Concepts

1.
Our being has the characteristic of data creation with-in and with-out the mind. We create concepts at every turn. We replace the real things with its concepts. We also mistake concepts for the real things.

Plato was one of the first to create the idea of ideal forms that all else is based upon. Real cats are but shadows of the ideal cat, where the ideal cat is the model for the cats of the world. But Plato did not have the benefit of current understanding. Cats did not always exist. It would be safe to say cats did not exist two billion years ago. Did the ideal form already exist then without a single cat to be in existence? What is the point of having the ideal form of cats if there were none to be?

The more likely answer would be that our ideal form of cats comes from our experience and observation of cats by way of blending all that is considered ideal of a cat, rather than something like an ideal form existing before we start.

2.
This is like the present state of Apple’s App Store. It is far from ideal but we keep bits we like here and there and remove other bits that don’t seem to work. Call it “tweaking”, “evolution” or some other term you like. Ideal forms are not there. Only the concept of ideal forms exist. We must not mistake the concept for the real thing or for the verbal form of it.

26 thoughts on “Concepts”

  1. …oops. Put send too soon…
    Consciousness ( but don’t get too caught up on ‘spiritual’ connatations please)
    Behaves in a way, and this behavior allows for reality to function. It functions in a manner to limit the parameters so we are able to be human as a knowable situation. But if the parameters are come against as actual aspects of reality, rather that ideal (of ideas, of knowledge only) then reality it’s comes to be problematized. But usually the parameters function very well, and work at every turn to route the idea back into that ideal place.

    Anyways. Getting way off topic.

    Thanks.

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  2. Hey. But thanks for the considerate responses. I know on a blog it can be rare, but I enjoy the discussion and hopefully I can learn something when people actually reply thoughtfully.

    I feel the Issue of an orientation upon objects is significant; though I do think Harman has good point,and the SRs found something also, I think they are often a but too one sided and scholastic in their approach (speculative, lol)

    A very basic question has to be: how is it possible that we (various thinkers) disagree on what is actually occurring?
    I mean this from proposals of basis or foundations, such as you exhibit, that reality is come back to at times,but then there are times or moments when we are having fantasies (for a term).

    I say simply that reality is real, and agree with much of how you put things. But also that reality does not account for everything that is occurring, that in its capacity to present to total in potential, it always misses something. This is similar to Harmans ‘withdraw from view’ but I do not think it is weighted toward a ‘static place or arena or situation’ that is omnipresent Reality. Chaos, nihilism and such are real figures.

    Remembering: I simply notice the situation where knowledge is occurring. It occurs for consciousness as an effect of consciousness. This effect is thus to be able to notice ‘before and after’ arrivals. Is able to have the situation you describe. Consciousness (for lack of a better word right now).

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  3. I am not talking about absolute truths. I do not believe they exist. Or that if absolute truths do exist we can never know them, only imagine them, or have secondhand knowledge of them.

    Besides, this particular discussion is with a friend who “knows” what I “mean” because we have talked certain points over. Taking pragmatic shortcuts here, in the Gricean sense.

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  4. I think that stasis is an imagined concept. The reality is constrained by time’s arrow. But equally I feel the very action of the very things described as unnatural is in fact part of the reality. Why is it that we human beings cannot accept ourselves of what we are? At the same time why cannot we accept that the very ideas of speculative realism, idealism or anything else is what we “do” as human beings.

    By “segregation” I guess you mean that I give the human centre stage. I am a human. For me to know the rock is not to become the rock but to imagine to be it. That is as close I can get to being it. Any other way of thinking would be to be deceived by our own nature.

    Remembering comes from where? Was it there before anything? Or are we talking metaphorically? While some kind of “remembering” occurs in the form of DNA it is not all Nature or all Nurture. In my opinion, it is a combination of both.

    Going back to the top, I feel stasis is never truly there. It is a concept in contrast to kinesis which is there. While Kant argued, too simplistically perhaps, that space and time is implicit. It is because of the existence of space and time that we sense what we can. Or rather, there is something to be sensed called a reality, objective reality, material reality, physical reality, the world, or some other term. But whether there is something to sense it, imperfectly taking “advantage” of the nature of reality is another matter. There was a point in time where the reality was there but not sensed. And there may be a point in time in the future where again nothing will exist to sense it. It does not make the reality disappear or different in any way to when it was sensed.

