On the Existence of the Human Body

Merleau-Ponty makes a big deal out of the supposed fact that all of our perceptions are wrapped up in the interaction of our bodies in a world, indeed, that the being-in-the-world is therefore the essence of perception. To be in the world is to be perceiving and to be perceiving is to be located in the world, in a body, more specifically. And to be located in a body is to be essentially concerned with the body itself, e.g. the hunger of the body or the sexuality of the body, or it's pains and pleasures in general. The idea of perceiving outside of the context of involvement with the perceived is therefore, for MP a dysfunctional phenomenon to be explained. The famous example of the man for whom the world is non-sexual, who has no interest in sexual contact or sexual activity, but who nevertheless has functioning sexual apparatus, has to be regarded as the abnormal limit case which proves the basic rule, e.g. that we humans are involved sexually in our world. We have to agree that sexual involvement in the world is a core way of being for us humans, but that we could be non-sexual and normal we have to reject. It is this holding the non-sexual perception as the abnormal that we want to examine as a clue to a better understanding of perception than MP's preliminary investigation.

Consider again the case, there is a man who is capable of having an erection, who's erection occasionally is available after being stimulated, but for whom the desire to have the erection or a subsequent orgasm is missing. He neither pursues sexual contact nor rejects it, and does not regard it with either disgust or longing. The asexual nature of the man's perceptions should be clear enough to "us other men" for whom in some ways sexual perception is obvious. We regard sexual situations as fundamentally desirable, as worthy of fulfillment. We conclude from this that there is a "sexual framework" by which we have an option to regard the world (this conclusion is different from MP's). That is, a group of sexual ideas, attitudes, desires, thoughts, etc., which combine to make a sexually-perceived world different from a non-sexually perceived world. Both worlds are equally valid - we can not say that the sexual world is more real than the world devoid of sexual perception, nor can we say that sexual perception is an illusion. Both are genuine perceptions which are unavailable to their perceptive opposites. We can even imagine correctly explaining to both participants how their worlds are different and yet their perceptions remain the same.

This is rather like a wolf being able to perceive ultraviolet light while humans can not. We can understand what it is like to have more colors available to us because we have seen the world at twilight when our color-perception is dimmed, we can extrapolate and imagine a world more vibrant than even our vibrant world. However, we may not be able to imagine a color we can't actually see. These are physiological and psycho-physiological features of our existence that are integrated with us as possibilities for judgements - we can judge the colordness or sexiness of a thing because our bodies are color-aware and sex-aware. If we weren't thusly aware, the world could have no color for us, or no sexiness.

Nevertheless, this color-possibility and sex-possibility is not merely physiological. We can imagine a person who's cones work but who nevertheless cannot distinguish between several colors, nor remember them as different just as we can imagine a man with a working sex organ but no sex drive. This is because it is our entire psychological makeup that is involved in perceiving as well as our physical makeup, and our psychological makeup can contain our social makeup as well. In particular, our language clearly affects our ability to make judgements in a given realm. We hear of aleuts that distinguish among 70 different kinds of snow, whereas I might be able to think of 20 at the most, and likely wouldn't be able to tell the difference between them by perception unaided by further tutelage on the matter. Students of music often learn to distinguish tones after they know of the existence of intervals and their ordering. Similarly with many other matters, our ability to grasp a matter intellectually often is a requirement for being able to perceive examples of it in our world. This is not evidence of error, necessarily, but rather evidence that our thoughts are equally important with our perceptive mechanisms (if there be such things) in generating our actual perceptions.

The body is thought of as the perceptive mechanism - the thing that without bias, in a sense, reports data to our minds for processing. This picture of the matter is almost certainly false. MP would have us believe that the mind extends to the body itself. Alternatively we might think of the mind as constituting the body as its perceptive tool. Either would adequately represent our feelings in the matter. In the second way of conceiving the matter, however, the body as constructed, thus also becomes flexible, bendable to our wills. And this tends to represent reality best. There is no dualism between wishing to type a word and that wish being fulfilled, in general. It is only in the odd-cases when we think of disembodied minds or dreams that the typing and the intent to type don't match up. Our body is an extension of our own wills, in the same way that our culture is.

In the USA there is an obesity problem. People don't "work" per se in order to have food, instead we organize ourselves so that food can be expeditiously brought to us whenever we want it. Our body as "instrument for producing food for survival" is replaced by our "working" body - as a productive member of society, the body serves the purpose it is given, clerk, manager, photographer, priest, etc. Similarly, our body as fighting machine for protection, hunting, thievery and plunder is no longer a working thing as it is subject to modern deterrence in the form of the absolute violence of mechanized warfare of every kind. One can not train one's own body to be an effective weapon against an armored tank. And the drivers of the tank do not fight, they push buttons and pull levers. If we do practice combative skills, they are games, psuedo-fighting to give the body something to do so that the useless appendage feels useful again. Even sex has become a form of entertainment, rather than a sacred responsibility and continuance of the notion of divine family. So everything having to do with sex becomes also entertainment too, we play with our bodies as though they were toys. Even eating is a form of entertainment. When the need to eat for sustenance is replaced by the desire to eat for entertainment, food also becomes a kind of plaything, an unreal version of the previous real thing. Our families, food, friends, fighting, in fact all of the normal activities of body-hood have become functions that are no longer in fact fulfilled by our bodies, but rather by our societies and which are now only mimicked by our bodies - which exist apparently as reminders of our past, of how we came to be such masters of our universe.

And this leaves us with the question of the very existence of the body. If we think of our bodies in their actual function - as a reminder of a past which may or may not have felt like these currently emulated activities of eating, sleeping, drinking, copulating, hunting, etc., we also realize that those activities certainly were not at all as they are emulated now. Even worse, we have no idea what these activities were like "before", since this before is a manufactured idea itself - something we told ourselves bodies were supposed to do. In short we have no idea what our bodies are, nor do we know we "have them" nor do we know what "having a body" would be like, even if we do think we have them. What we think we have - the leftover appendages of body-hood appear to be emulations of some past functional purpose, but what purposes and how accurate the emulations are is completely beyond our ken.

The human body, then, really is nothing at all, nothing but an idea, an idea of humanity put in place by our culture which itself is not produced by our bodies, but by our refusal to be anything but Humans. But if we are humans, why are we humans at all? The idea that humans are different from apes, for instance, comes from the idea that apes don't use tools, don't think, don't calculate and plan. We can demonstrate these facts for ourselves by observing them, the barbarians. But harkening back to the conquest of the Americas and Africa, don't we remember that the "people" we encountered there were also barbarians, apes unable to use language, form tools, and without religion. Remembering that even our idea of humanity changes with time and apparently at the whim of the winds of culture - the distinction between ape and man can be easily seen to be of the same order as our distinction between races of humans. And beyond the ape, there is the distinction between man and nature, man and world, man and god, distinctions which we manufacture as a part of our culture for various reasons, some of them good, some of them not.

With that, happy new year, may this be the year in which we are able to abandon our dualities about the world and our selves and recognize that our world depends on us, and we depend on our world, and that we are therefore the same.


R

An Economic Plan for US Recovery

During the last 8 years we've heard a lot about security. Security means different things to different people.

For some, security means big weapons and lots of people actively wielding them. Our hope is that this is not what Mr. Obama thinks this word means.

For most people, security means the ability to reliably provide for themselves and their families housing, food, medical care and the more abstract notions of happiness and love.

Some of these are inscribed in our constitution. We formed this union to provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare and ensure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.

We should continue to do this - continue to promote the general welfare, continue to ensure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity. These were wise words written by wise people.

Let's make no mistake about this though, those blessings for us and our posterity are at risk today. Each day our liberty is curtailed by ongoing activist legislation not wrong because of its intent, but because of its methodology - every time we make it illegal for one Joe to do what he wants, it puts at risk the liberty of Jane to do what she wants next. If we continue to curtail our liberties based on reactionary felt needs of any given time, in time all our of liberties will be gone.

In many ways, with them so go our general welfare. As our government continues to encroach on our daily lives, the quality of those lives decrease. We've seen this happen many times - with public education's "Learn to Work" program which has significantly eroded the quality of public education today. With our current economic interventionist strategy, we are threatening to do the same with our banks. Our local governments curtail how and where we can make money with their land-use policy. Various government agencies control how and from whom we can obtain energy and food.

Curtailing our liberties is not a way to ensure the blessings of liberty. Rather, it is to destroy those opportunities.

