I'm not saying they can't be or that they aren't. I'm saying your mind is the fundamental thing upon which you have any understanding of anything whatsoever. To even attempt to speak of objective reality as a separate thing from yourself is to negate your own existence, which is absurd. Any theory of reality or theory of understanding about what's going on must start with the mind.

Even given that objective reality is real, any experience you have of anything is just electrical signals in your brain. Any link that you have with any assumed objective reality is already fundamentally, necessarily, and irremovably mental in nature. How can it be otherwise? To even attempt to speak about things outside the context of your mind renders such a position totally unintelligible. You can't even define what such an experience would be, because iterating and understanding definitions is something dependent on your mind.

Okay. That's fine. But then how is it that you're asserting all of these other things about the universe with such certainty?

There is no rigorous proof of anything that you've asserted in this entire thread. So what is your actual logical foundation?

How have you know that this is actually 2019? What's your rigorous proof of that?

So, you're going to take this whole thread and throw away everything you've claimed about the universe and try to start over from a Descartian "I think therefore I am" type of position?

what do you mean by mental experience? Whats the difference between a mental experience and a physical experience?

The proper question is what do you mean by "physical experience" without the mind to experience it?

You can't even define what a physical experience is.

Asserting what thing, that the universe has a fundamental aspect of mind? That's what i've been asserting all thread. We know that it must because it's all we can know.





Wow it's unbelievable you think that what I just said is different from anything else I've said in this entire thread. Until you take the time to read my posts and understand them, you don't deserve any further responses.

well Im distinguishing between bodily sensations and thoughts. I am wondering what you mean by "mental experience"

What do you mean by "mind" and what proof do you have that there is such a thing ?

Bodily sensations are of your mind.

Just the standard definition.

Mind: the element or complex of elements in an individual that feels, perceives, thinks, wills, and especially reasons

The proof that mind is, is that I

Attempting to cast doubt on "mind existing" proves mind exists, as "attempting to cast doubt on" can only happen via a mind.

I'm hoping after enough of these exercises that you will understand, but I'm assuming you're questioning in good faith here.

I dont know what this means



Thats not proof of a mind. There is no proof of a thing that feels, perceives thinks etc. You cannot point to it, feel it, see it on a scanner. You cant even sense it.


Lol no it doesnt. You are assuming that a mind exists. Circular reasoning again.
You are assuming that you need a mind in order to cast doubt on a mind. You have yet to show that such a thing exists. You dont get to assume your conclusion and then batter everyone over the head with it each time you get questioned.

It would be nice if you answered my questions.

These paragraphs are essentially unintelligible.

I'll focus on this one

You just proved that there is by writing that.


Pointing, feeling, seeing, and sensing require a mind. What does it even mean to "sense something that's the source of sensation?" Its like saying you cant prove a thermometer measures because you can't measure measuring. It's gibberish.

Me: I weigh 195 lbs
Neeel: prove it
Me: this scale has been calibrated and shows I weigh 195 lbs
Neeel: prove that the scale weighs

This is nonsense. It's a scale because it weighs and it weighs because it's a scale.

I'm not assuming anything. When you say "you cant sense your mind" you're precluding sensing by attaching the word "sense". It's like saying you cant prove you're measuring because you cant measure measuring. By attaching the word measure, you're precluding you can measure!

circular reasoningcircular reasoningcircular reasoningcircular reasoningcircular reasoningcircular reasoningcircular reasoningcircular reasoningcircular reasoningcircular reasoningcircular reasoningcircular reasoningcircular reasoningcircular reasoningcircular reasoningcircular reasoningcircular reasoningcircular reasoningcircular reasoningcircular reasoningcircular reasoningcircular reasoningcircular reasoningcircular reasoning

Man thinks, feels and wills and of course cognates via the senses ; this is the soul in action.

It's not circular reasoning neeel. Its tautologous.

Im not making an argument that reasoning precludes mind, so it's not circular reasoning. It is necessary that reasoning precludes mind because reasoning is defined by minds.

Reasoning: the action of thinking about something in a logical, sensible way.

To say you can think without a mind is as much gibberish as saying "the square circle."

No one makes an argument that a circle is a circle. A circle is defined.

You not knowing or being stubborn about basic definitions is a huge waste of my time because I have to explain it to you.

This is a straight-up lie. You've asserted so many other things throughout this thread. You've made assertions about the size of the universe. And you've made assertions about what happens when I flip a coin. And you've made assertions about "logic" and "mathematics" as being specific properties of the universe.

We've gone over this. You are using mathematical terms and you literally don't even know what the words mean.

https://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/s...4&postcount=61

This is literal nonsense. (Also, notice how many other assertions you're making about the universe here.)

Is neeel's mind separate from your mind? Or his mind contained within your mind?

