Categories
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We organize what we perceive in the world in categories. Everywhere we find categories: words, concepts, objects. But why we do so? Are categories really part of the intrinsic essence of where we live? In a certain sense, we could say that the needing for categories comes from the perception of the world as a set of multiple different objects.
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It is completely instictual finding differences between a chair and a glass, or between a table and a laptop. However, since more than a century physics says that all the matter is made by the same essence, even if it is impossible to define that essence. On second thought, it is not just physics that talks about this uniformity of the world essence, but also ancient greek philosophers, and maybe others of whom I am unaware. E.g.
We learn in school that the basic building blocks of matter are particles. In fact, we often continue to teach this in universities where we explain that quarks and electrons form the lego-bricks from which all matter is made. But this statement hides a deeper truth. According to our best laws of physics, the fundamental building blocks of Nature are not discrete particles at all. Instead they are continuous fluid-like substances, spread throughout all of space. We call these objects fields.
David Tong webiste
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Why we need a categorical cognition of the world even if that same cognition carries us to conclude that there is no difference, in the end, between the various categories created by our mind? We live in a contradictory hystory period where the categorical mind is in crisis and tries to find new ways for encoding the world in new categories. But if the world is not made by categories and categories are only made by our mind, if this is true, then there is no win for this effort.
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The same crisis of the categorical mind is highlighted by studies on genre, sexuality, migrations, race, matter […]. In front of such highlighting the categorical mind tries to define new categories (sexual orientations, left nationalism, science fileds). Why do not we accept this new finding and do not we try to elaborate a real solution?
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We cannot refuse our perception, but we can reorder it in a non-categorical way.
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From a mathematical perspective, the categorical mind conceives the reality as a discrete space over which functions are appliable. However, the domain and co-domain of functions are not necessarily discretes. But so there are two possibilities:
- all functions start and end in a discrete space or in a continuous space, but they cannot start from one and end in the other type of space;
- there exist multiple spaces that could be thought as realities, and objects move from one reality to the other, allowing for the appliability of functions from discrete spaces to continuous and vice-versa; However, in our perception of the world, only one reality exists and it is easier to identify the first hypothesis as the most easily understandable by the human mind. Since the returned products of functions which act on objects can actually be continuous (e.g. we can modify object forms in an infinite number of ways with infinitesimal difference among them), we can argue that the reality is contiguous, if we accept that no other parallel realities exist.
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If differences between the perceived objects are continuous, then what is the definition of the various objects? Where an object ends of being itself and starts being another one?
Self-cosciousness
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The crisis of categories has inevitably influences on how we percieve ourselves. If categories do not exist, do we exist? Indeed, if it is true that self-consciousness is the first step towards the cognition of the world, is not this step the one that causes the perception of categories? If one begins to know the world with the mindset given by the distinction between himself and anything else, how can he achieve a non-categorical mindset?
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Since the categorical cognition of the world is contradictory, one can still try to correct its own idea once he finds out the contradiction. However, this correction must pass through the understanding that if categories and concepts do not exist, then neither himself exists as autonomous entity. Thus, the self-cosciousness itself is contradictory.
Language
- One could say that words are categories based on fake concepts generated by the categorical cognition of the world.
I see two possible solutions:
- refuse the language and adopt alternative communication mediums (gestural, non-verbal mediums)
- keep language and try to find strategies which relieve the contradiction caused by category thoughts: e.g. art , metasemantic language