An 'introduction to philosophy'.

Philosophy Forums Philosophy
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Hello, I am new.

I am actually twenty five years old but I have developed a new characteristic today. I have become a registered user of ILovePhilosophy.com.

So the introduction to philosophy in the title refers to my introduction to online philosophical discussion and participation at this site.

I don’t know a lot about philosophy but I completed an Art degree and have read a little Plato, Geothe, Nietsche, Zizek… so I have a few bricks of knowledge but no real cement.

I registered because I wanted to post two basic phrases that contain ideas I think are important to me personally but have never really been shared for open criticism.

1. Actively looking for something implies a commitment to the idea that it exists.

2. People can find exactly what they are looking for because the ‘it’ that they are looking for is impossible to preconcieve.

These are not facts or statements, they are my own ideas, I have no worked explanation for thinking about them I only have a set of circumstances that makes them worth thinking about.

I’d like some help on the logic of the first phrase and some help on the context (in philosophical writing) of the second one.

(The basics of their personal relevance: the first relates to a Christian upbringing and being around people who claim to have found God i.e. who looked for him, the second relates to an admiration of my parents for sustaining a long and contented marriage.)

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Hi Hydro,
and welcome to the forum. Please don’t confuse my post count or the green bold to my name, I am simply another poster like yourself and I moderate one forum ‘Earth Game Scenario’. I say this cause it sometimes happens that people take me for the admin or some head honcho of ILP. Neither is the case.

I have however been here for quite some time. The majority of the time I can say has been well spent discussing here. I hope you will be able to say the same.

Having said that, let’s take a look at your two premises…
You said that you have a set of circumstances that makes them worth thinking about, I would be happy to hear what those circumstances are. They may help me to understand you and your premises from a different perspective. I personally am a believer that the sceptic always wins, a doubt can be entered into any argument. My aim is not to enter doubt but to find the best of all possible views at any given time I am presented with a view so that I can live the best possible life I know of living. No more than that can be said, in my opinion.

You stated:

You asked for help in terms of logic. Here is my attempt: The only thing I can see wrong is that the implication is absolute, when it should be implicating only a probablistic implication. Put another way, actively looking for something doesn’t imply a commitment to the idea that it exists, it implies a commitment to the idea that is POSSIBLY exists. There are people who, when looking for something, assume it must exist (sometimes for the reason that if the mind can conceive of it, then it must exist - which is true to a degree). The mind can’t think of any one thing that it hasn’t experienced before, in my opinion. It can, however, put these experiences together in novel ways which are not found in previous experience. E.g. Unicorn, goblins, superman,…God. There are also people who work the other way and when designing something they assume it doesn’t exist and yet it is found that it does. For example, Buckminster Fuller designed a theoretical molecule (named after him as the ‘Fullerene’) which would be strong enough to carry anti-cancer substances directly to the source which would mean it couldn’t wouldn’t dissolve right away. The reason we lose our hear and grow weak is because the medication for cancer kills not only the cancer but our cells as well. Once fully worked out and once Mr. Fuller died, scholars found that the Fullerene actually existed in nature. I personally work from an inference to the best explanation while always being open to the fact that it may be wrong. Hence, when I go looking for something I am open to the fact that it may exist and that it may not. Even when I think I have found it, I am open to the fact that I may be mistaken. In the same way, if I can’t seem to find it, I continue to be open to the fact that it may exist but I haven’t found it. I believe this is the best way of working. I hope my logical explanation is clear and concise.

You stated:

The ‘it’ in terms of context, I believe, still needs further clarification. The ‘it’ could be a book I know I own and is in my house, I cannot find it, hence I am looking for it, but I also preconceive it. However, if you mean preconceive in the sense that you cannot conceive of something that you are looking for but have never experienced before, I would disagree, for the same reason as I mentioned in the above paragraph. To reiterate, I believe that human beings are unable to think of any one thing that hasn’t been experienced by them before, except agglomerations of experiences in new ways. In this sense, it is possible to find ‘it’ and to preconceive it without having experienced it before as an agglomeration of experiences that you have experienced before. For instance, due to your experiences of trees and of them being of different heights, some higher than others, you may come to think of looking for a tree that is the highest tree of all trees on Earth. You haven’t preconceived how high this tree is, what type of tree it will be, or how exactly it will look, but you have preconceived some possible aspects of it from previous experience and may one day find a tree that is in fact the tallest tree in the world (atleast for that time…likely it would be chopped down).

