Karl

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Everything posted by Karl

  1. I don't see it as desolate in any sense, neither is matter 'non-existent' and the universe a benevolent one. If you have followed my posts you would know that I favour the primacy of existence-concrete reality. I haven't said that no life exists, indeed my own living existence and that of every other living thing is proof enough. If you believe in omniscient, omnipotent God then you believe in determinism-that man is not a volitional creature and therefore in a sense, he would in that case be a kind of automaton. I think you mistake me for a materialist, a subjective mystic, or muscle mystic form of atheism. I can assure you I'm not, neither am I a spiritual mystic. People can be whatever they like in this respect, it's only here where we are asked what our philosophies are that we expand on them. If something I say is interesting, then that's good, same is true of your own philosophy.
  2. Because it's irrational-I am a volitional being in an uncreated eternal universe. There is no room for God, but if you believe there is then that's your business, I won't try and persuade you to the contrary.

  3. Hillary and Trump

    Karl replied to Jim D.'s topic in The Rabbit Hole

    For a start he has no authority. When or if he does achieve election then you will be able to judge how much of an authoritarian he is. He is most definitely a statist, he has some odd ideas on big infrastructure projects, supports big welfare and is a protectionist. This week though he came out swinging at the Fed, no other candidate has ever dared, but that might be only to ensure he places Obama's economic policies in the dustbin, which tags Clinton. He's a strange animal for certain, but anyone seeking power is a strange and dangerous animal in my estimation and those that support this power grab are fools.

  4. Hillary and Trump

    Karl replied to Jim D.'s topic in The Rabbit Hole

    I thought I had gone to a parallel universe in which Ralis was actually a libertarian. It was weird, I'm sure he said things like 'he doesn't like 'authoritarians' and indicated that he might even prefer freedom ! It was like all my Birthdays came at once and Ralis and I danced together in one of Blakes green fields.
  5. I'm neither omnipresent nor omnipotent. There is no God. Learning isn't an issue, though conceptual integration can be, it isn't error free.
  6. Prison is a concept of the mind, mind is a concept of the mind, concepts aren't concretes and there is no way to make them concrete within conception. A prison is a man made construction, a concept made concrete. It is because you believe in the primacy of consciousness that you imagine your mind as a prison. This is another version of the religious mysticism that describes the body as a prison of the soul. There is nothing new in that.
  7. what are using to formulate a reply sugar puffs ? The mind isn't 'just' it is 'all'. The reason people fear 'losing their minds' isn't whim, it's terrifying, but then perhaps you have not experienced it ?
  8. You are cheeky fond Mr MH :-) but I love you for it :-)

