Heidegger

Joe:
our starting point is the referent of ‘I’ in ‘I experience; therefore, I
am’. I would say that I am real in some sense simply because nothing unreal is
self-aware.

Mike:
I’ll come with you down that road. Here ‘I’ will denote ‘individual
self-awareness’ or something of that kind.

Next the sense of ‘real’ has to be provided.

If we agree that awareness is real yet immaterial (’material’ here including
all measurable features of the universe) then we have to work from a dualist
ontological perspective.

Now, within that dualist perspective we have to ask whether _any_ terms
normally used in the material monist perspctive are of any use at all. Primarily,
can the notion ‘exist’ be indifferently employed to denote a ‘presence’ in
both realms?

We are getting dangerously close to the category-mistake territory here that
Jud warns of.

Mike

Jud:
Mike is perfectly correct. The term *I* is simply the way the skin-bagged
thinking meat refers to itself.

The words *real* and *fact* are a far more dangerous words to use than any
other. Half the population take *real* it to mean objects that physically
exist. The other half ( predominately the hoi polloi) include
interactional events between material objects, or *facts* that comply (agree) with
their own assessment of *actuality.*

Thus coins are false rather than *real,* a woman is not considered a *real*
beauty, etc. The Effel Tower is *real* and it is a *fact* that it stands in
Paris.

Mike:
however, it is not clear that the referent of ‘I’ exists *as* a physical
object or *as* a nonphysical entity or whatever.

Jud:
When, in normal speech, a person says: *I am going to the races.* he refers
to the thinking, speaking, acting, self-referential, embrained meaty
organism he/she is - not some airy-fairy *soul* or *spirit* dreamed up by ancient
Greeks who wiped the arses on leaves and worshipped gods like Kronos who feared
his children would someday overthrow him, so at birth he took them from
Rhea, ripped the heads off and ate them.

Humans are mobile, electrochemical-Humans are mobil ideating meat
encapsulated in epidermic envelopes.

That which they ideate - the call *real.* That which happens and accords
with their version of their *real world* (as they call it) they call *a fact.*

What exist are causal objects. Material matergy. Force-fields. Spatially
situated physical entities (call them what you will)

Al the rest of the story is what the skin-bagged thinking-meat we call
*humans* think and say about such concrescences.

Cheers,

Jud.

Posted on Sunday, July 6th, 2008 at 6:00 am
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