6.37 There is no compulsion making one thing happen because another has happened. The only necessity that exists is logical necessity.
6.371 The whole modern conception of the world is founded on the
illusion that the so-called laws of nature are the explanations of
natural phenomena.
6.363 The procedure of induction consists in accepting as true the
simplest law that can be reconciled with our experiences.
6.3611 We cannot compare a process with 'the passage of time'--there is
no such thing--but only with another process (such as the working of a
chronometer).
6.3 The exploration of logic means the exploration of everything that is
subject to law. And outside logic everything is accidental.
6.31 The so-called law of induction cannot possibly be a law of logic,
since it is obviously a proposition with sense.---Nor, therefore, can it
be an a priori law.
6.233 The question whether intuition is needed for the solution of
mathematical problems must be given the answer that in this case
language itself provides the necessary intuition.
6.1271 It is clear that the number of the 'primitive propositions
of logic' is arbitrary, since one could derive logic from a single
primitive proposition...
6.45 To view the world sub specie aeterni is to view it as a whole--a
limited whole. Feeling the world as a limited whole--it is this that is
mystical.
6.5 When the answer cannot be put into words, neither can the question
be put into words. The riddle does not exist. If a question can be
framed at all, it is also possible to answer it.
6.51 Scepticism is not irrefutable, but obviously nonsensical, when it
tries to raise doubts where no questions can be asked. For doubt can
exist only where a question exists, a question only where an answer
exists, and an answer only where something can be said.
6.52 We feel that even when all possible scientific questions have been
answered, the problems of life remain completely untouched. Of course
there are then no questions left, and this itself is the answer.
6.521 The solution of the problem of life is seen in the vanishing of
the problem. (Is not this the reason why those who have found after a
long period of doubt that the sense of life became clear to them have
then been unable to say what constituted that sense?)
6.522 There are, indeed, things that cannot be put into words. They make
themselves manifest. They are what is mystical.
6.54 My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me
finally recognizes them as senseless, when he has climbed out through
them, on them, over them. (He must so to speak throw away the ladder,
after he has climbed up on it.) He must transcend these propositions,
and then he will see the world aright.
7. What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.
The Prophets Isaiah and Ezekiel dined with me, and I asked them how they dared so roundly to assert that God spake to them; and whether they did not think at the time, that they would be misunderstood, & so be the cause of imposition.
Isaiah answer'd. 'I saw no God, nor heard any, in a finite organical perception; but my senses discover'd the infinite in every thing, and as I was then perswaded, & remain confirm'd, that the voice of honest indignation is the voice of God, I cared not for consequences but wrote.'
Once I saw a Devil in a flame of fire, who arose before an Angel that sat on a cloud, and the Devil utter'd these words:
'The worship of God is: Honouring his gifts in other men, each according to his genius, and loving the greatest men best: those who envy or calumniate great men hate God; for there is no other God.'
The ancient Poets animated all sensible objects with Gods or Geniuses, calling them by the names and adorning them with the properties of woods, rivers, mountains, lakes, cities, nations, and whatever their enlarged & numerous senses could percieve.
And particularly they studied the genius of each city & country, placing it under its mental deity;
Till a system was formed, which some took advantage of & enslav'd the vulgar by attempting to realize or abstract the mental deities from their objects: thus began Priesthood;
Choosing forms of worship from poetic tales.
And at length they pronounc'd that the Gods had order'd such things.
Thus men forgot that All deities reside in the human breast.
The ancient tradition that the world will be consumed in fire at the end of six thousand years is true, as I have heard from Hell.
For the cherub with his flaming sword is hereby commanded to leave his guard at the tree of life, and when he does, the whole creation will be consumed and appear infinite and holy whereas it now appears finite & corrupt.
This will come to pass by an improvement of sensual enjoyment.
But first the notion that man has a body distinct from his soul is to be expunged; this I shall do, by printing in the infernal method, by corrosives, which in Hell are salutary and medicinal, melting apparent surfaces away, and displaying the infinite which was hid.
If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite.
For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narow chinks of his cavern.
I also asked Isaiah what made him go naked and barefoot three years? he answer'd, 'the same that made our friend Diogenes the Grecian.'
I then asked Ezekiel why he eat dung, & lay so long on his right & left side? he answer'd, 'the desire of raising other men into a perception of the infinite; this the North American tribes practise, & is he honest who resists his genius or conscience. only for the sake of present ease or gratification?'
