What does it feel like to be Enlightened?

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Atla
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Re: What does it feel like to be Enlightened?

Post by Atla »

odysseus wrote: Sun Dec 06, 2020 4:16 pm
Or maybe you lack the third element: a huge amount of experience with unusual states of mind. That's why you don't see that you built a castle out of psychological illusions, one of them is the inherent God-experience of humans. The certainty with which you preach your beliefs...
Sorry Atla. I do seem to get under your skin. You are what you read, and if you stick exclusively with texts that have no respect for this kind of thing, you will inevitably come away from this with a cynical point of view. It cannot help you here accept to say, just look at your own influences. Skinner, a while back, wrote Beyond Freedom and Dignity, and while he wasn't talking about ideas and their influences, he did talk about conditioning, and ideas we are exposed to certainly determine how we think.

Try reading Lev Shestov. He is an early existentialist and quite accessible, his All Things Are Possible. If you really want to know beyond the simple (and banal) conceptual analyses of analytic philosophy, check out Kant.

Ever wonder how it is that the current political conservatism has become so stratospherically absurd? Typically conservatives, if they read at all, never read outside of their comfort zone, the very definition of a parochial mind.
Nah, you're simply just a wishful thinker with no backbone. Instead of dealing with your own issues you try to push them on others. No wonder you avoid psychology and science, maybe you should try reading some.

Or alternatively we can just accept what some people say, that phenomenology is okay but it's not philosophy.
Skepdick
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Re: What does it feel like to be Enlightened?

Post by Skepdick »

Atla wrote: Sun Dec 06, 2020 4:26 pm No wonder you avoid psychology and science, maybe you should try reading some.
At least you distinguish psychology from science.

There's still hope for you, I guess...
odysseus
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Re: What does it feel like to be Enlightened?

Post by odysseus »

Atla wrote
Nah, you're simply just a wishful thinker with no backbone. Instead of dealing with your own issues you try to push them on others. No wonder you avoid psychology and science, maybe you should try reading some.

Or alternatively we can just accept what some people say, that phenomenology is okay but it's not philosophy.
But there is the rub Atla: I have a degree in a "hard science" and I've read plenty in psychology. But I've also read existentialists like Sartre and Heidegger. Why not just take the time and read these. I know it takes time, but it is time well spent.

But don't play the sour grapes game.

Consider what analytic philosophy actually does. There is this wonderful paper by David Golumbia "Quine, Derrida and Question of Philosophy". Quine, a huge name in analytic philosophy (Two Dogmas, Radical Translation, and so on) was very much committed to the physical sciences and hated Derrida, the phenomenologist, but they both concluded the same things! Or Rorty, a great analytic philosopher, thought the three greatest 20th century philosophers to be Dewey, Heidegger and Wittgenstein. Read Rorty's Mirror of Nature or his Contingency, Irony and Solidarity, so you can see how this goes. Rorty's pragmatism is quite close to Heidegger.

The point is, one must read across the board. I am certainly NOT pushing anything on anyone. I just think most do not read enough about things they have such dramatic opinions about. You have something to say about phenomenology, then you have actually read some, I assume. If you haven't, the time is now. THEN you can tell me I'm full sh** and why.
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Dontaskme
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Re: What does it feel like to be Enlightened?

Post by Dontaskme »

Thanks to Immanuel Can

I've had a revelation, a rememberence of something I had temporally forgotten.

You do not have to be born into the flesh if you do not want to. That must be what free will is all about.

Being of the flesh means you are born into a world of duality, where you attain knowledge of yourself.

This knowledge comes in very useful when it comes to knowing what you want, in the sense that you can become knowlegable that you can indeed ENDURE what it is like to be born in the flesh. When you know you can endure it, that is when you choose to be born. And I think that realisation is known as being born again.

If you decide that's it's just not worth all the hassle then after you are born and then die you then stay dead for ever. I think that's what it means by the resurrection, in that only those who know they can endure will choose life while they are alive.

And to be fair, when you have the knowledge that you can endure, then that's when life becomes a miracle in every way shape and form.

That's when the fun really starts, when life in all it's shape and form is known as a miracle.

.
Atla
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Re: What does it feel like to be Enlightened?

Post by Atla »

odysseus wrote: Sun Dec 06, 2020 5:22 pm
Atla wrote
Nah, you're simply just a wishful thinker with no backbone. Instead of dealing with your own issues you try to push them on others. No wonder you avoid psychology and science, maybe you should try reading some.

Or alternatively we can just accept what some people say, that phenomenology is okay but it's not philosophy.
But there is the rub Atla: I have a degree in a "hard science" and I've read plenty in psychology. But I've also read existentialists like Sartre and Heidegger. Why not just take the time and read these. I know it takes time, but it is time well spent.

