Karl

This use of anti-concepts is interesting because it gives no clue as to what is meant, it's just a package deal as I have discovered with anti- Semite. These things un-kind, un-loving or mis-treat are weasel words devoid of definition. Define: love, kind and treat. Love is the love of values, it does not exist seperately. To love implies an 'I' that can love. Unloved just means that someone does not see a value in someone else that would compliment their lives and make them happier. One can't 'unlove' someone. Kind means essentially being merciful. In other words giving a value which another person has not earned. Here it can be seen that un-kind also means nothing, it isn't an action at all, it is simply no action at all. To pass a beggar in the street and not to flip him a coin is not being un-kind, it is no different to passing a parked car in this respect. It is only when charity is given (mercy) of an unearned value that we can refer to it as any kind of kind action. Treat-ment is a judgement. To treat someone good or bad implies a standard. That standard is ones life and those things required to sustain it without regard to other men - life, liberty, property and the pursuit of happiness. To aggress against these rights is to treat someone badly, aggress means the physical initiation of force. Attacking someone is to use physical force against them either directly, or indirectly. In no way does this mean verbal attacks, which are simply words relating to concepts. One may judge them harsh or kind, but they have no physical attribute and so these descriptors are poetic illusions.

Which is totally untrue. Survival (remaining alive) is one long problem that must be continually solved. In order to experience anything we must be alive. Everyday you must do something if you wish to survive it is not sufficient to passively 'experience' because experience is the result of your thought and action. Experience is not passive, it is a volitionally conscious action and it is self generated activity that defines the life that we experience.

You aren't actually saying anything I can understand. The definition is the concept and it the concept is defined by its units. I was hoping you might get there and maybe figure out why 'life' must have 'meaning' and why that is particular to man who has a sense of 'I' or 'self' that is absent in animals and plants. I was attempting to show you that the use of words themselves to represent concepts is implicit in the answer. This might have gone over your head. It is the same thing as the stolen concept. To extrapolate it if it remains unclear: life is a word representing a concept. To ask 'why should life have meaning' implicitly provides its own answer. 'Life' is a concept, 'meaning' means definition. The fact that you have a concept 'life' at all gives it the necessity of meaning. If you wish we can further define the concept 'life' but it would be pointless. I can take you a very long way if you want, but my intention wasn't to lecture but to see if you could grasp the sense of your own question and why it implicitly contains the answer.

You are saying that meaning is defined as 'two in parasitic bond' ?

What does meaning mean ? :-) ask your cat, or the plants.

So are plants.

To stay alive.

Attack others ? As in the initiation of physical force against another person ?

You must at least eat and drink ? Why do you do that if life has no meaning for you ? Why bother ?

Really grasping at straws now. Never mind policies just dig up bits of minor rubbish whilst the US considers going to war with Russia :-/

McFly, McFly.... You really thought that's what I was doing ? Read through your conversation with Brian and tax codes.

Of course I would call you out on it :-)

Occasionally, just occasionally, I have serious doubts if the IQ test you took wasn't actually a competition to win an assorted box of organic vegetables.

Does it seem meaningless to you ? Your life has no meaning ? Are you a brick ?

The general welfare clause has been severely twisted and misinterpreted. It's like being told a car is two motorcycles strapped together, or a toy glider is exactly the same as a jumbo jet because they both fly and have wings. There have been many judicial cases over the interpretation.

I will answer as you have replied after Insaid I would bow out so out of politeness. Your experience is your experience, you say you had it so that's what you had. However when I say emotional equivalence I mean in the sense that there are conceptions associated with the emotions, that does not imply the conceptions are grounded, they can be floating abstractions. For instance 'God has chosen me' might bring euphoria, or a sense of deep joy, but no such God can be found in your own existent experience. This is what I mean by fantasy.

A matter of 'faith' and at that point there is little point in pursuing the argument further. For an objectivist this is akin to watching someone switch off their minds and thus no argument is possible with feelings. As long as you are not implying that I should accept feelings as facts then it's your business.

At this point I'm dropping out. Either I don't understand and therefore I never will, or I actually understand this far more than you think. Anyway, whichever it may be I cannot add any more.

This can be done, but you are making it have a complexity and mystery that is unnecessary. You have learned to focus awareness introspectively but you don't have the fore knowledge and so where you see mystic energies and outflows I decipher them. Like the matrix film. If you don't know what the code is, then it's a pretty energy waterfall on which you can fascinate like snowflakes falling on a moving windscreen. The flow arises, moves, disappears, but only because you don't know what you are looking at. You are looking at the windscreen wipers, but not at the road beyond it. This is effectively the position of a newborn trying to make sense of its external environment, you are beginning to learn about your internal states. No doubt I'm making assumptions again, I can't possibly understand blah blah blah. ;-)

That you cannot find the words describes an emotion, but all emotions have equivalence and if you have the time, patience and a high degree of introspection these can be revealed.

Mental states absolutely, this is scientifically proven, but not conscious states. Consciousness is the thing which is aware of the mental states, it is always on unless one is unconscious. The idea of changing conscious states would be bizzare. We can be more or less aware, but consciousness is operating at the same level as it grasps existence from wherever we point our awareness. Awareness can be focused, contracted, withdrawn into introspection, or spread out very wide. We are only ever conscious of the things in our awareness which are existents-these include self (a conceptual abstraction in introspective terms).

Thank you. It's IMO easier to accomplish by rational thinking and logic applied consistently-we don't learn this, we have to actively perform it. I think that what you describe is free wheeling. I did that for several years, but learned that the bad stuff comes back at unexpected moments and then it's worse because of the expectation it had been surpassed. Just my 2p worth.

There's no need for consensus. Open your eyes and there it is. Was Sri Auronindo a scientist who has found evidence of these different cognitive area within the brain ? Consciousness has to be conscious of something. There is no kind of consciousness that is consciously aware of itself. The concepts themselves are proof of this. Now, you may say that what you have is faith. I won't argue with faith it's not worth the effort and is the decision of the person wanting to believe in such things. I only argue if they try and convince me that their faith is right and I should agree that it. However, few here admit to faith, they say it's reality and if I ask them to prove it with respect to reality I get short shift. Like you just said that you believe no one knows what existent reality is, yet all proof has to be based on existent reality. What you are saying is there is no reality, so no proof can be given, so one must just feel it, or experience it-that is faith.

Touché :-)

Oh so you are comparing me with a 3 year old now. Nice. Mature rational argument for someone with all this spiritual wisdom and quiet minded body without a signal. Karl to Joeblast : return to Earth