Karl

No, the grouping 'arent' the way it is. The groupings are purely conceptual abstractions. Our perceptions are the way it is. This is why you need to define the concepts or you end up with floating abstractions that are NOT connected to reality. It doesn't matter whether you think the world is a soup of cosmic puffing all connected in one giant circuit. You would still need to make sense of it conceptually. As you don't see the world as a kind of matrix screen full of random motion, then what you perceive is what you percieve. If you refuse to define then all you get is a load of badly integrated and disintegrated abstractions. When you try and apply them to reality they don't fit. The rules for definitions are based on our conceptual categorisation. They are the swiftest means to get the connection to reality correctly set. They are based on Aristotlian logic as is, all proper science. Is physics different on the micro scale ? I doubt it. I think we have failed to define properly on the macro scale and are now making errors on top of errors. We are seeing the rope as a snake. Natures laws are consistent, if we have discovered inconsistency then it isn't nature that is wrong it's us. The problem is worse, because we have been following Kantian/Hegelian philosophy down Alice's rabbit hole we have thrown out reason and are proceeding to find an inconsistency in the, so called, quantum world, in order to justify more irrationality. We are heading out into a new dark ages very rapidly. I see it everywhere and I'm shocked at the speed of regression. I can see a time when we might be utilising CERN as some kind of sophisticated oracle-if we aren't doing that already ! We are already talking about time and future of quantum particles, how long before we see it as a high tech fortune teller ? I fear that asking the question about mans origin might well be something that will have become redundant in the next few hundred years, because man will no longer exist. I did say a few hundred because our technology now permits mass extinction.

You do give me a laugh. You introduced a contradiction to your argument....there was a time before... Its the universe, there was never a time before because all time is part of the universe, it is time going forward in the mode of causality. Everything man calls time is a measurement based on our lives and the cycles we see related to our lives. It won't damage your Daoist belief to see the universe as cyclic-it may well be, it might reach a point, start shrinking until it is very small-but remember that 'small' is mans measurement like time, a singularity is just the same as a universe, it's only the relative size of the thing. For all we know, this is a singularity compared to the size it will eventually reach. Everything is comparative. I just picked apart that bit of your argument, the rest is fine to me.

Not to describe, define. 3 things definitions are not: Descriptions. Entomological reports on the origin of words Examples- by pointing to concretes. I've given the example previously. Man is the rational animal. The genus: class wider than the concept to be defined which represents the basic identity of the concretes in question. The Differentia: the characteristic that differentiates the concretes in question from all other members of the genus. Rule of equivalence: true of all members of the class defined and only members of the class defined. In other words logically equivalent such that ALL S is P can be converted to ALL P is S without losing information So: man is the rational animal becomes man is the animal which uses reason. Rule of fundamentalist: the characteristic responsible for the greatest number of the entities distinctive characteristics. Rule of circularity: not directly or indirectly defining the subject by itself. Avoid synonyms and correlatives Rule of negatives: where possible the definition must be stated in the positive not negatively. Rule of obscurity: stated literally, clearly, simply and economically as possible (not metaphors/poetic allusions or semantics). Try defining a square first. Not here, but in the privacy of your own 'space' :-) This is hard stuff, it stretches the mind and creates consciousness expansion on levels you haven't known. Anyway we really shoukd take this onto our own thread before Junko does something to us involving various planets and moons :-)

I don't presume anything about atoms. You aren't defining space, you are describing properties of things in relation to other things. Causality. Many materials can propagate light and can be bent, so that isn't specific to 'space' You said beyond the limits of space. Can you define those limits. The answer is yours to define to your own satisfaction not mine. It's not really important that you have the right definition, but if you are using a concept without having defined it then how can you possibly integrate anything succesfully ? You can update the definition if new information becomes available, but, what right now is your definition. I can give my definition, it doesn't mean it's going to be a correct, but I have one and it's as clear as 1 + 1 = 2 If you think how you use the words, I would try not to go scientific, be basic or you will lose the thread of the definition. What do you mean when you say I like the open space, or I'm in a crawl space, or I'm in outer space ? I don't want to labour this or I'm going to piss everyone off even more than normal. So I don't expect any reply. It's an exercise.