The tao that can be told
is not the eternal Tao
The name that can be named
is not the eternal Name.
The unnamable is the eternally real.
Naming is the origin
of all particular things.
When people see some things as beautiful,
other things become ugly.
When people see some things as good,
other things become bad.
The Tao is like a well:
used but never used up.
It is like the eternal void:
filled with infinite possibilities.
It is hidden but always present.
I don't know who gave birth to it.
It is older than God.
The Master keeps her mind
always at one with the Tao;
that is what gives her her radiance.
The Tao is ungraspable.
How can her mind be at one with it?
Because she doesn't cling to ideas.
The Tao is dark and unfathomable.
How can it make her radiant?
Because she lets it.
Since before time and space were,
the Tao is.
It is beyond is and is not.
How do I know this is true?
I look inside myself and see.
If you want to become whole,
let yourself be partial.
If you want to become straight,
let yourself be crooked.
If you want to become full,
let yourself be empty.
If you want to be reborn,
let yourself die.
If you want to be given everything,
give everything up.
Not-knowing is true knowledge.
Presuming to know is a disease.
First realize that you are sick;
then you can move toward health.
The Master is her own physician.
She has healed herself of all knowing.
Thus she is truly whole.
When they lose their sense of awe,
people turn to religion.
When they no longer trust themselves,
they begin to depend upon authority.
The Tao doesn't take sides;
it gives birth to both good and evil.
The Master doesn't take sides;
she welcomes both saints and sinners.
Description is not explanation.
Metaphors and myths describe other aspects of our experience
than physics, but they too are inductive.
Time is made of concept.
Emphasis mine.
Pure concept is irreducible. It just is.
What is the essence of essence itself? Essence is oneness, unity, coherence, digital, discrete.
Concept is only one aspect of human experience. Other aspects are simply
nonconceptual. They just are. And concept itself just is. We can only talk about the world as a limited whole because all concept is essentially unification.
Essence is always one, or finite. But emotion and sensation are infinite and continuous. A finite concept will never explain or reduce infinite sensation and emotion. The "Infinite" is not even truly thinkable. It is a paradox used to show the limits of thought.
We just are here, and experience is. But we are blinded to this because we think that concepts are explanatory rather than descriptive. This is the philosophical blindness.
The emotional/sensational blindness is self-righteousness and the fear of death. We cling to concepts that
put us ABOVE the world-as-a-whole. We use concepts as islands to hide away from terror, love, guilt, CONNECTION to
what IS, and cannot be said, for the say-able/thinkable is a tiny speck of what IS. Thought is just one aspect of our being.
The other aspects cannot be reduced to thought. But we can ignore them, and cling to thoughts that flatter our righteousness
and tell us that we aren't really dying.
Being/God/Existence (cross these words out!) is/are radically terribly simple.
Emphasis mine. We can point to what we cannot say or think. It is.
"I am what I am." All images are idols. All concepts are idols.
---------- Post added 05-31-2010 at 06:06 PM ----------
Sound familiar?
"God" is incarnate, totally incarnate in "man", but man is not an island but the experience of all that is. There is no other god.
We philosophers are self-enslaved sometimes by our concepts?
Blake wrote w/ a lot of mockery in this book, hence all the mythological reference.
---------- Post added 05-31-2010 at 06:18 PM ----------
Naming is the origin of all particular (or finite) things. But Being/Tao/Life itself isn't finite. Or isn't only finite.
---------- Post added 05-31-2010 at 06:20 PM ----------
To see/feel/experience the world as a whole, as a unity, and not as a system of dualities. But this requires us to accept our death, and put away our self-righteousness.
It will therefore only be in language that the limit can be drawn, and what lies on the other side of the limit will simply be nonsense.
On the other hand the truth of the thoughts that are here communicated seems to me unassailable and definitive. I therefore believe myself to have found, on all essential points, the final solution of the problems. And if I am not mistaken in this belief, then the second thing in which the of this work consists is that it shows how little is achieved when these problems are solved.
I do not wish to judge how far my efforts coincide with those of other
philosophers. Indeed, what I have written here makes no claim to novelty
in detail, and the reason why I give no sources is that it is a matter
of indifference to me whether the thoughts that I have had have been
anticipated by someone else.
