a) i've already stated that whether there is a big crunch or not pending is debatable. certainly infinity is at play in this universe, so perhaps the energy from the initial big bang will carry on things forever. i happen to feel that it's a cycle like all other things, so i believe there will be a big crunch, and then after that, probably another big bang and the cycle just repeats itself forever.

b) to dispute the fact that there is an unconscious is sophomoric. rather than tell you why i like jung more than freud, i'll just (perhaps annoyingly) Q&A myself:
what do you think psychology and comparative religion are? they are fields of research and study, and are (largely) scientific disciplines.

z) everyone has an unconscious that knows everything. those who pursue the arts seem to have more of a connection to it than others.
it's sort of funny to read mockery by those that offer no ideas of their own.
As in Plato, Socrates' dictum of "Know Thyself!" should be everyone's imperative.
The imperative of my mockingbirds seems to go a little something like:
KILL THE WISE ONE!
KILL THE WISE ONE!

unfortunately, locating images of the singularity that caused the Big Bang would require a transdimensional lens.

I'll see if I can drag one up, and I'll get back to you on it.

however, in the meantime, Atari is right. time (as we know it) began the instant that particles exploded into this plane of existance.

although, I do disagree with the statement that it will end. as the fabric of space-time stretches like a balloon, temporal distortion is bound to occur (but will not cease).

[edit: I see your new post now atari, and that statement is fair enough (afterall, who REALLY knows?) personally, I hope that there is a Big Cruch, infinite expansion is too depressing.

your logic has more holes han a swiss cheese.

nobody is disputing the occurrence of the big bang here. it's just that you alone claim to know what was BEFORE it. which is an outlandish claim. if you wanna believe that in private, fine, but once you post it in public it's open for business.

now i'm not disputing "the existence of the unconscious", whatever maybe your definition of it, just your lunatic claim that it knows everything! at which i must, again, laugh.

PROVE ME WHAT WAS "BEFORE" THE BIG BANG, AND PROVE ME YOUR UNCONSCIOUS KNOWS BETTER THAN PARADE ITS LUNACY ON THE INTERNET, OH PROPHET, AND I'LL BELIEVE YOU.

i'm not "yelling", i'm just putting it all in caps so you don't miss the point.

my unconscious knows everything also... in truth we all share the same unconscious, a fact we delude ourselves from with the veil of maya... plato said so in his sock puppet dialogues and the cave shadow stories... so it must be true.

exactly, m1rr0r dash, the an individual's unconscious and the collective unconsious are obviously related but even moreso than most may think (if they do at all haha). in actuality, they are the same unconscious. not only in philosophy, but in life. it's just that human beings cannot ever truly fully grasp the contents.

glad to read your post too, floatingslowly. you seem to be the only one that gets that part.

i've decided to no longer give the mockingbirds any creedence or treat them to any further rebuttals. if you two (mirror and floating) ever want to pold along with me about the universe, i'm up for it most anytime to do so with you.

I believe that he was responding to me dickering about the "Big Crunch"


someday, I might. when / if I do, I'll be sure and thank you in my nobel acceptance speech.

:)


dear gawd, Atari doesn't need my help here....you kids carry on!

*snort*

science only precludes their validity when it comes to getting repeatable scientific results. the scientific method, when applied to shamanism, sceances, spirit writing, etc, has always shown them to be shams/cons/parlor tricks
science is a method of gathering information, not a cadre of old men out to demolish spirituality.

religion however,, IS a cadre of old men out to demolish freethought.

[quote=m1rr0r dash

paranormal inquiry will yield paranormal knowledge, psychoanalytic inquiry will yield psychoanalytic knowledge... that's all...[/quote]

paranormal inquiry YIELDS NOTHING!!!!! NOTHING AT ALL!

Duke university has had a department of paranormal studies for almost 60 years now. They have yet to YIELD ANYTHING AT ALLL!!!!!!! read about it.

I'm with you on that, Rob.

Like I wrote, m1rr0r dash, human beings cannot ever really fully grasp the unconscious contents.

