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