• archive
  • about

theoria

  • Without meaning, not meaningless

    January 21st, 2023

    There is a difference between something being meaningless and something without meaning. The former is emotive and centralizes consciousness. The latter is a description of the neutral nature of the external world.

    To be without meaning is to point out that meaning is projected on to the world by a meaning maker. It is a value judgement on the part of a conscious being.

    To be meaningless is to forget that there is a judgement call being made. It is the projection of incredulity on to the world.

    That is to say, what is being overlooked is that there is a meaning to the act of seeing the world as meaningless. The knee jerk reaction of existentialism separates out the internal world – the consciousness –from the world that the consciousness is inside, namely the so-called external world.

  • Thoughts on Aristotelian categories

    January 21st, 2023

    Ackrill wrote that he believed that categories were about things, not words. I disagree. Firstly, working through Aristotle’s concept of primary and secondary substances by his example, the individual man is both man and animal. The logic would be that there are not three existent entities but one, the individual man under which are entities which can only be termed categorical entities. These categorical entities seem to be endless. The individual can also be mammal among other categories.

    If it cannot be (ac)counted (for) it isn’t real.

  • Thoughts and memories

    January 20th, 2023

    I have direct perception of my thoughts, but I have no direct perception of other people’s thoughts. I only have their physical being and actions to judge their thoughts by. I can only assume that other beings have thoughts like my own.

    I do not think it is unreasonable to make this assumption. We see an apple, we assume it tastes like the other apples we have eaten. We judge from past experiences.

    Memory plays a large role in our understanding of reality. We must however ask what assumptions are we making about things, about the reality. Are we, without realizing it, skipping steps to get to some of our conclusions?

  • The embodied mind

    January 18th, 2023

    The theory of an embodied mind is neither new nor original. It is a staple of cognitive linguistics beginning with perhaps Mark Johnson and George Lakoff. The mind is never from any other perspective than the body within which it functions.

  • Knowledge and reality

    January 18th, 2023

    1.
    Knowledge is physically or materially based because our senses including the mind are materially based. Reality is material based.

    2.
    I deal with the material reality, or I should only deal with the material reality.

    3.
    The abstract, conceptual, non-material “realities” by definition have no effects upon the material reality. Therefore we should be concerned with them.

    4.
    We should only concern ourselves with the material which can perform abstraction, conceptualisation, and think about non-material realities, and not concern ourselves with abstractions, concepts and non-real “things”.

  • Source of knowledge and the body

    January 18th, 2023

    1.
    There is no evidence that we can have any kind of knowledge outside of or prior to sensory knowledge.

    2.
    If only the mind (whatever the word means) is necessary then we should be able to have knowledge through it alone. That is, a person born with no other sense other than the mind (following Buddhism, I take the mind to be the sixth sense) then this person’s mind should be sufficient to allow him access to knowledge.

    3.
    There is also no evidence of a mind independent of the body, either before one is born or after one has died.

  • Perception, West and East

    January 17th, 2023

    The term perception has a slightly different usage between the West and East. For the West, there is a distinction between sensation and perception. But for the East, perception means both raw sense data (sensation) and processed data of the mind (perception). This East-West distinction needs to be also kept in mind.

  • Sense and persense

    January 17th, 2023

    A distinction is made between sensation and perception. The raw data before it is processed or transmitted to the brain is sense data. the processed data after it is processed by the brain is persense data (a term I coined). Persense data explains a lot about, for example, optical illusions, loss of night vision or unnoticed degradation of hearing.

  • Perception

    January 13th, 2023

    Buddhism considers perception (pratyaksa) to be one of two (the other being inference) valid means of knowledge (pramāna). This is uncontroversial. What is to be minimally known is the physical reality. The question whether reality includes entities other than the physical ones.

  • The starting point for OMT

    January 13th, 2023

    If you had to start investigations into philosophy there are no better places to start than ontology and epistemology.

    Two of the oldest “branches” of philosophical inquiry, it lays the foundation for the rest of your philosophy to come.

    Ontology is the study of what exists. Epistemology is the study of what is known and how it is known.

    These questions cannot sound simpler. Yet very few satisfactory and probable answers have been given.

←Previous Page
1 2 3 4 5
Next Page→

Website Powered by WordPress.com.

  • Follow Following
    • theoria
    • Already have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.
    • theoria
    • Edit Site
    • Follow Following
    • Sign up
    • Log in
    • Report this content
    • View site in Reader
    • Manage subscriptions
    • Collapse this bar