Our Heideggerian Gospel via Daniel Peterson.

[MosiahFree]

I’ve seen it said before that Mormonism is an expression of theocentric Humanism (or at least very amenable to it) and as a result of its American origins is also amenable to American philosophy of the Pragmatic kind. I’m of the opinion that the Gospel we Mormons are to bring to the world is seriously compromised by the aforementioned ideas and in this thread I’ve decided to give an example of what a Gospel presentation looks like within the context of apologetics; a Gospel that commits to the flames Humanism and the doctrines of Pragmaticism.

I understand the length is a hindrance, but the Cliffs Notes version is: Humans do not create truth, we can only have it revealed to us.

In respect to apologetics, even those who are just slightly familiar with secular anti-mormonism will be well acquainted with their gauche habits of the mind; theirs is a socius that Richard Hofstadter warned us of back in the early 60s with his insightful meditation on, and dutiful archaeology of, ‘Anti-Intellectualism in American Life’. Now it may seem that anti-intellectualism is too harsh a charge to level at the participants of the anti-Mormon social media hive and indeed I do not make it without the necessary gravity it demands. I think the proper place to begin is with just what is meant by “intellectual” in the Hofstadter context:

Quote

To define what is distinctly intellectual it is necessary to be able to determine what differentiates, say, a professor or a lawyer who is an intellectual from one who is not; or perhaps more properly, what enables us to say that at one moment a professor or a lawyer is acting in a purely routine routine professional fashion and at another moment as an intellectual. The difference is not in the character of the idas with which he works but in his attitude toward them. I have suggested that in some sense he lives for ideas--which means that he has a sense of dedication to the life of the mind, which is very much like a religious commitment. This is not surprising, for in a very important way the role of the intellectual is inherited from the office of the cleric; it implies a special sense of the ultimate value in the existence of the act of comprehension.
'Anti-Intellectualism in American Life', Hofstadter, Richard. Vintage Books, New York City New York, 1963. p.27

Speaking of the Intellectual’s dedication to a life of the mind Hofstadter goes on to say:

Quote

The intellectual life has here taken on a kind of primary moral significance. It is this aspect of the intellectual’s feeling about ideas that I call his piety. The intellectual is engagé⎼⎼he is pledged, committed, enlisted. What everyone else is willing to admit, namely that ideas and abstractions are of signal importance in human life, he imperatively feels.
'Anti-Intellectualism in American Life', Hofstadter, Richard. Vintage Books, New York City New York, 1963. p.28

I think the most prolific Mormon Intellectual today is Daniel C. Peterson and through the aptly named blog ‘Sic et Non’ you can often find him engaging secular anti-mormonism with candor, grace, and acumen. One of Dr. Peterson’s recent blog posts has been causing some murmuring in the usual quarters and I thought it would serve as an excellent example of:

Quote

 

I find the continual contrasts of science to religion made by certain atheists — including at least two who like to comment on my blog — exceedingly odd.  They incessantly point out that science has given us new technologies and cures for polio and other diseases, while theology hasn’t.

My response, on the whole, is “So what?”

To me, this is rather like criticizing the Houston Astros for their failure to score a single touchdown during the entire 2017 baseball season.  Or faulting Homer because his English was so bad.  Or lamenting Chaucer’s uselessness in stamping out the bubonic plague or the irrelevance of an accurate knowledge of the Renaissance for building a highway bridge.

It’s like declaring that Thucydides, Tacitus, and Josephus are no longer worth reading since we now have electric toasters.  Or that, in these days of jet air travel, there’s no point in reflecting on ethics or on moral issues.  Or that, now that we’ve identified muons and positrons and covalent bonds, philosophy is obsolete.  Or that, for a society that has essentially eliminated smallpox, Shakespeare, Bach, Monet, ****ens, Goethe, Dante, and Dostoevsky are no longer relevant.

 

A thoughtful riposte and I daresay a coup de grâce on those who try to engage the good Doctor (as if any of the man’s most vocal critics even know who Gilbert Ryle is, much less having read the man). I’m going to come back to this last paragraph, but first I need to lay some philosophical groundwork.

Now I’m convinced that if Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) had not regretfully joined the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, he’d have been baptized a Mormon after reading the Book of Mormon, even a cursory reading. Herr Heidegger and Joseph Smith have more in common you might think; both come from village life, both ended up rejecting the dogmas that saturated their upbringing and established some new, both had remarkable charisma that drew in and made acolytes out of some of the brightest minds of their day, both raised above their station by their own talents but were derailed by their respective enemies, and both stand accused of extra-marital dalliances among other notable sins.

So what is the big deal about Heidegger? His singular obsession with BEING. Our experience of existence. See Heidegger believed that in Western intellectual tradition we have forgotten about the blunt and ever present question of Being, this fact lead Heidegger into a detailed examination of metaphysics, finding that the traditional ways of investigating Being are not only inadequate but they also impede us. We therefore must resort to “destruktion” in order to “abbau” the contemporary philosophical edifice; this is to say we must destroy the history of philosophy in order to deconstruct our obstacles (this is actually what Derrida has in mind when speaking of “deconstruction” FYI). We must get rid of Platonic, Aristotelian, Thomistic, Kantian, and Cartesian elements  before one can look at the raw phenomena of our existence.

See, it isn’t the case that beings are not simply things that exist, as some kind of furniture of reality. What most of the great metaphysicans have missed is that that their views of the world were not fundamental but just a distortion of experience. Being is existence, of which interpretation is necessary and unextractable from Being. Every Being’s existence has a unique specificity to it that is theirs. Interpretation of Being is not neutral, dispassionate, or even contemplative, but it has a movement that is forward to backward and backward to forward. This movement is what makes the existential structures our experienced lives possible, setting the conditions for the mystery of conscious awareness and compels us to question the world.

The rub of it though is that we are Beings in Time limited by birth and death, yet if philosophy and theology are at all representative of their cultures of origin, the West has trouble articulating the authenticity of our temporal character. Now this is where it gets interesting.

Another important and necessary precursor to the genius of Mormonism is Saint Augustine of Hippo (think of him as a North African B.H. Roberts living as a cenobite with a CTR ring w/thorns) who talks about this very issue in his ‘The Free Choice of the Will’ where he speaks at some length about how our love of God as summum bonum. Because we are imago dei what this love of God ends up really being is amor sui, but this is difficult because we must love human essence (which is incommutabilis) but we mistakenly identify our existence (which is mutabilis) as our essence and this drives home the contingency of our lives, this fleshly tabernacle cannot be present and identifiable in the ways we need it to be.

