An apology and an explanation

[QuantumTroll]

Hey Meta!

This is Zebnuts from the CARM boards. Real life (read "classes") and your board problems made it difficult to continue the discussion we were having, and I'd like to apologize for dropping off the face of Cyberspace like that...

I just want to explain some thoughts I've been having about our discussion. The fundamental problem I'm running into with you is that I'm not getting the sort of answers I want. At first glance, your Argument from TS isn't bad at all. I thought that there were some small glitches, but you'd iron them out easily if I pointed them out. As the discussion wore on, however, I came to realize that the entire thing is rife with assumptions and poorly defined concepts that only sound reasonable if the reader is a believer (or at least reads from a perspective of belief).

My training as a scientist and a mathematician have made it extremely difficult to read anything resembling a proof without a lot of skepticism. This is the hurdle that you never overcame. Every time I asked for clarification or definition, all I felt that I got was more of the same assumptions and ill-defined metaphysical terms. For example, you claimed that all Metaphysical Hierarchies have a unique top. Okay, I thought, let's try to figure out if this is true. So I tried to understand what such a hierarchy looks like, how it works, etc. But I never figured this out because Organizing Principles are so abstract that I wasn't even allowed to make up analogies or models. Instead, my only recourse was apparently to accept that these supremely abstract and ill-defined things all have a unique top - the TS. Now that I think about it, this might be the only property of metaphysical hierarchies that you were actually concrete about. To me, this positively screams sloppiness and wishful thinking.

In short, around the time when your old boards went down, I realized my disappointment with the discussion. That's why you heard nothing for a while, because I didn't know what to say...

Let me add some more perspective to this post: I'm perfectly aware that I would make a terrible philosopher, I'm ignorant of the literature, and I have no clue what I'm talking about. But I'm well versed in rigorous logical systems, and I'm telling you that your Argument from TS is far from rigorous. It might be logical, but with my current understanding I can't make that judgment. What I think you've done is to create a complex and deep fantasy, combining a bunch of just-so concepts to create a story that gives you rational warrant for belief. But without more concrete terms and definitions, it remains just a story.

I'd like to thank you for the positive, interesting, and respectful discussion, but I'm afraid it has drawn to a close. You've got 36 arguments on your site. If you're interested, we can start up another debate (I've got a problem with the Argument from the Sublime, for example).

[Metacrock]

Hey Meta!

This is Zebnuts from the CARM boards. Real life (read "classes") and your board problems made it difficult to continue the discussion we were having, and I'd like to apologize for dropping off the face of Cyberspace like that...

I just want to explain some thoughts I've been having about our discussion. The fundamental problem I'm running into with you is that I'm not getting the sort of answers I want. At first glance, your Argument from TS isn't bad at all. I thought that there were some small glitches, but you'd iron them out easily if I pointed them out. As the discussion wore on, however, I came to realize that the entire thing is rife with assumptions and poorly defined concepts that only sound reasonable if the reader is a believer (or at least reads from a perspective ofbelief).

no it's not. you have not articulated a problem. You have no formulated any logical argument pertaining to the argument itself. You haven't given me much to work against. It's mainly been me trying to explain what it's about over and over again.

My training as a scientist and a mathematician have made it extremely difficult to read anything resembling a proof without a lot of skepticism. This is the hurdle that you never overcame.

It's not my problem. You have boxed youself into a corner where you can only one stand one kind of knowledge.

Every time I asked for clarification or definition, all I felt that I got was more of the same assumptions and ill-defined metaphysical terms.

you have conditioned yourself to reject anything you think is metaphysics. you don't accept logic, you can think in terms of math and empiricism. Most of those exchanges were about trying to explain what Derrida says. I still don't know if you read my big explication of Derrida on my blog.

For example, you claimed that all Metaphysical Hierarchies have a unique top.

no, no no , nono no no no no. see you didn't listen. you are just hearing what you want to hear. you are so hyper concerned picking it apart that you can't just shut up and listen to what it says.

Okay, I thought, let's try to figure out if this is true. So I tried to understand what such a hierarchy looks like, how it works, etc. But I never figured this out because Organizing Principles are so abstract that I wasn't even allowed to make up analogies or models. Instead, my only recourse was apparently to accept that these supremely abstract and ill-defined things all have a unique top - the TS. Now that I think about it, this might be the only property of metaphysical hierarchies that you were actually concrete about. To me, this positively screams sloppiness and wishful thinking.

It's not that complicated. people think in hierarchies. they do. they think this way they do. yes, they do. they don't have always the same ones or the same ideas but they do think in terms of grouping data into a single pile and explaining that pile with a label that tells them what it is. thats not hard. that's not complicated to figure out.

you are trying t make it hard because you want to believe it's stupid.

In short, around the time when your old boards went down, I realized my disappointment with the discussion. That's why you heard nothing for a while, because I didn't know what to say...

