Understanding: a way of seeing

[coberst]

Understanding: a way of seeing

 

Know is see. Understand is grasp. These are rather common metaphors. Such metaphors help us comprehend.

 

Empathy is a technique for understanding. We can try to understand another person by creating a means whereby we can ‘walk a mile in her shoes’. We can create analogies of what the other person experiences as a means for us to ‘put on their shoes’.

 

An artist may paint in the manner of Picasso, or perhaps in the manner of a Rembrandt, or perhaps in the manner of a Monet. These different forms of painting represent different ways of seeing. They represent a personal understanding which provides us with a prism for seeing.

 

Mathematics is a way of seeing. Mathematics is the science of pattern. Imagine a very elaborate Persian rug. Imagine that you have only a small fragment of that rug. Mathematics offers a means whereby you might be able to construct the rest of that rug to look exactly like the original. Math can perhaps create a formula for the pattern in the rug such that you can, by following that math formula, exactly duplicate the pattern from which that rug was created.

 

Understanding is a stage of comprehension whereby a person can interject them self into the pattern through imagination. ‘Understanding is math’ because it helps the individual to ‘walk in the shoes’ of some other entity.

 

Understanding might correctly, in my opinion, be considered to be a personal paradigm. Knowledge is about truth but understanding is about meaning. Understanding is a means for placing the individual within the picture including the entity about which the individual wishes to become very familiar.

 

Understanding is a creative process that extends knowing. Understanding may or may not enhance the truth quality of comprehension. Picasso and Monet may paint the same object but have they captured the truth of that object.?

 

Is truth anything beyond what is normally considered to be truth?

 

Is truth anything beyond what humans have normalized (standardized)?

 

Does understanding aid or deter normalization?

 

Are you normal? Would you rather be normal than right?

 

Dare to be abnormal, but not foolish!

[Tarantism]

normality as a sort of mean for human traits. really though, if you asked anyone in the world, they would probably tell you that they are not normal at all. everyone, to themselves, is an individual...therefore normal is a standard that has been set yes, but it has never truely existed.

 

truth is subjective and does not exist either.

[Tarantism]

well i guess i should clairify. truth is subjective and does not exist to the conscious collective. however, truth is certainly real and dominant to the individual who believes it wholly. sometimes even scary...

[coberst]

Tarantism

 

 

I have often asked my self why humans act the way they do. About a year ago I decided that I needed to comprehend the sciences of psychology and psychoanalysis if I was ever going to answer my question. I am a retired engineer and I had never before studied these domains of knowledge.

 

Normal is a very important concept in many ways and is especially important in these two sciences.

 

Psychology and psychoanalysis inform me that repression is a fundamental characteristic of human nature. There exists a constant conflict between the unconscious and the conscious self due to constant conflict between the “pleasure principle” and the “reality principle”. Neurosis is what we call this conflict. All humans are neurotic. If we do not know normal how do we tell who is overly neurotic and who is just another health neurotic?

 

Without normal how do we know if we have a temperature?

 

How do we know who is tall and who is short?

 

Who is the deviant and who is normal?

 

Who is fat and who is thin?

 

Who should fail and who should pass?

 

What is fashionable and what is not?

 

How to measure progress or when we should seek change?

 

Likewise with truth; truth is very ambiguous but like normal we need it and it is important. Without truth how can we tell who is being false and who is the liar? The truth may be somewhat subjective but we execute people because we decide what truth is. What would priests and preachers do for a living if they did not hold truth in their hands?

[Liutas]

"Normal" - at right angles to everything else? :confused:

[Victor_Wrath]

Everything is Arbitrary

 

All knowledge is first based upon arbitrary foundations. This is that, and that is this and that is not this. What is truly frightening, is that all of these arbitrary assumptions are inherently flawed. While these assumptions provide meaning, purpose and to an extent understanding, there are always incomplete. One cannot truly know anything, because one is everything.

 

Take individuality, for instance. To say that you are not me, and that I am not the room I sit in, or the computer at which I type these words, is in actuality a false statement. In order to first separate myself from my environment and those around me, I must first draw an imaginary line and list the attributes that differ on both sides of that line. Like most, I’ll choose the edges of my skin as the outline of self. Making a list of all those attributes within the my imaginary boundary as self, and all of those attributes outside that boundary as other things and people. Yet what is required in this is for me to ignore all those things that remain constant on both sides of this imaginary line.

 

The truth is, that in all things there are some amounts of all other things, and there are no hard boundaries, for change occurs gradually, never instantaneously. The truth is, I am a part of the universe at large, and while the universes characteristics might change from one local to another, all its parts are merely an expression of the whole. Therefore, understanding is not possible in its purist definition, for one cannot hold the whole of the universe within his mind.