But don't play the sour grapes game.

Consider what analytic philosophy actually does. There is this wonderful paper by David Golumbia "Quine, Derrida and Question of Philosophy". Quine, a huge name in analytic philosophy (Two Dogmas, Radical Translation, and so on) was very much committed to the physical sciences and hated Derrida, the phenomenologist, but they both concluded the same things! Or Rorty, a great analytic philosopher, thought the three greatest 20th century philosophers to be Dewey, Heidegger and Wittgenstein. Read Rorty's Mirror of Nature or his Contingency, Irony and Solidarity, so you can see how this goes. Rorty's pragmatism is quite close to Heidegger.

The point is, one must read across the board. I am certainly NOT pushing anything on anyone. I just think most do not read enough about things they have such dramatic opinions about. You have something to say about phenomenology, then you have actually read some, I assume. If you haven't, the time is now. THEN you can tell me I'm full sh** and why.
And you still push it. What makes you so sure that it's time well spent? What if the other person already has an insight into the human mind that way exceeds yours? That's nowhere even near the really interesting questions of philosophy so why wouldn't it be a waste of time for me.
Besides what do I care about analytical philosophers, when the fundamentals of Western philosophy got largely refuted?

You know what never mind, when we did get to a few concrete examples, it kept turning out that you don't have a good grasp of what's actually going on, I guess I'll leave it at that.
odysseus
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Re: What does it feel like to be Enlightened?

Post by odysseus »

Atla wrote
And you still push it. What makes you so sure that it's time well spent? What if the other person already has an insight into the human mind that way exceeds yours? That's nowhere even near the really interesting questions of philosophy so why wouldn't it be a waste of time for me.
Besides what do I care about analytical philosophers, when the fundamentals of Western philosophy got largely refuted?

You know what never mind, when we did get to a few concrete examples, it kept turning out that you don't have a good grasp of what's actually going on, I guess I'll leave it at that.?
Hmmmm. Well, one last dot on the 'i' then:

"the fundamentals of Western philosophy got largely refuted?" But what does this mean? If you are saying that there are no conclusions then welcome to interesting thought everywhere. In the end when all philosophy is said and done, it will have, or should have, taken a person out of the confidence of knowing. This means very simply that the question all along was never about what can be achieved by theory and analysis. The "answer" to life the universe and everything is not an answer at all if answer is taken as the logical result of a discursive process, that is, an argument. The argument is a means to an end, not an end in itself. What philosophy does is, as Rorty, Derrida and others hold, lead us to its own end. One is struck by the impossibility of knowing, for at the foundation of all knowing is language and logic, and you can't know if you don't have a mind that has this, and logic and language cannot tell us what logic and language are, that is, get to the truth of what it is, and this is Wittgenstein and his Tractatus: To even conceive of the nature of logic, one has to employ logic! for that is what it is to conceive at all. So there are two sides to this: one is, logic is foundational for truth and one can never confirm this beyond the employment of logic; the other is, who cares? Because it is not logic and its discursive structures we have been looking for all along. Logic has always already been a search for meaning, and meaning rests with value. You see? To ask a question at all, even the most mundane, like what is a librarian? is a thing of parts: there is the motivation that seeks satisfaction in the basic structure of the question prior to it being a question about librarians or any particular thing. Remove the this meaning, and the entire question falls into mere abstraction, becomes empty and void of content.

This places the "truth" in the hands not of cognitive results, but meaning embedded in the subject's query. Philosophy, which wants to understand basic questions and assumptions, is realized as a wisdom for achieving meaning, not propositional completeness. Here, the matter of the line between religion and philosophy gets crossed, for this end is what religion is all about, as well. the line is blurred, for religion makes extravagant claims about God, but what it is really about is the the desire for higher meaning, greater understanding here is really about greater intimacy in matters of love, bliss and so on. Of course, we all know this. Why is heaven, well, heavenly? What is nirvana if not just this? The atman is the Brahman is nothing without the supreme consummation of happiness.

This is why I told don'taskme that there was promise in the thinking that puts language and its truth aside. Philosophy ends up here, inevitably. its purpose, if you ask me, and even if you don't, very personal, for we are persons before we are abstract philosophers, is to take us to the place where language runs out and we finally face the world as it is, dropping the pretentions of knowing. This is not an emptiness (notwithstanding the Buddhist methodological aporia) but a great unfolding.

But all this will not register on the mere telling. You have to do the reading. The reading is a process, a yoga.
Atla
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Re: What does it feel like to be Enlightened?

Post by Atla »

odysseus wrote: Sun Dec 06, 2020 8:35 pm
Atla wrote
And you still push it. What makes you so sure that it's time well spent? What if the other person already has an insight into the human mind that way exceeds yours? That's nowhere even near the really interesting questions of philosophy so why wouldn't it be a waste of time for me.
Besides what do I care about analytical philosophers, when the fundamentals of Western philosophy got largely refuted?

