mountainman

That's cool. I'll look out for him
in my travels. Thanks for the
useful introduction.

Best wishes,


Pete Brown
NAMASTE
http://www.mountainman.com.au/namaste_2006.htm

Ted Hoffman

No Robots. I think I am clear now. Since you also have your own subjective definition of what atheism is, then it is no wonder that you agree that Brunner was, in a strange, unconventional sense, an atheist.
Brunner wrote:
In the above phrase, he uses the "cogitant" as almost synonymous to God.
This bugger was not an atheist. He reminds me of Christopher Michael Langan, who attempts to use obscure neologisms like "Unbound telesis" which simply mean "God." Don't be duped by the wordplay.
"Spiritual atheist"? Is it the case that Brunerrian factions are divided along the spiritual-minded and the pure materialists?
Either "spiritual" is a misnomer forn a purely materialist phenomenon, or you actually believe that "spirits," in the sense of immortal, non-physical sentient entities, actually exist.

Ted Hoffman

Chilli, if the cogitant has no energy of its own, then it is a characteristic of, or part of us - like emotion. As such, it has no identity of its own. Hence it does not exist as a separate entity no more than sex exists as a separate entity.
If it was conceived by the light of common day, then it is a ray or a radiation of some sort. Hence physical.

No Robots

First off, I think you really should look at the whole of Our Christ. Brunner spends a great deal of effort describing the homonymy of the "god" of superstition and the "god" of spiritual insight. I mean, you wouldn't say that the "god" of Spinoza that Einstein claimed to believe was the good old "god" of religion, would you? Brunner's Cogitant is the same as the the God of Spinoza, the Father of Christ, and the Brahman of Buddhism. In philosophy it is called the One, Being, the Logos, Nous. This is the wholly abstract spiritual principle, of which the god of religion is a superstitious, anthropomorphic distortion.


There are no "Brunnerian factions". There are only a handful of people who are actively promoting his work. I am perhaps the one who is most interested in the spiritual dimension, but that is just because of my own circumstances and inclinations. What I am saying is that Brunner provides those of us who are atheists of a spiritual bent with the resources to defend ourselves against the totalizing rhetoric of the materialists. In the past, spiritual people had to defend themselves against the Pharisees and the priests. Today, they must defend themselves against the materialists.


The word "spiritual" is somewhat problematic. It is a translation of Brunner's term "geistig". The root word is "Geist" which in German covers the whole of that which is immaterial: mind, intellect, soul, spirit, ideal. As I noted above with my example of Dawkins, materialists always make sure they can pull the rabbit of "mind" out of the hat of "matter". But even the greatest magician in the world cannot pull a rabbit out of a hat unless the rabbit is already in the hat.

NOGO

Which places does it read as apologia?

This is standard arguement. I am willing to be convinced.

Chili

Maybe I am not using the right words Ted, that is possible, but the cogitant is whereby our senses are perceived. If you look at the crucifixion it is the brow that was crowned with thorns and all the senses were pierced to annihilate their influence upon the cogitant so that he (sic) can be raised and placed subservient to our intuition (intuition or womanity is effeminate and our cogitant or humanity is masculine).

It has no identity of its own apart from the hu-man identity that we call our own after we became rational beings. The cogitant is our persona, or mask, that we present to other people and really is an illusion wherefore it can rapture and set free the man that we were created to be, now in charge of his own destiny in heaven on earth. In other words, when the persona raptures that which remains is in heaven (this would be after the disciples or eidetic images are recalled into the upper room so that reason can prevail).

"Conceived by the light of common day" means that they were able to think for themselves in the absence of the celestial light that exists in Eden, or Eden by any other name. It made man (both males and females) co-creator with God to enhance the substance and beauty of God since the persona is and remains an illusion. So yes, that is what the curse is all about and is why I call it a slave identity . . . wherefore Jesus said that there was no marriage in heaven where nobody is a slave to their sex or sexuality.

Also, "the woman saw that the TOK was good for gaining wisdom, food and beauty" makes the cogitant a slave identity.

BTW, as co-creator with God do we influence the idea of God and so we actually are the formal cause behind evolution and the material cause of creation (after all, we are God even without realization).

Chili

Cogitant with a capital C is the illuminated cogitant spelled with a small c.

Ted Hoffman

No Robots, thanks. I understand your position much better. Let me tell you something about myself. When I came to IIDB, I spent the first year in the Philosophy forums. Then when the ultimate issues of cosmology and causality came up, I spent two years in Physics forums. I only stopped when I couldnt crack tensor equations and when calculations on Isomorphism, fractal physics and the like became a bit too challenging. Then I came to B C & H, which is now home.

