An interesting concept - you know basically nothing

When you look at something, say, a table, and I asked you to describe it, what would you say?

Probably something along the lines of, "Well it's about 3 feet tall, has four legs, a flat surface, it is made of wood and there is a waterstain over near that corner of it" or something like that.

Ok, so what is a surface? "It is something you can place things on like a cup"

What's a cup? "It's a container used to drink out of"

What is drinking? "It is something we do to satisfy thirst"

Wait, but what's thirst? Satisfy? We?

It goes on like that forever.

If you've noticed, things like cups and drinking and legs and wood are all concepts.

If you had never seen a wooden table before, you could only describe it using existing concepts until someone tells you the name of whatever you are looking at.

"Ah, now it's a table. Before it was undefined but now I know that when legs and wood and surfaces are arranged in that particular way, it is called a table." You have just created a new concept.

Things like tables and cups are pretty easy concepts, but there are also emotions. Happy is a concept. If you didn't have a word for being happy, all it would be is just this light and joyous feeling that puts you in better spirit.

What I'm getting at is that your conciousness is made up entire of concepts and links to other concepts.

You have all sorts of conceptless emotions, however. You might feel a certain way towards Christmas trees but chances are, you don't have a word or concept to describe that specific emotion you hold towards Christmas trees. You can say you like them, or they put you in the holiday spirit, but those concepts are very broad.

You don't really know anything... just lables and how they relate to eachother.

The way we think, operate and perceive the world is very stiff, overgeneralized and limited because all we know are concepts.

Kind of out there, but I believe it. Comments or constructive arguments would be appreciated.

It is an interesting concept .

I look in the sky , i see clouds . Clouds are made of water vapour . Water vapour can float because air currents support them . Clouds are formed from the sun heating the earth and its oceans , and the water is evapourated , or changes states from a liquid to a gas . The evapourated water condences to form clouds because as the evaporated water rises , it cools and changes state (which can be explained by current gas laws) . The condensation collects together to form clouds . When a cloud becomes very dense , and the air currents or updrafts below a cloud arent sufficient to keep the condensation up there , the condensation will fall from the lower clouds and form water droplets . The water droplets falling to earth are called rain . Rain is actually water , H2O . It is the basis for all life on earth . Rain falls and fills damns . Damn water is then treated chemically and tapped off to many different places which need it . It is eventually pumped up to your own tap where you can drink whenever you so wish .

I can know a whole lot about one thing such as clouds and how clouds and rain are related , but does that really make that knowlege worthless ? Knowlege is just information . I can drive a car and not know how the car works , however , when the car breaks down (and believe me , it will eventually :wink: ) that knowlege of how the car works can help you to fix it and therefore make for a much less frustrating time . So we can see that knowlege can be applied also .

Of course if you keep on focusing on each individual component of a system it will begin to be more and more useless knowlege , just as if i look at a car and then at the engine , then at the spark plug , then at the materials of the spark plug , then at the chemical make up of the sparkplug , then at the atomic make up of the chemical , then at the particle itself and how it operates . The knowlege then becomes redundant , but if i have a general knowlege of the entire system and how it operates it can be applied .

Im not saying your wrong , just that maybe your focusing on the wrong areas of knowlege . I mean , theres not a whole lot you can know about a table or a cup .

Do not mistake absense of knowledge for its form.
Concepts serve their purpose in knowledge as a whole. It is foolish to think that conceptual thought is inferior; why? Because conceptual thought is the most ultimate form of thought available to us now and thus, even relatively, it is certainly worth something. Our subconscious works strictly with conceptual thought. It is not something to be taken so lightly and thought of as lowly in any way.

I know what you mean that nothing is really ever self-defined. It's always defined by something else, and the further, the likely you'll find out that things are circular. All of our concepts rely on a given other concept that we take without question. Kind of scary, kind of not. Depends on how we choose to feel about it.

I do not think that it is "out there" It makes a lot of sense actually.
Van Gogh and a lot of his still lives captured something. He once remarked something in the lines of, I am not painting a table. It isn't really a table. It is just there, and I paint it.

I think that is what is intriguing about human nature too. A craftsman may see that table in an entire different light than you or I.
We conceptualizes many things each day because they are not pertinent to us. Everything can't be. So we label it and go on.

I like the addition of feeling as concepts. That is good.
I once was told, you are not a sad person. You are just feeling sad.
An emotion can spring up as quickly as it can leave. So if I am lacking confidence, then I really am only experiencing a lack confidence. It does not define me. Possibly through other people's eyes, but ironically............. they are labeling you!

