No problem.
synchronicity things where you picked up on my thoughts aimed at you.
)seeds wrote: You have made the assertion that consciousness presumes an unwarranted overestimation (a “gross distortion”) of its own value.
To which I responded by asking you to name just one thing (one ontic phenomenon) in the entire universe that would have any reason (i.e., any “purpose”) for existing if life and consciousness did not exist?
No, it is not inline with my meaning.Dubious wrote: ↑Mon Oct 23, 2017 10:13 pm Feel free to correct me if I misconstrue your question but its inference would suggest that any ontic phenomenon as an actual entity has no reason to exist unless life and consciousness validates its existence, that is, gives it purpose. As staged on this proscenium the universe is a morality play that requires consciousness to justify its existence. If the interpretation is inline with your meaning then I rest my case on consciousness making a total farce of itself far exceeding its mandate.
Of course it’s ludicrous, which is precisely why Schrödinger devised the “cat-in-the-box paradox” to show just how ludicrous it is. Even Einstein (Nick’s “cosmic man”) had problems with this issue.
If I am interpreting this correctly, then what you are saying is that one should always play it safe and only go by what your five senses tell you...
Our vocabularies are not the same, or something! I understand why you replied as you did. But what I meant by "good" feelings was not happy feelings but benevolent , useful, true and examined feelings. Those require reason and deliberation at some point and this is why we do philosophy.
Isn't meaning a cognitive issue? The meaning is there, whether one notices it or not. The extraordinary progression of life on Earth over the past four billion years makes clear that profound progress occurs, even if the benefits are not within the span of human lifetimes. If we are not satisfied with being a part of a greater story, it ends up being our problem, not that of the world, which will continue its remarkable story story regardless.Nick_A wrote: ↑Thu Oct 26, 2017 9:40 pmWhen our subjectivity doesn't offer the experience of meaning needed by the depth of the heart it is more than frustrating. It can even lead to both psychological and physical suicide. The feeling is of being in a prison and the intellect only offers a larger prison. How can we get out of our own way long enough to become open to the knowledge our subjectivity prevents?
No. Meaning is a need of the heart or body reason tries to explain. You don't understand this which is why spirit killing is nonsense for you. Binary thought is useful for humanity but lacks the force to do anything. The power of action comes from the emotion and the body which often has no interest in what we are thinking and is just concerned with their habits.Greta wrote: ↑Sat Oct 28, 2017 1:19 pmIsn't meaning a cognitive issue? The meaning is there, whether one notices it or not. The extraordinary progression of life on Earth over the past four billion years makes clear that profound progress occurs, even if the benefits are not within the span of human lifetimes. If we are not satisfied with being a part of a greater story, it ends up being our problem, not that of the world, which will continue its remarkable story story regardless.Nick_A wrote: ↑Thu Oct 26, 2017 9:40 pmWhen our subjectivity doesn't offer the experience of meaning needed by the depth of the heart it is more than frustrating. It can even lead to both psychological and physical suicide. The feeling is of being in a prison and the intellect only offers a larger prison. How can we get out of our own way long enough to become open to the knowledge our subjectivity prevents?
How do you get out of your own way?
To know, is to know that you know nothing. That is the meaning of true knowledge. Socrates
Getting out of our own way first requires experiencing how we get in our own way.From Jacob Needleman’s book: “The heart of Philosophy.” .
Chapter 1
Introduction
Man cannot live without philosophy. This is not a figure of speech but a literal fact that will be demonstrated in this book. There is a yearning in the heart that is nourished only by real philosophy and without this nourishment man dies as surely as if he were deprived of food and air. But this part of the human psyche is not known or honored in our culture. When it does breakthrough to our awareness it is either ignored or treated as something else. It is given wrong names; it is not cared for; it is crushed. And eventually, it may withdraw altogether, never again to appear. When this happens man becomes a thing. No matter what he accomplishes or experiences, no matter what happiness he experiences or what service he performs, he has in fact lost his real possibility. He is dead.
