Gee wrote:Greylorn;
Please consider the following:
Greylorn wrote:However, I propose that unless you include beginnings and endings, you are merely thinking in "holistic groups."
Holistic grouping has it's value; don't knock it. But that is only part of the process. Every investigation has a beginning, a starting point, but that starting point does not have to reflect a linear beginning. Where does one start to investigate consciousness? There are two obvious starting points, either the internal consciousness that we are aware of, or the beginning of all things, the Big Bang, or whatever happened. The only other option is religion.
Gee,
Why would I knock "holistic grouping?" I thought that I'd just created the term. However I've never formally studied holistics, and obviously someone who is better educated has developed some useful terminology without first consulting me.
The two obvious starting points have led to two theories that are supposedly different (omnipotent-God theology vs. micro-pea explosion science) but are actually functionally identical. A perceptive philosopher would notice that the premises behind Big Bang theory are functionally identical to those of monotheistic religions. You are forgiven for not making such an observation because you've not chosen to include physics in your educational repertoire.
Nonetheless I think that you were capable of making that observation had you turned your mind in that direction.
Should you be excused from accepting the contrivances of professional philosophers, all of them well credentialed, all of them professing to know something of the universe without taking the trouble to understand how it works? If you believe that Obama voters should be excused for not knowing of his fraudulent claim to U.S. citizenship, then you can excuse yourself for believing the lies of others.
You are currently reading, off topic, a book which explains existence from a different perspective than either of the alternatives you've proposed. It will be interesting to see how you deal with it. I hope that you will do so in a public forum. I'll create a thread in the books section to make it easy.
Gee wrote:
...and the proposed starting points did not give me that premise. I had already learned enough about religion and mind to understand that religion interprets it's information, so we are not talking about facts. Although religion can give me useful information, I can not base my studies on it's premises. The Eastern religions/philosophies can also give me some useful information, but their internal study is subjective -- unless one can attain Enlightenment. That would take a lifetime of meditation and is still not guaranteed, so I did not choose that path to find my premise. Of course, I could start with the beginning of all things, the Big Bang, but I was not there, so I am clueless about it.
Don't worry about that. The Big Bang theorists who weren't there either are infinitely more clueless than you. They have, and have always had access to the information that showed Big Bang theory to be an atrocious atheistic lie, but they ignored it because they are atheists. They felt that to reveal the lie would open the cosmological game to religionists. Big mistake, because religionists are insufficiently competent to play that game with real money-- that is, they will never bet the truth or falsity of their ideas upon their interpretation of hard science, because they know that they don't know any hard science, and do not want to learn it. Alas.
Please do not concern yourself with paths not chosen. I've studied enough of Eastern religions to understand their game. There is no path, except that of working people coughing up income better spent on a beer or a roll in the bushes to support a gang of useless beggars wearing red and saffron robes, and building fine temples for them to hang out in while practicing their absurd enlightenment acts, and while keeping a billion or so people in dumbshitland their entire lives.
Had you studied Buddhism in depth you'd have learned that enlightenment includes the understanding of reincarnation of the soul, and nirvana, and that nirvana is not a synonym for heaven. It means "extinguishment." The task of every "enlightened" soul is to extinguish its consciousness after death.
You would also have learned that modern Buddhists, phony jackasses like the Dalai Lama, have employed the rationalizational (sp) skills of the Democratic and Republican parties to absolve themselves of the need to achieve Nirvana. They'd rather be reincarnated as high-level Buddhist mucky-mucks.
Back to the beginning of your paragraph, where you wrote, "...
Being a philosopher by nature, I need a valid premise for an investigation," Therein lies the mistake of philosopher wanna-be's. the inherent fear to take a position of their own.
If you had a
valid premise at hand, what use would you be to that premise? Could you make it more valid?
You might consider making it less valid, which means that it was not a valid premise from the get-go. Or you could invalidate it, making it a premise that was not valid from its inception. (Yes, same thing.) Invalidation ought to be easy, since every premise of modern philosophy, and most of those from "ancient" philosophy, is and are invalid. So, what possible interesting relationship could you have to a "valid" philosophy?
(Other than to accept it as truth, live your life according to its principles, and deal with the consequences, learning therefrom.)
Finding a valid philosophy is no more noteworthy than spying a quarter on the sidewalk, picking it up, and being proud of your achievement-- then using it to buy some chewing gum.