Channeling the Apostle Paul, Augustine correctly notes that to truly love God is to seek the annihilation of the temporal/mortal/present through projection into an absolute future which is really what eternal life is.  See here (Mosiah 2:41):

Quote

And moreover, I would desire that ye should consider on the blessed and happy state of those that keep the commandments of God. For behold, they are blessed in all things both temporal and spiritual; and if they hold out faithful to the end they are received into heaven that thereby they may dwell with God in a state of never ending happiness. O remember, remember that these things are true; for the Lord God hath spoken it.

Just like we see in Augustine, the author of Mosiah brings out conceptual distinction between caritas/cupiditas: “…if they hold out faithful to the end...” the neglect of the present pushes us into that absolute future the love of God instills in us to seek.

Okay, so what does any of this have to do with Daniel Peterson? Well I take it as a given that Dr.Peterson is the kind of scholar who is deeply familiar with the canon of Aristotle and in the course of his studies he became intimate with ὑποκείμενον (dealing with form and matter in composition for those reading that are uninitiated). Herr Heidegger was just such a student as well and Heidegger argued authoritatively that art is actually Being imparting truths to us.

I took this to be Dr. Peterson’s point in response that petty school of critics that snap at his heels. That “Shakespeare, Bach, Monet, ****ens, Goethe, Dante, and Dostoevsky” is the kind of art that allows us to bear witness to eternal truths, a glimpse of that absolute future, brief access to that which is incommutabilis, the summum bonum.

But I think Dr.Peterson had a deeper lesson for us in this blog post; the bigger challenges Mormons are facing in terms of defending our sacred history from those who seek to bring Joseph Smith’s divine calling into the realm of the profane come from two wings related but different wings of philosophy. The first is the typical paleo-marxism that seeks to sublate the individual psychic process to outside/exterior social forces (e.g. Rorty and his identification of philosophical Ideology) and the second is post-Lacanian psychoanalysis which would see the Rortyian ideology as being congruent with unconscious pressures (which is the exact strategy Fawn Brodie uses).

I think we ought to join Dr. Peterson is eschewing the present to seek the eternal by adopting the kind of Heideggerian ontology that allows God to be God and we his creatures to be his creatures.

Take care friends!     

[stemelbow]

Alright, where'd you pic come from?

[mfbukowski]

1 hour ago, MosiahFree said:

I’ve seen it said before that Mormonism is an expression of theocentric Humanism (or at least very amenable to it) and as a result of its American origins is also amenable to American philosophy of the Pragmatic kind. I’m of the opinion that the Gospel we Mormons are to bring to the world is seriously compromised by the aforementioned ideas and in this thread I’ve decided to give an example of what a Gospel presentation looks like within the context of apologetics; a Gospel that commits to the flames Humanism and the doctrines of Pragmaticism.

I understand the length is a hindrance, but the Cliffs Notes version is: Humans do not create truth, we can only have it revealed to us.

In respect to apologetics, even those who are just slightly familiar with secular anti-mormonism will be well acquainted with their gauche habits of the mind; theirs is a socius that Richard Hofstadter warned us of back in the early 60s with his insightful meditation on, and dutiful archaeology of, ‘Anti-Intellectualism in American Life’. Now it may seem that anti-intellectualism is too harsh a charge to level at the participants of the anti-Mormon social media hive and indeed I do not make it without the necessary gravity it demands. I think the proper place to begin is with just what is meant by “intellectual” in the Hofstadter context:

Speaking of the Intellectual’s dedication to a life of the mind Hofstadter goes on to say:

I think the most prolific Mormon Intellectual today is Daniel C. Peterson and through the aptly named blog ‘Sic et Non’ you can often find him engaging secular anti-mormonism with candor, grace, and acumen. One of Dr. Peterson’s recent blog posts has been causing some murmuring in the usual quarters and I thought it would serve as an excellent example of:

A thoughtful riposte and I daresay a coup de grâce on those who try to engage the good Doctor (as if any of the man’s most vocal critics even know who Gilbert Ryle is, much less having read the man). I’m going to come back to this last paragraph, but first I need to lay some philosophical groundwork.

Now I’m convinced that if Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) had not regretfully joined the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, he’d have been baptized a Mormon after reading the Book of Mormon, even a cursory reading. Herr Heidegger and Joseph Smith have more in common you might think; both come from village life, both ended up rejecting the dogmas that saturated their upbringing and established some new, both had remarkable charisma that drew in and made acolytes out of some of the brightest minds of their day, both raised above their station by their own talents but were derailed by their respective enemies, and both stand accused of extra-marital dalliances among other notable sins.

So what is the big deal about Heidegger? His singular obsession with BEING. Our experience of existence. See Heidegger believed that in Western intellectual tradition we have forgotten about the blunt and ever present question of Being, this fact lead Heidegger into a detailed examination of metaphysics, finding that the traditional ways of investigating Being are not only inadequate but they also impede us. We therefore must resort to “destruktion” in order to “abbau” the contemporary philosophical edifice; this is to say we must destroy the history of philosophy in order to deconstruct our obstacles (this is actually what Derrida has in mind when speaking of “deconstruction” FYI). We must get rid of Platonic, Aristotelian, Thomistic, Kantian, and Cartesian elements  before one can look at the raw phenomena of our existence.

See, it isn’t the case that beings are not simply things that exist, as some kind of furniture of reality. What most of the great metaphysicans have missed is that that their views of the world were not fundamental but just a distortion of experience. Being is existence, of which interpretation is necessary and unextractable from Being. Every Being’s existence has a unique specificity to it that is theirs. Interpretation of Being is not neutral, dispassionate, or even contemplative, but it has a movement that is forward to backward and backward to forward. This movement is what makes the existential structures our experienced lives possible, setting the conditions for the mystery of conscious awareness and compels us to question the world.

The rub of it though is that we are Beings in Time limited by birth and death, yet if philosophy and theology are at all representative of their cultures of origin, the West has trouble articulating the authenticity of our temporal character. Now this is where it gets interesting.

Another important and necessary precursor to the genius of Mormonism is Saint Augustine of Hippo (think of him as a North African B.H. Roberts living as a cenobite with a CTR ring w/thorns) who talks about this very issue in his ‘The Free Choice of the Will’ where he speaks at some length about how our love of God as summum bonum. Because we are imago dei what this love of God ends up really being is amor sui, but this is difficult because we must love human essence (which is incommutabilis) but we mistakenly identify our existence (which is mutabilis) as our essence and this drives home the contingency of our lives, this fleshly tabernacle cannot be present and identifiable in the ways we need it to be.

