Source of Logic

Does proof need proof that the proof is real? How do we truly know, for certain, if anything is truly right or wrong?

https://www.quora.com/Does-proof-need-proof-that-the-proof-is-real-How-do-we-truly-know-for-certain-if-anything-is-truly-right-or-wrong

Source of logic is the question since it depends where we think logic comes.  If logic is purely a mental construct I can easily change my mind.  There are no inherent impediments or consequences from changing my mind from what is possible or not.  Possibility is a whim.  But to embed logic in the body (in the totality of mind-body interaction) the fact of the logic of either/or is absolute.  The logic of right side or left side (right hand or left hand), stand or not stand, fall or not fall, eat or not eat, breath or not breath, and so on.  An embodied logic cannot (ever) be denied, since to pretend to avoid the logic of this or that leads to life or death.  We learn this as infants when falling and crashing into the lamp table.  I fall, I bleed, I hurt.  The opposite is also true.  I avoid falling, I avoid bleeding, I avoid hurting.  We learn logic by being told to stay out of the street or be crushed by the wheels of a passing car.  Failing to do so is proven when the car crushes us.  If we are fortunate we will avoid this crushing when we have enough evidence to prove that to be the case when it crushes something else.


In such light it makes sense to replace “I think therefore I am” (logically true but inconsequential) with something like “I burn therefore I am.”  This cannot be denied or I set you on fire and that will prove (to be true or not) when we all will be burned by fire.  This actually proves a lot of thing, that there are absolutes, that I can know the world beyond my mind, and that morality is absolute (an undeniable proof that occurs to us when we start pleading for a common morality [because we, “burner” and “burnee,” are equally human]) so as to get the other person to stop when they pressing the flame to our flesh.  One may be able to convince oneself of this burning if it only happens once but somewhere between now and 4447 times we will be convinced.  And even if for some reason that person (who died from the burning) was not convinced were I to start the question of “to burn or not to burn” with everyone who watched the first question I am pretty certain that no one would ever disagree.  I would not disbelieve.  Of course, the question is not asked dispassionately as if it is happening to someone in general but happening to each and every one of us individually.  The same tests of logic could use drowning, breathing, eating, bleeding, chopping, stabbing, falling, crashing, etc, etc, etc.



Logic is learned from the basic motion of infants (our survival is proof) and remains the truth (for us) until we die.  Philosophy (which begins its function with adults who know how to walk and speak) thus fails to explain what it purports when it fails to remember the lessons of logic that are sown into our flesh.

Changing the Paradigm of Nonduality

A reply to the question: What is your personal definition of non-duality?

https://www.quora.com/What-is-your-personal-definition-of-non-duality


I  think we have the wrong concept of nonduality.  While understanding the “universe is neither dual or non-dual” (to the level of hard monism) is useful but we also need to understand the conceptuality that the universe is “both” dual "and" nondual at the same moment.  Everything in the universe is in the universe.  Look down my throat as far as you can go and there is no place that is not this universe.  At the same time I am in absolute dual “and” nondual relationships with, for example, water.  This must be so or I will die.  I am composed of water.  My very flesh is water.  I must drink water.  Water is needed to grow food I eat that is (the food) composed of water.  Water itself composed of molecules (oxygen) but at the same time try taking a gallon bubble of air a thousand feet deep in water.  While I have to drink water too much water is toxic.  Water can crush me, drown me, smash me, float me, cool me boil me, etc.  Water is soft when falling from a short distance and is hard as concrete when falling from a great distance.  Water itself can crash into me with enough speed that it will crush my body, will cause me to leak out the water in me and crush the cells in my flesh, bursting the parts of the flesh that contained water.  The substance of water is  like a thousand other things in this world.  Our personal life require "both" "or."

We must be permeable and impermeable, open and closed, desperately contain desperately resist, and at the same time only contain a limited amount of that (any) substance (the we must contain and resist).  We must have the conceptuality of a metaphysics that has all of the differences and likenesses at the same time.   All the same issues will arise in the construction of the (boundaries) self of every individual person.  I must have physical boundaries and physical holes.  I must have conceptual boundaries to hold to any specific belief (about right and wrong) an have conceptual holes to change my beliefs about what is right and wrong (by learning, by error, by experience, by communication with another person that informs me that that behavior [that I did] was experienced as a violation to their person).  We need boundaries that change and stay the same, has the ability to  accept and resist: give and deny emotions, love, anger, sympathy, and thousands of other things.  Of course, I can give a thousand hours of love and not have lost one ounce, one atom, of love.

