91–100 of 241 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Influential, yes. Plato was an elitist to the extreme, and his notions of a rigid class hierarchy did shape early feudal civilization in Europe. But most important? Would you want to live in his Republic?
Even more important, was Socrate's Republic meant to be taken seriously?
Isn't an essay based on the assumption we don't exist doomed from the beggining? We are not cells and molecules. We are souls. Strange that an essay that talks about philosophy doesn't have even once the word soul. Ancient Greek philosopher Aristotel seperates animals from humans as beings that have soul and the ability to think. His work "Physics" tried to capture concepts people ignore even these days, and tried to…
If we had a powerful enough computer to simulate the physics of how each cell works or simulated the connections of neurons, do you really think it won't be able to "think" like we do? Our brains really aren't any different from a computer. A neuron either fires or it doesn't; on or off; 1 or 0.
Humans aren't special. Other animals can clearly think and react to their environment to make "decisions", but they just aren't as powerful of a computer as we are.
On that note, I assume you also believe we have free will? Well, we don't. With a certain set of stimuli, you will make the same decision/"choice" every time. If you understand what I said above, this would become apparent.
With regards to the soul, where did the soul come from? Do primates have souls? If they don't, then it had to come into existence at some point. Was there a set of parents who were soulless and had a child who magically had a soul? What about groups of people that had a long time in isolation to evolve separately, such as the indigenous peoples of Australia and the Americas? Do they have souls? How about the "hobbit" that was found in Indonesia that's 12,000 years old and is a separate branch from homo sapiens? What about neanderthals?
If a human gets a soul upon conception, and identical twins are caused by a zygote that splits, does each twin only have half a soul?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
yes, but what is "self?" what is "interested?" How does the meaning change when you put "self interested" together as a phrase? As Paul mentioned in his essay, you're already bumping into what words mean. I can tell you what an integer is, what a square root is, and what a ratio is, and as a result, I can (by looking it up in a book and typing in the text, heh heh) prove that the square root of 2 can't be expressed a…
Ok but you're jumping down the rabbit hole to quickly. Physicists assume spherical cows, early mathematicians assumed only integers, why can't Rand assume that "self" is the thoughts and actions encased in one's skin? It is a good jump off point and a lot of useful philosophies can be derived from there. Sure they eventually break down once you push the definitions hard enough, but that just means the model needs to…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ok but you're jumping down the rabbit hole to quickly. Physicists assume spherical cows, early mathematicians assumed only integers, why can't Rand assume that "self" is the thoughts and actions encased in one's skin? It is a good jump off point and a lot of useful philosophies can be derived from there. Sure they eventually break down once you push the definitions hard enough, but that just means the model needs to…
Actually, there already is stuff that's far more refined (and empirically true) than Ayn Rand. It's called evolutionary psychology. Unfortunately, understanding it leaves one feeling rather unedified. It's like realizing that you've been a pawn in somebody else's game, and will continue to be one until your life ends. With Ayn Rand fans, this kind of message doesn't seem to be in demand.
Isn't an essay based on the assumption we don't exist doomed from the beggining? We are not cells and molecules. We are souls. Strange that an essay that talks about philosophy doesn't have even once the word soul. Ancient Greek philosopher Aristotel seperates animals from humans as beings that have soul and the ability to think. His work "Physics" tried to capture concepts people ignore even these days, and tried to…
See, the problem is that you are simply wrong. I do not believe in the soul, and I cannot say for certain that it does not exist. I CAN say for certain that we are just cells and molecules. Our brains are composed of neurons, which are simply complex chemical reactions. The cell is basically a test tube, separating off the chemicals from everything else. A certain threshold of a chemical interacts with a molecule on…
So basically we are all derivatives of that process. Everybody knows that.
The point is that philosophy is not about getting a claim and considering it substantial to eliminate other probabilities.
Metaphysics is not feasible they are part of a material world. they react with it of course but it exists whether you can accept it or not.
Everyone is trying to understand what happened to all that antimatter that was created during the bing bang. For every molecule there is another anti.
And what about time? who can explain that mystical concept? in the possibility that you can go beyond it, means it may not even be valid as a concept as we know it.
In all these strange ideas, it's impossible to be satisfied that everything is only molecules.
If everything is a chemical random chain reaction how can we all have similar ideas or visions of the future? and note that Greeks never considered chemistry as different from Physics. Only recently did Chemistry claim it's independence.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
yes, but what is "self?" what is "interested?" How does the meaning change when you put "self interested" together as a phrase? As Paul mentioned in his essay, you're already bumping into what words mean. I can tell you what an integer is, what a square root is, and what a ratio is, and as a result, I can (by looking it up in a book and typing in the text, heh heh) prove that the square root of 2 can't be expressed a…
Ok but you're jumping down the rabbit hole to quickly. Physicists assume spherical cows, early mathematicians assumed only integers, why can't Rand assume that "self" is the thoughts and actions encased in one's skin? It is a good jump off point and a lot of useful philosophies can be derived from there. Sure they eventually break down once you push the definitions hard enough, but that just means the model needs to…
The refinement you're talking about here isn't so much a matter of modifying an incorrect but exact definition as it is clarifying an irrefutable but ambiguous definition.
That said, maybe something could come of this if you truly got to the very basic building blocks. For instance, an integer is just a definition - an exact one, but a definition nonetheless. So we can define a rational number as the ratio of two integers, and then build a refutable hypothesis from it - that all numbers are either integers or the ratio of integers.
I have serious doubts as to whether "self interest" could ever be defined as precisely as an integer, though.
FWIW, PG's thoughts on philosophy are largely confined to "analytic philosophy", which I agree suffers from the problems he talks about. There is a whole other tradition of sorts (sometimes referred to as "continental philosophy"), taking a different path from Kant, including Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida, Foucault, Badiou, etc. This side of philosophy tends to suffer from being extremely difficult to understa…
Sometimes we find ourselves working with schemas that clearly have elements of truth, but that for some reason don't seem to hold up well empirically. Often times this is because the schema we have in our heads is more broadly defined than the underlying phenomenon. A good example of this is the phenomenon of prodigies. We know there are some people in society who are exceptionally talented in certain areas, and we c…
PG's redefinition of philosophy is something I've been thinking/writing about a bit recently. I prefer to call it insight, and I don't think its worth trying to define by itself. Insight is the abstract thinking that gets to the heart of a real problem or class of problems, it by definition illuminates our understanding. Calling it philosophy will just cause everyone who attempts it to miss the point. Plus philosophy has a history and a workforce, all of which will completely derail any attempt to redefine the field.
Reading philosophy is still good mental exercise, and it gives you interesting ways to think about the world. Learning to call bullshit on intimidating ideas is a good thing to learn. I agree that one test of it is whether it changes the way you do things -- or at least gives you an imperative to do so that you're too weak or cowardly to heed (see Nietzche, Thoreau, Schopenhauer, Seneca). But I dunno -- the whole mat…