Socrates said the exact opposite. We know everything but we've forgotten it, and just have to be reminded. That's what learning is.

... I'm confused.

It doesn't mean we don't know much about something because we have a name for it. It's just a way to communicate all the thousands of thoughts and peices of information about an object to other people.

I... don't see what the point of this is...

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Originally posted by bradybaker
Socrates said the exact opposite. We know everything but we've forgotten it, and just have to be reminded. That's what learning is.

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That's Plato. Socrates actually says that he doesn't know anything.

But your logic is a little flawed. You say we cannot use anything but words to describe any object. Well, you win the obvious prize! But what you are forgetting is the empirical data that these words are based on. What is yellow? Describe yellow. Can't do it? Does that mean you do not know what yellow is? No, you know very well what yellow is. It's just that this sense data cannot be transferred to another person in the same way it is perceived, so we use language to communicate instead. The fact that we cannot describe this sense data using language, does not mean we do not know anything about it.

Darkmatic - No, knowledge is not useless, that is not what I am saying. When an otter cracks open a clam using a rock, does he know that what he is cracking open is a clam and what he is holding is a rock? No, but he knows that smashing one into the ohter produces food. He has knowledge without concepts.

So far it looks like I'm saying that concepts are useless and should be looked down upon. That's not what I'm getting at. Concepts are VERY useful. Where would we be today without them? We'd be grunting, pointing cavemen.

All I am saying is that you should not take concepts to be the real thing. A table doesn't exist - it's just a concept. I mean, it's obviously there and you can touch it, but it doesn't exist - it's just a bunch of wood arranged a certain way. There is no table.

And I can describe yellow. It is a color that is often bright and to me has a general uplifting feeling, however too much of it hurts the eyes.

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Originally posted by Lance
And I can describe yellow. It is a color that is often bright and to me has a general uplifting feeling, however too much of it hurts the eyes.

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No, no! What is yellow? You've given situational examples of what yellow can be like. I don't need to know that. I need you to explain the concept of yellow to me. And I'm pretty sure you can't do that.

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Originally posted by Jalexxi

No, no! What is yellow? You've given situational examples of what yellow can be like. I don't need to know that. I need you to explain the concept of yellow to me. And I'm pretty sure you can't do that.

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#FFFF00

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o, no! What is yellow? You've given situational examples of what yellow can be like. I don't need to know that. I need you to explain the concept of yellow to me. And I'm pretty sure you can't do that.[/b]

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Exactly! Concepts are too ridgid to say what yellow is and be 100% accurate. The same goes for anything.

So you're right. I can't tell you what yellow is. I can't tell you what a table is either if you've never seen one. I could describe it using concepts, which is too limiting. You'll think "Oh, I know what you are talking about - I call tables four-legged stools"

But that is beside the point.

Lemme clear something up. When I say you don't know anything, I mean you don't know anything in the way that you would normally classify knowledge.

Of course you could learn how to drive a car without any language skills (however language makes it easier). All I am saying is that when it comes to the conscious mind, all you know are concepts. You communicate and think about lables and how they relate to eachother.

It's just a thought.

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Originally posted by Jalexxi
That's Plato. Socrates actually says that he doesn't know anything.

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Well, 'Socrates' said it in the Platonic dialogues, same thing. Sort of.

And I agree that it's pretty ridiculous....just trying to add a new angle to the discussion.

I'll start with Socrates statement, "We know everything but have forgotten and need to remember".

Well, before we remember anything, we do know nothing. One would think that would not take too long to learn something, but actually it does. The way our physical bodies are defined, the senses are limited. Often people mistake what we perceive for the truth. It's not true because a part of the picture is missing. It doesn't matter how many people you can get to agree with you, it's not entirely right.

There is only one truth we may learn in the beginning, "We can't know anything". Once we surrender that everything we thought we learned is unconditionally wrong, that we do know nothing, that is the first truth. Then we have learned, then we may start remembering.

It's quite a leap of faith, now if this cannot be verified all existence is worthless. Fortunately, it can. Once you submit to this first truth, you will see your sign. Coming back to my point about a limited picture, let's now call that picture the infinite vibrational spectrum.

If we do not see a complete picture now, again everything is wrong and may as well explode. Simply put, this picture is the light. It's God, the only thing that can permeate an infinite space. You will experience an unconditional feeling of joy and love and witness a light so brilliant that you have never seen before. You won't want it to go away, but unfortunately, it will. That my friends, is enlightenment. I have felt the light, you may too. It's everyone's priviledge.

