What's the Significance of the Strange-Loop that Nearly Every Word is defined in Terms of Other Words

[Joseph Maynor]

When I ask: What is reality?  Am I expecting you to give me a set of words in response?  Should I put them in a bag and carry them around with me?  What makes your words relevant or valuable to me?  What am I asking for when I ask this question?  Does that intention align with the "somewhat arbitrary" set of words that is given to me by a particular responder?  What is this 'What is X?' game that we are playing, where X is a word?  What's really going on in this word-association game?

Here's a famous example from Plato: Knowledge is true, justified, belief.  Is that a strange-loop?  Contemplate it!  What is really going on in this "definition"?

Video on point to watch:

 

Edited December 14, 2017 by Joseph Maynor

[snowleopard]

11 minutes ago, Joseph Maynor said:

When I ask: What is reality?  Am I expecting you to give me a set of words in response? 

@Joseph Maynor  How about a whack from a zen master's stick instead !?

[Joseph Maynor]

I love this paraphrase that I got from one of Leo's videos: "That whole thing is a story; and every story is a contextual framework."

[Joseph Maynor]

1 hour ago, snowleopard said:

@Joseph Maynor  How about a whack from a zen master's stick instead !?

This is not intended to be an empty philosophical question.  This is a very practical question.  We don't really know what the hell we're doing with words.  I want to start a discussion: but people have to engage and face this issue head on, not lazily hand-wave it away.  We've gotta do the contemplation work!  I'm inviting folks to join into a discussion on these issues.  If you don't want to contemplate these issues, don't dissuade others from doing so.  What the Mind thinks the question What is reality? is asking and what is actually obtained is apples and oranges.  There's a disconnect there that the Mind is concealing!  That should register as a big deal to you.

Edited December 14, 2017 by Joseph Maynor

[snowleopard]

@Joseph Maynor The comment wasn't intended to be flippant. Just showing that there are valid, if rather severe, alternatives to language as a way to point to Reality. But I totally agree, if we're going the language route, as obviously we must in this text-bound forum, then clearly understanding the power of language, and the problems with language, and the importance of clarity and refinement of language, and not dismissing it lightly, is surely paramount to its effective expression. I'm a poet at heart, and a deep lover of language, and playing with it, but also take it very seriously, and so I very much respect what you're getting at here.

Speak as if the world entire were but a single ear,
intent on hearing what you say;
for so, in truth, it is ~ The Book of Mirdad

Edited December 15, 2017 by snowleopard

[Joseph Maynor]

On 12/14/2017 at 5:56 AM, snowleopard said:

@Joseph Maynor The comment wasn't intended to be flippant. Just showing that there are valid, if rather severe, alternatives to language as a way to point to Reality. But I totally agree, if we're going the language route, as obviously we must in this text-bound forum, then clearly understanding the power of language, and the problems with language, and the importance of clarity and refinement of language, and not dismissing it lightly, is surely paramount to its effective expression. I'm a poet at heart, and a deep lover of language, and playing with it, but also take it very seriously, and so I very much respect what you're getting at here.

Speak as if the world entire were but a single ear,
intent on hearing what you say;
for so, in truth, it is ~ The Book of Mirdad

What if everything you just gave me here I regarded as just black and white markings? 

[Nahm]

@Joseph Maynor What's the Significance of the Strange-Loop that Nearly Every Word is defined in Terms of Other Words

 It’s all “relativity”. 3 cups & a peanut, that don’t exist. All illusion. It’s hysterical . It’s magic. It’s a completely pervasive bombardment of reassurance, misunderstood. If it seems otherwise, I think that’s a testament to how well it’s done, how convincing it is.  If it was all made out of something, you’d be able to get to the bottom of it. But it’s not, as you know. It’s made of nothing. Creating an entire universe out of nothing and being in it not actually knowing what you are or how you got there is literally the kind of thing we do (doing now).  It will never matter what words you speak to the illusion, it can’t tell the truth, because it is an illusion. The nature of an illusion, is to convince you something happened or is happening or will happen, that really isn’t actually.  Any & every “thing” in the illusion loops / goes full circle. Food to waste to fertilizer, to food. Rain to rivers, to ocean, to rain. One being, to two people, to one person / one being, etc, etc, and here are, in the loop the whole time. Of course, we don’t exist. 

[ajasatya]

On 14/12/2017 at 8:56 AM, Joseph Maynor said:

What is reality?

i am holding a cat with my left hand and a knife with my right hand. tell me a zen word or i'll cut the cat's throat!

[snowleopard]

3 hours ago, Joseph Maynor said:

What if everything you just gave me here I regarded as just black and white markings? 

So basically you're asking what if you didn't understand english? 

[Leo Gura]

The significance is that, once again, everything is made out of nothing.

Jacques Derrida and Post-Structuralism nailed the true nature of language.

[snowleopard]

33 minutes ago, Leo Gura said:

The significance is that, once again, everything is made out of nothing.

I'm reminded of a poem that speaks of this ...

 

then out of some wordless depths

of fertile silence and stillness,

a wormlike sentence is born,

and crawls across the page,

devouring the empty spacetime,

whereupon it spins a lyrical cocoon,

emerging after a cryptic timeline,

as if by divine grace or magic,

as an intricately transfigured

metamorphosed metaphor ...

an utterance taking wing,

that in a flight of imagining,

like Logos bewitched by Eros,

sings words to awaken by.

[SOUL]

What is the significance of the silence in between words?

What is the significance of the sounds that make up words?

What is the significance of the vibrations that make up sounds?

What is the significance of what vibrations bounce against to create sounds?

What is the significance of vibrations doing the dance that they do?

What is the significance of something filling nothing to create everything?

What is the significance of asking these questions rather than the peace with just being present?

Edited December 18, 2017 by SOUL