You seem to believe that the unimaginative pedants who teach philosophy in universities are philosophers. Why? Because the gang of nits who call themselves philosophers and have obtained small pieces of paper to frame and hang on their den walls have perpetuated their irrelevant selves by declaring that some of their kowtowing students deserve the same papers and titles?
These self-called philosophers are just teachers, no smarter than whoever taught you 5th grade grammar, but born to parents wealthy enough to cough up the money (and that is really all that it takes) for them to acquire a Ph.D in a worthless field of study that is devoted to seeking out and promulgating the dumbest ideas ever invented by men who might score 120 on an I.Q. test, on a good day.
The job of an honorable philosopher is not to hold up billboards for "valid" theories. It is to blow holes in shitty theories that have been well regarded by pinheads who called them "valid." A true philosopher's job is to invent new theories and to defend them. Not everyone can do this. An objective philosopher who cannot invent his own theories can, however, find good theories that are poorly regarded and seek some value in them, and upon finding some value, defend those ideas by offering alternative perspectives on their value.
(That suggestion is totally unrelated to my proposal that you read and evaluate my book. Nope. Not related. Just coincidence. Did I even write this? Shame on me.)
Your demand for a "valid" theory as your starting point is like a quarterback demanding that his receivers catch every pass thrown in their general direction. Welcome to the real world.
Gee wrote:
I researched philosophies, then considered religious views, the paranormal, and whatever science could tell me that I could understand, but I could find no valid premise that worked with all of them. Consciousness can not be tested or observed, so how do we even know that it exists? Well, the answer to that would be life. Life is the only indication that we have that consciousness exists, so I started to study the patterns of life, because if I could not know what consciousness is, maybe I could know how consciousness works.
Gee,
As a woman who has studied emotions, no doubt from within and without, take a look at how yours affect your approach to philosophy. You keep demanding
validity, like a woman who demands that her lover will always love her, even if she brings yapping little dogs, whiny cats, and undisciplined (at her insistence) children into his life and insists upon having sex during Green Bay Packer games.
You claim to be a "natural philosopher." But where have you sought your philosophical insights? Seems to me, from the field of philosophy.
The California gold rush was the result of validity. Gold had indeed been found. People traveled across country in search of easy money laying on the ground, and most of them died broke because they didn't figure on having to do any digging, shoveling, or pick-axe work. I guess that they figured themselves to be "natural" gold miners, born and bred to collect the nuggets lying at their feet.
Yes, validity is nice, because if a premise is already valid you don't have to do jack shit to validate it. All you need to do is say, "Yes, it's valid!" and declare yourself a philosopher.
That's like cooling your heels in a California creek, finding a gold nugget, and declaring yourself to be a gold miner. Shall we carry this analogy deeper into reality?
A philosopher studying philosophy books in search of ideas is like a miner digging a tunnel into the basement of Fort Knox in search of gold, then carrying out some of it and declaring it to be his own.
Is that the kind of philosopher that you want to be? If so, why are we talking?
Like you, I've researched a variety of views, same categories as yours. I cherry-picked, and found irrelevant bullshit in the best of them. There was a little bit of good stuff. Descartes was helpful.
Various religions were just variations on the premise that a bigger pile of bullshit is a better pile. Islam and Christianity are still quibbling (killing people) over the issue of who has amassed the biggest pile.
The philosophers you've studied are insufficiently competent to define consciousness. By following them, you allowed your self to be drawn into their stupifying confusions, to accept their intellectual shortcomings as your own. That's what comes from label-attachment. You want to be regarded as a philosopher, so you've adopted their tramp-stamps. Like a kid in the ghetto needs social acceptance, so joins a gang of nitwits and gets a tattoo to show allegiance. Okay, if that's what you want.
Consider the standards of philosophers before joining their club. They are pretty much a gang of inbred bullshit artists who have co-opted what should be a valid area of intelligent human inquiry. To pursue philosophy beyond their level, beyond irrelevancy, beyond their chosen ignorance of physics, up to the level of open-minded intelligence, you need to leave the pack, rise above the glut. It's hard to recognize yourself as an eagle when you've been living your life on a turkey farm where the birds cannot fly and their language is gobble-de-gook.
You can begin by giving up the conventional notion that consciousness is a function of life.
It is the other way around.
Gee wrote:
I don't see how a "beginning" is possible and think that anything that looks like a beginning, would just look like it from our limited perspective and would not actually be a beginning. I suspect that religion got the "God always was and always will be" part of it right in their interpretations.
G
With considerable respect for your open sharing of your beliefs, opinions, and insights-- so rare on a public forum--
Greylorn
