I Pit Time

I was totally confused by Arwin’s post. I thought since the Stones had been touring since the Precambion period that they might have stopped in the Netherlands once. Maybe in 1960 for 20 minutes. But I guess it just feels like the first time…

It’s just an illusion. But I can see how the sense of flying like an eagle could give that impression (must have been the good stuff).

First instance.
(And first performance of the tour, I might add.)

Kind words, might take you up on that. You might be stuck on the fact that words are one level above what they describe, not what ‘is’. Does that make sense?

Yeah, that’s the idea. What “is” is the thing you can’t get to; you have to circle around it and construct the picture using abstractions. It’s the way the human mind works, for some reason. Anyway, I’ve got the word-ojbect association; what I’m having trouble with is communicating levels of abstraction beyond that. I can tell you what they represent, but not where they are, because everybody has a different image of the overall structure. Mine is more or less spherical, with the core being that central “reality” which both comprises and defines everything else, and the body of the sphere consisting of a latticework of “points” which are conceptualizations of objects, connected together by ideas to form larger frameworks of philosophies.

The two other people to whom I’ve managed to explain this well enough for them to have any idea what I’m talking about have both pictured this differently; one visualizes something akin to a histogram, and the other sees it as more of a tree, with ideas stemming out from the trunk which is the concrete basis of reality. I can translate between these without much trouble. The two things I need to do are 1) figure out how to communicate the concept of an all-inclusive conceptual framework, and 2) find some organizational guidelines or axes on which to base a physical representation of the thing. That second part may well be impossible to achieve in a practical sense, since there four perceivable dimensions and a theoretically infinite number of planes of abstraction (hey, YOU make a diagram of a 10-dimensional sphere), but I hope to develop a working example anyhow. I could go on, but I’ve rambled enough in this thread, and to those who are uninitiated in the ways of thinking about abstractions way too fucking much, this probably comes across as a bunch of pretentious wankery anyhow. If you wonder WHY the hell I’m doing this, you can either search for my old thread on the Freedom of Thought Movement I intend to one day start, or you can just email me.

Incidentally, that offer is open to anybody who’d like to chat about this…or, alternatively, anybody who thinks a conversation with a crazy guy might be good for a few kicks. :wink:

Meanwhile, I’ll just enjoy the illusion of the instrumental interpretation of time signatures. Ooooh yeeeaaah…!

Yeah, time. Beckoning me. Always off flowing like a river. On and on it goes. Often, to the sea.

Did you look around for your possibilities? After all, the leaves are brown, there’s a patch of snow on the ground, and the sky’s the hazy shade of winter.

But…if it weren’t for time, wouldn’t everything have to happen all at once?

Oh yeah, but time won’t give me time. It won’t let me wait that long.

And you run and you run to catch up with the Sun but it’s sinking,
Racing around to come up behind you again,
The Sun is the same in a relative but you’re older,
Shorter of breath and one day closer to death.

No, I’m not sure you got what I meant. Words aren’t a separate level of abstraction, they are a level above whatever they describe. That includes other words, images, symbols, etc. It’s a mess. That’s why it is so hard to make layers of abstraction. Think also of programming languages that can be 1st level (machine code), second level right up to fifth level. (prolog)

Why don’t you open a thread for this in great debates, and I’ll be happy to join you there?

Is it possible to formulate a synthetic a priori proposition about something noumenal?

I’m not 100% sure if I understood this correctly, but I think you just did.

Not with any certainty, no, but by defining what elements we can perceive and their relative degree of difference from our impressions of the noumenal object, we come closer to gaining an inherent, if incommunicable, understanding of what exactly our perceptive process is. That would be essentially the point of what I said above.

Dunno…I stay out of GD for a reason. We start going on about this in there, we’re going to have people upholding 18 different definitions of “abstraction”, proposing pure linear thought, bringing up principles of quantum mechanics, and maybe have a side dish of what-if nihilism thrown in for shits and giggles…plus we’re going to have to provide cites for concepts such as “noumenal objects”, and frankly – while I do find that particular idea useful to communicate the essence of the “thing” – the less I’m forced to associate myself with Kant, the better. I’d much rather either do this here, or via e-mail.

I do want to continue it, though, because if you’re saying that by your standards a word is not a first-level abstraction of an objects, we’re missing each other’s points somewhere. You can define an object (and by “object” I refer equally to a physical object or a specific conceptual entity) either as noumenal, which is somewhat useless for the purpose of discussion, or else by those elements of the thing which we agree we can and do perceive. With that accomplished, we form an abstract image of the thing in question, and impart upon that base-level (but still removed from the object itself) image an embodiment, which, thanks to the nature of human communication, is generally a word. It’s quite likely that you’ve experienced the simplest evidence of the truth of this abstraction for yourself: have you ever had an idea or a feeling, a strong conceptualization in your mind that was very much a single, specific, well-defined thought, yet searching your memory and knowledge, you drew a blank on any possible word to express it? What you’ve done there is attempted to formulate a first-level abstraction from the base, or object, level…and it’s the same thing you do anytime you use a word for anything. The only difference in the two scenarios is that, when talking about, say, a pizza, your mind, which is quite used to dealing with the concept of pizza, instantly provides the term you’ve attached to that abstraction, and you say “pizza” without giving it a second thought. The fact that this comes so naturally – quite often without any metaconscious intervention at all – leads many people to believe that there is no difference in level between word and object. This is a flawed perception, but easy nonetheless to conclude if one never seeks evidence to the contrary.

I agree with your statement that words are a level above whatever they describe, but that seems to be confirming my point rather than refuting it. Regarding symbols, that would serve to make the symbol an even higher-level abstraction from the object level, as we are then abstracting the abstraction of the original object. Continuing along those lines, something even more complex, such as a coherent philosophy that encompasses various ideas and objects, can be a tenth-level abstraction from its most basic object (though not, obviously, of every object included in the philosophy). This is ignoring the different types of abstraction in favor of talking solely about the primary scale, but I trust you understand why I’m doing that. Now, levels of programming language are a different story, because all we’re doing there is redefining the same concepts on the same level but in different terms. We aren’t going up or down the primary scale of abstraction. Binary forms assembler forms C forms Visual Basic, but at the end of the day we’re still moving electrons around in the same patterns with the same meaning attached to the result. The only difference in the “levels of language” are man-made levels of complexity – pointedly different from abstraction.

Mr. Crazy Guy, you have my e-mail address, do you not?

I know what you mean. I vastly prefer Newsweek. But right now I can’t afford that and Writer’s Digest, so I’m just reading Newsweek online.

I’m still there Roland, I just remembered that I have an Eng. Lit. essay that deals with this, and might be interesting. Just have to find it, as it’s been a while.

One thing I’m wondering though - is it sensible to work with levels here? I am more and more instinctively distrusting any kind of distinction, and am increasingly of the opinion that it is better to describe factors that can cover a ‘distance’ in anaologe terms.

I’ll get back to you this weekend.