Devil's advocate for why ontology is meaningless and vacuous.

[Edwardo Piet]

In a vacuum and without a context the words "something" and "nothing" and "existent" and "nonexistent" are completely useless, basically.

Such words are only helpful with a context and purpose.

Person 1: "What are you doing?"

person 2: "nothing"

This has a contexual meaning. If taken literally if "doing" counts as being.... if "existing" is itself doing something then the response "nothing" means "not existing".... and since existence is indefinable that's identical to saying "existing".... so the person may as well have said "something".

Without a context and without a purpose and taken 100% literally "I am doing something"/"I am existing" and "I am doing nothing"/"I am not existing" mean exactly the same thing....

Unless that is, we answer the question "Does the imagination exist?" and "Is the imagination real?" with different answers. I define my metaphysics as a "yes" answer to the first question and a "no" to the second. But that's just because that works for me and helps me avoid and spot equivocation and conflation of concepts... at the end of the day it's all labelling that's just my own way of labelling.... it's my own metaphysics

[robvalue]

@ Rob

I see what you mean by it all being labelling... as you said here:

If nothing is "real" at all, that is fine.

Replace this sentence with "If everything is "real", that is fine" or "if nothing is "imaginary" at all, that is fine" or "if everything is "imaginary", that is fine" and nothing changes... indeed... all labels.

It's also why I said this in the OP:

In summary I'd conclude that ontology is meaningless. 'Being' is indefinable and therefore no different to 'nothingness' because nothingness can't be anything anyway because it's nothing. There is no nothing.

Let's say I replaced that with the following:

In summary I'd conclude that nothingness is meaningless. 'Nothingness' is indefinable and therefore no different to 'Being' because 'Being' itself has to be everything which is indistinguiable from it being nothing. All there is is 'Being'.

What's the difference between the two? I'd say in reality it makes no difference and is labels. The first one is bascially saying "Existence is indefinable  and there is no such thing as nothing" and the second one is saying "Nothingness is in definable and every thing is a thing".

It's rather like how "everything is equally different to everything else" and "everything is equally similar to everything else" is saying the same thing regardless of "different" and "similar" having opposite meanings.

What do you reckon?

Yes, I think that makes sense to me! If you can't define what "existence" is, you can't define what the lack of it is, either. You can just say whether a label applies, or not. We're just trying to make sense of our surroundings as best we can.

[robvalue]

Also, it's a tautology to say an object can't possibly not exist, if we've simply defined an object as something that exists.

[Edwardo Piet]

Is the "post 911 world" real?

Well... the date is 9/11 today and the future doesn't exist yet/isn't real yet because it by definition hasn't happened yet. So the world after 9/11 (starting with 9/12) -- or IOW: tomorrow -- isn't real.

So taken that way... the answer to your question is "no"

Post 9/11 2001 as opposed to 9/11 2016? Not necessarily real but certainly existent even if only solipsistically.

What is solipsistic/imaginary existence? It's the presence of our minds. It's the fact that minds are present or 'there'. No one would be able to imagine anything, there would be no lights on, without the existence of minds.

That's just my definition of 'existence' again, though. I don't define existence to mean "not imaginary"... that's how I define real. Because to say our imagination/our minds are not imaginary/not mental makes no sense to me.

What does it mean to exist in an imaginary way? To me it's just the opposite of the absence of an imagination. We can't imagine what it's like to not imagine something but we can imagine the concept of there being things without imaginations. Either rocks have imaginations or they do not. I'm thinking, no, but of course I can't prove that. But that is indeed very different to rocks having imaginations. I wouldn't say the imagination of a rock with an imagination was "real" I would say its imagination existed and was by definition the totality of imaginary experiences in its mind.

It's just my own way of sensemaking. We could just as easily say "reality" and "existence" mean exactly the same thing and "imaginaryness" and "nonexistence" mean exactly the same thing... it's simply my own way of avoiding equivoation between the imaginary concept of "absent altogether both in a real and imagined way" and the imaginary concept of "present as an imaginary concept but absent outside of that concept". It just clears things up for me.

Like... there's a difference between a) the concept of an absence of a concept besides the own concept of the absence of that very concept of an absence of a concept and b) the concept of the presence of a concept that isn't simply present as that concept of a presence of a concept but also refers to another concept itself that is present.

