Name-calling
All animals have evolved the ability to discover patterns in the barrage of visual and aural stimulus. In humans this ability is particularly well-tuned. Just look at a cloud or that random pattern of cracks on the wall of the bathroom. Pretty soon you begin to see a face or an animal or some other form. You know that the face you see is not really there, but your mind, trained to find patterns, identifies one there. The night sky is nothing more than a random sprinkling of stars, yet even these have been ordered into constellations.
We cannot help but name things, and group what we see into categories and classes, all with names of their own. Without a name, a thing simply doesn't exist. It is indistinguishable from the chaotic universe of things we have not yet named. Given a name, it belongs to a group. Given a group, it shares properties with other members of that group. Science is our best attempt to exhaustively enumerate and relate those names and properties.
I suspect that the difficulties we have with free-will, determinism, quantum reality, and ordering rest of the named universe is simply that we are confusing the named, and perceived reality for the true reality that surges like a current beyong the limits, beyond the very nature, of our perception.
3 Comments:
Of course, what I have described is hardly original. It is an extension of the Whorf Hypothesis of linguistic determinism. Language limits our ability to perceive the world.
I recently read a similar discussion in a local newspaper, it all bears down on wether co-incidence
is an overused form of denial.
You mentioned that we humans couldn’t help but name things. In my opinion, this is the only choice we have given by nature to classify, group and break down perceived surroundings into fragments so that we could narrow down the scope, or in other words definitions, of our perceptions for the purpose of communicating to each other. At least, this is the way used by western cultures.
At mean time, I have to agree with your suspicions at end of you post that by naming things, including the development of theories of our natures, we may or may not gain any more insights of final reality. For example, to describe what an apple really is, we could first say that an apple is a kind of fruit, which in turn is a class of vegetation. Also, we could say that an apple has a round shape that is a class of geometries. Further more, we could again say that some of the apples have the color of green, which is a class of perceptions. We could go on and on by using words such as weight, size, taste, smell and so on to future narrow down the scope or definition of an apple. However, no matter how hard we try, those descriptions are only properties of an apple in terms of naming, but not the true reality since would never narrow down the definition of a apple into a singularity. Even among individual apples, differences could be found to distinguish from one to another. Therefore, there is no way we could find a single definition to fully define what an apple really is.
On other hand, eastern philosophers believe that immeasurable (i.e. that which cannot be named, described, or understood through any form of reason) is regarded as the primary reality (David Bohm – wholeness and the implicate order). This is, as you mentioned in your post, the fundamental concept of Daoism.
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