I think, from now on it's going to be a different Satyr. One of the fun things about being a caricature, alluding to a symbol of Dionysian ecstasy.
Discussing metaphysics with children is tiresome. Not a maiden in sight to seduce with my linguistic charms. I think it's time for a shift. I have other internet outlets for my gravitas. Satire....Know Thyself.
What Satyr is trying to get across to you, Magnus, is that words are not merely definitions but representational constructs of reality, like ideas. When he says words are metaphors, he is grasping the higher meaning of them that go beyond the limitations of definitions and propounding that they are conceptual tools to Instill order upon chaos. They are symbols that are subject to flux, not immutable, which allows them to be subject to forms of creative dexterous thinking and imagination, which in turn is a process of intellection which allows for deeper understanding of ideas and nature. I can look at at a tree and see it only as what the word represents, or I can see it for something more, even something greater, its aesthetic qualities, the power of its size and mass, the way the leaves fall and move in the wind, etc. This is what philosophy and wisdom are made of. Hence, Schopenhauer's representation of Will. It has nothing to do with books or definitions BRO. It has to do with the art of thinking.
Satyr Daemon
Gender : Posts : 37276 Join date : 2009-08-24 Age : 58 Location : Hyperborea
Mencken simply did not speak English was well as a Serbian git with an on-line thesaurus. He never thought to open his dictionary and see what it is, in conventional thinking. Fuck'im.
And what of that imbecile Heraclitus and that river that no man can ever step twice into. Did he have a dictionary of conventional definitions?
No, an autistic Serbian nit-wit with an English Dictionary is far smarter...he speaks English good. So confident as to go on-line and insult Satyrs....distracting them from their play with sirens. Do you know what "one" means? Let's look it up.
What Satyr is trying to get across to you, Magnus, is that words are not merely definitions but representational constructs of reality, like ideas.
I never said that words are definitions.
The word "tree" is a word and the sentence "a woody perennial plant, typically having a single stem or trunk growing to a considerable height and bearing lateral branches at some distance from the ground" is its definition.
Words are symbols and symbols are things that are used to represent other things. The definition of a word is simply a verbal description of what that word means.
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When he says words are metaphors
He's misusing the word "metaphor" and by doing so spreading confusion.
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When he says words are metaphors, he is grasping the higher meaning of them that go beyond the limitations of definitions and propounding that they are conceptual tools to Instill order upon chaos.
This is difficult to understand. How do you use words to "instill order upon chaos"?
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They are symbols that are subject to flux, not immutable, which allows them to be subject to forms of creative dexterous thinking and imagination, which in turn is a process of intellection which allows for deeper understanding of ideas and nature.
You mean there are words whose meaning must change? Why?
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I can look at at a tree and see it only as what the word represents, or I can see it for something more, even something greater, its aesthetic qualities, the power of its size and mass, the way the leaves fall and move in the wind, etc.
How do you look at a tree and see it only as what the word "tree" represents? If you're looking at a tree, you ARE looking at what the word "tree" represents, even if you're paying attention to its aesthetic qualities, the power of its size and mass, the way the leaves fall and move in the wind, etc.
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This is what philosophy and wisdom are made of. Hence, Schopenhauer's representation of Will. It has nothing to do with books or definitions BRO. It has to do with the art of thinking.
How are you going to communicate your thoughts if you pay no respect to language? Also, how are you going to understand other people?
Mencken simply did not speak English was well as a Serbian git with an on-line thesaurus.
I am not the only person who thinks that you're abusing language. There are plenty of others. A lot of them are native English speakers.
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And what of that imbecile Heraclitus and that river that no man can ever step twice into. Did he have a dictionary of conventional definitions?
Heraclitus isn't an imbecile. People who use his fragments to support their misuse of English language are. (And even they are not imbeciles, but merely people who misuse English language.)