    This last point I think is what OOO and SR wants to say. But what is different is that I think OOO and SR do not consider the objects that do sense as being of the same reality. That perhaps we should look at their nature or characteristics as well.

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  5. I don’t think we will ever on this one.

    I understand you come from the OOO and speculative realism point of view, where Kant’s correlationism is not all but viewed as flawed.

    I take to Kant particularly from a cognitive linguistics stance. Everything is embodied. To stand outside of ourselves is to me impossible and not desirable.

    Best to agree to disagree.

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  6. “When a truth is found” presumes that knowledge has access to actual true things, and not merely ‘humanly’ true things.

    It is indeed PM run amok that is was the problem, and not PM as such. It is and continues to be the confusion that arises because everyone supposes their consciousness and knowledge is accessing true things, as a primary ability, rather than a subsequent effect.

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  7. I’d say it is against the PM-run-amok that we have now to define our stable givens. But we cannot do it by merely saying “we are going to define things this way” because that repeats the PM relativity. Instead, reality “finds itself” as a “natural” manner, as an ‘of course’ view, such that the need takes place to find what it not objectionable to place knowledge in a corresponding justified situation that becomes given, so as to not require a further justification.

    Similar to Descartes and what we know now as science, the object of science did not come about through any sort of argument, not by discussing the possibilities of the reality of its object, rather, the mode came about to justify its process to knowledge so it would no longer need a justification in argument beyond “don’t you see?” And the. Eventually a general disregarding of those who refuse or otherwise don’t see.

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  8. … the ‘machine/individual’ idea is founded in an origin ideal, that various segregate universal machine objects arrived out of an essentially true matrix, our machine particular in its ability to be segregate as a part of its knowledge, where everything else about its knowledge it relative and up for debate. Lol.

    I thought you were making an analogy to Plato remembering. But then also talking about how some knowledge is and some knowledge is not. It appeared contradictory, but I see it was not.

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  9. There definitely is an assumption of order in those instances.

    What I call the hard question of consciousness (which is a little different than the famous one) concerns at what point a line that defines what is given is drawn.

    Of course, our time now is very concerned with a realism against which it is out of fashion to argue. One cannot argue with fashion; it’s like punching air! Lol.

    My point actually takes the equally probable case where Being cannot be sorted out as subsequent. Hence, all knowing occurs in an order of remembering. It would thus be within this remembering that we find a second order knowledge involved with the possibility that various instances of knowledge can be classified. Knowledge itself being automatically located as a kind of ‘static and central’ thing by which other things may be ordered for a common human reality.

    It appears that you qualify your answer upon a particular given cosmological order, where a segregation of Being is primary.

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  10. The truth is there. The lies are a truth to the reality. Perception is a struggle to find the truth among the existing lies. I don’t think this process is static but continual. Once the truth is found we still need to keep track of the changing conditions that want to bring about untruth again.

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  11. Imagine for the moment an embryonic being comes into being. It has a brain, the centre of thought and perceptions. However, this embryo has no sense faculties of eyes, ears, nose, mouth, skin. Since nothing is sensed nothing is perceived. There is no start to perception. It has nothing to give it a single thought, and therefore not a single concept whatsoever, of either itself or the reality.

    Let us imagine another being, given access to the reality through senses, but then all sense faculties are turned off after this brief access. Whatever, sense information that the brain was given begins the process of perception and therefore concepts. After turning off all sensation the perceiving mind continues with the available information. Concepts are then built upon the information and concepts, no matter how rudimentary.

    This is what I mean by concepts being available and created. Conceptualisation sustains more conceptualisation. But without the first concepts nothing can begin. And without the first sensations no first concepts come into that being to begin the processes of perception, thought and extended conceptualisation.

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  12. Plato’s remembering; you disagree. You have said that some objects are remembered. But some are only known when they arrive. You seem to also have agreed with me when I suggest that the only way for a thought to occur, the only way that I could know something is if it already existed as a thought or as an idea within me or of me or however you would put that, such that everything that occurs in one’s experience is really a remembering, knowledge that preexisted the arrival of the object but yet was remembered when the object appears.

    Those two cases seem to be exclusive

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  13. Some concepts arrive before the object because the concept maker the object. But other concepts are not created by the maker and cannot arrive before the object.

    Concepts must have a conceiver-object before concepts can come into existence. Before a conceiver-object exists there are no concepts.

    The physical relation of objects exist in reality, with or without a conceiver-object. But nothing before the conceiver-object came into being had a concept of these relations.

