The Force? Immanent or Transcendent?

forceuser wrote: You are so right I'm sure there's others that have more experience than me but I have felt the Earth breathe and it is spoken Both at times in my ears other times in my soul and other times in my head.
I have moved physical objects with just my mind when I was connected with I guess you call it the force.
And one time I actually created a living flesh poltergeist when I was 16 years old that scared my mom and sister to death just by feeling believing and seen the force and what is possible that I wanted to create.
And so much more is possible it is only limited to what we feel and believe.
But from my brief understanding we all are connected and/or as one and can do anything it's all about love and just experiencing New things

You are absolutely right. I think some like gisteron and adder are misinterpreting the experience of a thing with the thing itself. The experience of a thing of course happens in the mind but that has nothing really to do with the existence of the thing. It exists whether you experience it or not. This is the force. You experience the force differently than me or somebody else and so you might see parts of it I dont see. But cuz i don't see what you see does mot mean it does not exist. But we both see something and we both know how to use it in some way. If it only existed in our minds this would not be true.

The power is there undeniable, thats all there is to it. Its like a knife. The knife exists undeniable. But while you might call it a bread cutter I might call it fish gutter, we see different use but it doesn't change the fact that its still a knife that exists independently of our experience of it. This is the force a real tangeable thi g that exists independent of the experience. If it didn't exist we could never cut bread or gut fish. The simple proof the force exists is the evidence of cut bread and gutted fish.

So like the enlightened ones? (something we never called ourself) are just the ones that found the use for this object that sits right in front of us, right? Manifesting a ghost to flesh form can't be done with the mind alone right!

You are absolutely right everyone as a different experience not counting moving physical objects with your mind and let's call it an astro state or Force ghost state.
I've had experience with voices talking to me 1 from my physical ears to was in my mind and 3 with something like in Star Wars where a force ghost would talk to Luke Skywallker

But of course everyone's perspective is from something different I think some people actually have real experiences example a voice comes to you and says your father just died and he live 2000 miles away can you get a phone call an hour later saying your dad died an hour ago that I believe is more than coincidence I think that is more closely related to what I'm talking about or some type of force that's connected with everything reveal something to you
For example when I was a late teenager one morning I got up and I heard this voice inside of me not in my head but kind of like in my body like a echo chamber said you're going to receive a Bible today

To keep the story short I said to myself I am going to disprove this voices and nonsense once and for all I said I'm going to do everything humanly possible to never receive a Bible today
I just happened to be at a Bible study that night the pastor abruptly stops in the middle and says I cannot continue the service because the Holy Ghost told me I will not continue until this person and you know who you are received this Bible this continued on for 5 to 10 minutes and I thought there's no way in hell I'm going to receive this a raise my hand
The person next to me with a stare at the pastor not even blinking raised his hand and I thought good I knew it wasn't going to be me after the service was over and was going home this person said stop I said yes and they said the Holy Spirit told me you were the one that had to receive this tonight and I was forced to give it to you.
Of course this is just one simple example but after a lifetime of these hundreds and hundreds of examples and all being a hundred percent right I'm slowly starting to realize but maybe there's something else going on in the world that we don't know about that we were not taught in science class. Of course that's just one person's two cents

I know I've already added my 2 cents so by now and probably up to about 20 cents into this game
. There's one challenge that we're going to be for an uphill battle because
I personally believe that you know there's 2 parts is a brain the analytical part and then whatever the other side was called the force is not based on analytical it goes against its nature I believe so we are trained to be analytical thinkers so the more we think the more schooling we get the harder it is to connect with let's call it the force that's why even now there's kids who are being trained to see things with her eyes closed and I mean real things objects in a Room that's just the start of it because they're connecting to the force and life energy that all of us analytical thinkers have no clue abou
I'm driving so hopefully Everyone can understand it

ah yes the side of intuition and the side of logicalness. to much logicalness will get ya every time! because you ignore the intuitiontive side. we all need to spend more time in our emotions and intjuition so that the force becomes a natural part of our "experience" as we were saying earlier. the force is real but if you dont allow the experience of it it will never be there for you to explore. It is quite real and tangeable if you do this.

Fyxe wrote: The experience of a thing of course happens in the mind but that has nothing really to do with the existence of the thing.

