existence/non-existence

Jeanie

Yep!! There they are!! The posts that make my head explode! :eek:

Thanks fins and angel, I'm just gonna go clean all my brain tissue off the computer now!!

I'll be back to read both those posts again, when my brain grows back!

angelica

FinsburyParkCarrots wrote:

Language is arbitrary from reality. You can talk signifiers - sign systems flailing and failing at conveying extra-linguistic concepts in the world - all you want, but they'll only relate to other signifiers. They're not signifieds. So arguably, language can neither prove nor disprove reality or the existence of a world outside of words: it might try to represent the unspeakable, but what it is is an utterance that can never bring thought into matter.

Cool. It took me a long time to grasp this. We've got ourselves confused and looking through illusions, by not recognizing that words represent something and are not the same as that something. I'm personally releasing myself from the limits that words convey, and opening myself to the unadulterated truths behind the limits.

However, can matter bring thought into utterance? And how can you prove it, when you're bound by the limits of utterance, something apart from matter?

What do you mean?

FinsburyParkCarrots

angelica wrote:

What do you mean?

Well, I was thinking of the Marxist adage that social being (matter) determines consciousness, and then saying, well, how do we know, if that notion is just a formation in words, and ideas such as "matter" have no material substance or single signified but are just terms in language, referential to other linguistic concepts? I was just deconstructing Marxist-materialist philosophy there.

angelica

FinsburyParkCarrots wrote:

Well, I was thinking of the Marxist adage that social being (matter) determines consciousness, and then saying, well, how do we know, if that notion is just a formation in words, and ideas such as "matter" have no material substance or single signified but are just terms in language, referential to other linguistic concepts? I was just deconstructing Marxist-materialist philosophy there.

Hey, cool. This is a concept that although I'm grasping more and more, it seems that you understand more of it than myself!

This is mind-bending for me! I'd love to hear more elaboration of what you are saying here!

Kann

While I didn't understand every thing that was posted (the utterance part for example!) I wanted to take the example of comsologists and astrophysicists (?) who, in order to explain some poorly understood events, have to imagine and create unexistent matters : ether (in the physical sense, even though has been disproven, was imagined to fill a void concerning light in the universe), antimatter which was imagined before it was proven and a mind created an unexistent matter. Or even the imaginary numbers in mathematics, an unexistent and even impossible concept which was created for (at first) no real purpose but which finally found applications much later.

know1

I think "existence" is a concept that humans created. Therefore, they can grant existence to anything as the owners of that concept.

Ahnimus

A square circle
A red blue
An oxymoron
Military Intelligence