Let me add some more perspective to this post: I'm perfectly aware that I would make a terrible philosopher, I'm ignorant of the literature, and I have no clue what I'm talking about. But I'm well versed in rigorous logical systems, and I'm telling you that your Argument from TS is far from rigorous. It might be logical, but with my current understanding I can't make that judgment. What I think you've done is to create a complex and deep fantasy, combining a bunch of just-so concepts to create a story that gives you rational warrant for belief. But without more concrete terms and definitions, it remains just a story.

I'd like to thank you for the positive, interesting, and respectful discussion, but I'm afraid it has drawn to a close. You've got 36 arguments on your site. If you're interested, we can start up another debate (I've got a problem with the Argument from the Sublime, for example).

the period at the end of SON was too higgeldy piggeldy to accomplish anything. All my discussions were disrupted. lots of loose ends I can't pick back up. The point about a single OP makes me angry but not at you. Just at the lack of time and stable conditions to discuss. But it's really a very simple point. People have complex heirarchies with lotos of levels and they have lots of organizing principles. But i think they all boil down to one if you consider reducing to them to their constituent parts. that one winds up being reason.

I'm putting up my Derridian explanation, here in this thread. please read it and try to get the idea.

[Metacrock]

This is a summary of Derrida on the Transcendental Signifier and why it "proves" the existence of God (in my special sense of "proof" that I use as "for practical purposes").


Derrida was from French North Africa, 1930-2004. here are two articles on him that will give you a basic run down:

Derrida on Wiki


Derrida in Philosophical Encyclopedia



Derrida was a student of Martin Heidegger. Derrida is the best known philosopher of recent times. Heidegger was an existentialist, then dropped that and began to call himself a "phenomenologist." Everything Derrida says came from Heidegger. Every move of decontracution is found in Heidegger, but Derrida put it together in a different package than Heidegger's.

"Deconstruction" was Derrida's babby. He invented it although one can find it's roots all over Western letters. He's plugging in elements from Heidegger, Sartre, Brintano, Nicholas of Cuza, Charles Sanders Pierce and all over the place.This is the run down on Deconstruction. I was taught Derrida by someone who had been his student in Paris in the late 60s before he moved to Yale.

Phenomenology is an attempt to place the observer at the center of awareness to allow sense data to be understood in ways that are not predetermined by preconceived categories. The idea is that the data will form its own categories. Attempts to gather sense data and heard it all into pre selected categories biases reality. In vernacular one might say "don't pigeon hole but remain open to possibilities for everything no matter how familiar or or obvious we think it might be. This attempt to pre select categories of knowledge is what Heidegger calls "Metaphysics." In this sense even science is metaphysics!

Derrida wants to explicate the end of western metaphysics,(his phrase). What does this mean? It means he, and most postmoderns, believe that the paths along which western metaphics have led us are dead ends. We have run out of metaphysics. We haven't run out of science, in the sense that there plenty of facts to look at, but in a way we have because reductionism has lowered our expectations about what we will find. But Derrida's beef is not with science. A Major segment of of postmodernists tried to attack modern science, but they were swept aside with the Alan Sokal stuff. Derrida was never one of them.

Derrida argues that Western metaphysics has always been predicated upon an organizing principal that orders reality and organizes sense data. William James Sums it up well in his Gilford Lectures:

"Plato gave so brilliant and impressive a defense of this common human feeling, that the doctrine of the reality of abstract objects has been known as the platonic theory of ideas ever since. Abstract Beauty, for example, is for Plato a perfectly definite individual being, of which the intellect is aware as of something additional to all the perishing beauties of the earth. "The true order of going," he says, in the often quoted passage in his 'Banquet,' "is to use the beauties of earth as steps along which one mounts upwards for the sake of that other Beauty, going from one to two, and from two to all fair forms, and from fair forms to fair actions, and from fair actions to fair notions, until from fair notions he arrives at the notion of absolute Beauty, and at last knows what the essence of Beauty is." 2 In our last lecture we had a glimpse of the way in which a platonizing writer like Emerson may treat the abstract divineness of things, the moral structure of the universe, as a fact worthy of worship. In those various churches without a God which to-day are spreading through the world under the name of ethical societies, we have a similar worship of the abstract divine, the moral law believed in as an ultimate object."




Derrida begins with Plato's theory of knowledge, this is the basis of Western metaphysics. Plato says that prior to birth we are in contact with the forms, thus knowledge is a matter of remembering, no learning for the first time. But then the question arises is speech closer to what we remember, or is writing? Socrates says the spoken word is closer to the ideas inside us, the memory of the forms, thus spoken word is better (more true, closer to reality) than written word. As he puts it "a writer dies his written words are like orphans since he is not there to defend them." This supremacy of the spoken word sets up a hierarchy of meaning and importance in western culture. We have come to value reason as the organizing principle of truth, as the "natural light" because it's an extension of the concept of this true Platonic knowledge. Reason becomes this overarching truth regime (Faucault's word) that organizes all reality. Everything is paired up into hierarchies, little hierarchies that fit into the big over all hierarchy, these are called "binary opossitions." They they take the form of couplets, consisting of the "true" or "correct" term and it's supplement; the false term or the unimportant addition to the "real thing." Examples are: up/down, black/white/ true/false/ male/female. Reason is construed as male and this resutls in "phalologocentrism."

