On ''what there is''
Maghister , You missed many important ’’points’’.Perhaps and certainly if i want to be honest, but for me you miss many more... :) Anyway i want here to thank you for the discussion initiated by you... You can’t ignore thisFor you consciousness is a ghost in a box... If you want to undertand what is "consciousness" and why it is not an "illusion" but the root of reality... I cannot convince you with words...Even with a book about all human history by genius like the german poet And thinker : Jean Gebser "the ever present origin"... Reading the treatises of Goethe in science and his maxims could help to figure it out... After all Goethe is the greatest thinker in germany: Shakespeare + Newton in the same head...So deep even today Goethe is underestimated save by genius like Cassirer and other great thinkers.... Kant is great but not on the same level....It is an academic professor so great it was... Beside them what is Frege? :) the greatest logician is Kurt Goedel... Anyway discussing with you is interesting and i will not try to convince you.... Consciousness is not an argument in a discourse, it never was, but the landscape where all there is, is.... "he origin ever present"... Buddhah discourse, Lao Tse, or Christ.... This is also "thinking" not only blind religion....Thinking is not propositional calculus nor scientific proposition about matter or reality ...It is way deeper... By the way i studied linguistic and my master is a french genius who wrote 40 books : Gustave Guillaume ... He is the founder of a neurolinguistic approach to language... I cannot made a short introduction to all that here.... Alas we dont know each other in reality.... Only through short posts... I apologize if i was "rude" .... I am passionnate ... and i apologize to be ignorant about cartridges....All audio subject interest me for sure...But i lost my turntable eons ago for practical reason.. My best to you... |
Maghister , You missed many important ''points''. Logic does not say which propositions are true or false but that two contradictory propositions can't be both true. Also that from false assertion no true deductions can be made. Also that proposition are true or false independent from our will. Then rationality is not an ''thing'' or ''object'' but human attitude expressed by actions. Those actions have caused many disasters . You can't ignore this with your verbalism nor by assuming ''consciousness'' as the old Greek '' deus ex machina''. The ''meanings'' you assume are meanings of words or ''concepts'' which are statement about language not reality. The same illusion as by old philosopher. In Germany btw they are still using ''notions'' or ''concepts'' so they missed the ''transition'' to sentences, statements or propositions as linguistic entities which can be true or false independent of our willingness. |
There is no such thing as ’’rationality’’ to findRationality is not an object supposed to exist, nor a concept only supposed to be eternal... Latin rationality inherited from the greek Logos... It is a living RELATION, an internal TOTALITY encompassing what we call "reality" now, which is material only, discourse and speech and consciousness and thinking mind... The transformation of this internal totality of experience in Three external totalities is the passage from the beginning of our civilization to the actual "hubris" and Faustian will of our own actual world, culminating in technological idolatrry called transhumanism...Which is the absolute death of reason by separating it from freedom and then separating it from the reality and from language.... Rationality is a meaningful creation by imaginative moral perception... When someone say: "Dont do to others what you dont want the others did to you, " this person by a FREE act of moral perceptive imagination create a NEW reality where it is possible to experiment in himself what others will feel...Without this freedom this is not possible...Free moral imaginative perception is a new organ of perception literally.... How can we perceive pure love without it? Rationality is a NEW meaningful phenomenon created in the cosmos and it came into being by a free act of thinking ONLY....It is not a dead rule... But something that is born new each day , it is evolutive growing process... Then rationality exist at the same time like an absolute creation and like an absolute new world...It is the living link between the two... What is reality without rationality: a nightmare who work to exist and will disapear...Look in an horror movie What is reality with rationality : something no numbers can define, a changing, evolving, meaninful growing living new cosmos... Calling that wishful thinking is abolishing freedom...And calling that wishful thinking is negating reality not endorsing it...It is endorsing a condemned reality promised to disapear not by a judging God external to it but by the power of our freedom... Reality need us to exist....If not, something lack for his perpetuation as conscious life.... Kant was wrong... what