Many people are fascinated with this topic. It's one of my favorite things to talk about. I find consciousness to be a very awesome and profound phenomena. Conventional theists and conventional atheists go at each other's necks on this one. Theists say that our consciousness ( "soul/spirit" as they would say ) will be everlasting in either heaven or hell, and many atheists claim that consciousness is a mere epiphenomena of the brain, that is to say, of matter or something of that nature. And that when we physically die, our consciousness disappears completely.
In this argument of mine, I'm not going to go into whether or not there is an afterlife or anything of that nature. My argument is going to be on the nature of consciousness in the here and now. But let me clarify, this position I will make manifest is in no way original to me.
I will make the claim for a form of pan-experiantialism + Double aspect theory as being the most plausible theory for the nature of consciousness/awareness.
First, consciousness is NOT identical to the brain/neural correlates. You can scan someone's brain and isolate the neural correlates associated with rage, but when you scan the person's brain, you don't experience their first person, subjective experience of rage; you just see a third person representation of it via the neural correlates. Consciousness and the brain are distinct realities even if one is, ultimately, reducible to the other.
Some of you may be screaming, " Dualism! Dualism! ". I don't subscribe to the classical, religious form of dualism, so hold onto your horses.
Here is where materialistic reductionism seems implausible. If one is going to make the claim that consciousness is reducible to the brain, then they are going to have to explain how unconscious, objective matter can give rise to subjective awareness ( which is in itself immaterial, i.e., not objective ). This is what philosophers call " The hard problem of consciousness".
No one has been able to show how unconscious matter gives rise to immaterial experience. Some say. " Well in the future, we will be able to explain it materialistically". But that's, really, not convincing at all. Seems more like a clinging or, possibly, emotional attachment to a position ( how religious ).
My position makes the claim that the mind is of a double aspect. One aspect is the first person ( subjective - inner ) and the other is the third person ( so called " objective" - external ). These two are distinct aspects of the mind, but they are correlated, that is to say, implicitly they are interconnected. This position is very complimentary with the rest of reality, that is to say, the Yin-Yang aspect of reality - the balancing of opposites, e.g., masculine and feminine, light and dark, cold and hot, up and down, order and chaos, etc. Reality is dualistic!
The third person, objective aspect of the mind, i.e., our outer experience of an external world of matter - of solidity - is symbolic of the masculine ( perceived otherness, abstractions, a will to explore and unveil the unknown, Apollonian), and the inner, subjective first person aspect of the mind is symbolic of the feminine ( feelings, emotions, intuition, the Dionysian ).
All of existence is active, that is to say, striving for advancement ( will to power ). The organic and inorganic are interconnected. I hypothesize that awareness is much like how the organic extends from the inorganic, i.e., Human or animalistic awareness is a gradation of primal awareness going all the way down to the fundamental aspect of reality. This position would get rid of the " Hard problem of consciousness ".
The rest of this position is summed up perfectly in the video clip:
Refutations are more than welcome. But make sure they are of substance! Not mere hollow, lackadaisical statements!
Last edited by Primal Rage on Sun Sep 29, 2013 7:30 pm; edited 1 time in total
Satyr Daemon
Gender : Posts : 37187 Join date : 2009-08-24 Age : 58 Location : Hyperborea
No materialism. Matter is another form of (inter)activity, as energy is. ENERGY = fast (inter)activity, in relation to observing consciousness. MATTER = slow (inter)activity, in relation to observing consciousness.
We call it matter because in relation to us, our awareness, our brain's processes, it is acting at a slower rate, whereas with faster (inter)activity the activity is more obvious. Sometimes the light's speed, it being the fastest medium we know of, determines our sensual limitations.
Life precedes consciousness. Life is a self-maintaining, self-organizing, process: self-ordering.
Consciousness evolves to aid in this ordering. It begins as outwardly focused, proving that the senses evolve to perceive and to discriminate otherness. This makes liberal tactics of making discrimination a sickness, or something shameful, a blatant attempt to blind the brain, and to reduce the effectiveness of its reason for evolving.
Ergo, life is a part of reality, which is self-organizing: it harvests, consumes, integrates other processes into its own ordering. This is fascistic, and cruel, according to some effete morons, and simply mentioning it as a possibility explaining existence, makes you a hater. The logic here is what to express an opinion you must, MUST, benefit from it, or you must, MUST, like it.
It, this self-organizing process, distinguishes itself as such: it distinguishes itself as an ordering within the disordering. It stands apart, it separates, it distances - see the kin, the skull, the methodology of dualism? Consciousness is a part of life outwardly focused and becoming aware of reality.
That which distinguishes, is separating itself, from reality, now becomes aware of the reality, the world, it is separating distinguishing itself within. Consciousness begins as a perception of the negative, that which is other than self. It is itself a distancing, a rejection, a resistance. The mind organizes the disorganizing. To achieve this it must set up an I and Other. This is the foundation of binary thinking, or dualism, of the dialectic. It also explains the antagonistic character of life, in relation to existence and this otherness created because of life and consciousness.
Self-Consciousness is a further enhancement of this living process and this tool of consciousness. It is a part of consciousness becoming aware of is own consciousness, and of its own living process; its own self-organizing.
Keeping in mind that all this "part of" implies that not all is perceiving, and so part of life perceiving the world, implies that the self is not perceived - then part of consciousness perceiving consciousness, implies that part of consciousness, the part which is focused back on self (let's call it a mental agency, a part of the brain functions) cannot perceive itself perceiving - the eye cannot see itself seeing, except via a reflection. Self-consciousness in its primitive state begins as a reflective process, which perceives otherness, is conscious of an other, which is perceiving it. The reaction tells it about itself. This is how, at first, identity is built on other people's opinions and (re)actions. Self-consciousness becomes this consciousness of self, through another's reactions to self.
All the above also explains why god evolves as something outside, some mind outside the mind, some consciousness other than our own (in the beyond, the mystical, the above, the outside) whispering in the mind. This is the emerging self-consciousness, or consciousness of consciousness, mistaking itself for some external mind.
The eye cannot see itself, right(?), so the self-consciousness which must become aware of its own self-consciousness using another, mistaken the other as the source of this awareness. It's own perceptions of perceiving and its own internal dialogue, supported by a fear of death and the hope which is fear's only antidote, begins to believe that its self-consciousness is really a God. If this is supported by some external authority, a preacher, peers, state, institutions, then this self-consciousness is transferred to an other. This is the start of nationalism, the mystical experience with God, Jayne's Bicameral mind, idealism, schizophrenia, and all kind of spiritual experiences. Just visit ILP, or other forums, to experience the full gamut of this unsophisticated self-consciousness, seeking itself in otherness.
It's like with self-hypnosis. On stage with a professional hypnotist, it is the self putting itself in a trance, and the hypnotist is the one who recognizes the types that are prone to this, and knows how to trigger the effect. Because self-consciousness is relatively new, in evolutionary terms, proven by how many organisms are actually self-conscious to some degree (elephants, dolphins, chimpanzees, gorillas, humans, bonobos, orangutangs ...) the evolution of the agency, the part of the brain that will "detach" itself form the rest of the brain functions to turn upon itself, must be weak or large. The size of the brain functions required to achieve this task is determined by the sophistication of the brain itself. With meditation what is occurring is that this part of consciousness to turn upon itself, splintering off from consciousness, is shrunk, as much as possible, increasing the degree of self-consciousness experienced. I doubt the brain can achieve any degree of self-awareness when the part of the brain functions recede to a level where this is no longer feasible, and no matter how much we shrink these aggregate processes required to remain conscious, so as to then maintain consciousness of consciousness, there will always be that piece, that part which is not included.
I also think that when speaking of meditation what is occurring is a shrinking of a mind's perceptual-event-horizon. Essentially the mind is shutting down processes, willingly, to revert to an animal, or infantile state. At some point what is experiences is the moment, or as close to the present as possible. This makes sense only if we understand consciousness as a looking back. We live forward, towards increasing chaos, but perceive backwards, towards order.
This is why knowing thyself means knowing as much of your past as possible.
So, meditation decreases this temporal gap between the going forwards towards entropy and looking back towards order, trying to achieve the desirable convergence where the conscious mind is entirely present. And what is in this presence: emptiness.
_________________ γνῶθι σεαυτόν μηδέν άγαν
Last edited by Satyr on Sun Sep 29, 2013 7:47 pm; edited 1 time in total
Human consciousness is, indeed, a function, i.e., of the will to power. I don't believe that human consciousness is fundamental. But rather all systems have some form of experience whether it be complex or primitive. Life does proceed human consciousness, but the real question is: Does life proceed all forms of awareness? This is where I hypothesize that energetic systems have primitive senses to aid in their wills to power. The more complex the organism or systems of energy become, the more their senses become complex and acute.
And interesting thoughts on meditation. I believe Freud speculated that meditation is a sort of self-induced catatonia.
Satyr Daemon
Gender : Posts : 37187 Join date : 2009-08-24 Age : 58 Location : Hyperborea
No, I part ways with Nietzsche and Schopenhauer here.
For me, only a living, self-organizing, emergent unity, can produce a will - a directed movement towards. All else is (inter)activity.
I think life is only possible in a towards entropy temporal direction, which means that life can only experience itself as an ordering within the disordering. No 'will to' outside of life, animated matter, because all is in Flux.
I do not believe in will as being anything but a brain function directing an organism's aggregate energies. No life, no self-organizing processes = no will. Man is god emerging. Without man, as part of life, god is nonsensical.
At some point of space/time, within the towards entropy direction, a (re)action takes place. This (re)action may or may not develop into what we know as life. No teleology, no meaning, no purpose. All the previous are human constructs.
I consider gravity a force of nature which does not require a will.
What is weak, inferior, is attracted to what is stronger, and is in the vicinity. I consider this attraction a local phenomenon, within a greater tendency towards entropy. In the end this local ordering fails to produce the required resistance to maintain itself.
No willing necessary. What is in a higher state or order will assimilate what is within its power, within its space/time vicinity, and integrate it within this ordering. An echo of the near-absolute, or the Big Bang, perhaps.
Since entropy increases with no effort, what is increasing requires no willing, and is actually contrary and contradicts what is being willed. To put it in Nietzschean terms: Will to Power fails since power is decreasing without willing it.
Perhaps this is where overcoming resentiment comes in.
Kind of off topic question, but what do you think of Nietzsche's eternal recurrence doctrine? Have you written about this already? I'd be interested in your thoughts on this.
Satyr Daemon
Gender : Posts : 37187 Join date : 2009-08-24 Age : 58 Location : Hyperborea
Kind of off topic question, but what do you think of Nietzsche's eternal recurrence doctrine? Have you written about this already? I'd be interested in your thoughts on this.
It's really a test of will. If eternal recurrence is as Nietzsche describes it, and not as some Hindu reincarnation or any dogma proposing a retention of data, calling it karma, then whether we are or we are not reliving the same life over and over again, does not matter.
This is more of a test of self-love, and a test of one's love for all the circumstances that lead to this self: nature. It is a test of one's resentiment, to use his own labels.
If you truly love life, nature, and the self it produces, then the idea of reliving the exact same life would be a joyous thing: you would be a yay-sayer. If you feel dismayed by the prospect, or feel the slightest of misgivings, then the level of doubt exposes the level of dissatisfaction, resentment, and disappointment with yourself and life - you are a nay-sayer.
Only the overman would be a total yes-sayer. despite what imbeciles think, and how they understand the term "superman", connecting it to fascism or comic book, pop-cultural caricatures, the term "overman" means only this: To have zero resentiment, to say yes to how you are, and all that makes you possible. Go into any chat forum and you get a variety of misinterpretations. Imbeciles, cowards, women galore, projecting upon the concept everything they fear ...and because they fear it, they hate it ...and because they hate it, they accuse it of hating to justify their own emotions in relation to the hypocritical, moral, persona they wear like a mask. This is why retards like d(63 and the entire clan of dimwits on ILP are hilarious.
They have no clue, but rush to create these strawmen, these scapegoats, which I lend myself to, so as to burn in effigy, and absolve themselves and their own delusions of what they fear they are the most guilty of.
