General Philosophical discussion

[amongst]

thats just a very simple way of putting i guess.

[the.crooked]

finish reading. I address much of those things

[NayS]

hi, i am very interested in philosophy but im very much a begginer, im just wondering if any one can give me some pointers on some books to read or maybe send me some documents or something?? PM me please

thanks

[NoeWhan]

Everything has been done before. History and the future, are the same.

 

Who is the master? You are. Everyone here has a different perception, but at the same time we are all the same.

 

DMT is the drug I want to try, even though we trip on it when we sleep!!!

 

The best philosophical minded person in my view, is Robert Anton Wilson.

 

This is my favorite small film... 'Who is the Master?'

 

(I may have posted this b4...)

[the.crooked]

thats a bit of a strong oversimplification.

 

 

as for NayS-

 

I suggest either starting with Descarte's meditations. Or Socratic dialogues.

[the.crooked]

the only way to read philosophy is to actually read the texts.

 

 

oh and look into some eastern philosophies as well.

 

Tao Te Ching, Baghavadghita, etc.

[the.crooked]

What do I want to do?

 

I want to compare what I see as similar trends in the conceptual structures laid out by thinkers on both sides of the “continental” and “analytic” divide. While the “continental” title is now more accurately being attributed to a certain era of philosophy in the European western tradition and “analytic” denotes a wider field of inquiry in philosophy, the two emerged as contemporaries and spoke to each other as such. As peers often do with each other they argued as to the rational high ground of their own perspective and explicative ineptitude of the other. Dawkins scathingly criticizes Deleuze as a pseudo-intellectual who masks academic ineffectualness in overly dense yet content lacking language. Bergson and even the likes of Delueze often criticize the empiricism rich analytic tradition as lacking the insight to capture the ineffable truths of existence.

 

Yet, both display some of and pull from the same overarching concepts about truth, language, its relationship to our experiences and how we make choices based on the knowledge we gain through such. Rather, in their own ways, they all agree on the same points. I want to show that through a close comparison of the specific passages in the text which I think provide the means to a “radical translation,” a la Davidson and Quine, of one into the others.

[the.crooked]

here are the qoutes from Quine that I often put up on in some sort of paraphrased form.

 

 

The unit of empirical significance is the whole of science”

 

-W.V Quine on the mistake of Russel et all in considering language to the atomistic level of term to term readings. The perspectives put forth here lead to a monistic conception of epistemology similar to the metaphysical monism of Deleuze.

 

 

 

 

“The totality of our so-called knowledge or beliefs, from the most casual matters of geography and history to the profoundest laws of atomic physics of even of pure mathematics and logic, is a man-made fabric which impinges on experience only along the edges.”

 

-W.V. Quine on the epistemological state of humanity. To repudiate the difference between analytic and synthetic statements and to accept the limits of reduction of experience to language leaves one with this prima facie empty and nihilistic perspective. However, there is hope.

 

 

 

 

“Or, to change the figure, total science is like a field of force whose boundary conditions are experience. A conflict with experience at the periphery occasions readjustments in the interior of the field. Truth values have to be redistributed over some of our statements. Re-evaluation of some statements entails re-evaluation fo others, because of their logical interconnections – the logical laws being in turn simply certain further statements of the system, certain further elements of the field. Having re-evaluated one statement we must re-evaluate some others, whether they be statements logically connected with the first or whether they be the statements of logical connections themselves. But the total field is so underdetermined by its boundary conditions, experience, that there is much latitude of choice as to what statements to re-evaluate in the light of any single contrary experience. No particular experiences are linked with any particular statements in the interior of the field, except indirectly through considerations of equilibrium affecting the field as a whole”

 

-W.V. Quine on changing the previous imagery in the last quote. This image shows the larger implications of how language and experience interact to change the events of our experience into the truth valued statements which comprise our language/knowledge (memory). Imagining the implications this metaphor brings to moral issues bearing on right and wrong are immediately relevant. The constant testing of true statements against our immediate and perpetual experience is like that of Deleuze’s focus on Nietzche’s eternal return. We are presented with experiences/choices whose causal results present us with a basis to test this field of linguistic knowledge. This is an eternal process (time as a function of divisible space and time. The dualism of the infinite and the infinitely divisible expressed in the common tongue of finite physical boundaries.)

[Harpo Marx]

Everything has been done before. History and the future, are the same.

 

Who is the master? You are. Everyone here has a different perception, but at the same time we are all the same.

 

DMT is the drug I want to try, even though we trip on it when we sleep!!!

 

 

Drugs won't answer anything for you.

[the.crooked]

yeah, ill be happy when he stops mucking up my threads.

[Module X]

“The totality of our so-called knowledge or beliefs, from the most casual matters of geography and history to the profoundest laws of atomic physics of even of pure mathematics and logic, is a man-made fabric which impinges on experience only along the edges.”

