Is it your destiny to read these words, or not?
Do you choose of your own free will to read these words, or not?
I don’t know if you know that you don’t know, but you don’t.
Keep in mind dear friend, appease hubris I won’t
Again and always I’ll remind you of this
And from you reciprocity is all that I wish
The truth can never be conveyed in words, nor measured in units.
If one becomes habituated towards eccentricity, one becomes an engine for or generator of novelty.
When the improbable becomes actualized, changes occur, which constitute and/or necessitate adaptation. Thus novelty fuels and/or catalyzes the evolutionary process.
If we want to see our surrounding environment (our world), we need immersive light to reveal for us the details of what we’re trying to behold. If we want to see out into “the great beyond” we need immersion in darkness. When one sees while standing in “the light”, they see only what is illuminated by the light touching it. When one sees while inhabiting vast darkness, one can see whatever myriad points of light might lay in the distance.
fR-AG>M9ENTS OF A mIN=D ON pHil6o'sophy/izing
That statement; “nothing is true, everything is permissible”, seems true enough to me. All (as in THE ALL) permits everything because everything is in ALL. If All were to in some sense, “lay down the law”, permitting some things to be and not others, then it would cease to be The All. It would be a determined thing. It would be an it.
With that in mind, let us consider the condition of individual things; its.
Not everything is appropriate for certain goal or design imperatives. If you have no imperatives, it basically means that you don’t have any value bias. So to be a thing, is to harbor a kind of bias towards some other thing/s, or else you would be The All. Maybe this is what some people mean when they speak of “being one with god”; Letting go of any bias and surrendering to the acceptance of and identity in All-ness.
If God constitutes or is synonymous with the boundless All, then the split between good and evil would be like a split personality in the omnipotent ALL-MIND of god. If god is everything, then there could be no distinction between good and evil. If god is only “the good”, then god would thus be a determined thing, if “the good” were to exist. This seems to fly in the face of the notion of an all knowing, omnipotent, boundless god. This is a deterministic and biased god. And if this deterministic “good” god is all powerful, how can he be antagonized by something like an “evil” devil. If god is the creator of all things, why would it create or allow an antagonist to be as such in any actuality? If god is everything where does this good vs evil dichotomy come from?
Did good determine evil by attributing something as such out of ALL, and vice versa, simultaneously, like one might attribute the distinct qualia of an animal shape to a random arrangement of a cloud formation thus actualizing the fact of the shape? Did the God just get board of being everywhere all the time, and decide to split in two so it would have a playmate to compete with or a “dragon to slay”. Did it suddenly come to attribute/fabricate a sense of a knowledge of good and evil, and decide to cast out something it wanted gone from itself? Did All develop a kind of split or dual personality disorder, thus creating the first determinations and allowing such things as a level of Newtonian physics to emerge at certain cosmological scales, where everything tangable within those scales can be translated into binary code of ones and zeros, out of which humans emerge with their ever more discriminating minds, to bring forth myriad bifurcations and variations of ways of thinking about and doing everything they can think about and do.
It would seem that what is deemed good or bad would be necessarily value based. Thus we are left with relativism in and of the All.
As biological human things, the meeting of our basic imperatives for sustenance, reproduction, and maximizing the enjoyment of life’s experiences, precedes our value system constructs. Once people “connect the dots” of a causal chain, systemic attributions can be determined, and generalized guidelines can be arrived at.
So that which we judge to be of some positive value for our lives can be labeled good (a good thing). If and when we find (or make up) correlations, or observe what seem to be relationships between things which we believe bring us positive value to our lives, we might see how the generalized notion of “The Good” or “goodness” might form and become widely accepted through cultural mechanisms of all sorts and ingrained in the thinking of culturally bounded consciousness.
That which we judge to be detrimental, antagonistic, or of some kind of negative value to any imperative we are endowed with or espouse to in some way, can be demonized and labeled “bad” or “evil”. If and when we find (or fabricate) correlations, or observe what seem to be relationships between things which we believe possess these evil, bad, or otherwise undesirable attributes, we can see how the notion of evil and evilness come to be, and come to be mimetically proliferated and generally accepted, and thusly feared, hated, and persecuted in all its perceived forms.
When we look at these correlated good things juxtaposed against correlated bad things, then the ages old psychic splits which characterize our ever pervasive good v evil, Us v them, wild/savage v civilized/cultivated dichotomies come to mold our thinking as we develop from birth, immersed in culture. Its also easy to see how one person’s or one culture’s idea of good could be another’s conception of evil, and vice versa, given any number of variables.