Many people will say that the need for protecting ourselves against wrongdoers outweighs the need for liberty. But here we have to make a strong distinction between someone doing harm to another person by actively engaging them, and someone perceiving a harm done where there is none. For instance, we all can agree that inhaling second-hand smoke is harmful, but need we all agree that it is the smoker's fault that the non-smoking party is deciding to be in close proximity with them? At the very least this question is debatable. Surely someone not wishing to inhale second-hand smoke can leave or choose not to be near people that smoke. Society has built-in protections for such problems, and our mistake is to try to legislate our way out of them.

Another way our government tends to curtail our freedoms is by actively controlling the way we citizens conduct business. By subsidizing various activities and penalizing others, the federal government significantly decides the course of the american economy. For instance, our choice to subsidize road-building rather than rail, light rail and bullet-rail has put our transportation system decades behind other modernized countries. We've subsidized that system again today by providing low-cost loans for the dying automobile industry. Similarly, our banking industry is failing, and we've subsidized that failing industry again by injecting money directly into obsolete institutions. And lastly, we've subsidized our weapons and military-consulting industries with dire consequences for us and our worldwide friends, with the result that when our war has ended (and it must end) we will have a completely valueless industry here subsidized, again, by the federal government, sucking resources daily from the public funds whose purpose is to benefit We the People.

If we are to remain free and ensure freedom in trade while simultaneously promoting growth, we can't subsidize dying industries. We must look to the future.

President Elect Obama's administration will have tough choices to make about how to steer the country, with unprecedented power in both houses of Congress, the Democratic party will have legislative and administrative freedom unparalleled in current history. This policy-making freedom must be used to ensure the blessings of liberty and to promote the general welfare for ourselves and our posterity.

How can we do that without creating another government-funded fiasco like our banking system, military system, energy system and transportation system?

I think the answer must be this - we have to get our federal-hands out of the business of deciding economic policy either directly or indirectly.

People, left to their freedoms and with their pocketbooks in tact will do what is good for themselves - we will innovate, expand, survive and prosper by the work of our own hands. In fact, the very idea of a government handout is morally appalling to anyone without a physical or mental disability and should be regarded as the very lowest of low activities for those able to contribute their own innovation and/or labor to the betterment of mankind.

We must start this process at the top, for we began it at the top.

The first industries to lose their direct and indirect subsidies must be those industries most directly benefitting them, the guilty parties are enumerated above - we must dismantle our failing banking system and build and economic system on fairness and freedom rather than centralized control and cronyism. We must replace our failing transportation system of endless road-building and endless-car-building with systems that our country can live with for generations to come - and take our money out of the eternal waste of the automobile business. We must end our de facto subsidy of the oil industry by military means worldwide and invest in renewable energy sources here at home. We must end our dependency on foreign countries for all manner of essential materials as a matter of national security - a nation that depends on other countries for food, energy or medical supplies is constantly at risk of losing those supplies and at the mercy of their providers.

How can we do this without intervening in the economic system?

The answer is actually extremely simple. We must simply put an end to government subsidies for those activities. We must stop spending money on unnecessary foreign wars. We must stop giving money wholesale to bankers. We must stop giving money to automotive industry executives. It's that simple, we must put an end to the subsidizing of the largest industries in our country and we must do it immediately.

The results some people say would be catastrophic. But catastrophic for whom? Surely they would be catastrophic for the stockholders in those industries in terms of their lost savings, but the real question is why we're rewarding them for failing!

For regular people, it would mean the following. Instead of our country depending on foreign sources for shoes and food and televisions and computers, we would more efficiently produce them locally to offset the increased cost of importing them without the de facto oil subsidy. By forcing America to rely on internal resources for energy, our tremendous think-tank of innovation would surge its activity to creating sustainable, renewable local sources of energy which would ensure that prosperity we enjoy now for generations to come. By removing the automobile subsidy, Americans would innovate in alternative forms of transportation, maybe even have the flying car we saw in the Jetsons when we were young. By removing the heavy burden of foreign wars, we would have additional human and capital resources to fulfill our needs for our people right here at home.

In short, by simply NOT engaging in these practices of subsidizing directly and indirectly the banking, oil, automotive and military industries, we would create the secure and blessed nation we know we should have.

At the same time, the risk of NOT pursuing this course of action is dire. There are really two things we might do to fail here, both of which we've done before. The first is to pursue legislative and administrative actions to directly intervene in the "fixing" of the american economy by continuing the subsidies of these industries. This would be catastrophic, creating in the United States a country permanently dependent on its ability to extend military might to acquire oil and raw goods necessary for the sustenance of human life here at home. This ongoing activity in which we are already engaged creates our enemies by giving them good reason to oppose us. Our extension of our economic influence abroad creates effective slavery worldwide, requires us to support oppressive regimes, and attracts the most radical elements of society to want to war with us and gives them the moral rational required to recruit what would normally be peaceful people to their cause which should be our shared cause - Freedom. If we stay this course, we destroy our own freedom for ourselves and diminish the likelihood of providing security for ourselves and our posterity.

If on the other hand, we attempt to subsidize OTHER forms of economic recovery - by handing out money to other businesses - we run the risk of simply missing the mark. For instance, if President Obama's administration were to subsidize the building of electric cars and those cars were not a suitable replacement for our current industry, in 10 years or less we would be in the same position we are in today - obsolete technology chasing an advancing world. If we create a comprehensive plan to create electricity cleanly today, and use that electricity efficiently for many years to come, we might still miss the mark and at the cost of, again, our freedom, as our legislation effectively legislates more and more how we can do business.

Let's imagine this scenario. Let's imagine that there were some combination of renewable clean electricity sources that could be developed with a finite cost today. And let's imagine that those electricity sources could be deployed to solve our general transportation problems in the form of trains, electric cars and publicly available air and sea-freight. Let's imagine further that we can produce all of the necessary materials and technologies here in the USA. Let's imagine that the United States becomes again the worldwide leader in energy-technology and transportation technology and because we've given up using military means to get what we need, we've gained allies and friends worldwide. And finally, let's imagine that the Federal Government subsidized this entire effort, creating millions of jobs and new companies in the next 8 years.

This sounds pretty good, right? Certainly in comparison to today, it sounds great. Idyllic even. As long as we're imagining it, we may as well all buy tickets for the maiden voyage of the Starship Enterprise.

In reality, though, our government is horrible at subsidizing innovation, terrible at creating jobs, and even worse at making us world-leaders. Look again at the military we've created, which while excellent, is based on military ideas from the previous century, incapable of winning a modern war (Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan) because the notion of winning is no longer ad-equated by the method of combat. We think rolling tanks over a capital city wins a war. It doesn't. We have to get used to that idea. What would work? I don't know. But I do know that what we've failed to do by pouring billions of dollars into government subsidized research is produce an army capable of defeating any modern opponent.

Similarly, look at our federally subsidized education system, which continues to be the embarrassment of our people that every other first-world country manages to educate our children better than we do. Medicaire, is failing, we can't take care of our medical needs. Social Security is failing, we can't take care of our old people. In fact, we can't name a single successful government program with the possible exception of the Internet (and I say possible because, as we see now, private concerns are attempting to restrict internet access from the people who subsidized its creation - google "NET NEUTRALITY"). In short, increasing government subsidizing of any of these programs is simply bound to failure because it's based on the mistaken idea that governments are good at solving society's problems from the top-down.

Instead, we must allow our economy to fix itself from the bottom up, by simply refraining from subsidizing the failed business models and allowing Americans to fix our economy ourselves.

filed under - libertarianism.

Why you can't have what you want.

I've said before "disambiguating between 'you' and 'you'" is tough to do. Disambiguating between you and I is even harder sometimes.

BUT - you can't have what you want for the simple reason that what you want is not a great idea.

Back up.

You can have what you want, but don't expect God to give it to you. God only wants to give you things that are good for you.

If you want something bad for you, get it yourself.

Why is everything so hard? Because you're not asking for what you should want, but for what you think you want.

Why would I want something that's not good for me? Aren't I the arbiter of what is good for me?

Unfortunately, no. If you knew everything, then you might know what was good for you, but you don't. Live with it.

Who is this who thinks they want something that they should not want?

It's the pseudo-you. The you-image that the real-you has. It is what you think of yourself, how you delude yourself about yourself, the words that you use to describe yourself all put together into a nice mental image of you.

Who is that you? Really it is nobody.

Who is the You that is putting this picture together?

THAT's a real good question. Who would you ask?

______

I say that thinking is what happens when you don't let words have their natural relationships with each other. That is, when you assume what is common sense about words is possibly false and move from there.

For instance, common sense says "There are no square circles." But there are. I would put up a picture of one but I'd rather have you get the impression of it yourself.

