Karl

Well then "how do you know what you know" ? Doesn't that presuppose a you who can know it ?

or in your case whom, whom, whom ;-)

Yet and this is precisely what I'm saying. I do not live in denial of those facts, I stand by them. I am a part of the universe and I have a nature (identity) as do all other existent objects. Every object is acting and interacting according to its nature (identity). I cannot produce something out of nothing, I can only rearrange things by application of physical effort and that's all. The answer to the question 'who am I' is easy. The problem is that you don't like the answer and continue asking in the hope you never have to answer it, or that there will be some significant intrinsic revelation which negates the question. I'm saying it is what it is, if you don't like it then that's too bad, but asking the question a million times won't change it.

Navel gazing you mean ;-) Done that, wrote a book about it. We can convince ourselves of just about anything if we are dedicated enough-I did. Yet there is always an irksome little something, like a stone in your shoe. You can try and ignore it, you can pretend the pain is something else but pain, but every so often it gives you a sharp kind of agony that wakes you up. Eventually you are forced to stop, take off the shoe and deal with it, or limp along for the rest of the journey.

I don't see how you can have an external contentment. I is I. Everything you think and feel is confined to self. The moment you believe you have permanent contentment is the moment reality can prove you wrong. I don't go by 'if it isn't permanent then it's not real'. Certainly contentment is real. The more certain and confident that you are, the more you gain values and hold them, the greater your contentment becomes. I do not in anyway deny that, it is my philosophy and it is objectivist philosophy. If you have access to everything that you need, if you are comfortable with who you are then you will maximise happiness. Hurrah for that :-) The problem comes with evasion. When surrender becomes the goal. When you try to banish the ego or end the mind in order to feel nothing, to try to be in a permanent kind of anaesthesia. To be unconcerned with reality and desires, to become a mindless zombie with a smile permanently etched on its face. This is the suicider, the Nihlist who has given up and seeks living oblivion.

We are talking about different things. I have no willingness to allow things to be as they are, things are either absolutes or they are not. Things that I can change I must be willing to change and have the capacity to alter. I know the atom can be split, but I am incapable-at present, and unwilling to apply the effort required to affect the action. However I can and do obtain and prepare food for my consumption. I cannot alter gravity, but I can utilise gravity to obtain values I desire. If I fall from my bike I would wish to annul gravity, but as I cannot, then I wear protective clothing, maintain the motorcycle and ride skilfully. Without gravity a motorcycle would be completely useless.

:blinks: :looks around for the rubber chicken: :blinks again: ;-)

Quite right, there isn't a subjective truth, truth is objective reality, the facts are the facts. Just as the tree makes a sound when it falls in the forest whether there is anyone to hear it or not.

There can only be inner contentment, but it is impermanent. You get hot, cold, hungry and thirsty. If you were perfectly contented there would be no desire to improve your situation by seeking the values of shade, a blanket, some food and a drink. Life is constant discontentment and the need to gain/keep values. That you accept this to be true might be regarded as having contentment with discontentment, which I will rename as forcing oneself to accept reality as it is. ;-) that there are absolutes which you cannot change and other things that you can. Funnily enough this thought of contentment with discontentment was my first ever glimpse of enlightenment. I realised that reality was really reality, that I got unhappy, sad, angry, happy regardless of how I thought I should be.

Yet those facts remain absolutes. Objective truth IS known by the participants. This is the same argument that goes ' John has a cold and I don't have a cold, therefore there is no objective truth that can be known'. That is a logical fallacy, because John has a cold-that is true for John. It is also true for everyone else that John has a cold. It is an established fact.