Channeling the Apostle Paul, Augustine correctly notes that to truly love God is to seek the annihilation of the temporal/mortal/present through projection into an absolute future which is really what eternal life is.  See here (Mosiah 2:41):

Just like we see in Augustine, the author of Mosiah brings out conceptual distinction between caritas/cupiditas: “…if they hold out faithful to the end...” the neglect of the present pushes us into that absolute future the love of God instills in us to seek.

Okay, so what does any of this have to do with Daniel Peterson? Well I take it as a given that Dr.Peterson is the kind of scholar who is deeply familiar with the canon of Aristotle and in the course of his studies he became intimate with ὑποκείμενον (dealing with form and matter in composition for those reading that are uninitiated). Herr Heidegger was just such a student as well and Heidegger argued authoritatively that art is actually Being imparting truths to us.

I took this to be Dr. Peterson’s point in response that petty school of critics that snap at his heels. That “Shakespeare, Bach, Monet, ****ens, Goethe, Dante, and Dostoevsky” is the kind of art that allows us to bear witness to eternal truths, a glimpse of that absolute future, brief access to that which is incommutabilis, the summum bonum.

But I think Dr.Peterson had a deeper lesson for us in this blog post; the bigger challenges Mormons are facing in terms of defending our sacred history from those who seek to bring Joseph Smith’s divine calling into the realm of the profane come from two wings related but different wings of philosophy. The first is the typical paleo-marxism that seeks to sublate the individual psychic process to outside/exterior social forces (e.g. Rorty and his identification of philosophical Ideology) and the second is post-Lacanian psychoanalysis which would see the Rortyian ideology as being congruent with unconscious pressures (which is the exact strategy Fawn Brodie uses).

I think we ought to join Dr. Peterson is eschewing the present to seek the eternal by adopting the kind of Heideggerian ontology that allows God to be God and we his creatures to be his creatures.

Take care friends!     

You gotta read some Jim Faulconer stuff.

Haven't read anything but the OP so far

Here is something else you might enjoy.   It's like a 3 pager or so

http://rintintin.colorado.edu/~vancecd/phil201/Jackson.pdf

A lot easier than Heidegger. 

Quote

 

I am what is sometimes known as a "qualia freak." I think that there are certain features of the bodily sensations especially, but also of certain perceptual experiences, which no amount of purely physical information includes. Tell me everything physical there is to tell about what is going on in a living brain, the kind of states, their functional role, their relation to what goes on at other times and in other brains, and so on and so forth, and be I as clever as can be in fitting it all together, you won't have told me about the hurtfulness of pains, the itchiness of itches, pangs of jealousy, or about the characteristic experience of tasting a lemon, smelling a rose, hearing a loud noise or seeing the sky.

 

 

Edited November 30, 2017 by mfbukowski

[MosiahFree]

1 hour ago, mfbukowski said:

You gotta read some Jim Faulconer stuff.

Haven't read anything but the OP so far

Here is something else you might enjoy.   It's like a 3 pager or so

http://rintintin.colorado.edu/~vancecd/phil201/Jackson.pdf

A lot easier than Heidegger. 

 

Thanks for the link! Looks excellent on my first skim

[Robert F. Smith]

On 11/30/2017 at 1:18 PM, MosiahFree said:

I’ve seen it said before that Mormonism is an expression of theocentric Humanism (or at least very amenable to it) and as a result of its American origins is also amenable to American philosophy of the Pragmatic kind. I’m of the opinion that the Gospel we Mormons are to bring to the world is seriously compromised by the aforementioned ideas and in this thread I’ve decided to give an example of what a Gospel presentation looks like within the context of apologetics; a Gospel that commits to the flames Humanism and the doctrines of Pragmaticism.

I understand the length is a hindrance, but the Cliffs Notes version is: Humans do not create truth, we can only have it revealed to us.

.............................................................................

Mormonism is overwhelmingly humanist in the following sense:

Quote

Humanism is a philosophical and ethical stance that emphasizes the value and agency of human beings, individually and collectively, and generally prefers critical thinking and evidence(rationalism and empiricism) over acceptance of dogma or superstition. The meaning of the term humanism has fluctuated according to the successive intellectual movements which have identified with it.[1] The term was coined by theologian Friedrich Niethammer at the beginning of the 19th century to refer to a system of education based on the study of classical literature ("classical humanism"). Generally, however, humanism refers to a perspective that affirms some notion of human freedom and progress.

In modern times, humanist movements are typically non-religious movements aligned with secularism, and today humanism typically refers to a nontheistic life stance centred on human agency and looking to science rather than revelation from a supernatural source to understand the world.[2][3]  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humanism .

Because Mormonism emphasizes naturalism (of God and universe), and rejects supernaturalism and superstition, it clearly removes itself from any association with normative Judeo-Christian-Muslim dogma.  Because Mormonism sees God as finite, and with a shared interdependence with humans (humans as the genus & species of God), one might seek some meaning in process theology qua relational theology:

 

See, for example,

Floyd Ross, “Process Philosophy and Mormon Thought,” Sunstone, 7/1 (Jan-Feb 1982):17-25, online at https://www.sunstonemagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/sbi/articles/031-16-25.pdf .

Garland E. Tickemyer, "Joseph Smith and Process Theology," Dialogue, 17/3 (Autumn 1984):75-85, online at https://www.dialoguejournal.com/wp-content/uploads/sbi/articles/Dialogue_V17N03_77.pdf .

Edited December 2, 2017 by Robert F. Smith

[The Nehor]

Is this what is meant by the philosophies of men with a little scripture mixed in?  

[Robert F. Smith]

37 minutes ago, The Nehor said:

Is this what is meant by the philosophies of men with a little scripture mixed in?  

Yeh, something like D&C 88:118,-- since some ain't got faith, we need to edify one another through both book larnen and through faith -- speaking words of wisdom . . .

[mfbukowski]

6 hours ago, Robert F. Smith said:

Mormonism is overwhelmingly humanist in the following sense:

Because Mormonism emphasizes naturalism (of God and universe), and rejects supernaturalism and superstition, it clearly removes itself from any association with normative Judeo-Christian-Muslim dogma.  Because Mormonism sees God as finite, and with a shared interdependence with humans (humans as the genus & species of God), one might seek some meaning in process theology qua relational theology:

 

See, for example,

Floyd Ross, “Process Philosophy and Mormon Thought,” Sunstone, 7/1 (Jan-Feb 1982):17-25, online at https://www.sunstonemagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/sbi/articles/031-16-25.pdf .