I have to be able to resist the ontological cohesiveness of baseballs as object or be struck with damaging force and be able to "perform" with baseballs in a nondualistic relationship to throw, hit or catch the baseball.  My skill at performance with a baseball will be my ability to engage in a nondual dance with the ball.  At the same time I dance with the ball I am submerged in objects that follow the same rules of existence, like the bat and my hands and my feet and the ground and objects like gravity, the wind, and the fact of my own momentum: the speed, momentum and direction of the ball (as an existence of its own) in interchange with me.

Our metaphysics has to be rich enough, have enough depth, to take all this in.  The questions of dual and nondual has to take all these problems into consideration or we might be forced to live in a poverty of space.  It is fortunate we do most of this unconsciously.

My definition of nonduality is that it describes a performative maturity that thinks and acts (and thus dances with) all these things.  Nonduality is like dancing well.  It looks to me, having studied both Eastern and Western philosophy, that we have the wrong concept of nonduality.

(This has been edited from original)

Questioning Reason Again

I saw this website when looking for things interesting on the internet.  It considers ideas that are very important and for that reason I decided to reply.

http://www.lawfulrebel.com/reason-guide-knowledge/

Reason: Our Only Guide to Knowledge


My problem is not with "reasoning" but the concept that human inherently have a "thing" within them that filters internal and eternal contact with the world, self, and body.  I believe you have conflated the ontological, absolutes in the world like rocks and trees and trucks and fire and starvation, with the epistemological.  At birth, epistemologically, human beings begin at zero.  Logic and reasoning are learned because we are minds and bodies with right and left hands (feet, knees, elbows, and buttocks), that fall down and get up, move objects and are moved as objects.  The learning that is made possible by these things can in the future, through practiced, make possible the act of reasoning.  This all happens at the point of intersection of the all of these factors.  Even the instrument that we learn reasoning through itself is an unknown entity without the accumulation of experiences.  We can acquire the skill of reasoning because we have bodies that cannot stop acting in the world.  Not only is this knowledge learned it must forever be updated, a continuation of examining past experience with present predicament as best we can.  The problem of the necessity to re-update knowledge faces difficulties from every direction, whether from confusions, distortions, complexity, injury, etc. The further difficulty is knowing how to apply previous skills to unknowable future incidences in the world (as within the self) of greater and greater complexity.  Philosophy, generally, has based its reasoning on knowledge that it does not have because it is "run" by adults (who have already learned to crawl, walk, which holes to feed and which holes to evacuate, learned how to speak, read and write, all of which are huge tasks at the time when we are all mired in ignorance).  All knowledge has an objective and a subjective component.   It is education (such as training, among the many different things) that differentiates between fighter pilots, neurosurgeons, and professional baseball pitchers as compared with the everyone else.  It is also education (personal experiences) that allow us have the "maturity" to deal with failure, suffering and loss without falling to alcohol, drugs or suicide.  Reasoning without experience is no better than experience without reasoning.  Even then it all this starts at zero.

(This is an edited version)

Russia Election Influencing Strategy

 Published, Letter to the Editor, Daily Mountain Eagle, Jasper, AL Tuesday, May 31, 2017 

There is a general belief, including CIA Director Clapper's statement, "all U.S. intelligence agencies agree," the goal of the Russians was to elect Trump.  I disagree with this "conclusion" not on political reasons or collected data, but strategically: where are the Russians in this?

First reason, does the above "conclusion" answer whether Russians have a greater "reason" for Hillary or Trump to be President?  Russians care nothing about U.S. politics unless it affects them.  They care about rebuilding Russian national power to the status of the old Soviet Union.  In this election which candidate did the Russians perceive advantageous?  There must be a Russian goal for the tampering; knowing that goal is a better determiner in exposing "influencing" than collecting data proving Hillary or Trump.

Second reason, a Russian logic for election tampering for Hillary and not for Trump is because is she was touted as "Obama's third term."  This is based on the Obama foreign policy of withdrawal from conflict, which supports Russian Goals.  They would not want this o change, if given a choice they would prefer to act as they please.  The purpose of Russian election influencing would be U.S. non-interference.

Third reason, Hillary has political history, from problems as a Secretary of State to bad security judgments: with Trump its guesswork.  Additionally, the Democrats and the Left would limit Hillary with an unwillingness to support direct military action.  Trump will lead a party eager to militarily punish Russian wrongdoing.  The personalities, the history, the beliefs, the parties, and the peoples they represent give a clear reason why the Russians would "influence" the election for Hillary not Trump.

