Her name is Zoey and she is 3. :3
Adorable.
Yes, I know that this thread is DED, but who cares? Who even really reads the post dates? Anyway, on topic: Life makes me think. What’s the meaning of it? (If you say 42, I’ll kill you.) Looking at other people’s actions, knowing they have lives, families, their own problems, that makes me think.
yesiknowsomeonealreadysaidthat
You could’ve just made a new thread and no one would be the wiser.
42
There is no such thing as meaning or purpose, those concepts had to be invented to explain human interactions.
Do line segments, like, exist?
Or does only our understanding of line segments exist?
Well all reality is perceived through education. Like with Plato’s Allegory of the Cave from The Republic, the prisoners merely see what is taught to them by the puppet masters. With that in mind, line segments exist in the sense that someone came up with that idea, made a shadow puppet out of it (education) and now it is common knowledge that lines exist in segments and in infinite amounts.
So to answer your question, nothing exists. Our understanding exists, which creates a reality in which things “exist”. But nothing in reality is concrete. If the entire human race forgot what the color blue looks like, anyone with the desire to discover a new reality could say it’s something entirely different from the blue it was known as.
Speaking of which, that story and that book make me think and question a whole lot of things in life.
I would go ahead and say that nothing exists in our perceived reality. In a philosophical sense, perceived reality and actual reality are supposed to be inseparable, but we don’t live in purely constructed philosophical world. We understand (or the smart ones do) that the reality we perceive does not accurately reflect what the world really is. We know that there are colors out there that we simply don’t have the capacity to observe with our own eyes, and yet, we know that it really does in fact exist.
Plato’s story about the cave, as I interpreted it, didn’t mean that reality doesn’t exist at all. I thought it meant that your perceived reality could all be a lie. It means that the reality you call yours is not necessarily universal. That being said, it never invalidates the notion that there is a single truthful reality. It’s a similar claim in the eyes of the individual, but it is an important distinction to make.
To each their own haha but to me, Plato was trying to convey the message that reality is a taught thing and not a natural thing that has always been. Going off nature versus nurture, we are nurtured to believe that blue is blue. In nature, blue could actually be anything. Blue is merely the name we gave it, and that is something that is then taught in the shadows on the wall before people who don’t strive to make their own reality (I.e the prisoner that is freed and learns of a new reality before returning to the cave being adventurous discoverers versus the ignorant, chained prisoners)
On a side note, I think the freed prisoners death is what Plato sees in the changing of reality. The masses, tied into their belief of others teachings and not into their learning of new, undiscovered things shun the newer ideas. Ideas such as the Heliocentric theory, the world being round, etc weren’t really believed until the death of those that set out to prove it true. As they’re dead, they join the mass of puppet masters and teach their reality (now accepted) and so on.
In a way, we are both kind of saying the same thing in two different ways. You’re saying that our perceived reality, according to Plato, could be a lie. I’m saying that our perceived reality is made up by countless people and taught to others unwilling to discover on their own the truth of the world and that we only accept things as they are because we are taught them, regardless of fact or fiction.
Watching the Truman Show.
Yeah agreed. I was kind of splitting hairs.
2 x 21