You know what never mind, when we did get to a few concrete examples, it kept turning out that you don't have a good grasp of what's actually going on, I guess I'll leave it at that.?
Hmmmm. Well, one last dot on the 'i' then:

"the fundamentals of Western philosophy got largely refuted?" But what does this mean? If you are saying that there are no conclusions then welcome to interesting thought everywhere. In the end when all philosophy is said and done, it will have, or should have, taken a person out of the confidence of knowing. This means very simply that the question all along was never about what can be achieved by theory and analysis. The "answer" to life the universe and everything is not an answer at all if answer is taken as the logical result of a discursive process, that is, an argument. The argument is a means to an end, not an end in itself. What philosophy does is, as Rorty, Derrida and others hold, lead us to its own end. One is struck by the impossibility of knowing, for at the foundation of all knowing is language and logic, and you can't know if you don't have a mind that has this, and logic and language cannot tell us what logic and language are, that is, get to the truth of what it is, and this is Wittgenstein and his Tractatus: To even conceive of the nature of logic, one has to employ logic! for that is what it is to conceive at all. So there are two sides to this: one is, logic is foundational for truth and one can never confirm this beyond the employment of logic; the other is, who cares? Because it is not logic and its discursive structures we have been looking for all along. Logic has always already been a search for meaning, and meaning rests with value. You see? To ask a question at all, even the most mundane, like what is a librarian? is a thing of parts: there is the motivation that seeks satisfaction in the basic structure of the question prior to it being a question about librarians or any particular thing. Remove the this meaning, and the entire question falls into mere abstraction, becomes empty and void of content.

This places the "truth" in the hands not of cognitive results, but meaning embedded in the subject's query. Philosophy, which wants to understand basic questions and assumptions, is realized as a wisdom for achieving meaning, not propositional completeness. Here, the matter of the line between religion and philosophy gets crossed, for this end is what religion is all about, as well. the line is blurred, for religion makes extravagant claims about God, but what it is really about is the the desire for higher meaning, greater understanding here is really about greater intimacy in matters of love, bliss and so on. Of course, we all know this. Why is heaven, well, heavenly? What is nirvana if not just this? The atman is the Brahman is nothing without the supreme consummation of happiness.

This is why I told don'taskme that there was promise in the thinking that puts language and its truth aside. Philosophy ends up here, inevitably. its purpose, if you ask me, and even if you don't, very personal, for we are persons before we are abstract philosophers, is to take us to the place where language runs out and we finally face the world as it is, dropping the pretentions of knowing. This is not an emptiness (notwithstanding the Buddhist methodological aporia) but a great unfolding.

But all this will not register on the mere telling. You have to do the reading. The reading is a process, a yoga.
Take the person out of the confidence of knowing, go to the place where language runs out and face the world as it is? Looks like basic stuff, didn't occur to me that it's worth mentioning. One covers such issues and then returns to the non-subjective main question: why (/how) are we here?
odysseus
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Re: What does it feel like to be Enlightened?

Post by odysseus »

Atla wrote
Take the person out of the confidence of knowing, go to the place where language runs out and face the world as it is? Looks like basic stuff, didn't occur to me that it's worth mentioning. One covers such issues and then returns to the non-subjective main question: why (/how) are we here?
Such a "why" question, it should be noted, is not a question of causality, as a question, say, about evolution would address, as in, we're here because our biological ancestors had genes that were conducive to reproduction and survival, etc. This why question is about meaning, and not dictionary meaning, but value meaning. I could ask, why is there something rather than nothing and find no more than a paradox: the questioning having the presumption of an answer, but there being no possible answer. No answer, that is, IF one asks the question looking for the usual answers. But then, the answer, the only one, that is satisfying does not look to symbolic logic or analysis of terms and their contexts.

The answer to your question and the question why is there something rather than nothing is the same, and it is, if you will, worn on the sleeve of existence itself (reading Heidegger and david Chalmers' "The Conscious Mind" and you find the admission that what we seek is what is closest at hand): What is there in the world that has intrinsic, stand alone, value? Something not contingent, but brings into the world meaning that resists analysis, is "given" and is in the fabric of existence itself. This is value qua value. Meaning, remove the incidental entanglements of our lives, the factual details of our problems and the solving of them, and distill experience down, as Kant did with logic, to its essence, and what is left is value, which manifests in the world as the various delicious and disgusting affairs, the joyful and the abhorrent and every concrete in your face actuality: these are lived in meaning. Life is a meaningful experience primaraly, not reductively, not emergently, but in actuality.

