Enduring Problems in Philosophy

Ren said:
One possibility is that the language we're speaking is simply not adequate and already, in the first place, encodes an understanding of consciousness which will one day be considered archaic.

It's a very real possibility.
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Yes. Exactly. It's the scale. I'm inclined to place my bet on a self-formulated theory(*hypothesis*whatever) that just as voices of giants sound different from the voices of ants, language has a scale.

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mintoots said:
Yes. Exactly. It's the scale. I'm inclined to place my bet on a self-formulated theory that just as voices of giants sound different from the voices of ants, language has a scale.
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I think you would very much enjoy reading a chapter from Richard Rorty's Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. The chapter is titled "The Antipodeans".

In it he conducts a thought experiment, imagining another conscious species that does not share our vocabulary at all for mental states. His aim is to suggest that they are still able to describe as much of their experience as we do.
 
Ren said:
Haha no, just wondering if I've been missing something throughout. :p
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I do see where John is at, too. There is a huge amount of faith in science for sure. I liken it to a calculated risk. These millions of theories that you mentioned earlier as being stuck as thoughts aren't totally invalidated anyway. It often takes generations for the next genius to figure it out in reference to an age old theory. Sometimes the tools available to us affect our investigative skills.

Where I think John is correct is that even the logic of the theories we've postulated, or even accept as rules and laws may still be argued against should there be newer and more apt knowledge to come. In other words, nothing is definite nor etched in stone for ever because even stone is not eternal. That said, while the modicum of faith in science is rather meticulously methodical and by that empirical, that's still faith.

Of course, religion has it differently. You've very clearly pointed it out as a non-rational acceptance. However should we reduce both faiths to its simplest form, it's still faith. Perhaps it is a fallacy of ambiguity, but it really is still faith.
 
Ren said:
I think you would very much enjoy reading a chapter from Richard Rorty's Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. The chapter is titled "The Antipodeans".

In it he conducts a thought experiment, imagining another conscious species that does not share our vocabulary at all for mental states. His aim is to suggest that they are still able to describe as much of their experience as we do.
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Interesting. Like somewhat modernized tribes of the amazon are the only language sets that are more likely to connect or communicate with the tribes with zero contact. Okay, I'll look it up. Thanks Renny. Don't be huffy and puffy.
 
mintoots said:
Of course, religion has it differently. You've very clearly pointed it out as a non-rational acceptance. However should we reduce both faiths to its simplest form, it's still faith. Perhaps it is a fallacy of ambiguity, but it really is still faith.
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Yes, you could say that it is 'still faith' in the most vague sense of the word faith, I suppose.
 
Ren said:
Yes, you could say that it is 'still faith' in the most vague sense of the word faith, I suppose.
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:tearsofjoy::tearsofjoy::tearsofjoy:

The scientific approach to establishing a law is very clearly logical. The religious approach to establishing law is, uhm, well, autocratic. It's the classic argument between the grassroots vs top-down approach. In any case, both clearly have their bearings on society. I suppose what matters is to which laws society subscribes to. Diversification is an a-game. At least we aren't all putting all our eggs in one basket. Should Christ come for his re-entry and banish all non-believers, then we'd have some human reserves. Should Christ never come and leave it to science to impregnate other parts of the universe with eukaryotes, then we've also got that covered. In this case, over population is a survival mechanism. Hehe.
 
mintoots said:
:tearsofjoy::tearsofjoy::tearsofjoy:

The scientific approach to establishing a law is very clearly logical. The religious approach to establishing law is, uhm, well, autocratic. It's the classic argument between the grassroots vs top-down approach. In any case, both clearly have their bearings on society. I suppose what matters is to which laws society subscribes to. Diversification is an a-game. At least we aren't all putting all our eggs in one basket. Should Christ come for his re-entry and banish all non-believers, then we'd have some human reserves. Should Christ never come and leave it to science to impregnate other parts of the universe with eukaryotes, then we've also got that covered. In this case, over population is a survival mechanism. Hehe.
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I am being a little rigid on the distinction between different meanings of the word faith because blurring the distinction is a familiar tactic for those philosophers who argue that science is no more rational than religion.

From this perspective, the blurring of the distinction is not innocent, and often expertly maneuvered. (Not by anyone here, of course). Hence my anal-retentiveness, hehe!
 
Ren said:
I am being a little rigid on the distinction between different meanings of the word faith because blurring the distinction is a familiar tactic for those philosophers who argue that science is no more rational than religion.

From this perspective, the blurring of the distinction is not innocent, and often expertly maneuvered. (Not by anyone here, of course). Hence my anal-retentiveness, hehe!
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:tearsofjoy::sweatsmile::tearsofjoy:

Okay okay, I accept that. I wasn't judging! :grimacing:
 
Ren said:
as anal as they get.
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LMAO. Well, aren't we all?

But yes, actually, if faith were a risk then the scientific kind is rather calculated whereas religion is a devilish gambling mechanism. However, while Science is easily proving the physically tangible (as is commonly accepted and not philosophically defined), religion is dominating the temporal realm. What do you think?
 