Derrida's goal is to destroy hierarchies, to show that there is no truth, there is no meaning. We can't know anything. Derridian postmodernism is like archaeologists who try to piece together fragments of a broken vase. Some say "there is a vase here, we just have to fin out how the peices fit." Another says "there may be two vases." The postmodernist says "we don't have all the pieces, they may not have been a vase, it may be 16 vases, we can't know, there is no final answer, it's always going to be a jumble. The Deridian position is a good philosophical justification for nihilism. The difference being a nihilism takes too much effort.. The logical conclusion of Derridianism if one were consist would be to sit in a chair and say nothing until one starves to death. Of course Derrida himself was not consistent. He was one of the most prolific writers. His overall project was to tear down hierarchy and destroy the concept of the TS. Here is his argument against reason:


He asks "does reason ground itself?" Can we use reason to prove reason?



"Are we obeying the principle of reason when we ask what grounds this principle [reason] which is itself a principle of grounding? We are not--which does not mean that we are disobeying it either. Are we dealing here with a circle or with an abyss? The circle would consist in seeking to account for reason by reason, to reason to the principle of reason, appealing to the principle to make it speak of itself at the very point where, according to Heidegger, the prinicple of reason says nothing about reason itself. The abyss, the hole, ..., the empty gorge would be the impossibility for a principle of grounding to ground itself...Are we to use reason to account for the principle of reason? Is the reason for reason rational?"(Derrida in Criticism and Culture, Robert Con Davis and Ronald Schlefflier, Longman 1991, 20.)




Derrida sought to destroy metaphysical hierarchy. How did he intend to do that? He did it by creating a method of reading a text, a critical tool that would allow him to dissect and destroy any hierarchy simply because it was a hierarchy. That tool was known as "deconstruction." To reconstruct one takes apart, in the sense of destroy; destruction = destruction.

Hierarchy is based upon the binary opposition. That means hierarchies are like stacks of couplets, each contianing a major term and suppolamental term:

God/
evil

up/
down

male/
female

the assumption is that the term on top is the "major term" the "real" thing, the one on the bottom is tacked on or er zots, or somehow inferior. A hierarchical metaphysics is constructed out of these binaries. These are among the categories we use to order our perception of sense data; and thus to order the world. We can see this in the atheist metaphysics of scientism:

Objective/
subjective

empirical/
logical


Derrida inverts the couplets. The "inferior term" is taken as the superior term, and the assumption is made that the hierarchy is false. But what move allows this? He accomplishes this move by the realization of the principle of "differance." This is not my dyslexia at work. He spells it with an "a" in order to out over the point that there is more to it than just "difference" as we understand it. That is, difference is the basis of meaning in language. Meaning of signifier is based upon the difference in one signifier and another. That means we call a "tree" a "tree" not because it is intrinsically endowed with treeness, but because we don't call it a "frog," a "bat" or an "elephant." The meaning of these terms, what they refer to, is totally arbitrary. Thus meaning arises through difference. Derrida uses this point as the staging ground for a multiple assault on all of Western thought. He derives from it the notion that meaning derives from absence (difference is absence) rather than presence. So Plato is screwed, the Platonic theory is crap. This is so because the meaning of truth in Platonic terms is presence, the proximity to the forms, remember? So the presence of the forms in our thinking is our nearness to truth. The closer the ware to what we recall of the forms the closer we are to truth. He sets up a hierarchy of presence in which speaking is closer to truth than writing.

Derrida destroys this hierarchy of presence by demonstrating that derives from absence (difference = absence because there is no presence of meaning in the signifier). He finds that meaning is never present. Meaning is always absent and sought after, always different and differed. He makes a pun on differ and deffer. Meaning is differed in that language has multiple meanings (why he likes puns) and one can never be sure that the meaning of a statement is always off stage waiting to come on, and when it does it only refers to another meaning. Life a child who always asks "why" the answer is never available, it's always in the next question, and the next, and the next. It's flickering away always. He uses the phase "always already," meaning is already absent.

Deconstruction works by finding a contradiction in the thesis and using that to flip over all the meanings. The classic Derridian example is the distinction in Rousseau between nature and nurture, the natural and civilized. Rousseau says that we can have natural morality we can be naturally good and naturally happy by being spontaneous and rooted in nature. He also says, however, that civilization is good because it nurtures us and gives us a basis in education and understanding. This is an inherent contradiction and Derrida exploits it to show that all of Rousseau's ideas are meaningless. In fact he shows that all meaning is meaningless. Everything falls apart, there is no grand edifice of truth that can stand before the onslaught of deconstruction. If one takes deconstruction seriously one must, to be totally consistent, just wind up sitting in a corner and never speaking and never assuming anything.

