Editor's note: If you have no sense of whimsy, or no appreciation of philosophy, I suggest you leave before FORTY-TWO OCCAM'S RAZOR BOOGAHBOOGAHBOOGAH!
Okay. They're gone. Good.
Note also that these definitions are the meanings I choose to attach to words. I am not suggesting you use the same ones. I do encourage you to find some word befitting each if you do not yet possess one, however. If you lack meaningless words, you may find some in the appendix.
Note also that this is clearly not in alphabetical order. If that matters. It doesn't.
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GOD:
A man sees before him a black box with a crank. He turns the handle and music springs forth. This machine is mystically endowed with the capacity to make music! Another man steps forward, doubting him, and pries open the box. The two see then it is not the box but the things inside which seem to produce the music. These strange pieces are disassembled further still and analyzed that the parts they form can be understood. Eventually the pieces can be analyzed no more. Their function, it seems, is simple and obvious. But there is yet a reason they work as they do. Countless ignored questions such as why the metal behaves as it does, or resonates its sweet tones only when struck just so. Even as more and more is discovered, countless questions remain. An infinite mystery. A world of understanding yet-to-be, and endless.
Note: Many people use God to name their exclusive source of absolute truth and/or moral bases. I give mine a different name. See: INTUITION.
THE WORLD:
All that is and all that be. Except, of course, me. Anything that I can perceive, I can only perceive. Therefore perception would appear to be a singular conduit to all entities within some realm. This realm I call the world.
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SCIENCE:
See: GOD. The attempt to explain things by observing them, at times with the deluded reasoning that we can contrive a unified explanation for everything while making no assumptions whatsoever to base it upon. The limit of questions will always be a barrier which is somewhere between divine, magical, or mundane. The last of these is most satisfactory; all are characterized by answering "why?" with "because." Since science only observes the objects of its study it can at best make predictions of how they will behave. This is very useful when lower levels of abstraction can be examined to explain phenomena occurring at higher levels but, again, there's always a limit of questions. Even if we're pushing it further and further back.
MAGIC:
This is the word we use to describe things Science has yet to understand. Science, the egotistical and loud fellow he is, makes a point of saying it does not exist and that he therefore knows everything. Alternately we can interpret magic as being everything science can never explain. Everything functions upon a set of rules, however, and if we're searching for said rules then we are scientists and all things are science. And no things are magic, leaving it a useless word. Therefore I like the former definition because it's awesome. The Higgs Boson is magic.
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EGO:
An entity which is stuck with the horrible curse of never being satisfied with what it has. It is the protagonist of my story and yours, and daily quests to the conclusion of its endless quest which ends with death. But don't fret! If that quest ended the story would be a lot less interesting. If our protagonist surmounted the mountain of perfection he would have nowhere to go but down. Or he could just rot up there. Whatever. In actuality that mountain will always turn out to be an observation point at the base of a bigger mountain, or so I suspect. But don't tell science, or he'll get another one of his hissy-fits and no one likes that.
INTUITION:
If you believe intuition exists or can do anything special, you're crazy. If you actually talk to it you're really far gone. The nutcases say it's some kind of rational facility in the mind which due to its lack of metacognition can perform much more advanced problem-solving and thought, but for the same reason cannot explain how it solves its problems. As any crazy person will tell you, it can be manifested as a voice if one takes care to get into a proper mindset and avoid putting words in its mouth. (This is apparently harder than it sounds) After all, if it's just saying what you want it to say then you won't be a very good crazy person. You'll be talking to yourself but you won't be officially crazy. A crazy guy suggested trying to achieve a strong theta brainwave without falling asleep, or trying to lucid dream. But he was crazy and I disregarded him. Also the crazy people say intuition compels us to justify certain irrational beliefs, such as the ethical value of human beings or the need to eat. They say that these motivational assumptions and some logical ones (such as that the text you're reading actually exists) are built-in as a means of developing a basis for rational thought in both the conscious and intuitive minds.
BODY:
A member of the world which is more relevant but arguably less concrete than the last two things. The three of them, crazy people allege, are formulating aspects of a human being and a really flexible system of semantics that allows you to relate with people from drastically different schools of thought instead of just arguing. Of course, the crazy people are deluded and meaningless argument is the only way to achieve intellectual development at the individual and social levels. Anyway, the body is useful for learning, creating, exploring and interacting with people, and makes a few basic demands with regard to upkeep, including food, water, relief, reproduction and so forth.
Unfortunately, those in search of purpose sometimes are discomforted at thinking very hard and yet also refuse to take orders from men with books. Therefore, they accept the simple solution that bodily requests and the body's social imperatives are they keys to happiness, failing to recognize the other, more satisfying drives that the human being harbors. These become productive members of society, pursuing comfort and regard as they live. Since physiological and social drives wane with age these people find their 'successful' lifestyles very dissatisfying and die unhappy.
