Language and Reality (Humans)

by dhw, Monday, April 04, 2011, 12:48 (4981 days ago)

TONY (under Why is there something rather than nothing?): Sorry for the late reply. I am trying to work within the boundaries of our language DHW. We can measure photons, we can measure the spectrum of light and how they break down into colors. Black is not a color, it is an absence of color. Darkness is simply the absence of light. Time is human construct to help us deal with an extremely rapid sequence of static states. The sense of touch is illusory as you will never actually touch anything. All I was trying to point out is that 'Nothing' is only useful as defining the absence of something. Which is basically a state that can not exist.-Thank you for replying. I had actually asked you for a definition of reality, and for three examples of things that are "real", because you had said that nothing, time, darkness etc. were intellectual constructs which had "no place in reality" (other than as abstracts) and did not "really exist". However, this ties in with the point you have raised about the boundaries of language, which is so important that I think it deserves a separate thread. Ideally, it would have formed part of the epistemology discussion, but that seems to have been abandoned.-All language is a human construct, symbolizing aspects of what we believe to be reality. The problem in our discussions is to determine what level we are going to work on, and I am 100% in agreement with David in objecting to the "philosophizing that goes nowhere". You and I know what we mean when we talk of "black" and of "darkness". My commonsense response to your definitions of these two terms is that the absence of colour/light is REAL (i.e. has a place in reality), and we call it black/darkness. I'm not too sure about your definition of time, but the same argument applies: the rapid sequence of static states is REAL, and we call it time. The absence of something is REAL, and we call it nothing. (I'll ignore touch, as I don't understand why that is illusory, and I don't want us to be distracted from the theme of language and reality.) -On the epistemological thread, Matt and I finally agreed on a definition of knowledge as "information accepted as being true by general consensus among those who are aware of it". This information (concerning which the general consensus may change ... knowledge is not fixed for ever) will always be subject to "the boundaries of our language", and we can never capture the totality of things with our words, but I think the above definition also gives us a workable, commonsense basis for a definition of "reality". Once you move to the philosophical level, however, there is no such thing as reality. (I could say here "nothing is real", and crack two nuts with one stone!) And so at this level, where human constructs are deemed to have no place in reality, discussion comes to an end.