Prevalent Problem of Today’s Artists: Initial Specialization

Perhaps I am not qualified to have an opinion in this area- thus I will let that statement be my credentials. There is a short story I read recently called ‘The Circle of Elite Wizards’ which accounts for a young and learning youth who tries to master the higher and complex spells prior to the more easy and mundane magic. He is repeatedly told by his master that he must first learn ‘red’ and ‘blue’ magic before he can even start to work on ‘purple’ magic. Although he is taught there to be a hierarchy to magic, he nevertheless goes for his own desire first and right away without caring to look into the others. When he comes across ‘black’ magic, he is enthralled and makes it his soul focus. In four years he manages to craft a kind of ‘black’ magic which is entirely creative; is it solely his own and strange to the others. He manages to use this to save the village from a peculiar villain, almost as strange as himself (who is seemingly invulnerable to all magic). The youth perishes in the battle and takes the villain with him and so the story is left with an open end, ripe for various interpretations.

The interpretation I want to suggest is one concerning art: that although there is a primacy for creativity in the initial (if not fascist) specialization to one aspect of art over all others, I think in the end is proves to be a weak creativity. In other words, it is truly and honestly creative, but it is a kind of creativity which would have likely been able to be possessed later, within the proper channels. What am I talking about here? It is like the young painter who shuns learning painting in the ‘proper’ way so they can devote more time to their specialization. What is specialization to mean here? For the artist themselves, they will dub it ‘good art’ or that small branch or branches of art which they resonate with the most. This is the greatest danger for the artist, for although it is proven to be a sound method to value and cherish what we love best through imitation and that imitating the greats is a path in itself to greatness; such a path can be just as damaging in its limitations.

Heidegger speaks of the openness of possibility containing restrictions underneath. What kind of restrictions? The kind which occur when we choose left, that we can then no longer choose right (and vice versa if we walk back and change our minds). If we specialize too soon or remain too focused, we can fail to pick up the general skills which lie outside our field of vision. As the young mage is unable to partake in red or blue but remains wanting purple; and furthermore with black (as the mixture of all colors) so too specialization can prove to be the most fatal choice to an artist if it is chosen too soon.

Is this all too abstract? Then let me throw off the curtain: my charge is to one Matthew Wilkinson in his endeavors for artistry. By holding opinions of art-connoisseury and mixing them with art-creation, you are in danger of limiting your artistry. What we hold ‘below’ us is similar to what we ‘dislike’ and what we hold ‘apex’ is similar to what we ‘want to be like’. This is all good and well within and alone to the realm of being a connoisseur, but it MUST be separated from the much different realm of art-creation! Just like having contempt for a shit book can sometimes keep us from understanding something ‘shitty’ and perhaps important about the world; so to our art must be eclectic. But ecleticity in art-connoisseury is much different than ecleticity in art-creation.

We do not mean you have to read shit books in order to write good ones; but you should be able to craft the forms of the ‘below’ books in order to reach the heights of the ‘apex’ kinds. What am I talking about? Clearly: we can like and dislike action movies, that’s one thing, but to actively decide that they are ‘below’ our movie exploits and thus are not worth our-making-them (as a path to keep us from making lousy movies) is a fallacy. You must separate your opinions of art from your skills of art-creation. In other words, if making action movies IS really ‘below’ the focus you desire to have, then I think you must (or should/ought) PROVE it to be so by MASTERING the lower craft to ensure more skill in the higher. This is not a quibble about art opinions, but about art-creation.

Question: is it possible to craft and perfect action movie (in art-creation) and still hold a distain opinion for action movies themselves (in art-connoisseury)? I think this question is actively and successfully avoided by most artists. Only the more complex artist could accomplish this ‘paradox’ (even though it is not really a paradox at all but a kind of wisdom) by holding both these opposing ideas simultaneously.

Objection: would not the work on an action movie prove to soil the effort and skill of someone who wants to work on something else? Are there not enough people already doing this sort of easy stuff? Is it really hierarchical at all, are not all artists simply choosing to do what they want, outside and beyond any intellectual rules or systems of sense? Should we not simply do what we feel invigorated to do, instead of adhering to someone else’s commands for artistry and excellence artful mind?

