Mandibil wrote: ↑Sat Jan 30, 2021 1:34 pm
No, it is just an inaccessible void, just accept it.
OK. I accept it
Let's go deeper - not in the void but into what is accessible to experience.
My goal will be to clear the ground a little more.
How does one arrive at an axiom? What is an axiom?
It is a
thought expressing certain idea.
Where does that thought come from? From
thinking.
Why one speaks at all about a World? For simplicity, let's imagine a state of being, as much free from any preconceived ideas, axioms, etc., as possible. To make it easier - disregard the contents of the senses, as long as we imagine a physical world associated with them.
We are faced by a World of experiences or perceptions - colors, tones, smells, tastes, feelings, etc. A great unknown. We don't know what causes the perceptions. But still, we experience ourselves as
something that is having these perceptions. As soon as I
think about a perception I
split the World into two - the perception itself and my concept, the meaning I connect to that perception through the thought.
Now this peculiarity of thinking leads to all kinds of splits known in philosophy - I/World, I/not-I, object/subject, self/other, mind/matter, being/non-being, etc., etc.
What is the common thing between all these? It is that they are all the result of
thinking. Neither of these is an apriori fact of existence. The only
absolutely certain thing is that there's a thinking process which produces thoughts as these.
So thinking produces the axioms. How? Either by producing thoughts about perceptions or by producing purely abstract thoughts - in other words thinking perceives itself. This is what abstract thinking is - we are engaged in perceiving our own thoughts.
One such axiom could be "thinking exists". It is something that is absolutely certain - as long as we think. Even if we try to prove "thinking does not exist" we'll be formulating thoughts about it and in this very act we are contradicting what we've set out to prove.
I hope that so far it is clear that thinking is the starting point for any philosophical knowledge of the World. Before object/subject, inner/outer, there's thinking - even before thinking conceptualizes itself.
Mandibil wrote: ↑Sat Jan 30, 2021 1:34 pm
There is no need for belief, it just follows from the first axiom as a necessity imho.
Now that's circular logic. We already established that the axiom is
already a product of thinking. It is one of the countless possible thought-fruits that thinking can produce. To make this more visible consider: "'God exists' is an axiom. Then it is no longer a question of belief because it follows directly from this first axiom as necessity". I suppose you won't agree with the above axiom. Just in the same way, anyone can say that "the void is inaccessible" is exactly as arbitrary as "God exists".
So the question is whether the thoughts we produce reflect self-evident truths or we are choosing (even if unconsciously) that certain thought will be the fundament of our thinking experience, while disregarding all other alternatives.
It was for this reason that I wanted first to direct the conversation towards thinking itself. Because both "God exists" and "the void is inaccessible" are
products of thinking. Thinking is the only certain thing underlying both axioms. This is something that I wanted to point attention too - that there's (often quite unclear) thinking activity even before we choose an axiom as foundation. If we are able to experience our activity at that point, we are in position to examine the palette of all possible axioms and trace how we landed exactly on the one we chose.
So do we agree so far that at the root of our existence as
knowers is the thinking process?
I wanted to clarify these things in order to avoid oscillating around the central point, while being confused about the
source of the problem.
Now that hopefully we've cleared the ground a little more, can I paraphrase your conjecture like this:
"Forgetting about axioms and philosophical trains of thought - just as a description of direct experience, we simply
can't trace how thoughts pop into existence. So I experience something akin to a void from where thoughts emerge. I perceive the thoughts that emerge from the thinking process but when I try to follow these thoughts back from where they came, I face only oblivion. And further, I think that this same void contains the
causes for all other perceptions."
With our more fundamental understanding about the centrality of thinking, would you express yourself in the above way?
I just wanted to synchronize our understanding before going further.