roachboy

nezmot: spoken like a true nominalist....i would probably have made more or less the same argument as you did to extend the last post--my only divergence would have been a less optimistic end (i do not think that the absolutes would be found, are findable--i think they are semantic effects.) but yes.

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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

Seer666

If you have ever been in love with someone so much it hurts, then you should already know.

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Bad spellers of the world untie!!!

I am the one you warned me of

I seem to have misplaced the bullet with your name on it, but I have a whole box addressed to occupant.

roachboy

seer:
i'm sorry, but....what?
i don't understand what you are saying.

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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

NCB

Well stated. I concur

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Nimetic

1+1 always equals 2

In boolean algebra, if A is true and B is false, then (A OR B) is true.

Hydrogen always has one proton, exactly

A benzene molecule always contains six carbon atoms

Pi is the same for everyone.

Seer666

This will sound odd comeing from a bitter bastard like me, but love is the absolute. Be it absolute joy or absolute pain. When you are head over heels hopelessly can't live without you in love, the world is a better place. The effects it has on every aspect of you life is, well, absolute. The same goes when it crashes down on you. The missery of bottoming out from such an overwhelming emotional high. If you have ever been head over heels in love like that, then you know there IS an absolute. And if you have had it go wrong, then you wish like hell there wasn't.

__________________
Bad spellers of the world untie!!!

I am the one you warned me of

I seem to have misplaced the bullet with your name on it, but I have a whole box addressed to occupant.

roachboy

huh...i wonder if we are talking about the same thing under the rubric of absolute, then.
at a crass structural level, love leans on an investment of affect in an object--that is in the image of another (investment here in the psychoanalytic sense.)
there is often a kind of transfer of power that follows on this investment: you might link your sense of yourself to the actions of another, whom you do not and cannot control....once this is in place, then all kinds of results can take shape that feel as though they originate from without--which in a sense they do, but only as a function of your own investment and the types of relation to that investment that you bundle together with the emotion you call love (i put it this way because love can mean alot of things)...so because you lay yourself open in this way--you allow the image of another to function as judge. because love is, particularly in its more crush-like phases, caught up with fantasy at many many particular (that is individual) levels, it follows that a structuring feature of this kind of relation is that there may be an assymetry between the image you construct for yourself of the other, as object of your desire, and the person who floats about in that image. being in love would tend to prompt you to downplay such assymetries--but if things (the actual relationship) do not go as you would prefer, those assymetries (gaps) can reveal themselves in very painful ways.

because you put another in a position to effectively make judgements about you--deep emotional judgements--the outcomes of the relationship do in fact come from a space beyond your control--which would make them seem transcendent (not absolute)--but the origin of that transcendence is your own affective investment and the ways in which affect gets knit into an emotional state you call love--a state that brings with it all kinds of specific rules/comportments.

this whole thing is a kind of structural explanation for a type of relation, not an account of love itself. i dont think i could give an account of love. i say this because i feel a bit odd about what i wrote above, which responds to your post, seer, in the context of this thread, but at the same time seems to make a very complex emotional space into something that relies on a kind of hydraulic relation between component parts. thinking in this way about emotions is sometimes strange business.

anyway, i dont see how love could be understood as anything like an absolute.
but like i said, maybe we are talking about different understandings of the term absolute.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

Locobot

There seems to be a number of competing definitions of absolute in this thread. I think the main question here is whether there are moral absolutes which exist regardless of the situation. I argue that there are not. Absolutism is a feature of many religions and some philosophies. Its contrast is moral relativity which judges values by societal and situational characteristics.

There are simple examples that negate either position however. You might say that its absolutely immoral for a mother to kill her child (post birth) but there are situations that call for this, such as to preserve the health of others in the family (starvation/sacrifice). Interestingly the bible, which is the source text for many absolutist religions, includes a number of instances where the sacrifice of one's child is deemed necessary by God (who is "absolutely moral").

