I asked Dr. Kelly Ross:

I wonder if  in the thought of Kant and Fries it is possible to draw a direct connection between the dinge an sich and non intuitive immediate knowledge.

His answer: Kant and Fries thought that Reason related directly to things-in-themselves, and non-intuitive immediate knowledge was knowledge from Reason for Fries.  So, yes.

I: The thing in itself is beyond empirical experience but knowledge of its existence seems to a kind of knowledge; while the immediate non intuitive kind of knowledge is more related to the synthetic a priori, first principles, and universals.

Dr. Kelly Ross : There are aspects of things-in-themselves that Kant already thought were only known through Reason.  Morality, in the first place.  Because of morality, he thought that God, freedom, and immortality were implied.  I only think that works well with freedom.  But the general principle is that unconditioned realities are possible among things-in-themselves but not among phenomena.  God, freedom, and immorality all involve unconditioned realities.

I: Is it possible that it is this non intuitive immediate knowledge that knows the dinge an sich?

Dr. Kelly Ross: The problem with our dealing with things-in-themselves, according to Kant, is that there cannot be a consistent theory of transcendent objects without generating antinomies.  I think that is still a good principle, and you can see the page on antinomies at http://www.friesian.com/antinom.htm.

But there is more to the transcendent than metaphysical paradoxes.  Neither Kant nor Fries knew how to deal with the principles of actual religions, e.g. ritual requirements such as baptism or observing the Sabbath.  See "Nelson and Religion" at http://www.friesian.com/nelson.htm#religion for the problems with the Kant-Friesian attitude.

Appendix:

(1) What I was getting at was that I think non intuitive immediate knowledge knows the existence of the dinge an sich, but reason knows universals. [I probably did not state this clearly enough in my question.]

(2) Also what I was trying to say was that even though the way Kant gets to the dinge an sich is different than how he treats the question of a priori synthetic knowledge, still they both seem connected.

(3) Are not unconditioned realities in the category of the thing in itself? And at least as far as Kant the dinge on sich is rather common place things. It is just we can get to what those things really are. But is it not so that we understand universals about those things? For example the laws of physics? What perhaps Kelly Ross is saying is that at a certain  common place things start to generate contradictions. For example Quantum Mechanics. The actual equations are exact and simple and local. [Correlation is not the same as causation.]
Here is Lubos's statement about this

Entanglement is nothing else than the quantum variation of the concept of correlation. It either represents any correlation between two subsystems that is properly described and understood in the language of quantum mechanics; or it refers to those correlations that make the subsystems behave differently than anything in classical physics.\

http://motls.blogspot.com/2012/03/most-of-research-of-nonlocality-is.html

A man is stopped by the police around 1 am and he is asked where he is going at this time of the night. 

The man replies, "I am on my way to a lecture about alcohol abuse and the effects it has on the human body, as well as smoking and staying out late." 

The police officer then asks, "Really? And who is giving that lecture at this time of night, and where will it be held?" 

The man replies, "That lecture would be given by my wife, and it would be held at home." 

I heard this lecture from my learning partner. He was  in New Mexico and part of the driver education course there involved seeing the difference between a person's brain who drank alcohol and one who did not. [These were from people who had donated their bodies to science.] The regular brain was  obviously healthy. It looked healthy and firm and clean. The brain of the person that drank alcohol when it was merely touched the slightest bit instantly fell apart into a bloody mess.


This relates to me because a  Tartar originally from the Crimea but now in Ukraine proper comes into my room about twice a week without asking and steals any money or wine that I have for Kidush [that is for one cup on Friday night]. This is not unusual. In the Ukraine, there are many  people that can't be happy unless they steal something. There are wonderful people in the Ukraine, but by and large there is this strange little thing that about 90% of the adult males have have that seem incurable.

Of course every group of people has at least one characteristic flaw. So just noticing this problem in Ukraine does not mean that anyone else is any better. Some people have much worse addictions than to alcohol and theft. For example Muslims seems to have usually bad days when they can't murder some Jew or Christian. Homosexuals in the USA seem to be very unhappy if they can't make others into sexual perverts. Everyone and every groups has their own special "evil inclination."

There is difference between deficit and debt.

Jon Gabriel Ricochet's chart


According to this information it is probably a good idea to elect a Republican president who at least does not have to goal to bankrupt the USA.







From Jon Ricochet

"The D.C. press corps was giddy last night, declaring that the fiscal crisis had ended. Senators praised "honorable friends" from "great states," congressmembers gave standing O's to their stalwart leaders, and the president saluted bipartisanship while ridiculing Republicans, bloggers, activists and pretty much anyone else who dared oppose him.

If the whole thing seemed a bit surreal, it's because the whole thing was a bit surreal. America's fiscal crisis is not that our debt ceiling isn't quite high enough — it's that we have too much debt.