Exactly. Just because you have an experience does in no way entail that what you think it was is in fact what it was, let alone that it was an experience of something partly external to yourself. Of course if one thinks oneself infallible, I can appreciate how they'd trust themselves fully. However, for the rest of us mere mortals the only way this can be impressive is in that thinking oneself so perfect seems foreign to us.

It exists whether you experience it or not.

Maybe. Again, we are still struggling to define what this "it" that supposedly exists even is. But once you come up with what it is you even mean by the things you say, by all means, feel free to present your evidence. I for one am open to reviewing it, and to changing my perspective as your evidence would compel me.

This is the force. You experience the force differently than me or somebody else and so you might see parts of it I dont see. But cuz i don't see what you see does mot mean it does not exist. But we both see something and we both know how to use it in some way. If it only existed in our minds this would not be true.

This is the opposite of evidence for your case. It is evidence against it. Consider:

Take a string, any string. It can be a cotton string or a nylon string or brass string, a guitar string or a piano string or a stitching string, it doesn't matter. Span it tight and strike it, and you will hear a sound. Strike it again and you will hear the same sound. A third time - the same sound. Now span it tighter, and strike it again, and the pitch will be higher. Now without changing the tension on it, span a shorter length of it, and strike it again, and the pitch will be higher still.
Don't believe your ears? Ask a friend to verify how the pitch changes with tension and with length. Record the sounds with a microphone. It can be Rode microphone or a Sennheiser microphone or a Neumann microphone, or what ever brand you can get your hands on, it doesn't matter. Then dump the recordings into an audio editing software. It can be Adobe Audition or FL Studio or Audacity, or what ever other program you can get your hands on, it doesn't matter. Isolate periods where the sound is audible, then run a spectral decomposition on them and see how the dominant frequencies are higher in the tighter string and higher in the shorter string.
Don't trust audio recordings? Alright, let's take a high speed camera, of any brand, zoom in close on the middle of the string in each case, and record how they vibrate upon being struck. Dump the videos into virtualdub and export the frames to your hard drive. Then go into that folder, find a frame where the string reverses direction and count the frames until it reverses again. You'll notice that the tighter string and the shorter string have fewer frames between reversals.

The string, and its pitch "exist" outside of your perception. You can ask a large amount of people and bar a handful of exceptions (as pitch sensitivity is actually very variable in humans), almost everyone else's "perspective" and "experience" will be quite similar to your own. Take any selection of technological means to measure what is going on, and they, too, despite having no living soul to receive an experience, will nonetheless confirm the experiences of you and your human peers. There will be no argument about the existence of the string or the pitch, nor how it changes as you span the string in different ways. Almost nobody will "see aspects of it" that you don't, nor will you "see things" others cannot. Real things have this peculiar tendency of being - for the most part - subject independent, consistent, and repeatable, while all magical woo has is a stubborn insistence that realness is some other undefined property things inherently have and that it needn't have to do with any of the ones just listed. It's why the "minimal facts" approach, of ignoring all inconsistencies and focusing on the one kernel that may be common to all tales, is one you'll find in religious apologetics, but a "maximal facts" approach of acknowledging all the evidence and building some sort of understanding that allows to predict as much of it ab initio as can be gotten away with inevitably leads to one kind of heresy or another.

If what you are talking about was any kind of real, everyone wouldn't have an arbitrary and different experience with it. You wouldn't point your finger like Oprah at everyone who has an odd anecdote to share, proclaiming "You know the Force! And you know the Force! And you know the Force!", but you'd be there with your proverbial microphone and camera, studying what ever singular real phenomenon there is, leaving perhaps variations of it to be studied by your peers. You wouldn't recommend a suspension of the intellectual and critical faculties in favour of intuition and emotion. Nor, dare I say, would any Jedi, as if memory serves the Code actually has something to say about that, does it not...

The power is there undeniable, thats all there is to it. Its like a knife. The knife exists undeniable. But while you might call it a bread cutter I might call it fish gutter, we see different use but it doesn't change the fact that its still a knife that exists independently of our experience of it. This is the force a real tangeable thi g that exists independent of the experience. If it didn't exist we could never cut bread or gut fish. The simple proof the force exists is the evidence of cut bread and gutted fish.

