Information does not exist as such

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Atla
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Re: Information does not exist as such

Post by Atla »

uwot wrote: Sat Mar 03, 2018 12:48 pm
Well, if there are exceptions, then "Western philosophy is all dualistic" is not true. QED.
Pathetic hairsplitting. You don't have the ability to process context, and you lose the main argument, so all you can do is point out something like this.
Depends on how much influence you attribute to empiricism, idealism, materialism, physicalism, pantheism, phenomenology, just off the top of my head.
You are lying again. I explained 2-3 times already in this thread to you why these views are all dualistic too (well except if we just use empiricism as a general principle etc. but that's no longer a philosophical stance).

And I also explained that you lack the ability to notice anyhing beyond the most surface level monism. Because you lack the education in philosophy, and you apparently also have no ability to learn.
I have, but by your own admission, you have not.
You are lying. I have, you stopped halfway. You lack the basic understanding about how deep dualistic thinking goes and what it entails. You fail to understand the difference to Eastern thought. You mix ignorance with confidance, even though I helped you 2-3 timaes already to see through it.
uwot
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Re: Information does not exist as such

Post by uwot »

Atla wrote: Sat Mar 03, 2018 1:10 pmI explained 2-3 times already in this thread to you why these views are all dualistic too (well except if we just use empiricism as a general principle etc. but that's no longer a philosophical stance).
Really?
Atla wrote: Sat Mar 03, 2018 9:24 amDamn right, even the ones I can't be bothered to research.
Atla
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Re: Information does not exist as such

Post by Atla »

uwot wrote: Sat Mar 03, 2018 2:52 pm
Atla wrote: Sat Mar 03, 2018 1:10 pmI explained 2-3 times already in this thread to you why these views are all dualistic too (well except if we just use empiricism as a general principle etc. but that's no longer a philosophical stance).
Really?
Atla wrote: Sat Mar 03, 2018 9:24 amDamn right, even the ones I can't be bothered to research.
Really. I've fleetingly looked at every major philosophy since Plato and they are all dualistic. Exceptions are rare and short-lived. And since Descartes this applies even more. Subjective idealism included. So why should I research a wrong philosophy more deeply.
And those who have compared Eastern to Western philosophy, and actually know what they are talking about, not just misinterpret the whole damn thing, usually arrive at the same conclusion about dualism.

Now maybe you should educate yourself before you start with all the condescending ad-hominems, every time.
uwot
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Re: Information does not exist as such

Post by uwot »

Atla wrote: Sat Mar 03, 2018 3:08 pm I've fleetingly looked at every major philosophy since Plato and they are all dualistic. Exceptions are rare and short-lived. And since Descartes this applies even more.
You could make a reasonable case that western philosophy since Descartes has been a series of refutations of Cartesianism. Could you explain what in your fleeting look at German Idealism, for instance, persuaded you that it is dualist?
Atla wrote: Sat Mar 03, 2018 3:08 pmSubjective idealism included. So why should I research a wrong philosophy more deeply.
I haven't mentioned subjective idealism. You are free to choose any philosophy that pleases you, but if you wish to persuade others of its superiority, you ought to have a working knowledge of the competition.
Atla wrote: Sat Mar 03, 2018 3:08 pmAnd those who have compared Eastern to Western philosophy, and actually know what they are talking about, not just misinterpret the whole damn thing, usually arrive at the same conclusion about dualism.
That could only be the ones who don't know much about eastern philosophy, which itself has dualist and non-dualist traditions; yin and yang, you might say.
Atla wrote: Sat Mar 03, 2018 3:08 pmNow maybe you should educate yourself before you start with all the condescending ad-hominems, every time.
I haven't used any ad-hominem arguments.
Troll
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Re: Information does not exist as such

Post by Troll »

“Ok admittedly I may be totally off on this one, I'm admittedly uninterested to look up this philosophy. So if I gather correctly, first we make the standard Western split-mind (that's inherent in all Western views), then we position ourselves into the mind-substance view, make that one universal.”

