Objective vs Subjective reality

Tre
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Objective vs Subjective reality

I have been debating with someone on another board who is convinced that atheism is a belief unto itself, rather than a non-belief. After several failed attempts to educate them on the subject, she continually claims that everything is subjective, and that there are no objective facts, not even in science. Even though I agree to a point, I hate it when "spiritual people" counter with the whole "atheism is as bad as organized religion its all subjective" arguement. I tried to deconstruct her "points", but she kept insisting that nothing is objective. I admit to not having a very firm grip on philosophical arguements surrounding this topic. Does anyone have any suggestions on what I can say?


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Tre wrote: I have been

Tre wrote:

I have been debating with someone on another board who is convinced that atheism is a belief unto itself, rather than a non-belief.


Strong atheism is a positive claim. It holds that there are deductive arguments that disprove the existence of a god. The most common arguments are Non cogntivism, which holds thatthe term 'god' is incoherent' or contradictory and thererfore, all theistic claims are irrational) and the argument from evil, which refutes the existence of an omnibenevolent deity.

Weak atheism is merely a lack of belief in theism. It holds that there are no good arguments for theism and that, therefore, non belief is rational. In this case, the burden of proof is on the theist.

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 After several failed attempts to educate them on the subject, she continually claims that everything is subjective, and that there are no objective facts, not even in science.

If this is the case, then her own claim that everything is subjective is subjective. Ergo you are under no obligation to accept  her claim.

Therefore, she has no epistemic rights to her claim, and her claim is irrational.

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 Even though I agree to a point, I hate it when "spiritual people" counter with the whole "atheism is as bad as organized religion its all subjective" arguement. I tried to deconstruct her "points", but she kept insisting that nothing is objective.

If she believes this, then you are both merely exchanging feelings and opinions, and there is no grounds for debate in the first place. Tip your hat and head for the door.

 

"Hitler burned people like Anne Frank, for that we call him evil.
"God" burns Anne Frank eternally. For that, theists call him 'good.'


Tre
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Thanks! Those are some good

Thanks! Those are some good points and I'll make sure to use them! I kind of figured I was wasting my time debating with her. She seemed more intent on getting across opinions than really engaging in an exchange of ideas.


spacebuddha
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I used to believe the exact

I used to believe the exact opposite of what the individual you describe believes.  I thought that everything is objective and that eventually all things will be known through science.  But the older I get and the more I look at the problem, the more it occurs to me that this is unprovable.  I'm starting to see things from a more Kantian perspective.  Nothing can be known in itself.  Because, to know of something, information about it must pass through the lens of our senses which will always distort and filter the reality of the object itself.  To then form an idea about the object requires us to filter that information even further through weak and strong associations with other ideas and eventually to place it within our understanding of reality.  A further problem arises when we realise that our understanding of the world itself is based on the belief that  the world as well as we, ourselves, exist; an idea that can neither be proven nor disproven much like the god question.  So then, is all knowledge based on belief?  Does this mean that people believe what they want to believe?  It seems, the only way to resolve this would be to go beyond the limitations our language imposes on us.  To accept the idea that there is a tangible reality we have to eliminate false dichotomy.  Everything is both subjective and objective to some degree.  You and the world exist not as seperate entities but as two parts of a unity. 


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spacebuddha wrote: But the

spacebuddha wrote:
But the older I get and the more I look at the problem, the more it occurs to me that this is unprovable.

This is just the Arguement from ignorance applied to something else besides god.  Just because you're unable to place the world into context does not mean it's impossible.  No doubt that it's difficult and takes an extreme amount of intellectual effort, but that's just an obstacle. 

 

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I'm starting to see things from a more Kantian perspective. Nothing can be known in itself. Because, to know of something, information about it must pass through the lens of our senses which will always distort and filter the reality of the object itself.

Tabula Rasa.  Sense perception's saving grace is that it doesn't actively distort anything, it does nothing but indiscriminately imput what it has he capability to percieve and input.  The distortion here is a fabrication.  An ever growing understanding of reality allows us to integrate new knowledge with prior knowledge and measure it up for compatibility and consistency.  Thinking doesn't even begin at the perceptual level, and to know anything is not the same as percieving it, understanding it is.

 

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To then form an idea about the object requires us to filter that information even further through weak and strong associations with other ideas and eventually to place it within our understanding of reality.

How is this even a credit to your arguement? Having an ever-expanding range of knowledge to compare/contrast and integrate for consistency only increases the likelyhood that we will percieve and understand correctly or recognize possible deception, and dig in further to understand that (illusions etc..). 

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A further problem arises when we realise that our understanding of the world itself is based on the belief that the world as well as we, ourselves, exist; an idea that can neither be proven nor disproven much like the god question.

I agree that it can't be disproven.  The existence of reality is beyond the concept of "proof." Existence and consciousness are facts implicit in every perception. They are the base of all knowledge (and the precondition of proof): knowledge presupposes something to know and someone to know it. They are absolutes which cannot be questioned or escaped: every human utterance, including the denial of these axioms, implies their use and acceptance.

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So then, is all knowledge based on belief?

Depends on what you mean by "knowledge."  Faith in god is not knowledge of god.  Believing in Santa Clause is not Knowledge of santa clause.  Knowledge is the end product of a combination of reasoning and logic measured up against the ruler of existence. 

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Does this mean that people believe what they want to believe?

People generally do that anyway, thats one of the things the RRS is looking to give a slight push towards turning around. 

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It seems, the only way to resolve this would be to go beyond the limitations our language imposes on us.

Efficient and clear communication is not easy, and mastery of even your own native language will take a lifetime, but what "beyond" are you talking about? 

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To accept the idea that there is a tangible reality we have to eliminate false dichotomy.

Or maybe we could just think, and realize that thought in an of itself presupposes an entity capable of thinking, the existence of thought presupposes the existence of someTHING to do the thinking. There is no false dichotomy in regarding yourself as an independant existent, an organism, a mammal amongst and living within the gradure of the natural world.  Existence is not an "attribute" that you and a tree could be said to "share" that you could uses in concluding that you are an indivisible unit called "existence" making you similar, you are seperate entities, sperate existents, and the fact that you can interact with it, confirms tangible reality without attempting to sum all of reality up into a single unit.

 The idea of a subjective reality arrises because of the diversity among human beings and their cultures, the fact that (as I think sam harris points out) there is no such thing as "Australian Biology" or "Asian Chemistry" is a testament to the Objective reality we live in.  Science is science is science and it's the same here as it is everywhere else in the world.


cheezues
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Tre wrote: I have been

Tre wrote:

I have been debating with someone on another board who is convinced that atheism is a belief unto itself, rather than a non-belief.

This is very important, it has a lot to do with simple language and the definition of the word Atheism as it's been historically opposed with it's common usage today, look for me to post a topic about this very soon in this thread.

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After several failed attempts to educate them on the subject, she continually claims that everything is subjective, and that there are no objective facts, not even in science.

No Objective Facts? Sounds like she's attempted to state an Objective fact, thus contradicting herself thoroughly.  If "No Objective Facts" isn't an objective fact then there must be some Objective facts that can coexist with non-objective ones.  Either way this is an unintelligible statement. 

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Even though I agree to a point, I hate it when "spiritual people" counter with the whole "atheism is as bad as organized religion its all subjective" arguement.

You should point out that it's not an actual arguement so much as it's an Ad Hominem and a Straw Man rolled into one.  Don't allow logical fallacies to enter into your debates with theists. 

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I tried to deconstruct her "points", but she kept insisting that nothing is objective. I admit to not having a very firm grip on philosophical arguements surrounding this topic. Does anyone have any suggestions on what I can say?

People that repeat the same thing over and over again in any discussion usually aren't equipped intellectuallly to deal with any opposing viewpoint, it's not that she doesn't think what you're saying is true, she just isn't psychologically capable of allowing a concept of "Objective fact" within proximity of her mystical theistic worldview, because she knows her worldview couldn't survie such contact.

I would invite her to prove her statement without using the language that we both agree is objective enough for her to use and me to understand (and visa versa) and to admit that even saying that there are "No Objective Facts" is uttering an Objective fact.

You could just invite her to come on the boards here and post up. =) 


spacebuddha
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cheezues

cheezues wrote:

spacebuddha wrote:
But the older I get and the more I look at the problem, the more it occurs to me that this is unprovable.

This is just the Arguement from ignorance applied to something else besides god. Just because you're unable to place the world into context does not mean it's impossible. No doubt that it's difficult and takes an extreme amount of intellectual effort, but that's just an obstacle.


Like Descartes, I start with the assumption that I think and therefore I am. But I recognise that assumption as a belief. I also believe that there is a world outside of me. I can not prove this without using ideas aquired from this outside world or my own mind and therefore it, too, remains a belief. I can examine everything I have sensed and catagorized and thought about to find correspondences and areas of agreement but that is as close as I, nor anyone else I think, will come to knowing what is real.

Logic is a good tool but even that is flawed. There was a mathemetician in the early part of the last century named Kurt Godel who showed that even the best system for expressing a logical statement cannot answer all logical statements.

Our tools for understanding are flawed but I believe there is truth. I just don't think we will ever fully know it.

 

 

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I'm starting to see things from a more Kantian perspective. Nothing can be known in itself. Because, to know of something, information about it must pass through the lens of our senses which will always distort and filter the reality of the object itself.

Tabula Rasa. Sense perception's saving grace is that it doesn't actively distort anything, it does nothing but indiscriminately imput what it has he capability to percieve and input. The distortion here is a fabrication. An ever growing understanding of reality allows us to integrate new knowledge with prior knowledge and measure it up for compatibility and consistency. Thinking doesn't even begin at the perceptual level, and to know anything is not the same as percieving it, understanding it is.

To perceive an object is to intercept the EM waves that bounce off of it and into our retina or to hear the air vibrations that it emits. But, our eyes and ears are not perfect. There are many frequencies in the EM spectrum of which visible light is only a small part. We cannot see radio or infrared waves. Likewise, the human ear can only hear a limited range of audio frequencies. This means we miss out an a lot of information that an object could be sending us. It is what I mean when I say filter. The information we can receive has to be translated into neural signals that the brain can 'read' before it can reach the level of our understanding. This is a distortion caused by the brain reinterpereting reality.

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To then form an idea about the object requires us to filter that information even further through weak and strong associations with other ideas and eventually to place it within our understanding of reality.

How is this even a credit to your arguement? Having an ever-expanding range of knowledge to compare/contrast and integrate for consistency only increases the likelyhood that we will percieve and understand correctly or recognize possible deception, and dig in further to understand that (illusions etc..).

Our knowledge is built since childhood from a foundation through successive iterations of learning either through books or direct experience. Since, as I contend, even the most basic ideas we form will be flawed to some degree, this will have a multiplying effect the further we move from that foundation. In other words, the further we abstract; the further we distance our mind from the world as we perceive it, the more distorted and inaccurate our view becomes.

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A further problem arises when we realise that our understanding of the world itself is based on the belief that the world as well as we, ourselves, exist; an idea that can neither be proven nor disproven much like the god question.

I agree that it can't be disproven. The existence of reality is beyond the concept of "proof." Existence and consciousness are facts implicit in every perception. They are the base of all knowledge (and the precondition of proof): knowledge presupposes something to know and someone to know it. They are absolutes which cannot be questioned or escaped: every human utterance, including the denial of these axioms, implies their use and acceptance.

It can't be proven either. On what ground could you assert it? It is a belief.

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So then, is all knowledge based on belief?

Depends on what you mean by "knowledge." Faith in god is not knowledge of god. Believing in Santa Clause is not Knowledge of santa clause. Knowledge is the end product of a combination of reasoning and logic measured up against the ruler of existence.

This realm of corresponding ideas that we call 'knowledge' all rests on the assumption that we exist.

 

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Does this mean that people believe what they want to believe?

People generally do that anyway, thats one of the things the RRS is looking to give a slight push towards turning around.

I think there is good reason to conclude (aside from what I've already said) that most of what people 'know' is based on belief. For example: You believe your body is made up of molecules of varying substances. Why? You've never actually seen these molecules. But you were told by a teacher and you've read in books that these things actually exist, and because you trusted these sources, you believed it and included that belief in your knowledge domain. And this can apply to any information that isn't directly percieved. You hear something from an expert and believe it because you generally trust experts. Of course, I'm not saying these things are false nor that all experts are liars but I am saying that these are held beliefs rather than something known. And I'm sure you're smart enough to know that not all experts are right and most are wrong before they are right.

 

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It seems, the only way to resolve this would be to go beyond the limitations our language imposes on us.

Efficient and clear communication is not easy, and mastery of even your own native language will take a lifetime, but what "beyond" are you talking about?

Our language because it derives from our understanding is just as flawed. We invent catagories for things and expect them to fit in neatly ordered boxes when, in fact, there is a lot of overlap and subtle shades of meaning that we often miss. The subjective/objective dichotomy was the example I gave. Since information must pass through the mind, there is always a degree to which it can be called subjective and since that knowledge derives from the outside world, there is also some degree to which it is objective. My point is that there are no absolutes here. As for going beyond, I'm still not entirely sure myself how it can be done. Sometimes I meditate. Sometimes I try to think in purely fluid concepts. That is the only way I know of at the moment. I suppose we could try inventing a new language but I think we would still be limited.

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To accept the idea that there is a tangible reality we have to eliminate false dichotomy.

Or maybe we could just think, and realize that thought in an of itself presupposes an entity capable of thinking, the existence of thought presupposes the existence of someTHING to do the thinking. There is no false dichotomy in regarding yourself as an independant existent, an organism, a mammal amongst and living within the gradure of the natural world. Existence is not an "attribute" that you and a tree could be said to "share" that you could uses in concluding that you are an indivisible unit called "existence" making you similar, you are seperate entities, sperate existents, and the fact that you can interact with it, confirms tangible reality without attempting to sum all of reality up into a single unit.

But where do you end and where does the tree begin?

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The idea of a subjective reality arrises because of the diversity among human beings and their cultures, the fact that (as I think sam harris points out) there is no such thing as "Australian Biology" or "Asian Chemistry" is a testament to the Objective reality we live in. Science is science is science and it's the same here as it is everywhere else in the world.

I can agree with this but would like to again point out that objective and subjective reality are not clearly defined nor totally independent.


cheezues
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spacebuddha

cheezues wrote:

spacebuddha wrote:
But the older I get and the more I look at the problem, the more it occurs to me that this is unprovable.

This is just the Arguement from ignorance applied to something else besides god. Just because you're unable to place the world into context does not mean it's impossible. No doubt that it's difficult and takes an extreme amount of intellectual effort, but that's just an obstacle.


Like Descartes, I start with the assumption that I think and therefore I am. But I recognise that assumption as a belief. I also believe that there is a world outside of me. I can not prove this without using ideas aquired from this outside world or my own mind and therefore it, too, remains a belief. I can examine everything I have sensed and catagorized and thought about to find correspondences and areas of agreement but that is as close as I, nor anyone else I think, will come to knowing what is real.

