Karl

God doesn't exist and I'm still garbage. Go figure. Life is just the pits isn't it ?

It's kind of a thing you have to prove for yourself, or not. If you now have the alternate view then that allows an examination of your own conceptions. I've been on both sides so I know the strong lure of the primacy of consciousness. The primacy of consciousness argument leaves open possibilities that the primacy of existence slams shut. It seems more expansive, but there is more than one way to expand consciousness, so, if it doesn't work out for you, then at least you have another option. It's more earthy, grounded and one dimensional (Brian tells me) but, like a guitarist with only one finger, beautiful music may still be played within the limits of those confines. Sometimes less is more :-)

Oh no, a wicked dis-believer, there's always one heretical sceptic. Here, drink this snake oil.

Sure it can, you aren't trying hard enough

"I refuse to prove that I exist, for proof denies faith and without faith I am nothing"

Cabin fever ? I'm going to walk along the river in half an hour or so. I get cabin fever.

It's a relative conceptual measurement of causality, as is distance (space between objects). Because we are conceptual creatures we are dependent on the past as a key to our long range future. It is purely a human concept, animals only have direct perception.

The fact remains that our senses/perception-and I should add the caveat of a fully working human being-perceive reality as it is. That is regardless of what lies beneath the surface, or beyond the range of our unassisted senses. You can't prove otherwise, all you are doing is conceptualising snakes from rope. We identify virus, particles, genomes that we didn't know we're there, but we could conceive them and then test to see if they were real. Our ability to create abstract concepts, integrate them and make new conceptions is-as far as we know-unique. Because we must conceptualise, we have the ability to question the reality of our perceptions. Thus the three objectivist questions: where am I ? How do I know it ? What should I do ? If you cannot trust your senses, then you cannot answer the second. Then you can't answer the first, or the third. Do you glimpse the problem ? You see, if you can't trust your senses, then moving straight to some thesis about what you believe, simply holds no water. There is just a conceptual abstract linked to nothing, by nothing, proven by nothing, sensed by nothing. It is a completely floating abstraction. It is pointless to set out to prove your perception is faulty, if proof relies entirely on perceptions of concretes. This is where Kant, Planck and their cohorts have planted the old skeptic seed that consciousness has primacy over existence. If you wish to accept their premise then you must accept that you can't know anything for certain. Everything is subjective consciousness playing out its tune. Therefore consciousness has no identity. Man is a quantum consciousness creating its own universe. To me that's abdication of the human mind. I get the sense of mental surrender and man simply giving up, like the last thoughts of a drowning man who hasn't the strength to fight to survive. I say 'rage against the dying of the light, do not go quietly into that dark place' thus I will act as a beacon, a solitary station cranking out a direction signal to anyone with ears enough to hear it. The mass of lemmings are heading for their quantum cliff, but a few will run the other way. Not many I think, but sufficient I hope.

She is the God father of all the other crooks, so many dirty secrets that everyone has on everyone else that letting one out might expose the lot of them. Of course many think they are crooks, but like everything, contemplation isn't proof. You can keep on sticking that vote in the ballot box for the Hillary turkey show in the hope what you think is true, isn't as true as you think. In England we were just smashing things up. We gave up on intelligent debate and turned to mass vandalism. We vandalised our minds, property, culture, aesthetics, economics, opportunity, Politics. You name it and we kicked the shit out of it then put it on a wall, wore it, drank it, listened to it and stalled it art. Punk. The name said it all. We still aren't tired of trashing everything we made the trashing itself an art form and exported in world wide.

If I don't look at this forum will this thread still be running ? It's like hotel California : you can 'threaten' to check out, but you can never leave'

Your lucky, they stuck me in a knitting pattern and I'm allergic to lanolin.

If we can't verify it then it's non existent as far as we are concerned. If we look at a piece of material it looks solid enough, but we know that it's composed of atoms and those atoms are composed of a multiplicity of particles. We can construct experiments and machines that can give us results which we can see using our senses. There are lots of things we don't yet know, but what we see with our senses is all we have to go on. They and we are part of the universe itself, not an alien adjunct. You cannot prove proof. So we cannot go beyond the axioms. Existence exists and our consciousness grasps that existence through our sensing/cognitive faculties. We can only discuss one axiom with respect to another. One day we might discover that the universe is made of ethereal cosmic puffs, but it won't change existence, consciousness or our direct perception of reality. If we stick to proving our inductive conceptual theories through proof of their existence, it's better than wasting time trying to prove the non existence of something, we don't need to and cannot prove the absence of something.

I have to agree with that. The whole thing is a charade in which there were supposed to be two establishment favourites flanked by two more extreme outsiders. Obama represented the status quo, Hillary/Jeb the change and Bernie/Trump the extremes. It's the old Hegelian dialectic. The crowd was supposed to choose Hillary or Jeb -it didn't really matter which. The charade has turned into a grand farce in which the media are trying to marginalise Trump out of existence to leave Hillary as the only option, meanwhile the Bernie supporters won't let their dream die even whilst Bernie is committing sepeku in front of them.

