Extrain;152677 wrote:

? If you made a living doing the impossible, then it necessarily follows you didn't do anything, precisely because whatever it was you thought you did, you actually didn't do, since, in accordance with what you said, "everything is impossible." If you did do something, on the other hand, then it necessarily follows that whatever you did is possible to do.

All I have done, and I have done everything, will be wiped away by time; so I did nothing, and was nothing...

?

Quote:

That's the very question philosophy and science asks, "what are these things"? The disciplines which investigate that question are empirical science and metaphysics.

However, now you are directly suggesting you know the true nature of reality independent of science and philosophy. Do you have some superior God-like knowledge scientists and philosophers fail to possess? That's inconsistent with everything you are saying, not to mention, arrogant.

Of morality, which is my focus as a moralist, I can say only what it is not, which is to say it is infinite...

Quote:

But this is inconsistent with your own admission that you don't know anything. You would already have to know that "spiritual and moral reality" are not logical or rational in order to claim to know that logic and reason do not apply to these things themselves. After all, what if logic and reason do apply to spirituality and morality, but you just didn't know it?

Greece of Plato and Socrates, and Rome of the Caesars, and Germany of Nietzsche were all fantasy worlds, and they must have seemed so, as our own world does... That is what societies in decline are like...And it is our obligation to see through all the smoke and rubbish to some true value...

Of the moral world, one does not know because knowledge is impossible, so instead, one feels... I live life by the braille method...I feel my way through it...And of course, what I can say I say by hunch, or insight; and I see that morals have their logic, but it is not the logic of the physical world...

kennethamy;152720 wrote:

I don't know about you, but my world doesn't not seem fantastic. "Life is real, and life is earnest" from where I sit. Is where you dwell a place named "OZ"? They give you green-tinted spectacles before you enter the city walls. Maybe that explains it.

---------- Post added 04-16-2010 at 08:48 AM ----------
Oz was Us, and the characters in that story were: Industry that needed a heart, and got a clock, the eight hour day; Farmers who needed education and got land grant colleges, Government that needed courage, and got a testimonial to its courage... Was it strange to you???

If reality were real, which is to say: if the forms worked, and fed the realtionships, then so many people would not be trying to escape them through drugs like religion, or power, or sex, or with drugs in fact... People are trying to correct reality by changing their own perceptions of it because they cannot change the thing in fact, and they have lost the essential sense of power from their lives...I think it is fantastic, but in a nightmarish sort of way...

Quote:

As Extrain has already inquired, if knowledge is impossible, how can you know all this, including that knowledge is impossible? Have you ever wondered about that?

Knowledge of the physical world is possible to an extent, but that is not where human problems lie...In the moral world, uncertainty is certain...

And how do you know that uncertainty is certain when you say that knowledge is impossible?

It is exactly because no experiment can be devised which does not skew the results, and because we are talking of moral forms with meaning, but without being... It is possible to get a sense of the effect of moral forms on the life of people and their societies by observation, but it is all anachdotal... We can see how people behave... We can try to put that together with what they say they believe; but there is nothing we can count as true knowedge... We are dealing with infinites, and to believe Kant, we can have only finite knowledge...That much is obvious, and that is about the extent of our knowledge, of matters in gross; and if we cannot move from the general to the particular we cannot say we have a true conception of the thing, so I do not say I know truth, or know at all... All I know is I don't know; and that I do not need to, to observe what we can all observe...

So, how did you say you knew that certainty is impossible when, at the same time, you say that knowledge is impossible?

Stating the obvious is not philosophy...It is like saying the sun rises, which people say even while they know better...In moral questions the object is not certainty nor knowledge, but only a sense, which may be enough if we have enough of it to keep us from destruction... I know what I can prove, and of the moral world I can prove nothing, so the standard of knowledge has to be lowered, or the meaning of the word must be changed to something other than knowledge as we usually consider the word... I would rather avoid it all if I can so I can observe and draw some insupportable conclusions...Do we not accept much of history as fact even while knowing it to be fiction???The same is true of psychology and sociology, that it is fiction...And it is fiction because fact is impossible, so why not a plausible lie??? It gives us somehing besides a Gordian knot to deal with...