But, it is true, if such a man could exist, and to whatever degree he could exist, he would exude such power, such a mysterious attraction, that others would experience him as if he were an alien god.
_________________ γνῶθι σεαυτόν μηδέν άγαν
Lyssa Har Har Harr
Gender : Posts : 8965 Join date : 2012-03-01 Location : The Cockpit
"Nothing is more erroneous than to make of psychical and physical phenomena the two faces, the two revelations of one and the same substanoe. Nothing is explained thereby: the concept "substance" is perfectly useless as an explanation. Consciousness in a subsidiary role, almost indifferent, superfluous, perhaps destined to vanish and give way to a perfect automatism- When we observe ouly the inner phenomena we may be compared with the deaf-and-dumb, who divine through movements of the lips the words they do not hear. From the phenomena of the inner sense we conclude the existence of invisible and other phenomena that we would apprehend if our means of observation were adequate and that one calls the nerve current. We" lack any sensitive organs for this inner world, so we sense a thousandfold complexity as a unity; so we introduce causation where any reason for motion and change remains invisible to us -the sequence of thoughts and feelings is only their becoming- visible in consciousness. That this sequence has anything to do with a causal chain is completely unbelievable: consciousness has never furnished us with an example of cause and effect." [WTP, 523]
Quote :
"The role of "consciousness."- It is essential that one should not make a mistake over the role of "consciousness": it is our relation with the "outer world" that evolved it. On the other hand, the direction or protection and care in respect of the co-ordination of the bodily functions does not enter our consciousness; any more than spiritual accumulation: that a higher court rules over these things cannot be doubted-a kind of directing committee on which the various chief desires make their votes and power felt. "Pleasure," "displeasure" are hints from this sphere; also the act of will; also ideas. In summa: That which becomes conscious is involved in causal relations which are entirely withheld from us-the sequence of thoughts, feelings, ideas in consciousness does not signify that this sequence is a causal sequence; but apparently it is so, to the highest degree. Upon this appearance we have founded our whole idea of spirit, reason, logic, etc. ( - none of these exist: they are fictitious syntheses and unities), and projected these into things and behind things! Usually, one takes consciousness itself as the general senso- rium and supreme court; nonetheless, it is only a means of com- munication: it is evolved through social intercourse and with a view to the interests of social intercourse- "Intercourse" here under- stood to include the influences of the outer world and the reactions they compel on our side; also our effect upon the outer world. It is not the directing agent, but an organ of the directing agent." [WTP, 524]
Scott Bakker is a Nietzschean. [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]
Quote :
"..at some point in our recent evolutionary past, perhaps coeval with the development of language, the human brain became more and more recursive, which is to say, more and more able to factor its own processes into its environmental interventions. Many different evolutionary fables may be told here, but the important thing (to stipulate at the very least) is that some twist of recursive information integration, by degrees or by leaps, led to human consciousness. Somehow, the brain developed the capacity to ‘see itself,’ more or less. We have good reason to suppose that the information that makes it to consciousness is every bit as strategic as it is fragmental. We may only ‘see’ an absurd fraction of what is going on, but we can nevertheless assume that it’s the fraction that matters most …”
So far so good, except Bakker would take this "blindness" and limitation to speak of a "transcendence" that "must probably exist" but we have "no way of knowing"... and we all know where that goes...
But this theory also simultaneously validates the fact a creature of lower intelligence cannot experience that "transcendence" which to a creature of higher intelligence is "normal" consciousness, a wider horizon.
I do not remember where i read the exemplary link one made between a forrest and becoming aware; i do remember however, Satyr making clear whereever needed that consciousness is all about discrimination.
Thus these 2 subjects were in my mind for the last two weeks and i have assimilated it into my own mind. My gratefulness for that.
Consciousness, becoming aware..
Consciousness is noticing, seeing, hearing, feeling and experiencing the differences, being able to separate inferior from superior, beauty from average, ugliness from health, and so on. Making the connections.
For example, on a great distance you see a contrast in the landscape, a slightly different colour, you can see it rises above, at least, if your senses are not deluding you.
You come closer and the contrast becomes more clear; you can make a valid judgment that the objects are indeed raising above the landscape.
Step by step you become more aware; your bare feets perceive change from the earth you walk on. The air might feel and breath differently in contrast when you were still at the far away, hilly landscape when you became for the first time aware on the differences.
Closer and closer you come to the objects; you see it is a forrest. Nearer you come, you can see the trees - closer, and you can see the different species of trees. Step by step until you can seperate individual trees from each other, belonging to the same specie.
What do you see? The condition of the many trees, the health, the fruits they bear; the contrast between young and old, fruitful and near death, to rot away and give life by its very death. You can sense the bark, the leaves, the whole of its being - the past. Their fruits have each its unique taste, might be deadly, or giving the energy you just needed.
You become aware of the different animal species, who have each a preferance for certain trees. Big, small, this or that specie, young, old, already rotting etc.
So, you are in the forrest, it might be dark at first sight due to the fully leafed branches, not allowing all the sunlight to pass; but the more you experience, the more you able you are to seperate, the more you see the differences and understand them; the more enlightened you will become.
This, of course, also goes for the different breeds of humans - you can deny the differences, but by denying, it does not mean the existence of these differences, will adjust to your wishes of uniformity. We are subjected to Nature, you can deny reality, live in disconnection with rough Nature - but the fact is, natural selection replaced by memetic breeding, societal selection - results in dysgenics.
The emotional outbursts you get to endure by merely talking about race, genetics, homosexuality etc., are outcries against your consciousness.
The more aware you will become, the more able you are to separate inferior from superior, the more conscious you are - the more reality you posses.
They want you too become a zombie, like them. Living as mere impulsive Manimals. This is an attack against the essence of being human, becoming aware.
''A Zombie is a made-up creature characterized by insatiable appetites and governed by a monomaniacal, brainless, obsessiveness. Its goal is immediate and constant gratification – a hedonistic nightmare. It is neither male nor female, because its sex is nothing more but a decaying remnant of a previous persona, resembling the tattered clothes falling off of its putrefying, rambling, form. We cannot call it human, because it is not identifiable as anything reproductive. Calling it a “thing” should suffice. It is a monstrosity, infected by some kind of modern disease which has overturned death and made it animated, in imitation of life. This is why it serves as the perfect caricature, metaphor, symbol, for the common every-day, western, Americanized, feminized, man.
A Zombie is all about hunger, hedonism, feeding, corporeal compensation for a decaying body, and a rotten brain. It has no historical background, no past. It is all about the immediate, the gratifying, and the shallow. It can only stumble towards some future; it drags itself towards any sound, any movement, promising action, a source of material fulfillment. It congregates on mass, and feeds.
Zombies are individualistic, in that they follow their own need/hunger, towards the intended source of satiation, but their behavior is uniform, in that it is predictable and shared. They are identities who adhere to a common behavioral patterns, which may, or may not, take a different path but, in the end, is headed towards the same, the common, the shared, object/objective. In isolation, the Zombie is easily dealt with, because of its mindlessness, and slowness. Slow is what defines this creature – slow and methodical. It is when zombies become part of a group, attracted by a shared stimulation, when they become a force to be reckoned with.
Zombies, much like simple organisms, animals, need not have a sense of self, a shared identity, nor even come from the same background, wear the same rags, or have to have experienced the same things in the same ways, because it is their shared hunger, the binding need, the lack, which makes them a singular category.''
Great voice & accent. What most precisely gives illustration to it all is the notion of ageism. We can see its progression and where its going. This sexual attraction to overly nurturing females, I kind of want to dissect it in a freudian way. Obsession of big brests to the extent of mass plastic surgery, attraction to overly young or old females, and a desire to afflict or receive sexual humiliation. It all oozes a message of death, a sort of unworthiness aware of itself, with a wish to retreat into childish deviance.
Nothing sexual, yet it derives from the same essence.
Lyssa Har Har Harr
Gender : Posts : 8965 Join date : 2012-03-01 Location : The Cockpit
"There is no nothing with which to divide existence, therefore it is continuous. The "subject" is only ever conceivable as the object of conception, and therefore contradicts itself as a concept, and thus its relative opposite "the object" simultaneously loses its relative meaning. Thus in order to impose (as a "subject") an understanding of existence in discrete terms is fundamentally illogical, and one must draw upon other values with which to construct a reality. From this basis, it is then possible to evaluate these different value sets and all the truths that may subsequently emerge. I propose "experience" as the fundamental substance of existence: the concrete complement to the abstract term. Thus I have titled it "Experientialism" - a play on the synthesis of Existentialism and Essentialism, from which it draws in equal measure.
The primary stage, the establishment of the foundation of continuous experience is not process philosophy. Herein lies the connection with Essentialism. The secondary stage is indeed related to process philosophy. Though process philosophy requires a base in order to stand up by itself, and that is what I have provided for it - along with a specific position from which to begin its process. Not so much intelligence nor design, but consciousness yes. If you are familiar with him, George Berkeley has been a significant influence in opposition to the traditionally materialistic worldview. I believe that the human understanding of existence precludes the human ability to refer to and conceive of existence. Experience as "one" but also "zero" (because if the whole is "1", there are no relative comparisons from which to grant intellectual meaning - there "just is"). Continuous experience has no boundaries until they are imposed, and it is literally the simplest thing to realise. And from then, by all means impose!"
Is Imbesil just rewording chaos - 'one continuous experience' after taking the world itself as a subject? One more Spinozaist...
Are you Imbesil?
Then this is like Vedanta or Buddhism or eckhart's Plotinian Xt. where one equates one's self with the Self of which nothing 'definite' can be said, but only 'not this, not this': [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]
Becoming one as the "One continuous experience"... The 'present' and the 'now' in this sense would supposedly simply be what occurs before the conceptualizing machine takes over or the conceptualizing consciousness is made to stop, 'extinguished' , and what the mystics and the kyoto school call the 'timeless heart', 'inner kingdom of blessedness', etc.
Or as Satyr put it;
Satyr wrote:
"To span the distance between noumenon and phenomenon, art must be used as a bridge, where language (including mathematics) is no more than an art-form. This requires a counter-intuitive artistry, where the real is seen from the corner of one's eye, as it falls away, but never actually seen directly. Art uses many methods to represent what can never be perceived completely.
Counter-intuitive, because intuition is born from a (re)action to flux, and so it is based on ordering the disordering, or finding patterns in the chaos. Intuition can only perceive what is most like it, what is similar, and so similarity is what it thrives on, refusing to acknowledge difference, because it indicates a contradiction."
In other words, although we may grasp more intuitively,,, the subject has increased reality ('existence'), more well-grounded, only with increasing differentiation ('essence'), and not immersing on the bases of similarities. For example, as the runemaster Flowers showed, anything that 'slithers' has warned us of danger and so built into our evolution, that the very shape of S makes us uneasy and elicits compelled reactions;
Such pre-conceptual intuitive awareness of simply sensing danger does not increase our essence, but diminishes it;
Nietzsche wrote:
"Owing to the nature of animal consciousness, the world of which we can become conscious is only a surface-and sign-world, a world that is made common and meaner; whatever becomes conscious becomes by the same token shallow, thin, relatively stupid, general, sign, herd signal; all becoming conscious involves a great and thorough corruption, falsification, reduction to superficialities, and generalization." [1882]
Satyr wrote:
"A simple organism need not understand what it perceives. It need only (re)act to it, usually by finding similarities which trigger these evolved automatic (re)actions. The expected outcome is its reward...usually in the form of pleasure. Pleasure indicates, to the primitive mind, that it did well...that it achieved and accomplished something it need not understand how or why, only enjoy the outcome which only demanded a surrender to automatic (re)activity based on a simplification/generalization it inherits as an intuitive, innate, understanding. The primary role of consciousness is to increase survivability and so understanding need not be present if the (re)action to a phenomena results in survival.
