Why is everything so "2" ?
- Thread starter maruschx
- Start date
DaveC426913
Valued Senior Member
The book 'Fifty Shades of Grey' has sold over 60 million copies.
By River's accounting, that makes it 200 times more true than the afterlife.
Differences can't be derived from featureless homogeneity or uniformity. Arrangements of such dissimilarity and conflict likewise provide the distinctions between things and the meanings of things in the course of relating them to each other. Languages or symbolic systems also have to lack unvarying regularity in order to be made distinct themselves and perform their function of representing the original diverse circumstances of human experience (as well as our invented abstractions, fictions, prescriptive principles, etc).
Two characteristics are the most minimal "alphabet" for supplying patterns. That parsimony is why binary opposition would arise and be so commonly favored (or if not that, then eventually favored by certain endeavors like computational enterprises).
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Magical Realist
Valued Senior Member
I am in agreement that language is huge part of the construction process of what we mean by the world or reality. But language is not the same as us individually. It is something we learned and evolved an innate capacity for. The ability to refer sensibly, to describe, to generalize, to question, and to analyze. All of this comes out of our proficiency with language and it's underlying structures of semiotics and logic. Language is a part of that collective body of information we know as culture that we get programmed with in the first 18 years of our lives. It objectifies what we perceive and subjectifies who perceives. Even time and space may derive their distinctive qualities from the conditioning of our cultural matrix. A recent sci movie on alien contact visited this possibility. Can the world exist separately from the cultural software that runs the hardware of our brains? That's a question we have yet to settle. I suspect not..There is no sense talking about something that can't be referred to with words.
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Write4U
Valued Senior Member
IMO, cognition of "two" started very early in the evolutionary process of most animals
a) most animals have two or sets of two physical attributes. Two arms, legs, eyes, ears, etc.
b) these physical attributes creates a *symmetry* a natural balance.
c) when symmetry is broken, our minds recognize that something is amiss. It is not in balance.
IMO, this may be due to a natural mirroring function, which allows humans and other intelligent animals, to mirror behaviors. We often see children imitating (mirroring) the movements of a parent.
http://www.mathsisfun.com/algebra/equation-symmetry.html
and
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror_neuron
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maruschx
Registered Member
I really like this statement as it's making the way our mind is working visible in a very tangible way. Language is always referring to something, if we say "something that can't be referred to with words" we are making a reference again. But it is exactly pointing to the challenge, we have no chance to catch something behind the changing horizon of our language. That's why it's making no sense to consider something behind it as reality.
As a reply to Michael 345:
When we think about how our perception of the world might have developed and with that our mind, would you agree to the statement, that the only way we can perceive reality is through
our eyes, ears, nose ... the sensors our body has ? And that we have the ability to transform and persist these perceptions in our mind in representations of it ?
The mind is working like a mirror and is then able to mirror these representations again. That's why we can think about things we have seen in the past, can create abstractions, reflect these again and so on.
Over time we learned to use our ability to make sound to assign certain sounds to certain representations, we started talking and then again, created a next layer of representation (writing, mathematics as representation of number concepts or spoken words).
But the initial process is completely happening within us, we can either verify these thoughts, pictures etc. then again with our perceptions (eye, ear, mind) or with other human beings, but that's it. And this is done and only possible by (all forms of) language, you can't tell me about any perceptions you have made without using words or signs, and without telling someone, it is only existing as something "perceived" within you.
That's what I meant with "Simplified, the reality we're perceiving (as humans) is an individual construction, verified and aligned with others over long time, driven by evolution and based on language."
I find it peculiar you
really like this statement as it's making the way our mind is working visible in a very tangible way
because the sentence does not make sense
I will try and express my comments about your post but I am very unclear as to the purpose or concerns or point you are trying to convey
* We perceive various aspects of reality through various senses yes
That is the job of the senses
To provide the body with information about the world around us
* We have a memory yes
* I would not characterise the mind as a mirror or the memory in that way either
We can recall memory yes
* OK
* OK
* We can reinforce or dispute our memory by various means yes
* OK
You should be able to match my * points to your text
"Simplified, the reality we're perceiving (as humans) is an individual construction, verified and aligned with others over long time, driven by evolution and based on language."
