First of all, thank you very much!
1. I didn’t completely understand: do composite ideas not signify anything in the world? Anything that exists? If so, what is their referent?
As for disputes about ideas — couldn’t one argue that the reason for the dispute is that same conceptual fog that causes people to say meaningless things?
2. I’ll just note that I wasn’t trying to define existence, but rather a basic building block of language.

3. I’ll try to sharpen the point.
There is the category of non-material entities (thoughts, arguments, theories, properties, etc.). Here I mean concrete entities: this thought, this description, and so on — that is one thing. The second thing is “abstractions” or “ideas” like “book” or “proposition,” which are not directed toward any concrete object but toward, as stated, the idea. The question is whether these things are the same. Do they exist in the same sense?

1. Not necessarily. That is an idea just like the way non-Platonists think about all concepts.
I didn’t understand the point about the dispute.
3. Everything that exists exists in the same sense. The fact that there are entities that have matter and location in space and others that do not — the difference is not in the sense of existence, but in the properties of the existing thing.

1. Truthfully, I don’t completely understand how they conceive of it.
As for the dispute: there is a phenomenon (as the Rabbi said above) of people arguing about the meanings of concepts (what is good, what is Judaism, and so on). The claim is that one cannot say that the concept is a product of a person’s imagination or definition, because then the dispute would be completely futile, and it is unreasonable to assume that there are so many pointless disputes; therefore we say that the concept under discussion is real and exists. My question is: why can’t the phenomenon of disputes about concepts be explained in a “psychological” way? A certain definition is culturally loaded (or something like that), and that is what brings the emotions into the discussion, while the concept itself is somewhat vague, causing one person to argue for one definition and another for a different one. They do not reach common ground because they are not proficient in logical reasoning. Is that really so implausible?

What’s the problem? They think these are fictions created in our minds. Indeed, already in Two Carts I pointed out that in the conventionalist view, disputes about concepts are unnecessary and merely semantic.
The alternative you are proposing regarding these disputes is that this is a semantic argument. Even if there is ambiguity, such an argument is pointless. Let each side define the terms for itself and that’s that. It is only a matter of dictionary entries. The arguments still come out looking stupid. My claim is that people feel these arguments are real, and therefore it seems more plausible to me that they truly believe this — that is, that they are essentialists. In fact they have a false consciousness of conventionalism (see columns 203–4).

Doesn’t a fiction need a referent?

Not a referent that exists. It can have a referent that is only an idea.

The concept of existence is always connected to importance (and importance is an instinctive concept). What exists is important; what does not exist is not important. The question of what exists is equivalent to the question of what is important. Arguments arise as a war of instincts — who gets to determine what is important, meaning who rules. Therefore arguments are futile at root and do not lead to truth.
And regarding the actual question of what exists: the human being is the source of importance and the source of existence, and therefore no contradiction will arise if you assume that everything you can think of simply exists. Contradictions arise when one tries to make extensions — adding further properties to the definition of existence. For example, the property that a thing that exists always existed and always will exist. Then contradictions arise with the original instinctive definition. This is always the result of an instinct leaping above its station.

The more interesting questions are about the very creation of concepts and how thought performs interaction among them and creates new concepts (while stripping the sensory and instinctive elements from the original concepts).

In honor of our master, The Last Decisor. After kissing the soles of his holy feet, I notice the decisiveness that characterizes your messages, and all for no wrongdoing on their part. Not for nothing is your screen name “The Last Decisor.”
You make absurd declarations with total certainty as though this were Torah being given to us now from Sinai, and all who hear must fall silent. To identify existence with importance is about like identifying the color red with kindness.
By the way, some have made a somewhat similar identification, such as Anselm in his ontological argument (see the first notebook), but even he does not speak of identity but of a connection. In his view, what exists is more complete than what does not exist. But even he did not go so far as the absurd claim that identifies the two.
And I will conclude by asking Your Honor’s forgiveness for having had the audacity to come after the Last Decisor…

In my opinion there is something to what the Decisor says — not in the sense of irrational instinct, but in terms of identifying existence with the good, as Maimonides and some of the Scholastics argued. But his wording is misleading, and perhaps I’ll explain another time.

I didn’t understand what the problem is with decisiveness. When things are decisive and absurd, then it is easiest to refute them.
Tone of speech or degree of decisiveness should not be a consideration at all.
I try not to write the non-decisive things, out of respect for the screen name.

Decisor — ayahuasca and meditation, we already mentioned that, right? 😉 Once Adar enters…

I read a bit in Notebook A, and unfortunately I did not see any hint of anything even remotely close to what I am saying.

At the beginning you wrote: “Throughout history this proof has received extensive treatment and even additional formulations, some of them somewhat different,” and that is just another example of the kind of confusion created when an unidentified instinct tries to leap above its station.

Rabbi Amsalem proved that the human being is the source of importance (in the sense that a person gives or does not give importance to things, meaning the person defines what exists), but he did it in a confusing way because he did not know what his basic assumptions were. In any case, the fact that the human being is the source of importance is a built-in basic assumption in every person. That is, he proved nothing new. And all the verbiage written about this, and the ignoring of the simple fact that it all stems from instinct, only added to the confusion.

Copenhagen, you are distorting my words. Existence is not identified with the good. Existence is identified with the thing to which we assign importance, and we assign importance to bad states even more than to good states, in order to avoid them.

Maybe you are hinting at the interesting question of why we assign importance to one thing and not another. But even if you find that the reason is the good, that still does not make them identical. At most you could say that there is a causal instinctive dynamic whereby one instinct causes a person to adopt a certain worldview that someone else does not accept because his dynamic is different. In any case, it is very personal.

Decisor,
It is not easier to refute decisive claims. Decisiveness is tone, and it has nothing whatsoever to do with content. What bothers me is that you make absurd claims; the decisive tone merely adds to the discomfort. The claims are absurd in a way that does not even require arguing against them. I gave you an example of an absurd claim of that sort. You are simply identifying one category with something from a different category. What exactly do you want me to answer to that?
As for your second message, with your permission I won’t address it. I simply cannot even manage to read it. I hope you understood what is written there and what the connection is between one sentence and the next, and between all of that and my words. As far as I’m concerned, it is literally a riddle.

It seems to me that something here was not understood properly:
I wrote: “The concept of existence is always connected to importance”; “existence is identified with the thing to which we assign importance.”
The identity is not between existence and importance, but with the thing to which we assign importance.

And if that is still what you were referring to, then your refutation would imply that one cannot say about ice cream that it is tasty, because that would be identifying one category with a different category. But clearly logical claims of this type do not apply to the psyche, and if that is not clear, then perhaps that is the source of all the confusion.

In any case, I see no refutation here, only difficulty accepting the claims.

It seems to me that we are speaking different languages. You understand nothing of what I write, and I understand nothing of what you write. So be it.

In Notebook A you wrote in “On Definitions and Existence”: “Factual claims that speak about the existence or non-existence of things are the result of observation.” Clearly that is not a correct claim: a child who believes in the existence of Santa Claus has never observed him.
A more correct sentence would be: “Factual claims that speak about things are the result of observation.” The word “existence” is unnecessary. But even that still does not say very much, especially if it is not a direct result.

You observed my claims and still you say that they are not arbitrary and valid, and are even absurd. Why? Because you dismiss them and do not assign them importance, and that only proves the correctness of the claim that existence is connected to assigning importance.