Those that claim paranormal powers like "psychics" and "channelers" betray any credibility when they proffer knowledge that is essentially unknowable in the detail that they describe. They are quite foolish, and those that follow them are surely fools.

And this is the essential reason why many of these charlatans now go by the title of an "intuitive." It's an easier sell, since, you know, we all have the potential ability to be at least somewhat intuitive at times.

"Be still, and know that I am God." - Psalms 46:10

atari, I will admit being skeptic and a cynic at heart, but I do understand that shamanism/ritual/religion can be a path to enlightenment, and a path to metaphysical knowledge. I am down with that.
However, I see metaphysical knowledge as purely personal, which I think you have stated before, and therefore not valid to apply to the general state of humanity or the universe.

I personally do not agree with your take on the "unconscious" but I personally feel that WILL is an energy a force, and that human WILL by virtue of our huge and complex brains, probably can and does exert influence on the world around us.

The mind is holographic. the brain is set up holographically, in some sense. there have been studies done on lizard, where they take out their brains, and then put half of the brain back in, and the lizard can function at 90-98% capacity, even though it is missing half of it's physical brain. they ahve also emptied out lizard's skulls, BLENDED their brains in a blender, and poured the blended brain matter back into the lizards, and the lizards FUNCTIONED at around 35-40% capacity. Incredible!

if our brains/minds actually do function as holographic information storage systems then this would help explain the pervading sense that humans (and as far as we know, ONLY humans) feel of something greater than ourselves existing outside of and inside of ourselves.

it is all quite odd.

Link for that study please.

i hope you understand that when i say science precludes the validity of aesthetic or poetics, i don't mean they are mutually exclusive... they are both valuable tools suited to different tasks and both have made valuable contributions to understanding the world.

but... repeatable results make for mediocre paintings... un-repeatable results make for iconic cultural images that resonate for generations...


....also, according to your definition (cadre of old men out to demolish freethought...), my thesis committee is a religion.

true, human beings cannot ever really fully grasp the unconscious contents. but poking around in the dark hardly requires psychic superpowers, just basic psychoanalysis...

of course !@#$%! will tell you they're essentially the same thing.

let me see what I can find. I read it in books, not online, so I will have to search for a paper.

I agree; except to say science doesn't 'preclude' the validity; science deals with truth(-values), which isn't quite the same as qualitative assertions. 'Validity' is applied to the technique of scientific exploration, not the results qua results.

Re-reading Kant's 3rd lately - now there's a book that anyone talking about aesthetics should read...

perhaps it would be more accurate to say that the scientific method denies the validity of aesthetic judgements.

..the only kant i've read is the prolegomena... but one of these days, i'll get deeper into it...

my advice...don't bother with kant. everything you need to know about kant can be found in will durant haha.

oh...he's going on about aesthetics in that one, Glice? that could be interesting i suppose.

treat us to a few good words from it...maybe?

when i said i haven't read kant, i mean my unconscious already knows all of kant's writings and i have no need to go and purchase a stack of paper to find anything out about it... i just got the prolegomena cause i liked the cover...

ahahha

kant was just dreaming the impossible dream la-la-la...just like we all are on some level.

it doesn't DENY them, it's totally unrelated to them.

jeezus johnson, what a mishmash.

Camus can do, but Sartre is Smartre

priceless

well, Scooby-Doo can doo-doo, but Jimmy Carter is smarter.

where's that homer hippie?

oh there he is




oh, too slow

mish-mash?

catachresis


kat-a-kree'-sis Gk. “misuse” abusio figure of abuse, abusion

mishmash. mishmash. mishmash.

You'll like this one - I was, for about 2 months, using the word Catachresis when I actually meant catechism. A linguistic irony Lacan himself would've been proud of, methinks.

Bart's right, let's none of us "have a cow."

Some lizards. I only got 15% capacity back on mine, shouldn't have used ice crush, but, De-Lish!

come on, man. that's my academic "get out of jail free" card. theoretically (rhetorically) it shoud win every argument.

in theory communism works...

From §33 "Second peculiarity of the judgment of Taste.