So if we conceptualize God as being all and everything in one, but god is only good, then all-inclusion is good and exclusion of any thing as such, would not be the good, but bad, and worse to the degree which any one particular thing excludes or disconnects itself or is otherwise disconnected or exempted from the seamless, boundless All-being.
We could then perhaps conceptualize the acceptance and balancing of All in one as being one with god, godly, godlike, divine, holy, or one of those kinds of labels, and on the other hand conceptualize an uncompromising it-ness (like an ego centric state), or discrimination or bias, as bad, evil, unholy, corrupt, or whatever negative or inhibitory word you want to pick to drive home the point of error.
Perhaps we could conceptualize the Freudian terms Eros in place of good and Thanatos in place of evil. If we consider that which is congenial or helpful to human survival and enjoyment thereof as good, and that which antagonizes Eros and/or promotes death and/or suffering as evil, then these seem like they could be used interchangeably under that kind of framework. So if our values are erotic, they aspire to godliness, if our values undermine Eros and/or aspire death and or suffering, then they are characterized by and of demonic thanatopian evil.
“though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I shall fear no evil, for thou art with me”. Psalm 23:4
So we could vindicate the idea of relativism as a way of conceptualizing or linguistically framing, quantum ontology and/or the nature of an All-being which we might call God. What we call quantum mechanics doesn’t appear to me to be mechanical at all. No separate parts interacting, no mechanism. Mechanism begins with interaction of seperate parts, right?
Relativism however, does not seem viable, as an appropriate application as a moral philosophy to live by, because it doesn’t discriminate against those ideas, values and/or behaviors which are uncongenial or detrimental to human survival and flourishing imperatives. Once you leave quantum super positioned all, to be or embody a determined thing (organism, meme, cultural institution or otherwise), if you intend (or have the sense of or belief in intention) to continue to exist in that particular state of being, anything which compromises that continuity, cannot be assimilated or tolerated under the instincts and/or values which are instituted or intended to maintain or accomplish the imperatives endowed by or espoused to that particular state of being.
IS = ATTRIBUTION
For attribution to occur, there must exist a subject which does attributing, if I put any stock in quantum physics or my own sense of rationality as (if) I understand these concepts. Things which can subjectively attribute do not make themselves out of nothing and nowhere, right? A thing with the capacity for subjectively engaging in evaluative attribution of the (or some of the) qualia, to or of another thing, would logically have to have come into existence by some process of assemblage involving a complex causal chain of past interactions between other things which resulted in the coming to be of this or any attributively/judgmentally capable subject. Also, one might expect that an attribution requires a means for engaging in evaluative description to be communicated amongst and evaluated by other attributorally capacitated subjects.
“A label is just a label” John Galusha
A floobabble is not a floobabble, unless we largley agree to call something a flooblable.
When we can find no word to attribute to a thing/concept/phenomenon….., then we can either comb through whatever database of conceptual models we find available to us to try to find something which can assimilate this thing/concept/phenomenon….., or we can make up a word or model to describe our alleged experience of this whatever it may be. Then we can talk about it and compare its definition/s to other alleged whatevers out there.
I am not Trevor. Trevor is the label assigned to my new born mind-body shortly after birth, in accordance with the conventional social requirements, as was my assignment with my respective social security number. My DNA (I suppose) is much the same as it was back then, but this malleable but seemingly consistently self affirmable amalgamation of memes, neurochemistry/physiology and who really knows what, which I call my personal identity seems to have undergone numerous and considerable changes.
Labels serve a function; to chunk complex things, ideas, concepts or whatever, into words or combinations of words (or other symbol/s). This is (I think) meant to serve a purpose of easing or hastening dialog about an is/attribution. An about-ness requires an is-ness for which it can be about. I think most would agree with the premise: a sense of about-ness, would be a pre requisite for something like what we call meaning.
So here we have meaningful-ness, of an is-ness, attributed by or through a subject, linguistically described in terms of the is-nesses’ about-nesses’.
What is? Does each person who asks these questions in the same words, actually intend to ask the same exact question, and exactly how does one find any ontological truth in answers to questions which demand intelligibly, identifiable, definitive, attributions of things, which are only verifiable by the judgments made on the basis of experiences which are by their very nature ineffable to the subject who is supposedly doing the experiencing? It would seem that a consciousness bound up in a particular view/perspective of the world, lacks consciousness outside of that view/perspective, and thus has no basis for empirical examination of that inchoate space.