Garland E. Tickemyer, "Joseph Smith and Process Theology," Dialogue, 17 (Autumn 1984):75-85, online at https://www.dialoguejournal.com/wp-content/uploads/sbi/articles/Dialogue_V17N03_77.pdf .

Yep, I was into Whitehead before Pragmatism but my profs were all analytic, so I had to go toward Rorty but to me it's all the same.

Anything out of Claremont is strictly Whitehead thru John Cobb. Patrick Mason is in that whole milieu 

Edited December 1, 2017 by mfbukowski

[mfbukowski]

5 hours ago, The Nehor said:

Is this what is meant by the philosophies of men with a little scripture mixed in?  

Seems to me that scripture is already philosophy, and if it is not "God breathed"...... Hmmmmm, sombody wrote it ....

and lf God is a Man.... 

It was not my idea to reveal that God is a glorified Man with a tangible human body.... 

And then we have the very human God made Man named Jesus who spoke a lot of philosophy.....

The distinction is pretty thin.

 

Edited December 1, 2017 by mfbukowski

[Physics Guy]

9 hours ago, mfbukowski said:

Here is something else you might enjoy.   It's like a 3 pager or so

http://rintintin.colorado.edu/~vancecd/phil201/Jackson.pdf

Thanks for the link. It was enjoyable, but I'm afraid not impressive. It's just an argument from poverty of imagination, disguised by slippery language.

The author repeatedly asks us to assume hypothetically that we know everything phyical about a person who has a subjective experience, but then denies that we know what their subjective experience is like. The only reason this seems at all like an argument, rather than a mere self-contradiction, is that in fact no-one does currently know all the neurophysiology of experiences like color vision. So when the author assures me that I don't understand the subjective experience of someone else's color vision, I have to agree.

But the author's argument is not supposed to be about my actual state of knowledge! It's supposed to be about a counterfactual hypothetical state of knowledge, in which I would know everything physical. My current inability to imagine what that knowledge might be is not a proof that such knowledge is insufficient to explain subjective qualia.

Consider for comparison the following argument which tries to prove that there is some transcendent quality in the thought of the philosopher Jacques Derrida, a quality which cannot be reduced to words. The argument runs, "Assume that you have read and understood every word that Derrida ever wrote."

Okay, we all nod: assumption made, for the sake of argument.

The argument continues, "But now do you understand Derrida?"

Well, um, no, of course we don't. No matter what we may be assuming hypothetically, we have not actually read all of Derrida.

"So," the argument concludes triumphantly, "there is something in Derrida which cannot be reduced to words!"

The obvious rebuttal is, "I don't actually understand Derrida, but if I had read all his works, then maybe I would understand him." And in the same way it is a rebuttal to this linked article about qualia, to say that if we really did know and undertand all the physical facts about a person's brain, then maybe we would understand their qualitative subjective experiences.

[mfbukowski]

17 minutes ago, Physics Guy said:

Thanks for the link. It was enjoyable, but I'm afraid not impressive. It's just an argument from poverty of imagination, disguised by slippery language.

The author repeatedly asks us to assume hypothetically that we know everything phyical about a person who has a subjective experience, but then denies that we know what their subjective experience is like. The only reason this seems at all like an argument, rather than a mere self-contradiction, is that in fact no-one does currently know all the neurophysiology of experiences like color vision. So when the author assures me that I don't understand the subjective experience of someone else's color vision, I have to agree.

But the author's argument is not supposed to be about my actual state of knowledge! It's supposed to be about a counterfactual hypothetical state of knowledge, in which I would know everything physical. My current inability to imagine what that knowledge might be is not a proof that such knowledge is insufficient to explain subjective qualia.

Consider for comparison the following argument which tries to prove that there is some transcendent quality in the thought of the philosopher Jacques Derrida, a quality which cannot be reduced to words. The argument runs, "Assume that you have read and understood every word that Derrida ever wrote."

Okay, we all nod: assumption made, for the sake of argument.

The argument continues, "But now do you understand Derrida?"

Well, um, no, of course we don't. No matter what we may be assuming hypothetically, we have not actually read all of Derrida.

"So," the argument concludes triumphantly, "there is something in Derrida which cannot be reduced to words!"

The obvious rebuttal is, "I don't actually understand Derrida, but if I had read all his works, then maybe I would understand him." And in the same way it is a rebuttal to this linked article about qualia, to say that if we really did know and undertand all the physical facts about a person's brain, then maybe we would understand their qualitative subjective experiences.

I think you missed a little here. I already referred you to Thomas Nagel, but of course he's just a dummy. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Nagel

Publish it in Mind and get famous.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind_(journal)

Unfortunately you cannot make a third person statement into first person, it cannot be logically equivalent. Oops. 

Edited December 1, 2017 by mfbukowski

[Robert F. Smith]

3 hours ago, Physics Guy said:

......................................................... It's just an argument from poverty of imagination, disguised by slippery language.

The author repeatedly asks us to assume hypothetically that we know everything phyical about a person who has a subjective experience, but then denies that we know what their subjective experience is like. The only reason this seems at all like an argument, rather than a mere self-contradiction, is that in fact no-one does currently know all the neurophysiology of experiences like color vision. So when the author assures me that I don't understand the subjective experience of someone else's color vision, I have to agree.

But the author's argument is not supposed to be about my actual state of knowledge! It's supposed to be about a counterfactual hypothetical state of knowledge, in which I would know everything physical. My current inability to imagine what that knowledge might be is not a proof that such knowledge is insufficient to explain subjective qualia.

............................................................

"So," the argument concludes triumphantly, "there is something in Derrida which cannot be reduced to words!"

The obvious rebuttal is, "I don't actually understand Derrida, but if I had read all his works, then maybe I would understand him." And in the same way it is a rebuttal to this linked article about qualia, to say that if we really did know and undertand all the physical facts about a person's brain, then maybe we would understand their qualitative subjective experiences.

It is much worse than that, guy:  It is the words themselves which are the problem, even if not suffering from poverty of imagination or slippery language.  We are talking about descriptive words, which are simply never adequate in describing reality (whatever that is).  It is not that we do not have enough words, nor that we have not read everything Derrida has ever written, but rather that the words themselves cannot do the job expected of them -- try as we might.  We cannot substitute words for reality because reality is subjectively perceived and ineffable. Actions (and reality) speak louder than words.

[mfbukowski]

8 hours ago, Physics Guy said:

Thanks for the link. It was enjoyable, but I'm afraid not impressive. It's just an argument from poverty of imagination, disguised by slippery language.

