cardboard adolescent

it's not an argument because "being presented as itself" is the opposite of an argument. when you say something like "god is absolute truth" that is presenting a statement as itself, it's the opposite of an argument, it's faith. my whole point is that the basis of what constitutes logic has to be outside the domain of logic, and this is not an "out there postmodern perspective," it's a basic problem of philosophy. it's something logicians understand. a system can not justify itself, that's completely circular.

Tarski's undefinability theorem - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

you're using your consciousness to decide to roll the dice, right? so you're still using your consciousness. this is completely beside the point.

here i'll bring in some postmodernism, just because it's fun. you're basically setting up a duality here of feelings being passive (happening to you) and reason being active (your mode of being), which is perhaps the pinnacle of "phallogocentrism." because with your thoughts you "penetrate" the world, whereas through your feelings the world penetrates you, you associate more with your thoughts, since ultimately you associate more with your cock. however, it's a completely ungrounded claim and association on your part. although reason feels active, it always comes in response to some cue from your feelings, a perceived lack or yearning. hence, there is no reason to assume that reason is not just as passive as feelings, and the duality between consciousness/subconsciousness is completely unwarranted. there is no choosing between reason or emotions, one uses reason to judge emotions and emotions to judge reason. you do not choose to use reason, reason is the very mode of choosing, it's just as much something that happens to you as feeling.

this is pretty self-contradictory. how can you be voluntarily unconscious? for something to be voluntary implies consciousness. axioms are not established because they yield progress, axioms are always stumbled upon by reasoning backwards, we start by adding 1 plus 1 without asking what 1 is, and only when we are called upon to rigorously defend the operations that we're doing do we reason back to axioms. these axioms feel self-evident because they feel justified by the operations we've been doing. however, with non-euclidean geometry we find that even the most obvious axiom can be inverted to produce a completely counter-intuitive system which nevertheless is internally consistent. there is no way to choose between two such systems except by asking "which works better as a model?" and what that means is basically "which is better at helping us get what we desire?"

i should point out that "which works better as a model" does not mean "which is closer to reality?" since this again is completely circular, we can not compare a system to reality because we do not know this reality beyond the system we have of understanding it, so ultimately this would just mean comparing the system to itself. we can perfect a system by trying to resolve its internal contradictions, but there is a limit to this as well, which was found by godel. he proved that a system can not be complete and consistent... to remain consistent it must be incomplete (and of course if it loses consistency, it becomes meaningless). so does this mean we should assume that reality itself is incomplete? or that the systems we use to model reality are inherently imperfect?

and here we go again. i've made this point before: stop using "the postmodernist" as a straw man. if you want to talk about baudrillard, derrida, lyotard, lacan, fine, i'll debate any fine point with you. but you're making generalizations which show that you haven't really read these people or understood the subtlety in their work. they are all responding to (or completing) very long, drawn out philosophical traditions, and if their points seem completely absurd it's because they're also building on hegel, who more or less turned philosophy on its head. your points about transcendence are vague and again, miss the point: transcendence is generally taken as freeing yourself from the confines of the material world, and since our understanding of this material world is based on the systems we use to model it, i don't see how the perfection of these systems could possibly push us outside them, unless their perfection paradoxically means their dissolution, which is an argument a postmodernist might make, although most of them do not believe in the possibility of transcendence.

i'm not questioning the law of identity, because to question the law of identity already presupposes it. you should make your perspective stronger, and instead of saying that "whatever isn't reason isn't thought" simply say that there is no thinking outside reason. because if there is something trans-rational that isn't thought, then there obviously is a mode of transcending reason, which is what i think you're confusedly arguing against. what i am questioning is that you can "prove" the law of identity, you can't you have to assume it. and there is a huge difference between proving and assuming: any proof is always dependent on an assumption, but this assumption can not be dependent on a proof, it has to be dependent on something else. to say that it is dependent on itself is completely circular and meaningless. so it must be dependent on a feeling of how the world is (which is what aristotle was saying when he said they are "self-evident") or it is dependent on nothing, which is to say, arbitrary and artificial. either way, the heart of reason is not rational.