Reality exist regardless of our perception of it or not
So it is NOT a individual OR collective construction
We describe what we perceive and as a function of language we assign words to our perceptions
As we learn more about our environment our language expands
From your original post at 7 you seem to be fixing about the number 2
As far as the human body is concerned there is so much more of the body of which there is only 1 so forget about the body
As for 8 if you think you can encode reality with 0s and 1s it really depends
I'm to lazy to look up what a word like cat
would look like in digital code but while the code would only use 0 and 1 there would be of them
So 9 not a valid observation and
10 no
Yazata
Valued Senior Member
I kind of agree with you, to the extent that language and its associated conceptual vocabulary is central to our ability to say anything about reality. But I disagree vehemently with any assertion that whatever it is that we say about reality is the reality that we are talking about. That idea seems like a fundamental confusion to me.
That's where you and I part company. But it does help explain a lot of your willingness to believe in ghosts and ufos, doesn't it?
So if I want to be able to walk through walls, all I have to do is adopt a radically different world-view in which that's possible, right? Lind of like Neo in the Matrix.
That's my fundamental argument with Thomas Kuhn, who argued that people with different "paradigms" live in different worlds. In a way I agree, but Kuhn appears to have meant it quite literally and I would interpret it more figuratively.
My question is, if they are literally living in different worlds, how is it possible for them to bump into each other in the hallway?
Ok, I agree with that. But I don't see any problem with us referring to the universe beyond our own thoughts and linguistic constructions with words. That's what the physical sciences (to say nothing of common sense) do every day. When I point at the sky and exclaim "There's the Moon up there", I'm not saying "There's my concept of the Moon floating up there" or even "There's our current culture's socially-constructed concept of "the Moon" manifesting in the spatial concept of "up there".
Of course anything that I say about the Moon will express my knowledge and beliefs about the Moon, which is obviously culturally contextual. It will be embodied in whatever language I'm using and will be expressed in the conceptual vocabulary that I have available. But those things aren't what I'm referring to. At best, the conceptual stuff just helps shape the propositions that I'm asserting about the ostensible that thing that I'm pointing at and interacting causally with (through vision in this case).
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Magical Realist
Valued Senior Member
I know the idea of a culturally constructed reality is radical. I myself expose myself to contradictions such is where did the culture come from and what about the brain that is programmed with it. Surely these aren't also constructs of the cultural matrix. So I leave this question more open-ended as indeed it is. To what extent is reality a construct, and to what extent is it real in itself? Since I do believe in the paranormal and ufos and esp and such, I have to face the fact that very much of what we perceive about reality is only a fraction of what is going on out there. Does an ant's perception of the jungle even qualify as "the jungle" as it really is? Is our highly filtered rendition of the world a faithful representation of the entirety or more of a catoonish grotesque of it? Like comparing a stick figure of a person to the actual person?
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Write4U
Valued Senior Member
The physical stuff is real, it's our perspective that varies. That's why we can and must use the term "relative to the observer" in everything we experience.
Even if we duplicate at another level the external world as it is in our extrospective experiences and everyday conceptions, science or physics in particular will still turn it into a multiple array of competing, super-weird models that outdo even the philosophical doctrines of old (example below). Reifying it at an abstract or metaphysical level is not going to preserve the original version which commonsense or phenomenal realists desire the world to be.
