A few more questions, if you don't mind. Do you consider "dreams" to be "real"? If something can be experienced, does that make it real?
No because I can dream I slept with Jessica Alba and experience it but it doesn't make it real. The Bear.
So would you say, for something to be "real", you must be able to experience it and it must be substantial, as opposed to non-substantial (like a dream Jessica Alba )?
Sorry to be both off topic and nit-picky but: Sentient means "able to perceive or feel things": therefore, an ape is sentient in a way that "a system of self referential ideas" cannot be. A person can't just impose new definitions on words as and when it suits them in order to support their own specific world view. For communication to make any sense, we need to work with accepted definitions as they are.
I’m sorry if my line of questioning seems a bit bizarre, but I am going somewhere with this… I think… What do you make of the following two statements: If something is to be deemed “real”, it must exist. In order to know that something exists, we must experience it in some shape or form, i.e. we cannot experience that which does not exist (that which does not exist is not there for us to experience).
Statement 1 : accepted. Statement 2 : not accepted. Something can exist without us experiencing. There are many things I know exist that I haven't experienced. The Bear.
Do you mean like "God is everything?" You'll find that I used the word Julie used, in her context, if you check.
for the love of qi! enough navel gazing. this is not about god, religion or the importance of beliefs in general. could we stop now? get back to the original discussion, if there is any mileage left in it.
You know when you were studying post enlightenment thinkers, did you happen across ontology? That might help with the glib belief that you're right.
Well, how about we organize a get together for the UK folks? Let's just get the gloves on and see who has what.
Wasn't the original discussion about what a clip of The Amazing Randi was doing on a Taiji forum? No mileage left in that I fear.......
ahahahaha. yes, that's what i mean. not all the excellent discussion that resulted from it. noooooo. not the effort polar bear, tao quan and others went about discussing a potential investigation that all parties would contribute to? noooo or how about an exploration of the use of clinical trials and the scientific method or alternatives? noooo you'd rather troll.
Of course I have studied ontology, in fact I worked on genetic algorithms for clinical decision support software using ontologies with the snowmed clinical dictionary. However, onotogies refer to the human conceptual constructions that are represented by langauge and being a deconstructionist by nature, I like to break down these frameworks rather than play within them. However, we are not studing that in all the above scenarios we are studying clinical outcomes from a specific treatment plan and you don't need ontologies for that. If you really want we can lurch head long into Derida, Foucault et al but it won't change the basic premise of the methodology I mapped out for testing the clinical outcome of the practice of qigong as a method of post-op recovery. The Bear.
