metonymy4u

All that can be judged must be given in experience. Theory without sensation is empty.

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These days I’ve been wondering: if light cannot be a part of the universe we live in, how can we see it so easily?

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There is one thought that is often a harbinger of disaster in therapy: “This patient is too fragile for therapy.” Many variations are expressed: “too much resistance,” “too fixated,” “too much unconscious hostility,” “too manipulative,” “no motivation,” etc. I find it interesting that I can remember only 1 or 2 patients about whom I’ve had that thought, but countless colleagues and professional peers about whom I’ve had that thought. As if we reserve our special words only for the “other,” and never for ourselves.

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Oughts, being derived from is’s, are just as contingent as any is that is or may be. It seems to me.

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It seems to me that many modern psychologists (Freud, Beck, Chomsky, Hayes) have done what Descartes did: they have started looking for causal powers in something that is manifest to humans and not to animals. These authors have also, like Kant, renamed the name of the given and transferred its home to the mind, to the social order, to language, to cognition, etc. They want you to believe they have climbed a new mountain, returned with a new in-sight, or dis-covered a new rule. But a relational frame is no more interesting, as a cause, than the id, original sin or a dream visited demon. All are events given in experience, none more or less real than my computer or the hills outside my window.

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From the outside, it is easy to assume that sitting zazen is a very passive activity. But this is simply an illusion cast by the fact that behavior has become mostly private – gone covert. Feelings, urges, thoughts are all as real as any other event we can speak of.

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I meet a lot of people who think that human behavior either is or should be governed by rules. Plenty of famous philosophers also believe and believed this. Leibniz and (maybe) Kant to name two. Hayes, Freud and Beck to name another two. Yet, I have doubts.

Consider the following sequence:

01110100 01101111 00100000 01100010 01100101 00100000 01101111 01110010 00100000 01101110 01101111 01110100 00100000 01110100 01101111 00100000 01100010 01100101

It expresses one of the most famous phrases in the English language (or so I’m told). Can’t read it? Ok, here’s what it (supposedly) says: “To be or not to be.” Still can’t read it? Well, that’s strange, I just told you what it says. Why can’t you read it? Why can’t you just follow the rules and read it? Are you strange or something? A weird sort of person? Not normal? Why doesn’t this make sense?

The problem, I think, is that no one has ever been able to make sense of sense. No one has ever been able to live life, mean meaning, draw drawing, sing singing, or dis-cover discovering. Come to think of it, that would be a pretty good definition of God.

A God that tortures people who wonder about God.

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Are abstractions real or the objects that are abstracted from real?

Plato: The objects are real, seeing them is difficult.
Aristotle: Actually, seeing them is impossible.
Augustine: God made the objects and gave humans the capacity to speak of them.
Descartes: I agree with Auggie, except I think therefore I God.
Leibniz: Objects are the same, abstractions are different.
Kant: I am rationally bound to agree with Aristotle and Descartes.
Kierkegaard: Yes, depending on your experience.
Berkeley: The objects are thought by God.
Hegel: The objects are thinking through history.
Nietzsche: Objects are power. Reality is power.
Freud: Resistance is futile.
Heidegger: What objects?
Sartre: I agree with Soren.
Skinner: I agree with Soren too, and I’m gonna prove it.
Wittgenstein: uh…WTF?

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I take Searle’s Chinese room argument, the Turing test and Wittgenstein’s Tractatus to be demonstrations of how pragmatically limited are questions about consciousness, reality, freedom, thought, intent, etc…One can argue to a multiverse of endless noumena and still get run over by a bus.

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I’m thinking all definitions are quite circular. In the way a circle is. That is, circularly circular.

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