They say, for instance, that mathematics is the history of taking what was once considered a contradiction and assuming its truth as an axiom. That's how we got negative numbers, transcendental numbers, curved space, etc. We took the obvious and assumed it was false and followed through.

That's THINKING.

When thinking about oneself, the obvious is to think about one's thoughts. But the truth is I am not my thoughts, nor am I the string of them being put together. I am the maker of my thoughts when I am thinking, and the lazy one when I'm not.

That is, thinking is precisely what happens when words fail. When a word loses its given meaning, we start to have to think about what it means. Children do this when they learn the language - they think about something and then assign words to them. Sometimes our thinking begins with words alone - when we are given ideas that we don't originate ourselves. What do we have when these words fail? Nothing, I think.

Rambling on again.

When you ask for something you want but should not want, this just means that it is not you that's asking for it, but rather this word-constructed you put there by your socialization - your words without origination. That is, it is something OTHER than you doing the asking.

In order to be thinking, you have to be connecting words to things yourself.

What is doing the asking?

How did these words come to have the organization they do? Who invented this language stuff, and why do we use it the way we do?

Language changes over time. The question is not who invented it, really, but who is inventing it NOW?

If it is YOU inventing your language, hurray.

If it is someone ELSE inventing your language, what has that to do with you? Who is doing the inventing? How are they giving it to you?

Some people say it's the Media that is giving us our language as an expression of the capitalist society which is building our world the way it is. That's somewhat true, art and culture are defined by society in some ways. But the truth is, art and culture that have been coopted by a vague they - people we do not know and with who's words we can not connect - this "they" - the producers of culture - are not completely amorphous. They are are around us and when we let them, in us.

Sometimes we produce culture ourselves - we can do this in two ways.

We can produce culture out of ourselves or by allowing the culture that has been produced in us to reproduce.

In memetics we hear of idea-genes - the genetics of ideas.

If we make a song for production and distribution on the radio in order to make money, we are following an idea that has existed in our culture for about 100 years. That song may have value as a cultural artifact of the money-making system. But if we make a song because our heart burns to sing, that too is an old meme, many centuries older than making music for money.

Is there a way to make a song without it being the result of songs we've heard before? To actually re-invent music? Someone obviously did it.

But we will never hear those songs, the we of our "culture" for those songs will not carry our society's genes - it will not bear the mark of the beast, so to speak. In fact, "we" may not even recognize such things as songs, as music even. This goes for every other aspect of our culture. As it breeds itself, it forces acceptableness into the language, in the same way that spelling is pounded into children when they are young, and mistakes pounded out, cultural correctness is pounded out of us all the day long.

But children's spelling mistakes aren't -mistakes - really. IN fact they're following rules - just not all the rules. They learn some rules - what "t's" sound like and then when they can't spell "thought" we teach them the exception to the rule about how t's sound. But their original spelling of "thought" wasn't a mistake, it was the following of an earlier rule that we gave them.

Errors are not what we think. Errors are correct in some ways.

Are there any real errors under these "pseudo" errors?

Yes. I think that some of what our culture says is harmful to us as individuals - we are asked to drink CocaCola and eat at McDonalds. But the truth is these things are harmful to us. God rightly makes it hard for us to have them while our society tries to make it easy. That is, it's hard to be a member of our society, but once you are, having a CocaCola is easy.

Why is it hard to be a member of our society?

Because in order to do it, we must reject our own inner-selves in favor of this pseudo-self, the non-self that our society teaches us that we have.

So why can't you have what you want? Because "you" don't want it.

The Free Market

Yesterday we officially found ourselves in a recession (which we've been in for a year according to the NBER).

Meanwhile our country's inflation is running nearly DOUBLE what it was last year (according to inflationdata.com).

This combination of things is the "free market's impossibility" called "stagflation" where prices rise while income decreases.

It's impossible in a "free market" because prices are the result of demand in a free market.

Theoretically, if there's less money around, demand goes down, and prices go down.

But in this "market" prices go up while demand goes down.

How is this possible?

Our market is not free.

into the chaos

To be alive is to be moving.

To be moving is to be changing.

To be changing is to not be the same as you were before.

To be the same spirit is to be a dead spirit.

To be a changing spirit is to be a living spirit.

To fulfill one's will is to finish what has begun.

To finish what has begun is to change, but completing the same will is to be dead.

Therefore, to live is to embrace chaos, to hope for radical change and to endeavor to be the catalyst for that change yourself by being chaotic.

Our hope for a higher being is a hope that our chaos will bring us eternal life, infinite power, and infinite knowledge.

Only by embracing chaos can we hope for life - for to fail in changing is death.

Only by embracing chaos can we hope for power - for to have power is to be alive.

Only by embracing chaos can we hope for infinite knowledge - for to be aware of new things is to be renewed in oneself.

An Eternal Perspective

The idea of eternity as a static passive meaningless abstract perfect world is old-news. Plato was wrong.

Eternity is Alive.

To stop moving is to be dead.

When did God stop moving?

And that brings us to some key versus in the bible, notably near the beginning and end.

"In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth."

In the beginning of what? That'd be the beginning of the heavens and the earth, obviously.

What was God doing before that?

Blasphemy you say. Read On I Say!

Revelation 21:1 -

"Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and there was no longer any sea."

So apparently when God is done with this world, God will be making a new one.

Is this world a world that happened after an older one? This world has a sea. What will the world after that have? What about the one before?

And where did the Angels and Demons come from?

---- Just wait, evoke images ---

When God makes his Family come to being in the World, we get His Spirit - we are free to create and love. This makes us worth having around, otherwise, why bother? The more we ask for, the more we get, the more we love, the more love we get.

We can get evil too, by sowing evil. What you reap, so you shall sow. Plant a peach seed, get a peach tree.

What has God sown? Us. We love, we hate. We seek and attain power, and all manner of other things. So we are like little gods.

What are angels but little gods? What are demons but little gods gone bad?

If we can't be free, how can we love?

If we never do anything but good, how are we free?

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IF I make something capable of being Good - like a little god - it must be free. So it must be capable of being bad too. They are contained in the same breath. One can not make something higher without making something lower. One can not make something good without making something bad.

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We say that God is Good. Few of us I think know what this means. I'm not convinced that I have a full understanding of it. I am convinced that I don't know the full extent of it. I do know also that it's fundamentally true.

What can this mean, except that having made something bad, God can still be Good. Apparently the existence of Good at all is worth the possibility of the evil.

Apparently also, it's possible to be improving. That is, it is possible for the Good to be in the process of outweighing the Bad, as it probably already does (there appears to me to be more good in the world than bad, but this may be my peculiar perspective). In some ways this means seeing the good in the bad itself, that the bad things that happen are just aspects of the good things that happen, and recognizing the good in the bad is half the battle. The other half being the improving of the bad.

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Is there a world beyond this good and bad? Is there a purer perspective in which there is only good, or only bad, or only neither?

A neutral world, in which nothing is good, is worthless. Why bother with it?

A bad world, in which nothing is good, why bother with that either?

So if there is a world beyond ours which is beyond good and evil, it must be itself pure good.

How can that be?

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If we can recognize that the bad things in our world are really good - that they are parts of the process of perfection, we can imagine how to come to live in this purely good world.

But can we really do this. Can we think of war and murder and rape as good somehow?

Maybe, who are we?

There is the saying "That which does not kill us makes us stronger." And so if we can continue on in the face of adversity, even our pains are redeemable. And what will count as death, then? Simply failing to continue on.

What if the evil does kill us?

And so we're back to our eternal perspective. If we fear death, continuing on in the face of adversity is ridiculous. How can we not fear death except by this - by knowing that God will not let us die uselessly, that is by faith we need not fear death.

Aloha,

Robbie

Ethics

Last time I ended with the bare-word "Ethics".

I want to lump all of ethics, morality and "right-living" into the same basket. There is one group of things - goodness in action.

Good actions are mostly purpose-relative and their fitfulness is determined by whether or not the purpose is fulfilled by them.

But purposes can also be actions - when we choose a purpose, we decide to call it good. Such actions also can be good and bad - good and bad deciding between purposes are the kinds of decisions that are most important for us because they are closest to our own souls.

If we commit to a purpose, we adopt that purpose as our own, as a permanent part of our own being, a stamp, as it were, by which we ask other people to recognize us. The are therefore what we are.

We can therefore choose what we are. We are free.

Freedom in purpose doesn't mean that we have a complete free reign to decide whatever we want. For if we recognize that that freedom of purpose is ours, then we recognize that we are responsible for the purposes we choose - that they define us just as we define them. And these purposes are ours to own, we can not disclaim them.