Dismissing this deeply profound and most basic axiom as a mere belief does not allow you to escape from verifying that it is the truth with every thought you think (by mere virtue that you exist and can think them) and every action you take. As I stated before, although you seem to not have grasped this, is that the concept of "proof" rests not only on the existence of reality, but of an objective reality where proof can be assertained and communicated from one person to another, verified through scientific experimentation. Reality is beyond proof, becaues the mere notion of proof (or any notion for that matter) verfies that which it rests upon. If existence does not exist, if reality is not objective, the entirity of human experience becomes instantaneously unintelligible.. and yet here we are. The "assumption" that "I think therefor I am" is merely a belief isn't beyond the reach of evidence as I've just demonstrated because there is no way to refute the existence of reality, and no good reason to want to.

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Logic is a good tool but even that is flawed. There was a mathemetician in the early part of the last century named Kurt Godel who showed that even the best system for expressing a logical statement cannot answer all logical statements.

Our tools for understanding are flawed but I believe there is truth. I just don't think we will ever fully know it.

If you consider the idea of "fully knowing it" and interpret that to mean the ability to hold in cognitive awareness every aspect of every molecule everywhere, omniscience basically, then you never will achieve that end. Is there any need for omniscience? I submit that there is not. Human beings possess a specific nature, and their type of consciousness does does as well. Compartmentalizing ideas into conceptual abstractions in order to reduce and represent the massive data that we input is the method we use to understand fully. To grasp the human body is not to understand every basic component of it, the biological regulatory systems that sustain it, or any of that, rather grasping it entails understanding each of these independantly. These are complex systems and they've been studied and as biology continues we will continue to gain an even greater understanding of the human body. Our tools for understanding are not innately flawed, they are suspible to error and only through continued study can those errors be corrected, whatever and whenever they may arise. Their potential for error does not necessarily mean they will arive at errors consistantly. It's easy to see this in the continued sciences as they've evolved over the years, alchemy became chemistry, astrology became astronomy etc...

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To perceive an object is to intercept the EM waves that bounce off of it and into our retina or to hear the air vibrations that it emits. But, our eyes and ears are not perfect. There are many frequencies in the EM spectrum of which visible light is only a small part. We cannot see radio or infrared waves. Likewise, the human ear can only hear a limited range of audio frequencies. This means we miss out an a lot of information that an object could be sending us. It is what I mean when I say filter. The information we can receive has to be translated into neural signals that the brain can 'read' before it can reach the level of our understanding. This is a distortion caused by the brain reinterpereting reality.

To say that our eyes and ears are not "perfect" in this sense is to state that they are not omnipotent. Your eyes will never be able to percieve the entire electromagnetic spectrum and to set that as a standard for perfecting is indeed comparable to how christians measure themselves against the "moral" ten commandments and always fall short. This is modern philosophies way of manufacturing low self esteem and guilt. The important point is that we have percieved the length of the electromagnetic spectrum and if we so chose we could once again using specialized instrumentation prove the existence of both extremities through simple observation. We've gained the ability to percieve these things, not in direct awareness, but through the application of our minds to these instruments and the manipulation of reality to bring the far reaching edges of this spectrum into view.

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Our knowledge is built since childhood from a foundation through successive iterations of learning either through books or direct experience. Since, as I contend, even the most basic ideas we form will be flawed to some degree, this will have a multiplying effect the further we move from that foundation. In other words, the further we abstract; the further we distance our mind from the world as we perceive it, the more distorted and inaccurate our view becomes.

The multiplying effect you're talking about will only exacerbate problems if they exist making them MORE apparent and making us MORE likely to correct our conceptions.

"basic ideas" in this context entails considering abstract ideas out of any context, and cross examining them in different contexts as though they were the same, when in fact they wouldn't be. like "killing is wrong" for a quick and easy example of a "basic idea." Fact is it's not always wrong to kill someone. Ideas are very seldom basic unless it's something that isn't fully understood, the human mind and it's network of concepts is intricate and complex.

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I agree that it can't be disproven. The existence of reality is beyond the concept of "proof." Existence and consciousness are facts implicit in every perception. They are the base of all knowledge (and the precondition of proof): knowledge presupposes something to know and someone to know it. They are absolutes which cannot be questioned or escaped: every human utterance, including the denial of these axioms, implies their use and acceptance.

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It can't be proven either. On what ground could you assert it? It is a belief.

It's an axiom as I've stated, the mere act of asking for proof, or how I would assert it, presupposes it's existence. Asking for grounds upon which to assert an axiom is a contradiction, because an axiomatic concept is something that is presupposed and implied when considering all other concepts. The axiom is the grounds, and everything "above ground" implies that foundation. The fact that you can't disprove the existence of reality ought to be a good clue here for you, beyond mere "matrix-style" speculations and "what-if" statements, it's called the fallacy of the stolen concept, I'll post a thread about that here very soon.

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This realm of corresponding ideas that we call 'knowledge' all rests on the assumption that we exist.

It rests on several things actually, Objective Reality, A consciousness capable of percieving both Objective reality and itself, and it rests on all of those individual existents within reality possessing a specific identity.

It logically flows that with the annihilation of the concept of reality the annihilation of knowledge will become a reality.

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I think there is good reason to conclude (aside from what I've already said) that most of what people 'know' is based on belief. For example: You believe your body is made up of molecules of varying substances. Why? You've never actually seen these molecules. But you were told by a teacher and you've read in books that these things actually exist, and because you trusted these sources, you believed it and included that belief in your knowledge domain. And this can apply to any information that isn't directly percieved. You hear something from an expert and believe it because you generally trust experts. Of course, I'm not saying these things are false nor that all experts are liars but I am saying that these are held beliefs rather than something known. And I'm sure you're smart enough to know that not all experts are right and most are wrong before they are right.

"this can apply to any information that isn't directly percieved" This was a very important quote within the paragraph that I think highlights a contradiction that needs to be addressed. You've created this notion of what knowledge is and you've set the bar beyond the reach of the limited human consciousness. The entire belief structure of "subjective reality" "true knowledge is impossible" completely ignores the type of consciousness that human beings possess and asks them to rely strictly.. as you're quote verifies.. that human beings operate on a perceptual level instead of a conceptual one.

This is deeper epistemology here, however, human consciousness is described very well by Leonard Peikoff, and I'll quote him on it now just to give credit where it is due...

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Reason performs this function by means of concepts, and the validity of reason rests on the validity of concepts. But the nature and origin of concepts is a major philosophic problem. If concepts refer to facts, then knowledge has a base in reality, and one can define objective principles to guide man's process of cognition. If concepts are cut off from reality, then so is all human knowledge, and man is helplessly blind.

This is the "problem of universals," on which Western philosophy has foundered.

Plato claimed to find the referent of concepts not in this world, but in a supernatural dimension of essences. The Kantians regard concepts (some or all) as devoid of referents, i.e., as subjective creations of the human mind independent of external facts. Both approaches and all of their variants in the history of philosophy lead to the same essential consequence: the severing of man's tools of cognition from reality, and therefore the undercutting of man's mind. (Although Aristotle's epistemology is far superior, his theory of concepts is intermingled with remnants of Platonism and is untenable.) Recent philosophers have given up the problem and, as a result, have given up philosophy as such.

concepts are derived from and do refer to the facts of reality.

The mind at birth (as Aristotle first stated) is tabula rasa; there are no innate ideas. The senses are man's primary means of contact with reality; they give him the precondition of all subsequent knowledge, the evidence that something is. What the something is he discovers on the conceptual level of awareness.

Conceptualization is man's method of organizing sensory material. To form a concept, one isolates two or more similar concretes from the rest of one's perceptual field, and integrates them into a single mental unit, symbolized by a word. A concept subsumes an unlimited number of instances: the concretes one isolated, and all others (past, present, and future) which are similar to them.

Similarity is the key to this process. The mind can retain the characteristics of similar concretes without specifying their measurements, which vary from case to case. "A concept is a mental integration of two or more units possessing the same distinguishing characteristic(s), with their particular measurements omitted."

 

The basic principle of concept-formation (which states that the omitted measurements must exist in some quantity, but may exist in any quantity) is the equivalent of the basic principle of algebra, which states that algebraic symbols must be given some numerical value, but may be given any value. In this sense and respect, perceptual awareness is the arithmetic, but conceptual awareness is the algebra of cognition.

 

Concepts are neither supernatural nor subjective: they refer to facts of this world, as processed by man's means of cognition.

You would contend here the the formation of these concepts is where the trouble begins because you measure the efficacy of human perception by the standard of omniscience and omnipotence, and human beings posses neither. This i what you've done in the response the quote below. When human perception is acknowledge for what it is, as well as human conception, you'll overcome this hurdle you've placed in front of yourself.

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Our language because it derives from our understanding is just as flawed. We invent catagories for things and expect them to fit in neatly ordered boxes when, in fact, there is a lot of overlap and subtle shades of meaning that we often miss. The subjective/objective dichotomy was the example I gave. Since information must pass through the mind, there is always a degree to which it can be called subjective and since that knowledge derives from the outside world, there is also some degree to which it is objective. My point is that there are no absolutes here. As for going beyond, I'm still not entirely sure myself how it can be done. Sometimes I meditate. Sometimes I try to think in purely fluid concepts. That is the only way I know of at the moment. I suppose we could try inventing a new language but I think we would still be limited.

"My point is that there are no absolutes here." do you mean that, absolutely? Sounds to me as though you've just attempted to state one, isn't that interesting.

Human beings move from a state of ignorance to a state of understanding based on the effort they put into attaining understanding. To consider a persons ideas as "subjective" simply because they lie on the gradient between ignorance and mastery is fallacious because the ideas they do acknowledge are not necessarily different than someone who has mastered them. Their understanding might be lacking but as far as the facts go they won't disagree with anyone else, some of their conclusions they draw from those facts might be a bit off because their understanding is incomplete, but those mistakes can only serve as indicators of error in reasoning, or evidence for their incomplete understanding. There is nothing subjective about that.

Similarly in the previous paragraph when I expanded on the difference between existing on the perceptual level and the conceptual level, I believe that in resolving that more fundamental issue you will come to find that language is as powerful as can be provided you understand how to use it, and have an adequate vocabulary. Just like anything else however only through usage can you become more masterful.

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But where do you end and where does the tree begin?

You've only highlighted exactly what I said about treating the entirity of existence as a single unit. This isn't a fundamental issue, I would focus more on the difference between the difference between perception and conception before I moved into this, you should begin there.

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I can agree with this but would like to again point out that objective and subjective reality are not clearly defined nor totally independent.

Simply because the terminolgy you're using doesn't apply to what you're using it to refer to. This is not indicative of a lacking on the behalf of language, rather your understanding of it's use.


spacebuddha
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cheezues wrote: Quote:

cheezues wrote:



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Like Descartes, I start with the assumption that I think and therefore I am. But I recognise that assumption as a belief. I also believe that there is a world outside of me. I can not prove this without using ideas aquired from this outside world or my own mind and therefore it, too, remains a belief. I can examine everything I have sensed and catagorized and thought about to find correspondences and areas of agreement but that is as close as I, nor anyone else I think, will come to knowing what is real.


Dismissing this deeply profound and most basic axiom as a mere belief does not allow you to escape from verifying that it is the truth with every thought you think (by mere virtue that you exist and can think them) and every action you take. As I stated before, although you seem to not have grasped this, is that the concept of "proof" rests not only on the existence of reality, but of an objective reality where proof can be assertained and communicated from one person to another, verified through scientific experimentation. Reality is beyond proof, becaues the mere notion of proof (or any notion for that matter) verfies that which it rests upon. If existence does not exist, if reality is not objective, the entirity of human experience becomes instantaneously unintelligible.. and yet here we are. The "assumption" that "I think therefor I am" is merely a belief isn't beyond the reach of evidence as I've just demonstrated because there is no way to refute the existence of reality, and no good reason to want to.



By verifying anything, I do not reveal a truth. I am only stating a conviction. I can see that you're attempting to trap me by saying that in order to make any statement, even one of belief, I have to assume these axioms. In other words, beliefs must rest on facts. I can show you that this doesn't have to be simply by modifying my statement to take the form of: I believe that I believe I exist and that so too does reality. Ah, you might say but who believes first? Who is the original 'I'? Then, I would tell you that there isn't a need when I further modify the statement to the form of: I believe that I believe that I believe that... on into infinity. You might further contend that even an infinit regress has to begin somewhere. There still must be an 'I' at the beginning no matter how many beliefs follow it. But I would ask, is this necessarily so? Might there be a belief before the 'I'? Maybe there is another who believes in me. Not necessarily a god per se but possibly a Platonic realm or the universe itself or maybe just another individual like me. Maybe belief can exist on its own or belief and believer can exist in a loop where each creates the other: the dialectic.


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Logic is a good tool but even that is flawed. There was a mathemetician in the early part of the last century named Kurt Godel who showed that even the best system for expressing a logical statement cannot answer all logical statements.

Our tools for understanding are flawed but I believe there is truth. I just don't think we will ever fully know it.


If you consider the idea of "fully knowing it" and interpret that to mean the ability to hold in cognitive awareness every aspect of every molecule everywhere, omniscience basically, then you never will achieve that end. Is there any need for omniscience? I submit that there is not. Human beings possess a specific nature, and their type of consciousness does does as well. Compartmentalizing ideas into conceptual abstractions in order to reduce and represent the massive data that we input is the method we use to understand fully. To grasp the human body is not to understand every basic component of it, the biological regulatory systems that sustain it, or any of that, rather grasping it entails understanding each of these independantly. These are complex systems and they've been studied and as biology continues we will continue to gain an even greater understanding of the human body. Our tools for understanding are not innately flawed, they are suspible to error and only through continued study can those errors be corrected, whatever and whenever they may arise. Their potential for error does not necessarily mean they will arive at errors consistantly. It's easy to see this in the continued sciences as they've evolved over the years, alchemy became chemistry, astrology became astronomy etc...



I agree. Omnicience is not necessary, nor disirable I think. But I maintain that truth is not something that is known or perhaps can be known in full. It is a progress of gradation. It can only be known in part. To say that one 'knows' the truth is really saying that they know a part of the truth or that they know the truth within a specific context.


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To perceive an object is to intercept the EM waves that bounce off of it and into our retina or to hear the air vibrations that it emits. But, our eyes and ears are not perfect. There are many frequencies in the EM spectrum of which visible light is only a small part. We cannot see radio or infrared waves. Likewise, the human ear can only hear a limited range of audio frequencies. This means we miss out an a lot of information that an object could be sending us. It is what I mean when I say filter. The information we can receive has to be translated into neural signals that the brain can 'read' before it can reach the level of our understanding. This is a distortion caused by the brain reinterpereting reality.


To say that our eyes and ears are not "perfect" in this sense is to state that they are not omnipotent. Your eyes will never be able to percieve the entire electromagnetic spectrum and to set that as a standard for perfecting is indeed comparable to how christians measure themselves against the "moral" ten commandments and always fall short. This is modern philosophies way of manufacturing low self esteem and guilt. The important point is that we have percieved the length of the electromagnetic spectrum and if we so chose we could once again using specialized instrumentation prove the existence of both extremities through simple observation. We've gained the ability to percieve these things, not in direct awareness, but through the application of our minds to these instruments and the manipulation of reality to bring the far reaching edges of this spectrum into view.



