A Defense of Immaterialism: The Debate - Page 19 - Politics Forum.org | PoFo

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#14943515
B0ycey wrote:You need to prove percepts are mental concepts VS.


No I don't, they are by definition mental, both in the OP and by the following:

the mental result or product of perceiving, as distinguished from the act of perceiving; an impression or sensation of something perceived.

something that is perceived; the object of perception.
https://www.dictionary.com/browse/percepts


percept
: an impression of an object obtained by use of the senses : sense-datum


https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/percept

1. The object of perception.
2. A mental impression of something perceived by the senses, serving as a basic component in the formation of concepts; a sense datum.

https://www.thefreedictionary.com/percept

percept
NOUN
Philosophy
1An object of perception; something that is perceived.

Example sentences
1.1 A mental concept that is developed as a consequence of the process of perception.

https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/percept

percept (plural percepts)

(psychology, philosophy, now rare) Something perceived; the object of perception. [from 19th c.]
(psychology, philosophy) A perceived object as it exists in the mind of someone perceiving it; the mental impression that is the result of perceiving something.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/percept

PHENOMENA (a synonym):

Philosophy:
an appearance or immediate object of awareness in experience.
Kantianism.a thing as it appears to and is constructed by the mind, as distinguished from a noumenon, or thing-in-itself.


Wiki.

On LIGHT:

Who said light exists at all? :lol:

If it cannot be described (is not a percept) or is not a mind, I have no reason to believe it exists at all.

What I understand as light is what I see; brightness, often times having color, that is correlated in its presence with the revealing of other objects when otherwise I might only see blackness.
#14943520
Victoribus Spolia wrote:What I understand as light is what I see; brightness, often times having color, that is correlated in its presence with the revealing of other objects when otherwise I might only see blackness.
Blackness is the absence of light. Blackness is an abstraction, created by a spectrum of contrast. Light is a measurable physical phenomenon.

Most of what I describe on page 18 is based upon a physical system that can be observed and is therefore an approximation of what is actually happening in this thread. All other posters are ignoring this present moment and acting as if they're not cogs in a perceptual wheel.

Furthermore, light or what we call "light" is energy. I'm guessing that you eat plants, thus you're eating refined light. It's a chain, there's no separation within this present moment. You're just too busy bouncing bullshit off bullshit to notice what's happening right NOW.
#14943521
RhetoricThug wrote:Blackness is the absence of light. Blackness is an abstraction. Light is a measurable physical phenomena.


What exactly is being measured? The white stuff i see, the thing I call bright? The thing I call warmth?

Thats the point.

Blackness is what I see, you call this absence of light, but I disagree, I see a black laptop and mouse on my desk, but there is "light" all around me. You can get into "reflection and refraction et al." but all of those claims are actually abstractions, usually entirely unrelated measurement, theories, and sensations that are claimed to be the same thing or cause by the same thing. None of which is provable and almost all mere correlation.

This is the point of idealism, what is plain to my senses is what is real.
#14943525
Cross-examine everything, dissect this present moment.
Victoribus Spolia wrote:What exactly is being measured? The white stuff i see, the thing I call bright? The thing I call warmth?

Thats the point.

Blackness is what I see, you call this absence of light, but I disagree, I see a black laptop and mouse on my desk, but there is "light" all around me. You can get into "reflection and refraction et al." but all of those claims are actually abstractions, usually entirely unrelated measurement, theories, and sensations that are claimed to be the same thing or cause by the same thing. None of which is provable and almost all mere correlation.
Ohhh... so language is therefore an abstraction and everything in this thread is not what's actually happening right NOW. :roll: Okay, yeah, that's what I've been trying to tell you. The unified field of experience is this inescapable present moment. God, not man's idea or image of God, is this present moment unfolding~ing~ing~ing. We're enfolded in this moment, we're enfolded in the Universe, in God.

Duality is a material abstraction and knowledge is organized ignorance. Personal philosophy is selective awareness. Finite vs infinite, but the infinite BEING contains the finite BEING. We're co-creating reality. Creation or the generative principle is proof. ORDO AB CHAO, my dear brother. Order is the opposite of chaos, but order doesn't exist without chaos. The observer abstracts order out of chaos. It's interrelated/interconnected measurement of motion, time is absolute and relative simultaneously, thus the flow of existence is a paradox.

Creation is proof because I've never observed nothing come nothing. In-fact, it would be impossible for a human to observe nothing, because we're consciousness having a human experience. Consciousness is everything.

"I want to know God's thoughts – the rest are mere details." is funny because the laws of the universe are formulated by the details, humans are the details of God's thoughts. It is foolish to think that a single human can know God's thoughts or the Universe in its entirety.

This is the point of idealism, what is plain to my senses is what is real.

We better get this mirror peer-reviewed before we get lost in its reflection. :lol:
#14943533
Victoribus Spolia wrote:No I don't, they are by definition mental, both in the OP and by the following:


Do you even read what you publish? And talk about selective bolding. I suppose you are the destroyer of definitions. I have mental impressions mentioned a lot. Next you will be telling me footprints are shoes. :lol: Or processes of. If I make a cake, am I a cake? :lol:

So no proof then. Gotcha.

But sure, a percept is a mental impression obtained from our senses. I agree with the definition. But you declare it is mental content. So you declare it is solely a thought. So prove it.

Wiki.

On LIGHT:

Who said light exists at all? :lol:

If it cannot be described (is not a percept) or is not a mind, I have no reason to believe it exists at all.

What I understand as light is what I see; brightness, often times having color, that is correlated in its presence with the revealing of other objects when otherwise I might only see blackness.


So you doubt the existence of light, but God... interesting.

But the reason you cannot describe light is very simple. You only perceive light. You never perceive the object. So to describe light depends on what you perceive. So you cannot describe it as it is the reason for your visual experience and matter only distorts the light waves allowing the process of mental contents to occur. In order words, E is vision experience (mental content) but B light is only the process of that, along with matter A, Eyes C, and the Brain D. Remove any of A to D, and visual mental content ends.