Value is your answer. The why are we here? question is a value question, for it looks to what meaning could be to being here beyond the mere contingency of proffered ideas. Value is absolute--value-in-Being is what we ARE. We are also rational, but as Hume, again, tells us, reason is an empty vessel. We are pragmatic, but this, as well as reason, begs the question: what good is this? The only thing that non contingently answers THAT question is value and meaning. We are here for higher value, meaning (Emanuel Levinas, Jean Paul Nancy, Henry Michel, ....Jesus, Buddha)
Atla
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Re: What does it feel like to be Enlightened?

Post by Atla »

odysseus wrote: Sun Dec 06, 2020 8:35 pm
Atla wrote
And you still push it. What makes you so sure that it's time well spent? What if the other person already has an insight into the human mind that way exceeds yours? That's nowhere even near the really interesting questions of philosophy so why wouldn't it be a waste of time for me.
Besides what do I care about analytical philosophers, when the fundamentals of Western philosophy got largely refuted?

You know what never mind, when we did get to a few concrete examples, it kept turning out that you don't have a good grasp of what's actually going on, I guess I'll leave it at that.?
Hmmmm. Well, one last dot on the 'i' then:

"the fundamentals of Western philosophy got largely refuted?" But what does this mean? If you are saying that there are no conclusions then welcome to interesting thought everywhere. In the end when all philosophy is said and done, it will have, or should have, taken a person out of the confidence of knowing. This means very simply that the question all along was never about what can be achieved by theory and analysis. The "answer" to life the universe and everything is not an answer at all if answer is taken as the logical result of a discursive process, that is, an argument. The argument is a means to an end, not an end in itself. What philosophy does is, as Rorty, Derrida and others hold, lead us to its own end. One is struck by the impossibility of knowing, for at the foundation of all knowing is language and logic, and you can't know if you don't have a mind that has this, and logic and language cannot tell us what logic and language are, that is, get to the truth of what it is, and this is Wittgenstein and his Tractatus: To even conceive of the nature of logic, one has to employ logic! for that is what it is to conceive at all. So there are two sides to this: one is, logic is foundational for truth and one can never confirm this beyond the employment of logic; the other is, who cares? Because it is not logic and its discursive structures we have been looking for all along. Logic has always already been a search for meaning, and meaning rests with value. You see? To ask a question at all, even the most mundane, like what is a librarian? is a thing of parts: there is the motivation that seeks satisfaction in the basic structure of the question prior to it being a question about librarians or any particular thing. Remove the this meaning, and the entire question falls into mere abstraction, becomes empty and void of content.

This places the "truth" in the hands not of cognitive results, but meaning embedded in the subject's query. Philosophy, which wants to understand basic questions and assumptions, is realized as a wisdom for achieving meaning, not propositional completeness. Here, the matter of the line between religion and philosophy gets crossed, for this end is what religion is all about, as well. the line is blurred, for religion makes extravagant claims about God, but what it is really about is the the desire for higher meaning, greater understanding here is really about greater intimacy in matters of love, bliss and so on. Of course, we all know this. Why is heaven, well, heavenly? What is nirvana if not just this? The atman is the Brahman is nothing without the supreme consummation of happiness.

This is why I told don'taskme that there was promise in the thinking that puts language and its truth aside. Philosophy ends up here, inevitably. its purpose, if you ask me, and even if you don't, very personal, for we are persons before we are abstract philosophers, is to take us to the place where language runs out and we finally face the world as it is, dropping the pretentions of knowing. This is not an emptiness (notwithstanding the Buddhist methodological aporia) but a great unfolding.

But all this will not register on the mere telling. You have to do the reading. The reading is a process, a yoga.
And yes the question, and any possible answer to the question, will be shaped in every way by the "logics", "meanings" etc. that are already inherent in us, in a sense we are forever running in circles. Human consciousness, human understanding is inherently circular, so in a way, "philosophy" is self-refuting and its own end, all human thinking is self-refuting and its own end.

One simply acknowledges such basic issues and moves beyond them anyway. For example as a nondualist, 100% of what I write is in metaphor, I've simply gotten good at mimicking the dualistic language of Western thought again.
Atla
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Re: What does it feel like to be Enlightened?

Post by Atla »

odysseus wrote: Sun Dec 06, 2020 9:54 pm
Atla wrote
Take the person out of the confidence of knowing, go to the place where language runs out and face the world as it is? Looks like basic stuff, didn't occur to me that it's worth mentioning. One covers such issues and then returns to the non-subjective main question: why (/how) are we here?
Such a "why" question, it should be noted, is not a question of causality, as a question, say, about evolution would address, as in, we're here because our biological ancestors had genes that were conducive to reproduction and survival, etc. This why question is about meaning, and not dictionary meaning, but value meaning. I could ask, why is there something rather than nothing and find no more than a paradox: the questioning having the presumption of an answer, but there being no possible answer. No answer, that is, IF one asks the question looking for the usual answers. But then, the answer, the only one, that is satisfying does not look to symbolic logic or analysis of terms and their contexts.