Similarly to the marriage, it is impossible for your parents to have preconceived a long and contented marriage, though they may have met couples who have been married a long time and claim to be content in the marriage; the validity of such a claim is beyond the scope of your parents’ or anyone elses knowledge. Whether such a thing as a long and content marriage actually is possible is also impossible for your parents to preconceive. Yet, they know of the establishment of marriage, they know what it is to be content, and from this they agglomerate the two and aim for such a goal though ‘it’ in its entirety is impossible to preconceive. You cannot understand what it is to have a long content marriage unless you have experienced it.

I hope that helps.

What’s your take?

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H.p.p.,

  1. Actively looking for something implies a commitment to the idea that it exists.

  2. People can find exactly what they are looking for because the ‘it’ that they are looking for is impossible to preconcieve.

I really like your two points, but I am curious how you interrelate them. Read together they say something like:

A commitment to an impossible to preconceived thing, will allow you to find it.

Would you agree that that’s what you have implied? And what would a commitment to an impossible to preconceive thing be like?

Dunamis

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of course it is there… sitting in the corner of the sphere…

are you familiar with the writings of Lewis Carroll?

-Imp

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Hi Magius, Dunamis, and Impenitent (see end of this reply for your personal message) thanks for your replies.

This message is long so I have colour coded it for ease of navigation you each have your own colour. Of course anyone is welcome to read it all.

Coincidentally I was looking online today for connections between the Greek word ‘Dunamis’ and the topical word ‘Tsunami’ which visually appear to be similar. My dictionary (Collins Concise) tells me that Tsunami comes from the Japanese ‘Tsu’ - port and ‘Nami’ - wave, whilst ‘Dunamis’ I previously discovered is Greek meaning power. I was looking for ‘Logos’ at the time in relation to ‘Logarithms’. My name in this forum comes from Greek, ‘Hydro’ - water, ‘Pneuma’ - air, ‘Pyr’ - fire and ‘Osis’ - state, condition, action for my own amusement. (for your perusal empire.net/~merlin/greek.html).

So I guess I have proved your point Magius, I didn’t know the origin of the word ‘Tsunami’ but was committed to the idea that it must have an origin based on the fact that it is a word with a meaning, like other words which (I) have (experienced as having) meanings and origins. Therefore I agglutinated (next word in my dictionary after agglomerate) an idea from my experiences and went looking in order to validate it.

Maybe I should change the first phrase to:

Actively looking for something implies a commitment to validating something that exists as an idea.

however, I said that the phrases originated from personal circumstances and so it is possible that the first phrase does not yet represent or contain these circumstances (or should that be underlying feelings) adequately which would mean that resolving the phrase logically might solve the wrong problem. I suppose I have to try and get underneath the origins of the phrase again for my self.

Quote attrib. Magius:
“You said that you have a set of circumstances that makes them worth thinking about, I would be happy to hear what those circumstances are.”

The idea of ‘Faith’ plays a part in the context, and elements of the experiences are like I said growing up in a Church and a Christian school run by the Church too.

I was born in 1979, 18 in 1997, 21 in 2000 so my childhood and adulthood are neatly split the turn of a millennium - Hooray. I am not being mystical about this in anyway but I remember a general climate of anticipation in the Church and in the world in general about the whole millennium thing. Build up. In the Church this manifested as animated talk of ‘Revival’ (spiritual, for the world) and supernormal behaviours (e.g. religiousmovements.lib.virginia. … bless.html - n.b. I live in the UK so things were similar and connected but different).