But reason needs to understand and to do so it needs to distance itself from the survival interest, to achieve clarity. To understand is to perceive patterns in the perceived which may or may not benefit the organism. Intuition is about revealing, exposing...the phenomenon appears, to a degree, and never completely, as it is never complete but ever-changing, to the perceiving subjective mind. The organism reliant or organization, on order, simplifies/generalizes the phenomenon into a static thing, and then develops (re)actions to it, through trial and error - natural selection. This is primitive intuition, where children, women, and effete males remain.
Counter-intuitive is when these automatic intuition are comprehended as automatic, and symbolic, and the mind seeks to see beyond them. Not to dismiss them but to place them into a more lucid context."
Point being, it is not every conceptualization that "oppresses" us; real Buddhism, for instance, was only against the abstraction that severed being from becoming, where the noumenon lost reference with the phenomenon. Sama-dhi or the one-pointed mind or the most con-Centrate self is increased counter-intuitive conscious Discrimination that is alert to the concordance with the real.
When Nietzsche called for the 'shut down' of consciousness, he meant two things.
1. Doing away with that consciousness where we have denied its continual growth and have taken it as an absolute unchanging self-identity;
Nietzsche wrote:
"Consciousness is the last and latest development of the organic and hence also what is most unfinished and least powerful. . . . If the conserving association of the instincts were not so very much more powerful, and if it did not serve the whole as a regulator, humanity would have to perish of its misjudgments and its fantasies with open eyes, of its lack of thoroughness and its credulity—in short, of its consciousness; rather, without the former, humanity would have long disappeared! Before a function is fully developed and mature it constitutes a danger for the organism, and it is good if for that time it is heartily tyrannized! Thus consciousness is properly tyrannized—not least by our pride in it! One thinks that it constitutes the kernel of the human being; what is abiding, eternal, ultimate, and most original in it. One takes consciousness for a determinate magnitude! One denies its growth and its intermittences! Takes it for the ‘unity of the organism’!" [KSA 3, 382–83/GS 84–85]
Nietzsche wrote:
"Consciousness-beginning quite externally, as coordination and becoming conscious of "impressions"-at first at the furthest distance from the biological center of the individual; but a processthat deepens and intensifies itself, and continually draws nearer to that center." [WTP, 504]
And,
2. 'Doing away' with consciousness only as its incorporation into us as our unhesitant instinct;
Nietzsche wrote:
"All perfect acts are unconscious and no longer subject to will; consciousness is the expression of an imperfect and often morbid state in a person. Personal perfection as conditioned by will, as consciousness, as reasoning with dialectics, is a caricature, a kind of self-contradiction - A degree of consciousness makes perfection impossible." [WTP, 289]
Nietzsche wrote:
"Principal error of psychologists: they regard the indistinct idea as a lower kind of idea than the distinct: but that which removes itself from our consciousness and for that reason becomes obscure can on that account be perfectly clear in itself. Becoming obscure is a matter of perspective of consciousness." [WTP, 528]
Nietzsche wrote:
"In the Greek philosophers I see a decline of the instincts: otherwise they could not have blundered so far as to posit the conscious state as more valuable. Intensity of consciousness stands in inverse ratio to ease and speed of cerebral transmission. We must in fact seek perfect life where it has become least conscious (i.e., least aware of its logic, its reasons, its means and intentions, its utility). ...The stored-up integrity and shrewdness of generations which are never conscious of their principles and are even a little afraid of principles." [WTP, 439]
Nietzsche wrote:
"The great man... is unhesitating." [WTP, 962]
Nietzsche wrote:
"Mastery. - One has attained to mastery when one neither goes wrong nor hesitates in the performance." [Daybreak, 537]
Nietzsche wrote:
"The whole surface of consciousness - consciousness is a surface - has to be kept free from all of the great imperatives. Be careful even of great words, great attitudes . . . . I have no memory of ever having made an effort-you will not detect any trace of struggle in my life, I am the opposite of a heroic nature. To "will" anything, to "strive" after anything, to have a "goal," a "wish" in mind I have never experienced this. Right now I am still looking out over my future-an immense future!-as if it were a calm sea: there is not a ripple of longing. I do not have the slightest wish for anything to be different from how it is; I do not want to become anything other than what I am. But this is how my life has always been.
To react slowly; a great consciousness; no feeling of struggle."
Andre Gide wrote:
"Know thyself! A maxim as pernicious as it is ugly. Whoever observes himself arrests his own development. A caterpillar who wanted to know itself well would never become a butterfly."
According to the decadent's definition of the Dionysian, the 'spontaneous' would be the hedonistic letting-go of the self. And such self-abandonment is not what it means to be free or unrepressed in one's 'essence'.
According to the master's definition of the Dionysian, the 'spontaneous' is an unhesitancy from greater and greater consciousness that has become in-corporated as one's body, one's body of know-ledge that dialectics becomes unncessary. Self-possession is moving together as one 'essential' continuous self.
Any kind of Experientialist philosophy that equates the 'shutting down of consciousness' with immersion into chaos while believing the world itself as a unitary subject is as nihilistic as those Value-Ontotheists who see the world as an intelligent design.
What is the 'specific position' you begin the process for process thought, Imbesil? Whitehead had no qualms calling it God and a new Christianity; how about you? Even if you didn't inherit that title, are you carrying on the Priestly tradition?
Whitehead had no qualms calling it God and a new Christianity; how about you?
Semantics. All the bumf that comes with religions like Christianity hardly necessarily follows from continuous experience. If your conception of "God" is that of omnipresence, then they have that in common, but do they then have everything else in common? I've noticed some rather interesting overlaps with Christianity - perhaps I am carrying on the priestly tradition afterall? A strange one, considering I am as atheist as they come.
Original sin also seems to come into it - the initial departure from the consistency of continuous experience to a discrete interpretation. Invoking separation violates the logic of "there can be no nothing to separate". Yet this is where knowledge comes from. Note the simplest of logical observations is all that's required, rather than something as vague as "faith". But are we to concentrate on similarities in order to dismiss something by association with something that it is not? Are we to concentrate on differences to try and counter this? Or is it not something that can simply be evaluated in its own right?
Other targets for association might be Deconstructionism or Descartes. Both incorporate a reduction, the former is the means of doing so and the latter amounts to an essence and I do the same. Nihilism would deconstruct indefinitely or "to nothingness". I do not, quite the opposite - ontologically speaking that is. Epistemologically perhaps yes, I have been rather merciless. Not intentionally, exactly. Just because of the afore-mentioned undeniable logic.
I'm not that familiar with Spinoza, I'm afraid. Nor Buddhism. You're not the first to say my work is reminiscent of either, but I guess this is coincidence. Certain names have helped open doors for me, but my work is all my own. You could liken continuous experience with chaos, though I'm not keen on the common connotations of the word. It's not necessarily frantic, it is not unorderable. You can by all means order it, you only sacrifice fundamental consistency in doing so - but this can be very useful, all is permitted. Doing so allows us to speak of things such as this, for example. Fundamentally it's neither order nor chaos and yet it is continuous with such interpretations - language doesn't really cut it here.
Lyssa Har Har Harr
Gender : Posts : 8965 Join date : 2012-03-01 Location : The Cockpit
Whitehead had no qualms calling it God and a new Christianity; how about you?
Semantics. All the bumf that comes with religions like Christianity hardly necessarily follows from continuous experience. If your conception of "God" is that of omnipresence, then they have that in common, but do they then have everything else in common? I've noticed some rather interesting overlaps with Christianity - perhaps I am carrying on the priestly tradition afterall? A strange one, considering I am as atheist as they come.
They do and you are.
Whitehead created a Neo-Platonic circuit by positing God at both ends - bridging Spinoza's immanent god [prehension] and Leibniz's transcendent god, except the monads are not discrete and they interact [concrescence]. The minute one speaks of eternal unchanging objects, you know you are in a bad place.
God is the omnipresent 'heart', the 'inner kingdom' who unites mind and body, potential and actual, possible and real:
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"Eternal objects have their existence in the mind of God, and because s/he, having absolute union with the material plane, is integral in every occasion of concrescence, "each eternal object has a definite, effective relevance to each concrescent process," Whitehead writes, "Apart from such orderings, there would be a complete disjunction of eternal objects unrealized in the temporal world." God, then, is the mediator, the interface between the conceptual potentiality and the material reality."
Original sin also seems to come into it - the initial departure from the consistency of continuous experience to a discrete interpretation.
See. Perfect.
What could be more Xt. than the abolishing of the ego in the name of eden?
The presumption that the 'true world' is the world-of-being - as if there was ever a being, and not the world-of-becoming, of dionysos being torn apart and fragmented again and again is yet again the same hedonism of change as evil, as suffering.
Nietzsche wrote:
""Dionysus versus the "Crucified": there you have the antithesis. It is not a difference in regard to their martyrdom-it is a difference in the meaning of it. Life itself, its eternal fruitfulness and recurrence, creates torment, destruction, the will to annihilation. In the other case, suffering - the "Crucified as the innocent one" - counts as an objection to this life, as a formula for its condemnation.- One will see that the problem is that of the meaning of suffering: whether a Christian meaning or a tragic meaning. In the former case, it is supposed to be the path to a holy existence; in the latter case, being is counted as holy enough to justify even a monstrous amount of suffering." [WTP, 1052]
Dionysos being 're-stored' and feeling 'one-with-nature', "consistency",,, is with the total character of the world of becoming, not being. We know of no 'original sin', except that of cowardice - to keep up with the world of becoming... and that kind of "consistent" balance... To possess "metis" was therefore to be 'favoured', to be in a state of grace and blessedness.
Invoking separation violates the logic of "there can be no nothing to separate". Yet this is where knowledge comes from. Note the simplest of logical observations is all that's required, rather than something as vague as "faith".
Yes, the 'atomic' subject is a fiction; a 'subject' real-izes itself through a coherence or integrating of experience or memory. But your and Whitehead's Xt. abstracts and deifies the concept of 'experience/memory', one universal 'sensorium', datum, etc., making an eternal substance out of the process, as in when you say,
"My existence has always been experience, my experience has always existed."
= "I have always lived in the memory of God."
..., etc.
When you conflate the possible unrealized with the actual realized, then anyone can speak of anything, including God, as an 'actual entity', and this is exactly what Whitehead does:
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"Whitehead invites us to “descend the scale of organic being.” This is a thought experiment. As we move from dogs and horses down to the amoeba and the jellyfish, various dimensions of human consciousness drop out of what remains of “experience,” but such animals, and even vegetables, retain some aspect of a relation to the environment. A jellyfish advances and withdraws and an amoeba moves its pseudopodia in response to the prick of a pin, as we all discovered in junior high science class. A vegetable grows down to the point of dampness in the earth and upward to the sun, growing out of the shade of other plants if need be to get into the light. Most assuredly the amoeba and the plant do not possess anything like the properties of a Cartesian mind, yet, as Whitehead notes, there is “some direct reason for attributing [to them] dim, slow feelings of causal nexus” (PR 176-77). Normally Whitehead puts the term feelings in quotes in such a context, matching his use of “experience.” His point is that even at that level there is some primitive mode of taking account of the environment, some basic way of “feeling,” or being in relation with, other actual entities. The amoeba is clearly not a mind and its “experience” is clearly nothing like conscious human experience. Yet it, in some very primitive way, “takes account of” its environment. Even in the inorganic world magnets “attract” filings and gravity “pulls” objects. Just so, when we reach the bottom of the scale of organic being, Whitehead says, it is the case that “[a]s we pass to the inorganic world, causation never for a moment seems to lose its grip. What is lost is originativeness, and any evidence of immediate absorption in the present.
There is no going behind actual entities to find anything more real. They differ among themselves: God is an actual entity, and so is the most trivial puff of existence in far-off empty space. . . . The final facts are, all alike, actual entities; and these actual entities are drops of experience, complex and interdependent” (PR 18). Of course there are minds and bodies in the world, but every mind and every body is a grouping of actual entities. Such groupings of actual entities are called societies. A society is not a final actuality; it is, rather, an abstraction that has its reality in virtue of the full and final concreteness of the actual entities that make it up.
