Maria Cuervo
Gold Meritorious Patron
Re: The Movie, "Going Clear"
The problem is that a paintbrush in the hand is not commensurable to consciousness and thoughts, and the existence of stuff, so I was not sure how you wanted to continue the exchange (without going off topic big time onto Philosophy and off of BTs and Scn). A paint brush is an object. Thoughts are a bit dodgier. Descartes was only talking about thinking. But mostly, he was talking about what we see and to prove thinking might somehow be able to verify what we see.
So I see a paintbrush. How do I know where it came from? We really cannot know that. Now if I did a picture with my paintbrush, I can surmise that I painted it, it's my picture, etc. Finding out where the stuff in the picture came from is harder. I can trace it via my recall and anyone around me may have witnessed that I painted it. But it's harder to trace the genealogy of atoms, hard to do that with the 'cosmos'.
Various issues,
- where did everything come from (God, nowhere, evolution, always there, evolved, a demiurge)
and
- when I look at the world, how do I know it is there and not a delusion or hallucination or dream. (descartes' question). I was only commenting on that, not the first point. While I don't know, let me offer some thoughts anyway, not definitively since I am neither God or physicist and can only offer the logical way this has sometimes been thought of in metaphysical (not scientific) terms.
Let's just assume it is all really there (the cosmos) and not a trick of the mind put there by an evil demon.
Given that we think it is there, and we are not going to be conspiracy theorists about the fact it is there but we will just 'accept' everything is there, how do we ascertain where it came from and if it came to be or if it was eternally there?
For ancient Greeks, the options were chaos or order. Plato proposes order but also references chaos. Chaos would be the poetic, Greek view. Time is cyclical, not linear, like the seasons. Nothing came to be in a moment of creation, stuff was always there. Nothing ceases to be. Sounds like nothing can be created or destroyed. I said somewhere that ancient or archaic views sometimes align with physics. Ok. In some small ways maybe, ask a scientist who is also a classicist. If we are archaic Greeks AND believe in the gods we will go for chaos because then it means the gods simply shaped existing matter. The world is uncreated in this view. Versions of this persist today.
The choice there would be Chaos (slowly develops but from always there 'stuff' and matter) v. order (created designed world as Medieval Christians thought which was created by 1 God). Even within the ancient Greek view however, there was always been an argument, even for the pagan Greeks, between Order and Chaos. Plato argues for order, and proposes in Book II of the republic something eerily like monotheism. He concludes this because his system requires there be ONE GOOD SOURCE of ALL. He never says what this source is. He claims not to know. He also describes the soul in vivid detail, as well as the underworld and the demigods and so on. His descriptions are frankly better than that found in the Scn cosmology. And Socrates, whose dialogues he is recording, is put to death for this view, imagine, a theocracy of gods suddenly punctuated by this buffoon who wants to say that there is ONE. The typical Greek view including the gods sort of needs the chaos view rather than the order view, since if the order view is correct as Plato thought, everything flows down from 1 originary source and that means that the gods become bit players. Socrates agrees with that because for him the gods mete out fate in a random, cruel, and inconsistent way. There is not one view of justice. For him that is illogical. There should be an absolute truth, a source of truth, somewhere. But the gods are not it, since they do quarrel and they are so arbitrary in the way they rule and mete out punishments. They act like men.
For the ancients the system with more than one god is going to drift to chaos as the most original way things have always been, created from existing 'stuff', not created from nothing. If creation was from existing stuff then we can have a sort of 'variable' view of justice. Depending on the god, the rules are different. Thus humans, trying to be good, end up tossed about.
The question for both camps when we speak of coming to be and ceasing to be of stuff is not really about the above, but about transformation. Stuff that is made of matter comes to be and ceases. Sure. But for Plato the soul is eternal and uncreated.
Now this does not bother Medieval Christians (and they all love plato and use his entire philosophy along with theirs). the reason it's not an issue is that for them God is outside of time and therefore of course his creations can also be out of time. We use the words time and creation only loosely since for us we live in the mirage.
By the time Descartes comes around with the I think therefore I am the questions are much different. Descartes is trying to know if the "I" can be fooled concerning what is there. How do we know that what is there is really there. Thus we have not answered that question simply because we have a brush in our hand. All of experience could be an illusion, a mirage.
Of course Plato already said that so Descartes is a bit slow. Even though he is a bit of a Christian, a scientist, and also a Platonist. All combined.
So the problem of consciousness I responded to Terril about has to do with the fact that there is no way to verify if that lovely being who appeared was what Terril thought it was, at least for Descartes. That being could be loving but still decide that for Terril's sake, the lie of being a BT was ok for now. That being could appear as a beautiful being, mesmerize the subject, and suck it dry like a vampire, even letting it FN. The Cartesian point was NOT to figure out what the world is since this is a separate thing. The scientific issue there for him was that our bodies are like microscopes. Some see badly. Some have poor hearing. So how can we KNOW what we see. How do we know that the I is real at all?
