Karl

They say the moon is hollow and the rings of Saturn are engineered. It's even suggested Jupiter is an extinguished binary star and the canals of Mars were carved out by electrical discharge. Of course they also said the Royal family murdered Princess Di. I don't believe anyone unless they are dressed like Darth Vader.

Does it ? It looks to me that the shining beacon of Islamism and Sharia-Iran-did pretty well out of diplomacy, as do the Arabs that are funding Mosques, Madrasahs and AQ/ISIS. The megalomaniac bully already looks like it went to war with the only countries that provided stability and have turned them into ISISville.

Sanders is a socialist-hardly the walking in light type on any level. Basically death, poverty and misery for the masses and a good life for the select few, which pretty much sounds like Hillary, except her aim is on other countries 'masses'. Trump just seems like he is saying all the stuff the others woukd like to say, but their teams won't let's them.

Correct. It is has no sides or borders. To have borders would mean it wasn't the universe. It's we humans that have the concept, so we had really understand what we are conceptualising. There is a tendency in education and on TV for talk of the 'infinite' universe, which is also incorrect. The universe is finite, but boundless. Same as talk of multiple universes, when universe means the totality. So if it contains other dimensions these would also be in the universe.

Yes, we conceptualise a sphere, but then we prove that it is mathematically correct and we can hold it in our hands, it rolls in all directions, we can check its volume displacement. There are innumerable ways to check that what we perceive and what we conceptualise are one and the same. The concept of the universe is the concept of ALL things. It isn't the concept of a sphere or a cube. It isn't a thing in the way of a planet, it is ALL planets and everything else. People think of the universe as a giant sphere they could hold were their hands large enough, but the universe contains all hands of every size, even massive, giant, inconceivably massive hands are part of its make up. It is important to correctly understand what you are defining when referring to the universe and to keep that consistently. Like looking at the horizon when flying. Just because it seems to disappear when you climb, or dive, it remains the horizon exactly where it always was.

Well it's an analogy. I could easily deny that possibility as candles are made by man and the hand of man must take one candle to the next. If the Earth is deprived of an atmosphere there would be no oxygen for the flame. If you are in deep dreamless sleep, despite some low level of consciousness, then you have no awareness beyond the self. When the body dies there will not even be that. However you can make babies.

Why do you call it the universe, what is your conception and definition. If it's a foggy kind of thing in your mind then it's worth exploring why. All fire and water are within the universe, all destructive conversion is within the universe.

Firstly it was an analogy, but yes all flames are unique, though it's important to say that flames, candles etc have a specific nature which does not strive for survival. A flame cannot commit suicide, it doesn't get hungry, it has no free will. Usually when we talk of a flame lighting a thousand candles it is to say that we can spread a message without any loss to ourselves. We are no less for sharing a message than we were before we shared it.

Or you are beginning to understand me better :-) I meant aether in the way of a huge kind of infinity that is often imagined by people, not as a fact.

To talk of 'beginning points' is skeptic/sophist philosophy. It's the same thing as saying you can step in the same river twice, that everything is changing and so nothing has specific identity. There was no beginning to the universe, so, it pointless to talk of a beginning of CT. we can move past that point and find causality. We light a candle, the candle burns until there is no more wax, then the flame is extinguished. We can say that the heat from the flame went somewhere and the wax went somewhere else, but the essential universe remains the universe even those these changes have occured. The flame has gone, the candle has gone, the essential elements that came together to make that specific candle and flame have dispersed. The flame doesn't continue as a flame in some ghostly way, neither does the candle. The flame and candle are not reborn, but, we make new candles and light them.

In your philosophy, or that you see in mine ? The universe is not some semantic term, or scientific discovery. The universe is our highest conception. It is all and everything. Beyond what we can't know is pointless to consider and would be included in the universe anyway. It isn't such in the case of scientific discovery within the universe, in those aspects of science there are many things we don't yet know. However the universe we do know, not every aspect of it, but it's overall aspect as the universe. It cannot be destroyed because it was never created. This is entirely baffling if you have only ever thought in terms of causality, but all causality is within the universe, destruction of things into other things is all within the universe in its totality. Once you grasp the significance of the statement, then you can realise mans potential. We aren't just flecks of dust in the aether, we are cognitive of the entire totality in one single concept. Our minds are as boundless as the universe, on a par with the universe. Imagine what we are capable of !

