Oh, no worries. I'm starting to get burned out on so much talking anyways so the longer the better.
Yeah. I've resolved to let a few days pass before each reply.
Incidentally, I've also resolved not to reply to any of your posts in other threads touching on the subjects we're discussing here; I'm worried we might hijack any and all of them, else.
I think that a lot of where we are at odds is rooted in epistemological value. I feel like you have a conviction that the value of a model is directly proportional to it's pragmatic usefulness in making determinations, predictions, developing methodologies, etc.
True enough. My biggest concern is that you don't have to seem to have a method (scientific or otherwise) for discerning personal truth from non-truth.
What I'm trying to tell you, as he puts it, is "the fact that these things cannot be dissected with reductionist methodology does not make them any less real. Rather, the inability of reductionism to make sense of them demonstrates the limits of the reductionist approach".
I would agree there, but the above problem remains. Science does not marginalize those phenomena (not any more than a physicist marginalizes literature by being quiet about it, anyway), although you of course hold that the SEW does. I say that if it does its no wonder, as personal truths are both less likely to spread and more difficult to use in a demonstrably (in any way) representative fashion. But I do maintain that most people do use mechanisms and approaches to themselves as well as their lives that are at odds with what I understand SEW to be. This is also in line with the psychological findings of the crucial importance of conscious or unconscious emotions in decision-making.
My theory is that only by going beyond strict reductionism and pragmatism can we arrive at a model which embraces the reality of both the concrete, physical, objective and the abstract. meaningful, and subjective sides of the cosmos which we not only exist in but represent and demonstrate. We are the evidence. We are the method.
We are only evidence of ourselves; our genetically intrinsic methods are demonstrably imperfect, thus the need for a more abstract method. What I think is evidence of anything else than what I think.
I'm going to go through and try to answer specific questions but I really think most of the rest has to do with reduction to empirical criteria as a precondition for consideration and a measure of validity, which I completely accept for the purposes of science working with physical objects and materials, but I reject when dealing with the cosmos as a whole.
The whole cosmos being the two sides of the coin or the symmetrical spectrum you mentioned, I assume.
If so, see above; missing method.
In the one demonstration I did throwing the I Ching, it appeared to reflect the situation quite accurately. It can fairly reliably give your intuition a boost.
As can any bible passage, or P.K. Dick gibberish. No method to make distinctions in terms of veracity.
It's like the uncertainty principle. If you want sharp epistemological delineations, you can have them but at the cost of a lot of other great values - meaning, numinousity, inspiration, illumination, etc.
I find that arbitrary meaning and inspiration can be derived just as easily from scientific findings as it can from Tarot. With just as much or little merit. And desirability has no place in a discussion about veracity.
If you mean consciousness, yes we do have some very strong indication that consciousness is strictly limited to neurological networks.
Only if you define consciousness as the activity of neurological networks. What if neurological networks amplify and focus rather than generate consciousness?
What? I say "there's some evidence for X" and you say "only if you assume X is true"?
What if it's a bunch of squirrels in training wheels? I don't know.
The activity of neurological network thing has the most evidence right now. Should new evidence surface, I will be sure to take a look at it (assuming I have a job by then). For sure, the amplification or channeling model may be scientifically equivalent to the current ones, but it wouldn't pass Occam's razor; and just because it may be constistent with reality.
Because our own interiority can be mapped to peptides and peptides are composed of atoms. Why would the sudden appearance of subjectivity out of nowhere make more sense than a building upon inherent properties of subordinate components.
It's neither sudden nor out of nowhere. And systems can demonstrably have properties that their parts do not.
Why not interiority? Doesn't it seem like you are inside of your head, behind your eyes?
It
does seem like that. Hardly surprising considering sight is our single most important sensory input line.
That is the basis. 1) Matter and energy are intimately related, 2) energy demonstrates that a highly ordered and aesthetically pleasing visual phenomenon can be carried invisibly. 3) matter behaves in highly ordered ways but it is denser and less accessible from the outside than energy. 4) since we know that even energy routinely 'hides' it's inner nature even with no visible place to hide, it seems like one way to explain the coherence that we experience would be that matter and energy my contain order which cannot be accessed from the outside.
Where is the meaning in all that? All I see is information and (potentially) order.
Never even mind that your basis is purely conceptual.
I disagree. A circle is an elemental shape which can be reduced, described, and analyzed with certain properties but you don't assemble a circle from descriptions, the descriptions are an afterthought.
