Why do so many people mistake language for reality?

[Philosaur]

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If the words are as meaningless as all that, then what does that sentence teach? That words can assembled in the noun, verb, object configuration and transmit no intelligence?
Many of us finger that out before encountering that nonsense phrase.

I'm not trying to convince anyone that koans are effective or worthwhile. I'm just pointing out that you're judging them by the wrong criteria. It's like reading a Batman comic and decrying how fake it is. Well, yeah! It's not meant to be history.

In any event, there's a spectrum of nonsense, ranging from random letters thrown together, to pure gibberish like glossalalia, to gibberish like that found in "Jabberwocky", to sensible-sounding sentences that are only found to be nonsense after some consideration.

You, and any five-year-old, can point out all day long that the koans are nonsensical. That doesn't mean there's nothing interesting going on at that border between meaning and nonsense.

The fields of politics and religion thrive on such nonsense.

Along with marketing, economics, art, and many other things. Do you look at all social sciences the same way?

I personally find many of the Continental philosophers, along with the post-modernists to have a VERY low signal-to-noise ratio. It's Sturgeon's law: 90% of anything is crap.

 

[Bodhi Dharma Zen]

Interesting post

Concepts are as much part of "reality" as percepts.

Agreed, and this is an important point, sometimes people (specially some of the self called "skeptics" in this forum), ditch concepts and ideas as irrelevant, and "reality" (which in itself is another concept) as what matters in the end.

They forget, most people forget actually, that we live in a world of sensations, some of them come from our senses and the others are feelings, beliefs, concepts and so on, and (this is the important part) they weight the same, so to speak.

The earth WAS flat at some point, and the earth was the center of the universe. Both concepts were taken as KNOWLEDGE at the time, and were backed up by (known) facts and observations.

Later, better observations lead the way to broader facts (no more real facts, just broader) and this made people to change their beliefs (and keep believing they have knowledge).

Knowledge on the other hand is when a concept has a corresponding percept.

This is, exactly, where the problem begins, as (briefely) pointed out above.

Philosophy is not only about knowledge it is about the full human experience. And a fundamental part of that experience is language or symbolic representations.

Agreed, furthermore, we all do philosophy everytime we act based on an idea (I'm going to buy some bread) needs you tu assume your car has gas, the store is open, your favorite brand is in stock an so on (it is philosophy because you asume reality is what you believe it is).

Understanding how language works has been the work of philosophers for some time culminating in Wittgenstein's work on the relationship between language and thought.

Probably the greatest philosopher of all times, but I wouldn't say its the culmination, it is like a Newton or Einstein for philosophy, but I bet we still have a lot to create and discover.

He said something important: "The limits of my language are the limits of my world" and I believe this is exactly the case.

 

[I Ratant]

Many people died under Communism, Communism is a philosophy, therefore many people died under philosophy, therefore philosophers are the parasites on society?

That's essentially the logic of your post with a few extra bare assertions that philosophy is made up of "bumper stickers" for gullible people.

What "bumper stickers" did Plato come up with? Or Frege?

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"Applied philosophy"... when some charismatic ego-maniac picks up on some bumper sticker and ensorceles the unwashed masses with the pie-in-the-sky implications of something an academic divorced from contact with reality excretes as real.

 

[I Ratant]

...



Along with marketing, economics, art, and many other things. Do you look at all social sciences the same way?

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All? No. Some go bonkers (overboard to ludicrous extremes) with "fairness" and "equality" and stuff like that, but others have a useful place.
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I personally find many of the Continental philosophers, along with the post-modernists to have a VERY low signal-to-noise ratio. It's Sturgeon's law: 90% of anything is crap.

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Sturgeon is correct .

 

[phunk]

FYI, the answer to the 'unstoppable force, immovable object' question is 'quantum tunneling'.

 

[Philosaur]

FYI, the answer to the 'unstoppable force, immovable object' question is 'quantum tunneling'.

I was thinking the U.S. legislature.

 

[I Ratant]

I was thinking the U.S. legislature.

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More like "invincibly ignorant".

 

[westprog]

Wait, what? Does this mean that none of us thinks always in words, even if we also use other forms of cognition to assist? Then what's that constant running dialogue in my head? Please clarify, in case I'm misunderstanding.

"Thinking is nothing but talking to yourself." "Oh yeah?" said Bennie. "Do you know the crazy shape of a crankshaft in a car? How did you describe it when you were talking to yourself?"

Clearly much of what we think is non-verbal.

 

[epepke]

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"Neener!"
I say "Neener, neener, neener" to you, sir!

I counter your neener with a solid boo boo, sirrah!

 

[I Ratant]

You win!

 

[westprog]

I think you mistake politics for the **** politicians blame stuff on, Stalin did what Stalin did, you can't blame Marx for what Stalin did. Nor can you blame Adam Smith for starvation of children in Victorian england and current day africa.