……………………….The function of philosophy in human life is to help Man remember. It has no other task. And anything that calls itself philosophy which does not serve this function is simply not philosophy……………………………….
We get in our own way by allowing detrimental emotional and bodily habits to dominate our lives making reason meaningless."All of us who are concerned for peace and triumph of reason and justice must be keenly aware how small an influence reason and honest good will exert upon events in the political field." ~Albert Einstein
“People mistakenly assume that their thinking is done by their head; it is actually done by the heart which first dictates the conclusion, then commands the head to provide the reasoning that will defend it.” Anthony de Mello
Emotional intelligence is good, and is intelligence which has to be experienced, like other social/physical skills are experiential skills.The cosmic man will have acquired emotional intelligence.
Emotional intelligence is good, and is intelligence which has to be experienced, like other social/physical skills are experiential skills.The cosmic man will have acquired emotional intelligence.
The United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
This strikes me as just handing over control and primacy to our emotions. This is the way of animals, children, certain kinds of creatives, and those with mental disorders. Most healthy adults learn to put their emotions aside so as to take up their responsibilities, many of which bring no immediate joy but are morally preferable to being focused on our emotional needs.
The world would be a more peaceful and happy place if people were a bit less motivated.Nick_A wrote:Binary thought is useful for humanity but lacks the force to do anything. The power of action comes from the emotion and the body which often has no interest in what we are thinking and is just concerned with their habits.
Ah, the Hesse principle. I won't say I like it but, through my tremendous social incompetence and general screwups, I somehow managed to gift myself such a journey with a near production line of rock bottoms to climb out of.Nick_A wrote:A person gets out of their own way by either the intentional or accidental experience of "hitting bottom." At that level there is nothing left to defend so a person experiences meaning and can even find freedom from harmful attachments as strong as addiction. But the personality fights the experience of hitting bottom - of admitting its futility and that it knows nothing in regards to human meaning.
Nick quoting Needleman wrote:Man cannot live without philosophy.
I responded to the above before reading this.You seem to deny that the Great Chain of Being has any truth in it. Being is of one quality and there is no scale of being that connects the lowest forms of matter with the Source of creation. There is either existence or non-existence but no great chain that connects the extremes.There is also no scale of emotional quality which begins at the animal level and increases in quality up to the level of conscious humanity. However what if intellectual intelligence measured by the quality of associations could be matched by a quality of emotional intelligence that measures objective quality as within the great chain of being? Wouldn’t it be better to allow our associations to manifest within a human perspectives with the emotional awareness of objective value? The idea isn’t to make reason a slave of primitive animal and negative emotions but rather to have reason serve objective quality emotionally appreciated and expressed by conscious man.? I know it doesn’t exist for cave man but I present it as a potential.This strikes me as just handing over control and primacy to our emotions. This is the way of animals, children, certain kinds of creatives, and those with mental disorders. Most healthy adults learn to put their emotions aside so as to take up their responsibilities, many of which bring no immediate joy but are morally preferable to being focused on our emotional needs.
Unfortunately, being unaware of relative emotional quality it is easy to seek to kill the natural attraction to eros as previously described. Eros represents the quality of being between Man and its Source. As of now you re not sensitive to it. Most secular progressives are the same and when in positions of power in education seek to destroy it in the young in favor of humanistic goals.Some "spirit" must be - not "killed" - but put aside for more important needs than our own emotional concerns. This is the reality of growing up, and has always been so, eg. initiation rites. It is only with age and less busyness that we can again pick up the threads of life we followed before society moulded us into the productive units it needs. Not ideal, but nothing is.
Would it? The struggle for prestige dominates cave life and motivations to acquire prestige can be harmless but also lead to a variety of abominations. But what if there were a greater motivation to open to the suppressed need for meaning beyond the need for prestige and the joys of technology?The world would be a more peaceful and happy place if people were a bit less motivated.
