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Concept Mapping and Meaning

schopenhauer1 October 26, 2016 at 12:55 10300 views 29 comments
Philosophically speaking, what do bear attacks, anatomy, chemistry, physics, office work, aliens, foraging societies, and technology have in common?

Comments (29)

Hanover October 26, 2016 at 13:36 #28717
They are all nouns. Had the word "put" or "friendly" appeared (for example), your puzzle would have been more difficult.
schopenhauer1 October 26, 2016 at 14:16 #28723
Reply to Hanover
Ok, I guess I should say the concepts themselves and not the parts of speech they belong to, though that is correct. Add in any adjectives you want in front of them.. I like your suggestion of friendly in front of bear attacks.. "Oh, don't mind the grizzlies; they're just prone to your local friendly bear attack".
Barry Etheridge October 26, 2016 at 14:32 #28725
They're all mentioned in a work entitled "Where God went wrong" which fell through a black hole in 3016 and emerged in Peterborough in 1936 only to lay hidden beneath a discarded Ford Model T until a recent land reclamation project? As good as any other answer!
Hanover October 26, 2016 at 15:09 #28733
They are all things I didn't eat for breakfast.
schopenhauer1 October 26, 2016 at 17:03 #28748
Reply to Hanover

Some may say bread is a technology..yeast, baking and all. Also, it is composed of physical properties and chemical molecules.. So you indeed did eat some of those..
wuliheron October 26, 2016 at 18:22 #28752
Quoting schopenhauer1
Philosophically speaking, what do bear attacks, anatomy, chemistry, physics, office work, aliens, foraging societies, and technology have in common?


They are all lesser truths which can be viewed either contexts or contents in different situations. A statistic of one being an oxymoron is an example of how content and contexts exchange identities in lesser truths. There are many lesser truths and, then, there is the One Greater Truth that without the truth nothing makes sense!
Hanover October 26, 2016 at 18:34 #28754
Reply to schopenhauer1 I didn't have breakfast.
Janus October 26, 2016 at 21:32 #28766
Bear attacks are not good for your anatomy, but you can use weapons whose existence rely on advances in chemistry and physics to protect yourself from them.

However this produces office work for the staff in the National Parks, who would rather see illegal aliens dying than the rapid decline of bears. Even though they are still wilderness areas foraging societies have also disappeared form National Parks, due to the rise of weapons technology .
BC October 26, 2016 at 22:59 #28783
All eight terms are collectivities (like, all the understandings of physics, all the incidences of bear attacks, all the aliens occupying high office in human governments, and the like).

BC October 26, 2016 at 23:09 #28785
Quoting John
the National Parks, who would rather see illegal aliens dying than the rapid decline of bears.


Sound ecology. Actually, if the bears would eat more illegal aliens, the bears would flourish. And, BTW, bear-eaten-illegal-aliens would not be available to be counted, so less office work. Win, win, win.

BC October 26, 2016 at 23:11 #28786
Reply to Hanover And whose fault is that?
Sir2u October 27, 2016 at 00:52 #28801
They are all topics that Trump is incapable of discussing intelligently. But from what I have seen of the guy, your list is only about 0.001 percent complete.
Brainglitch October 27, 2016 at 00:54 #28802
Reply to schopenhauer1 How about: they are all human-brain-generated conceptualizations, that is, human-brain ways of seeing things, of understanding our interactions with the world by separating out certain features and organizing them into thought-units?

Or maybe just last night's Jeopardy categories?
Wayfarer October 27, 2016 at 07:51 #28838
It reminds me of the famous list that Foucault references at the beginning of his book, The Order of Things, which I encountered in a post-grad tutorial, derived from some possibly fictional Chinese imperial source:

  • The list divides all animals into 14 categories:* Those that belong to the emperor* Embalmed ones* Those that are trained* Sucking pigs* Mermaids (or Sirens)* Fabulous ones* Stray dogs* Those that are included in this classification* Those that tremble as if they were mad* Innumerable ones* Those drawn with a very fine camel hair brush* Et cetera* Those that have just broken the flower vase* Those that, at a distance, resemble flies


I particularly like the last of these.