If we choose to hurt someone, we can not later disclaim that choice, only make excuses for why we made a bad choice.

There are people who say there is no difference between bad and good choices. I believe that such people have not been recently punched in the stomach or in the nose. Nor will they have seen their own children suffer needlessly because of another person's greed.

Morality is reality, it is one's own inner-being.

One With God

There is a long scale from faith to rationality. I'm going to give a general outline of the major points before delving into the real problem here.


Pure Faith - where one adamantly refuses to intellectually question whether or not something is true or admit any kind of evidence
Subjective Evidentual Faith - where one is willing to intellectually question whether or not something is true but only accept subjective evidence or subjective criteria for validity of that evidence
Absolute Subjective Evidentual Faith - where one claims to absolutely know the truth by subjective evidence
Objective Evidentual Faith - where one is willing to question intellectually matters of religion with objective evidence or objective standards of evidence
Absolute Objective Evidentual Faith - where one claims to know the truth by objective evidence

Lastly I think we have agnosticism and skepticism which I think is best characterized by the refusal to accept any evidence whatever on any basis. We won't be much considering these two here, I do elsewhere.


The point of providing the scale is also the point of providing the basis for a discussion of the meaning "One With God" or "God Realizations" and perhaps "Self-Realization" when given a religous tone.

Some people will claim to have reached God by pure faith - they simply know they have received the truth by pure faith.
Some people claim that it is impossible to do such things and that they know so from pure reason.
There is a scale similar to the epistemic scale above - differing kinds of evidence are presented for the one-ness with god.

These are similar to the claims to prophecy - you can accept a prophet by pure faith or by evidence of the truth of their prophecies. (Prophecy, though, passes away for what was once a surprise becomes obvious after it happens...) or by whether or not the prophet "resonates with you."

I'd like to think that there must be some kind of objective standard for these things although I think the matter is not that simple.

I regard relationships with God as similar in character in some respects with relationships with people. There is no good science of relationships with people per se - psychology, sociology, linguistics, etc. - all attempt to be sciences of people and relationships among people. Clearly politics would be another such in the list. I think the best example of "scientific relationships with people" are actually negative in our world - war and gambling. We have a great science of war and similarly a great science of gambling (lying and telling other people lies). This is likely just a question of the character of our people. There should also be a science of love and I suspect if people were to spend as much effort knowing how to love one another as we do knowing how to kill or cheat one another, we would have a much better world indeed.

God relationships are different. God is super-personal - not like one person, but not unlike one person - simply beyond us people. Nevertheless, I believe there is an art and science to God-knowledge just as there is an art-and-science to people-relationships. To make friends, you make gestures of friendship, to make love you make gestures of love. God is similar in that God provides a means to relationship by living with us, inside us, beside us. This makes it more difficult than other relationships but easier, but we're moving too fast.

The problem of determining THAT there is an art-science of God-relating is different from deciding what the content of it is.

What I want to reject here though is the idea that there is no such art-science of God-relationship.

Throughout time there have been people we think of as prophets or people specifically people who are closer to God than our common man. The "big names" come to mind - Mohammed, Christ, Buddha, Krishna, Moses, Elijah, Ramakrishna, Ghandi, etc.

Of course it is possible to doubt that these people had any closer a relationship with God than any one else. And of course it is possible to try to be picky among them - is Christ a better prophet than Buddha? Is Mohammed better than Moses? Is Lao Tzu better than Ramakrishna?

One thing we can say is that each of the major religious traditions has its archetypical example of the successfully-God-related person and each provides a method for following their example and attaining a similar God-Relationship. (In the case where God is not the correct word we have cognates "supreme peace" "truth" "englightenment" to take its place).

So we have a model of religion:

An Archetype
A Method
A Supreme Goal

We could make a grid but it wouldn't be that complicated so we can suffice ourselves knowing that the grid could exist.

So here we have the question of deciding on a method, an archetype and a supreme goal.

Religion need not be this way. We could doggedly insist on defining our own religion. Perhaps we could have a religion without a goal or method or archetype or various combinations of them.

Some forms of buddhism I think of this way - without goal or archetype, but only method. Some forms of Christianity I think of as without method but having Archetype and Goal.

I think there must be a way of deciding whether and which things we need to have what we call a religion.

If not, we have to agree that any religion must be arbitrary - why should listen to Mohammed's prophecy? Why should we take on the devotion of Krishna? Why should we follow the example of Christ? Why should we follow Buddha's Golden path?

It should be noted that any answer to such questions will have to use reasons which are not necessarily themselves dependent on the evidence from the "inside" of those religious traditions. I mean, it would be unfair to point out that Buddhism gives a way of avoiding the demons one encounters in the Bardo as a purpose for choosing the path of Buddha since in order to be worried about the Bardo, you have to have adopted a certain amount of the Buddhist tradition. Similar considerations apply to each of the world religious movements. The christian can't assume that oneness with God is the supreme goal without knowing that God is available for one-ness and how would we know that without assuming something about God given to us by Christ?

I think there must still be an answer to this. But it is not the same type of answer to which we are accustomed - a yes or no, true or false, black and white answer. For us to choose an archetype, we have to choose one with which we somehow identify. Can we choose who we identify with or do we decide that? Choosing methods, similar questions apply. Not every method is good for every player in chess, why assume that there is only one method for attaining the highest goal?

Goals don't have what normally are considered "scientific methods for determining them" but some common considerations apply. We want happiness, peace, joy, a cessation of pain, etc. We want our children and families to be happy. The more illumined among us (again from my point of view) want everyone to have these things - knowing that no one truly has peace until we all do. But the question of goal-choosing is a person-relative problem. The question is not "What is the Goal?" but rather "What is MY GOAL?" - that is, what do YOU WANT.

For this you have to decide for yourself. And if you are pragmatic, you then you will also (probably) choose a method - to have failed to choose a method will have been to chosen a kind of anti-method which is itself a kind of method. For definitive methods, you may or may not want an archetype.

But this is not to reject the notion of Goal and Archetype and Method.

Being human, I make a few assumptions about you - along the lines of those outlined above - that you have goals that are somewhat "rational" in that they are themselves fundamentally desirable. If these things don't appeal to you, I may have nothing interesting in common with you. We may not even be sufficiently similar for it to be worthwhile for you to read what follows. In fact, I may not want you to read any further than this - please adopt my goals, they're good ones - happiness, peace, joy, cessation of pain and universal compassion.

If you -do- share these goals, then I think there is a (perhaps many) method(s) for attaining them and archetypes which have by their various methods.

For that we must wait another week, I fear. For now all I hope to have resolved is that there is a simple and rational set of questions underlying religion:

What should we attempt to attain as a highest goal?
How should we attempt to attain them?
Has anyone ever done this before that might be helpful?

And that answers to these question have a fundamentally rational - even scientific - method for determining their answers.

We call this science Ethics.

Implication and conditionality

The traditional problem of platonism is this - how can eternal extra-worldly objects affect this temporal world and vice versa.

As analysis moves up the chain the question becomes about the phenomenon of logic - reason - and the absolute notion of reason, logic.

In my terms, "reason" will refer to the actual good reasoning of human beings. "Logic" will refer only to the abstract notion of the possibilities of valid and sound inferences.

In this world, there are reasoning-events where people deduce or induce. Those reasoning-events are members of the causal or pseudo-causal chain of events of this world. They have relations to things with causal efficacy, including causal and pseudo-causal (quantum?) relations with them. I don't know the full nature of those causal and pseudo-causal chains, only that they are there.

This is true -no matter what- we say about whether or not our minds or souls or brains are part of or not part of this world - the world around us in a sense dictates to a large extent what we think about - that is, what we concern ourselves with - in the ordinary course of reason. Even "extraordinary reasoning events" - like thinking about metalogic - have their roots in physical conditions - who I am, where I am born, what my parents thought was important, what my teachers thought was important, etc., all combine to make this questioning about the notion of reason a reality for me. This is not to commit to causal determinism with respect to reason, but rather simply to note that the subject matter of our reason is to an extent subordinate to the availability of datum about which to reason. While we may be able to reason ex nihilo, in general we don't in fact. And what we're interested here preliminarily is "in fact" not the "abstract possibility" that were we disembodied eternal minds how we might then reason.

Similarly, the conclusions that we draw from a given set of circumstances appear to be to a large extent socially-determined. A child of the middle ages when seeing a sick person might make guesses as to the various humours involved in the sickness. In the early 21st century, we assume the existence of some virus or bacteria or poison is the cause of the disease. In the late 21st century, we may have determined the quantum basis of life and may attribute diseases to some field-conditions - I DON'T KNOW what we'll find out or decide obviously. Even the idea of thinking about our faculties of reason sociologically is a phenomenon of our century (Kuhn, feyerabend, etc.).

