[coldtea]

>It is contradiction with the original meaning and purpose of the whole endeavor - the search for ultimate reality, of what is.

Only assuming reality is rational. Which is a pre-conceived notion -- and that's even more in contradiction with the original meaning and purpose of the whole endeavor.

Though, even scientists can get it wrong (e.g. "God doesn't play dice", when apparently, she does).

[lngnmn]

Come on, rationality as a concept of the mind is unapplicable to reality. Reality just is.

Genetic patterns, for example, are not rational or irrational. Some of them encode genes for proteins, so they are preserved by the evolution processes (mutations in, say, hemoglobin would be selected out). Some of them are random noise. The whole thing is stochastic - random mutation occur, so God plays a dice, but some patterns managed to propagate itself, so here is some determinism within stochasticity. That is basic life.

And then everything builds up upon it, up to french existentialists, speculating about abstract freedom.

[coldtea]

>Come on, rationality as a concept of the mind is unapplicable to reality. Reality just is.

That's exactly the kind of non-philosophical argument that takes for granted what it should investigate.

Reality barely "just is". And even if it is, we have no way of accessing reality-reality, just our perceptions of it (which is the message of Kant, and to a different degree, Hume).

And whether reality is rational, Hegel would also like to have a discussion with you. He'll agree on the "reality is rational" part, but not in the way you think it (e.g. he accepts reality as contradictory at the ontological level, and event accepts contradictions in his version of logic).

>Genetic patterns, for example, are not rational or irrational.

Philosophical inquiry needed (akin to "citation needed").

[lngnmn]

> non-philosophical argument that takes for granted what it should investigate.

It has been investigated. The experimental findings of genetics could prune out lots and lots of prior nonsense, the way a backtracking tree-pruning search algorithm would do. Philosophy need to be constantly revisited, to be up to date with what is proven to be the case.

One implication of genetics is that life is proved to be a "mechanical process" - in other words, there is nothing "extra" to it. God is proved to be dead.

The inquiry is quite short. As long as we have established that the mind is what the brain does, and brain is a product of this particular spot of the universe (it requires water, atoms and certain temperature) every concept produced by the mind is withing this closure, not parallel or outside of it. As an Indian philosopher would say, I am That (Brahman - the universe, what is), not something else. A lot of western bullshit could be pruned out that way.

You know, in the Pirsig's book the hero dismissed Indian philosophy, by attending a wrong sect of extreme advaitists, who are naively postulating that everything is an illusion.

To find the distinction where "what is" ends and an illusion (self-conditioning) produced by mind (and society) begins is the task of philosophy as an endeavor, not some scholastic branch. This is the way to see "That" more clearly.

"Before knowing what is lies outside know what lies within" as the ancient saying goes. Know how the instrument works before make any measurements.

[AnimalMuppet]

> One implication of genetics is that life is proved to be a "mechanical process" - in other words, there is nothing "extra" to it. God is proved to be dead.

Not at all. God is proved to not be needed to explain certain things that are explained by genetics. That's all.

> As long as we have established that the mind is what the brain does...

You haven't. Nobody has. We have assumed, but that's not the same thing.

[lngnmn]

God is a word, a label. That label could be meaningfully attached to one of the two concepts - the process, of which we are by-products, which is running by the machine we call Universe, or, to the language-possessing, self-conscious mind, looking at which the ancient people created their anthropomorphic toy-gods.

One famous Sufi saying goes like this "Nothing can know god but god [itself]". This, intuitively, gives one a hint about the correct labeling and the recursive definition hints that it is all inside the mind, mere mental concepts and social constructs.

The machine which runs all this... Well, it could be called god too, and Hindu mystics did it three or four millennia ago, destroying all the Vedic anthropomorphic gods as mere products of imagination.

Modern science leaves no place for any god, but one of these two.