But keep up the good work. Creationists will love you. Rational minds less so as there is no proof being presented here. Only assumptions. Layers and layers of assumptions.
#14943545
@B0ycey

I've been trying to synthesize some sources in regards to how the absolute ontology of mind versus matter shouldn't confuse the relative unity of the subject/object relation. As well as how qualia has an intermediate status rather than being solely a property of objects or of the mind and thought that you might enjoy this summary from one of the sources, considering how you've been explaining your points.

https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/wits/vygotsky-consciousness.pdf
Image
In The German Ideology, Marx wrote “My relation to my environment is my consciousness,” but then crossed it out. But this is a very succinct way of putting it. Marx puts it in the first person; he does not say “a person’s relation to their environment is their consciousness,” because he must treat anyone else’s consciousness scientifically, in the knowledge that another person’s consciousness must be inferred from their behaviour and whatever we know about their physiological condition. But his own consciousness occupies a special position because everything he knows passes through his consciousness, including his scientific investigations. The point is that the special ontological status occupied by consciousness only applies in the first person. Descartes’ mistake was to extend a perfectly valid question he asked of himself, to consciousness in general.
...
VYGOTSKY EXPLAINS this as follows. Consider an object A (such as a table) which exists thanks to a natural process P, and the image of the table we see in a mirror α, thanks to a natural process π, involving light beams and reflective surfaces. The image α exists thanks to two objective processes, P and π. It would be absurd to identify A and α, to say the reflection of a table is a table. A is material and exists independently of α which is non-material. It would also be wrong to identify α with the optical processes which produce it, π. α is neither A nor π. Both A and π are real processes and α is their apparent, i.e., unreal result. The reflection does not exist, but both the table and the optical processes exist. The reflection of a table is identical neither with the real optical processes nor with the table itself.

Likewise in psychology, both the world outside the brain and the processes taking place in the brain, are objective, material processes, by definition, being outside of consciousness (the image), while on the other hand, consciousness is not material, it is a phantom. It is just as wrong to identify consciousness with the material processes which bring it about as it is to identify consciousness with the natural process it apprehends.

Just as a mirror cannot reflect image α, since a reflection presupposes a light source and α is not a light source, so introspection cannot apprehend its own thoughts. Introspection is itself an act of consciousness and a so-called state of the mind. It cannot step outside of itself to observe itself without that act of introspection.

Like the reflection, the thought is a phantom, a chimera, an illusion. But my consciousness is my illusion, and because I know that what I perceive is not the same as what exists outside of my consciousness, I can take action to verify my observations. I can look at things from different angles, I can compare with past experience, seek a second opinion, consult measuring devices, and so on, and by such means make my illusions truer and truer. There is not an absolute line separating truth from illusion. Every truth has an element of illusion and every illusion an element of truth. But one still has to know the difference, and the difference rests on the absolute difference between my consciousness and the material world outside of my consciousness
.
#14943561
Thank you @Wellsy, I do enjoy your input.

As for consciousness, the problem of understanding how it works or why it works is as old as thought itself. Marx, Kant, Berkeley, even myself or yourself, it doesn't matter who you are, it seems today there is no definitive proof you can provide that can prove what consciousness is that is going to knock the ball out of the park. So I won't claim I have absolute proof, because even using facts we can deduce certain things, but we can't explain why neurons works as they do. Nonetheless I don't declare to have certainty. VS does. And even though you can prove that certain aspects are required for vision and these can be tested, he just dismisses this because to test requires percepts. That is fine, until you look at his point of view that God as a mind also requires percepts to create things originally - and before man there is no other mind to help him create within the first days of creation if that is what is required. So there is a fallacy under his own logic. But as I say, you don't perceive the object, just light. So actually, even under his logic, I have not committed any fallacy actually.

But I do like to make it clear, I don't mind people believing what they like. I don't dismiss God as VS claims. But as of yet I have not seen why his existence is required for anything. This being true, all VS has is an assumption. And if he is going to go and publish he must understand that he will be dismissed for the reasons Ingliz and to some extent myself have published. There be no accolade of acceptance at the end of this for him. So what is his goals? To publish a concept. Or to publish proof. Because at the moment he will just be publishing a concept.
#14943571
Victoribus Spolia wrote:name the fallacies I committed and how they apply.

Example:

Your argument/Berkeley's 'master argument'.

If you can conceive it possible for … any sensible object whatsover to exist without the mind, then I will grant it actually to be so... (DHP 200)

P1) If it is possible to conceive of a sensible object without a mind, then it is possible that those things exist without minds.

P2) It is not possible to conceive of a sensible object without a mind.

C) It is not possible that there are sensible objects without minds.

Logical Form:

P1) If P, then M

P2) not-P

C) not-M

Denying the antecedent is a fallacy in formal logic where in a standard if/then premise, the antecedent (what comes after the "if") is made not true, then it is concluded that the consequent (what comes after the "then") is not true.

You committed this formal fallacy in the 'master argument'. The argument is invalid because the truth of the premises does not guarantee the truth of the conclusion.

Exceptions: none.

Wittgensteinian nonsense

More language games.

The Tree and the reflection principle

Philonous’ challenge to Hylas was to conceive a tree to exist which is not conceived. What is absurd is not exactly the same: it is to conceive a tree which is not conceived

1. Hylas conceives a tree to exist which is not conceived
2. Hylas conceives a tree which is not conceived.

To distinguish (1) from (2) we need say that only the latter ascribes an absurd thought to Hylas.

But how could these claims come apart? Is it not obvious that to conceive a thing is nothing more or less than to conceive a thing to exist? The distinction is hard to appreciate at first, because in the clause ‘a tree to exist which is not conceived’, the bare predicate separates the subject from the relative clause which modifies it. But on reflection it seems clear that (1´) is equivalent to (1´´), which is in turn equivalent to (1´´´) and (1´´´´):

1´. Hylas conceives [a tree to exist [which is not conceived]]
1´´. Hylas conceives [a tree [which is not conceived] to exist]
1´´´. Hylas conceives [that a tree [which is not conceived] exists]
1´´´´. Hylas conceives [that there exists a tree [which is not conceived]].