2.021 Objects make up the substance of the world. That is why they cannot be composite.
2.0271 Objects are what is unalterable and subsistent; their configuration is what is changing and unstable.
2.11 A picture presents a situation in logical space, the existence and
non-existence of states of affairs.
2.1511 That is how a picture is attached to reality; it reaches right
out to it.
2.1512 It is laid against reality like a measure.
2.172 A picture cannot, however, depict its pictorial form: it displays
it.
2.221 What a picture represents is its sense.
2.222 The agreement or disagreement or its sense with reality
constitutes its truth or falsity.
2.223 In order to tell whether a picture is true or false we must
compare it with reality.
2.225 There are no pictures that are true a priori.
3.02 A thought contains the possibility of the situation of which it is
the thought. What is thinkable is possible too.
3.03 Thought can never be of anything illogical, since, if it were, we
should have to think illogically.
3.031 It used to be said that God could create anything except what
would be contrary to the laws of logic. The truth is that we could not
say what an 'illogical' world would look like.
3.032 It is as impossible to represent in language anything that
'contradicts logic' as it is in geometry to represent by its coordinates
a figure that contradicts the laws of space, or to give the coordinates
of a point that does not exist.
3.0321 Though a state of affairs that would contravene the laws of
physics can be represented by us spatially, one that would contravene the laws of geometry cannot.
3.11 We use the perceptible sign of a proposition (spoken or written,
etc.) as a projection of a possible situation. The method of projection
is to think of the sense of the proposition.
3.203 A name means an object. The object is its meaning. ('A' is the
same sign as 'A'.)
3.221 Objects can only be named. Signs are their representatives. I can
only speak about them: I cannot put them into words. Propositions can
only say how things are, not what they are.
3.341 So what is essential in a proposition is what all propositions
that can express the same sense have in common. And similarly, in
general, what is essential in a symbol is what all symbols that can
serve the same purpose have in common.
3.4 A proposition determines a place in logical space. The existence of this logical place is guaranteed by the mere existence of the constituents--by the existence of the proposition with a sense.
4.04 In a proposition there must be exactly as many distinguishable
parts as in the situation that it represents. The two must possess the
same logical (mathematical) multiplicity. (Compare Hertz's Mechanics on
dynamical models.)
4.041 This mathematical multiplicity, of course, cannot itself be the
subject of depiction. One cannot get away from it when depicting.
6.4311 Death is not an event in life: we do not live to experience death. If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present. Our life has no end in just the way in which our visual field has no limits.
6.44 It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it
exists.
6.45 To view the world sub specie aeterni is to view it as a whole--a
limited whole. Feeling the world as a limited whole--it is this that is
mystical.
l
"The Tao is not the real Tao" is a contradiction, right?
"Whereof one cannot speak..." is a tautology, right?
One of the things in the TLP is that some things can be said, others need be shown. I find the Lecture on Ethics extremely important in this regard. The life of Wittgenstein shows ethics; He had no reason for writing such a book, as such a book is already written.
A lot of the arguments about the early'n'latter W, etc., all tends to dismiss his life as unimportant in the intellectual debate. Such misses the larger picture, I believe. Take, for example, the line "To imagine an language is to imagine a form of life" and the Philosophical Investigations-- he presents to us language games, and does a great series of them. He thinks his work unfinished in the PI, but obviously not so of his life. "Tell them I had a wonderful life" are his last lines, after saying so much of "Us, We, and I". The intro to the Philosophical Remarks, and the text therein, speaks of how there is a new language in his words (a new form of life). The two cannot be taken separately.
He was born into one of the wealthiest families in Vienna, and gave away his wealth and lived ascetically. He was not drafted in WWI, because of a leg condition, but volunteered anyway. And when put in charge of mechanical repairs, he asked of his superiors, continually, to be put in the front lines; to which he eventually reached. He built for himself cabins to stay in, but for another he built a mansion to perfect to live in. When he had solved all the problems of philosophy, he went to teach children in a small, poor, rural town. When offered pay for some lecture he gave, he returned the money, saying the lecture were rubbish. Etc.
I don't know much about the Tao or Blake.
/2 cents
1) I suggest we look at a non-reductive interpretation of this line. Outside of concepts, there is no meaning, no sense. But there is sensation and emotion. Concepts exists systematically, but this system of concepts is embodied or immersed in a river of sensation and emotion. I think we sometimes bounce around like a pinball in this system of concepts, refusing to examine what concept is, and perhaps more importantly---what it isn't. What does concept distract us from?