With these instruments we can be aware of the rest of the spectrum but only by translating it into what we can already perceive with our human senses. A bumblebee can see in the ultra-violet wavelength without the need for instruments but if we were ever able to communicate with one, it would not be able to describe the sensation to us. What the bee sees when it looks at a flower reflecting UV is an entirely different color than any we can imagine. It isn't red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo or violet or anything in between. It's something else. We can use a UV detector and 'translate' it into a color we're able to pick up such as purple but we can't see it as a seperate color. It would be like someone who has been color-blind their entire life trying to understand what blue looks like. This is not a disparagement of humanity just an acknowlegement of our limitations.


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Our knowledge is built since childhood from a foundation through successive iterations of learning either through books or direct experience. Since, as I contend, even the most basic ideas we form will be flawed to some degree, this will have a multiplying effect the further we move from that foundation. In other words, the further we abstract; the further we distance our mind from the world as we perceive it, the more distorted and inaccurate our view becomes.


The multiplying effect you're talking about will only exacerbate problems if they exist making them MORE apparent and making us MORE likely to correct our conceptions.



But what if our methods for solving these problems rely on the same erroneous assumptions that brought us there in the first place?


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"basic ideas" in this context entails considering abstract ideas out of any context, and cross examining them in different contexts as though they were the same, when in fact they wouldn't be. like "killing is wrong" for a quick and easy example of a "basic idea." Fact is it's not always wrong to kill someone. Ideas are very seldom basic unless it's something that isn't fully understood, the human mind and it's network of concepts is intricate and complex.



When I said basic ideas, I was referring to the first assumptions we make of the world. A child looking at the sun moving across the sky would assume an earth-centered world much like the ancients who would eventually develop an elaborate system of concentric spheres to describe the heavens. Consider, also, the Newtonian concept of gravity as a force that pulls. It took over 200 years for us to realise that it is actually a consquence of the geometry of space-time. How many of our current theories are wrong?


Your example: "killing is wrong" rest on the concept of life and death as well as the very subjective concept of wrong and right. Both of these ideas are by necessity vague. Basic ideas are not "fully understood" as you say but how do you define what is or is not "fully understood"? BTW, I think a Buddhist would disagree with the "fact" that it is not always wrong to kill.


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I agree that it can't be disproven. The existence of reality is beyond the concept of "proof." Existence and consciousness are facts implicit in every perception. They are the base of all knowledge (and the precondition of proof): knowledge presupposes something to know and someone to know it. They are absolutes which cannot be questioned or escaped: every human utterance, including the denial of these axioms, implies their use and acceptance.




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It can't be proven either. On what ground could you assert it? It is a belief.


It's an axiom as I've stated, the mere act of asking for proof, or how I would assert it, presupposes it's existence. Asking for grounds upon which to assert an axiom is a contradiction, because an axiomatic concept is something that is presupposed and implied when considering all other concepts. The axiom is the grounds, and everything "above ground" implies that foundation. The fact that you can't disprove the existence of reality ought to be a good clue here for you, beyond mere "matrix-style" speculations and "what-if" statements, it's called the fallacy of the stolen concept, I'll post a thread about that here very soon.



I think there is some confusion here on whether we're discussing being itself or being as we know it. I am asserting that the latter is uncertain. As to the question of being itself, I'll bring it up in a later post.


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This realm of corresponding ideas that we call 'knowledge' all rests on the assumption that we exist.


It rests on several things actually, Objective Reality, A consciousness capable of percieving both Objective reality and itself, and it rests on all of those individual existents within reality possessing a specific identity.

It logically flows that with the annihilation of the concept of reality the annihilation of knowledge will become a reality.




I would call this a false-dilemma. Your argument assumes that there must either be an objective reality or not. I think the bulk of our debate has been on the idea of absolutes. Is there a possible median between the extremes? Can we say that there may or may not be an objective reality and we may or may not know it? Might it further be possible to assign a scale of probability to questions such as this?


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I think there is good reason to conclude (aside from what I've already said) that most of what people 'know' is based on belief. For example: You believe your body is made up of molecules of varying substances. Why? You've never actually seen these molecules. But you were told by a teacher and you've read in books that these things actually exist, and because you trusted these sources, you believed it and included that belief in your knowledge domain. And this can apply to any information that isn't directly percieved. You hear something from an expert and believe it because you generally trust experts. Of course, I'm not saying these things are false nor that all experts are liars but I am saying that these are held beliefs rather than something known. And I'm sure you're smart enough to know that not all experts are right and most are wrong before they are right.


"this can apply to any information that isn't directly percieved" This was a very important quote within the paragraph that I think highlights a contradiction that needs to be addressed. You've created this notion of what knowledge is and you've set the bar beyond the reach of the limited human consciousness. The entire belief structure of "subjective reality" "true knowledge is impossible" completely ignores the type of consciousness that human beings possess and asks them to rely strictly.. as you're quote verifies.. that human beings operate on a perceptual level instead of a conceptual one.



What I'm trying to get across is that knowledge is by necessity incomplete and that the more we abstract from perception, the more incomplete it becomes.


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This is deeper epistemology here, however, human consciousness is described very well by Leonard Peikoff, and I'll quote him on it now just to give credit where it is due...

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Reason performs this function by means of concepts, and the validity of reason rests on the validity of concepts. But the nature and origin of concepts is a major philosophic problem. If concepts refer to facts, then knowledge has a base in reality, and one can define objective principles to guide man's process of cognition. If concepts are cut off from reality, then so is all human knowledge, and man is helplessly blind.

This is the "problem of universals," on which Western philosophy has foundered.

Plato claimed to find the referent of concepts not in this world, but in a supernatural dimension of essences. The Kantians regard concepts (some or all) as devoid of referents, i.e., as subjective creations of the human mind independent of external facts. Both approaches and all of their variants in the history of philosophy lead to the same essential consequence: the severing of man's tools of cognition from reality, and therefore the undercutting of man's mind. (Although Aristotle's epistemology is far superior, his theory of concepts is intermingled with remnants of Platonism and is untenable.) Recent philosophers have given up the problem and, as a result, have given up philosophy as such.

concepts are derived from and do refer to the facts of reality.

The mind at birth (as Aristotle first stated) is tabula rasa; there are no innate ideas. The senses are man's primary means of contact with reality; they give him the precondition of all subsequent knowledge, the evidence that something is. What the something is he discovers on the conceptual level of awareness.

Conceptualization is man's method of organizing sensory material. To form a concept, one isolates two or more similar concretes from the rest of one's perceptual field, and integrates them into a single mental unit, symbolized by a word. A concept subsumes an unlimited number of instances: the concretes one isolated, and all others (past, present, and future) which are similar to them.

Similarity is the key to this process. The mind can retain the characteristics of similar concretes without specifying their measurements, which vary from case to case. "A concept is a mental integration of two or more units possessing the same distinguishing characteristic(s), with their particular measurements omitted."


The basic principle of concept-formation (which states that the omitted measurements must exist in some quantity, but may exist in any quantity) is the equivalent of the basic principle of algebra, which states that algebraic symbols must be given some numerical value, but may be given any value. In this sense and respect, perceptual awareness is the arithmetic, but conceptual awareness is the algebra of cognition.


Concepts are neither supernatural nor subjective: they refer to facts of this world, as processed by man's means of cognition.



I like this quote and would agree with it if "validity" were replaced with "likelyhood".


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You would contend here the the formation of these concepts is where the trouble begins because you measure the efficacy of human perception by the standard of omniscience and omnipotence, and human beings posses neither. This i what you've done in the response the quote below. When human perception is acknowledge for what it is, as well as human conception, you'll overcome this hurdle you've placed in front of yourself.



I see no problem with comparing our current awareness to full awareness. Our awareness may seem insignificant in this context but it doesn't have to be. We're always progressing and expanding it. We may one day reach this lofty realm but I doubt it. Still, it is worth the effort.


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Our language because it derives from our understanding is just as flawed. We invent catagories for things and expect them to fit in neatly ordered boxes when, in fact, there is a lot of overlap and subtle shades of meaning that we often miss. The subjective/objective dichotomy was the example I gave. Since information must pass through the mind, there is always a degree to which it can be called subjective and since that knowledge derives from the outside world, there is also some degree to which it is objective. My point is that there are no absolutes here. As for going beyond, I'm still not entirely sure myself how it can be done. Sometimes I meditate. Sometimes I try to think in purely fluid concepts. That is the only way I know of at the moment. I suppose we could try inventing a new language but I think we would still be limited.


"My point is that there are no absolutes here." do you mean that, absolutely? Sounds to me as though you've just attempted to state one, isn't that interesting.



I said that there are no absolutes here. That is not to say that there aren't other absolutes elsewhere upon which to ground this statement. You say there are absolutes such as existance but I would counter by saying that although there may be absolutes, there are no known absolutes. I think I should have clarified that in the first place. Anyway, that was my mistake. And, in case you're thinking of countering my agnosticism of absolutes by declaring that this too is an absolute statement, I will rephrase it and say that the only absolute is the lack of other absolutes; the only certainty is uncertainty and the only impossibility is impossibility itself.

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Human beings move from a state of ignorance to a state of understanding based on the effort they put into attaining understanding. To consider a persons ideas as "subjective" simply because they lie on the gradient between ignorance and mastery is fallacious because the ideas they do acknowledge are not necessarily different than someone who has mastered them. Their understanding might be lacking but as far as the facts go they won't disagree with anyone else, some of their conclusions they draw from those facts might be a bit off because their understanding is incomplete, but those mistakes can only serve as indicators of error in reasoning, or evidence for their incomplete understanding. There is nothing subjective about that.



Every idea is thought of with some degree of subjectivity because they require a subject to think them. When I assess the world around me, the measurements come from within my own mind.

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Similarly in the previous paragraph when I expanded on the difference between existing on the perceptual level and the conceptual level, I believe that in resolving that more fundamental issue you will come to find that language is as powerful as can be provided you understand how to use it, and have an adequate vocabulary. Just like anything else however only through usage can you become more masterful.



Language is powerful but it is at the same time limited and more so than understanding. To give an example: If I told you I had a trip, it could mean I fell, I went somewhere, or I imbibed a hallucinogen. It doesn't give you the complete picture unless I further clarify it. There is also a problem when we compare other languages and see that a word that means one thing in language A may translate to mean a number of things in language B. When you give an affirmative response in English, you say "yes" but in japanese, you would say hai, iiya, ui, ee, iya, iesu or sayou. (I don't know japanese but I've watched enough anime to know that hai is the yes you use when speaking formally as when you're addressing your parents or a superior at work.)


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But where do you end and where does the tree begin?


You've only highlighted exactly what I said about treating the entirity of existence as a single unit. This isn't a fundamental issue, I would focus more on the difference between the difference between perception and conception before I moved into this, you should begin there.



Ok, then I'll state that there is no absolute difference between perception and conception. The definition is as arbitrary as finding the exact point where my molecules end and the tree's begin. And I'll take it even further and say that if my perception/conception is also a part of me and I am beholding the tree, then, in a way, we share an existance.


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I can agree with this but would like to again point out that objective and subjective reality are not clearly defined nor totally independent.


Simply because the terminolgy you're using doesn't apply to what you're using it to refer to. This is not indicative of a lacking on the behalf of language, rather your understanding of it's use.



It is indicative of the limits imposed by a false dichotomy of absolute catagories rather than a range of possibility.


spacebuddha
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cheezues, you've talked a

cheezues, you've talked a lot about axioms so I thought I would try to guess and number yours so that we can have a more centered debate.

1. there is being
2. there are similarities and differences within this being
3. there are patterns within the similarities and differences which form identities
4. we exist as seperate identities
5. we percieve the patterns of similarities and differences
6. we conceive of being
7. we conceive of identities
8. we make statements of truth based on our conception of being
9. we know truth by comparing our statements

Tell me if this is correct or simply correct it yourself and I will try to take each one individually.



I would also like to condense this down to our main arguments so that we're not quoting ad nausiam. I sense that there are four.


YOU: There exists absolutes and one of them is existance itself.
ME: There may exist absolutes but they are not known and may be unknowable.

YOU: We perceive and conceive of objective reality.
ME: We may perceive an outside world and if we do, it is with at least some degree of subjectivity.

YOU: Human knowledge reflects reality and becomes a better reflection the more we abstract.
ME: Knowledge is developed primarily through the senses but reflects reality less the more we abstract.

YOU: Language is a necessary tool for understanding reality
ME: Language is a useful tool for understanding reality but it is more limiting than reason itself and even more limiting than direct perception.




cheezues
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spacebuddha wrote: By

spacebuddha wrote:

By verifying anything, I do not reveal a truth.

Then what does "to verify" mean?  It seems like it's meaning is completely stripped at this point. 

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I am only stating a conviction.

Which proves the existence of a consciousness capable of formulating thoughts and translating them into verbal form. 

 

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I can see that you're attempting to trap me by saying that in order to make any statement, even one of belief, I have to assume these axioms.

Make no mistake, I am not attempting to trap you, rather demonstrating ostensively that they are inescapable and necessarily valid. 

In other words, beliefs must rest on facts.

Valid/True beliefs must rest on facts, you can believe in god (as an example) and it doesn't reference anything in reality.  Or a concept like furniture, "furniture" is not a thing, but classifies knowledge conceptually. 

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I can show you that this doesn't have to be simply by modifying my statement to take the form of: I believe that I believe I exist and that so too does reality. Ah, you might say but who believes first? Who is the original 'I'? Then, I would tell you that there isn't a need when I further modify the statement to the form of: I believe that I believe that I believe that... on into infinity. You might further contend that even an infinit regress has to begin somewhere. There still must be an 'I' at the beginning no matter how many beliefs follow it. But I would ask, is this necessarily so? Might there be a belief before the 'I'? Maybe there is another who believes in me. Not necessarily a god per se but possibly a Platonic realm or the universe itself or maybe just another individual like me. Maybe belief can exist on its own or belief and believer can exist in a loop where each creates the other: the dialectic.

But the only possible way you're able to formulate this "logic" is to isolate it, and insulate it from the rest of existence, then the manipulation of it can begin.  Modifying a statement doesn't change the fact that you've stated it, which implies the existence of an entity which is capable of stating anything, and a consciousness governing the thoughts and controlling your bodies linguistic capability to form the thoughs into auditory sensations percieved by others nearby.


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I agree. Omnicience is not necessary, nor disirable I think. But I maintain that truth is not something that is known or perhaps can be known in full. It is a progress of gradation. It can only be known in part. To say that one 'knows' the truth is really saying that they know a part of the truth or that they know the truth within a specific context.

 Of course the interconnectedness of our thoughts and of the reality we reference with them is never something that can be considered as a whole complete, becuase that would imply omniscience, so again here you're equating "know fully" with "omniscience."

"known in part" here means the same thing as "in context" but all knowledge even the most abstract abstractions are "within a context" if they are to mean anything at all.  Which goes back to how True beliefs must reference and rely on reality in order to mean anything.  Thats the nature of the human mind to "know in part" what reality is, but because abstracting common attributes among species of beliefs and applying them successfully to other areas our ability to know more about the word significantly increases.  This by the way, is a product of what conceptualization provides, perception could not be as expansive, not even close.