And (1´´´´) is very different from (2): unlike the latter, (1) does not ascribe a self-defeating thought to Hylas. Given that in (1´) – (1´´´´) ‘conceive’ takes a clausal complement, the reflection principle is not applicable. The subtle but important difference between (1) and (2) is not the mere presence of ‘exist’; it is rather that ‘a tree to exist which is not conceived’ is a clause, and ‘a tree which is not conceived’ is a phrase. This can be seen from the fact that, unlike (1) but like (2), ‘Hylas conceives an existing tree which is not conceived’ also ascribes a self-defeating thought to Hylas. The contrast between (1) and (2) is rather this. If (2) is true and Hylas reflects on his thought, he must thereby come to have such a thought – that he conceives a tree which is not conceived. There is no other form of reflection possible. If, however, (1) is true and Hylas reflects on his thought, he might fail to come to have such a thought – he might just think that he conceives that some tree or other exists which is not conceived.

Hylas can meet Philonous’ challenge. He can conceive a tree to exist which is not conceived, without absurdity. (Szabó 2005)

Addendum

T: ‘a tree which is not conceived’.

To substantiate the response to Berkeley's master argument, our semantics must block the inference from ‘Hylas conceives [T to exist]’ to ‘Hylas conceives [T]’. The obvious way to do so is to distinguish between the ‘conceive’ which takes a clausal complement and the ‘conceive’ which takes a noun phrase complement. I shall call the former conceive-that, the latter conceive-of (the terms are used as mnemonics only; as in (1) and (2), both ‘that’ and ‘of’ can be omitted). Assuming a simple theory of attitude ascriptions, where conceive-that expresses a binary relation between a conceiver and the content of a declarative sentence, which is traditionally called a proposition, I say that conceive-of expresses a binary relation between a conceiver and the content of a noun phrase, which I shall call a term. What terms are depends primarily on what propositions are. Once this distinction is made it is no more surprising that ‘Hylas conceives [T to exist]’ fails to entail ‘Hylas conceives [T]’ than the fact that ‘Hylas knows [T to exist]’ fails to entail ‘Hylas knows [T]’.


:)
#14943858
There's no separation in this inescapable present moment where everything happens simultaneously. The singularity already happened, we call it LIFE.

NO finite mind will reveal the INFINITE BEING.

@ingliz
@Wellsy
@Victoribus Spolia
@RhetoricThug
@B0ycey
Worship organized ignorance, they're lost in a reflection of their own awareness. They're here to organize the past, co-create the future, and ignore the present. That's why they come here. Once they fully realize the hidden potential of this present moment, they'll stop wasting their precious finite energy typing sweet nothings.

As for who/when/where/why/how/what can be perceived by a finite mind... Creation is proof. You're living evidence. You cannot observe nothing come from nothing. Everything you create is an aspect of consciousness.

Systems within systems within systems within systems, to infinity
Each system is a sign or symptom of other systems
The medium is the message
Consciousness is the medium, we're the message
#14943911
You seriously need to work on presenting your arguments better RT. All I read is thought processes and conclusions. It is like reading the musings of someone high on drugs and trying to work out what the fuck they are talking about. How you reach any of your verdicts is a complete mystery.

The only reason I am responding is because there are some interesting verdicts that you present that I happen to agree with.

RhetoricThug wrote:There's no separation in this inescapable present moment where everything happens simultaneously. The singularity already happened, we call it LIFE.


I agree with this. I think the singularity that is life has already happened. And it happens simultaneously. In other words the birth of the universe right down to its destruction has already occurred. And we as conscious minds can only experience the specific time of the the part of the universe that we happen to reside in. For that reason I don't believe light has speed at all. And as it has no mass, exists in all time periods until it interacts with energy. So instead of light moving, I believe spacetime stretches around it giving the illusion it moves. And spacetime stretches at different rates within the universe, which allows the possibility of reality to occur.

As I believe this, it is one of the reasons I don't fear death. And I don't believe the conscious mind has the ability of death either. Why? Because as I believe all of time exists simultaneously, consciousness must also exist simultaneously. And when you die you will just experience another part of your reality in another multiuniverse - perhaps from the beginning again.

NO finite mind will reveal the INFINITE BEING.


Perhaps we are infinite minds.

Worship organized ignorance, they're lost in a reflection of their own awareness. They're here to organize the past, co-create the future, and ignore the present. That's why they come here. Once they fully realize the hidden potential of this present moment, they'll stop wasting their precious finite energy typing sweet nothings.


I think you will find it is you who is typing sweet nothings. :lol:

But seriously no, we are arguing a question. A question that has nothing to do with the threads title it seems. What creates the reality we experience. Are visual percepts illusions of lights that are imprints of our consciousness via our senses or are percepts mind creations that are given to us from another mind. We are not discussing the past, present or future. But sure the present has potential. But what is it as you seem to ask the question?

As for who/when/where/why/how/what can be perceived by a finite mind... Creation is proof. You're living evidence. You cannot observe nothing come from nothing. Everything you create is an aspect of consciousness.


Well, that begs the question actually. No one is arguing that you can observe something from nothing. We are arguing what it is that creates something. For me we observe only light through the interaction of energy and our senses. For VS, as he believes percepts are created solely through thought, only a supreme mind is able to create percepts we see - ignoring the evidence that suggests otherwise as to trust the results you observe requires perception. He seems oblivious to his own paradox that as God is a mind, if we as individuals cannot create our own percepts, neither can God initially under the same principle. But whatever.

Systems within systems within systems within systems, to infinity
Each system is a sign or symptom of other systems
The medium is the message
Consciousness is the medium, we're the message


Sorry, using plain English, what does this even mean? What exactly is "The Message?"
Last edited by B0ycey on 02 Sep 2018 15:51, edited 1 time in total.
#14943952
B0ycey wrote:neither can God

If God was neither conscious nor capable of agency before God had the ideas of agency and consciousness, it leaves open the question of exactly what can be coherently supposed to be made by God.

Victoribus Spolia wrote:causal efficacy... Phenomenal Idealists deny that anything sensible is the cause of any other sensible thing.

