Voidmatrix wrote:Considering your present stance (the overall baselessness and abstraction of our thinking), how does your stance hold up?
Is it not sense data that brought you to your supposition about sense data, thus being void at the core ("very notion of object is an abstraction"
?
Again, with your current stance in mind, can even those two conclusions be reached (can any conclusion truly be reached)?
Just to clarify, I am in no way challenging what you've stated (I already see paradoxes all over the place, and that's what this is coming down to for me), but just exploring it further.
That line [between concrete and abstract] as well as a barrage of others I find hard to draw once you get deep enough toward it. Things become blurred and cohesive, making one wonder if the way they got there is valid any longer. That place of an enigmatic and esoteric nature.
In regards to your two conclusions, I definitely feel that. When it comes to explaining trips to others, I typically tell people to pretend there are quotes around everything I say because our language is too limited to do the experience justice. While language helps us in so many ways to communicate things from what's necessary for survival to how we feel, there will always be some limit, because what one person means by a word is not always exactly the same as someone else's; through intersubjectivity it becomes generalized so that words can be used to communicate. There are words in some languages that there's no counterpart or direct translation for in others, leading me to think there are intersubjective experiences that some have had that others haven't, otherwise there would be a correspondence for said word.
And to add to your point about further problems (such as indeterminacy), there's indeterminacy in fields of science as well (like cosmology). All the same, the first paragraph screamed GODEL to me lol.
One love
One may say that it is in fact not the sense data which brings us to any conclusions about the sense data whatsoever, since none of these conclusions can, in any way, be observed. The same goes for the entire empirical method in general, you have to add something to the observation in order to even get to the notion of observation.
The paradox still remains, if abstractions are to be distrusted, then my conclusion about those abstraction is also abstract. However, these paradoxes are intentional. My idea is that, if one cannot grasp any truths, if neither the senses nor reason can lead us to truth, if reason in itself is flawed and paradoxical, then the only thing we are left with are paradoxes. And even if the paradoxes don't lead us to any truth, they can still either point towards a shadow of some truth or dispel the illusions of truth.
My thoughts are contradictory and paradoxical, and partly for that reason I have grown to distrust language. Consider a DMT experience. You are completely immersed and lost in the experience, there is no time to "think" about anything, but as soon as it starts to fade away you ask yourself what exactly it was what you experienced. You start trying to recall things, you try to arrange and order those bits of memory in some way. You end up building a narrative... but who is to say that that is what you actually experienced and not something you constructed afterwards? Could you not extend the same to all experience in general? How can we say what we experience?
Nietzsche talks about a similar issue in "On truth and lies in a non moral sense". He asks what do words have to do with the neural activity, and what does that have to do with the electromagnetic waves which induce it? In each case, we jump from one sphere, to another completely different one. What are words but metaphors... mere metaphors. To describe experience with words is to describe a painting with a melody, or music with a painting.
So far I have arrived at the conclusion that a) one ought to take a purely practical approach towards language in particular and epistemology in general. i.e. not to ask what is true or false, but "what can we do with x" or "How does a hypothesis help us do x". One must speak only in so far one makes no claims about truth or falsehood, and beyond that, one must remain silent. After my last few DMT experiences, I have come to strongly doubt all of my narratives about my past experiences. I feel like... just staying silent! just letting myself experience what I experience, without trying to figure out what I experience. I wonder what it would be like to be free of language.
این جهان با تو خوش است و آن جهان با تو خوش است
این جهان بیمن مباش و آن جهان بیمن مرو
ای عیان بیمن مدان و ای زبان بیمن مخوان
ای نظر بیمن مبین و ای روان بیمن مرو