What exactly are we talking about? How can we verify weather or not we are talking about the same matters, on the same mental page? If I’m talking to you, and you don’t understand what I am talking about, what could be the point to proceeding with the trajectory of the conversation, besides perhaps digressing into glossolalious vocal entertainment? Is that all we are doing, engaging in self importantized Poetic, rhetorical, muddling, meandering, jargon loaded babble about nothing which can be proven to exist, while convincing ourselves that what we are doing is especially satisfying and important?
Take a pause. Maybe go back and read some of the previous over again carefully to see if the pieces fit.
Interactions determine. Without interaction, nothing exists but one whole seamless All-ness in omnipotent, undifferentiated superposition.
In the beginning, God created…..
Before there was anything, there was everything (The whole, the One, The All).
Out of the omnipotent all, apparently emerged a thing or thing-ness somehow, an autonomous thing, possessing attributes which did not constitute the totality of the All-being. Something was amiss from this “original thing” which seems to imply that there was a bifurcation. A split where two or more things emerge which are lacking in some attribute that some possess and the other/s lack. But how could an interaction occur between or within anything when there was originally no other than super-positioned all? How does exclusively attributed thing-nesses become so out of The All (which could also be called The Void depending on a glass half empty or half full attributive viewpoint/disposition).
Did the and/or does the All/Void somehow interact with itself. This theory has been postulated (I think proposed under the label of Quantum Field Theory, one of the major proponents of which I believe is Dr. John Hegalen from the Miharshi School of Management (where they receive brain integration report cards along with standard grades)). Does All interact with itself in dynamic ways, creating dimensions of individual things which interact with one another in approximately determined dynamic relationships, out of which, ever more complex and determined systems of things emerge? Or was there no becoming? Was there no need of an egg from which this cosmic chicken could originate out of? Was it the illusive God, who just is, always was, and shall be forever more?
If we just chalk it all up to “God’s Will” (which, it would seem, you could conceivably do given the framework here thus far), Then what could be the point of me, in all my determined thing-ness, willing, or trying to do anything. If god has everything under control, and there is no escaping gods will, and the wheels of divine determinism are locked into an un-breakable inertia, against which resistance is futile, then I can just stop clinging to illusions of free will and stop trying to interject into causal processes which cannot be interrupted or modified in any way by any effort of any kind, because its all part of the divine plan, and whatever I do, I do without exception within the absolute dictates of Gods Plan. So just sit back, relax and watch the plan unfold in humble acquiescence to it.
Yet somehow I have the unshakable sense, that I observe and interact in my own right. So this all seems difficult to believe. The notion of being one of some god’s drone, strikes an intuitively dissonant and cognitively dissonant chord in my psyche, not to mention an anxious rebellion against the prospect of being manipulated against my “will” by something I cannot even behold.
So here I seem to be; a self proclaimed, self assertive, self conscious thing, but apparently determined by my dynamic interactions with other things. So not only am I determined in and by a particular state of being, in the context of particular life conditions/elements in which I find myself immersed in and a part of, but I determine, or rather determinations occur through my own processes. So in some sense I am bounded and unbounded at once. Unbounded within the bounds of determined parameters. So in a sense I can make a claim to a kind of free will, (which is a term that seems to contradict itself, which seems to me to lend it validity in this train of micro/macro paradoxicallity) but it would seem that I would have to concede that the liberties which constitute this “free will” exist in the context of a determined field of preconditions.
It seems to me at this time, that to the degree which I have, and effectively use the capacity to observe, identify, and attribute the qualia of what constitutes the freedoms and constraints under which my mind-body can interact with the environment, I am conscious, and can explore further capacities, to make attributions selected from a more diverse range of alternatives, and thus expand the scope consciousness. The broader the scope of my consciousness, the better foothold I have to push back the limits of what I can conceive of. The determinations of my capacity for possibility of thought seem to erode as consciousness becomes/emerges. This capacity to choose from less strictly determined levels as you become more conscious, seems counter to the notion that interactions determine.