Right, but how do you end the Central banks and return to sound money ( which I agree with of course) when the apparatus exists to resurrect it ? They can't kill everyone. Their power depends on the people's acceptance of Government. Without the people's blessing there is no Government. Without any Government there is no government central bank or unsound money, by action of the market, which throws out bad operators. That's the ultimate democracy.

specifically a day is mans description of a natural event. A day is just a turn of the earth into daylight. We call it a day 24 hrs and we call the dark part night, though it's encapsulated in the 24 hrs. However it's just revolving mass and energy. One day the Earth will be burned up, or fly apart, but the Sun, the components of the planet will continue on. A storm isn't man made but again it's a description of rapid air movements caused by gravity, mass, temperature, pressure etc. The energy creating them is conserved. These things are all universal. The universe is ALL things ever. It is the sum total of everything. It contains everything there has ever been and all there ever will be. The universe has the identity 'the universe' but it is the sum of all identies within it. It is something not no-thing. It is begin less and endless because it is a thing, it is all things.

So you haven't yet got a definition. It's just a word backed by nothing but fog. Are you entirely certain you can point to space ? Try thinking of all the examples you can where space is used in a sentence and see if you can categorise by pulling the essence out of each. I like the milk marketing boards equivocation "we put cows in space" We refer to things as inner and outer space. We say we need space to grow, space to think, space to breath, space craft, space ship, space men, crawl space, space bar, spacious, spacing, spatial, public space, private space, open space etc Is it a material ? Do any of those description lead you to think it might be of the genus 'material' ? I mean we talk of space between atoms, we have space under water, in a virtual vacuum, in air or in a solid, or any other gas. Do we need then to consider the material aspects of the concept ? Try and be specific.

I don't have it backwards as you have aptly demonstrated. Government was prior to Oligarchs taking control of it. Where I said 'Government become the Oligachs' I was specifically meaning communism in which the Government officials appropriate the means of production. Anyway, all that's by the by, we can rabbit on all day about what came first, but I'm more interested in what you think the solution is.

Please not the doughnut, anything but the doughnut. :-) No, the doughnut is a specific kind of thing that can be defined as a ring of dough with a hole at its centre. Define space for yourself. Unless you can define it then you have a floating concept. You have your concepts inverted, but if you define space then you will be amazed at your new found understanding and can stop bothering me with doughnuts. Unless you want to buy me a doughnut and then you can bother me then :-) Only if something is expanding, but then some things contract. I have a perfect example hanging between my legs :-) that's probably too much information, but it might focus you on space in order to avoid the image. :-) It would be chaotic if you had no perceptual integration and your senses just poured neat sensations into your head. You could not then seperate carrot from celery. If you were unconscious you would have no sense of anything. The point you are actually beginning to make with your carrots, bowl and soup is for the primacy of existence, which, I'm not sure that you previously accepted ? I might be wrong,mI know you didn't accept the lack of conceptual abstracts for animals" Anyway, define 'space' genus, differentia, stated in the positive and free of logical fallacies. If you haven't ever attempted it, then it will be a mind blowing experience which will make your head ache. I can help you formulate if you don't know the exact rules on fundamentals, equivalence, circularity, negatives, obscurity. That's if you up for it. Might take a few attempts. Try not to use the dictionary, it's not always accurate anyway. Your own definition is like building your own house, it's hard, but the experience improves you abilities and cognitive skills.

You are referring to man made things. I refer you back to life ending, because these things are directly attributable man. These are things we have control of by the expediency of life and reason. What never began, never ends. That's correct. The universe never began and it will never end.

They were not one and the same, that's the point of all the hoy poloy of Government laws. All that black stick, two houses and parliamentary laws. If it's always the case that the oligarchs get hold of the Government, then you are left with three alternatives: Either get rid of the oligarchs, get rid of the Government, or have the Government effectively become the oligarchs and impose communism. My philosophy is to get the Government completely out of commerce and delimit their powers to purely justice and law. That's the only way to stop the bankers becoming rulers, you take away any connection that allows it to happen. We all know where we are then. We have seen that no amount of democracy prevents the spread of government once it is allowed to roam into every area of our lives. It's inevitable that some people will try and capture Government power when it has a direct bearing on their lifestyle. No amount of glass steagall, nationalisation or regulation can stop it, the problem is that the Government is capable of enacting these legalities.

Yes, but that's what the creation of the BoE was I just told you that. Before the BoE they issued war bonds that people could buy voluntarily, then they cashed them in for Gold when they were matured-presumably because the King had pilfered the defeated and stocked up his treasure house. However, we had a parliament after Oliver Cromwell beat the King. This was the beginnings of democratic Government and a tying up of all the loose ends that allowed people freedom.

No, they meant this is a book at 101 pages.

Do you know what he did because Joeblast is making a quiz of it ?