Now, the issue that you are talking about materialists pulling "mind" out of matter" perhaps, marks the dividing line between me and you. I am a materialist. It was not a simple chhoice. I have studied the problem of Qualia and the Problem of Mary (remember Mary - the hypothetical Physicist who is trained in a black-and-white environment?) and note that serious Physicists like John Wheeler and David Bohm have addressed these problems. They have presented the holographic theory of the mind and since you mention cybernetics, have you read the CTMU? In it, Christopher Michael Langan's presents the concepts of conspansion, hology and self-transducive syntax in CTMU - my bet is that Langan can really take you in with his syndiffeonesis , SCSPL (Self Configuring Self Processing Language). David Bohm talked about the universe's implicate order, nonlocality and holomovement. Have you studied these and are you aware of their weaknesses? The same current flows through them. And these are people who have studied these problems and even formalized them in equations. And they have met criticisms. One has no choice but to be very well instructed in quantum physics and in particular, the theories leaning close to what you are talking about is similar to the one in quantum mechanics known as the causal interpretation and the place of the mind in the collapse of the quantum wavefunction.
For you to come to a definitive answer regarding spiritualism (as in the One [in Taoism], Being, the Logos, Nous...), in my view, you must first study the causal closure thesis alongside the issues I have mentioned above and develop an antithesis against it if you have. Then present it for critique - wherever - at ARN, at ISCID or even here at IIDB at Physics forums. If you have, we can move to the Physics forums and tackle this subject thoroughly. I asked a few questions in the earlier page which you did not answer. I dont know what that means.
It is important to remember that presenting cosmological theories qua Philosophy, like Brunner's "I-Self" and “unity of consciousness”, sans the input of Physics, is pure mental masturbation.
In a sense, what Brunner is presenting is a primitive form of what Wheeler and David Bohm presented. As you can see from my critique, this guy wasnt even good as a thinker. He was ill-informed on Biblical issues (and it is clear he had a closed mind and never familiarized himself with what Bultmann, Schweitzer and other critics were propounding) and because he lacked a scientific background, his theories lack a proper input from the relevant disciplines. You will try to keep mapping his metaphysics to occasional datums until you try to use it to explain phenomena.

Ted Hoffman

So, the cogitant is consciousness (or nerve centers). Have you studied about the celebral cortex?
Do you know what causes someone to be comatose?
What is the state of the cogitant when someone is comatose?
What does the cogitant know about the state of Schrondiger's cat before we open the box? How can we know what the cogitant knows?
What is the role of the cogitant on Wheeler's action from a distance and delayed thought experiments?
When time expands (I assume you are familiar with manifolds and the Twin Experiment in physics), what happens to the cogitant? Does it expand too?
What was the cogitant doing 0.0001 seconds after the big bang?
Actually, the crown is round to indicate that pain and pleasure are inseparable. And when Christ wears the crown, he wears both facets of life and becomes immortal.
So the cogitant is now not consciousness, or sense experience, but personality. What about character?
Remember, character is who we are in the dark as you correctly imply.
So, now we have to die before we can have a character?
It is a slave identity because the mythmakers were psychoneurotics who could not explore their infantile sexual identities publicly. Freud and structuralists made this argument. What you call the persona is just a bundle of supressed infantile fears and sexual desires.
Death is not the solution. There is no upper room. The upper room is a mythic figure created via the mythmakers infantile desires to go back to the warmth of the womb and escape the exposure created through childbirth and the threat of being killed by the father. That is why most mythic heroes like Oedipus commit patricide. Even Jesus shows he is a man by surviving the crucifiction and joining his father. He thus triumphs and believers triumph vicariously and exalt him.
This was the psychoneurotic mythmaker seeking release from the turmoil of his churning infantile fantasies, which are held back by society.
The woman represents the mythmaker's mother: his Oedipal object of sexual desire. Of course, the mythmakers were invariantly male. That is why before the monotehistic male God Yahweh took hold, we had female godesses like asherah. In their statues and iconic representations, they are voluptuous women with full breasts and wide hips: the object of the mythmaker's sexual desire.
Wrong categorization. Evolution is noth a myth. God is a myth.

Chili

I am not much of a student of anything Ted and forgot the details you are looking fore.Would that be protestant theology by any chance because in Catholicism Jesus wears the crown. Christ the Cogitant always was immortal. Hint, he was the real son that was introduced to Mary at the foot of the cross when the persona was crucified.

Pain and pleasure are inseparable but they are and extract of eternal bliss.In our character we are both Cogitant and cogitant until the cogitant is crucified and spends 3 days in the netherworld to illuminate the source of cognition. No, that which is crucified can also rapture into oblivion whence it came. That may be so but they do take charge of the body.Jesus was one with the father long before they crucified the Jew in him.When the kundalini is raised the urge is gone forever.Mythmaker has to be male because God is masculine. He is the reality we base our illusion on, remember, from cogitant to Cogitant?And so the argument continues until the reality behind myth is found.