[extropy-chat] PHIL: Derrida and Deconstruction

[Robert Bradbury]

On 10/31/06, Jef Allbright <jef at jefallbright.net> wrote:
>
>  If I were asked this in a personal sense, although not, of course, in the
> person of Derrida, but rather, as one who might have a sense of some aspect
> of being that is Derrida, I might answer that it is in large part
> unknowable, but in some small part I could say that the crossover, however
> small, gathers meaning from the context of the question, and the questioner.
> [snip]
>

Being unfamiliar with Derrida (and much "philosopy" for that matter [I know
a little about Chomsky]) I briefly scanned his Wikipedia entry.  One thing I
wondered (given how long his entry is) is *why* do people care so much about
this stuff?

As a total aside, when one gets into these "transhumanist" vs.
"postmodernist", vs. xyzzy-ist "type" discussions, I am struck by some of
the similarities between fields like philosophy and computer science. For
example programmers can have long and passionate debates over the relative
merits of C++ vs. Perl vs. Python vs. Java (and don't even mention Lisp or
Smalltalk).  One difference between computer science and philosophy is that
in the former the discussions can rely on some generally agreed upon
definitions that mean the same thing to everyone.  In the later I'm less
sure that that is the case.

With computers a 1 is a 1, a 0 is a 0, an "and" and an "or" are certain
things you can do with them.  With philopsophy, at least at some levels,
those things are still being defined and debated.  It seems that much of the
discussion originated before any modern hunderstanding of what the brain is
and how it works (neuroscience) which in turn is developing in parallel with
the understanding of the hardware itself (molecular and genomic biology).
With philosophers, not only do you have this *huge* body of knowledge,
represented by relatively nondeterministic and highly unique neural patterns
but its running on top of hardware (genetic polymorphisms) which may have
sufficient differences that it may be relatively impossible for the
individuals to "think" the same way.  In computer science one would look at
it and say its simple -- machine X executes the X instruction set and
machine Y executes the Y instruction set and there is no way that either of
them is ever going to execute each other's instructions [1].  The best you
can do is create sort of an abstraction (which is what higher level
languages are) that let machine X and machine Y accomplish specific tasks in
their own way.  One has to wonder if the entire area of philosophy is
nothing more than a complex variation of this.

It will be interesting to see how philosophy deals with differences in
genetic polymorphisms and neural structures that explain precisely why
Chomsky could never have understood Derrida, why a postmodernist can never
understand a humanist, etc.

Robert

1. One could consider spoken languages, written languages and perhaps
cultures to be parallels to computer languages and computer instruction sets
-- but they are *so* much less precise that one would wonder whether people
not educated in computer science (presumably most philosophers) can even
begin to comprehend the degree to which they are communicating with
play-doh?
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