Unbound Telesis

The need to describe the universe as a physically separate entity is an issue that I believe needs to be addressed. This seems to be an incorrect objectification in the psychology of people who do this. Some people go so far as to use this model of separation as a means of describing God. The self could be misleading one to try and find more outside of the physical body.This desire to search for more defines a separate or unique purpose. It seems to result, psychologically, in a deluded and childish mentality to live according to the wish to find something more than what can be observed. That is what some of us here refer to as a "retarded psychology". This may only be a misinterpretation. Kind of like authority and institutions are what we see when we refuse to see education.

In terms of the universe and what its boundary consists of, it is probably wrong to conceive it as something more than matter and energy. The imagination presents us with infinite possibility so we decide to attribute this as a property of inconceivable phenomenon. In itself it is quite premature to claim such a humanistic explanation as our Occam's razor is it not? Mankind, despite his mentality at whatever the stage of evolution, senses the need to worship symbols and entities within himself. But that our minds do not always (or ever) correctly unveil the truth, we arrive at conflicting or undecidable arguments. This desire to reach harmony and balance no matter the cost is part of the human condition and what we define ourselves by.

On the internet yesterday I read of the term "unbound telesis" to describe the state of nothingness or freedom from constraint. This is being used somehow to equate the boundaries of God's mind to that of the boundaries of the universe. It occurred to me that if the universe is only perceived to be separate when it is in fact not, then the unbound telesis is in fact a figment of the self. I was watching the Matrix carefully for the first time yesterday and thought that all these human concepts could just be a means of entertaining the self which we tend to falsely combine with the mind. Science is our way of quantifying and qualifying the world around us, it can be used to demonstrate anything if we try hard enough. Occam's razor is a major feature used to attribute good and evil to science (whatever is simple would only be right to keep simple, evil is where we purposely complicate what should stay simple or simplify what should stay complex). Now this preference can either be a childish desire of the human condition or it can actually be a means to what some call "absolute truth", assuming that truth exists as something absolute as opposed to merely another objectification of the self. This would then imply that science is an inherent property of mind and not just the self. In this case the infinite implications of "unbound telesis" might also be an inherent property of mind. The satisfaction of personal needs amidst the destructive imperfections of man does not necessarily invalidate the possibility of a God, but it does raise the question of compatibility. This would fill in the blanks as to the unbound telesis of the universe and that of the self as being two completely separate things, whereas the unbound telesis of the universe and that of the mind are not.

http://www.iidb.org/vbb/archive/index.php/t-61683.html

 

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This is vital information.

 

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>__>

I have been saying this for years but in a much better way so that normal people understand too. Everybody should read this.


peace.

 

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Looks interesting.
I'll have to read the article more thoroughly later, but for now, I do have to react to this (which is what I see as the actual source of the whole problem...):

Separate from what?

You see, it is this exact semantic issue that creates the 'problem'....



...more later.

 

Seperate from your mind and the realm of imagination land ofcourse.


peace.

 

I'll wait for CC to clarify.

EFOC, you should know better: there's no "of course" when it comes to philosophy...

 

Yeah but philosophy is just fun like wordplay and sory telling something to do in your spare time. There is only so far you can reach with it and I am at my limit now im afraid theres nothing more philosophy can teach me. =(.


Ps it's a uefull tool when mastered though.

peace.

 

The universe is not physically separate from you. It otherwise is an incorrect objectification in the imagination. Unbound telesis is an example of the delusion of a "retarded psychology" of people who propose that the universe equates to a gigantic mind and that the boundaries of the universe are made up of something more than matter and energy.

 

unless he socks in here, you'd be waiting awhile

 

Why does it need to be addressed?

"Seems to be"?
So how would you go about deciding (definitively) whether it is or isn't incorrect?

And?

And?
Is that a bad thing?
If so why?
Are you sure we're being "misled"?

Separate from the search?

"Seems" again?
"Deluded and childish"?
By whose criteria?
(Not, forgetting of course, that if this search hadn't occurred you wouldn't be able to tell us how deluded and childish it - by any means whatsoever other than word of mouth).

"Some of us here"?
Here being where?
Which "some of us"? Human "some of us", posters "some of us", philosophers "some of us"?

You think?

 

That is a key issue. If you don't separate 'it' out, you can't think of it as a physical entity. Immersed, we have experience. Something - a word I am using here metaphorically - which I have a hard time saying it either physical or non-physical. But the enterprise of science does separate it out.

 

Indeed.

Again, separate it out from what?
Mind, I'm a materialist, so I can't think of anything that isn't physical....

Oh?

 

The 'observer'. The subject is separate out from the object.

