what defines life - Page 4

why cant you hand in essays? ur an english major for god's sake. (are you bothered by the shortened form 'ur'? on account of ur an english major)

Because I can't control my mind.

lol, I contemplated suicide when I thought I figured out 'the trick to life' and I couldn't do it because I hadn't written a note to my family and that if I tried to tell anyone it they would all think I was crazy and I'd be put in an insane asylum. So I decided that I'd wait til the next day and write a note and jump off something high so there would be no pain. Luckily I changed my mind in the morning, did I mention I was tripping when I came up with this theory? lol, not a very good experience.

If your physically fit then the maths you do to catch a ball is quicker and better than any mathematician. If your a great mathematician you can analyse the enactment precisely and accurately to model it. Beyond this anything then used by this example falls into human mind stuff. engineers may use it to create a robot to create a virtual game or to help nurture sportsmen. Philosophers may turn to materialism or determinism or the lack of our judgement or randomness or anything really.

The simple things still remain with us though like our abilities...stick with the simple things and the more complicated stuff may surface if and when it needs to.

"If your physically fit then the maths you do to catch a ball is quicker and better than any mathematician."

why is it better? so you're suggesting no one goes to college and everyone just eats, sleeps, plays baseball, reproduces and dies without any formal education? You say stick to the simple things yet it seems you've taken some interest in philosophy.

Simple is relative to what your good at I think is my point. Remember nature is the primary source of most things at least, and mathematicians try to model this nature. They use maths, which is a tool, a very good one, but chemicals you produce and the phsyical nervous system is far more 'natural' than a mathematician's equation. For example, when you see a tree, that view of it will be more precise and acurate than you can paint with your hand. Painting, maths, language are all secondary things (nature being a prime thing) and are used mosly to comunicate. When I throw a ball I 'know' where its going toland probably better than any model does...I can take into account things like wind speed, resistance, my strength on the day, WITHOUT thinking of them. Some think about it; thts the sign of a great individual mind-the better ones are proved right-or more acuurate.

Also, remember, 'Education is what remains after one has forgotten what one has learned in school' (Albert). Thouh meant I', sure with some rye humour here! it seems to be true if you want to have some knowledge, rather than just information to pass tests...think on this.

Its how you use what you know, not what you know.

you put so much faith in 'reality', for instance what you said about a tree. You could convert everything in this 'reality' into a mathematical equation but what about concepts? Are they not real too? Are they not a part of reality? Are not mathematical equations part of reality also? You are dividing the two yet I think they are one in the same. You can't percieve a reality without a mind, therefore without one, the other is absent. To say one is better than the other is just ignorant. It's like saying ying is better than yang.

Just going to put my two cents in to address the topic heading.

Well to put it simply- life is the period between fertilisation or mitosis and death. However life is more than this. Life is multi-faceted, especially for humans. Why? because we have a self consciousness; our individual perception. This is the most important attribute in giving reason to life because it determines our reality and the way we perceive life as it is.

Life... is it that simple? or is it complicated? Well it depends on a reference point. It is all relative. It is all about perception. I think a few keywords must be emphasized in this topic- existence, perception and reality.

'existence' is life. Existence is reality. There is no objective world, only the reality of our mental state. The way I perceive life and its connection to reality of our existence is within a postmodernist realm (which i have posted a few times in CC). It takes on a relativist approach as well.

The only way we can reason reality or existence is through our own mind. The world "out there", external reality, is a shared universe of common experience. It is the lowest common denominator of all our experience. We take it for granted and it supplies us with a common field of action. That is all it is. Your realm of personal "mind" is another sort of universe. You experience it every second 24/7. From your inner mind comes all meaning about everything in the "outer" universe. You may be influenced by the external world of common experience, but this inner universe exists, is very real, and is ultimately of more value than anything "out there". Why? Because what happens "out there" depends totally on what you do or what occurs with your own mind. Your personal universe is the only thing able of deciding value. What you perceive from the 'outer' universe is received and detected in your 'inner' reality. Yet the eye is much more than a camera, the ear more than a microphone. The broader question of how we aprehend objects and events in our inner reality- how we perceive our surroundings is simply our sensory attributes

Now onto a little more about life. Although it may seem a tangent, I think it is important to address the idea of conciousness, as it is a fundamental attribute in perception and reality of life. Every human shares common traits, experiences and instincts, so there is a point of synchronized consciousness, or more so collected unconsciousness.

The way I see it is that the individual conscious perception is internal. When our experiences, instincts, traits and tasks interact with another individual conscious perception, then sychronization inevitably takes place. A person's consciousness is related to the way they view, interpret, understand, and interact with, everyone and everything around them. Our conscious system allows a 'universal synchronization' to interact during a social confrontation. The state of one's consciousness is determined by a person's point of view, their beliefs and 'programming'. Beliefs and programming are usually in sync with a person's level of consciousness. However I don't think the concious system is ever completely in sync with one another. It is shared and common amongst all, thus making it universal, but it is never identical, because there is perceptual difference.

