Is a formula used in the Talmud after an inconclusive debate.
If there are persistent philosophical bottle necks it might be that we all need to do something to resolve them.
So for example: the mind body problem.
Sometimes it seems like our job is to come up with a theory of how mental substances or qualities fit together with physical substances or qualities , as if the problem will be solved by thinking about it correctly.
But here’s another way to look at it
Maybe the task of the mind is to turn body into mind — ie to make matter free clear and transparent to human mind and will.
In that case the mind body problem will real main until that task is accomplished whereupon it will disappear.
Maybe other problems are like that eg personal identity.
Monthly Archives: July 2014
I will be signing my book “does santa exist a philosophical investigation”
At San Diego com
c on
Friday 2 pm at the penguin booth 1028
Come on by!
Philosophers as Trickster Figures
All cultures have their mythological trickster figure, Hermes in Greece, and Coyote in various Native American traditions. The trickster mixes up categories, makes fun of the powerful, gets his way by intellectual tricks, and is both sacred and annoying.
Listen to this description of Soren Kierkegaard as a schoolboy, from Garff biography:
“He was a skinny boy, always on the run, and he could never keep from giving free rein to his whimsy and from teasing others, using nicknames he had heard, or laughter, or funny faces, even though this often earned him a serious beating. I do not recall that his language was ever genuinely witty or cutting, but it was annoying and provocative, and he was aware that it had this effect even though he was often the one who had to pay for it. These outburst of his passion for teasing seemed to be absolutely unconnected with the rest of his otherwise silent and unspeaking existence among us, with the withdrawn and introverted character he displayed most of the time. During these outburst his most remarkable talent was the ability to make his target appear ridiculous, and it was especially eh big, tall, and powerfully built boys he chose as the objects of his derision…[W]hen our classmate, H.P. Holst, would read us his attempts at poetry or a Danish composition, Soren Kierkegaard was always one of the first to interrupt his reading by throwing a book at his head.”
Kierkegaard went on to write books under fake names, claim that Christianity was the highest form of life but that he wasn’t a Christian, argue in dense parodic philosophic works that the highest truth was subjectivity. He also mercilessly teased Hegel the big man in nineteenth century European culture, and also everybody in the Danish church.
In this he was imitating Socrates, the subject of his doctoral dissertation, archetypical trickster of the European tradition, who was so annoying that the big, tale powerfully-buit boys he made fun of had him killed.
PAN-PSYCHISM
A lot of people don’t like dualism and indeed, what’s to like? It always seems so cloojy! Recently it seems the old doctrine of pan-psychism has been dusted off in analytic philosophy as an alternative. It asks the question: Could everything be conscious at a very low level?
Maybe! But if everything is thinking, what is it thinking?
Is a down quark thinking “Wow! I’m a down quark! How about that!”. How could it? Does it have enough moving parts to think it is an I? Only very very smart physicists even understand what quarks are and their brains have literally kabadajillions of quarks. Why do they bother having such big brains if a single quark can think stuff about quarks?
Does a chlorine ion think “I would love to have another electron right now and complete my shell!” Why? Why isn’t it happy being a chlorine ion? Why does it want to complete its shell?
Does an electron think “I wish somebody would come along and measure me so I could have a definite location?” Why isn’t it okay not having a definite location? But if it is okay not having a definite location, is it okay not having a definite thought?
What about time? Is it thinking “I do enjoy keeping track of where everything is in the temporal structure of the universe?” Does it need it’s own time in order to think that thought, and does that own time have thoughts?
Are thoughts conscious? Obviously if I am having a thought about chicken I am conscious — of chicken! –, but what about the thought itself? Is it thinking “I’m glad I’m helping Eric have a mental connection with chicken?” Is the gladness of the thought thinking “I’m glad this thought is glad?”
Is the universe thinking, the single deep thought “Universe. Universe. Universe.”?
Maybe I’m not a pan-psychist!
INFORMATION
Some people talk about information as if it is a real thing that the universe is made of. That’s wrong. The concept of information was developed by Claude Shannon in order to make sense of how you could convey a message from a sender to a receiver over wires. It only makes sense relative to a situation in which there is one person who wants to convey something to somebody else. Other than that there is no information and it doesn’t make any sense to ask how many bits are in it. It’s as if somebody wrote a paper on hints and people decided that the world was made of hints, but there was no hinter, or somebody wrote a paper on the mathematics of coding, and people decided that the universe was a giant code. It makes sense, I guess, if you believe in a creator deity, but most of the information-based ontologists are not appealing to a transcendental sender of information. You can also tell that information is derived from a communicative situation through the connection with the word “informative”. Messages contain information if and only if they are informative. To the right group of people a baton point coneys the message “start playing the Jupiter symphony”.
Unfair Philosophical Criticisms
Eternal return if the same? More like eternal return of the lame!
Concluding Unscientific
<blockquotc Postscript? More like concluding unimaginative bullshit!
Sein und Zeit? More like sein und shite!
Logische Aufbau der Welt more like logical construction of your mother
Tractatus Logico Philosophicus? More like fuck us fucko face fuckicus!
