Opposites, does darkness exist.

I would really like to discuss an idea that won’t leave me alone. Those of you who are more educated then me forgive me if this is a retread of the ideas of greater men then myself. This idea was formed from an incomplete reading of Hegel (Who I readily admit I don’t remotely understand) and stems from his dialectic.

Can something exist in and of itself or does it require tension from it’s opposite to exist.

DOES the negative have an existence of it’s own or is it simply the absence of the positive.

What determines which is the ‘real thing’ and which is merely the opposite.

My example is light. I offer that light is the actual substance and that darkness is merely the absence of light. My justification is that light can always increase (You can always get one measurable bit brighter), where as there is an “absolute zero” at which no light exists…total darkness.

My questions on this would be…

A. How valid is this idea.
B. How much necessity is there in the tension between the two opposites for their existence.
C. How well can this model apply to more metaphysical concepts like good and evil using the dialectic (thesis,antithesis, synthesis)?

Again, for the smarter amongst us who actually understand Hegel, forgive me if I am simply revisiting his ideas.

Things in themselves don’t exist largely because when on claims that they do there is only faith with no actual expirience involved.

If you can’t expirience a thing in of itself, how is it real?

Less than a week or so ago I had never experienced “The Joker”, were you real last week?

It is very difficult to “experience” an electron, or at least to quantify that experience. We are still able to use reason to draw conclusions about how an electron operates and from these conclusions we have built very successful models.

Models are just that models.

Simulative models are not actuality. Read some Baudrillard on that issue.

Perceivement makes reality so if you didn’t perceive me a week ago then no at that time I was not real.

If someone told you that bigfoot existed a week ago you would of said it isn’t real but if you saw bigfoot a week later only then in your perceived mind did it actually become real to you through expirience.

Expirience is the manifester of what is real and consequently of our own ignorance or finite nature it is also the manifester of delusion too all at once. We as a species have the ability to see things and to deceive ourselves all at once simultaneously which makes it that much harder in understanding existence altogether.

There are no such things as opposites. It’s a poetic structure, mostly.

A. I think its valid (the light-example)

B. Without the idea of light, the idea of darkness ceases to exist. The word ‘darkness’ would lose its meaning. Only visitors from somewhere with light would find the place ‘dark’.

In the same way, we might imagine something called ‘magbar’. Lack of ‘magbar’ is then defined as ‘ungbar’. This world is ‘ungbar’ all over. This doesn’t really mean anything.

Its dangerous territory and we should be careful. This is rather a special case than something universal. It only applies to opposites that are opposites by definition. (‘X’ and ‘lack of X’)

C. Not into metaphysics so can’t help you there…

Darkness refers to the non-existence of light. It also refers to degrees, such that it would be “darker” if “there is less light.” Certainly, there are times when the existing state somewhere is one where there is a lack of light.

This argument can and does boil down to subjectivism versus objectivism…

I am mostly subjective, but not completely.

An objectivist believes that things exist in-and-of themselves.

A subjectivist believes that things must be experienced in order to exist and be ‘real’.

Nothing exist unless it has an opposite because one provides the context for the other. Without the one, the other has no meaning. Good can not exist without evil. All these terms are relative btw. And they’re both two sides of the same coin.

the existence of such a thing is not in question, rather its distinguishability… what is warm without cold…

warm would have no name, it would simply be our everyday state of being, we would call it normal.

There we go, more to the point on my argument.

What is warm? It is a subjective description of heat.

What is heat, heat is the motion of molecules and can be described/quantified objectively. Heat is the actual quality we are talking about and cold is the absence of heat. Yet what you said as far as our experience of warm and cold is exactly correct. I’m fascinated in what changes when we go from an objective to a subjective means of thinking about something. Trying to make subjective and objective mutually exlusive misses the point somewhat, I think the two means of examining a subject each have their own merits and somewhere there is a synthesis of objective and subjective.

The application of more or less energy to an area is objective but the experience of cold or hot is more subjetive than objective.