But treating knowledge of everything with knowledge itself about any particular and refuting omniscience for the purpose of exposing knowledge of everything as impossible, and then applying that knowledge itself is invalid because omniscience is impossible, does not flow. 

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With these instruments we can be aware of the rest of the spectrum but only by translating it into what we can already perceive with our human senses.

This is the same thing as conceptualization with words.  All furniture in the world, all kinds that serve all different functions are brought within the grasp of human understanding with the spoken word "furniture."  Things that would be beyond our reach not because we can't percieve them (as is the case with the EMS) but because of the massive variety of the same type of thing, furniture.  Language and conceptualization are "translating it(reality) into what we can already percieve (language) with our human senses."  In effect connecting the perceptual level of human consciousness (which we've assumed all along exists) with its conceptual faculty.

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A bumblebee can see in the ultra-violet wavelength without the need for instruments but if we were ever able to communicate with one, it would not be able to describe the sensation to us.  What the bee sees when it looks at a flower reflecting UV is an entirely different color than any we can imagine. It isn't red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo or violet or anything in between. It's something else. We can use a UV detector and 'translate' it into a color we're able to pick up such as purple but we can't see it as a seperate color. It would be like someone who has been color-blind their entire life trying to understand what blue looks like. This is not a disparagement of humanity just an acknowlegement of our limitations.

 And I agree that such limitations exist, and accept them with humility and with an eagerness to expand them through conceptual understanding.  This is  I guess, an attempt to refute identity, our eyes are not the same as insect eyes, flowers reflect more kinds of light than ultra-violet and visible light, percieving a flower and acknowledging that it is what it is does not discount or ignore EVERY type of light that a flower can reflect.  Understanding is not a concept that applies to perception, because the senses are involuntary and necessarily valid.  Interpreting that data and categorizing it into "orange flower" or however specific or broad you want to be with it does not discount the other properties and attributes of the flower because for understanding in any specific context requires focusing in, both perceptually and conceptually, on specific attributes that are relevant at the time, or at least thought to be so.  To communicate with a Bee about what the flower is would take not only language translation (assuming something so rediculous) but a translation of the EMS from visible light to UV which could only take place conceptually.  Arriving at the conclusion that the flower is orange would be a language translation only, and using different words to express what the flower is does not change what the flower is.


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But what if our methods for solving these problems rely on the same erroneous assumptions that brought us there in the first place?

There would be a case by case difference, but if we're talking about "erroneous methods" being "the use of your mind and senses, ie.. you're perceptual and conceptual faculties" we'll never be able to shift away from them because that is the nature of being human. As has been the case seldomly an entire new way of looking at the problem is needed.


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When I said basic ideas, I was referring to the first assumptions we make of the world. A child looking at the sun moving across the sky would assume an earth-centered world much like the ancients who would eventually develop an elaborate system of concentric spheres to describe the heavens.

 Children don't assume as much as adults do, children at least ask questions and do what to them would be good investigation.

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Consider, also, the Newtonian concept of gravity as a force that pulls. It took over 200 years for us to realise that it is actually a consquence of the geometry of space-time. How many of our current theories are wrong?

No idea, as I'm not up to date on all of our "theories" or how many of them are based on this single newtonian concept.  If I were to consider any of them I would cross reference this theory with others that any given subsequent theory is based on and look for incompatibility.  This assumes that even if our theory on gravitation is wrong that theories beyond it are necessarily wrong, I believe they would be incomplete, but not necessarily wrong.  Like when people thought the earth was flat and the sun spun around the earth, we still developed calendar systems based off of that, and identified celestial bodies, later on it was expanded upon and revised.

 

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Your example: "killing is wrong" rest on the concept of life and death as well as the very subjective concept of wrong and right.

good of you to point it out that "killing is wrong" rests on the concept of the Value in living, as opposed to being dead, that is essentially the basis for all values and moral statements like "killing is wrong" that I make. Whether thats subjective, is another topic in itself, stating that it is subjective doesnt make it true without any arguement (reality by assertion fallacy).

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Both of these ideas are by necessity vague. Basic ideas are not "fully understood" as you say but how do you define what is or is not "fully understood"? BTW, I think a Buddhist would disagree with the "fact" that it is not always wrong to kill.

I was intentionally using a vague example to point out how the context COULD be dropped in order to make simple statements fallacious becuase they are incomplete, on this I think you've agreed.  This was also to point out that basic ideas, fundamental ideas like axiomatic concepts are objective self-evident absolutes that must be assumed to be refuted.  There's a different thread already started dealing with these "basic ideas"

 Fully understood as I've used it just means a grasp of how the conceptual framework in the mind works.  For example understanding furniture, and knowing that it applies to every kind of furniture without knowing what all the different types of furniture are. 

Monks take that to a pretty hilarious extreme, expanding it to things like grass O_o!  The mere act of being alive, breathing, moving around muscles KILLS cells in your own body that you have to replace through the concumption of other living things, the buddists don't like to think to much about that though.

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I think there is some confusion here on whether we're discussing being itself or being as we know it. I am asserting that the latter is uncertain. As to the question of being itself, I'll bring it up in a later post.

 Because "being as we know it" our understanding of it is derived from "being itself" and in order to mean anything "being as we know it" must reflect "being itself."


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I would call this a false-dilemma. Your argument assumes that there must either be an objective reality or not.

Exactly right, because the law of non-contradiction is one of those axiomatic concepts that is a self-evident truth, irrefutable and necessarily valid. 

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I think the bulk of our debate has been on the idea of absolutes. Is there a possible median between the extremes? Can we say that there may or may not be an objective reality and we may or may not know it? Might it further be possible to assign a scale of probability to questions such as this?

A scale and a median, surely, but not of probability, but of understanding. We cannot say that there may not be an objective reality, this is the fallacy of the stolen concept in it's fullest, however we can say that we may or may not know it, because the existence of this thread is evidence of the disagreement.

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What I'm trying to get across is that knowledge is by necessity incomplete and that the more we abstract from perception, the more incomplete it becomes.

I understand what you're saying here, in that the ability for variation increases as abstraction increases.  A few important points.  As we move from basic (broad) knowledge or axiomatic concepts to higher abstractions we actually narrow what parts of reality we're talking about while retaining the ability to connect them back to these axiomatic concepts for validation.  All knowledge depends on a certain relationship; it is based on a context of earlier information.

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I like this quote and would agree with it if "validity" were replaced with "likelyhood".

The "likelyhood" of concepts? I'm not sure what you're even calling into question here.


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I see no problem with comparing our current awareness to full awareness. Our awareness may seem insignificant in this context but it doesn't have to be. We're always progressing and expanding it. We may one day reach this lofty realm but I doubt it. Still, it is worth the effort.

 What foundation could you use to build such a store of knowledge and awareness without an Objective reality to reference? Subjectivity shoots itself in the foot in the pursuit for "awareness."  "full awareness" isn't possible at any one time, the human mind is incapable of holding all of it in a single instant.  In a specific context about a single issue, awareness increases and conclusions can be abstracted and related to other instances where single issues within specific contexts have been considered, but still, full awareness is beyond human ability.  Just think of how complex and expansive each branch of scientific research is and you'll easily begin to understand how human understanding is only possible when FOCUSing takes place.

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I said that there are no absolutes here. That is not to say that there aren't other absolutes elsewhere upon which to ground this statement. You say there are absolutes such as existance but I would counter by saying that although there may be absolutes, there are no known absolutes.

Sounds like you've once again injected a claim of absolute knowledge about something, in this case "known absolutes." 

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I think I should have clarified that in the first place. Anyway, that was my mistake. And, in case you're thinking of countering my agnosticism of absolutes by declaring that this too is an absolute statement, I will rephrase it and say that the only absolute is the lack of other absolutes; the only certainty is uncertainty and the only impossibility is impossibility itself.

If you were to do that you'd have to demonstrate why only this 1 absolute were possible.  This would lead you to commiting nothing short of a long strain of stolen concept fallacies.  If you wanna try it I'll point them out.  The only reason the statement "There are no absolutes" carries any weight is because it doesn't allow any absolutes, and needs no standard with which to differentiate itself from other absolutes.  When you use this one statement as an absolute that rejects all others you take advantage of an unnamed standard the previous statement does not, and you have to defend it.  This is the question you've got to tackle now, "Why can NO absolutes exist, if THIS absolute can exist about the non-existence of other absolutes?"


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Every idea is thought of with some degree of subjectivity because they require a subject to think them. When I assess the world around me, the measurements come from within my own mind.

What to measure the world with is really a choice, you didn't invent the inch, you didnt invent the color green in your mind, these are learned tools of measurment given in verbal form for understanding.  If you choose to use your own methods thats fine and dandy, just don't pretend it's intelligible. 

 You've also assumed a lot here.

1) "The senses distort reality because they sense."  When sense perception is actually a process of interaction between your senses and things independant of them.  You've reduced your demand on the senses, in order to obtain "real knowledge" the standard is now direct awareness without sensation, and nothing of that sort is possible for humans.  To reject the validity of sense perception is to reject them simply because they exist, not because of how they work or "distort" what they involuntarily interact with.

2) "The mind distorts ideas because it thinks."  We cannot escape the limitations of a human consciousness, the arguement observes.  We cannot escape our dependance on human senses, human concepts, human logic, the human brain.  We cannot shed human identity.  Therefore, the arguement concludes, we cannot gain a knowledge of reality.  In other words; our consciousness is something; it has specific means and forms of cognition; therefore, it is disqualified as a factulty of cognition.  This arguement is so thoroughly Kant and makes absolutely no sense.  What sort of consciousness can percieve reality with this approach.  The answer is(however nonsensical); a consciousness not limited by any means of cognition; a consciousness percieves no-how; a consciousness which is not of this kind as against that; a consciousness which is nothing in particular, ie.. which is nothing, ie.. which does not exist.  It's method is that by the mere possession of a specific identity, the essence of existence, any and every consciousness is invalidated. Or, any means of knowledge makes knowledge impossible.

A quote here that displays how absurd this is from ayn rand, "man is blind, becuase he has eyes - deaf, because he has ears - deluded, becaues he has a mind - and things he percieves do not exist, because he percieves them." lol

Make no mistake here what we think isn't necessarily valid becuase we think it either, but becaues it references and maps back onto reality through a process of validation, we call them reasoning and logic. 

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Language is powerful but it is at the same time limited and more so than understanding. To give an example: If I told you I had a trip, it could mean I fell, I went somewhere, or I imbibed a hallucinogen. It doesn't give you the complete picture unless I further clarify it.  There is also a problem when we compare other languages and see that a word that means one thing in language A may translate to mean a number of things in language B. When you give an affirmative response in English, you say "yes" but in japanese, you would say hai, iiya, ui, ee, iya, iesu or sayou. (I don't know japanese but I've watched enough anime to know that hai is the yes you use when speaking formally as when you're addressing your parents or a superior at work.)

Yes, sure, okay, alright, you bet, etc..  There are just as many affirmative responses in english as any other language I'd assume.   

Language is a system of symbols, and even though single words may not map directly from one language to another does not mean that one language is incapable of expressing what another language can if given enough room to communicate.

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Ok, then I'll state that there is no absolute difference between perception and conception. The definition is as arbitrary as finding the exact point where my molecules end and the tree's begin. And I'll take it even further and say that if my perception/conception is also a part of me and I am beholding the tree, then, in a way, we share an existance.

Attempt to percieve "furniture."  Chair might be an existent available for perception, "furniture" is not.Attempt to percieve "consciousness."  Attempt to percieve "gradient."  Abstract concepts are not perceptual, but they can be traced to perceptual data.  "green" would be perceptual, "color" would not.

On to the definitions which you claim to be arbitrary(without saying why other than I assume you don't personally know them).

Perception: Sensory experience is a form of awareness produced by physical entities (the external stimuli) acting on physical instrumentalities (the sense organs), which respond automatically, as a link in a causally determined chain.

Conception: Man's method of organizing sensory material. To form a concept, one isolates two or more similar concretes from the rest of one's perceptual field, and integrates them into a single mental unit, symbolized by a word. A concept subsumes an unlimited number of instances: the concretes one isolated, and all others (past, present, and future) which are similar to them.

If consciousness were to be broken down into subcategories immediately, they would be these two and only these two for humans.

So here you're just flat out wrong because there is an absolute difference and it's clearly defined. 

 

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It is indicative of the limits imposed by a false dichotomy of absolute catagories rather than a range of possibility.

Categories are just that and only that, containers with which these "possiblities" fall under.  We're not in total disagreement here, I just think you're approaching this from the wrong angle.


cheezues
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spacebuddha

spacebuddha wrote:
cheezues, you've talked a lot about axioms so I thought I would try to guess and number yours so that we can have a more centered debate.

1. there is being
2. there are similarities and differences within this being
3. there are patterns within the similarities and differences which form identities
4. we exist as seperate identities
5. we percieve the patterns of similarities and differences
6. we conceive of being
7. we conceive of identities
8. we make statements of truth based on our conception of being
9. we know truth by comparing our statements

Tell me if this is correct or simply correct it yourself and I will try to take each one individually.

I've expanded on these in detail in another thread which I will link to you. The only axiomatic concepts I've acknowledged without being able to break down farther are Existence, Consciousness, and Identity. http://www.rationalresponders.com/forum/sapient/philosophy_and_psychology_with_chaoslord_and_todangst/6715


 

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I would also like to condense this down to our main arguments so that we're not quoting ad nausiam. I sense that there are four.

 Thats a good idea, whoever I feel like a lot of what we're talking about is interrelated.  Splitting them up might not be as easy as you think, but it just depends on our focus.


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YOU: There exists absolutes and one of them is existance itself.
ME: There may exist absolutes but they are not known and may be unknowable.

This one is accurate, in contradistinction from your "unknowability" I think they are "unavoidable self-evidences."

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YOU: We perceive and conceive of objective reality.
ME: We may perceive an outside world and if we do, it is with at least some degree of subjectivity.

Partially accurate. I expand into the outside world is unavoidable and there is no "if we do" about it.  and the degree which you site as being grounds for subjectivity is really just the gradient we all lie on ranging from ignorance to omniscience, where we lie on that gradient doesn't necessarily contradict others, and objectivly shouldn't, who are elsewhere on this gradient.


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YOU: Human knowledge reflects reality and becomes a better reflection the more we abstract.
ME: Knowledge is developed primarily through the senses but reflects reality less the more we abstract.

 Accurate.


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YOU: Language is a necessary tool for understanding reality
ME: Language is a useful tool for understanding reality but it is more limiting than reason itself and even more limiting than direct perception.

Language is a necessary tool for understanding reality on the conceptual level.  Only basic reasoning is possible without the use of language.  Reason itself relies on the ability of the mind to form concepts because reason is a faculty of awareness, its function is to percieve that which exists and organize observational data through the process of concept formation.  Linguistic definition is the last phase of concept formation (referenced earlier) so language and reason are inter related, both require a consciousness.  I don't think direct perception is limiting, so I would have to first take issue with that before we spoke about "language as a limitation."