Strategically, the election tampering is a short-term goal, where a passive, weaken, non-aggressive, non-involved in foreign affairs U.S. nation helps Russia's long-term goal's.  The Russians would've chosen Hillary.    

PIC

Further Thoughts on Russian Strategy

Written two years later after continued investigation 02- 19, 2019

When the above letter was published on May 30, 2017 (Daily Mountain Eagle) I did not think that almost two years later the debate over collusion between Donald Trump and the Russians would remain unresolved.  Of course, I do understand the Democratic Party's political motivation for continuing the investigation.  At the same time I am surprised and disappointed that in all the debate neither proponents or opponents of Donald Trump  have looked at this in terms of Russian motives.  This should have been one of the first questions.

Any investigation into collusion ought first have been looked at in terms of a Russian strategy.  Russian goals, to be unopposed as they attempt to absorb more land, ought to have been paramount in deciding whether the Russian's would have chosen to assist candidate Clinton or Trump.  The Russians, like most every other nation in the world, have a stake in who will be the president of the United States.  This includes political and military support, financial aide, and trade status.  The reasons for this is endless.    

It would not surprise me that the Russians would have created the appearance of collusion no matter which candidate was elected.  To weaken the will of the United States to oppose Russian goals would be an ongoing strategy.  It would not surprise me that the Russians are still involved in political interference, and in contradictory directions, to create confusion on both sides of American politics, Democrat and Republican.  

This all suggests to me that Russian goals and strategies to achieve those goals would have been paramount in the Russian's deciding who to assist candidate Clinton or Trump.  This does not even require collusion to occur on the part of any individual but would be a fact of ongoing election interference at any level, state and federal.

As much as I did then when I was writing the piece I believe the Russians are laughing themselves silly at their strategic victory.  What I did not include in my discussion in my first letter, which is even more true now, after the election  the Russians would have every reason to continue their strategy in a variety of  different ways.  Whether their was collusion or not it is to Russian advantage to create that illusion that their was collusion.  And even if that strategy fails achieve some legal damage the incitement of internal conflict is already a win.  The Russians are probably already devising and implementing their next plans of attack.

The strategy has always been and will continue to be to weaken the United States, and targeting President Trump as corrupt is one method to achieve that.  It makes it so much easier that this Russian strategy dovetails with the goals of the Democrat Party.  Not only does this suspicion  weaken the office of President, and the Republican party that he represents, it calls into question the nation's integrity and moral status.  The Russians would know the left-leaning political proclivity of the American media and that with this news information would itself create immense internal division.  Among other reasons it was the difference between the two political parties and the media that would have informed them which candidate that they would want to win.

I do not doubt that after the election the Russians did their best to manufacture the suspicion that Trump colluded.  They are still doing this.  True strategic thinking would be to aim at creating as many conflicting stories as possible for the purpose of maximizing confusion.  Of course this strategy requires plausible deniability for the Russians, all the while looking guilty.  The denial itself is done strategically.  This is war by pure manipulation.  The goal is to weaken the opponent internally so they will be less able to function, and even more problematically when a crisis arises.   The more the Democrats and Republicans fight over this issue the greater the Russian strategic win.

Eternal Companions

Submitted, Letter to the Editor, Daily Mountain Eagle, Jasper, AL

Daniel Gardner’s editorial July 23, 2019 was very inspirational.  I admire devout persons like the astronauts Mr. Gardner describes.  Long ago I came to believe that human beings were created to be God’s “eternal companions.”  This is more meaningful now since contracting an incurable disease.  The times I almost died brought about a reexamination of perspectives.  Suffering taught me to be grateful to God for what I have been given even if at times I would prefer otherwise.

I could easily become angry at the unfairness.  It is common to believe in God based on preconceptions.  In Robert Anderson’s The Silence of God, he says there is a common belief that “if the Christian God were not a myth He would not remain passive in the presence of all the suffering and wrong that prevail in the world” (Anderson 29).  Compare this with the truth about benefits and adversities found in the New Testament: it “rains on the just and the unjust” (Matthew 5:45).

It would be easy to be envious of others’ successes.  I have learned that our abilities are gifts and have no permanence.  Confidence based on believing we deserve the good life is an illusion.  We are responsible for our responses in the worse possible moments.  I have attempted to accept the life I have graciously and be able to say, like Paul, “I have learned, in whatsoever state I am in, therewith to be content” (Philippians 4:11).

I cannot deny that my reason for my confidence is because I know this life is an incredibly small portion of eternity.  Whenever I think my standing in life is not exactly as I would wish it, but I look toward the infinite panorama of the future.  Sometimes I feel just like an astronaut strapped in and counting down.

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