2) Objects are concepts, even if these concepts are "laid against reality like a measure."
3) Quantity is fundamental to human thought
4) All science and religion must refer back to nonconceptual human sensation/emotion
hi rec
I guess you are a mathematician. And i am told that i am weak in maths.
But still i would like to risk my name to shame, and request you to kindly elaborate the above sentences. Because - i think these are profound statements, and i have no idea of witt, and his ideas, and would therefore like to have your assistence to know the implications of those ideas, in the light of your views on his statements.
...If we look around at the world, our mind automatically breaks up the visual field into pieces. Just as automatically, from habit and socialization, we see these visual pieces in terms of meanings/concepts/words. When we see a car (a shape of rectangles and circles usually), we also know how this car fits into to human life. It can move. It carries human beings around. Etc. Now in physics terms this car is not a separate object. It's molecules and electromagnetic waves are in continuous contact with the air and the road. Electromagnetic waves are passing through it and though us all the time. So it's our perception that abstracts or yanks out this visual experience and sees it as a separate thing/being known as a "car" in English which does such and such in the causal and social network.
I've gone on long enough so I will get to the implications. All explanations must fail when it comes to sensation and emotion. You can't explain a shoe with a red balloon. Concept/form is one thing. Sensation and emotion are others. The smell of rotten fish just is. The smile of a lovely girl and the emotion associated with this just is. The pain of a rotten tooth just is. The feeling of crawling into bed dog tired --the intense pleasure -- just is. There is incredible richness to human experience which is obscured by descriptions mistaken for explanations. Science describes sensation in terms of mental models like particles and mathematical equations. These equations and concepts serve us well. But this is not really an explanation. We have a conceptual/imaginary causal nexus that the describe experience in terms of. But this method neglects the subject in its pursuit of that Santa Clause known as objectivity. Objectivity cannot be perfect. Thought and emotion and sensation are experienced privately, even if these private self-worlds overlap and agree to call this shared experience (overlapping) the "real world."
I apologise for not being on form this week. I've got two weeks of exam madness with the students, and it won't let up for a while. Nevertheless, I will try to trigger some thoughts below, and hope they may help, irritate, or spark more discussion on this fascinating thesis of yours.
Quote:
Your response was great. I don't feel like I can claim this thesis, as I had so many influences. But perhaps I can claim a certain synthesis and emphasis.
qualia;174909 wrote:
I quickly jotted down the thoughts which arose from what you wrote above:
- the world of science (using the term lightly), the physics' world, abstracts the car from its world, then breaks the subject up into self-sufficient properties (molecules, atoms, electrons). This is the sciences' world of being.
- our experience of the car, we get into it and we use it. The car becomes a 'tool', a means in which we endow it with a task aiming towards some kind of more fundamental necessity for us (getting to work, do the weekend shopping). This is the toolness being. In a perfect state its being should just disappear, become almost invisible as we drive to work listening to the radio or thinking about our day ahead, we forget all about the electrons or functioning of the car and focus on other stuff.
- If the car doesn't work we enter into untoolness being, it is now getting in our way, ithe car has become a disturbance whereas before it was quite transparent. We probably don't stand back from it and just stare at it, as in the physics world, but we certianly aren't using it like a tool anymore. We need to apply another kind of being to broken down cars.
- we cannot understand the car as having a place in the world if it weren't already in a world of roads, certain skills and practices, drilling fields, mining, welding, upholstery, a high degree of division of labour, wheels, ball bearings, tubes and pipes. The same follows for the physics world which also depends on its discourses, practices, historicality, etc. This could be a social world of being of the car.
- the contemplative attitude - as you say - yanks the car from the world, but not the visual experience. When we see a car we take in the road, the traffic lights, the direction, the pavement, the swooshing sounds as it passes by, headlights, other cars, form and design, people, buildings etc.