Satyr Daemon
Gender : Posts : 37276 Join date : 2009-08-24 Age : 58 Location : Hyperborea
Contestant Satyr: I'll take "Absolute" for $300, Alex
Alex Trebek:
Mencken, H.L. wrote:
Since the beginning of time they have been trying to get order and method into the thinking of Homo sapiens- and Homo sapiens, when he thinks at all, is still the brother to the lowly ass (Equus africanuus), even to the ears and the bray. I include the philosophers themselves, unanimously and especially. True enough, one arises now and then who somehow manages to be charming and even plausible. I point to Plato, to Nietzsche, to Schopenhauer. But it is always as poet or politician, not as philosopher. The genuine professional, sticking to his gloomy speculations, is as dull as a table of logarithms. What man in human history wrote worse than Kant? Was it, perhaps, Hegel? My own candidate, if I were pushed, would be found among the so-called Critical realists of to-day. They achieve the truly astounding feats of writing worse than the New Thoughters, whom they also resemble otherwise - nay, even worse than the late Warren Gamaliel Hading. What reduces all philosophers to incoherence and folly, soon or late, is the lure of the absolute. It tortures them as the dream of Law Enforcement tortures Prohibitionists. Now and then, when they forget it transiently, they grow relatively rational and even ingratiating, but in the long run they always resume their chase of it, and that chase carries them inevitably into intellectual Bad Lands. For the absolute, of course, is a mere banshee, a concept without substance or reality. No such thing exists. When, by logical devices, it is triumphantly established, the feat is exactly on all fours with that of the mathematician who proved that twice was double once two. Who believes in Kant's categorical imperative today? Certainly not any student of psychology, who has got beyond the first page of his horn-book.
The Human Mind - On Metaphysicians
Contestant Satyr: What is, what doesn't actually exist.
Alex Trebek: Correct, you old fool.
Contestant Satyr:Language for $500, Alex
Alex Trebek :
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a figure of speech in which a word or phrase is applied to an object or action to which it is not literally applicable.
Contestant Satyr: What is....ummmm....metaphor Alex.
Alex Trebek: Correct again, you confusion spreading freak.
Contestant Satyr: Metaphysics for $1000 Alex.
Alex Trebek:
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the lowest cardinal number; half of two; 1.
1. referring to a person or thing previously mentioned or easily identified. "her mood changed from one of moroseness to one of joy" 2. a person of a specified kind. "you're the one who ruined her life"
Contestant Satyr :What is...an encompassed portion of space/time.
Alex Trebek: Nooo.....sorry, dim-wit. Not part of conventional understanding. You return to -200. Choose again...if you've been determined by God or nature to do so.
_________________ γνῶθι σεαυτόν μηδέν άγαν
Last edited by Satyr on Sat Jul 27, 2019 9:17 pm; edited 4 times in total
He's misusing the word "metaphor" and by doing so spreading confusion.
FOR YOU. Yes. You are the confused one BRO. All your other responses to my post only serve to illustrate that.. You are a post-modern mind. Trapped and stunted in the uses and abuses of language. Unlike Satyr, I have no stamina to engage a mind like yours. I just wanted to poke at you to see if there was a different effect. There wasn't. Carry on.
FOR YOU. Yes. You are the confused one BRO. All your other responses to my post only serve to illustrate that.. You are a post-modern mind. Trapped and stunted in the uses and abuses of language. Unlike Satyr, I have no stamina to engage a mind like yours. I just wanted to poke at you to see if there was a different effect. There wasn't. Carry on.
Have a nice day.
Satyr Daemon
Gender : Posts : 37276 Join date : 2009-08-24 Age : 58 Location : Hyperborea
[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] have you not read the Serbian version of the English dictinoary? Have you no sense of conventional meanings?
There is an absolute. I see it. One complete full bottle on one complete full table. Complete, full, total....silly Anglos. Serbians are way ahead...especially autistic, idiot savants. They can be quite charming, you know. They are genius and charming...so there's no downside to autism. It's win-win. Don't understand why it is considered a weakness when it is obviously an evolutionary advantage.
There are people who define the word "true" to mean the degree to which the symbol looks like the symbolized. According to them, when you say "This is a tree" while pointing to an actual tree you are not completely right because the statement itself does not look exactly like the tree.
It is important to note that this is not how people normally define the word "true".
The statement "This is an infinite train" is made out of a finite number of letters. The actual physical object the statement is used to represent, however, is made out of an infinite number of parts. Thus, they say, the statement does not represent what it refers to with perfect / absolute accuracy.
This is, of course, true. Generally speaking, no symbol humans use looks exactly like what it represents. But that's not an interesting insight, and moreover, the manner in which they express it is obscure. Not an artistic use of language, as some claim, but plain and simple abuse of language. It's obscurantism. It's a simple and a relatively insignificant insight expressed using unnecessarily complicated language.
One of the consequences of using language in a non-standard way is the inability to understand other people when they use language the way it is supposed to be used. (We can see this on this very thread as Satyr keeps misrepresenting everything I am saying.)
Normally, when people say that a proposition is true, what they mean is that the phenomenon the proposition is used to represent can in fact be represented by that proposition. So when there is an actual physical three-dimensional object that we call tree standing in front of us and we point at it and say "This is a tree" we are completely right because what's in front of us can be represented by that sentence.
And what about the idea that the word "one" implies finitude merely because our symbols are made out of a finite number of elements?