I don't think thats true, and here is why. When you look at an object you normally think about it and inside your mind you say "this is a rock", and that would be labeling it.

What happens if you see a rock and don't think about it though? You still saw it and you know its there but you never focused on it and so it doesn't have a label.

As for the otter, I would say it knows what food is and it knows what a rock is. If it didn't use any concepts it wouldn't be able to remeber what to do. If you ask yourself "what is a rock?", can you picture it in your head without using words? Yes, which means you must know what it is.

Just because we don't normally think of an object in a pure form without concepts doesn't mean we can't. We just can't talk to people about it.

@ DistantClone: Sounds a lot like sufism - I first read about this concept that you know nothing in books related to what you are talking about. Have you heard of A.H. Almaas?

And of course an otter knows what food is and what a rock is. If it didn't, it would smash rocks onto rocks instead of finding a clam and banging it on a big rock on the shore.

Conciously, no you do not look at everything and go "Ah, that is a rock. That is a tree. That is my mother waving at me near that car."

The human concious, however brilliant, is very limited. Our unconcious/subconcious/id/whatever-you-want-to-call-it recognizes and processes everything that you perceive. Not only that, it uses all of the information around you that you normally neglect to calculate and try to predict what will happen next. This is a basic survival technique, but because our language ability and form of concepts have become so advanced, we rely on them [concepts] to function. If we didn't use them all the time, we would be animalistic.

We constantly use concepts to keep our reality stable. You are just not aware of it.

Oh and I appreciate the well thought out arguments and structured debate - very few internet forums are this civilized

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Originally posted by Lance

Lemme clear something up. When I say you don't know anything, I mean you don't know anything in the way that you would normally classify knowledge.

Of course you could learn how to drive a car without any language skills (however language makes it easier). All I am saying is that when it comes to the conscious mind, all you know are concepts. You communicate and think about lables and how they relate to eachother.

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In the way you would normally classify knowledge? I wasn't aware there was a universal definition that limited knowledge to only words. In fact, in my opinion, words have nothing to do with knowledge at all.
You basically say words are empty because their definitions can only be determined by using other words, and so on into infinity. Well, but if someone takes me to a table, points, and says "THAT is a table.", do I remain totally ignorant of what a table is and have nothing but hollow concepts in my mind? No. I know what a table is because I have seen it, not because there are a thousand other hollow concepts that refer to it.

This is being taken a bit too far. The point is being missed entirely.

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In the way you would normally classify knowledge? I wasn't aware there was a universal definition that limited knowledge to only words. In fact, in my opinion, words have nothing to do with knowledge at all.
You basically say words are empty because their definitions can only be determined by using other words, and so on into infinity. Well, but if someone takes me to a table, points, and says "THAT is a table.", do I remain totally ignorant of what a table is and have nothing but hollow concepts in my mind? No. I know what a table is because I have seen it, not because there are a thousand other hollow concepts that refer to it.

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Yes, concepts are empty. They do not exist. Hence, you know nothing, but you are looking at it from the wrong perspective.

Look at the mind of an infant. When they look around, they do not see anything as separate from anything else. They see a table, but they also see the floor, the chairs, the cup and everything else around it all melded into one thing. During the first weeks of infancy, they do not even know that they are separate from their mothers. This is because an infant does not have concepts to define a table from the floor, so they are one thing.

So yes, you do know what a table is if you've seen it, but that is only because you have other things to define it. If you did not have any concepts whatsoever and looked at a kitchen, would you be able to find the table?

You might have seen the table before, maybe even touched it, studied it or moved it around, but without definitions for it, all you have are shapeless emotions attached to the things you perceive. In that sense, you know what a table is. Until someone points and says "Table," then you know what it "really" is.

You have to understand that concepts do not exist. They are just ideas that we have to stabilize our reality. If concepts don't exist and we base our reality upon them, then we know nothing. [/quote]

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Originally posted by Lance
Look at the mind of an infant. When they look around, they do not see anything as separate from anything else. They see a table, but they also see the floor, the chairs, the cup and everything else around it all melded into one thing. During the first weeks of infancy, they do not even know that they are separate from their mothers. This is because an infant does not have concepts to define a table from the floor, so they are one thing.

So yes, you do know what a table is if you've seen it, but that is only because you have other things to define it. If you did not have any concepts whatsoever and looked at a kitchen, would you be able to find the table?

You might have seen the table before, maybe even touched it, studied it or moved it around, but without definitions for it, all you have are shapeless emotions attached to the things you perceive. In that sense, you know what a table is. Until someone points and says "Table," then you know what it "really" is.

