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Originally Posted by Angela  Who said he was wrong? Not me. I specifically said quite the opposite. |
I noticed.
That was Dan, not you. I was late for work when I wrote that. =/
Quote:
Originally Posted by Angela There's no real, objective substance to either one, but there is a gestalt of concept as a result of people contributing to the gestalt by viewing it through their lens. As each person contributes by viewing it as they do, and perhaps expressing how it looks, the apparent shape shifts for others, too.
Like the Internet! There is certainly such a thing, I reckon, but all it is is the construction of people's perspective and contribution. From time to time, people try to establish rules about what the Internet *should* be, and the shape of the concept shifts and changes as people make their own rules. |
Erk. You should have stuck to something I don't know very well.
The Internet
does exist independent of people's beliefs and perspectives. I found a very excellent summarization of it, yesterday:
Design for the Internet.
It's unfair to say something doesn't really exist simply because most people don't understand its reality. If you were to apply that reasoning to one of your own preferred words, empowerment, I imagine you wouldn't think quite the same way. Does empowerment actually exist? Is it something else--say, an indirect form of oppression--simply because someone imagines it so?
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Originally Posted by Angela it seems that he believes that polarity exists as a real, objective "thing" in the world, a physical phenomenon, the way many people see gravity. |
But... but... gravity isn't a real, objective thing in the world.
It's not really a matter of its physicality, though: it's a matter of atomicity. We might call various artforms Impressionist or Cubist; we might call philosophies a vague Western, or Aristotlian, or Deleuzian; we might name religions Buddhism or shamanism. These aren't physical things, either, but we can't meaningfully discuss them without some agreement as to what they are. We can discuss shamanism in general, or North American shamanism, or Iroquois shamanism or Eskimo or Siberian or African. We can discuss the origins of Buddhism in Hinduism, or its derivations in China, Japan, in hacker culture. But we can only do this because we know what it
is, and we also know what it's
not. That's atomicity.
When we don't, we find that our conversations go in circles and are nothing more than screaming matches at their most lively. The most common statement will end up being, "Wait... but that's not how it works." Imagine if we blamed atheism for Stalinism. You can certainly make the connection, but the two concepts aren't actually related. I can say that because I know what atheism is, and I know what Stalinism is, and I know there are a thousand intermediate steps between the two that make a world of difference. Simply because someone thinks they're the same only means that they're flat-out wrong, and nothing else.
I ramble.
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Originally Posted by Angela It makes sense to write a manual, or have a definitive point of reference, like a guru, if you're looking at it from that perspective. |
As far as I'm concerned, we're agreed here. I still don't think you quite got what I was trying for, especially with the guru thing, but if you can see that far, it feels like I've made enough progress.
Holy crap I wrote a lot.