I'm ignorant of the term or it was a spelling error. I'm taking it as materialist. If you can't think of anything that is not physical, I don't know what the use of the term is. Especially with its bias toward hard, three dimensional things, and then fluids, etc., down the line. To me when we say something is physical we really mean we can experience it over and over. Or we have. But the actual experiencing is not physical, not in the ways I use that word. Not if that word has any use as a term to distinguish one phenomenon from another.

If I examine my experience and try to determine what that means, I find experiences. Are my experiences material? And again, I am not making a case that minds are not brains and all those other ideas BASED ENTIRELY ON HOW WE REIFY EXPERIENCES into words like physical. Physical coming out of certain facets of experience. We attribute these qualities to objects, out there.

When people say experience/consciousness is really material in some way, I want to say 'No, material is really experience/consciousness,' to any degree that sentence has meaning. Everything we are capable of thinking matter is, is derived from experience. To say 'what I mean by matter and its qualities is not bound by consciousness/experience' is like asserting that you can accurately convey the sound of your fathers voice by drawing with crayons.

I am not saying that there are no objects 'out there'. That gets kinda silly also. But the use of the term matter, as if it is more fundamental than experience is silly. We can only know that word's meaning or anything else about it by having gathered up information from our experience. The word is, really, pointing at experience, which is all we have and is more fundamental.

So I have a hard time with saying that consciousness is 'really' matter in some way. I don't think that sentence can mean anything. It is either an absolutely useless and meaningless tautology and or it is saying a subset is more fundamental than the set.

Sure the whole project is to take the observer as much as possible out of the observed.

 

Ah.
Well, I took that for a given. The subject/object dichotomy is an entirely different topic. In any case, I'm guessing that the OP meant something different...

Yep. Bad typing day for me.

The term is simply used as a matter of convenience. You're right, strictly speaking it is somewhat vacuous. But then again, so is using "I" when I speak....

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Right, but the "there' from which we stipulate an experience, is always physical....

I agree with all of the above.

Right, but as we know from the "observer effect", Heisenburg, etc., such a distinction is untenable. It only pragmatically manifests itself as a procedural methodology.

Again though, I don't think that this is what the OP was getting at...

 

jah, but not quite in the same way. It can give a useful distinction from which accurate decisions can be made.

See, I don't think that's saying anything. Unless you are positing an outside of experience 'there'. Or unless you are making physical = can be experienced. And if it is this latter, well, physical is very misleading. And when I say 'can be experienced' this should not be thought of as referring to an it. As in 'it can be experienced', some object, for example. I mean more an experience can be had like that. This avoids transcendence,which I assume most materials would.

Oh dear.

'We' may 'know' it. But I don't think 'we' really do. The mass of in here thinking about 'out there' with 'out there' being physical and 'in here' being virtual but really physical also, as if that term 'physical' can have the slightest residue of meaning after all that sleight of hand, is, yeah, a mass.

I read the OP again and at first, given the opening, I thought you were wrong. But I read further and I find I cannot take a stand.

 

Hmmm.
I don't see it that way. I think the problem is that we ordinarily think of identity terms as potential sets. So, in and out, live and dead, black and white, physical and non-physical (immaterial??). Note that while all of these are regularly used as contraries, they are in fact not such. This is just a semantical instantiation of the Laws of Identity and Non-Contradiction.

I do mean the latter. So, thankfully, it's not tautologous. And while in select few cases "physical" can be misleading, it's certainly less troublesome than positing some conceptual contrary....
And I do like your functionalist definition; 'capable of rendering experience' is fine with me.
(And gods yes we'll avoid silly transcendent notions..

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)

Right. But all of it can be explained in phenomenological terms, ones that will always refer back to a material.

Indeed. Without clarification at this point we're just stabbing randomly.

 

See that still sounds meaningless to me and misleading.

I look up the etymology of matter and I get things like wood, timber, house, mother.

Hard, three dimensional objects - except for Mom, I mean at least mine was mostly soft, with exceptions. IOW short hand conceptions for repeated experiences of a minority subset of our experiences. IOW not including experiences of gases, like air, and fluids like water, sounds, dreams, memory, feelings and sensations not related to touch and so on.

Words on have meaning related to experiences and experiences when carefully observed are not like how we imagine physical things are. We cannot retouch and experience. It is not solid. Etc.

A phenomenologist need not at all commit him or herself to being a materialist.

The problem for me with being a materialist is it takes a metaphor based on a subset of experiences, reifies it, says that matter is more real than experience and is the basis for it. That one has experiences 'of' it. Even though everything we know of this 'it' is experience. It is constituted, for us, of experience.

But it ends up that experience is this little film that flits effectively or not over reality, which is material.

I actually think this is crazy, though mundanely and not directly threateningly so.

 

Alas I can only disagree. All we ever experience is physical. Any linguistic reference to a non-physical thing is exactly, and only that: a conceit.
Any phenomenologist worth his salt would agree with this.

