Man: "No, and neither do you. You don't know "how much," because it is relative to you not knowing at all. You can never know "how much" it hurt because you don't know how much it "could" hurt. There is simply no maximum, or minimum.

Imagine you are a mini boat floating in a glass of water that is 1/4 full, and the height of the water is the degree of your pain. However you don't know what level the water is at because when you look up there is a fog. So you don't know the water is at 1/4 of the glass. So how can you know "how much" pain you are experiencing?"

This is an example of a problem that I too often encounter. Situations in which we have to gauge a degree on concepts. Nature has raised us to speak in these terms. Our inadequate language cannot capture accurately some ideas. It cannot accurately speak in terms of certainty, nor can we really capture certainty in our mind. Their really exists no certainty when it comes to concepts and abstractions.

So it becomes useful to imagine almost everything as existing on a continuum.

"Do you love me?" -yes, how much, I cannot say.

"That was funny." -Indeed, how funny was it, I cannot say. It was very funny.

"You are so ugly." -how ugly, no one can know.

You can imagine the millions of situations in which this idea applies. So I have devised this continuum to help me better understand things. This provides structure within “Positive Nihilism" (which I will also explain sometime).

A Continuum's Use
Pain, happiness, love, hate, beauty, value, almost all things that we conceptualize exist on a continuum. Continuums are good because they eliminate absolutes and the distinction that are naturally inherent in our language and understandings. This can prevent us from being wrong, because our absolutist language and mentality can often create obstacles when we philosophize, because we fall into the absolutism of our conceptual language. To continue, there exists no absolutes on a continuum of conceptions, because it extends forever, reaching no end.

The Need To Conceptualize
I would say that life is an anomaly in the universe. Humans are especially, with our ability to conceptualize. So if we are to say that humans are an anomaly in the universe, then we must say that human conceptions are even more of an anomaly. These conceptions only exist as energy in the molecules of the human brain, but nevertheless, they exist is some way. So there is no way for these conceptions to be absolute in this universe, thus we must devise this continuum to avoid error in both communication and understanding.

Although, I do not find it beneficial to label things, I have to label here (in a moment). I do not find it beneficial because labeling something can create a great propensity to introduce absolutes into the label. For example, if I call someone's shirt "red" I feel mistaken, because red is only a concept and I know that there are thousands of tones and shades of red. So it is difficult to be accurate when we label things. Everything is far too complex to simply be confined to a simple label, a word that we utter. But nevertheless, our greatest means for communication is language. Language can only operate in a certain way. So I am forced to develop labels to describe a concept. The only other method would be to instead explain the concept every time a label would have to be used. But no one has time for that, and additionally, in order to explain I would have to use words, -and more labels. So it is an endless unavoidable dilemma. (probably the most effective way to truly communicate adequately would be through telepathy)

So I must use these labels to provide a means of roughly conceptualizing an idea. This idea is the “certainty continuum of conceptions.” Now knowing that conceptions cannot be absolute, we must find a way of categorizing the "weight" of some conceptions to reach greater truths and more accurate understandings when concepts are put to use. We deal with several kinds of concepts of a varying sort. We have to conceptualize many things to be able to communicate them and understand reality. The source of these things come from different places. Sometimes we have to conceptualize things created by nature. Sometimes other things created by humans. So we face a difficulty of understanding what is absolute in our reality and what is not. To do this we must use the continuum. But we must first realize that absolutism (and its counterparts, which I will soon describe) is itself on a continuum.

Facts & Concepts
Before we get into it, it is also important to understand the difference between facts and concepts. A fact can be considered, occurrences, or actions, or conditions, or names. It is a fact that some cars are called Corvettes. There is no question there. It is a fact that this animal is called a cat (although evolution troubles this, but realmism accounts for this). It is a fact that you are sitting in a chair. It is a fact that JFK was killed. It is a fact that I am typing. It is a fact that it is raining. Now we use concepts (words) to label these facts, but even without these words, the facts remain, they just remain without description. These things are absolute, but they aren't really relevant to absolutism because they sort of escape the issue. They escape the necessity of absolute measure. (As a side note, the only way these facts would not be absolute would be if Solipsism is true and everything is just an illusion. Though I doubt Solipsism.) Anyways, determining absolutes really only applies to abstract concepts, things that do not really exist but rather are abstractions created by language and our brains, therefore can never be facts.

The Levels of Absolutism
So, to categorize the degrees of absolutism, I have to basically make-up words.
There are things for which nature is responsible. We can consider "nature" as the son of existence. So, second to existence, is nature of some sort. So anything created by nature can be very absolute (almost an oxymoron: "very absolute"). So we have to look into our lives and determine what has been created by nature. Well the appeal of beauty, for example, is created by nature. Psychoanalysts are studying how the brain responds when it views things that we consider beautiful. There may be a strict set of parameters, such as congruency in the face, or patterns in a particular object, colors, etc. These things are product of nature's design. So the platitude "beauty is in the eye of the beholder" may be straight bullshit, because there may be a near absolute criteria for beauty, designed by nature, the son of existence and the father of us. For another example, think about what we consider as funny. There is an electro-chemical process involving the molecules in our brain that makes us react with a laugh when our brain thinks something is funny. Humor may have a specific criteria. It obviously does, if the timing of a joke is a bit off, then something that could be perfectly funny, isn't because it did not meat the criteria required by our mental processes to consider it funny, thus there is produced no laugh. Nature has built this. So it is possible to say that something might be absolutely funny (if it meets the criteria to stimulate our brain's processes designed by nature). This applies to what is sexually arousing, or what is considered healthy, or several other things. I would consider these things to be quasiabsolutes.