[...] If a man, iin the first place, does not find a building, a prospect, or a poem beautiful, a hundred voices all highly praising it will not force his inmost agreement. He may indeed feign that it pleases him in order that he may not be regarded as devoid of taste; he may even begin to doubt whether he has formed his taste on a knowledge of a sufficient number of objects of a certain kind (just as one, who believes that he recognisses in the distance as a forest, something which all others regard as a town, doubts the judgment of his own sight). But he clearly sees that the agreement of others gives no valid proof of the judgment about beauty. Others might perhaps see and observe for him; and what many have seen in one way, although he believes that he has seen it differently, might serve him as an adequate ground of proof of a theoretical and consequently logical judgment. But that a thing has pleased others could never serve as the basis of an aesthetical judgment. A judgment of others which is unfavouable to ours may indeed rightly make us scrutinise our own with care, but it can never convince us of its incorrectness. There is therefore no empirical ground of proof which would force a judgment of taste upon anyone. "

and that is because BEAUTY LIES IN THE EYE

as the lovely kim gordon sez


taste/aesthetics/value judgements, are all purely personal, just as much a result of nature as of nurture.

VERY WELL DONE at reaching a conclusion based on having read ONE paragraph of a VERY LONG BOOK.

Unfortunately, your conclusion is wrong, and you're ACTUALLY asserting your own opinion which is by no means represented by Kant.

I think Kant does say that beauty is subjective, but he differentiates beauty from the sublime.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immanue...tic_philosophy
Kant was one of the first philosophers to develop and integrate aesthetic theory into a unified and comprehensive philosophical system, utilizing ideas that played an integral role throughout his philosophy.[47]
In the chapter "Analytic of the Beautiful" of the Critique of Judgment, Kant states that beauty is not a property of an artwork or natural phenomenon, but is instead a consciousness of the pleasure which attends the 'free-play' of the imagination and the understanding. Even though it appears that we are using reason to decide that which is beautiful, the judgment is not a cognitive judgment,[48] "and is consequently not logical, but aesthetical" (§ 1). A pure judgement of taste is in fact subjective insofar as it refers to the emotional response of the subject and is based upon nothing but esteem for an object itself: it is a disinterested pleasure, and we feel that pure judgements of taste, i.e. judgements of beauty, lay claim to universal validity (§§20–22). It is important to note that this universal validity is not derived from a determinate concept of beauty but from common sense. Kant also believed that a judgement of taste shares characteristics engaged in a moral judgement: both are disinterested, and we hold them to be universal. In the chapter "Analytic of the Sublime" Kant identifies the sublime as an aesthetic quality which, like beauty, is subjective, but unlike beauty refers to an indeterminate relationship between the faculties of the imagination and of reason, and shares the character of moral judgments in the use of reason. The feeling of the sublime, itself comprised of two distinct modes (the mathematical sublime and the dynamical sublime), describe two subjective moments both of which concern the relationship of the faculty of the imagination to reason. The mathematical sublime is situated in the failure of the imagination to comprehend natural objects which appear boundless and formless, or which appear "absolutely great" (§ 23–25). This imaginative failure is then recuperated through the pleasure taken in reason's assertion of the concept of infinity. In this move the faculty of reason proves itself superior to our fallible sensible self (§§ 25–26). In the dynamical sublime there is the sense of annihilation of the sensible self as the imagination tries to comprehend a vast might. This power of nature threatens us but through the resistance of reason to such sensible annihilation, the subject feels a pleasure and a sense of the human moral vocation. This appreciation of moral feeling through exposure to the sublime helps to develop moral character.
---
It's crazy how he gets into sub-categories of the sublime with his "mathematical" and "dynamical" sublime.

This is one wild sentence from the entry above:
This imaginative failure is then recuperated through the pleasure taken in reason's assertion of the concept of infinity.

...des gouts et des colours, on ne discute pas.

Well, quite.

Lo siento, no entiendo.

all I did was post a personal observation regarding the inability to achieve consensus as to what is :beauty" and what is not "beauty."

chills!

PWND

well done, sir..