[RexImperator]

(04-03-2015 04:30 PM)TomArrow Wrote:  

(04-03-2015 03:18 PM)RexImperator Wrote:  

I'm not being terribly rigorous here

That's your weak point. If you don't define what it means, it can mean anything and thus you can basically make connections from anything to anything, which appears fascinating.
...

For me, one of the big challenges of being rational is to be as rigorous as possible in asking goal-oriented questions. What are you really asking and where do you expect the answer to lead you? If nowhere, why bother asking? Is your goal possibly to have some sort of realization and experience a state of euphoria due to feeling intelligent? Or is your goal to take away the meaning of a word to distance yourself from the feeling you associate with it? (typical for relativism)

Yes, I was thinking a bit off the cuff and I figured some other posters would help me clarify things.

I can see why philosophers spend so much time defining terminology. It's necessary to be precise.

We'd have to start with defining terms like "real", "objective" and "subjective".

While doing some self-inquiry I was questioning what we really "know" about "reality".

We have been brought up in this "scientific" age and yet when you look at science, which can only deal with things that are observed or measured in some way, it's quite limited. So that's where the metaphysics come in.

I was reading how Kant made a distinction between "phenomena" and "noumena". The first being things we can sense directly (empirically) and the second being those things that are more theoretical or at least one step removed from our senses. I'm not sure I totally understand it yet, but has me thinking.

Thoughts are interesting because they fall in that category where they may be real, but can only be observed indirectly. For instance, we could do an experiment on thinking about certain thoughts and then measure hormone levels and see how they change. But we won't know the subject's thoughts other than what they tell us about them.

If a child has an imaginary friend, we'll laugh because we know it's not real, but a figment of the mind. But we might consider that the thought of having the imaginary friend is real.

To answer your other question, part of the reason I'm interested in this is that I have been reading about the Buddhist concept of annata, which refers to no-self or emptiness. And I have been experiencing some of this myself. This is not a negative emptiness which is lacking something but more like a tranquil spaciousness. Basically, the way to understand this is that when you look inside yourself, your "ego" or your belief of who you are, your self-conception is actually just another thought itself, which like all thoughts is impermanent and subject to continuous change like everything else. There actually is no fixed self. There are recurring and repetitive thought patterns, but even those can change.

When you meditate, you are able to stretch out the periods of time where you are aware, but are not thinking anything at all, and begin to experience yourself as this sort of empty awareness. Eventually you bring it into everyday life. Your thoughts then lose the power of having any "self" invested in them.

On the psychological level, it seems to me that you really don't need anything else at all. You are already complete once you are at peace with mere existence/being itself, which is really the only thing you'll ever have. Everything else you will lose, eventually.