Response: the simple and distain-worthy art is there to be conquered not avoided. What do you gain from fleeing form it? You DO gain much within the realm of art-connoisseury, this is obvious, but are you merely an art connoisseur? Are you not more than this, but a fellow creator? What respect would you have if a youngster who wanted to imitated you said ‘I only do, read and work on your style and no one else’s.’ Would that not be horrible? When it comes to opinion it is a complement (art-connoisseury) but when it came to skills would it not be suicide (art-creation)?

Artists shoot themselves in the foot by initially specializing in their higher art-forms and fail to see how this keeps them forever-young, forever unable to do anything with power. They will remain weak in their creativity, even if their creativity is something interesting. This time of learning we all find ourselves in, in our current and young age, should not be used for specialization and personal exploration; rather, it should be used for mastering up the ‘lower’ and easier forms of art so as to benefit the great and higher aims we go for.

Milton gave himself the challenge to work with and master all the other forms of poetry before Epic. Why? Because this was his way of showing the epic poem to be the greatest of all poems. Is it? It does not have to be, perhaps someone else might master all other forms of poetry and then finish with the sonnet. This is not an objective system, but a kind of wise exploration of one’s field of study. Let the connoisseurs shun what they shun, they have only their opinions; the artist needs to be rise above such stuff if they are to truly break out of the art-conniosseury realm and break into the art-creation realm.

What do you think Matt, this charge is aimed at you?

Quantum Imagination

Small intro and caveat: There are not enough good blog entries as of late and thus I feel the need to resurface and attempt to provide something fascinating (if you become a fascist after reading this, then you have gone too far).

I am no physicist (although I am quite confident in my own physicality) and thus I might get some things wrong here; all the more for a reader to respond, than to actually have something to say! But when we talk about electrons and atoms we find a curious little thing occurring, this ‘occurrence’ has caused an entire new school of thought called Quantum Mechanics, which surprisingly works dynamically different than classical or macro physical mechanics (such as gravity, plants and mass etc). The way to successfully systematize this ‘occurrence’ is to postulate that when a choice for an electron is presented, instead of the classical way of seeing things as either/or, we find the quantum idea to go both. Thus it is only when we ‘look’ that we find only one way has been taken, prior to looking both were taken.

This kind of thought in the firm solid structure of respectable science, has allowed their kid-brothers to dazzle us with interesting stories, mixing truth with fiction in a various amount of ways. We now think of multiple dimensions, possible universes, and the ‘space-time’ continuum. The idea is that whenever there is a choice given in our actual world, both are taken, the one you pick and the one picked by our counterpart. To paraphrase a great book “it is that when a coin lands heads here on our world, it most definitely lands tails in theirs!” From here, a great inquiry can be ‘imagined’ as to how many different versions of events can take place, but let me take it a bit farther.

Suppose that this might apply to all and any imaginative means; specifically not that they are imaginable but that another actual-possible world has it. Thus, there is a world where I am still Christian and one where Nixon did not get water-gated. Take it a bit farther, suppose there are different histories, and further yet, different universal evolution! Different rules for matter and on and on into the most possible possibilities our imagination can unveil. Ignoring the philosophical side of this, it goes without saying that there is such a world out there which has various events taking place, those events being the ones you think up. Now think of television!

We have all watched and loved to see our favourite actors or movie stars shoot laser weapons or kill dragons; but in some kind of quantum-imaginative way, those events are taking place in a distant and other possible world. It is not that events like Star Trek are taking place, but the real and exact events like Star Trek are taking place. There is a world where Captain Picard really does command the Enterprise and so forth.

From our quantum imagination we can find and imagine all sorts of things, and now add a perhaps meaningless but dare I say interesting possible-quality of being pseudo-real. So let that be a lesson to those who ponder terrible things or wondrous things, for your thoughts although not really creating these events is in fact, on a sense of possibility, are taking you to ‘real’ places. That magical island of Lost is real and John Locke is really dead, what a pity; for I find a possible-Lost where John Locke is actually alive much more entertaining.