Reply to Brainglitch welcome BG!
Harry Hindu October 27, 2016 at 11:26 #28862
Quoting schopenhauer1
Philosophically speaking, what do bear attacks, anatomy, chemistry, physics, office work, aliens, foraging societies, and technology have in common?


They are all strings of symbols that refer to (mean) something other than the symbols themselves. What they refer to is some external process to the mind. The organization of the symbols and the establishment of the correlation of the symbols to their external process is a process of the mind.

schopenhauer1 October 27, 2016 at 13:02 #28869
Quoting wuliheron
They are all lesser truths which can be viewed either contexts or contents in different situations. A statistic of one being an oxymoron is an example of how content and contexts exchange identities in lesser truths. There are many lesser truths and, then, there is the One Greater Truth that without the truth nothing makes sense!


Can you explain this further..you may be getting it?
schopenhauer1 October 27, 2016 at 13:03 #28870
Quoting John
Bear attacks are not good for your anatomy, but you can use weapons whose existence rely on advances in chemistry and physics to protect yourself from them.

However this produces office work for the staff in the National Parks, who would rather see illegal aliens dying than the rapid decline of bears. Even though they are still wilderness areas foraging societies have also disappeared form National Parks, due to the rise of weapons technology .


I like the story.
schopenhauer1 October 27, 2016 at 13:04 #28871
Quoting Bitter Crank
All eight terms are collectivities (like, all the understandings of physics, all the incidences of bear attacks, all the aliens occupying high office in human governments, and the like).


Quoting Bitter Crank
Sound ecology. Actually, if the bears would eat more illegal aliens, the bears would flourish. And, BTW, bear-eaten-illegal-aliens would not be available to be counted, so less office work. Win, win, win.


Who would have thought bear attacks are the solutions to our political problems.
schopenhauer1 October 27, 2016 at 13:16 #28872
Quoting Brainglitch
How about: they are all human-brain-generated conceptualizations, that is, human-brain ways of seeing things, of understanding our interactions with the world by separating out certain features and organizing them into thought-units?


I like this one.. What is the underlying message here? The basic dichotomy between human experience and the "thing-in-itself"? That truth cannot be conveyed in language, but only human-biased expression that makes sense to us because it is how our minds are structured? It works us, so it works.. but we are simply self-contained conceptual machines that are not beyond our own linguistic programming?
schopenhauer1 October 27, 2016 at 13:17 #28873
Quoting Harry Hindu
They are all strings of symbols that refer to (mean) something other than the symbols themselves. What they refer to is some external process to the mind. The organization of the symbols and the establishment of the correlation of the symbols to their external process is a process of the mind.


Yes, my response is pretty much the same as brainglitch.
schopenhauer1 October 27, 2016 at 13:19 #28874
Reply to Wayfarer
Indeed, how things can be classified can change the context of how the phenomena is viewed.
schopenhauer1 October 27, 2016 at 13:20 #28875
Quoting Barry Etheridge
They're all mentioned in a work entitled "Where God went wrong" which fell through a black hole in 3016 and emerged in Peterborough in 1936 only to lay hidden beneath a discarded Ford Model T until a recent land reclamation project? As good as any other answer!


Combine this with John's story.
wuliheron October 27, 2016 at 15:11 #28889
Reply to schopenhauer1

Greater truths progressively reveal themselves within the unfolding context of our lives. We might assume the earth is flat, but a photograph of it from orbit can change our mind not because the contents of our assumptions changed, but because the context from which we view them has changed. Normally people of statistics as a context and the number one as merely content, but a statistic of one is an oxymoron because both are lesser truths to the One Greater Truth that the context of our unfolding truth determines what we perceive and whether it makes any sense whatsoever.
schopenhauer1 October 27, 2016 at 18:47 #28897
Reply to wuliheron

Related to this post, perhaps the concepts in the OP are supposed to show different levels of abstraction. At what point are abstractions real? Are bear attacks real, or is it the bear harming a human real? Or is it the bear is simply moving at a particular time and space? Context is key. Are all events ontologically equal? Are all abstractions ontologically equal?

