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So, I was looking through a magnifying glass, and I was thinking, if people wore magnifying glasses by there eyes the whole day, the world would be so much bigger.
Which led me to ponder, how do we know really what size we are? Everything we see is based upon the size our eyes view things.
Furthermore, how do I know my friend views himself and our surroundings the same size as I view myself and my surroundings?
That’s why rating posts might not be such a great idea after all…
You probably had something else in mind. I have a gut feeling as to what it might be.
The size of man – his Middos, (measurements). That’s the true way to measure man. All else are meaningless dimensions.
The size of man – the definition is limited to your imagination. The possibilities are plenty.
(Someone mentioned rating posts or posters the other day. Hence my reply.)
Oh Shreck – there’s a book by that title: Middos, the Measure of Man.
Talmud: And maybe you’re a speck on the back of a giant turtle. I think there’s a book like that. (shoutout to OOM 🙂 )
More seriously, your brain adjusts to process information relative to other information. So if everything was bigger, your brain would eventually learn to make it smaller, and you wouldn’t see it as bigger any more.
When someone is near you, you see him as being the same size as someoe standing ten feet away. However, your eye actually sees him 40 times larger. What you call seeing is actually ‘knowing’ based on sight.
HaLeiVi “What you call seeing is actually ‘knowing’ based on sight.”
fascinating
this is not exacly on thread topic but i just heard a great line on an english song on kol berama do not ask how big is the man in the fight but how big is the fight in the man
Everything’s relative. If you wore magnifying glasses (unless they were those annoying toy types that are all distorted) the increase in size would be to scale, so that it would seem like everyone’s bigger.
Except you, really, so it would probably impact the way you view the world, like you said.
Fevery thought (I’m home sick): Everyone has a different size magnifying glass in their eyes, and it should really be more powerful (and more humbling) as opposed to less powerful, where you feel bigger than everyone else. It’s a mindset thing.
Torah613: Don’t forget the four elephants. ^_^
writersoul: Refuah sheleimah! 🙁
You sound a bit like one of my friends who asked me “How do you know we exist? Maybe we are all part of one big dream and none of us were ever reality?”
I told him that I don’t care, but when he wakes up he should wake me up too.
I saw an advert once were they played mamash on your point — It was an advert for a beer.
Two guys were sitting in a boat, fishing, and suddenly a bottle of beer appeared above one of the guys heads. The guy grabbed the bottle, and suddenly was pulled out of the boat… The scene changes, and you see two huge aliens sitting in a room, holding fishing nets above a small hole, and a little guy – the guy from the boat, in miniature – pops out.
That is the same yesod – we think that our environment is normal, is the best is the most natural. A fish feels that his pond is the real world, there is no bigger picture. But just like the pond is a mere puddle, this advert was making as though Earth was also just a little puddle in some alien world.
And who knows? Maybe they are right!
OOM – 5 elephants. One crashed.
I think everyone asks some form of this question at one point or another. Most move on, some get hooked on acid.
Yekke2 – It’s a thought experiment variously called the ‘brain in a jar’ experiment or ‘Descarte’s evil genie’. Both are really different set-ups of the same idea: how would you know if you were nothing more than the dream of an evil genie/brain in a jar. From this Descartes essentially drew the same conclusion as you – cogite ergo sum (I think therefore I am), or in your case ‘wake me up’. In other words, the knowledge of your own awareness that you are aware means that you must exist to have that awareness. I know that previous sentence sounds a bit hinky but it’s easy enough to get your head round with a bit of thought.
Yups. As is mentioned in Behind the Attic Wall, almost everyone at one point wonders if their brain views colors the same way as everyone elses does. As far as this point goes, when I’m wearing contacts, everything is a bit smaller so I get to see more. If I wear glasses with a higher prescription everything just looks distorted. If I don’t wear anything at all only things right near me are visible. I think there is a point where the size of everything feels right. To test how big people see stuff, you can just test how large their field of vision is. I think everyone’s with glasses should be about the same.
jmh – Exactly. Although I always what is helps to pinch yourself to see if you are dreaming, because as much as you can dream up the whole story, you can “dream” that you feel it.
Anyways, I am not bothered if I exist or not; I am happy exactly the way i am.
And, according to the Gemara, ??? ???? ??? ????!
The Gemara doesn’t say “Tov” it says “Noach.” It means “it would be easier for man not to have been created,” not “it would be better for man not to have been created.”
jmh, cut me some slack–I only got that book yesterday. 😛
OOM, jmh: I was just reading that one! I’m going through all the Watch ones in order. Except Snuff, which is dumb.
What’s cool about Descartes’s point of view, to me at least, is that according to him, as jmh pointed out, it doesn’t matter whether you truly “exist” or not. As long as you feel like you exist, and you’re able to think about it, meaning that you have a consciousness, from his perspective, nothing else matters- you could be living as an experiment in a lab with everyone else fake to see how you react, or by yourself with everyone else as hallucinations, and it doesn’t matter, because realistically speaking we can only understand what is in our realm of experience. If we feel like we exist, then we exist, because something is doing the thinking, and that something thinks that what it is doing is existing.
Why do I feel like the entire above paragraph was a waste of virtual paper?
I guess it doesn’t matter, though, as long as my fingers burned calories writing it :).
^_^
I think that philosophers have pointed out that words are useful insofar as we use them to describe different things in common ways that we all understand, and although words appear to describe the essence of things, they do not do that.
nooooooo you must watch ATLA first
OOM – it’s a good one, especially if you know your Scottish history…
size of man? generally shorter than Golem.
haha I will be sure to google some (or you could just enlighten me as to the pertinent bits… :P).
talmud: ???
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