The interdependence of actual entities is critical. As Whitehead says, “Actual entities involve each other by reason of their prehensions of each other” (PR 20). This word prehensions relates to the business of putting the word experience in quotes as one moves down the scale of organic being. “Prehension” is cut off from the word apprehension. “Apprehension” refers to the fully conscious grasping of something; the attenuated version of that word, that is, “prehension,” refers, for Whitehead, to the primitive, unconscious, primordial, attenuated way that, way down at the bottom of the scale of organic and then inorganic being, one actual occasion takes account of another. The becoming of an actual entity is its process of prehending the actual entities in its immediate past, in what Whitehead labels its actual world, and then harmonizing those prehensions into the unity of being which that concrescing actual entity becomes. It is helpful to note that the word concrescence means a growing together—in this case the growing together of the prehensions that constitute the actual entity which is in the process of becoming.
Actual entities happen very quickly; they appropriate their actual world, concresce, reach their final unity, and then become part of that actual world which gives rise to the next generation of actual entities. They exist (their being is their becoming) very briefly as “subjects” and then take up their role as objects, as brute facts that the future must take into account."
Perspectivism is a Logic, not a Logos; where Whitehead and Nietzsche differ:
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"In his Science and the Modern World, pp. 101-106 (paperback edition 69-72), Alfred North Whitehead writes:
The word perceive is, in our common usage, shot through and through with the notion of cognitive apprehension. So is the word apprehension, even with the adjective cognition omitted. I will use the word prehension for uncognitive apprehension: by this I mean apprehension which may or may not be cognitive.
For Berkeley's mind, I substitute a process of prehensive unification. . . . In the first place, note that the idea of simple location has gone. The things which are grasped into a realised unity, here and now, are not the castle, the cloud, and the planet simply in themselves; but are the castle, the cloud, and the planet from the standpoint , in space and time, of the prehensive unification. In other words, it is the castle over there from the standpoint of the unification here. It is, therefore, the castle, the cloud, and the planet which are grasped in unity here. You will remember that the idea of perspectives is quite familiar in philosophy. It was introduced by Leibniz, in the notion of his monads mirroring perspectives of the universe. I am using the same notion, only I am toning down his monads into the unified events [in later Whitehead writings, actual entities or occasions of experience]in space and time. . . . In the analogy with Spinoza, his one substance is for me the one underlying activity of realisation . . . Thus, concrete fact is process. Its primary analysis is into underlying activity of prehension, and into realised prehensive events.
The difficulties of philosophy in respect to space and time are founded on the error of considering them as primarily the loci of simple locations. Perception is simply the cognition of prehensive unification, or more shortly, perception is cognition of prehension. The actual world is a manifold of prehension; and a ‘prehension' is a ‘prehensive occasion'; and a prehensive occasion is the most concrete finite entity, conceived as what it is in itself and for itself, and not as from its aspect in the essence of another such occasion. . . . For space and time are simply abstractions from the totality of prehensive unifications as mutually patterned in each other.
[In answer to Berkeley's claim that the reality of nature is] the reality of ideas in mind [Whitehead maintains that nature is] a complex of prehensive unifications. Space and time exhibit the general scheme of interlocked relations of these prehensions. You cannot tear any one of them out of its context. Yet each of them within its context has all the reality that attaches to the whole complex. Conversely, the totality has the same reality as each prehension; for each prehension unifies the modalities to be ascribed, from its standpoint, to every part of the whole. A prehension is a process of unifying.
The realities of nature are the prehensions in nature, that is to say, the events in nature."
"In so far as the word "knowledge" has any meaning, the world is knowable; but it is interpretable otherwise, it has no meaning behind it, but countless meanings.- "Perspectivism."
It is our needs that interpret the world; our drives and their For and Against. Every drive is a kind of lust to rule; each one has its perspective that it would like to compel all the other drives to accept as a norm.
We set up a word at the point at which our ignorance begins, at which we can see no further, e.g., the word "I," the word "do," the word "suffer":-these are perhaps the horizon of our knowledge, but not "truths."
No things remain but only dynamic quanta, in a relation of tension to all other dynamic quanta: their essence lies in their relation to all other quanta, in their "effect" upon the same. The will to power not a being, not a becoming, but a pathos - the most elemental fact from which a becoming and effecting first emerge... This necessary perspectivism by virtue of which every center of force -and not only man -- construes all the rest of the world from its own view-point, i.e., measures, feels, forms, according to its own force - it is being specific, definitely acting and reacting thus and thus, as may be the case. Perspectivism is only a complex form of specificity. My idea is that every specific body strives to become master over all space and to extend its force (-its will to power:) and to thrust back all that resists its extension. But it continually encounters similar efforts on the part of other bodies and ends by coming to an arrangement ("union") with those of them that are sufficiently related to it: thus they then conspire together for power. And the process goes on-
"Thinking" in primitive conditions (pre-organic) is the crystallization of forms, as in the case of crystal.- In our thought, the essential feature is fitting new material into old schemas ( = Procrustes' bed), making equal what is new.
Even in the domain of the inorganic an atom of force is concerned only with its neighborhood: distant forces balance one another. Here is the kernel of the perspective view and why a living creature is "egoistic" through and through.
Supposing that the world had a certain quantum of force at its disposal, then it is obvious that every displacement of power at any point would affect the whole system - thus together with sequential causality there would be a contiguous and concurrent dependence." [WTP, 481-2, 499, 635-38]
How and where N. takes the concept of "pathos" here, is not the same as your/Whitehead's "experience". In the former, the highest pathos is from the maximizing of distance as the 'great chain of becoming'; whereas to you/Whitehead, the highest experience is from maximum synergy as the 'great chain of being'.
But are we to concentrate on similarities in order to dismiss something by association with something that it is not? Are we to concentrate on differences to try and counter this? Or is it not something that can simply be evaluated in its own right?
I am not the one who claimed they are simply giving base to Whitehead's experientialism or pan-psychism; it was you. The devil is in the details, but there's also that 'a rosecroix by any other name...'
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Other targets for association might be Deconstructionism or Descartes. Both incorporate a reduction, the former is the means of doing so and the latter amounts to an essence and I do the same. Nihilism would deconstruct indefinitely or "to nothingness". I do not, quite the opposite - ontologically speaking that is. Epistemologically perhaps yes, I have been rather merciless. Not intentionally, exactly. Just because of the afore-mentioned undeniable logic.
Yes, I see it, and that's why you are all the more priestly. Real nihilism is actually to stop at some Thing.
Nietzsche wrote:
""Knowledge" is a referring back: in its essence a regressus in infinitum. That which comes to a standstill (at a supposed causa prima, at something unconditioned, etc.) is laziness, weariness--" [WTP, 575]
Inertia operates. ...in the sense of truth. What is true? Where an explanation is given which causes us the minimum of spiritual effort." [WTP, 279]
Satyr wrote:
"No meaning, no goal, no thing-in-itself...this is a "positive", and not a "negative". A projection of the absent absolute taken literally as an existence which contradicts existence."
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I'm not that familiar with Spinoza, I'm afraid. Nor Buddhism.
Nagarjuna's buddhist tetra-lemma does to existence what Derrida does to language, but they arrive to different sensibilities. Nagarjuna does not want to cling to anything; Derrida wants to play with everything. Apollonian/Dionysian.
As for Spinoza, see: [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]
You're not the first to say my work is reminiscent of either, but I guess this is coincidence.
Ha, 'just coincidence'...
No, it is no coincidence.
Consider this:
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"The connection between God and religion on the one hand, and the sociopolitical on the other, seems to rest in Whitehead’s case with the notion of world consciousness. As a guide to Whitehead’s use of this term, I shall be utilizing the valuable work of Thomas J. Regan, S.J.
"World consciousness," a term which Whitehead in fact only uses twice, is intended, says Regan, "to convey an awareness of the harmonious unity and value of the entire universe." Indeed, "the attitude of mind guided by this notion would be one that was most capable of maximizing the value possibilities for a particular experience" (p. 3). Thus, world consciousness is clearly related to Whitehead’s idea of religion, which is essentially an ethical notion: "The movement of the religious consciousness starts from self valuation, but it broadens into the concept of world as a realm of adjusted values, mutually intensifying or mutually destructive" (RM 58f.). Characterizing world consciousness as "a very high level abstraction which has affected the thought patterns of an individual or of a society" (p. 5), Regan goes on to show how for Whitehead the approximation to world consciousness and the development of religion are parallel. Both exhibit the same dynamic towards the more general, inclusive perspective. If this is true, and if Regan’s contention that world consciousness is the basis of social ethics in Whitehead’s thought is also true, then any action for justice or human rights or the freedom of the oppressed can be viewed religiously. It is certainly true that the individual who acts upon the possession of world consciousness will act to maximize the intensity of value of a given actual occasion, and such an action is indubitably one towards which God "lures." If, then, Whitehead’s thinking bears this association of the ethical and the religious, can it accommodate the revolutionary impulse which it needs if it is to serve political theology?
A clear contrast between the visions of Hegel and Whitehead rests on the relative modernity of the latter. For Hegel, the process of history was driven by a metaphysical necessity, the so-called "cunning of reason," and the outcome was and is assured, even if at any given moment elements of chaos and lack of reason are all too apparent. Hegel considered history to be a true struggle, but one in which the warring elements could be readily identified. Whitehead, on the other hand, recognizes a de facto growth in world consciousness or the generalization of the religious impulse, but does not seem to see any necessity in it. Their respective notions of God, of course, correspond to this difference: Hegel’s God drives the process; Whitehead’s coaxes it. Both fulfill their respective functions insofar as reason is present in history, but Hegel’s God is that reason impelling history, while Whitehead’s is that reason hoping history will see the need to be reasonable.
Whitehead’s notion of world consciousness, and hence his hope of progress in history, is dependent on human cooperation. But it is particularly difficult to see how, given the generality of his idea and its clear compatibility with the Christian vision, we can have any surety that individuals will in fact act according to world consciousness. What will motivate them so to act? For Whitehead, of course, knowledge equals virtue, and a lack of willingness to act is presumably explicable as a lack of knowledge. Yet, those who ought to have more knowledge -- the educated -- seem singularly unwilling to act. The system sounds fine, but does it actually work? Is there any evidence that things are actually happening as Whitehead would have it, or is it a hopeless quest in every sense?
In Whitehead’s view, human life is distinguished by a three-stage process of "wishing to live, to live well and to live better" (FR . This is a prerequisite for the experience of world consciousness. Put simply, this has to mean that where there is deep and urgent concern for basic human needs, for food and clothing and health care and education, there cannot be the requisite peace for the experience of world consciousness. Education, "civilization," even leisure, seem to Whitehead to be necessary’ before either individuals or society can operate upon sufficiently general (i.e., non-selfish) criteria to make world consciousness a possibility. However, as we have already seen, world consciousness in Whitehead is the basis of social ethics and in close affinity with what he would want to designate as the fundamental religious impulse, the maximization of value. In consequence, the improvement of the world, "building the kingdom," in the language of traditional Christian theology, or "praxis in solidarity with the oppressed," in the terms of political theology, has to be in the hands of those whom we cannot avoid calling "the bourgeoisie," if not the aristocracy.
Whitehead’s God is in some respects compatible with the God of Christianity, and even with the God of liberation theology. God for Whitehead has an all-encompassing vision and is "the binding element in the world." The maximum possible actualization of value which this God favors has to include the redress of the terrible grievances of the oppressed. However, the Whiteheadian God only intends such an end through being the lure towards the best possible actualization of value in any occasion."
And compare with the Process Church's [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]:
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"Hubbard coined Dianetics from the Greek stems dia, meaning "through," and nous, meaning "mind". Dianetics divides the mind into three parts: the conscious "analytical mind," the subconscious "reactive mind," and the somatic mind. The goal of Dianetics is to remove the "reactive mind," which Scientologists believe prevents people from becoming more ethical, more aware, happier and saner. The Dianetics procedure to achieve this is called "auditing". Auditing is a process whereby a series of questions are asked by the Scientology auditor, in an attempt to rid the audited person of the painful experiences of the past, which Scientologists believe to be the cause of the "reactive mind".
