Being religious and keeping Torah are two opposites.

 Being religious and keeping Torah are two opposites. Being religious is group identification. That is directly opposed to keeping Torah which means to follow the law of the Torah no matter what any one says or believes. 

And in fact we find most practices of the religious are directly opposed to Torah. E.g., honor your father and mother. This is given hypocritical lip service.

But the legalistic aspects of thing is not what is the most pressing issue. Rather there is some deep kelipa of Amalek which infests the religious world. Some real viciousness that is hard to talk about since they use the show of keeping Torah which makes it difficult to see into the hypocrisy. 

the very emphasis on appearance of religiosity ought to give a red light to warning since thenTorah says the opposite--to walk privately with God.

music file z57

 z57 D Minor

even though marrying the daughter of a Torah scholar in an important value, I can see that it is more important to marry someone that appreciates learning Torah [for its own sake].

 Human relations are hard to figure out. My wife was absolutely intense on marrying me. This relation had started to some degree in high school. She was a  violinist in the high school orchestra when I first saw her. We got along very well but there was no serious relationship. Then when I went off to Shar Yashuv in NY [a great Litvak yeshiva in NY], she had written a note to God telling him that she thought that I had discovered something important, but I had disappeared. She was hoping I would call her and let her know what I had discovered. Then after a year, I called her. [For the last year in high school and my first year at Shar Yashuv, I had no contact with any of my former friends. Intentionally]. But while I was back home in California, after one year I decided to call her. This is a long story, but she became extremely intent with trying to get me to marry her--which I did.--And I am very happy that I did so. But she was not the daughter of a Torah scholar, so she did not really understand what I was doing in learning Torah. Maybe I myself did not understand this. Learning Torah is after all an area of value that is beyond human reason. 

And the odd thing is that very often daughters of Torah scholars also do not seem to appreciate learning Torah. I began to see that Torah to most people is a means to make money. So even those that learn Torah for its own sake would be at a loss to understand why the religious world cannot see learning Torah for its own sake as a positive value.

So even though marrying the daughter of a Torah scholar in an important value, I can see that it is more important to marry someone that appreciates learning Torah [for its own sake].

The answer of Dr Ross to my letter about the difference between Copenhagen and Everett.

[I was advocating Everett as being a better approach since there is no magical collapse of the wave function. But then Dr. Kelley Ross points out that in in Bohr there must be an observer (somewhere) for Quantum mechanics to work. And this two level of reality is essential to Kant and Plato also.    

[I also want to mention that Everett's many worlds theory does not mean many universes, but can simply be different areas in our universe where the different possibilities of QM come to be.]

I think it is important to mention here that even in Everett, there is an observer. So the two levels of reality are preserved. I.e., in Bohr if u have two and one observes the other then there is a collapse of the wave function. But someone outside of that system can see them both as one system and thus still connected by one wave function. [You can see that even a piece of matter like an electron can have a wave function--because of E=mc^2. So the outer observer sees just these two inner people as a connected wave.]  

When you say "QM just gets larger and larger as far as one wants to go," I take that to mean that there is no "magical collapse" of the wave function, ever.  This "Everett" must be one of the people who doesn't like the dualism implied in quantum mechanics.

He's not alone, although usually it goes the other way, that the reality of the wave is dismissed and particles affirmed.  But it is hard to leave out the particle part, since particles do at times behave like particles:  They have definite location (within Uncertainty) and Dirac's mathematics for them postulates a geometrical point, which a wave is not.

So this doesn't seem right or helpful to me.  The whole idea of a Kantian quantum mechanics is that the dualism is preserved, as in Kant's metaphysics.  You don't like that?

KR

the importance of the Gra

There is on one hand the very great importance of learning Torah. On the other the religious world which makes it money by means of a pretense of keeping Torah is quite corrupt. Even though there are here and there great yeshivot which keep and learn Torah sincerely, the religious word itself is mainly fill with delusions. Thus it is clear that for anyone to keep and learn Torah sincerely he or she must stay away from the corrupting influence of the religious . I have no claim to understand the hearts of men, but I can see clearly that the practices of the religious have nothing to do with Torah at all. It is all a show or the sake of money and power.