- the word 'car' has no sense in a language which was only made up of the one word 'car'. It would refer to everything. Language functions in virtue of differences and oppositions. 'Car' can only be defined by what it is not - cat, tree, history. Even the grouping of letters c-a-r distinguish the sign from what it is not c-o-w. The sign 'car' makes no sense if it isn't negatively derived in relation to other signs of a system. The word can never be abstracted from the sign system per se, when in sign mode we are always still assumming the sign system. If I abstract a sign from its system it would look something like this 'Njaknpoti' (which is 'car' in another system, but nor ours so we don't understand its significance). It follows, that the individual sign 'car' does not define, stand for, or reflect the object but only does so in virtue of being negatively 'defined' within the same system of other signs-words-sounds-thoughts-signifier-signified etc. The sign system (language) must always function negatively, in opposition, in difference, the idea of a positive concept only comes after a given degree of abstraction, not at the level of everyday experience.
- All these speculations make sense and are made by only one kind of being thus far known, us. We are the makers of being's intelligibility, although being does not depend on us. From the examples above, there can be no essence as such for being. We can make a whole load of ontologies, depending on the interrogation and enquiry. The copola crowd of some kind of fixed and eternal and imputable is, is a game for dogmatists and fundamentalists. (Bit of a polemic, that one).
All this is brilliant. You covered territory that I didn't address. The only thing you left out is Beauty. I don't know Heidegger that well. I recall something that might relate vaguely. My point is stressing the is-ness is to uncover the strangeness and miracle in everyday life. Are humans more bored and greedy than is necessary? I don't know. Personally, I am sometimes in a state of mind where all the usual things are quasi-miraculous. A cat or a dog is like beautiful alien. To pay close attention to one's pleasure --like that of getting into bed when one's body is tired. If you feel like, I'd enjoy your response on the Blake part of the post, which is prior to the one you focused on.
qualia;174909 wrote:
These modes of being described become a concern. But there is no just is. That would depend on our enquiry and the level of depth we wish to bring it..
Our everyday experiences of these kinds of emotions, qualia, for example, informs us that some form of emotion, qualia, is going on, and act as an indicator, perhaps, to one's self and others that something is going on.
I've split it up like this because I wonder how many emotions we pass through in a day, how many qualia we go through, and yet busy in our world, we fail to notice.
We could ask ourselves, as busy, coping, active, doing, thinking, acting beings in the world, why do we have these things like qualia, emotions in the first place? What telos do they serve, if any?
Are they, or are emotions' or qualia's is - interrupters, distracting us like our broken down car above, or information carriers, other forms of news our bodies tells us about, are they modes of being which set us up for action, are they interrogators, getting us to inspect and seek out a something? Or something more, or a bit of a pick and mix? No is, just a whole load of is's.
Quote:
I will admit that raw is-ness is hard to experience and usually must be inferred. Because we are symbolic practical busy animals. We don't have time. But my stress on this obscured raw isness is motivated by the thrill of this idea: all our explanations exist in the realm of concept. Qualia are their own realm. They are not and seemingly cannot be reduced, unless one counts our forgetfulness of them. I was reading Husserl today, just a little. And he seemed in his longwinded way to be saying the same thing. Except he was drawing aesthetic conclusions, but only presenting their irreducibility.
qualia;174909 wrote:
I think even if we can never get to the heart of the matter, philosophical speculation is fascinating and helpful in understanding our world. Life is at its best when we engage in trying to disclose this world of our being, and not shut it out. After all, science helps to explain so little.
Last word on objectivity - what springs from thought must inevitably be an 'object', even 'self' on reflection. There can be nothing but objectivity, although evidently, we can never be objective about objectivity - we cannot deworld ourselves, or step outside. Hope that makes some kind of sense.
There can be no thing but objectivity, in my opinion. Concept is discrete. Sensation and emotion are continuous. We are a collision of two kinds of perception. I think that sometimes we do re-world ourselves. You have a lady, right? Well, you probably know the sweetness of pillowtalk. That face 6 inches away. What world is this? A world of beauty and tenderness? An Eden that must eventually fade? But there are men like Blake who seemed to live there most of the time. Inborn? Learned? I think that a relative excess of Eros can re-world one, especially if one can overcome the usual anxieties, the dodges, the self-fetishes (conceptual) that bind one.
I see and feel the beauty and power of the discrete/digital aspect of experience. All human thought is abstraction. Mathematics is precise abstraction. That's how I see it. And mathematics is only precise because it withdraws as much as possible from sensation and emotion. Of course this precision can then inspired emotion, especially where math tries to integrate the discrete and the continuous.
.........
