The thing is, I see great potential in Reconstructo, so when he spends time with navel gazing philosophy I get sad and my world crumbles inside.

Ofcause there's a slim chance that your kind of philosophy some day will gain useage, but I doubt it.

Reconstructo is one of the most creative folks in this forum, with an open attitude, and willing to change is mind as often as necessary to achieve an higher degree of knowledge, more then I can say on almost everybody else...

Correct him if you can; but abuse is always pointless... No one does it alone, and philosophy as a form of relationship is best with many minds and many points of view... We are not an army, but we may be a navy whose fleet has been sunk... We have to presume that many are here for the same reason that Socrates and his crew took to the streets: because their society was not working as they thought it should...That is the reason behhind every questio of ethics or knowledge or faith... Okay, will you now limit the members or the opinions???

... If you talk trash, or if honey flows from your finger tips the chances are equal in my book that you will inspire some insight on my part that would not have been inspired without your being there... I need you guys, all of you...You help me think, even force me to think at times, and I need that, and I hate to admit how much...

It already has, long since. Philosophy is often enough a "technology of morale. " We seem, as thinking humans, to have an itch for clarity. Perhaps you are not that interested in problems such as mind-matter or self-other dichotomies/confusions, but I used to be. Of course my current philosophy has extricated me from such confusions. I no longer waste time on certain questions, as I have a satisfactory answer. Instead I have moved on to other questions, which at the moment happen to be mathematical.

Seems you narrow my intend, and broaded your view too much.

It's possible. But then I mostly see you criticize others rather than express your own interests. I'm quite willing to hear what it is that fascinates you.

I'm sure it's not just utility. After all, we're not bees.

You are very right, I critisize alot. It's both good, and very bad and annoying ..I know.

I hate watchign "rainbow chasers" chase what they can never reach, it's an illusion and the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow is just a romantic myth. I see such things as great irrational thinking, which I can't help try to destroy and make the helpless victim get some rationality in his/her head, by this it's maybe I who am the rainbow chaser, I'm just too poor at convincing people en mass, my rethoric skills are not good, and my methods are brutal, therefore too often I talk for deaf ears.

Reconstructo

The thing is, most here try to see things for what they are, defining them and their use, I see things as what they can be ..their potential.

We do not see things at all... Rather, we see their meaning in the form of concepts...

I can sympathize with that, but perhaps you will agree that the potential future is related to the actual present.

That's trying to define things too much again, not everything needs definition, some things are better left undefined and be defined ad hoc.

Cross the bridge when you get to it. Or my personal "don't take a domp on the bear, before it's shot".

How much is too much? Perhaps you will agree that this is matter of taste?

The deepest part of my interpretation of Hegel is that he transcends all sorts of troublesome attempts to define. For instance, the mind-matter dichotomy.

In some ways, we agree more than you might expect. I also don't want philosophy to be bogged down with useless questions. At the same time, one must really examine the questions to "prove" they are indeed useless, and not just difficult. The mind-matter dichotomy was almost "destined" to be wrestled with, as the relation twixt subject and object is not an easy one. Also the problem of universals. In what way do abstractions exist? Is chairness more real than individual chairs? What is goodness? And does it exist apart from events and objects?

What are concepts? The concept of concept is a gold mine. To think about thinking.

To stay on topic, do you see what I mean by "the rational is real"? Agreement, at the moment, is secondary. I'm making a strange point. I admit that. But for it was a valuable "realization." What do you make of my argument? And I'm asking only for a sincere attempt at understanding what I'm driving at.

I just got David Foster Wallace's book on infinity. It's good stuff. And it's a good example. We can cook up a concept like infinity only by negating our concept of the finite. We can't think infinity and we can't think the unthinkable. But we can put a minus sign in front of anything.

I struggled with this line at first. How is the real rational, when we are always still figuring out what reality is?

It now makes perfect sense to me, so I'm sharing my view on it, and encouraging a friendly discussion on the matter. Here's my view on it.

The world as we know it is structured by human concept. Even if there is a structure beneath or above our human concept, this itself is still just a human concept. Human concept is all the structure we have and are ever going to have, it seems to me.
We cook up gods and theories and philosophies, and this is the intelligable structure of the world. And we cannot speak or think outside of structure, also known as ratio, also known as rationality.

