General Philosophical discussion

[the.crooked]

Alright, and now to post something a little more intense and inline with my intended purpose of this thread.

 

I'm going to post a small outline of a potential writing sample for Grad School applications. I see this possible piece geared towards application in various Futurism graduate programs around the world. There are going to be some things out of context here. As this is an outline for myself there are certainly things which are written more for my own remembrance than for public discussion.

 

At any rate, and without further adieu. The first thing I have thought seriously about in a while:

 

• A defense of Futurism from a mixed perspective in the Philosophy of Science and Politics:

 

i. There are a prevalent views from Political Philosophy (Mill), Philosophy of Science (Kuhn) and Philosophy of Language (Quine) that propose progression and trends are sparked by moments of significant change in dominant thought. These parallels and patterns in how periods of homogenized thought are called into question and revised provides a strong case for the practice of strategic forethought, or Futurism, as a prescient and flourishing field of study.

 

ii. John Stuart Mill asserts that Societal progression reaches points of accelerated advancement through conflict between “genius” and the views of the “masses.”

 

iii. Kuhn marks the advancements of scientific thought through shifts in the predominant paradigm via a select few people who exploit predictive failures in the aforementioned paradigm.

 

iv. Quine argues that there are two types of theoretical revision: peripheral and central. The Former relates to revision in beliefs whose truth and validity is tied to a more immediate experience of reality, e.g. changing the belief that “it is raining outside” upon seeing a sunny sky, and the latter revision of beliefs whose truth and validity is tied to a systemic consistency among a more widespread range of held beliefs, e.g. changing the belief that “there is a god” to “there is not a god.”

 

v. That this history and transition of beliefs in either a privately held manner (personally through Quine, or within a specialized community like Kuhn) or more complex public form (social progress through Mill) vacillates between periods of fundamental change and periods of homogenized thought suggests that if one can understand the mechanisms of fundamental changes in belief they may be able to analyze periods of homogenized thought to their various logical conclusions.

 

vi. This practice of Futurism is but a meta-analysis of societal and theoretical paradigms to accurately reflect possible outcomes in both a quantitative and qualitative form.

 

vii. Further questions to ask are how does this predictive process play out, and how best to approach it for various applications

 

 

 

Hopefully a few people can pull out some meaning for a quick conversation about it.

[the.crooked]

naturally, my post kills all conversation.

[russell jones]

naturally, my post kills all conversation.

I started one yesterday, then got a phone call from my girl. :)

 

I'll get back to this in a little while when I have more time.

[mr.feeny]

What is time.

ihave reaLizd that time is a trip when you actuaLLy sit down and think about it and besides that time truLy is priceLess and vaLuabLe.

[the.crooked]

Please learn what capital letters are for.

[.hopeless.]

fuck the world and everybody on it.

 

 

 

 

 

my 2 cents.

[Cracked Ass]

Interesting, I didn't know anyone else was on to meta-analysis of the patterns of belief change, or that it had a name (Futurism).

I'm not signing up for futurism - I don't know what else has been propounded other than the idea of analyzing patterns of belief change and looking at the possibility of predicting where it's headed - but my own application of this idea (a long time ago) is a strong part of my general intuition that as science solves mysteries, they stop having religious/divine attribution, and the pattern over time favors the debunking of religious BS in favor of the advancement of real knowledge; and as this unfolds the religious ones will be further marginalized as their body of pseudo-knowledge shrinks. However this will take freaking forever; science doesn't even have the momentum or the driver's seat yet. It's like trying to stamp out smoking worldwide - they will cling to whatever they have, and even try to push back. Religious people have a trump card: the vastness of the unknown, a murk in which they can hide for a long time.

[the.crooked]

yeah, arguments of based on knowledge of the unknown is a pretty unfortunate thing that most ideologies will have against rational thought.

 

It's something I was arguing in the thread about reasons not to believe in god. There are always going to be differences in how people approach known unknown knowledge. For the rational scientific mind, to know that there are necessarily going to explanatory gaps in one's model of though is part of our belief system. For those whose belief system is based on faith not in a model but in the absolutism of certain concepts in that model, there will always be a point of disparity about unknown knowledge. Religious people play on the lack of understanding about what are seemingly technical terms of science, "theory," etc. and make arguments for their own models like Intelligent Design on those linguistic disparities.

