Be rational. Don't adhere to the irrational game of "let the rare exceptions dictate the general rule". This only results in more harm than good. — Roger Gregoire

That this kind of bullshit is one of the reasons why serious debate is next to impossible. Laymen weighing in with a superficial understanding of the science and no references or citations to back up their outlandish claims. — Isaac

Not once in your emotional rant did you refute my logic. -- can you? -- can you find a logical flaw in my words (other than just saying they are wrong)? — Roger Gregoire

I'm with Isaac on this one. It strikes me as extremely unlikely that a significant proportion of the viral load in the atmosphere would be removed by the lungs of people not wearing masks. I looked, but couldn't find evidence either way on the web. My conclusion - the scenario described in Roger Gregoire's post is unsupported unless he can provide evidence. This isn't a matter of "logic." It's a matter of fact. As far as I can see, RG has his facts wrong.

Oh, Ok. Then I'll address my remarks to Joshs; "convey" implies that something moved from here to there, so one might be tempted to ask what it is that was moved, and set that out in words. But nothing - no thing - was moved. — Banno

Convey (from web) - Make (an idea, impression, or feeling) known or understandable to someone.

Second definition.

Display might be a better choice. — Banno

I was using Joshs' language. I think "convey" and "display" are both fine.

I'll agree with this, but add that it is by way of a definition of meaning. Music and visual arts can can of course still be profound. There is a strong sense in which setting out the meaning of a piece is detracting from it. — Banno

Yes, I guess it comes down to what we think "means" means. In everyday language, "meaning" is often used to mean significance. That's not what we're talking about. So, yes, the best music and art is profound, even if it doesn't mean anything.

But don’t the components of a painting tell a story? — Joshs

I've used this long quote about four times in the past month. Now I have to do it again. This is a quote from "October Light," by John Gardner. A French horn player describing what he hears when he listens to a composition. I've hidden the text to keep the post short.



Emphasis mine. Art is the same as music. It means nothing at all but what it is.

I could describe in words da Vinci’s last supper, or show the painting. Could the words used to describe the scene ever convey more than the visual image? — Joshs

No. The painting will always convey more. More importantly, what the painting conveys is different from what any interpretation provides.

Sorry. There just wasn’t a trigger in your comments sufficient to inspire me to engage with them. I did explain myself, which I considered to be enough, so..... — Mww

I don't mind that you didn't want to respond. I was using your response as an example of the pitfalls of depending on language unselfconsciously.

Is the sharing of a perceptual image or a sound recording also the telling of a story? — Joshs

I think language is fundamentally different from other modes of expression. I got in a discussion with my physical therapist the other day. He plays jazz saxophone. I asked him if music means anything. He hadn't thought about that before. My position is that music, and visual arts, don't mean anything. Meaning comes with words.

What we do by naming, using words, is telling stories.
— T Clark

Perhaps, but far and away too close to empirical anthropology, and very far from epistemological metaphysics. I have very little interest in the former, and great interest in the latter. I want to know how the method by which naming occurs, not so much the post hoc employment of it. The former makes necessary I understand myself, which I control, but the latter only makes possible another understands me, which I cannot. — Mww

I was thinking about this some more. It struck me that your response to my post is a good example of what I was trying to describe. Because of one word I used, "stories," you dismissed the rest of my thoughts as "empirical anthropology," rather than engaging with them. I wonder if I had just written "One of the things stories words do is apply human values to the world" you would have been willing to pay attention to what I wrote.

To save you some time, Isaac thinks intelligent life is extremely rare and that we are the only ones at least in our group of galaxies. — Maximum7

Based on very circumstantial evidence (and my own unjustified intuition), I'm betting on life being common and intelligence not being extremely rare. Here's some "evidence."

• Life started on Earth just about as soon as the environment cooled down enough for complex molecules to form.
• As we start to understand how life began, it seems the processes involved may be explainable without the need for vastly improbable or exotic phenomena.
• It appears that complex nervous systems have evolved independently at least twice in the history of life in organisms very far apart on the evolutionary scale - vertebrates, including humans, and invertebrates, including mollusks.