A consequence of ‘build up’ in a Church (i.e. the people) is the unbalancing of its functional hierarchies i.e. leaders who are normally accessible to people become like celebrities and common or garden Christians become like Church addicts (addicts don’t ask questions they just take it as it comes).

So that is the context. I developed a personal problem with the idea of ‘Faith’ within this context. I started questioning how I knew whether I had enough ‘Faith’ in God or not. This is paradoxical and was a misunderstanding in itself since ‘Faith’ does not have a scale it is mutually exclusive with ‘absent Faith’. Though the wrong question, the questioning was justified owing to changes in the behaviour of influential people and established situations in my life (e.g. going to church).

The supernormal (if that is a fair word to use) behaviours - like people praying, falling to the floor then claiming to have had visions from God, on mass, regularly - induced the questioning, since I believed in God but had difficulty aligning (though I wanted to) what I saw with what I believed. In theory it was possible (e.g. “God works in mysterious ways”, I saw no reason why God should not do what he liked after all he wasn’t hurting anybody) yet in practice too immediate, self-contained and to my mind inconsistent in scale (I perceived that the impact of ‘Revival’ within the Church would have a coinciding impact on the local community if it were all it were cracked up to be).

From my position as a young person/believer within the Church’s unuttered (social) hierarchy and concurrently as one of the fallerers overers it was also the Church’s rhetoric that caused the misunderstanding and confusion about Faith. People would stand up in Church and speak about getting closer to God, knowing Jesus better and in 1997 a Christian band I was listening to at the time released a single called ‘Deeper’ delirious.org.uk/discog/singles/deeper.html as if with ‘Revival’ came a spiritual self improvement contract.

I hope I am keeping you with me. I’ll try and get back to the thread now.

Actively looking for something implies a commitment to the idea that it exists.

So I have framed the above phrase within a question about Faith and I have also come accidentally across the reason I departed the Faith in God I had as a child/young person i.e. that my understanding of God, rather than being a true reflection, was dependent on the rhetoric and specific interpretation (of the Bible) of people who seemed to be less aware of themselves than I had always perceived them to be. As my world expanded, theirs seemed to shrink.

Faith though, was always defined for me in terms of a verse in the Bible, bk. Hebrews, ch.11, v. 1 “Now Faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see”.

Similarly (circa 2005 years and 25 days later…) in the Collins Concise (i.e. old faithful): faith n 1. Strong or unshakeable belief in something esp. without proof, 2.…

Hence … “a commitment to the idea that it exists” = faith,

or to cut and paste:

Actively looking for something implies being sure of what I hope for and certain of what I do not see.

Quote attrib. Magius:
“You asked for help in terms of logic. Here is my attempt: The only thing I can see wrong is that the implication is absolute, when it should be implicating only a probabilistic implication.”

I think the reason that you picked up on this then and that I wrote the phrase (I’m calling it simply a phrase to try and differentiate against it being termed a premise or an axiom or anything of that nature) as I did was that the originating context is ‘Faith’ and therefore the ‘something’s’ existence must be held to be certain.

If I reduce it to

  1. Actively looking for something implies Faith

it seems less ambiguous. I could even write

  1. Searching implies Faith.

Which is obvious isn’t it?

I appreciated what you wrote here Magius:
“Hence, when I go looking for something I am open to the fact that it may exist and that it may not. Even when I think I have found it, I am open to the fact that I may be mistaken. In the same way, if I can’t seem to find it, I continue to be open to the fact that it may exist but I haven’t found it. I believe this is the best way of working. I hope my logical explanation is clear and concise.”

That sort of sums up my current take on the existence of God, when I believed I had a method of accessing God I could talk about God with certainty but when the means of access no longer worked for me it didn’t discount God it just obscured God from my vision. The binoculars broke.

Dunamis,

Quote attrib. Dunamis:
"I really like your two points, but I am curious how you interrelate them. Read together they say something like:

A commitment to an impossible to preconceive thing, will allow you to find it.

