Seasons

I can label a carrot as orange, and I did not create orangeness, I just described it

To me, the most important point is that while we're busy labeling things, we're not actually experiencing or understanding them. I have found myself doing this while attempting to read a book. I see the words. I process them as words. But the meaning never seeps from the words. They are nothing more than words. Yes, "orangeness" is a quality we expect to find in carrots, and scientists could even measure the wavelengths of the light reflected and find an average value for the orangeness of carrots. But the point to a carrot is not that it is orange.

Imagine, if you will, two scientists (or philosophers or lawyers take your pick) arguing about the exact shade of orange of a carrot. They ask a passerby about it. The passerby stares at them both, takes the carrot, and eats it. The passerby has experienced the carrot. (And the passerby need not eat it; she could just as well use it to beat the scientists over the head )

You would only know it to be good or neutral by reference to your memory of what is bad, if you were transported to this "only good" life after experiencing this current existence

I disagree. I think that we often "don't know what we've got till it's gone" but that we can enjoy good without knowing bad. For example, it's true that youth is wasted on the young. That doesn't mean that the young can't fully enjoy being young, it's that they don't know what old feels like. If the purpose of "bad" was so we could know "good" we'd be born old and get younger and prettier, so we'd appreciate it when we have it. Also there would be some balance and justice to it: people would have enough bad to appreciate good and then live "good" and well.

Duality is hard-coded into this reality - you see it everywhere, so it's really no surprise that our minds play the same game.

I think duality is a mental construct, the way we order or experiences and make sense of our awareness. I am not convinced it is hard codded into reality.

If you had been born into a truly "only good" life, you would not be able to conceive of such things. Your appreciation of life could be no more intense than that of a tree, or an amoeba - something mindless and insensate.

I don't think that follows. I think that those who live the "good" life still have awareness. Maybe I don't appreciate not being covered in 30 feet of mud because I don't think about it, but swallowing a village in earth didn't make me any better or expand my consciousness in the slightest. Maybe I am shallow no matter who suffers.

Do you really believe it would be "orange" if there were no eyes to see it, or no one called it "orange"?

Yes. I think there is an external reality, and though the words we use to describe it are limited, and the way we percieve it is limited, the reality is there. I think planets exists people on this word do not know about. I think lots of things may exists that have never been observed by humans.

Carrots don't think they're orange - neither do they worry about the "badness" of being eaten versus the "goodness" of going quietly to seed.

Just because we have no evidence that carrots have any form of awareness does not mean that they have no external existence. Even if I am color blind, carrots are orange. I just do not percieve orange. If I percieve "orange" the same way you percieve "violet" it doesn't change the outer quality of orange. If I built the right machine (say a camera) it would detect "orange" and could be processsed in a computer to read orange and match other orange, even if none of the machines are aware of orange. It is objective.

And there could be no compassion or charity if there were no suffering.

As long as there was love, art, laughter and peace, I would be willing to live with it.



Now to see if my tags worked...what does the post look like?

It's gone 5am here, so I can't answer all the points that want addressing, but I'll try and explain this one before my brain shuts down completely, and come back to the others tomorrow (today?):


I think duality is a mental construct, the way we order or experiences and make sense of our awareness. I am not convinced it is hard codded into reality.

Only insofar as this reality is also a mental construct. What relation it bears to any higher "meta-Reality" (with a capital R,) is unknowable (though the existence of a higher Reality is provable, and a little of its nature possibly deducible.)
Take my favourite example - a stick. It has two ends, but I think to myself "I only need one end". So I snap one end off. Do I now have a single-ended stick? No - I have two double-ended sticks, at half the length. Or I can split it endwise - do I get two sticks each with 2 half-ends, adding up to 1 end per stick? No. There's nothing you can do with this stick to escape the fractal encoding that gives you the whole image at half the resolution.

The same goes for all energy that is composed of waves oscillating between crest and trough. It also goes for each spatial dimension, that again can only be measured in two opposing directions (in fact are each embodied in exactly and inescapably 2 attributes): left - right, up - down, in - out. And time, of course, we like to think flows from past - future.
So how can there be anything, within this reality, that is not bounded by dualist principles? It may not be the ultimate Reality, but it's all we are capable of interacting with.
And although these spatio-temporal dualities are in opposition, they are also necessarily complementary in Cartesian terms. The 1-dimensional measurement you make to define a point from one end of the scale, is inversely proportional to the measurement from the other end of the scale. So we find that opposition - complement is also dual.
At this scale of reality, duality is simply inescapable.

It's a sort of transcognitive, metamemetic ideography of the heterolinguistic supradialectic. As we call it in the trade...

yes you are, roxie. yes you are...
but i still don't buy this whole needing evil thing... there are people in this world who have never expirienced evil... certain small children for example... they've heard of evil... they understand what it means, but they don't know it.. and they exist. they don't become any less of people, their lives are still meaningful to them, and they are happy. (i'm not saying every kid is likethis, i'm using an example)

also, just because i'm a contrary person... not all carrots are orange. some are white. are these any less of carrots?