We aren't talking about matter, but about spirit which does not exist except within a specific arrangement of things. Our bodies will continue for a time to grow hair and nails, but after that our bodies decay into dust, liquids and gas. There is no place for our spirits to go. Once the body is dead, so is the mind. Objectivism holds that consciousness does not exist apart from matter. Death is the extinction of our individual selves. However, our death is not the extinction of all consciousness, only our particular consciousness. Life will go on, we will not. It will be as if we never existed except for the ripples of our actions across time.

The universe will be destroyed by what ? The universe is everything there ever was and will be. To suggest the universe will be destroyed means that it isn't the universe, that there is something external to the universe which is impossible.

Not for me it isn't. There is nothing after death. I fear death because I like living.

My thoughts ARE what make me uniquely me, but my consciousness isn't generating existence. As I made very plain existence has primacy over consciousness. The universe has always been and always will be and I am a product of causality within the universe. Thought is not 'another sense'. The senses are perfect receivers as is perception. This is an automatic faculty. We are reasoning creatures and therefore we must think. It is our thoughts (conceptualisation)that can be erroneous. You appear to have moved Descartes demon from the external to the internal. To judge consciousness true or false then you must have some datum. As you have just said that the datum itself (reality) would be false, then there would be no way to judge it. Consciousness can't be in error, it is an axiom. Error is entirely in human thought, because conceptions can float. The old stick in a beaker of water example shows that our sense perception is perfect, but that we might make an error in our conceptualisation of what we are seeing. We then must account for the perception logically. This is the only place that true and false occurs. We must judge our conception with our direct perception. Science is the best method we know of doing that. An illusion is a perception which we have not correctly interpreted conceptually. Hence the illusion of a bent stick in a beaker of water is a result of the refraction index difference between air and water. The perception is perfect, but the illusion is that we 'think' the stick is bent until we know sufficient about the physics involved. You are making errors in the same way. They are conceptual errors. The universe contains no errors, our senses and perception are also error free. We really do see what's out there perfectly. Falsity only occurs in our conceptual storage where we make an error. The only way we can judge an error is by reference to our perception. Does what we think agree with what we see. Consciousness is axiomatic, you can't judge consciousness, it is the faculty of consciousness that allows us to perceive, conceptualise and compare one with the other. The only deceiver is our conception. This is why we need specific kinds of rules to reduce error. Logic is that tool. Logic isn't an invention, it is an ordering of our thought processes. It is the physical equivalent of lifting a heavy object without damaging our bodies.

Only because you haven't met the right dominatrix.

At least it's still got all its own teeth.

It depends on context. I couldn't answer more than 100% of the posts on this forum. However. If I only answered 1 post last year and 100,000 questions this year I could express that as a ration in percentage term as greater than 100%. I could answer as a multiplier or as a fixed number as well.

I've always had two penises, the trouble I now have is digit envy.

Only 9 fingers :-/ how many are we supposed to have ?

No, it isn't.

The materialist strikes again ;-)

Yes consciousness is axiomatic. One of the things that I probably didn't say, as consciousness is the faculty to perceive existence, but is not defined beyond that, so existence does not imply a physical world exists.

Yes, civilised discourse :-) Its out of the question as far as objectivism is concerned. I used to think that way and wrote my book on that premise so I'm intimate with that ideology. Consciousness has identity ONLY if existence has primacy. Consciousness IS something, so it has identity in that sense. If consciousness has primacy, then clearly it has no identity. I'm not suggesting that whatever consciousness is, that it has a specific local identity CT / Karl / MH / Dog. Only that it is some-thing, not no-thing.

I assure you I'm not brave :-) it's simple for me to see that consciousness must be conscious of some-thing. You haven't had all these perceptions poured into your head and then somehow discover them like hidden memories. Therefore it's clear that existence exists prior to consciousness in order for consciousness to be conscious of it. As consciousness has an identity, it is also existent and there you are ;-)