LastThursday

Enlightenment is a dripping tap, not Niagra falls.

Yes yes, but by telling us "think about what you're doing" you're encouraging the very thing you're arguing against. Your advice is just self-help in disguise.

@CARDOZZO you asked us a sensible question, we open up and give you genuine answers, you castigate us for those answers. We've got to start from somewhere, as normies, and go from there, there will be people at many different stages here. And, the work isn't done on this forum, which is an informal chaotic place, it's done IRL. Anyone looking in here will get a very distorted shallow picture of what's really going on. A stage turqoise saint isn't going to announce their presence at all, they will look and sound normal.

Funny you should say that, I have vivid dreams and good recall. I used to maintain a dream diary for a while. I stopped because I was waking in the middle of the night and making quick notes of my dreams, but that was making me tired in the day. I need a better system. What do you think can be realised from dreams?

It sounds potentially exciting. What would that entail from your point of view?

@CARDOZZO it's an interesting question for sure. Living day to day is totally ordinary. I think and behave as if I'm in a physical material world, and I treat and respect others as I would like to be treated myself: respectfully, as a sovereign, intelligent person. I will never know what it is to be someone else inside their body and mind, it's probably quite alien, but from the outside there are a lot of similarities. I generally yield as much of myself as people are able to bear, I know that I can be a lot more open and openminded than a lot of people I come across, and sometimes they're surprised at this when they bother to ask. I often feel like an iceberg with only the tip showing, underneath is a churning sea of ideas, knowledge and creativity, even spirituality. I often have "wtf is this?" moments, and have a clear intuition about things, which I will talk about if people are interested. I think spirituality has affected me deeply, I'm very "Zen" and "Existential" in my approach to life and people and to myself. It's mostly as a counterbalance to my ADHD mind, and I think that's why spirituality attracted me in the first place. Cool enigmatic on the outside, frothy on the inside. People often comment about how calm I am. If only they knew!

I suppose I was just poking at cause and effect there. Depression isn't a conventional illness whereby the body (and mind) need to be damped down so that it can recover and/or not injure itself further. The body could be energetic, and the mind still ruminate about the lack of control, and feel hopeless, and indeed you could do that with a sharp and active mind to even greater effect. I wonder if the negative rumination actually comes from the body reacting as if it were ill (physically), and not the other way round? Of course being lethargic in body in and mind, is a very good indicator to others that "I need help", and maybe that is part of the equation?

Thanks for the sparring @zurew, I haven't got much else to add, I'll call it there.

@zurew I understand where you're coming from. Propositional logic is supposed to be this mathematically precise system with only definite answers, and that anything outside of that is not logic. You could argue that the definition of a proposition is that it only has one interpretation and only a true/false validity, and if those conditions are not met, it is not a proposition. Maybe the idea of a hypothesis takes over here instead. The law in your example tries to be mathematical about what it defines, and so yes, rape has a list of predefined conditions which have to be met (i.e. there is a fixed interpretation), and if all conditions are met then it is unequivocally true otherwise it is most definitely false. "Rape" is a proposition in its purest sense in law. This being the case, then why are agents needed at all, if there is no free will in either intepretation or assessment? Why have a jury, if it is clear that rape occurred under the list of conditions in law? What I'm pointing out in my roundabout way is that a pure propositional logic does not generally hold in the real world. There is no pure fixed interpretation and there is no pure fixed assessment of that interpretation. What I'm also pointing out is that propositional logic is a product of messy human minds in the first place. It is a product of the thing the propositions seek to describe. As such it can suffer from self-referencing or circularity.

Reading the above, the thing that springs to mind is "control of what?". There are things we absolutely have to control, such as where and how to get food, finding a place to sleep, the base things of survival. Then from there each form of control gets more and more removed from base survival. I suppose control here means all forms of it, whether self-control, control of others, control of environment or circumstances? Where control is a forcing of things to be beneficial to oneself. Letting go then, would be either deliberately relinquishing control over certain things, or re-framing things so that the sense of needing to control it evaporates. I think some people are more prone to needing to control than others, because the sense of control gives them comfort or security, they over control. I always found it intruiguing that these symptoms of depression are nearly exactly those of being ill in general, such as with a cold. Maybe the body's reaction to depression is one of "I must be ill" and acts accordingly? Just a thought.

No, because information requires interpretation by pulling in a load of personal context. Each member of a jury will give a different value of truthiness for the proposition. Indeed, even if A raped B (the proposition), A and B themselves could disagree about whether it was rape, because each has their own context and interpretation of the "facts". In short you can't evade interpretation when assigning a value to a proposition. To compound that, there isn't necessarily a binary true/false value to a proposition, in reality there will always be uncertainty however small. The only sense in which a proposition can uniquivocally be true then, is if the proposition uses the definition of a thing, i.e. "a triangle has three sides" is true because a triangle is by definition a three-sided thing. Nearly all propositions are more like "it's always sunny on Tuesday", with no definite truth value: what do we mean by always, what do we mean by sunny, where is the sunny day happening? and on and on.

That's a fair and a common sense way of understanding it, the observer and the observed. Or you could say we're in Plato's cave looking at shadows, and inferring that there's an actuality beyond. It's construction, models and interpretation all the way down. The structures in reality are in fact shadows, they are the "things we notice" about reality.

Believing you can fly doesn’t make you able to fly. But understanding the structure of reality well enough that we can build aeroplanes, does make human flight possible. My point is that physical laws are descriptions of structures in reality, not things created by belief. What's the difference? Both are interpretations of "things we notice" in nature. The two are exactly the same. Scientific laws are just a more formal system of modelling. Interpretation is constrained by cognition and what we're wired to perceive. A proposition is simply a verbal statement in thought, to put it in a simple way. As such, as soon as it arises in thought, then it exists. That's it. Before it arises, it doesn't exist. I mean nothing more than that.

@zurew as I said we're arguing from different paradigms, so you're not going to agree with me, and that's fine by me. For example: I say the laws of physics are a construction of human thought. We observe nature, make up hypotheses (propositions) about our observations, and then validate those hypotheses to get at their truth value. The very concept of "law" is a construct. There's nothing instrinsic at all about "the laws of physics". The laws of physics don't hold if you have no notion of laws or physics. In any case the laws are constantly revised and added to, a Victorian's laws of physics is not a 21st century person's laws of physics. Equally, propositions are constructions of human thought, not separate from them. A proposition only "exists" as human thought, nothing else. And, as such propositions must be shared into other minds, and so suffer from relativity. Epistemology is not prior to human thought. Because you paradigm doesn't allow it.

@zurew you're just seeing it from a different paradigm than me, maybe I hold an unusual position. From my paradigm the content of the proposition is less important than its existence (location) in the first place. I say this because you can have any content you like. Think of a proposition machine that churns these things out one every second. You contend that if any of these arbitrary propositions are true (or false), then they are forever true, even if no one reads them. But were the propositions true before the machine generated them? No, because the truthfulness depends on the proposition existing in the first place. From my point of view the proposition needs to be "instanced" by both coming into existence and being understood in someone's mind (i.e. it's relative). The proposition itself contains information, and that information must be "held" somewhere. Apart from the content, the proposition itself must be validated in some way. It doesn't hold that a proposition is immediately true or false, other states may be, "unknown" or "uncertain". Validation takes "effort" and "time" however small. I agree that once the state of a proposition is known, then you can extend its truthfulness both backwards and forwards in time, but that's only after the fact. The flipside way of looking at it is that a proposition always had a definite truthfulness value, but you had to uncover it by some sort of process. Either way discovering the truthfulness of a proposition is a process, exactly as a jury does in court.