Reference
sekhar
What we speak and write
How do we acquire linguistic skills?
Is not the word an abstract entity all by itself?
Finally, are we using the word or used by it
robdashu
When the word refers to a physical object, that is one level of abstraction, when the word refers to an emotion, thought, perception, etc, it adds another level of abstraction.
Words are dangerous and powerful, because of their past associations within an individual's mind with past events.
Sometimes the word has the same meaning to all, but the more layers of abstraction (among other things) that are added, the more likely listener and speaker are talking about slightly different concepts.
Sometimes I wonder how we can communicate as reliably as we do!
Chris Diederich
“Row, row, row your boat, gently down the stream / Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, life is but a dream”
-English language nursery rhyme
Postmodern Naturalism (PMN) - (first published as a Google doc)
The Filosofy of Facebook and Frames
The Catalog is the Exhibition
The Philosophy of Large Gaps
By: Christophe Diederich
The tenets of my philosophy
1) God is.
2) The Holocaust is the worst thing that ever happened.
3) Super-frame theory of physics
4) Consistency
5) Contamination
6) Neo-conservatism
The core of my philosophy: All objects have a meaning.
Abstract: Imagine a philosophy that explains human action via the reading of letters and other objects in a causal manner. I also offer a new physics and an application to expand thinking beyond current coordinate systems.
Postmodern Naturalism
1. Epistemology and Ontology
This philosophy is based on the premise that in the sense that they are defined objects, which affect the senses via particles of light or matter, in this sense letters are like any other objects.
When I read, on a basic level what is happening is that the text is sending photons into my eyes, which causes a thought. What I am looking at is the object that is the text, often black ink forms on white paper or black pixels surrounded by light pixels.
The thought I have is only a truth if I permit the existence of thought. We can permit thought as physical phenomena not yet fully grounded in more basic phenomena like particles and waves, or we can create a new phenomenon – let us call it “ephemerum” – in which thought exists. I will decide against a new substance like that. I would also deny that thought exists as a manifestation of particles and waves and other, older, proven phenomena. I deny the truth of thought. For me it is a crutch concept for an inability to grasp the immediacy and physical reality of images outside of our visual field. By true I mean that which is used in philosophy to describe regularities of the world. Fiction is no less real, but it is not well suited for man’s desire to create order in our chaotic world.
As I have now canceled thought out of the operation, reading becomes a closed circle of well-known mechanical phenomena. The image of the text causes an image in the mind. By mind I understand the sum of all images of any given observer.
The meaning of the text is its contour. Meaning and shape is the same thing. There is nothing more behind this. In language I see the truth about the world. The letter is the God face. I will show that I understand by following instructions, but what I am really doing is acting on an image and creating new ones. I read my world like I read the text, taking cues from the language of its objects and their arrangement. I too am a letter and so it is letters looking at letters, God loving Himself. The face is a letter is a book – this is the genius of Mark Zuckerberg. The human not only reads the objects, the objects read him, and a multifold of narratives about an individual are created, that we may pass through via a postmodern naturalist expansion of the mind explained under the point: Application. The object essentially reads the human observer and reacts accordingly. In this sense, we are constantly creating our own reality. A multifold of realities pass by each other as humans are amongst themselves.
The thought that the text causes in me is expressed in my body – this is what Spinoza meant by the mind being the thought of the body. My extremities read other objects and conjure up images that my eyes do not see, but they are part of my mind and part of reality.
2. Contamination Theory
I arrived at the literal theory of nature by thinking about reading. For a long time I had been holding the idea that it may not be such a good idea after all to read as much as possible or even a lot.
Based on Spinoza’s affect theory, I theorized that any reading would actually shape the mind. Bad reading will shape the mind poorly. Literature does not just simply blow through the mind like a fresh gust of wind, leaving on its way a neutral trace of its content for the mind to remember and work with. Literature changes the mind, for this it is that we say a book has changed my life. It is necessary to protect the mind from bad reading.
One might argue, then how is it that a great mind such as Karl Marx was able to stay great despite reading so much, all of which was most likely not on the level of an Aristotle, or a Hegel (Hegel by the way is one of my knowledge gaps in philosophy).
To answer this reply, let me make a detour via a common academic procedure; to read as much on a topic before writing on it and most certainly – in the case of social science – before judging it.
Now Marx wrote the Communist Manifesto, his main analysis of capitalism, before he wrote Das Kapital, his main description of capitalism. He read the most on capitalism between the manifesto and Das Kapital. Das Kapital contains no value statements on capitalism.
It is as though the bountiful lecture on capitalism neutralized his mind on capitalism. In this, the academics are correct; namely that bountiful lecture objectifies the opinion. The statement that one must only form an opinion after one has sufficiently informed oneself seems not to be true for Marx. In any case, what he read on capitalism seems to have shifted his opinion – for better or worse is not to be judged right here.
The shift signals that reading shapes the mind, that a certain kind of literature can form one’s thought in one way or another. Bad, poor, and despicable literature makes for a bad, poor, and despicable mind. In the spirit of the correlation of what is good and what is rare (Spinoza), most literature is bad, poor, and despicable. Do not read everything, far from it.
