No Birth - No Death - No Death - No Birth.

Is the mind the same as the body? What is consciousness? Can machines have it?

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Dontaskme
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Re: No Birth - No Death - No Death - No Birth.

Post by Dontaskme »

Arising_uk wrote: Tue Apr 02, 2019 12:11 pm"you"? I'm surprised you don't faint from cognitive dissonance at times.
The ''you'' is the first person singular pronoun. ( I ) that is primary to any claim of knowledge, claimed knowledge is secondary (belief)
( I ) does not claim to be. IT IS..it does not depend on knowledge of itself to be itself, it's self-standing just by simple being.

There is no I because there is no other than I

The belief that cognitive dissonance is what a person is or can express, or be, or believe ..is a false belief built through the lens of a claimed perception, it's purely nothing more than imagined belief which has no substance or reality to it whatsoever...to believe in a belief as having substance or reality outside of the mind is the sickness that is the belief a human has a mind..there is no such entity as a human in reality except the conceptual belief. . . but then if there is no belief, there is no reality to be believed...which kind of points to there being no reality either...so nothing here to get hung up about.

Models of reality are not reality.

Reality doesn't have to make sense, or reality is not rational.

Reality is irrational.

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PeteJ
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Post by PeteJ »

This sort of disagreement reminds me how important it is that we study metaphysics. If we do then we discover that the OP's view is logically sound and demonstrably so, while opponents are bound to find metaphysics useless and confusing having rejected the only view that works.

This is all demonstrated by Nagarjuna. But to find this out we would have to be interested and not just concerned with pushing away ideas we don't like.

I see no reason to believe that Reality is not perfectly reasonable and rational.
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Post by Belinda »

Arising_uk wrote: Fri Mar 22, 2019 11:43 am
Dontaskme wrote: No thing has ever been seen ...things are Known, not seen..there is nothing behind or within an image...an image is an empty projection of the imageless..Known as concept in this inconceivable conception.
If you ever make it to London be very careful of stepping in front of those big red images with nothing behind them.
But there is no duality between a dead body and the bus that killed him. Both are really undifferentiated from the whole , except as thinking makes them differentiated. This is true of DAM if she exists full time in eternity.
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Arising_uk
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Re: No Birth - No Death - No Death - No Birth.

Post by Arising_uk »

Dontaskme wrote:The ''you'' is the first person singular pronoun. ( I ) that is primary to any claim of knowledge, claimed knowledge is secondary (belief) ( I ) does not claim to be. IT IS..it does not depend on knowledge of itself to be itself, it's self-standing just by simple being. ...
And in fact would have no 'I' unless there were others.
There is no I because there is no other than I
There is an 'I' because there are others other than I, if there were no others then no need for the 'I' to declare itself one.
The belief that cognitive dissonance is what a person is or can express, or be, or believe ..is a false belief built through the lens of a claimed perception, it's purely nothing more than imagined belief which has no substance or reality to it whatsoever...to believe in a belief as having substance or reality outside of the mind is the sickness that is the belief a human has a mind..there is no such entity as a human in reality except the conceptual belief. . . but then if there is no belief, there is no reality to be believed...which kind of points to there being no reality either...so nothing here to get hung up about. ...
Cognitive dissonance is the holding or expressing of mutually incompatible beliefs, given you claim there are no others nor even yourself or that 'we' are all 'oneself' but then use language that contradicts what you express is an example of cognitive dissonance.
Models of reality are not reality. ...
I know which is why I know that what you claim is not reality.
Reality doesn't have to make sense, or reality is not rational.

Reality is irrational.
.
If you are making this claim about 'Reality' in the sense of the Noumena or some 'True Reality' then you cannot make it as you have no idea whether it can be true or not.
PeteJ
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Re: No Birth - No Death - No Death - No Birth.

Post by PeteJ »

Arising_uk wrote: Wed Jun 19, 2019 12:37 pmIf you are making this claim about 'Reality' in the sense of the Noumena or some 'True Reality' then you cannot make it as you have no idea whether it can be true or not.
Just as you have no idea whether this statement of yours is true.

You can deny the claims of people who claim to know, but you cannot prove they don't know.

You're dismissing the entire Perennial philosophy in one sentence, and it wouldn't be perennial if it was this easy to dismiss.
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Post by Skepdick »

PeteJ wrote: Wed Jun 19, 2019 1:38 pm Just as you have no idea whether this statement of yours is true.

You can deny the claims of people who claim to know, but you cannot prove they don't know.
But in the same breath one could claim that they know all of their claims to be true, and then point out that you can't prove they don't know.

