“Often we are dealing with problems that don’t even exist.”
(Paraphrase of a video showing a man jumping the moving shadows of the blade of a wind generator.)
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1.
I have a white car.
I went to a car manufacturing factory and saw how they make cars. The body is silver at first they dip the entire body into white paint.
So is my car white, or is my car covered in paint that is white?
2.
In spring the leaves are green. but in autumn they change to yellow or red, then eventually to brown. What is the true colour of leaves.
3.
Two trees have green leaves. Taking a sample and putting the leaves side by side they are not identical in colour. One is lighter than the other. Why do we still call them green?
4.
A book is sitting on my shelf. It has been sitting there for years. One day, I take the book off the shelf to read and notice that the edge of the pages have yellowed ever so slightly compared to the inside of the book. Yet when the book was on the shelf I still thought was white. Is the book pages still white in that sense?
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Experience is of the present.
Even when you think of the past or future it is done in the present. That is, time is not past time because you think of the past, and time is not future time because you think of the future. Thought occurs in the present but in an instance it is in the past. For time does not stand still.
We may think of slices of time, but we do not experience time as slices.
Time, itself, is diachronic, not synchronic. Thoughts of time can be either diachronic or synchronic, for the thought of time is not the same as time. They are two separate entities.
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Reality exists independently of it being perceived.
Matter, space, and time does what it does without it being understood.
What is perceived is the past is near the present and is never the future. There is always a delay.
This “is” is the thought of a time, whether it be a past, a present, or a future.
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Imagine a database that traces everything in the universe in snapshot like the British National Corpus (BNC).
I would call it the Philosophical Ontology Corpus or POC.
Just like the BNC my POC would be a snapshot of say for example now. And instead of being a sample it would be of the statistical population, that is, everything would be accounted for. This is theoretical, of course. To sample the population would be impossible.
So let me take this snapshot, which would be a synchronic study. It would be of the moment, POC-2024-05-07-0421-05.
The first piece of data would be to identify everything in reality. For argument’s sake let me take all individual atoms in reality to be ontologically existent. In order to identify all atoms I would give them a unique identifier (UID). Now, even though every atom in this snapshot is accounted for it is not useful. Elemental atoms clump together to make units, molecules. Suppose that two oxygen atoms did form a unit O2 I will now include this in my database and give it a UID. But I would also need a new data column to identify the original atoms. So this new column would identify its composition and have the UID of both atoms in it. In other words, the column would no longer be of only all the individual atoms but also includes units that are composed of individual unit as well. The POC would be now much larger to the original database.
Now only that, now let us say that I want to talk about me as a unit I would have my own UID which would have a composition UID (cUID) of all the atoms. This seems straight forward enough.
But what if I only want to talk about “my hand” which is part of my body? A new UID would be created with the corresponding cUID of the material that make up my hand.
In other words, I will need a new column with the identifying words “my hand” if I have only talked or thought about it. But, unlike a traditional corpus, POC will start with UIDs instead of token usages of the language. The UID would be mapping of everything in the world and I have theoretically conceived in thought. That is, because I have chosen to ask the question “what exists”.
Clearly, it is not only of the particulars, but also of the conceived combinations of particulars (O2, my body, my hand, etc).
And if I continue with this, then I will also include non-particulars (green, fast, on, the, he, and, numbers, unicorns, capitalism, etc) as well.
POC would be an extremely large database.
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Thoughts and symbols are, by definition, infinite. Whereas, objects are finite. So, naturally, there will be more thought and symbolic entities than object entities of reality.
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There are more thought entities than symbolic entities. There are more symbolic entities than object entities.
thoughts ≥ symbols ≥ objects
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Thought and symbolism are actions. I am a body with mind actions (thoughts and symbols). Thoughts and language do not bring about things. Things bring about thoughts and language. The first task is to orient oneself correctly about these entities.
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I express my understanding of reality through my actions. I am no longer a passive observer. I belong to the reality as a thing of reality. I am an active agent. My agency means a full acceptance of my place and time in reality. I define my tasks in reality, for purpose is not a given.
theoria 