JADE HELM: TROOPS TO “OPERATE UNDETECTED AMONGST CIVILIAN POPULATION”

That IS proof of theory, in itself.

 

October 12, 2006
I Think Therefore I Am?
Filed under: Mind — Peter @ 12:00 am
That the act of thinking guarantees the existence of the self is a fact that many philosophers take for granted. As Descartes famously put it “I think, therefore I am”, an assertion that has come to be known as the cogito. Certainly the cogito doesn’t seem like something that can be doubted, but if we are really to rely on it we should be certain that its truth can be divorced from Descartes’ philosophy. Here then I will attempt to reconstruct the cogito, as something that cannot be doubted, using a modern philosophical approach.

To defend the cogito we must first reduce it a simpler form that is easier to defend, which is an assertion that we must accept that doubts exist, since to doubt that assertion would be to prove it to be correct. However, even this form of the cogito may be attacked by a kind of radical skepticism. It is possible that what seems like a doubt to us is in actuality not a doubt, but only the appearance of one, and thus it is possible that we might consistently have something that seemed to us like a doubt about the statement “doubts exist”, since no real doubting is going on. To defeat this kind of radical skepticism we must define doubt in terms of presentations, and thus restate our initial claim as “there exist things that present themselves as doubts”. Of course the radical skeptic may now claim that we haven’t proved that real doubts exist, only things that seem like them. This might be a real problem if we believed that a conscious act was something that existed outside of consciousness and was made available to it. This is not, however, how we approach conscious acts, conscious acts simply are their appearances. Even if the conscious act itself is part of some larger unconscious activity, what defines the conscious act as a specific conscious act is how it presents itself to us, unconscious features are irrelevant. And so our rephrasing of the initial claim isn’t even a substantive change, simply a clarification.

Knowing that doubt exists we can generalize and assert that conscious acts exist, since doubts are a kind of conscious act (although we haven’t proven that anything besides doubt must exist), yielding “there exist things that present themselves as conscious acts”. From here, if we are to reach Descartes’ conclusion, we must somehow show that the self exists, and not just the conscious acts. There are basically three ways of understanding the “I” in “I think, therefore I exist”, as the real self, as the self that is constituted by the act of thinking, and as the first person perspective. Of these three it is obvious that the existence of conscious acts can’t prove that “real self” indeed exists. What I mean by real self is the properties of the mind / conscious mind that are really had by the individual, for example certain abilities, dispositions, memories, ect. It should be obvious that a deluded individual might construe his or herself as some other individual in their thoughts, for example as Napoleon. In their thoughts they might think of themselves as having Napoleon’s memories, Napoleon’s dispositions, ect, but in reality they have none of these things, their real self is not Napoleon. Thus it is not self-contradictory to deny that the self that one thinks that they are is their real self, although it is hard to see why anyone would do this. Similar considerations reveal that it is impossible to deny that the constituted self (the self as conceived of in conscious acts) exists, since to assert “I (or this person) is not my real self” is to constitute that self in the denial. The existence of the constituted self is, however, largely irrelevant, since in conscious acts we can constitute any number of such selves, and deny that they are us.

The really interesting question, then, is if we can show that the existence of a conscious act guarantees the existence of a first person perspective, and if some constituted self must exist as a result of this. The structure of consciousness, the fact that we talk of the conscious act as a presentation, certainly implies that the act is structured around a first person perspective. For the moment then I will take it as given that without a first person perspective nothing can be conscious (since otherwise who or what would it be an appearance to?), and thus to doubt that the first person perspective exists would itself be a conscious act structured around a first person perspective, confirming its existence. Why do I say structured around a first person perspective? Simply because a radical skeptic might insist that there is no real first person perspective, only an appearance of one.* So all we can really say is that the conscious act, the experience, seems as though it has a first person perspective, but given our discussion earlier about the contents of consciousness, this is all that really matters. And, as I alluded above, the existence of a first person viewpoint it itself a kind of minimal constituted self, since the first person perspective implies that there is someone who is having the current experience, even if it doesn’t necessarily give that self any other attributes.

Despite its age the cogito is still an important part of the philosophy of mind. Unlike Descartes, we no longer take it as founding all knowledge (or as proving the existence of god). However, even apart from Descartes’ projects, the cogito is still an important argument for the existence of the mind, since the cogito, as presented above, seems to guarantee that it is impossible to consistently doubt that something like consciousness and the first person perspective exist, a point that seems to escape eliminative materialists.

 

Was it the plastic belts, or the white sidewalls?

 

The Rent A Car stickers.