The world is against the need for objective truth. It gets in the way of indoctrination into secularized religious goals, politics, commercialism or whatever. Yet there is this minority whose need for truth is stronger than the need for pleasure. They need to feel the truth of human being emotionally as well as intellectually. Why kill the need when they are young and mould them into the productive units the Great Beast needs? Einstein wrote of the cosmic man. The world opposes such conscious evolution and desires to restrict human being to exist as a seed of itself with an unsure future.Of course it had been stupid of me to express it in quite that way, but nevertheless the point was worth pondering: does there exist in man a natural attraction to truth and to the struggle for truth that is stronger than the natural attraction to pleasure? The history of religion in the west seems by and large to rest on the assumption that the answer is no. Therefore, externally induced emotions of egoistic fear (hellfire), anticipation of pleasure (heaven), vengeance, etc., have been marshaled to keep people in the faith.
Welcome to the club. We re given a gift and then sacrifice it to our ego – the proverbial 30 pieces of silver. It is the norm. J.Krishnamurti explains:Ah, the Hesse principle. I won't say I like it but, through my tremendous social incompetence and general screwups, I somehow managed to gift myself such a journey with a near production line of rock bottoms to climb out of.
Time and again I'd reach a point where I did not want to live. Rather than killing myself I'd "kill my ego". Basically, I surrendered. I lost all agendas other than ticking the boxes of life that needed to be ticked. At that point all of my relationships would improve markedly. I'd have some clarity without the distraction of overpowering emotions. In this low motivation, low ego state life would start going so swimmingly that my ego would become more active again; I would see myself as having something to lose. Thus would begin the downward spiral.
The gift is received by the higher parts of our collective being. It soon descends and begins to be interpreted by our lower parts. We then lose the forest for the trees. A conscious being experiences the forest and the trees as connected. Cave man lacks the conscious quality necessary to maintain the connection.“We are going to discuss this morning the dissolution of the Order of the Star. Many people will be delighted, and others will be rather sad. It is a question neither for rejoicing nor for sadness, because it is inevitable, as I am going to explain. “You may remember the story of how the devil and a friend of his were walking down the street, when they saw ahead of them a man stoop down and pick up something from the ground, look at it, and put it away in his pocket. The friend said to the devil, “What did that man pick up?” “He picked up a piece of Truth,” said the devil. “That is a very bad business for you, then,” said his friend. “Oh, not at all,” the devil replied, “I am going to let him organize it."
Does mindfulness produce a contradiction? Most of Western Buddhism I’ve experienced seeks to avoid the contradiction in the cause of peace. The dialectic as described by Socrates is designed to lead to the experience of our ignorance and the contradictions it produces. Einstein describes opening to genuine intuition as the means to experience the quality of reality that reconciles our contradictions. It will lead to the truth of ourselves within a universal perspective. If human existence develops in accordance with the contradictions of the human condition, what will we end up with? Only a few have the need, the courage, and the will, to consciously experience the contradictions within themselves so they can be reconciled from a higher perspective. As a result society must remain at the same level of being and who knows what that will led to as society becomes more technologically advanced?The answer - for me, if not you - is philosophy, or at least philosophical thinking, and what the new agers call mindfulness. You need to be alert to the ego inflating and quickly pr1ck the illusion that the good in one's life can be assured, rather than being doomed to return to dust. Life is a constant series of greetings to the new and farewells to that which we loved, and the latter must be accepted if we are to have some relief from life's hassles.
When it comes to the Great Chain of Being or The Omega Point, I like the general concepts - who knows how far evolution can go? - but each includes speculative claims typical of the times from which they were conceived.Nick_A wrote: ↑Sun Oct 29, 2017 4:47 am Greta
You seem to deny that the Great Chain of Being has any truth in it. Being is of one quality and there is no scale of being that connects the lowest forms of matter with the Source of creation. There is either existence or non-existence but no great chain that connects the extremes.There is also no scale of emotional quality which begins at the animal level and increases in quality up to the level of conscious humanity. However what if intellectual intelligence measured by the quality of associations could be matched by a quality of emotional intelligence that measures objective quality as within the great chain of being? Wouldn’t it be better to allow our associations to manifest within a human perspectives with the emotional awareness of objective value? The idea isn’t to make reason a slave of primitive animal and negative emotions but rather to have reason serve objective quality emotionally appreciated and expressed by conscious man.? I know it doesn’t exist for cave man but I present it as a potential.This strikes me as just handing over control and primacy to our emotions. This is the way of animals, children, certain kinds of creatives, and those with mental disorders. Most healthy adults learn to put their emotions aside so as to take up their responsibilities, many of which bring no immediate joy but are morally preferable to being focused on our emotional needs.
