Knowledge vs. Experience?

 Individual experience is the foundation of reality as Sartre approached it, yet Tillich looked more toward reality-meanings as the worthwhile prospect. Subjective dynamism in psychological pragmatism with mind being a kind of fiction is another philosophical approach.

 I am skeptical about gurus or whatever that advocate reliance simple on personal experience so that one has an amoeba-like existence. The Khmer Rouge were for ignorance-taking things back to the year zero. In the information age it really wouldn't place one in a good economic vantage point. Rulers sometimes like subjects to contemplate their navel and swill vodka.

 Carl Jung and his greater-than-Freud- observations surpassed his teacher's interpretation of dreams. Jung's w ere archetypes such as drowning or freezing, suffocating/witch sitting on one's chest, interpretation of pulsating blood with a cask of amontillado, a plekasaurus pit and a pendulum or whatever (just joking), having an animal bite off an appendage or of a collective unconscious was one interesting approach to common experience and then having a common PTSD experience/analysis about it. Without reading Jung it would be difficult to form a good opinion about his thoughts

 Jesus Christ was/is God though. Some want to morph that into he had a special relationship as the Son to the 'Father' who is the absolute transcendent for-himself. Christology is a field in-itself. He often quoted scripture and had a relationship with God who is the source of all experience.

 The Buddha aka Sakkyamuni was a brilliant prince from a decaying social order without upward mobility who went out to find his own way to relate to the pervasive social changes of his day. He obviously was familiar with the Vedic tradition and developed his own form of Stoic pragmatism to the challenges of reality.

 I think it is a common experience for people to associate all learning with authorities or hierarchical structures and then seek to controvert everything spiritually in some sort of a liberation process. The United States though was about individual freedom and liberty to learn for-oneself from whatever sources. Intellectual capital is a valuable thin. People make errors in regarding knowledge and in placing it's value in relation to personal experience. One doesn't want to be a programmed minion and instead needs to think for-oneself. One can learn to read, learn to tie knots, build boats, learn how to build electro-magnetic mass drivers or whatever and compartmentalize that knowledge without becoming a robot regurgitating data.

 Emerson and the transcendentalists were well educated as was Ben Franklin, William James and so many others. It is important to free oneself intellectually and pursue one's interests on a disciplined course following truth where it leads rather than to simply rise in a hierarchical social role that requires politically correct course curriculum, yet that can be very costly.

 It's an ancient role too-Socrates mentioned that the unexamined life isn't worth living and that probably is right. Jesus said that those who save their lives would lose them, yet if losing them for His sake will find them.

 The founders of the United States sought to free man from the oppressive burdens of class hierarchies yet corporations and government today informalize methods for driving government to become in opposition to democracy and to call corporate or social hierarchical control democratic. It is through education that is free than one can learn of the macro-social problems stifling rational social response to common challenges. The answers may not exist except as one makes a good judgment upon the basis of abstract learning as well as personal experience.

 Maybe its like flying an aircraft in zero visibility without relying just on one's personal senses to know up/down or guess how far from the mountain that is somewhere ahead one's location is.

 One cannot reinvent or rediscover all of history and philosophy with personal experience, and if people had to invent everything anew they wouldn't have clothes to wear and would need to hunt the fur-bearing mammals for hides. The world is a fly-by-wire kind of place today given its resources and demographics and the effort to conserve as much human liberty and resource health as possible requires brilliance as well as the ignorance of all social learning for two or three minutes a week to honor the tradition of trial and error development of science and liberty.

 I would agree that a priesthood of believers rectification of the ecclesiastical structures would support a better Christian experience for most today when even some Christians might be uncomfortable in churches where the congregants have a higher standard of living and go for other reasons than discipleship.

On 'The Unconditional'

The unconditional that Tillich writes of is set off the world culture for-itself. It is something comparable to Augustine's City of God/City of Man relation. Tillich's view is fascinating for many reasons yet especially so for it historical, cultural and philosophical dichotomies. If one reads the German idealist philosophers as well as Toynbee and Augustine then it is easy to appreciate Tillich's synthesis and analysis of the role of religion, philosophy of religion, culture and scientific-empirical thinking and actualization within social structure and the world.

Of course I believe that Jesus Christ is the only  way to renormalize human being with God. Tillich though is quite a bit more radical in his world view. He also seems happy enough to make the unconditional available to several religious beleifs, yet he has different meanings for faith and even topics such as 'the existence of God' and so forth.

Presently I am considering theonomy and autonomy in the context of the auto nomos (extent of law) and cultural practices such as the corresponding decline of creativity concurrent with lack of faith. The unconditional seems to be requisite for social creativity. I may buy a copy of 'What is Religion' eventually so I can grubby it up in S.E. Alaska along with 'Ontological Relativity' and a few other books sometime.