The answer to your question and the question why is there something rather than nothing is the same, and it is, if you will, worn on the sleeve of existence itself (reading Heidegger and david Chalmers' "The Conscious Mind" and you find the admission that what we seek is what is closest at hand): What is there in the world that has intrinsic, stand alone, value? Something not contingent, but brings into the world meaning that resists analysis, is "given" and is in the fabric of existence itself. This is value qua value. Meaning, remove the incidental entanglements of our lives, the factual details of our problems and the solving of them, and distill experience down, as Kant did with logic, to its essence, and what is left is value, which manifests in the world as the various delicious and disgusting affairs, the joyful and the abhorrent and every concrete in your face actuality: these are lived in meaning. Life is a meaningful experience primaraly, not reductively, not emergently, but in actuality.

Value is your answer. The why are we here? question is a value question, for it looks to what meaning could be to being here beyond the mere contingency of proffered ideas. Value is absolute--value-in-Being is what we ARE. We are also rational, but as Hume, again, tells us, reason is an empty vessel. We are pragmatic, but this, as well as reason, begs the question: what good is this? The only thing that non contingently answers THAT question is value and meaning. We are here for higher value, meaning (Emanuel Levinas, Jean Paul Nancy, Henry Michel, ....Jesus, Buddha)
The question isn't why is there something rather than nothing. That question is insoluble / it's just the way it is, that there is something.

The question is why are WE here. That probably has nothing to do with value, what kind of rubbish is that? 'Value' is just a human psychological phenomenon, entirely insignificant in the grand scheme.
odysseus
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Re: What does it feel like to be Enlightened?

Post by odysseus »

Atla wrote
The question is why are WE here. That probably has nothing to do with value, what kind of rubbish is that? 'Value' is just a human psychological phenomenon, entirely insignificant in the grand scheme.
The hard part is getting you to take serious things seriously. Put aside phenomenology, and look at things from a more familiar pov.

One has to look at the matter as it stands before you, and put aside assumptions that pull you away. Value is a human psychological phenomenon, but climb down to the next level, if you want to keep a physicist's terminology, and you have atoms, quarks and other subatomic events, and here, at the level of particle physics, science will tend to say you are at the resting place of meaningful explanations when it comes to talking in foundational terms about what things are. So when we talk of that small, unregarded blue planet, events are significant beyond the local. They are "what the universe (or, existence, being, reality; choose your poison) does" over there. Usually, we are concerned with the here's and there's of things because we have a practical purpose in mind, but the assumptions we have about their basic physics issue from a body of general views, that is, views that rest with inductive arguments grounded in observations we make of the world that are confirmed through our telescopes and microscopes and other data enhancing equipment.

What catches the attention of the empirical scientist is the anomaly, what breaks with working paradigms. thus, if we observe something in a galaxy far, far away in our, say, spectral analyses of star light, that indicates something novel at the level of basic assumptions is happening, we become very interested. After all, science is not made of what the world IS, it is made of assumptions about the way the world is. The "is" of the world is carried to us through our language and conceptualizations, and truth and reality is made of this. (It is irresistible to point out that this makes logic and language ground zero for observations, and what seems like insignificant blue planet events becomes the very center all all things. The "over there" and over here" are just our way of splitting up eternity into manageable parts.) The point I am making is that it is very easy to dismiss claims about the grand scheme of things rising above the insignificant affairs here on Earth. We ARE the grand scheme of things simply because our events are the "grand scheme's" events and whatever occurs here is just as telling as to the nature of the universe as anything else we might witness. If in the galaxy far, far away, we noticed a gravitational event and there was no explaining why things were moving as they were, all eyes would be there. And if, after exhaustive observation and theorizing, the event remained the unexplained, then: paradigm shift in basic science, a very big deal.

So, what has this to do with value? Value and meaning is the anomaly. Physics ignores this because it takes this as irrelevant to its paradigms. It is the assumption of science that one day, physics will be able to "explain" value and human experience as science's paradigms are endlessly expanding, but for now, it is silent, for it cannot make the emergent quality/physics connection, of, respectively, value (our ouches and yums, and horrors and blisses) and material.

The trouble this creates for our thinking is that we take science to be the be all andn end all, and since science is unable to speak here, it presents the tacit determination that value has no significant place in serious, hard science thinking. This is blatantly not the case. It is a deficit in science that creates a prejudicial regard that makes what stands before us in perfect clarity an obscure and unimportant affair. But the human drama is precisely the opposite of this.