No. Seeing things is not at all Western. The notion of “nous” is Western, meaning, the specific focus on “all things”, that one can think of “all things” that exist, or “the whole”. In Greek, “ta panta” as over and, “logically” against, “hen” or “the One”. Seeing, what the eye does, is not something peculiar to Western thought. The notion of “logic” is also Western, Insofar as it means an extreme focus on “assertion”. I.e., on saying a thing is “available”, yes or no, true or false. And then, what are the rules of availability? I.e., first of all, “identity”, secondly “contradiction”. Rules of thought, so called.
“Ok so in this view if I gather correctly, we add this underlying theme that we see the Moon as sort of how it presents itself to us from this distance. But that can be mildly psychotic to me, because now it is sort of interacting with us, like it was some sort of entity, even if it's just a rock.”
Forget that. It’s literal, if you like. The point is that one sees a tiny moon. And then if we ask, what is the moon, what is it really, then? Well, It is a big place that we can walk around. So, what we see seems to be a symbol, if you like, that points to the “real thing”. I.e., what it would be like if we were there.

Now, I point out to you this. Is it not “psychotic” to speak of a “philisophic zombie”? Well, that is simply standard analytic philosophy. In life, we see people we know. We don’t see some thing, the thing sensed, and then ask, well, are they really a person, are they “conscious”? Is that a thing, and also a consciousness of the one I see. That requires a reflective act. It is metaphysics. So. Berkeley is denying metaphysics and sticking to ordinary “common sense”. Yet, he runs into a problem. What do we mean by the a thing? What we see at a distance, often deceptive, or the thing as it is when one is right there, in touching distance, so to say.

“And when I think that everything behaves the same way, now that's lonely. We are lost in a gloomy world of strange happenings, and everything is some kind of an entity, alive or dead it doesn't matter. And we are also a strange entity. The sense of separation becomes almost absolute.”
Everything is grasped as available for manipulation. As causal, and that means, one can find the cause, and seize it, and improve upon it. The point, however, is the “everything”, that is what is Western. The notion of phusis, of nature. It is the habit of the way things change. Determined against what changes. The “uniformity of nature”. It guides all our searching.
Atla
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Re: Information does not exist as such

Post by Atla »

Troll wrote: Tue Mar 06, 2018 1:50 amNo. Seeing things is not at all Western. The notion of “nous” is Western, meaning, the specific focus on “all things”, that one can think of “all things” that exist, or “the whole”. In Greek, “ta panta” as over and, “logically” against, “hen” or “the One”. Seeing, what the eye does, is not something peculiar to Western thought. The notion of “logic” is also Western, Insofar as it means an extreme focus on “assertion”. I.e., on saying a thing is “available”, yes or no, true or false. And then, what are the rules of availability? I.e., first of all, “identity”, secondly “contradiction”. Rules of thought, so called.
Seeing is always happening, but in dualistic thought there is kind of an entity doing the seeing, or it's happening to the entity, or the eye does it. In nondual thought it's basically just happening without an entity, it's an unseparable part of the universal process. But the eye of course still plays an important part in seeing, and the intellect plays an important part in interpreting.

About logic, well I use the Western binary logic. The Eastern pluralistic "logic" I find pretty much useless for anything and nonsensical.
Forget that. It’s literal, if you like. The point is that one sees a tiny moon. And then if we ask, what is the moon, what is it really, then? Well, It is a big place that we can walk around. So, what we see seems to be a symbol, if you like, that points to the “real thing”. I.e., what it would be like if we were there.
How do you know it's a big place and how do you know you can walk around there, without scientific investigation? You don't, you just see a tiny Moon. It's a little white something on the sky, that's all.
And as you get close, how and why does the symbol turn into the real thing? There seems to be a breaking point..