Jacob Cordingley
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spacebuddha wrote: I used

spacebuddha wrote:
I used to believe the exact opposite of what the individual you describe believes.  I thought that everything is objective and that eventually all things will be known through science.  But the older I get and the more I look at the problem, the more it occurs to me that this is unprovable.  I'm starting to see things from a more Kantian perspective.  Nothing can be known in itself.  Because, to know of something, information about it must pass through the lens of our senses which will always distort and filter the reality of the object itself.  To then form an idea about the object requires us to filter that information even further through weak and strong associations with other ideas and eventually to place it within our understanding of reality.  A further problem arises when we realise that our understanding of the world itself is based on the belief that  the world as well as we, ourselves, exist; an idea that can neither be proven nor disproven much like the god question.  So then, is all knowledge based on belief?  Does this mean that people believe what they want to believe?  It seems, the only way to resolve this would be to go beyond the limitations our language imposes on us.  To accept the idea that there is a tangible reality we have to eliminate false dichotomy.  Everything is both subjective and objective to some degree.  You and the world exist not as seperate entities but as two parts of a unity. 

While I see your point about our senses distorting things I would challenge the conclusions you draw from it. The Universe holds objectifyable truths about everything eg. there is only one truth about what the planet Jupiter is comprised of, there can not be two competing subjective truths. In order to get as close to the truth as possible (perhaps we can't as humans understand completely) we must endeavour to find as much evidence as possible in order to draw the truest conclusions possible. Things like the weight of the planet, perhaps some samples of the gases that we believe (through the evidence we have thus far) make up Jupiter, might be obtained in a future when we have the technology to actually to get such samples (I know I know, extremely high gravity makes that virtually impossible now). But we can analyse the evidence we have to get as close to the truth as our senses will allow us.

Let me take a different tactic. Most humans see in colour, it is very rare that a human doesn't see in colour (excepting blind people). We also know that our vision of colour is our brain's interpretation of the various visible frequencies of the electro-magnetic spectrum. But we can know that fact, we can know things through our senses which tell us how weak our senses actually are. Also I might point out that our senses enable us to see what really is there on the scale that we have been evolutionarily programmed to operate on, but nevertheless they enable us to experience the world on a level that does not subtract much from the truth of it. The property of being green is something that exists in reality, it might be something that could be interpreted differently by different species, but our senses still show us the objective truth of what is there despite subjective interpretations. This truth is something we can find though, we can know the frequencies that create green despite subjective interpretations of those frequencies with our eyes. The fact that we can create machinery that gives us true interpretations of what our biological senses can't feel is the means how we can reach the truths, these extra-sensory machines, can interpret things in ways that our real senses can understand.

I probably haven't argued that well but it's late and I'm tired.


spacebuddha
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cheezues

Ignore this really big box. For some reason (even though I've checked and re-editted it 7 times) it still ends up getting fubared.

 

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By verifying anything, I do not reveal a truth.


Then what does "to verify" mean? It seems like it's meaning is completely stripped at this point.



To show a connection.

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I am only stating a conviction.


Which proves the existence of a consciousness capable of formulating thoughts and translating them into verbal form.



Yes, this particular argument makes that assumption.


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I can see that you're attempting to trap me by saying that in order to make any statement, even one of belief, I have to assume these axioms.


Make no mistake, I am not attempting to trap you, rather demonstrating ostensively that they are inescapable and necessarily valid.

In other words, beliefs must rest on facts.


Valid/True beliefs must rest on facts, you can believe in god (as an example) and it doesn't reference anything in reality. Or a concept like furniture, "furniture" is not a thing, but classifies knowledge conceptually.

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I can show you that this doesn't have to be simply by modifying my statement to take the form of: I believe that I believe I exist and that so too does reality. Ah, you might say but who believes first? Who is the original 'I'? Then, I would tell you that there isn't a need when I further modify the statement to the form of: I believe that I believe that I believe that... on into infinity. You might further contend that even an infinit regress has to begin somewhere. There still must be an 'I' at the beginning no matter how many beliefs follow it. But I would ask, is this necessarily so? Might there be a belief before the 'I'? Maybe there is another who believes in me. Not necessarily a god per se but possibly a Platonic realm or the universe itself or maybe just another individual like me. Maybe belief can exist on its own or belief and believer can exist in a loop where each creates the other: the dialectic.


But the only possible way you're able to formulate this "logic" is to isolate it, and insulate it from the rest of existence, then the manipulation of it can begin. Modifying a statement doesn't change the fact that you've stated it, which implies the existence of an entity which is capable of stating anything, and a consciousness governing the thoughts and controlling your bodies linguistic capability to form the thoughs into auditory sensations percieved by others nearby.


If we're under the assumption that I exist as a seperate entity or as a focal point in a definable and objective world, then this holds. The language severely limits my attempt to show an alternative but I will try to do so in the follow ups.

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I agree. Omnicience is not necessary, nor disirable I think. But I maintain that truth is not something that is known or perhaps can be known in full. It is a progress of gradation. It can only be known in part. To say that one 'knows' the truth is really saying that they know a part of the truth or that they know the truth within a specific context.


Of course the interconnectedness of our thoughts and of the reality we reference with them is never something that can be considered as a whole complete, becuase that would imply omniscience, so again here you're equating "know fully" with "omniscience."

"known in part" here means the same thing as "in context" but all knowledge even the most abstract abstractions are "within a context" if they are to mean anything at all. Which goes back to how True beliefs must reference and rely on reality in order to mean anything. Thats the nature of the human mind to "know in part" what reality is, but because abstracting common attributes among species of beliefs and applying them successfully to other areas our ability to know more about the word significantly increases. This by the way, is a product of what conceptualization provides, perception could not be as expansive, not even close.

But treating knowledge of everything with knowledge itself about any particular and refuting omniscience for the purpose of exposing knowledge of everything as impossible, and then applying that knowledge itself is invalid because omniscience is impossible, does not flow.


How about: knowledge of a particular of a particular rather than knowledge of a particular in itself?

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With these instruments we can be aware of the rest of the spectrum but only by translating it into what we can already perceive with our human senses.


This is the same thing as conceptualization with words. All furniture in the world, all kinds that serve all different functions are brought within the grasp of human understanding with the spoken word "furniture." Things that would be beyond our reach not because we can't percieve them (as is the case with the EMS) but because of the massive variety of the same type of thing, furniture. Language and conceptualization are "translating it(reality) into what we can already percieve (language) with our human senses." In effect connecting the perceptual level of human consciousness (which we've assumed all along exists) with its conceptual faculty.


Conceptualization is a way to improve the quality of our understanding but to perceive further allows us to better conceptualize, thus expanding the borders of our knowledge.


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A bumblebee can see in the ultra-violet wavelength without the need for instruments but if we were ever able to communicate with one, it would not be able to describe the sensation to us. What the bee sees when it looks at a flower reflecting UV is an entirely different color than any we can imagine. It isn't red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo or violet or anything in between. It's something else. We can use a UV detector and 'translate' it into a color we're able to pick up such as purple but we can't see it as a seperate color. It would be like someone who has been color-blind their entire life trying to understand what blue looks like. This is not a disparagement of humanity just an acknowlegement of our limitations.



And I agree that such limitations exist, and accept them with humility and with an eagerness to expand them through conceptual understanding. This is I guess, an attempt to refute identity, our eyes are not the same as insect eyes, flowers reflect more kinds of light than ultra-violet and visible light, percieving a flower and acknowledging that it is what it is does not discount or ignore EVERY type of light that a flower can reflect. Understanding is not a concept that applies to perception, because the senses are involuntary and necessarily valid. Interpreting that data and categorizing it into "orange flower" or however specific or broad you want to be with it does not discount the other properties and attributes of the flower because for understanding in any specific context requires focusing in, both perceptually and conceptually, on specific attributes that are relevant at the time, or at least thought to be so. To communicate with a Bee about what the flower is would take not only language translation (assuming something so rediculous) but a translation of the EMS from visible light to UV which could only take place conceptually. Arriving at the conclusion that the flower is orange would be a language translation only, and using different words to express what the flower is does not change what the flower is.


It does not change some of our shared concepts of the flower but some of its reality will be revealed and some will remain hidden. I think you agree here.


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But what if our methods for solving these problems rely on the same erroneous assumptions that brought us there in the first place?


There would be a case by case difference, but if we're talking about "erroneous methods" being "the use of your mind and senses, ie.. you're perceptual and conceptual faculties" we'll never be able to shift away from them because that is the nature of being human. As has been the case seldomly an entire new way of looking at the problem is needed.


An example of "Erroneous methods":

A implies B implies C (or so we think)

Knowledge of A is based on knowledge of B which is based on knowledge of C

We may find out that what we know about A is flawed because B is flawed. We alter our conjecture yet C remains the same even though it was wrong all along.

A case by case difference doesn't help us as long as we remain in C. So we have to be as inclusive of what we accept as cases as possible. Nothing is erroneous about using your mind and senses as long as you're doing it to the greatest extent possible.


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When I said basic ideas, I was referring to the first assumptions we make of the world. A child looking at the sun moving across the sky would assume an earth-centered world much like the ancients who would eventually develop an elaborate system of concentric spheres to describe the heavens.


Children don't assume as much as adults do, children at least ask questions and do what to them would be good investigation.

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Consider, also, the Newtonian concept of gravity as a force that pulls. It took over 200 years for us to realise that it is actually a consquence of the geometry of space-time. How many of our current theories are wrong?


No idea, as I'm not up to date on all of our "theories" or how many of them are based on this single newtonian concept. If I were to consider any of them I would cross reference this theory with others that any given subsequent theory is based on and look for incompatibility. This assumes that even if our theory on gravitation is wrong that theories beyond it are necessarily wrong, I believe they would be incomplete, but not necessarily wrong. Like when people thought the earth was flat and the sun spun around the earth, we still developed calendar systems based off of that, and identified celestial bodies, later on it was expanded upon and revised.


When you talk about calandars and celestial bodies, you're talking about names and measurements, which are things we invent and assign without the need to understand the implicit workings of nature.


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Your example: "killing is wrong" rest on the concept of life and death as well as the very subjective concept of wrong and right.


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good of you to point it out that "killing is wrong" rests on the concept of the Value in living, as opposed to being dead, that is essentially the basis for all values and moral statements like "killing is wrong" that I make. Whether thats subjective, is another topic in itself, stating that it is subjective doesnt make it true without any arguement (reality by assertion fallacy).


So your ethics are based on life. Is that more Rand? But, yes, that is another topic.

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Both of these ideas are by necessity vague. Basic ideas are not "fully understood" as you say but how do you define what is or is not "fully understood"? BTW, I think a Buddhist would disagree with the "fact" that it is not always wrong to kill.


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I was intentionally using a vague example to point out how the context COULD be dropped in order to make simple statements fallacious becuase they are incomplete, on this I think you've agreed. This was also to point out that basic ideas, fundamental ideas like axiomatic concepts are objective self-evident absolutes that must be assumed to be refuted. There's a different thread already started dealing with these "basic ideas"


I've already looked at it.

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Fully understood as I've used it just means a grasp of how the conceptual framework in the mind works. For example understanding furniture, and knowing that it applies to every kind of furniture without knowing what all the different types of furniture are.


So, full understanding means good enough understanding to you?

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Monks take that to a pretty hilarious extreme, expanding it to things like grass O_o! The mere act of being alive, breathing, moving around muscles KILLS cells in your own body that you have to replace through the concumption of other living things, the buddists don't like to think to much about that though.


True, but I was only pointing that out to show you that there is some degree of subjectivity to the idea even if, at the moment, it remains necessary to kill.

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I think there is some confusion here on whether we're discussing being itself or being as we know it. I am asserting that the latter is uncertain. As to the question of being itself, I'll bring it up in a later post.


Because "being as we know it" our understanding of it is derived from "being itself" and in order to mean anything "being as we know it" must reflect "being itself."


My question is how many times romoved is our understanding of reality from reality itself?

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I would call this a false-dilemma. Your argument assumes that there must either be an objective reality or not.


Exactly right, because the law of non-contradiction is one of those axiomatic concepts that is a self-evident truth, irrefutable and necessarily valid.


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I think the bulk of our debate has been on the idea of absolutes. Is there a possible median between the extremes? Can we say that there may or may not be an objective reality and we may or may not know it? Might it further be possible to assign a scale of probability to questions such as this?


A scale and a median, surely, but not of probability, but of understanding. We cannot say that there may not be an objective reality, this is the fallacy of the stolen concept in it's fullest, however we can say that we may or may not know it, because the existence of this thread is evidence of the disagreement.


I'll bring up existance itself in the smaller, shortened, thread (or subthread I guess would be a better term)

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What I'm trying to get across is that knowledge is by necessity incomplete and that the more we abstract from perception, the more incomplete it becomes.


I understand what you're saying here, in that the ability for variation increases as abstraction increases. A few important points. As we move from basic (broad) knowledge or axiomatic concepts to higher abstractions we actually narrow what parts of reality we're talking about while retaining the ability to connect them back to these axiomatic concepts for validation. All knowledge depends on a certain relationship; it is based on a context of earlier information.


I mostly agree but I'm not sure if it's really "earlier" information or if all information is based on all other information. The mind is a web after all.

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I like this quote and would agree with it if "validity" were replaced with "likelyhood".


The "likelyhood" of concepts? I'm not sure what you're even calling into question here.


Absolute statements.

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I see no problem with comparing our current awareness to full awareness. Our awareness may seem insignificant in this context but it doesn't have to be. We're always progressing and expanding it. We may one day reach this lofty realm but I doubt it. Still, it is worth the effort.


What foundation could you use to build such a store of knowledge and awareness without an Objective reality to reference? Subjectivity shoots itself in the foot in the pursuit for "awareness." "full awareness" isn't possible at any one time, the human mind is incapable of holding all of it in a single instant. In a specific context about a single issue, awareness increases and conclusions can be abstracted and related to other instances where single issues within specific contexts have been considered, but still, full awareness is beyond human ability. Just think of how complex and expansive each branch of scientific research is and you'll easily begin to understand how human understanding is only possible when FOCUSing takes place.


Focusing is useful and necessary for deductive reasoning but when we do focus, we can lose some of the "bigger picture" and that forces us to lose some of our intuitive ability. Contrarywise, when we expand our awareness to a larger context and attempt inductive reasoning, we lose what we had gained by focusing. Of course, one may count memory as the correcting tool by allowing us to compare things which are observed from the large context to the small but that, too, has flaws and limits.

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I said that there are no absolutes here. That is not to say that there aren't other absolutes elsewhere upon which to ground this statement. You say there are absolutes such as existance but I would counter by saying that although there may be absolutes, there are no known absolutes.


Sounds like you've once again injected a claim of absolute knowledge about something, in this case "known absolutes."


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I think I should have clarified that in the first place. Anyway, that was my mistake. And, in case you're thinking of countering my agnosticism of absolutes by declaring that this too is an absolute statement, I will rephrase it and say that the only absolute is the lack of other absolutes; the only certainty is uncertainty and the only impossibility is impossibility itself.


