Karl

That was me 6 years ago BES.

Bit like: "I find myself enjoying my thoughts and body energies in a way that has me grinning like a cheshire cat. I can't remember that I have ever 'not' thought this way (if that makes sense) yet somehow something has subtly changed."

@wilf thank you. "But it's real, just as I am real so is the world. It's a perfect creation with many levels and enormous complexity. It is driven by an infinite source that is neither created or destroyed, the source is not a dead energy, it is pure love. Not the soppy stuff, this is far deeper, infinite and supreme. Once that is realised, once theatre nature is revealed it is obvious. I am that I am, the conduit of this power and part of it. It allows a pure love of the world and total detachment at the same time. An immense depth and strength without fear and a need to serve." A bit like that kind of thing. Stillness dancing. Expansion of consciousness ?

So it's a sensation that you can't describe.

It is the ONLY motivating factor. You cannot love anything unless you accept your ego A selfless love is a contradiction. Love is to judge and appreciate the values and happiness that others bring to ones own life.

Only an egoist is capable of love. To say 'I love' one must first be capable of saying 'I'.

No there is no plurality of absolutes. There can be plurality of concepts. The external perception is not the internal conception, but the direct perception of existence is direct and perfect. You are trying to keep the sceptics/sophist argument of each moment meaning no absolutes. It's your natural inclination to want reality to be maleable. For you it accomplishes the confirmation of a conceptual belief. That it is not that way will contradict what you believe to be true, but you are going to try and make it work anyway. Relative is only appropriate to existence. If you cannot conceive existence you cannot conceive absolutes. That makes relativism a product of conception unrelated in any sense to existent reality. That is what you believe to be true and you are unshakeable in that conviction even as you write that something is true, that you rely on reality to offer proof and yet you deny reality. That's the paradox that can't be resolved unless you get rid of your current belief. People say that there are no absolutes without realising that they are using that what they are saying is an absolute. In essence: there are absolutely no absolutes.

They experience reality directly, everybody does regardless of words. That should be obvious from childhood where there is no vocabulary. A baby must build concepts from perceptions. A mental fog is only conceptual. It is when you have a higher concept then realise you actually have no precise definition for the concept. In fact it is floating. It is that way because it is not grounded in reality. This was something I tried explaining in the 'dream/reality' thread. We can have all kinds of floating concepts and sometimes we attempt to evade actual definitions in case the reality crushes the dream, or because we generally have been unknowingly ignorant.

A word doesn't necessarily have exactly the same meaning for everyone, but it is always exactly the same word that everyone sees. The word is an absolute the meaning that each person ascribes to it is an absolute. That meaning to that one person is an absolute to every other person and the universe. One person is most likely to ascribe a slightly different variation to the next. That isn't provable, but is certainly likely. Yet, as long as the word has been accurately interpreted there is no confusion because the concept that arises is a pure abstraction. If the word requires further descriptors to make it work then it doesn't register as anything but a connections word. For instance you cannot form anything out of: The Is Concluded Eaten The grammar is fractured, the best we can do with 'the' is to imagine some noun might follow, but it might be a verb so our minds can only cycle between many options of 'what comes next' and in the absence of new information there is just mental fog.

Agreed. There are many words from different cultures and philosophies which are completely undefinable. They are abstractions which are floating concepts. A good example of a very common word is freedom. A person thinking of freedom might get an idea of a himself running down an empty beach, an authoritarian Government would say you are free if you aren't required to take hard decisions. Another is 'propaganda'. It's a very well used word, but trying to define it is an exercise in frustration-it doesn't mean anything in particular that sme other word does not more appropriately describe. A typical religious word 'God' -best of luck with that :-)

Guess which bank will lose most from Brexit and which bank is lobbying hardest and shoving in the most money to keep us trapped. Clue: the same bank that lobbied for the bailouts, got Greece into the EU and so many other hooky things there isn't a book big enough to fit them all in. http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-04-14/guess-which-major-bank-loses-most-brexit

That isn't what I'm saying Nikolai. Words can and do change, as do definitions. I'm not saying the word itself is sacrosanct and permanently glued to an object-that's nominalism-it just means whatever it means at any given time and place. It is a written/spoken representation of a concept. The perception from which it springs is a directly perceived concrete reality. There isn't anything relative about it. We perceive existence directly, we conceptualise it, then label that concept with a verbal representation. We trade concepts through the currency of words, symbols and pictures. Sometimes these words might not accurately communicate the concept due to the experience of the traders. We see that all the time when trying to communicate in a foreign country. We can shout out the English word as loud as we want, but to the Italian shopkeeper it means nothing. Eventually by hand gestures, sounds, judicious pointing and trail/error we can get across what we want. The shopkeeper might enlighten us to the word he uses to describe that object. We don't then believe that word describes only that particular object, we know it's the same concept with a different label attached. We make the transition easily because it's the same as the concept we currently hold in our heads and we hold the concept that there are languages that have different words for the same things. The words aren't magic, they are part of how we built a hierarchy of concepts as we began learning.

:-/ That's not what I meant and I do appreciate that you woukd take the time to teach me about such things. However that's the cart before the horse. I'm not a physicist or a scientist. I have a reasonable working knowledge and that's about it. I was wondering about the philosophy that underpins the science and trying to work back to that by finding a definition of 'field'. I did not say the definition was wrong-this isn't a 'test Brian' thing. I thought it possible you could take the definition somewhat beyond that point. Anyway, I shall open a thread and let's see. Maybe you won't keep getting so bloody arsey with me and have some patience with my vague attempts at trying to grasp something, or not, as the case maybe.