Now, this argument is not to be trifled with, and summarily declaring it all rubbish will convince me I am talking to a person of very limited resources. It requires analysis. Take a serious look and tell me what you think of it parts, its logical moves, the claims it makes and so on.
Atla
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Re: What does it feel like to be Enlightened?

Post by Atla »

odysseus wrote: Mon Dec 07, 2020 4:26 pm The hard part is getting you to take serious things seriously. Put aside phenomenology, and look at things from a more familiar pov.

One has to look at the matter as it stands before you, and put aside assumptions that pull you away. Value is a human psychological phenomenon, but climb down to the next level, if you want to keep a physicist's terminology, and you have atoms, quarks and other subatomic events, and here, at the level of particle physics, science will tend to say you are at the resting place of meaningful explanations when it comes to talking in foundational terms about what things are. So when we talk of that small, unregarded blue planet, events are significant beyond the local. They are "what the universe (or, existence, being, reality; choose your poison) does" over there. Usually, we are concerned with the here's and there's of things because we have a practical purpose in mind, but the assumptions we have about their basic physics issue from a body of general views, that is, views that rest with inductive arguments grounded in observations we make of the world that are confirmed through our telescopes and microscopes and other data enhancing equipment.

What catches the attention of the empirical scientist is the anomaly, what breaks with working paradigms. thus, if we observe something in a galaxy far, far away in our, say, spectral analyses of star light, that indicates something novel at the level of basic assumptions is happening, we become very interested. After all, science is not made of what the world IS, it is made of assumptions about the way the world is. The "is" of the world is carried to us through our language and conceptualizations, and truth and reality is made of this. (It is irresistible to point out that this makes logic and language ground zero for observations, and what seems like insignificant blue planet events becomes the very center all all things. The "over there" and over here" are just our way of splitting up eternity into manageable parts.) The point I am making is that it is very easy to dismiss claims about the grand scheme of things rising above the insignificant affairs here on Earth. We ARE the grand scheme of things simply because our events are the "grand scheme's" events and whatever occurs here is just as telling as to the nature of the universe as anything else we might witness. If in the galaxy far, far away, we noticed a gravitational event and there was no explaining why things were moving as they were, all eyes would be there. And if, after exhaustive observation and theorizing, the event remained the unexplained, then: paradigm shift in basic science, a very big deal.

So, what has this to do with value? Value and meaning is the anomaly. Physics ignores this because it takes this as irrelevant to its paradigms. It is the assumption of science that one day, physics will be able to "explain" value and human experience as science's paradigms are endlessly expanding, but for now, it is silent, for it cannot make the emergent quality/physics connection, of, respectively, value (our ouches and yums, and horrors and blisses) and material.

The trouble this creates for our thinking is that we take science to be the be all andn end all, and since science is unable to speak here, it presents the tacit determination that value has no significant place in serious, hard science thinking. This is blatantly not the case. It is a deficit in science that creates a prejudicial regard that makes what stands before us in perfect clarity an obscure and unimportant affair. But the human drama is precisely the opposite of this.

Now, this argument is not to be trifled with, and summarily declaring it all rubbish will convince me I am talking to a person of very limited resources. It requires analysis. Take a serious look and tell me what you think of it parts, its logical moves, the claims it makes and so on.
All qualia are anomalous for materialism/philosophical physicalism (wouldn't say for science itself, only for science as it is done today), why single out value and meaning? Of course I'm not a materialist/philosophical physicalist, I think I said many times that I'm a nondualist (which is based in direct experience).

I'm really at a loss why you keep writing these long comments about the faults of 'hard science thinking', when I made it abundantly clear that I know that it's just a kind of description of/within direct experience, and not to be mistaken for some kind of fundamental ontology for P-zombiehood. Why not address my actual position?

But resolving such conflicts doesn't explain why we are here either, it may resolve the 'nature' of existence/consciousness in general, but it doesn't address why WE humans are right here right now, what's happening with us and our world. Value doesn't seem to have anything major to do with this. The topic of materialism/philosophical physicalism vs qualia / direct experience, and the topic of why we are here, basically aren't even related, at least I don't see how they are.
Atla
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Re: What does it feel like to be Enlightened?

Post by Atla »

odysseus wrote: Mon Dec 07, 2020 4:26 pm
Atla wrote
The question is why are WE here. That probably has nothing to do with value, what kind of rubbish is that? 'Value' is just a human psychological phenomenon, entirely insignificant in the grand scheme.
The hard part is getting you to take serious things seriously. Put aside phenomenology, and look at things from a more familiar pov.