What point is there in investing into this way of thinking in the first place, when science has mostly already solved these questions?
Now, I point out to you this. Is it not “psychotic” to speak of a “philisophic zombie”? Well, that is simply standard analytic philosophy. In life, we see people we know. We don’t see some thing, the thing sensed, and then ask, well, are they really a person, are they “conscious”? Is that a thing, and also a consciousness of the one I see. That requires a reflective act. It is metaphysics. So. Berkeley is denying metaphysics and sticking to ordinary “common sense”. Yet, he runs into a problem. What do we mean by the a thing? What we see at a distance, often deceptive, or the thing as it is when one is right there, in touching distance, so to say.
It still is psychotic, just maybe to a lesser degree. "Philosophical zombie" is based on the Western split mind: something is either conscious or not. Where "consciousness" is usually a catch-all word for several different things, randomly mixed together.
In nondual thought I would say that a "philosophical zombie" is more like a human that lacks self-awareness, but all the other aspects of consciousness are still there.

Ordinary Western common sense is wrong. We don't have the common sense that the individual self is illusory and continuous with everything else, and therefore we are one and the same with the absolute, the ground of all being. We are reality, we are it.

A thing, well.. you see there is a second, even deeper problem with things too. In dualistic thinking we "thing"-ify in the first place. We take a part of the universe, separate it from the rest of the universe, and call it a thing, like the Moon, and then it behaves like a unit. But there was no such actual separation found anywhere.
Everything is grasped as available for manipulation. As causal, and that means, one can find the cause, and seize it, and improve upon it. The point, however, is the “everything”, that is what is Western. The notion of phusis, of nature. It is the habit of the way things change. Determined against what changes. The “uniformity of nature”. It guides all our searching.
I don't think there is any disagreement on this one.
I just meant that where everything is an interacting symbol or entity, the sense of entity-ness and therefore the sense of separation is hard-wired even more than usual. Maybe I misunderstand it, but the way I imagine it it chills me to the bone, which is funny, I don't remember any philosophy doing that to me.
Troll
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Re: Information does not exist as such

Post by Troll »

I must bequeath to you this long speach, but the most important thing would be to show the first step in saying what science is, prior to going on about all sorts of bizarre metaphysics which stem from the neglect of that first step.
“Seeing is always happening, but in dualistic thought there is kind of an entity doing the seeing, or it's happening to the entity, or the eye does it. In nondual thought it's basically just happening without an entity, it's an unseparable part of the universal process. But the eye of course still plays an important part in seeing, and the intellect plays an important part in interpreting.

About logic, well I use the Western binary logic. The Eastern pluralistic "logic" I find pretty much useless for anything and nonsensical.”
This sounds entirely verbal to me, it’s like lawyer talk, wholly empty of content. To say something is happening without an “entity” implies that someone understands themselves as an “entity”, myself, and then make a speculative leap into cloudcuckooland, a hypothesis, and say, but “really…”. It is baby talk. Socrates, as presented in Plato’s work, never discusses anything like it. The things they say are much more simple. For instance, I see a picture of Yukio Mishima, and, unlike someone who doesn’t know what he looks like, I say at once, that is the surpassing dramatist and novelist, Mishima. The inference is that the person who knows, is different from the one who doesn’t know. And then the question, why?, is answered by the notion of knowledge. It’s hard to see, in almost everything Plato and Aristotle say, how one can say they are simply wrong. They describe things, and the notions follow by “force”, as it were.

What does “binary logic” mean? No such notion exists in the Western tradition. You are speaking of pure maths, i.e., rules made in imagination. It does not involve reason in any way, it is imagination or picturing the relations of symbols. There is such a thing as a rule of thought forbidding contradiction, but it is not artificial, it simply is a name for saying something false. Someone says that the Greeks lived on the Mediterranean, and some moments latter they say, the Greeks, they who live in the Americas. If one keeps shifting one does sophistry, rather than dialectic. There is no Eastern “logic” at all if one speaks appropriately. Logic is part of the word logos, meaning speach. Logic is the art of speaking or, what is the same, reasoning. The whole thing revolves in a system of thinking that now permeates the whole world. The reason is that what logic is is connected to the interpretation of things as available or present, so that it refers only to assertions as what corresponds to a thing already there or given, and known in the sense given above.

