Forces Of The Universe

Off Topic
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[quote]nephorm wrote:
endgamer711 wrote:
Not even close.

Lucky for me I wasn’t being entirely serious. But when you say nothing better has been determined, do you mean in terms of universal applicability?

I could argue, for example, that the Categorical Imperative is at least equally as morally sound as the Golden Rule. However, either guide will break down in the specific.
[/quote]

I guess I mean nothing better has come out of philosophy as a guide to right action. Given a suitably deep understanding of the situation at hand, the GR never really breaks. Some situations can’t be made better no matter what anyone does. Rejection of duality clarifies that in these cases all the possible outcomes are equivalent.

The way I see it, the Categorical Imperative was basically Kant’s attempt to derive the GR from first principles, sort of like Russell and Whitehead deriving arithmetic from logical axioms. A philosophy fan can tell you how the Categorical Imperative never really breaks either, and how much of the time it winds up at what any sensible person would do, but the man in the street cannot use this thing. It is just one more item for discussion among philosophers. “Act as if you were through your maxims a law-making member of a kingdom of ends” what the hell is that supposed to mean?

Finally, Kant (along with most of the rest of philosophy) is shot through with species-isms. Be nice to humans? What about the higher animals? Human nature is good? Well why postulate when you can actually study it and trace its consequences both good and ill? Human nature is neither good nor bad, it is human. Kant has set humanity upon a pedestal, not really a good place for anything that isn’t a statue.

For Buddhists the only categorical imperative is to become aware, but this seems to be purely a practical matter. In their view if you get reincarnated as something other than human, it will be that much harder for you to get off the wheel.

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[quote]nephorm wrote:

And yet I was called a radical skeptic, accused of offering sophistry arguments, then called a theist which rebuffed the radical skeptic, for making somewhat this same argument 2 pages ago.

Come on, I never said that you were a radical skeptic… I specifically said that you could NOT be a radical skeptic because you are theistic.
I did say that one of your arguments was sophistry… perhaps I should’ve said specious, if that makes you feel any better. My argument with you wasn’t that you felt science was limited, but that the limits you posited for it were so stringent.[/quote]

As I stated this was not meant to be argumentative, I was just summarizing the responses to my previous posts.

I don’t recall posting limits on scientific studies or conclusions. I did say that just because the majority agree that it is so, does not mean that it is so.

And certainly if you believe in most religious doctrines you would have to agree that science is not the end all be all of information and conclusions.

While I can’t prove creationism without doubt, nor can you prove evolution without doubt. There are just to many holes to fill at this point.

I just feel there is room for philisophical reasoning in the scientific field. Not in the pure science, of cours, but when it comes to reasoning from a conclusion–why not.

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[quote]endgamer711 wrote:
I guess I mean nothing better has come out of philosophy as a guide to right action. Given a suitably deep understanding of the situation at hand, the GR never really breaks.
[/quote]

But given a suitably deep understanding of the situation, no rule is necessary.

I think it’s easy to explain as “Do nothing that, were it to become mandatory law, would not eliminate itself as a possible action.” Murdering, for example… if everyone murdered, there would be no one left to kill. Shoplifting: if everyone were to steal from stores, the stores would eventually have no more merchandise to steal. The stores would close down. Shoplifting cannot be applied universally.

[quote]
Finally, Kant (along with most of the rest of philosophy) is shot through with species-isms.[/quote]

I’m not a Kantian, I’m just bringing up the Categorical Imperative as an example. Keep in mind (you probably already know this) that most classical philosophy was not designed to be given directly to the people. Rather, in many cases it was designed to be understood and applied in simplified form through law. Creating a cookie-cutter solution isn’t generally what philsophy is (or should be) about.

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[quote]nephorm wrote:

But given a suitably deep understanding of the situation, no rule is necessary.
[/quote]

No, you still need the rule, but you do need to fully understand the effects of your actions. Even once you separate good from evil, you still have a choice to make.

I think Kant arrives at a decision not to shoplift by a needlessly round about path. It’s hardly necessary. Someone is always affected by what we do, even shoplifting. Things happen in isolation only among theorists, who insist on having something simple enough to talk about (gedanken experiments, again).

Philosophy was always for the elite, but that used to mean anybody who wasn’t a helot. The club has gotten a lot more exclusive since then, but this should be no source of pride but only grave concern. The result? Dry as toast. Philosophy used to be a spectacle, it was good clean fun. People brought picnic lunches. Maybe it will happen again. The bioethicists are making quite a splash.

