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Old Notes from a Past Class

"The Euthyphro dilemna refers to a question Socrates raised: "Do the gods command something because it is good (which means Goodness is a standard that's independent of God), or is something good because the gods command it? Robert Adams says anything good is good because a loving God who is Himself the standard of goodness commands it.

"An infinite regress is a series of things traced infinitely back, that is, with no actual starting point. Therefore the number of things must be infinite."

"Four marks of a religious experience according to William James: Ineffability, Noetic, Transience (this one is debatable, in my opinion), and Passivity."

"Anselm distinguishes (sort of) between existence in the mind, and existence in reality. While Anselm doesn't actually say there is a difference between something existing in the mind, and something existing in reality, he says there is a difference between something existing in the mind, and understanding that it exists in reality. Then later on, he says that it is greater to exist in reality than in the mind alone."
(This note confuses me. Wouldn't the statement "it is greater to exist in reality than to exist in the mind alone" be itself a statement that says there is a difference between something existing in the mind, and something existing in reality?)

"According to William James, a choice is a "genuine option" when it is important, and it is forced upon one. That is to say, even not deciding, even that, places you in one of the two options. For example, in the decision whether to marry or remain unmarried, if you don't decide, you remain (I would say "become", but in this case you already are such) unmarried."

Comments

Interesting post. I had an experience this year which meets James' criteria. The fact that I wasn't trying to have the experience is what made it all the more impactful. I pondered it for days, until finally accepting it as a mystery.

~ k
 
I had some exchanges with Slithytoves on whether reality is actually just a form of social psychosis: if you and I agree on something, it's "real." If we don't, it's not real until one of us changes position, or we reject either each other, or the importance of the difference ("agreeing to disagree").

This got my attention: "While Anselm doesn't actually say there is a difference between something existing in the mind, and something existing in reality, he says there is a difference between something existing in the mind, and understanding that it exists in reality." I'm understanding Anselm to mean that the ability to state that something "exists in reality" means:
  • the ability to persuade another mind that cannot see the thing to believe that it could see the thing, given controlled conditions;
  • the ability to enable another mind to have the experience that leads to a revelation that it has seen the thing, despite no control over conditions.
The first is an experiment of a hypothesis: I let go of my insistence of reality to make it a proposal, because I believe I can reproduce the thought at will for a receptive mind. The second is making my experience a metaphor for yours, and yours a metaphor for mine. I let go of my insistence that reality is connected to me at all to assert that my experience of reality is a metaphor, as is yours. I agree that I can't get out of my own mind: either my senses present evidence, or my thoughts create meaning, but both those things happen inside my mind.

Now we're both in Plato's Cave: reality as we know it is a shadow of what's real. Which was probably not Anselm's point: he is suggesting that we can get out of our own minds. I can say that I think he's right. I can also say I simply can't prove it, because theophanatic experience is neither empirical nor hypothetical. And that conclusion defies science as I know it.

That's a lot of syllables for "I agree with kestrel. It's a mystery."

View media item 3096
 
I want to paint the syllables transformed through my brain, like a saxophone echoing through empty night time streets.
 

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