How did you say you knew that certainty is impossible when, at the same time, you say that knowledge is impossible?

Because that much is obvious, though I can't prove that either... The Sun also rises...Isn't it obvious???

To say something is obvious is to say how you know it is true. So, when you say it is obvious, you are (I suppose) saying that you know that it is true. So my question to you is this: If you say that knowledge is impossible, then how is it possible for you to know that certainty is impossible when you have just said that knowledge is impossible? How can you state both that you know that certainty is impossible, and also, that knowledge is impossible without contradicting yourself? (The answer, "it is obvious" is not, as you can see, available to you, since it is an answer to a different question which supposes that you have not contradicted yourself). Isn't analytic philosophy interesting and useful?

There is knowing, and there is proving, and I would never try to say I know Know, without reasonble proof... Let me give you an example: If you read ancient literature, and some historiaclly based writing on the Germanic tribes, and then exmaine anthropolical evidence of the American Indian, you might be inclined to draw some reasonable conclusions, and even support them, and more fundamentally, to form a picture of the whole for each from the parts of the many... And I am not saying this is a mistake; but to suggest one actually knows something about people long dead is foolish, because the proof is so slight... What is in it for me to have certainty??? What is in it for me to say I know??? I am not buying into some ego trip, when to be honest, we can know but little and presume a lot with reasonable evidence... The problem is not -knowing or not knowing... The problem is the usual moral question: How honest can we be about the state of our knowledge...

Of some subjects under the heading of physics we can know and prove... Of moral questions we may know with evidence, and not prove...Moral knowledge is not the equivalent of physical knowledge, and should not even be called knowledge, and the point is not to do, as it is with physical knowledge, but is with morallity to prevent doing evil...

Anyone can do...Anyone can say they know; but the object of honesty is to say that without certain knowledge that good will result from ones actions no one should do...

There is knowing, and there is proving, and I would never try to say I know Know, without reasonble proof... Let me give you an example: If you read ancient literature, and some historiaclly based writing on the Germanic tribes, and then exmaine anthropolical evidence of the American Indian, you might be inclined to draw some reasonable conclusions, and even support them, and more fundamentally, to form a picture of the whole for each from the parts of the many... And I am not saying this is a mistake; but to suggest one actually knows something about people long dead is foolish, because the proof is so slight... What is in it for me to have certainty??? What is in it for me to say I know??? I am not buying into some ego trip, when to be honest, we can know but little and presume a lot with reasonable evidence... The problem is not -knowing or not knowing... The problem is the usual moral question: How honest can we be about the state of our knowledge...

Of some subjects under the heading of physics we can know and prove... Of moral questions we may know with evidence, and not prove...Moral knowledge is not the equivalent of physical knowledge, and should not even be called knowledge, and the point is not to do, as it is with physical knowledge, but is with morallity to prevent doing evil...

Anyone can do...Anyone can say they know; but the object of honesty is to say that without certain knowledge that good will result from ones actions no one should do...

But what has this to do with your saying that you know something, and, at the same time, saying that it is impossible to know anything? And what has this to do with the absurd claim that philosophy is physics?

Anyone can do...Anyone can say they know; but the object of honesty is to say that without certain knowledge that good will result from ones actions no one should do...

Should do what?

Greece of Plato and Socrates, and Rome of the Caesars, and Germany of Nietzsche were all fantasy worlds, and they must have seemed so, as our own world does... That is what societies in decline are like...And it is our obligation to see through all the smoke and rubbish to some true value...

Fido why do you do this? -> (word word word... word word word..., etc.) Do you have difficulty completing a sentence? Or do you just lose focus of what you were trying to say?

1. Morality deals with what ought to be done, not with preventing evil. How can Morality not be knowledge? What is it then?

