Empiricist-Bruno wrote: ↑December 24th, 2019, 6:11 pm
Papus79,
When we communicate, there are always limits to the possibilities of said communication. If you don't understand what I am saying, if I fail to express myself properly, if you fail to interpret me correctly, if we aren't on the same page, if we can't be on the same page (due to diverging beliefs), if we disagree to the purpose of communication, if we do not agree as to whom is whom in a conversation, if we reject the other's perspective, then whatever exchange that occurs between the two of us can only be a failed attempt at communication.
So, what I am trying to do here is to see if can get on the same page. To that end, I feel some basic worldly and self understanding is required and I am seeing that it isn't there now. I am finding you inquisitive, and so I am attempting to see if what we are lacking here might be something that I can spark in you somehow.
So there are probably many different ways to use language and what I'll consider here are a couple that are somewhat diametrically opposed in their application:
- Speaking as plainly as possible, often to try and draw participants in a conversation together to a rather mundane, common-trade aspect of reality which most people's intuitions map onto and where it's at least assumed (correctly or incorrectly) that doing such can shelve the problems of combinatorial explosion both in terms of meaning and interpretation.
- Cryptic, synthetic, or probing language that in some eastern religious contexts is considered 'twilight'. This is language that can indeed be used by huxters and snake oil salesmen but when used in good faith it's an attempt to send a probe out into places that words haven't penetrated that well to date. It's the desire to jump into a submarine, dive into the intellectual, mythological, and archetypal 'dark matter' of culture, of nature, of the paths and junctions of the escapades and historical accidents of Darwinian evolution which have traced themselves out in reality as strongly as early childhood neural pathways, which didn't necessarily need to be primal highways of motive in the world but by historical accident they became precisely that, thus these tend to be some combination of both blunt facts (like those evolutionary psychology hopes to probe) and more nebulous ones (think depth psychology here) and it's an attempt to - hopefully - pick higher-hanging fruit than what something like physics can give us, and then as we pull it back down it's in the hope that said fruit doesn't dissolve in our hands, and if it does dissolve in our hands it's a signal that what we grabbed wasn't a thing in and of itself but a collection of disparate things that we mistook for something autonomous which means we have to keep trying until we do find solid structures or at least reliable enough relationships to say we've found something.
Both of these approaches are appropriate, the later I think is probably better for one's own private journals or for people like Daniel Schmachtenberger, Jamie Wheel, and Jordan Greenhall sitting on couches (eg. Rebel Wisdom) chatting about cultural potentials and fixes whereas the former is better for the position we seem to be in - ie. realizing that we're in disparate places and trying to figure out what points in common we can start from.
I get that the above was a bit lengthy but - I just wanted to clarify that I think both have their place for different uses.
Empiricist-Bruno wrote: ↑December 24th, 2019, 6:11 pmLet me try and cover some basic facts with you, and hopefully, I will not loose you. First, when you watch tv for instance, you can dive beneath the sea and see what is there on the sea floor (with your oen eyes?) but you don't get wet in the process so is this evidence that all you saw was a lie and make belief? Was that evidence that what you see is arbitrary and you are the ultimate judge in deciding what you saw or did not see? Was that just evidence that you can see what a camera saw?
If you are willing to go with me through these questions, I feel that we may indeed get somewhere.
So starting with the blunt obvious that I doubt we'd disagree on - television stations have broadcasts that they want to show, based on some combination of public attention they'll get, the purpose of the channel (something like Discovery or The Learning Channel would be likely to host something like this on an oceanography show), and the mission statements and attitudes of those channels will curate that content. When you see someone bringing a camera underwater to show something - like a coral reef, like sharks, octupi, various fish, sharks, etc. you're potentially getting an educational lesson, it's probably going to be a bit weak because it has to be marketable for people who aren't in masters degree programs for marine biology, in other cases it may be someone simply showing their scuba diving vacation in Cozumel, Cairns, or something like that.
If I see underwater footage on TV, for me at least, there's an a priori understanding - one that happens subconsciously without deliberation - that I'm seeing mechanical capture of a quite real place on earth and it's a place where if I hop on a plane, fill out my travel visa, go to the right scuba shop, rent gear, and dive in the same place I'll see the same physical features - variances in living organisms like reef (or if we were talking about terrestrial places - trees and the like) are a given based on how much time lapses between when the TV show was shot and when I actually decided to go.
Here's actually a very good real life description of something that I did back in August. I found pictures of Moraine Lake in Banff, Alberta, so breath taking and had Moraine Lake as a computer background wallpaper so often that I actually decided to put the money down to take a tour - flying into Calgary, going to Banff, Jasper, Mount Robson, and out through British Columbia to Victoria and Vancouver. I took close to 3,000 pictures, I knew I was going somewhere very scenic and it did every bit as much for me as I remembered my trip ten years prior to Australia and New Zealand having done for me when I saw places like Milford Sound and the park lands which lead up to it.
Were my various pictures of Moraine Lake just like everyone else's? Not exactly. I had certain shots (like on to of the 'moraine' rock pile) which were probably 99% similar in terms of camera angle to other people's most popular shots of the lake and mountains. I also made a point to walk up what would appear to be (from that vantage point) the right side of the lake and take as many pictures from other angles as I could. Clearly the time of year matters, degree of cloud cover matters, because you'll get different colors, different 'feels' to the pictures, and I'll add that the rock flour in the water which makes the images of the lake itself so impressive can range from turquoise to a greener color based on how much sun you have.