moves human being to act is not an external God or an external imperative , a duty... It is freedom to love.... Miyostin, The ’’shorthand’’ description of truth is ’’correspondence Truth come into being by participation not ONLY by an EXTERNAL correspondance between language,mind and reality...This participation participated to an INTERNAL totality of meaning between reality, mind and language... Technology is powerful but BLIND... Technology is not science itself.... And science is not ONLY knowledge... It is not enough for science to exist....It lack free consciousness and moral perceptive and creative imagination....The cult of technology is an idolatry of power without science nor reason... All misunderstanding in philosophy mostly come with the lost of an innate meaning and the freedom of pure power inherited by the emergence of nominalism...It was a detotalisation of the original logos...History after biological evolution could not exist without this pure act of possible freedom without this lost of innate meaning which was an original "programmation" of consciousness...This history is a revelation (apocalypsos in greek ) of our own FREE being ....We are free to create hell or heaven.... It is not religion here.... Read science fiction book.... Like "Blade runner" inspired by Philip K. Dick.... Any act of perceptive and creative moral imagination is a prophecy or a potential prediction... We choose between horror or beauty... Freely.... They still need to discover Frege. So in this case Americans andBy the way it is impossible to understand history of philosophy which is also an history of consciousness ( like music history is or art history etc) without going back to the origin of our own civilization with the birth of nominalism and BEFORE at the times of Parmenides... But it will take a book for me to explain that not a post.... |
Miyostin, The ''shorthand'' description of truth is ''correspondence with reality''. The other is to state that something is a fact. But the general opinion among logician, linguist and philosopher of science is that those are statement , sentences or propositions. This is to say that the only linguistic ''entity'' which can be true or false are statement and not ''notions'', ''concepts'' or ''ideas''. When we look at older philosopher like Kant, Hegel, etc. we will see that they talk about ''concepts'' ( Begriffen ) as ''things'' that are true and are actually ''explaining'' the meaning of concepts. Those are then put in ''opposition to each other'', Since Frege and modern linguistic only statements are considered to be either true or false (tertium non datur). However ''correspondence'' should not be seen as ''identity relation''. This was Frege's error caused by his admiration of Kant. ''German sickness is the need to admire 'some' persons ''. Kant btw is also such person. So when in Germany don't ever criticise Kant and Hegel only very cautious. They still need to discover Frege. So in this case Americans and English (Russel) were first. |
@mahgister, I must not be explaining myself very well. There is only one reality. That reality can be interpreted differently but there is only one reality. mijostyn I misinterpret what you said yes.....Yes you are right men defines reality by agreeing in a consensus...This consensus is defined by numbers.... And these numbers can be verified by an experimental consensus... But then it lacks in this reality what is lacking in the numbers, the meaningful perceptive effect interpreted and also added on the phenomena by each consciousness... We can agree about that.... I then apologize for my over reaction... |
@mahgister, I must not be explaining myself very well. There is only one reality. That reality can be interpreted differently but there is only one reality. As an example, the color red is defined as light energy with a wavelength at 700 nm. That is the reality. If we are all presented with light at 700 nm we will all call the color red because we have been taught to do so even though we are all having a personal experience in viewing the color. Same thing happens with sound in a more complicated way. If a system comes close to emulating a live performance just like the colors we will all interpret it the same way even though we are having a personal experience. I have seen this happen on a number of occasions. I use to work with a very high end Audio store and we were setting up these systems on a regular basis. As soon as deviations from the reality start occurring personal biases start infiltrating the evaluation. Which defects can you tolerate, which defects bother you the most? The vast variety of opinions you see here are based on deviations from reality. The "reality" has to be based on acoustic or lightly amplified instruments. Large concerts represent a maze of variables you can't account for. There are great live recordings many of them superior to the actual concert experience. But, you can't hear the light show. @nandric, sad isn't it? I prefer to call it primitive human behavior. Will we ever learn to overcome our instincts? All those characters are the same it is only that their weapons got better as time marched on. Thank god the vast majority of us are not suicidal but the Japanese Kamikaze should serve as an important lesson. God will not help us if certain people get a bomb. In the end it will be religion that is the ruin of us. |
