☃️merry chrimist☃️ on Nostr: 🌲Fæġer Mæġden🌲 Guy Incognito gav Underrated post. Given my own interests, ...
🌲Fæġer Mæġden🌲 (npub1g0u…3vfw) Guy Incognito (npub1pz6…7c8z) gav (npub1w4j…cead) Underrated post.
Given my own interests, it's probably not surprising that I have similar views on symbols versus language.
> the world is always understood as it is before language describes it.
A recurring struggle in my life is finding people who are like this, and wasting less time on people who aren't like this (they are the true word"cel"s).
The overall idea reminds me of this aspect of Wittgenstein's picture-language theory (all I know about it is the wikipedia page, which I quote from):
"Wittgenstein claims there is an unbridgeable gap between what can be expressed in language and what can only be expressed in non-verbal ways. The picture theory of meaning states that statements are meaningful if, and only if, they can be defined or pictured in the real world."
Those hardline mathematicians which I mentioned view the real world and the mathematical world as being the same thing. In math, the choice of names is obviously arbitrary, so they extend that to real world concepts. What they fail to realize is that language which describes the real world is much more complicated than language as used in math. All sorts of hidden meanings (symbols in their own right) get dragged into a conversation when polarizing terms are used. They insist on using words simply - having one word mean one thing - and end up offending people. This is also why I hate debating leftist academics.
> makes me think that he equated the two
I have always thought that he equated the two. This wasn't as absurd for him as it might seem to us. Back in the day, even a silly geometry fact about six lines intersecting in a circle could be given a name like the "hexagrammum mysticum" (real). So I think they were more open to the idea that symbols themselves could be a higher essence.
Really, I think the only reason why we think otherwise - that symbols are somehow "low" - is due to the idea of computing (beginning with Leibniz, who tried to make a "calculus" for all of human thought). If we drop the idea (universally-believed today) that symbols are somehow generated through "calculation," then there is only one place they could come from, which is "above." It's not a coincidence that the Greeks didn't use any algebra in their theoretical math, only geometry - only vision.
Plato also viewed manmade things as embodying forms. For example, the "form of emptiness" in a cup, which is the "virtue" that makes it perform well as a cup. I wonder whether he would consider a cup-maker to be a form-summoner or (as the Inuit would have it) a form-revealer.
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I agree that symbols always refer to the real world, at the end of the day. I think the symbol of "negation" is very powerful though. From life, we get non-life. From death, we get non-death, which is not the same as "life." Maybe this takes us full circle: transhumanism as a negation of the world.
It's kind of remarkable, I think, that given a symbol we can imagine the negation of it. Given the finite, can we automatically know the infinite?
Given my own interests, it's probably not surprising that I have similar views on symbols versus language.
> the world is always understood as it is before language describes it.
A recurring struggle in my life is finding people who are like this, and wasting less time on people who aren't like this (they are the true word"cel"s).
The overall idea reminds me of this aspect of Wittgenstein's picture-language theory (all I know about it is the wikipedia page, which I quote from):
"Wittgenstein claims there is an unbridgeable gap between what can be expressed in language and what can only be expressed in non-verbal ways. The picture theory of meaning states that statements are meaningful if, and only if, they can be defined or pictured in the real world."
Those hardline mathematicians which I mentioned view the real world and the mathematical world as being the same thing. In math, the choice of names is obviously arbitrary, so they extend that to real world concepts. What they fail to realize is that language which describes the real world is much more complicated than language as used in math. All sorts of hidden meanings (symbols in their own right) get dragged into a conversation when polarizing terms are used. They insist on using words simply - having one word mean one thing - and end up offending people. This is also why I hate debating leftist academics.
> makes me think that he equated the two
I have always thought that he equated the two. This wasn't as absurd for him as it might seem to us. Back in the day, even a silly geometry fact about six lines intersecting in a circle could be given a name like the "hexagrammum mysticum" (real). So I think they were more open to the idea that symbols themselves could be a higher essence.
Really, I think the only reason why we think otherwise - that symbols are somehow "low" - is due to the idea of computing (beginning with Leibniz, who tried to make a "calculus" for all of human thought). If we drop the idea (universally-believed today) that symbols are somehow generated through "calculation," then there is only one place they could come from, which is "above." It's not a coincidence that the Greeks didn't use any algebra in their theoretical math, only geometry - only vision.
Plato also viewed manmade things as embodying forms. For example, the "form of emptiness" in a cup, which is the "virtue" that makes it perform well as a cup. I wonder whether he would consider a cup-maker to be a form-summoner or (as the Inuit would have it) a form-revealer.
---
I agree that symbols always refer to the real world, at the end of the day. I think the symbol of "negation" is very powerful though. From life, we get non-life. From death, we get non-death, which is not the same as "life." Maybe this takes us full circle: transhumanism as a negation of the world.
It's kind of remarkable, I think, that given a symbol we can imagine the negation of it. Given the finite, can we automatically know the infinite?