If you were to do that you'd have to demonstrate why only this 1 absolute were possible. This would lead you to commiting nothing short of a long strain of stolen concept fallacies. If you wanna try it I'll point them out. The only reason the statement "There are no absolutes" carries any weight is because it doesn't allow any absolutes, and needs no standard with which to differentiate itself from other absolutes. When you use this one statement as an absolute that rejects all others you take advantage of an unnamed standard the previous statement does not, and you have to defend it. This is the question you've got to tackle now, "Why can NO absolutes exist, if THIS absolute can exist about the non-existence of other absolutes?"



"the only absolute is the lack of other absolutes" was meant as a 'self-killing' concept. The logic was meant to have a degree of self-contridiction in order to kill the term itself. But I think I will try to save a few paragraphs by simply saying that I am abandoning absolutes. Whenever I say "this is that" the "is" should be taken to mean "is probably" or "is likely" or "I believe is".

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Every idea is thought of with some degree of subjectivity because they require a subject to think them. When I assess the world around me, the measurements come from within my own mind.


What to measure the world with is really a choice, you didn't invent the inch, you didnt invent the color green in your mind, these are learned tools of measurment given in verbal form for understanding. If you choose to use your own methods thats fine and dandy, just don't pretend it's intelligible.


Would you be able to give me an exact meter if I asked you to do so without any tools? All measures are subjective approximations deriving from humanity's attempts to compare quantities by using a standard. Metric has become the international standard, but even those measurements are only approximations.

The meter as defined by Wikipedia:

The metremeter or meter (see spelling differences) is a measure of length. It is the basic unit of length in the metric system and in the International System of Units (SI), used around the world for general and scientific purposes. Historically, the metremeter was formally defined by the French Academy of Sciences as the length between two marks on a platinum-iridium bar (which was designed to represent 1/10,000,000 of the distance from the equator to the north pole through Paris). Today it is officially defined by the International Bureau of Weights and Measures as the distance travelled by light in absolute vacuum in 1/299,792,458 of a second - another approximate measurement


The second as defined by Wikipedia

Under the International System of Units, the second is currently defined as the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium-133 atom.[1] This definition refers to a caesium atom at rest at a temperature of 0 K (absolute zero). The ground state is defined at zero magnetic field.[1] The second thus defined is equivalent to the ephemeris second.

We may never be able to duplicate these conditions in the lab but if we ever did, we would most likely find a very small amount of difference in time from these periods of radiation than what we had originally thought and would have to further refine the standard. Exacting our measurements is a continuing process. I didn't invent measurements but humanity as a whole did and continues to do so. I may not have defined the inch but, without tools, I have to approximate my own.

When I said measurements I was referring more to what I choose to measure a perception/conception against. What ideas or sensations? It would depend on the situation.

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You've also assumed a lot here.

1) "The senses distort reality because they sense." When sense perception is actually a process of interaction between your senses and things independant of them. You've reduced your demand on the senses, in order to obtain "real knowledge" the standard is now direct awareness without sensation, and nothing of that sort is possible for humans. To reject the validity of sense perception is to reject them simply because they exist, not because of how they work or "distort" what they involuntarily interact with.


The senses distort reality because, by sensing, they are changing one form of energy - or information - into another.

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2) "The mind distorts ideas because it thinks." We cannot escape the limitations of a human consciousness, the arguement observes. We cannot escape our dependance on human senses, human concepts, human logic, the human brain. We cannot shed human identity. Therefore, the arguement concludes, we cannot gain a knowledge of reality. In other words; our consciousness is something; it has specific means and forms of cognition; therefore, it is disqualified as a factulty of cognition. This arguement is so thoroughly Kant and makes absolutely no sense. What sort of consciousness can percieve reality with this approach. The answer is(however nonsensical); a consciousness not limited by any means of cognition; a consciousness percieves no-how; a consciousness which is not of this kind as against that; a consciousness which is nothing in particular, ie.. which is nothing, ie.. which does not exist. It's method is that by the mere possession of a specific identity, the essence of existence, any and every consciousness is invalidated. Or, any means of knowledge makes knowledge impossible.


The mind distorts reality because it not only relies on information that comes through the senses, but it builds its knowlege of reality based on who's mind it is, what state it is in, and where it is focused at the moment. One may hear a sound but fail to notice as they are concentrating on a visual.


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A quote here that displays how absurd this is from ayn rand, "man is blind, becuase he has eyes - deaf, because he has ears - deluded, becaues he has a mind - and things he percieves do not exist, because he percieves them." lol


A better phrasing would be "man is blind, deaf and deluded because he sees, hears and thinks (one activity will dominate) - and things he perceive may exist but not in the way in which he perceives them"


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Make no mistake here what we think isn't necessarily valid becuase we think it either, but becaues it references and maps back onto reality through a process of validation, we call them reasoning and logic.


A good argument although some maps are better than others. And it is not complete unless you define complete to mean good enough.

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Language is powerful but it is at the same time limited and more so than understanding. To give an example: If I told you I had a trip, it could mean I fell, I went somewhere, or I imbibed a hallucinogen. It doesn't give you the complete picture unless I further clarify it. There is also a problem when we compare other languages and see that a word that means one thing in language A may translate to mean a number of things in language B. When you give an affirmative response in English, you say "yes" but in japanese, you would say hai, iiya, ui, ee, iya, iesu or sayou. (I don't know japanese but I've watched enough anime to know that hai is the yes you use when speaking formally as when you're addressing your parents or a superior at work.)


Yes, sure, okay, alright, you bet, etc.. There are just as many affirmative responses in english as any other language I'd assume.

Language is a system of symbols, and even though single words may not map directly from one language to another does not mean that one language is incapable of expressing what another language can if given enough room to communicate.


Then, the descriptive power of a given quantity of a specific language or the amount of room that it needs to communicate is a limiting factor. And there are other limiting factors. People have different levels of linquistic ability and they interperate the same words differently. We learn and understand through association. Two different people may hear the word "four" and while one things of the digit, the other may be considering four objects. People also have different emotional attachments to words such as the different responses you'd get if you mentioned rape to a serial rapist or a rape victim.


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Ok, then I'll state that there is no absolute difference between perception and conception. The definition is as arbitrary as finding the exact point where my molecules end and the tree's begin. And I'll take it even further and say that if my perception/conception is also a part of me and I am beholding the tree, then, in a way, we share an existance.


Attempt to percieve "furniture." Chair might be an existent available for perception, "furniture" is not.Attempt to percieve "consciousness." Attempt to percieve "gradient." Abstract concepts are not perceptual, but they can be traced to perceptual data. "green" would be perceptual, "color" would not.

On to the definitions which you claim to be arbitrary(without saying why other than I assume you don't personally know them).

Perception: Sensory experience is a form of awareness produced by physical entities (the external stimuli) acting on physical instrumentalities (the sense organs), which respond automatically, as a link in a causally determined chain.

Conception: Man's method of organizing sensory material. To form a concept, one isolates two or more similar concretes from the rest of one's perceptual field, and integrates them into a single mental unit, symbolized by a word. A concept subsumes an unlimited number of instances: the concretes one isolated, and all others (past, present, and future) which are similar to them.

If consciousness were to be broken down into subcategories immediately, they would be these two and only these two for humans.

So here you're just flat out wrong because there is an absolute difference and it's clearly defined.


A thought experiment:

You observe a tree. Light bounces off of it and into your eyes where it is focused onto the optic nerve. Photons become electrical signals which travel along the nerve until it reaches a neuron. Can the neuron be said to have perceived the signal? When this information is relayed to other neurons can we say that it has conceived of new information based on this percept? As the information is relayed through the net, it eventually activates a group of neurons that represent the the idea of color. Color, as the concept is then relayed to other sets of neurons; maybe the ones responsible for holding the memory of the sound that is heard when the word is spoken or the way in which it is written. Could we then say that color (as a catagory) is perceived in some way? If the answers to these questions are all yes, then it can be said that perception and conception both occur many times throughout the process. Both of these things are happening regardless of whether you say you are only perceiving or conceiving.

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It is indicative of the limits imposed by a false dichotomy of absolute catagories rather than a range of possibility.


Categories are just that and only that, containers with which these "possiblities" fall under. We're not in total disagreement here, I just think you're approaching this from the wrong angle.


Then, would you agree that this range of possibilities has more validity than the catagories under which they fall?


spacebuddha
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cheezues wrote: spacebuddha



cheezues wrote:


spacebuddha wrote:
cheezues, you've talked a lot about axioms so I thought I would try to guess and number yours so that we can have a more centered debate.

1. there is being
2. there are similarities and differences within this being
3. there are patterns within the similarities and differences which form identities
4. we exist as seperate identities
5. we percieve the patterns of similarities and differences
6. we conceive of being
7. we conceive of identities
8. we make statements of truth based on our conception of being
9. we know truth by comparing our statements

Tell me if this is correct or simply correct it yourself and I will try to take each one individually.


I've expanded on these in detail in another thread which I will link to you. The only axiomatic concepts I've acknowledged without being able to break down farther are Existence, Consciousness, and Identity. http://www.rationalresponders.com/forum/sapient/philosophy_and_psychology_with_chaoslord_and_todangst/6715


"Existance, Consciousness and Identity" Could you expand further upon these?

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I would also like to condense this down to our main arguments so that we're not quoting ad nausiam. I sense that there are four.


Thats a good idea, whoever I feel like a lot of what we're talking about is interrelated. Splitting them up might not be as easy as you think, but it just depends on our focus.


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YOU: There exists absolutes and one of them is existance itself.
ME: There may exist absolutes but they are not known and may be unknowable.


This one is accurate, in contradistinction from your "unknowability" I think they are "unavoidable self-evidences."


Which absolutes do you consider "unavoidable self-evidences"?

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YOU: We perceive and conceive of objective reality.
ME: We may perceive an outside world and if we do, it is with at least some degree of subjectivity.


Partially accurate. I expand into the outside world is unavoidable and there is no "if we do" about it. and the degree which you site as being grounds for subjectivity is really just the gradient we all lie on ranging from ignorance to omniscience, where we lie on that gradient doesn't necessarily contradict others, and objectivly shouldn't, who are elsewhere on this gradient.


How do you know if there is a world outside of your own mind? How do you know you aren't a solipsist? As for the gradient, what do you do when you don't have all the necessary information about something? You hypothesize, right? Doesn't that inject a degree of subjectivity?

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YOU: Human knowledge reflects reality and becomes a better reflection the more we abstract.
ME: Knowledge is developed primarily through the senses but reflects reality less the more we abstract.


Accurate.


OK, previously, you described catagories as boxes to hold a range of possibilities. I described the weak and strong associations that form ideas. To give you a visual fix on this, try to imagine an idea as a shape with a fuzzy border. In the center is the strongest association; the main focus. The further you move from that the weaker the associations get and the more the idea fades. When catagories are formed, we take a lot of these fuzzy shapes and try to place them in a box whose borders are perfect lines. What is inside is certain and what is outside is irrelevant. There is some loss of the original idea. Now, when we put these catagories together to make bigger catagories, that loss is multiplied. This is what distances us from reality.

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YOU: Language is a necessary tool for understanding reality
ME: Language is a useful tool for understanding reality but it is more limiting than reason itself and even more limiting than direct perception.


Language is a necessary tool for understanding reality on the conceptual level. Only basic reasoning is possible without the use of language. Reason itself relies on the ability of the mind to form concepts because reason is a faculty of awareness, its function is to percieve that which exists and organize observational data through the process of concept formation. Linguistic definition is the last phase of concept formation (referenced earlier) so language and reason are inter related, both require a consciousness. I don't think direct perception is limiting, so I would have to first take issue with that before we spoke about "language as a limitation."


Direct perception is limited by our ability to perceive. Conception is limited by our ability to perceive and conceive. Language is limited by both of those things plus the loss incurred when transmitting information. It also suffers from the fact that it has been forming since the dawn of human existance. Because of this, it still bares within itself, some of the outdated ideas and concepts from the past. There is, I believe, implicit within language, links between concepts that steer us in non-enlightening directions. The English language developed after the church had established itself as a forceful power. Think about how similar the word "good" is to "god" and how similar the word "evil" is to "devil".



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Jacob Cordingley

Jacob Cordingley wrote:


spacebuddha wrote:
I used to believe the exact opposite of what the individual you describe believes. I thought that everything is objective and that eventually all things will be known through science. But the older I get and the more I look at the problem, the more it occurs to me that this is unprovable. I'm starting to see things from a more Kantian perspective. Nothing can be known in itself. Because, to know of something, information about it must pass through the lens of our senses which will always distort and filter the reality of the object itself. To then form an idea about the object requires us to filter that information even further through weak and strong associations with other ideas and eventually to place it within our understanding of reality. A further problem arises when we realise that our understanding of the world itself is based on the belief that the world as well as we, ourselves, exist; an idea that can neither be proven nor disproven much like the god question. So then, is all knowledge based on belief? Does this mean that people believe what they want to believe? It seems, the only way to resolve this would be to go beyond the limitations our language imposes on us. To accept the idea that there is a tangible reality we have to eliminate false dichotomy. Everything is both subjective and objective to some degree. You and the world exist not as seperate entities but as two parts of a unity.



While I see your point about our senses distorting things I would challenge the conclusions you draw from it. The Universe holds objectifyable truths about everything eg. there is only one truth about what the planet Jupiter is comprised of, there can not be two competing subjective truths. In order to get as close to the truth as possible (perhaps we can't as humans understand completely) we must endeavour to find as much evidence as possible in order to draw the truest conclusions possible. Things like the weight of the planet, perhaps some samples of the gases that we believe (through the evidence we have thus far) make up Jupiter, might be obtained in a future when we have the technology to actually to get such samples (I know I know, extremely high gravity makes that virtually impossible now). But we can analyse the evidence we have to get as close to the truth as our senses will allow us.


Jupiter's core remains a mystery which opens the door to conjecture and subjectivity.

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Let me take a different tactic. Most humans see in colour, it is very rare that a human doesn't see in colour (excepting blind people). We also know that our vision of colour is our brain's interpretation of the various visible frequencies of the electro-magnetic spectrum. But we can know that fact, we can know things through our senses which tell us how weak our senses actually are. Also I might point out that our senses enable us to see what really is there on the scale that we have been evolutionarily programmed to operate on, but nevertheless they enable us to experience the world on a level that does not subtract much from the truth of it. The property of being green is something that exists in reality, it might be something that could be interpreted differently by different species, but our senses still show us the objective truth of what is there despite subjective interpretations. This truth is something we can find though, we can know the frequencies that create green despite subjective interpretations of those frequencies with our eyes. The fact that we can create machinery that gives us true interpretations of what our biological senses can't feel is the means how we can reach the truths, these extra-sensory machines, can interpret things in ways that our real senses can understand.

I probably haven't argued that well but it's late and I'm tired.


Assuming there is an objective reality in which we exist as seperate individuals, how do you know that what looks green to you doesn't look red to me?  We can create machines that will show frequencies for colors whose name we agree upon but those frenquencies still lack a vital bit of information that we can only know by directly perceiving color.


cheezues
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Quote: Valid/True beliefs

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Valid/True beliefs must rest on facts, you can believe in god (as an example) and it doesn't reference anything in reality. Or a concept like furniture, "furniture" is not a thing, but classifies knowledge conceptually.