1. Objects are dependent for their existence as singular objects on concept or form. If we look around at the world, our mind automatically breaks up the visual field into pieces. Just as automatically, from habit and socialization, we see these visual pieces in terms of meanings/concepts/words. When we see a car (a shape of rectangles and circles usually), we also know how this car fits into to human life. It can move. It carries human beings around. Etc. Now in physics terms this car is not a separate object.
2. This is how concept is laid like a measure/ruler against sensation. We generally interpret sound and color in terms of objects. And this is so practically and socially important, we forget that sound and color (etc.) exists for themselves as sound and color. Sound and color are fundamental human experiences. No amount of abstract talk can reduce them. All we can do is pile concept on top of them, without really burying or explaining them. Sensation just is. Emotion just is. All the books in the world, scientific or religious, cannot change that.
There is simply a disconnect between thought and sensation and emotion. All explanation of any kind exists within a limited aspect of human experience. True, we can be so dazzled by these scientific or theological explanations that we forget to notice how limited they must be. Thought is only one slice of the human experience. And if there were not emotion and sensation, thought would be meaningless in the sense of having no value. Without pleasure in its emotional or sensual form, or pain, thought can do nothing for us. What matter if Hell exists or if the world is made of blind chance an swirling particles? And all of this is abstract conceptual imagination in the first place. A mere island in an ocean of irreducible sensation and emotion.
Quantity should be understood especially in the sense of unity. Or oneness. All pluralities are also unities, and it's my theory that all thought is unification. Every sentence and every equation. Every noun. And even a verb like run. Excepting arithmetic and formal logic, human discourse is usually in relation to sensation and emotion. And this is why words are so slippery. To use the word "flower" is to refer to millions of sensations, or maybe hundreds in the case of a child. The flower concept is a powerful way to hyper-simplify the ocean of experience. Most of our language is this sort of compacting/unifying of sensation and emotion. A word like "love" refers to what? Cloud of emotion, past and present. Consider "justice" or "truth." These words must refer to sensation and emotion to have any meaning, but sensation and emotion vary from person to person and are private experiences. So most of our language use is slippery, very slippery, and most arguments concern the definition of terms. Because sensation and emotion are private, their can be no perfect defintion of such terms. Open a dictionary and discover the ultimate run around. One word is defined by twenty others, which in turn are defined by twenty others. At some point a child has to learn that "red' applies to the sensation of red. And it's only by talking and living with others that he develops faith in this sound/letter symbol as a way to communicate redness without redness being present or without having to physically point at the redness that is present.
But what is redness? A unification of what all red things have in common and a negation or forgetting of what red things do not have in common. I can't express this next thought perfectly in language, because language is discrete/discursive/digital, but outside of our thinking is continuous sensation and emotion. Not only is sensation-and-emotion continuous, our inborn ideal geometry is also continuous. We can contemplate perfect circles. We can contemplate dividing something endlessly into smaller and smaller parts. Of course physics tells us of particles, but this is something else. Imagine an ideal gray goo that is not made of particles but is purely continuous. We can slice this up forever into smaller and smaller pieces. We imagine numbers as if on a line something like this. Between any two numbers, no matter how close, there are as infinity of other numbers.
I've gone on long enough so I will get to the implications. All explanations must fail when it comes to sensation and emotion. You can't explain a shoe with a red balloon. Concept/form is one thing. Sensation and emotion are others. The smell of rotten fish just is. The smile of a lovely girl and the emotion associated with this just is. The pain of a rotten tooth just is. The feeling of crawling into bed dog tired --the intense pleasure -- just is.
There is incredible richness to human experience which is obscured by descriptions mistaken for explanations. Science describes sensation in terms of mental models like particles and mathematical equations. These equations and concepts serve us well. But this is not really an explanation. We have a conceptual/imaginary causal nexus that the describe experience in terms of. But this method neglects the subject in its pursuit of that Santa Clause known as objectivity. Objectivity cannot be perfect. Thought and emotion and sensation are experienced privately, even if these private self-worlds overlap and agree to call this shared experience (overlapping) the "real world."
We can't think above our own minds. So if a God exists, he must exists for us as conception, sensation, emotion. He must exist within us. And the real world that exists at all for us also exists within us as thought, sensation, emotion. Of course the "self" is just one concept among others. The self is a useful explanatory concept like the real world or molecules. In all cases, and with all concepts except perhaps for math/logic, the abstractions we use are ways to organize sensation and emotion. It takes a while for a baby to realize its mother is a separate object and finally a person. We learn the game from others. We learn to take certain concepts as true, because we must. But all concepts are unstable. They are ways to organize what is prior to concept, sensation and emotion.
