UNIVERSALISM - ERRORS OF AWARENESS
What are some errors of Awareness?
Sometimes we forget that the word is not THE thing.
We sometimes think that the word label, the word apple, is attached directly to the thing apple, forgetting that the word must refer back to the idea of apple in our mind.
We sometimes identify or objectify the idea in our mind confusing it with an external thing, reversing the natural order of awareness, thus falsifying our knowledge.
Identification of a thing is always misleading or false because the only identity a thing has is in the idea of that thing in our mind
We sometimes confuse the thing we see with the event or process that is really happening, the motion of the subatomic wave-particles, moving near the speed of light, that we cannot sense. We forget that we are sensing only an awareness of that event, that a thing is not the event itself.
We project our idea, of a thing, onto an event we cannot even sense, the error of identity.
We sometimes confuse a word label with an actual real event, swirling subatomic wave-particles near light speed.
Of course, in many instances, there are far more than four levels of awareness, since human language is self-reflexive thus able to talk about itself. Words often refer only to other words, with real events many, many levels lower. Unless we keep this in mind, we are confusing reality, real events, with manmade language, words.
Many words refer only to ideas in our minds, having no objects or events as referents; for example, the word "justice" does not refer to a real event in spacetime. We confuse what happens inside our minds with what is happening outside our minds.
The First Law of Human Knowledge is that words, idea and things are not the same.
"It is impossible to dissociate language from science or science from language, because every natural science always involves three things: the sequence of phenomena on which the science is based; the abstract concepts which call these phenomena to mind; and the words in which the concepts are expressed. To call forth a concept, a word is needed; to portray a phenomenon, a concept is needed. All three mirror one and same reality. Words are thus required to preserve and transmit ideas, so that it is clear that the advancement of a science and the improvement of its technical vocabulary go hand in hand. No matter how certain we are of the phenomena, no matter how adequately our concepts reflect them, we cannot help perpetuating wrong ideas unless we have a precise terminology in which to express ourselves."
--Antoine Laurent Lavoisier (1743-1794)