3. Criticism of Neurology
This is the fallacy of Neurology; namely that thought is centered on the brain. One example: If I am behind a corner and stretch my arm beyond the corner so people around it can see, then I feel I am being watched, although my brain and eyes remain out of the sight of the people. If a pinky finger and a light source are in the frame of reference then the pinky sees the light (Feynman). Numa, a colleague from high school who is blind on one eye, once replied upon my inquiry of what it was like to be blind, that it is as though one were looking through one’s pinky. This is illustrative of the ability of all body members, not just the head, to comprehend a sensation.
Behavioral Psychology shows that movements can heal one’s mind; that not just thoughts can.
4. The computer analogy
There is no reason why we can fathom an interconnected virtual world of meaningful data points and not see that the real world is exactly the same, that all of reality is made of data points that communicate between each other in dimensions not yet accessed by human observation, that this happens all at once and that everything, everywhere is here now. This description is a result of the concept of space-time (Einstein) and it is the singularity (McKenna) happening right now. In fact, herein lies the merger of the real and virtual worlds.
5. Physics
One object reads the other and vice-versa. The reading affects both objects and I will call the causal connection the reading line. The reading line is a relative phenomenon of the frame of reference with a high probability of occurrence between two objects (Feynman).
5.1. Super-frame theory of physics
One way to think about the universe is like a computer. There is no reason then that the system should not have BIOS, that programs should not run apps, whereby seemingly separate events are connected via a higher-level script. There is no reason then that one would deny this system intelligence.
Concerning the question of gravity; This approach remains in the realm of general relativity (Einstein): A massive object attracts a less massive one because the former has more time than the latter (given an equal size), so the latter makes up for this difference in motion.
I theorize frames (Goffman) that enable causalities on a higher level of reflection (Spinoza). Reflection is a dimension of the universe. A frame allows the spin of one particle to determine the spin of another, remote particle. An empirical counterpart of a reflexive super-frame could be dark matter (Oort). Dark matter thus would exist as an extended object in the dimension of reflection. This would also mitigate the problem of vacuum. Common experience says there is an empty space between objects, even between molecules of air, yet modern philosophy teaches that there is no vacuum. In super-frame physics you can have vacuum in one frame stabilized by another. In the future, mechanical accidents can be prevented by activating dark matter with a charge and thereby not letting non-dark matter collide.
Allowing for super-frames also lets us detect proof of the end of the universe. We can prove the big bang in the dimensions of space and time by the linear phenomenon of cosmic background radiation. The end of the universe lies similarly in the dimensions of space and time but we cannot seem to find linear proof, such as for example cosmic foreground detachment energy. The access to future events lies in non-linear phenomena in reflective levels of space and time where future events may leave traces such as non-congruent structuration of abstract space-time.
6. Mathematics
Numbers are like letters except that their sentences demand stability to be correct. The human body confirms this stability in a similar way as when it listens.
7. Biology
In a super-frame causal system, there is no reason why genes cannot change intra-life.
The second fallacy of Darwinism is the constancy of any parameter in relative evolutionary processes; who is to say that a given environment stays more or less the same so that a species may adapt. With constantly changing environments and species, an optimal fit is a rare event and not part of a historical development towards an optimized species.
Free choice is one of the laws of human nature.
8. Psychology
Psychological illness is due to the body reacting to a certain narrative and associating with it a particularly negative value. What remains however is the fact that the pre-condition for psychological afflictions is boredom. This is the empty space wherein the negative narrative can move.
Schizophrenics simply respond more to globules (see Application) than other people.
Dreams are all the globules of the sub-conscious.
9. Politics
If the Destruction of the Jews had been even more successful, the oral tradition in Judaism would have been wiped out. The oral tradition is a linear connection to people in other points in space-time. Completely destroying this connection will render our global society’s reading of the world less humane, as it is the Jews that brought us the Ten Commandments.
10. Medicine
Similarly to non-linearity in evolutionary progress, we recognize that human health is not eternally expansive but rather curbs linear growth with a self-destructive core code that leaves us coming back to a similar point at the end of our lives as the one we were at in the beginning.
11. Immortality
As our lives are a set of unique data points in space-time (Kurzweil), they can never really be lost and can be re-enacted with a program run over our life code. We cannot rule out that the life we are currently living is just such an operation. We are able to change the direction of our life and run different reading lines. This intra-life dynamism gives life an aspect of real-time eternality, as the changing of course supersedes any future activation of one fixed life-code.
12. Ellipsoid Image of Life
The shape of the world can be conceived as an ellipsoid. Life is a reading of this entire ellipsoid.
13. Learning of Languages
Languages are learnt not by example, but through themselves. The sentence: Go to the sink and wash your hands under the faucet – this sentence leads to a similar action because its image causes the human to do this.
14. Application
The new coordinate system I have developed is the globule, with one axis being the reading line and the other the level of reflection. It allows the observer to know things beyond his visual field. For example, one can see who is walking up a flight of stairs hidden behind a wall or under a floor by thinking of the reading line between the people on the stairs and, for example, the bottom face of the floor (ceiling) and of a one-higher level of reflection.
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Wu Li
Language is processed by the same parts of the brain used for vision and for making tools and can be explained using simple pattern recognition. Recently neurologists documented the pattern recognition required for people to intuitively count up to five which is likely the origin of all logics and mathematics, while another four more complex pattern recognition networks are required to establish the foundations of syntax for language. At any rate, the evidence thus far overwhelmingly supports the idea that language is related more to Intuitionistic mathematics and logic than classical ones and simple pattern recognition. Whether you consider that using the word or being used by words depends on the context as far as I'm concerned because words have no demonstrable meaning outside specific contexts.