 

That's not likely, sorry. All of those groups are easily gauged and controlled: they are innately conservative, prone to accept authority and to obey commands from authority figures, and they are unlikely to pose any serious objections, let alone threats.

If Uncle Sam were practicing to put down an attempted coup d'état, he would make sure his forces could infiltrate any groups with a separate and well-established command structure, internal rules which are well enforced, and primary loyalties to other Governments or NGOs:

• The Mafia or other criminal organizations.
• Churches and quasi-religious organizations, such as the Black Muslims.
• Non-English speaking minorities with significant money and/or political clout.
• American citizens whom work for large multi-national corporations.

That's not the complete list, but you get the idea.

William Warren

 

Naah He got it from the Urban Section of the Dictionary, I looked!

 

Not wishing to argue, but Broker is correct. It is a done deal and in Print and Voice.

 

It's easy to shut down the cellular network. It's also easy to shut down landlines. (Sorry, conspiracy theorists, those are just facts.) It's not something which can be done with the flip of any single switch though, but it could be accomplished in a (stops to think, remembers long-ago wooden buildings at Fort Gordon and long-ago warnings, and the oath I took) ...

... Never mind. It can be done, and I'd better stop there.

(Son-of-a-bitch! That's the first time in my civilian life that I've realized that I still have to censor myself!)​

Most Americans haven't had an independent thought since our first day of kindergarten, but I'll leave that aside. Our "resourcefulness" is almost always aimed toward taking advantage of weaknesses in an opponents' plan, and as for ingenuity, well, remember Wernher von Braun and all the other German scientists whom were "de-Nazified" following WW2, when the U.S. wanted ballistic missiles faster than we could educate our own rocket scientists. As a people, we are frighteningly dull.

And, sad to say, you'd need a lot more than 10%.

The government - that is, any system of leadership with the muscle to enforce its will - could interrupt the food supply very easily, and starve out any city, town, or region that opposed its authority. Forget any idea of surviving on home grown crops: they take too long to grow, and modern seed varieties require commercial fertilizers and pesticides which can also be cut off, even more quickly than the food supply.

If they want us, they've got us, and they've got us right where they want us. Get used to it.

William Warren

 

I was "connecting dots" as invited by BTPost; and as my opening statement indicated. There's a whole lot of that kind of supposition going around these days surrounding Jade Helm 15, whether in the "Tin Foil Lounge", or under a named thread. Far be it from me to induce provocation or criticism for simply offering thoughts and theories. Actual evidence would have to be from someone connected to either the Sinaloa (of which I've never been connected), or the .mil / .gov (of which my honorable uniformed service to this country has long since passed). If anyone else has a reasonable-sounding JH 15 "dot connecting" theory, I'd be glad to hear about it, whether in the Tin Foil area or in this named thread.

 

Rereading my post, it came out harsher than intended. My apologies, in that regard. However....your theory is flawed, and self defeating.
What will be the logical reaction to a prison break? A massive manhunt, increased scrutiny of his operations, arrests of his employees as they try to squeeze his whereabouts out of his underlings, all things that would deeply hinder his operations. (All so he can be in the driver's seat at the time? Not logical.) He would cripple his business in an effort to safeguard it. He is smarter and more ruthless than that. He wouldn't go anywhere near his area of operations. If anything, he would operate at a remote location, and by messages (all of which he could do from prison with no real risk.)

 

That's what I'm talking about Kellory. No harm nor foul taken. Brainstorming as a process is seldom complete or logical---and always freewheeling (but not exactly Tin Foil level). It depends on others in the group to pick up the ball and run with it. Now we're thinking outside the box. I agree that he's not out to run day-to-day ops in his syndicate. But I do suspect he's gathering his preps (cash, trusted family, and anything else not already secured at his hide) and heading to his BOL somewhere in South or Central America, because he is uneasy about what he's heard about JH15. I'm sure he had the escape plan in place for months. It was just a matter of when he was going to activate it. Obviously his information sources have indicated something big (for him at least) was in the wind.

 

I was there in 70 - zero-zero-Sierra

I wonder if they still rent boats out at that lake?

 

I hesitate to say this, but something we have to consider. If after what just happened in Tennessee, they allow all us servicemen and woman to walk around fully armed, doesn't that constitute a violation of this act?

 

No.

"The original Posse Comitatus Act referred essentially to the United States Army. The United States Air Force was added in 1956, and the United States Navy and the United States Marine Corps have been included by a regulation of the United States Department of Defense. This law is often relied upon to prevent the Department of Defense from interfering in domestic law enforcement"