Would you agree that that’s what you have implied? And what would a commitment to an impossible to preconceive thing be like?"

Yes I think I do agree, I was thinking about this the other day, it is what is implied despite being illogical. It basically says that I think that people who desire to find something enough will accept something else in its place as though it were the thing itself because the thing itself is an incomplete, unknowable model.

I was thinking of the story in the old testament where Moses goes up a mountain to talk to God and spends a long time up there receiving Gods law on the tablets of stone, so long that the Israelites get fed up with waiting decide that Moses has died and make a golden calf to worship instead.

I think the key word is commitment because implicit in commitment is motivation which shows a response to the stimulus of a desire, illuminating the fact that something is missing, that there’s a felt need.

Also, how about if I suggested that there is nothing at all that can be fully preconceived? In which case ever finding anything would always be approximate. How wrong could I be?

and finaly

Impenitent,

Thank you for your reply,

Regretfully I have not yet read any Lewis Carroll but I have seen the Disney animated classic, however, I intend to correct this error. Are you familiar with the writings of Hydropneumapyrosis? ilovephilosophy.com/phpbb/vi … 45#1627745

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Carroll wrote extensively about the philosophy of meaning, language and logic…

this is interesting:
atschool.eduweb.co.uk/cite/staff … /alice.htm

-Imp

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Magius:
First of all, wonderful response! I especialyl admire your inherently open-minded and inquisitive take.
I have a question about your idea of the agglomeration of previous experience being what creates otherwise original ideas. (i admit i had to look up agglomeration) How might have the idea God come about? or anything conceived as absolute? Obviously, the other ideas are based off images already experienced (as you explained quite well). Even conceptual ideas, such as justice, can be explained by common emotional responses to various actions (thus, as we feel sadness, anger, etc. when a family member is murdered due to the hardwiring of our brain, we generalize what one may consider an aspect of justice). But how could we have conceived of God? (I think this applies solely to monotheism, as polytheistic religions do not seem to have anything resembling that level absolutism.) Could it be because our perspective is all we know and then hearing other oppinions, discovering our own mistakes, etc. leads to an idea of truth? I dont know, there seems to be something missing there… Or could be because we had the concept of authority already and therefore conceptualized ‘authority over all’? But where does the all come from? is it from our constant discovery of new things thus leading to the ideas of what is ‘known’ and ‘not known’, and then all is ‘what is both the known and what is not known’? wait… i just answered my own question… mmm may as well post this anyway, maybe someone will find it interesting… anyway, am i understanding you correctly? any other way to ‘explain the creation of God’? did i miss anything in my reasoning?
Oh, but now I have a new question: the general creation of intangible concepts. I can see concepts arising out of emotional responses, but they then seem to seperate from the emotions themselves. Thus, a lot of philosophy is all about debating the nature of these concepts. How do these concepts continue, seperate from their emotional responses? I guess this is more of a psychological question about concepts in general… anyway, just wondering how you have applied your ideas to concepts and such…

Hydropneumapyrosis:
First off, I really enjoyed your story. Your insights concerning your philosophic/theological journey were quite interesting.
I have one concern however:

in contrast to:

While your statement says that ‘just because you can’t find it’, it doesn’t mean its not there, Magius’ is saying that, as well as ‘just because you think you’ve found it doesn’t mean you really have’. Thus, not to religion bash, but the #1 problem with any idea of ‘the absolute’.

Besides, I don’t think ‘Searching implies Faith’ is obvious at all, especially when you’re describing faith as “a commitment to the idea that it exists”. In fact, I would almost say (depending on how strict we’re being about ‘faith’) that can’t be true given a metaphysical context. If you have faith that God exists, why do you need to search for God? Searching for metaphysical ‘objects’ obviously isn’t physical searching (like looking for a book), its the contemplation of your belief in its (metaphysical) existance. In other words, searching for God could also be phrased as contemplating one’s faith in the existance of God. Searching can also be used as “getting closer to” or “better understanding”, though you addressed this, making it more black and white than that. In this case, one might say “searching for a better understanding of God”. The faith in God is implied, yes, but that is not what is being searched for. It is asking whether the path to better understanding exists or not.
Perhaps that was your point was and i just misunderstood. Do you still believe that faith is something had or not had, and that this invalidates the idea of “closeness to God”? Or was that your past oppinion?