I ended part 1 with his statement that logic cannot be secured by logical argument He undermines logic and reason in this way and reduces them to ashes. Thus the final step in deconstruction is to show that there is no meaning, there is no truth all lies in ruin. His main objective is to destroy the Transendetal signifier because that is the essence of Platonic meaning,t he big idea at the top of the hierarchy that secures meaning and makes sense of all other marks that make sense of the world.He is quite aware that the TS equals God, he says so himself. This is his ultimate triumph over Christianity. It's a supreme moment for atheism, but of course the American scientifically obsessed, philosophically challenged atheists could never appreciates it. Once you come to truly understand Derrida and your faith survives it, nothing in the nature of an intellectual argument can ever threaten your faith again.

How does one survive it? One of the major pastimes in graduate school for student just encountering Derrida is to sit around trying to deconstruct Derrida. Everyone does this and everyone thinks he's the first person to think of it. You can just tell when student's understanding is reaching critical mass and she/he is about to say "Hey, let's deconstruct him!" Derrida knew this, and he traded in it. Its' one of the features that assured that people wanted to study him more. But it doesn't matter if you deconstruct him because it only proves his point. Since he says there is no truth there is no ultimate reality there is no meaning, ti doesn't matter if what he says is untrue and not meaningful. Except for one thing: you don't have to make the final step. If you are to reverse Derrida then you don't want to prove that he has no ultimate meaning, you want to prove that he does have meaning and he's just wrong. This is can be done by using his method, but not using the final step. Don't conclusion there's no meaning, just show that his meaning is wrong.

Derrdia follows Heidegger in almost everything. Almost every step he makes can be seen in Heidegger's Parmenides book. Both thinkers say that metaphysics is undeniable. Derrida wants to explicate the end of metaphysics, but he also says there is no hope of escaping metaphysics. Even language itself is metaphysical. We cannot help but do metaphysics. That means metaphysical hierarchies are inescapable which means the TS is inescapable. Thus the choice we have is to assume there is a TS or to fall silent and never speak, never try to think coherently.But we cannot live with that choice. Because we have to assume it, we can't live without it, we should assume there is a Transendental signifier, and as Derrida points out, that's just a truncated version of God.

[KR Wordgazer]

Just when did Derrida write, Metacrock? Because I'm wondering if G.K. Chesterton had him in mind in Orthodoxy, when he wrote:

"That peril is that the human mind is free to destroy itself. . . . It is an act of faith to assert that our thoughts have any relation to reality at all. If you are merely a sceptic, you must sooner or later ask yourself the question, 'Why should anything go right; even observation and deduction? Why should not good logic be as misleading as bad logic? They are both movements in the brain of a bewildered ape?' The young sceptic says, 'I have the right to think for myself.' But the old sceptic, the complete sceptic, says, 'I have no right to think for myself. I have no right to think at all.'"

As for this:

you have conditioned yourself to reject anything you think is metaphysics. you don't accept logic, you can think in terms of math and empiricism.

It puts me in mind of Chesterton's words in another chapter of the same work:

"The Christian is quite free to believe that there is a considerable amount of settled order and inevitable development in the universe. But the materialist is not allowed to admit into his spotless machine the slightest speck of spiritualism or miracle."

This mindset puts reality in a box from which it is not allowed to climb out. At one time the materialist position seemed reasonable to me. But then I thought-- "if there is anything in the universe besides material cause and effect, then it's not something that's going to be governed by the rules of material cause and effect. And if all I am ever willing to look at is material cause and effect, then I will never see it, even if it's right in front of me." It is important that reason be allowed out of the materialist box. If not, then it ceases even to claim any right to being true reason-- to having any bearing on reality. Remove the TS, and reason topples, for it is based on nothing.

Materialism, viewed from within itself, seems to make sense. But it is a small universe, a narrow universe. Chesterton again:

"[The materialist] understands everything, and everything does not seem worth understanding. His cosmos may be complete in every rivet and cog-wheel, but still his cosmos is smaller than our world. . . If the cosmos of the materialist is the real cosmos, it is not much of a cosmos. . . The whole of life is something much more grey, narrow and trivial than the many separate aspects of it. The parts seem greater than the whole."

[QuantumTroll]

As the discussion wore on, however, I came to realize that the entire thing is rife with assumptions and poorly defined concepts that only sound reasonable if the reader is a believer (or at least reads from a perspective ofbelief).

no it's not. you have not articulated a problem. You have no formulated any logical argument pertaining to the argument itself. You haven't given me much to work against. It's mainly been me trying to explain what it's about over and over again.

I've formulated tons of logical objections to your argument. I've tried to show you places where it apparently rests on assumptions that I do not think are necessarily valid. From my perspective, you've failed to even recognize the weaknesses in your argument when I pointed them out. Do you see why the discussion is fruitless? You don't understand what I'm saying, and unless we meet face to face that is unlikely to change.

My training as a scientist and a mathematician have made it extremely difficult to read anything resembling a proof without a lot of skepticism. This is the hurdle that you never overcame.

It's not my problem. You have boxed youself into a corner where you can only one stand one kind of knowledge.

