Philosophy for beginners?

[kabbes]

Well this thread certainly demonstrated that lbj didn't have the free will required to go to bed remotely within the timeframe he wanted.

 

[Jonti]

Again you miss the fact that existentialists are interested in experience, though I'm sure they will get round to writing about it when this experience involves non linear movement in time.

One's lived experience can only involve linear movement in time true; but phenomenologically we are not continuous unified beings at all.

Shifting back to the results of science we see we don't exist on just the one newtonian scale either, but on every scale from the planck length at least up to that of our everyday existence. One cannot understand even the mechanics of digestion without also understanding quantum tunneling of hydrogen ions, for example. That's just the way it is. How we interpret facts like that is another matter, of course.

Point being that at the molecular scale and below, time does get very weird indeed, and there nothing in phenomenology or existentialism to contradict that finding.

 

[Santino]

Sophie's World etc etc.

 

[Jonti]

What has relativity got to do with any of this, again it seems you are doing the all too common fallacy of employing very precise techical definitions of concepts in a very loose allegorcial matter.

As for free will not being useful scientifically, well yes thinking of atoms having free will certainly isn't very clever, but seeling to understand human societies without placing free will somewhere is also futile, especially as it is the defining feature of human experience.
....

The relevance is that relativity is an enormously successful and powerful science, and it is also a determinist science. Mind you, QM is also an enormously successful and powerful science, but one that allows many different possible futures to flow from the present state of the world.

One might say there is no such thing as science, there is only the scientific method, and the various sciences that we have developed by applying the scientific method. Unlike Math (sic) science is not a unified body of knowledge. Yet.

 

[Jonti]

It's quite easy to see that General Relativity is a determinist science. It envisages the whole history of the universe as a single block of time through which we are just travelling. The future already awaits; whatever will be will be, and we cannot change that.

The key idea here is that of Einstein Simultaneity.

Two events A and B are Einstein simultaneous if light (and therefore information) cannot travel from A before B occurs. A and B are then so close together in space time that no direct causal influence can travel between them.

More to the point, an observer can adopt a frame of reference (uniform rectilinear motion) from which A occurs before B; or a frame of reference from which the two events are seen as simultaneous; or a frame of reference from which B occurs before A.

Well, the space-time interval between us and, for example, Polaris the pole star is about 430 light years. This means that events on Earth within a (any!) 430 year time slice are Einstein simultaneous with events in a corresponding time-slice on Polaris. Any earthly event within that timeslice can be seen as before, simultaneous with, or after any event within the corresponding timeslice on Polaris.

Our galaxy, the Milky Way, is about 100,000 light years in diameter. So all of human history and far into the future could be ordered arbitrarily relative to events on the other side of the galaxy. To general relativity the whole history of the universe is a single block of space-time that we are just travelling through, turning the pages, so to speak, and unable to influence in any way.

 

[Jonti]

Sophie's World etc etc.

apparently it's not as good as the Communist Manifesto.

 

[mozzy]

Phew!!!!! I went to bed last night in a bit of a sulk cause no one had replied to my poor little thread and I wake up this morning to pages and pages of really good ideas!! Cheers folks! There is alot to read here and get my head round but I am at work so will have to wait to get engrosed in this!

I think I may introduce this chap into something a little lighter as I don't want to frighten him or bombard him - if he responds, well I will then up the dose so to speak!! I think ALbert Camus will be a good starter as will alot of the Existentialists and then I will see how he responds to that!!

Phew - Cheers for the ideas!!! Brilliant!!

 

[Jonti]

Communist Manifesto is good, fast paced and short.

JP Sartre - Existentialism and Humanism, again good and short but deals with lots of things.

^ this

 

[littlebabyjesus]

This is it, playing out. Separation point between science and philosophy.

Right, I'm really, really not going to get back into this thread today, but the idea that there can be a separation between science and philosophy is simply absurd. Philosophy must accommodate science. This is not an optional extra. If it does not, it is worthless.

This is why I think a great deal of continental philosophy is just hot air, and of no use for furthering thought. In fact, it just produces confusion.

Anyway, I have work to do today. And I haven't had that much sleep!

 

[revol68]

Right, I'm really, really not going to get back into this thread today, but the idea that there can be a separation between science and philosophy is simply absurd. Philosophy must accommodate science. This is not an optional extra. If it does not, it is worthless.

