Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius

Philosophy Forums Philosophy
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I haven’t read too much of Jorge Luis Borges but his short story, Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, is absolutely fascinating and is definitely worth your time if you haven’t read it. In gross summary, it is about the earth discovering an entire encyclopedia of a fictional world and going crazy over it, making mass copies and teaching it in school, to the point where the universe itself changes reflecting the writings of the book. Again, this summary is awful and the story should be read.

I believe that the universe exists in our minds (or just in my mind … I haven’t decided yet). My metaphysics is a consequently a subjective idealistic one. Further, I strongly believe that logic, math, but especially science, is a religion no more mythological and fictional than any myth or religion of antiquity that we ridicule.

Just a little while ago humanity discovered that they didn’t have a physical theory of the universe that could be called true, that the laws of physics were inventions of man, that what we now call classical mechanics is at best a mere mortal reductionism of the external world, that the theory, model, system, language crashes when dealing with things very small. For very small things we have another system, quantum mechanics, which makes predictions of small things. But event that system suffers from huge shortcomings, not being able to completely compensate for the underlying chaos of the universe. Quantum mechanics does not replace classical mechanics. We are thus left with nothing true or absolute, just a hope that someday we can maybe “evolve” and find some theory of everything to numb us from the chaos.

But until that day (I don’t think that day will ever happen) where are we living? How much different are we today with our theories and systems than we were years ago when we believed that intelligent forces governed the laws of our world? The order we painted on the universe years ago was a way of objectifying the external world, painting order on chaos, and it worked in antiquity.

One might say that we’ve evolved. I would say that is not necessarily true. If we have gotten better at anything it would be that we have gotten better at convincing ourselves that we know anything about the universe, the external world.

And as for math and logic, I believe that they are inventions at best. If you take an abstract mathematics class in college you’ll quickly find how an awesome mathematical system can describe nature in no way at all. Logic and language fail because they are models, incomplete representations of a world that we should feel nausea when attempting to perceive it.

But enough of that logic stuff. There’s a really good (and funny) thread on it here.

All of this is not to say I don’t have any beliefs. I like treating my idealism as sort of metaphilosophy to a more materialistic philosophy, that is, I believe that the universe and its people are ideas in my head and that I God with infinite control of it but that I chose to live within the system and restrict myself by it.

Make any sense?

  • ken
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Hi ken.

I looked at the story but haven’t read the whole thing. As I understand it, this newly discovered culture is metaphysically idealist to the point that they have no nouns, and actions different in number are even said to be done by the same subjects.

It would be fascenating to discover the works of another culture, to work with it, to assimilate anything good in it. However, I think this newly discovered culture’s language is not as rich as Earth’s as we use nouns – which are really useful to use – as well as verbs. I think these two categories of things said are universal in Earth languages. Now if the new culture had actually come up with some thought we hadn’t, that would be even more interesting and worthwhile to work with. But their culture seems to present us with less than a step forward, as it’s not exact.

But I’m just seeing it as a factor of cultural difference, as we know of in Earth languages and philosophies, which run on common human categories of thinking – some of which are more exact than others. Which is a good reason to learn certain of this world’s languages.

mrn

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hey, sup…
yeah it does make sense…but is it really ‘your philosophy’? cause it sounds a lot like mysticism to me, if not identical…
but it’s ok if you came to that conclusion by yourself withput reading the baghabad gitta, the gnostic gospels… any other apocryphal book or mystical occult grymoire…or …just… depak chopra!:stuck_out_tongue: lol!!!

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name,

Do you mind if I call you name? I want to do that cool thing where you call someone by the first part of their alias or whatever but calling you my would get confusing…

But anyway, it seems we have opposing views yet I’m not quite sure. I’m not completely sure if I’m catching your drift and am very afraid of straw manning you. It seems to me, at least, that you believe that our language is the mighty right language and that any other languages of any other types can be assimilated into ours if we have something we want from them but should otherwise get tossed into the trash because they are wrong.

I believe that if people were cleverer, we’d devise very different languages to express different things, whether they relate to the world or not. It seems to us that English suites us but a spoken language 1000 years from now might not resemble ours in any way.

And today we see a lot of this language as tool stuff. French is the language of choice when writing important international documents that need to be as void of ambiguities as possible. I would call mathematics a language. Its differences from spoken language are obvious. More interesting are high level programming languages like Haskell where everything refers to a function, essentially a verb, thus making Haskell a language of verbs. Likewise, Python, with every thing being an object, could be seen as a language of nouns.

… and my train of thought had been derailed. Name, I’m not sure if we’re having the same argument so … uh … let me know.

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heavenly,

I wouldn’t call myself a mystic. The belief I wrote before about being God ‘n’ everything isn’t something I usually… believe in. It’s more like a consequence of believing that the only universe I can be sure of is the one I model out of my perceptions and that at the base of these perceptions could very well be chaos just like randomness can be used to write a seemingly creative computer program. But I don’t strongly believe that there is no universe outside of my perceptions and so I much less believe that I’m God. But it’s a neat idea and one I’m playing with.