Every time I asked for clarification or definition, all I felt that I got was more of the same assumptions and ill-defined metaphysical terms.

you have conditioned yourself to reject anything you think is metaphysics. you don't accept logic, you can think in terms of math and empiricism. Most of those exchanges were about trying to explain what Derrida says. I still don't know if you read my big explication of Derrida on my blog.

Please don't tell me that I reject all metaphysics. That's a ridiculous accusation, and harmful to the level of discourse. Don't blame my closed-mindedness for your failure to make the proof convincing.

For example, you claimed that all Metaphysical Hierarchies have a unique top.

no, no no , nono no no no no. see you didn't listen. you are just hearing what you want to hear. you are so hyper concerned picking it apart that you can't just shut up and listen to what it says.

Again, I've tried to accept your argument, but when I scrutinize it closely it falls apart. I ask "where's the glue?", and you hand me more pieces. I'm not trying to pick it apart, I'm trying to fix it so it satisfies me.

Okay, I thought, let's try to figure out if this is true. So I tried to understand what such a hierarchy looks like, how it works, etc. But I never figured this out because Organizing Principles are so abstract that I wasn't even allowed to make up analogies or models. Instead, my only recourse was apparently to accept that these supremely abstract and ill-defined things all have a unique top - the TS. Now that I think about it, this might be the only property of metaphysical hierarchies that you were actually concrete about. To me, this positively screams sloppiness and wishful thinking.

It's not that complicated. people think in hierarchies. they do. they think this way they do. yes, they do. they don't have always the same ones or the same ideas but they do think in terms of grouping data into a single pile and explaining that pile with a label that tells them what it is. thats not hard. that's not complicated to figure out.

you are trying t make it hard because you want to believe it's stupid.

Fine, people think in hierarchies. Why is there only one kind of possible hierarchy? Why are you so sure that it's a hierarchy with a single top (and according to Derrida, a binary nature)? What do the habits of the human mind have to do with the creation of the universe? What would this imply about a universe that had no people and therefore no thinking? I'm not making it hard because I want it to be stupid. I'm simply not accepting these rather baseless premises without looking further, especially since that last question hints that a universe without thinking beings wouldn't exist.

Basically, I feel that if the way I'm thinking about this stuff is wrong, then I don't want to be right. That makes me feel silly and prejudiced, but it's true and I find it very difficult to change my mind about this. If I can't examine the truth in detail and from several angles without it falling apart, then I can't really accept it. I hope that we can keep talking about this sort of stuff anyway, because I do find it interesting. Who knows, perhaps I'll start thinking differently some day?

[Metacrock]

As the discussion wore on, however, I came to realize that the entire thing is rife with assumptions and poorly defined concepts that only sound reasonable if the reader is a believer (or at least reads from a perspective ofbelief).

no it's not. you have not articulated a problem. You have no formulated any logical argument pertaining to the argument itself. You haven't given me much to work against. It's mainly been me trying to explain what it's about over and over again.

I've formulated tons of logical objections to your argument. I've tried to show you places where it apparently rests on assumptions that I do not think are necessarily valid. From my perspective, you've failed to even recognize the weaknesses in your argument when I pointed them out. Do you see why the discussion is fruitless? You don't understand what I'm saying, and unless we meet face to face that is unlikely to change.

you need to list them. you mention in passing, you need to go "Ok here they are:

(1) this
(2) that
(3) the other thing

ect.

My training as a scientist and a mathematician have made it extremely difficult to read anything resembling a proof without a lot of skepticism. This is the hurdle that you never overcame.

It's not my problem. You have boxed youself into a corner where you can only one stand one kind of knowledge.

Every time I asked for clarification or definition, all I felt that I got was more of the same assumptions and ill-defined metaphysical terms.

I tried to define it as clearly as I could. what exactly is "it?" The TS? the organizing principles used in assessing reality? The process of binary opposition? the method of deconstruction? the trace?

you have conditioned yourself to reject anything you think is metaphysics. you don't accept logic, you can think in terms of math and empiricism. Most of those exchanges were about trying to explain what Derrida says. I still don't know if you read my big explication of Derrida on my blog.

Please don't tell me that I reject all metaphysics. That's a ridiculous accusation, and harmful to the level of discourse. Don't blame my closed-mindedness for your failure to make the proof convincing.

I thought you said you did. Back up a minute here. I'm not trying to put words in your mouth or put you down. I have respect for you as a thinker. I apologize if I came across that way. I was a little hurt because I felt you were being dismissive of my argument. I think now we just didn't have the good time to discuss it in depth.

I'm still sharpening it. I never did get a good hit on it. All the hits I've gotten so far and I'm not counting yours, have been just empty mockery by people who didn't get it and say superficial mocking things. So I need the dialectical process to really understand its limits.

For example, you claimed that all Metaphysical Hierarchies have a unique top.

no, no no , nono no no no no. see you didn't listen. you are just hearing what you want to hear. you are so hyper concerned picking it apart that you can't just shut up and listen to what it says.