Scientologists believe that "the basic principle of existence is to survive," and that the motivation to survive is inhibited by aberrations "ranging from simple neuroses to different psychotic states to various kinds of sociopathic behavior patterns". Hubbard developed Dianetics, claiming that it could eradicate these aberrations."
In other words, its the same hedonistic imperative of Spinoza's that maximum interaction and co-operation maximizes experience and maximizes 'self-valuing'. What makes for 'better' experience has automatically more reality. The false idea of "positive progress" and maximum unitedness as 'virtue'. "More is better." Becoming one large body = super-human power = god Height of 'virtuosity' = blessedness...
Certain names have helped open doors for me, but my work is all my own. You could liken continuous experience with chaos, though I'm not keen on the common connotations of the word.
I meant as in when Spinoza dubbed Nature as God as you do, when nature is chaos.
It's interesting to watch someone wrestle with themselves.
Why are you so keen to assure me that you cannot separate omnipresence from everything else associated with "God"? You go on to assure me that this insistence of yours to which you cling is perfectly "Xtian - I have no doubt of the depth of your devoutness, you have nothing to prove to me.
However, I am afraid that I do not find that "God" necessarily has a monopoly on omnipresence, as His other supposed attributes are not logical sequiturs of omnipresence. Feel free to persuade me otherwise if you feel the need, but I must remind you that I will not accept simple statements that amount to "it just is". I know abductive reasoning and logical fallacy is the hallmark of this forum, but I am a foreigner here. I humbly request that you respect my quaint customs.
I have no association with the transcendent, only the immanent. The former is just as inconsistent as the existence of "nothingness" and the experience of "unconsciousness". If Whitehead bridges the two then clearly we differ. Continuous experience is only the actual, never the potential. The real and never the possible. It replaces the traditionally proposed fundamental substances of psyche and matter with "experience". Its kingdom is not "inner" any more than it is or isn't "outer".
Can you point out for me where I said continuous experience was unchanging? The term is not only appropriate as non-"discrete", but also because it denotes an experience that continues rather than stops. It is flux it is becoming: my experiential analogy is that of fabric blowing in the wind, perhaps fire is also appropriate. Always animated and dynamic, with all qualia merging into one another - the same experiential substance, but "not separated by any nothing". This is important. You can rave on about your sentiments concerning Nietzschean "distance", but I openly challenge you to consistently prove the nothingness necessary for separating discrete entities.
Try and posit a somethingness between discrete entities and you just end up with the same problem - what separates the somethingness from the discrete entities that it has been posited to separate? Logically, all must be continuous. But feel free to be illogical.
Am I in a bad place? No. Fundamentally I am not even "in a place", though "I am". But Experientialism doesn't stop at the fundamental. It is also a building that you may construct according to whatever values you choose. Experientialism just serves to point out what inconsistencies you have adopted in order to do so, and by no means prohibits one from doing so. In this critical respect, you can see the ego is absolutely not abandoned. It is just understood as what it is. You might wish to draw some kind of morality from this by proposing consistency as "good" and inconsistency as "evil", but in doing so I have explicitly permitted evil. The philosophy merely privileges consistency before inconsistency whilst subsequently allowing both.
Your imagination is commendable, my child (ah, the priest returns). But this philosophy is at its core a lot more boring than you want it to be. Though at least it is interesting non-fundamentally. Play away.
Satyr Daemon
Gender : Posts : 37187 Join date : 2009-08-24 Age : 58 Location : Hyperborea
It's interesting to watch someone wrestle with themselves.
Why are you so keen to assure me that you cannot separate omnipresence from everything else associated with "God"? However, I am afraid that I do not find that "God" necessarily has a monopoly on omnipresence, as His other supposed attributes are not logical sequiturs of omnipresence. Feel free to persuade me otherwise if you feel the need, but I must remind you that I will not accept simple statements that amount to "it just is".
Because you claimed to be supplementing the basis to Whitehead's explicit Xt. and his belief in eternal objects.
Do you deny this now? In your current post, you call this flux as an 'experiential substance'?! The Heraclitean fire is a metaphor; to call such a dynamism as one whole is you abstracting it. There is no "presence"/"present" as such... its all in flux.
Tell me, what is the goal of becoming more and more consistent here, as in merging with this cont. experience? What does your ideal become when it is The experience that everyone ought to partake in to be consistent? There is flux and movement only because there is differential energy; is everyone the same reality?
Is it any good to state that you dont believe in nothingness, but here you are with other words championing the same - the return to the undifferentiated primordial womb?
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I have no association with the transcendent, only the immanent. The former is just as inconsistent as the existence of "nothingness" and the experience of "unconsciousness". If Whitehead bridges the two then clearly we differ. Continuous experience is only the actual, never the potential. The real and never the possible." Can you point out for me where I said continuous experience was unchanging?
He does. Explain yourself then on what you meant by "my experience has always existed"... As if truth was always ever there, and it is we who "fall" into ignorance while abstracting away...
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You can rave on about your sentiments concerning Nietzschean "distance", but I openly challenge you to consistently prove the nothingness necessary for separating discrete entities.
Nobody is denying the fluxious nature of the world, but how do you then define consciousness as you have:
"that which is always there, existence, pre-interpretation. The undeniable fundamental and absolute declaration that has no opposite."
You are equivovating nature with consciousness as Spinoza, etc.
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Try and posit a somethingness between discrete entities and you just end up with the same problem - what separates the somethingness from the discrete entities that it has been posited to separate? Logically, all must be continuous. But feel free to be illogical.
I already told you, imbecil, the atomic subject is a fiction; but this does not mean one denies life as you are stupidly doing...
The very nature of life IS differentiation, is resistance to entropy, is the shape-forming will organizing itself to greater and greater efficiency...
What is continuous is flux... and the paradox of life is such that inherent to that very becoming, is the will to become more, which prompts self-preservation and organization of centres for 'self'-efficiency. The 'borders' are where the influence of your power is checked by other powers, and these 'borders' are constantly changing.
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Am I in a bad place? No. Fundamentally I am not even "in a place", though "I am".
This is Daoism now.
Even then, to speak Daoistically, the pure experience of self is not in the unconscious and unmediated silence which we prehend more than our consciousness could, no doubt, but our pure experience of self is in the maximally differentiating self-consciousness that becomes more and more the very 'Law' (there is no law as such), the very 'Dao'... A degree towards 'I Am the 'Law''...
You should pay attention to Satyr's metaphor of the whirlpool, which was a good one:
Satyr wrote:
"Self, is like a whirlpool in a river; a tornado. It comes about from the (inter)actions of water/air streams, it holds true, for a while, and it then returns to the flow.
It has no center, because its edges are fluctuating, and as one moves away from the edges, one tumbles into a void, disappearing into the deep (past).
Consciousness is this edge, this fluctuating rim, (inter)acting with the river's flows. Self-Consciousness is this approach towards the middle which falls away. Know Thyself is diving into the vortex."
"Consistency" is not a surrender to the current, but the coinciding of the logic he is with larger and larger logic. - "Consistency" is becoming simple or some would call this luck. Simple, not simplistic.
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In this critical respect, you can see the ego is absolutely not abandoned. It is just understood as what it is.
And what is the ego to you?
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Your imagination is commendable, my child (ah, the priest returns). But this philosophy is at its core a lot more boring than you want it to be. Though at least it is interesting non-fundamentally. Play away.
The drabber and drier it is, the better for me; entertain away, little girl... I'd enjoy making you wet with sweat
Because you claimed to be supplementing the basis to Whitehead's explicit Xt. and his belief in eternal objects.
I don't even know who Whitehead is. All I claimed was the basis of Experientialism and its continuous, dynamic and fundamental substance.
An observation, if I may? You seem desperate to attach an already-existing label to my philosophy, like the Zarathustrean Soothsayer. Now it's Whitehead, now it's Taoism, now it's Xtian, now it's Spinozan. You need it to be one thing but find yourself jumping to and from all of the many authorities that you know, and yet it already is one thing: Experientialism. Of course it is reminiscent of elements of all of my influences, and apparently also other philosophies that I am not familiar with. I'm not an alien, but nor is my philosophy plagiarism - it hasn't come out of nowhere but it exists in its own right. Perhaps you are a victim of a good philosophical education, where the object of the game is to evaluate existing thought, of which you must demonstrate an encyclopaedic knowledge? You certainly succeed there, it's impressive in a way.
Can you clarify "there is no presence / present" for me? It sounds like an odd thing for you to say alongside such vehement opposition to Nihilism. If you can't recognise the present then you are truly lost. Sure it's variably changing, and the conventional temporal understanding has an infinity of past separated from an infinity of future only by an infinitesimal present, but this conception has evidently inverted the emphasis for the sake of attempting a "sub specie aeternitatis". Such a project would only have been able to begin from extrapolating consistencies "under the aspect of experience", and yet its goal is to precede its own origin. An example of inconsistency.
The goal of consistency is aesthetic. Nothing can be built by inconsistency without collapsing. An argument cannot be made, not even sense can be made from inconsistency. As far as philosophy goes, which seems to fundamentally rely on consistency, it would seem consistent to found a philosophy on consistency. The end goal of this is not an ideal, it is more of a pure reality: continuous experience. But the end goal of consistency isn't the end goal of Experientialism, it is the start. Starting from absolute consistency, one subsequently evaluates their creations in terms of inconsistencies relative to any consistencies. All of these creations are useful according to the values injected into them, even though none of them are absolutely true. The closest one can get to truth in this respect is to identify why something is not true, and in turn why it is valuable. It's an interpretative philosophy.
I didn't go about arriving at this philosophy by having this destination in mind, I just wanted to answer all of the most fundamental philosophical paradoxes as consistently as possible, and ended up here. For example, I was strict about the ever-elusive notion of "the subject". As soon as it is identified it becomes its opposite: "the object". It is only ever "implied", yet under scrutiny it is revealed as non-existent after all. And in turn, the "objective" loses any relative meaning against the "subjective". Deductively there is only existence, which inductively always takes the form of experience. One cannot even conceive of any nothingness to bound it spatially or temporarily, because conception is a form of experience and thus cannot be its bound, or anything "on the other side of the bound". "Eternity" and "omnipresence" take on a different meaning due to this logically necessary conclusion - by definition they don't extend beyond reality, they are reality and nothing more or less. This is life, which I categorically do not deny - exactly the opposite. All nature is life: that equivocation you observed seems true. Some of it evades entropy, some does not.
It ought to be evident from my logical reasoning that I do not arrive here lightly or arbitrarily. There has been no need to distort anything about life, I've just ended up correcting logical conception to be mercilessly real and nothing more or less. Simple, yes. And there is not even self, fundamentally, but the inconsistency of the ego appears to demand its discrete existence all the same. I find the extent of this occurs in direct correlation with the experience of fear - in a good way. The more intense the fear, the more differentiated experience appears, it seems to keep one alive rather well so I am all for its non-fundamental utility. I don't deny the existence of the discrete, I just deny that it is fundamental.
Lyssa wrote:
The drabber and drier it is, the better for me; entertain away, little girl... I'd enjoy making you wet with sweat
I am going to interpret this as a come-on and there's nothing you can do about it.
Satyr Daemon
Gender : Posts : 37187 Join date : 2009-08-24 Age : 58 Location : Hyperborea
Discrimination is a discernment of patterns of the world. Life can only self-maintain by judging, discriminating... consciousness IS discrimination. Consciousness evolves TO judge. Patterns are how we perceive different aspects of the real, and then decide if they are good, or bad, in relation to our needs. Without discernment there is no life. You would be dead in a minute.
A good judgment is objective, boy, before it becomes subjective.
There is no self outside this ordering, this distancing from other.
Life is about borders, boy. A membrane, a skin, is a divide, a distancing to create ordering, within the (inter)acting. Without borders there is no choice, no will, no reason. No distancing, no discrimination, means no life.
Turing consciousness into "original sin" is your Judeo-Christian bullshit. How much you despise yourself, boy. This world is the world. No other self, you decrepit nothing. You've invented shit. Another nobody tapping into the Nihilistic escape psychology, finding another way "out" of your existential predicament: you must be very insecure to avoid judgments.