 
Roses In The Vineyard said:
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Thank you for sharing this. It's extremely motivating. I agree that we are indebted to those who have gone before us; those who took risks which we ride on the back of, as if our ponderings of those risks are at all similar. In many ways, I think we succumb to 'existing' vicariously through the risks of those of the past, seeing ourselves in them, but not willing ourselves to act in analogous fortitude. It's why we are often drawn to the heroic stories of old, and long to emulate them, if only in our fantasies. I'm reminded of the phrase, 'fortune favors the bold'. However, within that reference, I'm compelled to say that 'Life favors the bold'. As the video suggested, some merely 'exist', but if they opened themselves to pain in their bravura, there exists symmetry in that they'd also open themselves to the depth of all that life has to offer. Perhaps, this is the true crux of purpose.

<3

Edited to add a favorite painting, which Ni drudged up out of my fortress of memory.
caspar-david-friedrich-wanderer-above-the-sea-of-fog.jpg
(by Caspar David Friedrich 'Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog')
 
mintoots said:
Firstly, we named them. Hence, we perceived them. To name them, we associated them with their jobs as crudely as we understand them. Kidneys regulate blood, hearts pump it all throughout, etc. At that, I propose that the beginning of identity is in the naming. When we accept something with whatever personal associations we create toward it, we give it an identity. From this point of view, however, identity is relative because after all, what if the Kidney never thought of it as a Kidney, but instead a city? Maybe it's a city of clustered cells. We never really know. We just imposed upon its identity by calling it as such
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That's an interesting point, Min. I understand it as saying that the concept we have of 'kidney' is a matter of convention. It is not something transcendental, which exists outside of space and time, and which we have happened to uncover. Rather communities of human subjects interact, communicate, and intersubjectively come to an agreement that the name 'kidney' will refer to a concept with meaning x. Both the meaning of the concept and its name are, in some sense, arbitrary, since they have been conventionally defined by the community. Note however that the result is not subjective. It is objective in a social sense: it has been agreed by a community of human subjects.

I agree with all of this. Now the interesting question is: in this intersubjectively agreed conventional concept of 'kidney', are there elements that are actually not a matter of convention? Here two candidates appear: essence and identity. The philosopher of language will be tempted to say that 'essence' is just another matter of convention (which seems to be the route you've chosen, too). But it is not so evident with identity. Like you suggested, it does not seem to be a mere matter of convention when my kidney stops being my kidney and becomes John's kidney. It does not seem to be a mere matter of convention when a body stops being a body and becomes a corpse.

Here, as you suggested, the agency of physical death does seem to have explanatory significance. But what about the suggestion I made in an earlier post:

Ren said:
It seems that most people, on the strength of their intuition alone, would say that Boat A is the boat whose parts got replaced over time. In other words, it remained the same boat. The boat that got assembled years later from the original parts is not Boat A, but Boat B.

The question, of course, is how to provide an argument to support this basic intuition. The argument I have in mind relies on the concept of spatio-temporal continuity (or continuity of space-time paths). An object in spacetime undergoes change, necessarily, but its identity is preserved through change as long as it showcases continuity of space-time paths. Merely replacing a part every month or so does not create a fundamental discontinuity. On the other hand, in the case of the boat which gets assembled years later from the (now cured) discarded original parts, there is a fundamental discontinuity, in the sense that the discarded parts lie scattered in a pile inside a warehouse for years before they are re-assembled. Those years constitute the spatio-temporal discontinuity, and hence the non-identity of the reassembled boat with Boat A.
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Could spatio-temporal discontinuity be the primary cause of identity change? Death would represent an example, but being separated from a body (and added to another) would be another example.
 
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Ren said:
It seems contradictory to me to hold, on the one hand, that the Bible is intentionally vague, and to complain (on the other) about the multitude of available interpretations.

Indeterminacy of interpretation is a necessary consequence of vagueness. If the original itself is vague, how can one claim to have the 'right' interpretation? There must be fuzziness on both sides.
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I meant to return to this. I think vague is the wrong word. Somewhat hidden seems to me more what I meant.

One reason for this adjustment is that I think when things are revealed (and it was there all along), the right interpretation is obvious should one be free of various shackles, such as the influence of orthodoxy and personal attachments.
 
o2b said:
I meant to return to this. I think vague is the wrong word. Somewhat hidden seems to me more what I meant.

One reason for this adjustment is that I think when things are revealed (and it was there all along), the right interpretation is obvious should one be free of various shackles, such as the influence of orthodoxy and personal attachments.
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Hidden and somewhat layered?

Anyway, that makes more sense :)
 
o2b said:
I think vague is the wrong word. Somewhat hidden seems to me more what I meant.
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Interesting that you use the term 'hidden'.

I meant to proselytize a bit about this game for a while, and now seems like a good time to post this video. It played a profoundly important role in my final casting away of nihilism and it bears some relevance to both biblical exegesis and the problem of identity (which is unfortunately not so well developed here).

 
Sidis Coruscatis said:
Interesting that you use the term 'hidden'.

I meant to proselytize a bit about this game for a while, and now seems like a good time to post this video. It played a profoundly important role in my final casting away of nihilism and it bears some relevance to both biblical exegesis and the problem of identity (which is unfortunately not so well developed here).

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Oh my, there is a Nintendo Switch port. I'm downloading this today!
 
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