"To be real is to have causal powers." (Jaegwon Kim 1998)

If an organism is going to count as having beliefs or knowledge about the environment—that is, mental states whose content is about the environment—then it seems that those mental states must be causally connected to the environment. And if those mental states are to guide the organism’s behaviour, then it seems that the connection must be a two-way connection: mental states must be both caused by and causes of events in the environment. (Oppy 2009)

If it isn’t literally true that my wanting is causally responsible for my reaching, and my itching is causally responsible for my scratching, and my believing is causally responsible for my saying . . . if none of that is literally true, then practically everything I believe about anything is false and it’s the end of the world. (Fodor 1991)

Wittgensteinian nonsense

Die Ideen exis­tie­ren nicht ge­trennt von der Spra­che. (Marx, Notebook I)

Ideas do not exist separately from language.


:)
Last edited by ingliz on 03 Sep 2018 10:13, edited 2 times in total.
#14943964
Please read carefully
B0ycey wrote:You seriously need to work on presenting your arguments better RT. All I read is thought processes and conclusions.
The 'connected proposition' is a sequence with a well-defined beginning and end; perhaps it is the strong sequentiality that provides the sense of connectedness. As with the syllogism, truth is abstract, based on matching, and the 'system' is informed by containment of the conclusion in the premisses, or in the conjunction of the premisses. All of the features of logical 'connection' and syllogistic reasoning exhibit and use only the properties of visual space: space imagined as a neutral container, space that is static, linear, continuous, and connected.

Humans produce conclusions. The Universe doesn't produce conclusions. RT is a forum image, he's 1/100th of the mask behind the keyboard. The mask behind the keyboard is 1/100th of the human behind the mask. And last, but not least, the human behind the mask is 1/? of consciousness. This thread, as a small scale simulation or demonstration of how consciousness evolves, shows us that thought is always in motion.

Consciousness, like this present moment, is a process from which we can never escape. When the finite mind dies, its ideas may find new vehicles for expression. Language as such is a morphological form of thought, our signs and symbols give material expression to immaterial thoughts. Visually it's true that language has structure, a definitive form, and that's why we believe conclusions exist. But beyond the vanishing point of language, human thought is suspended above materialism, it's boundless and horizon-less and has the ability to impregnate matter.

The mystery schools like to use gender to explain the properties of consciousness. Thought is its father, matter its mother.

Furthermore, if you study philology, you'd understand that grammar (as a function of the Trivium) is used to interpret the book of nature. What's fascinating however, the book of nature didn't exist before literacy. In nature there are no figures-minus-grounds. In fact, in nature there are no figures at all- only a dynamic environmental mosaic that is discontinuous and diverse. The Greeks abstracted nature as an environment so they could observe and study it as something separate from the human figure. This ground/figure dialectic created logic as we know it. And it's from logic that we garner classical mechanics, which had been (from the time of Euclid to Newton) the dominate form of human awareness. Taxonomy (scientific classification) and the study of phenomena as working parts of composition is a side-effect of literacy. Visual space ignores the spherical modes of causal connections, and therefore conditions neuropsychological communication to emphasize material reality as a physical all-encompassing field of experience.

Fortunately for humankind, as we dissect various parts of visual space, we begin to understand some of the non-visual systems which underlie physical reality. When I say non-visual systems, I'm saying that we can only observe the visual effects of a non-visual cause. For instance, consider cymatics, I can see the sand form a pattern, but the cause is a non-visual phenomenon. Human thought intuitively projects theoretic models of non-visual information systems, but we lack the technology to extend our sensorium to scientifically observe such systems. Human concepts regarding space and the things in space changed when transformation theory (see Paul Dirac) probed the so-called fixed properties of matter. The observation of quantities in motion as related to the qualities of systems, laid the foundation for quantum mechanics. This paradigm shift mathematically gave rise to the observer and observed paradox. We extend our sensibilities into the field of BEING, but the appearance of what we can experience is limited by our field of awareness. Lastly, our field of awareness appears to be impacting the fabric of reality. A strange loop, indeed. :eek:

Language, being a technology, always preserves a play or figure/ground relation between experience, and perception and its replay in expression. Must I remind the reader that the mind/matter interface is a bridge for sensation? Interface, of the resonant interval as 'where the action is' in all structures, whether chemical, psychic, or social, involves touch. Science says, if we're unable to touch it, or it is unable to touch us, it must not actually exist. Science can be a cyclops of reasoning, because its methodology dwells in a material cave of experience. Consciousness is the immaterial thing-in-itself we can not touch, because consciousness is the unified field of BEING. Consciousness is like this present moment, we're enfolded it, and we can only observe and investigate its shadow. The shadow of this present moment is the past & future. The shadow of an infinite happening is a finite happening. We're conscioiusness unfolding~ing~ing~ing... ad infinitum.

It is like reading the musings of someone high on drugs and trying to work out what the fuck they are talking about.
Forum image B0ycey is being very disrespectful.

If anyone would form an opinion or judgment either out of his own observation, or out of the crowd of authorities, or out of the forms of demonstration (which have now acquired a sanction like that of judicial laws), concerning these speculations of mine, let him not hope that he can do it in passage or by the by; but let him examine the thing thoroughly; let him make some little trial for himself of the way which I describe and lay out; let him familiarize his thoughts with that subtlety of nature to which experience bears witness; let him correct by seasonable patience and due delay the depraved and deep-rooted habits of his mind; and when all this is done and he has begun to be his own master, let him (if he will) use his own judgment.

-Francis Bacon, Preface to the Novum Organon

How you reach any of your verdicts is a complete mystery.
I agree, I'm trying to figure this out too.

The only reason I am responding is because there are some interesting verdicts that you present that I happen to agree with.
"My lord, the great forum image B0ycey agrees!"

"Yes, an appeal to solipsism... I'm sure. Very well, send him some dick pics. That should please the mind"

"From what angle, my lord?"

"Stop insulting me, any angle will do."



