So, give me an idea on what You Yourself are looking for. Can you expound on this?
Write something in here pretending it was written by someone else - something which would satisfy your need and understanding of "what we are is what it means to be human.
Insofar as “what it means is in what it means” – I think a better way to end that line would have been ~~ to me… in other words, to each individual person.
One thing that it means to be human is that we are are unique individuals in a way though we also have our similarities.
Meaning is different to everyone, based on how they think, how they feel, what they love, what inspires them, what is repugnant to them, their life history, chemicals in the brain…et cetera.
Do you mean what it must be like to explain the meaning of ‘red’ to a color blind man? We, who can see red, know what it means, but we can’t always come up with an exhaustive explanation for it, such that we could explain it to a color blind man. But that’s because the meaning of red is in the seeing of the color itself. ← Is that what you mean?
Ah I see, fair enough. Perhaps if we know what we mean - what that means, then you may find a meaning for life. So it seems to me that understanding what that meaning is, is the critical aspect. Without that we can’t begin to understand what life means ~ if we don’t first know what we mean, and indeed what meaning means.
… importantly, what all this means is that there is something that means something, a ‘you’, its just that we cannot describe that without describing something else, or generally making third party definitions.
Arc
“what I am is the thingness of what I mean, and what it means to be me”. “I am the meaning of me, and all information about any aspect of that, is not that meaning nor me, but merely a part of it and hence nothing to do which what I am and what the whole meaning of that is”.
Insofar as “what it means is in what it means” – I think a better way to end that line would have been ~~ to me…
Well I specifically didn’t add any affixes or anything, because ‘what it means to me’ would be my description of me and that is an abstraction of the thing itself and not the actual meaning.
The meaning I agree is particular and different to everyone, but that’s a perception. To make that perception we have to go outside of ourselves and look at the thing or try to, and again we are then making a description.
Kinda, but the first person perspective of what it means is to me more akin to an object. For example the blind man doesnt know what red is, and I cannot describe that to him, but if he was ‘red’ then there is a meaning of what he is that is red, whether he knows it or not. So if we could see what we mean we would be ‘red’.
So I suppose the difficulty is ultimately in making a first person description of a thing.
E.g. you cannot define the relative positions of particles, but when there are collections of them you can say that object is there and what have you. So in a way, all of this is like saying that particles would have a position, but when we try to determine that our measuring is an abstraction [same as description of meaning of someone]. that’s not true in physics of course, the particles actually don’t have a position.
Ergo we are [what it means to be us] particles in specific positions, but if we describe that we are particles in different positions.
So we are pushing the particle by acting upon it in the form of measurement, ok. But does that mean the particle doesn’t know where it is itself? Perhaps not, but in the analogy here, a person does know where they are, as do all observers.
Good point, I’ve wondered much the same, but we don’t know where the particles would have moved to during that calculation…
I agree. maybe the duality only exists according to the way we look at something, so if you observe it in two ways you get a duality, if you make a measure we are equally splitting the action in two. …and its in the third party [the measure - act of].
Yes, I understand. This is entirely what I’m trying to get at with my theory of meaning. You must recall the many discussions we’ve gotten into about my theory of mind, right? You know how a large part of it has to do with meaning, right? It’s one of the three components of experience: 1) quality, 2) being, and 3) meaning. Just as the root meaning of red is in the seeing of red, so to is the root meaning of an object, like a truck, in the seeing of the truck. In general, anything we experience contains a meaning that defines what that thing is.
Yes, you can only get so much detail out of an experience. At a certain point, you have to accept that meaning is fundamental, that it doesn’t break down any further.
Define “thingness” to me. I’m not trying to be difficult here.
The way I look at it, and I may be wrong, but isn’t “thingness” too broad a scope?
If you could express those first six words differently, how might you express it? I’m trying to get at your meaning. Maybe what you mean by “meaning” here is the sum total of who you really are ~~ which facts and information about yourself or one’s self doesn’t explain that sum total.
For someone who loves words as I do, I often have such trouble communicating.
Maybe the reason for that is because when we find what we assume is the true meaning, we stop searching and diving further into learning about the experience.
Experience is like the iceberg. Most of what is “actual” cannot be seen. One has to dive beneath and explore.