What might this mean for our daily choices? I think we are not so situated within our bodies and minds and this actual world as much as we might think. In a sense each choice we face is a question “which possible world do you exist in?” and at each of these moments we craft our existence into one of these worlds. See this not as you making out of yourselves a kind of person with character as a sculptor makes a statue out of clay, this would merely be a regular existential approach. Instead think of a vast plurality of circuits, where your soul or mind is the only thing you really are. At each crossroad you make a choice onto which path you take, and your soul ‘rides’ it out. You are riding your personal existence and flowing into and out-of everyone else’s existence as a plethora of possibilities dies and are reborn in each second in each space. I am not being poetic or romantic here.

Think about this the next time you drive or walk to work, the next time you choose to eat this or that; or, God-fearing, the next time you change the channel! That’s a real world you are watching there...

The Serpent’s Egg

Good thoughts Jon.

Only I never said Logic could sum of everything, only that everything was based on fundamental reasoning. The point is in the difference and the latter makes the former possible (plus the realization of knowing the limits of Logic).

In your comment on the limits of reason, you said “we can … be aware … that our reasoning is flawed and also we can discern and suspect ourselves” of this.

How are we able to be aware that our reasoning is flawed if not through a more general application of reasoning?

How are we able to discern and suspect our reasoning abilities if not upon some larger context of knowing?

I agree with you that our reasoning is flawed in the sense that Logic and Empiricism are flawed but not fundamental reasoning. I also agree that we need to discern it is flawed and suspect other people’s (including our own) systems of reasoning for problems; but how can this happen? If all we have is one level of reasoning and it is flawed, then how can something which cannot be trusted convince us that we should not trust it?

If our most basis of reasoning is flawed then we have a non-starter, we cannot even know that the starting ground is flawed unless we can state so from a larger context.

In order for us to find out our reasoning is flawed, we must be moving from one thing to another, ALL along over top of some other larger meta-thing which allows for the movement to take place.

Thus what we find out is NOT that reasoning is flawed, but CERTAIN KINDS of reasoning is flawed, like Logic. It is flawed because it cannot yet account for all possible thought- but here is the key- to know this about Logic MEANS we did not first start with Logic but something else, something else upon which Logic itself is based.

My thesis in this conversation was that the greater/larger meta-thing Logic and company were founded upon was Fundamental Reasoning.

It seems to me like you agree with me (that reasoning has problems) and I agree with you (that Logic and other forms of rationality do not fully account for reality or the human person) BUT here is the clincher: if we can know that reasoning has problems, how is it are we found with that knowledge?

If you say its because reason itself tells us that reason has problems, then you are still putting all your trust in reason- you also have hopeful outlook on reason, for if it can tell you of its own problems, some aspect of it is still perfectly trust-worthy.

If you say you know it in some other way, then you have to show first, what that other thing is and second, how that other thing is not reason.

Can you see how being SURE reason has problems is in ITSELF a proclamation of just how TRUSTWORTHY reason is?
So you can see, even the ends of things are contained within reason and if we can know that our Logic cannot fully account for something, then we are using something else which his more fundamental than Logic to know this- this thing is, I suggest to you, a fundamental reasoning. And it tells us of our problems, it shows them to us as we try to make it more powerful (ie, when we reason about reasoning and create Logic, Empiricism and so on).

In this sense, and in a very powerful sense ALL things are rational things, in that they are always based upon fundamental reasoning, NOT LOGIC or EMPRICISM, but a fundamental way of thinking.

Therefore pointing out the limitations of Logic reaffirms the desire to point out other problems in other forms of reasoning. And this is why we should point them out in Religious Reasoning. Prior to that we must show that what Religious people do is in fact Religious Reasoning because right now they think they are doing something wholly different from reasoning. It is my claim that they are doing something different from Logic but not from fundamental reasoning.

Finally, this is why we can reason about God, this is why we must avoid using contradictions in Theology, because although God might be able to go beyond contradictions, we cannot and when we are using a contradiction we are not accounting for God in a powerful way but merely making mistakes (mistakes we know are mistakes).

But what happens when the mistake is no longer called a mistake? When the mistake is called a mystery and that mystery is denied a true definition of mistake because humans are not allowed to reason about God?