The author repeatedly asks us to assume hypothetically that we know everything phyical about a person who has a subjective experience, but then denies that we know what their subjective experience is like. The only reason this seems at all like an argument, rather than a mere self-contradiction, is that in fact no-one does currently know all the neurophysiology of experiences like color vision. So when the author assures me that I don't understand the subjective experience of someone else's color vision, I have to agree.

But the author's argument is not supposed to be about my actual state of knowledge! It's supposed to be about a counterfactual hypothetical state of knowledge, in which I would know everything physical. My current inability to imagine what that knowledge might be is not a proof that such knowledge is insufficient to explain subjective qualia.

Consider for comparison the following argument which tries to prove that there is some transcendent quality in the thought of the philosopher Jacques Derrida, a quality which cannot be reduced to words. The argument runs, "Assume that you have read and understood every word that Derrida ever wrote."

Okay, we all nod: assumption made, for the sake of argument.

The argument continues, "But now do you understand Derrida?"

Well, um, no, of course we don't. No matter what we may be assuming hypothetically, we have not actually read all of Derrida.

"So," the argument concludes triumphantly, "there is something in Derrida which cannot be reduced to words!"

The obvious rebuttal is, "I don't actually understand Derrida, but if I had read all his works, then maybe I would understand him." And in the same way it is a rebuttal to this linked article about qualia, to say that if we really did know and undertand all the physical facts about a person's brain, then maybe we would understand their qualitative subjective experiences.

OK I will bite and try to explain it to you- 

Philosophy is not about science.   Period.  Do you even understand that?  Do you understand that philosophy is about the IMPORTANCE, meaning and significance of our lives?

Think about that.   We are talking about strategy in basketball and you are talking about the physics of how a ball bounces.  Can you possibly get that distinction?

The SUBJECT MATTER here is the meaning and significance of being human, what it means to have freedom as opposed to being determined, why it is wrong to kill people, the nature of how we know these things, what it means to get up in the morning and be miserable or be happy.   Do you care about being happy?   Is it important in your life?   How does one live to become happy??  If we were discussing perhaps the benefits of exercise in being happy, how to organize your time to exercise, or what ATTITUDE was preventing us from exercising, there might be an analogy here.  Suppose someone said that they did not have time to exercise or that they liked to sit on the couch and watch TV instead of exercising and your response was about the science of how muscles contract, how relevant would your comments be?

Totally irrelevant.

The subject matter here is about what it is like to be a human being, the meaning and significance of life, what thoughts and ideas make being human worthwhile enough to stick around in this ....hole of a world for another day, what it is like to face everyday with joy and understanding of who we are and where we are going- what values we have in life and what we find important- and your responses have nothing to do with the topic, but only discuss how our brains work.

So f'n what????

What the subject IS IS the qualitative subjective experiences of being human!!!

Do you get that???

How a ball bounces has nothing to do with why I like or dislike basketball or why basketball is important in my life!!!!!!!

Some people's qualitative subjective experience is that they LIVE for basketball. (fill in any blank you like that is abstract- some live to make others "free" some live to "save" people, some people get out of bed to pursue science, some like airplanes, some think constantly about how to build skyscrapers etc etc etc.

BUT ALL have something IMPORTANT in their lives that science by design DOES NOT ADDRESS!!!!!!

SCIENCE BY DESIGN IS DISPASSIONATE AND WHAT WE ARE DISCUSSING HERE IS THE SUBJECTIVITY OF PASSIONS AND WHAT IS IMPORTANT IN LIFE.

And along you come talking about axons and dendrites.

HUH??

Knowing how my heart beats is interesting but it does not change my perspective on life.  This is about our PERSPECTIVES- SUBJECTIVE PERSPECTIVES on life.

If knowing how your brain works is important to you and gives you happiness and makes it worthwhile to stick around for another day- or another 75 years then good for you!!

If knowing how your brain works gives you joy makes your life meaningful and answers all the IMPORTANT questions of life for you - HURRAH!

But at least know others have different concerns.

And please don't respond to me more about neurophysiology when I am not discussing it because I won't respond.   I don't like basketball enough to talk about it either.

Knowing how a car works - even if you know it perfectly- is not about how it feels to drive a new car.  It is not about the status some people attach to cars.  It is not about the freedom it gives you to get to work.  It is not about how a car gives you joy on a trip when you drive through Yosemite and see the marvelous vistas that open up.

And all you want to talk about is fuel injection and insist that if we knew about fuel injection, suddenly the freedom of driving a brand new convertible through Yosemite on a summer day would be explained.

Nope.

And one more

Notice that Jackson's argument is that "physicalist descriptions are incomplete"

Your point is that:

Quote

 

The obvious rebuttal is, "I don't actually understand Derrida, but if I had read all his works, then maybe I would understand him." And in the same way it is a rebuttal to this linked article about qualia, to say that if we really did know and undertand all the physical facts about a person's brain, then maybe we would understand their qualitative subjective experiences.

 

In other words, physicalist descriptions are incomplete.  It appears you agree with Jackson.

You should read some Derrida.  Bon Chance!

Edited December 1, 2017 by mfbukowski

[mfbukowski]

4 hours ago, Robert F. Smith said:

It is much worse than that, guy:  It is the words themselves which are the problem, even if not suffering from poverty of imagination or slippery language.  We are talking about descriptive words, which are simply never adequate in describing reality (whatever that is).  It is not that we do not have enough words, nor that we have not read everything Derrida has ever written, but rather that the words themselves cannot do the job expected of them -- try as we might.  We cannot substitute words for reality because reality is subjectively perceived and ineffable. Actions (and reality) speak louder than words.

[mfbukowski]

22 hours ago, MosiahFree said:

I’ve seen it said before that Mormonism is an expression of theocentric Humanism (or at least very amenable to it) and as a result of its American origins is also amenable to American philosophy of the Pragmatic kind. I’m of the opinion that the Gospel we Mormons are to bring to the world is seriously compromised by the aforementioned ideas and in this thread I’ve decided to give an example of what a Gospel presentation looks like within the context of apologetics; a Gospel that commits to the flames Humanism and the doctrines of Pragmaticism.

I understand the length is a hindrance, but the Cliffs Notes version is: Humans do not create truth, we can only have it revealed to us.

