To see is to forget the name of the thing one sees (2009)
geopolicraticus.wordpress.com
geopolicraticus.wordpress.com
This can be shown, for example, in chicken sexers. Chicken cloaca all look the same to most of us. But once you've learned for to distinguish the two sexes, they actually look different to you.
But any beginner art student knows the drawback of this. When you see a face, your brain sees it as a set of "face symbols." You then draw a set of "face symbols," and your drawing looks like a bad cartoon of a face.
Becoming an artist requires turning off the part of the brain that turns a face into face symbols, and being able to see the things for the thing it really is.
And you nailed it.
"Then the imitator, I said, is a long way off the truth, and can do all things because he lightly touches on a small part of them, and that part an image. For example: A painter will paint a cobbler, carpenter, or any other artist, though he knows nothing of their arts; and, if he is a good artist, he may deceive children or simple persons, when he shows them his picture of a carpenter from a distance, and they will fancy that they are looking at a real carpenter."
"The imitator or maker of the image knows nothing of true existence; he knows appearances only."
It is Paul Valery, but per Adrian Kohn's A Way to Look at Things by Not Forgetting Their Names, Valery may be (intentionally?) misreading Blaise Pascal just to get a jibe in. See footnote 3, bottom of page 11: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2674801
Or, alternatively, you can consciously switch how you see it. A hand. Me. A bunch of molecules. Remnants of an old supernova. The results of millions of years of evolution. The tool with which you can communicate the depth of your love to your child by gently stroking them. Just actively changing the "name" you give it will change the way you perceive it, sometimes subtly, sometimes quite radically.
If you are interested in this kind of things, I would recommend the teachings or Rob Burbea. His whole works are built around exploring this topic.
That is, the mechanical effort of forming notes on an instrument and reading them in and then playing a song is replaced by feeling the tune.
Once I've owned a piece of music, I can goof off with the tempo, try some variations, put in some mood.
In a word: jazz.
As an aside, this may help explain why neither jazz nor this sort of thinking is popular. There is much effort involved in hoisting oneself up to this level of skill.
"Thus everybody has certain rules according to which he acts in dealing with his tailor. These rules are, we will grant, soundly based on genuine experience ;and by acting on them a man will deal fairly with his tailor and helps his tailor to deal fairly by him. But so far as he acts according to these rules, he is dealing with his tailor only in his capacity as a tailor, not as John Robinson, aged sixty, with a weak heart and a consumptive daughter, a passion for gardening and an overdraft at the bank. The rules for dealing with tailors no doubt enable you to cope with the tailor in John Robinson, but they prevent you from getting to grips with whatever else there may be in him. Of course, if you know that he has a weak heart, you will manage your dealings with him by modifying the rules for tailor-situations in the light of the rules for situations involving people with weak hearts. But at this rate the modifications soon become so complicated that the rules are no longer of any practical use to you. You have got beyond the stage at which rules can guide action, and you go back to improvising, as best you can, a method of handling the situation in which you find yourself."
--
From the autobiography of R.G. Collingwood. His writings often have the theme of trying to understand particular instances of a thing on its own terms, only generalising into abstractions when seeing some quality in crowds of individual instances. I've rarely regretted that same approach when it comes to abstraction in code/software, but have regretted premature abstraction many times.
--Richard P. Feynman
I felt (and still feel) the course was a tragedy, that I had an intro to biologists, not biology.
I took it because when I learned honors bio in highschool in 91 it was all memorization of plant parts. This was way way better.
…and Feynman’s criticism of rote memorization in education systems: https://enlightenedidiot.net/random/feynman-on-brazilian-edu...
When my mum was in medical school (1950s) they still used Latin (teaching was otherwise in English). It wasn’t one of the languages she spoke, but she just memorized the tokens and then could go back home and work in a hospital because all the technical terms were the same.
I did learn Latin and so used to be amused by the names of things. Unfortunately she was quite busy and never shared my amusement. A shame as she otherwise had a good sense of humor.
A thing has shape and form and so many other aspects just by the virtue of being.