What I mean by this is that when you try to describe an experience to someone by breaking it down into its components, there comes a point at which we can’t break the components down further. For example, how would you explain the experience of seeing a rainbow? You might say: “well, there’s red, there’s orange, there’s yellow…” And then someone might ask: “How do you explain the red part?” and you might say: “Well, it’s just… red.” ← That’s the point at which you have to say the experience of seeing red is fundamental–it doesn’t seem to break down into smaller components.
But there are other ways of reaching for descriptions of experiences other than by breaking them down into components. You might compare the experience to something similar. You might say: “red is like the iridescence of a rose,” or “it’s like passion or rage”. ← Descriptions like these might help a color blind man get a closer idea of what seeing red is like.
But doesn’t the actual explanation of the “experience” go much deeper than what we believe we see or the actual reason behind it?
It’s also okay to use the phrase color spectrum. lol
Exactly but the blind man may never have seen the iridescence of the rose, gib.
You might compare the iridescence of the rose to the feeling which comes over him when his wife or girlfriend lean in for a passionate kiss…
Rage doesn’t necessarily have to “see red”. It could turn things to black where is no light. lol
But I get what you mean.
I suppose that in order to explain your experience it might be good to know what wavelength the other person is on.
If one of another species came for a visit, you couldn’t explain the beating heart if that species had no beating heart. You would have to know what in his mind (HIS mind might not be like ours) was similar to a beating heart. Maybe there were what passed for drums on his world. lol This is getting ridiculous.
Depends on what you mean by “explanation”. What I mean is something like “describing what it feels like”.
No! This only applies to red!
We would have to assume there are experiences we and the alien species share in common. If they had drums in their world, and more importantly if they could hear those drums in the same way we do, we might be able to use that as a point of comparison when explaining what a beating heart was like.
Of course I remember our debates and your writings, I’ve been trying to expand on them ever since . I would hasten I small caveat though, because this is not just meaning in terms of red as the experience of red, but the very thingness of red. That red is not due to our experiencing of it, it is - I believe, an aspect of the world and we experience that not just in the sense that our minds can see/experience it’s projection. ergo it is in our minds, because it is ‘out there’ such that there is something in origins from which our vision of red is manifest. In other words the red exists before our experiencing of it.
Back to people and what it means to be human or anything, what someone else thinks is ‘you’ the object cannot be what you are. Equally what you think you are - if you attempt to explain that, is equally not what you are. The world sees red without eyes! If humans didn’t exist the world would still experience itself and know what red is, but it does that without ‘knowing’ what red is. When the tree falls in the forest it does make a sound, because there is a meaning in all things which is not knowledgeable.
Let me put it as succinctly as I cam; knowledge is a third party version of meaning, which is the first party version. A projection is equally in the third party.
This is why we find it so difficult to understand what we are, as knowledge is indirect, but everything in the world is in the first party. The tree, red and you, are in the first party, our experience of that is in the third ~ a projection.
I don’t know, maybe meaning isn’t the right term for red, trees and things in themselves, maybe that’s something that is not meaning or knowledge. I know its splitting hairs but I am trying to get at ‘it’, what are all these things like red and the sound of trees, if the description is merely representative. How can that be scientific? For example; if there were ‘red’ and nothing else but the infinite void, what is red? This is very fundamental because its saying science is partly wrong, red cannot be physical [or experiential come to think of it] if it exists. That would infer that ‘you’ cannot be physical if the it that you are is like red. Take light, a transparent photon is seen as colour and brightness, so we cannot say red is a quality of light. Ergo take the universe away and we have many examples of ‘it’, in fact we have every example of everything - don’t we? So a world without the physics is what we begin with, and it is that world which the mind experiences, the physics are merely communicators of those qualities.
additionally…
Arc
See above ^^. you are right, that thingness is too broad, red is a thingness not present in light. You are a thingness not present in the body or brain. It is counter intuitive, but the thingness cannot be exposited by knowledge or any third party version of it.
No not the sum total, that would be a collection, but I am one.
Ok, so then you must mean that the world has the only “true” perception of things–seeing things as they really are, as opposed to us who might distort the way things are.
I think what you’re getting at is how things are “in themselves”–like the Kantian noumena–and you’ve come across an insight that this is tied directly into the meaning of a thing–what we mean by ‘red’ or ‘that person’ or ‘this particle’–what it means is directly tied to what it is.
And this is why I think this lead straight into my theory. This connection to meaning is what hints that there must be a mental aspect to the core identity of things, for meaning is exclusively a mental phenomenon.
