Conceptualizing Conceptualization

@Reconstructo,

Reconstructo;132236 wrote:

How are concepts made? Is the world made of concepts? Is man made of concepts? What role does time play in the generation and modification of concepts? Is time possible without conceptualization? Is conceptualization possible without time? Is Kant the self-consciousness of conceptualization? Was Hegel the self-conceptualization of conceptualization?

You never know, do you. I just love a mystery!

@Reconstructo,

Reconstructo wrote:

Is man made of concepts?

Before I jump to conclusions, what do you mean here? I thought man was made of things like bone, flesh, and organs. But here you question if he is made of concepts. That seems so incredibly strange to me. How could anything be made of a concept, except, a concept?

You can't be speaking literally. It must be some sort of figurative or metaphysic talk. I can't put my finger on it. Are there other people that speak like this? Hegel or Heidegger, perhaps? You speak of them a lot. Maybe Ortega? Where's longknowledge at?

I would genuinely like to know what you mean here. Our conversations always get into some sort of pissing contest, and my questions are never answered. Please help me here. I'm frankly bewildered.

@Zetherin,

Zetherin;132300 wrote:

Before I jump to conclusions, what do you mean here? I thought man was made of things like bone, flesh, and organs. But here you question if he is made of concepts. That seems so incredibly strange to me. How could anything be made of a concept, except, a concept?

You can't be speaking literally. It must be some sort of figurative or metaphysic talk. I can't put my finger on it. Are there other people that speak like this? Hegel or Heidegger, perhaps? You speak of them a lot. Maybe Ortega? Where's longknowledge at?

I would genuinely like to know what you mean here. Our conversations always get into some sort of pissing contest, and my questions are never answered. Please help me here. I'm frankly bewildered.

He is, as customary, confusing the concept of X with X. (In line with his confusion of the experience of X with X, and so on). It is just subjective idealism in another of its manifestations.

@kennethamy,

kennethamy;132303 wrote:

He is, as customary, confusing the concept of X with X. (In line with his confusion of the experience of X with X, and so on). It is just subjective idealism in another of its manifestations.

But how is that possible when we've gone over this in countless threads? It just doesn't make any sense.

The man doesn't seem stupid. He seems as though he is bright and is able to learn and correct mistakes. So, I have to give him the benefit of the doubt and think he is speaking about something else.

@Zetherin,

Zetherin;132307 wrote:

But how is that possible when we've gone over this in countless threads? It just doesn't make any sense.

The man doesn't seem stupid. He seems as though he is bright and is able to learn and correct mistakes. So, I have to give him the benefit of the doubt and think he is speaking about something else.

It may be that, as Wittgenstein put it, "He is in the grip of a theory". Many philosophers have that common ailment. Once you are in the grip of a theory, extricating yourself takes a great deal of effort, and, sometimes, help. A kind of philosophical therapy may be needed. Sometimes I try to administer shock therapy, but sometimes, the grip is so strong that nothing works. After all, psychotherapy is a long and arduous procedure.

"The philosopher's treatment of a question is like the treatment of an illness" Wittgenstein.

@Zetherin,

Zetherin;132300 wrote:

Before I jump to conclusions, what do you mean here? I thought man was made of things like bone, flesh, and organs. But here you question if he is made of concepts. That seems so incredibly strange to me. How could anything be made of a concept, except, a concept?

You can't be speaking literally. It must be some sort of figurative or metaphysic talk. I can't put my finger on it. Are there other people that speak like this? Hegel or Heidegger, perhaps? You speak of them a lot. Maybe Ortega? Where's longknowledge at?

I would genuinely like to know what you mean here. Our conversations always get into some sort of pissing contest, and my questions are never answered. Please help me here. I'm frankly bewildered.

Hi there, Zeth! I appreciate your directness. Yes, it's a metaphorical oversimplification. What about man makes him MAN and not an animal? I would say logos, discourse, concepts. Hegel argued that Man is Time is Concepts. Because Human Time or History, meaning Time as progress, is only possible by means of concepts. The future and the past only exist in the present as concept, and in no other way.

The intellectual/spiritual evolution of both humanity and individual man is the sophistication of his system of concepts. Hegel used the word Begriff, which translates to Concept. He used Concept, singular, as a description of our integrated network of concepts. So our Concept is essentially the same as our Science in the broadest sense including metaphysics.

For Hegel, the Concept burrows into itself. Intellectual progress is largely the progress of self-consciousness. Kant is a great example of this. He studied human experience to deduce the way that humans automatically structure their qualia.

For Science to be Objective, it must connect itself to the atemporal. For if knowledge is only connect to the temporal, or the passing, it is doomed to remain mere opinion.