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Hi quibbles thank you for your reply,

I assume you mean my story as detailed in this thread, as opposed to my post in the Creative Writing section that I pointed Impenitent to.

I would say that ‘God’ like ‘Faith’ is either present or not present.

Closeness to God would depend on being able to define aspects of the nature of God. To understand my computer better, I have to divide it into parts and understand their functions and how they interrelate. Nothing changes about the computer, it is me and my understanding that changes.

I could divide my computer into products:
Keyboard, Monitor, Mouse, Box

Then components:
Software, Hard Disk, Memory, Processor etc…

Then chips, circuits, concepts, materials, particles…

but as I go down and down eventually at some point I’m going to hit a barrier where the available information runs out and there is something there I don’t understand.

Whether God exists or not is not dependent on my understanding, which I think relates to what Magius wrote.

Yes I would be prepared to eat my words there, however, I arrived at ‘Searching implies Faith’ more as a reduction of my original phrase following my thinking about ‘Faith’ rather than as a conclusive statement.

So (I think) logicaly, you don’t need to search for God if you have Faith. If you really have Faith in God you are certain that God exists but you would search for a better understanding of aspects of Gods nature that you have access to e.g. for the Christian this might be by reading the Bible which you also accept through Faith to be the true word of God.

Is it the impossiblity of Faith in light of principles of Reason that brought about the “God is Dead” idea that happened in philosophy?

Thanks again to everyone who’s contributed here so far I’m really enjoying my first thread in the forum.

Alice is on order by the way and I’m enjoying contemplating Non-Being. (see Impenitents link)

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and when you are finished with carroll, check out kierkegaard’s fear and trembling… that is one of the ultimate books about existential faith… (it was slightly before nietzsche but it asks many of the same questions with a decidedly different flavor…

-Imp

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Hydro,

That doesn’t work either, when I have an idea that something may exist, I do not automatically become convinced that its exists is certain…this is an error on your part, an error that quibbles aptly found himself. The error isn’t just in this but that you seem to want to be open to all possibilities EXCEPT God…and that’s your perogative but not mine.

You spoke about Faith, but I must humbly disagree with your definition. In fact, I feel coerced to share with you my fear and worry that your definition of faith is the cause of all wars in the past and present. It isn’t the faith in God, for the definition you shared is much more general and destructive, for it can be applied to all things in life, namely, faith according to your apparent understanding is the willingness to believe in something for no reason. The simple fact of human beings doing something for no reason is impossible. All things we do are for a reason, whether we are conscious of it or not. Perhaps I will go into further explication of my fear and my philosophical views which I have worked in quite deeply for your understanding of faith (I have come upon it more times than I have ever dreamed in my life). However, I do wish to tell you that there is a faith I do believe in but I wish to add the caveat that the philosopher who touched me by his definition of faith has nothing more to do with his philosophy other than his definition of faith. I say this because people like to think that if a person holds one thing to be true of one philosopher they must also hold everything else the philosopher said as true as well. The philosopher I am referring to is Kierkegaard. Coincidentally, someone mentioned him in their post in this thread. I too strongly advocate reading Either/Or, Fear and Trembling, and The Sickness unto Death (the place you can find ‘faith’ as I understand it). The definition of faith that I refer to is “that the self in being itself and in willing to be itself rests transparently with God”…I should also note that what I understand as ‘God’ is completely different than what Kierkegaard understands by ‘God’. I was also quite touched by his explication on the Knight of Faith and with his concept of ‘dark night of the soul’.

I too am as old as you, I was born on March 30th 1979.

You stated:

But doesn’t the church frown upon questioning your faith? Isn’t there a problem to start with if you are questioning whether you have enough faith or not?