Also, how do you know that this is the right definition of "mind"?

Re: the universe as logical

I think there's a pretty interesting discussion somewhere in there. Even if we can't really get to it in this thread. And "logical" is maybe not exactly the right word, although the Greek logos is pretty evocative IMO.

The book I'm currently reading refers (in an offhand way, it's not interested in this question) to the "spatial-temporal-causal-quantitative" structure of the world as represented in the minds of great apes and humans. It is interesting that we find the world to have that structure, although in DODN's version it seems like he should find instead that those are structures of our minds rather than the universe.

Anyway, just something I've been enjoying thinking about.

Logic? Does reasoning do that? Using reason to do logic. Is reason a mental faculty like imagination? Yeah, brain scans do show it’s brain related. So brains exists in the universe. Well it seems to belong in an order that’s not unlike logical. Can we simulated it using partials logic and imagination?

Well heck. Did we wind up creating universe again? If so, how to create universe with parts that do not contain potential for all what a universe is to become as created. Still it’s at least just me creating the supposed universe. That’s where the awareness, imagination and reason to do so sprang from. The remaining universe may be yet as totally aware being an awareness my brain structurally can not process entirely but only because myself and my neighbors have a little bit of our own awareness to look at our posts and wonder are we aware of creating universe looks as simple as using some reasoning, imagination and sense? Which we are aware of.

Or maybe we are just creating posts. Sorry universe, no creating for you...

We could get into it in this thread, if instead of taking a stance of total argumentativeness people would be willing to concede on basic definitional points about reasoning that nearly everyone who has ever reasoned considers colloquial.

For the 20th time no. No no no and no. This is a misrepresentation of what I'm saying that some and especially OrP have made consistently throughout the thread. I am not a strict idealist in any sense other than regarding epistemology. Ontologically I'm more of a dual aspect monist.

It is not possible to define anything beyond our mind until we consider our mind a priori. Attempting to think about the universe as it is must include our mind before we even get off the ground, because talking about reasoning, and observation, and perception, and feelings, and intuitions, and experimentation, and math, and logic, and science, and bodily anything are experiences that are ultimately mental. To even define matter you need to have a mind to both observe it and define it.

This renders speaking about anything outside our minds in terms of epistemology as completely unintelligible. Any theory of understanding must start with the mind. It does not follow that all is illusory, but certain things are constraied in some ways in an ontological sense.

This conversation has gotten precisely nowhere because people instantly thought what I wrote was idiotic and have refused to be moved from their preclusions due to pure stubbornness despite ever increasing elucidation and clarity on my end.

There are no more ways I can say the obvious. Until I get the good faith discussion anyone else deserves, I'm done with it and will have to draw final conclusions about the posters on these side forums I've suspected to be true for a couple years.

When using technical language (specifically, mathematical language), the level of precision matters. You simply cannot throw around a technical term like "topological" and twist it to mean what you want it to mean while simultaneously insisting that you're using it in a mathematical sense. The same is true of things like "necessary truth" and set theoretic concepts.

Basically, you're just making things up as you go and calling the whole thing "colloquial" to release yourself from the technical bits you don't like, while also trying to claim hold of the technical bits you do like. That's just not how this works.

Idiocy was not assumed, it was demonstrated. When pressed for details, you uttered nonsense. Your use of language has been analyzed and faults have been found. When your nonsense is highlighted and pressed, you add even more nonsense, as if that will help. And then you assert with full confidence that everything you've said actually makes sense without adding any meaningful discussion to explain it. Basically, you've been reduced to repeating yourself that you claims should be taken as true without proof and without justification.

You are free to claim that everyone else is stubborn and you're the only enlightened one that is sensible. Just as I am free to laugh at the nonsense you've put forward and say that it's gibberish.

Yes it makes sense.

You just spoke about perception and consciousness as two different things.
An ant doesn't require consciousness to make sense of it's surroundings/universe. Neither does a robot with nueral networking software.
You don't know what consciousness is. Yet you speak about us having consciousness...?

What exactly is it that we have? Sartre's understanding of it? Heiddeger's understanding of it? Spinoza's understanding of it? Dennett's understanding of it? Schopenhauer's understanding of it? The Hindus understanding of it?

Take a step back. What is it that you're talking about?

First of all, words dont have one precise definition. You pick the definitions of words you want to use to convey the meaning you intend to get across. Language isnt some static machine whose inputs only lead to one meaning. This is something you seem to fail to understand, as the vast majority of your contentions regarding my posts are semantic in nature. So for example when speaking about topology, I clarified I was using the general definition to refer to "underlying structure of" which can be applied analogously to the universe as a whole. Unless you're arguing that the universe has no underlying structure, I dont see what your problem with this would be so I have to conclude you're arguing just to argue.

