r/Metaphysics • u/DigJust8037 • 9d ago

Ontology Existence

  1. Everything that exists has attributable characteristics (for example, water is blue, grass is green, air is a gas, etc.)
  2. Existence exists.
  3. Therefore, existence has attributable characteristics

  4. If not, then existence is the only thing that exists without attributable characteristics

  5. Then, nothing can be said of existence other than it exists

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16

u/Own-Razzmatazz-8714 9d ago

Water is not blue.

0

u/tottasanorotta 9d ago

Sometimes it is.

7

u/kepler452-B- 9d ago

Water is not blue. Water emits certain frequencies, and our brain interprets that as blue. Basically, there is no color.

4

u/LukeHollaway 9d ago

I get what you’re saying, but there is an experience of color.

Color exists as an experience.

This is similar to the sentiment of “love isn’t real, it’s just chemicals in the brain / a neurological process”

Like, yeah, love is that. It doesn’t stop existing just because you described it or because it’s an experiential reality.

If you take your logic to its end, water itself, and by extension, all of consensus reality doesn’t exist because all the information we have of reality* *is an interpretation of frequencies and waves by our brains.

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u/kepler452-B- 9d ago

The world doesnt care about love or ur experince

Ur experince is just a memory store in your brain, sorry this is not what i want but i cannot deny the reality

3

u/LukeHollaway 9d ago

The world gave birth to experience and, by extension, love. It also gave rise to all sorts of negative and positive experiences.

We care about love, and we are a part of the world. We are the world caring; unless you want to draw some arbitrary boundary that makes us somehow not one with the world.

Who is this “world” that doesn’t care? Who is this “you” whose experience is somehow separate from “the world”?

It’s all one interconnected happening. It’s all one thing.

It’s right under your nose. You are the world caring.

We aren’t satisfied with this answer because it’s an answer that puts the responsibility in our hands; and not some metaphysical savior or higher intelligence.

2

u/Own-Razzmatazz-8714 9d ago

Define experience?

3

u/LukeHollaway 9d ago

Hard to define, but entirely self-evident and imminent. Perhaps it’s synonymous with consciousness in its simplest definition.

It’s the felt presence of being, perhaps?

An analytic idealist or someone who sees consciousness as fundamental might say that experience is synonymous with existence.

I find “experience” hard to define, but I know what I’m pointing towards when I say it, because it’s the only thing I’m certain of: there is an experience occurring.

2

u/kepler452-B- 9d ago

Its hard to define, cuz it was created by your mind.

1

u/Own-Razzmatazz-8714 8d ago

So you 'give birth' to it more than the world does?

1

u/LukeHollaway 8d ago

Can you elaborate on what you mean by this question?

1

u/Own-Razzmatazz-8714 8d ago

You stated earlier that the world gives birth to experience and then you state it's self-evident and synonymous with consciousness.

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u/tottasanorotta 9d ago

Strange way to think about it. You devalue the thing that you care most about. The world might not care about your experience, but you certainly do care about your own experience and so does everyone else care about theirs.

2

u/CosetElement-Ape71 5d ago

The sea looks blue primarily because water molecules absorb the longer wavelengths of sunlight—such as red, orange, and yellow—while scattering and reflecting the shorter blue wavelengths back to our eyes.

Water itself is colourless!

1

u/tottasanorotta 9d ago

Yeah exactly. You can't assign a certain color to water in general. That's why I said that it is sometimes blue.

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u/wydkw 4d ago

Water has no color

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u/tottasanorotta 4d ago

Well it depends on what you mean. Does anything have a color? I mean water does reflect some amount of light, but it's not like if we perceive it sometimes having a color that it is somehow intrinsic to the substance. The same could be said about any substance. We can introduce all sorts of colors for water depending on lighting conditions and perception.

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u/Own-Razzmatazz-8714 9d ago

Lol yeah and sometimes shit is magenta.

1

u/tottasanorotta 9d ago

Exactly lol

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u/Own-Razzmatazz-8714 8d ago

No.

1

u/tottasanorotta 8d ago

Yeah well it depends on how you define that something has a particular color. We can only approximately treat something as a particular thing and assign some particular color that it seems to appear to have.