Seneca (4 BC) was the first who wrote ''rationale enim animal est homo'' ( Man is a rational animal ). Since then rationality become a kind of virtue which all people wanted to ascribe to themselves with Popper who added to the virtue by claiming his own ''rational criticism'' as the highest virtue. But if we look at the human history we can state that Seneca was the first who formulated ''wishful thinking''. There is no such thing as ''rationality'' to find in human history. On the contrary ; hate, revenge, robbery and insatiable power hunger can much better explain human history. Think of Egyptian pharaoh, Chinese emperors, Alexander, Napoleon , Hitler, Stalin, Mao , etc. Our history teachers even learned us to admire those creatures. Way then should our forum be characterised as ''rational''? |
Kant wrote next to ''pure reason'' also an book about ''practical reason''. I ever started an thread about ''irreparable cartridges'' caused by my loss of Sony XL 88D (D= diamond cantilever+ stylus from the same piece of diamond!). The reason was ''closed plastic body'' filled with dampening material. Such body can't be opened for repair work. I noticed the similarity with closed (very expensive) ZYX kinds and wanted to inform my ''forum friends''. To my big surprise there was no interest of any kind. One can argue that ''practical reason'' is similar to ''rational kind'' . But look at this thread . Unbelievable interest and reactions to such ''esoteric thread''. |
I will tell you from experience that if you put us all blind folded in a room with a fabulous system every single one of us would agree that it was an excellent system.All your post made sense only around the definition of the word " fabulous"... It resemble a sophism... All people around a system blindfolded will acclaim a truly fabulous system.... And a fabulous system is truly fabulous if all people blindfold could claim that it is.... Because we are all biased of course.... But no need to be blindfolded to train his biases...It is called education... And consciousness can erase pain....Or the opposite.... Thomas Aquinas with bad teeth did not suffer when praying when someone would put off his bad teeth....... Some people one morning discover the mystic Mary Magdalene de Pazzi ( the most beautiful woman in Italy at the times ) in ectasy with his hand freeze in a bucket of ice after washing the laundry and forgetful of the world suddenly ... Where is the pain? In his consciousness/body like a servant around his master.... Consciousness is older than pain...An angel or a yogi perhaps whisper it to my ears just now....It seems my angel/yogi contradict evolutive biology... Perhaps not.... Perhaps consciousness is at the same time LESS and MORE... And perhaps audio experience is also at the same time less AND more....Like the acoustical sleeping shephard/ princess waiting for the audiophile prince to kiss her before becoming a Queen ... 😁😊😊😊😊 |
snilf, yes, the sensation is a personal experience but I'm not talking about that. The damage the fire will cause to your hand will be the same regardless of who it is that is sticking their hand in the fire and regardless of what they feel. Protein starts denaturing at 106 degrees F. I find it interesting that it also does not matter what animal you stick in the fire the response will be the same. Do dogs feel the same pain we do? What about caterpillars? Same response. Pain is a very ancient sensation and virtually universal for good reason. Animals that had an aversion to destructive, life challenging forces out survived those that did not. If pain did not hurt we would all be dead by the age of 18. It is very much like what people think they hear. That is a personal experience that has been programmed by a variety of influences. I can tell you what I hear in descriptive terms but will you hear the same thing? I will argue that you will not as it is very unlikely both of us will be listening to the same aspect of any given performance at exactly the same time. Even if a solo instrument is playing you might single out the bass while I single out the treble. Does it really matter? I will tell you from experience that if you put us all blind folded in a room with a fabulous system every single one of us would agree that it was an excellent system. |
’The logic’’ of reactions to my thread. I started this threadYou are totally right... I apologize... It is me only who could be blamed for the greatest part...I love philosophy more than cartridge alas! I dont own a turntable .... i am retired and reading the name Quine and Frege about cartridges i could not resist.....I will mute myself.... But why speaking about Quine and Frege in a cartridge thread? Is it not a bit "haughty" ? I cannot reproach it to you because i could be like that myself... 😁 Did you not wait for some reaction for this improbable association and somewhat kind of provocation? My deepest respects..... |