So we may call our reasoning-events "causally determined" - even the platonist won't deny the presence of a given person on earth is causally determined by their parents' mating - and without our presence, our conclusion-reaching isn't even remotely possible. Again, "causally determined" is not to be read in the sense of determinism as traditionally conceived.

Now, given that our reasoning-events are causally determined, there is a question as to their relationship to the abstraction notions of inference and validity which we (some of us anyway) have. And the question arises, what is the relationship between a given inference and it's generalized rule which makes it a "good reasoning"?

For instance, back to the math questions. We say "2 + 3 = 5" and so the correct answer to "if you have 2 cats and someone gives you three more how many cats do you have?" is 5. But here there are obviously counter-possibilities. Maybe the cats ran away during the transaction? Maybe when you add cats, they don't act like integers, but instead quintegers and are magically transported to another world. Maybe being the key word here. How will we determine from pure mathematics how many cats are in your possession? How can mathematics, indeed, decide what a cat is or how to count them.

I've said before that the concept of number is prior to set theory. I think it's also prior to mathematics generally. The questions "how to count and what to count" are more akin to what happens when a conductor and symphony interact than when a mathematician attempts an abstraction. The Conductor indicates the piece of music and tempo so that the musicians can stay together - all knowing what to count and how to count based on the movement of the baton and the conductor's gestures. This primal ability to count is in a way essential to what we do in a way evolutionarily. If a person can not repeat what its parents say eventually, it can not learn its language and it is unable to join society and be recognized as fully human. There are obviously such people. The genesis of this ability to repeat is unknown obviously, but some key elements have to be in it I think:

To repeat a phrase, someone must differentiate the phrase from other things and sounds around them, isolate it as a single thing of the kind in question (perhaps without having any thoughts of it being "single"). This happens in general with practice - hearing and testing to see which sounds produce the desired results in their environment - perhaps needed results. An infant is hungry and cries out. Eventually it learns to distinguish the hunger cry from the pain cry and indicate when the matter is settled and so the infant learns to speak eventually by identifying sounds made by their caretakers corresponding to the relevant events.

In this way also the core of "conditionals and implication" are learned. The baby learns that IF they scream such and such, they get food that they need. Then they learn that if they SAY such and such they get the specific kind of food that they need, etc. The -if-ness- is a relation between the word and the event. Eventually we learn that there are relations between words and words - our parents/siblings/teachers teach us the use of other new words not by ostension but by relations to other words. We learn to read a dictionary, etc.

This second kind of implication - semantic implication - is somewhat related to the first. We say "only use bald when someone has no hair on their heads" but we define "hair on the head" by ostension (sometimes). So while "bald" comes to have a specific semantic relation to "hair on the head" upon its first use, it becomes when used this way "linked" in a special way to no-hair-on-head (e.g. the phenomenon underlying "there is no hair on that person's head" when spoken and understood as true). By systematically relating words to each other (say by providing a dictionary or set of definitions) we can create a closed system of definitions - we'll come back to this.

Meanwhile, it remains possible to detach baldness from "no-hair-on-head" and we learn this after a short time. There are a million varieties of baldness - thinning, thinning in just the crown, shaving the head, partial shaving of the head, etc. Not all of them or even any of them need be immediately related to having "no hair on the head" (which it turns out is very seldom associated with baldness if you take it too literally - everybody has hair on their heads). In fact, learning to detach "no-hair-on-head" given by the first ostension is critical to learning what "baldness" really is - so that baldness becomes a phenomenon of its own.

In this way, I think, all such semantic implication dissolves - when we learn to use "2" we also learn to semantically detach it from "1 + 1" or "count and stop at the second one" or whatever. We learn that 2 is special and that its PURELY SEMANTIC relations with other things dissolve the more we understand the phenomenon of two-ness. The argument is simple. If two is "by definition" 1 + 1, then what is the meaning of "I have two legs"? In what way are my legs added together? Are my legs subject to the union axiom? Of course we can try to tell such a story but that story gets wilder and wilder the more detail required of it. When stories about why something is the way it is become too wild, we have a tendency to start thinking of them either as literally false or as metaphorical.

And so we start looking for the base of the metaphor - that is, trying to understand the Phenomenon of Two-ness. By this I mean distinguishing the specific circumstances in which "2" is the appropriate descriptive modifier - and so we return to finding out what we are counting and how we should count it/them. So we have not "two mashed potatoes" even if we have two potatoes that are mashed, for instance - because we've learned that 2-ness is nevertheless a phenomenon of the nature of our speaking without it being therefore a purely semantic phenomenon.

Thus detached from pure semantic relations, I think, the temptation toward platonism is removed. If we understand the nature of semantic relations (e.g. relations between human communicative devices) and look at them for what they are (words, talking, singing, pointing, etc.) rather than what they should be (purely logical entities with absolute meanings) we come to be able to understand how things IN FACT have semantic relationships without therefore being extra-worldly.

These semantic relationships, though, then don't have the implication-force we're used to assigning to them. In the platonist system of thinking, implications are absolute because the predicates are introduced with purely semantic relationships - all bald men have no hair on their head in the platonic world BECAUSE to be bald is to not have hair on your head by definition. Again, though, if we recognize that such introductions by definition only go so far, then we're able to understand what the word "bald" really means phenomenally.

IN FACT, if we insist on the purely semantic meaning of bald, we are simply unable to understand real discourse about the word "balding" or "bald". "The difference between living things and non-living things is that living things are still moving". This saying isn't true (the sun is moving, isn't it?) but the idea behind it is - and it applies to words as well. If our words become "rigorously defined" they become useless because they are unable to cope the with ongoing phenomenon of the world around us.

So finally to the notions of implication and conditionality. There is a certain kind of conditionality which is primordial for our language - the ability to associate words with situations and phenomenon pragmatically to produce behavior in our parents. Without a notional similar to "If I scream, they'll come" the screaming ceases (and this is a tested fact - either the baby dies or learns some other way to get the attention it needs or learns that it doesn't need the attention it thought it did), language is impossible - because there's no associating linguistic phenomena (the screaming) with other phenomena (the help). THIS variety of implication though, is not what we call "semantic implication" - the relations between words and words defined by them, though. That relation - the relations between words and their definitions - has to be regarded as an heuristic tool for learning languages more quickly. A person who has never been exposed to the phenomenon of baldness can nevertheless get a sense of what it would be like by pure word-definitions and will make a variety of assumptions about a person described as bald. HOWEVER, these assumptions will never be completely accurate as they are unable to provide DEDUCTIVE CERTAINTY.

But we do have still implication - phenomenal implication - implications which are presumed by the notion of the possibility of semantic implication. These phenomenal implications we also call "reason" and in some cases "common sense" - and while known to be fallible, are also capable of being thought of as revealing real relations between real things, as opposed to their semantic counterparts.

So we have two notions corresponding to our initial "logic" and "reason". We have a notion of implication - semantic implication - for which a statement must be regarded as true because so defined - and a notion of conditionality - for which a notion must be regarded as true because it is the underlying phenomenon for the possibility of a semantic structure. To give another example - my own existence must be regarded as conditionally related to this email because it is a member of its underlying phenomenon that make it possible.

Some Dichotomy-izing

if you know what you want, you know how to get it
if you know how to get it, you know what you want
there is no difference between them then
there are no ends and no means to justify
there is no method, no way, rather, the goal is the way
there is no goal, no ultimatum, no finality
being is therefore a process - to be is to be becoming
to cease to be becoming is to cease to be at all
dead things lie still, the living move about
But to be changing is to be at the edge of non-being
to be becoming what you will be but are not yet
And so teetering on death at all times
on the brink of contradiction
moving forward forever into the nothing

What's Obvious about the Obvious

Absolute Truth Claims are generally greeted with skepticism and rightly so.  People are often crazy, megalomaniacal, deluded, overconfident liars with a profit motive.

Nevertheless, we are interested in truth - at least for ourselves in our own case.

Why are we interested in truth?

First there is the pragmatic reason.  In order to act rationally, that is, to act with knowledge guiding our actions, we have to believe that the knowledge we are putting in to practice is true or at least a good approximation to it.  If we act without knowing that our thoughts on a matter are true, then we are acting somewhat carelessly.  The degree to which we don't know whether or not our actions are appropriate is the degree to which we are acting out of ignorance.  Most people act out of ignorance most of the time.  And this isn't a problem because our guesses are usually really good - informed as it were in the background by the rest of what we know.  Meanwhile, though, many decisions we make are very well informed.  We rely on our base-informedness to help us make good guesses and move forward practically.