 

 

I think the more obvious analogy here would be a map. Knowledge creates a useful reference construct for us to navigate various obstacles as they present themselves. When we're talking specifically about knowledge expressed as language, I think Plato had it backwards: you're looking at a map of a map. That is, while our sensory perceptions necessarily simplify astronomically complex amounts of input into practically manageable and useful sights, sounds, etc., lingual expression takes this another step to the abstract and creates broader artificial tapestries. That said...

 

 

 

Bump for a new page. Want to hear more thoughts on this:

 

Here, yet again, is a beginning of something I am writing for school. This paper is supposed to be a reflection on multicultural perspectives within my field of inquiry. I am choosing to make a comparison of form (syntax) to meaning (semantics) in philosophical texts. Specifically, I will deal with ideas of linguistic economy (less is more, elocutionary brevity, etc), complexity vs. simplism, and a comparison of eastern to western texts. On the western side I will critique the argument that metaphysical writings lack intellectual validity due to their seemingly impenetrable texts. For eastern comparison I am going to look at the dialectic presentation in the Tao Te Ching and the experience of paradox in Buddhist Koans. Ultimately I will use my presentation of eastern texts as expressive of a specific connection between semantics in syntax in that each writing is tailored such that to understand the syntax of the writing is to appreciate its message. Seemingly obvious but it does a lot to refute the notion that writing need be lucid to be effective philosophy. Rather I want to use the notion of syntax leading the reader to a state of implicit right knowing as a justification of overtly complex writings in the western cannon. For when a person reads a Koan they are introduced to examine a hard question in which the answer may not particularly be expressable in words, but that upon reaching an answer the reader has been "shocked" or "jarred" into a state of experiential understanding. This compared to the dialective of the Tao Te Ching is similar in that the oppositionary form of this text accomplishes the same task by presenting the reader with paradox after paradox in an attempt to characterize "the way." All of this will be mediated through a discussion of Richard Dawkins and other contemporary analytic writers against European metaphysical writings such as Giles Deleuze and Charles Guattari.

 

This is definitely an interesting topic, but to me it begs the consideration of non-lingual expression. I would argue that Art, gestures, music, even elaborate traditions that can include aspects of many different things, including language, can express philosophically profound concepts with equal and often more success than words. This idea is more Eastern, I guess, in that it implies that you don't necessarily need to "think" (in the Western, dialectical sense), to gain understanding. As far as the goal of your paper though, it looks solid.

 

His ultimate conclusion is that the form of language can not be removed from our semantics. For to try and understand a word based on definition alone, only leads to circular notions of linguistic description. Through a reduction of analysticity (logical truths) to nothing more than a muddled wanton belief in linguistic slight of hand Quine showed that we must regard full sentences as having meaning, and that such statements are appreciated as checked against experience which feeds their meaning. To quote; “The total of our knowledge is like a field of force where the boundary conditions are that of experience.”

 

I'm not sure if I disagree with this or just dislike the analogy Quine gives. I need to think about it more.

 

One of the contemporary cannons for clear lucid writing is the belief in an economy of words per concept to be conveyed. Brevity, being concise and an appeal to the mantra of “less is more” seems to have dominated western writing all the way from journalism into analytic philosophy. But is such an appeal warranted as the best possible way to convey a concept? It is an assumption on the part of many that the best way for a reader to experience a semantic truth (or right knowing) is through the least amount of words possible. However, I question whether or not this elocutionary economy is falsely given precedence over a need for unique syntactic structure per a given concept.

 

What about literature? Fiction is obviously not to be excluded in any discussion of philosophy in writing, and in some ways it is immune to considerations of brevity. Perhaps you could even take the idea further and argue that a formal, complex philosophical argument could be accomplished equivalently through an allegorical piece of fiction.

 

 

 

An idea regarding our good friend Plato occured to me as I was scratching the surface of this thread. As I hinted at earlier I think he had the whole theory of forms backwards. It's absurd to think of, for example, "chairness" as being a more profound concept than the specific chair you're sitting in now. It's merely a matter of practical communication to call something you sit on a "chair." The most philosophically meaningful way, I think, to look at a chair is through the eyes of an infant. The chair is a thing you can map out: touch, see, sometimes hear, smell, taste. It is like other things you have seen in some ways, and unlike many more in many more ways. Ultimately, it's meaning is veiled in mystery. I guess what I mean to say is that pretty much any philosophy of certainty is very narrow-minded. Not sure if that's even relevant anymore. Ramble on...

 

I'll try to go through some of the other writings you posted.

[Cracked Ass]

I only managed to get through your first post about mathematics, time, consciousness, etc. I don't have time to be thorough tonight but I'll try to come back.

In the meantime, despite your hatred for the pettiness of grammar, PLEASE try to remember that a CANNON goes boom and shoots balls, and a CANON is an entire body of literature. Every time you misspell it as 'cannon' I get a vivid mental image you did not intend. (The grammar thing is big for me, especially if you're writing a formal paper. It just reduces your credibility: how can this guy be on point playing with big and complex ideas if he's not on point with the building blocks of communication: language?)

But enough of that quibble.

It's funny, just a few months ago I was thinking about time and math and I hit on that same concept and wrote it down: "Time exists only for the purpose of change." With that thought came a bunch of related ideas; the short version is that we're on the same page with your first few assertions.