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I have a problem with that whole " I am God " speech. I think it’s because it is the easy way to go. Not trying to flame you or anything I mean I understand where people get the idea but it’s too weak IMO.

"Since I have no idea or recollection/experience of any god i’m going to say that I am God "

I believe if one was truly god then we would consciously know it. The universe is too magnificent for there to even be a God, especially in the form of a concscious person.

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that ?i’m God’ philosophy is very logica, I believe I’m god too, lol… :stuck_out_tongue:
seriously… it’s the most logical thing, since we can’t really know anything outside ourselves…
so we are justified in this belief.

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Hi again, base. If “mrn” isn’t cool enough for you to say, “name” will be fine.

I don’t think we’re in disagreement here. (Although I would say some math “uses” a special code.) Some verbal languages are more expressive than others. See how we use greek and latin in philosophy, or for some sanskrit, which I’ve been told is especially precise in its meanings. In english, look at how many uses the word “love” has – with such ambiguity, it is far from a perfectly expressive language.

But I wonder if a millenium from now, language might be as different as a millenium ago – our words will be in their etymologies; but their words probably will be even more different because of more communication between cultures. And if we discover another culture, there is liable to be some mixture of cultures. It just seems having no nouns in a language would be less expressive than even our language is using nouns.

mrn

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Baseless:
I am glad that you enjoyed that little story. Is it by any chance part of the anthology of short stories by him called “Labyrinths”. If it is, then check out “Funes Memoirs”. It is summarized…somewhere… as"
“Funes, His Memory,’ is an investigation of another side of this verbal infinity. Disguised as a piece written In memoriam, the story presents a young man gifted with incredible powers of memory. After an injury which left him paralyzed, Funes began to capitalize on this ability. He learns Latin in a single night of study, and then embarks on the creation of his own language. This language has a word for everything, and every possible state of this thing according to time and perception. Every leaf has a unique word in this language, every drop of water in the oceans and combinations thereof. Funes dies at 24 of pulmonary congestion.”
Now have you read some of the problems posited by those who study the fallacies of language, fallacies that often include the contingent:“…unless they’re God.” Can someone possess a private language? The answer is No, because memory is faulty and cannot record exactly nor recall completely. Now Borges indulges in his fiction to answer the question from a “What if”, stance, and what we find is what makes us human and long-living.

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Socratic,

If one were to believe one that existence is a lucid dream then wouldn’t that make the dreamer God?

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mrn,

In my philosophy, that would be like saying that a screwdriver is more useful than an axe. In many ways a screwdriver is more useful but an axe still has its applications as does a language of, say, verbs. Haskell is said to even more expressive than object oriented programming languages; most would say that it has its purposes. I call Haskell a language of verbs because it’s really a language where every thing is a function.

I’d say a nounless language would good for describing subjective ideas. In a subjective idealistic worldview - like the one in Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius -, one where there are no objects because there is no external world, a nounless language would be ideal.

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omar,

I’ve never heard of that story but it does sound very Borgesian. I’m reading from his Collected Fictions, a book of short stories. Borges didn’t believe in writing novels, only short stories.

I’m not sure if I get your drift. I would say, though, that it wouldn’t be very hard to memorize an entire language if the language were very small. Although you mentioned a “private language” and that reminds me of something Wittgenstein said although I never understood what he meant by a personal language.

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Well it is impossible to believe that existence is a lucid dream because everybody wakes up from a lucid dream at some point in time (and don’t say death because no one knows what death is like). IMO to say that existence is a dream is a mere imagination. Look around you and look at how real everything is. It cannot possibly be a dream, it is definitely reality.

Even if you were living a lucid dream who’s to say that you are God. Imagine if your life right now really was a lucid dream and all you know is time and space in this lucid dream. Well don’t you think there could be something outside of time and space? All you know is reality. whether or not its a dream is just an imagination. Saying that you are the god is just another illogical excuse for not being able to understand the metaphysical nature of things.

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Socratic,

My point is that what exists outside of space and time, what is transcendent from our concept of the universe is that very force that conceptualizes the universe which is non other than ourselves. What is beyond the objects of matter and energy is which objectifies. The universe is this awesome structure - you could imagine a rook - foating in some space, standing on nothing, on faiths - baseless. Hence my username baselessrook. That space in which the structure exists is the mind, ourselves. And because it is I who created the structure with all of its objects and rules and because I’m in control of it I’d call myself God.

That’s the idea, at least.

My problem with it is accounting for that feeling that I exist within a system, that other people exist, and most of all, that I am not really God. While it’s logical that I have control over my universe it sure doesn’t feel like I’m in control.

That’s kinda why I’m on these forums. I’m hoping someone will point me in the right direction.