In respect to apologetics, even those who are just slightly familiar with secular anti-mormonism will be well acquainted with their gauche habits of the mind; theirs is a socius that Richard Hofstadter warned us of back in the early 60s with his insightful meditation on, and dutiful archaeology of, ‘Anti-Intellectualism in American Life’. Now it may seem that anti-intellectualism is too harsh a charge to level at the participants of the anti-Mormon social media hive and indeed I do not make it without the necessary gravity it demands. I think the proper place to begin is with just what is meant by “intellectual” in the Hofstadter context:

Speaking of the Intellectual’s dedication to a life of the mind Hofstadter goes on to say:

I think the most prolific Mormon Intellectual today is Daniel C. Peterson and through the aptly named blog ‘Sic et Non’ you can often find him engaging secular anti-mormonism with candor, grace, and acumen. One of Dr. Peterson’s recent blog posts has been causing some murmuring in the usual quarters and I thought it would serve as an excellent example of:

A thoughtful riposte and I daresay a coup de grâce on those who try to engage the good Doctor (as if any of the man’s most vocal critics even know who Gilbert Ryle is, much less having read the man). I’m going to come back to this last paragraph, but first I need to lay some philosophical groundwork.

Now I’m convinced that if Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) had not regretfully joined the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, he’d have been baptized a Mormon after reading the Book of Mormon, even a cursory reading. Herr Heidegger and Joseph Smith have more in common you might think; both come from village life, both ended up rejecting the dogmas that saturated their upbringing and established some new, both had remarkable charisma that drew in and made acolytes out of some of the brightest minds of their day, both raised above their station by their own talents but were derailed by their respective enemies, and both stand accused of extra-marital dalliances among other notable sins.

So what is the big deal about Heidegger? His singular obsession with BEING. Our experience of existence. See Heidegger believed that in Western intellectual tradition we have forgotten about the blunt and ever present question of Being, this fact lead Heidegger into a detailed examination of metaphysics, finding that the traditional ways of investigating Being are not only inadequate but they also impede us. We therefore must resort to “destruktion” in order to “abbau” the contemporary philosophical edifice; this is to say we must destroy the history of philosophy in order to deconstruct our obstacles (this is actually what Derrida has in mind when speaking of “deconstruction” FYI). We must get rid of Platonic, Aristotelian, Thomistic, Kantian, and Cartesian elements  before one can look at the raw phenomena of our existence.

See, it isn’t the case that beings are not simply things that exist, as some kind of furniture of reality. What most of the great metaphysicans have missed is that that their views of the world were not fundamental but just a distortion of experience. Being is existence, of which interpretation is necessary and unextractable from Being. Every Being’s existence has a unique specificity to it that is theirs. Interpretation of Being is not neutral, dispassionate, or even contemplative, but it has a movement that is forward to backward and backward to forward. This movement is what makes the existential structures our experienced lives possible, setting the conditions for the mystery of conscious awareness and compels us to question the world.

The rub of it though is that we are Beings in Time limited by birth and death, yet if philosophy and theology are at all representative of their cultures of origin, the West has trouble articulating the authenticity of our temporal character. Now this is where it gets interesting.

Another important and necessary precursor to the genius of Mormonism is Saint Augustine of Hippo (think of him as a North African B.H. Roberts living as a cenobite with a CTR ring w/thorns) who talks about this very issue in his ‘The Free Choice of the Will’ where he speaks at some length about how our love of God as summum bonum. Because we are imago dei what this love of God ends up really being is amor sui, but this is difficult because we must love human essence (which is incommutabilis) but we mistakenly identify our existence (which is mutabilis) as our essence and this drives home the contingency of our lives, this fleshly tabernacle cannot be present and identifiable in the ways we need it to be.

Channeling the Apostle Paul, Augustine correctly notes that to truly love God is to seek the annihilation of the temporal/mortal/present through projection into an absolute future which is really what eternal life is.  See here (Mosiah 2:41):

Just like we see in Augustine, the author of Mosiah brings out conceptual distinction between caritas/cupiditas: “…if they hold out faithful to the end...” the neglect of the present pushes us into that absolute future the love of God instills in us to seek.

Okay, so what does any of this have to do with Daniel Peterson? Well I take it as a given that Dr.Peterson is the kind of scholar who is deeply familiar with the canon of Aristotle and in the course of his studies he became intimate with ὑποκείμενον (dealing with form and matter in composition for those reading that are uninitiated). Herr Heidegger was just such a student as well and Heidegger argued authoritatively that art is actually Being imparting truths to us.

I took this to be Dr. Peterson’s point in response that petty school of critics that snap at his heels. That “Shakespeare, Bach, Monet, ****ens, Goethe, Dante, and Dostoevsky” is the kind of art that allows us to bear witness to eternal truths, a glimpse of that absolute future, brief access to that which is incommutabilis, the summum bonum.

But I think Dr.Peterson had a deeper lesson for us in this blog post; the bigger challenges Mormons are facing in terms of defending our sacred history from those who seek to bring Joseph Smith’s divine calling into the realm of the profane come from two wings related but different wings of philosophy. The first is the typical paleo-marxism that seeks to sublate the individual psychic process to outside/exterior social forces (e.g. Rorty and his identification of philosophical Ideology) and the second is post-Lacanian psychoanalysis which would see the Rortyian ideology as being congruent with unconscious pressures (which is the exact strategy Fawn Brodie uses).

I think we ought to join Dr. Peterson is eschewing the present to seek the eternal by adopting the kind of Heideggerian ontology that allows God to be God and we his creatures to be his creatures.

Take care friends!     

Wonderful post, there are a couple of points I would like to explain and maybe disagree upon

I think the areas that need clarification are about Rorty

I agree with your analysis of Rorty but would not paint him as darkly as you do perhaps because you are not as familiar with his overall work, and how he "found religion" though I think I linked to that somewhere.  Just FYI he was married to a Mormon professor and his kids were raised Mormon and had a philosophy professor as home teacher- I can document all that if you like and give you links. Late in life he thought that a humanistic polytheism was the way to go for a religion.  Gosh I wonder where he got that idea.

Without a doubt I totally disagree with his analysis in Contingency I&S which I know I referred to you- on the contingency of the self.

Rubbish- because it is clear to me that we indeed phenomenologically HAVE wordless experiences not conditioned by language and therefore the self is not contingent on language.  Further if you read Chantal Bax https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/subjectivity-after-wittgenstein-9781441144102/ you will find that she makes the point that a contingent self is actually not a problem to the the notion that we are all individuals regardless of contingency due to the fact that each individual has such a variety of allegedly "contingent" inputs that it still does not render an individual an automatron.