Impossible is a degree of difficulty... The word has no absolute meaning... Like most words... Neither does knowing have an absolute meaning... Are you guys dense or what... People act as if they do know when they do not... I admit I know not, so I do not, and you want me to drink hemlock... I swear.

1.13 The facts in logical space are the world.

2.013 Each thing is, as it were, in a space of possible states of affairs. This space I can imagine empty, but I cannot imagine the thing without the space.
2.0131 A spatial object must be situated in infinite space. (A spatial point is an argument-place.) A speck in the visual field, thought it need not be red, must have some colour: it is, so to speak, surrounded by colour-space. Notes must have some pitch, objects of the sense of touch some degree of hardness, and so on.

2.021 Objects make up the substance of the world. That is why they cannot be composite.

3.03 Thought can never be of anything illogical, since, if it were, we should have to think illogically.
3.031 It used to be said that God could create anything except what would be contrary to the laws of logic. The truth is that we could not say what an 'illogical' world would look like.
3.032 It is as impossible to represent in language anything that 'contradicts logic' as it is in geometry to represent by its coordinates a figure that contradicts the laws of space, or to give the coordinates of a point that does not exist.

4.113 Philosophy sets limits to the much disputed sphere of natural science.
4.114 It must set limits to what can be thought; and, in doing so, to what cannot be thought. It must set limits to what cannot be thought by working outwards through what can be thought.

5.4711 To give the essence of a proposition means to give the essence of all description, and thus the essence of the world.

5.4731 Self-evidence, which Russell talked about so much, can become dispensable in logic, only because language itself prevents every logical mistake.-What makes logic a priori is the impossibility of illogical thought.

5.53 Identity of object I express by identity of sign, and not by using a sign for identity. Difference of objects I express by difference of signs.
5.533 The identity-sign, therefore, is not an essential constituent of conceptual notation.

But again, how do you know any of this is true if you don't know anything?

If all of this is just your opinion, then none of us have any good reason to think what you say is true. So we can just ignore you.

5.6 The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.
5.61 Logic pervades the world: the limits of the world are also its limits. So we cannot say in logic, 'The world has this in it, and this, but not that.' For that would appear to presuppose that we were excluding certain possibilities, and this cannot be the case, since it would require that logic should go beyond the limits of the world; for only in that way could it view those limits from the other side as well. We cannot think what we cannot think; so what we cannot think we cannot say either.
5.62 This remark provides the key to the problem, how much truth there is in solipsism. For what the solipsist means is quite correct; only it cannot be said, but makes itself manifest. The world is my world: this is manifest in the fact that the limits of language (of that language which alone I understand) mean the limits of my world.
5.621 The world and life are one.
5.63 I am my world. (The microcosm.)
5.631 There is no such thing as the subject that thinks or entertains ideas. If I wrote a book called The World as l found it, I should have to include a report on my body, and should have to say which parts were subordinate to my will, and which were not, etc., this being a method of isolating the subject, or rather of showing that in an important sense there is no subject; for it alone could not be mentioned in that book.-
5.632 The subject does not belong to the world: rather, it is a limit of the world.
5.633 Where in the world is a metaphysical subject to be found? You will say that this is exactly like the case of the eye and the visual field. But really you do not see the eye. And nothing in the visual field allows you to infer that it is seen by an eye.
5.6331 For the form of the visual field is surely not like this
5.634 This is connected with the fact that no part of our experience is at the same time a priori. Whatever we see could be other than it is. Whatever we can describe at all could be other than it is. There is no a priori order of things.
5.64 Here it can be seen that solipsism, when its implications are followed out strictly, coincides with pure realism. The self of solipsism shrinks to a point without extension, and there remains the reality co-ordinated with it.
5.641 Thus there really is a sense in which philosophy can talk about the self in a non-psychological way. What brings the self into philosophy is the fact that 'the world is my world'. The philosophical self is not the human being, not the human body, or the human soul, with which psychology deals, but rather the metaphysical subject, the limit of the world-not a part of it.