So, does that prove anything. No, but it does allow me to say what I want with at least a veneer of justification. I bet we find life on Mars or one of the planetary moons. Maybe I just hope we do. If we do, that will change everything.

The second option, also worth seriously considering, is Ernst Mayer's view. He points out that in the only planet we know of that contains life in this universe, intelligence seems to be a lethal mutation. Look around, most of the species that survive and thrive are single cell organisms. — Manuel

if of course we develop at such a pace and do not bomb ourselves back into the Stone Age, for which there is no guarantee. — Art Stoic Spirit

Unfortunately, it doesn't seem unlikely to me that one of the reasons we haven't met alien civilizations is that whenever one reaches a certain level of technological advancement it destroys itself.

It is surely the mark of intelligence to rush about the Galaxy exploring, invading, and exploiting everyone everywhere, and generally interfering and demonstrating the superiority of ones' civilisation. If one just minds one's own business, one might be mistaken for a dumb dolphin or something. — unenlightened

I'm not sure what a highly advanced alien civilization might do, but I agree that assuming they would behave like us is not justified.

Yea but the sage acts by doing nothing. — frank

Good point! Then again, no one ever accused me of being a sage.

PRIDE and UNITY. Extreme capitalism (with no reigns) has made Americans numb to a sense of community! It’s “I got mine fuck you”! Hitler was wrong, but you gotta admit he made his people UNITED and PROUD! We just gotta use that magic in the right way. — Trey

An oversimplification by an order of magnitude or so, but I agree that corporate capitalism is the, or at least one of the, primary villains.

A little advice - "Hitler was wrong, but...," is never the right start to a comment if you expect to be taken seriously.

Aw, geez Frank. Now I have to get off my ass and continue this discussion.

And yes, naming changes things in a sense, absolutely.
— Manuel

How so? — Mww

What we do by naming, using words, is tell stories. We are telling stories about the world. One of the things stories do is apply human values to the world. Forgive me now while I vastly oversimplify. We talk about apples because apples are important as sources of food. We name snakes because they are dangerous. We separate green out of the spectrum of electromagnetic radiation because sometimes in the world things which reflect light in that range of wavelengths are important to us. We didn't name other wavelengths because they didn't influence our lives, or we didn't know they did. Now we talk about radio waves because somewhere along the line, they became important.

Names, words, say "Pay attention here. This is important."

There's no way to directly share X experience with another person. — Manuel

I'm stepping on thin ice, so forgive me if I retract this right away - There are ways of sharing experience other than using names and words. That's what art and music do. Physical and emotional intimacy. Now, stepping out even further on thinner ice - maybe that's what showing someone how to do something does, e.g. teaching someone how to ride a bike.

Apples are separate from the rest of everything else after they are named. “Apple” represents the separation. — Mww

I'm ok with this.

Not before. After. Objects are already things, therefore not by becoming things, but by becoming phenomena. Phenomena precede naming. — Mww

But this has me scratching my head. How can an apple be a thing if it has not been separated from the rest of everything else.

Apple is merely a word that represents some real physical object with certain empirical properties; that object, that thing, before it is given to human perception, just is in the world, just whatever it is, just whatever that happens to be. And no more than that can be said about it. — Mww

How can a thing be a thing or an object before it is separated from everything else? The Tao does not contain or include apples. It's just the Tao, which is the name we use for that which can not be named.

The representation always presupposes that which is represented; words always presuppose that to which they relate. — Mww

I was nodding my head in agreement till you got to this. That's not how I see it. There is a sense in which things do not exist until they are named. Yes, I know. That is not the standard way of looking at existence, but is sometimes a useful way to think about it.

This is quite apparent from the fact we know a priori we cannot look directly at the thing called “sun”, which makes explicit there is something about that object not contained in the mere word that represents it. — Mww

I can't remember anything from when I was a baby, but I'm pretty sure I learned not to look at the sun from experience.