Secondly is the moral reason - being interested in the truth is honest, good, upright.

Thirdly is the intellectual reason - curiosity.

There have been many assaults on the notion of the truth through time - Buddhism taken in its most austere forms denies the notion of human knowledge and truth.  Medieval and Modern Skepticism, Physicalist Psychologism, and post-modern Deconstruction all count as fundamental attacks on rationality and truth - each of them denies the accessibility of truth to humans in various ways.  All of them also have a fundamental flaw which is the topic of our current discussion.

I like to say it's obviously true that there's truth and that we can know at least some of it.  But obviousness I know is a culturally relative and psychologically dependent term, so I'd like to try to give it a technical meaning that's adequate for our purpose here.

For my purposes, something is obviously true if and only if it couldn't possibly be false.

Now that's clear enough I think except for the term "possibly".  For again a question arises - possibly according to who?  One says that pigs could fly, another says they can't - who's right, how do we decide.  That's really our question and so we haven't moved forward very far yet.

And here I want to point out that even the term "possibly" can be given a strong meaning based on the law of non-contradiction - something can't possibly be true if it implies a contradiction.  And yet here we are again - what implies a contradiction? 

I think there are three main cases of this kind.  There are "surface contradictions" where the contradiction is apparent in the very sentence in which it's uttered.    Things like "The chair is in the room and is wholly outside of the room."  go in this category.  These I also term the "obviously false."  

A second category are "roundabout contradictions" - these are congregations of sentences which taken together imply a contradiction.  For instance:

My mother is in the bathroom.

The bathroom is on mars.

My mother is not on mars.

--- no single sentence is obviously a contradiction but taken together we know one must be false.

The last category I'd like to think about are "self-defeating contradictions" - that is contradictions that, though they seem possible, nevertheless imply a contradiction.  These are the trickier ones.  Here I don't merely mean complicated "roundabout contradictions" but rather contradictions which if true imply their own falseness in some other way.

Thus for instance, the sentence "I don't exist" while not a contradiction in either of the straightforward senses above, must be false if uttered intentionally, e.g. in order to be thought of as true.  

This sentence is self-defeating because if it were true, the person who uttered it would not have been there to utter it.  But since we know that if uttered, someone uttered it, we know it to be false whenever uttered.  There are other ways that other sentences can be self-defeating.  I don't think there is a limit to the number of ways that sentences can be self-defeating in this way.  I do think that self-defeat-ability is finally reducible to complex cases of roundabout contradictions, but that they are nevertheless a special case of them - the cases where the speaking of something itself implies its own falsity.  The specialness is due to the fact that such sentences have existential import.  That is - the very existence of the sentence, utterance or proposition in question is what provides the hidden contradiction.

This existential import is obviously different from the other kinds of contradictions.

We know without knowing what beevils are that if all beevils are numbly and grohan is a beevil then beevil is numbly on pain of contradiction.  What we don't know from such games is whether or not there are any beevils at all and so whatever we may prove from this a priori formal "game" theorem, we can never actually prove anything about beevils.  

In the case of the self-defeating contradiction, we can prove something positive as a result of their obvious falsity.

In the famous case of DesCartes' Cogito we have such an argument.   The "I" that utters "I think" must be there to utter it, otherwise, it must obviously be false - in that the assumption that it was false would imply a self-defeating contradiction.

Thus "I exist" when uttered must be true.  Whatever "I" is, if it utters it, it's so.

And now we have the tools we need to get where we wanted to go.

It follows that if there are such absolute truths, that each of skepticism, post-modernism and psychologism are simply false.    That's a truth you can act on, count on, live by and be convinced of without reference to any sales pitch.

Skepticism is the theory that there are no truths or less worryingly, that no truths can be known.

But we know that there must be truths, for if there were no truths, then the following sentence would be true, but it is a self-defeating contradiction:

"There are no true sentences"

If it were true, then it couldn't exist.  But there it is.  Consequently, it must be false.

And we obviously know it.  

With deconstruction we have a slightly more virile anti-transcendentalism - a deconstructionist might say that the context in which the utterance in question is hypothetical and not determinable, and so the meaning of it is hopelessly vague.   But this is a mistake.  While we do depend on interpersonal communication's possibility, we also have a handy argument for its necessity. (roughly from wittgenstein).

If there were no interpersonal communication, then these words I'm using would be meaningless for their meaning is dependent on people using them for communicating.

This argument taken rightly, is again of the transcendental form:

There are no meaningful or understandable sentences.  

Is obviously false, for if true, it's meaningless.  How can a meaningless sentence be true?

And now we have in our hands our double-edged sword - truth and meaningfulness.

With it we can defeat many foes.  Which we will defeat is going to have to wait until tomorrow.

Another Thing

What is God like?

Western thinkers don't like to talk about God's logical form - what God is.

To be more specific.  One asks "Is God a particular thing or a kind of thing?"  There is a list of questions: "Is God mindful or mindless?" "Is God embodied or disembodied?" "Is God free or determined?"  "Is God Good?"... The list goes on indefinitely.

In many ways these categories are mistaken dichotomies.  The best way to illustrate this, for me, is by reference to logic itself.

In logic one has axioms and proceeds from these axioms via accepted rules of inference to conclusions to form a proof.  They rather dryly look like (A -> B & A ) -> B.  Nothing important.

But one can inquire into the status of the axioms.  Lewis Caroll's famous paradox about the Tortoise asks us to consider the status of modus ponens itself - what is the force of logical force AT ALL?  Similarly the Problem of the Criterion by Chisolm is illustrative of what happens when one questions the axioms - the very definitions by which we reason - themselves.

One should regard the Buddhist notion of a Koan and Mu as attempted illustrations of this basic fact of human reason - we don't have a foundation.  Nothing is given.  

Given that nothing is given ... then what?

It's not that bad, and for an essay on transdendental truth, stay tuned.  For now, we shall have to take it as given that something is given - that is, that there is some truth simply because the contradiction:

There is no truth.

Is a contradiction (if true, then not true.)

But given that nothing is given and that there is truth, we could move forward.

Are we being hasty.  Is it possible that the law of non-contradiction is false too?  Is it also a false dichotomy?

Certainly there is a form of Caroll's paradox that would dismember the law of noncontradiction:

A & B 

B -> !A

______

! A & B

Is a form of classical contradiction - a kind of reductio in which A and B are found to be contradictory in the lemma.    The question for a Caroll-thinking person might be "Persuade me that we need to conclude that way assuming I don't already accept the law of non-contradiction."  

The most fundamental form of it, !(A & !A) is equally problematic.  In the abstract form displayed there, it appears simply to be the very foundation of thinkability.  If we can't deny such statements out of hand, then we simply can't live, we might think.

However, there are many such examples in common human language:

"The table is blue and the table is not blue. " - we can imagine many cases where this happens.

"The man is bald and the man is not bald." - I don't count myself among these, but I know many of them.

"The earth is round and not round." - it's round-ish...

"The earth is rotating around the sun and it's not rotating around the sun." - we could surely give a mathematical model that shows the earth as the center of the universe.

This is the problem of vagueness - we need specific enough predicates to apply to things to say whether or not the words we want to use are capable of being applied in contradictory ways.

To use our first example "The Table is blue and not blue" could be clarified in english:  

"The Table is Blue Everywhere at all Times that it exists and the Table is NOT Blue Everywhere and at all Times that it exists."

This one, we say, is surely a contradiction.  Surely only one of them is true (probably the second, I should think.)

My point being only this - that there are more and less vague predicates and therefore more and less valid dichotomies.

I personally make a strict dichotomy between these two predicates:

Exists

Does Not Exist

Thus, for me, for all things, either they exist or they do not.    I don't want to debate "Whether or not existence is a predicate" - it appears obvious to me that there are things that exists and that everything that doesn't exist doesn't have any properties.  I'm not trying to be dogmatic here, but rather just to explain how I'm willing to use the word "exists".

For instance, according to me Santa Claus does not exist but I do.  

I think if we don't make this fundamental distinction, then any attempt to discuss frankly anything at all must ultimately fail - if we can't agree that there is a difference between something existing and not existing, how can we ever hope to come to an agreement on whether or not something is true or not true?

I term "existence" then a Transcendental Category - it's transcendental in that everything is known to either be or not be in its category without reference to any of the particulars in any case.

There is, of course, a small problem with my seemingly dogmatic language.  There appear to be things that don't exist - Santa Claus comes again to mind.  IN a sense anyway, Santa Claus is not exactly nothing.