Then again, it could be that I and others may have qualities and have enjoyed experiences that you could never understand.Nick_A wrote: ↑Sun Oct 29, 2017 4:47 amUnfortunately, being unaware of relative emotional quality it is easy to seek to kill the natural attraction to eros as previously described. Eros represents the quality of being between Man and its Source. As of now you re not sensitive to it. Most secular progressives are the same and when in positions of power in education seek to destroy it in the young in favor of humanistic goals.Some "spirit" must be - not "killed" - but put aside for more important needs than our own emotional concerns. This is the reality of growing up, and has always been so, eg. initiation rites. It is only with age and less busyness that we can again pick up the threads of life we followed before society moulded us into the productive units it needs. Not ideal, but nothing is.
Yes, I think it would be good if everyone simply slowed down. That is impossible, though, given global competition. There will be a lot more intrusively motivated people coming into our lives in the future, one way or another. Worse luck.Nick_A wrote:Would it? The struggle for prestige dominates cave life and motivations to acquire prestige can be harmless but also lead to a variety of abominations. But what if there were a greater motivation to open to the suppressed need for meaning beyond the need for prestige and the joys of technology?The world would be a more peaceful and happy place if people were a bit less motivated.
Whose "objective" truth do you mean?Nick_A wrote:The world is against the need for objective truth.
What I like about the scientific method is the pooling of minds, and generally very good ones. I like the rigour. It's reliable.Nick_A wrote:The gift is received by the higher parts of our collective being. It soon descends and begins to be interpreted by our lower parts. We then lose the forest for the trees. A conscious being experiences the forest and the trees as connected. Cave man lacks the conscious quality necessary to maintain the connection.
However, if Einstein had had those great intuitions but did not have the math to back it up, no one would have listened to him.Nick_A wrote:Does mindfulness produce a contradiction? Most of Western Buddhism I’ve experienced seeks to avoid the contradiction in the cause of peace. The dialectic as described by Socrates is designed to lead to the experience of our ignorance and the contradictions it produces. Einstein describes opening to genuine intuition as the means to experience the quality of reality that reconciles our contradictions.The answer - for me, if not you - is philosophy, or at least philosophical thinking, and what the new agers call mindfulness. You need to be alert to the ego inflating and quickly pr1ck the illusion that the good in one's life can be assured, rather than being doomed to return to dust. Life is a constant series of greetings to the new and farewells to that which we loved, and the latter must be accepted if we are to have some relief from life's hassles.
But people who have been taught to use critical judgement are protected against any certainty that ,when they organize their experiences, they are sure to be in possession of the truth. When you have learned to use critical judgement you know that your considered critical judgements about truth are no better than probabilities.“We are going to discuss this morning the dissolution of the Order of the Star. Many people will be delighted, and others will be rather sad. It is a question neither for rejoicing nor for sadness, because it is inevitable, as I am going to explain. “You may remember the story of how the devil and a friend of his were walking down the street, when they saw ahead of them a man stoop down and pick up something from the ground, look at it, and put it away in his pocket. The friend said to the devil, “What did that man pick up?” “He picked up a piece of Truth,” said the devil. “That is a very bad business for you, then,” said his friend. “Oh, not at all,” the devil replied, “I am going to let him organize it."
The gift is received by the higher parts of our collective being. It soon descends and begins to be interpreted by our lower parts. We then lose the forest for the trees. A conscious being experiences the forest and the trees as connected. Cave man lacks the conscious quality necessary to maintain the connection.