When this happens, we have what we have today. We have inconsistent hermeneutics, we have contradictions in mystery’s clothing and we have a lot of people doing a lot of reasoning but refusing to call it reasoning.

The Serpents Tail and Competitors

Hey Jon,

I went through about seven different posts but this is a really hard topic to explain really clearly. I think instead of making a case-study in inconsistent reasoning I am simply going to ask you where you stand on this point of mine.

I think it will prove to be much more effective if we focus upon what you still need to be convinced of instead of simply falling into the same old posts we have already written, read and posted.


So:

What is not convincing so far?

What do you need to be convinced of still, in order for you to agree with me?

The Golden Calf of Religion: rational adherence to irrationality idolatry

Jon said:
“I agree. But something could come from beyond our reason and disclose itself not as irrational or rationally contained but as a revealed mystery.”

Here, once you have said ‘come from beyond’ you have already postulated a space called ‘inside reason’ and a space called ‘beyond reason’. You have designated that we could speak and think about something ‘inside reason’ but know that it came from ‘beyond reason.’

But fundamental reasoning is at the foundation of both these places! The fact that you can speak about ‘beyond’ anything means you have it on a rational basis.

Parmenides said there are only two areas of thought: that which is and that which is not; furthermore nothing can be said about that which is not. (you might want to exclude the last sentence there, for even saying we cannot speak about what is not might be crossing the line).

This is what it means to say that, that which is outside of reason is beyond us entirely- not that it exists outside of our reasoning but rather that if it exists to us in any way then it is already inside reasoning.

When I say it is unimportant, I mean it is NOT. To say it in positive terms, anything we can think, talk about, imagine and discuss is already within reason.

Jon said:
“a mystery revealed can be reasonable without being yet fully understood.”

I agree, but that would make it based on the foundation of reason. To say that we do not fully understand something already assumes we have it in our minds; it is to say we do not yet have a sufficient pattern connected to this sense-object. (but even when we think we do have a sufficient pattern, we already know that patterns must always be scrutinized again and again.

Jon said:
“then are we rejecting all "memory", as you called it a few posts back? Is it just about each individual interpreting sense and pattern for oneself? How does one weed through the politics and sociology one holds in oneself without holding it up to history and larger discussion?”

That was just to say that it is difficult to parse when there are no political and sociological ramifications, even more so when there are extras on the line. That was all I was saying.

Jon said quoting me:
"It is not until we can look at the competing patterns with sobriety that we can actually decide with clarity." Yeah. That's right. So how do we do that?

I think the first step is to realize that nothing should be considered immune to rational inquiry. All too often people say ‘it doesn’t matter that this doesn’t make sense, it is not supposed to make sense’ (thus saying this is an irrational object and needs not to make sense).

Jon said:
“But to say that the step from recognizing the Given to accepting the idea of a Giver is irrational is to refuse a priori, as a choice, the possibility of anything transcending us altogether.”

To say something is given just means it is necessary, that is what a priori means as well. There is no giver, unless you wanted to account for reality as a giver of some sort. This also does not mean nothing transcends us, something can or might, but what it means to say ‘such and such’ about that which transcends us will still be based on the foundation of reason.

Jon said:
“unless you make the presuppositional (and by definition absurd) decision before hand that it is impossible before proven, you then have not only the same Given from which to use reason but you have even more solid grounds to hope in the usefulness of reason”

Again, no one is to deem anything impossible before being proven, it is simply a postulation of how reasoning likely works. The field of reason is also and open concept, as we found in quantum mechanics first thought to be beyond the ability of reason to account for, but now is accountable.

Here is the biggest application of what I am saying:

To ignore the potential problems of something utilizing bad reasoning is regress not progress. Quantum mechanics needed lots of study and work until they were able to really think and speak about it with clarity and now reason seems to have a broader application (now that it can account for quantum physics).

What about religion?

Take the idea of the Trinity. The application of reason upon it is questioned by believers and frequently thought dubious. The Trinity is classified as a mystery and thus ‘beyond’ the grasp of human minds (noetic aspect of the fall). When I was a believer I wanted to re-examine this, try to unite reason with the Trinity (as I believe many theologians desire). But the response to such an action is met with rejection because the human mind is not allowed to critique God or more so, reason is not allowed to critique God because then reason would be ‘higher’ than God.

