Ten Green Bottles

Everything is flux.
----Heraclitus.

To see everything as a stream one has to be outside the stream.

The water takes on the shape of the container but remains water.
---A sufi saying.

Ten Green Bottles. Is that the Sea?

At Tesco's:

1. Pass me five red apples will ya?

2. Sorry?

1. Which part of that sentence don't you understand bud?
Let me spell it out: Five. Red. Apples. Comprende? Or shall I write it on slips of paper?

2. Five?

1. Yes. One more than 4. Even a robot could understand that. Shall I put it down mathematically? More. Than. >
No? 4 + 1

2. What is meant by '+' ?

1. Red. Even a fool knows what that is.

2. Isn't that a secondary quality?

1. Apple? they do have apples in your country , don't they?

2. Is this the name of something or the essential property of the thing?

1. Where's my gun? Or maybe I'll just buy them on-line.

2. Ah! The western solution: power, money, or technology!

Realism (R) and Idealism (I)
( from Nagel's View from Nowhere).

R: The world extends beyond what we can conceive.
I: What is, is what we can conceive. What we cannot conceive is not or is nonsense. (Strong version: something doesn't exist or make sense unless we perceive it)

This is not an empirical argument but an argument from reason..about what we 'can' conceive and not what infinite minds can or what minds actually do conceive. R holds that there is a reality that exists independently of our minds , language, and our methods of reaching it. This is what makes objectivity possible. But, R also maintains that an increase in objectivity doesn't necessarily reveal the world , or, rather, all features of the world, as they really are and a difference between what we can conceive and what what there is still remains. for a Realist Idealism embodies a lack of humility: as if to say: I am the world! It limits the universe to our own terms of self-understanding and is a form of reductionism.

Positive Inconceivable: the idea that there are a category of things to which we cannot apply our concepts is either impossible or incoherent.
Negative Inconceivable: there are, or may be, things that we may not , or can not, conceive of.

So, is there really a category of things of which we can form no conception? The idealists might say: wouldn't such a conception of such a category itself be a contradiction since to use words like 'exist' is already to be on this side of 'conception'. Perhaps one version of Realism turns this on its head and says that its position is merely that we cannot rule out such a category and if we do, then on what grounds do we do so?

The idealist claim seems to go like this: We cannot form a general concept of reality that goes beyond existence as we understand it. What would it mean to say that such a category (of things that are inconceivable) 'exists'? By imputing 'existence' or 'truth' to it does that not mean that it can, in at least some respects, be thought of..i.e it is back within the fold of what is conceivable? Can something be said to exist if the mind does not (cannot) conceive it?

The realist rejoinder might go like this: we can imagine certain people for whom reality extends beyond what they can conceive. Think of concentric circles and the blind, deaf , at the centre of them. If we, with our higher conceptions, were not to exist, the reality to which our conceptions were an adequate measure, would still exist and be true. In that sense, reality is independent of the minds of the those at a lower level. The same analogy holds with higher beings. It is perfectly possible to imagine beings who have a higher understanding of reality than we do.

So, even if we cannot communicate with such beings, or they cannot communicate with us, does it follow from that that a higher form of understanding does not exist ? Or , to put it in narrow terms: that it cannot exist? On what grounds can we say that there is no possibility of anything beyond our experience being real? [As the Allama pointed out, this itself is an a priori assumption!]