Except we have no bread cutters or fish gutters, to stick with your analogy. We have people who claim they gutted fish with a 15^th century samurai sword called "the Force", and we have people who claim they cut bread with a 15^th century samurai sword called "the Force", and a bunch more people who believe it because life isn't exciting enough for them without buying into lies. What we don't have is the bread slices nor the fish guts, and most of the time we don't even get to see the bread or the fish in question at all. If you want anyone who doesn't take clowns seriously to take you seriously, you can start by presenting the actual bread and the actual fish (i.e. that the claimed manifestation is something that even actually occurred to begin with and is not just a tall tale). And if you claim that the bread was cut and the fish was gutted not just by any blade (i.e. known or unknown natural mechanisms or trickery) but by a 15^th century samurai sword (i.e. actual magical powers or the Force), then you better produce some evidence that the sword in question actually exists and is not a mere kitchen knife, and that the alleged cutter and gutter had contact with it at the alleged time. To say that "well, something was used to cut the bread/gut the fish" is not a demonstration that the bread was cut, nor that the fish was gutted, nor that either happened with the aid of an antique masterwork blade.

Interesting thoughts.
"It" is the force that exists. "It" is the power of experience to mentally manipulate the environment. You readily embrace other such powers in your descriptions of the strings. The powers, or in other words, forces of physics. Why is the power of experience any less valid to you?

You yourself allow for exceptions in the people that agree on the experience of the strings. So why don't you allow for exceptions in the experience of the force? In strings the physics is undeniable vibrations, but the experience might be academic for some, musical for others, annoying to yet others, or seen as some new form of power generation or whatever else! So tell me is the purpose of the string to hold a package together or to create music or to just vibrate so scenitists can study sound waves? What is its purpose? Different from function. This is the force within the string.

Are black boxes of electronics capable of deriving anything from the string other than function? No they are not because they are not self aware. This disqualifies them from being a valid way to see the force. They are only capable of examining things that exist outside of perception. Function. Only we can interpret the meaning of a thing, that is where the force lives. In the meaning of a thjng. Once we can understand that it easy to extract that power and create something that physics can never define.

So you see the bread cutter and the fish gutter are sitting right there before you. You just have to see them for what they are, pick them up and then use them.

Fyxe wrote: "It" is the force that exists. "It" is the power of experience to mentally manipulate the environment. You readily embrace other such powers in your descriptions of the strings. The powers, or in other words, forces of physics. Why is the power of experience any less valid to you?

It... isn't? I don't know. I don't understand the question.

You yourself allow for exceptions in the people that agree on the experience of the strings.

Yes. Consensus seldom is, and more seldom yet needs to be absolute. If every viable instrument and a majority of observers agree on something when it is entirely logically conceivable that they wouldn't, that points to there being something outside of pure reason that compels them to, especially regarding the instrument to which reason is not even available. Sure, look long enough and you will find the two dissenters. If that renders the question an open one to you, that's fine. To me it doesn't. To me the odd ones out, the data points that are for some reason or another far outside the overall data set are, as you rightly call them, "exceptions". One doesn't get to have exceptions where there is no rule, much less if there isn't even any data there to construct one.

So why don't you allow for exceptions in the experience of the force?

Exceptions from what rule? The way you framed it, everything is an exception from everything else because there is nothing to point to that would qualify as the norm in the first place. It's not that everyone experiences it slightly differently like in the case of the strings and pitches bar the three and a half people whose hearing is good for nothing who can still use instruments to come to the conclusion everybody else reached. With your the Force you paint it more like that everybody experiences something (when in fact the overwhelming majority wouldn't even claim as much, while the ones who do have all their homework still ahead of them to show that they aren't either lying or mistaken), and that makes it all the Force, because because.

In strings the physics is undeniable vibrations,...

Oh, it's deniable, all right. That's sort of the point. There is no logical necessity for physics to be as it is, or for the string to behave as it does. Anyone and everyone is free to a priori believe what ever they please about it. The point is that what does indeed go on with the string is a sort of real that actually transcends the subjective experience of any one observer, and is so consistent between not only a cartoonishly high proportion of observers, but also between presumably subjectivity-free machines, and that consistency is so pristine that entire industries can be built upon that understanding, like music. Your asking about "purpose" here seems to be a cheap attempt at distraction from the subject matter. The behaviour of the string is "real" in a way that generates not just experiences, but ones that can be intersubjectively verified, accurately predicted, and exploited for the benefit of mankind. The behaviour of your the Force is "real" in a way that is entirely whimsical and allows not for the formation of any kind of comparable subject-independent usefulness.

