Thanks for the compliment! :-) But I’m not a philosopher.
I look at it differently. Something has caught your attention. And if the text has made you stop and ponder for at least a tiny moment on any word/question/relation, then it’s played its function—to gleam at things from a different perspective.
It’s like in the parable about the blind men and an elephant. We look at life from different perspectives or different levels of abstraction. What we compress from it turns into our understanding. If we like, we can operate at different levels of abstraction constructively in complementary fashion. Every kind of knowledge contains in itself potential for some understanding (even if it’s negative). Not always and not everything can be formalized and reduced to simple logical rules without contradictions (think about Gödel’s theorems). And there was no intention to do that.
Here the intention was to share something that I find to be interesting and which may lead other people to reflect. What concerns my skill to do that—that’s entirely different point. And understanding is a little miracle when it happens, but it is not a necessity.
Yeah. Headline caught my attention and I was expecting that the content would follow, but there was none.
My intent is not to comment on your skill, but to rather warn you of the discipline itself. It seems you feel you’re gaining some profound knowledge by this pondering—I am afraid though this is just illusion—and a dangerous one. Just wanted to warn you of that.
Sorry for the disappointment. But you’ve discovered something—the emptiness of content! It is not sarcasm. Fundamentally, even the disappointment is empty as it’s dependent on the expectation (but to get this far one has to contemplate deeply). Any phenomenon—external or internal—can be approached this way. That’s the payload.
EDIT: It’s not a cheap trick! One can think of it this way. First, there is a conceptual understanding of emptiness (you’ve heard of it somewhere and have discovered conceptual emptiness of constructs). Second phase is to apply it on the perceptual level (as in the example with the disappointment, one can actually be free from it but it’s an advanced level of insight into emptiness). And the final phase is to understand the emptiness of intrinsic meaning we set to our life, or our “intrinsic” expectation from life. The last phase is non-trivial. If one gets insight into it, one awakens. In this way our “intrinsic” disappointment with life disappears.
Thanks for the compliment! :-) But I’m not a philosopher.
I look at it differently. Something has caught your attention. And if the text has made you stop and ponder for at least a tiny moment on any word/question/relation, then it’s played its function—to gleam at things from a different perspective.
It’s like in the parable about the blind men and an elephant. We look at life from different perspectives or different levels of abstraction. What we compress from it turns into our understanding. If we like, we can operate at different levels of abstraction constructively in complementary fashion. Every kind of knowledge contains in itself potential for some understanding (even if it’s negative). Not always and not everything can be formalized and reduced to simple logical rules without contradictions (think about Gödel’s theorems). And there was no intention to do that.
Here the intention was to share something that I find to be interesting and which may lead other people to reflect. What concerns my skill to do that—that’s entirely different point. And understanding is a little miracle when it happens, but it is not a necessity.
Yeah. Headline caught my attention and I was expecting that the content would follow, but there was none.
My intent is not to comment on your skill, but to rather warn you of the discipline itself. It seems you feel you’re gaining some profound knowledge by this pondering—I am afraid though this is just illusion—and a dangerous one. Just wanted to warn you of that.
Sorry for the disappointment. But you’ve discovered something—the emptiness of content! It is not sarcasm. Fundamentally, even the disappointment is empty as it’s dependent on the expectation (but to get this far one has to contemplate deeply). Any phenomenon—external or internal—can be approached this way. That’s the payload.
EDIT: It’s not a cheap trick! One can think of it this way. First, there is a conceptual understanding of emptiness (you’ve heard of it somewhere and have discovered conceptual emptiness of constructs). Second phase is to apply it on the perceptual level (as in the example with the disappointment, one can actually be free from it but it’s an advanced level of insight into emptiness). And the final phase is to understand the emptiness of intrinsic meaning we set to our life, or our “intrinsic” expectation from life. The last phase is non-trivial. If one gets insight into it, one awakens. In this way our “intrinsic” disappointment with life disappears.