That sentence already shows that reason is ‘higher’ than God in that reason is used to insulate God from further criticism. God is shown to be in a system in which God is above (or ought to be above) all other things, but what about the system itself, what about the system God is found to be placed within? The theologian might respond, ‘okay, but God is also above the system itself, into areas which transcend reasoning and our minds entirely.’

That is a good answer, one which I used to give in past days, but the implication is that, that which is beyond our reasoning cannot matter to us, perhaps only in some kind of pointer which says ‘it goes further into the unattainable.’ That is what it means to say that God transcends reason. Yet theologians who say this will not be consistent with this idea, instead the ‘usage’ of what is irrational is mostly used to insulate religion instead of clarifying it.

When a mystery is no longer being clarified then it is not really a mystery at all. I imagine you might want to object to this but suppose I put something of mine into a mystery form?

Suppose we were arguing abortion and you said ‘but it is killing potential life, and you already said you did not want to kill potential life ever!’ Instead of really thinking about this I simply responded: ‘I know it does not make sense, these two ideas that I do not want to ever kill potential life and I still support abortion which I agree is killing potential life; BUT this is a mystery about me.’

Is it really a mystery? Or is it just a problem I am not honestly dealing with? Suppose you asked me about it later and I said: ‘my views on abortion and killing are no longer rational and thus I do not have to deal with the fact that they are inconsistent; they lie beyond the realms of reason.’

Now I am not equating this ‘argumentative move’ with religion, nor am I saying that Theologians are not rational reject reason or cheat in their god-thought. All I am saying is this was one of the things which gave me my current skepticism.

It came from the idea that all truth is gods truth, and that if god made the world the way it is (including reason) then why would so much of his religion not follow through on it? I know you could argue that and suggest that many religions do follow through on reason, or that many religions are trying to work their religions.

I am not trying to be unfair, but simply explain exactly what I mean when I say religions use irrationality as idolatry.

So yeah, that is pretty much my whole thesis on this subject. This is why I think reason applies to everything (at least this general and fundamental concept of reasoning which I have been explaining).

A personal reflection:

This is also one of my major reasoning why I hold to a soft-atheism. I honestly believe that if one considered the god-question with sobriety, I personally believe they have to say god is possible but less than likely thus far.

Bad Reasoning and No Reasoning

So an obvious question which follows this entire conversation is: what do we do with reason, what is it for? The answer is truth. What exactly is truth in the first place? Why are we concerned with it?

At the bottom of the idea of truth is the concept of the world. Just like we had to take as given that we have sensibility and that we sense objects, we find that this entails the world. Is there a world, is answered in the affirmative but what kind of world is left open.

This is the difference in-between having given sensibility and given objects vs. patterns. As we have already discussed, patterns are what really matters; equivalent to saying ‘the world is this way’ is a definition of truth.

As the concept of truth if further fleshed out, reasoning about reasoning becomes more significant: we create a system called Logic, which has the primary function of truth-preservation (meaning, when one starts with something true and uses the system of Logic, one should find truth is preserved). But as we have found out in utilizing this system, to make it efficient we are forced to limit its application. Hence Logic works well for science but not well for social-sciences and so forth.

To say something is true, or to define Truth, is to suggest that a certain construed meaning (pattern) “the world is not flat” has the property of being more or most likely to connect with a given object (our experience of the world).

The other important aspect of reason is bad reasoning. As signified in close examination of Logic, formal constraints can be used in reasoning to move the likelihood of a pattern (ie effect its truth-value). It is not to say that using bad reasoning always makes something NOT true or least likely but rather it simply becomes a red-flag worth noting when attempting to construe meaning upon the world. As anyone who has studied Logic formally knows, there are many fallacious, invalid and bad rational arguments which still can be true. But knowing what is bad and why is important.

Obviously since I am speaking about a grand and fundamental reasoning here, there can be nothing which lies outside of reason; or rather, that which does lie outside of reason is unimportant since it has not and cannot make its way into our minds. If it were to at any moment, it would cease to be irrational and thus become rational (in the general sense I am speaking about here).

