Randomness

@JLNobody,

JLNobody wrote:

....I'm thinking now of the zen approach to facing reality as it is primorially given by means of an absolutely passive (i.e., prereflective awareness) posture (meditation).....

Anybody can mess up definitions - no need to check into your neighborhood asylum just yet, simply review your understanding of your terms.

Starting with the Chinese character for "ZEN" >
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zen
> which literally means "empty" or "no-thing". The posters here insisting you and Cyracuz have been discussing "nothing" agree with you.

1 Reply

@Cyracuz,

Cyracuz wrote:

george wrote:

Quote:
That is simply untrue. The real issue here is that he .. and you .. have not discussed anything at all.

In all fairness, doesn't this statement reveal more about your capacity to collect information from a text than the writers intent in writing it? I do not mean to offend by saying this. It's a fair question in my opinion.

The way I see it, after establishing the value of the concept random, we (JL and myself) are now considering how concepts relate to eachother and how we as observers are more entangled in the interplay of "natural forces" than scientific method tends to assume. If you are still thinking within the boundaries of science I can see how it appears we are discussing nothing.

What "natural forces" are these? Please define them.

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High Seas
Any relationship percieved in nature in which the observer is seen as irrelevant for the outcome of the observation. For instance the observation that water boils around 100 degrees celcius.

And you are right, Joe, that the idea of objective existence isn't very useful in regard to our concepts themselves. The idea that empirical observation cannot prove anyting may be universally accepted, but it seems to me that most people still think in terms of absolute reality in which concepts have their own meaning independent of our perception. The observation may be superfuous in relation to our science, but it is my opinion that if we see all this as an extension of self exploration that situation changes.

1 Reply

@Cyracuz,

Cyracuz wrote:

The observation may be superfuous in relation to our science, but it is my opinion that if we see all this as an extension of self exploration that situation changes.

And if we saw this as a seventeenth-century Restoration-era comedy the situation would change even more.

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@High Seas,

Ha Ha, very funny, High Seas.

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@JLNobody,

JLNobody wrote:

Ha Ha, very funny, High Seas.

Thank you so much, "Nobody" - and btw, you'd be called "Outis" in ancient Greek: meaning nobody, no such person.

It does sound to me much better than "zen", but then I'm trained in the Western scientific tradition. Odysseus chose the name "outis" for himself, in an effort to confound communication protocols (other places known as "speech") among a race of unfriendly one-eyed giants, one of whom he had just blinded. It may well be, as you say, that great truths can be found in the arts that cannot be found in the sciences ..... Smile

1 Reply

@High Seas,

Outis, I wish I knew that when I was coming with a handle. Thanks.
I'm "no such person". I am an entity (a social person) from the outside, but when I reflect (perceptually, not conceptually) from the so-called inside I am not. I'm Nobody. And so are you--from my perspective. Notice that my language contradicts my assertion. "I" am built into our grammar.
But no more of this. Joe has chastised me and others of my persuasion for hijacking threads with our perspective(s) on dualism.

1 Reply

@JLNobody,

JLNobody wrote:

Outis, I wish I knew that when I was coming with a handle. Thanks.
I'm "no such person". ...

Glad you liked "Outis" - and you can always change your name to it, as you know. I know pitifully few Chinese characters, but I looked up the word in the ancient Greek original text of the Odyssey - don't worry, I'll post the translation also - and discovered it's usually translated as "No man":

Quote:

με κτείνει δόλῳ οὐδὲ βίηφιν.’

http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0135%3Abook%3D9%3Acard%3D360

Quote:

...in a frenzy of rage and pain, shouting as he did so to the other Cyclopes who lived on the bleak headlands near him; so they gathered from all quarters round his cave when they heard him crying, and asked what was the matter with him.

"‘What ails you, Polyphemus,’ said they, ‘that you make such a noise, breaking the stillness of the night, and preventing us from being able to sleep? Surely no man is carrying off your sheep? Surely no man is trying to kill you either by fraud or by force?

"But Polyphemus shouted to them from inside the cave, ‘Noman is killing me by fraud! Noman is killing me by force!’

http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0218%3Abook%3D9%3Acard%3D6

1 Reply

@High Seas,

I know this from one of Kirk Douglas' movies. Thanks anyway.
JLNoman

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The time at which I write this post is random. I hadn't planned it, but now I am writing it on an impulse I had no way to predict.

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@Cyracuz,

Now you ARE using "randomness" in the more existential psycho-phenomenological sense, as opposed to the mathematical sense of the physics-types among us.

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@JLNobody,

Yes. But if I said why, would it still be randomness?

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@Cyracuz,

Cyracuz wrote:

The time at which I write this post is random. I hadn't planned it, but now I am writing it on an impulse I had no way to predict.

Hari Seldon may well have planned it that way.

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@Eorl,

Then Hari knows something I don't.

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@Cyracuz,

It could be, perhaps, a post factum imposition of order on a "randomish" phenomenon, which, I suspect, is what we do all the time. Metaphorically, when I present an abstract painting to viewers, they often try to see something in it, as if it were just a failed effort at representational art.

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@JLNobody,

Freud would say it was! Smile

1 Reply

@Eorl,

I agree. Life can be a large Rorshak, or Thematic Apperception, Test. We are constantly projecting ourselves onto ambiguous phenomena--attempting to render things familiar.

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@JLNobody,

Pffft. Rorschach tests. The doctor accused me of terrible things, but HE was the one with all the dirty pictures!

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@JLNobody,

Hm.. perhaps art, the creation of a painting, is a good example of a deterministic process that cannot be expressed mathematically.

1 Reply

@Cyracuz,

Or even logically.

1 Reply

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