One has to look at the matter as it stands before you, and put aside assumptions that pull you away. Value is a human psychological phenomenon, but climb down to the next level, if you want to keep a physicist's terminology, and you have atoms, quarks and other subatomic events, and here, at the level of particle physics, science will tend to say you are at the resting place of meaningful explanations when it comes to talking in foundational terms about what things are. So when we talk of that small, unregarded blue planet, events are significant beyond the local. They are "what the universe (or, existence, being, reality; choose your poison) does" over there. Usually, we are concerned with the here's and there's of things because we have a practical purpose in mind, but the assumptions we have about their basic physics issue from a body of general views, that is, views that rest with inductive arguments grounded in observations we make of the world that are confirmed through our telescopes and microscopes and other data enhancing equipment.

What catches the attention of the empirical scientist is the anomaly, what breaks with working paradigms. thus, if we observe something in a galaxy far, far away in our, say, spectral analyses of star light, that indicates something novel at the level of basic assumptions is happening, we become very interested. After all, science is not made of what the world IS, it is made of assumptions about the way the world is. The "is" of the world is carried to us through our language and conceptualizations, and truth and reality is made of this. (It is irresistible to point out that this makes logic and language ground zero for observations, and what seems like insignificant blue planet events becomes the very center all all things. The "over there" and over here" are just our way of splitting up eternity into manageable parts.) The point I am making is that it is very easy to dismiss claims about the grand scheme of things rising above the insignificant affairs here on Earth. We ARE the grand scheme of things simply because our events are the "grand scheme's" events and whatever occurs here is just as telling as to the nature of the universe as anything else we might witness. If in the galaxy far, far away, we noticed a gravitational event and there was no explaining why things were moving as they were, all eyes would be there. And if, after exhaustive observation and theorizing, the event remained the unexplained, then: paradigm shift in basic science, a very big deal.

So, what has this to do with value? Value and meaning is the anomaly. Physics ignores this because it takes this as irrelevant to its paradigms. It is the assumption of science that one day, physics will be able to "explain" value and human experience as science's paradigms are endlessly expanding, but for now, it is silent, for it cannot make the emergent quality/physics connection, of, respectively, value (our ouches and yums, and horrors and blisses) and material.

The trouble this creates for our thinking is that we take science to be the be all andn end all, and since science is unable to speak here, it presents the tacit determination that value has no significant place in serious, hard science thinking. This is blatantly not the case. It is a deficit in science that creates a prejudicial regard that makes what stands before us in perfect clarity an obscure and unimportant affair. But the human drama is precisely the opposite of this.

Now, this argument is not to be trifled with, and summarily declaring it all rubbish will convince me I am talking to a person of very limited resources. It requires analysis. Take a serious look and tell me what you think of it parts, its logical moves, the claims it makes and so on.
2nd reply - I've been thinking some more about this, but sorry I just don't see it. Meaning and value, among many other things, are necessary for us to even formulate an answer to 'why are we here'. They are necessary to even have formulations and questions and answers at all.

But saying that we are here because of value and meaning, is a bit like saying that to write an amazing novel where a mistery gets solved, you need pen and paper, so the solution to the mistery is pen and paper.
odysseus
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Re: What does it feel like to be Enlightened?

Post by odysseus »

Atla wrote
2nd reply - I've been thinking some more about this, but sorry I just don't see it. Meaning and value, among many other things, are necessary for us to even formulate an answer to 'why are we here'. They are necessary to even have formulations and questions and answers at all.

But saying that we are here because of value and meaning, is a bit like saying that to write an amazing novel where a mystery gets solved, you need pen and paper, so the solution to the mystery is pen and paper.
But value/meaning, this is not "thing".

To tell you the truth, at this point I cannot tell you why important things are important. you simply have to look closely at the matter itself. It is a metaethical issue: not how to determine what the right thing is to do, looking to utility, reason or deontology (duty), but to ask what "the Good' and "the bad" are that underlie ethical right and wrong. Look plainly at the material events that this is all about, the terrible suffering, the bliss of being in love and not think of these as emergent qualities, reducible to something else, but in themselves, as if your job is to, prior to advancing a theory, get a very clear description of what it is in the first place you are theorizing about. Geologists study rocks and minerals and look at the detail of crystal structures, biologists have their microscopes, I mean, this is the very first step, this intimacy with what it is you want to know about.

Does this mean putting a lighted match to your finger? Well, yes. But then, you've already done this, or something like this. We know pain. Awful stuff, and to think seriously about it we have to put the paradigms out of commission for these prepossess the observation and we want something pure. This is called phenomenology, and here it will be the phenomenology of pain/pleasure, suffering/delight. We ask, what is it in its pure presence, not the way thought wants to grab it and take over, the way it does in everyday life, where language glosses over things to get ideas across about something else. Language does disclose the world, but it also controls, manages experience to reduce it to trivialities like "have a nice day" and logical constructions like Demorgan's theorem and everything else we "say"!