Great post and good observation... thanks... I was being sarcastic as usual. But I suspect that the thread probably makes more sense on pyschadelics, as it makes also most no sense to me. And I keep misreading Nandiric as Tantric, so it all is getting to spiritual for this simpleton. |
holmz234 posts10-16-2021 7:10pmGreat post and good observation... thanks... 😊But these books exist only in french it is the catch....😁😊 Precisely what enlarge the scope of our attention reveal itself often like a "mushroom" revelation or a religious one precisely... If you feel that impression not knowing where you are anymore, you are "stoned" indeed reading this thread, it is because your brain work now at higher speed... You now know how man create languages, religions, sciences... the three main symbolic forms.... In a state of tremendous ectasy... In the process of creating my own room acoustic i lived through this "mushroom" or ectasy state listening music through my listenings experiments.... My deepest respect and salutation.... « If all is a miraculous revelation in this room, where is the place of my wife please? »-Groucho Marx 🤓 |
''The logic'' of reactions to my thread. I started this thread with a kind of introduction to ''what there is'' in general and limited the extension to ''what analog component there are'' in particular cartridges. I even named Raul and chakster as example of worthwhile contributors. But there was not one single reaction about ''what cartridges there are'' but the most were critical remarks about my philosophical ''content''. However my reactions were only reactions to reaction of the members. Who then should be blamed? |
What are the differencesEnormous.... Infinite difference to say it clearly... Machine cannot choose to be programmed by this or those person, they could never either choose the program content...A man choose the programmer and the program content , if he cannot choose his country or his family he can also reprogram himself or chose an other "father" or an other "language"... We can "program" ourself or saying it in a better way, we may reorient our attention and consciousness to perceive WHOLE and INTERNAL TOTALITY not only external one and external parts... This is the "natural" pathway.....Goethe call the perception of the whole : Truth or Beauty...Or Nature... Goethe would have never fall for the transhumanist tactic to erase nature or to blur the distinction between artificial and natural....What we see behind the world actual crisis if you pay attention.... Can all It depend of what you call a statement precisely ... your definition of statement mimic a procustean bed...And procustean method is a bad joke for sure not a method....but you already know that no? But language is deeper than proposition statement or logical calculus...Language convey and express multidimensional human experiences... Read about metaphors....You will learn that you have never understood what a metaphor is ever...It is normal, metaphor processing reflect the deeper mechanism of the mind... ALL LANGUAGE IS METAPHORICAL STRATA...Not propositional strata at all, save at the mere surface... Read about creative imagination and perception... I will propose an exercise for you: Read about the limit and power of language in apophatic and cataphatic Theology East and west , after that think about the deep Cantorian analogy between the idea of set and the way it relate to Spiritual Theology for example, if you want to practice language power of expression and limitations.... And if you think all i just said is superficial read what Kurt Goedel has to say about it....And say to him if you dare that he is a bad reader of Frege and Quine....😁 You can also practice the "yoga" of attention by reading the Goethe treatise about plant... I will let you choose what stir your pot the best, numbers, geometry or living organism... You could also pick acoustic and think how to figure out for yourself how the sound "lives" in your own particular room....Experiencing then not dead equations through a computer but miraculous physico-psychical phenomena... Not S is P but living metaphor call "music".... In all these contemplation proposition S is P is useless... I recommend to make the matter straight the 2 greatest books about mathematical creativity and spiritual experience ever written : Alexander Grothendieck : "The key of dreams" and "Harvests and sowings", 2,000 pages long... No trace of Frege here or Quine... 😁i read them... I suppose that you know already that Grothendieck is a genius only in the same league of the like of Poincaré and Ramanujan.... Not many other one... But these books exist only in french it is the catch....😁😊 |