That's just plain and simple nonsense.
The meaning of a symbol has absolutely nothing to do with the constitution of that symbol. We might be able to agree that the word "one" is a thing made out of a finite number of elements but that does not mean the meaning of the word "one" is a thing made out of a finite number of elements.
The meaning of a symbol is not the symbol itself. The meaning of a symbol is the set of all things that can be represented by that symbol.
For example, the meaning of the word "dog" is the set of all physical objects that can be represented by the word "dog". The meaning of the word "dog" is not the word "dog" itself.
If the word "dog" is made out of a finite number of elements (letters) that does not mean that what it represents (the actual physical objects we call dogs) is also finite.
That's just . . . nonsense.
Last edited by Magnus Anderson on Sun Jul 28, 2019 9:56 am; edited 1 time in total
Satyr Daemon
Gender : Posts : 37276 Join date : 2009-08-24 Age : 58 Location : Hyperborea
The subject of this thread can be reduced to the following claim:
The word "one" does not imply finitude.
This means the statement "One infinite train" is not a logical contradiction.
Satyr's only counter-argument so far has been: The word "one" implies finitude because the word "one" is made out of a finite number of letters.
My response to his counter-argument has been: The meaning of a symbol has nothing to do with the symbol itself. For example, the meaning of the word "tree" has nothing to do with the four-letter symbol t-r-e-e.
What was Satyr's response? No response.
What about others?
Polish Youth had no arguments. The only thing he said is how frustrated he is with the discussion. I feel for him.
Kvasir had no arguments either, and he completely missed the point, but at least he wasn't as frustrated as Polish Youth.
Basically, they are all on the defensive. (Yeah right, I'm a mean guy who has come here to hurt Satyr by throwing horrible insults at him.)
Here's an article on the subject: [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]
I should take the advice of the article and make my posts softer but I can't help but be a teeny little bit mean.
I am actually gradually leaning away from some of Satyrs main propositions and general remarks and attitudes expressed by some of the forums members here(like hostility against common church or equating Marx with the mad left or communism) but unlike you I have some common sense to respect a man who is over twice my age and has been writing and thinking when I was 6-7 years of age and further generally respect the purpose and magnitude of this forum and not post anything before I have some well-thought-out and grounded system to propose, unlike you, who throws sentences at Satyrs threads, book and essays. Right now I am neither confident in his opinions nor completely dismissive of them, I have not had much time to read or think(I've been working since 15, lately 6 days a week plus night-shifts) to develop myself intellectually but I have my bits and pieces of observations and thoughts plus I have been lucky to meet some noble and intelligent persons who have had opinions, quite harshly, opposite of his, on some of the themes.
[You must be registered and logged in to see this image.] This is me with Erics twin, he said his name isn't important because he will save the Western Civilization when I asked for it first time upon introducing ourselves, I think you might be him, which makes you Eric without automatically equating Eric with Eric that I am looking for though it doesn't make any difference(define difference anyway...), the reason I suspect you might be him without being him, without this actually mattering is because when he talked and I expressed my opinion he would disagree, speak his mind on the matter and then walk off and look into the distance(which made conversing quite difficult)...Do you see the woman in the back?, she's black, that might be the real Lyssa...
There are many different symbols of infinity. Whether these symbols are finite or infinite is irrelevant because even if they are finite it does not follow that there is no such thing, no such quantity, as infinity out there in the real world.
To say "X exists" where X is any symbol of your choice is to say that there is a portion of reality that can be represented by that symbol X. What the symbol X is in itself is irrelevant.
Thus, to say "Infinity exists" is to say that there is a portion of reality that can be represented by the word "infinity". What the word "infinity" is in itself is irrelevant.
More importantly -- since this pertains to the subject -- what the word "one" is in itself is irrelevant to the question of the meaning of the word "one". Even if the word "one" is a finite thing it does not follow that what the word "one" can represent must be a finite thing.
How can a word be anything but finite? How can something dependant on its existence on its interaction with humans who are finite be infinite? If I carve 100 on a rock and it will outlast humans then it will not be a 100 but three symbols on a rock?
How can a word be anything but finite? How can something dependant on its existence on its interaction with humans who are finite be infinite?
Just as I did not make a claim that symbols are finite, I did not make a claim that they are infinite. I merely stated that whether symbols are finite or infinite is irrelevant. What they are on their own has nothing to do with what they mean to a group of people.
A symbol is just a thing that represents some other thing. It can be any kind of thing. For example, it can be a physical object that is infinite in size (such as an infinitely long bus.) Whatever it is, it has nothing to do with what it means. The fact that one and the same symbol can mean two completely different things proves it.