This is why I think a great deal of continental philosophy is just hot air, and of no use for furthering thought. In fact, it just produces confusion.

Anyway, I have work to do today. And I haven't had that much sleep!

yes and equally science must accomodate philosophy, which it of coruse already does havin arisen from it.

anyway the whole point about relativity is completely superflous to the original discussion about existentialism and free will and was only thrown up as chaff when LittlebabyJesus realised he was out of his depth.

 

[Jonti]

that's one interpretation ...

agree might as well think of science as natural philosophy

 

[littlebabyjesus]

Some points regarding my rather futile argument with revol last night – no criticism intended of you, revol:

The question of our freedom is irrelevant, is it not? What do we mean when we say that we are in control of our actions? We are our actions. Is not free will necessarily a dualistic concept? And if it is, surely this fact needs some justification so that we know what we mean by it.

I haven't reached a satisfactory conclusion regarding this yet, but I think we were both arguing over the wrong thing last night. We needed spend time defining what we were talking about more clearly first.

This thread has made me feel like a total beginner in philosophy.

 

[revol68]

I wanted discuss how you'd solved the questions thrown up by existentialism and how they were irrelevant, you however wanted to go on some nonsense about relativity and free will.

You missed the fact that existentialism is about human experience and as such all the metaphysics in the world over free will versus determinism are irelevant to it because you agreed that we do experience free will, even if it is simply a determined necessity.

 

[littlebabyjesus]

You didn't give me any questions thrown up by existentialism to have a go at, except how does the individual relate to society, which I answered to the best of my ability. My position on this, really, is one that I know you would not accept – existentialism does not, on its own, throw up any questions at all.

Tbh, I'm not interested in that conversation any more. Sorry.


Anyway...

Getting back to my previous post, I feel a step in the right direction is to talk not of a being with free will, but of a being with purpose. We are indubitably purposeful beings – that is what life creates essentially. I'm not sure it is necessary to go beyond that.

 

[littlebabyjesus]

existentialism is about human experience

Hmmm. I'm always suspicious of doctrines that seek to deal solely with human experience. Too self-limiting. We can learn a great deal about ourselves by looking at other animals. But I won't go there...

 

[revol68]

We can learn a great deal about ourselves by looking at other animals.

And how would one do that from outside a human experience?

 

[littlebabyjesus]

And how would one do that from outside a human experience?

Of course, we wouldn't. But so what? I may be being slow here, so maybe we should go right back to the beginning:

What are the questions thrown up by existentialism?


Sorry, I should have asked you this about 18 hours ago.


In fact, I shall start a new thread for it. You can answer there.

 

[Mation]

I haven't read the whole thread </auspicious beginning>

He's very important for almost every area of philosophy, and though "wrong" on some things, people would never have been "right" without him.

Absolutely. It's harsh to criticise the giants on whose shoulders we stand. We necessarily (given our young world of writing, history and mass communication) have more to work from than anyone who ever came up with an original idea. We can think from there on and compare with other theories. (I know lbj agrees with me on this.)

This is a good post, obviously verging on the determinist who says it will drive us mad to understand ourselves as determinist, but we are.

I can't agree with all that, just because of mine, and what people tell me, is their experience of being human. But I enjoyed the well thought out post.

We feel we have free will, we can't seem to help it, even if we believe in determinism. So I think then that you need to separate out the discussion of how one acts while having free will (whether or not it is an illusion) and the discussion of how the universe works (which may be such that our feeling of free will really is an illusion).

Possibly.

 

[littlebabyjesus]

We are purposeful beings. We act in all kinds of ways that are directed towards keeping us alive, allowing us to reproduce, and, depending which animal we are, seeing our offspring through to a time that they can reproduce themselves. In humans, the reproductive purpose has extended to seeing grandchildren appear. You have not completed your job as a parent until your children have reproduced.

All life is purposeful in this way. Bacteria acts in a way that will see it reproduce. Bees, a conifer, tigers. All are purposeful beings.