“What point is there in investing into this way of thinking in the first place, when science has mostly already solved these questions?”
It’s as though you were hypnotized. The question isn’t even asked, one would have to overcome the resistance to asking the question first. You didn’t answer at all, what is the object? And stop saying “science” as though it meant something. It’s especially absurd given the metaphysical vapidities you have produced and claimed to be subscribed to. In the tradition, going somewhere, seeing it directly, was called empirical, i.e., gathering the rough experiences of things. Yet, we don’t know what these “things” are. How does one first generate a notion of the sensorium? Exactly. Say it in normal terms, not metaphysical or “scientific”. I mean at the level in which I gave the example about what knowing is.

“It still is psychotic,”
If you are this squeamish and fastidious you should not do philosophy or science. It’s silly and very religious, i.e., it attacks non-conformity. One needs to be open to reflection in philosophy. Get your head out of the amniotic fluid. It’s important to recognize that thinking about something, and understanding it, is not to subscribe to it. If one fears being brainwashed one will never be able to see what avenues others have followed, and so will not learn.

“ individual self is illusory”
That’s wholly vacant metaphysics. One experiences oneself, and then abstracting from that starting point into speculative notions one claims not to believe in it. Baby talk. You are still the one who denies yourself. It’s very Freudian. Freud says the masochist whips himself, and so remains the master. Your religion is one of whipping yourself. The weeping, or, if you like, joyfulness, or, if you like, nihilism, of the one who makes claims about what "really" is. And thereby neglects investigation of what is!


Now, I tell you, as long as one plays such games one doesn't do philosophy. Dreck and drivel.
“But there was no such actual separation found anywhere.”
I find it everywhere, as do you and everyone else. What you are saying is that in reflection we can posit that (i.e., as a metaphysics of 'mechanics'). True enough, and yet, how is it to be thought? Obviously any being that didn’t make such distinctions would die at once. But, worse than that, as Kant pointed out, if we do not consider causality, nothing will be intelligible at all. Supposing we had no intelligibility, and made no distinctions, yet, do we not then think of a common sense without any content, alongside this one, where there are many things, and much intelligibility? what would then be the principle of preferring, as more real, the lack of content or intelligibility? It becomes a moral dictate.


Your thinking is very confused. You praise “science” without asking where does one first raise the conception? It's not like a stone in the path. Form common sense? And then at once, and at the same time, you slip into a moralistic metaphysics which insists on a certain interpretation of the lack of “actual separation found”.

So, first, ask, what do you mean by science? Whatever a public opinion poll would say? How does one ask the question, what’s the first step? how is it asked, and why? It can only be asked because it is already in our common sense, in our average daily talk. And there it means, to everyone, vaguely, what is done in the universities under such names as biology and chemistry. Some answer like that needs to lead us towards some distinctions and determinations. Yet, in arriving at our meaning we act on our judgment, which is part of the current common sense. Thus, some person, ad hominem, must hold up a statement of what science is, and subscribe to it. That is the old meaning of dialogical science, fetting statements which someone grants. If no one is there, ad hominem, there is no arguing against the statement. One can not argue with one who does not affirm the statement.


You see, “science” must stand as an “actual separation found”, else, what are you speaking of? Aristotle, for instance, understood science as arts that require a logos, and not only mimicking. I mean, one might learn shirt making without any speaking about it, or hypothesising. But, theology, by contrast, is a science only because it requires reasoning, i.e., logos.
Atla
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Re: Information does not exist as such

Post by Atla »

