KARL JASPERS FORUM

TA61 (Andemicael)

Commentary 8 (to R2)

PLAYING CHESS ?
by Adrian van der Meijden
31 January 2004, posted 7 February 2004

<1>
But in this sense brown and purple are not *real" colours in that we cannot locate them in the rainbow spectrum, nor by Land's polaroid as theory-supported by Goethe. I cannot recall whether either colour film or polaroid show these colours. I don't look at pictures analytically. We certainly have them as dyes. To get a brown paint we mix up many colours, or else wait for autumn leaves. The perception of motion is an illusion begotten on the digitalised. We do not *see* motion. We thereby mentally construct motion to fill in the gaps between sense objects, which makes it constructivist, of a kind. This is more or less analogous to how concepts are constellations [or assemblages of data] "objects" in a static sense. For Kant space and time are both equally illusory which can be made merged in a continuum with which our sensorium cannot cope. Properly speaking we ought to speak of the conceptualisation of motion. To my knowledge no research so far has shown that we see or sense motion at the sensory input level and therefore has to be ascribed to thruput.

<2>
On the basis of this we can construct a fourfold perspective, viz SYMBOLIC - or imaginary and axiomatic *by definition*- I say, I say, I say - where things and data are only real when entertained by a mind, singly or in groups. REAL - conversely or contrary, with the attached puzzle as to whether it is still real when not observed in solipsism, which then needs an authority to assert a dogma about it. SCIENTIFIC as real regardless of being observed; which goes with the objective and all the rest PSYCHIC conjugately real for selective groupings, as in folie a deux or collective delusions. although we cannot actually tell whether or not an appeance is real or a distortion of the real. ALTERNATIVELY we can always disbelieve.

<3>
And once more go round the mulberry bush of possibilities and debate which of what we shall/may take as absolutised, relativised and contingent or ephemeral. This seems to be matched by English verbs which have several dimensions, viz (a) gerundial vs perfective or in process vs completed action, (b) past, present, future. I have been being doing that all along, or, I thought we had been finished with that old hash - which last actually says that we want to reopen or re-examine this or that. In that sense we can declare three dimensions of time absolutised or as defined, relativised and again the previous two as real vs imaginary. And anent Feyerabend and many others who do the round of such variables; which I suppose we could call Socratic and upon which basis the Greeks already did all that for our still incomplete body of knowledge.

<4>
I am not exactly enamoured of linguistic jargon as it has too many conventional assumptions built in. In a way this conflicts with Korzybski's "the map is not the territory" changed into only the symbolic [ ie the mapping] may be held as real, easily supported by using data, grammars and words from other, non-sanscrit family of languages. Here we can further moot that actually, Sanscrit is an already artificialised rsi-priestly language, made unneccesarily complex in abstract, Ishmaelically "hairsplitting" ways, and in a way not unlike how things fare with classical Arabic vs the common tongue. Even then all one has to do is traverse any country and society, in time and across space to find an officially approved, formal language as against many dialects. Much the same we can for both the whole and the particular, argue how many meanings does that word "real" and "and" have? To what degree are then the categories derived from both in common?

<5>
This raises issues about the uniquely particular of the subjective vs the statistical, stereotyped or "averaged" communal miminalist, maximalist, etc., maps of the world.

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Adrian van der Meijden