You stated:

I hope you don’t take this harshly, but I am going to disagree with the above verse. I’m not sure of anything I have hoped for until it has stopped being hope, passed by as an experience, and I recollect it as it happened only to realize what I hoped for was what I experienced. “sure” is not to be understood as certainty, for I believe we never have certainty. Life, to me isn’t about certainty, though FEELING as though there is certainty is quite a powerful and useful thing. Only a truly wise person can feel certain while still being open to the fact that there is no certainty.

You stated:

This above quote resembles the most dangerous of all faiths. To have a strong belief is okay, but to have an unshakeable belief is the worst thing a person can have…especially without proof. But even with proof, the person shouldn’t have unshakeable belief, if what they believe is truly unshakeable a person need not defend it. Personally, I don’t there is a single unshakeable truth.

Notice you said:

There is your error. If God is a certainty and you are not, how can you expect to speak of God with certainty? If something is certain or not, it plays no role to guide ones life along certainty (rationally, though emotionally it is quite powerful and useful).

What’s your take?

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Quibbles,
I don’t think I ever got a chance to welcome you to the ILP message board. Welcome fellow colleague on this sojourn in life upon this island we call earth…I bid thee well.

This may sound weird but thank you for hearty approbation and your lavishness in praise for my post. Not that I think my posts need praise, but that as philosophers and as people, we are often inclinded to criticize and sometimes even demean others while seldom complimenting or giving praise where it is due. This means that our energy levels and our zest for life often declines.

You asked:

Two reasons…well sort of three:

  1. Anthropocentricism
  2. Anthropomorphism
  3. Logic

Allow me to elaborate:

  1. The word means to think of human beings as the center of the universe, or the be all and end all of all things. Since we think this then we begin to look at and to demarcate the characteristics human beings hold that nothing else holds…reason, and isn’t God the ultimate reasoner?

  2. The word means to project (psychological term used to describe the tendency to take ones own characteristics and apply them to others) ones qualities unto others. God appears to have all the qualities human beings have, caring, power, reason, etc.

However, (1) and (2) are easily defeated without the third. The kind of logic I am talking about is more an abstract nature which tends to extend things WAY TOO far along logical circuits…though this has actually helped human kind greatly in the past, it has hurt us the most in terms of Faith and God. What I am trying to say is: relating (3) to (1) we find human beings are the center of all things, but no one single human being is the center of all things…because we are fallible. So then God must be something that is like us human beings IN ALL THINGS EXCEPT our fallibility. All characteristics that human beings don’t have but God does, like being material beings, can be explained in terms of fallibility. Being a material thing was thought of being fallible, imperfect, one needs only to look at Plato and Aristotle to see this. Hence, God (the HIGHEST level human being - isn’t it funny how we think if there is a God it is human beings who communicate with him only, have a close relationship to him, cause we are so like him) is the center of all things, but all of us are parts of God so we share in being the center of all things. Put another way, the only way for human beings to logically explain to themselves that they are the center of the universe they had to lower themselves a notch and put the conception of God there instead. Relating (3) to (2), so God has our qualities right? But how and why? Imagine for a second that God doesn’t exist but that we are going to create him, using all the powers of our intellect. Since our intellect tells us that our intellect is more powerful than anything we know, though it is fallible, would we not attribute intellect to God but extend it logically as far as we could? How far is that you ask? Well lets extend God intellect to being smarter than ourselves, but that would mean that he is fallible still to some point, or perhaps human beings though less intelligent now, may one day catch upto God’s intellect, hence that wouldn’t be very CENTER OF THE UNIVERSE like. So let’s say that God’s intellect is such that it can never be reached by us, or by anything, but does that mean he knows everything? Not necessarily. It may be that there is 1000 points of knowledge that nothing can ever come to know, and God knows 100 of those 1000, hence he is only lacking 900 forever while everything else is lacking at a minimum 1000 points of knowledge. But what of those 900 points of knowledge? What are they and where do we put them in our metaphysical view? It would appear that those 900 points of knowledge would be greater than God, hence NOT CENTER OF THE UNIVERSE like. Okay, so lets now change our view that not only is God’s intellect such that nothing can ever reach his intellect, but that his intellect encompasses ALL things. These are all logical extensions. The same applies to Gods power, benevolence, etc.

