Philosophy and the Art of Reason: Let us enter the high country of the mind

So essentially you mean more by the term philosophy than the love of wisdom?, or is it existentially?

 

I don't know...

But I will tell you this---essentially I am an essentialist but existentially I am limited by existentialism, though no matter how existentialist I must be, I am not an existentialist. In conclusion I must temper my essentialism with existentialism.

Let me clarify, essentially I am not an existentialist, but rather an essentialist no matter how existentialist I am.

Would you believe an existential essentialist?

 

Jacques Maritain, but he was more an essentialist existentialist. The essence of Nature is the very existing to one's perception. No lack.

 

I don't think it essential that anyone exist although we exist in all essence.

I think there is a difference between existing and appearing, between knowledge and sensational perception.
Perception is an interrogative as we come to this world seeking.
Perception is not knowledge but can lead to it. Looking for food and finding food are related but are not the same. To find food is the translation from the potential to good to emanating health, from crying, grasping, to being fed, from dim awareness to brilliant clarity.

We refine our search, learn till will come close enough to what is so, within a certain gravitational horizon like that of a black hole, that we are sucked in or god/good takes the last step in the translation of perception into knowledge. And all of this abides in a ray of creation.

We are both tasting and knowing.

 

This is too complex. Can we get back to something like "what is motivation"?

 

motivation is psychotic

 

So what is your motivation for the statement too complex? Do you mean get back to what you want? Is what you want to participate in a meaningful way
in entering the high country of the mind, or is it to bring it down? We reach on up to become light then through gamma out of sight.

 

i don't trust motivational speakers .

 

Calgirl---let me see if I can pull you up here----as thedope and I have talked about this before.

What is reality? Is it the physical world that exists around us, or is it the world that is created in our heads. The physical and the mental (or the physical and the spiritual) were largely seen as connected into a whole. To some people (such as animists) everything was alive---so this connection between physical and spiritual was seen as life itself. To others there was spirit and forms that made up the spiritual side. Spirit or soul gave life to living things, but God (for example) also created the ideal forms which gives shape to the physical.

Descartes came along and decided that we needed to know what was truly real, and in order to do that he decided to deny all existence until he came to the one conclusion that he could not deny----I think therefore I am. He then used that first principle to go back and reprove that everything else exists---but this First Principle very effectively separated mind from body. The mind or ego is the subjective side of reality, and the body or the physical is the objective side of reality.

Time goes by and the academic world becomes increasingly objectivistic---cold-hearted (thanks to Descartes)-----and eventually Locke comes along speaking out in favor of materialism---that there is only a physical universe. This does not sit well with Berkeley who then wrote his thesis that esse est percepi (existence is perception). This could be taken in several ways, including that all we can understand to be true is what we perceive. But Berkeley took it to its literal meaning---that nothing physical truly exists---that there is no matter---only mind and that all of reality is simply a perception of the mind. This did not sit well with Hume who came out and demonstrated that we cannot prove mind to exist, and therefore it does not exist. This put philosophy, and therefore science, in a crisis with no where to turn. Science and philosophy were two sides of the same coin, and empirical evidence, theories and laws and principles were all seen as trying to understand the universe God had created, which would be an understanding of the absolute good---God. This crisis questioned god, matter, mind, and left no answer to anything. A joke of the time went, 'No matter, never mind.

It was at this point that Kant came along and saw that Locke, Berkeley, Hume, and also Rousseau, had all made points that needed to be tied together. In the process he brought Descartes split of the mind and body to its logical conclusion by separating the physical (science, mechanics) from that of the mind (philosophy, religion, metaphysics).

But more importantly he said that the physical world is a chaos of unorganized stimulus--color, noise, textures, hardness, scent----perception organizes the stimulus, conception organizes the perception---in this way thought is created. For Kant, reality is manufactured by the mind. This means that we could never truly know what a thing is---the thing in itself. We can only know what we perceive it to be. He said we could contemplate and understand or conceive of true reality, but we could never experience it.

Does physical reality actually exist? Quantum physics and such theories as that of the holographic universe seem to suggest that there is a lot more to Kant than we think----in fact, there might even be more to berkeley than we think.

Husserl and Brentano said that a thought must always be of a thing, which is to say that a thought must include a perception. Sartre pointed out that there must also be a perception, awareness, or understanding that one is thinking of something. If you do not know you are thinking of something than you must be unconscious and thinking without awareness. This awareness is not thought out---you don't think I am thinking about thinking of something, you simple know that you are thinking of something.

Does that get your brain juices flowing on any of this subject?

 

Well mea culpa:

I find some of the meditations of Allan Watts on the self as all reality really interesting a lot. That is he believes in Buddhism the self can be the self-organizing principle of the universe. woo...hooo..


http://www.alanwattspodcast.com/

 

Now that we have the remedial academic progressions perhaps now the idyll?

The whole defines the part but the part does not define the whole and in this way is the whole greater than the sum of it's parts. When you bring the parts together they approach rapprochement. We know more in accumulation than we know in isolation and therefor we appear transcendent. As you teach your subject you learn more and therefor you begin to know more or discover things you didn't realize you knew.

We are but we doubt that we are giving the appearance of a-priori as we come to know ourselves. The mind is naturally abstract but this does not mean non-physical. There are many physical phenomena that we may only apprehend abstractly given economies of scale like atoms or atomic particles.

I like alan watts' meditations on symbols.

My meditation is beyond symbols.

 

Essence---in the sense we have talked about here is non-physical. Is Mind physical? This tends to lead to a materialist conclusion if we assume that the mind is nothing but physical (not that it is the only conclusion, but it is the more likely conclusion).

To the materialist, the non-physical cannot exist. So how amazing would it be if we could show that the non-physical does exist. And yet, light itself consists of quanta that exist as zero-mass, zero-time----which is, non-physical.

But-----we are starting down that same path as a thread that already exists (and started by Indyhippy no less).



I read most of Alan Watt's books as a teenager. I still have all the books. In fact you might notice the title of one of the titles of his books as the quote after my name below. It comes from my favorite Chinese poem, which he took the title from. I prefer my own translation of the Chinese, but Alan Watts translation is my second favorite English translation.

 

one can have a personality cult, or one can use reason.
these are separate things, whether the personality is the revealer of a religious belief, some honored figure of philosophy of the past, or any other person.

wisedom does not come from the cult of ANY personality.

 

So yet another new week which means a new question.
Who decides what morality is?

 

What it actually is, or what is moral or not?

 

Some have argued that morality is a suite of behavioral capacities likely shared by all mammals living in complex social groups. They define morality as "a suite of interrelated other-regarding behaviors that cultivate and regulate complex interactions within social groups." This suite of behaviors includes empathy, reciprocity, altruism, cooperation, and a sense of fairness.

 

It is not that different---mine is a little more vague in some ways (like the Chinese), but the differences are subtle. I posted it before in my thread, 'For Japanese Speakers':

 

morality is not decided by any person, but by how the wonders of reality work. by this i do not mean in a selfish way, though it is the point where self interest and altruism meet, or to put it more compactly, the kind of world we all have to live in that results.

that is what determines morality, not a person nor a book, but what actually avoids causing harm.