"Blame" isn't important. If someone implements ideas faithfully, and those ideas have particular consequences, it's wise to see the connection between the ideas and the results.

 

[angrysoba]

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"Applied philosophy"... when some charismatic ego-maniac picks up on some bumper sticker and ensorceles the unwashed masses with the pie-in-the-sky implications of something an academic divorced from contact with reality excretes as real.

I think you're confusing pompous language with reality.

 

[I Ratant]

I think you're confusing pompous language with reality.

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Really?
Philosophies seem to be full of it pompous language, to impress the unwashed masses with silly ideas that fall flat when confronting reality.
Any of them need a healthy dose of reality to be implemented in a feasible manner.

 

[angrysoba]

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Really?
Philosophies seem to be full of it pompous language, to impress the unwashed masses with silly ideas that fall flat when confronting reality.
Any of them need a healthy dose of reality to be implemented in a feasible manner.

I Ratant,

In my post, I said:

I think you're confusing pompous language with reality.

You respond with:

Philosophies seem to be full of it pompous language, to impress the unwashed masses with silly ideas that fall flat when confronting reality.

How does that in any way answer my charge to you?

I have no idea what your experience with actual philosophers are but in my experience philosophers are almost completely unconcerned with connecting with the "unwashed masses" because they tend to think the "unwashed masses" are far too thick to understand what they are talking about.

As for "bumper stickers", you're as likely to find "bumper stickers" in a philosophy paper as you are to find raunchy sex scenes.

 

[epepke]

Why is everyone hammering away at the ridiculousness of a Zen koan that was never supposed to have an answer in the first place? Buddhists don't sit around pondering what the answer could be. The whole point is to shock you out of your quotidian "monkey mind" rambling, the inner monologue (dialogue?) that slingblade mentioned.

That would be a great story if it weren't wrong.

From Wikipedia:

A kōan may be used as a test of a Zen student's ability. For monks in formal training, and for some laypersons, a teacher invokes a kōan and demands some definite response from a student during private interviews.

About a quarter century ago, I held in my hands a book called something like 99 Zen Koans with Answers. The only one I can remember is "a butterfly" for the sound of one hand clapping. I went excitedly to a friend who was more into this stuff and said, "I just discovered that koans aren't the unanswerable ponderables that people say they are. The student has to get the right answer fast or else the master whups him upside the head with a rattan stick." He nodded sagely and pointed out how many Zen students were enlightened by being whupped upside the head with a rattan stick.

I don't know where this idea that they don't have answers comes from, but I strongly suspect that drugs and California were both involved.

 

[Darth Rotor]

I'm aware that you don't mean all philosophers, but I have to say this.

As a philosophy major myself, I think {snip}

how many ways can I say "do you want fries with that" and retain the essential meaning of fries?

 

[angrysoba]

how many ways can I say "do you want fries with that" and retain the essential meaning of fries?

Do you mean they got a first?

If you look on the bright side, scanning the "philosophers wanted" ads in the paper takes so little time that it leaves you free for the rest of the day.

 

[Polarize]

I think the problem with philosophy sometimes is that it provides a framework to understand reality around us, but this is attempting to describe reality before attempting to venture out and discovering what reality is. Thats what science is for.

 

[I Ratant]

I think the problem with philosophy sometimes is that it provides a framework to understand reality around us, but this is attempting to describe reality before attempting to venture out and discovering what reality is. Thats what science is for.

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And science shouldn't invent words to explain simple concepts, just because it can.
Like "bijection" a term in math I just encountered here.
Is apparently definable as "A bijection, or bijective function, is a mathematical function which is both a surjective function and an injective function i.e. a bijection is one-to-one and onto. This means that each object in the codomain of a bijective function is equivalent to the application of the bijection on a unique object in its domain. Said precisely, a bijection f from a set X to a set Y determines a one-to-one correspondence between the sets X and Y when for every x \in X there is a unique y\in Y with f(x) = y, and for every y \in Y there is a unique x\in X with y = f(x)."
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Which in simple terms says one thing is the same as another.
Philosophy reeks of this type of complication of simplicities.

 

[Minoosh]

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"Applied philosophy"... when some charismatic ego-maniac picks up on some bumper sticker and ensorceles the unwashed masses with the pie-in-the-sky implications of something an academic divorced from contact with reality excretes as real.

Mao was a psychopath. Mass murder wasn't a side effect, it was an intentional act. Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot - they weren't "divorced from contact with reality," they just liked to destroy things. Manipulate people. Inflict pain for the hell of it. It wasn't about philosophy or ideology.

From what little I know of Mao, he probably understood he'd killed 30 million Chinese peasants and got off on the fact. He may have imagined it as a perverse tribute to the peasantry - 30 million down, but so many more left! At any rate he probably had a good idea how ruinous his policies would be.

Are psychopaths emotional solipsists? I can't decide if being oblivious to other people's pain is compatible with enjoying other people's pain.