Mantus

I think the process described here may help give people a better understanding of their fellow human beings.

The objectivity of concepts such as meaning, purpose, freewill or comprehensible truth is not influenced by value. Value does not make them real. In this case I use the term value to describe the importance of something within our personal map of reality.

Human being understand the world though association. We link things and concepts together to give them meaning. This process happens in our minds and does not always miror the world out there. As such there is a saying that the map (our internal reality) is not the territory (actual reality). At the heart of our universal model are things (objects). This is where most people's maps match, it's easy to relate object to each other (engine>car>driver). However as we move to the fringes of understanding and our senses start to falter our mind fills in the blanks between things with likelly concepts and subjectivity is born (gear>clock>time). As we move even further from the center of our map things (objects) become instinct and we are in a realm of pure concepts which are linked together and given meaning though association with other subjective musings.

An illustration of value within our map of reality,

The concept of love plays a major role in the reality of many people. They use this subjective concept to link and relate various other part of their reality. The more a person uses a concept, the more gaps a concepts fills, the more important it becomes in their reality. If someone who strongly believed in love were to remove it from their reality, mental structures such as relationships, human relations and sexuality could collapse within their mind. A very painful process. Thus the more we apply something to our map (structure) of reality the more value it has to us.

It also happens that once a concept has enough value people often backwards rationalize: freewill has allot of value in my reality, thus freewill is objective.

This is where things start getting very intresting. I really enjoy the human mind.


Golden Hello asks "why does anything exist?" existance has meaning because we realate it to non-existance, but non-existance is an abstract term. To feel how odd it is just think about the reader of this thread who doesnt exist. How odd is it to be thinking about something which isnt there and never will be. I bet you already though of this reader as a him, or her, perhaps even given other qualities. And we can because this phantom reader now exists in our minds. Now through this thread, a subjective reader has been anchored to an object (computer) and though this computer it will be anchored to many other objects and other minds...but wait, the reader doesnt exist right?

We can take this further. We can create thousands of non-existant objects in our minds. Write books and threads about them. Apply the idea of non-existance to quantum physics and now, out of nowhere, non-existance, the thigns that's not supposed to be experienced is a huge part of our lives and holds allot of value in our reality.

What if we were to eliminate the concept of non-existance? What if it had no value? Well, our phantom reader was just mental masturbation, the books can be recycled the threads lost and quantum physics can find another explanation (or description) for the behaviour of subatomic particles.

Existance is no longer a quality of things because it has no opposite. So Golden's question lost it's meaning.

Odd...

Ch'i

Interesting idea, and I think the same goes for most things. In human history, especially science and philosophy, an object or idea is best defined by it's opposite. Makes sense. Good post.