Yes but its not a perception because you need a brain/processor to perceive, and eyes to see red. But the world doesn’t have those faculties. I agree with your theory in terms of experiential projection in our minds, just that every aspect of that has derivatives - origins. I don’t know how we can know something that’s not there, like the sound of a tree falling in the forest if it doesn’t make a sound itself.
Meaning in our mind is the result of processing information which itself is a third party; to inform - to yield what a thing is to another thing [a delivery of ‘something’ from one party to another]. The universe cannot do that without there being anything to report - an original meaning.
Would you suggest that mind is primary then? So you somehow got an universal perception of things which is then being projected. Even in a universe mostly without the presence of mind. That’s a very fundamental problem, especially as I don’t know how we can have what we are [mind] if mind isn’t also derivative and exist in origins ~ at least prior to our own existence.
I am inclined to think there is something that can become mind and other things which aren’t mind too. But that’s impossible without those other things then also not having some element of mind, or for that matter, mind not having some element of non-mind [a contradiction]. I can only imagine that the original state doesn’t have any contradicting aspects, which possibly means that ultimately there is no such thing as mind or non-mind. …kinda takes us away from the meaning of what we are if we get into all that, and we end up with no meaning?
So what we mean is not what we mean? There is no meaning in things and no derivatives. Aaahhhh!
Yes, there’s definitely something there and there’s definitely origins. But I think it’s the objects of perception, which reside in perception, that are the origins and the “something” that lead to knowledge. ← Perception and knowledge are two different areas of our minds. But even the perception needs an origin from which to derive. That, however, is outside the reach of our experience and our knowledge. I do believe, though, it’s still a form of experience, just not our own.
Yes, mind is primary. If mind is composed of three components: 1) quality, 2) being, and 3) meaning, then it is being which ties your points together with mine. To me, mind is not something that needs be derived. It is fundamentally being itself. Being must be the foundation of everything that exists, for it makes no sense to ask: what underlies being such as to support its existence. It must be such that it supplies its own existence just from being what it is. I think mind fits this profile because 1) it manifests being at face value, and 2) it manifests its own necessity and justification (<-- that which supplies its own existence just from being what it is). ← This we see in component 3): meaning.
However, there is another sense in which you are correct to suppose there must be an origin from which mind derives–that’s temporality. Every instance of mind requires a temporal origin. We see this best when we look at thought. Every thought is derived from a prior thought. And this is also a good example with which to see how necessity and justification ties into meaning and gives rise to “flow” ← the process by which mind unfolds and metamorphosizes. Every thought has a meaning. That meaning is what gives rise to other thoughts. With syllogisms, for example, we see that we derive the conclusions from the meaning of the premises. We say that if all X’s are Y, and if this is an X, that means it is a Y. The initial thoughts (the premises), in virtue of what they mean, give rise to the flow of thought, a flow governed by the necessity of logic.
Now, when it comes to experiences like sensation and perception, the origins of these experiences come from something prior to what we can claim to be consciously aware of. But I still say it’s an experience nonetheless. It’s an experience whose quality determines a meaning which justifies or necessitates the next experience in the flow, and this flow eventually gives way to human sensation and perception. Sensation an perception, in other words, are like the conclusion to a set of premises, but these premises are outside the reach of what we can claim to be consciously aware of. And sensation and perception, in turn, get to be the “premises” to everything we get from them: knowledge, inferences, interpretations, etc.
If you want to trace experience back to the beginning of time, then we come to the Big Bang. I have some special views on the link between that cataclysmic event and the experience that accompanied it, but that’s a whole other branch of my theory. Suffice it to say, I know it has to be a “special” kind of experience if it is to serve as the “first” in the universal flow of experience. If each experience justifies or necessitates the next in the flow of experiences (like premises do a conclusion), then what justified/necessitated the first? It must have been “special” in such a way that it somehow justified itself.