IOW there's a difference between the vacuously self-referential concept of the concept of an absence of a concept and the concept of the presence a concept pointing to a different concept.

TL;DR: Even when only speaking of the attempt to conceptualize the unconceptualizable ((*)(or the conceptulization of the conceptulizable)(*)... such a self-referential conceptualization attempt is different to a conceptualization attempt pointing to another concept. It's valid to distinguish between the completely meaningless self-referentially vacuous conceptulization of nonconceptulization/conceptualization of conceptualization (*both are equally useless*) on the one hand and the act of conceptualizating something imaginary like "the concept of the character buzz lightyear", for example, on the other hand.

[Edwardo Piet]

Also, it's a tautology to say an object can't possibly not exist, if we've simply defined an object as something that exists.

It is a tautology but it does distinguish non-objects from objects, presences from absences, things from non-things and nothing from something.

It is tautological indeed. So to what purpose do I make such a distinction? To distinguish between the concept of an absence of anything at all and the concept of an absence of an absence of anything outside of one's own mind (there doesn't have to be anything out there but there is a difference between us conceptualizing an "out there" and us not conceptualizing an "out there").

TL;DR: I'm making a distinct tautology in order to distinguish it from a separate tautology. It's like a sub-tautology. Indeed it's meaningless to say all objects exist even objects that are entirely subjective objects but at least that way we've made a clear distinction between the conceptuallization of entirely subjective objects and the conceptualization of objects that are at the very least postulated to be outside the mind regardless of whether they actually are or if there's any way that an external world can ever be proven (I don't see how possibly).

In practice it makes no difference but I guess it opens a conceptual doorway, if only a tiny and almost certainly useless one. But usefulness is not the stuff of philosophy anyway.

[robvalue]

If it was useful, we'd have to listen to theists

[Edwardo Piet]

Yes lol. Pretty much.

P.S. Bryan Magee is awesome.

I have very strongly this feeling... that our everyday life is at one and the same time banal, overfamiliar, platitudinous and yet mysterious and extraordinary.

[robvalue]

Me again. I missed out a stage, which you'd already mentioned. So let's start again:

Type 1 realities: Inflexibly shared realities, such as "our objective reality". The realities can be altered, obviously, but the alterations then apply to anyone trying to access the reality.

Type 2 realities: Direct experiences, such as the phenomenological representation of a type 1 reality. In a lot of ways, science is all about comparing the overlap of our type 2 realities to try and learn, indirectly, about a type 1 reality.

Type 3 realities: Indirect experiences, such as our imagination or dreams. These don't have to come from any other reality, and don't have to obey any particular rules as such.

Type 4 realities: Flexibly shared realities, such as fictional worlds or abstract ideas. We can pool ideas to create realities to later draw on. But we can also alter them however we like individually, as we see fit.

[Gemini]

I've given up defining "existence" and "reality" in non-circular terms. I've not seen it done. I use them only comparatively, or informally. Hence absurdism

I think if the question is "what does reality mean," in some rarified, ethereal, meta-philosophical sense, then you're right. If the question is, "what's a useful definition of reality?" that's answerable. 

Features of a map that don't correspond to any territory aren't real. Which could be epistemological instruments, fictional entities, or delusions. I know that "centimeters" have no existence apart from representational systems that we use to schematize experience; the character "Gandalf" corresponds to no historical person; and conspiracist ideation pertaining to reptilian-human hybrids is madness.

All of these beliefs do exist in a sense, as the part of the territory that the map is made out of (whatever constitutes experience), but they don't correspond to anything other than themselves.

[ScienceAf]

Devil's advocating for some premises:

Premise 1. Subjectivity is ontologically objectively existent.

Premise 2. Moral values are purely and wholely epistemlogically subjective.

Premise 3. Those wholly epistemolgically subjective moral values reside ontologically objectively existent within all human brains.

Premise 4.  Those ontologically objectively existent moral values residing in human brains are just as capable of disageeing with one another as if they were not ontologically objective.

Premise 5. Ontological objectivity is both entirely meaningless and valueless and there is no difference whatsoever between ontologically objective moral values and fully subjective moral values.

In summary I'd conclude that ontology is meaningless. 'Being' is indefinable and therefore no different to 'nothingness' because nothingness can't be anything anyway because it's nothing. There is no nothing.

Big words for a TortoiseFace.