You can't assemble a circle. You can just make shapes that very much resemble one. These shapes were described by humans, resulting in the abstract concept of a circle, which has proven highly useful and representative but is in not a real entity.
There's no logic without humanity
Basis?
*sigh*
Prolly just a semantic mismatch again. There is no
discipline of logic without humanity. No mathematical systems. No concept of argumentation.
But there is order potentially describable by logic, math, and arguments.
It proves that even in the realm of complete abstraction, there are rules. Not human rules, but ontological rules of pattern itself. Matter or protons are ideas about physical substance, not ideal patterns which exist only as abstractions.
Of course. If you describe X as humpty and Y as dumpty and X and Y are incompatible, so will humpty and dumpty.
If logic were truly only human, then humans could easily imagine a square circle...what's stopping them?
The incoherence? Those are mutual exclusive abstract ideas describing mutually exclusive patterns in nature. Why would they be compatible in the mind of an organism wthat evolved to recognize and distinguish patterns?
But I do see what you're driving at. Logic as a way of thinking is purely human; but it's also custom-tailored to be representative to some degree of the appearent order of reality. This does not mean the cosmso in its totality adheres to our concepts of logic; but its order is to some degree representable and communicable.
They're opposites if we apply certain concepts. What follows?
Not sure what we were talking about here.
I was referring to the issue with your notion of symmetry. X and Y are opposites only if certain assumptions are mode, i.e. the axis is set arbitrarily. In one way, a particle and an anti-particle are opposites. In many ways, they are not.
My point being that while looking for symmetries and opposites alongside an arbitrarily chosen axis sure can be productive, there's nothing to suggest that our ability to understand and regard something as symmetrical and/or opposing does not in itself allow any conclusion.
Your two sides of the same coin matephor, for instance.
based on what? what says that an obscure method can't have specific advantages due to it's obscurity or made more effective through obscurity? I know this to be a fact in intuitive matters.
That's not what I was driving at; my point was that if it's obscure, you have no way of judging it's veracity, except by empirical evaluation of the outcomes. In other words, again, you have no idea if or why your conclusions are valid on any level.
You can't force inspiration to happen or put it on a timer or tease it into doing your bidding - it's just the opposite, it only really works when you partially surrender to it's method/madness. This is how art works.
And that's all part of our incomprehension of the workings of the brain/consciousness. Note how art does not and never has had to do with veracity, "only" personal meaning.
Because, like you said, words aren't things depending on your definition. A good model of the cosmos has both a side where words are things and one where they aren't.
Where did I say that? Words are depending
solely on our definitions. There is recourse to the universe, of course, but words with other meanings work just as well, as evidenced by a whole bunch of languages with a lot of semantic overlap, but also a lot of semantic differences.
Words aren't concrete things, but they're as real as any pattern or process. They're part of the universe, not necessarily representative.
Because qualia alone makes existence worthwhile. Nobody needs to prove water is wet because it is a self evident truth, but if we want to understand how truth in the subjective universe works, qualia is the main subject that matters.
What you call subjective universe I would simply call another tiny aspect of the same coherent universe.
Qualia are important to us, but that doesn't mean they are true.
That's why I said "brain functions", not "brain".
You can't find any circle shaped brain functions either.
You can't find words either. You also won't find MS Office if you disassemble your computer, or an eddy if you look at the gas molecules individually. What of it?
But it hums along quite merrily while it's conscious host is in a decade long coma. The brain doesn't need consciousness. It doesn't need to feel things to accomplish survival. The fact that we feel things points to layers of meaningful processes which have little to do with mechanical necessity.
Yes, no, maybe. Consciousness may be a by-product as mentioned or it may in fact be crucial to our survival as a species.
The stomach can survive without its host only long enough to die of starvation without outside assistance. And that's hardly surprising, considering many body functions, including our psyches, are running automatically without us ever knowing.
I do get your point - why consciousness? - but I do not expect even a personally satisfying answer without empirical evidence.
It depends on your definition of new age religion. To me it seems much more like psychology or philosophy than religion. It's not a belief system, it's just an interpretation of our numerical symbols. It's psychosemiotics.
Again, how do I distinguish its degree of veracity from scientology, deism, or some such?
You obviously have a well-thought-out construct (leaning quite heavily on language, methinks). They do to. You're saying psychosemiotics; scientology says dianetics. They do not have empirical evidence; neither do you.
I'm just trying to determine how you would distinguish the veracity of the outcomes even if it only pertains to you and you alone.