So contingency of language is not as big a problem for contingency of the self as Rorty might believe even at his worst moments in Contingency I & S

Further to me the whole idea of an "ironist" is incoherent- a contingent self who rises above contingency somehow to become  a "strong poet" who creates her own reality?  To me that is simply self contradictory.   It's like being a little pregnant- you cannot be a little contingent and yet rise above it to become a strong poet.

BUT

What I like about Rorty is that he is the poster child for new atheism and postmodernism yet his arguments give a perfect justification for religion seen as its own language game and context community that can generate its own "truth".   So IF Rorty was Mormon- he would have no problem saying something like "I know the church is true".

In fact that is precisely what he is about- that communities have their own "truth" and therefore religion is perfectly justified within their own community to speak about religious matters and call their views "true"

From an apologetics point of view where you are going against yahoos who do not get this at all, you throw some Rorty at them and it's end of discussion.  As postmoderns themselves they no reply possible.  You throw the poster boy for postmodernism at them against their own argument.

And THAT is why I stress Rorty- not that he is someone to emulate or think like but that EVEN RORTY has to admit the legitimacy of religious propositions.

But it is a great post- thanks

I also think that whether or not we create or receive "revelation" is a semantic question.   I see revelation as a subjective phenomenon - exactly like a "raw feel" or a given quale.   It is an overwhelming "feeling" or "perception" for lack of a better word that we know somehow comes from "outside" and is non-verbal and yet cannot be put into words.  That describes a "testimony" experience as well as it describes a "red" experience

Did we create that or did it in fact come from outside?   In some instances it is unknowable though encoded somehow in the experience is the knowledge that it came from outside and is not self-produced.

NEVERTHELESS we take that experience and in thought give it a category and make it verbal as we mentally construct an "explanation" and for me that creation of reality parallels a godlike action- taking matter unorganized and organizing it

So as humans we act as gods in creating reality AS WE KNOW IT and creating our own internal context for new information.  "That happened because I believe in God vs "That happened because I drank milk last night" - the old spirit of Jacob Marley, the physicalist.

So is it "given" to us- Heidegger- or do we "create" it- Rorty or doesn't it matter- Bukowski. 

Fideism works for me just fine, along with James and Kierkegaard and others.  

I am more of a mystic than anything.  Words- what are they good for? 

Well somethings I guess. 

Pure Wittgenstein. 

But i think you are a relatively new Catholic convert?  You gotta read some Stephen Webb, Catholic theologian VERY sympathetic to Mormonism  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_H._Webb

Edited December 1, 2017 by mfbukowski

[clarkgoble]

22 hours ago, MosiahFree said:

I understand the length is a hindrance, but the Cliffs Notes version is: Humans do not create truth, we can only have it revealed to us.

That's Nibley's argument in the second half of the Ancient State where he most clearly reveals himself as a sort of platonist. I'm not sure what you mean here though. (I was hoping you'd finish chiming in on the other thread)

Quote

Now I’m convinced that if Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) had not regretfully joined the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, he’d have been baptized a Mormon after reading the Book of Mormon, even a cursory reading. Herr Heidegger and Joseph Smith have more in common you might think; both come from village life, both ended up rejecting the dogmas that saturated their upbringing and established some new, both had remarkable charisma that drew in and made acolytes out of some of the brightest minds of their day, both raised above their station by their own talents but were derailed by their respective enemies, and both stand accused of extra-marital dalliances among other notable sins.

I'm far from convinced of that. While I like a lot of Heidegger's insights he was rather despicable as a human being. 

Quote

Herr Heidegger was just such a student as well and Heidegger argued authoritatively that art is actually Being imparting truths to us.

Well unveiling things. But then that gets at what he considered art.

Quote

But I think Dr.Peterson had a deeper lesson for us in this blog post; the bigger challenges Mormons are facing in terms of defending our sacred history from those who seek to bring Joseph Smith’s divine calling into the realm of the profane come from two wings related but different wings of philosophy. The first is the typical paleo-marxism that seeks to sublate the individual psychic process to outside/exterior social forces (e.g. Rorty and his identification of philosophical Ideology) and the second is post-Lacanian psychoanalysis which would see the Rortyian ideology as being congruent with unconscious pressures (which is the exact strategy Fawn Brodie uses).

Confess I'm not following you here.

[clarkgoble]

12 minutes ago, mfbukowski said:

it is clear to me that we indeed phenomenologically HAVE wordless experiences not conditioned by language and therefore the self is not contingent on language.  Further if you read Chantal Bax https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/subjectivity-after-wittgenstein-9781441144102/ you will find that she makes the point that a contingent self is actually not a problem to the the notion that we are all individuals regardless of contingency due to the fact that each individual has such a variety of allegedly "contingent" inputs that it still does not render an individual an automatron.

Now you're just sounding Peircean again. 

11 hours ago, mfbukowski said:

Yep, I was into Whitehead before Pragmatism but my profs were all analytic, so I had to go toward Rorty but to me it's all the same.

Anything out of Claremont is strictly Whitehead thru John Cobb. Patrick Mason is in that whole milieu 

I confess I just don't care for Whitehead for various reasons. But he's definitely extremely influential in a fairly diverse Mormon theology crowd ranging from Blake Ostler to Patrick Mason and so forth.

11 hours ago, Physics Guy said:

Consider for comparison the following argument which tries to prove that there is some transcendent quality in the thought of the philosopher Jacques Derrida, a quality which cannot be reduced to words. The argument runs, "Assume that you have read and understood every word that Derrida ever wrote."

Okay, we all nod: assumption made, for the sake of argument.

The argument continues, "But now do you understand Derrida?"

Well, um, no, of course we don't. No matter what we may be assuming hypothetically, we have not actually read all of Derrida.

"So," the argument concludes triumphantly, "there is something in Derrida which cannot be reduced to words!"

The obvious rebuttal is, "I don't actually understand Derrida, but if I had read all his works, then maybe I would understand him." And in the same way it is a rebuttal to this linked article about qualia, to say that if we really did know and undertand all the physical facts about a person's brain, then maybe we would understand their qualitative subjective experiences.

Saying there's something transcendent in Derrida's work would seem to be self-refuting. LOL.

I like Derrida, but the whole point of his work is that there are gaps that affect meaning and disjoint meanings.  Derrida's whole argument would be even if you did understand all the physical facts about a brain there would still be gaps and therefore you couldn't understand the subjective experience. Put a different way this is the charge I made to Mark. Something is always excluded that can undermine what we think we know.