The only atemporal reality that Kant could connect us to was the way that we automatically structure our perception. His transcendental categories are man's self-consciousness of the way he always, eternally, structures his qualia. Substance, causality, quantity, and so on. All human conceptual experience manifests this eternal or transcendental structure. Kant was a compromise between rationalism and skepticism/empiricism. What we were experiencing in-itself was unknowable, but the general ways we structure our experience were both permanent and deducible.

Hegel goes on from here, and presents the evolution of man's conceptual self consciousness. His is an atheistic system in which man or philosophy or time can become fully conscious of itself and attain Wisdom or Truth.

@Reconstructo,

Reconstructo;132592 wrote:

Hi there, Zeth! I appreciate your directness. Yes, it's a metaphorical oversimplification. What about man makes him MAN and not an animal? I would say logos, discourse, concepts.

Have you considered that the DNA of humans is different from the DNA of beasts? Of course, as you know, humans are animals. But they are not beasts.

@kennethamy,

kennethamy;132310 wrote:

It may be that, as Wittgenstein put it, "He is in the grip of a theory". Many philosophers have that common ailment. Once you are in the grip of a theory, extricating yourself takes a great deal of effort, and, sometimes, help. A kind of philosophical therapy may be needed. Sometimes I try to administer shock therapy, but sometimes, the grip is so strong that nothing works. After all, psychotherapy is a long and arduous procedure.

"The philosopher's treatment of a question is like the treatment of an illness" Wittgenstein.

The perception of theory, which is beautiful, as disease..is itself a disease. They call it hypochondria. Or perhaps philosophy-phobia. Wittgenstein was a bright man, but he was also a suicidal man. His problems are not the problems of all of us. "Beauty is the splendor of truth." This word Truth can function as a numen, and it's this numinous truth that inspired Plato's statement.
You seem to be in the grip of the theory that theory is bad or painful or sickly. To me, this is a tragicomedy. It's as if an impotent man were to assure himself that sex is no good anyway.

---------- Post added 02-25-2010 at 08:49 PM ----------

kennethamy;132595 wrote:

Have you considered that the DNA of humans is different from the DNA of beasts? Of course, as you know, humans are animals. But they are not beasts.

Please stick to the subject of the thread. If it does not interest you, please post somewhere else. Don't be a hijacker. It's bad manners. I don't mind sincere engagement on the issue. I don't mind disagreement. But I would rather not play some insincere game.

@Reconstructo,

Is Concept "transcendentally" a circle? that being a two-dimensional metaphor/sign for unification To conceive is to take in. To take in is in most cases also to leave out. To abstract is to negate the particulars involved in order to synthesize essence.
We conceive a horse. We associate certain qualia with this horse and the rest with not-horse. Pretty simple.

But was is the concept of concept? How were abstractions abstracted? That was a leap of self-consciousness. Draw a circle around "justice" "truth" "friendly" "hidden," etc. Now label this circle/concept Abstraction. And sure enough, at some point what all these abstractions have in common will manifest. Or were manifested by means of this circumscription...and circumscription is a two-dimensional metaphor for conceptualization. (To tie in geometry and spatial intuition with the transcendental concept.)

Number is actually purified concept, or negative concept. Number is transcendental/eternal. Logos is spatial as well as transcendental. Words are ones that get dirty, absorb qualia and other words. Logos is the intersection of time and space.
The spatial/qualia/metaphorical/analogical nature of logos is what makes it less precise than number. Transcendental space is analog. Transcendental concept is digital. Therefore pi. Therefore Zeno's "paradoxes."

If Logos is a zero, an encircling unity, then number is a 1, which is a vertical line, which does enclose space. A word is the number one (the one number) gutted and stuffed with qualia and hyperlinks to other words. Negative theology (including newfangled positronic theology) is the gutting of words, in order to reveal the transcendental number which is experienced as a numen, as "transcendence," which is only a feeling, only music. Man cannot transcend the transcendental. Else we defile the truth with paradox. reconstructo is not, despite appearances, a mystic. Philosophy is the religion of science, and therefore the science of religion.
1 = 0 = i

@Reconstructo,

Reconstructo;133381 wrote:

Is Concept "transcendentally" a circle?

I now see that the triangle is a superior representation of concept. Number is a point, or a circle, or a sphere. Word is a triangle, or a spiral.

Word is essentially synthesis. Two bottom angles join at the top, negated as they are unified. Word synthesizes in two ways, according to the same triangular model.