In Yogic logic, one of the practices is to turn thought off completely. Such a mental state is surprisingly innately pleasant, for me at least. Walking along a beach, or through a forest, just absorbing it thoughtlessly and nonjudgmentally has this affect of connecting me with the surroundings that is lost once thought returns. — Pop

I don't know anything about "yogic logic," so I'm making some assumptions. I'm ok with what you've written, as long as we stipulate that "turning thought off completely" does not mean walking around in a haze. Many western philosophers have interpreted eastern meditative practice that way. In that kind of state, you are paying attention, fully awake and aware, and actively participating in the world.

In short, naming something is a very brief and concise way of expressing something which is much richer in experience than a single word could convey. It's the difference between all the ways you could think about trees and how you interact with them as opposed to merely naming them. — Manuel

I'm mostly ok with this. Naming can be brief and concise because something is lost. Something is also changed. The thing-in-itself is different from the thing.

I think one place where the thing-in-itself really differs from the Tao is that the Tao is everything all at once undifferentiated. Kant seems to think that apples are separate from the rest of everything before they become things. Before they are named. That doesn't make sense to me. Keeping in mind that my experience with Kant is limited, so I may be misrepresenting him.

I say that a ‘feeling’ is a particular change being made in the way we relate to a situation, just as a word is. — Joshs

I disagree. That's not how I experience either feelings or words.

What give a feeling the richness a word doesn’t have? Is it some intrinsic , immediate mystery? — Joshs

Probably the word "feeling" is not the right one. I generally use the word "experience." The experience includes everything; sights, smells, sounds, touch, heat, cold, along with interoception, i.e. our internal sense of our bodies. It's all of those things at once. It is possible to experience the world directly in this way without words or concepts. I can do it...sometimes. Mostly not, but enough to know that it's possible.

Is it some intrinsic , immediate mystery? — Joshs

It's not a mystery. The experience comes first. The words are something added by processing and interpreting the experience. Maybe the words are the mystery. Cue eerie music.

The distinction resides in the point-of-use of a speculative human cognitive system on the one hand, and the talking about the conditions under which that point-of-use system operates, on the other. — Mww

I don't understand. Can you give me an example.

Intentional communication. — Mww

Again, an example would be helpful.

I can also think ‘pre-verbally’, using the felt as a of a situation. But to me words are merely more richly articulated versions of a felt sense. — Joshs

I think it's the other way around. Words are chopped up and stacked representations of something much richer.

The felt sense is a vague , impressionistic sketch of what the word crystalizes. — Joshs

The crystallization you refer to is achieved by throwing away much of the information included in the original experience.

Is it anything like this? — Joshs

I read it a couple of times and still don't really understand what he's getting at. There is this:

Thus intellectual meanings are in their very nature aspects of subjective feelings. Any moment's subjective feeling implicitly contains many possible meanings which could be differentiated and symbolized. — Joshs

Which I disagree with. It's like he's trying to define the problem away. What does it mean to say that a "feeling implicitly contains many possible meanings." I think he has it backwards.

The answer to the second question then becomes....to know a thing it is necessary to conceive it, and to conceive a thing it is necessary to represent it, but the mere representation of a thing makes the naming of it only possible and not necessary. — Mww

I don't understand the distinction you are making between the representation and the naming. How is it represented if not in words?

By the same token, taking into consideration the second question really meant to ask.....how can I know you know something that can’t be put into words (or some kind of expression)....then it is the case I cannot. — Mww

No. That's not what I "really meant to ask." I think my question is clear. Also, what did you have in mind when you wrote "some kind of expression."

But feeling is already an expressing , and as such it IS a kind of talking. — Joshs

You're changing the meaning of the word "talking." Talking uses words. — T Clark

I left something important out. I know that what I call experience, wordless awareness, is different from knowing or understanding using language. It feels different in a profound way. It uses different parts of me. If you don't feel that same difference, then there's probably not much further we can go with this discussion.

That doesn't mean you're wrong. It just means you experience the world differently than I do.

Yes, but saying one knows them is also wrong. They just are the case; explanation stops here. — Banno

The word I use is "experience." I have many experiences that do not involve words. It's probably true that most of my experiences don't involve words. I think that's true of most people. Let me think about that.

