Haha, you stupid fools I am not going anywhere. I am like that case of the herpes that appears only when you are getting ready for a hot date

Everyone read this and tell me what you think, it was kind of a mindfawk for me.
Keep the retarded replys down to a minimum, that way people can see why this post was started.



Epistemology is the study of knowledge and how we know things. Consider the word "cat". How do you know what it really means? By looking the word up in the dictionary? You will just be presented with more words that need defining. And you can't just keep looking up words in an infinite regress of defining each definition you come across. One can respond that we know what cat means by using it as a sign to refer to a real cat, but how do we know it is a sign for the "real cat"? If someone points at the real cat and says "Cat", how do we know what his act of pointing means? Perhaps he is calling his outstretched finger a cat, or the direction of the point is meant to be conveyed from his finger to his shoulder blade to something behind him? So how can we ever be sure that we know what others really mean when they say things? As you can see, studying epistemology is a lot like being a five-year old who absolutely will not stop asking his mother "Why" whenever she offers an explanation.

Ive thought of that too. HOW DO WE KNOW 5 is really 5? why cant 5 be 4

Your right, AS YOUR, GOD I NOW COMMAND FIVE TO BE FOUR AND CAT TO BE INFINITY!

Plato believed that every type of object exists as an idea in people’s mind…for example, when someone says “cat,” we picture a cat in our head. It won’t be the exact same cat they’re talking about, but it gives us an idea of what they mean…and the way we develop this idea is from the countless times we’ve heard or seen the word “cat” associated with one.

Jean Baudrillard, on the other hand, thinks that we’re pretty much screwed once we learn to speak. Like the original post pointed out, words don’t mean anything beyond what we say they mean, which is infinitely circular. That means that everything anyone says is subjective, and no two people will have quite the same interpretation of any statement or question. That’s the most basic of his arguments…the rest just gets more and more complicated and post-modern and I don’t get it.

I agree more with Plato…I think that language works perfectly fine the vast majority of the time. The very fact that we’re having this discussion proves that. When we learn to speak, it’s done by associating words with objects and actions and slowly builds up. We can learn complicated words by looking them up because even if the definition only gives us more words, they tend to be simpler words that we have a base of experience with. We know the cat is a cat because our mind automatically associates it with the other mental images of cats stored in our memory, which is why things that looks like cats but aren’t are confusing, and so are cats that don’t look like cats at all. It’s all based on our experience. We know what someone means when they point at something because we’ve been through that hundreds of times in our life. The very first time someone pointed at something, we might not have understood, but when we eventually looked that way we were rewarded with some type of positive feedback, and that was the first image stored in our memory under what “pointing finger” means.

Math is pretty much the same. The symbol “4” or “5” can mean anything to anyone, because it’s not something found in nature. However, for the mathematical system that makes the modern world go round to function, we need to accept that four is this many x’s- x x x x. Once you accept what numbers and symbols stand for, then math obviously is reflected in nature…if there are two stones and another stone is added, there will in essence be three stones, no matter what symbols you want to attach to those terms.

Excellent reply, but if this is true about Jean Baudrillard, in a "non-super hard to understand way" could you explain:

What does he believe we could do to at least remedy the situation, or does he just say we are pretty much fawked and that humans will always be living in a reality that nothing means what it should?

I will look him up later, but my work comp is really slow and it takes me too long to surf the web.

I can give it a shot...that's really just the premise of his main theory, which is that a lot of mankind's problems arise when they try to connect language and truth or reality it tries to convey. Instead of trying to remedy the break between language and reality, he just sort of explains its harmful effects.

He does say we need to accept that language is inherently subjective, and the meaning we think we're conveying only exists in our individual minds. I guess that's an affirmative to your second choice, we're pretty much never going to fix the gap.

After that his work gets really dense...one of the more understandable concepts is that words are actually based on negation; back to the cat example, we know what "cat" is because it's not anything else, not a dog or a plane or a telephone...but I don't know if I really buy that, I'm still going with what I said earlier.

If you want to get to the real essence of his theory, look up hyperreality...and if you understand it, you'll be way past me.

Another modern philosopher to look into is Jacques Derrida. He's a proponent of literary "deconstruction," a method that basically looks at a statement (or originally, an entire work of literature) and breaks it down into the various potential meanings and assumptions that it embodies. I guess that has potential to be a remedy to Baudrillard's problem...maybe you could eliminate possible meanings until you get to the one that's right or something?

I mean, I still disagree that it's such a huge deal...it's probably true that words can't accurately convey much of anything, but I think they do a good enough job that things work smoothly 99% of the time. I don't know how, but that doesn't change it.

Just because we perceive things to be there, it doesn't make it so. For instance, if 10 people see the same painting for 5 seconds, and are asked to write down what they remember from the painting, chances are each answer will be different. Witnesses have seen the same man, one saying he's short and dark, another saying tall and blonde. How is it possible for both of them to be telling the truth.
^Perhaps not as intelligent as Judicator's post and little off topic.


A side note I think is interesting: When we look at somebody's shirt and see it as red, we say that it is in fact a red shirt. This is not true. The only colour that the light can create is red, so really, the shirt is every colour BUT red.

I guess that's true, but I think if you shared the responses among the group, they would probably mostly agree (yeah, that's right, I forgot there was blue in that corner, etc.) They might have remembered different things, but that doesn't mean they would have any contradictions (although they might if people thought a shape was pacman and another thought it was a pie graph, or a similar situation.)

As far as the short/dark vs. tall/blond, I'm not sure I believe it. People can have false memories, flat-out lie, or have seen a different person...but I don't think two people could actually see the same person and honestly perceive him in such drastically different ways.



Yeah, colors are really tricky when you think about them. The main question I have about them are what they look like to other people, since colors are literally ONLY defined by the things that are that color (sure, you could get into wavelengths, but that wouldn't change the rest of my point.)

For example, we can all agree that (in general) the sky, water, and Windows taskbars are blue. However, we have no clue if the color I see when I look at those is the same that you see when you do...blue to my eyes could be green to yours, and there's no way we'd ever know. The sky/water/taskbar/anything else we call blue would just show up to you as green, and you'd say "yep, it's blue alright."

I probably didn't make any sense there, but whatever. Tell me if I did, I'll feel better about my communication skills.

This is the kind of stuff I think/talk about with my friends while we are stoned, made perfect sense to me.

You guys need to go get some sleep...

Made sense to me but I'm sleepy.


And yeah, my cousin and a couple friends are cops and they've had witnesses argue over those kinds of things.

What the hell is a sleep?

My IQ got raised by at least ten points for each of Judicator's responses.

Welcome to the world of Counter-Strike.

1984 when hes holding up the fingers :P


why cant it be 3 or 5 :P

my brain hurts from all this thinking..

I've discussed colors with a few friends and how it may be possible for other people to see them differently. One person may see 'yellow' as yellow and another may see 'yellow' as green, 'yellow' being the color we've been told to recognize as the sun and the n00bfest border color. Well if one person still sees it as being green, but has been told it is yellow, everything he sees as green would be labeled 'yellow' while the other person still sees and associates yellow with 'yellow'. So is there a way for one person to point out to the other that what they are both viewing are not the same 'yellow'?

so if i view my penis as big, and she views my penis as small....whos to say that im wrong and shes right if were looking at the same penis

So I'm not the only one thinking about this while playing Meteos.

With all that color stuff said, what about being colorblind? XD

wow lots of typing