- Natalie Wolchover: On the timeless boundary of our space-time bubble, the entanglements linking together qubits (and encoding the universe’s dynamical interior) would presumably remain intact, since these quantum correlations do not require that signals be sent back and forth. But the state of the qubits must be static and timeless. This line of reasoning suggests that somehow, just as the qubits on the boundary of AdS space give rise to an interior with one extra spatial dimension, qubits on the timeless boundary of de Sitter space must give rise to a universe with time — dynamical time, in particular. Researchers haven’t yet figured out how to do these calculations. “In de Sitter space,” Swingle said, “we don’t have a good idea for how to understand the emergence of time.”
One clue comes from theoretical insights arrived at by Don Page and William Wootters in the 1980s. Page, now at the University of Alberta, and Wootters, now at Williams, discovered that an entangled system that is globally static can contain a subsystem that appears to evolve from the point of view of an observer within it. Called a “history state,” the system consists of a subsystem entangled with what you might call a clock. The state of the subsystem differs depending on whether the clock is in a state where its hour hand points to one, two, three and so on. “But the whole state of system-plus-clock doesn’t change in time,” Swingle explained. “There is no time. It’s just the state — it doesn’t ever change.” In other words, time doesn’t exist globally, but an effective notion of time emerges for the subsystem. --Quantum Gravity’s Time Problem
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Beaconator
Valued Senior Member
Number Four is not to be bought!
The reason everything is all 2"$. Is because communication is the only way to make two.
The reason everything is all 2"$. Is because communication is the only way to make two.
DaveC426913
Valued Senior Member
But Number Five is alive!
Beaconator
Valued Senior Member
Unk....
Write4U
Valued Senior Member
We can represent the word cat in many different ways. The word is a mathematical construct.
As you mentioned, we can use binary code.
We can use decimal code.
We can use Morse code.
We can use dots or holes on an old computer punch card
We can use sound wave-lengths or grunts and clicks
We can use sign language.
We can use alphabetical symbols (in many different symbolic languages)
We can use associative language such as "meow"
This is what Roger Antonsen so entertainingly explained;
A useful conversion table;
http://www.unit-conversion.info/texttools/octal/#data
Written and spoken language is totally subjective. There is no universal standard. Each word has many meanings and each meaning can be done with alternate words. We can assign whatever sound or symbol we wish, all based on the imagination. The result is words can get in the way of reality. Lawyers, politicians and con artists can use words to twist truth and justice.
Math is somewhat different, but it too is a type of language. Math is only as good as the assumptions we use to describe the theory, with the assumptions of a theory, using the subjectivity of written and spoken language. If I assume I can travel twice the speed of light, math will get me to the moon in half the time of someone who travels only at the speed of light.
Language was used to iron out and assign the theorems and operations of math. For example, consider division by a fraction; 1/(1/2)=2. This is a perpetual motion machine created by language for math.
If I started with one gallon of gasoline and divided it by 1/10, I get 10 gallons? This math function is very flexible and can be used to solve the world's energy problem. It can also be used to feed the poor.
The Miracle of Jesus, feeding the multitudes, with a couple of fish and a loaf of bread turns out to be mathematically possible. He only had to divide the fish and bread by 1/1000. Math can be used to perform miracles.
Math is somewhat different, but it too is a type of language. Math is only as good as the assumptions we use to describe the theory, with the assumptions of a theory, using the subjectivity of written and spoken language. If I assume I can travel twice the speed of light, math will get me to the moon in half the time of someone who travels only at the speed of light.
Language was used to iron out and assign the theorems and operations of math. For example, consider division by a fraction; 1/(1/2)=2. This is a perpetual motion machine created by language for math.
If I started with one gallon of gasoline and divided it by 1/10, I get 10 gallons? This math function is very flexible and can be used to solve the world's energy problem. It can also be used to feed the poor.
The Miracle of Jesus, feeding the multitudes, with a couple of fish and a loaf of bread turns out to be mathematically possible. He only had to divide the fish and bread by 1/1000. Math can be used to perform miracles.
So very wrong
If it was correct I would hire you as my accountant
Divide 1 gallon of gasoline by
1/10th
you get
10 1/10ths of gasoline