I know what you mean. I just thank my lucky stars I'm not in the mainstream. Could have been a politician, which is cringeworthy.Greta:
You may have noticed that I am not bothered very easily these days. Age, experience, sloth, possibly all of the above. No, I'd rather just chat with people who think deeply and, if I encountered such a person who thought very similarly to me, that would be most unfamiliar terrain
Right. But there is something inexplicable "here" which will not vanish in a puff of logic about how meaning depends on other meanings. It is the givens that are there, and sustain regardless of the direction of interpretation: A Christian calls evil a sin against god. I call evil the horror of being cooked alive in a Sicilian bull. I ask, in all of theory of all the sciences, can anyone tell me what THAT is doing in this place we call reality? I don't mean why people treat others so badly, or how does evolution explain the selection of extreme vulnerability; I mean what is that doing here at all? Why does Being DO that? The point I'm making is that when you get to this place where yo're looking at someting that is simply given, not embedded in some elaborate explanation or theory or social institution, you are then on solid ground,and meaing is not lost to interpretation. Many foolish questions disappear, like wondering if god existed how could there be evil. It's a contrived question. The only foundationally meaningful ones are about what is here antecedent to any interpretation. This is phenomenology. Husserl's epoche presents possibilityI don't see the blunt and disorienting aspects of language as invalidating our expressed and tested perceptions contained in our body of knowledge. Think Einstein; everything is relative. This is THE key point in any conversation about what seems to be "most real". It doesn't much matter if the fabric of the universe is thought, energy or jello - the relativities are the same.
A star is a star. But if you ask different questions, not like "are the stars out tonight," but like, how do we know that a star exists? or, How do we know a start exists and what does that knowledge tell us about justified true belief, and, what is the structure of that knowledge claim, i.e., if we look at the knowledge claim itself, and not the content (the star), what does this show us about our knowingn the world at all? and so on; then the ontological features come out, are laid bare, because this kind of questions already dismisses things that what are being claimed in knowledge claims. content is out here. And the narrative on this begins with Kant, and moves into phenomenology/existentialism and ends up with postmodernism: a world lost in endless streams of deconstruction, never touching the "ground" defended by epistemological foundationalism. What we know becomes language games.I may be I, and I expect all logical thinkers, would agree with Kant about the impossibility of truly perceiving noumena without sensory bias. So when we describe a star, what we are referring to are moving zones of extreme concentration of the fabric of the universe within the arena we call "the known universe". They are much larger, hotter and more dense than most non-composite entities. Further, there is no firm boundary around a star; its influence extends for over a trillion kilometres, just as our own influences extend beyond our own bodies. These dynamics are not just playing out in our heads because we all see our star and feel its influence (yesterday it was 40C here). However, to know exactly what a star is, we would need to know what energy is - the actual nature of the fabric of reality beyond the usual prosaic definition of energy; "work". Since we are made of the same stuff, that's tricky, so we settle for relativities.
What is a star from the German existentialist perspective? Different to how I described it?
I don't find geeky puzzle solving that intriguing, but these guys really do help to shape how we can think about the world. See Consul's posts on this on this sort of thing. It gets thick, but it is rewarding, his reading references. But it all starts with Kant. Kant's Critique of Pure reason made philosophical thinking something deeply important.