Does it? I've never heard of that before. It seems to me, and this proves my point, that the 'lightning flashing' example was chosen specifically because the noun is experienced as the verb, and that's what you wanted to show. Hopefully I've shown you that most of the time the noun and verb are two completley different things.
aporia: I considered that, but most folks consider thunder and lightning to be two different things, so I didn’t go that way. Also,
I totally agree with this.
I see lightening as a stick going into water.
The lightening is the stick, and the flash is the wave that the stick creates in the water.
Oh there really is a difference, in perception. But surely if I see lightning flashing (lol) and someone else only hears the thunder, then the difference would lie only in the two persons experiences. But surely the lightning went on happening just the same.
I am not trying to say that there isn’t a perceived difference, I am trying to say that the difference only lies in the perception. So, we could say beyond perception, everything is the same.
Welcome to the boards, torrentfields. What an interesting way of looking at things.
Subject and verb are grammatical distinctions taken from the logical distinctions substance and action. It might be interesting to concieve of a way of speaking with only verbs, but as was said above we think by composition and division and a verb-only language might be limited to poetic usage and in which it would be hard to do philosophy. God Himself seems almost more verb than noun in the Christian traditon, being Being and Love. I like the thought of saying a bear must be “bearing” – the act of being a bear; very existential.
The knower and the known are one in the act of knowing. (Aristotle) Not sure how you want to everthrow the monarchy of the universe in concept.
Cordiallying,
posessing owning named
T
Do you believe that there are any created objective things in the universe? If so, are they different from one another?
If an asteroid hit the earth next week wiping out all life on earth, would the universe still exist? Would there be objective things in the universe without mankind to perceive them. Without our perception, would everything be the same in the universe?
Hey, I thought you only believed in relative truth. But here you are believing in things happening “just the same”, that is, independent of anyone’s perceptions. So what do you mean when you say the lightning went on happening just the same?
I’ll tell you what I think you mean by that. When you hear that distinctive crack during a storm, you tell yourself “lightning struck”. When you say that, what you are really doing is making several predictions using the linguistic shorthand “lightning struck”. Among those predictions are the following:
I could go on with many others, but my point is that the idea of a thing happening “independent of human observers” doesn’t make any sense. There’s no way to know whether things happen independent of human observers, or what it would even mean for a thing to happen independent of an observer. What you really mean when you say that lightning struck independent of human observers is that if you were to ask certain observers who were in the right place at the right time, they would probably say certain predictable things.
In summary, events and things are socially constructed. To say that a thing “is” or that something “happened” is merely to predict that other people would probably report certain things in line with your interpretation of the event, if those people met certain conditions for making the observations of the event. To say that things happen independently of people is a shorthand for the social construction of the thing and the event.
Dunamis, have I seen the light yet? 
the confusing of certainty for truth, and that proof is necessary for meaning is the infinite regression of the sophist fool.
socrates knew that he knew nothing. one wonders what plato knew?
language is not impossible, it just requires the proper tools for the mind to extract meaning. then, the mind can become the toll we’d all like it to be. when did language become so reduced to the tyranny of math and logic?
DAMN POSITIVISTS!
Oh no not at all, they would still be totally diferent, but without the perception to perceive that difference, it wouldn’t matter much would it? That’s why I still believe their is an ultimate conciousness (call it God if you want) that is one independant of the many. And this would be what you would experience after death. This would mean that life is unconciousness or hypnotization in that we perceive there are differences, hence the infinite and fabulous displays of the perception of difference in what we call vision, hearing, thinking, and so on. And all of these sensory perceptions rely on a difference, little tiny yes’s and little tiny no’s, all aranged in a vast array of patterns. But these yes’s and no’s rely on each other to be different, and in this sense they are one.
That isn’t to say that many are seperate from the one, because the many rely on the one to be seperate. It is in fact from the one which the many come forth isn’t it? Aren’t opposites what make us percieve the difference in the first place? These different are based on opposites, or two sides of a coin if you will. Now you can obviously see the coin has two sides, but surely it is still one coin. Another example is emptiness and form, it is the emptiness of a room that allows form to exist within it. What use would a room be if it was solid? So the same would apply to the universe, forms cannot exist inside it if there is no space between them.
Everything is a coincidence of opposites, but you see we perceive these opposites as two seperate things, when in fact that are inseperably interdependent of each other, one cannot exist without the other. So explicitly these things are different, but implicitly they are one.
So yes, things are different, but no, they are not. And the fact that they are not different is somehow more profound, because they are one.
The “huge flaw” in our language lies not in the language itself , but rather the people who speak it but cannot understand what they themselves are saying.
Okay, sidestepping the issue of infinite regression how about the infinite deferral along the signifying chain? That (simply) to understand one sentence one needs to be able distinguish it from all other sentences and every comparison with another sentence brings with it a deferral of meaning…?
I thought that Socrates was told that he was the wisest man because wisest is he that knows that he knows nothing…
Language is social and metaphysical. Experience (the mind) is individual. There is no private meaning but there’s no transcendental signified either…
And then we’d be able to spell perfectly! A tyranny of good spelling…
I’d say that language now has greater variety (i.e. less reduction) than ever before. This is Wittgenstein’s fault…