I think that we probably have become self-aware as a by-product of evolution that involved our brains growing much bigger (others have said most of this), stimulated by the huge possibilities of dextrous hands freed from the function of locomotion. In other words, our self-awareness did not evolve because it is advantageous to us. It evolved because exploiting strong, flexible limbs dedicated to exploring the world had huge benefits in terms of new foods, tools or learned techniques (the last two being a positive feedback into the selection of bigger brains). These bigger brains have stumbled upon the idea that we are all individuals in the world, that we are born and die, etc. These realisations may also be a positive feedback, they may also be neutral or merely not detrimental enough for the benefits to be outweighed (we all know that we perform any task more effectively when the conscious mind is not trying to control it, so it has negative consequences, but also may have positive ones, as I say below).

We have realised that we exist as individuals. And when we, in that very odd dualistic way that self-awareness feels to be (maybe not so odd given how it arises), look at ourselves, what do we find? We find a highly purposeful being that does not appear to do anything without a reason. This is us. We are doing these things. There is a time delay between our actions and our representation of those actions to ourselves in our consciousness. After we've done it, we see what we did, and we also see why we did it. The time delay is short, however. The representation feels like it has come with the action – it has required clever experimentation to prove to us that this is not the case, and it is only very recently that we have realised that it is not the case. Given that we feel that the the action and the representation of the action occur simultaneously, we attribute the cause of the action not to the pre-conscious purposeful being that in fact is the cause, but to the conscious reflecting being that we generally consider to be 'us'.

We see both the action and the wider context of the action in the model of reality generated by our brains, which is the content of our consciousness. They are gathered together into a meaningful whole, so the action and evidence for the reason for the action are there together. The strong urge we have to make sense of what we perceive has a wealth of evidence. We are always looking for meaning. We make the final link ourselves in what we do not realise is a post-fact reconstruction – we did this because of that. No wonder those experiencing a psychotic episode, whose ability to generate their models of reality is breaking down, talk about 'losing themselves' and no longer being in control.

This is the phenomenon that we commonly call free will.


There is constant feedback going on in our brains. Understanding of motivation that may be gained via the post-fact consciousness is readily available to the whole purposeful self for future actions. Any knowledge acquired by our conscious minds looking at the model of reality that is consciousness is freely available for the pre-conscious mind to use in the future. This could potentially rapidly speed up the potential for learning, and could be a reason why consciousness would be selected evolutionarily – another positive feedback on brain growth that was already being selected for clever hands.

 

[Jonti]

Phenomenologically, freewill manifests itself as a sort of tagging ... 'this was caused by my act', rather than in something like the ability to go to bed on time. It's still useful, so we can take it as real

Nobody decides to make a decision, one simply decides. The process is inscrutable, so we are condemned to freedom if one wants to put things that way. But one could equally say the essence of conscious existence is choice, and go shopping.

Maybe

 

[littlebabyjesus]

dp

 

[Jonti]

You just said that!

 

[littlebabyjesus]

Shit. I went in to tinker, thought I'd lost a bit and rewrote it.

I'll delete one.

 

[littlebabyjesus]

Phenomenologically, freewill manifests itself as a sort of tagging ... 'this was caused by my act', rather than in something like the ability to go to bed on time. It's still useful, so we can take it as real

Why did you use that example?

 

[littlebabyjesus]

Phenomenologically, freewill manifests itself as a sort of tagging ... 'this was caused by my act',

Yes, it does. But it is more than that. 'this was caused by my act that was initiated by me', and the me most of us mistakenly mean is the conscious me, which only becomes aware of the decision after it has happened. We simply do not realise that consciousness is after the fact. At least, we haven't until very very recently.

 

[phildwyer]

Phenomenologically, freewill manifests itself as a sort of tagging ... 'this was caused by my act', rather than in something like the ability to go to bed on time. It's still useful, so we can take it as real

Nobody decides to make a decision, one simply decides. The process is inscrutable, so we are condemned to freedom if one wants to put things that way. But one could equally say the essence of conscious existence is choice, and go shopping.

Maybe

You're quite mad really aren't you?

 

[littlebabyjesus]

You're quite mad really aren't you?

Very far from it.

Have you been keeping up?

 

[phildwyer]

Very far from it.

Have you been keeping up?

I have indeed. Jonti appears to change his opinions from thread to thread in an erratic and unpredictable manner, reminiscent to me at least of a mental patient.

 

[Jonti]

Dwyer thinks there's a loony on the loose!

LoLs @ silly smug thug

 

[phildwyer]

Mentalist, stick to "poetry"....