Unless perhaps a human’s consciousness taps into the multiverse at the quantum level (perhaps during the stasis of dormant brain cells) and brings back novel possibilities to reactivated brain cells (or something), like a microscopic shaman journeying to and returning from the spirit world with inspiring visions. Perhaps this could be part of the out of body experience people have under the influence of many psychedelic drugs, under certain doses and conditions, and perhaps this is why the shaman requires isolation from the attributing, ising, judging community, to go “deep into it” and do the work of shamanism. Perhaps this results from a dissipation of some small scale matter into quantum superposition, of some if not all of the particles which are at the basis of the material components involved with mental activity in the brain. When a part of a system (human of community or a particle or cell in body) returns to concrescence from out of a superposition, the novelty retrieved from the multiverse is dispersed with each interaction it makes within the system, which then reverberates out through each approximate interaction, until it absorbs out into the rest of the material world, like a drop of LSD-25 through the bloodstream. This seems like a libation, or the rejuvenation from a good restful sleep for a weary world of habit and mediocrity.
Anyway, this sense (be it an illusion or not) of expanding consciousness as an autocatalytic process seems to be at the heart of what we might call intellectual freedom. More consciousness, more possibilities. More possibilities means more freedom (as defined by freedom to choose). Anything which might stand in the way of expanding the options which can be selected from is oppressive. And like any freedom, intellectual freedom, remains always bounded symbiotically to intellectual courage. The worst oppressor of a human mind is still its own cowardliness. If you want freedom, be free, or stop bitching!
As ever more complexity emerges, It accumulates a plethora of possibilities and interconnections. When the complexity becomes a static whole (in some sense) it assumes the capacity of a “building block” of which new forms can be constructed from, which evolve to complexify in their own ways, then mesh into yet another scale of basic building blocks. It would seem this kind of thing could go on forever, and just might, if the foundations of these ever more complex forms continue to maintain their structural integrity as it were.
As we express whatever stage in this process we are engaged in, through our actions as individuals and as coherently amalgamate wholes, we express what we are about, and where we are going by doing as we do.
Ontological speculations always tend to suck me into an epistemological vacuum. How bout you?
When you say that something is, you are postulating the ontological fact of an attribution, fabricated in your mind, under the influence of memes (or whatever memes are supposed to account for). If you don’t understand the nature of your own experience, which is all that can be experienced by whatever constitutes this alleged you, then anything you might believe to be absolute ontological fact, is no more than desperately insecure delusion, rigorously rationalized and schematized. In short: hell.
Hell realms (Buddhist language) of Maya, might be conceptualized as levels of absolutist determination.
Hell as the distinction of other people from self (“hell is other people” (was that Sartre?))
Who or what might be the culprit (god or demon in Buddhist thinking) creating and maintaining this illusion of this “oh so sensible”, ontological world?
A model can be born from wonderfully expansive thought on the part of its originator, but can then tend to stifle the free thinking of those who might later become bounded to thinking within the framework of a particular model.
The problematic, lies in, and only in, the psychology of the subject who attributes problem-ness to a thing or situation. This could be a useful survival mechanism, or a harmful illusion, depending on the context of the application of a problem/solution dichotomy, and the value based bias/opinion/s implied by the nature of one’s being.
So my grand theory is that no theory deserves unquestioning adherence or rejection without reservation. We don’t, and perhaps can’t know enough to be the final judges of ontology. Maybe these illusive notions of ontology and truth are only delusions, made entirely of subjective judgment, and no such thing exists outside of it. The empirical is all we seem to have, and seems to work (whatever that means) for us (whoever we are), pragmatically speaking, but maybe we should not delude ourselves into believing without any reservation, that our human capacities can recognize, let alone reveal or explain “the truth” of any ontology outside of the observed and subjectively attributed.
Some things are just beyond us as we are, whatever that might be. But that shouldn’t dishearten anyone, because we have not yet defined, let alone tapped into even a fraction of our potential as we are now, so we have lots of growing room and no shortage of possible futures to help create. I don’t like the way that the term “unsettled”, is tagged negatively. I think we can settle down once we’re dead or otherwise unable or unwilling to go on. Settling too much for too, long allows stubborn orthodoxy and pious smugness to emerge, and this is like kryptonite for the expression and nurturing of expansive, exploratory, innovative, revolutionary, and evolutionary impulses and ideas, and the people who come up with and spread them.
Try and make sense out of all that why dont ya.
WARNING! APPROACHING QUALM! INITIATE EVASIVE ACTION!
OH SHIT! TOO LATE! IMPACT! SCHEMA IN FLUX! PIETY HAS BEEN COMPROMIZED! MAYDAY! MAYDAY! ABORT EGO! I REPEAT, ABORT EGO!
When you think you've seen "the light", dont jump to conclusions. Just call it a U.F.O.