Giving a name to it doesn’t change the thing in the slightest, and mostly tells about the namer, not the namee.
One of the most infuriating things today is large swathes of people getting this wrong like you, and then acting on their limited view.
Humility and you aren't closely acquainted huh? Also love how you launched off on this tangent without thinking it through too much.
> Giving a name to it doesn’t change the thing in the slightest
Where do you think the shape and form that I'm speaking of exist? I'm referring to our subjective experience of reality. Did you genuinely think I meant that we changed objective reality by classifying something in our minds?
An eclipse is the moon getting in front of the sun, but for some people, it was a jaguar eating the sun, and that was scary. That's the shape and form they gave an eclipse in their minds.
Do you think people who never learned languages (eg. due to child abuse) have subjective experiences?
It makes sense to me, we're hardwired for language, it has been rather heavily selected for.
This is not a straw man - people spend hours of study learning the Latin names for funny little blobs in the human body, and call it "learning anatomy", and feel a sense of achievement. And the sense of achievement is important! It's motivation for an important task. But they have learned nothing, until they go back and learn what each blob does. It is vital to keep reminding the student of this, to not let their sense of achievement fool them into thinking they have finished learning anatomy. They have only started.
So you have a rough idea what they sound like.
Waxeyes/silvereyes are called tauhou (stranger or "new arrival") which tells us something very interesting about them indeed - that they self-introduced across 2000km of windswept ocean.
Can know _some_ things from a name.
Like that Feynman likely just made those names up :D
But I agree, fugel is just a botched invention.
Onomatopoeia also depends heavily on language and culture. In other words, knowing an onomatopoeic name for something only tells you what somebody thought it sounded like, at best.
A name is just a name, even if some are better than others.
Reason is confined to rationality, but the way is not.
I absolutely agree that there is a lot of parallels with Buddhist descriptions of "co-dependent arising", but there are also important differences. Buddhism is focused on suffering, its origin, its cessation, and the path to its cessation. It is a practical path, and everything that is not related to this path is out of its scope.
But I would disagree that eastern philosophy explores this "much richly". The article cites Kant and Husserl in the second paragraph. And the whole idea of seeing "things as they really are" was imported to Buddhist thought by western thinkers[1]. This idea is present in currents of the 3 Abrahamic traditions, in great part through the influence of neo-platonism from the 3rd century onward.
This kind of concept is present in mysticism in all 3 Abrahamic traditions, though in a different language.
As a Buddhist practitioner turned mystically inclined Christian, I would argue that there are lots of facets to look at this, from a wide array of traditions, and all have their place and value. One of the hardest things to do is not to immediately dismiss them by analogy with waht we already think we know, e.g. "oh yeah that's just good ol' teaching of the emptiness of all phenomena, I know that!", without rejecting what one learned until now either. What is beyond word can be described in countless ways, and each of them can help shed a new light and reveal holes in ones current understanding of "reality", if you let it do its work.
[1] you could argue that it is part of some Mahayana traditions, but the way they describe it is so foreign that if you do not engage with it for years, theoretically and practically, you will understand it through a "romantic" lense.
Any citations for this? It would seem demonstrably false to me at first glance.
A central concept in Buddhism is actually "emptiness", or the absence of inherent existence of all phenomena. It is sometimes used in Mahayana teachings as "the way things really are", but as I said, this is subtle and confusing, because "the way things really are" is that they do not have independent existence. I would not venture interpreting those strands of teaching too much, as I am not famliar enough with them.
I heard those arguments from various sources, mostly from Thanissaro Bikkhu and Rob Burbea. They are both westerners, formed in the Theravada tradition and scholars of the Pali canon (able to read it in the original language), which I think actually makes them particularly well suited to identify points that might be misinterpreted from a western reader.
Phenomena is empty of a permanent self but not empty of existence. The phenomena exists, but that phenomena is not possessed of a permanent unchanging nature.
The Bahiya Sutta has:
> "Then, Bāhiya, you should train yourself thus: In reference to the seen, there will be only the seen."
https://fakebuddhaquotes.com/i-am-a-finger-pointing-to-the-m...