And that's right - Santa Claus is a collection of ideas and customs surrounding the Western-European notion of Christmas - he wears a big hat, beard, red clothes and drives a flying sleigh.  Well, not exactly.  The more specific truth of it is that we say of him those things but know that they aren't true.    Problem avoided - there is a relationship between transcendental existence and transcendental truth:  if something is in the category "Exists" then it is possible that some sentence can be true about it.  If something is NOT in the category "Exists" then it is not possible that some sentence can be true about it.

This is also shown in our customs - people disagree about what Santa Claus is like without anyone thinking anyone is crazy.  We simply think there is no fact of the matter - it's not worth arguing about whether or not Santa has or does not have an assistant named Schwarte Pete.

Not quite problem solved.  What if someone flew in with the red suit, climbed out of their reindeer driven sleigh and gave us a hearty ho-ho-ho?  What then?  Does Santa Exist IF THAT HAPPENED?

I think we'd have a reserved affirmative here.  We might inquire as to his history and if everything panned out we might have to reluctantly agree that Santa exists IN THAT CASE.  We might then find out that many things we thought true of Santa are not, and after investigation of the matter, we would no doubt come to many conclusions about Santa.

But what is the meaning of IN THAT CASE - what are we saying would happen to Santa if he moved from the "not-existing" to the "existing" category?

Well, we shouldn't say anything at all happened to santa.  It's not possible, I think, for things to happen to non-existent things.  So the question is - what happens to the world when something that is merely possible becomes actual?

And so now we're ready to turn full circle.

How does that which is possible - e.g. the sun coming up in the morning - become actual - e.g. the sun actually having come up in the morning?

Now there is a sense in which this question is a scientific one - in the case of the sun, it comes up because the earth rotates in such and such a way and gravity and light and blah blah blah.

There is another sense in which this is not a scientific question.  The most general sense we spoke about earlier - how in general do things that could be otherwise or could not be at all come to be?  

This general question is not addressed by empirical observation, but rather like existence, is a policy question in a way.  We could say "When should we acknowledge that an imagined thing has come from being a mere idea to being a real thing in the world?"  

Being a software programmer by profession, I'm very familiar with this, but it's no different from any other kind of engineering and construction problem.   An architect draws a house.  The house, at that point, does not exist.   Carpenters build the house - the the house in question exists.  Is it the same house that didn't exist before?  Obviously not, nothing can be identical with something that doesn't exist.  But there is a sense in which it is the same - our conceptions about what the house was to be like have become realized.   We can compare our drawings to the house itself and to the extent to which the drawings match, we can say that the vision of the architect has been realized.

Is that the best way to talk about it?  The Vision becomes the Reality.  How does this happen?  By our own will, in the case of a house.  Someone finds money, pays another person to do it, they build the house.  That is, we become convinced, in a way, to act on our vision in order to produce it.  That is "creation".  

Not all things that exist appear obviously to have been created - not even things made by people.  For instance, there are our mistakes and side-effects.  An architect may not consider that there is a house behind the house he designed for which as a result of the building of the house the view from the porch is blocked.  Did the architect intend to block the view?  Maybe, maybe not.  Let's assume not.  Then is the resultant blockage the creation of the architect?

I don't know what to say in this case.  Legally we say yes, it is the fault of the builder of the house.    Formally I think we would agree - if the primary cause in the view-blocking is the house and the primary cause of the house is the architect and builder, then the architect and builder created the view blockage just as they created the house.

We trace our lineage of existence to responsibility, in the most general sense.

What of things that don't appear to have been created at all.  For instance, a fawn.  The fawn wasn't there, was conceived (in the carnal sense) by the parents and then born.  We may or may not attribute intelligence to the fawn, so the idea of "Vision" here is out of the question, at least in the case of the doe and buck.  Nevertheless, there is a difference between existing and non-existing for the fawn.  Prior to insemination there was no fawn, after birth there was.  -something happened-.  Obviously again there is the scientific question - how do deer reproduce?  

But there is also a non-scientific question.   If we decide the science - deer reproduce this way - there remains the question "Why are there deer that reproduce that way?"  And so we are back to our earlier problem with the sun - why is there gravity such that planets rotate around the earth?  Why are there laws of nature?  How, in general, do things that might not be the way they are, come to be the way they are?

This question is slightly different from, but related to another question by Heidegger - Why is there anything at all?

In some ways if we could answer that question, we could answer this one and vice versa.  If - in general - we knew how things come into being then we could say - at least potentially - how these things have come into being.  There being a slight difference in that just because we know in general how things come into being, it doesn't follow that we would therefore know how these particular things came into being.

Now here there is a temptation to speculate.  Heidegger notes that God is a traditional answer to his question.  And that's so - God is why this world exists - why there is something rather than nothing at all.  But there remains the question of the mechanism.  How does God explain why there is something rather than nothing at all?

But we can answer this question without speculation.

If we assert that there is a difference between existing and not existing and that there is - in general - a process of becoming which is the moving from existing to non-existing - then there is the notion of the nature of this process - what is the process itself.

This is a kind of a scientific question  - we can investigate the nature of processes in general - but also a metascientific question - for there will always remain the question of why any of these processes that just happen to exist are the ones that they are and exist themselves.  Just as we have a question as to the reason for the existence of the most general physical laws, we have a question as to the reason for the existence of the process itself.

Nevertheless, though, we have found another transcendental category of being.  There is the the category of what exists and the category of what could potentially exist (for which our current model is mental imagery or vision) and finally the category of things that transform potential things into real things.

We are ourselves this last kind of thing - we humans transform potential things (visions and ideas) into real things (buildings and computer programs).  

Are there any such other kinds of things?  Obviously the world itself is engaged in becoming what it will be moment-to-moment.  And there is therefore that thing which is transforming it from what it can possibly be to what it actually becomes.  This generalized force that creates and sustains the universe many (indeed most) people call God.  But there are many questions surrounding that name as well.

In particular there are the questions with which we started many of which we are in a position now to answer.

Is God One thing or many things?

It is an obvious fact given our previous discussion that there are many god-like things.  We humans are god-like in that we take the merely possible and make it actual.   We bring things into being purposefully.  It seems equally obvious that there is at least one other such thing.  It is not clear whether or not there are more such things.  We can imagine, for instance, there being several gods designing the world as a committee or just one omnipotent God who does all the work him/herself.    That is to say, from what we have thus far, we don't have an answer to this question.  

There is a partial answer however - obviously there are no contradictions of the kind we spoke earlier where two contradictory predicates apply at the same time to the same thing in the same way.  So at a minimum God(s) are unified in their active creating in that it/they make only one set of true statements be true.

Is god Mindless or Mindful?

Our model for mindfulness is this:  Vision -> action -> reality.  Our visions or conceptions guide our actions into bringing something envisioned into reality.  Now we can imagine both - that God has a vision for reality and does not have a vision for reality.  In fact we can imagine both simultaneously - perhaps God has a vision for reality that God is bringing about but it is only partial, perhaps some of reality God is letting happen by accident (e.g. as the view is unintentionally blocked by architect's building) or leaving up to other god-like beings (e.g. people).

So we have a bit of  a false dichotomy here - mindfulness and mindful are vague - something can be mindful and mindless in the same act.  We do this ourselves most of the time.  Intentionally going to work, but unintentionally wasting fuel.

Is God embodied or disembodied?

Here, again, we have I think a vague predicate.  Atoms are physical things.  Quarks and gluons are physical things, and the things that make them up are physical on presumes.  However, there is still the potentiality for quarks and gluons which is itself real.  That process of quarks and gluons and fields becoming real (say at the big bang) and coming to obey a specific set of physical laws (instead of some other set) is not obviously a physical process.  Nevertheless, the reality of them - the fact that they do happen at all - is something that happens in a causal nexus where things interact with each other - e.g. in a world.  So one must think of God as being both simultaneously embodied and disembodied - both beyond and inside the world that is created - interacting with it and bringing it into being at the same time.

Is God Free or Determined?

We have to ask the same question of our selves and I think the answer is roughly the same.    Obviously People do not create the context in which they act.  I have the parents that I do, live in a society that I do, have the basic needs that I do, live on the planet that I do.  These facts about my life significantly determine which options are available for me.   Nevertheless I can create a vision of what I want and carry it out and can change that vision "at will".  So I am simultaneously free and determined - free to do what I want within the constraints of the world in which I am situated.

I thing similar considerations apply to God.  God can not choose not to Be God.  God could not, for instance I think, choose not to create the world.  At the same time, God's given context - being able to choose among various visions of reality that God may have - is not constrained by the same kinds of considerations that I have - God need not have created a sun, but I must live with the sun.  God need not have created my mother, but I must have a mother.

