Hostility?
None at all! I just see dirt in her eyes, she trying to clean it and offer assitance.
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No. I’m saying nouns are broad and adjectives provide context. Especially in this day and age, I’m sure you could find better, more precise labels.
For example: a 154SP vs a BS-310. One of these is what you’d call a ‘salt shaker’, the other a ‘cocktail shaker’. Both have more precise labels available to them.
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Mm. More precise. Not so user-friendly, though.
Also, how sure are you that NOTHING in the history of cryptic alphanumeric designations has used those marks before? You might want to add a few more digits to avoid ambiguity.
Then you can pass me the 1AS-96-AGL394-B with the BCL-43-111G7H-9 and avoid all confusion.
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I can’t be sure. That, again, is where context matters.
Where it doesn’t matter, however, is in determining what is or is not that specific thing. The 154SP doesn’t stop being itself just because you’ve put powdered garlic into it. It doesn’t magically become a BS-310 if you put two different types of alcohol in, cover the top with your hand, and shake it up.
Labels are just that: labels. They are not the thing. They merely describe the thing, allow us to convey the concept of the thing. They don’t define the thing. The thing defines the thing, and there is no blurriness to what is it, and what is not it.
Edit to add: Nor is it my mind that determines what is the cup, and what is not the cup. The cup is itself, no matter what I call it. The label is only useful when communicating with you, so as to avoid confusion… for example: that I am not intending to mean the cup, while you intend to mean the cup and its contents.
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Solipsism Is Bunk.
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So-- everything else in that paragraph? Dead on. I totally agree, though I’d expand that to suggest that it extends to the label that pops up in your head as well as the one you convey.
As for the “thing defines the thing?” … now I kind of want to go ask my mug whether it regards itself as a coffee mug or just a mug. Only, it doesn’t talk. Maybe I could work out something with medical, get some kind of reading?
So-- being funny aside, Arrendis, I somewhat agree that things are what they are and there’s no helping that. Except, how we define what they are, and what they are, is hard to say. To me, a cup (for holding or measuring or drinking out of or whathaveyou; definitely not for living in). To a fish, a house (totally for living in). Which of us is right seems like it’ll depend on who’s using it.
Editing to add:
Also, what is necessary for that thing to be the thing varies accordingly. For me, a “coffee” cup with a broken handle has lost something kind of essential: my ability to hold it comfortably while it’s full to capacity with near-boiling coffee. The fish seems likely to regard the handle as decoration, if that-- not essential to the house at all.
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What is, is. (The moon)
Trying to describe a thing, like explaining colors to a blind person (Finger pointing to the moon)
Remove all falsness and what is left is truth.
Just look straight into it.
All the coat of words, descriptions, adjectives, categorizations, borders and all that are just layers upon layers of… something else.
A kiss to the red hotness, another to the penitant fraticide cold blooded murder of kin and shameful display to the entire universe alsp good with words, and yet another to the sweaty soldier that presses on.
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Except, neither you nor the fish are defining the thing. You’re describing the use to which you’d put it. The thing is itself. Period. If your concept of the cup is its uses… then you’re conceiving of your actions, not of the thing.
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Uh … “parricide,” I think, Ms. Tsukiyo. (And I think it’s “fratricide.”) It seems wee’re tryig to be carful wih oor languag.
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Not gonna lie, I laughed at the blatant typoese. But yeah, if you’re going to object to misunderstandings, then precision rather becomes necessary, doesn’t it?
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I dont know who you killed so far you vicious murderer 
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Shift the burden of proof; if you meet a solipsist in the road, throw half-bricks at them until they convince you that they do not, in fact, want to have half-bricks sailing at their head, and you don’t want to throw them either.
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Shifting the burden of proof is ridiculous. The onus remains on the one making the assertion. If the solipsist attempts to assert you’re not real, though, fire away.
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Yep! And if I go trying to see the thing itself-- not to deny my navigation dataset, because I kind of need that, but to try to really understand the underlying reality … then what I’m trying to see is the Totality.
At this point, the main difference in our perspectives seems to be that you see “a thing.” I see a mass of ceramic that’s okay with hanging out together for a while, if that makes sense. It doesn’t have a separate “self,” without anything around to mentally carve it out of the rest of the Totality.
Imagine a coffee cup (fine, a cup) buried in and filled with sand. Over thousands of years, no living thing digs it up, and eventually the sand solidifies into sandstone. Then, one maybe-terrible day, some stress creates a fault in the ceramic.