Troll wrote: Thu Mar 08, 2018 10:09 pmI must bequeath to you this long speach, but the most important thing would be to show the first step in saying what science is, prior to going on about all sorts of bizarre metaphysics which stem from the neglect of that first step.
The scientific method. In my opinion, how we interpret the findings of the scientific method, is the question. What you said about how we see the Moon, seems to contradict any interpretation I can think o, so we may just as well agree to disagree here.
This sounds entirely verbal to me, it’s like lawyer talk, wholly empty of content. To say something is happening without an “entity” implies that someone understands themselves as an “entity”, myself, and then make a speculative leap into cloudcuckooland, a hypothesis, and say, but “really…”. It is baby talk. Socrates, as presented in Plato’s work, never discusses anything like it. The things they say are much more simple. For instance, I see a picture of Yukio Mishima, and, unlike someone who doesn’t know what he looks like, I say at once, that is the surpassing dramatist and novelist, Mishima. The inference is that the person who knows, is different from the one who doesn’t know. And then the question, why?, is answered by the notion of knowledge. It’s hard to see, in almost everything Plato and Aristotle say, how one can say they are simply wrong. They describe things, and the notions follow by “force”, as it were.
It's absolutely not verbal. I mean that, technically speaking, there is no "I" as some kind of separate entity, some kind of center of action, that does things, that has things, that sees things. Or at least there is no sign that it would exist.
Instead, the "I" is made of a bunch of thoughts, feelings, sensations, self-awareness etc. it's probably circular etc. but it is a part of and continuous with the rest of the universe.
What does “binary logic” mean? No such notion exists in the Western tradition. You are speaking of pure maths, i.e., rules made in imagination. It does not involve reason in any way, it is imagination or picturing the relations of symbols. There is such a thing as a rule of thought forbidding contradiction, but it is not artificial, it simply is a name for saying something false. Someone says that the Greeks lived on the Mediterranean, and some moments latter they say, the Greeks, they who live in the Americas. If one keeps shifting one does sophistry, rather than dialectic. There is no Eastern “logic” at all if one speaks appropriately. Logic is part of the word logos, meaning speach. Logic is the art of speaking or, what is the same, reasoning. The whole thing revolves in a system of thinking that now permeates the whole world. The reason is that what logic is is connected to the interpretation of things as available or present, so that it refers only to assertions as what corresponds to a thing already there or given, and known in the sense given above.
Boolean logic / two-valued logic / yes-or-no logic logic.
Many-valued logic is pretty much unusable for reasoning in my opinion.
It’s as though you were hypnotized. The question isn’t even asked, one would have to overcome the resistance to asking the question first. You didn’t answer at all, what is the object? And stop saying “science” as though it meant something. It’s especially absurd given the metaphysical vapidities you have produced and claimed to be subscribed to. In the tradition, going somewhere, seeing it directly, was called empirical, i.e., gathering the rough experiences of things. Yet, we don’t know what these “things” are. How does one first generate a notion of the sensorium? Exactly. Say it in normal terms, not metaphysical or “scientific”. I mean at the level in which I gave the example about what knowing is.
I don't think I'm the one who sounds hypnotized here..
I see no reason to assume that the Moon as the thing-in-itself "out there" and the image of the Moon "in your head" are of different nature, or that only one of them exists. It was found that they are made of exactly the same stuff. Therefore experience is fundamental (and is the same thing as stuff).
If you are this squeamish and fastidious you should not do philosophy or science. It’s silly and very religious, i.e., it attacks non-conformity. One needs to be open to reflection in philosophy. Get your head out of the amniotic fluid. It’s important to recognize that thinking about something, and understanding it, is not to subscribe to it. If one fears being brainwashed one will never be able to see what avenues others have followed, and so will not learn.
But from my perspective it IS mildly psychotic. And I was part of the Western split-mind culture for 25+ years too (without realizing that I was part of it) so I think I have a basis for comparison.
That’s wholly vacant metaphysics. One experiences oneself, and then abstracting from that starting point into speculative notions one claims not to believe in it. Baby talk. You are still the one who denies yourself. It’s very Freudian. Freud says the masochist whips himself, and so remains the master. Your religion is one of whipping yourself. The weeping, or, if you like, joyfulness, or, if you like, nihilism, of the one who makes claims about what "really" is. And thereby neglects investigation of what is!


