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It's not really an opinion thing, because the human body is something we can physically test and observe, and we know there's nothing there besides physical particles (conception and growth, anyone?). If only everyone went into neurology and tried to empirically make sense out of it. We'd get real answers in no time.

At 1/24/11 07:45 AM, RubberTrucky wrote: There are further enigmas regarding this. the biggest I've already explained a few times is how we are build of elementary particles, without any glint of consciousness, but as a whole are something totally different and alive. Heck, we even fight for our survival, have very complex system to ensure we stay alive and feel consciously pressed to survive even though our particles have no will in the matter whatsoever. Which ever state, they will survive anyways and even more so, they are in a more stable/ desirable state when we are dead. (we can die, but we can't un-die)

Ah, even scarier is when you reduce the human complexity not just to a bunch of instincts and results, but the physics involves. For example, when you see something coming towards you you begin to run away. This can be simplifies to photons hitting your eye and initiating a long and extremely complex chemical chain that results in your legs moving.

At 2/24/11 09:49 PM, ChainsawNinjaZX wrote: I believe it's called a soul.

Please get out of here. There is nothing special about the human composition besides complexity, so this sense of entitlement belief in souls gives to the human being is a barrier to actual understanding.

At 3/4/11 09:10 PM, Al6200 wrote: One of the features of Heidegger's writing is the contraction of several words into nouns: ready-to-hand, present-at-hand, being-toward-death. Traditionally dasein means something close to "existence" or "life" in the German language, but Heidegger uses it to mean "Being-in-the-world". The choice of dasein over the contraction is mostly an aesthetic choice by those who translated the original German into English.

Yes, the idea of both being and relation. An object without relation cannot exist, nor can a perceiver without something to perceive.

Let's again return to the table from a Heideggerian perspective (which I would call modern). Heidegger begins by rejecting the idea that we can think of the table in terms of its properties. He says that the table does not exist by itself, it only exists as something experienced. If the table is ready-to-hand (that is, if it is being used), we may not be aware of the table or its properties at all. Merleau-Ponty extends the Heideggerian concept by explaining that even when we are simply grasping something, we are actively projecting it into the future and placing it into a world of significance.

Well, modern as in new, yeas, but philosophically, the focus on perception alone is a central tenet of post-modernism. It breaks down the duality of the cartesian way of thought (which, once brought into the social realm of nature/culture dualities becomes the tenet of "Modernism") into what is supposed to be a simpler paradigm.

I am beginning to remember the name from my studies, and there are several main issues with the philosophy as a whole. The first is that if we abandon things-as-objects in favor of things-as-experience, then we end up with a lack of understanding one facet in order to bolster another. An object cannot be perceived without first existing, which begs the question of the world outside our perception: can it exist without being perceived, when all we call important is that perception?

The second problem is that it uses Modernism's (or rather the cartesian) paradigm as the structure of it's deconstruction, tying it irrevocably to the very thing it is trying to break down. When we abandon a dualist view for one that merely removes one half of the picture, then we are not philosophically strengthened... rather we are weakened. Instead, we need to find a way that subject and object can co-exist as a hybrid object, as something of both nature and culture, that can contain both the observation, and the objective.

A third issue it raises is the homogeny of observation between observers of remarkably different experiences. Without a stable underlying ontology (whether or not the entirety of that "be"ing can ever be known) should we be able to expect such widespread agreement about the world? Without objects being able to enact each other into meaningful existence, how can an observer even ever become? And when all observation is gone, might the universe enact itself beyond that point?

Each individual can describe the whole of their experience. They can call this consciousness. Some modes of experience we can characterize as being-with-a-thing. If I pick up a rock, I characterize my experience with it as being-with-a-thing because it is wholly determined by physical laws that I understand. When I encounter a person, I characterize my experience as "being-with-another" because I recognize my projections as having some similarity to the choices that I would make.

And what of that rock before you came upon it? And what of your mind before you came upon the rock? Did your perception will it into being, or did the two, instead, interact... and ENact each other into a new reality? Staticness (and, similarly linearity) is a problem of human cognition. It is hard for us to conceive of a world in constant flux. We resist change, we find it hard to anticipate repercussions beyond a few steps. We try to simplify things into moments, into something we can capture and say "This: this is real. This is." But the instant we do that, everything changes. Consider it heisenberg's universal uncertainty principle: The moment we know something, it is (like the brand new computer we just bought) outdated and obsolete and every moment of less and less import to the "current" reality.

Perception matters, indeed. Even as you gaze upon the same words on the same BBS as I do, they are different. Read by different eyes, displayed by a different screen, from a different location, through a different set of infrastructure, and understood by a different mind. This creates a separate ontological reality from mine. But a related one, and one that is forged through our interactions with our tools, and through them, each other. Pure perspectivalism cannot do the magnitude of this event justice: it seeks too much paring down to make ease of explanation. Instead, if we see things as chains of interactions, forever shifting and reacting to each other, forever using hybrid objects that are neither pure perspective or pure object, but inseparable alloys of both, then we can get a clearer picture of reality... and the role that consciousness plays in it.