mijostyn: yes, the fire burns if I put my hand in it. But—as Descartes already pointed out—the sensation of "burning" is not "in" the fire but in me, the experiencer. Is fire "hot"? Well, that's the word we use in English to identify the sensation associated with fire. But do you suppose that "hotness" is a property of fire? That would be to mistake the experience of the thing with the thing itself. Nor is the "hotness" of fire merely the excitation of electrons in its sub-atomic structure. That description merely substitutes one experience for another. It's like saying that sound is really just wave motion in the air. Schopenhauer points out that a deaf person will not grasp what sound is by viewing Chladni's traces. "Hotness" is a subjective experience. Again, to paraphrase Descartes, if I come near the fire, I feel a pleasurable sensation of warmth; if I come too near, that pleasurable sensation turns to pain. But those sensations are not in the fire! As for whether or not "Serbian" and "Croatian" are just different dialects of the "same" language...that's a dull topic for anyone not intimately concerned with those languages. And, of course, politics—and history—are relevant here. South Slav identity is a fraught business. |
There are all kinds of rules. So ''there are rules''. Are those ''normative'' in the sense of prescribing certain behaviour? Are rules ''truth -functional''? That is can't they be true or false? Can terms or concepts be true or false or are those only some ''special kinds of sentences or statements''? There are different kinds of rules in different ''cultures'' or countries, So they are obviously not universal . Who determines their boundaries? I got all kinds of reprimands regarding implicit stated rules. Those then are assumed to be ''natural''? Are people programmed with them together with native language and its grammar which is also ''loaded'' with rules? Can all statements be put in '' s is P'' (subject IS predicate) sentence form? In this thread we see this ''grammar form'' as ,uh, a rule. Some of the members even told me that ''Croat''- and ''Serbian language '' are not the same. Probably because of some rule of his own. How many English languages are only in England ? How many in Germany or Holland? I can hear difference between Dutch dialects . What are the differences between programmed computers and programmed people? |
Steamerdude and Spotcheckb, instead of voicing your feelings here about what is here, you could be doing something useful, like waxing profound over on the "What is most important, the turntable, tonearm, or cartridge?" thread. Now there's a meaty and audiophilic way to spend your time. Sadly, the thread has not been taken out and shot, so you still have a chance to sink your teeth into it. |
It is not difficult to understand that if you plays suddenly Mozart in a jail speakers you will create aggressive reactions in inmates unused to accomodate "feelings" and unable to entertain them anyway in their survival jungle... Samething in a thread where the OP think about philosophical matters with people offended by their unability to understand ... I welcome him even if i am not on the same boat for philosophy... Anyway are we not supposed to become friends here not foes mainly ? Or is it only for cables lovers here? This is a thread among many other threads in the audiogon forum here.... Pick the one thread you will prefer without insulting people because they use other part of their brain.... |
Watts is good, but even he cannot convey the nature of reality in less than a minute.Very good video from Watts thanks.... Watts was able to communicate to all the consciousness feeling unity "sensation"... It is enough to do so....Most academic philosophers could not do that.... Watts is a Lao Tse for taxi driver....I was one younger and i read his books particularly about zen.... 😊 |
Music is inside us not only outside us....You are completely right also here... I wll not add anything...save that animals attend music in their own way... Music and sounds are "metabolic" phenomenon also.... They are not only internal for the mind but also for the body metabolism because music and sounds modify it...Then music and sound are internal and external in two different ways... My deepest respect to you.... |
Music is inside us not only outside us.... I can accept that. So the recording would spark the music within us. In what sense can it be said that music is within us? Perhaps, as we are what we eat, we are also what we hear (have heard). Though it is also said that musical attunement is innate with humans. So maybe true in two independent ways. |
This post doesn’t belong on an audio forum, so I should just resist the temptation of weighing in. But I can’t.Great post thanks... It feel good to be understood sometimes here.... For your remark about where we "drew the line between the real and the imaginary" everybody must read the greatest underestimated Goethean Scholar which is Cassirer and his "symbolic forms" books....Cassirer born a Kantian pupil become a Goethean reader all of his life....And remember that Goethe was a Spinoza admirer.... My deepest respects... |