I think the singularity that is life has already happened. And it happens simultaneously. In other words the birth of the universe right down to its destruction has already occurred. And we as conscious minds can only experience the specific time of the the part of the universe that we happen to reside in. For that reason I don't believe light has speed at all. And as it has no mass, exists in all time periods until it interacts with energy. So instead of light moving, I believe spacetime stretches around it giving the illusion it moves. And spacetime stretches at different rates within the universe, which allows the possibility of reality to occur.
You're still thinking in parts, using fragmentary thoughts to explain something that involves simultaneity. Your mind is an interference pattern. Inference from a point of reference.

It is one of the reasons I don't fear death. To the conscious mind I don't think death is even possible. Because as I believe all of time exist simultaneously, consciousness must also exist simultaneously. And when you die you will just experience another part of your reality in another multiuniverse - perhaps from the beginning again.
IF we're to fear anything, we should fear birth. For it's the flow of existence, the rise and fall of things, which ultimately frightens the mind. Death is predictable. But it's here, in this present moment, an infinite potential washes away our BEING. Alas, I'm not afraid of creation.

Perhaps we are infinite minds.

:excited:

But seriously no, we are arguing a question. A question that has nothing to do with the threads title it seems. What creates the reality we experience. Are visual percepts illusions of lights that are imprints to our consciousness via our senses or are percepts mind creations that are given to us from another mind. We are not discussing the past, present or future. But sure the present has potential. But what is it as you seem to ask the question?
I encourage you to experience sensory deprivation. It will help you get "closer" to these questions.

Well, that begs the question actually. No one is arguing that you can observe something from nothing. We are arguing what it is that creates something. For me we observe only light though the interaction of energy and our senses.


But in the night of thick darkness enveloping the earliest antiquity, so remote from ourselves, there shines the eternal and never failing light of a truth beyond all question: that the world of civil society has certainly been made by men, and that its principles are therefore to be found within the modifications of our own human mind. Whoever reflects on this cannot but marvel that the philosophers should have bent all their energies to the study of the world of nature, which, since God made it, He alone knows; and that they should have neglected the study of the world of nations, or civil world, which, since men had made it, men could come to know. This aberration was a consequence of that infirmity of the human mind by which, immersed and buried in the body, it naturally inclines to take notice of bodily things, and finds the effort to attend to itself too laborious; just as the bodily eye sees all objects outside itself but needs a mirror to see itself.

-Giambattista Vico

For VS, as he believes percepts are created solely though thought, only a supreme mind is able to create percepts we see - ignoring the evidence that suggests otherwise as to trust the results you observe requires perception. He seems oblivious to his own paradox that as God is a mind, if we as individuals cannot create our own percepts, neither can God initially under the same principle. But whatever.
Sure, but forum image @Victoribus Spolia has a point. A point that supports objective morality too... There's archetypal wisdom, or as Vico pointed out:

There must, in the nature of human things be a mental language common to all nations, which uniformly grasps the substance of things feasible in human social life, and expresses it with as many diverse modifications as these same things may have diverse aspects. A proof of this is afforded by proverbs or maxims of vulgar wisdom, in which substantially the same meanings find as many diverse expressions as there are nations ancient and modern.

This common mental language is proper to our science, by whose light linguistic scholars will be enabled to construct a mental vocabulary common to all the various articulate languages living and dead... As far as our small erudition will permit, we shall make use of this vocabulary in all the matters we discuss.


Etymological archetypes support and reflect a common perception.

Sorry, using plain English, what does this even mean? What exactly is "The Message?"

A message is information in formation.

We're systemic projections of a unified field or medium. Consciousness is the medium or unified field, we're content, fruit of this moment, visible characteristics. All observable information systems interconnect... For instance, planet earth is a medium, and everything in it is a message. The milky way is a medium, and everything in it is a message. The universe is a medium, and everything in it is a message. From the smallest system to the largest system, as above so below, everything is passing through media or fields that unify ALL phenomena. Consciousness unifies the human experience.



Sincerely,

Consciousness having a human experience :rainbow:
Last edited by RhetoricThug on 03 Sep 2018 17:52, edited 11 times in total.
#14943965
B0ycey wrote:
Spoiler: show
Thank you @Wellsy, I do enjoy your input.

As for consciousness, the problem of understanding how it works or why it works is as old as thought itself. Marx, Kant, Berkeley, even myself or yourself, it doesn't matter who you are, it seems today there is no definitive proof you can provide that can prove what consciousness is that is going to knock the ball out of the park. So I won't claim I have absolute proof, because even using facts we can deduce certain things, but we can't explain why neurons works as they do. Nonetheless I don't declare to have certainty. VS does. And even though you can prove that certain aspects are required for vision and these can be tested, he just dismisses this because to test requires percepts. That is fine, until you look at his point of view that God as a mind also requires percepts to create things originally - and before man there is no other mind to help him create within the first days of creation if that is what is required. So there is a fallacy under his own logic. But as I say, you don't perceive the object, just light. So actually, even under his logic, I have not committed any fallacy actually.

But I do like to make it clear, I don't mind people believing what they like. I don't dismiss God as VS claims. But as of yet I have not seen why his existence is required for anything. This being true, all VS has is an assumption. And if he is going to go and publish he must understand that he will be dismissed for the reasons Ingliz and to some extent myself have published. There be no accolade of acceptance at the end of this for him. So what is his goals? To publish a concept. Or to publish proof. Because at the moment he will just be publishing a concept.

Indeed it is old though I think there have been some fruitful developments.
I don't think we're going to solve the hard problem of consciousness soon (The relationship between physical processes and qualia) but I do think there is something good in the trend of the 'extended mind' where consciousness isn't confined to physical processes in one's mind (mind-body problem/hard problem of consciousness) but is based on the blurred nature of the subject-object relation where consciousness is actively tied to activity with objects in the world.
I suspect it's something which follows in the footsteps of Hegel.
Spoiler: show
THE EXTENDED MIND by Andy Clark and David Chalmers
Where does the mind stop and the rest of the world begin? The question invites two standard replies. Some accept the demarcations of skin and skull, and say that what is outside the body is outside the mind. Others are impressed by arguments suggesting that the meaning of our words "just ain't in the head", and hold that this externalism about meaning carries over into an externalism about mind. We propose to pursue a third position. We advocate a very different sort of externalism: an active externalism, based on the active role of the environment in driving cognitive processes.