The above experiences did map on well to my expectations, the variances that I saw between the Moraine Lake that inspired me to plan a trip to Banff and the Moraine Lake I actually saw were - and I'm going to say this carefully (we can unpack this later) 'within tolerance' of what I expected. The most immediate things I mean by 'within tolerance' which I could offer right now is that the weather was conducive to going out and taking a walk (Maligne Lake in Jasper - different story), the only major variables that can dilute the value of such a view - which I learned going to Milford Sound - is if the scenery on the bus or car ride to the point of interest in and of itself is so beautiful that by the time you arrive at the point of interest it's actually anticlimactic, and that's not a matter of having arrived somewhere like the beach in Dark City and realizing it's just a painting on the wall - it's a problem over-exposure to certain sort of landscape geometries that our brains process as deeply meaningful or significant (I think this has implications when you see it in the patterns of consistent rock layers in the same way you see loads of fractal geometry in great cathedrals such as Notre Dame of both France and Montreal).
One thing I will say, notably, about pictures vs. actually being somewhere - and I'd say this about film as well - I'm sure that if I saw an oceanography show, jumped in the water at the same place and saw those things with my own eyes the one thing that would be different is quality of depth perception and distance, that's something that clearly gets flattened or lost with 2D film. Hollywood has tried to fix that with 3D movies and a very obvious place where that made a differences - seeing Avatar in both 2D and 3D where seeing it in 2D the floating rock climbs were much more claustrophobic where they were less so in 3D.
I doubt that will directly answer your question but I hope it will at least give you at least some common territory to pry into.
Empiricist-Bruno wrote: ↑December 24th, 2019, 6:11 pmAnd when you describe to me the story of where idiots stand or could stand in the events in question, what I do not get and fail to see is where you and I stand in this narration? Are you the narrator of this story or are you and I characters of that story which I am reading here? When you provide the narration for allegedly real events, what are you really doing? And if you are describing a reality, how can you both be a character of that story and at the same time the story's narrator? So please help me identify where you and I really stand in this real story. Can you really be narrating a story and really act out as a character in that story that you allegedly are narrating? If I am not informed of where you stand in such a narration, then I feel I do not have the means to figure my point and you do not have the means to follow where I am going with this.
So here's a rather big and ugly problem that we can't get rid of as conscious agents trying to describe a universe that we're embedded in. Lets say I have a picture frame in my hands and it's a bit of a magical picture frame in that I can stretch it or collapse it at will to whatever size I want (think of it maybe like a data projection - ie. we're wearing Google glasses and I can transfer the frame I'm drawing to your headset as well).
In the distance we have a crowd of people. I zero in on a conversation between two people, that frame now holds two people. I then see that those two people are technically in a group of six people that they know but they're just having a side conversation relevant to the group more than them - cool, I just enlarged the frame to hold six people. They're actually standing in line to get tickets at the CN tower to get an impressive view of Toronto so now I need to take a few more shots - one of their group and the ticket agent (to show the context of where they are) and if I really want to get acrobatic, tip my camera on its side, I can try to capture that group, everyone else in line, the ticket agent, and enough of the CN tower for you to be able to tell that it's the CN tower without the six people in question being either out of the frame or coming in at too low of fidelity to see who they are or what they're doing (might need to get relatively close to them and then aim upward). If there's a security camera behind us standing there then I have us looking at those six people, those six people, the ticket line, the ticket booth, and CN tower. Now.... if I really want to get wild, I can grab satellite footage of what's happening over Toronto and Mississauga and you'll see a very large container of all these things and far, far, more but you'll lose all of our relevant detail.
In our conversation about idiots online they live on planet earth - so we're all included in that story. We're talking in an online medium, in that sense we're part of a slightly overlapping zone. That we're talking about them explicitly would make us part of a story that some college undergrad might be doing if they're writing a term paper on discourse regarding outrageous news on social media and, unknown to us, this thread could be getting analyzed by said student to compare the range of reactions from knee-jerk to thoughtful, types of responses per assumed age and gender demographic of the user. A story behind that story we wouldn't see is that student's paper getting graded by the professor and the impact on their lives (positive or negative) that the quality of their work, or their relationship with their professor, which would impact the remaining course of their education.
In essence - such frames are essentially arbitrary in and of themselves, and thus separating ourselves out from one story or another isn't an actuality - it's just a tool for contextualizing information or drawing comparison and contrasts between two things that coexist in a larger frame. It's a bit like the statement 'there are 2x' and x can be absolutely anything, it means nothing out of context and it almost seems farcical at this point that the Pythagoreans cared as much about '2' being opposition when in reality the more salient question is 'two what?'. A hydrogen atom consists of a proton and an electron (2 different things but still 2) and it's about the simplest and most common atom out there and its tough to tell whether it's still 2 'things', whether we can void that because a proton is many quarks, or whether the example gets voided because it's two different things, ie. proton and electron, and that the situation only applies if its two identical things. As is nearly always the case context is king.
Empiricist-Bruno wrote: ↑December 24th, 2019, 6:11 pmAs far as you now using the word "drive" instead of "siphon", I would just observe that we are not making any meaningful progress. To "drive" means to push to propel. So, an engine is what drives a car and yet, the most common perspective in our world today is that people drive cars when they obviously do not. We constantly lie with the word "drive" and it renders the use of this word meaningless, due to self and media gaslighting. The truth as to matter if we are to communicate effectively. Unfortunately, ideology and less truth seem easier to sell but that is at our own risks and perils, especially over the long term.
I'm somewhat doubting there is much progress that can be made unless, as I said earlier, a mechanical or civil engineer could show up to this thread and tell us that there's a very precise and narrow word usage accepted as cannon in that industry for what we're trying to describe. Short of that words are rather imprecise tools and even with that all we're doing is looking to an authority as an arbiter of value - which is fine, just that one could admit that aside from brokering word usage agreements it's questionable how much accuracy over and above brokered agreement is actually added.
Humbly watching Youtube in Universe 25. - Me