Dennis Mahar wrote:Does Reasoning need an 'I'.?
Do you own reasoning?
Where do the results of reasoning reside? Can reasoning lead to different conclusions? Where do
those reside?
Blair wrote:Bobo wrote:Hey prince, do you think that genius is universal (in all things or all people)?
No.
Bobo - haven't you read
any of Blair's posts?
Intentionality asserts an I.
Assertion itself implies an I. If this is what you mean, I agree.
Dennis wrote: (I am) Not denying existence exists.
Not denying a sense of 'I'.
How it exists is the question.
Do 'I' own my birth?
Does 'I' own my death?
Does 'I' own my life?
I included the parentheses above, my words, since your style of writing makes your meaning ambiguous in my eyes sometimes. Read as written, "not denying" could be taken as a gerund and therefore the subject of a complete sentence. That entirely alters the meaning - I believe your meaning is consistent in that the "I am" was tacitly implied.
You are saying a sense of I exists, but not conceding that this indicates an actual I exists. But the following questions about ownership are in my view entirely irrelevant to the actual existence or not of an I. Because if you answer no to all of them, it in no way proves or even supports the idea that there is no I but only (a delusional) sense of an I.
Consider these responses to those question: Every
one is born, every
one dies, and between the two, every
one lives. Your posers could be taken as indictments of the idea of "ownership" rather than of the existence of the I.
Suppose that ownership of anything is an illusion, and living within it a delusion. Things can be taken away from you, after all. So can your life, but not if you do not in some sense have it to begin with.
Your philosophy does tend to render everything meaningless - which logically makes the philosophy itself meaningless. Most significantly, it makes learning meaningless, if not impossible, if taken to its logical conclusions. If there is no I, there is nothing that can learn or grow. Your view also makes teaching completely hollow, and the teacher/pupil relationship (as well as any other kind of relationship) untenable, since a relationship requires two or more individuals, which cannot exist according to you.
I guess my point here is really simple. If nobody controls when or if they are born or die, or very much of what happens in between, then that is simply an observation about everybody, and therefore can't prove anything. It would be like asking, do you control how tall you grow? Can you fly? No? Then your I does not exist.
It doesn't follow.