https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/pdfs/searle.pdf
At a dialogue between neuroscientists, psychologists and philosophers in May 2006, I had the pleasure of meeting John Searle; John is a very engaging and intelligent character. He has spent 50 years in so-called ‘philosophy of mind’, his chosen area of specialism, and speaks with great clarity and confidence on his topic. John thought that the view of ‘extended mind’, espoused by half of us, was ‘crazy’, and to that other half, the idea of John and others that consciousness was something entirely caused by neurons and located exclusively between the ears, was ‘crazy’.
...
But let us make a slight revision to Searle’s assumptions. Let us assume that thinking is not something going on exclusively between the ears, but on the contrary, that other parts of our body and things and people outside of us participate, in however small a way does not matter, in consciousness. Let us assume that the brain is not a closed system. Let us suppose for example that the presence of something in my field of vision (for example my address book), participates in my consciousness (for example, remembering my friend’s phone number). That is, that the change from one state of consciousness to another depends in some measure on something which is not between my ears, and is therefore not subject solely to the biology of the brain.

If then, my own actions manifest human freedom (which is just what is to be proved), then the things I have in my field of vision at any given time, not to mention my economic situation, the friends and family I have, the books and computers I have at my disposal, my state of health, etc., etc., are manifestations of my own free activity. If we allow that these things, manifestations in part of my own free activity, participate in determining my thinking at any given moment, then nothing more is necessary to establish that my consciousness is in part the result of my own freedom, and is not determined by physics alone. The physical environment in which I live, inclusive of the internal constitution of my body, is the manifestation of both lawful physical activity and wilful human activity, including my own previous interactions with other people and things. If my consciousness is constituted, even in part, by states of this extended system, then my consciousness is not subject solely to the laws of physics – wholly but not solely.

This pushes the logician’s puzzle back one degree. If I ever had free will, then that free will is embedded in the environment in which I now live. There would still have to have been (for the logician) an original act of free will. So our logician still has a problem: in order for me to manifest free will in the use of something outside the brain in the determination of my consciousness, then I must have acted as a free person at some time in the past. This leads to an infinite regression: in order to be free I must already be free.

This is the same problem to which Johann Fichte addressed himself in 1799. His solution was this: it is necessary for some other person to recognise me as a free person, to call upon me to exercise my freedom. Free will therefore does not derive from the internal constitution of the human organism, but rather from the demands of other people. Free will is not an innate property of the human body, but a social product ‒ the creation of social formations in which people were required to act as free agents.

https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/works/phylogeny.htm
The key concept which comes out of at the end of Donald’s enquiry is the concept of ‘extended mind’ – the combination of material artefacts and mnemonic and computational devices with the internal cognitive apparatus of human beings who have been raised in the practice of using them. Human physiology, behaviour and consciousness cannot be reproduced by individual human beings alone; we are reliant for our every action on the world of artefacts, with its own intricate inherent system of relations. Theory is the ideal form of the structure of material culture. Every thought, memory, problem solution or communication, is effected by the mobilisation of the internal mind of individuals, and the external mind contained within human culture. Taken together, the internal and external mind is called ‘extended mind’. This is what Hegel called Geist, an entity in which the division between subjectivity and objectivity is relative and not absolute.

The below is useful in a novel position of a apparently Hegelian nature in regards to ideality which I think is useful in considering the content of consciousness and how the material products and relations become reified in our minds and independent of us individually as culture.
The Concept of the Ideal


I think this tends towards at least a scientific study where there is a combination of subjectivity with objectivity rather than framing them as independent of one another by generalizing the ontology of mind versus matter in the way Descartes did.
Which is the muddle of those who are trying to address the nature of consciousness as if isolated to the brain.
Where I think a more apt understanding in regards to ideality doesn't strictly side with an active idealism or contemplative materialism but takes both as natural.
http://critique-of-pure-interest.blogspot.com/2011/12/between-materialism-and-idealism-marx.html
The fact that this intermediate status of qualia is rarely observed, has everything to do with the traditional opposition between idealism and materialism – precisely the opposition Marx wants to overcome in the first Thesis on Feuerbach. Because traditional materialism stresses one-sidedly the passivity of man with respect to nature, it can understand qualia only as secondary, ie as mere effects in consciousness caused by external objects. And because idealism, in contrast, stresses one-sidedly the (mental) activity of the human subject, it cannot understand qualia as coming from external objects. The result is that materialism and idealism, precisely because of their opposing positions (passivity vs. activity), come to a surprisingly unanimous opinion about the ontological status of sensory qualities: they are merely subjective and not objective. Thus the traditional contrast in philosophy between materialism and idealism has led to a systematic disregard of the true in-between status of sensory qualities. Marx was in a sense the first to rehabilitate that true status of the sensory by taking up a position between materialism and idealism. That seems to be one of the main reasons why Marx in the first Thesis on Feuerbach focuses specifically on sensation, that is, on “reality, sensuousness” which in traditional materialism “is conceived only in the form of the object or of intuition, but not as sensuous human activity, practice, not subjectively”. Marx’s point is therefore not that man as part of nature is a sensuous being, rather his point is that reality as such is sensuous, i.e. praxis, the reciprocal determination of subject and object that takes place in sensation. For Marx, the sensuous is the medium (ie the middle, the “between”) in which subject and object – man and nature – meet and determine each other.

I think it is also particularly fruitful in that it's humanized nature (material world that has been changed by man and changed man) that becomes both the material content and ideal form of our consciousness, where consciousness is inherently social, it can't develop in isolated man and man himself only becomes increasingly consciousness in relation to humanity.
A great example of this is found in Vygotsky's critique if Piaget in which he showed that inner speech is a product of external speech which is developed in relation to the socialized world that our parents/caretakers integrate into.
So in the end I think we might not be solving the relation/correlation between mind and matter in terms of mapping the nature of the brain in a way that would satisfy us. But I think there might be much to it in this novel avenue of consciousness as a relation to the external world.
In part because I suspect there is much that can be yet understood empirically if only guided with a conscious rational mind like Vygotsky whose works themselves opened up future avenues in understanding more about consciousness. Such is the nature of human knowledge that it is always relative to the absolute, always a work in progress and for what little we know has come a long way from where we once were.