I'm not sure if you were comparing the two or just commenting and agreeing, but belief in god is unfounded because it doesn't reference anything in reality, and is often presented by someone who ascribes internally incompatible attributes to it.

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If we're under the assumption that I exist as a seperate entity or as a focal point in a definable and objective world, then this holds. The language severely limits my attempt to show an alternative but I will try to do so in the follow ups.

You're not grasping what I'm saying here.  This "assumption" is inescapable.

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  How about: knowledge of a particular of a particular rather than knowledge of a particular in itself?

It doesn't change the contextual nature of knowledge.  To make a demand that to qualify as knowledge the knowledg must be knowledge of a particular in itself is again to demand omniscience.

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Conceptualization is a way to improve the quality of our understanding but to perceive further allows us to better conceptualize, thus expanding the borders of our knowledge.

Oh certainly agreed, these two modes of perception are interdependant and inseperable. 

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It does not change some of our shared concepts of the flower but some of its reality will be revealed and some will remain hidden. I think you agree here.

Flowers don't reveal anything to anyone.  This is always true for perception perception and indeed the higher levels of conception, and that is that they are active processes that require focus.

Again though, talking about the "reality" of the flower in and of itself is the same type of implicit demand for omniscience.  To know and understand flowers one does not, and is indeed incapable of,  holding in immediate awareness the information contained within every molecule that comprises said flower.  Thats really all you've been asking for though is awareness of particular things.  Think of conceptualization as a zip file for perceptual awareness.

 

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Nothing is erroneous about using your mind and senses as long as you're doing it to the greatest extent possible.

Even if we were you've already defined knowledge for human beings outside the realm of human potential.

Human knowledge isn't a single chain of A to B to C but imagine thousands of chains  that are interconnected at different areas of their chain.

Take 26 chains... "a" "ab" "abc" abcd" etc.. until "a-z"

A is referenced in all of these chains and lets say A references a specific concept, B represents a percept, and continue mixing them in all the way to Z.  These chains exist simultaneously and to expose a single contradiction in 1, lets say the letter "R" within concept "a-z" would reveal potential problems in all of them, but identifying said problem does not invalidate the other bits of knowledge a-q and s-z.  the more knowledge we gain the more interdependant it becomes and the easier it is to find contradictions when they are introduced.

Suppose again we've weeded out all contradictions in the time being in all of our supposed chains of knowledge, then a new one comes along that we're introduced too.  We'll call it "1".  We use all sensory material available, and it's very likely that none may be available in the case of studying something out of a book, like the bible.  We then attempt to integrate "1" into knowledge-base "a" through "a-z" and it just so turns out that 1 is the exact contradicting opposite of "b".  So we substitute in B in knowledge chains "ab" - "az" excluding some chains like "a" because they dont necessarily help us validate the truth value of "1" or "b".  We place "1" in "ab" doesn't work, and we do the same to the rest and it doesn't work.  We have no grounds upon which to accept this proposition "1."  Certainty exists not because "1" is absolutely false, but because our entire base of knowledge has been tested against "1" to see if it holds up.  Adding the perceptual level of consciousness only compounds the rigorousness with which we stretch and bend and pull and test our conceptual fabric against the evidence the senses provide us.

 

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When you talk about calandars and celestial bodies, you're talking about names and measurements, which are things we invent and assign without the need to understand the implicit workings of nature.

Names are the broad categorical concept under which all attributes known and unknown of any given existent are classified, without an existent or concept under which to assign discovered attributes these names become meaningless.  God is a good example.  Once again the meaning is derived from the connection between human beings to the concept through understanding, and/or human beings to the existent through perception.  We use classification systems and measurments for the sole purpose of understanding the workings of nature, and doing so in knowable communicable terms.

Calenders come without a need to understand the implicit workings of nature?  Small children will disagree with you when they ask you why the weather changes.  You could explain the calender as representative of the position of earth around the sun, and it's effect on our seasons, how we track that.  This measurement is BASED on the workings of nature.  Using it implies your understanding of the passage of time, not necessarily what time is, but that it's moving along, and yesterday is not today or tomorrow, and each such day corresponds to 1 unit on the page.

lastly, we didn't consider names of non-entities before we found entities with which to give them.   First there was  the planet, then our classification of it.  An invention does not undermine it's validity just because it is an invention.  Our invention of the term "jupiter" and how we assigned it to a planet is not invalidated just by you saying, "we invented it."  

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So your ethics are based on life.

yup 

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Is that more Rand?

Not originally, but yea.

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True, but I was only pointing that out to show you that there is some degree of subjectivity to the idea even if, at the moment, it remains necessary to kill.

Differences in ideas do not correlate to differences in reality.  Monks might believe that grass is on a par with human life because they believe in some life force, a supernatural power, but that doesn't create it.  Human life however, is the precondition for any individual to value anything, because one must exist in order to value anything.  Comparing the two as being on an equal in terms of provability, and then using them to site an instance of "subjectivity" or differences in philosophies doesn't make subjective.  In all the biology I've studied I've never uncovered a "life force" governing the natural process that govern the growth of grass or any other plant life.  Reality here, once again hands in the final verdict that buddhist, as well intentioned and harmless as they are, are full of shit.  Thanks again Science!

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My question is how many times romoved is our understanding of reality from reality itself?

We can abstract on many levels, and the existence of some philosophies out there attributes to how disconnected someone can become if they are not at least cogniscent of the machinations of how they think, but such evidence does not necessarily reflect that all such higher abstractions are invalid.  Indeed, it presupposes that perception as such IS valid and that degredation takes place along the way, which really concludes this thread as far as Objective vs. Subjective reality goes.  To understand how to avoid said degradation, because it is only a potential, refer back to my example, fairly complex for an example, of my thoughts that interconnect and are all mixtures of perception and conception and just multiply that until you think you've reached the complexity of the human brain.

Once again though I agree here that its not easy as we get higher and higher, which is why not everyone is interested in philosophy, but I don't think that subtracts from the worlds explicit need to replace ancient philosophy with more current versions.

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I mostly agree but I'm not sure if it's really "earlier" information or if all information is based on all other information. The mind is a web after all.

Blue, Red, Green, Orange come before one understands what "Color" means.  Red is a piece of earlier information. And, if information and knowledge is not based on all other information and knowledge, immune to cross referencing then what does it mean when science is said to progress?  When a theory happens to prove correct and our understanding of our entire world transforms, like Evolution.  The Fact of Evolution would not be possible without the massive suseptibility of related information to be crossreferenced with other pieces it relates to, both previous and current.

 

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Focusing is useful and necessary for deductive reasoning but when we do focus, we can lose some of the "bigger picture" and that forces us to lose some of our intuitive ability. Contrarywise, when we expand our awareness to a larger context and attempt inductive reasoning, we lose what we had gained by focusing. Of course, one may count memory as the correcting tool by allowing us to compare things which are observed from the large context to the small but that, too, has flaws and limits.

Thats when abstraction matters the most.  Zoom in close and check out the evolution of bacteria over a matter of seconds, or the developement of mycelium cultures over the progress of a few years and then zoom way out into a macro world view and look into the past at the same time at the fossil record and the history we've recorded all summed up into the abstraction called "Evolution"  You can then squeeze all of that massive information, the information you've associated with it personally and then consider other subjects which you've summed.

Our record keeping is a really important tool for human beings on the level we are now.  The ability to look back on a book full of previous information to bring forward into your immediate awareness and file away pieces, card catelogging the data if you will, for later recollection or reference.  Without reference material we would be in poor shape.  That same reference material however provides that large scale context that you're talking about which does have limits, because only so many people read any given book and some of them might not care about it, some might critique it etc...  but it doesn't presuppose flaws with the knowledge in the book.

 

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"the only absolute is the lack of other absolutes" was meant as a 'self-killing' concept. The logic was meant to have a degree of self-contridiction in order to kill the term itself. But I think I will try to save a few paragraphs by simply saying that I am abandoning absolutes. Whenever I say "this is that" the "is" should be taken to mean "is probably" or "is likely" or "I believe is".

We'll you said you've read the thread about Axiomatic Concepts, so feel free to present an arguement that disproves the absolutism of those.  Evreything else is superficial unless we establish those as ground rules.

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When I said measurements I was referring more to what I choose to measure a perception/conception against. What ideas or sensations? It would depend on the situation.

Other perceptions and conceptions.  Other ideas and sensations, and the context (situation) is always important, but that doesn't make reality subjective.

All of the things you've said about measurement I could link you a page about the concept of  Unit-economy, as Objectivism explains epistemological developement of human consciousness.

Just because we invent something relative and make it a standard does not mean it is subjective.  The difference between 1000 different tests in a lab considering the length of a meter won't move it visibly along the ruler, it's a relative measurement used to attain unit-economy to make the world understandable.

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The senses distort reality because, by sensing, they are changing one form of energy - or information - into another.

So you've sabotaged your only connection to reality.

Aside from that you haven't grasped that sensation is an indescriminate process.  Whatever the senses are capable of percieving they will.  Is "distort" the appropriate word to even use here?  I would assert that interpret is the best word possible to give to it, lets have a look-see at the definitions and see what we can come up with.

Distortion: 

 

 

to twist awry or out of shape; make crooked or deformed: Arthritis had distorted his fingers.
2.to give a false, perverted, or disproportionate meaning to; misrepresent: to distort the facts.
3.Electronics. to reproduce or amplify (a signal) inaccurately by changing the frequencies or unequally changing the delay or amplitude of the components of the output wave.

 

Interpret:

1.to give or provide the meaning of; explain; explicate; elucidate: to interpret the hidden meaning of a parable.
2.to construe or understand in a particular way: to interpret a reply as favorable.
3.to bring out the meaning of (a dramatic work, music, etc.) by performance or execution.

 

While it is true that the electrical signals sent by your nerves are not the same electrical current that sparked the reaction, a correlation can be made between them.  The difference exists there, that is the reason I didn't choose the term "reveal."  Now, having a direct mapping our brains to know what is hot because we touch something that is hot... is that a distortion?

Does it? 

1.to twist awry or out of shape; make crooked or deformed: Arthritis had distorted his fingers.

 

It's not deforming reality because it's only coming into contact with it.  It's not twisting reality for the same reason, nor is it manipulating the outward media that spark the sensations.

Does it? 

1.to give or provide the meaning of; explain; explicate; elucidate: to interpret the hidden meaning of a parable.

 

Our senses most certainly allow us to piece together meaning out of what we percieve.  Hot things are hot, cold things are cold, various waves of light are interpreted differently by our eyes.  Revealing these patterns to us through involuntary interaction certainly helps us explain existence.

You see where I'm going with this.

The only reason the philosoph you've read chooses to use the word distort is so that it can attribute some volition to the sense organs.  When it's not failing at that it's trying to disconnect the directly causal relationship between the senses and what interacts with them, your example with the eye fell under this category.

It serves no purpose that could be considered the furthering or advancing of our knowledge but seeks instead, to obfuscate our methods of learning so that it can slip in some nice little prescriptions for ethics and politics later on when in fact the definition doesn't even apply to how the senses work.  No distortion is taking place, there is a causal involuntary relationship, an INTERPRETATION, between our sense experience and the outside world.

 

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The mind distorts reality because it not only relies on information that comes through the senses, but it builds its knowlege of reality based on who's mind it is, what state it is in, and where it is focused at the moment.

So A) when the mind relies on information to make a case, that case is necessarily invalid because it must rely on previous information...

But B) when you use language that you learned through the use of your mind which relied on some necessarily invalid information, your arguement is somehow valid... 

there is no C) because A and B are inconsistant.

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"man is blind, deaf and deluded because he sees, hears and thinks (one activity will dominate)

Sports and many physical activities require an equal reliance on all of these things, where if any dominate you're probably going to fuck up somewhere else.  Whether it's tunnel visioning and going deaf or you wander off in thought and forget what you're looking at, and the guy across the room you're staring at starts getting really uncomfortable lol!

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Then, the descriptive power of a given quantity of a specific language or the amount of room that it needs to communicate is a limiting factor.

Yea this basically falls in line with the rest of your arguement.  And this is a pattern I'm really hoping to highlight for you.

First you set the standard which is unattainable.  In this form of the arguement, telepathy.

Then you set the arguement up, In this case it's the ability to communicate without speaking because in order to communicate, "sometimes communication can take more space, longer time."

Thus you set the standard that short "communication, to be rich in meaning is necessarily, and without evidence, always the best whether it is possible or not."  The logical extreme of this being telepathy.

You then say that "language, because it is spoken or written, takes up space and thus is limited because it is communicated."

You could further reduce that into the mind being necessarily flawed, as you've done already, because it must employ means in order to function.

It's not just these "subjective" processes you're argueing against because you apply this logic to all of your arguements.  I said it before and it's just that, in order for any process to be invalid it only need a means, and because causality exists, nothing is valid.

These are not real arguements, they're mental rubix cubes that are fun once in a while, but it's rediculous, internally contradictory, and still can't escape it's absolute reliance on the faculties and means which it refutes.

Practically this philosophy amounts to absolute stagnation in the face of any means.

but you still haven't been able to avoid validating the Objectivity of reality in presenting any of your arguements.

haha! 

 


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cheezues wrote: Quote:

cheezues wrote:


Quote:

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Valid/True beliefs must rest on facts, you can believe in god (as an example) and it doesn't reference anything in reality. Or a concept like furniture, "furniture" is not a thing, but classifies knowledge conceptually.


I'm not sure if you were comparing the two or just commenting and agreeing, but belief in god is unfounded because it doesn't reference anything in reality, and is often presented by someone who ascribes internally incompatible attributes to it.


I think there is some confusion over who is quoting who. This thread has become completely fubared. Scroll to the bottom.


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If we're under the assumption that I exist as a seperate entity or as a focal point in a definable and objective world, then this holds. The language severely limits my attempt to show an alternative but I will try to do so in the follow ups.


You're not grasping what I'm saying here. This "assumption" is inescapable.

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How about: knowledge of a particular of a particular rather than knowledge of a particular in itself?


It doesn't change the contextual nature of knowledge. To make a demand that to qualify as knowledge the knowledg must be knowledge of a particular in itself is again to demand omniscience.

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Conceptualization is a way to improve the quality of our understanding but to perceive further allows us to better conceptualize, thus expanding the borders of our knowledge.


Oh certainly agreed, these two modes of perception are interdependant and inseperable.

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It does not change some of our shared concepts of the flower but some of its reality will be revealed and some will remain hidden. I think you agree here.


Flowers don't reveal anything to anyone. This is always true for perception perception and indeed the higher levels of conception, and that is that they are active processes that require focus.

Again though, talking about the "reality" of the flower in and of itself is the same type of implicit demand for omniscience. To know and understand flowers one does not, and is indeed incapable of, holding in immediate awareness the information contained within every molecule that comprises said flower. Thats really all you've been asking for though is awareness of particular things. Think of conceptualization as a zip file for perceptual awareness.

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Nothing is erroneous about using your mind and senses as long as you're doing it to the greatest extent possible.


Even if we were you've already defined knowledge for human beings outside the realm of human potential.

Human knowledge isn't a single chain of A to B to C but imagine thousands of chains that are interconnected at different areas of their chain.