Quantity is fundamental because we seem to have a built in concept-maker or abstraction-faculty that unifies sensation-emotion into abbreviated symbolic conceptual-experience. What is memory? Where is the future? Thinking is digital, except that our words are slippery. So only math which denies sensation and emotion is ideally digital. But thinking is still digital enough for quantity to be fundamental. All concept has two foundational properties: it exists and it is one. To say 5 birds is already to unite 11111 into 5. 5 is a unity of sub-units. Birds is a unity of bird bird bird. Justice is a unity of all kinds of vague experience. We think in unities, but we sense and feel without bound.
Quanity and existence on one hand as the proto-concept or father of thought. Sensation-emotion on the other hand as what is unified by thought, without ever being truly explainable by thought. All the neuroscience is the world is only going to be abstractions. Redness will still just be. Pain will still just be. Love will still just be. "I am what I am" says God in the Bible. Well, we can do without the god concept but this "am what i am" is a great description of sensation and emotion. THat's all one can say about. "it" is.
qualia;174909 wrote:
Our everyday experiences of these kinds of emotions, qualia, for example, informs us that some form of emotion, qualia, is going on, and act as an indicator, perhaps, to one's self and others that something is going on.
I've split it up like this because I wonder how many emotions we pass through in a day, how many qualia we go through, and yet busy in our world, we fail to notice.
We could ask ourselves, as busy, coping, active, doing, thinking, acting beings in the world, why do we have these things like qualia, emotions in the first place? What telos do they serve, if any?
Are they, or are emotions' or qualia's is - interrupters, distracting us like our broken down car above, or information carriers, other forms of news our bodies tells us about, are they modes of being which set us up for action, are they interrogators, getting us to inspect and seek out a something? Or something more, or a bit of a pick and mix? No is, just a whole load of is's.
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I will admit that raw is-ness is hard to experience and usually must be inferred. .............. all our explanations exist in the realm of concept. Qualia are their own realm. They are not and seemingly cannot be reduced, unless one counts our forgetfulness of them.
I can't help but intrude into your conversation. Excuse me for that.
When we talk about 'emotions', again a generalised concept - from the cue that Recon. has given us - we should bear in mind the nature of our Mind.
Being conscious, we have thought. Objectified we may call it neural impulses or dispatches or images. An impulse or image is what is given meaning by associating it with a sound-word. Thats where communication comes in. It is in the scheme of nature, to give vent to emotions through expressions. If Recon. says 'objectivity cannot be perfect', it is because we either fail to see the underlying truths or reality, or we fail to explain in terms of concepts - our common experiences, in a correct and proper manner, which again is the most difficult part of our common understandings, and constarints and limitation of communication. The rules of science tries therfore to bring an uniformity in the methods of enquiry, so that some level of objectivity is accomplished.
Our mind is still a mystery no doubt, but emotions are indeed objective since there is a motive behind every emotion. It is the purpose of Nature. Without emotion and sensation, no further cause and effect wil take place in the biological sphere.
Without emotion and sensation there is no mind, without the mind the car will not move.
You have just described what 'concepts' means. I think i agree with you. Congrats for deciphering 'concepts' and distincguishing the idea of concepts. It is very vital for philosophy.
I tend to agree with this view. Quite a good description, and if you discovered the limitation of human experience, welcome aboard!
Yes, if you contemplate........ then there is no end. But the fundamentals of matter or the basic structure of matter is being probed into. Is it strings or a sub-quark or other particles or some kind of substance is making the human mind stretch itself and ask what is matter after all.
,....... and by the way, infinity is also a concept term.
But i would like to know, how love, compassion, sympathy, solidarity (all emotions) be quantified. And, sensation-emotion (an concept by amalgamation of what goes on inside our mind) is indeed unified by thought, and it is thought that explains this abstract constructs in our mind by form of the fcaulty of sound inother words language. Poetry, art - paintings and sculptures, music, drama's, cinemas and scriptures are th ediffrent forms of human expressions of the sensation-emotion process. The 'is' is what is attempted to be explained. But since as you rightly say, that each experiences are private, and subjective,...... we therfore have the wide range and variety of human characters, thoughts and philosophies.
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