Are black boxes of electronics capable of deriving anything from the string other than function? No they are not because they are not self aware. This disqualifies them from being a valid way to see the force.

Why? If your "the power of experience" is as valid as the forces of physics, then why would a technique to quantify the latter be fundamentally unfit to assess the former? You can't have it both ways. Either your woo is real and can therefore be studied the way other real things can be, or it cannot be studied the way real things can and is therefore not among them. Take your pick.

They are only capable of examining things that exist outside of perception.

Gibberish. The difference between a microphone and the organ in your inner ear that gives you perception of the sound is that one passes the electrical signal through a copper wire while the other passes it through a neuronal one. Your cochlea is every bit as much a machine as the ones you say are restricted to things outside of perception. If you want to exclude what a machine can pick up from perception, by all means, be my guest, but you are forfeiting this way the means to perceive it with your body also.

Only we can interpret the meaning of a thing, that is where the force lives. In the meaning of a thjng. Once we can understand that it easy to extract that power and create something that physics can never define.

So you see the bread cutter and the fish gutter are sitting right there before you. You just have to see them for what they are, pick them up and then use them.

Interesting. Say, what ever happened to the actual magical powers by which we can manipulate things in our environment? Are they swiftly forgotten now that terms for reality or believability have been proposed, so that now you are left weasling away from any of those tall claims and onto some cheap sophistry so ill-phrased as to entirely evade any sort of substantive intellectual discourse? Tell me, then, what will you say the day meaning has been understood and modeled by psychologists and neuroscientists? What barely-even-gap in the knowledge of the far better educated than either of us will you try and cram your god in then? What pitiful shadow of itself will you be reducing this perhaps once respectable attempt at a philosophy then, assuming this isn't quite the bottom of the barrel yet already?

It's not that I hate sounding as hostile as I do right now, but I would struggle to find a way not to, considering how much Lt. Sulu could learn from these evasive maneuvers you are pulling without even much of a threat in sight. And given how effortlessly you seem to be performing them, I have a hard time justifying engaging with that struggle.

Its ok Gisteron, be as hostile as you like and engage as you see fit. If you see no threat then ignore it. However I think you do see a thread or you would have never brought your weapons to bare in the first place. Its ok, my shields are still down and will take your salvo full force and be the better for it in the end. I am a reike master now and the last year has taught me much. most off all to keep shields down and take the photon torpedos. they dont hurt at all really because my armor is great!

The very instrument in my reason is right there, open and before you. just pick it up! Even a consensus does not make such a thing so. Just because everyone believes that UFOs dont exist does not mean they do not exist. popular opinion is not very scentific now is it? if we still believed the plague was caused because of angry gods we wouild not be very enlightened would we.

I do tell you that your idea of the mechanical instruments that should be capable of measuring the force are wrong. A machine that is not self aware will never see tghe force, be ab le to measure it or confirm its existence. It takes more than that. Now I do believe that if you could create true AI, a self aware machine, ahh what a breakthrough that would be! you would have a machine that could actually see the force and tell you what it is. This is what im hoping for in my lifetime. It takes consciuusness you see, not processes or programs.

You see yo uare stuck on the vibration of the string and missing its meaning. sure it vibrates and it can be repeated. But what does it mean? Is it music or is it the beginnings of a wind turbine? you see we can all agree on the string vibrating, but the idea in that meaning is the force. thats why we see the force differently. take that next step above simple function into meaning and you find the force.

What can we do with that meaning? well you have gotten on my case about abonding that question but I have not. I think we are just beginning to understand the greater meaning of the force. What is it capable of? making music or creating a wind turbine or just maybe moving an object with the mind. Yes science alwqays progresses and wehn it reaches is maximum people will turn to the unknown to explain the rest of the things we dont understand and say god did it or woo did it. but that is not the casse. The force exists in those places inbetween knowledge and experience of the unknown. It is the ineffiable.

you limit yourself gisteron to mechanical function, seek to move beyond that function to its meaning and you shall find the force!

Fyxe wrote: Now I do believe that if you could create true AI, a self aware machine, ahh what a breakthrough that would be! you would have a machine that could actually see the force and tell you what it is. This is what im hoping for in my lifetime. It takes consciuusness you see, not processes or programs.