Hence, there is nothing NEW in God, except the projection of our abilities extended by logic to their furthest level of extension by our intellectual abilities at that time.

I say at that time cause people are finding flaws with conceptions of God all the time, there always were problems with any and all concepts of divine beings…we try to fix those problems upon new information about our universe and then begin to reapply the same logical extensions. Hence, in the earliest times (really early) we thought God was fire because fire was the only element of the four that didn’t emit a noticeable pattern…it appeared random. This made fire seem somehow untouched by the natural laws. Then (later) we figured out that there was nothing special about fire, especially when we finally did away with the idea of phlogiston, we realized that God wasn’t fire so then (later still) we looked up into the stars which we didn’t understand and thought that God was there, but then (later still) we figured out that stars were just other celestial bodies out in space, so now with quantum physics, string theory, big bang, etc…we have answered for ourselves many questions except that we can’t seem to figure out how the big bang started (though there are theories) and even if it did start from one of many ways, how did those many ways start? Guess what we answer? God. Hence, as many on ILP are fond of, or were fond of, saying is that God is the name we give to our ignorance. I say the reason God is the name we give to our ignorance because LOGIC pushes us to extremes, those extremes invariably are not understood at the time the extreme logic is made and hence we attribute it to God. Once the extreme logical position comes to be understood (not to be God) we then reposition God in a new logical extreme that we don’t understand for him to sit upon his ignorant throne until we come crashing down on that one too only for him to be reseated again and again.

So you are quite right when you answer your own question:

What you said is a quick way of saying what I said above.

What’s your take?

12

H.p.p.,

I think that there is a pre-positing truth behind your observation. Consciousness constructs a past while viewing the future, giving the impression that a desire has always been there. The commitment you refer to, from my perspective, is that pre-positing act. You fall in love with someone you have known for a long time, you marry her/him and in your life when looking back at the times “before” you were in love, you realize that you always were in love, but did not realize it, or did not act on it. Many of our constructions are done in this way, they allow us to narrate Time, and ground ourselves in a deep rooted past.

Dunamis

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Thanks Magius, both for you welcome and thorough response :slight_smile:

I understand the idea, though I’m still contemplating the implications of it (applying the concept to other aspects of develepment).

As for my take, the idea seems very reasonable, despite the assumption of only having access to what we have experienced. I tried using similar kind of logic today in a discussion w/ a peer, and he (essentially) said that the root assumption could not be made. As the mind is a result of neurobiologic operations of the brain, externally altering the chemicals may result in the production of truly original ideas (of course, nevermind that there basis lies in complex cellular interaction; im talking purely conceptual). The idea could remain valid, I said, if there was a direct correlation between the mental and physical (I don’t mean this in a duelistic sense). The best example I can give of this sort of interaction would be adding a chemical would be have teh identical and simultneous effect as introducing the concept of “a chemical has been added to your brain” to the collective of concepts the mind can agglomerate with… if that makes sense.
Anyway, as I am new to this idea (at least, at this level of development), I was wondering what the typical implications and problems are. Has this idea had any impact? And of course, what are your personal ideas surrounding it?

oh ya, HPP, sorry for changing the topic… if you want, ill move to another thread. And yes, I was talking about your story on this thread, though I’ll be sure to check out your cw as well :slight_smile:

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Hi quibbles,
ask your peer to give you one and only one example of a truly original idea that cannot be traced back to the persons experiences.

What’s your take?

15

Well, the natural question to ask would “How could you tell if something was truly an original idea?” As the original idea is introduced into the person’s mind, it would be immediately combined with all the other ideas, thus ‘contaminating’ it. Even if the person managed to communicate the idea in its truly original state, others could only relate to it through their previous experience, thus its originality would be lost. Perhaps. Or again, if others managed to receive the idea, it would again become immediately ‘contaminated’. Thus an original idea could never be recognized as original.