Again, I've tried to accept your argument, but when I scrutinize it closely it falls apart. I ask "where's the glue?", and you hand me more pieces. I'm not trying to pick it apart, I'm trying to fix it so it satisfies me.

sorry,that's where I was getting testy because I'm use to it just be dismissed. I see that you have thought about it seriously and I appreciate that.

Okay, I thought, let's try to figure out if this is true. So I tried to understand what such a hierarchy looks like, how it works, etc. But I never figured this out because Organizing Principles are so abstract that I wasn't even allowed to make up analogies or models. Instead, my only recourse was apparently to accept that these supremely abstract and ill-defined things all have a unique top - the TS. Now that I think about it, this might be the only property of metaphysical hierarchies that you were actually concrete about. To me, this positively screams sloppiness and wishful thinking.

I think to a certain degree I may be assuming knowledge in certain areas on your part, because in my experince those areas were not in question, among people who had read Derrida and who had a back ground in Heidegger and postmodernism.

Me:
It's not that complicated. people think in hierarchies. they do. they think this way they do. yes, they do. they don't have always the same ones or the same ideas but they do think in terms of grouping data into a single pile and explaining that pile with a label that tells them what it is. thats not hard. that's not complicated to figure out.

you are trying t make it hard because you want to believe it's stupid.

Fine, people think in hierarchies. Why is there only one kind of possible hierarchy?

I didn't say that. I said if you start putting things under ruebricks used to define them, they will boil down to reason, as the supreme organizing principle.

Why are you so sure that it's a hierarchy with a single top (and according to Derrida, a binary nature)?

because that's the nature of predication when things are predicated upon other things in the hierarchy. take math. counting is the basis of math. numbers are the basis of counting. logic is the basis of numbers (Russell and Whitehead: Principia) reason is the basis of logic. Now you might say Language rather than counting is the basis of math. That's a good point but without counting you can't have a concept of math, even though math is a language nad is more than just counting. You can go from language back to reason too.

What do the habits of the human mind have to do with the creation of the universe? What would this imply about a universe that had no people and therefore no thinking? I'm not making it hard because I want it to be stupid. I'm simply not accepting these rather baseless premises without looking further, especially since that last question hints that a universe without thinking beings wouldn't exist.

If there is no correspondence between how we perceive the world and the way the world works, then how is it we can navigate in it? There has to be some relation between the way things work and statistical probability even though there is no celestial statistician making sure everything conforms.

Basically, I feel that if the way I'm thinking about this stuff is wrong, then I don't want to be right. That makes me feel silly and prejudiced, but it's true and I find it very difficult to change my mind about this. If I can't examine the truth in detail and from several angles without it falling apart, then I can't really accept it. I hope that we can keep talking about this sort of stuff anyway, because I do find it interesting. Who knows, perhaps I'll start thinking differently some day?

I am not saying the way you think about it is wrong. It just doesn't include a bunch of stuff that perhaps would broaden your understanding, I'm sure that's ture for me as well.

[QuantumTroll]

You have no formulated any logical argument pertaining to the argument itself. You haven't given me much to work against. It's mainly been me trying to explain what it's about over and over again.

you need to list them. you mention in passing, you need to go "Ok here they are:

(1) this
(2) that
(3) the other thing

ect.

Fair enough, you're right, I haven't presented you with any concrete attempt at refuting your argument. I tried to understand the argument fully before picking it apart, but I buggered that idea up pretty well. This puts me in the unenviable position of having to refute something which I don't really grasp. Oh well, there's no avoiding it now

Here we go then. These are the two big ones. I'm using this page as a source, btw.
1) The TS need not be unique.
2) Suppose I accept a unique and necessary TS. Then there is still no indication that the TSed is real.

I also have a niggling problem with this (but it's merely a matter of my preconceived notions):
3) Since the proof of the existence of the TS is based on thinking, this proof is invalid in a universe that contains no thinkers. That bothers me from a scientific perspective, since we always try to remove the observer from the picture.

Anyway, I need to explain #1 and #2 more.
1) The existence and uniqueness of the TS is "proven" by the apparent inability of influential thinkers to come up with an organizing principle that lacks a top tier with a single concept. Personally (and this is where face to face discussion would be nice) I can imagine other options. The last few times I tried to make this point, I made up examples of what I mean, but they tend to distract from the discussion so I'll omit them here. Your argument is invalid unless you can come up with more solid reasons to support the existence of a unique signifier at the top of any valid metaphysical hierarchy. The fact that Derrida and others always come back to exactly one TS isn't really enough. I agree that this fact can be interpreted as an indication that the premise holds, but it could also be an indication of human psychology or the limits of language.