Agin - you are really discussing words and not “things”. Hegel, like all metaphysics, merely misunderstands language. His dialectic is a fictional sort of “logic”. It’s beautiful, like a pretty painting. But he just sort of made it up.

Let’s start here - is “absence” really the same as “opposite”?

Sometimes people think they misunderstand Hegel, but really they don’t. He was a genius, but ultimately made no sense. Funny how that can happen.

That’s what I’m getting at. It would appear that light and dark are two opposite things but when you get down to it it’s just words describing a single thing that has a greater or lesser value. Language has been a huge stumbling block for my own personal attempt to understand things because the words end up taking on their own meaning and the description supplants the thing being described. I am attempting to make language correspond to what really “is” but that’s easier said than done…actually that makes no sense at all .

Light and dark are two sides of the same coin. One can’t exist without the other.

Yes, language is very inexact to describe nature. That’s why scientists use math instead of language to describe it.

 because the thing has manifestational 3D consequential properties . either of thought , energy or substance and the variations of states thereof. which has also has effects and affects on things

(Followed by a summary)

I agree with uccisore greatly.

I believe that the next step in our further understanding the nature of reality will be to rigorously comprehend relativity (not specifically einstein’s theory, nor “relativism” in this case). It is efficient for us to often specify things in terms of existence and absence and be deterministic. The greatest whole of reality might be deterministic, but the qualities of what we experience may not be. The paradox of Schrodinger’s cat is an important consideration in metaphysics and epistemology but is not practical for daily life.

In other words: It is practical, even necessary to survival, for us to think in terms of things and their opposites quite strictly. But if we want to split hairs on the reality of the matter, then there is an absence of any standalone concept whatsoever. Think of math as you move from an understanding of algebra and into calculus. At first its easy pulling the legos apart and mix-and-matching them as symbols. But in order to really make fundamental calculations, you have to start thinking in terms of curves and generality. You specify it as much as possible, but the straight or solid line is . . . just not there.

Example: We fare quite well having a number line across two axes, tracking the trajectory of a rocket to land on its target asteroid. But to be fundamental we would also have to admit that the rocket matter only tends to exist (luckily a strong tendency) and thus the line may not remain so solid or may not be fully definable in just those two axes.

Think in terms of science. Once you explain it down to the fundamental particles and enter quantum foam, or conversely astrophysics, and explain it to quintessence aka dark energy, (exotic matter is . . . filling in the gaps of something else)- you end up with all sorts of paradoxes . . . or in other words . . . oxymorons that don’t seem to have an alternative.

I think it’s destructive to try explaining this by hamming up a movie entitled “What the bleep do we know” and throwing together some scientists with some new age schmos, to crudely interpret this relativity. I think it’s better to say that we’re getting a good idea, but we just can’t quite put it in our own words.

To be more blunt about light and darkness, I would agree that light seems to be the . . . “it” and darkness the “not” simply because we know a photon of light and an electromagnetic wave is emanating in a ray of light. It triggers changes- transfers energy. There is no ray of darkness (in conventional science) identifying any particles, waves, or rays which influence any energy.

On the other hand- “cold” and “hot” are both “its” because they are both particles just at different rates of speed. And supposedly the absolute coldest (“Absolute zero”) is not actually a zero in terms of movement (time doesn’t just stop). It’s just the minimum physically possible- the least density which a gas can expand.

SUMMARY: I doubt there is any individual concept, but we assume there are because we couldn’t progress by trying to leap into that mode of thinking at our stage of understanding. It is practical for us to think like agincourt. But eventually we have to consider the prospect presented by uccisore.

Light is the real, darkness is the imaginary. They both exist in our mind.

 the thing is that darkness draws in light so that the darkness becomes energetic and then the light becomes darkness and so the the cycle goes , around and around it does.

think on this though , at night , with a cloudless sky , is there not a more beautiful sight . a balance between light and darkness.

as to C , to much darkness is not good and to much light is not good both can blind one to the reality of the Universe and the way things are . a balance