U.S. Unemployment Rate Surges Upward to 8.3%

The U.S. unemployment rate in July moved up to 8.3 percent with tens of millions more that have work staying in low-paying jobs with few benefits.

The U6 figure of people without work or underemployed and would like to find a good job even if discouraged trying to get on with a state government a contractor in Afghanistan, a new Chick Fillet in Boston to rival, Boston Chicken and Col. Sanders and etc. is somewhere around 20%.

http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2012/08/03/Unemployment-Rate-Rises-to-8-3-Percent

Descartes and the 'Discourse on The Method' Today

Descartes was a professional mercenary and during an extended stay in Bavaria he had an opportunity to use a sauna a lot. Evidently it was a kind of stove that one could get in and bake during the colder winters of the time. In such a peaceful environment he naturally experienced a kind of detachment and could let his mind wander and settle back to first principles of thought.

So he wondered in that sauna how he could be certain of his existence. Without mind and its thought he would not exist. That is his existence would be as uniformed as that of a log or a stone. He encountered the problems of dynamic subjectivism-he thinks therefore he exists, yet the existence is a phenomenon itself and like the Zen scholar he would need to wonder if it means anything at all.

http://www.philosophypages.com/hy/4b.htm

Today the pragmatist side of popular political philosophy can sing that 'there is no such thing as the real world, I am invincible' and so forth. Jean Paul Sartre in Being and Nothingness takes Descartes' French rationalism and describes direct experience without making metaphysical judgments about it.

Sartre was a French rationalist describing the phenomenon of mind and thought. Science or knowledge is a product of thought and intelligence. Intellect has a foundation in mass and energy, and W.V.O. Quine too assented to mind within a framework of philosophical physicalism. That leaves the question of what matter is really comprised of aside. One rationalist tradition builds on Descartres' method of critical analysis.

One cannot organize knowledge, provide an easy way to find all the prime numbers to infinity or form good science without thought.

post-script on body-mind dualism

The context is that thought exists in addition to things physically experienced such as the body. 

There obviously are numerous philosophical opinions about the nature of reality that thought experiences. Roderick Chilsom wrote a nice little book named 'The Problem of the Criterion' the title of which encapsulates a little of the paradox of finding some ultimate thing to base reality upon. One has Lao Tzu's man or a butterfly and Bishop Berkley's Three Dialogues and also Membrane Theory with a potentially infinite number of dimensions of which a few are selected.

There isn't even an ultimate particle or field to base anything from, and so Christians and physicists tend to offer the same opinion that the eternal preceded the temporal in some form. It isn't necessary to get to bound down in the objects vs. mind paradigm since no one can say more than relatively what either/or are made of.

Vedral's book on reality as information akin to holograms I suppose that are entangled probabilities from a quantum field that isn't actually the Higgs Field is interesting. One cannot point to this or that cosmological theory or abnegation of exteriority and mass energy-for itself and base speculate persuasively that either the mind or matter are not actual.

I had a unusual experience a year ago with a balance and consciousness fade out at the same time. It was worse than sea-sickness (I had that a couple times when first I went out to sea) and generally I like to forget about it.

I wondered what caused the experience of my mind seaming to break up into quarter sections, spin and dissolve like going down a drain before I fell over to the left and nearly but not quite became unconscious before slowly recovering on the ground. I think I ate to many chocolate donuts and chocolate bars and that in some way I developed a chocolate toxic reaction. I quit eating chocolate for good and the problem went away. 

Yet chocolate may not have been to blame, for it turned out that I had an abscessed tooth that made a passage into my nasal cavity, and I think that is in some way connected to the eustachian tubes in the inner ear. These medical issues and a lung/airway issue that lasted a more than a year camping in Anchorage Alaska provided a little experience with the temporality of mind and its relation to the body. Certainly I am convinced that the mind is a nice experience reliant upon the body.

Keeping one's body and mind in good shape is a good idea.

On the Philosophy of Religion

Reading Paul Tillich's book 'What is Religion' recently brought a lot of new insights. Of course one can regard Heidegger and Husserl as phenomenologists searching for essents or primal cores of being, yet Tillich wrote that metaphysics is fundamentally a religious act.Tillich differentiated a greater physics of the unknown from the transcendent mysticism or metaphysics that one might find in' The Cloud of Unknowing' or even contemplations of monism as a manifestation of God.

The philosophy of religion is a philosophical activity-intensely so, and Tillich explains very well  how that is so. Jesus Christ as a transcendent human being is obviously philosophically relevant, since philosophers search for the truth in what exists. In some regards true religion is one with the deeper philosophical insights into reality. The cultural manifestations of religion in some instances have more in common with culture than with the mystic or rational philosophical insights that one may have.