These are unfair philosophical arguments of no value. Let’s have no more of them on this web log.
Complexity: why?
Some think life desires to be ever more complex and that’s a good thing.
As if the universes finest flower is a nice bureaucracy.
Why not simplicity?
The best things are simple.
Complicated things give one a headache.
Darwinian Explanations Don’t Tell You the Purpose of Your Life
Darwinian explanations only say how a random process of selection could have created a human, but they don’t tell you what the purpose of a human being is. You cannot deduce that the purpose of human life is, for example, physical survival based on a Darwinian story.
Proof:
Imagine that a powerful being called the Artist decided to create another being for the purpose of self-expression, much as we create art. Call the created being the Homunculus. Rather than tinkering in the lab to make the Homunculus the Artist put a Darwinian process in motion. The end result was a human being. However the purpose of that human being was not survival — it was self-expression.
QED
Also – we are the Artist and the Homunculus!
MAPS OF THE CITY WHERE I WAS BORN
The map of the city where I grew up is not complicated. There is a central island called Ybant; this is connected by bridges and tunnels to another island named Elmotopolo. Both islands, the central island and the secondary island are connected to a municipality on the mainland known as Samanera. The whole is connected by a hundred-year old mass transit system of underground subway lines and buses. It is the finest in the nation and runs twenty-four hours a day.
Recently my son went to stay on the Upper West Side of Ybant. He took the underground train to a neighborhood known as the True Cappadocia, which is located on the Lower East Side of Ybant. He asked me on the phone “Is True Cappadocia in Ybant?”
How could he not realize that he during his subway journey he had simply traveled from one region of Ybant to another? That he had not left it?
I realized that for my son the distinction between what was on one island and what was on another island was less important than the cultural geography of the city — which neighborhoods had regions of open-air debate, which were conducive to pageantry and theater, which were financial. The financial district, Buck Town, which spanned the Lesser Estuary separating Ybant from Elmotopolo was for him a single geographical unit, even if traversing it required tunnel travel. It did not matter to him whether a tunnel went underwater or not. My son’s journey from the haute-bourgeois regions of the Upper West Side to the high-stakes Bohemianism of True Cappadocia signaled a more important journey to him than from Ybant to Elmotopolo. To him cultural regions were the real regions of the map; while what lay on a contiguous land-mass was an unimportant detail.
Later, during the co-presidency of Esmond and Deolo, when my son was a very old man certain regions of the city were placed under different clouds of cognitive enhancing drugs. Cloud Delta made the mind sensitive but the emotions labile, Cloud Lambda made the sense of time dilated and the mind creative but the emotions impassive, Cloud Gamma maximized one’s consciousness for quick gambling in the broadest sense including day-trading and online poker. For my grandson, who was a freelance psychopharm, which one of these clouds one belonged to became the salient feature of a map, not the underlying cultural regions. Because if one was in the sensitive weepy world of Cloud Delta it didn’t matter whether one was in True Cappadocia or Buck Town, at least not so much. One would make one’s pageants or deal one’s deal in a weepy hyper-sensitive state if one was in Cloud Delta, and that was more important than which one of these activities one was performing.
Still later during the last years of the True and Everlasting Intersubstantiate regions were installed in the tunnels that changed one’s body’s size without knowing it. Extremely important regions of the city were thus able to fit, as they say, in a cat’s top-hat, because traveling to them shrunk one to the size of a bacterium. Other tunnels changed one’s size randomly. One part of the city extended for light years, and as one traveled across he bridge to it each mile made one bigger and bigger, so that it seemed one was in the same place, excepting of course the effect of relativistic time delation upon the neuron’s in one’s galaxy-sized brain.
Under these conditions it would be a brave soul who attempted to limn the true cartography of my native city, although, in a dim conservative, resentful corner of my heart I couldn’t help but whisper to myself, these other maps are fine in their own place. Until one day when my map, dividing my city into islands and rivers separating them takes its own rightful place as the true and reliable map. The day the flood would come and the Essuary would rise high and wash away the bridges and tunnels, and whether one stood firm on the mainland of Samanera or languished across the water on an island increased in saliency, so urgently, that the other maps all washed away.
Explanations of Human Behavior and Experiences
Sometimes the way to explain a human phenomenon is to talk about where it came from. So, for example, we explain why people like to eat sugar, even when it’s unhealthy to them, by appealing to a Darwinian story about the cell’s need for sugar,and the evolution of a brain to find sugar in a sugar-poor environment.
But sometimes we appeal to what the goal of the behavior is. So…
Supposing we want to explain the fact that when you ask someone what “2+2” equals he says “4”.
Isn’t some of the explanation not just:
a)Humans evolved (biologically and culturally) so as to be able to say “4” when asked what “2+2” is
but also
b)2+2=4.
What determines which kind of explanation we appeal to?
Are both explanations using “explanation” in the same sense?
Maybe the first case, the Darwinian case, explains the behavior by connecting it to a predictive law, while the second explains the behavior by connecting it to a truth? Is the general concept of explanation then “connecting to a wider context”?
Maybe there is not a single wider context, but there are many, and thus many different forms of explanation?
Eric Linus Kaplan 