Back to Home

God & Science Forum Message

Forums: Atm · Astrophotography · Blackholes · Blackholes2 · CCD · Celestron · Domes · Education
Eyepieces · Meade · Misc. · God and Science · SETI · Software · UFO · XEphem
RSS Button

Home | Discussion Forums | God and Science | Post
Login

Be the first pioneers to continue the Astronomy Discussions at our new Astronomy meeting place...
The Space and Astronomy Agora
Basic Definitions

Forum List | Follow Ups | Post Message | Back to Thread Topics | In Response To
Posted by Kyle Manjaro on February 20, 2007 11:26:16 UTC

From the posting dates I've come along five years! since this original discussion which I came across quite by accident via Google.


As a result (and because the thread is abbreviated) I've no idea where the original discussion originated and what it was, in detail, about. However, I did pick up on the use of terms like "reality", "real" and "exist" amongst others.


In case someone else comes along after me I'd like to toss in some useful-to-me (only!) working definitions I have for these terms that may be useful to others as from my perspective I found the use of these terms in the thread to be ambiguous and open ended.


Real: What's real is what exists in a given realm.


Exists: What exists (in a given realm) is whatever can be expressed, generated, or otherwise manifested in that realm (and therefore in the terms of what or how the realm is constituted, realized, or generated).


Reality: The whole of what's manifested and therfore exists (Has "standing") within a realm.


"Reality": The whole of what's manifested within a realm and is also detectable by an observer (who can be in any realm) within that realm (i.e. whatever is detectable is so by virtue of being manifested and thus "real" in the observer's realm(s)). "Realities," given their observer coupled limits, are generally 'smaller' than Realities.


Realm: Loosely, a realm is a field, region, or 'space' (in the broadest sense) which is constituted, realized, or generated by a particular condition and/or operation, or set of conditions and/or operations, regardless of the presence or absence of material-of-that realm or space, content.


Hence, "Reality is everything that exists" is a context-free or context-independent statement (and therefore ambiguous) in that it specifies no realm or realms - and from my model (that's all it is) any and all realities are so and only so within a realm.


Differently, I've a different model for "knowledge", "knowing", and "known" (in the sense of 'known' as the 'sense' object externally to the observer or sense subject in the sense of indicating that the perception originates internal to the observer). Jumping right into this model then:


Any system that directly experiences phenomena as events and which then represents (in whatever way, form, or process) its experience of events is often termed noetic. The word Noetic" comes to us from noetikos, from the Greek nous meaning ‘mind’, and means knowing that is experienced directly and thus becomes knowledge, where knowing means observational and cognitive acts like sensing, perceiving, conceiving, and categorizing and 'experienced directly' does NOT mean results or perceptions arrived at by or through processes like 'deduction, induction, abduction, or any of the indirect like.


Etymologically, nous is from noos, from the verbal root no, gno, cf. Sanskrit jna, Latin nosco, gnosco, German kennen, and English ken, know. Nous- or ‘mind’ is also the root of gnosis, diagnosis, agnostic, knowledge, and from this comes the adjective “noetic”. ‘Noos’ or nous is also one of the oldest and deepest terms of Greek philosophy, taken from Egypt where it was called ‘Nout’, (in Egypt Nu was the primeval cosmic deep, described in the Egyptian creation as a watery mass in a state of perduring, intense activity, eternally in motion in its structural detail yet eternally quiescent as a whole).


While ‘noesis’ therefore refers to intellect or mind, its verb noeo means: to realize, to understand, to think; and the English verb "to know" is a direct derivation of the Greek word, giving rise to our world "knowledge." The suffix -'ledge' in the word 'knowledge' derives from the word "læcan," which in turn derives from lac (an Anglo-Saxon suffix denoting action). "Læcan," as in wedlock, means acting to form or maintain a union, bond or tie.


Hence knowing that leads to knowledge indicates the action of forming and/or maintaining a tie, union or formation, [of sensations, perceptions, observations and categorizations].


Thus knowledge is (in this model) knowing locked into form.


Sensory experience - whether objective ('outside the observer) or subjective (within the observer) once 'seen' can then be 'seen' again (knowing locked into form as knowledge and then knowledge later retrieved to more or less re-liberate the 'knowing').


Our experiences thus become internal knowledge.

Follow Ups:

    Login to Post
    Additional Information
    Google
     
    Web www.astronomy.net
    DayNightLine
    About Astronomy Net | Advertise on Astronomy Net | Contact & Comments | Privacy Policy
    Unless otherwise specified, web site content Copyright 1994-2024 John Huggins All Rights Reserved
    Forum posts are Copyright their authors as specified in the heading above the post.
    "dbHTML," "AstroGuide," "ASTRONOMY.NET" & "VA.NET"
    are trademarks of John Huggins