“My fellow Americans,” Barack Obama said in a speech late in his presidency condemning terrorism, “I am confident in this mission because we are on the right side of history.” When I heard him say that, I immediately thought: what’s history got to do with it? I recalled Obama’s fondness for Martin Luther King Jr.’s statement that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” A moving sentiment, indeed; but is it true? I’m dismayed by Obama’s penchant, by no means unique to him, to see history as the arbiter of justice, by the tendency to subscribe to a belief in “the judgment of history”. I wasn’t alone in my dismay. In an article in The Atlantic in 2015, “The Wrong Side of ‘The Right Side of History’”, David Green expounded at length on the fallacy of awaiting the judgment of history, of time, to which Obama, and many others, has apparently succumbed. It is a dangerous fallacy. “Everything that is threatened by time,” wrote the mystical, Christian-Platonist French philosopher Simone Weil in Gravity and Grace, “secretes falsehoods in order not to die.” What, one must ask, is the source of this fetishism of history, and more generally, of the march of time?
One source, clearly, is the idea of progress. And where did this idea come from? “Christianity,” said Weil in her Letter to a Priest, “was responsible for bringing [us] this notion of progress … and this notion has become the bane of the world.” Why the bane of the world? Because “there is no reason to establish any connection between the degree of perfection and chronological sequence.” Worse, as she put it in her late book, The Need for Roots, written as she languished in London toward the end of WWII, disgusted by the Free French for whom she agreed to write the book: “History is a tissue of base and cruel acts in the midst of which a few drops of purity sparkle at long intervals.” But as a Christian, didn’t Weil think history forever changed after the ministry of Christ? No. “The content of Christianity existed before Christ”, she said in Letter to a Priest, for “if the Redemption … had not been present on earth from the very beginning, it would not be possible to pardon God.” Indeed “since [Christ’s] day there have been no very noticeable changes in men’s behavior.”
At the heart of Weil’s argument against history resides a lesson she tried over and over again to teach those who would listen, a lesson we today need specially to heed. The lesson concerns the fundamental question of whether the meaning of the world, as one might put it, or its value, or its significance, can be found within it. That it can is the message of so-called humanism, a child of The Enlightenment, the view that the key to our destiny lies within us. Call that view immanentism, in contrast with transcendentalism, or if you prefer, the horizontal vs the vertical perspective, or, perhaps most perspicuously, naturalism vs. supernaturalism. On this question, one cannot avoid taking sides. As T.S. Eliot, an early champion of Weil, said in “Second Thoughts About Humanism”: “Either everything in man can be traced as a development from below, or something must come from above. There is no avoiding that dilemma: you must either be a naturalist or a supernaturalist.” Wittgenstein, strikingly, in his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus — ironically, the “bible” of the positivists of the Vienna Circle — made his position on that dilemma perfectly clear. “The sense of the world,” he wrote, “must lie outside the world. … n it no value exists — and if it did exist, it would have no value. … Ethics is transcendental. … God does not reveal himself in the world.”
seeds wrote: Belinda, what exactly is the “better alternative”?
Can that be used as a prayer for the dying?Belinda wrote: ↑Sat Oct 28, 2017 6:23 pm The United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Preamble
Whereas recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world,
Whereas disregard and contempt for human rights have resulted in barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind, and the advent of a world in which human beings shall enjoy freedom of speech and belief and freedom from fear and want has been proclaimed as the highest aspiration of the common people,
Whereas it is essential, if man is not to be compelled to have recourse, as a last resort, to rebellion against tyranny and oppression, that human rights should be protected by the rule of law,
Whereas it is essential to promote the development of friendly relations between nations,
Whereas the peoples of the United Nations have in the Charter reaffirmed their faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person and in the equal rights of men and women and have determined to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom,
Whereas Member States have pledged themselves to achieve, in co-operation with the United Nations, the promotion of universal respect for and observance of human rights and fundamental freedoms,
Whereas a common understanding of these rights and freedoms is of the greatest importance for the full realization of this pledge,
Now, Therefore THE GENERAL ASSEMBLY proclaims THIS UNIVERSAL DECLARATION OF HUMAN RIGHTS as a common standard of achievement for all peoples and all nations, to the end that every individual and every organ of society, keeping this Declaration constantly in mind, shall strive by teaching and education to promote respect for these rights and freedoms and by progressive measures, national and international, to secure their universal and effective recognition and observance, both among the peoples of Member States themselves and among the peoples of territories under their jurisdiction.