2) Supposing that the TS is a metaphysical necessity isn't enough. Quite frankly, I'm still confused on this point. You say "Transcendental Signifyer is the ultimate metaphysical principle which makes sense of the universe." Then God is the TS. But the being named God is the TSed. So while we need a TS (e.g. the word God) to make sense of the universe and to think, the signified itself is not required. Unless there's more. I asked for more once before, and you can read what you wrote in response here. This is the point at which I became disheartened. It seemed like you kept on conflating TS and TSed, even though I think they're separate concepts. So again, if the TS is the top Organizing Principle, what is the argument for the existence of the TSed?

You once said "We have no choice but to assume the reality of some form of transcendental signified since the universe does seem to fall into line with the meaning we bestow upon it." This touches on my #3. If the TSed is real, then it should be real regardless of whether or not meaning is bestowed on the universe. Ignoring this objection, there's still the problem that it's the TS that is the Organizing Principle, so I see no need for the TSed.

[Metacrock]

You have no formulated any logical argument pertaining to the argument itself. You haven't given me much to work against. It's mainly been me trying to explain what it's about over and over again.

you need to list them. you mention in passing, you need to go "Ok here they are:

(1) this
(2) that
(3) the other thing

ect.

Fair enough, you're right, I haven't presented you with any concrete attempt at refuting your argument. I tried to understand the argument fully before picking it apart, but I buggered that idea up pretty well. This puts me in the unenviable position of having to refute something which I don't really grasp. Oh well, there's no avoiding it now

Here we go then. These are the two big ones. I'm using this page as a source, btw.
1) The TS need not be unique.
2) Suppose I accept a unique and necessary TS. Then there is still no indication that the TSed is real.

I never did really think the uniqueness argument had any place here. I still don't. so it need not be unique. No indication that it's real is just gainsaying the argument. the indication is that we can't do without it. we can't think in any other way, we can't even have language without, and it works. we can navigate the universe, observe the universe and so forth.

I also have a niggling problem with this (but it's merely a matter of my preconceived notions):

Ok I don't know what to say there

3) Since the proof of the existence of the TS is based on thinking, this proof is invalid in a universe that contains no thinkers. That bothers me from a scientific perspective, since we always try to remove the observer from the picture.

well that's interesting. But theoretically we can. With no people what would be the organzing principle? Well laws of physics. The still have to be prescriptive. Total descriptive laws don't explain how the universe could get started when there is nothing to make laws work and no universe to describe. But laws require hierarchical function and that means organizing principles.

Anyway, I need to explain #1 and #2 more.
1) The existence and uniqueness of the TS is "proven" by the apparent inability of influential thinkers to come up with an organizing principle that lacks a top tier with a single concept. Personally (and this is where face to face discussion would be nice) I can imagine other options. The last few times I tried to make this point, I made up examples of what I mean, but they tend to distract from the discussion so I'll omit them here. Your argument is invalid unless you can come up with more solid reasons to support the existence of a unique signifier at the top of any valid metaphysical hierarchy. The fact that Derrida and others always come back to exactly one TS isn't really enough. I agree that this fact can be interpreted as an indication that the premise holds, but it could also be an indication of human psychology or the limits of language.

sorry this is is totally off the wall.

(1) existence is proven by apparent inablity of ifluentail thinkers to come up with an organizing princple that lack a top tier--that's got nothing to do with it. I don't understand why this is hard. The argument:

We think in terms of organzing sense data into meaningful perconcieved pigeon holes that help us explain what the data means. We group these into hierarchies and we have over it all a single organizing principle that makes sense of the whole. This is the way the mind works. The single principle is usually something like math, or logic. some system that explains how things are organized in reality. WE really can't think without doing this because language itself is basically the same thing. So we can't function or think without dividing up the world and sticking the data in little meaningful groves that tell us how it all works.


the bottom line is, because we can't get by without it,and it works, there must really be an organizing principle that makes it all happen, that makes sense of it all.

2) Supposing that the TS is a metaphysical necessity isn't enough. Quite frankly, I'm still confused on this point. You say "Transcendental Signifyer is the ultimate metaphysical principle which makes sense of the universe." Then God is the TS. But the being named God is the TSed. So while we need a TS (e.g. the word God) to make sense of the universe and to think, the signified itself is not required.

sure it is. It's not required to make sense, but then ultimately a signifier that doesn't point to a signified doesn't make sense. so the fact that it works to understand the world is a good indication that there is such a principle.

Unless there's more. I asked for more once before, and you can read what you wrote in response
here. This is the point at which I became disheartened. It seemed like you kept on conflating TS and TSed, even though I think they're separate concepts. So again, if the TS is the top Organizing Principle, what is the argument for the existence of the TSed?

You once said "We have no choice but to assume the reality of some form of transcendental signified since the universe does seem to fall into line with the meaning we bestow upon it." This touches on my #3. If the TSed is real, then it should be real regardless of whether or not meaning is bestowed on the universe. Ignoring this objection, there's still the problem that it's the TS that is the Organizing Principle, so I see no need for the TSed.