Quasiabsolute
A quasiabsolute is essentially anything that is designed by nature and that has a specific criteria needed to stimulate the processes of our brain and maintain our existence as we are. Now, keep in mind though, that all of this grows much more difficult the more intelligent an organism is. The more basic the intelligence of a human is, the more primitive it will be, thus the more controlled by basic nature it is. So when we reach a certain level of intelligence these quasiabsolutes seem to grow blurry. For instance, one man may consider child porn to be sexually arousing, while another man may consider big tits and pink twat to be sexually arousing. So it can be the case that these men find different things to be sexually arousing (by the wiring of their brain, thanks to nature, but the complexity of which allows a conscious perversion that allows the sexual reaction to be different depending on the stimuli), so how can these things be considered quasiabsolute (near absolute) if they vary? Well, as I stated earlier, absolutism itself exists on a continuum, and that which is quasiabsolute may exist more absolute or less absolute (there is no distinctions in the transition across, the extension of the continuum is indivisible and blends seemlessly), but it is nevertheless on the upper end of the continuum in the direction of absolute. Remember the goal here is to categorize what things are more absolute than others, not to determine what IS absolute. So to simplify, sexual arousal in a simple brained dog is very quasiabsolute. Though sexual arousal in a complex brained human is less quasiabsolute because the human brain has mechanisms that can allow sexual arousal to vary, although rarely.

It may seem like there is some sort of unclear contradiction, but that is the problem I spoke of earlier. Our inadequate language sets it up so that these sorts of contradictions can seem to occur. Conceptually, these ideas are sound, but when they are put into words they can begin to seem as though they contradict. It takes a while for these concepts to manifest entirely.

Psuedoabsolutes
So to continue, aside from nature, we also have concepts generated completely out of our own human brains, of which is the source. These things include morals, values, principles, standards, or ideals (and perhaps even language, maybe not, haven’t thought about it yet). These things do not exist in nature. They exist only within our social consciousness. They seem absolute, and we can make sense of their purpose, but they are further from nature and this thereby pushes them toward the middle of the continuum. I will call these psuedoabsolutes, because they do seem to be absolute at times and we can form great arguments in their favor to qualify them as absolute (or at least quasiabsolute), but they fail to be “real” in the universe. To elaborate, it does seem wrong to kill a man, so the concept of murder is condemned. Though nature has set up no guidelines or "criteria" of any sort for this to be regimented. Thus it falls away from being absolute. Because we have to develop logical reasons as to why a particular murder is wrong. “Wrong” and “right” doesn’t actually exists in the universe.

Nonabsolutes
Furthermore, we have nonabsolutes, things such as fashion, religion, politics, etc. All of these things operate on the concepts built by human beings, completely distant from nature and not found in nature. We have no decent justification for fashion, other than it being the flow of culture. A pair of pants can be considered cool one day and dreadful the next. Psuedoabsolutes and nonabsolutes can only exist with intelligent creatures.

Now I mentioned above that a pair of pants may be cool one day and not the next. A refutation of my argument could include the idea I used earlier: beauty. Someone could say “well the pants simply appeal to the same things in the brain to which beauty similarly appeals.” In my response I would have to posit a previous point that I made. As I said, with intelligent creatures (intelligence is on the continuum too by the way) absolutism begins to grow blurry, because intelligent creatures can escape the uniform regimentation of nature, thus intelligent creatures can bypass the "intended" criteria set by nature. So, by this, the pants that are considered "cool" are NOT quasiabsolute (as beauty is) because the true criteria set by nature would not recognize the pair of pants as beautiful or attractive (or whatever). So there is a quasiabsolute standard, but humans have gained the ability to resist this standard because we have developed a complex society that demands resistance as it bizarrely drifts into new cultural norms. So that is why fashion is not absolute. With fashion, we do not always stick to what our inner nature would prefer. It's just another example of a problem in the human anomaly.

How To Account For Intelligent Creatures
Intelligent creature posses the ability to resist nature by nature's own design. So to accommodate this new issue, I am forced to devise a more complex continuum. We have to now imagine a multidimensional continuum. This becomes "realmism" (which I will explain in another "chapter" lol, but I'll give a little here). The same continuum we have been dealing with now extends into different realms (dimensions) in which the complexity grows greater with each new realm. The realm complexity grows greater because the consciousness accounted for in these realms grows more complex itself. Furthermore, these realms are in tandem with the continuum. There exists no division of the realms, they are indivisible just as the continuum is. The transition from one realm to the next is so gradual that there is really no knowable distinction. However the gradual transition does grow into more complex realms of existence. These realms account for the different levels of consciousness that emerge in the universe. It accounts for their capacity and how absolutes apply to these levels of consciousness. It accounts for the relative levels of subjectivity and objectivity found in these different levels of consciousness.

This is why continuums are important. It helps leave room for exceptions, which are vital in avoiding mistaken absolutes. As easy, comfortable, and organized as it is to have absolutes and constants, they in fact, are hard to find. So many exceptions exist that blur the lines of distinction and division, that these lines HAVE to be blurred into a multidimensional continuum to ever get a grip on things. And that is what realmism is.

The only true absolutes that exist are mathematics and numbers.

Anyways this concept of a certainty continuum coupled with realmism, really helps me understand a lot of things more accurately, and it becomes easier to see the philosophical errors that some people make.

(I can't wait for someone to tell me that made absolutely no sense.)