Which leaves you where exactly?
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Arising_uk
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Post by Arising_uk »

PeteJ wrote:Just as you have no idea whether this statement of yours is true.

You can deny the claims of people who claim to know, but you cannot prove they don't know.
Given I said with respect to the Noumenon then I think I can. Of course one could disagree with Kant's description of the relationship between phenomena, the noumena and reason and say that one knows things about the Noumenon or the 'One' if you like but then I think the onus is upon the one who makes that claim to provide evidence to back up such an assertion.
You're dismissing the entire Perennial philosophy in one sentence, and it wouldn't be perennial if it was this easy to dismiss.
Well if you mean the idea that 'God' is the 'One' and this is what all religions express then I think the fact that most religions disagree with the others about who holds the 'Absolute' truth makes it fairly easy to dismiss as just the meanderings of the fantasists, in that no-one actually has a sccoby-doo about what is the actual case with respect to causation and phenomena. Me, I think there are only two absolute truths, "I Am" and "there are phenomena" but I do hold a metaphysical belief that what I am is a Body with senses, memory and a language in an external world and an ontological and epistemological one that because I have the language that I do I can know that there is at least one other than me and hence there is also an external world.
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Re: No Birth - No Death - No Death - No Birth.

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Arising_uk wrote: Thu Jun 20, 2019 1:52 am
PeteJ wrote:Just as you have no idea whether this statement of yours is true.

You can deny the claims of people who claim to know, but you cannot prove they don't know.
Given I said with respect to the Noumenon then I think I can. Of course one could disagree with Kant's description of the relationship between phenomena, the noumena and reason and say that one knows things about the Noumenon or the 'One' if you like but then I think the onus is upon the one who makes that claim to provide evidence to back up such an assertion.
You're dismissing the entire Perennial philosophy in one sentence, and it wouldn't be perennial if it was this easy to dismiss.
Well if you mean the idea that 'God' is the 'One' and this is what all religions express then I think the fact that most religions disagree with the others about who holds the 'Absolute' truth makes it fairly easy to dismiss as just the meanderings of the fantasists, in that no-one actually has a sccoby-doo about what is the actual case with respect to causation and phenomena. Me, I think there are only two absolute truths, "I Am" and "there are phenomena" but I do hold a metaphysical belief that what I am is a Body with senses, memory and a language in an external world and an ontological and epistemological one that because I have the language that I do I can know that there is at least one other than me and hence there is also an external world.
There is no known 'Absolute truth' except what ''thought'' puts there via (mind) in this conception.

It takes a mind to know a mind.

Who or what knows the mind that knows? ... All that can be known about that notion is ''I don't know''

There is no ''Absolute truth'' to be known...There is 'Absolute not-knowing truth' ...A knowing that cannot be known..No claim, no blame.

Whether there is a claimer or a denial of a claimer of knowledge, both ideas are derived from the same not-knowing source. Which is ONE with itself. Even to say with itself implies two..and this is the absurism of metaphysical understanding ..the notion of Oneness.

But there is only ever the totality of ONENESS / WHOLE / UNITY ... there is no other whole. A whole is indivisible. That the whole appears as many aspects and parts of itself takes nothing from the whole. Who or what is going to divide a whole but the whole itself?

You are the whole ..you know it, but you cannot speak about it without creating separation, language divides...but in reality, the language is only the whole in communication with itself - it's the sound of it's own self-made echo.

Life is living itself all alone all one. No-thing is living and no-thing is dying. All that is happening is endless change within the infinite changeless. Finite appearances and disappearances, comings and going within itself the infinite source of itself. And that which is infinite cannot come and go, and yet that's exactly what it does apparently.

Reality is irrational. It's Non-dual.

.

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Post by surreptitious57 »

Reality is only irrational to us because we do not fully understand it and never shall
Though if we did we would realise there is actually nothing irrational about it at all
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surreptitious57 wrote: Thu Jun 20, 2019 8:55 am Reality is only irrational to us because we do not fully understand it and never shall
Though if we did we would realise there is actually nothing irrational about it at all

It's also irrational because we do apparently understand it rationally...also, it's irrational to understand it rationally because ultimately there is nothing to understand, we are the standing under what will always be beyond comprehension...the self evident truth is that life is functioning and working all by itself and so there is no requirement nor a demand for knowing beyond what cannot be known...but is the human mind ever satisfied with that?
What if sentient human awareness was all there is? ..could we handle that?

Meanwhile, everything else that is assumed to be known other than this immediate not-knowing knowing.. is just pure fantasy and imagination the mind makes up according to it's own unique model version of reality.