I listen music now at least not sounds -- MahgisterYou are "technically" right...Completely right... But being right here is not enough... Music is inside us not only outside us.... |
This post doesn't belong on an audio forum, so I should just resist the temptation of weighing in. But I can't. First, Quine's point (in "Ontological Relativity," from which comes the "Gavagai" coinage), as well as in several other places, is just that our best scientific theories should govern our ontology. This is a fancy way of saying that if an accepted and useful scientific theory demands that we regard a given theoretical construct as "real," then we should do so. As David Lewis put it, although "sets" were "unknown to Homo javanensis," they are nevertheless indispensable in modern mathematics and therefore should be regarded as "real." This question dates at least to Plato, for whom numbers were more "real" than the things of perception they enumerated, being pure intelligible entities not subject to perspective, change over time, and so forth. Which is to say that, although they proclaim themselves to be "empiricists," Quine, et al., are really committed to idealism—to the "reality" of non-empirical theoretical entities. This insight dovetails with what I think mahgister was trying to say in citing Goethe. But Goethe's view just follows Kant: the "real" is always already a construct of consciousness—of perception, which is sense information processed and interpreted by the mind. The real "in itself" is simply unknowable. Thus, Goethe says that perception is already "theoretical": "Alles vergängliche / Ist nur ein Gleichnis." This insight makes it exceedingly difficult to know where to draw the lines between the "real" and the "imaginary"; in effect, the real IS what "imagination" constructs for experience. But that is NOT to say there is no independent reality "in itself"; rather, we just don't know anything about it except insofar as we experience it (that is, insofar as it becomes mental). Coincidentally, I also speak (or read) 4 languages. Serbo-Croatian isn't one of them, but Croatian is. My wife's mother was a Serb, her father a Croat (we met in Germany). There is no such language as "Serbo-Croatian." Serbian and Croatian are, of course, very similar as Slavic languages; Slovenian is also similar, and Slovenia was part of the former Yugoslavia along with Serbia and Croatia. But, just for instance, Serbian and Croatian aren't even written in the same alphabet! Books published in Belgrade (Beograd) are printed in Cyrillic. My wife tells me that there are indeed words for "niece" and "nephew" in Serbian as well as in Croatian. I'd give examples, but this post is already egregiously gratuitous. |
holmz-
Well I made it a minute in (almost) and it was seeming to be a religious talk. That's because a) you only made it a minute in and b) it turned out to be one of the many Watts videos where they cut up and pieced together different talks. I just listened to the first few seconds, it started off the talk I thought it was, only later realized it was all chopped up. There are elements of religion but it is equal parts science and philosophy. The Cliff Notes version is there are two great Myths or ways we view the world- the Ceramic Model, and the Fully Automatic. The Ceramic Model is the religious one, in which everything is just mere stuff, clay in the Bible, into which God breathes life. But really it is all just dead lifeless stuff. And so in the Ceramic Model we human beings are all fundamentally different and apart from everything else. Animals to a lesser extent as well. The Fully Automatic Model is the one we think of as scientific and in this one everything is just lifeless dead particles just like clay only we dispense with God and say the mind and soul are nothing more than artifacts of all these billiard balls bouncing around. There's a lot more, like I said this is the Cliff Notes version. Expanding on each model it becomes increasingly clear just how much they each are missing. It does take a while though. Watts is good, but even he cannot convey the nature of reality in less than a minute. https://youtu.be/UPcs3B1omx8?t=27 |
Anybody who read about logic know Frege drama... And Quine ’s meaning defense theory againt the referential behavioristic theory is not the most sophisticated metaphysic there is in history... 😁 It takes not much time to figure it out... Try to figure out Charles Sanders Peirce in one hour ? 