It's as if I had $250K in credit card debt and I told my wife, "Great news, honey — our fiscal crisis is over! I just got a new Visa!" If she didn't hit me over the head with a rolling pin, she would most assuredly tell me where I should place it.

To help visualize how up the creek we find ourselves, I created the infographic above.

It's an imperfect analogy, but imagine the green is your salary, the yellow is the amount you're spending over your salary, and the red is your MasterCard statement. Before sharing this info with your spouse, I recommend you hide the rolling pin."

Sometimes the best remedy for a Torah controversy is simply a good old-fashioned, down to earth, nothing buttery, look-it-up-to-see-if-it’s-so, Torah study. No fancy footwork necessary. Just cut right to the chase, let the Torah speak for itself, then be loyal to it. That’s all. Of course, because of ambiguities in the text, not every challenging, contentious  dispute can be settled this easily.
That is why the Talmud exists--to clarify ambiguous issues.
Frequently, though, a careful, close, honest look at the Torah [Five Books of Moses] is all that’s required to resolve what might seem at first to be a difficult dispute.

 I take it to respond to one of the most severe challenges to Torah today. The question: What does God really think about homosexuality? Could it be that the Torah has simply gotten it all wrong? A dedicated group of homosexuals and “gay-friendly” Jews think so, and they are campaigning relentlessly to change your mind. They have certified scholars on their team, they’re tactically clever, and they’re aggressively training their own ambassadors to send out to reform the Torah. When—not “if,” but “when”—you encounter this teaching, you’ll need tried and true Torah answers.

If in doubt go to the Torah. If that is ambiguous, then go to the Oral Law. What is the Oral Law? According to many Christians, it is a conspiracy to undermine the Torah. So it can't help Christians. But for people that are not hostile to it, it can be helpful. It contains the way the Torah was understood traditionally. In other words, we, the Jews, had the Old Testament during the Second Temple period. The entire corpus of the Old Testament had been completed from the time of Moses until the end of the First Temple. But we also had a traditional understanding of how to keep the laws of the Torah. No one thought it is up to every individual to decide how to keep the Sabbath. For if there had been, then a person brought in front of the court to be tried for breaking the Sabbath could say that in his sincere opinion what he was doing was not breaking the Sabbath. That goes for all the laws of the Old Testament.

So simply put: there is a hierarchy in understanding the Old Testament of the Bible. The first step is the literal meaning. If that is clear, then full stop. If that is not clear then we go to the Mishna and Gemara (Talmud). If that is clear, then stop. If it is not clear then we go to the Rambam and other medieval people to gain understanding about the specific issue.
What is common for Christian to complain about is that often this order is reversed. For some reason people will use minor writers in order to confuse major issues. And that is a true critique.

q5  q5 in midi format This piece was not developed as thoroughly as I would have liked as you can tell. But there is little I can do about it. It has to be formed naturally, and I can go back and change things even if I would like to. There have been times when I did the best I could and then a few years later I looked back at the same piece and it occurred to me what was missing. This happened for example in b98.
I knew something was missing at the end, but for several years I did not know what it was until I got to Uman and looked it over again. I hope God grants to me the same with this piece.

In praise of Talmud.

I have limited objective here. It is to point out the advantage of learning Talmud for its own sake and not to be paid for doing so. And I also want to point out a kind of time limit for it. That is I don't want learning Talmud to become away of making a living, because then it loses the effect.

The main effect of Talmud is that it carries with it the different promises that you find the sages said about learning Torah. [And it is the actual oral tradition first hand. As the Rambam says "Just like one must can not add or subtract from the Written Torah, so he can't add or subtract from the Oral Torah." But, of course, people add and subtract from the Written and Oral Law all the time. The point however of the Rambam is that none of that stuff counts as Torah.]

This I am sure all sounds very vague. So let me try to make myself clear.
First to defend my position in front of Christians I should say that I am not saying Talmud is Divine in the same sense that the Torah and prophets are Divine. Rather, I am saying that learning Talmud connects one to the same divine source as when one learns the Torah and prophets. And it has the advantage that it goes into detail how to keep the laws of the Torah and prophets with rigorous analysis, and it does not leave it to individual opinions which vary as the winds.

Second, I wanted to point out there are kinds of services that people promise, "If you do such and such, this will be the result." A good example is Yoga. In spite of extensive studies, no one has found any evidence that yoga does anything for anyone,- and yet it is a multi million dollar industry. People pay good money to do what there is no the slightest evidence that it does anything but waste your time.

But I have good reason to believe from what I have seen in others and in myself, that learning Talmud has enormous benefit --but only on condition it is not done  for pay. If one is paid for learning the learning turns to poison and corrupts the character. So this is a delicate matter.

j93 mp3  j93 midi  j93 nwc