Philosophy Who Needs It


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GS:

OK - this looks like a place of agreement.

"...our nervous system still produces abstractions. General semantics is about the importance and method of differentiating orders of abstraction, not the actual mechanism of abstraction."

An example or two of the bolded concepts above?

Adam

Korzybski called the problem "confusing orders of abstraction" however I think a modern word might be 'reification'. See here. He believed the indiscriminate use of the 'is of identity' so common in the subject-predicate syntax leads to this. Even a simple statement like "the grass is green" implies that "greeness" is a property of "grass" when actually 'green grass' is a label for a perception inside us, an abstraction. So we attribute properties of things inside our heads to something outside. This can be called projection, objectification, reification, etc.

Greenness is a property of grass--that is of a property that causes the greenness. Sometimes grass is brown. The problem of doing this your way so to say is we get blogged down pinning the tail on the donkey instead of thinking with some ease and facilitation. There has to be some utility or we've got word games instead of thinking such as: The grass is brown, should we water it? It's true science unveils many commonsensical ideas that are false many times because of misperception and lack of real knowledge and rigor, but the revelations there of education are a real joy to the interested and active mind. The label "inside our heads" implies some arbitrariness as if the basic reference wasn't to the grass but the label. The grass itself isn't (just?) in our heads so why the color?

--Brant

confused by gs but not by GS

Edited by Brant Gaede
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GS, I have to echo Brant on this. I was just about to post a possibility of the grass being blue. I'm a little confused by what you're saying as well.

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Simply put, the statement that "the grass is green" is shorthand for something like this; light reflecting off molecules is mostly of this wavelength x, and exciting neurons in my nervous system whereupon it results in a sensation which I call 'green'. Abstraction of 'grass' is a similar process whereby an image including the the edges of the objects called 'blades of grass' are formed in our cortex. Our simple subject-predicate language refers to abstractions in our nervous system. The language of lightwaves, neurons, cortex, molecules, etc. is far more complex and a far better (structurally similar) description. What is outside our nervous system is energies. The "objects" and their "properties" are abstractions from these energies produced in the nervous system.

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If I was blind how would you explain to me that "the grass is green"? If I can only feel, taste, and smell then how can the greeness be a property of the grass? Greeness is a result of the interaction of the observer and the light in our environment. If there is no vision there is no greeness for that observer. By speaking in terms of light, wavelength, electromagnetic spectrum etc. it may be possible to explain what you mean by "the grass is green" to a blind person.

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If I was blind how would you explain to me that "the grass is green"? If I can only feel, taste, and smell then how can the greeness be a property of the grass? Greeness is a result of the interaction of the observer and the light in our environment. If there is no vision there is no greeness for that observer. By speaking in terms of light, wavelength, electromagnetic spectrum etc. it may be possible to explain what you mean by "the grass is green" to a blind person.

This seems to be only a version of "If a tree falls in the forest and there is nobody there to hear it fall, did it make a sound?"

--Brant

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If I was blind how would you explain to me that "the grass is green"? If I can only feel, taste, and smell then how can the greeness be a property of the grass? Greeness is a result of the interaction of the observer and the light in our environment. If there is no vision there is no greeness for that observer. By speaking in terms of light, wavelength, electromagnetic spectrum etc. it may be possible to explain what you mean by "the grass is green" to a blind person.

I would make a transducer that would turn light frequency into a sound signal. Color could be coded as pitch. It isn't exactly what a sighted person experiences but it could be used to distinguish between red apples and green grass.

Ba'al Chatzaf

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This seems to be only a version of "If a tree falls in the forest and there is nobody there to hear it fall, did it make a sound?"

--Brant

The same argument applies. "Sound" means nothing if you are deaf but the theory of soundwaves and how they effect our ears (in people who CAN hear) could be understood even by a deaf person.

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GS, I have to echo Brant on this. I was just about to post a possibility of the grass being blue. I'm a little confused by what you're saying as well.

It usually depended upon the psychedelic taken I am told.

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  • 1 year later...

I hope you don't include Ginko Bulboa. :-)

"Chinese culture, they are believed to have health benefits; some also consider them to have aphrodisiac qualities. Japanese cooks add Ginkgo seeds (called ginnan) to dishes such as chawanmushi, and cooked seeds are often eaten along with other dishes."

In 2002 a long-anticipated paper appeared in JAMA (Journal of the American Medical Association) titled "Ginkgo for memory enhancement: a randomized controlled trial." This Williams College study, sponsored by the National Institute on Aging rather than Schwabe, examined the effects of ginkgo consumption on healthy volunteers older than 60. The conclusion, now cited in the National Institutes of Health's ginkgo fact sheet, said: "When taken following the manufacturer's instructions, ginkgo provides no measurable benefit in memory or related cognitive function to adults with healthy cognitive function." ... The impact of this seemingly damning assessment, however, was ameliorated by the almost simultaneous publication of a Schwabe-sponsored study in the less prestigious journal Human Psychopharmacology. This rival study, conducted at Jerry Falwell's Liberty University, was rejected by JAMA, and came to a very different—if not exactly sweeping—conclusion: There was ample evidence to support "the potential efficacy of Ginkgo biloba EGb 761 in enhancing certain neuropsychological/memory processes of cognitively intact older adults, 60 years of age and over."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ginkgo_biloba

Great and powerful tree with lots of uses. Six (6) of them even survived the A-Bombing of Hiroshima. see:

Extreme examples of the Ginkgo's tenacity may be seen in Hiroshima, Japan, where six trees growing between 1–2 km from the 1945 atom bomb explosion were among the few living things in the area to survive the blast (photos and details).

Adam

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I hope you don't include Ginko Bulboa. :-)

Wasn't Ginko Bulboa a fictitious wrestler from Philadelphia played by Sylvester Stalone?

Ba'al Chatzaf

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