One example is that of the great neo-Platonist named Plotinus who wrote the Enneads on The One. Like other neo-Platonists he had an awareness of the mystical heyschasm of direct insight into the nature of The One transcending experience. The Orthodox authorities of course eventually declared heyschasm to be heresy on the premise that one cannot have a direct revelation of God.

That is a different problem than the philosophy of religion of course. Yet I can imagine driving a car through Utah and suddenly experiencing a different Universe where the profound Spirit of Truth has a presence before descending back into the integrated beingness of 'this world'. That kind of experience could be described as direct revelation  yet possible not for The Spirit is a presence yet not directly perceived even in a paranormal space-time context that is itself something of a revelation something like Swedenborg might have described.

Tillich's delineation of the philosophy of religion in an ontology different from the critical-analytical paradigm for science, the phenomenalism of philosophers such as Hegel and  Kant and the pragmatists does afford the opportunity to select for-oneself the sort of worldview to develop. Well, there may be some danger in writing about Jesus Christ in a philosophical area I suppose-atheists can make their way into such places perhaps from the background of the pragmatist sect of secularists regarding thought as a temporal manifestation without significance except as it serves to perfect human existence. There were and are philosophers that are simply cognitive nominalists wiithout a trace of Platonism.

Philosophically minded people should tolerate opinions including mentions of Jesus Christ affirmatively even if they don't rise to the level of 'preaching'. It might have been fun to do some preaching as did Ralph Waldo Emerson part-time of course. That opportunity doesn't arise in the humble writings of some philosophers. One can consider the party line, the thought police, the C.P.S.U. caliber media or the cynics and discern existential modes of behavior that it is possible to be philosophical about, yet a philosophy of religion has a deeper human interest since it transcends our own grounds of existence as physics beings with a mind thinking in-the-world.

Democrat Party Ups Price of Membership to Abortion & Gay Marriage

Some wonder if the Democratic Party plans to make homosexual marriage a part of its official party platform is representative of a focus on social issues and litmus tests for support including homosexuality and abortion that make the party a limited tent, exclusive and unconcerned about economics that are inclusive of all American citizens.

http://www.thenewamerican.com/culture/family/item/12278-democrats-to-add-legalizing-same-sex-marriage-to-party-platform

If gender is a factor in economic planning, it would entail that there is something to differentiate from, and I would not myself say that all individuals of a sex have a uniform template for economic formulations.

President Obama has made a Cage aux Folles Hope-a-Dope economic method his economic modus vivendi: Build up the national debt to 21 trillion dollars using the put it on the charge card of the rich. A homosexual economist named John Maynard Keynes invented that policy after World War One when the rich ranks were decimated by war. Cambridge University students had about a 70% casualty rate. 

Do homosexuals have different secular interests from families? Would they have a greater interest in disposability, travel or oil consumption. Do they have different interests in providing for children or grandchildren, inheritence of currency or property than straight people? Are their attitudes toward illegally immigrating male aliens different than those of straight males? If so would that effect labor supply in the U.S.A.? Are homosexuals working in some industries more than others with a different participation rate than straight workers?

There may be gender effects in macro-economic theory. I know that homosexual marriage supporters take direct economic retributive actions now and then, as if they were an oppressive class themselves. velopment of economic policies. It is difficult to say how much the homosexual factor effects effects national economic development.  I only took an intro to sociology course and haven't been reading in ongoing research into the sociological distribution of U.S. homosexuals in economic fields.

Hitler, Reagan, Bush II and Obama have all used variants of Keynsianism. It's only a short-term fix and dumps long-range troubles that seem to be building up now.

The Obama administration has made homosexual marriage and support a fundametal feature of his administration. He gave nearly free health benefits to homosexual federal workers sex live-in partners, has celebrated gay pride day in the military, made homosexuality in the military an acceptable practice and so forth. The homosexual Barney Franks was in charge of the House Finance Committee for the first part of the Obama administration, and so these real facts become part of the problem about how to repair the nation's finances, and to understand how the administration and politicians in general can be so incompetent.

Ishango Bone of Zaire/Uganda and the Prime Numbers

 In 6500 B.C. someone evidently carved several prime numbers on a bone and it was discovered in 1960. Some speculate the bone may be as old as 20,000 b.c. It was found in Central Equatorial Africa along Lake Edward near the present Uganda-Zaire border. Lake Edward is one of the head-water sources of the Nile. One wonders if that isn't where Arthur C. Clark's real mathematically inclined humans where from carving prime numbers into a baboon femur.

 Obviously one wonders what happened to those early mathematical genius'. Did they wander to New York to become 11 dimensional quantitative stock traders or where they aliens that returned to the shining planet above the hill leaving only a grisly bone scratchpad toy from their hunting party?

 A prime number is any integer that cannot be made by multiplying two other numbers to form it. All numbers that are not prime can be made by multiplying prime numbers together. I suspect that all prime numbers if divided in half end up with a .5 on the end, yet not all numbers cut in half with a .5 portion are prime.

 http://www.math.buffalo.edu/mad/Ancient-Africa/ishango.