It’s a tiny fault, a hairline break. The two halves aren’t apart, not separated in the slightest; there’s no meaningful difference in the cup’s situation at all, as long as it remains buried. But if it’s dug up … it’ll be useless, as a cup. Or at least require glue.
(Might still make an okay house.)
Has its essence changed in some fundamental way? Just from having a crack that doesn’t matter at all, in its present, and indefinite, circumstances?
I don’t think that it has. And, I don’t think you can prove otherwise, any more than I can prove (to myself) that I’m not the only one that exists. (Because someone else expressing a personal belief in solipsism is speaking an obvious absurdity: I’M the one whose eyes I see the world through!)
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I see a multitude of things. I see the cup. I see the clay. I see the lacquer that’s been fire-bonded into the clay. I see (albeit not directly) the molecules—each its own thing, even while part of the larger whole—I see the atoms, and I see the quarks. Each of these layers contains distinct, discrete things. Every one of them is real.
It’s the coastline problem, really. How long is the coastline of a given island? Well… it depends on your resolution. The more you drill down, the more you find little inlets and peninsulae, little turns and hooks that… you could measure across… or you could measure every curve.
You seem hel-bent on insisting only the global map’s scale is ‘real’, only it matters. I say all of the scales matter. They’re all real. It’s just a matter of what layer you need to interact with at that moment. And the interaction of those layers… that’s real, too. That matters. That’s part of the totality you seek to understand.
By flattening it all, by only wanting to view the big picture—the ‘totality’—as ‘real’… you blind yourself to all but an infinitesimally small sliver of that totality.
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Hee. Sorry; it might be a little frustrating dealing with two of us, even if Ms. Tsukiyo isn’t saying a lot.
I’d draw a line, Arrendis, between what is “real” and what “matters.” For me, they’re not so closely aligned. “What’s real?” A massive interlocking web of interaction and entanglement. It’s a wonderful mess.
“What matters?” It does. Like … maybe all of it. From the quantum level up. To start with, it’s beautiful.
You seem to believe I see a world devoid of meaning. In a way that’s true-- I don’t see meaning as something handed down to us by gods, or by the Totality itself. But, I also believe in the dignity of small things. Human struggles and sufferings. Kindnesses done. Those are meaningful to me.
Before you ask, no, I don’t see all of humanity as my responsibility. The reasons for that are as stated, but, also, there’s a little more to it.
My predecessor worked big: grand plans and schemes. She thought we were a new species, you know? Something strange, no longer truly kin to humankind. Something they’d grow to hate and fear. And, she was going to save us all. That’s what her “Exodus Project” was-- an attempt to abandon New Eden, and human space, to strike out for distant stars, with as many as would follow her.
She … did a lot of damage, I think. Not least, providing support to those of our kind who don’t see themselves as bound by human rules.
I want to fix that, but I’m also wary of repeating the mistake: the belief that my sight is clear, that I’m fit to lead and teach. So I work small. I focus on those close to me, and whatever crisis crosses my path. I’ll help against the Drifters, or, probably, to explore abyssal deadspace, but I don’t want to lead anymore. I’ll get in extended discussions over well-trod ground, instead of trying to carve a Path of my own.
I’m a small person, with limited ambitions. Probably that’s what I should have been content to be, before.
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Anyone who tells you that you should see all of humanity as your responsibility is either a)a megalomaniac, b)a sadist who wants to watch you go insane, or c)an Amarr bishop who thinks you should be Emperor/Empress (and which, in my book, means they’re (b) and want to see if they can male (a) the flavor of insane you go).
Let’s just get that out of the way right there.
If it matters, Aria, it’s real. It has to be, because it has real impact and real implications. It may only be real conceptually, but it’s real, nonetheless.
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Hee. But, see, there, we’re back to the “EVERYTHING matters” bit. And it does, all up and down the scale. So, sure, we can say it’s all real … but that creates kind of a dense fog of reality. Navigating’s a pain.
Navigating that situation in a sophisticated way that actually takes a broad range of circumstances into account for overall strong outcomes instead of focusing on just a few in a way that produces limited success and a lot of collateral damage … that sounds a lot like “wisdom,” yes?
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Nope. It sounds a lot like ‘life’. Everyone’s gotta figure it out for themselves, in the end.
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