Moral relativism on the other hand puts us in the position of excusing cultural practices like cannibalism, childhood female circumcision, and slavery as immoral to us but moral to others. The only way around the acceptance of truly abhorent behavior that I can conceive of is to argue for a global moral community. Not an absolute global moral, but an interconnected web of cultures. There are no humans living today that do not at least know that there are others who do not live as they do. Therefore no culture is completely insulated from external moral influence and consequently judgement.

The math (an outgrowth of philosophy) examples above are interesting, but as has already been pointed out, they exist only when predicated on a great number of abstractions. Not that concepts like zero or inifinity don't have applicability in real life, but they don't actually exist as anything other than abstractions. Interestingly the ancient Greeks, who saw no difference between math and philosophy, had neither a concept of zero nor infinity. Although the pre-Socratic Zeno had a number of philosphical problems based around concepts of the infinite, he didn't extend those concepts mathematically. Aristotle had a number of proofs for why there was no infinity.

In physics there is a concept of absolute zero temperature at which all molecular activity ceases. To my knowledge though that state has never been reproduced in a laboratory (they've gotten within a degree) so it remains theoretical.

meembo

Outside of the realm of religion, I don't believe there are any absolutes. If people are debating the definition of absolutes in this thread -- that rules out absolutes altogether, doesn't it?

I believe in religious absolutes, but I think that's out of the range of this post. I don't think humans experience absolutes. Love is closest thing to religion that most people will admit to. I believe that religious belief is an extension of love.

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less I say, smarter I am

Amnesia620

Death. That is an absolute.

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For example, I find that a lot of college girls are barbie doll carbon copies with few differences...Sadly, they're dumb, ditzy, immature, snotty, fake, or they are the gravitational center to orbiting drama. - Amnesia620

LazyBoy

I think the only absolute truth is death.

-Will

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Life is nothing, everything.....and something in between...

Seer666

That is, unless you bring in the possiblity of reincarnation, in which case, death, like life, is just a temperary state. Also, once there is no more life, death has no meaning, so sooner or later, when all this comes to a finnal stop, death is pretty much meaningless, and no longer relivent.

Raochboy, I'll get back to your point once my brain stops hurting enough to think. Long day at work.

__________________
Bad spellers of the world untie!!!

I am the one you warned me of

I seem to have misplaced the bullet with your name on it, but I have a whole box addressed to occupant.

LazyBoy

Reincarnated or not....the body never returns....Dig up a 100 year old casket, and I'm pretty sure there will be some nasty remains in it...

So yeah, death is pretty much absolute

-Will

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Life is nothing, everything.....and something in between...

biznatch

Well the philosopher's quest itself, is originally a search for an absolute: Truth. But because through history, man has become increasingly aware of his own limitations (can we trust our own senses? aren't they flawed?how accurate is our capacity to reason? Can we trust ourselves, isn't our unconscious hiding something from ourselves?) becase of all of these issues and also scientific paradoxes(physical laws of gravity vs. subatomic physics), they had to replace absolute universal truths with validities, limited by time and space.
So are there any absolutes? Often what we do is go towards that absolute and try to get closer and closer, never attaining it, IMO.

Seer666

Tell that to Buffy. :P

__________________
Bad spellers of the world untie!!!

I am the one you warned me of

I seem to have misplaced the bullet with your name on it, but I have a whole box addressed to occupant.

Martian

Do you know that? And when does it become an absolute?

In a hundred years, the body decomposes to the point where it's skeletal. The remains bear some resemblance to the individual they once were. How about a thousand years? Or a million? At which point do those remains cease being remains and simply become matter, so much more 'stuff', as it's been aptly put?

And further, if the body dies but the soul lives on, is that truly death? Could it not also be a transition, a sort of chrysalis?

Or, let's go extreme and see if it holds up. it's pretty widely accepted these days that perception is fallible. What you see is not necessarily what you get. So if somebody dies, how do you know they've actually died? How do you know those remains are, in fact, remains?