Take 26 chains... "a" "ab" "abc" abcd" etc.. until "a-z"

A is referenced in all of these chains and lets say A references a specific concept, B represents a percept, and continue mixing them in all the way to Z. These chains exist simultaneously and to expose a single contradiction in 1, lets say the letter "R" within concept "a-z" would reveal potential problems in all of them, but identifying said problem does not invalidate the other bits of knowledge a-q and s-z. the more knowledge we gain the more interdependant it becomes and the easier it is to find contradictions when they are introduced.

Suppose again we've weeded out all contradictions in the time being in all of our supposed chains of knowledge, then a new one comes along that we're introduced too. We'll call it "1". We use all sensory material available, and it's very likely that none may be available in the case of studying something out of a book, like the bible. We then attempt to integrate "1" into knowledge-base "a" through "a-z" and it just so turns out that 1 is the exact contradicting opposite of "b". So we substitute in B in knowledge chains "ab" - "az" excluding some chains like "a" because they dont necessarily help us validate the truth value of "1" or "b". We place "1" in "ab" doesn't work, and we do the same to the rest and it doesn't work. We have no grounds upon which to accept this proposition "1." Certainty exists not because "1" is absolutely false, but because our entire base of knowledge has been tested against "1" to see if it holds up. Adding the perceptual level of consciousness only compounds the rigorousness with which we stretch and bend and pull and test our conceptual fabric against the evidence the senses provide us.

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When you talk about calandars and celestial bodies, you're talking about names and measurements, which are things we invent and assign without the need to understand the implicit workings of nature.


Names are the broad categorical concept under which all attributes known and unknown of any given existent are classified, without an existent or concept under which to assign discovered attributes these names become meaningless. God is a good example. Once again the meaning is derived from the connection between human beings to the concept through understanding, and/or human beings to the existent through perception. We use classification systems and measurments for the sole purpose of understanding the workings of nature, and doing so in knowable communicable terms.

Calenders come without a need to understand the implicit workings of nature? Small children will disagree with you when they ask you why the weather changes. You could explain the calender as representative of the position of earth around the sun, and it's effect on our seasons, how we track that. This measurement is BASED on the workings of nature. Using it implies your understanding of the passage of time, not necessarily what time is, but that it's moving along, and yesterday is not today or tomorrow, and each such day corresponds to 1 unit on the page.

lastly, we didn't consider names of non-entities before we found entities with which to give them. First there was the planet, then our classification of it. An invention does not undermine it's validity just because it is an invention. Our invention of the term "jupiter" and how we assigned it to a planet is not invalidated just by you saying, "we invented it."

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So your ethics are based on life.


yup

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Is that more Rand?


Not originally, but yea.

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True, but I was only pointing that out to show you that there is some degree of subjectivity to the idea even if, at the moment, it remains necessary to kill.


Differences in ideas do not correlate to differences in reality. Monks might believe that grass is on a par with human life because they believe in some life force, a supernatural power, but that doesn't create it. Human life however, is the precondition for any individual to value anything, because one must exist in order to value anything. Comparing the two as being on an equal in terms of provability, and then using them to site an instance of "subjectivity" or differences in philosophies doesn't make subjective. In all the biology I've studied I've never uncovered a "life force" governing the natural process that govern the growth of grass or any other plant life. Reality here, once again hands in the final verdict that buddhist, as well intentioned and harmless as they are, are full of shit. Thanks again Science!

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My question is how many times romoved is our understanding of reality from reality itself?


We can abstract on many levels, and the existence of some philosophies out there attributes to how disconnected someone can become if they are not at least cogniscent of the machinations of how they think, but such evidence does not necessarily reflect that all such higher abstractions are invalid. Indeed, it presupposes that perception as such IS valid and that degredation takes place along the way, which really concludes this thread as far as Objective vs. Subjective reality goes. To understand how to avoid said degradation, because it is only a potential, refer back to my example, fairly complex for an example, of my thoughts that interconnect and are all mixtures of perception and conception and just multiply that until you think you've reached the complexity of the human brain.

Once again though I agree here that its not easy as we get higher and higher, which is why not everyone is interested in philosophy, but I don't think that subtracts from the worlds explicit need to replace ancient philosophy with more current versions.

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I mostly agree but I'm not sure if it's really "earlier" information or if all information is based on all other information. The mind is a web after all.


Blue, Red, Green, Orange come before one understands what "Color" means. Red is a piece of earlier information. And, if information and knowledge is not based on all other information and knowledge, immune to cross referencing then what does it mean when science is said to progress? When a theory happens to prove correct and our understanding of our entire world transforms, like Evolution. The Fact of Evolution would not be possible without the massive suseptibility of related information to be crossreferenced with other pieces it relates to, both previous and current.

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Focusing is useful and necessary for deductive reasoning but when we do focus, we can lose some of the "bigger picture" and that forces us to lose some of our intuitive ability. Contrarywise, when we expand our awareness to a larger context and attempt inductive reasoning, we lose what we had gained by focusing. Of course, one may count memory as the correcting tool by allowing us to compare things which are observed from the large context to the small but that, too, has flaws and limits.


Thats when abstraction matters the most. Zoom in close and check out the evolution of bacteria over a matter of seconds, or the developement of mycelium cultures over the progress of a few years and then zoom way out into a macro world view and look into the past at the same time at the fossil record and the history we've recorded all summed up into the abstraction called "Evolution" You can then squeeze all of that massive information, the information you've associated with it personally and then consider other subjects which you've summed.

Our record keeping is a really important tool for human beings on the level we are now. The ability to look back on a book full of previous information to bring forward into your immediate awareness and file away pieces, card catelogging the data if you will, for later recollection or reference. Without reference material we would be in poor shape. That same reference material however provides that large scale context that you're talking about which does have limits, because only so many people read any given book and some of them might not care about it, some might critique it etc... but it doesn't presuppose flaws with the knowledge in the book.

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"the only absolute is the lack of other absolutes" was meant as a 'self-killing' concept. The logic was meant to have a degree of self-contridiction in order to kill the term itself. But I think I will try to save a few paragraphs by simply saying that I am abandoning absolutes. Whenever I say "this is that" the "is" should be taken to mean "is probably" or "is likely" or "I believe is".


We'll you said you've read the thread about Axiomatic Concepts, so feel free to present an arguement that disproves the absolutism of those. Evreything else is superficial unless we establish those as ground rules.

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When I said measurements I was referring more to what I choose to measure a perception/conception against. What ideas or sensations? It would depend on the situation.


Other perceptions and conceptions. Other ideas and sensations, and the context (situation) is always important, but that doesn't make reality subjective.

All of the things you've said about measurement I could link you a page about the concept of Unit-economy, as Objectivism explains epistemological developement of human consciousness.

Just because we invent something relative and make it a standard does not mean it is subjective. The difference between 1000 different tests in a lab considering the length of a meter won't move it visibly along the ruler, it's a relative measurement used to attain unit-economy to make the world understandable.

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The senses distort reality because, by sensing, they are changing one form of energy - or information - into another.


So you've sabotaged your only connection to reality.

Aside from that you haven't grasped that sensation is an indescriminate process. Whatever the senses are capable of percieving they will. Is "distort" the appropriate word to even use here? I would assert that interpret is the best word possible to give to it, lets have a look-see at the definitions and see what we can come up with.

Distortion:




to twist awry or out of shape; make crooked or deformed: Arthritis had distorted his fingers.
2. to give a false, perverted, or disproportionate meaning to; misrepresent: to distort the facts.
3. Electronics. to reproduce or amplify (a signal) inaccurately by changing the frequencies or unequally changing the delay or amplitude of the components of the output wave.



Interpret:
1. to give or provide the meaning of; explain; explicate; elucidate: to interpret the hidden meaning of a parable.
2. to construe or understand in a particular way: to interpret a reply as favorable.
3. to bring out the meaning of (a dramatic work, music, etc.) by performance or execution.



While it is true that the electrical signals sent by your nerves are not the same electrical current that sparked the reaction, a correlation can be made between them. The difference exists there, that is the reason I didn't choose the term "reveal." Now, having a direct mapping our brains to know what is hot because we touch something that is hot... is that a distortion?

Does it?
1. to twist awry or out of shape; make crooked or deformed: Arthritis had distorted his fingers.



It's not deforming reality because it's only coming into contact with it. It's not twisting reality for the same reason, nor is it manipulating the outward media that spark the sensations.

Does it?
1. to give or provide the meaning of; explain; explicate; elucidate: to interpret the hidden meaning of a parable.



Our senses most certainly allow us to piece together meaning out of what we percieve. Hot things are hot, cold things are cold, various waves of light are interpreted differently by our eyes. Revealing these patterns to us through involuntary interaction certainly helps us explain existence.

You see where I'm going with this.

The only reason the philosoph you've read chooses to use the word distort is so that it can attribute some volition to the sense organs. When it's not failing at that it's trying to disconnect the directly causal relationship between the senses and what interacts with them, your example with the eye fell under this category.

It serves no purpose that could be considered the furthering or advancing of our knowledge but seeks instead, to obfuscate our methods of learning so that it can slip in some nice little prescriptions for ethics and politics later on when in fact the definition doesn't even apply to how the senses work. No distortion is taking place, there is a causal involuntary relationship, an INTERPRETATION, between our sense experience and the outside world.

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The mind distorts reality because it not only relies on information that comes through the senses, but it builds its knowlege of reality based on who's mind it is, what state it is in, and where it is focused at the moment.


So A) when the mind relies on information to make a case, that case is necessarily invalid because it must rely on previous information...

But B) when you use language that you learned through the use of your mind which relied on some necessarily invalid information, your arguement is somehow valid...

there is no C) because A and B are inconsistant.

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"man is blind, deaf and deluded because he sees, hears and thinks (one activity will dominate)


Sports and many physical activities require an equal reliance on all of these things, where if any dominate you're probably going to fuck up somewhere else. Whether it's tunnel visioning and going deaf or you wander off in thought and forget what you're looking at, and the guy across the room you're staring at starts getting really uncomfortable lol!

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Then, the descriptive power of a given quantity of a specific language or the amount of room that it needs to communicate is a limiting factor.


Yea this basically falls in line with the rest of your arguement. And this is a pattern I'm really hoping to highlight for you.

First you set the standard which is unattainable. In this form of the arguement, telepathy.

Then you set the arguement up, In this case it's the ability to communicate without speaking because in order to communicate, "sometimes communication can take more space, longer time."

Thus you set the standard that short "communication, to be rich in meaning is necessarily, and without evidence, always the best whether it is possible or not." The logical extreme of this being telepathy.

You then say that "language, because it is spoken or written, takes up space and thus is limited because it is communicated."

You could further reduce that into the mind being necessarily flawed, as you've done already, because it must employ means in order to function.

It's not just these "subjective" processes you're argueing against because you apply this logic to all of your arguements. I said it before and it's just that, in order for any process to be invalid it only need a means, and because causality exists, nothing is valid.

These are not real arguements, they're mental rubix cubes that are fun once in a while, but it's rediculous, internally contradictory, and still can't escape it's absolute reliance on the faculties and means which it refutes.

Practically this philosophy amounts to absolute stagnation in the face of any means.

but you still haven't been able to avoid validating the Objectivity of reality in presenting any of your arguements.

haha!





Let's go ahead and get started on the short version. I've already posted my request for you to expand on your definitions of existance, consciousness and identity. I'd also like to see your definition of knowledge. My question for you at this point is this: If I were able to show you a way to refute existance itself, would you agree that all of your philosophy rests on shaky ground?


cheezues
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Quote:

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My question for you at this point is this: If I were able to show you a way to refute existance itself, would you agree that all of your philosophy rests on shaky ground?

Yes, it would really do a lot more damage to my framework than just make it shakey.

 

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Existence and consciousness are facts implicit in every perception. They are the base of all knowledge (and the precondition of proof): knowledge presupposes something to know and someone to know it. They are absolutes which cannot be questioned or escaped: every human utterance, including the denial of these axioms, implies their use and acceptance.

 


Sodium Pentothal
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You need to firmly stand

You need to firmly stand your ground that atheism is just not having any reason to believe in a god.  It's optional to try to disprove "god" through hard atheistic tactics, but I'm of the opinion that there is no reason for us to believe in a god alone more than suffices.  Sounds like this person trapped you with strawmen arguments and irrelevant specifics.

 Again, I'd just stand my ground and just keep saying that as an atheist, I've yet to see evidence that god exists.  The burden of proof is on the claimant/positive (the person), not the listener (you.

"If I don't think something can be explained conventionally, it must be magic. And magic comes from God!" -everyday religious person


Susan
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Spacebudha, it looks like

Spacebudha, it looks like maybe you've figured out your formatting problems, but just in case:

I suspect your formatting problems are due to using an editor like MS Word to write your post and then copying and pasting.  Word has all sorts of little hidden things it uses for formatting that will do weird stuff here when copied in.

It's almost impossible for a mod to fix and it takes a massive amount of time. 

If you want to write your comment using another application first, I suggest a plain text editor so there aren't the hidden things for paragraphs and new lines within the body of the text.

 

 

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spacebuddha
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Consciousness as the notion

Consciousness as the notion that we exist as seperate entities taking in perception from the outside world and making inferences based thereupon.  If you accept the idea that everything in the universe is a conglomeration of particles behaving in accordance with known physical laws then it follows that the brain, too, is a part of this.  It is a physical entity operating under physical laws.  Therefore, at its very core, the brain is simply responding to stimuli.  What we call consciousness is simply a reaction to electrical impulses.  The separation here is only semantic.  It is arbitrarily defined.  The mind cannot exist without the rest of the cosmos.

Existance as the implication that there is being as opposed to non-being.  This was, or course, the most difficult to refute.  I spent a lot of time thinking on this one.  But it is possible to argue against.  First, it requires that one accept the notion that existance is defined dialectically.  That is to say, all that is, is defined by it's opposite.  Hot is defined by cold, large by small, etc...  So then, if this is true, and if everything that exists could be taken as a whole; everything and its negation summed up; then we would end with a zero, nothing, non-being.


spacebuddha
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Susan wrote: Spacebudha,

Susan wrote:

Spacebudha, it looks like maybe you've figured out your formatting problems, but just in case:

I suspect your formatting problems are due to using an editor like MS Word to write your post and then copying and pasting. Word has all sorts of little hidden things it uses for formatting that will do weird stuff here when copied in.

It's almost impossible for a mod to fix and it takes a massive amount of time.

If you want to write your comment using another application first, I suggest a plain text editor so there aren't the hidden things for paragraphs and new lines within the body of the text.

 

 

 

I tried using notepad but my reply would be filled by unnecessary spaces and breaks that I would have to painstakingly go through and delete.  If you can suggest a better editor than notepad or wordpad, I'm all ears. 


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spacebuddha wrote: I tried

spacebuddha wrote:

I tried using notepad but my reply would be filled by unnecessary spaces and breaks that I would have to painstakingly go through and delete. If you can suggest a better editor than notepad or wordpad, I'm all ears.

If it is an extensively long post and I don't feel like spellchecking it myself, I write it in 'Word', then copy and paste it to 'Wordpad', then copy and paste to here. I never have had a problem that way.