What constraints God does have is the subject of our last topic.

Is God Good?

There is no easy answer for this question so I'm going to start with another one.

One can ask "Are mosquitoes good?"  

They make disease, are parasites, and appear to add nothing of value to the ecosystem except possibly as food for carp which would be perfectly happy eating other things.

Nevertheless, the question of their suitability for existence is not relative to OUR purposes for them but presumably God's purpose for them.  That is, the fact that mosquitoes make people sick isn't relevant to whether or not God wants them here.  It may be that God has a specific purpose for mosquitoes unknown to us and that we are food for them is just a consequence of them being what they are.   As we know, it is always unpleasant to be food for something else....

So I think it is with mosquitoes - perhaps they exist to demonstrate to us how unpleasant it is to be food and engender in us kindness toward our food.  I really don't know.

But whether or not I understand their purpose is not relevant to their suitability for it - and that is the point.  God's intentions in making this world are whatever they are and my role in it is the one appointed in it to me by God.  I like my role in it - I'm free to make what I want into reality and that is a very pleasant proposition at least up front.  I feel like a child given my first car!  

Now not everyone feels this way.  For some people life is painful, either because of their own decisions or because of their circumstances.  For such people (and this includes me at various times), I think it's fully appropriate to complain to God both in asking for help and repenting (e.g. stopping whatever it was that caused their own pain if that's how they ended up in it.)  To continue our previous metaphor, if God builds a house that blocks your view, you may want to ask Him for a new view.  

But this still leads us a little off track.  The question is whether or not God is Good - and that depends on what God Does and what God is Supposed To Do.   And since we know that God is supposed to Create and Sustain the Universe, it is clear that God is good at that - even, in my opinion - at creating a Good Universe, full of everything of value for better and worse.

Nevertheless, for those struggling with pain I can offer my condolences (I also have pain) and hope (I also have hope).  Do not be afraid, remember that God created you too and remember your own creations (your children if you have them) - do you not love them?  Do you want to see them come to harm?  So have faith, God will bring you out of your pain.

In a Nutshell

Putting reality in a nutshell is probably a bad idea.

That's this one in a nutshell.

Life is complex.  The more important the questions, the more complex the answers.  Simple truths don't work in reality, at least, inasmuch as they work, they're not as simple as they seem.

The most complex question a person has to answer is this one:  What should I do with my soul?

Lots of people like to ignore this problem either by denying they have a soul or denying that it's their problem - theirs to do with what they want.

Both kinds of denial are not legitimate excuses for failing to take responsibility for oneself.  Pretending that you didn't hit your sister doesn't mean you didn't hit your sister.

Religion, in many ways, is an attempt to answer this question with a rational answer:

I should do with my soul the best possible thing that could be done with my soul.

What is that?

God only knows.

And that's literally true, God only knows.

How do you get God to tell you?

And there it gets complicated.

A friend of mine told me I should chant "I am ramakrishna" a few times.  But I couldn't.  I'm not ramakrishna.

So I read his book which is very nice.

Have I learned anything?  Yes.

I've learned that no matter how much I know, there's still more that I don't know.  I wouldn't have it any other way frankly.

Recognizing unity in all people - and the unity of the goal of human self-realization if you like that term - is trivial.

Nobody wants hell, everybody wants heaven - even if sometimes we have them confused.

Nobody wants to act on faith, everybody wants knowledge.  But I know from my own experience.  Knowing something for a fact doesn't make you act on it.  Take smoking, for instance.

So there are real differences between people.  The declaration is fudging on the words "created equal".  Equal in what?  Equal in that we all are open to ourselves as possibilities.  Certainly not in that either.

Jesus prayed for us though "I pray that they will be one as we are one" - the cryptic "oneness in the spirit, oneness in the Lord".  

Hindi's say "J'ai baghvan ji" - I am that which thou art.  "Thou" because you are holy and I acknowledge it. 

To be a descendent of God is truly miraculous.  How else can we quantify our existence?

If God is Matter, then we are Matter's children.  If God is the great spirit and creator of the Universe, then we are God's children.  If the Universe is inanimate, then we are its spirit, and we are thus the God we seek and we are one in our seeking for it.  If God has infused His World with His Spirit as the bible says, then we are his spirit here.

When God Breathed His Spirit into Adam, did this make Adam different from the other people there at the time?  YOU BET YOUR SWEET PATOOTY.  (In chapter 1 He made them male and female.  In Chapter 2 he made Adam and shortly thereafter made Eve.  Attention to details is critical when dealing with God.)

Dealing.  The Gates of heaven will not be stormed.  No amount of ratiocination will get us there.  No amount of pleading really.  Only this - the mercy of God.

Why will God show us mercy?

God put us here to take care of His Garden.  Well, we certainly messed that one up.

He said "Love One Another as I have Loved you."  Well, we certainly are messing that one up.

Instead we poison our world and kill our friends.

What can we do?  How do we set ourselves right again?

The metaphor I like is this - "balance a large ball perfectly still on your nose."

Perhaps someone with great skill can stop the ball from moving relative to them.  Such a person has great balance.  But no one I know can stop the ball from moving at all.  

So it is with us. We are balancing our small lives on a gigantic society the extent of which we can't possible begin to know.  We can do our best.  Is our best good enough?

Do people still get killed unjustly using the money you pay in taxes?  Do you pay your taxes out of fear of what the government would do to you if you didn't?  Then satisfying your fear is more important than preventing your government from killing people unjustly.

Yes, it's true, the government uses a form of extortion to extract that money from people of conscience.  But this doesn't excuse us.

Oh Lord, I say, Please forgive me for being a coward.

Why should Lord forgive me?

Was Christ a coward?  Why should I be allowed to be a coward and not He?

Ramakrishna says that we can not do good for others until God has given us the power.  That's roughly right, God would have to make it possible for us to start being Good.  When will God awaken and help those of us who do cry for truth, mercy and justice? 

Soon enough but not soon enough.

It strikes me that God has made the immovable object and the unstoppable force and is simply keeping them from colliding.  Even if they did, though, faith says, God will figure something out.

Well, that's all folks.

On Miracles & Uri Gellor

David Hume famously defined a miracle as a violation of the laws of nature.   The impossibility of such things is obvious - whatever actually happens must be in accordance with the laws of nature for the laws of nature must serve as an explanation for why everything is the way it is.

Does this clear up any of the common "mysteries". 

Yuri Gellor is a well known magician - he can perform tricks and I believe admits that his spoon

bending is a trick. Anyway, what if it isn't? What if he can bend spoons simply by looking at 

them and thinking of them as bent. What then? Then there is a law of nature with which Yuri's

spoon bending is consistent. A higher law, as it were.

Similarly with Moses. Moses is reported to have thrown his staff onto the ground and had it

change into a snake which then proceeded to eat the snakes of the priests of Ra. One says "you

can't change wood into snakes." Well, as far as we know, but maybe someone can?

Science is the knowledge of generalizations - generally things are attracted to each other, that

is called gravity. Science is also the knowledge of exceptions - sometimes things aren't

attracted to each other, that's another force (magnetic forces can do this, for instance). So

what?

It is outside the scope of generalizing to say that something did not happen once. Any story

that begins "once upon a time" science can neither confirm nor deny by experimentation.

It can tell us "we can not repeat that by doing anything of the sort." But does this prove

that something did not happen or just that we don't know how to repeat it?

Many well known magicians have been debunked by hidden cameras - the tricks they play that

amount to small miracles impress everyone. But what about real magic?

What would real magic look like today?

In our world dominated by humans, magic very seldom takes the form of extracting water from

rocks or gathering manna from heaven - we gather our own manna and steal that of our

brothers.

No, in our world, magic takes the same for it always did - in the battle between good and evil.

God is not a parlor magician, neither is the Devil. If the Devil makes someone wealthy or

healthy, there is a reason. What that reason is simply not investigated by modern scientific

methods mostly because rational motivation simply is not causally oriented.

We don't help our sisters because we are compelled to by force, that wouldn't be helping them

at all. We do it because we want to. If we were compelled to help someone, we wouldn't say

that we were helping them at all, but that, as it were, whoever helped us to do it did it.

In my own case, miracles happen when I help someone -at all-. I'm not a particularly nice

person. So when I find myself helping someone and it working, I'm taken aback, impressed

so to speak.

Miracles then, are simply invisible to those without the eyes to see them. Those who scoff

say that there is no miracle at all, not seeing that their own breath is a great miracle. Who

can seriously ignore the infinite depth and mystery involved in the fact that we are breathing

and living? Lots of people, they're called the blind.