Word synthesizes qualia by imposing a frame or border on it, and naming what is en-framed. To synthesize "horse," for instance, to put horse-qualia on one lower angle and not-horse on the other. At the top is horse. Horse can be re-synthesized or edited by putting the old-horse concept on one lower angle and the new qualia-concept on the other. At the top is synthesis.

Word can also synthesize concepts in the absence of new qualia. Two individual concepts (lower angles) are synthesized by the negation of their differences.

Circle/number is static or eternal. Triangle/logos is dynamic or temporal.

@Reconstructo,

I was just re-reading this thead. Zeth says man is made of flesh and bone, etc., and of course I know what he means. But flesh and bone are both concepts, interpretations of sense experience. It's all about self-consciousness. To see the structure of the world/experience/reality as largely imposed by ourselves.

It seems to me that any serious pursuit of truth requires an investigation of investigation. What is thinking? Is there a structure that is universal to all thinking? I think there is. And I have littered this forum with my thoughts on that. So I 'll stop here.

@Reconstructo,

Is it a job for psychology or philosophy, this proposed conceptualization of concept. Of course the word "concept" has been around for awhile, and concept has long been conceptualized. But it seems to me that we don't notice the forest, as too many trees are in the way.

@Reconstructo,

Why must man be an animal? I know that your biology textbook and Aristotle say so, but then, what of algae and plants?

It is quite obvious that if plants have their own kingdom and are not algae, then mankind cannot reasonably be put under the category of animal.

But to stay on topic, the OP start with the notion that concepts define. I just don't think concepts are essential. I think W has basically an inverted view of words as Plato. Concepts concoct an image of something like a balloon that has something in it; whereas we could think of words more as empty bubbles in a sea of the real. Of course, neither view is essential.

The notion that words are concepts, that words have a precise meaning or whatever, is crap. We are not playing dominoes with words; there is not a limited number of words nor a limited number of uses.

Another thread was discussing mathematical logic, which to me sounds like an oxymoron. Mathematical logic? Logic deals with language, math doesn't.

@jack phil,

jack;151413 wrote:

Why must man be an animal? I know that your biology textbook and Aristotle say so, but then, what of algae and plants?

It is quite obvious that if plants have their own kingdom and are not algae, then mankind cannot reasonably be put under the category of animal.

I agree. Although I can see why they wanted to put man under the animal concept, I can also see why this is questionable. And this touches on religious heritage. The baby was thrown out with the bath water. To reduce man to a clever animal is not perhaps an ideal plan, even if it intends to protect the "species" from fanaticism. We end up, perhaps, with a fanatical anti-fanaticism.

I think we can slice it anyway we please. A biology man will probably successfully justify the utility of the man-as-animal concept, but that is just one perspective. And I think philosophy is prior to all the rest.

---------- Post added 04-13-2010 at 02:27 PM ----------

jack;151413 wrote:

But to stay on topic, the OP start with the notion that concepts define. I just don't think concepts are essential. I think W has basically an inverted view of words as Plato. Concepts concoct an image of something like a balloon that has something in it; whereas we could think of words more as empty bubbles in a sea of the real. Of course, neither view is essential.

Well, for me, in my use of the term "concept," concepts are esentially essential ( Smile

), as for me essence and concept are the same. Of course we are wading into the slippery zone of logos, which cannot have the precision of mathematics, and even mathematics has its rough spots.

I like Lacan's notion of the Real as that which resists symboization, and yet the "Real" is indeed symbolization of that which resists symbolization. So the Real is like Kant's noumena, the label of something unthinkable, unknowable, except that we can think it as unthinkable, unknowable. Just as we can only process and infinite series by playing with its finite structure...and we can right it down finitely by using something akin to Aristotle's potential infinity. (I've just bumped into the modern dodge of this potential infinity, which is in essence the same thing. Just as the limit concept still seems to hint at infinitesimals, but that's another thread...)

---------- Post added 04-13-2010 at 02:30 PM ----------

jack;151413 wrote:

Another thread was discussing mathematical logic, which to me sounds like an oxymoron. Mathematical logic? Logic deals with language, math doesn't.

This is a good point. Logos means discourse, right? So logic would be discourse. But logos has a mathema element. It's my theory that "transcendental unity" is the foundation of both logos and mathema. I feel like this is indirectly addressed in the TLP. Formal logic can be described, in my opinion, as mathematical, but that's because we reduce propositions to Ps, and Es, and As. We no longer wrestle with qualia, and all master-concepts can be rigorously defined, which is not like real human discourse.

So I've always thought the value of formal logic is generally exaggerated, at least in its application to philosophy that matters. Of course it's a good thing if its limits are recognized, and I like the TLP for examining these limits.

Philosophy Forum

Conceptualizing Conceptualization

Quick Links

My Account

able2know