 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ishango_bone

 All numbers are proportions formed by adding one standard integer unit to the number before and forming the next higher number.  Positive whole numbers have different quantitative values in various reference frames.

 As numbers increase in size the difference of adding one more standard unit becomes a diminishing comparative value to preceding numbers. Adding 1 to 2 is large. Adding one to 100 is less significant to 100.

 One could imagine stretching a ribbon or line representing the number value from a point and then looping it back to the starting point. If one cuts that loop in half (divides the prime number in half) it should always have a value with .5 A possible defining characteristic yet not an exclusive one. There are numbers such as 15 that if cut in half have a .5 element (7.5), yet it is also possible to multiply 3 times 5 to get 15. A prime number cannot be multiplied by other numbers to generate it (with the obvious nominal representation of 1 times the prime number itself).

 Mathematicians have a better cultural tool kit to use for  finding prime numbers than I.

 Numbers growing into a spiral that extends infinitely might take different values retrospectively as relativistic effects stretch or compact the spiral-perhaps not equally everywhere on the spiral. One wonders if dark energy or gravity might not be a consequence of differentials of physics in structures that change space-time proportionately to primes.

 Prime number locations that would theoretically exist could be altered with the forces acting upon the spiral, and with recombination of local position values through extra-dimensional junctions.

 The subject of prime numbers and of the quest to solve the riddle of how mathematicians might solve Reimann's Hypothesis-a method to determine all of the prime numbers I suppose through algorithmic compresability (an abbreviated style) is the topic of a book I am presently reading called 'The Music of the Primes'. The uninteresting ideas I've advanced here except for the Ishango Bone mention aren't blamable on that text.

 What if gravity is shaped in relation to prime numbers. Gravitational field strengths could rise in relation to some subtle proportion that is dilated in space-time that it warps. It would be great if one could solve that sort of criterion for primes much less gravity yet it does stim one to think a little more.

 What if gravity, gravitons or gravity string quanta can only act in three or four dimensions and when piling up on the dimensional boundaries crimp up space-time warping it? Dimensions in some string and membrane conjectures are not all of the same size, so an inference can be advanced rightly or wrongly that some dimensions are porous to gravity and others not. If gravity warps up some dimensions of space-time yet not all, it might be possible to slip small enough data through to the extra dimensions should one want to send a message to Sally over there (if that is where Sally is).

I neglected to mention two salient salient facts about prime numbers.

 First; the number two is prime because of default. There isn't another number less than two amidst whole numbers that amounts to anything besides itself when multiplied by available whole numbers of those before two - one times one equals one. So two is the sole even number that is prime. It's a prestigious title for that humble number to wear-the only even prime amidst an infinite number of oddballs.

 Well, enough trash talking of two.

The second fact I didn't mention is that there is a million dollar bounty on solving the Riemann Hypothesis with a proof. It is one of the seven Clay Millennium math prizes the solutions of which are worth $1 million dollars apiece.

Stimulated a little by the prospect of winning a million can bring creative ideas. Non-mathematicians such as myself might find it simpler to visualize possible solutions to the Riemann hypothesis instead of calculating them.

I guess one could imagine the infinite series of whole numbers being in descending rather than an ascending order. Consider numbers starting at a zero ring level attached and increasing down an infinite line into an abyss. Maybe the ring has an infinite number of lines descending from it along the edge with vast intervals between them so they won't get tangled with experimental configurations or instructions given to each line to direct its shape.

In the first line hanging from the ring each at every prime number except for two (that will be treated as non-prime for practical reasons) instructions are given to the line to make a turn in some direction in proportion to the percent of change the prime number makes from the prior number to the value of the line total at its point.

That sort of schematic might make a nice pattern. With an infinite number of lines with prime numbers known extending to some computer-friendly extent that is finite, and with those lines given different instructions for changing course when reaching a prime it might be possible to effect quantitative analysis of the lines and perhaps find a pattern indicating a value predicting the location of primes in the future like Jack Ryan predicted Capt. Remus' turns in 'Hunt for Red October'.

Jesus had 12 disciples to start; yet one was pre-destined for betrayal so He was left with the prime number of eleven. Some might say that The Lord and Judas Iscariot needed to be included as the original number of associated religious practitioners; even so that number is also prime at 13.

The 0 ring of prime number series might have line intervals based on the first prime's 50% quantitative value increase for the whole line a that point, instead of placing the lines at the location of respective primes. It could be that if prime numbers are used as locations for place whole number lines into the abyss they will grow to close together along the circle and cramp infinite spacing soon crossing over into the realm of irrational numbers behind a decimal point with their own significance for finding the proof for the Riemann hypothesis.