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Okay, I'm going to dispense with all rhertorical flourishes and play Post-Buster, committed to keeping this message board free from logical infelicities. Intellectual hygiene is my aim, and will be my reward. Too much typing and too little thinking has plagued this board recently.
Summit
"Life is multi-faceted, especially for humans. Why? because we have a self consciousness; our individual perception".
How so? Because perception is polymorphous? Well frankly, no, and more pointedly, you deny so yourself a little further on in the course of your adumbrations:
"Every human shares common traits, experiences and instincts, so there is a point of synchronized consciousness, or more so collected unconsciousness".
The phenomenologists assign Being the role of the fundamental problem of philosophy because intentionality (the way in which an object is conditioned by consciousness) provides a universal reference point. That is more or less what you're saying here. But surely this contradicts your intial assertion - which amounts to something like: "there are an irreducible plurality of different theories about what life means because there are an irreducible plurality of conscious minds". Yet if this is the case, consciousness is not the solution but the problem to the enigma of life, precisely because of the way that it escapes any kind of stable definition.
What you actually meant, if I may be so bold as to flatly say it, is that volition - the free will of each person - is what makes life so rich and abounding in potentialities. In the first paragraph, then, you confused the idea of the will for consciousness: a very forgivable mistake, especially since the noxious gas of egoism commands a sulphurous dominion in these avowedly liberal and individualistic times. By a discrete historical process, the 'will' has been dissociated from forces outside the individual so that it now means little more than simply "choose". You made the same mistake my friend, and drowned your little theory in a host of unwanted companion ideas because of it.
heyjme: First, just a little quibble:
"Thus, I'm sure, that being a human and thus a finite thinker means other thinkers will be better than others".
See, this is the kind of thing I'm talking about man! What do you mean by "finite thinker"? It could mean any number of things! It would be pedantary to point out all the different permutations, and I think I
know what you're getting at... but still!...
"The idea of conciousness is mostly just egoism in disguise once again; the idea that man has created his environment. This is surficial. One answer would be that we are not human BEINGS but rather than 'we' are BEING human. This evolves into the idea of spirit (soul) again or the idea of the matrix, Alice in Wonderland, quantum soup (some proponents), etc-same ideas though of different sorts."
Well, whilst leaving aside the issue of what Summit actually meant for now, I'll suggest that you're talking about a problem which reveived much attention in Empiricist circles during the 18th century: namely, the problem of the relation of the external world to perception. Since Berkeley, Hartley, Hume et al espoused the idea that nothing exists outside of perception, they were logically committed to saying that the true provenance of philosophy (and indeed all thought) was to methodically - but unevaluatively - study the world which our sensory organs present to us. We are to leave the world as it is, and cordon it off with a sign that proclaims it to be THE LIMITS OF EXISTENCE.
Now I agree with you heyjme - this does constitute egoism, and I find it troubling. It sets my my prejudices in a muddle. It is an affront to my intuitions. But clearly, a lot of work needs to be to make this position philosophically justifiable; perhaps that can be done in another post. But I'm straying from the point. Which is this: summit - if his apparent affinities with the phenomenologists are anything more than just apparent -has been grossly misrepresented. Existentialists and Phenomenologists are not delineating the limits of reality, but knowledge; not the predicament of the universe, but existence. The way in which the two schools conceive the relationship between ontology and epistemology is very much to the point. For Empiricism, epistemology is prior, since a theory of the knowledge circumscribes the way we view the discursive world around us; for Phenomenology, on the other hand, ontology dictates the limits of what we can know - what lies beyond existence is thus deemed unknowable. And whilst this realisation might encourage a gratuitous wallowing in despair, I think we can agree that this is infinitely more desirable than the mortifying arrogance of Empiricist materialism.
This is too compressed, but I'm a lazy dog and I can't be bothered to edit it. I prefer to rest assured in the fact that you're wrong - and I'm right.
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