Sure, you can use different counting systems and get different meanings. Those work too. As long as there's a coherent system, the results will play out as the consequence of that system.
Of course. And that makes them (even "merely" personally) valid how?
Why? Basis?
Simple evolutionary mechanisms. No energy wasted on the ability to recognize patterns that aren't beneficial to recognize because nothing approaching them appears in nature with any regularity.
Scroll down to "cognitive" processes hypothesis[/quote]. I'm well aware it's only a hypothesis; but for my argumentation it's merely relevant that pattern recognition demonstrably screws up often, and there's no reason to assume it's not screwing up outside of optical input.
The more subjective you get the less about proving things it gets. Pattern recognition. Meaning. Interpretation. That's all there is at the ACME end.
If it's not about proving anything, why are we talking about truth as opposed to subjective desireability.
The periodic table is arbitrary itself.
It's still meaningful.
Of course. Arbitrary =/= random.
Isn't a symbolism an interpretation of innate color logic?
No, it's an interpretation of arbitrarily assigned semantic values to perceived phenomena with no basis at all. Much like the letter "A" has very little to do with the sound pattern recognized as its counterpart. My using a cross or a fish as interchangeable symbols for christianity reveal no innate logic about either; just like my loving someone has nothing to do with rings and a mumbling priest except by semantic attribution.
I can't equate "blood is red" with "red innately means danger" anymore than saying "cockadoodledoo" is the actual sound it describes.
It's not just a workable way of thinking, it's a root principle of thinking itself. A subjective universal.
It is
a way of thinking because no matter if it's underlying or not, we're capable of working around it to a degree, and because other ways of thinking are workable in principle.
Being a shared property does not make it correct or representative, just again, subjectively desireable (and often not even that).
Who says opposites don't share many features. Opposites are a pair. You can't pair two utterly unrelated things, and if you could they wouldn't be opposite, they'd be non-sequiturs.
Yes. Hence my problem with attempting to derive any kind of truth or meaning from them without a method to determine which are relevant to the discussion.
Since your flying does not cross over into the objecitve world, it's not a universal commonality. Symmetry is.
No. It's shared among humans; and the notions and definitions vary wildly depending on context. Symmetry is a shared commonality (quite possibly easily explained by its success in model-building and the consequent evolutionary advantages), not universal. It's a shared concept not necessarily representative of anything; much like languages, it can be said to exist with much recourse to the universe we perceive, including ourselves, but not of the whole universe.
Objective? So we do have need for objectifying measures?
Sure it can be a meaningful subjective truth, both personally and collectively. I don't think there is a difference between god and any other concept made up on the spot in the sense of it's existential validity, but there is a difference in which concepts spread and thrive and which ones die out which can probably be mapped to some measure of fidelity to subjective architectures. Flying spaghetti monster probably won't ever achieve the memetic strength of Islam.
So we're not talking about true truth here, but about what someone thinks it's true. How does the spreading mechanism have any impact on validity?
Sure you can make a 1 into a 2, like you said, simply redefine the words. Those are more subjective counting symbols Circles and squares need no words to define them. You can't make one into the other because they have a concrete pattern integrity independent of human logic. We didn't make up circles, we discovered them - they were provided for us by our pattern recognition perception. Even a blind person has a perception of a circle.
Circles and squares do need words to be communicable; but not to be understood. The exact same thing holds true for numbers. The knowledge that two is more than one is hard-wired in animals much less prone to abstraction than we are. You can, however, define them in different terms, although the ones in use are shared concepts due to their simplicity.
And a blind person has no notion whatsoever about circles except by touching them, just as much as a seeing person has no notion about circles except by seeing them. And abstracting many such shapes into a useful approximation.
We do not actually know any of that.
Why not?[/quote]
Because nobody has tried.
How is the cosmos subjective except in our assessment of it?
Our assessment of the cosmos is the cosmos being subjective.
That's just a linguistic sleight of hand. Our calling the sky blue is not the cosmos being subjective. It's us being subjective. We're only part of the cosmos and what's universal among humans is in no way therefore universal.
Everywhere. They don't have to connect, because they are different 'sides' of the same thing. They can't not connect. They just look different on the outside than they feel on the inside.
So what I get from this is that you want to reconcile the objective with the subjective, the objective being our collective making descriptions of what we perceive using well-defined methods and the subjective being what we arbitrarily assign of what we perceive using methods whose very workings are unknown to us?
You're basically trying to reconcile a non-system of finding subjective meaning with a system merely describing objectifiables.