It’s kind of like particle/wave duality, isn’t it? In the way physicists tell us that an electron isn’t really a particle as we think of it, but not really a wave either. It’s neither/both. I think my concept of mind could fit this formula. I’m definitely coming up with a whole other concept of “mind” that’s nothing like the conventional sort. In fact, it could be better defined as: little pieces of everythingness–not mental at all. It’s like, what do we really perceive when we look at a tree (for example)? Do we see “a perception”? Or do see the tree–exposed for the solid object it is. Given my theory of projection, I would say that’s what it really is ← the solid tree. But then you take something like an abstract thought: 2 + 2 = 4. ← What is that? Well, you might say it’s a thought, and you’d be right–it is a thought–but in the very midst of thinking it, it doesn’t feel mental at all. Rather, it feels like a truth, or a fact. So these pieces of everythingness can be solid objects like trees, they can be abstract truths or facts, they can be moral right and wrong, they can be the past, present, and future, they can be color or sound, even the themes of music of the beauty inherent in a sunset. They literally can be anything–everything. All I’m trying to get across with my theory of mind is what they all have in common–they can all be reflected upon as having this experiential aspect, and aspect that allows us to at least conceptualize them a mental things. But at the end of the day, it’s their projected form, the things they feel like they are in the moment which define their true essence. So it’s neither mind (in the conventional sense) nor matter (in the conventional sense), it’s “bits of everythingness”.
^ Sorry, huge mouth full there. I can get carried away!
Are we looking for a description of meaning or are we looking for a felt experience?
What is the “meaning” of description? Why do we want to “know” something in the sense of being able to represent that knowledge to us via symbols?
If I cannot feel meaning, then it seems to me that no definition of meaning will suffice for my understanding. So again, what is doing the seeking here? Is the drive to experience meaning doing the seeking, or is the drive to represent the word “meaning” doing the seeking? Are you trying to draw a map of meaning? Or are you trying to explore the territory of meaning.
I’ll throw out one possible definition of meaning.
Yes, meaning=being. I think that by answering these questions, we are, in a way, drawing a map of meaning, even if the answer refers us to the territory. It’s like if you explore a territory and you discover something (meaning) and then you go back and tell your friends: “I explored the territory and I found X” ← those words are like a map, except they take the form of spoken words, not drawing on paper.
Ok, so is there such a thing as non-meaning and non-being? Is pure info - data, anything at all like being? Are bricks [aside from in a modern art exhibition] being? Is an electron being? Don’t we have to add something to it for it to be more than just an electron?
Gib
Why? We exist in a universe born from nothing, so if we consider the contradictions which inevitably arise between e.g. mind or being, and not mind or being - like a rock or an electron, there can be nothing which originates both unless there is something in an electron that is the same as being? I am leaning towards the notion that nothing is base, and there are no same origins to both physics and mind, not directly, like an universal aspect or element.
The information in our brains can be separated from mind itself though, like one can record words and actions or a computer can replicate given informations. So info is more akin to rocks and electrons, whereas mind is not present in those things but in thought relates to them or their utility. There’s a difference and a separation.
That’s a finite chain in an infinite reality, not to mention that not all chains connect. Put all things and all personhood [mind, experience etc] in the cosmic blender and you get no personhood and no things, yet the result would be an emptiness which contains everything [= one not 0]. ergo the paradox of existence is that you may then arrive at two or more completely different things from the same origin, because the origin isn’t anything specifically [is empty]. Buddhists may say that emptiness and mind are the same, but I’d suggest that’s not true, we have to be able to arrive at different and non-complimentary items e.g. rocks and thought. Then if mind and emptiness are the same [surely ‘mind’ is more than emptiness?] that would mean electrons and rocks are synonymous with thought and being, and there are no contradictory factors. If there were no contradictory factors there would only be nothing, but existence exists, so nothing doesn’t [at least not at once].
1 is one thing, if you add something experiencing it to the equation then it is two things, no? Unless the original one - as you infer is experience. So how do we get to non experienced physical entities, and what is experience if there is nothing being experienced ~ not two things there.
They are all observers. Good point before that about the ability of mind to know; how can mind know something that isn’t mind. Perhaps info knows other info because its composed of observing particles, though that in my mind doesn’t imply a third party. An experiencing thing experiences of a thing I.e. from an external view point looking in. Rocks don’t observe other rocks, even though all the particles within them are observing one another. Existence has many strands of info and it doesn’t all connect, there simply is duality regardless of a given unity.
_
Looking at it in another way, “thingness” is not broad enough. What does it explain!
Red is not present within light? Maybe you meant something else. Otherwise, then why are we able to see that color?
Why is the tomato red, why is the grass green, why is the orange orange, why is the sky blue or a shade of blue, why does the rainbow appear? Is there red within it? lol
Consciousness is a “thingness”, is it not?
We may not be quite sure at this time exactly what it is or where it resides, but don’t most philosophers and scientists sort of intuit that the “I” is a part of consciousness, still permeates both the body and the brain and the mind? Or at least we interpret it that way.
Exactly - just like the iceberg. We need to go deeper and deeper into the exploration of meaning.
