Of Concepts and Abstraction

[genkaus]

Most of what you say makes no sense whatsoever, but I'll try to reply.

Not from where I'm sitting. Ours is a cognition of a biosphere, of matter and space; evolution and physics. What of the reality of an aphid or ant, an elephant or euglena?

Reality, being independent of consciousness, is not different for any of these creatures. The process of cognition might be different in practice, but it is the cognition of the same reality.

Is life what it is to exist, to be real?

No. Not everything that exists is alive.

What of granite? What of hydrogen?

What of them?

We have a perception of reality biased towards the organic and conceptualized to scale of eyes five feet off the ground;

Incorrect. The perception may be limited due to the nature of our physical senses but the conceptualization is not. Nor does it occur automatically. It always is a conscious process.

thirty trillion cells self-organized into an automated community where the natural processes are tended by a brain of which we have no awareness.

No perceptual awareness. We have other ways of gaining awareness of i.e. knowledge about things that are beyond the range of our perception.

Where the whole enterprise is guided by an emergent simulation, mind, a synergy distinctly lacking in empirical reality yet without which the entire structure is dysfunctional biological morass waiting to be recycled into the ecology.

The nature of existence of mind, cognition and knowledge is one of the questions I seek to be answered here.

Logic dictates chains of causality were of necessity linked to form "what is I" from "what exists;" but I was never a big fan of formal philosophy.

I can see that.

I have concluded that all chains of causality must reduce to I;

And how have you done that without using formal logic or philosophy?

that furthermore if I define "what exists," I must consider I do not exist.

You don't define what exists. You can only identify.

And "I do not exist" is self-contradictory.

I'm sitting here pecking away at this keyboard in the desert, anticipating the pressing of the "post reply;" when another I may or may not consider these words in time for me to still be. Here, or anywhere at all.

What does this mean?

"What exists" has found firmer ground in the realm of empirical science; "I" only exist in temporal relation to "you," and then only in simulation.

No. You exist even without any relation to me - temporal or otherwise.

For myself, archetype; "I love Gwyneth Paltrow" is this existence, which defines nothing in itself yet everything of itself.

Actually this tells me nothing at all.