In regards to VS, I wonder if his position is perhaps hostile to/suspect of natural philosophy/science and has gone back to a scholasticism where it's confined within limits that harmonize logical forms with God/scripture.
Better if religion was left to being a matter of faith and not try to rationalize it and be indifferent to content and only interest in the form of arguments apparently independent of the phenomenal world.
#14943969
RhetoricThug wrote:Forum image B0ycey is being very disrespectful.


No doubt I am being disrespectful RT, but I do so to help you out. Clearly you are knowledgeable in Philosophy. More so than me and perhaps more so than most on PoFo. But you don't make sense most of the time. Your last post was a massive improvement in clarity though.

I always take an approach on PoFo in writing to the point and reducing my sentences to the minimum. I don't use uncommon words or try to sound clever so a greater audience can understand me. Why don't you slow down and try to communicate efficiently rather than in musings? I think you will gain yourself the credit you deserve if your did.

But keep up the good work. And I will respond to you in time as I believe you have much to give on this subject.
#14943979
Wellsy wrote:Indeed it is old though I think there have been some fruitful developments.
I don't think we're going to solve the hard problem of consciousness soon (The relationship between physical processes and qualia) but I do think there is something good in the trend of the 'extended mind' where consciousness isn't confined to physical processes in one's mind (mind-body problem/hard problem of consciousness) but is based on the blurred nature of the subject-object relation where consciousness is actively tied to activity with objects in the world.
I suspect it's something which follows in the footsteps of Hegel.


Well, thank you Wellsy. You are better at arguing my position than me it appears. Hegel seems to in fashion recently and I will have to take more notice of his work. The quotes you published are exactly how I understand things.

The below is useful in a novel position of a apparently Hegelian nature in regards to ideality which I think is useful in considering the content of consciousness and how the material products and relations become reified in our minds and independent of us individually as culture.
The Concept of the Ideal[/spoiler]

I think this tends towards at least a scientific study where there is a combination of subjectivity with objectivity rather than framing them as independent of one another by generalizing the ontology of mind versus matter in the way Descartes did.
Which is the muddle of those who are trying to address the nature of consciousness as if isolated to the brain.
Where I think a more apt understanding in regards to ideality doesn't strictly side with an active idealism or contemplative materialism but takes both as natural.
http://critique-of-pure-interest.blogspot.com/2011/12/between-materialism-and-idealism-marx.html

I think it is also particularly fruitful in that it's humanized nature (material world that has been changed by man and changed man) that becomes both the material content and ideal form of our consciousness, where consciousness is inherently social, it can't develop in isolated man and man himself only becomes increasingly consciousness in relation to humanity.
A great example of this is found in Vygotsky's critique if Piaget in which he showed that inner speech is a product of external speech which is developed in relation to the socialized world that our parents/caretakers integrate into.
So in the end I think we might not be solving the relation/correlation between mind and matter in terms of mapping the nature of the brain in a way that would satisfy us. But I think there might be much to it in this novel avenue of consciousness as a relation to the external world.
In part because I suspect there is much that can be yet understood empirically if only guided with a conscious rational mind like Vygotsky whose works themselves opened up future avenues in understanding more about consciousness. Such is the nature of human knowledge that it is always relative to the absolute, always a work in progress and for what little we know has come a long way from where we once were.


I enjoy your analysis and agree with your conclusions. I think @Victoribus Spolia should take note of you Wellsy. He is looking for someone who can answer him in a philosophical but not in a scientific manner and it appears Hegel and absolute Idealism is the answer to his position.

In regards to VS, I wonder if his position is perhaps hostile to/suspect of natural philosophy/science and has gone back to a scholasticism where it's confined within limits that harmonize logical forms with God/scripture.
Better if religion was left to being a matter of faith and not try to rationalize it and be indifferent to content and only interest in the form of arguments apparently independent of the phenomenal world.


But he can't @Wellsy. All his arguments are trying to justify his religious beliefs. He ignore paradoxes for personal faith gains because he is too invested in his idea for the paradoxes to have any validity. Not just in this thread but in every thread I might add. Surely you must have come across his patriarchy faith notions on PoFo by now? If you debate him, and I think you should, ignore his tactics of dismissal of your position as they don't align to his belief and focus on his position and contradictions that they have. He will twist definition meanings to align with his belief and try and force words in your mouth to get you to contradict yourself. Be warned. But he is a worthy opponent of your intellect nonetheless.
#14944029
B0ycey wrote:Well, thank you Wellsy. You are better at arguing my position than me it appears. Hegel seems to in fashion recently and I will have to take more notice of his work. The quotes you published are exactly how I understand things.

I'm glad that it resonates.

I'm not sure I'm that competent at philosophy, its only recently I've taken a spurious glance towards the history of empiricist vs rationalist divide as suggested by an old member on her in order to situate and hopefully one day understand Hegel and Marx.
I suspect only Andy Blunden is taken with Hegel explicitly whilst the rest have arrived at such an avenue independently. My impressions is that whilst there is a lot mistaken and wrong with Hegel, his systematic and novel approach (based in large part on his predecessors efforts), even whilst mystified in his obscurest language (what a prick), do hold substance which progressive to the history of philosophy (human understanding).

I enjoy your analysis and agree with your conclusions. I think @Victoribus Spolia should take note of you Wellsy. He is looking for someone who can answer him in a philosophical but not in a scientific manner and it appears Hegel and absolute Idealism is the answer to his position.

I thought you might.
I'm a rare poster, but I do find VS intriguing in that he exemplifies an aspect of America that I don't really understand as I'm so alien to it. How does one come to be a person such as he? What is the nature of the world he has experienced to result in all this so far?
Well I don't think I'm the one to draw him away from where he is exactly, all I could suggest is that if he follows the path of criticism, he should presumably end up a Marxist :D
Because Hegel's Absolute Idealism was unfortunately thwarted by his emphasis on the spirit as the driving force, acting upon man and obscuring how humanity functions. Hegel seemingly had greater insight than most yet returned it to an Idealist manner.