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[quote]endgamer711 wrote:
No, you still need the rule, but you do need to fully understand the effects of your actions. Even once you separate good from evil, you still have a choice to make.
[/quote]

The philosopher, who would be the person who could grasp “the whole” and understand fully the situation and the consequences of his actions, would not need a rule to guide his choice. Otherwise, he’s working backwards from the conclusion to the proof, which is the antithesis of philosophy.

[quote]
Philosophy was always for the elite, but that used to mean anybody who wasn’t a helot. [/quote]

I’m not sure why you think this, could you elaborate? One need only read the Republic or virtually any other Platonic dialogue to see that philosophy proper was reserved for those who had “well-formed souls.” The difference between exoteric and esoteric teaching was well-known to the ancient philosophers.

Interesting; philosophy, in my view, is more accessible than ever to the diligent student. Libraries, amazon.com, the internet… never before have ancient and midieval works been so easily available.

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[quote]nephorm wrote:

The philosopher, who would be the person who could grasp “the whole” and understand fully the situation and the consequences of his actions, would not need a rule to guide his choice. Otherwise, he’s working backwards from the conclusion to the proof, which is the antithesis of philosophy.

[/quote]

The only situation a philosopher understands fully is one that he’s concocted for purposes of discussion. When it comes to his own actions in a poorly understood world, he wants heuristics and general principles as much as anyone else, and he wants them based on his own thinking. Besides, he’s got to convince the rest of us he’s come up with something worthwhile.

Plato didn’t invent philosophy. He was a reaction to what had gone before. Philosophy used to be a live discussion conducted in the marketplace, a lot like politics, not a fossil in a library.

The Greeks would compare their philosophers the way we compare the private lives of pop stars. In their view, the life of a philosopher was the proof of his philosophy. If a philosopher couldn’t walk the walk, it was presumed when it came to his philosophy he was talking out of his hat and his conclusions were suspect. At any rate, they hadn’t done him any good. “Ad hominem” argumentation was seen as a reasonable way of separating the wheat from the chaff.

Plato needed to reassure everyone that a bunch of academics using more formal argumentation would nevertheless meet all the traditional requirements. Thus we get this ad hominem bilge from him about purity of essence.

Elitism is no longer helping philosophy in its self-proclaimed mission. Sure the stuff is online, but that is not the same thing as accessible. In a democracy, the people are the legislators. If philosophy wants to have any purchase anymore it had better come down from its ivory tower and get on Oprah. Congress sure isn’t listening, unless we’ve got some philosopher lobbyists out there, and we seem to be fresh out of philosopher kings.

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[quote]endgamer711 wrote:
The only situation a philosopher understands fully is one that he’s concocted for purposes of discussion. When it comes to his own actions in a poorly understood world, he wants heuristics and general principles as much as anyone else, and he wants them based on his own thinking. Besides, he’s got to convince the rest of us he’s come up with something worthwhile.
[/quote]

We disagree fundamentally, there. When I say “fully,” that was in reference to your “suitably deep understanding,” which I believe is reserved for the philosopher, who sees farther than others. That is his role. You said that we need the rule, but we also need to fully understand the effects of our actions. Now, you’ve contradicted that point, and I’m willing to agree that it’s impossible to fully understand all consequences stemming from an action. But if we understand, in a suitably deep sense, the consequences of our actions, then what purpose serves the rule with regard to right action? It must be that the rule provides some sort of way to assign values to the various outcomes, suitably understood. What we seem to disagree upon is whether or not philosophers require a rule to determine this right action. I contend that philosophers my assess their ethical responsibilities through the application of reason. That the philosopher is equipped to see beyond his own immediate wants or needs, and is able to see further than the common man, is granted in the definition.
As such, I imagine that the problem is this: if we are granted a suitably clever individual, who is able to discern immediate consequences, but not the long-term ramifications of his actions, what metric or value-assigning mechanism would he use to decide between multiple seemingly suitable actions?

Now, you have two responses to this:

  1. Reject duality, and 2) apply the Golden Rule. But the Golden Rule requires that we understand who is benefitted or harmed by our action. It also assumes that there is some congruity between individual values. And it fails our test regarding ambiguous long-term results. Rejecting duality avoids the issue; it asserts a priori that the ultimate consequences are not only unknown but unknowable until history plays itself out. Right action is therefore irreducible to short-term assessments, because immediate effects are not guarantors of future effects. As such, no values may be assigned to these actions, and we find ourselves in a radically amoral world.

