The Tao of Publias II

Discussion in 'Psychology' started by Publias, Aug 21, 2002.

  1. question:

    if a word for something does not exist, does the thing exist ??



    best,

    surf:cool:
     
    #21     Aug 23, 2002
  2. ElCubano

    ElCubano

    Yes....There are many species of fish ( or whatever you want to call them) we have yet to ever see..When we encounter these new species they are without name. The opposite may not be so true...we have plenty of names for "BIGFOOT".....:confused:
     
    #22     Aug 23, 2002
  3. Publias

    Publias Guest

    YES ABSOLUTELY... It was funny to me to read another post on here recently talking about "simple" being a subjective term... What word is not??? None of them eixist outside the realm of thought and as such they will always be subjective, relative and ultimately miss the 'absolute' mark...

    Ever give any thought to just how relative they are MS? Look up any word in the dictionary and they will always be defined by another... Not one word in the english language can define itself, sometimes we tend to confuse our conceptualization of reality with reaity itself...

    Wipe out humans and you annihilate words... The real question is if you wipe out humans do you wipe out evrything else???

    PEACE and good trading,
    Publias
     
    #23     Aug 23, 2002
  4. Thou hast stood as king upon the unyielding land
    And caused it to flourish
    In thy from of "Ptah, the Risen Land,"
    In thy manifestation as the Unifier.
    What thy mouth created by speacking,
    What thy hands shaped according to thy heart,
    Thou hast raised up out of the waters of chaos!

    --Based on a translation from an ancient Egyptian Hymn



    You and I will not be on this Earth in 100 years, but maybe what we have created will still exceed beyond the limits of our flesh and bone. Will it be my images painted on canvas or your words on this electoral thread? I believe the best of the words we speak and shape with our minds and hearts will be and is our legacy and our children’s.

    Joseph Inverso

     
    #24     Aug 23, 2002
  5. That is correct. However, there is still a distinct difference in the levels of subjectivity of words and types of words. "Vehicle" is more subjective than "tank"; adjectives are more subjective than nouns, for example.
    There also exists a difference in subjectivity between certain adjectives. "excellent" and "simple" are both defined according to some standard. The standard for excellence is much more easily defined (and accessed) than that for "simplicity". So the post discussing "simple" wasn't completely redundant.
     
    #25     Aug 23, 2002
  6. Publias

    Publias Guest

    Dan what were your ears ringing?? I thought I could get away with posting that, because I assumed you would be too busy reading the threads that actually have "substance" like apecoil's 5k to 5000k thread :)

    But yes you are right obviously some words are more subjective than others I just kinda figured it went without saying...

    PEACE and good trading my friend,
    Publias
     
    #26     Aug 23, 2002
  7. gentlemen,

    thankyou for your response to my querry. further research from my library into the subject of lanquage reveled the following qoute from terrence mckenna, phD ethnopharmacologist and cultural anthopologist:

    " how do you feel ? fine and yet we have thousands and thousands of words about rugs, widgets, etc. so we need to create a much richer lanquage of emotion. there are times and there have been periods in english when there were emotions that don't exist anymore, because the words have been lost. this is getting very close to this business of how reality is made by lanquage. can we recover a loss emotion by creating a word for it ? there are colors that dont exist anymore because the words have been lost. i'm thinking of the word "jacinth" this is a certain kind of orange-- a sort of darker orange. once you know the word, you can always recoqnize it. if you dont know it, it does not exist for you ( the color)"

    hopefully this sheds some light on what i was getting at.

    best,

    surf:cool:
     
    #27     Aug 23, 2002
  8. Adonias

    Adonias

    "Concerning all acts of initiative and creation, there is one elementary truth, that the moment one definitely commits oneself, the Providence moves, too."

    Goethe
     
    #28     Aug 24, 2002
  9. Publias

    Publias Guest

    Reality is not created by words, it is our perception of reality that is often distorted by words, measurements, labels, etc.

    And therein lies the apparent "paradox of reality" that is perpetuated by the minds tendency to constantly apply labels and measurements to reality. The problem is that any and all conceptualizations of the mind about reality will be self-inferential in nature because we are a part of it. We are shaping "it" as much as "it" is shaping us... Ever see the Escher drawing with the two hands drawing themselves??? :)

    We see this all the time in science, mathematics and philosophy.

    Math; Godels Incompleteness Theorem
    Science; The Uncertainty Principle
    Philosophy; "All Cretans are liars"

    It is often a folly of the human condition to confuse our conception of reality with reality itself. I think Plato or Euclid actually had "God was a geometrician" on his gate leading to his home. For a long time the greatest minds actually thought that geometry existed in the outside objective world, that is until Einstein shattered Newtons theory of space-time when it proved to be 4 dimensional when taken past the speed of light... Past the speed of light Space-Time is actually curvature and we know you can't very well place a right angle on a sphere :)

    What I am trying to say is that while words, labels, associations, or any free creation of the mind can create emotion and often create what we perceive to be reality, it is NOT reality itself. This is just our perception of reality that is set in motion by our minds tendency to identify a world outside of ourselves. As my signature says "The finger pointing at the moon is not the moon itself"

    The sun still caressed the face of a pre-historic man before he had a label to try and define it.

    So I stick by my initial answer that the "thing" still exists without the word to define it. An emotion or sensation can still be experienced even know we have no word for it. I know this first hand because I have no words to accurately express the myriad of sensations that I felt the first time I ate mushrooms, but I can assure you that I still experienced it. At the same time an emotion can be lost when the word or conceptualization that perpetuated it is lost.

    PEACE and good trading Marketsurfer and I look foward to hearing what you were actually pointing at :)
     
    #29     Aug 24, 2002
  10. Pabst

    Pabst

    Clear your PM's and check your e-mail
     
    #30     Aug 24, 2002