You have to understand that concepts do not exist. They are just ideas that we have to stabilize our reality. If concepts don't exist and we base our reality upon them, then we know nothing.

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Well, no. We don't know nothing. Just nothing about the world outside of us. The world as it is presented to us, by the senses and filtered through a mesh of concepts, of that we can attain knowledge. Of the world that 'causes' these impressions, indeed, knowledge of that is out of our reach.
Is that what you meant?

It sounds like your mixing ideas. Just because your can't describe something to another person doesn't mean you don't know it. Knowing something and being able to describe it are two separate things.

If you where psychic maybe you could show someone what something is without using a concept to describe it.

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Originally posted by Lance
This is being taken a bit too far. The point is being missed entirely.

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In the way you would normally classify knowledge? I wasn't aware there was a universal definition that limited knowledge to only words. In fact, in my opinion, words have nothing to do with knowledge at all.
You basically say words are empty because their definitions can only be determined by using other words, and so on into infinity. Well, but if someone takes me to a table, points, and says "THAT is a table.", do I remain totally ignorant of what a table is and have nothing but hollow concepts in my mind? No. I know what a table is because I have seen it, not because there are a thousand other hollow concepts that refer to it.

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Yes, concepts are empty. They do not exist. Hence, you know nothing, but you are looking at it from the wrong perspective.

Look at the mind of an infant. When they look around, they do not see anything as separate from anything else. They see a table, but they also see the floor, the chairs, the cup and everything else around it all melded into one thing. During the first weeks of infancy, they do not even know that they are separate from their mothers. This is because an infant does not have concepts to define a table from the floor, so they are one thing.

So yes, you do know what a table is if you've seen it, but that is only because you have other things to define it. If you did not have any concepts whatsoever and looked at a kitchen, would you be able to find the table?

You might have seen the table before, maybe even touched it, studied it or moved it around, but without definitions for it, all you have are shapeless emotions attached to the things you perceive. In that sense, you know what a table is. Until someone points and says "Table," then you know what it "really" is.

You have to understand that concepts do not exist. They are just ideas that we have to stabilize our reality. If concepts don't exist and we base our reality upon them, then we know nothing. [/b]

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That's a very interesting concept, Lance. I've never even thought about an infant's perception of everything as connected, before, but it makes complete sense. :happy:

All of these ideas, however, depend on which theory of quantum reality you believe in. If you are more in line with the traditional Western "reductionist" perspective of a continuous, fundamentally physical, existence, then knowledge begins with both instinct and experience. I don't follow the "concepts are nothing" view, though. I think concepts are just as real as anything else. They are impulses. They are variables; factors. They hold more power than anything physical, because they hold the power to overcome anything physical, given the opportunity to be put to that use.
Hatred is a concept. Pride is a concept. But it is hatred and pride that cause countless deaths at the hands of fellow men around the globe, daily. You can reduce them to concepts. You can reduce them to figments of the imagination. You can describe them in chinese, english or sanskrit, but the way you present the concept is irrelevant. The exist. They are as real as anything else you'd define as real.
However, if you are more into the line of some of the present theories being brought about by quantum physicists, your entire perspective on this may be somewhat different.
I also think it's hard for anyone to have a conversation on reality without taking in more of the theories on it and weighing the information on both sides, so, here's a link to what's being called just about the most complete theory on reality we have today, that contradicts the traditional, widespread relativistic view that we now have as the status quo. From all I've read, it is receiving as much consideration, under the radar, as any other, and could prove to even overshoot the present paradigms.
http://www.dreamviews.com/forum/viewtopic....7444&highlight=

If you follow Bohm's way of thinking, knowledge is universal, as consciousness is, loosely speaking, all there is. Knowledge is gained through the ability to perceive the wave of whatever concept it is you're "learning." In the explicate order (the filtered reality that we perceive with our senses) we experience this by subjectively "gaining knowledge," and are sort-of weened (sp?) into knowledge through this experience. However the knowledge itself of these concepts are universal, and linked with all things in the unfiltered/implicate order level of reality, that is seperated from us by these theoretical, but widely agreed upon, multiple dimensions.

Again, it's hard to have a conversation on reality unless both parties are agreeing on the definition of reality. As of now, there is more than one (respected) way to propose what you think reality is, and what knowledge truly entails.

its actually quite accurate.
Then again. Words are just symbols.
We. in essence, know.
"So much of what we perceive, cannot be expressed."