My choices of value and ethics are certainly unique, but not the underlying reality that we all face. Reality does not alter according to perspective. Reality isn't subjective. I don't seek to speak from a place of perfect contentment because no such place is possible, life is movement and survival. You must obtain the values that are critical to you and there is effort involved in that action. For some this comes more easily, for others it is a struggle, but for all it comes as a necessity if you hold your own life as a primary value. You must do something and you must discover what to do by using your mind. It is nothing to do with 'it working for me' I'm not telling you what values you should have, what principles you need to obtain them or how you should go about obtaining and maintaining them. I'm simply setting out reality, existence, consciousness and reason. I'm telling you only how you function as a human being like a mechanic would tell a driver. I'm not the driver, nor the car, not the colour, not the route it shall take, nor the speed at which it will travel. This is not about me telling you I have some perfect life, or that this is what you should choose. I'm telling you that reality is what it is, that there are facts, natures, identities and laws that are fixed absolutes. These include existence exists; existence is identity; consciousness is identification. That your only tool of survival is your mind, that your senses must be trusted and that your perceptions are truth, but that your conceptions can vary with respect to those perceptions. You can make errors in conception, but none are possible in perception. That you were born a blank slate except for your cognitive/emotional faculties and that everything must be experienced and learned. Everything you know must be based on perception, that this is the only way you can define proof/truth. Reality is rigid. First obey nature then adapt nature. The flexible part is our cognitive apparatus, our ability to solve problems, to be logically deductive and thereby make inductive leaps. You are talking of an emotional flexibility, an ability to absorb shocks, that is psychology, I don't speak to that. You may be more or less flexible in regard to adversity just as some men are physically more resilient, just as some cars are faster than others, some offer more safety and reliability. When you talk of contentment then that is what you are talking about. You call this 'spiritual' but it is emotional contentment that is sought. That is an act of hedonism. Contentment and happiness are the result of obtaining values, they are not values that you need to seek, first seek a real value, then contentment comes to let you know that you achieved that value according to your principles. As long as you are required to choose, then each choice will necessarily be a moral choice. Why would you ask 'who am I' when you already know. You are defined by the way you use your mind, the experiences you have had, the values you hold and the principles (moral choices) you choose to obtain those values. Your emotions give clues to how closely you conform to your principles and your gain/loss of values. To wander the earth trying to find out who you are is like a man who says he has lost his spectacles, when in fact they are sat on his head. It is like counting the number of men crossing a stream and forgetting to count yourself and declaring that one of your number is lost.

There are undeniable facts present in any case; objective evidence devoid of perspective.

I was listening to a recent podcast by Leonard Piekoff which covered AA from an objectivist perspective. Somebody had asked the question regarding the use of religion in the 12 step programme as possibly being unethical, but of course AA isn't teaching religion, it tries to create a ladder to get people out of alcoholism using somethin unimpeachable-God, Jesus, the Universe, or Jim.

You were born with the capacity of cognition and emotion but you were born a blank slate that began experiencing the world around you from the moment you could and then attempting to make sense of the chaos. How you build your conceptions, what values you choose, what rules you choose to live by, that is who you are. There is no need to look for something else, you made yourself in conjunction with your experiences. You are always expanding, ever evolving, you are not the you that you were at birth, only the axiomatic consciousness of existence remains like a hunger which must be fed. There, I've answered your question. If you insist on trying to see your own eye you will be at it until the day you die. Your nature is a living organism, an animal that reasons. Your only means of survival is your mind. That is the beginning and end point of who you are. Your consciousness expands always to encompass the new integrations you make. Seriously you are looking for something that never was hidden, you built it, you installed the flaws and the foundations. It's all you in every sense. Your experiences will shape those conceptions, if those were bad experiences then the conceptions can be disintegrated and disconnected from reality. We can be broken, we can lose our grip on reality if we suffer abuse/trauma particularly as children. I don't wish to psychologise, but I think much of the need for finding the self is related to avoiding who we are in favour of some fantasy of who we could be. Life is struggle.