Our consciousness is always seperate. This seperation is our self consciousness; our individual perception. But it is apparent that perceiving does not require conscious supervision. Perceiving even doesn't necessarily yield a conscious experience. It is not only possible to have perception without awareness but also; memory and understanding without awareness and action without awareness.

The earth revolves around the sun.
People didnt know this before but it most probably did.
That sun is still there even when I don't look at it or think about it.
Some people have provided useless answers to prediciting behaviour.
Some concepts have stood the test of time, others have not.
Thus, I'm sure, that being a human and thus a finite thinker means other thinkers will be better than others.
The idea of conciousness is mostly just egoism in disguise once again; the idea that man has created his environment. This is surficial. One answer would be that we are not human BEINGS but rather than 'we' are BEING human. This evolves into the idea of spirit (soul) again or the idea of the matrix, Alice in Wonderland, quantum soup (some proponents), etc-same ideas though of different sorts.

Of course everything is part of a reality, the point for me is to find purer knowledge; consider it like looking at a photo of someone and thinking you have seen them. Face to face is clearly more accurate.

Okay, I'm going to dispense with all rhertorical flourishes and play Post-Buster, committed to keeping this message board free from logical infelicities. Intellectual hygiene is my aim, and will be my reward. Too much typing and too little thinking has plagued this board recently.

Summit
"Life is multi-faceted, especially for humans. Why? because we have a self consciousness; our individual perception".

How so? Because perception is polymorphous? Well frankly, no, and more pointedly, you deny so yourself a little further on in the course of your adumbrations:

"Every human shares common traits, experiences and instincts, so there is a point of synchronized consciousness, or more so collected unconsciousness".

The phenomenologists assign Being the role of the fundamental problem of philosophy because intentionality (the way in which an object is conditioned by consciousness) provides a universal reference point. That is more or less what you're saying here. But surely this contradicts your intial assertion - which amounts to something like: "there are an irreducible plurality of different theories about what life means because there are an irreducible plurality of conscious minds". Yet if this is the case, consciousness is not the solution but the problem to the enigma of life, precisely because of the way that it escapes any kind of stable definition.


What you actually meant, if I may be so bold as to flatly say it, is that volition - the free will of each person - is what makes life so rich and abounding in potentialities. In the first paragraph, then, you confused the idea of the will for consciousness: a very forgivable mistake, especially since the noxious gas of egoism commands a sulphurous dominion in these avowedly liberal and individualistic times. By a discrete historical process, the 'will' has been dissociated from forces outside the individual so that it now means little more than simply "choose". You made the same mistake my friend, and drowned your little theory in a host of unwanted companion ideas because of it.

heyjme: First, just a little quibble:
"Thus, I'm sure, that being a human and thus a finite thinker means other thinkers will be better than others".
See, this is the kind of thing I'm talking about man! What do you mean by "finite thinker"? It could mean any number of things! It would be pedantary to point out all the different permutations, and I think I
know what you're getting at... but still!...
"The idea of conciousness is mostly just egoism in disguise once again; the idea that man has created his environment. This is surficial. One answer would be that we are not human BEINGS but rather than 'we' are BEING human. This evolves into the idea of spirit (soul) again or the idea of the matrix, Alice in Wonderland, quantum soup (some proponents), etc-same ideas though of different sorts."
Well, whilst leaving aside the issue of what Summit actually meant for now, I'll suggest that you're talking about a problem which reveived much attention in Empiricist circles during the 18th century: namely, the problem of the relation of the external world to perception. Since Berkeley, Hartley, Hume et al espoused the idea that nothing exists outside of perception, they were logically committed to saying that the true provenance of philosophy (and indeed all thought) was to methodically - but unevaluatively - study the world which our sensory organs present to us. We are to leave the world as it is, and cordon it off with a sign that proclaims it to be THE LIMITS OF EXISTENCE.
Now I agree with you heyjme - this does constitute egoism, and I find it troubling. It sets my my prejudices in a muddle. It is an affront to my intuitions. But clearly, a lot of work needs to be to make this position philosophically justifiable; perhaps that can be done in another post. But I'm straying from the point. Which is this: summit - if his apparent affinities with the phenomenologists are anything more than just apparent -has been grossly misrepresented. Existentialists and Phenomenologists are not delineating the limits of reality, but knowledge; not the predicament of the universe, but existence. The way in which the two schools conceive the relationship between ontology and epistemology is very much to the point. For Empiricism, epistemology is prior, since a theory of the knowledge circumscribes the way we view the discursive world around us; for Phenomenology, on the other hand, ontology dictates the limits of what we can know - what lies beyond existence is thus deemed unknowable. And whilst this realisation might encourage a gratuitous wallowing in despair, I think we can agree that this is infinitely more desirable than the mortifying arrogance of Empiricist materialism.

This is too compressed, but I'm a lazy dog and I can't be bothered to edit it. I prefer to rest assured in the fact that you're wrong - and I'm right.