 

Understanding therefore, is a guide, it is an arbitrary tool to help us make assumptions about the universal, using only the local. Understanding, and knowledge should never be mistaken for law, must never become inflexible and ridged. For there can be no absolutes in the local. This is how science then becomes like religion, how what once a system of enlightenment then becomes a blinder to new possibilities.

 

Victor Wrath

____________________________________

 

-To see the unseen

-To know the unknown

-To find the unfound

 

-All absolutes are lies.

[coberst]

Victor

 

I am inclined to agree that all knowledge is arbitrary, that is, until I give it meaning. Humans are meaning creating creatures. Understanding is the creation of meaning. Empathy is the effort to create an analogy whereby I can step into the shoes of another. If I am successful then this other person is no longer arbitrary but is meaningful to me.

 

Reality is not a container but a rainbow.

 

Is there a demarcation boundary between instinct and reason? Is there a demarcation boundary between anything between here and the Big Bang? Is demarcation boundary a part of nature or is it a necessity of human comprehension? Is category a fact of nature or is category a necessity of human comprehension? Is anything different in kind from anything else? Is everything different only in degree from everything else?

 

I conclude that demarcation boundary is not an essential characteristic of nature but is an essential characteristic of human comprehension. Everything is a seamless flow from the Big Bang to now. Only in our mind do we have a difference in kind.

 

I wrote the first two paragraphs of the OP several days ago and only 24 hours later did I fall off my horse. Lightening struck and I realized, finally, what I had written. This realization has led to a large number of connections for me. I was convinced of certain fragments of knowledge and only when I was knocked off my horse did I find these fragments became a synthesis that I shall have to realize by writing more essays.

 

To recognize as true that reality is a rainbow allows me to comprehend the error of classical metaphysical realism, which is the foundation of Western society’s comprehension of reality. This may not be true for you but it is true for me.

 

Reality is a rainbow but we humans perceive reality as a myriad of containers! We perceive reality as containers because our “gut” tells us so and because classical metaphysics tells us so. Reality without demarcation boundaries means that everything is a seamless reality from everything else. It means that everything is not a kind of thing with its own necessary and sufficient nature but that all reality runs together and it is only in our minds that these containers exist.

[Victor_Wrath]

I think we are the same page in this, though using different terminology. This is often the case with me as I am not a classically educated philosopher, but one self educated who must find my own way to label things in my mind. Just more arbitrary titles, but ones that are personal rather than communal.

 

As you use the rainbow versus container, I have come to favor the grains of a plank of wood. The point at which it was cut, the angle and tilt of the log and many other factors are chosen, and through a three dimensional area of space, a two dimensional cut is made revealing an intricate patterns. You can see boundaries and lines which give the appearance of separateness to many aspect of the grains as they flow from one end of the plank to the other. You could imagine the shapes within as individuals in a two dimensional reality.

 

However, if you stop to think about it, the grains are not lines until they are cut, until they are viewed from an arbitrary frame of reference. In reality, they all ebb and flow into one another in a three dimensional space, all part of one another gradually changing and shifting through different aspects.

 

I imagine our world like this, our perspective are like that of an arbitrary three dimensional point of view. We see our separateness as evident, and being thinking animals, we categorize what we see by our differences and learn to no longer be aware of our similarities.

 

We fail to see that all things are part of the same ebb and flow, and on a fourth or fifth or infinite dimensionality, all things flow into and out of one another joining the universe in a single shifting entity.

 

I believe that arbitrary boundaries are essential to not just humanity, but probably to nearly all complex life forms at least on this world. Learning to do this gave the ability that enabled such life forms to gain an understanding of their reality that was vastly superior to the simpler life forms that preceded them.

 

However, I believe that failure to recognize that these concepts are arbitrary, rather than real is halting our development, and preventing us from achieving enlightenment as a race, rather than just as occasional individuals. Our perceptions maybe limited to the three dimensional, however, we are capable of shifting that framework in our minds and learning to see how things connect to each other in ways previously unseen.

 

The quest of humanity is the same as that of all other life forms, survive, adapt and expand. If we have any purpose at all, it is to become better than we were, while ensuring our survival as individuals and as a race. In the last ten thousand years we have turned our conquest against one another, when it is the unknown that we truly desire to conquer. If we are to remember this and move on, we must learn to adjust our frame of perception, be flexible with our imaginary boundaries, and learn that despite these tools of understanding, in truth, we are all one.

 

Victor Wrath

____________________________________

 

-To see the unseen

-To know the unknown

-To find the unfound

 

-All absolutes are lies.