It's a null question. You would only ask it if you believed you were something other than what you are, or indeed you were unable to determine who you were through illness or trauma. I don't say this in an off hand way. People who have suffered brain damage, multiple personality disorders, Alzheimer's disease truly don't know themselves. To lose ones mind is not to know self and that is a truly frightening proposition. We are not stones which lie in a steam and are shaped by water. We make ourselves. We shape and are shaped by our will, by our capacity to reason in relation to reality. You need only answer those three questions; where am I ? How do I know it ? What should I do ? It is pointless to try and reduce axioms. Existence exists and you are conscious of it. That's the starting point, the twin axiomatic truths which cannot be further broken down. It isn't possible to be conscious of consciousness, or conscious of unconsciousness, or conscious of nothing at all. Consciousness is something, it has identity, because it has identity it is capable of identifying. Consciousness isn't a fixed shape, it encompasses what we learn and expands as we integrate concepts logically. This is us making ourselves. We don't ask why the body requires food rather than poison, we know we must eat and must choose carefully what we eat in order to avoid death and increase health. It is exactly the same with the mind. We must be careful what we are digesting in order that we don't poison our consciousness, or leave it shrunken or disintegrated.

Jim means to himself instead of a Jesus/God. Not others turning their lives over to Jim, or at least I hope that's what he means unless he has become invested in that Neitzchian superman shit.

Only for the narcissistic and the mentally ill who are incapable of answering the three questions anyway.

Truth is a concept, it is when conception agrees with perception. X is X and a thing is a thing regardless of our thoughts about those facts. Only a conceptual being has the power to inquire if, what he thinks, agrees with what he senses; how he can come to know it and what he should do with that knowledge. Where am I ? How do I know it ? What should I do ? If truth were consciousness manifesting reality, then truth would be entirely subjective and a subjective truth is an oxymoron. There would be no point looking for something that could never be. It would be to decide that it was entirely unnecessary to know where you were because you couldn't know it and there would be no knowledge on which you could rely to decide what to do.

Your self approved coping strategy which brings order from chaos and makes sense of life. I get that.

Is that a result of the 12 step programme where you need something greater than ?

To which particular aspect of the universe do you defer ?

@sionnach. Ultimately it always comes down to force, or punishment by one group trying to control another. It's funny how Christians ignore their own bloody past. It was the seperation of church and state that finally turned Christianity a peaceful cult-though, like a volcano it continues to simmer in other ways, this can be seen in particularly in the USA with anti-abortion/homophobia/racism-but more importantly in the way it's philosophy clashes with capitalism. The Republican Party are supposed to be the supporters of freedom=capitalism, but their ideology of religionism is in the opposite direction. Christianity is by its nature anti-freedom/anti-reason, therefore it is anti-capitalist and irrational.

I'm not bringing up anything and have no idea what you are suggesting. I'm saying there are no greys, that a pragmatic approach ultimately leads to a busted civilisation because it suggests man cannot be moral. If you begin with the pragmatic approach you are automatically accepting immorality. People that want things to be morally grey are evading their own morals, they like certain things to be a bit foggy so that their own activities cannot easily be judged. That's where your 'live and let live' is heading. Yet I am not suggesting moralising, which is an irrational indiscriminate kind of moral application. I'm saying that you can definitely determine what's in the evil pile and what isn't. I'm certainly not talking about making laws against nakedness, tight dresses or the like. Once you get into compromise you can guarantee that at some point blood will start flowing. Take the Nice tragedy. The guy wasn't religious, he was an alcoholic, a wife beater and known for petty violence against members of the public. The result of tolerance, pragmatism, live and let live, is 80 dead. No one stopped this man, not the law, not his wife, not his friends, no one spoke out, and the result was needless death. Everyone wants to 'support' or 'empathise' or 'apologise' for the guys behaviour, he gets excused his behaviour instead of being confronted. A man that behaves violently and irrationally has lost all claim to any rights, he is nothing more than an animal to be put behind bars for safety.

Its in the nature of things to act according to their natures.

You mean deliberately set out to make someone miserable ? I can't see any purpose in doing that.