 

As far as your comment about futurism. I think it's a loose word. Think of the phrase "retro-futurism." The specific use here refers to the period of time in the early to mid 20th century where people were forecasting wildly different social norms based on where they saw current technologies and scientific theory. The difference was that there was still a lot of science to be done to refine the broad theories they were considering. Early sci-fi and it's aesthetic application through retro-futurism opened up the world to the relationship between making educated guesses in scientific progress and how that would effect our lives in the future, but we are finally at a point where we are starting to apply those theories at large (think materials design, nano-chemistry, quantum computing, etc.). We can finally start looking at what we have, what we can manipulate and attempt to make what we saw as our aesthetic ideals for science (technology proposed in sci-fi) and where we can progress. The LHC and other large scale experiments are bulding the foundations for this process and I imagine moore's law will apply in some parallel form to other modes of production and consumption.

 

Forecasting as a general practice, though, can be done through strong quantitative analyses. Probabilistic systems have gotten complex enough and we now have the computing power to effectively model millions upon millions of iterations of situations based on very specific starting parameters.

 

What I was proposing in my notes up there, is that this idea of futurism as a field of research is nothing really new, it's merely giving a name and application to the general mode of analytic thought that has existed and permeated most aspects of human progression to date.

[the.crooked]

QED.

 

Cracked Ass or tellurian can you edit that down a bit? the spacing might stem people seeing the last few responses.

[Cracked Ass]

Regrettably don't have time to look at Celente. Crooks based on your response I'd say don't associate me at all with futurism, or Futurism. All I do is step back and look at the historical perspective, see the trends of knowledge and ignorance unfold throughout history (including ignorance in science, which is rarer than in religion but often involves hubris, falling in love with one's hypotheses without adequate observation, etc. which is part of what makes science a two steps forward, one step back discipline). It doesn't take a lot of figuring to see that science will occasionally err but due to group rigor will generally advance knowledge and shine light into the murk, and hundreds of years later the various control freak churches will grudgingly admit that the scientists were right about that, but there's still a God, etc.

I had the same feelings about financial markets, the price of oil (I saw it trading below ten bucks a barrel in '99 and said "Boy, if I had Buffett's money I'd buy, hold, and roll over oil futures contracts by the hundreds"), various trends that involve humans. It's so easy for me to see short-sightedness and ignorance in humans, to zoom out and look at big and long-term pictures, and know that everything is cyclic, especially if it involves humans.

[Cracked Ass]

BTW the oil investment play I described in '99 would have taken 5 or 10 grand, 8 or 10 years, and a strong stomach during pullbacks, but depending on how aggressively you played it could have easily netted anywhere from twelve grand to twelve million.

[Leland Palmer]

I studied philosophy for a while at the start of university. I really liked the idea of it but a lot of it went over my head at the time to be honest. I enjoyed the existentialist stuff the most being 18 but I'd like to go back and re-read it all now that I'm a bit older and (possibly) a little wiser.

 

In response to chubbs' aborted thread you could try reading 'Nausea' by Sartre and 'The Plague' by Camus if you haven't already. They're philosophical novels rather than straight theory.

[Balance]

i dig the philosophical novels anda allegories as opposed to the dense theory for sure

[the.crooked]

dear god. i read through this entire thread. i hope i've moved from that asshole arrogant position. i hope my writing will be clearer and without the air that existed in all that shit.

[stoopit]

Yall r way 2 deep... I'm going back to brickslayer to look at the pretty colors.

[eriatarka23]

I despise giving this type of answering considering I might be taken for an ignorant dumbass, But I honestly read almost nothing posted here, despite it seeming interesting.

I just have absolutely no way of following that along, it's like hearing a conceptual artist talking about a sculpture of a hundred pans glued together, I naturally just let it go in one ear and pour out the other while I stare at some girl on the street or go walking to go buy a shake or some shit.

But since it appears to be a topic where one can just release his or her idea of their mind, I'll just go with:

 

Dude, I just simplify shit, spent my entire teenage analyzing every single thing, wasted my goddamn time haha.

I live for art, I go where it takes me and make lemonade out of the lemons it gives me.

I drop friends if they block my artistic path in any way, I drop girlfriends who do the same.

I despise money (family issues due to it might have resulted in that), but I recognize I need it in order to live so I make it without becoming a total asshole due to it.

And I just wanna be happy, doing what I love, whether that means selling my shit or teaching a handful of kids how to draw and appreciate art so at least a few of them won't become fast food guzzling idiots who think Picasso is a car (there's a car named Picasso here in Brazil) or Banksy is the english word for "little bank".

Anything else, I see absolutely no point in analyzing and consider a complete or partial waste of my time.

Except for, of course, video-games and beer on weekends, and soccer games (I'm Brazilian man, kill me if that's a sin).

I don't see myself asking "why" so much as "How to?" I guess.