Also perhaps the OP was trying to convey the almost absurd amount of contexts one can find themselves in. Being involved with a bear attack, being part of a foraging society, being a molecule doing its thing, they are a wide set of phenomena with so many different contexts and levels of being. Are they at all able to relate or are they a part of their own little sphere of ontological being?
Hanover October 27, 2016 at 18:53 #28900
Quoting Bitter Crank
And whose fault is that?


Your mama's.
wuliheron October 27, 2016 at 19:05 #28902
Quoting schopenhauer1
Related to this post, perhaps the concepts in the OP are supposed to show different levels of abstraction. At what point are abstractions real? Are bear attacks real, or is it the bear harming a human real? Or is it the bear is simply moving at a particular time and space? Context is key. Are all events ontologically equal? Are all abstractions ontologically equal?

Also perhaps the OP was trying to convey the almost absurd amount of contexts one can find themselves in. Being involved with a bear attack, being part of a foraging society, being a molecule doing its thing, they are a wide set of phenomena with so many different contexts and levels of being. Are they at all able to relate or are they a part of their own little sphere of ontological being?


What is a shadow in a well lit room becomes a faint blob of light in the dark because there is no clear dividing line between any context and its contents which can be considered yin and yang or indivisible complimentary-opposites or what some prefer to call particle-wave duality. Similarly, reality without dreams becomes just somebody's nightmare and dreams without reality are just a contradiction. For me this is literally true explaining why its impossible to live without dreaming and, for example, if you stay awake long enough you will merely hallucinate.

Physically, what it means is everything is metaphorical rather than metaphysical just as the evidence in quantum mechanics has asserted since Bell's Inequality Theorem. My own belief it is represents a recursion in the law of identity meaning we ultimately have to take everything on faith including our own free will and awareness. In more abstract philosophical terms, it means ontology can be considered just an epistemological idea and epistemology can be considered to be derived from ontology because a context without significant content is an oxymoron just like a statistic of one.

_db October 27, 2016 at 20:51 #28920
Quoting schopenhauer1
Philosophically speaking, what do bear attacks, anatomy, chemistry, physics, office work, aliens, foraging societies, and technology have in common?


They can all be predicated upon, i.e. they are subjects (nouns) and thus metaphysically speaking substances, events, processes, or whatever floats your metaphysical boat.

The freedom that evolves in a hierarchical, stable environment results in a wide diversity of things. All of them are connected by the fact that they exist and produce entropy.
Brainglitch October 27, 2016 at 23:58 #28963
Reply to schopenhauer1
What is the underlying message here? The basic dichotomy between human experience and the "thing-in-itself"? That truth cannot be conveyed in language, but only human-biased expression that makes sense to us because it is how our minds are structured?
It works us, so it works.

Pretty much.

What we convey via language such as you've listed are human-brain constructs. The notion of a thing-in-itself is itself such a construct, a way of conceiving and speaking about some aspect of an assumed external reality.

I don't do "truth" in any sense other than as conditional epistemic judgment about propositional statements. So, for me to say that a given statement is true is to say only that it satisfies whatever epistemic standards I deem appropriate for that particular statement in the given context.

... but we are simply self-contained conceptual machines that are not beyond our own linguistic programming?

This way I see it is that we are not self-contained, but rather we generate concepts from our interactions with the world, but these concepts are constrained by our particular humansystem kinds of interactions. We cannot really even conceive of what it is like to be a bat, or a lion, precisely because what it is like to be a certain creature requires experiencing the same kinds of interactions with the world that that creature experiences, in just the way that creature experiences them.

I see language not only as expressing, but alao as informing and contributing to the construction of, our conceptualizations.
schopenhauer1 October 28, 2016 at 00:02 #28967
Quoting Brainglitch
I see language not only as expressing, but alao as informing and contributing to the construction of, our conceptualizations.


Agreed..