"This is too compressed, but I'm a lazy dog and I can't be bothered to edit it. I prefer to rest assured in the fact that you're wrong - and I'm right."

You're not right though, a right answer is a solution to a problem. You haven't solved any problem here but rather raised other questions and philosophies which contradict the other posts. I'm assuming you're on a never ending quest for peace of mind knowing the end all answer to philosophy's most riddling questions. Well good luck but what stand do you take on some of these questions? You have yet to take a stand on anything. You simply read others posts and find the fallacies in their conjectures. To me you seem like a new age Socrates whose only knowledge was that he knew nothing.

You're right, actually. And wrong as well.

Look: Socrates is a hero of mine, chiefly because he showed that a rational man is, at bottom, a virtuous man. He gave himself to reason, granting her the sovereignty of his soul, and the strength of his mind. If his dialectic approach seemed absurd, it testified only to the stupidity of his fellow humans. Branded a crank, a sodomite and a sophist, he was put to death, hemlock poured into his unflinching mouth by a crowd of brainless revellers that were no more or less extraordinary than any other in history: their ancestors, kin in blood and in spirit, would persecute forevermore all those who ruled without force, and held sway without weapons.
But you're wrong if you think that I'm not right. You want a proof. Well, no such thing exists in philosophy. 3, 000 years have not changed anything: Mathematics offers something like a proof, but even these are susceptible to Socrates' weapons, since they rely on conditions which old snub-nose would consider arbitrary and therfore artificial.
You don't think I've taken any positions? I said in an earlier post that I believe that it is the task of philosophy to tidy up conceptual, linguistic, genealogical problems etc etc; that, in sum, it is less a clearly designated subject than a tool. So yes, philosophy is entirely negative. A good philosopher strives to chip away, one by one and with sleight of hand, the almighty penumbra of presupposition, prejudice and dogma which clog up our thinking and set us at odds. Hence my invulnerability to the accusations of that globulous fraud, WizardsLogic: my autonomy is my greatest possession. It is my greatest virtue. And the army of preconceptions that still welter beneath my conscience? I'm at war with them.

Ok its getting a little warm in this kitchen! You want to know truth? lol...

Lets start with the 'enemy', the mystics then shall we?

I'm going to use scientific knowledge to just scratch away...

Mostly, as far as I can tell, their ideas stem from the idea that most things project from ourselves-that we somehow create a form that spills out and thus that which materialists perceive is really 'out there' is just coming from 'out here'.

Onwards...Now, to the completely niave out here means ME. It means this body here is KING OF ALL. To others it means humans collectively. But I know some apes who are cleverer than some humans so that rules that out. So I go further, and I start to include the conciousness of other living things. Then I come to some strange anomalies. I look at bacteria, and I think do they think? Do they have a brain? Then I look to solve this mystery. I find a straneg creature called the jelly fish. It moves, it doesnt like being eaten. Yet it has no brain!!!!!

All it has is a central nervous system; a body of neurones to receive stimuli which, perhaps like binomial logic in a computer, acts to 010010101 or 'yes' and 'no' to you and me.

I cant rule out strict materialism here, though it seems dubious. What I can do is ask; what makes us humans tick over? I look at my hand. It has 5 didgits and everything looks ok. Its made up of molecules, atoms, then its made up of DNA..the information of life. But this itself is acid. Most of my body is just void....the matter is virtually not there at the subatomic scale so I exist. Ahhh, now we get to the mystics idea that everything doesnt really exist but that its a projection from something. Materialsits argue that its because the subatomic particles are whizzing around at sub-lightspeed (or at the speed of light?). We then get to this idea that everything is quantum soup...packets of information cohering with others. The blur between living and non-living becomes ever more apparent. Yet at my level here I'm certainly more able to deduce the laws of nature than a rat. I'm more intelligent....conciously, I'm more intelligent. My unconciousness influences my concious actions and my concious actions influence my unconcious actions. Here I must conclude with three propositions which I believe are so. Its purely belief and nothing more; though you see wheer I stand to now ask 'why not' into that void:

1. Illusion
2. Delusion
3. Pure truth

Those three things sum up all that is. But, thats stationery. Under stationery conditions, the pure truth is determined, I believe and with good reason, that the pure truth is a competetive thing whereby the person who has unravelled something which can be proven to work time and time again, without fault, cannot be proven wrong. The quite amazing thing is that it is possible, unlikely or likely, that the delusional and the illusional could one day form pure truth. This is a very intriguing idea, even if thats just what it is; an idea.


For now I'd say maths defines life. But thats just lame.

heyjme1, I think you should seek medical help.

yes the last few sentences were insane! (only the last bit though) But I do that sometimes; sometimes these insane ideas lead somwehere. The problem with rationality in its strictest sense is that its self-enclosed; progression is still made to serve the same ends.

lol @ medicine; I am my own pharmacist. Amidst the insane ideas I always keep a cap for rationality. This is the difference though between asking why and asking why not; you run the risk of failure, which is highly likely. But theres no fun without risk.