a summation of my perspective

[psygnisfive]

This is going to be an attempt to outline my philosophical foundations. I'm just posting this to bring together multiple issues that end up scattered in different threads.

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A1. Subjective things (perceptual experience, emotions, beliefs, etc.) exists.
A2. Objective things might exist.
A3. Mind is not necessarily perfect in function or manner of being.
A4. A system cannot be self referential without existing first independent of it's self referentiality.
A5. All experiences are mental constructions.
A6. Subjective things don't have to obey consistent rules.
A7. Objective things can't simultaneously exist and not exist.

P1 (from A1, A2, and A4). At least one thing is certain to exist objectively, namely, the experiencer.
P2 (from A2 and A5). If objective things exist, the only way to possibly experience them is through a subjective experience.
P3 (from A1 and P2). Subjective experiences and objective things will be experienced through the same mental constructions.
P4. (from A7). Objective things must interact with one another consistently, in a manner describable as "rules" or "laws" of nature.
P5. (from P4). Descriptions of experience must take into account the possible experience of objective content as distinct from subjective.

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Visualization of the subjective/objective gap:

http://www.wellnowwhat.net/transfers/subjective-objective.jpg

The stuff on the left of the dashed line is only ever grasped by the mind as stuff on the right, i.e. mental constructs, etc. There's never "direct" knowledge of the thing itself, because that would involve no transference of information from the object to the mind, which would imply that it's imaginary not objective.

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Also, a summation of what science is (and isn't):

Science is... An attempt to explain or at least describe experience that depends on the notion of discarding explanations that don't work in favor of explanations that do work.

Science is not... The assertion that something exists. Religion, superstition, science, etc. all depend on the assertion and belief that something exists, and then tries to explain or describe it. But the discovery of the existence of things or phenomena precedes all of them.

I make this distinction quite clearly because it points out my views of things like astrology. Astrology is a pre-modern "scientific" attempt to explain the world, but it turns out that if you actually look at the world, what astrology attempts to explain (why people behave the way they do, why things happen to people, etc) don't actually exist (people born during times of the year don't cluster into personality types, nor have similar life experiences, etc. and so there's no need to explain them, astrologically or otherwise). If the things did exist, then astrology would just be any other scientific theory, and it's usefulness would depend on whether or not it fails to describe the phenomena. But the phenomena are non-existent. So paraphrase Daniel Dennett (on the notion of a unified "consciousness" thing in the brain): You don't need to explain something that doesn't exist, it _just_ _doesn't_ _exist_!

[Szifers]

Thank you, Psyg. Now I will show you mine. I must inform you in advance that mine is bigger, obviously.

I don't have any philosophical foundations. Only the mystical experience can serve as a valid foundation. Philosophies are just mental constructions. But here's a summary of some bits of what I think is a tasteful way of philosophizing:

Statement of Common Sense 1: The presence (existence, reality) of experiences, sensual impressions, and the experience of being in general is a different "existing" than the existence of the object of experience, the thing that is being experienced, aka objective reality. The meaning of the two do not overlap. Actually, they have nothing in common. Thoughts for examle do not exist in the same sense as a chair exists. It's just a linguistic construct that they are in large part represented by the same verbs.

SCS 2: The question if objective reality or an objective thing exists or not is obviously meaningless. Objective reality and objective existing just simply mean the same.

SCS 3:There definately is an objective entity called my self, that is objective in the eyes of other people, and also in my own talking about myself as an objective entity. But the subjective self, the subjective experiencer of the experience is neither manifest as objectively real, nor present in the way that the experience is subjectively present. The subjective self as an experiencer of the subjective experience is therefore obviously just a fantasy.

Visualization of The Sacred Onion:

http://img0.tar.hu/siphersh/img/32835673.png

[psygnisfive]

I think for the most part we'd agree. The issue of mind isn't something I really touched on.

I'd like to clarify:

When you say the subjective self as experiencer, do you mean the concept of a single unified whole that exists somewhere that is "Consciousness" or "The Self", etc? Because Daniel Dennett (philosopher of mind and one of my "idols", of sorts) holds that line of view. He argues against the idea of a unity of consciousness and instead proposes that consciousness as most people conceive of it doesn't even exist and rather the things that we attribute to consciousness are really a bunch of scattered mental processes and such with no single unifying wholeness.

[Szifers]

Thank you for your question. Really attentive of you.

It's hard to define something that doesn't exist. It's a philosophical fantasy, derived from certain conceptual characteristics of human language. It's a mirror image of the self as it appears to other users of language.

It's the imaginary entity that is always very directly present for the objective experiencer, even more present than the experience itslef, and is not the experience. But something or someone that experiences the experience from the perspective of the experiencer. An invisible underlying experiencer that is supposed to be somehow the real "me". What I'm saying here is that for consciousness the experience is as deep as you can get. The concept of a subjective experiencer experiencing the experience is just made up without any pragmatic reason.