Here comes that kick boxing foot.... :-)

Seriously you could make a vicar weep .....oh you did that already :-) It isn't the label which is true. It's a conceptual symbol for a perceptual reality. if you ask me to point out the universe I swing my hand in an arc and motion generally. There it is. Can you deny it ? Because we can abstract, therefore we can know lots of things that we can't see and may never set eyes upon. We can know there are millions and millions of chairs, even though we never see them we induce their existence. So, we can chunk up the abstract and induce the entirety of everything and that is the universe. We can ask ourselves how it came about. What or who created it, but then, as we know it is the induced sum of all things we can know that it could never have been created otherwise it wouldn't be the sum of all things. Now you might say that we can't know anything, that our perceptions and conceptions are completely false, but then you must deny that you can deny anything because you have denied that you have anything but falsehoods. Then of course you can't know anything at all with certainty and you are just spewing random noises into the aether not knowing if you even exist.

You know nothing at all which has a beginning or an end on a universal material scale. Instead we have causality. Things are converted from one thing to another. The only thing that can be said to end is the individual life for a living entity.

Rushes out to where ? Space isn't a thing, it's a dimension a distance between A and B. There is no point at which it is devoid of everything, or it wouldn't be anything. Even if some - let's call it stuff- could leak out, it couldn't leak anywhere outside of where there is no outside. You can't poke a hole in the universe because that would mean the universe was not the universe. I'm not a scientist-obviously :-) If you have a beech then put up two flags. Then we measure the space between the two flags, but that isn't an area devoid of anything because we happened to measure to concentrate on the flags. There are distances between the air molecules, sand grains and so many smaller and smaller kinds of things that there may not be an end to them. So space is full of stuff, chocolate full of stuff, it's only our conception that allows us to make specific distinctions between planets and Suns. If we didn't have the faculty then everything would just be everything in one big chaotic soup.

What's this a game of guess the bloody monarch. :-) The BoE was 1694. I don't know how far you want to go back, it's pointless to go back beyond Cromwell or we end up in pure monarchies with an entirely different system of currencies, financials and wars. If you go back to the early 1600s it was the East India Company and Royal charters.

Rushing out to where ? There is no 'out'. It's the universe you nitwit ;-) LOL ( how many times do you have to be told :-) I don't know you will definitely have to go on the naughty step) it doesn't have an outside of itself, or that would be the universe, in which case we are in a small bubble within the universe, but that small bubble isn't the universe.

Because we call it the universe and that is what it is. It is the highest conceptual level. There could be two universes because 'uni' one. If there was hypothetically one which collapsed, then it had to collapse to something. As energy is neither created nor destroyed then we can be sure that this collapsing universe changed its state but continued existing as the universe until it expanded once again. If you are question the conservation of energy and the possibile existence of multiverse then you have to explain how that contradicts everything we currently understand and on which our knowledge is built. I'm not saying it's impossible, but, like tooth fairies, you have to produce one first. There was no beginning and there will be no end.

Best start with the basics. Instead of cluttering up other people's threads with philosophy I thought it only right that I should invite others to play in my sand pit. No biting, spitting, punching or weeing, but tough, polite argument is most acceptable. For those who have no idea what Objectivism is, it is the philosophy of Ayn Rand. It is based heavily on Aristotles philosophy but veers away from it in several areas including metaphysics. It's also a highly contested, derided and despised philosophy. The internet is full of myths regarding Rand and here we see that no one is really playing the ball, they play the man-or in this case the woman. The statement which really sums up objectivism is: existence is identity; consciousness is identification Consciousness and existence are axioms. Existence exists and consciousness must be conscious of something. From there we get the statement that existence is prior to consciousness. That existence exists regardless of consciousness being conscious of it. Objectivism is a complete moral philosophy beginning with existence and ending with action. It does not offer a prescriptive kind of ethics, but explains why they are a philosophical necessity for a creature with free will. I'm going to use Leonard Peikoffs guide to Objectivism at least to get an outline and arrangement. I'm not Peikoff and I'm certainly not Rand, but this will be my interpretation of their writing.

King George ? He wasn't on the throne until 1701 the BoE was already in operation by then.

Urban myth. We begin with the senses, the actions on the senses are automatically turned into perceptions. The perceptions are not automatically conceptualised. As babies we have to perceive the world before we can conceptualise it. That's where you will find a split, because you have an intrincisist view that concepts are revelation, or some kind of transfer.

Not backwards. How did central banks and banking cartels come about ? We didn't have cartels and central banks until the Governments made them legal. It is the Government which regulates banks because it's the Government that legalised their fraud. Causality. The British Government created the cartel and the BoE in order to continue its war with France. It went to a pack of shysters and crooks to borrow money and those guys demanded a Central bank, taxation and a single currency in return.