I think the point at which your structure crumbles - or at least cannot be proven solid - is in the vicinity and definitions of infinity and/or zero (including void and nullity). I stand solidly against Kurt Godel's assertion that there exists a mathematics independent of humans (and/or any observer whatsoever). I believe humans cannot extricate themselves from their creation of mathematics, and that the extremes of numbers (infinity and zero) are simply not properly defined in a way that helps us understand the universe.

Infinity cannot be reached. Therefore I find it suspect as a concept. A practical definition of infinity is "higher than we will ever need to count in a given context". If 'infinity minus one' is a nonsensical concept, then so is infinity.

I don't even trust measurements of large distances. Humans have never measured anything FROM any point outside our solar system, which is so small on a cosmological scale it might as well be a singularity. Yet we're confident that all these measurements we've taken from close by tell us how a 13-billion-year-old universe began? Hubris.

I'm falling asleep here so I'll have to explain later. But my feeling is that mathematics as we understand it today is no better than a model, an approximation of what's really going on, tailored to the HUMAN scale. (Don't even get me started on the 'Planck length'.)

Good thread, I'll be back.

[the.crooked]

Man after my own heart.

 

 

Well said, and word on the canon bizness.

 

 

yeah. your absolutely right, i dont care about grammar.

 

 

thats only because i came to writing from physics and then i read all that quine shit and was like, well, it all has to do with translation anywyas, so i might as well make people work for it.

 

 

arrogant sure, dickheaded, yes. fun... always. at least i enjoy writing my papers.

 

I also like the fact that you took the time to find the underlying concepts rather than get stuck on grammar though. That in itself shows my writing did what I wanted it to. I just want to go back and forth, I have little concern for the issues of "correct" structure. As I think/talk is how I type, for it is those thoughts that feed my beliefs.

 

i talk to so many of my friends from state schools and they hate writing. fuck dealing with stupid bullshit rules to write.

 

 

just a personal preference though.

[the.crooked]

also, cracked ass and chalmers, i will be posting some new stuff this next week or so

 

 

i have to finish a paper defending 20th century french metaphysics against analytic philosophy through textual analysis of buddhist koans.

[WORDISM45]

i'm writing an essay for critical thinking on the appeals to ignorance of conspiracy theories, i owe casek and his ilk so much for all the sweet examples they have given me

[Cracked Ass]

Attempts to refute infinity...

I said before that a practical definition of infinity is 'higher than we ever need to count in a given context'. But with our current definition of infinity we strive to make it more, and in fact we have to admit that it is unattainable. Given that infinity dwarfs any fixed number we can name - a million, a googol, a million googols - it makes itself obsolete as a concept. Just from a strictly practical standpoint, what is the highest any human has ever needed to count? Remember, numbers count stuff (or, people count stuff by assigning numbers). There's only two things to count: objects (loosely speaking) and units. What's the greatest number of objects ever contemplated? Number of quarks in the universe? Number of possible chess games? These may be in the googols, but they are finite. What's the greatest number of units ever contemplated? Number of Planck lengths encompassing the universe, cubed to simulate its total volume? A big number to be sure, but it loses to infinity. You can always add one to any of the numbers generated by my examples.

Or can you?

That's my argument: you can't, unless you can show me the thing you are adding. Numbers count stuff. If you run out of stuff, then you can't count higher than that. The highest anyone's ever counted is the largest number we can count to. We have no business adding one if there isn't one more tangible thing to add.

Now this sounds crazy, and debunkers will come at this assertion by splitting objects or units. If they reexamine the Planck length and decide that it can be halved, that doubles the previous high number of units. The trouble is that when you play this game, each tactic you use to jack up the highest number we've ever counted to forces you further away from anything meaningful.

Example of object-based meaninglessness: a googol of apples. In the history of Earth there has not been a googol of apples - not even close. Maybe there have been billions of pecks of apples - but not trillions, and certainly not a googol. So to speak of more apples than there have ever been is to talk nonsense. OK, you want to project how many apples the earth will ever produce. It's a larger number with the potential to be realized. It's still not a googol - the sun will supernova and fry the earth and all its apple trees before that many apples could ever be grown. But still, say you project a couple quadrillion apples. It's still nowhere near a googol. To speak of a googol of apples is absolute nonsense. To speak of a million googols of apples is to abandon any relationship between a rational mind and the use of numbers. And we're still nowhere near an "infinite" number of apples. Infinity is irrational.

I was going to give a parallel example of unit-based meaninglessness, but 1) I think I've made my point and 2) I already have mentioned the idea of splitting the Planck length, which is already defined at least in part as the smallest unit of distance that could possibly matter whatsoever. If you split that in half, and then in half again, you are again crawling toward infinity and away from rational thought. And you'll never get to infinity, but it won't take long to get to irrational.

[WORDISM45]

Attempts to refute infinity...