I do believe in the one Descartian absolute. Outside of that, I can't help but think there aren't any.

Here's a question; if anything were absolute, if anything were beyond reproach or debate, how could we be debating this? The answer, I would think, would be self-evident.

In terms of morals, that question ties closely to my belief that nobody embarks on a course of action while believing it to be wrong. Nobody does anything with the intent of being evil; there are no supervillains. It's simply that that individual's idea of what's moral doesn't line up with mine.

I had a discussion with a friend of mine recently on the subject. I took an extreme stance. It's something I do often, because it's only at the very far end of the spectrum that we can truly see if a theory holds up or not. Anyway, I created a hypothetical situation for him wherein he had to choose between humanity or some other form of being that outnumbered us, was sentient and was peaceful. I asked him which he'd choose. He told me that he'd choose to die and take the world with him rather than inflict harm on an undeserving people - if it were us or them, he'd essentially pick them. Me, I went the opposite route. I believe that an individual has to make any given choice based on his own values and wisdom - we can only work with what we've got, in other words. And I assign a higher value to my life and those that I care about than I do to some faceless race out there.

Is either stance wrong? It depends on how you look at it, I reckon.

__________________
I wake up in the morning more tired than before I slept
I get through cryin' and I'm sadder than before I wept
I get through thinkin' now, and the thoughts have left my head
I get through speakin' and I can't remember, not a word that I said

- Ben Harper, Show Me A Little Shame

LazyBoy

I'd enjoy telling alotta things to Buffy ....

Martian,

I see your points....Even if I were to look at it from a spiritual POV, as opposed to a physical POV, things would be different...

-Will

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Life is nothing, everything.....and something in between...

Seeker

Why has this been overlooked? *shrugs*

And what about the cosmic level of the collective consciousness?

Cosmic or universal laws such as "To thyne own self be true" and "All is one"? Are they not meant to be absolute?

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To those who wander but who are not lost...

~ Knowledge is not something you acquire, it is something you open yourself to.

alinn

If you say no, then that creates the absolute belief of not believing in absolutes :-) a paradox

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on the banister of life may all the splinters be pointed in the right direction...

Dragonknight

Okay come up with a way to make this absolute, I dare ya.

If you don't have oxygen in your blood your body DIES. There an absolute that cannot be wrong or changed.

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Freedom is NOT Free.

Rodney

There are no absolutes. Absolutely none!

erics

change is an absolute.

__________________
"What's the benefit of laughing
When you only have to cry?
Why take the big adventure
When you're only left to die???
"

RCAlyra2004

Interesting thread.

I really do wonder about the whole concept of absolutes, they become difficult when you consider the concept of infinity. Even absolute zero really isn't the coldest it can really get... of course... how would we measure anything colder?

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Living on the edge of sanity

biznatch

No? I thought that absolute zero was reached when there was a total absence of heat...which would explain the particles not moving (no friction)..
I always assumed that.

debaser

Absolutes only exist in a singularity. I wouldn't get to close if I were you...

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noahfor

For those of you who don't believe there are any absolutes: How do you question your own existence?

And for those of you who believe that their existence is absolute: You must be experiencing things in order to experience so mustn't there absolutely be things that can be experienced. For instance I experience green so I know that there is green to be expereinced, if only this one time for only me. I'm NOT saying there is a green things somewhere outside of me, but I'm saying there must be green in order for me to experience green, and since I do not doubt that I am experiencing then I cannot doubt that there is green.

Crack

I was gonna post a bunch of crap, but this is what it basically boils down to.

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Crack, you and I are long overdue for a vicious bout of mansex.

~Halx

pandaman87

well if we talk about moral absolutes, I don't really believe they exist, everything depends on the circumstance, time, and other factors.

I believe that if talking broadly, death is absolute, everyone and everythign will eventually die. you, me, this country, this world, this universe.