You are not eternal. No universal Self, moron. Sorry little boy. You will die.
I think you are already dead.
Your need to return to the unconscious, hoping it will lead to the uniform randomness of chaos, is your nihilistic passport out of life. You have a death-wish.
What separates the organism from the Flux IS its self-organizing, which requires a border to keep out possibilities so as to reinforce and cultivate probabilities within these borders, where it can exert its Will. The separation is not absolute...it is dynamic, and an ongoing struggle to maintain.
I've covered your point already, not that you had the patience to read that far, clearly. You were just waiting to misinterpret something so that you would have something to attack, right? You must have destroyed so many straw men people would think you live in a barn, yet you still couldn't hit the broad side of said barn with your aim. And close the door behind you on the way out, people would think you were born in one.
Satyr Daemon
Gender : Posts : 37187 Join date : 2009-08-24 Age : 58 Location : Hyperborea
Moron, you babble and say nothing. It is true...I skim through stupidity. I am too old to waste my time with another Nihilistic retard, craving his own nullification, using words full of promise. You despise yourself, and you've pulled some bullshit from your arse to invent some bigger Self. I leave you to your suicide dreams.
I have a barbecue to attend to. You can return to your MENSA musings. Your uniform random chaos of infinite possibilities is coming...only it will never be attained absolutely. Sorry...no cigar for you. Your genius is all you have....genius stated, and contained by self-hatred.
I am responding for others to read...because you are one...big...nothing.
Again... No borders, no life. Judgment IS consciousness.
Ordering is what separates from Flux. The border, the skin, the membrane is dynamic, not a thing, not a static absolute.
Ta, ta,
I think I am done with you.
_________________ γνῶθι σεαυτόν μηδέν άγαν
Lyssa Har Har Harr
Gender : Posts : 8965 Join date : 2012-03-01 Location : The Cockpit
All I claimed was the basis of Experientialism and its continuous, dynamic and fundamental substance.
The 'web' of relations is no "substance".
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An observation, if I may? You seem desperate to attach an already-existing label to my philosophy, like the Zarathustrean Soothsayer.
I'll explore and dissect you anywhich way I want. Your labelling me is you being inconsistent, but your sacrifice of consistency can be useful, all is permitted. Do continue.
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I'm not an alien, but nor is my philosophy plagiarism - it hasn't come out of nowhere but it exists in its own right.
Don't worry, I'm accusing you of worse things than that.
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Perhaps you are a victim of a good philosophical education, where the object of the game is to evaluate existing thought, of which you must demonstrate an encyclopaedic knowledge? You certainly succeed there, it's impressive in a way.
Such love for your own aura is so... gibberila, esp. when you only have claims and evade probing because you are a coward.
And if you weren't such an aurgasmist [I invented that btw.], your intellect would allow for the fact evaluation of anything "in its own right" doesn't happen in a vacuum, but wider the web of comparisons, greater the objectivity. Whether its an individual or a philosophical view, everything can be called unique and being in its own right when sheltered, and sheltering ideas is a good way to keep them from getting culled the natural way;
Satyr wrote:
"Within sheltering systems values that adhere to the underlying principles are free to take any form connecting them to the shared, to the common; in nature, in reality, in environments where there is no external control, no sheltering institution, value judging means the difference between life and death."
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Can you clarify "there is no presence / present" for me? It sounds like an odd thing for you to say alongside such vehement opposition to Nihilism.
There is no present since becoming is all there is. Elementary? "The world has never begun to become and never ceased from passing away. - It maintains itself in both." [N.]
To say there is something ever-present is you making it discrete and engaging in language games.
Satyr wrote:
"The abstraction of a "now" a 'here" is also an interesting concept. To construct the static thing it arbitrarily, or in accordance with its depth of individual perception, decides to eliminate all other dimensional fields. This is the quintessential essence of abstraction. To fabricate the one, the god, the now, the here, it disregards what precedes it....the dimension is severed, abstracted, detached from its fluidity, so as to create the simplification/generalization.
This is, exactly, what abstraction means. It is what consciousness requires to perceive. This separation, detachment, distancing. The cutting-away point is always ambiguous, it must remain so if the outcome is to be taken literally and not as an approximation a symbol a representation.
The wave is turned into a particle. The fluidity of existence, this Becoming, is terraformed, magically - but humanely, oh so humanely - into a thing, a particle a here, a now, a one, symbolized by a number and a word. It can be symbolized by a t-shirt, a statement, an image. It does not matter once the translation from fluid to static is taken literally as a correction of the real. This is the foundation of nihilism, of its subsequent cultural outcome as Modernity, and Americanism.
Rome being the civilization, that represented Hellenic culture...and Hellenism being a manifestation of Indo-European paganism. This, sets up the Rome vs Jerusalem division in the west, which takes on a different form in the east. this is what characterizes the current conflict in western discourse, and the conflicts that arise from it - most of which remain psychological as in schizophrenic, because the nihilistic paradigm dominates, creating this false dichotomy of right/left, positive/negative, right/wrong, God/Devil...pain/pleasure, 1/0. A division the majority identifies with."
There are 5 threads here on Nihilism, look it up.
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If you can't recognise the present then you are truly lost.
The present.
You do realize saying only the flux Is, or the now Is is a lang. abstraction.
I only recognize a presencIng... aletheia. Every presencing 'presences' the 'present' as more than its present, as what was already there as the dimension of possibilities. In the discrete sense, a hammer is a tool that hits the nail. In a more continuous sense, a hammer is what makes a house possible. It is presenced/concretized more and more in the continuous opening of the world. The hammer does not just exist in space; it opens up space. It is not only situated, it is situating the other(s); or better yet, use that in every permutation. It situates in being situated and in situating, it situates itself.
In this sense, the "fall away from ourselves", or the turning away from ourselves as a becomIng that is attuned to projecting its own potentiality, or being enmeshed "in" space, is what I call cowardice as the only "sin"; Heidegger called this "fallen condition" into the everyday busyness, a state of homelessness and inauthentic being. Yet, this cannot be called an "original sin" or any "sin" As IF there was some original Unity or Unit or Whole to reach...
Life does not Have an imperative to attain; life Is the imperative. - to become/transcend more and more. It is the Dividing and self-differentiating; there is no-thing to divide 'It'.
Heidegger wrote:
"Temporality is the condition of possibility of transcendence and thus also the condition of possibility of the intentionality that is founded in transcendence." [BP, p. 318]
There is no presence out there, like one would simply tune-into like a radio-station and all you need to have is the right frequency/mood to pick some station up. This [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] of tuning-into the unconcealedness does not mean there IS some Thing that Lies waiting to be apprehended... this kind of "present-at-hand" is the opposite of what he was trying to teach with the "ready-at-hand" or the 'already there'. That is to say,
Possibilities do not exist; they emerge in the very inter/acting, and so attunement means because there is only becoming and no being, no present, the world is therefore "always already there" and "thrown/flowing ahead of us", that one could say this "continuous presence is all there is" 'so to speak'.
There is no present.
The present is always pre- sent.
Heidegger wrote:
"World is not something subsequent that we calculate as a result from the sum of all beings. The world comes not afterward but beforehand..." [BP p.165]
Heidegger wrote:
"...before the experiencing of beings as extant, world is already understood; that is, we, the Dasein, in apprehending beings, are always already in a world." [BP, p.166]
Heidegger wrote:
"...the present is a being-open for entities confronting us, which are thus understood antecedently..." [BP, p.306]
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Sure it's variably changing, and the conventional temporal understanding has an infinity of past separated from an infinity of future only by an infinitesimal present, but this conception has evidently inverted the emphasis for the sake of attempting a "sub specie aeternitatis". Such a project would only have been able to begin from extrapolating consistencies "under the aspect of experience", and yet its goal is to precede its own origin. An example of inconsistency.
This is funny because the "sub specie aeternitatis" is what begins from the immanence of the infinitesimal present - call this infinite now as god or continuous presence, who cares,,,that is nihilistic abstraction. Or to put it in another frame you would understand,
Heidegger wrote:
"Insofar as what-is with-stands the utmost possibility of Notbeing, it itself stands in Being and yet has never thereby overtaken and overcome the possibility of Notbeing." [Lectures]: 'The chalk is flightier than the hammer']
To be is to 'withstand' notbeing. It both resists-and-copeswith notbeing. The present is a mental construct by consciousness to simultaneously conceive different rates of flow interacting continuously with the flux; while consciousness itself is part of the flux resisting a part of itself as flow. The daemonic consciousness then, is one that allows for the max. dissonances or the max. differentiation/stretching/looming of dimensions 'as though' there is only 'continuous experience'.
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The goal of consistency is aesthetic. Nothing can be built by inconsistency without collapsing. An argument cannot be made, not even sense can be made from inconsistency.
And yet, errors/discrete 'truths' are what have preserved life.
Without these inconsistencies, you would be dead. 'Manufacturing of discreteness itself is a feature of life.
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As far as philosophy goes, which seems to fundamentally rely on consistency, it would seem consistent to found a philosophy on consistency.
You could say the path of maximum resistance, the incorporation of reality [how much truth can you endure?] is what the highest aesthetic, a philosophy ought to concern itself with.
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Starting from absolute consistency, one subsequently evaluates their creations in terms of inconsistencies relative to any consistencies.
If omnipresent nature is not god, but chaos to you, do you realize, duf, you are saying, "Be consistent with the chaos that you are"?
The Dionysian standard of incorporating truth: "How much reality can you endure?" is not a call for [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] - the abolition of the ego and becoming chaos, but again in the sense Heidegger meant above - the development of a tremendous ego to maximally "with-stand" it. The more dissonance/simultaniety one with-stands, greater the being;
Nietzsche wrote:
"The highest man would have the greatest multiplicity of drives, in the relatively greatest strength that can be endured. Indeed, where the plant "man" shows himself strongest one finds instincts that conflict powerfully (e.g., in Shakespeare), but are controlled." [WTP, 966]
Nietzsche wrote:
"The wisest man would be the one richest in contradictions."[WTP, 259]
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For example, I was strict about the ever-elusive notion of "the subject". As soon as it is identified it becomes its opposite: "the object". It is only ever "implied", yet under scrutiny it is revealed as non-existent after all. And in turn, the "objective" loses any relative meaning against the "subjective".
Yes.
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It ought to be evident from my logical reasoning that I do not arrive here lightly or arbitrarily. There has been no need to distort anything about life, I've just ended up correcting logical conception to be mercilessly real and nothing more or less. Simple, yes. And there is not even self, fundamentally, but the inconsistency of the ego appears to demand its discrete existence all the same. I find the extent of this occurs in direct correlation with the experience of fear - in a good way. The more intense the fear, the more differentiated experience appears, it seems to keep one alive rather well so I am all for its non-fundamental utility. I don't deny the existence of the discrete, I just deny that it is fundamental.
This is you abstracting again. The "inconsistency" is consistent with life's innate consistency. The discrete ego as the error is a useful error, and part of life's own consistent logical drive towards maximal self-efficiency. The border is not a 'thing'.
The border Is life and life's differential process. To say the ego is necessary but not fundamental is You, Nihilist, dividing life that is one continuous interactivity towards max. self-organization. Now I'll also see you as a depraved Freudian, to whom man's erect posture and culture was an unreal repression, even oppression,, just as to you ego is a repression.
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Lyssa wrote:
The drabber and drier it is, the better for me; entertain away, little girl... I'd enjoy making you wet with sweat
I am going to interpret this as a come-on and there's nothing you can do about it.
By all means, yes, interpret that as a 'come-on, show some', since you aurgasm so freely and the bearings are clearly missing.
But Experience is. Continuous experience isn't a web of relations. It's a singular, unbounded and dynamic fabric, from which concepts like "relations" and "borders" can be artificially and usefully abstracted.
Lyssa wrote:
Don't worry, I'm accusing you of worse things than that.
Non-specific. No justification. Just an accusation. I know that's the way you guys do whatever it is you do here, but these baseless statements and claims are just stabs without an actual knife. Forgive me if I find them utterly meaningless and proceed to ignore them, like I have got Satyr to think he is doing to me.