I said before that a practical definition of infinity is 'higher than we ever need to count in a given context'. But with our current definition of infinity we strive to make it more, and in fact we have to admit that it is unattainable. Given that infinity dwarfs any fixed number we can name - a million, a googol, a million googols - it makes itself obsolete as a concept. Just from a strictly practical standpoint, what is the highest any human has ever needed to count? Remember, numbers count stuff (or, people count stuff by assigning numbers). There's only two things to count: objects (loosely speaking) and units. What's the greatest number of objects ever contemplated? Number of quarks in the universe? Number of possible chess games? These may be in the googols, but they are finite. What's the greatest number of units ever contemplated? Number of Planck lengths encompassing the universe, cubed to simulate its total volume? A big number to be sure, but it loses to infinity. You can always add one to any of the numbers generated by my examples.

Or can you?

That's my argument: you can't, unless you can show me the thing you are adding. Numbers count stuff. If you run out of stuff, then you can't count higher than that. The highest anyone's ever counted is the largest number we can count to. We have no business adding one if there isn't one more tangible thing to add.

Now this sounds crazy, and debunkers will come at this assertion by splitting objects or units. If they reexamine the Planck length and decide that it can be halved, that doubles the previous high number of units. The trouble is that when you play this game, each tactic you use to jack up the highest number we've ever counted to forces you further away from anything meaningful.

Example of object-based meaninglessness: a googol of apples. In the history of Earth there has not been a googol of apples - not even close. Maybe there have been billions of pecks of apples - but not trillions, and certainly not a googol. So to speak of more apples than there have ever been is to talk nonsense. OK, you want to project how many apples the earth will ever produce. It's a larger number with the potential to be realized. It's still not a googol - the sun will supernova and fry the earth and all its apple trees before that many apples could ever be grown. But still, say you project a couple quadrillion apples. It's still nowhere near a googol. To speak of a googol of apples is absolute nonsense. To speak of a million googols of apples is to abandon any relationship between a rational mind and the use of numbers. And we're still nowhere near an "infinite" number of apples. Infinity is irrational.

I was going to give a parallel example of unit-based meaninglessness, but 1) I think I've made my point and 2) I already have mentioned the idea of splitting the Planck length, which is already defined at least in part as the smallest unit of distance that could possibly matter whatsoever. If you split that in half, and then in half again, you are again crawling toward infinity and away from rational thought. And you'll never get to infinity, but it won't take long to get to irrational.

 

 

 

Don't like this argument at all. Human beings are blessed with having the ability to think in the abstract and hypothetical, also being able to think of the future. Even accepting the premise of your argument, which i don't believe to be true but don't intend to get in to, that a number can only exist if it is counting something, humans have the ability to speculate on events that have not and may not ever be, and to do so they may need higher numbers than are applicable to objects at the present time. Going on from your mass of the universe example, perhaps one would like to speculate what the mass of the expanding universe will be in any number of years from now ( a number presumably greater than any that is in existence at the current moment)

[the.crooked]

Attempts to refute infinity...

I said before that a practical definition of infinity is 'higher than we ever need to count in a given context'. But with our current definition of infinity we strive to make it more, and in fact we have to admit that it is unattainable. Given that infinity dwarfs any fixed number we can name - a million, a googol, a million googols - it makes itself obsolete as a concept. Just from a strictly practical standpoint, what is the highest any human has ever needed to count? Remember, numbers count stuff (or, people count stuff by assigning numbers). There's only two things to count: objects (loosely speaking) and units. What's the greatest number of objects ever contemplated? Number of quarks in the universe? Number of possible chess games? These may be in the googols, but they are finite. What's the greatest number of units ever contemplated? Number of Planck lengths encompassing the universe, cubed to simulate its total volume? A big number to be sure, but it loses to infinity. You can always add one to any of the numbers generated by my examples.

Or can you?

That's my argument: you can't, unless you can show me the thing you are adding. Numbers count stuff. If you run out of stuff, then you can't count higher than that. The highest anyone's ever counted is the largest number we can count to. We have no business adding one if there isn't one more tangible thing to add.

 

Transitive and intransitive counting:

 

"There are two kinds of counting, corresponding to transitive and intrasitive uses of the verb "to count." In one, "counting" admits of a direct object, as in "counting the marbles": in the other it does not...."

 

- Paul Benacerraf "What numbers could not be"

 

 

Mathematics is an abstract structure we impose on the external world. Countin, is a recursive measure which allows us to add concepts onto eachother in a strictly defined relationship between the symbols for the concepts.

 

The infinite has to be given, and while I appreciate the pragmatism in your thoughts, I think there is still a place for the infinite as an ideal. You say there is a loss of reality when we start thinkin about the infinite and ridiculously astronomical numbers, but it is just all relational. Think of the term "astronomical number" itself. I imagine the term was coined when the numbers seemed so big that they were on the scale of the heavens, however, those powers are not that significant anymore. When you have economic systems exploring how far we can turn money into purely an abstract form of mathematic processing (destruction of paper money, reliance on credit, etc), or when we have trade deficits in the trillions, or kabillijillion of anything, you will end up deal with the infinite. The value of any given number in relation to the infinite is always fixed. You are right about that. One is immediately apparent, but the other is an ideal that we can believe in as the ultimate expression of the finishing of time (to count to the infinite).