The history of philosophy is complex, but we can say that Socrates was the first political philosopher of any merit (there was one prior, but he is irrelevant to the discussion).
Philosophy as it was practiced before Socrates seemed to consist of natural philosophy, which was a dangerous endeavor indeed, and sophistry. There is very little pre-Socratic philosophy for us to refer to. But we can say that with Socrates came a precision in philosophy that was previously unknown. As a result, philosophy necessarily became inaccessible to certain people. Or, more accurately, became accessible in its entirety to only a few individuals. As the metaphor of the cave would suggest, the difference between the philosopher and the common man is not one of degree but of kind. Until the philosopher undergoes his conversion, until he steps into the light of day as it were, he is simply incapable of full understanding of the underlying nature of things.

Why would Plato need to reassure anyone? Athens had already decided that philosophy proper was not welcome in the city, which is why Plato opened his Academy outside of the polis.

Rousseau would answer you that the Legislator is in his most important role either philosopher or prophet. The philosopher, the Legislator (large ‘L’), designs the framework by which the common man or legislative body will govern himself or others. Hence the Constitution.

148

We’re going around in circles here. Philosophers need rules the same way that scientists need theories.

Why did Plato need to reassure anyone about the good nature of philosophers? It was necessary in order to continue the discussion for those present and those who would follow. He succeeded in convincing you, apparently. By the time of Kant, ad hominem argumentation had fallen so far off the wagon that if we accept the logic of the devil himself we are required to accept his conclusion and admit him to the brotherhood of philosophers.

The only thing that makes philosophy an elite activity is that this after dinner conversation has gone on for so long now that it takes years to get briefed on what has been said already. Any lawyer has what it takes to hack it, but alas philosophy pays less well than the law.

Rejecting duality is not saying that outcomes are unknown are unknowable. In some cases it argues their equivalence. It gives you a different way of perceiving the situation and evaluating the outcomes, is all.

The U.S. constitution is not a done deal. We’re still working on it. The current efforts could use a little help (or hindrance). Rousseau never met Tom DeLay, evidently.

Phiosophy seems to me like a neutron star that’s attracted so much interstellar debris it is about to become a black hole, from which no light whatsoever will issue. When was the last great exoteric teaching that came out of the box?

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[quote]endgamer711 wrote:
We’re going around in circles here. Philosophers need rules the same way that scientists need theories.
[/quote]

I still don’t see the reasoning behind this. Dialectical philosophy doesn’t require any established “rules” to start approaching the truth.

Do you have any references for this reassurance? Plato was, in my view, more concerned with explaining the sort of constitution required of a person who wished to seriously engage in philosophy. He never made guarantees that philosophers, in the vulgar sense, were good-natured. He argued the opposite, that the people would hate philosophers and attempt to drive them out. The people are inherently fearful and suspicious of philosophy.

Philosophy proper, again, was an elite activity at the time of Socrates. There wasn’t enough pre-Socratic philosophy to really require much of a briefing, and further, the dialogues reference the poets and pre-Socratic philosophers only infrequently. Socrates was interested in seeking wisdom in men, and so he went to the marketplace. That doesn’t mean that every person with whom he had conversation was a philosopher. Some of Socrates’ young friends, who sparred verbally with him throughout the dialogues, were not philosophers (explicitly stated). Yes, everyone could get into a ‘philosophical discussion,’ whatever that means, but you can see the same thing by going to the discussion section for ethics 101 at any school. That doesn’t make those students philosophers.

I’ve met some dense lawyers.

The Constitution has done admirably thus far… let’s just hope it manages to stay intact. No regime lasts forever, of course.

As Strauss would say, the only great thinker of our time may have been Heidegger… which is not to say that he was correct.

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endgamer:

I’d like to step away from the discussion at hand for a moment to thank you for a lively, civil debate. As we see in the political forum, it seems to be rare to have a difference of opinion that doesn’t degrade into name-calling, and that shows respect for the intelligence of all those concerned.