Ah.
See, you're talking purely about strictly material entities: "matter". The materialist position doesn't deny the reality of things one cannot literally grasp, like radio waves for example.

Right, but the problem is that in any analysis, one cannot avoid the bare physicality of our environment. I would counter that you're reifying 'experience' (a la early existentialists..). The problem with this is that while it is possible to be not-experiencing, it is impossible to be not physical....
So in a sense, you're right: the physical is the substrate of experience. And while we can reasonably say that the physical precedes and will succeed experience, we cannot say the obverse..

Crazy in what way?

 

My problem is primarily with the term 'physical' but then I also wonder if there isn't an agenda in the use of the word. If 'physical' comes down to 'can be experienced' then this is a much, much better term to use, even if it is a phrase. It has no baggage from solid, three dimensional objects - as opposed to energy or fields as a couple of accepted by all examples. The advantage of using the phrase 'can be experienced' is that it leaves open judgements about whether the experience can be had by others and in the same way.

Let's toss out an example: people who get pain in their joints before storms, or, more likely I assume, when there are changes in air pressure.

Before we understood what was happening a skeptic could say that this is not possible since the person is not experiencing something physical. Later on it turns out that, in fact, they were, if one uses your definition of physical, which is a synonym for 'can be experienced'. I think the latter is clearer, but also leaves off the table questions about what is physical - in the wide variety of meanings - and what might turn out later to have had a physical - or a generally experiencable - identity.

Once you use the word physical, you first raise for most people the solid, three dimensional object image or sense and many will not assume this is in some way metaphorical or even get the distinction. Second you allow yourself to be placed in a particular time and place where what seems not to have physical presence may turn out later to have that.

I'd also quibble that a phenomenologist should leave off notions of what is physical and what is not and focus on the experience. To me that is a part of bracketing. The enterprise of the phenomenology of religion should not be undercut from the beginning because the religious persons or investigators cannot demonstrate or have counterdemonstrated that it is unclear if there are physical objects of experiencing here.

Yes, I realize this, but the attachment to the word 'physical' should be nonexistent. It is so misleading. As is materialism. I realize the term has its history and words are not perfect, but I can't see why it is clung to. It is so misleading.

Well I could get fussier and say experiencing occurs and muffle the tendencies of language with a possible gerund possible present continuous verb. To use experience as a noun is not the same kind of reification. I do not have to think it is an object, physical or otherwise.

You cannot demonstrate the former to me. I will either experience your demonstration - in which case it failed - or I won't.

You are assuming from the beginning an external world, separate from the experiencer, and then referring to that.

These two sentences do not go together for me.

Second, whatever that word 'physical' means/points to are qualities that are experienced. They cannot, absolutely cannot, precede or succeed experience. Whatever the non-experienced world is we cannot talk about. That is not 'physical' for us, but your definitions of the word.

Because we have taken facets of experience - those associated with the word physical or material. Then used these facets of experience as a synecdoche for the whole of experience. Then we say that the subset (first term) is more primary than the set (second term). Setting aside the ontological issue, there is still a problem with the hallucination this produces. A map based on a synecdoche - in a sense a metaphor for all experience - is taken as more real than the thing itself.

That is a kind of madness.

You can see this when people talk about themselves in terms of neurotransmitters. I do not mean when a scientist does in a very specific context, I mean in more general everyday contexts where we 'understand' ourselves in terms of neurotransmitters and hormones. Where the reified objects of experience leap out of their very small subset - where they actually fit empirically - and become what we think we are.

That is loopy.

I think the problem can be reduced, in this context, by not using physical and material in these ways. The fact that these words are clung to makes me wonder if the problems are not really problems to their users. That there may be an attachment to having this subset of experience be used as the dominant metaphor, rather than others.

 

I agree. Generally speaking, when a Materialist uses the term "material", this is precisely what is meant.

Again, it's only misleading if one is prepared to accept a physical/non-physical dichotomy.

Nicely done. Yes, by "experience" I mean 'amenable to being experienced', or, as you've suggested 'experiencing' (or perhaps... experiencable... ?).
In any case, you're correct to differentiate between the act of experiencing and an experience; the former being an active dynamic, the latter a static referent.

You've never slept?

Not at all (I've often been called quite the solipsist...).
All I'm saying here is that whatever it is that experiences (me, you... etc.) has ever been physical.

Aha. So you are an existentialist at heart (essence precedes existence etc...). I guess we'll have to agree to disagree.

Interesting.
I see that procedure as a kind of rationality. In fact, the most provident one we all make use of. Sure, it may be (to the most hardcore skeptic) an illicit manouvre, but moreso than any other approach, it pays dividends.