If there is a unifying wholeness, that's the wholeness of the experience. Not the experiencer. There surely supposed to be a difference between the two. The meaningful difference is when you talk about someone as a human entity from the outside perspective, as part of the community, and apparently experiencing something.

Your experience is you. There's no meaning in introducing the conceptual duality of experience and experiencer there. It's similar to when you say that you are experiencing the experience. Putting object-subject relationships where there is no perceptual basis for that.

That's just simply this easternish there's-no-self philosophy. It makes some artificial philosophical problems just simply go away. Like the whole atheist-scpeticist-materialist ideology goes away when you clear up your language.

My fundamental philosophy is just simply remembering the mystical experience. And in that experience I gained insight to the depth of memetic imprisonment. A whole lot of bad things come from conceptual and other habits that have become self serving. And being meaningless is the first sign of being self-serving. And inducing useless opposition between people is another very definitive sign of a memetic entity that has become self-serving and anti-human. Therefore, I am against ideologies that create ideological opposition where it need not be.

[max_freakout]

Statement of Common Sense 1: The presence (existence, reality) of experiences, sensual impressions, and the experience of being in general is a different "existing" than the existence of the object of experience, the thing that is being experienced, aka objective reality. The meaning of the two do not overlap. Actually, they have nothing in common. Thoughts for examle do not exist in the same sense as a chair exists. It's just a linguistic construct that they are in large part represented by the same verbs.


Szifers have you read Sartre? That is precisely his thesis in 'Being and Nothingness'. Being/Existence in the world is 2 fundamentally different types, the being of objects, which is being-in-itself, and the being of consciousness, which is being-for-itself

He identified his philosophical project as the meaning of the synthetic relationship between being-in-itself and being-for-itself

i dont think he would have identified thoughts as being for themselves though

[Szifers]

McKenna defined his psychedelic ideology in large part as contrasted to existentialism. For obvious reasons. And I think that he grasped a really substantial aspect of the psychedelic experience by saying that existentialism got it entirely wrong. It's not about absolute freedom struggling for concreteness. We are rooted in nature. We are small figures in a bigger picture. We are natural. I think that's quite fundamental to the psychedelic revelation.

What I was trying to say is that you cannot question the realness of objective reality on the basis of comparing it to fantasy. You cannot say that reality is maybe just imagination. And that's because objective reality is not a hypothesis. It's like an axiom. It's a basic structural feature of human language. Objective reality is what objective reality means. It really exists per definitionem.

[psygnisfive]

Objective reality precedes even linguistic constructs. Before you can ponder existence you have to exist, even in a strictly non-linguistic sense of pondering. To have pondering, you must have a ponderer; to have questioning, a questioner; thought, a thinker.

[Szifers]

Why would I need a thinker to have a thought? What do you mean by "have" anyway?

For "questioning" of course you need a questioner. That's because questioning means that someone is a questioner. The same for ponderer.

"Before you can ponder existence you have to exist"

Before who can ponder? You start off by assuming that there is a self. Of course "you" can only ponder if you exist. But that only comes from language. That's how define the self. The one who ponders. The self is created by that definition as an imaginary entity. That doesn't make it more real.

[psygnisfive]

Why would I need a thinker to have a thought? What do you mean by "have" anyway?

To have thinking, you need something to think.

For "questioning" of course you need a questioner. That's because questioning means that someone is a questioner. The same for ponderer.

"Before you can ponder existence you have to exist"

Before who can ponder? You start off by assuming that there is a self. Of course "you" can only ponder if you exist. But that only comes from language. That's how define the self. The one who ponders. The self is created by that definition as an imaginary entity. That doesn't make it more real.

I'm merely saying that if you strip away all assumptions about "objective" reality, you can at least know that _one_ objective thing exists: you, the person doing the philosophizing. And by "you" I mean whatever mechanism supports self inquiry, etc.

[Szifers]

What you're saying it exactly like calling the universe "Creation", saying that every creation must have a creator, and concluding that therefore there must be a Creator.

"Cogito" means that there is a person, that person thinks, and that person is me. By saying "cogito ergo sum", you simply come the same conclusion that you pre-supposed. That's circular thinking and of course cannot have any validity as a conclusion.

But anyway, this line of thought is about the subjective self. Not the objective person that is thinking. Objective means that it is the object of the experience, as opposed to being the subject (i.e. the experiencer), or being subjective (i.e. being a quality of the experience).

[psygnisfive]

the reasoning demonstrates the necessity of _some_ sort of non-subjective world.

furthermore, subjective and objective to not mean as you say. subjective means that the experience is dependent on the experience (i.e. the nature of the experience lies in the subject experiencing it), objective means it's independent of experience (i.e. the nature of the experience lies in the object that's being experienced regardless of experiencer).