Clearly you are unfamiliar with the Great Chain of Being. It has nothing to do with my sensibilities. Consider this basic image of the chain. My sensibilities have nothing to do with it. I see it a bit differently but the basic idea of a chain of being is the same.When it comes to the Great Chain of Being or The Omega Point, I like the general concepts - who knows how far evolution can go? - but each includes speculative claims typical of the times from which they were conceived.
I'm not sure whom has higher sensibilities or what that really means, given that numerous cultures and subcultures consider themselves to be bastions of higher sensibilities. You appear to equate sensibilities that are harmonious with yours to be higher. I am not concerned with others' sensibilities, especially since I find my dog to be preferable company to many humans. I suppose this is where I, a secularist, have faith. I think nature knows what it's doing, and that we are just a part of a much larger picture.
In their 1936 work, The Great Chain of Being: The History of an Idea, the scholars E. M. W. Tillyard and A. O. Lovejoy argued that ancient and medieval thought was shaped by particular ideological framework known as the "The Chain of Being." Sometimes called the Scala Natura (scale of nature), this view saw all of creation existing within a universal hierarchy that stretched from God (or immutable perfection) at its highest point to inanimate matter at its lowest. One can see something of this hierarchy in Plato's ranking of human souls in the Phaedrus, but also in Aristotle's notion that the capacity to act upon reason rather than instinct distinguishes human beings from animals.
Indeed, each link in the Great Chain of Being represented a distinct category of living creature or form of matter. Those creatures or things higher on the Chain possessed greater intellect, movement, and ability than those placed below. Thus each being in the Chain possessed all of the attributes of what was below plus an additional, superior attribute:
God: existence + life + will + reason + immortality + omniscient, omnipotent
Angels: existence + life + will + reason + immortality
Humanity: existence + life + will + reason
Animals: existence + life + will
Plants: existence + life
Matter: existence
Nothingness
Is it surprising that atoms of the Great Beast should be trained as beasts? This is just normal for the Great Beast functioning in Plato’s cave.As George Carlin put it - the people just need to be just smart enough to run the machines but not smart enough to notice the corporations who are playing them.
Seemingly little people are increasingly filling the role once filled by animals - resources, potential pests that need control and beasts of burden. It appears to be a case of "what goes around, comes around".
Prsonal experiences have nothing necessarily to do with respecting and furthering the inner calling to experience the inner direction inhabited by eros. You deny it and further the elimination of this calling in support of the dominance of the Great beast.Then again, it could be that I and others may have qualities and have enjoyed experiences that you could never understand.
Thanks to the problem of other minds it's very easy for people to assume others to be almost akin to relative philosophical zombies while only they and a few annointed others are thought to be fully sentient humans. It's solipsism, and a common misconception.
The Great Beast is the only truth for you. You are only concerned with “whose truth” However universal truth exists regardless of human slavery to the Beast. If Man on earth were destroyed by an asteroid, universal truth and its meaning and purpose would still exist even though you couldn’t interpret it into your truth. Objective reason begins when subjective reason stops. It never stops for the secularist.Nick_A wrote:The world is against the need for objective truth.
Whose "objective" truth do you mean?
The scientific method is very good for defining and experimenting with facts. However it is meaningless for answering the basic human questions concerning objective human meaning and purpose and feeling their reality. Since secularists deny objective value, they seek to destroy the efforts of those attracted to eros to further their god: The Great Beast. They are reliable in their efforts and will do their best to prevent the natural gradual conscious awakening of cave man into the Cosmic Man.What I like about the scientific method is the pooling of minds, and generally very good ones. I like the rigour. It's reliable.