 

 

At any rate, I think the infinite is important, and most certainly real.

[Cracked Ass]

Don't like this argument at all. Human beings are blessed with having the ability to think in the abstract and hypothetical, also being able to think of the future. Even accepting the premise of your argument, which i don't believe to be true but don't intend to get in to, that a number can only exist if it is counting something, humans have the ability to speculate on events that have not and may not ever be, and to do so they may need higher numbers than are applicable to objects at the present time. Going on from your mass of the universe example, perhaps one would like to speculate what the mass of the expanding universe will be in any number of years from now ( a number presumably greater than any that is in existence at the current moment)

 

You took me a bit too literally, but my lack of clarity may be at fault. Go ahead and speculate on the mass of a much-expanded universe, I'll buy whatever large number you come up with. My point is twofold: one, that people never bother to examine how much mental real estate they annex when they play with large hypothetical numbers; and two, no hypothetical number you come up with (which does not count something tangible) begins to approach infinity. I say infinity is irrational because it has no utility whatsoever.

The invention of the concept of infinity reminds me a great deal of the invention of God: a human need to immediately jump to the ultimate, the extreme, the bestest and mostest. Like a greedy computer user who wants more memory to store photos, who needs only a couple extra gigs but claims billions of terabytes he won't use in a thousand lifetimes. There is a pattern here in human behavior to get quite a bit ahead of ourselves.

I think I'm still not being clear. The points I really want to make are several levels beyond my basic assertions, which are less of an actual argument than they are a zen-like tool to disengage from entrenched patterns of thinking. If I can't articulate my basics properly, then I haven't readied you for the next level, which is my fault. I'll try again by addressing crooked's last post.

[rubbish heap two]

I just finished Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, brilliant book. There needs to be more discussion of Eastern philosophy on here.

[the.crooked]

i bring it in quite a bit i think. i try to always look at correlates to taoism and buddhist thought.

 

 

i prefer not to hit on pop philosophy books though.

[russell jones]

also, cracked ass and chalmers, i will be posting some new stuff this next week or so

 

 

i have to finish a paper defending 20th century french metaphysics against analytic philosophy through textual analysis of buddhist koans.

 

 

I'm intrigued by your phrase "textual analysis of buddhist koans." Other than defending 20th century French metaphysics, what do you hope to accomplish? Is a textual analysis possible? Perhaps you are creating the concept of a koan inside one by hacking at method of solutions rather than the solutions themselves.

[the.crooked]

I have to write the paper tonight. at least the outline, so ill post that up when i am done. that can answer the question better than i can at the moment.

[rubbish heap two]

i bring it in quite a bit i think. i try to always look at correlates to taoism and buddhist thought.

 

 

i prefer not to hit on pop philosophy books though.

 

well, i just finished the tao te ching as well and plan on reading the bhagavad gita tomorrow maybe...

[the.crooked]

nice. i read the bhagavad gita my first year. i need to go back through it again.

[Cracked Ass]

Re: infinity

 

"There are two kinds of counting, corresponding to transitive and intrasitive uses of the verb "to count." In one, "counting" admits of a direct object, as in "counting the marbles": in the other it does not...."

 

- Paul Benacerraf "What numbers could not be"

 

So explain the use, any use, for intransitive counting. If the number you reach in intransitive counting does not represent anything tangible, then you have not imposed abstract structure on the world (your words, below).

 

Mathematics is an abstract structure we impose on the external world.

 

I'm fine with defining what you are counting as something theoretical, e.g. the volume of an expanded universe at some future point. That can be your direct object for transitive counting. But intransitive counting has no meaning whatsoever. If you can't name what you're counting, you aren't even counting, just naming off different numbers with no meaning.

 

The infinite has to be given

 

Prove it. What for? All I'll agree to is that if we need to count higher, there's space available in the artificial structure of mathematics that we invented. But that is still no reason to invoke a nonsensical concept like infinity.

 

The value of any given number in relation to the infinite is always fixed. You are right about that. One is immediately apparent, but the other is an ideal that we can believe in as the ultimate expression of the finishing of time (to count to the infinite).

 

This is a mushmouthed statement, meaningless. Be careful saying "an ideal we can believe in" - you do not speak for me. I don't believe in ideals. I believe in what matters. Infinity does not matter, it means nothing to me.

 

Essentially, I am putting forth pragmatism as a guiding principle for APPLIED math. If you don't need to count that high, don't.