At 1/24/11 07:34 AM, gumOnShoe wrote: I don't know how to put my finger on it to explain it. But the actuality of my existence bothers me.

I know the answer to this one. Like, a legitimate answer to the question. You can take what you want from it to be true though, but ultimately from personal experience i know it to be true.

Plain and simple, we are not physical bodies with souls. We are souls that temporarily inhabit physical bodies. This life you live is simply a shell, one that you birthed yourself into around the time that your fetal heart started beating. When you die, your conscious awareness simply leaves your body, and returns to a higher state of being.

Spirit does not know death, the physical body will die, but your memories and awareness will never die and will always continue. I can't describe spirit for you unfortunately, but it is the beauty of life. You do not have to believe in god to understand it either.

I know i've brought this up in recent threads too, but if you were to Astral Project for example, you would learn that your consciousness is able to leave your physical body behind and travel wherever you want to. Anyone can do it to, so it's not like i'm blowing smoke out of my ass saying that you have to trust only what people who astral project tell you. Do it for yourself, there's a book called "Astral Projection: Amazing Journeys outside the body" that i recommend reading. It tells you exactly how to do it, who knows, in a matter of weeks you could be learning more and more about your existence in ways you never dreamed was possible.

Before I get into the discussion at hand, I thought of an object to Heideggerian theory that I think is worth stating: It is possible to remove half of someone's brain and keep them alive (or so I have heard). Suppose it is possible to transplant half of one's brain into a second body. Now is only one of the half-brains dasein? Are we to believe that they are still one dasein? It seems intuitive that I-myself would be one of the half-brains after the split, but this does not fit with the fact that I-myself today am two half brains.

The issue here is that being-in-the-world feels very discrete and Heidegger's theory is built upon the idea that there is a whole construct of being-in-the-world despite the fact that being-in-the-world is in fact quite continuous.

At 3/8/11 05:24 AM, Ravariel wrote:

At 3/4/11 09:10 PM, Al6200 wrote: One of the features of Heidegger's writing is the contraction of several words into nouns: ready-to-hand, present-at-hand, being-toward-death. Traditionally dasein means something close to "existence" or "life" in the German language, but Heidegger uses it to mean "Being-in-the-world". The choice of dasein over the contraction is mostly an aesthetic choice by those who translated the original German into English.

Yes, the idea of both being and relation. An object without relation cannot exist, nor can a perceiver without something to perceive.

The thing is that you can question the split between subjects and objects entirely.

Let's again return to the table from a Heideggerian perspective (which I would call modern). Heidegger begins by rejecting the idea that we can think of the table in terms of its properties. He says that the table does not exist by itself, it only exists as something experienced. If the table is ready-to-hand (that is, if it is being used), we may not be aware of the table or its properties at all. Merleau-Ponty extends the Heideggerian concept by explaining that even when we are simply grasping something, we are actively projecting it into the future and placing it into a world of significance.

Well, modern as in new, yeas, but philosophically, the focus on perception alone is a central tenet of post-modernism. It breaks down the duality of the cartesian way of thought (which, once brought into the social realm of nature/culture dualities becomes the tenet of "Modernism") into what is supposed to be a simpler paradigm.

I am beginning to remember the name from my studies, and there are several main issues with the philosophy as a whole. The first is that if we abandon things-as-objects in favor of things-as-experience, then we end up with a lack of understanding one facet in order to bolster another. An object cannot be perceived without first existing, which begs the question of the world outside our perception: can it exist without being perceived, when all we call important is that perception?

Saying that being-in-the-world is all that matters is not the same as saying that "perception" is all that matters. All are simply facets of being in the world and you cannot separate "perception" from the world of "objects" because I would argue that the latter does not exist. The position you're defending seems to be something like Hegelianism: that there is a thing-in-itself and a thing as it is revealed to the subject.

I would argue that there is no such thing as a thing-in-itself.

The second problem is that it uses Modernism's (or rather the cartesian) paradigm as the structure of it's deconstruction, tying it irrevocably to the very thing it is trying to break down. When we abandon a dualist view for one that merely removes one half of the picture, then we are not philosophically strengthened... rather we are weakened. Instead, we need to find a way that subject and object can co-exist as a hybrid object, as something of both nature and culture, that can contain both the observation, and the objective.

You're not taking out "half of the picture", you're just changing the philosophical paradigm to remove the Cartesian distinction between subject and object.

A third issue it raises is the homogeny of observation between observers of remarkably different experiences. Without a stable underlying ontology (whether or not the entirety of that "be"ing can ever be known) should we be able to expect such widespread agreement about the world? Without objects being able to enact each other into meaningful existence, how can an observer even ever become? And when all observation is gone, might the universe enact itself beyond that point?

That's an interesting argument. I would reverse your argument and say that we know a person is a person precisely because they have "widespread agreement" about the world.