[/quote]

our dependence upon an orgnanizing preinciple and that we can't function without is an indication that there really is one because it works! That's an indication. it's not what makes it work, it works because it does. It's working (ie we can understand the world) is an indication that it is real (ie that there is an organizing principle). If we did not exist, the principle would exist. I think of this analogously to laws of physics, if we did not exist, there would be laws of physics, if the universe did not exist there would be laws of physics, but there might be any any way to know they were there. I see laws of physics as more than just descriptions of how the universe works, because I you need them to have a universe in the fist place and they have to be there before there is a universe to describe.

[QuantumTroll]

2) Supposing that the TS is a metaphysical necessity isn't enough. Quite frankly, I'm still confused on this point. You say "Transcendental Signifyer is the ultimate metaphysical principle which makes sense of the universe." Then God is the TS. But the being named God is the TSed. So while we need a TS (e.g. the word God) to make sense of the universe and to think, the signified itself is not required.

sure it is. It's not required to make sense, but then ultimately a signifier that doesn't point to a signified doesn't make sense. so the fact that it works to understand the world is a good indication that there is such a principle.

A signifier that doesn't point to a signified makes plenty of sense. "Blue" comes to mind. There's no actual "blueness" in the world, but "blue" is a signifier that human minds use. So the TSed needs more support than the mere existence of a TS.

It's a little hard to respond to posts that sound like they're dismissing my points out of hand. "It's not required to make sense" is a big turn off.

I never did really think the uniqueness argument had any place here. I still don't. so it need not be unique. No indication that it's real is just gainsaying the argument. the indication is that we can't do without it. we can't think in any other way, we can't even have language without, and it works. we can navigate the universe, observe the universe and so forth.

The uniqueness of the TS was key to equating God with the TS. I don't think you can do without a uniqueness argument. And according to your own definitions, it's the TS that lets us have language. We can do fine without the TSed. Why do I feel like you're always confusing the TS and the TSed?

We think in terms of organzing sense data into meaningful perconcieved pigeon holes that help us explain what the data means. We group these into hierarchies and we have over it all a single organizing principle that makes sense of the whole. This is the way the mind works. The single principle is usually something like math, or logic. some system that explains how things are organized in reality. WE really can't think without doing this because language itself is basically the same thing. So we can't function or think without dividing up the world and sticking the data in little meaningful groves that tell us how it all works.

You're ignoring what I'm saying. First, I don't agree with your perception about the way the mind works. You and some others believe it works in this way, but from what I've seen you've got no positive proof. I see people partitioning their experiences and applying different principles to different parts. I see hypocrisy and I see many kinds of sense data that are interpreted without language or logic. Telling me that "this is the way the mind works" is not convincing, and it does nothing to save your argument from relying on an assumption that not everyone is going to share. Secondly, human minds are hardly perfect. We're barely conscious of our internal processes, and the mind itself is emergent behavior in a complex system that grew out of evolutionary processes. Relying on our own perception of how our minds work and extrapolating to the world at large is a little conceited, I think. Thirdly, I was hoping that you'd post some logical support for some of this stuff - why all metaphysical hierarchies boil down to a single principle, [edited to add the rest of this paragraph, which disappeared somehow] why my attempts at treating it logically were flawed, or something more concrete than creative suppositions.

Again, this is the little scientist inside that yells "verify, or it's not true". It's unfortunate, perhaps, but apparently this little man isn't going to be satisfied with the stuff you and your website offer. At least I tried, right?

[KR Wordgazer]

You once said "We have no choice but to assume the reality of some form of transcendental signified since the universe does seem to fall into line with the meaning we bestow upon it." This touches on my #3. If the TSed is real, then it should be real regardless of whether or not meaning is bestowed on the universe.

What about going back a step from "meaning"? What about talking about the basic predictability of the way the universe acts, which is what gives the scientific method its foundation?

We see an event occur. We think to ourselves, "I have a guess as to how that works." We hypothesize and test our hypothesis. And the tests work because reality acts in predictable ways. So why does our reason, which looks for patterns and predictability, actually enable us to make sense of things in terms of patterns and predictability? Why isn't everything just random-- or why don't we see it as random? I think this is what Metacrock is saying when he says,

our dependence upon an orgnanizing preinciple and that we can't function without is an indication that there really is one because it works! That's an indication. it's not what makes it work, it works because it does. It's working (ie we can understand the world) is an indication that it is real (ie that there is an organizing principle).

I think the TSed would be real whether or not our human reason functioned the way it does-- but the fact that our reason does, and that it is able to make predictions and find patterns, means that our reason is more or less in line with the way the universe works. And our reason works according to organizing principles. And our organizing principles seem to go back to one TS.

I suppose you might say from here that the TSed is the material universe itself. But that brings me right back to the quote from Chesterton I posted earlier:

"[The materialist] understands everything, and everything does not seem worth understanding. His cosmos may be complete in every rivet and cog-wheel, but still his cosmos is smaller than our world. . . If the cosmos of the materialist is the real cosmos, it is not much of a cosmos. . . The whole of life is something much more grey, narrow and trivial than the many separate aspects of it. The parts seem greater than the whole."

If the material universe is the TSed, then why does it seem too limited, too inadequate for the TS?