Here's why: the extremes of size we have perceived in the universe are sufficient to warp human mathematics. You said that mathematics is an abstract structure we impose on the external world, and I agree. But it is a human invention, and though it works great at the human scale as well as some larger and smaller scales, I don't think we have any business "imposing" that structure on sizes and scales beyond our comprehension. This includes the far reaches of a universe supposedly thirteen billion years old, and therefore thirteen billion light years "across" (even though "across" isn't quite the right term); and at the scale of subatomic particles and smaller, where it becomes difficult to measure anything at all in a way that means something to humans. There is no escaping the humanocentricity of mathematics. I said earlier I don't trust measurements of extremely large distances, and here's why: we haven't been anywhere else in the universe. We've measured everything from this planet, or from spacecraft that haven't gone far. This is a piss-poor application of the scientific method. Until we've sent human observers at least 1000 light years in three different directions (forming a tetrahedron with an earthbound observer as the fourth point) and measured the distances and directions to see that they check out from other vantage points (the technique in this case would be called quadrangulation), I'm not confident that the Big Bang or Hubble Law are valid. Nor the estimates of the age or size of the universe. The ways in which scientists have reached these measurements are in many ways clever and praiseworthy, but they haven't been checked out with mundane grunt work. I don't see enough evidence. It will take us many thousands of years just to do my simple quadrangulation experiment - during which we are likely to have seriously refined our now primitive view of the universe with many other experiments I haven't thought of. (Look at this proposition from the 'bet against' standpoint: what is the likelihood that there will be NO startling discoveries about spacetime/the universe/existence/dark energy in the time that it takes us to accomplish significant interstellar travel? What is the likelihood that there will be NO big surprises about our understanding of the universe during the first thousand years of human interstellar travel?)

"Infinity" is not an applied math term. It is a leap into quasi-spiritual, intangible concepts requiring 'belief' but not observation. That's a place I don't go.

[the.crooked]

Hey, sorry I never responded Cracked. I will get back to you in the near future.

 

 

I have been swamped with work for school. I finally nailed down exactly what I am doing for my senior thesis. I am gonna post up what I have.

 

I have to put it in the form of a contractual proposal to my academic committee, so that is how it is written.

 

 

 

Here it is for anyone interested.

 

 

For my Division III project, I would like to complete a comparison of themes in 20th Century Analytic Philosophy and 20th century Continental Philosophy. This comparison would yield a more whole and complete perspective of the philosophical mind in western philosophy of the last century.

 

Specifically I want to show that the works of W.V. Quine and Donald Davidson end up being quite parallel in their philosophical conclusions to the works of Henri Bergson and Gilles Deleuze. I also feel like there is a middle ground between these two camps in the writings of Ludwig Wittgenstein.

 

I have made a tentative listing of the texts I would like to explore from each author. I am sure I will need to limit to a greater degree or specify further which parts of each text, but

 

Quine: “Two Dogmas of Empiricism”

“Ontological Relativity”

“On what there is”

 

Davidson: “On the very idea of a conceptual scheme”

“Mental Events”

“Radical Interpretation”

 

Bergson: Matter and Memory

Duration and Simultaneity

Time and Free will

 

Deleuze: Difference and Repetition

Logic of Sense

 

Wittgenstein: Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

Philosophical Investigations

 

The way I would like to approach my analyses is in two parts; (1) as a focus on the metaphysically non-dualist nature of each thinker. And (2) how this perspective of each author leads to a belief in life as a continual process repeating in roughly the same manner throughout. I would like to have the voice of Wittgenstein act as a revolving commentary to each philosopher and not necessarily place his thoughts rigidly in the format. I feel this will give an ease of transition from analytic to continental and back again should I so structure it that way.

 

The first section would be a comparison of Quine’s belief that the “total science is like a field of force whose boundary conditions are that of experience” (Two Dogmas), Davidson’s “Anomalous Monism,” Deleuze’s “Univocity,” and Bergson’s “Duration.” This would provide an overall analysis of each author’s main perspective and thus provide a basis for further comparison. Upon concluding this I hope it will bring me to a point where it is necessary to discuss the temporal implications of each theory. At which point I will switch to the second portion of the analyses.

 

In this half, I would examine the necessary conclusions of Quine based off of his “Two Dogmas of Empricism” and look at his text “Ontological Relativity.” I feel like his views on how theories transfer into one another can be looked at from the lens of personal theories and views and not in a canonical sense. In which case the changes he would be discussing would be at a personal level and thus more pertinent to the other author’s discussions of time at the personal experiential level. From here I can look at responses made by Davidson in his text “On the Very Idea of Conceptual Scheme” and “Mental Events.” From Davidson’s conclusions it should be easy to transfer into the ideas of Deleuze and Bergson. As Deleuze and Bergson are considered process philosophers it should not be hard to map the temporal interactions described by Davidson and Quine onto their own ontologies. The last section would be an attempt to do just that.

 

Ultimately I would like to show these connections because I believe that all these perspectives should be taken as a whole within the field of Philosophy. Just as quine feels science acts as a web of statements interacting with experience to determine their truth values, can not this same image be applied to the whole of any field of inquiry? With this in mind, should we not seek to align different philosophical views and understand how they position themselves against each other? I think that this is an important task. To be isolated to a given perspective in an entire field is insular in nature. The conclusions of the philosophers I intend to focus on seem to suggest an appreciation of pragmatism in how we look at scientific pursuit. So let us do the same with philosophy. But finding what is useful in each theory can only be done if we see what is similar and different between them.

[the.crooked]

cmooon where are my philosophy folk?