The last sort of point I want to make is the value we place in ‘bad’ reasoning. If we had two descriptions/arguments for different conclusions but were so close that they seemed to be equal (more or less) we might be stuck with a problem. However, if it were discovered that one of the two arguments was using ‘bad or poor’ reasoning, then it is my suggestion that this would be the thing which might unbalance the equilibrium.

The problem is however, that if the battle between two said points of view is old and carries all kinds of extra-argumentative implications, then the small difference signifying the use of poor reasoning will likely go undetected; or when detected with be passed off as just another ‘propaganda attack’ or what have you.

This is why the real answers to the hard questions of reality are usually not fully answerable until after the political, sociological and personal fallout has all but gone (such as the world being flat vs round for example). It is not until we can look at the competing patterns with sobriety that we can actually decide with clarity.

I think the same thing about the God-question.

My Second Response

I agree with you that the atom was imagined before it was sensed directly; however, the imagination which conjured up the atom was, itself, working from sensible object-pattern ideas which had high probability of being accurate. The work of the mind is to fit thought to the phenomenon which it senses, not the other way around.

We can use our imagination to make discoveries, but the discoveries are never called discoveries until they are sensed. Therefore, without the sensible object-patterns we have now for the atom (the evidence), we would have to conclude that the idea of the atom was only an idea based in other sense-object probabilities and did not become a sense-object itself until humans were able to construct tools which allowed for it to be sensed.

There are many other examples of imaginative answers which got rejected (many pre-Socratic philosophers believed all of reality was made up of one element like fire or water). What does it mean to reject it? Simply that such answers have low probability of being accurate whereas the atom idea has higher probability. So our imagination can lead us into error as much as it can lead us into new discoveries!

Jon said:
“Can there be no meaning in a (at least seemingly at first) one-time event? What is the place of reason as it relates to what seem to be creative acts? Would you say that one of the patterns we can reason about is the pattern of creativity and new events within history? Do we not have a human "memory" of such things and can we not reason about the pattern of previously unpatterned things?”

I think meaning signifies consistency. Consistency can be in many places and thus many different ‘takes’ on a sensible object can bring about various patterns which are all applicable or seem so initially. Sometimes we can eliminate lesser options but other times we can only rely upon likelihood.

Creativity is a function of our ability to abstractly take apart patterns and put them back together again in ways which are not originally sensed. This is the example of the unicorn: the joining of a horse-pattern with a horn-pattern to make a horse-horn-pattern. Our imagination creates space in-which we can then error. Once we create “2” and “+” and use them together we can get “2+2” which equals “4”. Now that we have all these things we can do extra stuff, move them around to create “2+2=2, 4+4=4, 2+4+=2+” and so forth. What can we do about this? We call them contradiction, or functions of imagination: patterns which do not have their own sense object. They might in the future, but for now the honest phenomenologist has to say they currently do not have a sense-object.

We can have patterns which do not connect with sensible objects and this is the strength and danger of thought. Sometimes our creativity can lead us to find new info (such as the atom) and other times it only takes us to the fantastical (novels, stories and other forms of art).

You could have meaning in a one-time event if the consistency being signified were found in other object-patterns. Language works like this: you can hear and understand sentences which you have never heard before and this is because you understand a sentence by the pieces not the whole-ness of it. Think of meeting a new person and hearing their name for the first time. It is a new experience (one-time-event initially) but is still based in sound-making. You might be confused at first because you have never heard it before, but this does not make it impossible to make sense of it (because it is still grounded in reality as it were).

This is why I think there is nothing to be properly considered ‘out side’ of reason: if you can talk it, think it or argue it is ‘out side’ of reason, then you are already working within reason. I usually find this idea of ‘out side reason’ being used as a tactic rather than a path to furthering ideas. ‘4+5=10’ is incorrect and if you said this one particular equation lies ‘out side of reason’ and thus IS correct even though it ‘looks’ wrong, then I am overtly suspicious.

Jon said:
“Can we reason about an Idea which encompasses and makes sense of the patterns themselves?”