  9. Hillary and Trump

    Karl replied to Jim D.'s topic in The Rabbit Hole

    I suspect the reality is far more crazy than any conspiracy theory can conceive. Between the crazy world of politics and the Feds jawboning markets it really does seem that we have waved Kansas bye bye. Who knows what's real down this convoluted rabbit hole. It's all part of the smoke and mirrors world of the mystic manipulators where nothing can ever be what it seems, then the only facts become those constantly repeated by the MSM until the discombobulated viewers finally give up and just accept whatever new reality their masters wish them to have. How her servants manage to put up with it I can only imagine is with unhealthy doses of horse tranquilliser plus a hundred kicked to death cats per week. I imagine she and her husband are quite mental and should really be under close medical scrutiny in a secure place.
  10. Parse the difference between unconsciousness and evasive conceptual thought. The mind that is aware there is no thoughts-is conceptualising 'no thoughts'. If one is unconscious then there are no conceptual thoughts. I learned this early on during meditation, that to see a blank screen, is to conceive and be conscious of a blank screen. This is how the witness arises, how to see our thoughts, to see we are never without them until we stop thinking and we only do that when we are unconscious-sleeping. Even then we have dream states and low level thoughts which we can access if that's our wish. I can sit for five minutes knowing that to think the mind is still is to be in error. When the mind is still, it is unconscious.
  11. This is correct, but this doesn't mean that ALL interpretations are in error. This is why it is necessary to link the conceptual to the perceptual. From the abstract to the concrete. This is how reason, logic and science became more analytical tools in order to explore reality with greater accuracy. At that time we began to withdraw from the whim, wishes and worship of mysticism and man took a giant leap forward in understanding. After Kant wrote his philosophical diahorrea with the aim of supporting religion/altruism over reason, he effectively started a war on reason. Kant won. However, he did not win much, Hegel/Dewey/Marx used the arrowhead he had forged to kill God anyway. It left man with neither God, nor reason. Muscle mysticism and its associated political ideals of collectivism/communism/fascism took the place of enlightened political thinking. The human mind is the ego, reason is its absolute, production is its goal. Today's men have shrunken egos as they have shrunken minds in which reason is vanquished over whim and subjectivism. Men refuse to believe they can know reality and hence live in a state of pathetic dreaming like caged animals looking up only to see what pleasure maybe afforded them and casting aside values like chaff. Everything comprises the universe, man makes sense of the universal soup because he must, his survival depends on knowledge and production. That knowledge must accord with concrete existence or it will be useless to him and he will diminish and die. All mans knowledge is towards one goal- maintaining his life as the primary value of every other value he must seek in order to maintain it; his mind as the only tool by which he can obtain those values and his ethics/morals the principles by which he best accomplishes them. Everything must be rooted in concrete existence, mind, reason, conception, morals, ethics, body cannot evade reality even if they can evade believing it.
  12. I'm not :-) I'm a man. A God is omniscient and omnipotent, a God can learn nothing, a God needs nothing, a God creates nothing, a God loves nothing. A God is limited, it has reached its limits due to its indestructible, all knowing nature. A man has no limits as yet defined. A mans consciousness is capable of growth beyond that of any God, it his position as man that gives him wings that Gods could never dream of.
  13. Unfortunately your PS is precisely where 'that' kind of thinking brings man. A return to mysticism and the abandonment of reason. What you believe is 'out of the box' are just wishes. I already know what you are searching for. It is indelible, hard etched, immobile, permanent, fixed and eternal. I cannot show it to you, it cannot be read in the pages of a book, nor fall from the lips of a guru, it is knowledge that has to be integrated with care, effort and precision. Not one concept can be out of place, no floating abstractions, nor foggy definitions. It is to be the volitional force of mind which grinds itself towards perfection with relentless and consistent effort. It cannot be haphazard, nor lazy, it must be an all consuming fire that burns down the irrational with its focused will to discover what lies within the ashes. The problem is that impossibly high places make men feel like Gods and reality as a plaything. To climb all the way down the mountain to leaden, cold hard reality feels like a retreat to a place once inhabited before the climb. It seems like a return to ignorance when the high places provide such splendid solitude and an eagles nest from which to watch the ignorant, unenlightened who never guessed at what is above them. To give up that piece of real estate appears to be a step backwards. It is nothing but the crippled ego attempting to fly, to flee it's earthly prison.

  14. Energy Work Poll

    Karl replied to RiverSnake's topic in General Discussion

    There wasn't an option for 'used to'. :-) so, I bunged it in No.
  15. Crabs are conscious, but only perceptually. The whole universe is in motion, only living things have volitional movement. Living things are causal operators which is their nature. Other none living objects have no volition, they are in motion, but have no volitional impulse- this impulse is the living entities purpose to survive.
  16. Consciousness cannot conceptualise no-thing, only the absence of a particular thing and that is hard enough. Try not thinking of a blue tree and you must first imagine the blue tree before negating it. No mechanism is required to confirm existence. Existence exists and consciousness is conscious of it. To be conscious of nothing is a contradiction. A consciousness without anything to grasp would be unconscious, it would be an impossibility. As an aside: Most people don't think in the inverse, they accept what they see without questioning reality, it's only those capable of higher abstractions that can think the way you do. I refer to that as the stage of 'mountain top' because I also once looked down from those lofty heights and became seduced by them. How long one stay there varies, Come down as fast as possible and find the perspective. First the valley, next the climb to the mountaintop, then the return to the valley having seen two other perspectives: the first is to accept the mountain/valley without question ( stage of ignorance), the second is to see the valley from the mountain (stage of evasion), third is to see the mountain and valley as they are ( stage of enlightenment). At each stage only the conception changes, there is still the carrying of water and the chopping of wood. Reality does not alter, existence exists and consciousness remains conscious of it. I do not think it's possible to pass directly from 1st to 3rd although I have entertained the possibility that it might. It's also really difficult to determine 1st stage people from the enlightened as their perspectives agree, but I think (cannot prove) that one must first pass through the 'eye of the needle' the 'mountaintop' in Karlosophy terminology:-) and thus those who have passed through retain the ability to understand that perspective equally. Those who cannot understand the perspective of primacy of consciousness(in the epistemological technical sense) have not attempted to climb the mountain-for them I do not think they even see it, or maybe they are already enlightened ? . It is for those people that rule books are written-much as for elementary students receive a set of pre-cast formula for squares, circles, cubes and such like, but the advanced mathematician is able to do so from first principles. It is often said that only children and professors really accept calculus-the first because they do not question, the second because they have fully understood. Everyone else floats in the area of accepting it works and having a foggy knowledge why it does, but not having worked through the steps it can be somewhat like a magic spell. This is somewhat as I see it. It's a working hypothesis only, not a scientific one in any sense, but it is interesting how it does seem to mirror the spiritual philosophers experience.
  17. No it's easy to grasp. It's the primacy of consciousness over existence. The subjective over the objective. Consciousness must be conscious of something - a consciousness conscious of no-thing would not be existent. Therefore it is simple to conclude that existence (object) exists and consciousness grasps the object as a subject. Therefore the primacy of existence. Consciousness is something, it has identity and a nature, therefore it exists. In order that it exists, existence must have primacy. Existence is identity; consciousness is identification.