Lyssa wrote:
There is no present since becoming is all there is. Elementary?
So semantics again then. I've been clearly referring to the present as a dynamic flux. "Becoming" works just as well, sure.
The bulk of your post seems to be an argument against me calling a "becoming" "continuously present". Instead of using the word "becoming" to mean exactly the same thing, I've made the fatal mistake of using a different word and explaining that the present is dynamic and in flux, just like you're using the word "becoming".
I know you need me to be your enemy because that's what I'm supposed to be apparently, but to reduce the grounds of that to a triviality seems kind of desperate. Are you so frustrated that you'll argue about nothing just because?
The only real thing you (and Satyr) seem to hold against me is that you need the world to be fundamentally discrete, and I've just pointed out that logically it can't be (there can be no nothing to separate) and followed the logic. And I've not even ruled out the utility in being inconsistent and using discretes, like we are doing now in conversing with one another. Being inconsistent in certain ways can be great, it is not "repressive" at all. It allows life for one, which I am all for.
There seems to be this insistence that I'm anti-life, or dead, or suicidal, because I say borders, and therefore life, is fundamentally inconsistent. There is clearly no appreciation of my appreciation of valuable inconsistencies, what I'm saying to be "consistent" must mean I'm ruling out the inconsistent, right? Wrong. "To be rich in contradictions"... - to borrow from your borrowing from Nietzsche.
You've started from "life exists" as your basis, and a discrete world follows due to the existence of death, from which life must be distinct. I've just thought it out a little more... I suppose the life/death distinction is black and white to at least the dimmer view to which Satyr is limited, regardless of the fact that they interact continuously, death is inside and all around life e.g. dead skin cells. We eat dead food, breathe dead air and drink dead water. They exist in a kind of symbiosis, with no absolute distinction between them, merging into one another continuously. Any apparent distinction dissolves the closer you look - look closely enough and you transcend it completely once everything becomes compounds and elements, atoms, sub-atomic particles and waves etc. The interpretation that you're referring to as life vs. death only exists within a certain range along the continuous scale of magnification. It's the one we're used to, and live our lives by so that's fair enough, but it's hardly fundamental - more circumstantial to our particular sensory abilities, which could easily be different.
You probably only read the beginning of that paragraph and a switch flipped "having divined me as someone who doesn't discern between life and death, and who is therefore dead/suicidal/anti-life because life necessitates the absolute refusal of death". I make a clear argument as to which you're not wrong, but you're also not right. You can stick to the dim view if you wish, and even refuse that it's dim. Just say these words and continue to force me into an identity that I demonstrably do not fit for the purposes of constructing a straw man to exercise your prejudices and frustrations, so I can confirm to myself that logic is wasted on you and I shall move on
Other misc bits and pieces:
Lyssa wrote:
To be is to 'withstand' notbeing. It both resists-and-copeswith notbeing.
There is no not-being. If you think you've identified it, it's being. Sorry.
Lyssa wrote:
And yet, errors/discrete 'truths' are what have preserved life.
Without these inconsistencies, you would be dead. 'Manufacturing of discreteness itself is a feature of life.
This is what I said, pay attention please.
How much truth can you endure, indeed.
Lyssa wrote:
If omnipresent nature is not god, but chaos to you, do you realize, duf, you are saying, "Be consistent with the chaos that you are"?
It's not chaos, as distinct from order. It's neither of these things, potentially either but not yet. I am saying that this singular non-distinct substance of experience is where maximum consistency leads to. This end point isn't consistency itself, but the means there are.
You should ask and at least try to comprehend first before assuming who the "duf" is.
Lyssa wrote:
Imbecile wrote:
For example, I was strict about the ever-elusive notion of "the subject". As soon as it is identified it becomes its opposite: "the object". It is only ever "implied", yet under scrutiny it is revealed as non-existent after all. And in turn, the "objective" loses any relative meaning against the "subjective".
Yes.
See, that wasn't so hard was it.
Lyssa wrote:
By all means, yes, interpret that as a 'come-on, show some', since you aurgasm so freely and the bearings are clearly missing.
You like a free and bearingless "aurgasm", do you?
Lyssa Har Har Harr
Gender : Posts : 8965 Join date : 2012-03-01 Location : The Cockpit
But Experience is. Continuous experience isn't a web of relations. It's a singular, unbounded and dynamic fabric, from which concepts like "relations" and "borders" can be artificially and usefully abstracted.
So semantics again then. What is this fabric? Is a fabric not a web? What is this experience made of?
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Lyssa wrote:
Don't worry, I'm accusing you of worse things than that.
Non-specific. No justification. Just an accusation. I know that's the way you guys do whatever it is you do here, but these baseless statements and claims are just stabs without an actual knife. Forgive me if I find them utterly meaningless and proceed to ignore them, like I have got Satyr to think he is doing to me.
Why would I be specific when you evade my or Satyr asking you specific questions? I asked you, what it meant when you said, "my experience has always existed." and then make claims you dont believe in any eternal objects... Ignore it again and continue to aurgasm as you always do.
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Lyssa wrote:
There is no present since becoming is all there is. Elementary?
So semantics again then. I've been clearly referring to the present as a dynamic flux. "Becoming" works just as well, sure.
I'm saying, because becoming is all there is, there can be no present technically speaking.
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The bulk of your post seems to be an argument against me calling a "becoming" "continuously present". Instead of using the word "becoming" to mean exactly the same thing, I've made the fatal mistake of using a different word and explaining that the present is dynamic and in flux, just like you're using the word "becoming".
Becoming is no presence, and I'm pointing out that calling it so is a language abstraction that makes a substance out of a process. Its like saying what is constant is change and then taking that as a constant literally. Do you get it, duf.?
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I know you need me to be your enemy because that's what I'm supposed to be apparently,
What would you rather be to me?
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but to reduce the grounds of that to a triviality seems kind of desperate. Are you so frustrated that you'll argue about nothing just because?
So anyone who wants to discriminate at the microlevel and split hairs and get to the bottom of the finer details is trivializing? Is that kind of shoddy labelling your escape route? How you shut down probing shows how desperate You cling to it. Any critique that is inconsistent with your aurgasmic view of yourself is immediately being villified as an enemy... What a highly emotional creature.
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The only real thing you (and Satyr) seem to hold against me is that you need the world to be fundamentally discrete, and I've just pointed out that logically it can't be (there can be no nothing to separate) and followed the logic.
Is that what you understood? We, or I dont "need" the world to be any which way; just stating what reality is. You are in error, for starters, to believe that something is "ever-present" literally. That is you introducing an abstraction and discreteness. Like I said, there is no "whole", no "singularity", no "unity" no "ever present substratum" to return to; "Life does not Have an imperative to attain; life Is the imperative. - to become/transcend more and more. It is the Dividing and self-differentiating; there is no-thing to divide 'It'." That living organisms create borders, thin films of consciousness is a logic inherent to life as it IS, its own evolutionary feature that moves towards greater and greater self-efficiency. The error among humans is when they begin to see themselves as separate from this very feature of life, the self as a being,,,, but every being is always only a being-in-becoming. The self is always an emerging.
The error as N. too pointed out, is when humans take consciousness as an Ends in itself, as the core of their unchanging identity, as a substance... when it is only a tool, a means for the quanta of organizing power we are. To become 'consistent' then is to tend towards max. self-organization, more refined discrimination, consciousness becoming subtler and sophisticated in the service of higher goals - not eliminating it, increased durations of effortless-effort and agile borders - "strong but supple".
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And I've not even ruled out the utility in being inconsistent and using discretes, like we are doing now in conversing with one another. Being inconsistent in certain ways can be great, it is not "repressive" at all. It allows life for one, which I am all for.
"Discretes allow life for one", but still is not the fundamental aspect of who we are? So life is not self-organizing? Tell me what life is.
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There seems to be this insistence that I'm anti-life, or dead, or suicidal, because I say borders, and therefore life, is fundamentally inconsistent. There is clearly no appreciation of my appreciation of valuable inconsistencies, what I'm saying to be "consistent" must mean I'm ruling out the inconsistent, right? Wrong. "To be rich in contradictions"... - to borrow from your borrowing from Nietzsche.
Your appreciation of it is quickly depreciated by your own devaluing of growth and exploitation as the fundamental feature of life.
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You've started from "life exists" as your basis,
No, You have.
Continuous experience is all there is, is your position.
For me, the life-sustaining life is rare, is an exception, is an 'accident', while chaos is the norm.
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and a discrete world follows due to the existence of death, from which life must be distinct. I've just thought it out a little more... I suppose the life/death distinction is black and white to at least the dimmer view to which Satyr is limited, regardless of the fact that they interact continuously, death is inside and all around life e.g. dead skin cells.
You are (con)fusing Apollonian aesthetics with the Dionysian world-view. There is no black/white absolute is something Satyr has been saying for over what... a decade now...
Satyr wrote:
"Life is an emerging unity, a towards Being, or if you will a towards the Absolute; a part of reality which has reached a level of sophistication where it has become aware of the world. In essence it is a part of the world becoming aware of itself.
Self-consciousness is a further sophistication of a living organism. It is a part of consciousness becoming aware of itself. So, self-consciousness is a part of consciousness which, in turn, is a part of reality turning in on itself. This is another way towards Being...or towards absolute order: God.
It does not matter what word you use to describe the absolute since its defining characteristic is its very absence. It is this absence that lends itself to any description and any projection; it is a tool which if taken literally becomes a religious icon or a comforting end.
Man's realization that it is this very absence which makes him possible or that gives his existence meaning and purpose is a part of the maturing process.
The self is also a metaphor for an absence. To know one's self is an ongoing process demanding more than just insight, demanding courage and the acceptance that this end of selfness is unattainable as it should be. Self is also a process; a dynamic activity. It is attainable in degree and then only ephemerally."
One might call it a Dionysian attitude, where the terror is mingled with mirth and sadness is accompanied by joy."
Nobody has denied that the self is not entropic in itself - how many times does one say its a continuous organizing towards-being. Becoming in the longer run is death to the individual unit from the individual point of view, while Becoming is growth, is life, from the view of the larger economy. And this is where aesthetics comes in. Apollonian Being says, "How much can you do without?" and Dionysian Becoming says, "How much can you take on?" and the best philosophy sees how the two are necessarily and fundamentally interrelated.
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We eat dead food, breathe dead air and drink dead water. They exist in a kind of symbiosis, with no absolute distinction between them, merging into one another continuously. Any apparent distinction dissolves the closer you look - look closely enough and you transcend it completely once everything becomes compounds and elements, atoms, sub-atomic particles and waves etc.
Yes, life feeds on life. No one spoke of any absolute distinctions here.
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The interpretation that you're referring to as life vs. death only exists within a certain range along the continuous scale of magnification. It's the one we're used to, and live our lives by so that's fair enough, but it's hardly fundamental - more circumstantial to our particular sensory abilities, which could easily be different.
No. And as I already pointed out in my very first post, its because your meaning of "looking closely" is different from my meaning.
For me, to "look closely" is to discern and discriminate sharper and sharper patterns. For you, to "look closely" is to intuit based on similarities - and this way, of course, everything is going to be the "same" silly. Everything can be reduced to the lowest common denominator.
But, life Is self-organizing and the more down the scale you go and "look closely" into the inorganic world, one sees forces repelling and arranging itself in certain patterns that are 'structure'-sustaining - one cannot call it a 'self' at this point. No doubt, these 'value-selfings' or 'value-structurings' are what We perceive. Yet, no doubt, our consciounsess is not separate from this very feature of life self-organizing towards greater efficiency. Nihilism is to deny this as reality, and 'inconsistency' is to abstract this emergence of consciousness as somehow separate from the character of life and making a discrete of it.
Whether life-sustaining-Life was an innate feature, a 'logical' necessity under unique and particular circumstances, separating out of Life at large - chaos,, is another matter, but we say at the most, life can only emerge in reaction to entropy, in resistance to entropy.
Anyone who thinks the fundamental feature of life in itself is not ordering or tending towards order and we are all fundamentally the same-nothing is a sheer nihilist. One who perceives the undifferentiated prima - the "soup" rather than the "fabric" - based on similarities than differences, is weak.
