On ''what there is''

holmz-

Well I made it a minute in (almost) and it was seeming to be a religious talk.

That's because a) you only made it a minute in and b) it turned out to be one of the many Watts videos where they cut up and pieced together different talks. I just listened to the first few seconds, it started off the talk I thought it was, only later realized it was all chopped up. There are elements of religion but it is equal parts science and philosophy.  

The Cliff Notes version is there are two great Myths or ways we view the world- the Ceramic Model, and the Fully Automatic.  

The Ceramic Model is the religious one, in which everything is just mere stuff, clay in the Bible, into which God breathes life. But really it is all just dead lifeless stuff. And so in the Ceramic Model we human beings are all fundamentally different and apart from everything else. Animals to a lesser extent as well.  

The Fully Automatic Model is the one we think of as scientific and in this one everything is just lifeless dead particles just like clay only we dispense with God and say the mind and soul are nothing more than artifacts of all these billiard balls bouncing around.   

There's a lot more, like I said this is the Cliff Notes version. Expanding on each model it becomes increasingly clear just how much they each are missing. It does take a while though. Watts is good, but even he cannot convey the nature of reality in less than a minute.    

https://youtu.be/UPcs3B1omx8?t=27

I listen music now at least not sounds -- Mahgister

If you are not attending a live performance or hearing a live stream of a performance, then you are not listening to music, you are listening to recordings.

This post doesn't belong on an audio forum, so I should just resist the temptation of weighing in. But I can't.

First, Quine's point (in "Ontological Relativity," from which comes the "Gavagai" coinage), as well as in several other places, is just that our best scientific theories should govern our ontology. This is a fancy way of saying that if an accepted and useful scientific theory demands that we regard a given theoretical construct as "real," then we should do so. As David Lewis put it, although "sets" were "unknown to Homo javanensis," they are nevertheless indispensable in modern mathematics and therefore should be regarded as "real." This question dates at least to Plato, for whom numbers were more "real" than the things of perception they enumerated, being pure intelligible entities not subject to perspective, change over time, and so forth. Which is to say that, although they proclaim themselves to be "empiricists," Quine, et al., are really committed to idealism—to the "reality" of non-empirical theoretical entities.

This insight dovetails with what I think mahgister was trying to say in citing Goethe. But Goethe's view just follows Kant: the "real" is always already a construct of consciousness—of perception, which is sense information processed and interpreted by the mind. The real "in itself" is simply unknowable. Thus, Goethe says that perception is already "theoretical": "Alles vergängliche / Ist nur ein Gleichnis." This insight makes it exceedingly difficult to know where to draw the lines between the "real" and the "imaginary"; in effect, the real IS what "imagination" constructs for experience. But that is NOT to say there is no independent reality "in itself"; rather, we just don't know anything about it except insofar as we experience it (that is, insofar as it becomes mental).

Coincidentally, I also speak (or read) 4 languages. Serbo-Croatian isn't one of them, but Croatian is. My wife's mother was a Serb, her father a Croat (we met in Germany). There is no such language as "Serbo-Croatian." Serbian and Croatian are, of course, very similar as Slavic languages; Slovenian is also similar, and Slovenia was part of the former Yugoslavia along with Serbia and Croatia. But, just for instance, Serbian and Croatian aren't even written in the same alphabet! Books published in Belgrade (Beograd) are printed in Cyrillic. My wife tells me that there are indeed words for "niece" and "nephew" in Serbian as well as in Croatian. I'd give examples, but this post is already egregiously gratuitous.

What a bunch of useless navel gazing and a terrible waste of time.

Gonna blame it on being cooped-up due to Covid restrictions?

I listen music now at least not sounds -- Mahgister

If you are not attending a live performance or hearing a live stream of a performance, then you are not listening to music, you are listening to recordings.

 You are "technically" right...Completely right...

But being right here is not enough...

Music is inside us not only outside us....