Thing is, sometimes one must change stance towards things, if you make a statemen too soon that is good or that is bad, then you will end up as a hippocrate should you chance your mind.

..that's why one should never rush off defining things.

Only by living you will know what, when and why. I can't tell you about everything.

This is wrong. A counterexample in the integers. They are surely infinite, and we can think about it.

The models, and scientific theories are only models. They contain concepts that might be inspired by nature, and they might even capture it, but we can never say, since there is no reference frame for which can can stand between a model, and the world, and compare them. This hint on theory laden nature of observation itself.

I disagree. We can only think the finite. To the degree that infinity is thinkable, it is no longer infinity. Of course we are bumping into slippery logos here, and a lack of friendly spirit would make the conversation pointless.
We can think that integers have no limit, but that is just infinite as a negation of finite. We can't truly imagine an infinity of numbers.
Define infinity. And then look at the word "in-finity." I ask you at least to see where I'm going here.

You seem to speak of the world as if there were a world outside our concepts and models of it. I don't think there is. We live in mental models. That's another way to say that the real is rational. True, qualia exists outside our concepts, but not for language and thought.Thus the word/concept "qualia" which itself is not qualia.

This is ridiculous. If you don ` t believe there is an external world, then you don ` t believe i exist, or that the computer in front of you is really there. You can say they are all models, but a model has to be a model of something( which is not a model ). What you say here is very counterintuitive, and contradictory.

In a sense, i can understand how you can be wrong. I mean, for 2000 years of mathematics from the Greek onward, the notion of "approximate infinite" is embraced, while the notion of "complete infinite" is laugh at. It is only in the light of Georg Cantor that complete infinite is revealed.

I am telling you that it is common to think of the entire set of integers all at once in contemporary mathematics. When people say Z( or the set of integers), they mean that as an infinite set. In fact, it is Cantor that developed a whole need area of mathematics know as set theory, and the theory of transfinite numbers.

This is ridiculous. If you don ` t believe there is an external world, then you don ` t believe i exist, or that the computer in front of you is really there. You can say they are all models, but a model has to be a model of something( which is not a model ). What you say here is very counterintuitive, and contradictory.

Yeah, man. I know about Cantor. But obviously he didn't write down an infinity of numbers. He just showed the possibility of one to one correspondence in certain scenarios. Cantor is great, of course. But Cantor isn't a god. Just a man with a plan, and one that claimed, in the end, to have gotten his most self-important theory from the Big Man himself.

In short, I feel like you are too busy trying to one-up me to see what it is I am aiming at. Take a break from the song and dance, brother. I'm talking about the nature of thought, and whether thought/concept is not itself in its very essence FINITE, in the sense of Concept AS limit. THe word/concept "infinity" is itself delimiting, else the word would be useless, completely vague. A word that does not delimited is exactly nonsense. Whereas the word "nonsense" is quite sensible, as it is the negation of "sense," something like "dfkgjdfkgjsdfhgkjdgsfgarg" would have no meaning.

If it sounds ridiculous, perhaps you should give me the benefit of the doubt and assume you are missing something. Perhaps it's just a difficult thought. Of course it may be counter-"intuitive" as practical life may reward certain prejudices/confusions. And Nietzsche tackles this well in Beyond Good and Evil.

Yes, a model has to be a model of something. So the model metaphor at some point breaks down. And this is why Hegel's idealism is called "absolute", when Kant's was "transcendental."

Here's the idea. Qualia are organized within a system of concepts.
But so are concepts. Many of our concepts don't organize/cut-up qualia but instead organize other concepts.

We have master concepts like the "world" or "reality" and smaller and smaller more specific concepts. For Hegel, self-consciousness progresses to the point where it dissolve the false dichotomy of subject-object and model/modeled. We only have models, and that, my friend, is exactly WHY the real is rational and the rational is real. THere's nothing outside the models, and therefore the model metaphor becomes obsolete. THe thing-in-itself is recognized as an empty confusion. It's like the Truman Show. THe thing-in-itself is an imaginary boundary. Something like infinity on the number spectrum.