I know I'm Jumping in the middle of things here (as usual)... But from what I've gathered it sounds like you're talking ablut duality and good in evil...

Being christian I'm supposed to say that Good and Evil are distincly on two seperate plains of existance.... however the Ying Yang holds some water in my book.

there is the potential for good or Evil in everyone and everything... so thats what i see the ying yang is mostly for... however, good needs evil otherwise how would you define good? (kinda sucks that you HAVE to have it) but Good needs something to fight for or else it would become weak.

there are people in this world who have never expirienced evil... certain small children for example... they've heard of evil... they understand what it means, but they don't know it.. and they exist. they don't become any less of people, their lives are still meaningful to them, and they are happy

Precisely because their experience of evil is so limited, children will interpret marginally less good experiences as positively bad, and radically polarise a spectrum of experience that an adult would consider all generally good. All children will find things to have tantrums about - it's perfectly natural, and utterly unavoidable. When mummy says "no more chocolate", or they miss an episode of Teletubbies, or daddy won't buy them a pony, of course they interpret this as the direst evil that could possibly befall them. It's no good trying to reason with them that they are loved, and well-fed and living a privileged, Western childhood with every benefit that that can provide - they "know" that not getting what they want is the most hideous injustice, and far worse than being a starving African, or an orphan chimney sweep, or whoever it is that mummy tells them to be thankful that they're better off than.

And if you try to pander to every whim, to never say no, and to provide nothing but gratification in their lives - does this make them happier? No - they just turn into brats who will throw tantrums on ever-flimsier pretexts. And generally their lives will be less happy than children who have been subject to some measure of discipline. And ultimately they will precisely become "less of people", with a good chance of having a much less meaningful life, if they are brought up to be self-absorbed and greedy and uncaring.

As long as there was love, art, laughter and peace, I would be willing to live with it.

There could be none of these things if there were not also at least the potential for, or memory of, hatred, destruction, tears and war.
But when we are ready for such a life free of all evil, I believe we will come to it. I think Thomas Merton put it best:

If men really wanted peace, they would sincerely ask God for it and He would give it to them. But why should He give the world a peace which it does not really desire? The peace the world pretends to desire is really no peace at all.
To some men peace merely means the liberty to exploit other people without fear of retaliation or interference. To others peace means the freedom to rob others without interruption. To still others it means the leisure to devour the goods of the earth without being compelled to interrupt their pleasures to feed those whom their greed is starving. And to practically everybody, peace simply means the absence of any physical violence that might cast a shadow over lives devoted to the satisfaction of their animal appetites for comfort and pleasure.
Many men like these have asked God for what they thought was "peace" and wondered why their prayer was not answered. They could not understand that it actually was answered. God left them with what they desired, for their idea of peace was only another form of war. The "cold war" is simply the normal consequence of our corrupt idea of a peace based on a policy of "every man for himself" in ethics, economics and political life. It is absurd to hope for a solid peace based on fictions and illusions!
So instead of loving what you think is peace, love other men and love God above all. And instead of hating the people you think are warmakers, hate the appetites and the disorder in your own soul, which are the causes of war. If you love peace, then hate injustice, hate tyranny, hate greed - but hate these things in yourself, not in another.

savpixie wrote: "also, just because i'm a contrary person... not all carrots are orange. some are white. are these any less of carrots?"

Exactly. The point is NOT the color. However, most of us excpect a carrot to be orange, so we might hesitate at labeling something not-orange as a carrot. We might think it's something entirely new. However, when some brave soul took a bite out of it and said, "Hey, this tastes just like a carrot," the mystery would be solved. And you could still use it to hit someone over the head.

not all carrots are orange. some are white. are these any less of carrots?

No, indeed. And to the carrot root-borer grub, they are not any colour at all. They're just tastier than other roots which are less tasty. Delicious-unpalatable is the duality appropriate to the entity of a grub - at that scale of reality, "orange" simply doesn't exist. We, supposedly more sophisticated entities with our advanced senses and technology, have many more dualist labels we can apply. Higher beings than us would have even more dualist labels they could apply, using even more refined and multifarious senses and advanced technology.
But Ulrike is right - the only way to experience the carrot is to stop labelling it and do something with it.

Great minds!

Hmm, Ulrike - you're a mathematician, so do you have any insights on why it is duality that we perceive emerging from dimensionality, and not trinity, or unity, or any other -ity (even fractionality?)? Or is that even a sane question to ask?

I know I tried to propose this to Eugene some time ago, but couldn't express it very well. I think his mathematical sensibilities also revolt at the prospect of undermining such an integral mathematical cornerstone. And perhaps yours do to, like any sane mathematician?

Hmmm... I think duality inherently arises in the mind first. I am here. Everything else is out there. So we divide things up as "X" or "Not X" similarly. So why not a third category? "Neither X nor Not X" comes to mind, but even something like "Undecidable as to X or Not X" (which comes out of Gödel's work) adds a third category. To be honest, I think Gödel has turned much of mathematics into a trinity, rather than a duality. And it is all still unified under the name of "Mathematics."

(I'm not quite sure if this is what you were getting at, so feel free to clarify if I've misunderstood. )