Something is particular before it is universal, that is, universals are constructs developed out of perceived commonality of particulars.
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Western philosophy suffers from a lack of action upon the understanding. It seems to only inform you on how to think but not how to live. One can only draw the conclusion that Western philosophy makes the physical reality of secondary importance.
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Sense experience of reality informs us of the sequence of time — a time which is past (before now), present (now) and future (after now).
We act now or close to now. We cannot act in the past, or the future. We can only recall the past and plan for the future.
In short, reality is only the present (now).
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When you deal with timeless truths you are not dealing with anything that solve particular problems in reality. By definition that is what strict logic is. It is concerned with only deductive reasoning and not anything inductive or abductive. Strict logic is useless when you want to deal with love, hate or anything in everyday life. Physical reality is not a neat, tidy and timeless place like strict logic space.
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For all the possible worlds we still have the actual world. We do not act upon the other possible worlds but only act upon the actual world. Why worry about other possible worlds then?
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Experience is within time, whether we are talk about sense or mental experience. It is only in the mind that time is forgotten, ignored, when in reality the process of mental experience is time-based.
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I do not think our epistemology is reason alone. Experience is both “external” sense experience and “internal” thought experience. Both are experiences based upon the body, the physical. Without the body we cannot understand the reality it inhabits. Our experience requires both sense and thought experience.
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The partitioning of the internal world from the external world is no longer necessary. In the “external” world are internal worlds (other people’s minds). Yet others observe me and see my internality in their external world. In other words, the external encompasses all internal worlds.
The internal worlds are part of the external world, not apart from it, not mysterious and inaccessible as it was before when the paradigm came into “being”.
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We have concepts (thoughts) in our heads. These concepts refer to concrete objects (objects that exist in reality) or conceptual objects (“objects” that “exist” as conceptualizations).
We must not confuse that which exist in reality (a physical entity), that which exist as conceptualization (a thought of a physical entity) and that which “exist” as conceptualization (a thought of a non-physical entity).
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At some point I had decided that even if God is immanent or transcendental to this world the fact that he does not interact with us he may be removed from the equation. That is, the activities of this world have nothing to do with God.
From here, it was then logical and easy to remove one by one the unnecessary “things” that populate this reality. What was left was a reality populated with matter, space and time. Some of this matter was imbued with something called life, consciousness, or some other similar term. What matters is that it is just matter. Consciousness is just a particular quality of this object.
What worries some philosophers is that there seems to be no purpose to us. These philosophers seem lost without something to aim for. And I agree. But I do not think that our aim and purpose is a given, or is the same in any way. There is no moral compass, no identical “North” to which we point to.
In short, we choose our own purposes, make our own goals. Sometimes we pursue these purposes and goals individually and sometimes we do them collectively.