[the.crooked]

Well, I suppose I should try and update this as maybe people will come in here again.

 

 

I have gotten further on my project.

 

I now present my thesis and a somewhat considered introduction as such:

 

 

In an attempt to find some of the more meaningful concepts from the last 100 years of both Analytic and European philosophy and to conduct a method of research based on conclusions of the texts I plan to examine: I propose the notion that language is a process which can be explained by means of denotation and connotation; and that this process has a temporal characteristic to it in which we find connotation related to the future/present and action and denotation in connexion with the past and memory. This association of meaning and the process of language to time and experience is necessary when meditated upon, but for the point of methodology it serves as a bridge to align the ontological discussions of 20th Century Analytic Philosophy and 20th Century French European Philosophy.

 

For Analytic Philosophy Meaning is the ontological focus of their exposition on epistemology and metaphysics. I take epistemology to be the language and structure there in implied of any given era of thought, or in a word, Knowledge. Metaphysics, in this case is the semantic component to language. Rather it is what epistemology actually says. Ontology, can be said to be the specific phrasing of any given era of thought's constructive process of epistemology and metaphysics (the vernacular, if you will).

 

Basically, Analytic philosophy is concerned with the relationship of language to existence/experience. Where does language become attached to our conscious experience of existence? In logic's early 20th century incarnations, it was an explicit system of sign, sense and reference. This was advocated by Gottlieb Frege and Bertrand Russel as they searched for a Logical and thus Rational foundation for mathematics. What was considered the a priori truths of Descarte (e.g. a triangle and the knowledge of such a form and truths inherit to it) needed to be validated. The skepticism of Hume was reconciled by Kant and his transcendental argument, but this was not enough for people like Frege and Russel. Eventually the notion was extended in the form of an entire logic built around the idea of a Number as a collection of elements which express the relationship so defined by the rule of inclusion in the set at all. Thus the number mark (3) refers to the set of all things which express "threehood." Whatever, that may be found to be. Concepts such as numbers are then objects with a name attached. This perspective of meaning relied upon the law of the excluded middle. This law is a foundation of modern logic in that it denies a middle ground between a concept and its negation (e.g. There is a concept "P" or there is its negation "~P." There is no in between. It is merely a possible state of affairs that p or not p exist but if p than certainly ~(~p). I don't know if that made sense, but essentially that is an explanation of the constructing the four basic truth functions of double negation in modern propositional logic). This is the structure of denotative meaning (where denotative meaning can be understood as the set of meanings in which a name actually corresponds to an existant referent. One might immediately think of proper names as a classic example of such. In the case previously mentioned one might say that the notation (3) stands as the proper name of the concept object that is the set of all things which express "threehood," etc.). It could be said that this, "denotative meaning" was the first ontological perspective/conclusion of Analytic philosophy. It reached a period of refinement after Frege and Russel when a young philosopher named Ludwig Wittgenstein took up the task of fixing what he saw as issues within in otherwise sound ontology. His first publication, "Tractatus Philosophico-Logicus," is just what it the name implies, an examination of epistemology and metaphysics through the denotative logic of Frege and Russel. His attacks on certain perspectives held by Frege and Russel were seen as refinements of logical notation and thus still in the initial ontology of denotation as primary to meaning. Wittgenstein, however, is quick to make a distinction between what is actually the world, and what we say, is the world. For when we make comments in philosophy, or comments in language at all, we are making statements which are to express a fact about a state of affairs. One might see this as a world where things happen and one in which there is why they happened. What Wittgenstein set out to do, is find out where those to worlds touch. Essentially he was trying to determine the fixing points of the denotative form.

 

If we interpret a name and its relation to an object in such a fashion (a=b) than we have understood denotative meaning as the classical identity statement. If we take a to be the world of happenings, and b to be the world of propositions/names, then we have some sense of what Wittgenstein was trying to do. In his consideration of deductive logic, he concludes many interesting points. One of particular importance is that in a purely logical notation when one tautology is understood, all others are given. Rather, to understand the law of the excluded middle is to understand all possible statements within logic.

 

This presents an interesting question for Wittgenstein: What, is it then, that tautologies are saying, if all they represent is not what has happened, but what could happen? Let us remember why this is so. We noted earlier that the law of the excluded middle (Which could be expressed through the statement (P v. ~P) where v is read as "or.") rather expresses a potential of come what may. "It is either raining or it is not raining," "It ain't over till its over" are all expressions of the excluded middle, but they are in fact nonsense. If anything they are delineating a grammatical rule: "In this language the concept which is denoted by "raining" is either going to have the characteristic of being the case or not being the case as expressed by the phrases "raining" and "not raining." Tautologies then, are not in fact names, and do not fit into the denotational mold with which Analytic philosophy still worked within. So what does the law of the excluded middle (keep in mind this is supposed to be the foundation of logic, Analytic Philosophy and denotational meaning in general) give us if not something which is based around the mode of Denotational meaning so sought after? Wittgenstein concludes, quite calmly, that philosophy and formal inquiry into meaning yeilds nothing, so far as being true in correspondence to "reality." At the end of the Tractatus, Wittgenstein is still convinced that denotation, or extensional meaning, is the correct way of language associating to reality (and thus experience), but did not adequately discern what can act as these "names" which are in fact directly associated to "objects" in reality.

