20 thoughts on “Through a glass darkly?

  1. I have no speakers at the moment, so videos are of little use to me. From what I have read, this is right up my alley.

  2. petrushka: I have no speakers at the moment, so videos are of little use to me.

    You are not missing much.

    What he says seems reasonably consistent with Kant’s view that we have no direct access to the world in itself.

    Korzybski says that we construct the world that we see, but that there is a real world and what we construct is based on the real world (sounds like “the world in itself”).

    K. calls that a process of abstracting. I am more inclined to call it a process of seeing.

  3. I frequently see things that turn out to be something other than what I saw. At least that’s what my wife says.

    And I can look right at something without seeing it. Especially if I am looking for it.

  4. I like this aphorism attributed to Korzybski

    There are two ways to slide easily through life: to believe everything or to doubt everything; both ways save us from thinking.

  5. Alan Fox: I like this aphorism attributed to Korzybski
    There are two ways to slide easily through life: to believe everything or to doubt everything; both ways save us from thinking.

    I would think believing everything makes life much easier than doubting everything. There are far more religious fanatics than there are cynical hipsters

  6. Its all a error on the subject of senses.
    Yes there is a real world and yes we see it fine. Its only that our soul must read our memory and its our memory that receives the input from senses.
    Itsa not perfect as there is editing. yet we see things as they are pretty much.
    These pgilosophers rightly discovered we don’t look at the world and only get it from senses. Yet they missed its pretty much the same thing as we are looking at our memory of the senses input. Just a wee bit of editing does not make it that we don’t see reality.
    they missed that our soul uses a virtual reality machine, called memory, but its right about 97%.

  7. REW: I would think believing everything makes life much easier than doubting everything. There are far more religious fanatics than there are cynical hipsters.

    This makes no sense.

  8. The external (real) world is a source of a massive amount of data. In the sense that much of it has to be ignored, we do engage in abstraction. But is this capacity for “abstraction” unique to humans?

    That’s only one way to speak of abstraction and it’s important not to confuse the meanings.

  9. Robert,

    they missed that our soul uses a virtual reality machine, called memory, but its right about 97%.

    So when the body dies, the soul wanders around heaven or hell in a state of amnesia? Or are you one of those Christians who believes in “soul sleep” between death and judgment?

  10. Oh look. It’s thread-jacking keiths. Again.

    Some souls sleep and some don’t. Look at Lazarus and the rich man. Not sleeping.

    Or maybe you think their bodies were in hell with them, and no longer in the grave.

    The flames couldn’t have been too bad. They could still talk. Maybe there’s advantages to being rich when you get to hell.

    Burning Flame

  11. Mung,

    Robert brought up souls and a very interesting 97% number, to be fair. What’s the missing 3%? How do you know this.

  12. @Korzybski

    The philosophers who say “the world is an illusion” didn’t mean “the world does not exist”. They meant pretty much the same thing that Mr. Korzybski meant. It can be phrased something like this: The perception of the world is a misperception, and the misperception occurs because there’s something there to be perceived.

  13. Fascinating. Two science-fiction novels which intrigued and influenced me when I was much younger were A E van Vogt’s The Pawns of Null-A and The World of Null-A based on Korzybski’s general semantics. It still makes a lot of sense to me.

  14. keiths:
    Robert,

    So when the body dies, the soul wanders around heaven or hell in a state of amnesia?Or are you one of those Christians who believes in “soul sleep” between death and judgment?

    Thats a good point. The bible does say the memory goes with us to the afterlife.
    Yet the memory is just a material organ.
    Therefore one must speculate that the soul does memorize after the material action of memory. Jesus would remember his time on earth.
    so the soul does just read thge memory but being the mysterious thing called soul it does remember after the memory mechanism has taken place.
    Remember Jesus did not remember his time as God when he was born on earth. He had to regrow in wisdom. He had no memory of Gods memory.

  15. Robert,

    Thats a good point. The bible does say the memory goes with us to the afterlife.
    Yet the memory is just a material organ.
    Therefore one must speculate that the soul does memorize after the material action of memory.

    If the soul is capable of remembering, then why do we need a “material organ” for memory in the first place?

  16. keiths:
    Robert,

    If the soul is capable of remembering, then why do we need a “material organ” for memory in the first place?

    Good point. Yet the memory organ is what does all the work for us. I can only speculate the soul remembers things that are soul like. Ummaterial souls possibly don’t recognise material things. this would explain some verses in the bible.
    Yet I’m sure our soul remembers things and the memory organ is material.
    Its all connected at some strange threshold anyways.
    However this thread was about a error in philofophy. Some folks figured out we are not in contact with the real world but only through senses BUT THEN they went wrong in not realizing its only a minor difference. We do see the world by senses after they enter our memory. We just read our memory. its just edited a little.

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