Subject: Re: [lojban] ce'u

From: Jim Peters <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 23 Aug 2001 15:28:15 +0100

And Rosta wrote:
> Without wanting to rehash or reopen old but unsolved debates, it
> creates known logicophilosophical problems when we say talk about
> individuals that don't exist in this world, by saying that they have
> certain properties in this world. I'm not saying that this creates
> nonsense ... but at the same time we DO want some way to make it
> clear when we are talking about something that does exist in this
> world

Depends what you mean by world. The world I live in, my reality, is
made up of everything I perceive, everything I've experienced, which
is what {li'i} seems to be connected with (having just checked the
RefGram).

Regarding Sherlock Holmes (resident of Baker St, right ?), reading the
stories about him gave me an experience, and so Sherlock Holmes is now
part of my world, as he was part of an experience of mine. I have
memories from Sherlock Holmes' world just the same as I have memories
from my own life.

The separation between {li'i} and {si'o} seems very useful to me. My
experience of the world is built purely on my own direct perceptions -
not on what I think might have happened to me, or what other people
might have thought happened to me. It's a very first-person thing.
We are often so involved with our thoughts that we take them for
reality, when they are in fact a side-effect and derivative of our
direct perceptions.

Strangely, the moment I decided to reply to this post, a large
butterfly fluttered in the window - the first time a butterfly has
ever come in here that I remember in 7 years. I think it may have
been a red admiral - although it's a long time since I looked at a
butterfly book. I helped it find its way back out the window.

Now I just have to figure out the connection between my wish to convey
the magic of a reality bigger than the physical world, and the magical
gift of a visit from (for me) a rare butterfly. Is this the world
helping me make my point ?

The big thing is that my reality is probably very different to the
next person's reality, and trying to cut everyone's reality down to
the same size is going to be very painful and limiting.

> Now, returning to li'i, the experience exists in the real world but
> the event the experiencer perceives themselves to have experienced
> does not. 

No, it's the other way around. The experience only exists in the
perceiver. The `event' might exist in some shared world (for example,
"physical reality") if someone else experienced it and the two can
agree on a few features of the event (at the very least). If only I
experienced it, it only exists in my world - but I can tell you about
it and you can experience a sense of it too, perhaps.

If this is all irrelevant nonsense, please ignore -

Jim

-- 
Jim Peters (_)/=\~/_(_) Uazú
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