7 hours ago, Robert F. Smith said:

It is much worse than that, guy:  It is the words themselves which are the problem, even if not suffering from poverty of imagination or slippery language.  We are talking about descriptive words, which are simply never adequate in describing reality (whatever that is).  It is not that we do not have enough words, nor that we have not read everything Derrida has ever written, but rather that the words themselves cannot do the job expected of them -- try as we might.  We cannot substitute words for reality because reality is subjectively perceived and ineffable. Actions (and reality) speak louder than words.

Exactly. Words are always a case of not enough and too much.

[mfbukowski]

1 hour ago, clarkgoble said:

Now you're just sounding Peircean again. 

I confess I just don't care for Whitehead for various reasons. But he's definitely extremely influential in a fairly diverse Mormon theology crowd ranging from Blake Ostler to Patrick Mason and so forth.

Saying there's something transcendent in Derrida's work would seem to be self-refuting. LOL.

I like Derrida, but the whole point of his work is that there are gaps that affect meaning and disjoint meanings.  Derrida's whole argument would be even if you did understand all the physical facts about a brain there would still be gaps and therefore you couldn't understand the subjective experience. Put a different way this is the charge I made to Mark. Something is always excluded that can undermine what we think we know.

Exactly. Words are always a case of not enough and too much.

The charge you made to me?

I have been saying that for 50 years. , Pure Wittgenstein.

[clarkgoble]

51 minutes ago, mfbukowski said:

I have been saying that for 50 years. , Pure Wittgenstein.

I wonder who said it first, Wittgenstein or Heidegger?

BTW - it is interesting there are two main camps in Mormon theology: the loosely process theologians following however indirectly Whitehead and then the phenomenologists following Heidegger and (with Adam Miller) perhaps Object Oriented Philosophy. There are a few Aristotileans as well. 

[Damien the Leper]

On 12/1/2017 at 9:25 AM, mfbukowski said:

OK I will bite and try to explain it to you- 

Philosophy is not about science.   Period.  Do you even understand that?  Do you understand that philosophy is about the IMPORTANCE, meaning and significance of our lives?

Think about that.   We are talking about strategy in basketball and you are talking about the physics of how a ball bounces.  Can you possibly get that distinction?

The SUBJECT MATTER here is the meaning and significance of being human, what it means to have freedom as opposed to being determined, why it is wrong to kill people, the nature of how we know these things, what it means to get up in the morning and be miserable or be happy.   Do you care about being happy?   Is it important in your life?   How does one live to become happy??  If we were discussing perhaps the benefits of exercise in being happy, how to organize your time to exercise, or what ATTITUDE was preventing us from exercising, there might be an analogy here.  Suppose someone said that they did not have time to exercise or that they liked to sit on the couch and watch TV instead of exercising and your response was about the science of how muscles contract, how relevant would your comments be?

Totally irrelevant.

The subject matter here is about what it is like to be a human being, the meaning and significance of life, what thoughts and ideas make being human worthwhile enough to stick around in this ....hole of a world for another day, what it is like to face everyday with joy and understanding of who we are and where we are going- what values we have in life and what we find important- and your responses have nothing to do with the topic, but only discuss how our brains work.

So f'n what????

What the subject IS IS the qualitative subjective experiences of being human!!!

Do you get that???

How a ball bounces has nothing to do with why I like or dislike basketball or why basketball is important in my life!!!!!!!

Some people's qualitative subjective experience is that they LIVE for basketball. (fill in any blank you like that is abstract- some live to make others "free" some live to "save" people, some people get out of bed to pursue science, some like airplanes, some think constantly about how to build skyscrapers etc etc etc.

BUT ALL have something IMPORTANT in their lives that science by design DOES NOT ADDRESS!!!!!!

SCIENCE BY DESIGN IS DISPASSIONATE AND WHAT WE ARE DISCUSSING HERE IS THE SUBJECTIVITY OF PASSIONS AND WHAT IS IMPORTANT IN LIFE.

And along you come talking about axons and dendrites.

HUH??

Knowing how my heart beats is interesting but it does not change my perspective on life.  This is about our PERSPECTIVES- SUBJECTIVE PERSPECTIVES on life.

If knowing how your brain works is important to you and gives you happiness and makes it worthwhile to stick around for another day- or another 75 years then good for you!!

If knowing how your brain works gives you joy makes your life meaningful and answers all the IMPORTANT questions of life for you - HURRAH!

But at least know others have different concerns.

And please don't respond to me more about neurophysiology when I am not discussing it because I won't respond.   I don't like basketball enough to talk about it either.

Knowing how a car works - even if you know it perfectly- is not about how it feels to drive a new car.  It is not about the status some people attach to cars.  It is not about the freedom it gives you to get to work.  It is not about how a car gives you joy on a trip when you drive through Yosemite and see the marvelous vistas that open up.

And all you want to talk about is fuel injection and insist that if we knew about fuel injection, suddenly the freedom of driving a brand new convertible through Yosemite on a summer day would be explained.

Nope.

And one more

Notice that Jackson's argument is that "physicalist descriptions are incomplete"

Your point is that:

In other words, physicalist descriptions are incomplete.  It appears you agree with Jackson.

You should read some Derrida.  Bon Chance!

I just had a brain orgasm! This is probably my most favorite post you've ever written.

[mfbukowski]

2 hours ago, Valentinus said:

I just had a brain orgasm! This is probably my most favorite post you've ever written.

Thanks mucho really! I kind of thought so too- I am finally getting how to communicate what I have been thinking for 50 years into words Mormons, former Mormons et al will understand.

So at least I have succeeded with one.  That beats zero after 40 years of trying.   

Pretty odd that I found the church at all really after only 10 years of looking.  Pretty odd that it exists at all, I was about to start my own!    A little Swedenborg and a dash of Pragmatism and the idea that humans are gods and you pretty much got the church of mfb.

That dang Joseph guy did it first and got it better with all the temple stuff, dang it.  Build a better mousetrap.... 

I was listening to some Mahler while driving a while ago and NOT a single word was in my mind except the sudden realization that I was totally immersed  in things as they are for a half hour or so without a single word breaking my total immersion.   Bliss.

I cannot imagine how Rorty or anyone could think that that was an experience based in language.  And yet in no way was it "religious" in a conventional way.

I think that is why we say (in paltry words) that "music opens our minds to the spirit"- I don't think those words are correct, I think it is just that music takes our brain out of verbal experience into pure qualia.   I suppose one could call that "opening our mind" since paltry words are paltry words and the best we can do.

But music is not "revelation".  I suppose it could be sometimes but I think it is important to make a distinction.

 

 

Edited December 2, 2017 by mfbukowski