But he can't @Wellsy. All his arguments are trying to justify his religious beliefs. He ignore paradoxes for personal faith gains because he is too invested in his idea for the paradoxes to have any validity. Not just in this thread but in every thread I might add. Surely you must have come across his patriarchy faith notions on PoFo by now? If you debate him, and I think you should, ignore his tactics of dismissal of your position as they don't align to his belief and focus on his position and contradictions that they have. He will twist definition meanings to align with his belief and try and force words in your mouth to get you to contradict yourself. Be warned. But he is a worthy opponent of your intellect nonetheless.

As in have I come across the peculiar musings in which he and his wife publicly express a want of men's authority over women? I've seen bits and pieces. But I haven't inquired so far as to see how 'faith' based they are. Though I do believe he is missing some crucial elements in his justification for it.
But that is a difference of me finding sympathy in Marx and he in others.

I do imagine he'd whirl my head, which is why, with less time than I used to have, I know try to reflect more before I post. Though I do still suspect I write rather sloppy and incoherently (an anxiety of mine in writing what I think without the effort of editing).
Though I do hope I live up to a quote of Schopenhauer ^_^
"The first rule for a good style is to have something to say; in fact, this in itself is almost enough"
I have been fortunate enough to have others think I do have content even if my presentation is poor.

Really I haven't followed this thread in too much detail and I'd draw VS to certain points of my own interest as I haven't the ability nor motivation for an immanent critique of his views.

P.s. bit drunk so hope this makes sense
#14944120
B0ycey wrote:No doubt I am being disrespectful RT, but I do so to help you out.
:lol: No. Your level of comprehension or cognitive sophistication isn't my burden. You're trying to help yourself out. The reader or audience, as an environment, shapes and controls content. Had I received several "likes" from other posters, I'd be thoroughly disgusted (@Wellsy). Groupthink is dangerous, and I will not pander or yield to general incompetence.

Clearly you are knowledgeable in Philosophy. More so than me and perhaps more so than most on PoFo. But you don't make sense most of the time. Your last post was a massive improvement in clarity though.
You speak with a forked tongue.
I always take an approach on PoFo in writing to the point and reducing my sentences to the minimum.
Yes, there's an effort to strip language of complex expression. Language, as a prosthetic device, externalizes thought. I will not minimize my capacity to express my thoughts just so a faceless forum image can feel more comfortable.
I don't use uncommon words or try to sound clever so a greater audience can understand me.
Again, I'm not interested in becoming a popular portrait.

Why don't you slow down and try to communicate efficiently rather than in musings?
Are you telling me not to think? Freedom of expression is a birthright. Perhaps you should speed up and learn how to think instead of what to think. Furthermore, the word you're looking for is effectively, not efficiently. If my standards do not produce the effect you desire, it's certainly not my problem. I'm not here to entertain you or cater to your attention span.

I think you will gain yourself the credit you deserve if your did.
Please stop patronizing me.



Side note:
And it's from logic that we garner classical mechanics, which had been (from the time of Euclid to Newton) the dominate form of human awareness. Taxonomy (scientific classification) and the study of phenomena as working parts of composition is a side-effect of literacy. Visual space ignores the spherical modes of causal connections, and therefore conditions neuropsychological communication to emphasize material reality as a physical-sequential all-encompassing field of experience.

...

Human concepts regarding space and the things in space changed when transformation theory (see Paul Dirac) probed the so-called fixed properties of matter. The observation of quantities in motion as related to the qualities of systems, laid the foundation for quantum mechanics.


I'd like to add:

Lewis Samuel Feuer notes that, 'quite apart from the discontinuous electronic transition from one orbit to another, Bohr's theory of the atom departed in its total imagery from the old model of the Newtonian, continuous world... The Kierkegaardian model reached so deeply into Bohr's thinking that he described the atom in its transitions from one stationary state to another as possessing a 'free choice' like that of the human subject choosing his qualitative leaps from one stage to another.'

Kierkegaard's Concept of Dread was published in 1844, the year of the telegraph, to which he alluded in the book as a sinister technology. The telegraph was the first technology of instantaneous communication. Kierkegaard made the discovery that both the creative spirit and human will act through sudden and discontinuous transitions and leaps. The same figure-ground ambiguity obtained between Bohr's principle of complementarity and Kierkegaard's dread. 'To Kierkegaard, dread was the point of intersection of the nature-determined world and the world of the individual free spirit; the person chose between them' (Feuer, Einstein and the Generations of Science, 144). Complementarity served as an escape from single, private, or abstract points of view, focusing on the inherent multiplicity of 'perspectives' in the interactions between physical phenomena and human observers. Bohr's coat of arms displayed the Chinese yang-yin symbols of cosmic complementarity.

Max Planck, Werner Heisenberg, and Louis de Broglie introduced further components of acoustic space into physics with quanta, indeterminacy, resonance, and wave mechanics. Heisenberg simplified the general presentation of quantum mechanics by abandoning 'the principle of continuity in Riemannian or Euclidean geometry and introduced the suggestion of a 'smallest length' to meet certain difficulties in quantum electrodynamics.


-Laws of Media, 44
Last edited by RhetoricThug on 03 Sep 2018 19:28, edited 2 times in total.
#14944122
Take your own approach RT. But surely you write to communicate. If your audience doesn't understand you they won't reply.

I won't waste my time trying to understand you if me highlighting there is an issue with the way you present your argument is a problem.
#14944132
B0ycey wrote: I won't waste my time trying to understand
And you're exploring philosophy? :mrt:

...


:lol: I'm a jubilant gent, I'm not going to get worked up over your disdain for wisdom.
#14944134
RhetoricThug wrote:And you're exploring philosophy? :mrt:


I am not exploring Philosophy. I consider most of it simply wrong. But philosophy does try to answer some interesting questions. And that is why I am interested in it.

But perhaps true wisdom would be achieved by focusing on what is known and finding the link to that which is unknown rather than answering questions without any foundation to reality.

But RT, nonetheless perhaps you can answer the very question which is being debated on this thread. What to you creates the percepts you witness? God, light or something else? What does philosophy teach you when answering this question?
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