but every leaf is unique. When it falls there will never be another identical to it. Impermanence writ large.