Consciousness is a process. You could have come to appreciate this, had you spent any time studying it. For all we know, you could have made an important contribution to our collective understanding of it yourself, but you chose instead waste your money (I shan't presume you wasted any time, seeing as these certificates can be simply bought all the same, and at bargain prices) on acquiring a certificate that demonstrably points to no demonstrable knowledge or useful skill. Be that as it may, though, judging by the fact that the presumably human interlocutor that is you has thus far not been able to demonstrate that they actually saw the Force nor an ability to explain to anyone what it is in coherent terms, it would seem that even having consciousness (assuming that you would say of yourself that you possess it), too, is insufficient. Everything will be, by the looks of it, because vaguery and misdirection/intentional misunderstanding seem to be only means to keep this fluff of yours from direct and unambiguous falsification.

You see yo uare stuck on the vibration of the string and missing its meaning.

You were comparing the Force to physical forces, and asked me how I could question the reality of the former whilst being comfortable with the reality of the latter. I brought up the vibration of the string as an example of what we usually mean when we call things "real", and to point out that what ever woo you are suggesting we set right beside it has none of those qualities. That was the entire purpose I had bringing forth the example.

"Meaning" (what ever that means, as you are clearly not using that term in any recognizable way one'd find in relevant philosophical fields) is what you shifted to only after it has become clear and evident to any impartial reader that there is no more ground for you to recover on the actual point I was making. It is, so it seems, in fact the case that when speaking of the real-ness of a string or its vibration we are indeed referring to something, while the real-ness of your mysticism seems by all accounts entirely illusory even on the rare occasion you muster the guts to stay on topic... or "on topic" as you raise it, anyway. We are, after all, dealing with yet another thread that was about a mostly different question that you just hijacked again to preach your own gospel instead of packing it up in a neat little sermon to be posted where those belong.

Fyxe wrote: The force exists in those places inbetween knowledge and experience of the unknown. It is the ineffiable.

It's not consensus so much as repeatability. One of the benefits of capitalism is that it invites independent wealth to grow and challenge and drive that inherent focus on growth to explore boundaries, as a function of freedom - rather than relying on a authority to provide closed focus on that drive and expect everyone else to align to it under auspices of responsibility. In the West it's not consensus, at least until it has to be because of practical limitations in people testing it for themselves.

And it's not that I mistake the thing for the experience of the thing, its that we can only relate to the thing via my experience of the thing.

So when talking about the Force (or anything) it's entirely dependant on my experience of the thing.... to even begin to understand the thing I must understand how I am experiencing it (as much as practicable).

I think the pole people are swinging around is along the lines of whether the limits of experience in knowing a thing have to define the limits of the experience of a thing. It seems to come down at people disagreeing about what is an accurate data source and what is not.

But its failing point does not even define it. I think the argument is more about rational handling of the potentially irrational. Some people can't handle the sight of it let alone handle it, and some people are covered in it, or covering themselves and others in it.

IMO if muppetA can track wholly subjective attributes to something, individually, it doesn't matter if others cannot match it. Those things can serve real use to the muppet regardless of others difference. Difference can be interesting, so long as its healthy and not objectively wrong.

Another way; does a bloke in binoculars looking at blinking Star at night see the same thing as the bloke staring at the same Star from an Astronomical Observatory.... it's the same thing but it's different levels of experience of it. A deeper understanding involves a relationship. Each point of view is valid to an extent, and at some level each point of view is unrelated to the rest.

Gisteron's approach is limiting in that it only validates things which are simple enough to be controlled such that they can be repeated and measured.. but while not a small thing it is indeed vital for existence and the very foundation of organisation and all the things which make humans different to other known lifeforms. But to limit oneself to it closes off one domain of potential, because of limitations on a different domain, ie; the limits of experience in knowing a thing don't have to define the limits of the experience of a thing AND the ways of experiencing a thing don't necessarily have to be defined by the limits in experiencing of the thing by others. At the end of the day, living is experiencing, not knowing. A life need not be defined by how we define the environment in which its possible. It's just important that the experience of it does not contradict or conflict with what is known about it, because that seems to be unhealthy, unhelpful or dangerous. Like meditating in the forest and letting the Lion eat you because it is the 'flow of nature' hehe, and hoping some folk cite you as enlightened for becoming the Lion #peakexperiencefordummies