Ender

Walrus- since you refuse to alleviate confusion on my part, or have any honest intention for a serious discussion....

Care to elaborate?

You confuse a priori knowledge, i.e. propositions that are not dependent on experience, with a posteriori knowledge, i.e. propositions that are derived from experience. If you so desire to conflate experience with logic, be my guest- since that will only demonstrate your inability to formulate a coherent epistemology.

How does that follow? Non-sequitor.

I still don't get your "concern."

Once you're finished with this self-indulgent cheap pop psychological ploy, let me know, and perhaps a meaningful discussion can be had.

~WiGGiN~

bgponder

Ender the Theothanatologist:

I offer more brain fodder, and play the Devil's Advocate Theist:

If the phenomenological reduction is not possible, which is debated in the schools, then this formulation of consciousness cannot necessarily be discerned from the whole of defined existence. Therefore, the lack or nothingness posited is simply an interesting part of the whole. Further, this is at best a definition of the human consciousness, and not applicable to God or conceptions of his consciousness--indeed, these human formulations are included in God's fullness as the abstraction of existence, all that is, and here manifest(I hope to approach some Catholic theology here, please comment, Bro. Albert).

Peace, cornbread, Barry

[ March 01, 2002: Message edited by: bgponder ]</p>

joedad

In other words, a "god" or "higher power" is a survival mechanism, all of which are continuously being naturally selected for/against.

joe

Ender

Barry, thanks for playing devils’ advocate.

I have one thing to ask of you: can you connect phenomenological reduction to what I have outlined above about consciousness?

One may reject Husserl’s “phenomenological reduction” and remain a phenomenologist.

If phenomenological reduction is the idea of examining the essential structure of consciousness as such by “bracketing” out everything else, i.e. our presuppositions of the external world, then one cannot scrutinize consciousness without identifying the reality of genuine, tangible objects in the world at the same time. I do not think it’s possible to “bracket” out existence and discover some transcendental essence Husserl searched in vain. The existence of the world can’t be suspended because it’s the most “immediately given.” There is a neat & awesome moment in the novella Nausea where the oversensitive narrator, at the famous park scene, suffers a ferocious experience of a “gnarled chestnut tree” in the park and is stunned with the realization that its presence is simply “there” or given, and that this is reality, the very “paste of things” and “self-evident irreducible.” There is no such “transcendental essence” found through reduction. No reduction is possible. The result of this Heideggerian split from Husserl is that the consciousness is not the self.

You have no more to say on what I’ve outlined as negation?

Whatever is not applicable to God or eliminates the template of human consciousness automatically rules out any possible apprehension of the word consciousness. :-) this is where theists default with their whimisical and arbitrariness of manipulating language to fit their paradoxical beliefs- if god is the ultimate paradox, then I have no argument. Neither does the theist.

I still have my empirical roots that you cannot get beyond the limits of your experience in positing what may be- if there is no such experience of a “consciousness bereft of human attributes” then there is no such thing. No if, or and but about it.

~WiGGiN~