To have this register as true is not up to me, but you. Everyone is different. Reading existentialism has, one might argue, its sole focus on elucidating this extraordinary, revelatory insight that in living our lives we are part of a system (pragmatic in nature. I follow Dewey, Rorty, James on this, as well as Heidegger. See his "ready to hand" concept of what Graham Harman calls "tool Being") that never questions itself. Too busy, we are, to ask those kinds of questions that speak to the primordial wonder of all things. This is what one has to do to ask about metaethics phenomenologically. It gets tough, weird, and profound. I read John Mackie (this analytic philosopher's Ethics: Inventing right and Wrong), Principia Ethica by Moore (a founding analytic philosopher), Wittgenstein's Tractatus and his very accessible Lecture on ethics, Husserl's Cartesian Meditations, adn so on. The argument in my head is a composite of these, but they opened doors of amazing insight. '

Of course, I am aware that the likelihood of you doing going out and spending the next five years or so reading things like this is slim. were I to sketch it out, it would, as has been the case on many occasion, be to no avail. You have to have a kind of burning curiosity to get answers to question like, why are we born to suffer and die? (my personal favorite)

Probably better to stick to posting.
Atla
Posts: 6670
Joined: Fri Dec 15, 2017 8:27 am

Re: What does it feel like to be Enlightened?

Post by Atla »

odysseus wrote: Fri Dec 11, 2020 4:22 am
Atla wrote
2nd reply - I've been thinking some more about this, but sorry I just don't see it. Meaning and value, among many other things, are necessary for us to even formulate an answer to 'why are we here'. They are necessary to even have formulations and questions and answers at all.

But saying that we are here because of value and meaning, is a bit like saying that to write an amazing novel where a mystery gets solved, you need pen and paper, so the solution to the mystery is pen and paper.
But value/meaning, this is not "thing".

To tell you the truth, at this point I cannot tell you why important things are important. you simply have to look closely at the matter itself. It is a metaethical issue: not how to determine what the right thing is to do, looking to utility, reason or deontology (duty), but to ask what "the Good' and "the bad" are that underlie ethical right and wrong. Look plainly at the material events that this is all about, the terrible suffering, the bliss of being in love and not think of these as emergent qualities, reducible to something else, but in themselves, as if your job is to, prior to advancing a theory, get a very clear description of what it is in the first place you are theorizing about. Geologists study rocks and minerals and look at the detail of crystal structures, biologists have their microscopes, I mean, this is the very first step, this intimacy with what it is you want to know about.

Does this mean putting a lighted match to your finger? Well, yes. But then, you've already done this, or something like this. We know pain. Awful stuff, and to think seriously about it we have to put the paradigms out of commission for these prepossess the observation and we want something pure. This is called phenomenology, and here it will be the phenomenology of pain/pleasure, suffering/delight. We ask, what is it in its pure presence, not the way thought wants to grab it and take over, the way it does in everyday life, where language glosses over things to get ideas across about something else. Language does disclose the world, but it also controls, manages experience to reduce it to trivialities like "have a nice day" and logical constructions like Demorgan's theorem and everything else we "say"!

To have this register as true is not up to me, but you. Everyone is different. Reading existentialism has, one might argue, its sole focus on elucidating this extraordinary, revelatory insight that in living our lives we are part of a system (pragmatic in nature. I follow Dewey, Rorty, James on this, as well as Heidegger. See his "ready to hand" concept of what Graham Harman calls "tool Being") that never questions itself. Too busy, we are, to ask those kinds of questions that speak to the primordial wonder of all things. This is what one has to do to ask about metaethics phenomenologically. It gets tough, weird, and profound. I read John Mackie (this analytic philosopher's Ethics: Inventing right and Wrong), Principia Ethica by Moore (a founding analytic philosopher), Wittgenstein's Tractatus and his very accessible Lecture on ethics, Husserl's Cartesian Meditations, adn so on. The argument in my head is a composite of these, but they opened doors of amazing insight. '

Of course, I am aware that the likelihood of you doing going out and spending the next five years or so reading things like this is slim. were I to sketch it out, it would, as has been the case on many occasion, be to no avail. You have to have a kind of burning curiosity to get answers to question like, why are we born to suffer and die? (my personal favorite)

Probably better to stick to posting.
I spent most of my life looking for answers, and think that you are misguided. You wanted a simple and dramatic answer, but ethics is also irrelevant in the grand scheme. There is nothing to explore there for me, except the psychology of annoying wishful thinking.

We aren't born to suffer and die. Yes there is birth, much suffering and death, those are all parts of the whole happening, but we are probably here for some wildly different, non-anthrophic reason. Yes whatever is going on here, we are caught up in it, the nature of our mind plays a central role in the happening, but still, the deep down reason is probably non-anthropic. It's easy to fall for the illusion of an anthropic reason, but you have to look deeper.
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