Back to irreducible complexity (PART TWO) (Introduction)

by xeno6696 , Sonoran Desert, Wednesday, February 24, 2010, 00:19 (5183 days ago) @ dhw

MATT, replying to my post of 11 February at 11.02: I apologize for how much time this took. It appears I had another of my "episodes" where a line of thought snaked in and I followed it assuming that you could read my brain. 
> 
> I have a similar problem, on which I blame my failure to write the symphonies and concertos the world has been waiting for. 
> 
> We're in agreement on the subject of determinate language, though I remain puzzled by Nietzsche's cross-eyed focus on subject and predicate when the problem of linguistic determinacy arises out of the whole process of finding words to denote realities. I didn't know the Hawaiians had no word for "goodbye". I thought they used "aloha" for both hello and goodbye (it should be obvious from the situation which is which). There's no special word in my wife's native language either (Urhobo). It would be a lot more significant, though, if a culture had never developed a word for "evil", or "god". Come to think of it, goodbye is actually "God be with you" (a bit like "adieu" and "adiòs"). Yet another example of how terms become established and we forget about their actual meaning. At this rate, atheists should never say goodbye! 
> -I'll admit that in the section I quoted, the chapter in context was dealing with psychologists and philosophers--but specifically Decartes and his Cogito Ergo Sum. In the same chapter he had a similarly vicious attack against physicists and scientists at large. So, although I characterize him fairly--I'm probably moving him a bit out of context in that passage. Regardless, it was a bad idea as your follow-up post shows that I did a bad job in my message. -> I can see that the selfishness surrounding the "I" (a pronoun, by the way, not an article) is a barrier to Buddhist enlightenment, in which case the ego has to exercise control over the id. Re-reading our original posts, though, I think my difficulty was in seeing how you linked this to the philosophy of "here and now". Probably not important. 
> -Never once will I ever say that the knowledge of my own language is even... "good." I'd be honest in saying that I couldn't even conjugate a verb without looking it up. -> You say "all things we view as causes and effects are as such because we built them to appear that way". Doesn't that negate about 90% of science? I agree, of course, that "the objects in a language are never to be considered the same thing as the entity they describe", but that's not quite the same argument, is it?-Yes, I especially mean that for science. Everything we know we know by language. Everything we know by science as well. If we never had language our state would be little changed over the course of the ages, and while I'll always argue for creature comforts, there's something to be said about a hard life.

--
\"Why is it, Master, that ascetics fight with ascetics?\"

\"It is, brahmin, because of attachment to views, adherence to views, fixation on views, addiction to views, obsession with views, holding firmly to views that ascetics fight with ascetics.\"