[ExI] Fwd: [Extropolis] simplified epistemology

William Flynn Wallace foozler83 at gmail.com
Tue May 18 17:33:51 UTC 2021


I forgot to send this to my other group  bill w

---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: William Flynn Wallace <foozler83 at gmail.com>
Date: Tue, May 18, 2021 at 10:44 AM
Subject: Re: [Extropolis] simplified epistemology
To: <extropolis at googlegroups.com>


This Feynman story really sums up a lot for me.  Why are there so many
varieties and sub varieties of philosophical schools?  Because, it seems,
everyone has to be smarter than everyone else, especially at figuring out
what someone else said.  Their 'take' on concepts then can become a 'school
of thought', which will initially attract followers, who then add their own
takes, split off and form a new subgroup and so on.  Given that there are
no facts to support any of the groups, this sort of thing has and will go
on forever, providing nothing of importance to society, only to their
tenure hopes (which they will get because some places will publish
anything, as already demonstrated by that physicist who wrote a nonsense
paper and got it published.)

Thought experiment:  ask philosophers what Kant meant by.............Get a
thousand answers, none of which totally agree with any other one.  Bring
Kant forward in time and ask him:  he reads all the interpretations, and
say  "Well, some of them are nearly correct on that point, but that was
what I thought when I wrote that paper, and since then I have changed and
now I think................."

Total value of philosophy = zero.  Natural philosophy turning into science
has been their only contribution to actual knowledge.

bill w

On Tue, May 18, 2021 at 5:45 AM John Clark <johnkclark at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Mon, May 17, 2021 at 5:10 PM Dan TheBookMan <danust2012 at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>
>> >>> *In philosophy, it *[rationalism] *means someone who believe that
>> physical reality is really all there is.*
>>
>> >> The trouble is in philosophy there's little agreement on what
>> constitutes physical reality and what does not.  If a car is moving at 11
>> miles an hour the car may be part of physical reality but what about the
>> number 11? Is the adjective "speed " part of physical reality, what
>> about "slow"? Are only nouns physically real or must we include
>> adjectives and adverbs? If you ask 11 philosophers those questions
>> you'll get 13 different answers.
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> * > This is a case where you trimming someone else's response really
>> shifts the meaning around. What I wrote was: '(Likewise, in everyday use, a
>> materialist is someone who chases after wealth and values that more than
>> friendships, family, etc. In philosophy, it means someone who believe[sic]
>> that physical reality is really all there is. That person might be an
>> ascetic in personal life and be a people person who feels their time
>> volunteering to build homes for the poor is more important than having a
>> big bank account.)' Now you chopped that and then added 'rationalism' in
>> square brackets to explain my use of 'it.' But it should be obvious by it,
>> I mean 'materialist.' :)*
>
>
> Sorry, because the "it" in question came just after the word "philosophy" I
> thought we were talking about what philosophers mean not what
> non-philosophers mean in everyday life by a certain word. And "*Is
> valuing wealth more than friendship or family a good idea?*" is not a
> scientific question, it is a matter of taste, and there's no arguing about
> matters of taste.
>
> * > Two further things could be said about your comment. One is that*
>
>
>> * whatever disagreements professional philosophers have, they often still
>> agree on some stuff, *
>
>
> Philosophers may agree on some stuff but not much. I love the story
> Richard Feynman tells about philosophers when he was in graduate school:
>
> *"In the Graduate College dining room at Princeton everybody used to sit
> with his own group. I sat with the physicists, but after a bit I thought:
> It would be nice to see what the rest of the world is doing, so I'll sit
> for a week or two in each of the other groups.*
>
> *When I sat with the philosophers I listened to them discuss very
> seriously a book called Process and Reality by Whitehead. They were using
> words in a funny way, and I couldn't quite understand what they were
> saying. Now I didn't want to interrupt them in their own conversation and
> keep asking them to explain something, and on the few occasions that I did,
> they'd try to explain it to me, but I still didn't get it. Finally they
> invited me to come to their seminar.*
>
> *They had a seminar that was like, a class. It had been meeting once a
> week to discuss a new chapter out of Process and Reality - some guy would
> give a report on it and then there would be a discussion. I  went to this
> seminar promising myself to keep my mouth shut, reminding myself that I
> didn't know anything about the subject, and I was going there just to
> watch.*
>
> *What happened there was typical - so typical that it was unbelievable,
> but true. First of all, I sat there without saying anything, which is
> almost unbelievable, but also true. A student gave a report on the chapter
> to be studied that week. In it Whitehead kept using the words "essential
> object" in a particular technical way that presumably he had defined, but
> that I didn't understand.*
>
>
> *After some discussion as to what "essential object" meant, the professor
> leading the seminar said something meant to clarify things and drew
> something that looked like lightning bolts on the blackboard. "Mr.
> Feynman," he said, "would you say an electron is an 'essential object'?"*
> *Well, now I was in trouble. I admitted that I hadn't read the book, so I
> had no idea of what Whitehead meant by the phrase; I had only come to
> watch. "But," I said, "I'll try to answer the professor's question if you
> will first answer a question from me, so I can have a better idea of what
> 'essential object' means.*
>
>
> *What I had intended to do was to find out whether they thought
> theoretical constructs were essential objects. The electron is a theory
> that we use; it is so useful in understanding the way nature works that we
> can almost call it real. I wanted to make the idea of a theory clear by
> analogy. In the case of the brick, my next question was going to be, "What
> about the inside of the brick?" - and I would then point out that no one
> has ever seen the inside of a brick. Every time you break the brick, you
> only see the surface. That the brick has an inside is a simple theory which
> helps us understand things better. The theory of electrons is analogous. So
> I began by asking, "Is a brick an essential object?"*
> *Then the answers came out. One man stood up and said, "A brick as an
> individual, specific brick. That is what Whitehead means by an essential
> object."*
>
> *Another man said, "No, it isn't the individual brick that is an essential
> object; it's the general character that all bricks have in common - their
> 'brickiness' - that is the essential object."*
>
> Another guy got up and said, "No, it's not in the bricks themselves.
> 'Essential object' means the idea in the mind that you get when you think
> of bricks."Another guy got up, and another, and I tell you I have never
> heard such ingenious different ways of looking at a brick before. And, just
> like it should in all stories about philosophers, it ended up in complete
> chaos. *In all their previous discussions they hadn't even asked
> themselves whether such a simple object as a brick, much less an electron,
> is an "essential object*." "
>
>   John K Clark
>
> --
> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups
> "extropolis" group.
> To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an
> email to extropolis+unsubscribe at googlegroups.com.
> To view this discussion on the web visit
> https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/extropolis/CAJPayv26c-OGp_sFGyanfG2A%3DL8y2S4o9JhjvQZqRJcw8FuX9w%40mail.gmail.com
> <https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/extropolis/CAJPayv26c-OGp_sFGyanfG2A%3DL8y2S4o9JhjvQZqRJcw8FuX9w%40mail.gmail.com?utm_medium=email&utm_source=footer>
> .
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20210518/6e4ab929/attachment-0001.htm>


More information about the extropy-chat mailing list