No, but I follow a lot of what comes out of the USA. In many ways it's now my spiritual home, so much good stuff has come out of the USA. It's dying now, but it isn't as dead as Britain, our country is so different to yours in the sense that class still exists in the academic sense. Philosophy may have died off in the US around 1970, but there are still accessible pockets of it. It's more mass market and devoid of snobbery. Britain has made it very difficult to access philosophical circles except Marxist group think through party politics. The internet opened horizons for me that were locked away in dusty institutions in our country.

You are really asking about an axiom. Reality is existence as opposed to the unreal and non existent. These things always have a habit of magically turning into a question of primacy and I hold the view that existent holds primacy over consciousness. In other words existence exists and consciousness is the faculty of grasping that existence. To be conscious, is to be conscious of something so when the tree is shaken out drops existence, consciousness and identity as corollary axioms. I follow objectivist philosophy and this boils down to: existence is identity; consciousness is identification. The axioms aren't reducible, that all we have to work with. The objectivism holds the view that X is X, a thing is a thing, it is what it is and it is nothing else. A subjectivist, or skeptic would hold the view that nothing is exactly what it seems because 'one may not step in the same river twice' 'what's true for you isn't necessarily tru for me' and Max Planck wrapped consciousness into existence and came out with a Nobel prize and quantum theory. Therefore as an objectivist I have my senses and I perceive reality directly, as it is. Any proof is proof based on those same senses. Everything has to be related back to the reality and checked to see if there is error between the conceptual abstract and the perceptual perceived concrete. In plain Yogic terms there is the story of the rope and snake. Perception sees what it sees, the mind may conceive a snake at a distance in the dark and see it moving. The only way to check is to get close enough to use the senses to prove what it is. If it turns out to be only old rope, then it hasn't magically transformed from the snake. Conception was in error, but that can be rectified by resolving it to the perceptual concrete.

We perceive reality directly through the senses, but we can have conceptual error. ( the case of the stick in the beaker of water appearing bent ). Our eyes do perceive it as it is, but we have to have a concept of light, water, density etc in order for us to understand why we perceive it, yet, just because we then understand what we are seeing it doesn't translate to seeing a straight stick. Dreams/hallucinations are concepts, to speak of them already assumes we know they are different to reality.

Well vote for Gary Johnson he has some views on weed. :-)

Only if you know you have created it, or you actively want to resolve it. This is one of the importances of learning the trivium. Input-process-output. Grammar allowing the detection of input errors ( in modern parlance this is referred to as comprehension, but it's a vey loose version of grammar), then logic to identify fallacies, incorrect classifications, definitions and finally rhetoric as the response. If children learned the Trivium today the world would be a very different place.

Not necessarily, that was what happened in fight club. The first rule of fight club is... If you get used to this conflict then you might feel it to be somewhat normal. Sometimes we just haven't got the resource to solve the bad integration.

Give them time. If they don't remove it they will likely tax it.

It seems always in 'a perfect' world for libertarians. The state shouldn't.......this/that/the other and I agree totally. The state should not prevent the sale of drugs, in a world in which the Government isn't already doing a million other things it shouldn't be doing either. It's like this gets plonked into the mix contained in an anti-government bomb casing. That the state can do all these other things, but hell, it ain't going to stop us taking recreational drugs. Let's say, that for everyone who decides to effectively opt out of the state services, they are welcome to buy and consume recreational canabis. If they get sick, get hooked, get into trouble then the state turns its back, just like an insurance company will if it finds you have driven your car under the influence of alcohol. You get into any bother and you go straight to the slammer, you get fired from work, ejected from your rented accommodation and have no rights of appeal if you are a confirmed user. No addiction centres, free health workers, your on your own.

As I said, murky. I find it difficult.

That's also true, used that argument a million times myself. Prohibition proved to be a catastrophic failure. I don't think we are arguing from the same view point. I would argue the same thing about alcohol as I do cannabis. It is potential harmful, not just to the self, but to others and that's where things get murky. If a drunken driver smashes into your family car and kills himself and your wife and kids, then do you just shrug ? Maybe you have to ? Maybe that's just life and alcohol is part of that picture ? It's a tragedy, it happens every day, but, the man driving wasn't the victim of some predetermined action, he made a decision, he chose to purchase, consume and then drive. How should we regard drinkers in that light, as potential murderers ? I said I don't have an answer, it really is an open debate on my behalf.

Not progressive. What you do in your own home is up to you, but where it impacts my life then we have an issue. You want to buy a big dog, fine, but let it crap in my garden and bite the kids, then I'm getting a shotgun. It's about boundaries. I tried explaining that about NAP, it doesn't work. Do I want to walk through a pile of drunken teenagers standing outside my gate, pissing on the fence, shouting abuse then leaving the path strewn with smashed glass, spit and vomit ? But hey, they weren't on my property were they ? They were just minding there own business on a public footpath ? I should just shut up and accept it because they weren't doing any harm ? I'm not a drug counsellor either. Far as I'm concerned people can dope themselves to death, drink themselves to cirrhosis or whatever, that's there right, as long as it doesn't spill into my rights at any point.

Edited at mods request.