Now, I tell you, as long as one plays such games one doesn't do philosophy. Dreck and drivel.
It's not vacant metaphysics, it's a fact. Why struggle, you might just as well accept it.
You do experience yourself in a sense, as I said before, you are self-aware, you are made of circular thoughts etc. But your separation from the rest of the unvierse is illusory.
Which is why nothing "extra" was ever found in the human head. Just more of the same atoms that everything else is made of.
I find it everywhere, as do you and everyone else. What you are saying is that in reflection we can posit that (i.e., as a metaphysics of 'mechanics'). True enough, and yet, how is it to be thought? Obviously any being that didn’t make such distinctions would die at once. But, worse than that, as Kant pointed out, if we do not consider causality, nothing will be intelligible at all. Supposing we had no intelligibility, and made no distinctions, yet, do we not then think of a common sense without any content, alongside this one, where there are many things, and much intelligibility? what would then be the principle of preferring, as more real, the lack of content or intelligibility? It becomes a moral dictate.
Nonsense. YOU find it everywhere, most people do. Some people don't. How about you stop telling others what they think?
And you are again major misunderstanding something here. Just because there are no inherent separations, divisions in reality, that doesn't mean that we shouldn't live our everyday lives based on agreed upon separations, divisons. That's useful, necessary.
There are at least two levels here you know, "underlying" nondualism and everyday dualism, of course we should't mix the two.
Your thinking is very confused. You praise “science” without asking where does one first raise the conception? It's not like a stone in the path. Form common sense? And then at once, and at the same time, you slip into a moralistic metaphysics which insists on a certain interpretation of the lack of “actual separation found”.
Actually my thinking is dead simple and very clear. And it resulted from re-unifying science and philosophy. And to my surprise Advaita Vedanta, Mahayana Buddhism and Taoism are also based on nondualism so it's not like it was something that I personally invented.

Now if Western philosophy is refuted, then you kinda wasted your education, and that's extremely unfair and unlucky.
So, first, ask, what do you mean by science? Whatever a public opinion poll would say? How does one ask the question, what’s the first step? how is it asked, and why? It can only be asked because it is already in our common sense, in our average daily talk. And there it means, to everyone, vaguely, what is done in the universities under such names as biology and chemistry. Some answer like that needs to lead us towards some distinctions and determinations. Yet, in arriving at our meaning we act on our judgment, which is part of the current common sense. Thus, some person, ad hominem, must hold up a statement of what science is, and subscribe to it. That is the old meaning of dialogical science, fetting statements which someone grants. If no one is there, ad hominem, there is no arguing against the statement. One can not argue with one who does not affirm the statement.
The scientific method. Did you know that nondualism is 100% compatible with all of science, plus here everything fits together into one coherent, logical picture?
You see, “science” must stand as an “actual separation found”, else, what are you speaking of? Aristotle, for instance, understood science as arts that require a logos, and not only mimicking. I mean, one might learn shirt making without any speaking about it, or hypothesising. But, theology, by contrast, is a science only because it requires reasoning, i.e., logos.
Theology is not a science and Aristotle is slightly outdated. Why must I conform to how ancient Greeks viewed the world? Since when is that the standard terminology?
Science mustn't stand as an "actual separation found", what the hell does that even mean?
Atla
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Re: Information does not exist as such

Post by Atla »

Atla wrote: Fri Mar 09, 2018 8:59 am Now if Western philosophy is refuted, then you kinda wasted your education, and that's extremely unfair and unlucky.
Hmm or maybe the opposite is true, maybe Western philosophy stands before an inevitable revolution that will be bigger than anyone could expect.

And so philosophy may soon again have a huge project at hand, something major to do: to reconcile the underlying nondual with the everyday dual. And marry Eastern nondualism to Western individualism in a satisfying way. Failing to do that leads to insanity, and we can see a few examples of that on this forum.
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