<div dir="ltr"><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:comic sans ms,sans-serif;font-size:large;color:#000000">I forgot to send this to my other group bill w</div><br><div class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">---------- Forwarded message ---------<br>From: <strong class="gmail_sendername" dir="auto">William Flynn Wallace</strong> <span dir="auto"><<a href="mailto:foozler83@gmail.com">foozler83@gmail.com</a>></span><br>Date: Tue, May 18, 2021 at 10:44 AM<br>Subject: Re: [Extropolis] simplified epistemology<br>To: <<a href="mailto:extropolis@googlegroups.com">extropolis@googlegroups.com</a>><br></div><br><br><div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><div style="font-family:"comic sans ms",sans-serif;font-size:large;color:rgb(0,0,0)">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.) </div><div style="font-family:"comic sans ms",sans-serif;font-size:large;color:rgb(0,0,0)"><br></div><div style="font-family:"comic sans ms",sans-serif;font-size:large;color:rgb(0,0,0)">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................." </div><div style="font-family:"comic sans ms",sans-serif;font-size:large;color:rgb(0,0,0)"><br></div><div style="font-family:"comic sans ms",sans-serif;font-size:large;color:rgb(0,0,0)">Total value of philosophy = zero. Natural philosophy turning into science has been their only contribution to actual knowledge. </div><div style="font-family:"comic sans ms",sans-serif;font-size:large;color:rgb(0,0,0)"><br></div><div style="font-family:"comic sans ms",sans-serif;font-size:large;color:rgb(0,0,0)">bill w</div></div></div></div><br><div class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Tue, May 18, 2021 at 5:45 AM John Clark <<a href="mailto:johnkclark@gmail.com" target="_blank">johnkclark@gmail.com</a>> wrote:<br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex"><div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><div style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif"><span style="font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif">On Mon, May 17, 2021 at 5:10 PM Dan TheBookMan <<a href="mailto:danust2012@gmail.com" target="_blank">danust2012@gmail.com</a>> wrote:</span><br></div></div><div class="gmail_quote"><div> </div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex">
>><span class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif">></span><span class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif"> <i></i></span><i>In philosophy, it </i>[rationalism] <i>means someone who believe that physical reality is really all there is.</i><br><br><font size="4">
><span class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif">></span> 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<span class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif"> </span>the car may be part of physical reality but what about the number 11? Is<span class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif"> </span>the adjective "speed " part of physical reality, what about "slow"? Are only<span class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif"> </span>nouns physically real or must we include adjectives and adverbs? If you ask<span class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif"> </span>11 philosophers those questions you'll get 13 different answers.<br></font>
<br><i>
<span class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif">> </span>This is a case where you trimming someone else's response really<span class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif"> </span>shifts the meaning around. What I wrote was:<br>
<br>
'(Likewise, in everyday use, a materialist is someone who chases after<br>
wealth and values that more than friendships, family, etc. In<br>
philosophy, it means someone who believe[sic] that physical reality is<br>
really all there is. That person might be an ascetic in personal life<br>
and be a people person who feels their time volunteering to build<br>
homes for the poor is more important than having a big bank account.)'<br>
<br>
Now you chopped that and then added 'rationalism' in square brackets<br>
to explain my use of 'it.' But it should be obvious by it, I mean<br>
'materialist.' :)<br></i></blockquote><div><br></div><div><font size="4">Sorry, because the <span class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif">"</span>it<span class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif">"</span> in question came just after the word <span class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif">"</span>philosophy<span class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif">"</span><span class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif"> </span>I thought we were talking about what philosophers mean not what non-philosophers mean in everyday life by <span class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif">a certain </span>word<span class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif">. And "<i>Is valuing wealth more than friendship or family a good idea?</i>" is not a scientific question, it is a matter of taste, and there's no arguing about matters of taste. </span></font></div><div><br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex"><i>
<span class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif">> </span>Two further things could be said about your comment. One is that</i></blockquote><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex"><i>
whatever disagreements professional philosophers have, they often<br>
still agree on some stuff, </i></blockquote><div><br></div><font size="4">Philosophers may agree on some stuff but not much. I love the story Richard Feynman tells about philosophers when he was in graduate school:</font><div><div><div style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif;display:inline"><i><br></i></div></div><div><div style="display:inline"><span style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:large"><i>"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.</i></span><br style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:large"><br style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:large"><span style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:large"><i>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.</i></span><i style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif"><br style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:large"></i><br style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:large"><span style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:large"><i>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.</i></span><br style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:large"><br style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:large"><span style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:large"><i>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.</i></span><br style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:large"><br style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:large"><i style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif"><span style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:large">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'?"</span><br style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:large"></i><br style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:large"><span style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:large"><i>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.</i></span><br style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:large"><br style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:large"><i style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif"><span style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:large">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?"</span><br style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:large"></i><br style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:large"><span style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:large"><i>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."</i></span><br style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:large"><br style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:large"><span style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:large"><i>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."</i></span></div></div><div><br></div><div><div style="display:inline"><div style="font-style:italic"><font size="4">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. <b>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</b>." "</font></div><div style="font-style:italic"><font size="4"><br></font></div><div><font size="4"> John K Clark</font></div></div></div></div></div></div>
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