http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Kd8xp86reY&feature=related
But then the silent response may well be the cancer of humanity!
WORDS are dangerous things!!
by Terry 36 Replies latest watchtower beliefs
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myelaine
dear Terry...
"2.God condemns --not just the specifically misbehaving humans to death for the affront against God's values. No, God condemns all of humanity! This is imputing guilt to other parties before they've had an opportunity to misbehave."
I think that God was condemning SIN, not humanity...otherwise why would He even send a Savior?
love michelle
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Terry
Terry,
So you basically agree with VoidEater: "possibility" is just a word. Absolutely necessary to the working of "reason" but still not a "fact".
I was referring to your initial axiom:
only possible things happen
Actually (!), only actual things happen.
The additional qualification of potentiality to the actual is conventional.
It artificially creates a broader and self-referential category which includes both the actual and things that never happened and never will, but, somehow, "might". In Greek terms, being and non-being (as Aristotle acknowledges): the original sin according to Parmenides.
Formally this is no more and no less provable than any other axiomatical combination of "word" and "fact," e.g. "only just things happen," or, "both just and unjust things happen".
If you reject (and you may well be right) the Platonic ascription of being to "ideas," possibility, like justice, is just a word. But you still have to use it because, to an extent, "it works," and you couldn't even start to think without it.
Which means that there is more to thought than "facts". Thinking is venturing into the non-being
"Possibility" is not just a word. (Just?)
Possibility--in the mathematical sense--is a place holder description of a function which is operational.
X times 7= ?
The X is a variable which has many possible values. Notice the word possible.
Once the value is set for X and the operation is carried out, the result is actual.
What is possible and what is potentially possible is really your point (if I may speak for you.)
In a scientific experiment, certain outcomes are potentially possible. Yet, only the actually possible can result.
Not all potentially possible outcomes are actually possible.
I hope this doesn't sound too petty or nit-picky. I'm just trying to clarify.
Formally this is no more and no less provable than any other axiomatical combination of "word" and "fact," e.g. "only just things happen," or, "both just and unjust things happen".
Words which represent facts are different from words which represent unproved possible facts as yet untested.
Just/Unjust things differ. They are values which have been derrived from actions according to norms.
I cannot agree with Plato. Nothing exists in an "ideal" realm in the sense we normally employ the word "exists". Ideal things are suppositional states of pseudo-being. Gods, essences, ideals, spirit realms, etc. are imaginatively projected superlatives only.
Let me offer a concrete analogy.
In Greek and Hebrew of old, there were no separate number symbols for quantities. Consequently, the dreadful decision was made to use the same symbols as the alphabet for quantities!
Consequently, a senselessly complicated confusion of "meanings" seemed to derrive from quantities (which happen to look exactly like words.
GEMATRIA became possible. GEMATRIA ascribed "meaning" to the seeming appearance of correspondency of quantity and identity.
Certain numbers were imputed to have qualities and omens and supernaturally implicit augurs. The mystics had (and still have!) a field day with this nonsense.
It is the confusion of our symbols in our own head that makes it possible to be swayed by our own jiggering of words to create "possible" worlds greater than the actual one.
If we were to isolate these kinds of words and red flag them (like rounding up Terrorists and placing them in Guantanamo) and subject them to waterboarding---why, we'd all be alot better off having been apprised of their secret illict plans to take over our world!
(See how I resorted to dovetailing a ridiculous metaphor into my analogy?)
We mix literal meanings with figurative meanings all the time and end up confusing ourselves and others.
Religious writers do it and have done---all through history.
THE BIBLE is a large accumulation of meta-layers of imputations of actual meaning with imaginary idealization of weasel words and metaphor.
Until and unless we systematize a way to demarcate our language usage, this sort of confusion will continue forever.
None of us can be careful enough not to trip up even when we are being cautious!!
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Narkissos
Lol.
What about numbers, precisely? Words ("ideas") or facts ("things")?
You don't run into "number two" like you run into the stool in your bathroom, do you?
"X" or "two" are just different levels of abstraction (as in your "potentially possible"); neither "exists" in the sense your stool does. (And, btw, such "levels" can only be distinguished in abstraction, not in reality.)
Again: you cannot even start thinking (which includes reckoning and counting) without venturing into the non-being (which includes creating "categories" like "fingers" applying indistinctly to the different "things" at the end of your hands, which then allows you to affirm you have got "ten" of "them").
It is certainly sound to differentiate the part of abstraction that methodically seeks experiential correspondence with "reality" (e.g. science) from that which doesn't (e.g. fiction). But it is not sound to simply equate the former with "reality"...
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Terry
What about numbers, precisely? Words ("ideas") or facts ("things")?
You don't run into "number two" like you run into the stool in your bathroom, do you?
I'm surprised, Narkissos! I really am.
(I will avoid the easy joke about "number two" and "stool" in the bathroom:)
Numbers represent. That is their function. Words represent, also.
What do they represent. One of two things.
1.Actual realities
2.Constructions of the imagination which have no referent in ostensible reality.
