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.