The consideration I've been trying to coax some kind of agreement upon is that humans had experiences long before the term "experience" was coined. — creativesoul
We find ourselves in the midst of the world, and cannot understand it except from within. — Joshs
The idea that all we have access to is our perception of the tree, and not the tree("Stove's Gem", it is often called) pervades academia to this day. — creativesoul
assuming that we do indeed use the same words to refer to the same patterns in experience — Hello Human
The consideration I've been trying to coax some kind of agreement upon is that humans had experiences long before the term "experience" was coined.
— creativesoul
Indeed. — Isaac
But you additionally claimed that those experiences constituted both internal and external features.
The counter was that what experiences constitute depends on the definition being used.
The idea that all we have access to is our perception of the tree, and not the tree("Stove's Gem", it is often called) pervades academia to this day.
— creativesoul
It's strange.
For one thing, we could just grant that we don't know things as they are in themselves, adding also that we don't know what the hell it's supposed to mean to know something as it is itself. We understand (well enough) the idea of a warranted statement or a true statement. But knowledge of something as it is independent of knowledge is like the taste of ketchup without the flavor, or music that is 'better than it sounds.' What's the turn on ? The mirage of surprisingly easy eternal 'knowledge'?
Another thing, whether something is 'real' or an 'illusion' or 'true' is a fundamentally social issue. So there's something weird in reasoning about whether or not others exist in the first place. — Pie
philosophy must be done within the limits of our concepts and language, — Hello Human
It's a matter of what existed in its entirety prior to, and thus regardless of, all accounting practices thereof thereafter. — creativesoul
it makes sense to me to understand this as a debate about which usage is preferable. — Pie
Folks, that is what philosophy amounts to - finding a good way to say tricky things. — Banno
This becomes even more obvious when we acknowledge that many of the different senses of the term are mutually exclusive and/or in some clear conflict with one another. They cannot all be accurate depictions and/or characterizations of what existed in its entirety prior to them. — creativesoul
As just argued above, whether or not human experience consists of both internal and external things is not a matter of definition and nothing more. — creativesoul
It would follow that the basic elemental constitution of all human experience prior to the term somehow depended upon that which did not even exist at the time. — creativesoul
The same way two different people may share the same name. — creativesoul
They are both called by the same name. They are not said to be the same thing. You've already said as much directly above. One is an entire living organism, and the other is but a part thereof. Sometimes "cell" is used to pick out an entire organism, sometimes it is used to pick out parts of an organism. — creativesoul
Sometimes "cell" is used to pick out an entire organism, sometimes it is used to pick out parts of an organism. — creativesoul
Exactly. — creativesoul
Folks, that is what philosophy amounts to - finding a good way to say tricky things. — Banno
When a community uses words in certain ways..., — creativesoul
Is there an external material world? (....) Such questions are the bane of philosophy. They are consequences of placing (...) the wrong kind of value upon consistent language use. — creativesoul
No object simply exists for us as what it is outside of changing contextual relationships of sense.
Key words being "for us"... Does that include the toddler in the crib under the tree? — creativesoul
I don't think feeling is essential to abstract meaning; abstract meaning consists in generalization. 'Tree" refers to whole class of concrete objects, whereas a class is an abstract object; a concept.
I didn't know that about people drawing similar images after listening to instrumental music. Can you cite references for that study? Does it work with all instrumental music or just some, like for example Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony?
In any case music is gentle, calm, slow, racing, violent, aggressive, chaotic, ordered, happy, sad, eerie, dark, light, and so on and these are all feeling tones, it seems to me. So, if the similarity in the drawings is on account of the feeling tones in them which echo the feeling tones in the music, that would not surprise me.
Haiku is a very "pictorial" genre of poetry; generally it evokes concrete images, the classic being Basho's best know haiku:
The ancient pond
A frog leaps in.
The sound of water.
I am not aware of poetry which is abstract like abstract art is. The Abstract Expressionists aimed to dispense with any representational associations with things of the world such as human figures or landscapes, under the influence of Clement Greenberg, they wanted to produce paintings emphasizing the two-dimensionality of the surface, which were to be judged in purely formal, compositional terms. Yet of course some of these paintings seem to evoke landscape such as Jackson Pollock's Autumn, Blue Poles and Lavender Mist.
So they skirt the edges between representing recognizable objects and evoking the feeling of natural textures: patterns of moss on walls, or the general fractal forms of foliage, rock-faces, clouds and so on. I suppose you could say that evoking generalized forms, as opposed to clearly representing particular objects, is a kind of abstraction, so maybe I'll rethink what I said earlier about "abstract" being an inappropriate label. But then maybe not, because again I think it comes down to evoking the feeling tones, and even representing or at resembling the patterns of these natural forms.
In any case, none of this changes my mind about whether it is possible to think complex discursive ideas without using language. As I said earlier my belief that it is not possible is based only on my own experience and the reports of some others I have put the question to. so I am not totally ruling out the possibility, but find it hard to see how I could be convinced, since any counterargument could only come in the form of reports by others who claim they can do it. So far only @Mww is the only one to have claimed to be able to do anything like this, and going by his descriptions I'm not sure we are even talking about the same thing. — Janus
Is there an external material world? (....) Such questions are the bane of philosophy. They are consequences of placing (...) the wrong kind of value upon consistent language use.
— creativesoul
What would the right kind of value look like? — Mww
Less like truth, more like meaning. — creativesoul
consistent language use alone is insufficient evidence to conclude that what's being said is true.... — creativesoul
If I group some cows into 'herd1' the cows still existed prior to my naming them 'herd1' but whether daisy the cow was in or out of herd1 did not pre-exist my naming. I declared it to be the case by grouping the herd that way. — Isaac
The grouping did not exist in its entirety prior to your 'christening'. I'm talking about things that did. You're talking about things that did not. That's the difference. — creativesoul
This assumption seems to repeat the traditional divide between emotion and cognition, feeling and thinking.
Supposedly , only verbal cognition is rational , conceptual. Feeling is mere spice, coloration, window dressing. It’s an important motivator but does not produce ideas in and of itself. — Joshs
The kind of reasoning animals may do, and humans also do pre-verbally or non-verbally is reasoning based on concrete visual, auditory, motor, tactile, olfactory, gustatory and proprioceptive images. — Janus
↪Joshs Music consists in concrete auditory imagery (sounds). Music presents, it does not represent in my view. — Janus
Sure you could they are kinds of signs, but not symbols with determinate meanings. — Janus
If I group some cows into 'herd1' the cows still existed prior to my naming them 'herd1' but whether daisy the cow was in or out of herd1 did not pre-exist my naming. — Isaac
The grouping did not exist in its entirety prior to your 'christening'. I'm talking about things that did. You're talking about things that did not. That's the difference.
— creativesoul
All things we name are such groupings. — Isaac
The tree is a group of cells, the cell is a group of organelles, the organelles are groups of molecules, the molecules are groups of atoms...
And all such groups are in constant flux, molecules from one group entering and leaving, becoming part of, and then excreted from...
And all such groups change over time such that their actual constituent parts are never the same... — Isaac
There's not a thing in the world which is not brought into being, from the heterogeneous soup of hidden states, by our conceptualizing, and constant reconstruction of it.
The notion of a tree as this thing in front of me is thus a complex synthesis of what we actually see , — Joshs
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