Yes, creating an Idea which further scrutinizes patterns themselves would be further scrutinizing reason itself. This is done when we think up Empiricism or Literature. They are Categories which organize patterns themselves.

Jon said:
“Certainly it is testable by its alignment with sensed objects and patterns, but if it holds enough reasonable force, couldn't such an Idea be allowed to test our very sensing response in return, in sort of a cycle of reasoning, from Ideas to Objects and Patterns and from Objects and Patterns to Ideas?”

Yes it could and this is why most scientists only work within the Empirical (sensing object) reality; they know they are limiting themselves, but they find such a limitation acute for their findings. Prior to this, before science was science and was only philosophy, the Findings as well as the initial Propositions had to be scrutinized. This is why people would take the question of “how many angles can dance on the head of a pin?” seriously; they wondered and wanted to know. Empirical science raises it’s efficiency by narrowing the initial parameters for questions to be considered (but they have their eyes open in this).

Jon said:
“Obviously I want to agree with that, while also pushing for something more complex, a cycle of reasoning that can be allowed to spiral back and forth rather than completely allowing either the Sensed Pattern or the Idea, the Description or the Phenomenon, to trump, or totally eclipse, the other, in our reasoning.”

I think I understand what you are saying here and I would agree, we should always allow our sensed patterns to be scrutinized. However, I am a bit skeptical that we might sense a pattern which could change our sensibility entirely- that seems dubious to me. What seems totally given is that we have sensibility and sense something (objects). We can take ourselves to places where we find new objects to sense (like atoms) but they are not ‘new’ in a totally-additional-sense, but only ‘new’ in an already-there-but-not-found-yet sense. When people first broke a jar into pieces, they were looking at ‘atoms’ of the jar and thus the progression towards quantum mechanics was always ‘ongoing’ as it were right from the beginning.

So our patterns always need to be reassessed, always! But I think we can still stand on sensibility and object no matter what occurs (only because to go against it would simultaneously undermine the attempt to go against it).

Jon said:
“Isn't that exactly why we need to go forward with a reasonable faith in the (potential, at least) marriage of Ideas and Forms?”

No, the marriage is not as important as being descriptively accurate is. The phenomenologist is okay with ideas which do not connect to sensed or sensible objects; the imagination is quite capable of creating such things: contradictions, purely imaginative objects and so forth.

There is no ‘faith’ in the potential connection of Ideas and sensed objects, only the categorization of what does fit (meaning high probability or reoccurring consistency) and what does not fit (meaning low probability or does not reoccur).

The reason why we think about consistency and reoccurrence is because we can be mistaken: we can take the wind causing a branch to rap against our door for a person knocking, a shadow for a ghost or whatnot. It is not that we did not sense an object in these moments, only that we placed the wrong pattern for what was sensed. BUT, if the error is never discovered or discovered quite late in the game, there will always be people who remain convinced that they did see a ghost.

That is fine as well, for we must always be open to new possibilities but even those individuals must be honest with themselves and accurate (meaning, if they never again sense the object in that particular way, they should say so). That is to say that IF ghosts are real, they are real in a very peculiar kind of ‘way’ and that the ‘way they are real’ is clearly less consistent then other ‘real’ things like trees, persons, dogs and rocks. The phenomenologist WOULD get upset if you wanted to classify ghosts as fitting the same description of trees and rocks; for this seems clearly a misapplication of consistency.

This is why consistency is important, because where it is lacking, we should be suspicious. And we are, predominantly in Medicine, where a new drug might do all kinds of desirable things, but if it does them randomly and without guarantee, then it is ruled as a bad drug.

So to re-state my answer: I think reasoning SHOULD cycle back upon previous patterns and scrutinize them; BUT, scrutinizing sensibility itself is not really possible. We can always be sure we are sensing and that we sense something (objects). All the scrutiny, skepticism and debate about patterns come after this because it is a function of reasoning itself. To say we can scrutinize sensibility itself is to say I can think and in thinking I prove that I cannot think.

Sorry if I jumped the gun on you but I think most of my thoughts are out there now, we only need to discuss the application and implication of them now.