And neither do I. We are living in an uncertainty landscape worsened by people paid to extort and distort all within the confines of belief mazes and human transcription errors.
I cannot even know whether the words I write here in this comment mean the same thing to you, the reader, as they mean to me when I write them; in fact it is virtually certain that they can never mean exactly the same things between us because meaning is inherently private and not public. Meaning is within us, and not within the words; words just symbolize private meanings. Oh yes, we do agree that "tree" (the word) refers to 'tree' (the concept) which refers to some "real" (whatever that means) tree (of some kind).
How can we agree? Aren't we really just harmonizing sounds among us--sounds we say to or hear from others plus the pretend-sounds we say silently in our throats. We certainly pretend that we understand one another and share specific ideas with one another; and we certainly pretend that the words we say silently to ourselves mean exactly the same things that they meant the last 200 times we said them.
If we look closely at this, we can easily see we make a lot of mistakes about agreement and about truth, because we experience a lot of misunderstandings and faulty memories and we spend a lot of time excusing these eventualities. It's OK., though, because we automatically limit our expectations on "agreement" with others and with actual past events (and our expectations on other, similar ideas about Truth, Reality, and even our own 'existence'). It seems we do reasonably well with that, from a limited practical standpoint, at least according to the way we (ahem!) think about agreement, truth, and such.
Actually, we really don't know what we are thinking about, either. But that is more difficult to explain than interpersonal misunderstandings. At least with words, we have words we can use to evaluate words with, as thought that always works. But with thoughts, memories, gestures, inclinations, beliefs that we cannot even describe, and so forth, it is a bit more of a problem even to recognize. Suffice it to notice that, ...
"For thousands of years, philosophers and artists from around the world have warned us that we live in a world of illusion, a world where nothing is what it appears to be. This is not some idle fantasy; many remarkable people have stood up to tell us this in no uncertain terms. They say we have come to believe many things that are not true. They say this is the cause of great misery and suffering among us."
"In Set Theory, a formal language of containers, no container can ever contain itself, nor can it contain any other container that contains that container. But in experience, this rule is almost universally broken.
Notice how every word in a dictionary is defined almost entirely by reference to other words in that same dictionary. This is acceptable in casual use because we instinctively know that no two instances of any word can have exactly the same meaning. Words acquire meanings more by usage than by definition. Every instance of a word has a unique meaning because each occurs in a different context, and meaning arises only from context. We want and assume consistent meanings for words, but meanings change according to context, and every context is unique across the universe.
Experiences define one another in the same way that words define one another in dictionaries.
This is relativity of meaning:
The entire universe of meaning arises only from relativity."
A great argument for not getting overly bothered by what we think is going on. Because, is it? Hard to say. So pumping my cortisol through the roof by consuming “news” is utterly pointless.
Try to be aware, and then move on and stand on some grass or smell some flowers. Some things are still real.
good, commendable stuff here Max. ever-lurking bias-confirmation plagues...All of us.
so...Add "the Israeli Mossad" to your Intel Community list. after learning at the foot of CIA A-Dulles from '48-'68...they've more likely been the sage of duplicity since!
Knowledge is usually nothing more than an opinion in which we strongly believe.
We don't know what we are talking about!
I cannot even know whether the words I write here in this comment mean the same thing to you, the reader, as they mean to me when I write them; in fact it is virtually certain that they can never mean exactly the same things between us because meaning is inherently private and not public. Meaning is within us, and not within the words; words just symbolize private meanings. Oh yes, we do agree that "tree" (the word) refers to 'tree' (the concept) which refers to some "real" (whatever that means) tree (of some kind).
How can we agree? Aren't we really just harmonizing sounds among us--sounds we say to or hear from others plus the pretend-sounds we say silently in our throats. We certainly pretend that we understand one another and share specific ideas with one another; and we certainly pretend that the words we say silently to ourselves mean exactly the same things that they meant the last 200 times we said them.
If we look closely at this, we can easily see we make a lot of mistakes about agreement and about truth, because we experience a lot of misunderstandings and faulty memories and we spend a lot of time excusing these eventualities. It's OK., though, because we automatically limit our expectations on "agreement" with others and with actual past events (and our expectations on other, similar ideas about Truth, Reality, and even our own 'existence'). It seems we do reasonably well with that, from a limited practical standpoint, at least according to the way we (ahem!) think about agreement, truth, and such.
Actually, we really don't know what we are thinking about, either. But that is more difficult to explain than interpersonal misunderstandings. At least with words, we have words we can use to evaluate words with, as thought that always works. But with thoughts, memories, gestures, inclinations, beliefs that we cannot even describe, and so forth, it is a bit more of a problem even to recognize. Suffice it to notice that, ...
"For thousands of years, philosophers and artists from around the world have warned us that we live in a world of illusion, a world where nothing is what it appears to be. This is not some idle fantasy; many remarkable people have stood up to tell us this in no uncertain terms. They say we have come to believe many things that are not true. They say this is the cause of great misery and suffering among us."
-- archive.org/details/BurntEliot/page/n8/mode/1up
And, ...
"In Set Theory, a formal language of containers, no container can ever contain itself, nor can it contain any other container that contains that container. But in experience, this rule is almost universally broken.
Notice how every word in a dictionary is defined almost entirely by reference to other words in that same dictionary. This is acceptable in casual use because we instinctively know that no two instances of any word can have exactly the same meaning. Words acquire meanings more by usage than by definition. Every instance of a word has a unique meaning because each occurs in a different context, and meaning arises only from context. We want and assume consistent meanings for words, but meanings change according to context, and every context is unique across the universe.
Experiences define one another in the same way that words define one another in dictionaries.
This is relativity of meaning:
The entire universe of meaning arises only from relativity."
-- archive.org/details/BurntEliot/page/48/mode/1up
Reminds me of Quine...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indeterminacy_of_translation :)
... as well as Nelson Goodman's Ways of Worldmaking.
Not to mention Borges's Library of Babel.
Very perceptive! Approach to words etc., from Quine + Derrida, in my own way, of course.
(Word and Object + Signature Event Context)
A great argument for not getting overly bothered by what we think is going on. Because, is it? Hard to say. So pumping my cortisol through the roof by consuming “news” is utterly pointless.
Try to be aware, and then move on and stand on some grass or smell some flowers. Some things are still real.
good, commendable stuff here Max. ever-lurking bias-confirmation plagues...All of us.
so...Add "the Israeli Mossad" to your Intel Community list. after learning at the foot of CIA A-Dulles from '48-'68...they've more likely been the sage of duplicity since!
No doubt. I simultaneously admire and am horrified by Mossad.