However, the general world of the Litvaks is basically OK.--except that they have not and do not realize the importance of the Gra. If they would the signature of the Gra on the letter of excommunication would be listened to.

My question that I asked Dr Kelley Ross and his answer. [He is going with the Friesian sort of modification of Kant.--and frankly I can not see any other way to go with Kant.

(Here Dr Ross quotes my question): There was one letter that I sent where I was asking if immediate non intuitive knowledge can help for how intuitions can fit into the basket of the categories and thus become united. 

(Dr Ross's answer:) In Kant, there is confusion about "intuition," since he originally says that it is given to us without any functions of thought, but then he ends up with the argument that to enter consciousness, intuition must be synthesized using the categories of the understanding.

Non-intuitive immediate knowledge is outside that debate.  That is how the categories are available in the first place, but we are not aware of them until we reflect on the products of synthesis, i.e. consciousness and perception.

(Here again is part pf my question): I forget this minute how he puts it but basically I think it is that there is some aspect of the intuitions -their form- that has the possibility of fitting into the categories and then the categories unite them.

(Dr Ross:) This overlooks the existence and activity of synthesis, which leaves out Kant's mature theory.  So I'm not sure what the reference in Kant would be for your citation. [my later note: I will have to look that up.]

(Me again:) Similarly there is some answer on how the categories can process the intuitions.

(Dr Ross:) Synthesis uses the categories to "process" the manifold of sensation so as to produce consciousness and experience.  If "intuition" implies awareness, then the application of the term must be moved from the given manifold to the product of synthesis.  This is a challenge in Kant scholarship.

(Me): It seemed to me that immediate non intuitive knowledge can be the source of this unity [of the intuitions]. That is the deeper source of knowledge that unites both the senses and the categories. 

Dr Ross: Again, there are different issues.  How the categories are available in the first place is different from what they are used for.  Kant's argument "from the possibility of experience" means that the categories must be available in order to be used.   And one thing that must also be available is the "unity of apperception," according to which synthesis constructs consciousness.  That will be "the source of this unity," and it will be, like the categories themselves, non-intuitive.

Note that Kant believed the "availability" of the categories was covered by his "metaphysical deduction," i.e. that the categories are artifacts of the forms of logic.  This was grossly insufficient for what was needed.  To get from the form of conditional propositions in logic to the concept of causality you need, well, the concept of causality.  Kant can't get that rabbit out of that hat.  Modern logic, for all its faults, clarified that -- although the Stoics had done it already.  Kant has similar problems in morality, thinking that moral imperatives will follow from the forms of logic also.  In all of that, even Platonism works better.

Yours truly,

KR

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I think one of the very important aspects of Kelley Ross is that he shows how the Friesian school i not psychologism but rather depends on axioms that are known, but not known infallibly but can be defeated as per the idea of Popper of falsifiability. 

Robert E Lee and the Civil War

 In the letters of Robert E Lee you find the idea that if the whole issue had been to obey the Constitution of the USA there never would have been any conflict. But you find the exact same idea in General Grant. To both of these men the entire issue was this alone. The South held secession was a right. And even if that is not a part of the Constitution , still it was stated openly by the Virginia delegates to the Continental Congress].

However in terms of slavery, I think the welfare system in the USA is slavery forcing white people to work for blacks without compensation. So I do not think that anyone really objects to slaver. Rather slavery of blacks they object to. But slavery of white people is OK.

 But that is how things are in the West--with the newspapers advocating one kind of outrage after the other. First global cooling, then global warming. Then Climate change, then vaccines. One set of outrages after the other. That is the odd sort of mentality of the West. Every ten years or so, the absolute unchangeable morality changes from one thing to the other, and that other is also unchangeable while the first is forgotten and goes back to the regular state.

Rather I think that morality ought to be based on reason, not fads nor just "faith" which is often delusion.