If the I is real, then we can proceed from there to try and prove things about the rest of the world. His proof the I is real is "I think therefore I am."
Now that this is out of the way, slowly the rest can be worked out. That was all. And I said complaint noted because I thought that maybe this long thing I just wrote is off-topic and not germain to Scn all that much. The point is that we cannot just 'assume' what a BT is, or what a being external to us is anymore than we can assume things about each other without first meeting and talking etc. No more than we can assume what is out there or if it is out there. And that the OT levels do not prepare one for working out in any way WHAT one is confronting. In that sense one is WIDE OPEN. If indeed the BT is not a BT, then we may be in trouble. If there are beings who are quite good at dissimulation, and don't give a rat's arse about us, then how sweet. This sodding idiot thinks I am a BT. WHEEEE.
The entire process of OT II and III - and this is really the only concern - is too simplistic and does not really have a clue what's out there. It tells a linear and pretty (neat) story about a disaster. Too much is left out to make it useful, it's evaluated and probably never happened, LRH was involved in Black magic, which does conjure 'beings' or claims to. The entire process of Scn, for me, is Ron's magic trick to get rich. So sure, I am just slightly suspicious that if beings of any sort are encountered, no preparation has been made, none can be made, nothing is as it seems through the looking glass, and EVEN IF there WERE BTS the problem is that we don't know if what we encountered on any given day in session WAS OR IS those BTs.
The whole thing should be left alone in my opinion since as-is the upper levels can cause nothing but death and cancer and illness. I just think that a) there are no BTS, b) there is no Incident as described and c) if there are beings, they are not BTs and I said IF. Therefore, leave it alone. And probably most of the sickness among OTs is simply eating crap food, not eating, not sleeping, not going to the doctor for care for things as they come up etc. BUT IF any possible beings exist, which shamanism says yes, they are NOT to be handled in any way. Either way the I is not total cause. The I cannot create the cosmos. The I cannot even verify if the cosmos is a hologram or VR or if it is real. The I can only know it (the i) exists. Descartes' I sucks. I personally don't care for Descartes or consciousness as a reality of any kind. Plato's view of the soul is much better.
Sorry I overextended.
For what? For being fair and honest?
The problem is that a paintbrush in the hand is not commensurable to consciousness and thoughts, and the existence of stuff, so I was not sure how you wanted to continue the exchange (without going off topic big time onto Philosophy and off of BTs and Scn). A paint brush is an object. Thoughts are a bit dodgier. Descartes was only talking about thinking. But mostly, he was talking about what we see and to prove thinking might somehow be able to verify what we see.
So I see a paintbrush. How do I know where it came from? We really cannot know that. Now if I did a picture with my paintbrush, I can surmise that I painted it, it's my picture, etc. Finding out where the stuff in the picture came from is harder. I can trace it via my recall and anyone around me may have witnessed that I painted it. But it's harder to trace the genealogy of atoms, hard to do that with the 'cosmos'.
Various issues,
- where did everything come from (God, nowhere, evolution, always there, evolved, a demiurge)
and
- when I look at the world, how do I know it is there and not a delusion or hallucination or dream. (descartes' question). I was only commenting on that, not the first point. While I don't know, let me offer some thoughts anyway, not definitively since I am neither God or physicist and can only offer the logical way this has sometimes been thought of in metaphysical (not scientific) terms.
Let's just assume it is all really there (the cosmos) and not a trick of the mind put there by an evil demon.
Given that we think it is there, and we are not going to be conspiracy theorists about the fact it is there but we will just 'accept' everything is there, how do we ascertain where it came from and if it came to be or if it was eternally there?
For ancient Greeks, the options were chaos or order. Plato proposes order but also references chaos. Chaos would be the poetic, Greek view. Time is cyclical, not linear, like the seasons. Nothing came to be in a moment of creation, stuff was always there. Nothing ceases to be. Sounds like nothing can be created or destroyed. I said somewhere that ancient or archaic views sometimes align with physics. Ok. In some small ways maybe, ask a scientist who is also a classicist. If we are archaic Greeks AND believe in the gods we will go for chaos because then it means the gods simply shaped existing matter. The world is uncreated in this view. Versions of this persist today.