But feeling is already an expressing , and as such it IS a kind of talking. — Joshs

You're changing the meaning of the word "talking." Talking uses words. This from the web:

Talk - speak in order to give information or express ideas or feelings; converse or communicate by spoken words.

It is the arts and poetry in particular that can deal with this kind of knowing I would say — Janus

I agree with this.

Yes, but saying one knows them is also wrong. — Banno

I agree with this. It doesn't make sense to say I know or understand something if I can't put it into words.

I think we know many things which cannot be put into words or at least definitively explained in words. Much of what we know is pre-cognitive, but I don't think that is the same as the different things the Daoists and Kant, in their different ways, were trying to get at. — Janus

Are there "pre-cognitive" things that can't be put into words that are different from what Lao Tzu and Kant are talking about? I don't think so, but I'm not sure of that at all. I'll think about it. And it's not that they can't be put into words, it's that when you do, they become something different. That difference between the Tao and the 10,000 things is at the heart of our experience of the world.

From the relatively little I know (compared to the specialist) of Daoist ideas I have formed the impression that they are positing, by hinting at, a universal movement of life and energy that flows as an undercurrent to our common life as it is conceived, in all of us. This universal dance of life will be intuited directly by those who are able to work effectively on their dispositions such as to quiet the dualistic mind that blinds us to its mistaken views. — Janus

There are more than a hundred translations of the "Tao Te Ching" along with dozens of commentaries written 2,500 years ago and last week. Each one of these has a different understanding of that Lao Tzu was trying to say. I've been in several reading groups and no one could ever agree. [irony]It is only through long study and meditation that I have finally reached an understanding which is clearly and unequivocally what Lao Tzu always intended.[/irony] So, no. That's not how I see it.

Kant, to my knowledge, denies the Spinozistic idea of rational intuition, which for Spinoza (and the Daoists) is the source of ideas of the eternal and the universal. — Janus

I don't know what "rational intuition" means, but it doesn't sound like anything I'd ever use to characterize the Tao as described in the Tao Te Ching. I don't know if Kant would have recognized Lao Tzu's ideas as similar to his. Probably not. I believe he was working about a century before eastern philosophical texts started to be available in Europe.

I wouldn't go as far as to say that our naming of things brings our world of things into existence, and I don't think Kant would either. — Janus

I'm certain you're right about Kant. Lao Tzu writes (Mitchell Verse 40):

All things are born of being.
Being is born of non-being.

Non-being generally refers to the Tao and being to the 10,000 things. I think this way of talking about reality makes sense, although I acknowledge it calls for a change in how we think about "being" and "existence."

As a kid I often use to think that words were like falsifications of thoughts - inchoate blocks used to construct a shared notion of experience - a notion that necessarily reduced or entrapped that personal experience in a kind of verbal prefabrication. It often seemed to me that when my thoughts become words they were heavily truncated or even diverted by the process. It led me to think that in the process of becoming verbal there's a concomitant loss of experiential wisdom. Maybe that doesn't make sense to others - words again... — Tom Storm

I think you're talking about just the insight that Lao Tzu, and I think Kant, were describing. And they're not the only ones. Many philosophies have a place for the unmediated direct experience of unspeakable reality. Words are used to shape those experiences into bite-sized, easily digestible pieces that will stack evenly on the shelves.

I draw an analogy between Kants noumena and the Dao too. I think Philosophers have many different ways of articulating the unknown, and it's implicitly the central problem in many. — Aidan buk

Then I'm a bit confused. You wrote:

For example, knowing that it sounds silly, someone asks, so you know the thing in itself then? And I'd say, what are you referring to, in your mind, when you mention the thing in itself?
Surely if you can think it, I can know it? — Aidan buk

Which is a restatement, in a sense, of the first verse of the Tao Te Ching. You seem to have a grasp of what it means to refer to the unreferable. The important thing is that it can't be put into words. There are ways of experiencing the world directly without words and ideas as intermediaries. It's something I experience all the time and I assume you have too.