 

For a while Wittgenstein followed his own advice and left the practice of philosophy, but eventually returned when adequate skepticism of some of his conclusions became apparent to himself and others with whom he held correspondence. After a sixteen year period of reflection, he produces his next text after the Tractatus, Philosophical Investigations. Rather than being concerned with the initial denotational program and the logicist project along with it, he focuses more on everyday language and where meaning lies in it. Perhaps, it was not the explication of logic that was the issue in the Tractatus, because it seems just as well to believe in the pragmatic values of formal logic, even if it doesn't fully reflect the functioning of everyday conversation. For could it not have been the ontology of denotation? What if meaning was to be found in some other aspect of language. In Investigations, Wittgenstein explores his past mistakes in the Tractatus into discussions of language as a behaviorist game; where the point is to find meaning in the rule which specifies how terms are structured in the series of a sentence. He is advancing something wholly different than denotational meaning now. Rather, it is not a specific knowledge of an object to which a name refers that is the composition of meaning, but knowing how to use a word which brings about its meaning. The potential for understanding how words could be placed next to each other and it have a recognizable meaning. This, is what is known as connotative meaning (When a person holds a connotative understanding of something, it is to know all possible applications of the term, not only those which are already existent, as is the case with denotational meaning and the example of Proper names). Language then, becomes a game of rule adoption and semantic appreciation. For when I can understand what compelled someone to structure their sentence in this or that way, I understand what they meant by that sentence. Only when I do not grasp the rules of construction/usage does confusion occur. If someone says something to me which I do not understand, I say "I don't get it" to which they respond "...", to which I say "Ahh, now I understand." It is not so much that there was something so profound in the response given to my query that allowed me access to the meaning in both statements, but that I was given enough of their language to access the rule by which those statements made sense to them. Thus I believe to understand the meaning of their utterance and conclude the game in the affirmation "Ahh, now I understand."

 

There is a familiar feeling here though. Who is to say the rule I choose to interpret from a given series, or sentence is actually something shared between myself and my interlocutor? Any series can be conformed to this or that rule. Rather, this or that rule is conformable to any series. So how then, do we actually make language work? The arbitrary nature by which it seems we assign rules to different series of notations/terms and then seek to confirm or deny the actual relevance of the rule we hold poses an unsettling quality; It undermines even the notion of knowing the rules of our own speech as we speak it. Initially it seemed that when I make this or that series of notations (be they auditory or visual) I am pulling from my understanding of a terms connotation and then applying the general rule between possible cases of use and placing it in its correct usage in this or that case. However, there is one striking issue with this, at the moment of actually putting out those series of notations, we are not aware of the rule we are applying. Only upon being questioned as to the rule we usedcould we answer. And in doing so we have denoted a meaning. We have chosen, out of all the possible rules which could make sense of this or that series of notation, one to affix a correct usage of the term. We have yet to escape the (a=b) form. We have merely masked it in a choice.

 

I will end this post on this question: If we have seen a progression from denotative meaning, to connotative meaning, only to recognize we are still applying a denotative method when we believe in the connotative ontology; Is there a way to solve this paradox?

 

It is late and I will come back to discuss further how my thesis does just that. The next time I post I will continue this examination of Meaning in the ontologies of denotation and connotation such that I will seek to posture the solution to this paradox as seeing the two forms of meaning not as static frameworks within which language operates, but a two fold process which creates language and is in fact the process of language at all. By virtue of it being a process that necessitates change (in this ontology the change comes in the form of rule adoption and revision) I will seek to align it with a temporal characteristic (time). What may also be said to have been left out of the previous discussion which now bears impact is the notion of will, or intent in these language games. Obviously, when I say something, I do it with reason. I do it with some intent of a meaning being conveyed. What that meaning is, even I may not be rightfully privy to (as we saw in the earlier example of my own speech and my conscious perception of the rules governing my speech as it occurs), but it was still done as a "choice" of mine. Let us consider, if only in a cursory fashion at this point, how will, or action, may be brought into this discussion. Perhaps it is through the temporal aspect of connotation and denotation that we may gain an insight into the relationship of intension and will as action to the ontology of meaning.

 

 

Ok kids, stew on that shit and I may come back in the next couple of days to continue.

 

 

This is gonna be an important process for me this year. Coming here to talk random shit. But I will always try to do it in the vein of the last thing I was talking about. Rather, if I am giving this level of explication into the current project that I am working in, I will continue on this level of explication until I finish it to my satisfaction. At which point, perhaps I will venture into my other more recent fascinations. But for now I will stick with the matter at hand.

 

 

I hope folks from the abstract thread in untitled come here.

 

Would be ballin to get some new insight.

[Poesia [ ] T]

Im soaking it in i havent read in awhile, and my brain has to get kick started. But let me read again. Nice writing though, it is harder to understand than i thought it would be. But it is appreciated.