151

[quote]comguy1 wrote:
From what I gleemed from your article, it seems your under the impression that somehow there’s an intelligence behind the universe guiding it to an order, and eventually into beings like us, who are intelligent, and that is somehow the way things are supposed to happen.
“chaos into order”

It’s not a trend. Organic life is no more ordered than anything else.

And vroom, there’s no such thing as non-physical. That’s all there is.

I’m hoping this made sense. I just woke up, in a bad mood. I’ll probably read this later and shake my head
Steve.[/quote]

<<<And vroom, there’s no such thing as non-physical. That’s all there is.>>>

You’re obviously very left-hemisphere dominant. Of course there are non-physical things, we call them “subjective”.

An example: Show me the color blue (the color as you experience it in your mind) in any logical means you can without actually using the color or a representation of it (ie: the sky, water).

Also, the answer to “If a tree falls in a forest and no one hears it, does it make a sound?” is “No.” Sound is a creation of the mind. The tree just gives off shock waves in the air (which our brain translates into “sound”), but if there is no conscious hearing subject there, the tree does not make a sound.

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[quote]DiogenestheCynic wrote:
An example: Show me the color blue (the color as you experience it in your mind) in any logical means you can without actually using the color or a representation of it (ie: the sky, water).[/quote]

Light in the 420-490nm wavelength range. A blind man could use a spectrometer (with braille or auditory output) and determine whether a color was “blue”. Blue light is definitely a physical phenomenon.

Your “tree falling in the forest” is also a bad example, as the “air waves” will occur whether someone is there or not to hear them. If sound was a purely subjective concept, we wouldn’t call Mach 1 “the speed of sound”; because a “subjective” speed is different for everyone. Like the sometimes mentioned “speed of thought”. I’ve known some people whose “speed of thought” is measured with a calendar, not a stopwatch. Whether you call it “sound”, “noise”, “air waves” or “vibrations on my eardrums”, semantics won’t make an objective phenomenon into a subjective one.

If you want subjective, non-physical concepts, there are many to choose from: beauty, justice, liberty, greed, etc. Stuff more suited to philosophy than science.

So, whether a painting is beautiful or not is a subjective, non-physical concept. Whether it uses the color “blue” and in what proportions is a purely objective, scientifically measurable one.

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[quote]pookie wrote:

Light in the 420-490nm wavelength range. A blind man could use a spectrometer (with braille or auditory output) and determine whether a color was “blue”. Blue light is definitely a physical phenomenon.[/quote]

You misunderstand entirely what I was trying to say. I’m talking about the phenomenon you experience in your mind that is “blue” that a man born blind could never experience. Look at the sky- you see “blue”. But the blue your brain contrives does not really exist in physical reality. It is your brain’s conscious representation of “This is what quantas of photons with wavelength 420-480 are.” If you still scratching your head at this, we’ll have to agree to disagree.

[quote]pookie wrote:

Your “tree falling in the forest” is also a bad example, as the “air waves” will occur whether someone is there or not to hear them. If sound was a purely subjective concept, we wouldn’t call Mach 1 “the speed of sound”; because a “subjective” speed is different for everyone. Like the sometimes mentioned “speed of thought”. I’ve known some people whose “speed of thought” is measured with a calendar, not a stopwatch. Whether you call it “sound”, “noise”, “air waves” or “vibrations on my eardrums”, semantics won’t make an objective phenomenon into a subjective one.[/quote]

See above arguement.

I’d sure as hell would like to know what your definition of subjective is, because I can separate “air wave vibrations” into what my brain demonstrates to my consciousness as “sound” and also I can separate this from physical data that a machine with a pressure sensitivity gauge could spit out onto paper. One is an experience and the others are not. One is the cause, the other two mentioned are effects.

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Diogenes is talking about what is referred to as “qualia” in philosophy of mind. Qualia are those properties sensory experiences which must be experienced to be known; they are incommunicable. For example… a dog can hear sounds at a higher pitch than a human can. The sound exists, and it is deciphered by the dog into a sensory experience. But the dog’s experience of that sound is not communicable to you… you will never ‘know’ that sound… hence it is epistemically unknowable to you. You may design another sort of test to determine the presence of the pitch, but not the experience of it. Make sense?

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[quote]DiogenestheCynic wrote:
You’re obviously very left-hemisphere dominant. Of course there are non-physical things, we call them “subjective”. [/quote]

I refute you thusly: There can be no such thing as an insubstantial substance.

HA!