Can’t you be “one” and at the same time a "collection?
Let’s suppose there was something deeper that underlied being, something that could be referred to in order to explain being. Then we would ask: what explains it’s being? ← In other words, we would have to assume that it has being as well. But then that same thing would have to underlie its own being, for that’s the very thing we’re trying to explain. It leads to an infinite regress.
When we ask: what underlies existence such that everything that exists is explained, we’re asking: where do our inquiries into existence finally come to rest? The only way that something could satisfy that criteria is if it not only explained everything that is based on it, but explained its own existence at the same time. “Being” is the word we use to refer to this thing.
Then my question to you is: would nothingness then be a “thing”? If nothingness really is the origin of both matter and mind (I assume you mean “mind” as conventionally understood), then it must really be a “something”, a something which has the power to give rise to at least mind and matter.
So you mean the signals in the computer circuits or the ink on paper taking the form of symbols ← this is information? There are those who would agree with you–they would say that information can exist physically in the world, independently from a conscious mind. Words written on paper, for example, would count as information even if there were no one around to read them, no one who could understand them.
I’m of the opinion that something can only count as information if there is a consciousness capable of interpreting it to have a specific meaning. If you came across an alien language, for example, it would most likely be meaningless to you, just a scattering of random symbols, but to one of those aliens, it would be full of meaning. This means at least that information is relative–that it is information is relative. This is why I take meaning to be in the apprehension of information, in the abstraction of meaning from things like symbols, words, signals in computer circuits, etc.
By “contradictory factors”, I assume you mean heterogeneity–the existence of things along side other things that aren’t the same. You also seem to be talking about “mind” in the conventional sense, not mind as I’ve redefined it in my theory. So I can understand where you’re coming from. Mind, in the conventional sense, is obviously “something”, something that obviously exists. So too is matter. With both coexisting in the universe, you get heterogeneity. The homogeneity you would get by mixing them together (along with everything else that might exist) would be the “emptiness” from which they all originated. It’s like the colors of a rainbow originating from white light that passed through a prism.
The origin would be the “everythingness” in my phrase “little bits of everythingness”. What we experience of the universe and our minds are the “bits”–they are a small set of particular colors. This is why I designate “quality” as the first component of experience. Our minds consist of a small sample of qualities from the infinite pool of all possible qualities–we have not only the whole spectrum of colors in our visual experiences, but the different tastes of food, the sounds of music–quiet, loud, soft, hard–we have different tactile experiences: pain, pleasure, cold, hot, etc.–and we have abstract perceptual qualities: beauty, ugliness, motion, form, depth–and then there are the qualities of our inner experience, experiences like thought and emotion, like memory, desire, fantasy, abstraction, etc. ← All these things are but a tiny sample of the range of qualities that mind in general is capable of. These are the little “bits” taken from everythingness to constitute the human mind. The rest of the universe, consequently, acquires all other qualities that are necessary to sum up to the whole, or the emptiness, the white that our “bits” and all the other “bits” that the universe acquires amount to. It’s like if the human mind was formed from a combination of shades of red and orange, then the rest of the universe would consequently be a mix of yellow, green, blue, and violet (whatever color that turns out to be). But taken together, they still amount to the same white as that which existed originally.
Well, my point about knowledge is that in order to know about something, about some experience we have, that experience must “flow”, or become, knowledge about that experience. Sensation seems have this ability. Once we experience sensation, that sensation tends to morph and flow and get translated in our minds until it becomes knowledge of that which we are sensing. However, anything that came before the experience of sensation in the flow of mind (as in universal Mind) doesn’t necessarily become knowledge. It obviously must lead to the knowledge of the sensation just mentioned, but that’s knowledge of that sensation, not knowledge of the experiences that came before that sensation. Therefore, whatever experiences preceded the sensation are unknowable. This leads to an illusion–the illusion that these prior experiences don’t exist, or that whatever gave rise to our sensations aren’t experiences in the same flow of mind, that our sensations are where our minds begin (thus leading to the illusion that our minds are individuated and exist in an otherwise mindless universe).
. I would hasten I small caveat though, because this is not just meaning in terms of red as the experience of red, but the very thingness of red. That red is not due to our experiencing of it, it is - I believe, an aspect of the world and we experience that not just in the sense that our minds can see/experience it’s projection. ergo it is in our minds, because it is ‘out there’ such that there is something in origins from which our vision of red is manifest. In other words the red exists before our experiencing of it.