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Post by PeteJ »

What we have here is the central disagreement between Russell's 'Western' tradition of thinking and the 'mystical' philosophy he so despised.

For the former certain knowledge is impossible and any claim to knowldege of metaphysical truths must be denied as fraudulent. For the latter certain knowledge is 'knowledge by identity' and while this may be certain it is not transmissable. Even if one can say what what one knows the other person cannot know you know it.

So, the only way to test the knowledge claims of those who claim knowledge is to acquire the same knowledge. This is the reason why mysticism is all about acquiring ones own knowledge, not accepting it second-hand.

The claim that the universe is irrational is not found in mysticism, where it is explained rationally. This is not obvious, it must be admitted, but a study of metaphysics will reveal that Russell is correct such that if one rejects the metaphysics of the Perennial tradition then metaphysics and Reality become incomprehensible, and this is why Russell and his peers find them so and adopt a pessimistic view of philosophy.

The claim that Reality is irrational or that knowledge is impossible is the claim that the Perennial philosophy is false. It is odd, then, that it has the only metaphysical scheme that works. It is implausible that the mystics hit on this scheme by accident and much more plausible that it is derived from a knowledge of Reality. But there can be no proof of this.

What can be proved is that the the knowledge claims and metaphysical explanations offered by philosophers dismissed as 'mystical' by Russell and his scholastic tradition work in logic and solve philosophical problems. What cannot be proved is whether they actually know these claims and explanations are correct. This would be something we have to discover for ourselves.

The difficulty of this sort of discussion is that those who follow Russell and don't do their homework don't know what these claims and explanations are and tend to just dismiss them as not worth knowing. The consequence is usually an irritable but futile discussion.

It's a shame that out universities don't teach the whole of philosophy.
surreptitious57
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Post by surreptitious57 »

Dontaskme wrote:
It is also irrational because we do apparently understand it rationally...also it is irrational to understand it rationally because ultimately there is nothing to understand we are the standing under what will always be beyond comprehension...the self evident truth is that life is functioning and working all by itself and so there is no requirement nor a demand for knowing beyond what cannot be known...but is the human mind ever satisfied
The human mind will never be satisfied because it has an insatiable desire to seek knowledge
There is therefore a necessary requirement to satisfy this desire which cannot just be ignored
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Post by PeteJ »

surreptitious57 wrote: Thu Jun 20, 2019 5:25 pm
The human mind will never be satisfied because it has an insatiable desire to seek knowledge
There is therefore a necessary requirement to satisfy this desire which cannot just be ignored
Yes. But it's all fine if the goal is to transcend the mind and its speculative machinations for Knowledge and Truth. This is not how most people use their minds, however, so this insatiable desire' tends to produce brilliant science and rubbish philosophy.
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Re: No Birth - No Death - No Death - No Birth.

Post by RCSaunders »

PeteJ wrote: Thu Jun 20, 2019 1:12 pm It's a shame that out universities don't teach the whole of philosophy.
Unfortunately they do and since most of it is nonsense, or worse, what little truth can be found in the corpus of philosophy is swamped by what is patently absurd.

I would not say that reality is "rational."

My reason may seem picky but it's because all formal forms or reason (logic), mathematics, and language are human inventions for dealing with the metaphysical. The metaphysical (reality) cannot have attributes that only exist in human consciousness.

Logic, mathematics, and language are epistemological methods for identifying what exists and its nature, methods that work supremely (the physical sciences for example). We can certainly describe much of the metaphysical reality using language, such as French, Chinese, or English, but we certainly would not say reality is French or Chinese. We can certainly discover and identify many aspects of reality using reason (logic) but we should not, therefore, say reality is rational. We can certainly say reality can be known and understood by means of reason.
Last edited by RCSaunders on Fri Jun 21, 2019 3:18 am, edited 2 times in total.
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Post by RCSaunders »

PeteJ wrote: Thu Jun 20, 2019 1:12 pm It is odd, then, that it has the only metaphysical scheme that works. It is implausible that the mystics hit on this scheme by accident ...

... the knowledge claims and metaphysical explanations offered by philosophers dismissed as 'mystical' ... work in logic and solve philosophical problems.
Pete, could you explain what you mean by a, "metaphysical scheme that works," which you think mystics hit on, and exactly what the, "metaphysical explanations offered by philosophers dismissed as 'mystical' ...[that] work in logic and solve philosophical problems," are?

What I'm interested in is what, the "metaphysical explanations" and the "metaphysical scheme," you allude to actually are.

Thanks, Randy
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