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You probably only read the beginning of that paragraph and a switch flipped "having divined me as someone who doesn't discern between life and death, and who is therefore dead/suicidal/anti-life because life necessitates the absolute refusal of death".
Its you who belongs in the barn with that much straw falling out of your mouth.
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I make a clear argument as to which you're not wrong, but you're also not right. You can stick to the dim view if you wish, and even refuse that it's dim. Just say these words and continue to force me into an identity that I demonstrably do not fit for the purposes of constructing a straw man to exercise your prejudices and frustrations, so I can confirm to myself that logic is wasted on you and I shall move on
I personalize nothing. I don't care whose philosophy this Experientialism is,,, I would say the same things.
Some tit-bits:
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Lyssa wrote:
To be is to 'withstand' notbeing. It both resists-and-copeswith notbeing.
There is no not-being. If you think you've identified it, it's being. Sorry.
It was Heidegger's quote, not mine. And he meant, because there is only ever becoming, every be...ing contains within itself the logic of becoming or notbeing too.
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Lyssa wrote:
And yet, errors/discrete 'truths' are what have preserved life.
Without these inconsistencies, you would be dead. 'Manufacturing of discreteness itself is a feature of life.
This is what I said, pay attention please.
How much truth can you endure, indeed.
This is what I mean.
If you keep focussing on the similarities, you miss the finer distinctions. Pay attention to the nuances.
You denied and still deny discreteness is a fundamental feature of life itself.
How much truth can you endure, in need, indeed.
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Lyssa wrote:
If omnipresent nature is not god, but chaos to you, do you realize, duf, you are saying, "Be consistent with the chaos that you are"?
It's not chaos, as distinct from order. It's neither of these things, potentially either but not yet. I am saying that this singular non-distinct substance of experience is where maximum consistency leads to. This end point isn't consistency itself, but the means there are.
Potentially either is another way of saying the primordial undifferentiated nothingness, before the "big bang". 1/0 are mutually re-inforcing mental constructs, where they each have meaning only in relation to the other, like Value-Ontotheism and Experientialism resp.
The fact that you just posited an "end-point" of where max. consistency leads to, makes your phil. all the more nihilistic.
Max. consistency would lead me to discern more and more, what I call the Turning-'point' - the edge as the middle. Borders are dynamic turning-points not where life and death collapse in non-differentiability, but where every entity asserts itself maximally. The edge of where one side of the page ends, is also where the other begins. In a book, the edge-is-also-the-middle. Such a 'junction' is not non-distinction, but max. distinction, max. "with-standing":
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"It is located in the very midst of these distinctions as the stuff from which these distinctions are made" - it is that determinative center which allows one to differentiate various poles, make valuations. It is the structure of an edge holding the two at their extremes where they cannot be reconciled. The Beyond is but a holding from the midst of them. the edge is simulatenously 'on'(in the midst) and 'over'(against which distinctions are made with respect to) the two faces. A right/dharmic measure not in the sense of a happy medium or a golden mean, in which everything is reduced to the balance of a placid equilibrium, but, rather, in the sense of a linking or a holding that maintains two things together at their extreme point: at the extreme point of their (in)commensurability, at the point where they can only just be perceived as two that are distinguised-yet-indistinguishable. ...This "not quite" is the minimal difference between two things, the exact measure or the shortest path between two things; the right measure is not to say that it is a kind of synthesis of the two, (or neutralization) or that the two find some kind of organic unity ; It is the name of the point where they nearly coincide." That point or juncture where the sharpest tension is felt between such extremes that cannot be reconciled, inevitably has the structure of preserving value." [Zupancic, The Shortest Shadow]
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You should ask and at least try to comprehend first before assuming who the "duf" is.
Been there, done that. How many chances do you give an evader?
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Lyssa wrote:
By all means, yes, interpret that as a 'come-on, show some', since you aurgasm so freely and the bearings are clearly missing.
You like a free and bearingless "aurgasm", do you?
Is that your way of conceding you have nothing else for me?
I suppose literally a fabric is just as much a network of strands as a web, but obviously I was speaking metaphorically, which draws more upon associations with a term than specific details about it. A web conjures up more of an emphasis on the individual strands, with spiders' webs for example having more space between the strands than strands themselves. A fabric, unless examined closely, seems like a smooth surface but with agile flexibility to allow fluid movement. The issue here is "which metaphor is best?" I can see this level of detail is important to you, but personally I am more concerned with what the metaphor denotes. As long as I can communicate that then I don't care how I do it. However, clearly I'm not sufficiently taking into account the potentially varied attitudes of my audience: if they are predisposed to seeing fault then they will attack such details. Since Experientialism is so obvious to me, I foolishly assume that people cannot fail to see what I mean regardless of detail.
In light of this, by all means criticise my wording, I am open to suggestions. I quite like your usage of the word "becoming" in lieu of "presence", of course I get what you mean when you associate presence with constancy. Likewise do I value your mention of the Heraclitan fire, so long as it is taken metaphorically to denote continuous experience.
I am quite content to have my work criticised, but there are different styles of criticism. An enemy will consistently try to wear down and beat you, and perhaps this is the greatest honour for the Dionysian - to thrive off of taking on as much as possible and still prevail. A friend can go too easy on you and accidentally end up dishonouring you by not pushing you hard enough. I would rather you, or someone at least, would be a worthy opponent who seeks to push me to the most constructive limit because I in turn do the same and that too is what my opponent would wish for themselves - rather than solely seeking to destroy me, exchanging attacks would amount to a merciless reciprocal pruning that leads to maximum mutual growth. In such a situation, either side thinks they can win, and the most satisfying victory is one that is optimally difficult. Unfortunately I have no say in the matter, you will be what you will be, but construction is my preference: perhaps this more Apollonian bent will clash too severely with your Dionysian preference. However I happen to quite like where this conversation has gone, the imaginative assumed associations have significantly subsided and I am tempted to believe that you have indeed considered what I have been saying as you claim. But maybe this is just a symptom of my low expectations of this forum. I have encountered a few of the residents here and each time I have been met with insulting simplicity in argument - good for the occasional fight, but ultimately fruitless. Perhaps you are different, but I still do not know who you are. Most of your arguments are borrowed from other thinkers, and sometimes you just seem like a subsidiary of Satyr whom I do not respect.
Congratulations to the guy for saying there is no black and white absolute for about 10 years, but it's actions and one's style that I am going to listen to as well. His copious yet ill-considered and solely belligerent presumptions about others are absolutely black and white, devoid of nuance and boring. Another thing about the best philosophies is that they communicate content consistently with their style and delivery. The content comes alive when delivered by a person who genuinely lives their philosophy.
Life is an interpretation, it is defined as separate from death, yet as we agree, the empirical distinction is not absolute - life and death are inseparably intermingled, weaving in and out of one another at all levels of magnification. The act of dividing the two requires a compromise of exact and true values in favour of practical and useful ones. Science is the process of making the latter more and more complex, whereas a logical examination of consistency in the context of one's experience simplifies. Again, what you said about the Dionysian and the Apollonian (respectively) applies here. I don't deny either, my beginnings are Apollonian to a point that cannot be surpassed by using the same values, and then it is Dionysian in its willingness to evaluate all possible interpretations from this point. One might begin such an interpretation of life as broadly as a dynamism and flux, a becoming arena of significant inconsistency, surrounding an area of relative consistency. Becoming more precise from there is an expression of value hierarchy, and it is the job of Experientialism to evaluate such interpretations in these terms. "Self-organising" is starting rather a few steps ahead.
My process is one of stepping backwards in order to begin a run-up. You seem to find the essence of Nihilism in stopping - yet without stopping in this analogy, one would be indefinitely stepping backwards. Finding a starting point is necessary for structure, and building is not Nihilism. Experientialism does not stop at continuous experience, it starts here. You cannot build from a soup, which is liquid and a kind of unstructured mess. Fabric is solid and can be sturdy as well as flexible. You need a material to build, mine is experience for simple logical reason that "there can be no nothing to separate". Nothing more or less. I have identified this simple logical truism as the essence of all philosophical paradoxes, and in solving it I breathe new life into philosophy.
Your "turning-point" page analogy is intriguing. Clearly both sides are the same page, the edge is the continuous transition between the "2", and it is our choice to treat the page as though it was two distinct sides discretely separated by an edge. "What separates the edge from the page?" iterates meaninglessly to infinity. But we can ignore that and this is the essence of creating a useful discrete interpretation out of fundamental continuity.
It's not as simple as "me seeing similarity and therefore getting similarity", though it is true that you concentrating on distinction leads to your discrete interpretation. I use logic and apply it to experience to end up with continuity - as in the above paragraph.
Some bitten-tits:
Lyssa wrote:
Why would I be specific when you evade my or Satyr asking you specific questions? I asked you, what it meant when you said, "my experience has always existed." and then make claims you dont believe in any eternal objects... Ignore it again and continue to aurgasm as you always do.
I thought I already addressed this:
Imbesil wrote:
One cannot even conceive of any nothingness to bound it spatially or temporarily, because conception is a form of experience and thus cannot be its bound, or anything "on the other side of the bound". "Eternity" and "omnipresence" take on a different meaning due to this logically necessary conclusion - by definition they don't extend beyond reality, they are reality and nothing more or less.
A quick skip of your posts and I don't see a response to it. Strange to call me the evader...
Eternal in the sense of existing independently of experience, I do not believe. Eternal in the sense that continuous experience has no temporal bounds, is evident.
If you think I've missed anything or not sufficiently answered your questions, don't assume I've evaded them - this is not my intention at all. It's possible I've missed them and it's possible you missed my answer.
Lyssa wrote:
The error as N. too pointed out, is when humans take consciousness as an Ends in itself, as the core of their unchanging identity, as a substance... when it is only a tool, a means for the quanta of organizing power we are. To become 'consistent' then is to tend towards max. self-organization, more refined discrimination, consciousness becoming subtler and sophisticated in the service of higher goals - not eliminating it, increased durations of effortless-effort and agile borders - "strong but supple".
If consciousness were only a tool, then by process of elimination, the resources that the tool manipulates and the end result of applying the tool do not fall into the realm of consciousness i.e. there is no consciousness of them, they are not of consciousness. Obviously false. However, if you are thinking of consciousness as a type of conception, abstracted from the contents of the conception, then perhaps your point makes sense to some degree. This is indeed an accepted way in which people use the term, but perhaps I need to clarify that I refer to consciousness in the concrete sense, the experience of "what you are conscious of" as well as the conscious awareness of your consciousness of experience. This is yet another reason for choosing the term "Experientialism", where experience is the fundamental substance, rather than calling it something to do with consciousness, which can carry other misleading connotations that detract from my intended meaning. Experience seems to transcend any subject/object connotations that consciousness commonly implies. "An experience" unifies any supposed subject and object (of which I've explained I deny the fundamental existence).
Lyssa wrote:
What a highly emotional creature.
I am "emotional" because I am a musician. I try to keep that to my music, however, and remove it from my philosophy - perhaps it spills across because one's own philosophy is a reflection of oneself. But I can also be coldly logical and at least the foundation of Experientialism is purely that.
Lyssa wrote:
Is that your way of conceding you have nothing else for me?
. This is a prerequisite for the experience of world consciousness. Put simply, this has to mean that where there is deep and urgent concern for basic human needs, for food and clothing and health care and education, there cannot be the requisite peace for the experience of world consciousness. Education, "civilization," even leisure, seem to Whitehead to be necessary’ before either individuals or society can operate upon sufficiently general (i.e., non-selfish) criteria to make world consciousness a possibility. However, as we have already seen, world consciousness in Whitehead is the basis of social ethics and in close affinity with what he would want to designate as the fundamental religious impulse, the maximization of value. In consequence, the improvement of the world, "building the kingdom," in the language of traditional Christian theology, or "praxis in solidarity with the oppressed," in the terms of political theology, has to be in the hands of those whom we cannot avoid calling "the bourgeoisie," if not the aristocracy.