    One of the characteristics of the object called the human beings is to be a concept-maker. In the same way the concept of concepts do not come into being without the concept-maker. Concept-making seems to “feed” upon itself.

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  14. Presumably at some point there must be agreement on when a fact is a fact in conventional reality or we are all lost in a postmodern mess? It’s still only an interpretation but one at least that is agreed upon I suppose or am I completely missing the point?

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  15. Fake news is a conscious action to deceive while pretending not to. This is not new. It is just that postmodernism has run amuck and lost its ability to identify and counter the grand-narrative.

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  16. I don’t not think that there can be a line drawn between thought and body. The process of thought does not make thought exist. I happy to say that thought is the mechanical process of the physical reality.

    “Propaganda” is what this machine does. So in the reverse the nature of this machine is to be make biases. It seems distinctions are Burlington made of the human as not being part of the reality, that the processes of the human machine is not worthy of study, that it is possible to remove ourselves from the process of “looking into them without bias”.

    In the end, we only have our point of views to look from, never being able to reach full a unbiased position. Such unbiased stances can only be imagined, not being truly an unbiased viewpoint.

    Disclaimers are needed, to be sure. And we can apologise for our position. I do not think we can ever go beyond that. Any stance that claims it is unbiased stands in contrast to biased views, and holds within this a subconscious, hidden and unacknowledged bias.

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  17. There is much debate about this in political discourse at the moment ~ real v fake. Reality is only what we perceive through our filters. Two sides see the same news and make it into something completely different. Never the Twain shall meet. “Two narratives one screen” to quote the annoying Scott Adams. Although I disagree with 99% of his views, is agree with this. I don’t know how we ever can find a middle way? Everyone is so attached to their view being right.

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  18. I fully understand the state of dictation. Let me reread slowly. I am sure I can make sense of it. After all, I am a human being. lol

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  19. I think the question implicit in the kind of consideration and results like that of your post, is where we draw the partition. This is to say where do we draw the line between what his thinking and what is the body. ? And I mean this in the sense of at what point did thoughts arrive that were not part of the whole functioning universe of from all existence? If we say that this particular organization of cells the neurons in my brain, or what is responsible for my unique organization and expression of thought, at what point did my brain dismiss itself from the rest of the universe to be able to create a fight that is segregate in order to have this kind of consideration of a deal and actual things.

    The assumption is that thought is this common thing, that it exists like a kind a balloon and this balloon is common across what we consider humanity and exists as a kind segregate from all other things in the universe.

    So I think when we put forth these kind of arguments we are necessarily putting forth a particular type of propaganda about what humanity is and how we exist in the universe.

    And kind of on a sidenote I think these kind of arguments that use Plato and this way I really kind of misunderstanding with Plato where you was coming from. Because I would suggest how is it possible for you to even read my sentence is here and understand what I’m saying if they didn’t already exist within you to thereby have an understanding of them.
    Where are you drying the partition to be able to say that these thoughts were generated by some sort of automatic learning machine that gains items or data or some sort of information for something that essentially, which means ideally, exist separately enough from that machine in order that I can take pieces from that other machine to assemble them in such away novel to itself to have these thoughts of an individual person individual person. where are you drying the partition to be able to say that these thoughts were generated by some sort of automatic learning machine that gains items or data or some sort of information for something that essentially, which means ideally, exist separately enough from that machine in order that I can take pieces from that other machine to assemble them in such a way novel to itself to have these thoughts of an individual person individual person

    And I think this might be so much the case that when you think of what I’m implying by making my argument here, your thoughts automatically go to some sort of nihilism or some sort of like ever consistent I don’t know undifferentiated undefined chaotic stasis motor or something like that, but then again that kind of logic king is dependent upon this prior instrument of what humanity is as a common sort and by extension or buy pre-extension what thought is.

    I feel like even though goes unsaid because it so well assumed, that we have come upon sort of two kinds of philosophy. One that assumes and leaves on analyze this thing called fight in this thing called humanity, these things that reside together in eternity in infinity as a unitive and special situation in the universe. This first kind of philosophy should be noted or should be described as a disclaimer or as just a notice for people reading it that it is upholding a certain type of ideology that we generally nowadays associate with civilization in progress and all that stuff. And then perhaps have another philosophy that actually attempts to get at the things in themselves that actually has a purpose of taking Givens and looking into them without bias.

    What u think?

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