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[quote]nephorm wrote:
endgamer711 wrote:
We’re going around in circles here. Philosophers need rules the same way that scientists need theories.

I still don’t see the reasoning behind this. Dialectical philosophy doesn’t require any established “rules” to start approaching the truth.
[/quote]

Well, my thought was they need abstractions such as rules and ‘maxims’ in order to talk to each other. And I suspect, even to guide their own interpretation of right action. And you want to test these abstractions. It’s a lot like what scientists do with hypotheses.

About 18 months ago I got into this discussion about ‘ad hominem’, what was the actual definition. It turns out that this has changed over time since Aristotle. They added things that were very obliquely related to the central notion as late as a few centures back. Anyhow, I found this paper and a some references from it, among some historians, that talked about this very primary meaning of ‘ad hominem’, this notion the ancient Greeks had about the philosophy and the philosopher being two sides of the same coin, and how ad hominem was by no means always considered to have been obnoxious. It actually made this small swatch of Aristotle make a bit more sense when used as context - Aristotle is arguing against a fallacy more than a rhetorical tactic, thus the enjoinder doesn’t show up amongst the stuff on rhetoric, but elsewhere. I cannot now remember what their primary sources were, but they were mentioned and seemed convincing. Anyhow, this is the existing context that Plato had to address in talking about who was fit for philosophy. I think he is trying to take it down a notch and say that philosophers don’t have to be heroic.

Being among Greeks, it is easy to imagine that the early brand of philosophy - every bit the vile stew you mention - was possibly a real riot in more ways than one (pass the word, the sophists are coming to town; collect rocks). Or maybe the young men were all hanging out discussing when they were supposed to be doing whatever instead.

Yes, Plato was talking to a small self-selecting group, an elite if you will. Was the selection actually based on what Plato said? Most likely not.

I joyfully disagree. I wish more people were philosophers in this fashion. When you look at the long litany of error among the published philosophers, what the heck, let anyone try their hand. Will they get published? Dunno. They can blog maybe.

I was looking at wikipedia on philosophy and it is great. By Heidegger I suppose you mean existentialism was the exoteric thing.

But wow, I found my philosopher, and I’ll put him up as exoterically even more recent: Camus (three cheers for absurdism) actually I’d read him as a novelist in the French but never considered him as a philosopher. Why am I attracted? Because of Godel’s Theorem and its significance to philosophy. So I guess it has got to make sense that an absurdist doesn’t much care about the purity of the discourse, thus my willingness to let in the rabble.

Anyway, I forgot to mention, I think the best reading of the GR requires you to put yourself fully in the other parties’ shoes, to the extent you know their context. Of course you can’t always get it right, but rules are only intended to ensure right action, not right outcomes after all.

I’ve got to do some work (gasp)

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All living systems (and the earth):

Low Entropic Energy in —> Does work on system -----> High Entropic Energy out

In the case of the earth, the sun emits mostly UV and visible light to the earth and a little IR, while the Earth radiates IR (IR has higher entropy). In between plants grow, an ordering process, etc. Welcome to Biophysics.

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[quote]endgamer711 wrote:
But wow, I found my philosopher, and I’ll put him up as exoterically even more recent: Camus (three cheers for absurdism) actually I’d read him as a novelist in the French but never considered him as a philosopher. Why am I attracted? Because of Godel’s Theorem and its significance to philosophy. So I guess it has got to make sense that an absurdist doesn’t much care about the purity of the discourse, thus my willingness to let in the rabble.
[/quote]

Oh, man, I just literally stayed up all night writing about Heidegger and existentialism… if you’re interested in seeing a first-class account of existentialism (well, actually, my humble summary of a first-class account of existentialism), let me know. I have no more energy for the subject!

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[quote]steveo wrote:
Welcome to Biophysics.[/quote]

Thanks, I’ve been waiting outside the gates all day!

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[quote]nephorm wrote:
Diogenes is talking about what is referred to as “qualia” in philosophy of mind. Qualia are those properties sensory experiences which must be experienced to be known; they are incommunicable. For example… a dog can hear sounds at a higher pitch than a human can. The sound exists, and it is deciphered by the dog into a sensory experience. But the dog’s experience of that sound is not communicable to you… you will never ‘know’ that sound… hence it is epistemically unknowable to you. You may design another sort of test to determine the presence of the pitch, but not the experience of it. Make sense?[/quote]

Ok, then. Carry on.