This leads into my second point, which is that the arena of mathematics corresponds to reality as a whole, topology included. If you dont think so, please come up with a plausible explanation for why the scientific method and mathematical modeling works so well. Or how it is that toruses dont exist despite the fact I ate one this morning. This is self evidently true for most mathematicians and scientists and you're very much an outlier if you disagree.

How do you figure that? A perception isn't something done with an eye, it's something done with a mind.

Ants arent conscious? That's a bizarre claim. They have brain cells and are widely considered to be the smartest insect in the world.

Consciousness can be loosely defined as awareness. There are degrees of it. An ant might simply be aware in a basic sense, a human is so aware that hes aware of himself. There are likely higher orders still.

When talking about the universe as a whole, which is the thing that gives rise to this spectrum of awareness, it doesnt make sense to infer anything but than at some fundamental level, the universe is aware; perhaps fundamentally protoconscious. For example, what sustains its coherence? Something outside of it, or is it self sustaining? If its self sustaining, how does it sustain its coherence without being aware of its parts? It cant be A and notA at the same time. How does it maintain the logical consistency of itself without being somehow aware of everywhere it is A and everywhere it is not A? It seems impossible to even define an alternative.

What then, does that mean? If the universe is aware, and the universe is all there is, what but itself can the universe be aware of? Ergo, the universe is self aware.

Having brain cells is a sufficient condition for consciousness? Where inside brain cells or in their operation can we find consciousness?

A tree doesn't have brain cells. Is it aware?
If yes, then it's clear that brain cells are not sufficient.

What isn't aware? A rock? If not, what is it missing?

We infer that life is concious based on its seemingly deliberate navigation of external environments - based on its complex behaviour. Advanced robots can behave in almost the same way. Do we infer them to be concious too? Why not?

These are only a few of the questions I have for you before we begin talking about the universe.

When using technical language, especially technical mathematical languge, they do have precise definitions. That's literally how we do math.

This is fine. I don't object to this. But what I object to is the use of words from one context used to describe something in another context and assuming that everything carries over in a one-to-one manner. Specifically, QUOTING A MATHEMATICAL DEFINITION and then pretending like you can adjust the meaning to be whatever it is you mean for it to be.

In the sense that words are carries of meaning, yes this is a semantic objection. For example, if I say "I'm feeling blue" you cannot suddenly assert that the color of my skin is changing. The word means something in the context, and the words must be understood in that context.

Specific to your usage of mathematical terminology, using a word like "topology" to make assertions about the universe (I think the quote was "the universe has a topology") and then asserting that this is mathematical is utterly ridiculous because it's the same type of semantic error as the blue example.

This is where I call you a liar. Because you literally took the definition labeled "MATHEMATICS" and just threw away mathematics contextualization and made it mean something entirely different and non-mathematical. I quoted that definition explicitly, showing you that you were doing this. You lied about the definition. You changed it to suit your desired conclusion.

This is where I can more or less just point to your abject lack of knowledge and have a hearty laugh at your expense. For example, real analysis is utterly incompatible with quantum mechanics. Real analysis assumes that distance measures can be taken to be as small as we want them to be, but QM doesn't allow this.

The "scientific method" is utterly non-mathematical in the sense that it proceeds on inductive reasoning from data, whereas mathematics works by deductive logic. They aren't the same process, and they aren't really that close to the same process. Maybe the process of discovering new ideas can be framed that way, but the actual mathematical process (ie, proving things) doesn't proceed under the same logical structure.

Furthermore, you're struggling with the whole classification thing. You're saying that because some math is useful for describing the universe that all math is useful for describing the universe. It's basically the whole "properties of the part are properties of the whole." What you don't realize is just how tiny the portion of mathematics that is applied in the pursuit of science really is.

In reality, you didn't actually eat a torus. You ate an approximation of a torus (perhaps we can call it torus-shaped). A mathematical torus has properties that whatever you ate didn't have. In topology, we would say that you can turn a torus into a coffee mug through a series of transformations. Could you take your torus and actually turn it into a coffee mug? Nope. So it wasn't actually a torus. (Also, a "coffee mug" in this mathematical sense isn't exactly what we mean when we say a "coffee mug" in reality. One is a type of model for the other, but they aren't the same.)

Again, idiocy is not assumed. It's being demonstrated. You are giving me more and more reasons to think your position it idiotic. And it's because you are showing me that you don't actually understand the things you're making assertions about.

Being aware is. You'd be hard pressed to make a case that ants aren't aware of their surroundings.

The fact of the matter is we experience consciousness. It doesn't make sense to question that it exists, whatever it is, because we experience it directly. In a lot of ways, as Descartes pointed out, it's sort of the limit of our epistemology. Everything else runs into the problem of induction.