😁😊Or the 13 century polimath genius Raimon Lulle the founder of combinatoric tree feed back calculus in the understanding of Norbert Wiener... Than so much for Frege and Quine.... Then if you want to brag about erudition pick an unknown extraordinary genius: Lucian Blaga for example and why not the polymath Hoene Wronski ? Or Simon L. Frank? I am sure that you dont even know their name... Like some says this is an " exercise in academic vanity"... But like another rightfully observe it is entertaining more than insults about politics... Then welcome to the OP humor and erudition... I apologize for my answers but you do brag first about 2 "little" academic philosophers, Quine and Frege....I prefer non academic giants... I myself are not a scientist, but i study mathematic and philosophy, some linguistic and poetry and other things i dare not to mention here... I am more able to related things than to concentrate on one only forever...For example i figure for myself the link between acoustic and audio by creating my own mechanical equalizer... So much for audio.... I listen music now at least not sounds...I will not go forever with branded names audio cult... I prefer basics here.... I am neither atheist nor a narrow believer... Consciousness is too mysterious and evident to be reduced to materialism rant.... And way before "gavagai" there is the silent tree of symbolic forms and activities, of which language is one branch.... Then no metaphysic based on dying nominalism and on technological religion could satisfy me... The idolatry of technology is not science but the theater on which plays the actual drama, which roots are in a spiritual battle for humanity soul... Dont take my point to be a religious one, you will miss it completely...Science is related and intertwined with technological history, but consciousness is NOT knowledge like some transhumanist want you to think of...Or like the scientist Goethe the real father of phenomenology remind us.... Instead of reading Frege i will suggest any Russian philosopher totally unknown in the US...This will be a remedy for any anglo saxon student.... 😁😊 But if you stick at all cost to english language try Whitehead....He forgot to be stupid to say the least.... Or a Serbo-croat german thinker : Rudolf steiner will do the job... My best to all.... "All geniuses sees the same light, only moles seek their own tunnel for comfort"- Anonymus Smith |
To recap: OP says his theme "sounds philosophical," which it does, but turns out he's simply praising the collective knowledge generated by the forum. Given that several powerful minds hang out around here, we went quickly to metaphysics, material physics, symbolic logic. Along the way I listened to the whole masterly Watts performance for the first time in years. Well, that's metaphysical, or purports to be. Doesn't strike me as "religious," though he uses the word "spiritual," which I take to mean not supernatural but noumenal: a projection of essence generated inductively. What more he may be claiming I can't tell, as he never answers the question "therefore what?" His chosen aperture, the question "what am I," seems hopelessly anthropocentric, but is saved by the answer "I/you/intelligent life am/are/is among innumerable inevitabilities of a physical universe having an infinite time span." Thanks to the several large minds for their learned digressions. I'm just happy knowing that when I wonder "what cartridges exist?," there's a place I can go to find out. |
“It depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is. If the—if he—if ‘is’ means is and never has been, that is not—that is one thing. If it means there is none, that was a completely true statement. … Now, if someone had asked me on that day, are you having any kind of sexual relations with Ms. Lewinsky, that is, asked me a question in the present tense, I would have said no. And it would have been completely true.”
Bill Clinton |
@nandric, I have several Russian patients. They bring me Sturgeon and it is almost time for winter borsht (with sour cream and herring.) I am also an atheist. My problem with a universal god is that he would have to have a very strange sense of humor. He would also have to be a white guy that spoke English. Chakster and rauliruegas have their biases but they generally have the physical science involved correct which makes their opinion valuable even if you do not agree with their bias. For many, choices in audio are emotional. They should be practical. For me it is not "what there is" but, Why there is. Having knowledge is wonderful but what can you do? I am dyslexic. Philosophy was consequently, not one of my strong subjects. |
Whatever crazy and hard to follow stuff there is on this thread, I'll take it any day over conspiracy theories, racism, sexism, and science denialism. There's a fun and spirited play of ideas here -- with no malice or mean intent. It's a bit of a crazy ball-room of ideas and intellectual riffing, but life is short. Ain't your bag? Click your mouse and poof! it's gone. |
Nandric, I have to assume that your posts on this thread are a practice in personal vanity, since you must know that you are flying high above the heads of most readers including myself regarding the writers and philosophers that you are referencing. (excluding mahgister) I think that it's far more effective to distill a point clearly in layman's terms than to use arcane references and even equations. ( ''for all x Fx& Gx'') I understand, you're smarter and more well read than me, but stop grandstanding and say something. By the way, in English it's did, not deed. Gee, I knew something you didn't know after all... |