Kants thing in itself, direct notions of eternity, nothingness, etc, at first thought, seem to represent thing which are unknowable. They purport to represent things outside of human cognition. — Aidan buk

Yesterday, @Janus had a little back and forth in the "I've got an idea..." ("citizen philosophy")" discussion. I claimed that Kant's noumena are similar to Lao Tzu's Tao. I didn't make a very good case and we didn't take the discussion far, but I still believe my comparison makes sense. The primary document describing Lao Tzu's vision of the Tao is the "Tao Te Ching." It starts with the following:

The tao that can be told
is not the eternal Tao
The name that can be named
is not the eternal Name.

The unnamable is the eternally real.
Naming is the origin
of all particular things.

That's from Verse 1 of Stephen Mitchell's translation. Here are some definitions of the Tao from various sources, keeping in mind that the Tao that can be defined is not the eternal Tao.

[1] The ground of being
[2] The Tao that cannot be spoken
[3] Oneness is the Tao which is invisible and formless.
[4] Nature is Tao. Tao is everlasting.
[5] The absolute principle underlying the universe
[6] That in virtue of which all things happen or exist
[7] The intuitive knowing of life that cannot be grasped full-heartedly as just a concept

But, surely, all there is is human cognition? In such an instance, there is no unknowable, in the way it is commonly assumed, instead, the unknowable is always knowable.
For example, knowing that it sounds silly, someone asks, so you know the thing in itself then? And I'd say, what are you referring to, in your mind, when you mention the thing in itself?
Surely if you can think it, I can know it? — Aidan buk

This is the heart of the question that Lao Tzu, and I think Kant, are getting at. How can you know something that can't be put into words? As the verse says, the unnamable, the Tao, is reality. The world we deal with conceptually consists of particular things - cars, apples, electrons, galaxies - which manifest from the Tao by being named. Some translators call these particular things "the ten thousand things," which I love. Putting things into language is what brings our world into existence. This is my particular interpretation, with which many disagree.

I'm certain that there are many people here on the forum who can find fault with my comparison of the Tao with noumena. I'm not claiming there is an exact correspondence, but it is clear to me that at heart the two men were talking about the same experience - knowing what can't be put into words. The unspeakable.

I guess you've never heard of the Zen Mastercard. — praxis

Don't chant "Om" without it.

Thanks, I just read it, and I'm sure I will read it many times more. It's a wonderful poem, dense and rich with allusion. I don't remember having read it before, which means I probably haven't; it is not a forgettable poem. — Janus

I'm glad you liked it.

How's that for unequivocality that may even speak to Frost's very point? — Janus

Have you read "Black Cottage?" It's my favorite Frost poem. My favorite poem. One of my favorite written works. It gives me shivers every time I read it. As I said, there's a lot more going on than just what I quoted.

I just don't think it is true that there have been no new ideas since soon after the dawn of writing; I haven't seen any evidence to support that claim and much to refute it. — Janus

I'm not the one to give you a better argument than the admittedly weak one I already have.

So, treating this not as poetry, but as philosophy for a moment, is the claim that all beliefs are always true, and are only counted false at times, or that beliefs can at some times be true and at others untrue? If the latter would this depend on changing conditions or is the poet suggesting that truth and falsity depend on prevailing? — Janus

If you are at all familiar with my oeuvre, you've heard me say that metaphysical ideas are not true or false, they are more or less useful in particular situations. That's part of the sense I get from what Frost has written, although there's a lot more going on too. But, dear God, he says it better than I ever could. He's one of our most philosophical poets.

Do you think Heidegger's understanding of being had a precursor? Hegel's dialectic? Spinoza's God? Kant's noumenon and transcendental ego? Descartes' "evil demon"? Leibniz' monads? Kierkegaard's leap of faith? Nietzsche's genealogy of morals? Wittgenstein's forms of life? There were recursors to all? — Janus

I can't speak to most of those. I have been struck by how Kant's noumenon is similar to Lao Tzu's Tao, even though I know he wasn't directly influenced. Schopenhauer considered himself a Buddhist. An evil demon who misleads humans has been part of folklore and religion for millennia. The idea that reality might be an illusion ditto. As I said, I am not familiar enough with the others to comment.