The choice there would be Chaos (slowly develops but from always there 'stuff' and matter) v. order (created designed world as Medieval Christians thought which was created by 1 God). Even within the ancient Greek view however, there was always been an argument, even for the pagan Greeks, between Order and Chaos. Plato argues for order, and proposes in Book II of the republic something eerily like monotheism. He concludes this because his system requires there be ONE GOOD SOURCE of ALL. He never says what this source is. He claims not to know. He also describes the soul in vivid detail, as well as the underworld and the demigods and so on. His descriptions are frankly better than that found in the Scn cosmology. And Socrates, whose dialogues he is recording, is put to death for this view, imagine, a theocracy of gods suddenly punctuated by this buffoon who wants to say that there is ONE. The typical Greek view including the gods sort of needs the chaos view rather than the order view, since if the order view is correct as Plato thought, everything flows down from 1 originary source and that means that the gods become bit players. Socrates agrees with that because for him the gods mete out fate in a random, cruel, and inconsistent way. There is not one view of justice. For him that is illogical. There should be an absolute truth, a source of truth, somewhere. But the gods are not it, since they do quarrel and they are so arbitrary in the way they rule and mete out punishments. They act like men.
For the ancients the system with more than one god is going to drift to chaos as the most original way things have always been, created from existing 'stuff', not created from nothing. If creation was from existing stuff then we can have a sort of 'variable' view of justice. Depending on the god, the rules are different. Thus humans, trying to be good, end up tossed about.
The question for both camps when we speak of coming to be and ceasing to be of stuff is not really about the above, but about transformation. Stuff that is made of matter comes to be and ceases. Sure. But for Plato the soul is eternal and uncreated.
Now this does not bother Medieval Christians (and they all love plato and use his entire philosophy along with theirs). the reason it's not an issue is that for them God is outside of time and therefore of course his creations can also be out of time. We use the words time and creation only loosely since for us we live in the mirage.
By the time Descartes comes around with the I think therefore I am the questions are much different. Descartes is trying to know if the "I" can be fooled concerning what is there. How do we know that what is there is really there. Thus we have not answered that question simply because we have a brush in our hand. All of experience could be an illusion, a mirage.
Of course Plato already said that so Descartes is a bit slow. Even though he is a bit of a Christian, a scientist, and also a Platonist. All combined.
So the problem of consciousness I responded to Terril about has to do with the fact that there is no way to verify if that lovely being who appeared was what Terril thought it was, at least for Descartes. That being could be loving but still decide that for Terril's sake, the lie of being a BT was ok for now. That being could appear as a beautiful being, mesmerize the subject, and suck it dry like a vampire, even letting it FN. The Cartesian point was NOT to figure out what the world is since this is a separate thing. The scientific issue there for him was that our bodies are like microscopes. Some see badly. Some have poor hearing. So how can we KNOW what we see. How do we know that the I is real at all?
If the I is real, then we can proceed from there to try and prove things about the rest of the world. His proof the I is real is "I think therefore I am."
Now that this is out of the way, slowly the rest can be worked out. That was all. And I said complaint noted because I thought that maybe this long thing I just wrote is off-topic and not germain to Scn all that much. The point is that we cannot just 'assume' what a BT is, or what a being external to us is anymore than we can assume things about each other without first meeting and talking etc. No more than we can assume what is out there or if it is out there. And that the OT levels do not prepare one for working out in any way WHAT one is confronting. In that sense one is WIDE OPEN. If indeed the BT is not a BT, then we may be in trouble. If there are beings who are quite good at dissimulation, and don't give a rat's arse about us, then how sweet. This sodding idiot thinks I am a BT. WHEEEE.
The entire process of OT II and III - and this is really the only concern - is too simplistic and does not really have a clue what's out there. It tells a linear and pretty (neat) story about a disaster. Too much is left out to make it useful, it's evaluated and probably never happened, LRH was involved in Black magic, which does conjure 'beings' or claims to. The entire process of Scn, for me, is Ron's magic trick to get rich. So sure, I am just slightly suspicious that if beings of any sort are encountered, no preparation has been made, none can be made, nothing is as it seems through the looking glass, and EVEN IF there WERE BTS the problem is that we don't know if what we encountered on any given day in session WAS OR IS those BTs.
The whole thing should be left alone in my opinion since as-is the upper levels can cause nothing but death and cancer and illness. I just think that a) there are no BTS, b) there is no Incident as described and c) if there are beings, they are not BTs and I said IF. Therefore, leave it alone. And probably most of the sickness among OTs is simply eating crap food, not eating, not sleeping, not going to the doctor for care for things as they come up etc. BUT IF any possible beings exist, which shamanism says yes, they are NOT to be handled in any way. Either way the I is not total cause. The I cannot create the cosmos. The I cannot even verify if the cosmos is a hologram or VR or if it is real. The I can only know it (the i) exists. Descartes' I sucks. I personally don't care for Descartes or consciousness as a reality of any kind. Plato's view of the soul is much better.
Sorry I overextended.
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You can quote all the major philosophers off the cuff and I find that so amazing.
Thank you. It took six years to get there and I am only on the surface.