  18. Hillary and Trump

    Karl replied to Jim D.'s topic in The Rabbit Hole

    That's just a conspiracy theory. The MSN are investigative journalists of the highest calibre, individually verifying every claim, of story, that wouldn't dream of simply taking a democratic press release and cut/paste it into their top news slots. It's that alt media that gets it all wrong, that's why they are all slightly out of synch. If they were real news people they would have come to exactly the same conclusions as the MSN, using almost exactly the same words and phrases. Hillary will 'power through' of course she will, the press no precisely how I'll she is-even if they managed not to report it, the little people don't need to know anyway. They need to get behind Hillary and stop rumouring.
  19. Not how we perceive (view) but how we interpret (conceptualise) what we perceive. A dog has no name for a tree, to a dog it just is and it only is once he comes upon it. A dog may dream about a tree, but not in the abstract sense, only as a memory of some familiar object. It cannot abstract 'trees' or 'forests' or the number of species of tree, nor how trees grow, or die, nor can it add other species to creat the abstract 'plant life' or consider a science like botany. The stick in the clear tumbler of water looks like any other stick like object to a dog, it doesn't consider the diffraction to be a significant detail. One human might conceive the stick as physically bent, another may argue the stick cannot really be bent by the water. Both see the stick as bent, but each may have a different interpretation of the phenomenon depending on exposure to other knowledge. One may consider it is magic, or that the water pressure bends the stick, the other has knowledge of diffraction.

  20. Defining concepts: Good and Bad people

    Karl replied to thelerner's topic in General Discussion

    You may call it reflexive, but that denies volition. Your heart beats reflexively and accelerates as you exercise, but it is you that chooses to exercise. We are born with the faculty of emotion as we are with cognition, but until we conceptualise experiences and abstracts we can't yet name those emotions. Animals simply react, they feel fear, pain, hunger and react accordingly, but they aren't aware of these things in a conceptual sense as you and I are. We can communicate an abstract of our emotional state, but we must first have known how to determine what the emotion is. We don't know sadness until we experience an event to which we determine the conceptual abstract. Otherwise, sadness for you would be happiness for me. Clearly this isn't true, we both share an abstract knowledge of sadness based on our own experience of sadness, even when are experiences may differ. Morality is not based on social sanction, nor on Gods word. Your view of social sanction makes you a muscle mysticist, your view that emotion based abstractions are purely devoid of experience is spiritual mysticism. You think that morality is a sanctified solid. I don't mean that at all. You must choose your moral code it is not supplied to you and here you suddenly get it, but in getting it you ignore it. That's quite funny really. More later. I'm in Turkey and off for a meal with my lovely wife in a restaurant perched on the bay front. The weather is beautiful.
  21. Subjectively or objectively ?
  22. I never tire of it :-) We would get a room if we could decide which one to get. Mines too inflexible for Brian and Brian's choice looks far too flimsy to me. I bet this is how it used to go in Ancient Greece. The audience sitting around going 'oh no it's these two again'.