Presume you are asking me ? I recognise it as part of a poem. That would be the only question to which I can answer true of false. As it isn't a syllogism-and not readilbly convertible into one because it is a work of art not an argument-then I take it as it is, which is that it isn't my favourite poem on first read, but maybe it will grow on me.

Of course, there is nothing intrinsic in the poem. We can derive some emotional connection from it if we share the authors conceptual vision, or it might leave us cold. I did not say that something could be interpreted differently, I said a poem is a poem. It has a definition. It is written or spoken language. That I hate whisky in no way prevents you from enjoying it. The whisky isn't chemically or materially different, but that does not mean you are stuck with the same sense of it. Of course poetry transmits information. It contains words in a sequence and time. It is a perceptual version of the artists conceptual space. A poem which used the moon would not be much help to someone on a planet bereft of a moon. Art is a concrete of an the artists abstract conceptual thinking. That's why I said its equivalent to giving birth, it's a hard thing to create, maybe the hardest thing of all. You are falling into the same trap as Michael and Nikolai. That you can interpret a word in a certain way, in no way invalidates the word as that word and not another word, or two different words. That a table is not a particular kind of table, size, colour or wood. It sets up that conceptual abstraction waiting for the next piece of information. If it's in a certain form of wording you recognise it as a poem, or an instruction, a shopping list or a story. As soon as logic or reason is mentioned there is a kind of stock reaction that it is empiricism or materialism of some kind. If you can prevent yourself having that knee jerk reaction you can see that I'm not suggesting that kind of thing at all. I'm saying to put things in their correct order. This does not dismiss the roving spiritual conceptual and emotional mix of a human being. It does not make a human into some kind of a robot, but a mix of the spiritual and the material, based in reality, existent, independent and conscious. In a sense you have already answered the 'why' of objectivism as you recognise the interconnection of things. That things are not in silo format when it comes to philosophy.

Depends in what sense. A poem is a conceptual creation birthed into perceptual written form. That it is a poem is true, that it means such and such to a person is true. It does not mean that the concept it espouses is true. I can say I've seen a square circle, but no such thing is true, but I might have a floating abstract concept that it is possible. A painting such as Van Goghs Sun flower is a perceptual representation of his conceptual abstractions. He embeds metaphors into the painting to convey the inner person. It is a birth in that sense. However, A remains A. The painting is 'of some Sunflowers' it isn't the sun flowers themselves and it isn't an actual concept which I can pop into my own head.

Not to them, no, but to everyone else. Sometimes people can be convinced that they see the same thing.

Better just telling me straight. Less chance of poetic confusion.

Right, but you don't have any concretes of those things on which you base the concepts. If it is true for you it must also be true for everyone else. A is A as I never tire of saying. If it is not true for everyone else then no one can share it anyway. It's a floating abstract, no matter how real it seems to you, it isn't real to anyone else. I totally accept that this is what you think, but I completely reject it because it is both logically flawed conceptually and devoid of concrete evidence in reality. I require both perceptual evidence and conceptual logical integration to verify what you are suggesting. As it stands I don't require the evidence because I have already dismissed it logically. If you showed me some kind of evidence I would be looking for the smoke and mirrors.

Good post. Yes, if it had come, then it should have grown that way. As long as people are not badgered, cudgelled, bribed and steered by an intellectual elite so certain that top down planning will achieve a great and glorious good. It never has. It doesn't matter how much rope is allowed around the ankles, in the end it's just soft authoritarianism and its anti-life. It isn't how humans are. We cannot be turned into robots or worker bees. Successive regimes have attempted it and caused horrifific bloodshed and misery, there isn't a better way of doing the same thing. Best to abandon trying before the blood starts flowing-which it inevitably will.

I've never been good at deciphering lyrics. It sounds like disillusionment. The moons always good for a bit of melancholy and solitude.

Sounds bloody miserable. Like the escalators in hog warts, but mostly never getting to any destination.

Yes, if you remove the qualifier of 'generally' that is correct. Now, one step further. The abstract things are directly related to concrete things. If they are not, then the philosophical abstraction is a floating concept tied to nothing at all and therefore cannot be succesfully integrated which makes it invalid. Throw away and begin again. Going back to the garden shed. If the abstract conceptual design is not tied to real world concretes it can't be built. Luckily we have logic to help us eliminate most of the error. The danger is carrying an abstract that does not relate to existent concretes and takes on a life of its own. Living the dream isn't dreaming the living. One is practical real world, the other is tortuous mental gymnastics designed to keep the abstract from touching reality.

Because you have a religious indoctrination ? That good and bad are intrinsic absolutes ? I don't recognise 'sinners' or 'saints' they are words devoid of definition except for religious people. You can tell good from bad people Michael ? If you talk to them, you can find out if they are the sort to help you or rob you ? You know friend from foe. I don't think in black and white, but in people's values. You don't want people to have fluid values or they help you one moment and kill you the next. With a shrug they explain to your bleeding corpse 'well it's all relative'.

Bloody hell, how do I get this over ? I'm really racking my brain to try to do so. It's not really so much what you are looking at, but where you are looking. A word is like a colour, or a shape. It is perceptual. Once you hear or see it, then it is transferred through to become a concept. The word you see or hear is exactly what you see or hear. It's a concrete and thus it is perceived directly without error (les leave aside the manner in which different qualities of sensing apparatus function for the moment). That you have imbued 'coffee table' with a different conceptual meaning doesn't invalidate the word coffee table. There is no actual 'coffee table ' in the word coffee table, but the word is what it is. There is nothing subjective or relative going on here. If If I said coffee table two successive times, then you didn't suddenly think I said cheese triangle. You might conceptualise a cheese triangle if you were that kind of an interesting thinker, but the word remains what it is. External perceptual concrete to internal perceptual directly experienced. Then internal conceptual abstraction. Does that get us any closer ?