I don’t know; I’m kind of uncomfortable with this line of reasoning. While makes ‘originality’ essentially irrelevant for everything… except its effects on the process of agglomeration. If ‘originality’ can exist, then agglomeration collapses. Furthermore, an ‘original’ ideas effects would be entirely unrecognizeable as being the result of an original idea, making it even more dangerous to agglomeration.

Unfortunetly, it seems that this dilemma can’t be solved until the relationship between the physical brain and mental imaging and conceptualization is better understood. Of course, determining the link may well turn out to be impossible (camera taking a picture of its film).

I did make a pretty quick judgement on this though; I’ll have contemplate this a little more… What’s your perspective?

Oh, what do you think about memetics? Conceptual agglomeration, while it can exist within traditional psychology, seems related to memetics.

Oh, are you interested enough in this to start a new thread?

16

a few points.

let us not confound the mind with reason. a penis is one thing, a vagina is another, but they both are a different kind of thing than an orgasm. so precisely what happens to ideas, or our minds, or their respective relationship has little bearing (i think) on the topics at hand.

magius is right, and the word possibility is needed, so we have to say
“Actively looking for something implies a commitment to the idea that it possibly exists”. othewrwise, what is the q.a. guy doing in a plant ? what is the purpose of having police ? or a trial ?

"People can find exactly what they are looking for because the ‘it’ that they are looking for is impossible to preconcieve. "

and here comes the problem… the first sentence is meaningfull in a much more absolute way than the other. their respective objects have different degrees of existance, if you will accept that term. otherwise, we can say they are of different types. just like the winning numbers in a lottery are different than the lottery players oppinions on what they will be. just because it might happen than most people bid on the same number does not affect its chance of turning up.

hence the act of searching (in abstract) and the actions of people (relatively more concrete) can not be combined together into a single phrase without taking that difference into account.

which is why dunamis’ combo does not work, he treats them as formally idempotent, which they are not.

imp did not make an idle suggestion. do not be fooled by the fact lewis caroll had a strange fondness for little girls and wrote tonsd of little girl stories. he is in fact a bright mathematical mind, and had not neglectable contributions to anglo saxon thought. i will even dare suggest some more stuff, maybe the russell-frege debate (which got some attention on this forum).

on the score of wether anything can be preconceived, kant will probably insist that at least space and time must be. which adds him to the list :slight_smile:

17

I disagree. Implication is a logical relation. And as such, it can only be “is” OR “is not”, p or ~p.

Hydro’s statement:

1. Actively looking for something implies a commitment to the idea that it exists.

Can also be written like this:

Actively looking for x implies a commitment to the idea that x exists.
( Actively looking for x implies p)

So, it is our commitment to the idea. ( p or ~p)—THIS is what we are implying, not the “existence of x”.

So, adding the word possibly to go along with “exists” is misplaced, confused, or irrelevant.

18

Hello everyone,

I just wanted to reassure you all that I haven’t run away from this thread, I do feel a little overwhelmed by the depth of the arguments and am trying to formulate a response to some of what has been said whilst at the same time others are adding their own fresh perspectives on the discussion. Well the more the merrier I say and no Dunamis, I am more than willing to follow along the path of discovery I am not prescious about the topic, has there ever been a river without tributaries or a tree without roots or branches?

Thank you zenofeller and arendt for your contributions they are equally fascinating.

Alice arrived through my letterbox today.

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20

arendt, my argument still stands. consider an congressional inquiry.
the fact that they inquire does not represent a commitment to the idea that some illegality has taken place. if they were commited to that idea, they would not investigate, they would pass a resolution or bill or whatever.

the fact that they inquire does however represent a commitment to thre idea that some illegality could have happened, and the likeliness is high enough to warrant the time and effort.

as i said, without the “possible” we would not need courthouses, just jails.

so, while what you say is formally correct, it is in my oppinion irrelevant.