  23. Defining concepts: Good and Bad people

    Karl replied to thelerner's topic in General Discussion

    Bloody hell Brian you are adding ever more contingencies to the example. I do not 'sacrifice' myself to strangers. I make a moral choice as to what the best action is for me. I'm going to die in a fireball if I crash, so I might as well drive off the cliff and avoid killing more people. I would try and jump out at the last second and hope to make it. It's also possible I would freeze with fear and plough straight into both bus and chain gang. Either way I'm dead. If I jump and die then I'm dead. I might not even realise I made that choice until I had. I might just twist the wheel defensively and vanish off the cliff whilst thinking 'bollox I could have jumped'. I'm acting to first try and preserve my life whether I do so, or not is immaterial. Yet, in the moment I may value the lives of others higher than my own, but my decision is not sacrifice, but a deliberately selfish action based on that judgement. It remains 'all about me as it does all about you. Every decision has moral implications. I must judge what is best for me. How do you know that capitalism is the right thing ? You call it natural, but nothing man does replicates the falling of a rock, nor the growing of a tree. There is no determinism as you have stated yourself, man is a volitional creature, he must decide what he will do. Now, how have you judged it ?

  24. Defining concepts: Good and Bad people

    Karl replied to thelerner's topic in General Discussion

    Brakes on :-) No, you wake up in the morning and go about sustaining your life-implicit in that sustaining is the answer to the question 'live/die". When one day you take to your bed and have neither the strength, nor the energy to carry on sustaining your life, then your actions will have answered the question implicitly and now you are on the run down to your death. While there is fight in you, then life will be the implicit choice, but eventually it may reach a point when the value of life has become so low that death is preferable. When the choice is life, then you must always ask what is required to sustain it, of course you don't always notice that asking (LOL more meditation required in order to strengthen the witness). Every action is a moral action initiated by a moral thought. These decisions can be equally immoral, but then you must have some way of deciding if they are good or bad for you. You must have a philosophy to decide what it is you must do. That philosophy doesn't float into your head, it isn't just waiting to be discovered as the spiritual Mystics woukd have it, neither is morality impossible because trality cannot be known-as the muscle Mystics believe. You don't act 'reflexively' or automatically, you act on previous experience and conceptual understanding. It seems like it's reflex, just as emotions are given names such as fear, hate, joy, love, sadness, but each and everyone has a conception attached to it. First one must experience an event and feel the emotion arising- that emotion does not come with a label so we have to associate the event with the emotion. The event is reality, the emotion is the response to the event, the label is the conception. So, we can trace every emotion and ask what the triggers are if we have sufficient stillness to do so. I can substitute another word here, but spiritual seekers need first to use terms they are comfortable with.

  25. Defining concepts: Good and Bad people

    Karl replied to thelerner's topic in General Discussion

    That's a false alternative and a straw man Brian. There will be times when a hard choice will have to be made. There is certainly a moral choice there and that's to drive off the cliff, attempting to jump clear at the last moment to ensure the truck doesn't crash into anything. If you don't make it then you tried, it won't change the outcome. Either you and truck off cliff, or truck goes off cliff and you survive with some broken bones and skin grafts. We can go at this all day. You support the constitution, but it's becoming clear that you don't actually know the philosophical underpinnings of that constitution. Unfortunately, that's why the constitution has been eroded to nothing. It's impossible to support a set of principles about which you do not understand the precepts from which they are derived. The result is that Kant and his ruinous philosophy have branded the constitutional rights arbitary whims no better than any other arbitary whim. Hence they no longer have need of existence and can be dispensed with along with the Bible and any other subjective statement-as Kant sees it. You are following this same line of irrationality, yet you appear completely fine with it. Why do you support the rights laid out in the constitution if you believe things are subjective. If they are, as you believe, subjective, then why plough this libertarian furrow. Why not pick socialism, tyranny or whatever works ? Surely you see this ? If everything is subjective then that is where you must stand. Why are you holding out against socialism ? Why do you judge this as bad and capitalism as good ? I've asked you this before and I really, really, don't want to be dragged into the Brian washing machine of flying boulders as it costs too much skin and blood. It's not my intention to win the argument by whatever means. I am not cleverer or more intelligent than you by any stretch, I'm simply asking the question that I think you should have asked of yourself.