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PURPOSE:
A magical reason to exist that we don't know. Once we find out we will accomplish our task and then become useless and probably stop existing or something. But worry not! We will quest on to please whatever entities have forged us, because clearly no Gods would make humans simply for the purpose of waiting and watching all the interesting things they did. No, even an all-powerful God has goals that can only be served by creating self-directed beings and expecting them to believe in said God with little evidence. It's silly to think the God would imagine Human existence to be its own reason, or to create intelligent beings for the sheer novelty of seeing what they make and discover. Silly to think any existing gods hide themselves mostly or completely for such reasons.
WILL:
Like purpose but a whole lot finickier. People always want something they don't have. If this is not the case, they stop moving. As can be seen in any nursing home those who cease to pursue tangible goals quickly degenerate mentally and physically, and die, whereas those who devote themselves even to silly or fruitless pursuits live on and are happy. (Rest in glory, Margaret Cook.) The word is synonymous with "futility" but a whole lot more upbeat owing to the wonderful connotative aspect of the English language. People will many things at a given time, at at any moment act on whatever they will the most. Long-term desires precipitate shorter ones which act toward the larger goal. So are mountains climbed step by step. As said previously, however, there is no tallest mountain. Only a time limit in which we can explore this big, wide world. Let that be its own reason, or otherwise choose from a list of Purposes. Yuck.
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REASON
A silly and never-ending (See: WILL) effort to make sense of everything. The typical technique is to seek out patterns in what we call the 'world', and elsewhere, and pick the ones which are not quite regular and not quite random. The ones which seem to work on a set of meaningful rules but aren't completely predictable. Why do we choose these? Regular things are already understood and random ones cannot yet be, as we judge them. Anyway, Reason searches for common threads, patterns, mechanisms and other things, and builds a great web of information to reflect the physical world. As this occurs concepts are shifted from the realm of the unknown (See: GOD) to that of the individual mind. (See: TRUTH) While reason is occasionally useful (See: SCIENCE) it eventually becomes a fruitless pursuit, though that's not so bad. (See: WILL) However, if used exclusively and not co-operatively as a method of understanding it can interfere sometimes with other things that help us get a clearer view of things. (See: INTUTION)
PARADIGM
This is the big and complicated web reason builds. It can also be any subset of that web. The concepts in a paradigm are used to make judgments and further reasoning with regard to the objects they model, be those physical or abstract. Capable of doing all manner of loop-de-loops and triple 360 flipkicks, the structure of the paradigm is a mystery which wierd programmery fellows probably sit alone trying to decode so they can make strong AI. Paradigms, like muscles, develop best under stress, especially when they are confronted with paradigms which are very different to themselves. When this occurs it's good to let the paradigms loose so they can duke it out and become stronger. One killing the other is rarer than is widely believed, and [actually dogfighting analogies are inappropriate because] it's in the interest of your paradigm to engage in this activity.
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MEANING
This is what is created when someone looks at the words in a book, or a sunset, or another person's face, or a trash can. Meaning is a set of ideas formulated by interpreting something, which are then processed by the mind. Arguably meaning is created intuitively before the ego gets its grubby hands on it, and processed intuitively at the same time. The ideas in meaning are compared against pieces of paradigm, whether said paradigm piece is highly temporary or more permanent. They are then either inserted into said paradigm (assimilation), forced into the paradigm which must change to hold them (accommodation) or thrown out as rubbish (the most common case).
TRUTH
All the understanding a person can manage to wring out of this mad world is placed gently (or forcefully) into a paradigm where it becomes what I call truth. I choose this meaning for this word rather than the conventional one (we'll assign it to the term FACT) which means things that are valid in the world and therefore equally so to all human minds. I make this choice because 'fact' can only be guessed at and what manifests in those guesses constitutes one's understanding of life, the universe, and everything. (See: TOWEL DAY) Truth sounds better and is more official and such, so I'd like to use it to describe something I can actually have and use, rather than some useless notion of absolution that humans seem to believe they're moving toward. (See: SCIENCE)
ABSTRACTION
...Is AWESOME. Awesomely confusing. Okay. Consider the common house cat. It's a feline, a mammal, an animal, and an organism. Those are levels of abstraction. We can go the opposite direction too. Miffy is a cat. This cat right here right now is miffy. We can form an abstraction over that--let's call it 'cat at varying levels of specificity'. We can form an abstraction over all such patterns--specificity and generality. We can form a specificity abstraction in a different direction, such as by denoting a cat to be a house pet, and therefore an element of a house. We can abstract in other ways such as by breaking Cat down into its properties (fur, teeth, claws, etc) or making a set (I'm thinking of all the cats I know). We can abstract over anything remotely resembling a pattern and so connect ideas and concepts in our paradigm. We can even abstract over abstraction itself, or over our own thought processes! This is wonderful when trying to bring about the technological singularity.
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POSSIBLE FUTURE ADDITIONS:
Ethics / Morals
Social System / Individual
Virtue / Vice
THIS IS AN APPENDIX
FNEEBLE, JARGUND, RESTIBLES, NICANTHIAN, OMIDEUM, TESTAROD, FARGENTHIUM, WIRTH
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