If you bump into that stool in your bathroom it is a quantifiable stool and a quantifiable bump which can be represented by numbers and words. (One stool, three legs, one bump, one bruise, etc.)
My whole point about words being "dangerous" is that we can easily misconstrue (to ourself) the unreal (non ostensible) from the real (quantifiable.)
Numbers have proven to be useful in just about everything from music to architecture to science because they represent quantifiable and predictable information about reality.
Theoretical physics and theoretical math represent also. Sometimes we discover where an equation fits, sometimes we never do. The ones that fit are useful and practical and practicable. Those that don't sit in the closet like a strange pair of shoes waiting for gnarly feet.
My point?
Don't lump the representationl nature of numbers and letters into one simple category! A fiction writer represents an imaginative string of possibilities which may spark the practical man into an action otherwise unforeseen.
Jules Verne gave us From the Earth to the Moon and NASA gave us an actual moon landing.
Verne did not give NASA the actual ways and means. But, the idea fired the practical imagination to achieve through math and ingenuity what Verne only opined.
H.G.Welles, on the other hand, gave us THE TIME MACHINE which as only served to lead equally brilliant thinkers down a blind alley.
So, you have to descrimate the possible from the impossible.
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R.Crusoe
Words are in fact a cancer and a cure to humanity, employed through communications of intent and misunderstandings.
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Narkissos
Terry,
What has your long reply substantially added to this sentence of mine (which you didn't quote)?
It is certainly sound to differentiate the part of abstraction that methodically seeks experiential correspondence with "reality" ( e.g. science) from that which doesn't ( e.g. fiction).
The modus operandi of language, or symbolism, or representation (of which mathematics are a subsection) always starts with diverging from "reality" (as in substituting a "word" or a "sign" to a "thing") and ends up impacting reality again (changing it through technique, morals, politics, etc.). Only you have shorter and longer cycles -- for instance, the "real" feedback of the symbolism of "red, orange and green" in a traffic light may be described as short when compared to the feedback of the Odyssey or Don Quijote on Western civilisation. But there is always a real feedback (whether it is to be assessed as "good" or "bad" is another, fairly subjective, question).
Notions like "justice" or "love" or "freedom" are certainly a different level of abstraction from "numbers," although all are basically "unreal". But they have certainly affected reality in many ways (not all "bad") through the history of mankind.
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Terry
Terry,
What has your long reply substantially added to this sentence of mine (which you didn't quote)?
It is certainly sound to differentiate the part of abstraction that methodically seeks experiential correspondence with "reality" ( e.g. science) from that which doesn't ( e.g. fiction).
The modus operandi of language, or symbolism, or representation (of which mathematics are a subsection) always starts with diverging from "reality" (as in substituting a "word" or a "sign" to a "thing") and ends up impacting reality again (changing it through technique, morals, politics, etc.). Only you have shorter and longer cycles -- for instance, the "real" feedback of the symbolism of "red, orange and green" in a traffic light may be described as short when compared to the feedback of the Odyssey or Don Quijote on Western civilisation. But there is always a real feedback (whether it is to be assessed as "good" or "bad" is another, fairly subjective, question).
Notions like "justice" or "love" or "freedom" are certainly a different level of abstraction from "numbers," although all are basically "unreal". But they have certainly affected reality in many ways (not all "bad") through the history of mankind.
This is all a bit like separating "hand" from "work". We use our hand to work.
We use ideas to set before our mind objects of thought.
An idea serves up an insubstantial non-thing which serves representationally the way a Senator represents a constituency.
How "real" is an idea? That seems to be what we are discussing now. (Either that, or I lost the thread ages ago.)
An idea is not the same as the thing it represents. Unless...you are thinking about ideas :)
It is not the hand I am discussing anymore than it is the idea.
What I am targeting is the actuality of the match up between the thing contemplated and what it represents ostensibly.
In other words, Justice becomes the outcome. Al Capone goes to jail. Justice is become real. Until Al Capone goes to jail there is only the pursuit of that end.
Back to words...
We cannot think without them. We can only form inchoate impressions and engage in emotive responses.
Once we actively attach layers of defined "meanings" to words, for all practical purposes, those "meanings" are the things they represent.
"Dog" becomes all dogs. But, Lassie becomes any particular dog playing the role of the character Lassie.
The general label has no specificity. The definition subsumed points to the reality.
This has become rather tiresome, no?
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R.Crusoe
Modification: Words are in fact a dynamic cancer and cure to humanity, employed through communications of intent and misunderstandings respecting the many existent realities, as a way of changing or preserving them. .
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Terry
We can come close to mastering our words if we'd pay more attention to the exact definitions when we learn them.
There are shades of meanings which delineate distinctions which make a big difference.
The average person pays so little attention to precision when it comes to speaking and writing that it becomes less an effort
of communication and more of an art of mind-reading by gesture and metaphor.
Being clear is the first cause in speaking, writing and learning.
Clarity is best achieved by actually knowing what you are saying in the first place.
A dictionary is a powerful thing to own.
Remember, the dictionary is not a bible. It is a mirror of common usage. Once we slide into gibberish, our dictionary will be a puddle of spit and mud.