the world fundamentally, metaphysically, does not make sense.
the assumption of all investigation is that somehow the world is a rational place. nothing makes sense. science works, it doesn’t make sense. philosophy hasn’t advanced in thousands of years.
even this message, you do not understand. it doesn’t make sense. words dilute what you don’t understand in the first place. there is nothing to be understood. what sense you make is the sense of non-sense.
You’re comin’ around, nooqy my boy!
(any second now Freddys gonna come in and hit you with a self-referential paradox)
Let’s see what happens.
Freddy?
Ouch! 
But maybe you are right. Especially about that presumption of a rational world.
‘the sense of non-sense’ was a lecture by alan watts too. where he says that the world does not have meaning in the sense of pointing to something outside itself …it is not the attribute of a sign. we say that the world has meaning, but what we refer to is that we feel that it has ‘significance’. the world has no meaning. and he goes on about Lewis Carrol and this and that, to apeal to the middle aged women in spandex jump suits who are on their way to starbucks after.
So we are left with mere common sense. Metaphysicians and physicist build their Towers of Babel towards realities beyond all but the most extraordinary comprehension. They see visions of reality that are far too complex for any brief mortal to grasp. Microscopic and macroscopic views both show us words beyond our wildest imagination. Yet the mesocosm, the middle ground where all live and operate remains about the same. The amazing complexity of subatomic particles has no directly noticeable effect on me walking down the street. I recently heard on physicist query, “Do all of these fantastic equations actually represent a real event, or are they just pretty math?†He said this because we often lack the technology and techniques necessary to empirically validate some of the highest levels of physics.
Yet simple principles like punctuality still operate to give up noticeable benefits. (Even if those benefits are often merely avoiding the harmful consequences of tardiness. Bill collectors can be so unforgiving.)
monooq, it is true that the reality doesnt make sense, but it doesnt matter either, because reality as such does not exist.
our constructs of it do exist, and they do make sense, inasmuch as their are our constructs.
so there.
take your pidle di diddle pocket nietzsche and shove it straight up your ass. i know what you are trying to mean by ‘reality doesn’t exist’, but thats because i am incredibly astute and well versed in different things that matter. you should really flesh your highlighted portions out… you know… describe the precise way in which you can build a house from bricks that don’t exist. you should see clearly what i mean by that.
(re: if you fell off the stupid tree and hit every branch… i mean how do you construct something from something that doesn’t make sense, and expect the construct to make sense? you will already make assumptions that don’t make sense.)
sorry my dear, wasnt the niet guy. i see the entire forum is very affectionate with the guy, but i particularly am not that fond of his writ.
as long as you can make a construct, the construct has to make sense, because that is the only way you can make it. you can not imagine something you can not imagine, so to speak. see what i mean ?
try to not be stuck in any sort of objective approach to reality, or any universality of existance.
i am in a helping mood. perhaps you would be more easily walked through this if you provide an example, which i refute.
my patience and good nature towards the handicapped extends only so far. (jokes)
moreoever, and whats more, which is the same thing, you will find that the subjective interpretation you want to exault is the product of a will you don’t understand, nor do you understand the will.
It makes sense because we know what sense is. Therefore, it makes sense.
Give it all the other ‘weird and wonderful’ definitions you like, it will still all make sense.
But what happens if something perfectly rational (something that you understand) is too deep for me to figure out? To me, since I cannot figure out how something would work-out logically, it does not make sense to me.
my point is: unless we can all have the exact same amount of knowledge at the same time, non-sense is still an existent entity, if you catch my drift.
just my $0.40 cents…
why don’t you tell me what you think it means ‘to make sense’? you won’t be able to make sense of ‘sense’ …and you’ll take a back door if you define it somehow pragmatically, which i will try and show won’t make sense.
BMW, it won’t make sense to the smartest human being. and since its metaphysical, it won’t make sense to the smartest human being ever imaginable by his being a human being.
you cant follow abstract explanations and beg for examples, and i am the handicaped ? awwww.
at any rate, here;s your example. consider a mainframe computer. consider there is a number of programs running on said mainframe. consider the opperating system never alows a program to read memory it didnt write (which would be something an os satisfies by definition, but hey, some people think windows is an os). consider the memory is perfect, there is no unintentional altering the data it holds.
a program can now not meaningfully return an error message saying “bad data structure” because the only way the respective data segment got to be there is because the same program wrote it. if it wrote it, it used the data structure it reads. if it cant read what it writes… well kudos to it. but its not a problem of the mainframe (hence its not a metaphysical issue).
What makes sense is purely relative to the perceiver.
Anything can make sense with enough information; and nothing makes sense without it.
Excellent. This is what I was attempting to say in my previeous post. 
Okay. So, you are actually helping Monooq’s argument, not attacking it. Because who gives meaning to anything, be it data structure in the computer, or structure in the mind, or structure in society, etc.?
data only has meaning in its relationship with the program, and always has meaning in its relationship with the program. we can maybe push this far enough as to say meaning is a void concept.
you have all said the same thing: that ‘making sense’ is a relational enterprise between more than one person. (or computer, or etc…)
you have all somehow missed the point: the world fundamentally, metaphysically, does not make sense.
this was the first line of the first post, and also the most important.
the sense you think you make of your friend’s telling you to buy him a hamburger is the sense of non-sense, because it lives in a larger context that does not make sense.
i was replying to that sentence in your original post. this was the most underlined line of the original post, and so, conceivably, the most important.
other than that, we agree, the world is not a certain way, albeit parts of it can be certain ways, sometimes, maybe.