The Irrelevant Philosopher
- philosophy |fəˈläsəfē|
- noun ( pl. -phies)
the study of the fundamental nature of knowledge, reality, and existence, esp. when considered as an academic discipline.
I am starting to construct a series of presentations for the OLLI Center of Ashland, Oregon. As I point out in my profile: I am Dr. Robert I. Price and I will soon be living in Medford. The first series I plan to develop will be titled: Understanding Reality. A central theme for this series will be the need to unlearn the bad habits imposed upon us by several hundred millennia of evolution. The effect of these bad habits can be seen in the works of philosophers, specifically classical philosophers.
Classical Philosophers began to become irrelevant about one hundred years ago. Starting in the 1950s I first learned of their lack of understanding (of the real world) as I began to explore the subtleties of quantum mechanics. My distain, for these pretentious posers, only strengthened while I was a college student in the 1970s. As a university faculty member these past three and a half decades I have finally lost all respect for any "academic" "classical" "philosopher". For illustration in this announcement: I will not bother with anymore than one Disgusting Example of the stupidity that passes for clear thinking by these cretins. For the pedants that might object, my point of view is grounded in four decades of arguing with classical philosophers, Classical philosophers seem to outnumber modern (non-New Age Eastern Woo-Woo) philosophers by a large margin. I look forward to meeting (what I hope is) many of the latter when I get to Oregon.
I plan a comprehensive look at how modern physics requires us to significantly alter how we think about reality while avoiding the pitfalls and pratfalls of the "New Age Eastern Woo-Woo" crowd. As I construct the various Beamer Presentations I plan to provide links and explanatory material for those of you that might be interested.
See you on the other side. RIP
Comments
just remember, there is
no spoon.
the little things you can do are more valuable than the giant things you can't! - @thanatokephaloides. On Twitter @wink1radio. (-2.1) All about building progressive media.
wow, that was some kinda serious philosopherizing,
that was.
jesus.
The earth is a multibillion-year-old sphere.
The Nazis killed millions of Jews.
On 9/11/01 a Boeing 757 (AA77) flew into the Pentagon.
AGCC is happening.
If you cannot accept these facts, I cannot fake an interest in any of your opinions.
God, Religion, and Philosophy
I just finished reading "The Swerve", wonder if you heard of it. If nothing else, it is an indictment of those Middle Age clerics, who forbade philosophy for a thousand years.
I followed your link. Wow, this philosopher has axiomatically assumed a loving God. How weird is that!
Good luck on your new digs!
Bernie is a win-win.
we liked "The Swerve"
He also wrote a book about Shakespeare that we nicknamed "The Swill" as we combined "The Swerve" with "William". I forget what it's really called but it's as good as "The Swerve".
"New Age Eastern Woo-Woo" crowd
LOL.
Good luck with that in Medford.
The current working assumption appears to be that our Shroedinger's Cat system is still alive. But what if we all suspect it's not, and the real problem is we just can't bring ourselves to open the box?
OMG, These are the kind of
school professors I have for lunch.
I wonder does he mean like the lead poisoned water in Flint or the over 2000 water systems in this country flooded with lethal contaminates our "government" won't do anything about, because they have to go kill a bunch of brown people?
And besides, governments have to spend money on war, not to help their own people. Obviously our rights have nothing to do with anything by the way our "government" acts.
Why is this ignorant (expletive) allowed in a position to educate people? I would hound him relentlessly until he was fired or quit!
It's absurd what passes for education now days.
What a misfortune it is that we should thus be compelled to let our boys’ schooling interfere with their education! - Grant Allen
Looking forward to your series Dr.
RR
C99, my refuge from an insane world. #ForceTheVote
So Let Me Get This Straight
...if you don't believe in God, you don't know that you have inalienable rights.
I suppose he has never met an atheist. They know they got rights!
This logic is generally believed to be pretty far removed from "philosophy" I hope. It's just so unenlightened.
Bernie is a win-win.
He doesn't think I am serious.
His arrogance prevents him from considering me as an intellectual equal. But I suppose that is acceptable considering my thoughts about him.
Well...
there's arrogance, and there's contempt. But my point was he is using a theological premise to support a philosophical point. OR.. he is not being philosophical. Because he is invoking a dubious axiomatic premise, to wit: the Bible is literal and factual. Bad logic?
Bernie is a win-win.
I thought about this:
But, I had too much on my plate, and created (over 35 years) some college wide changes. But, I couldn't get the necessary leverage to bridge into another college. I am glad university politics are a thing of my past (almost exactly two years now!) and I can move on to other more fruitful endeavors.
As usual, your essay is thought-provoking
I was a philosophy major in college, taking multiple classes in 3 of my 4 years.
Epistemology and not quantum physics is the key to understanding. I'm sure you know this. For those of you that don't know, epistemology is the philosophic discipline dealing with meaning. How do we know what we know (or what we think we know).
The quote from your "disgusting example" is hardly that.
That quote is a non-truth. Life matters to me and I assume it matters to you--otherwise why would you, or anyone, pursue any undertaking? This is a fundamental property of all life (with the rare exception of suicide). All life forms do everything in their power to maintain existence--there own. They do so without worrying about "the meaning of life". They do it because they have life.
I have great regard for quantum physics, mesons, bosons, and six flavors of quarks. Not that I doubt the validity of such deep search for the ultimate particle (or sub-particle or whatever it is called), you will not find the meaning of life there. The existence of God, a being I most closely believe was best described as the "prime mover" comes closest to Deity but doesn't really explain it.
Nor does the existence of sub-atomic particles disprove it.
The answers depend upon having faith--faith is the belief that something exists (for example God) which cannot be proven--nor disproven.
Let me give you a modern "article" of faith in modern cosmology. It's the Big Bang theory. Let's assume that this theory (and let's not glorify that theory be calling it fact) is true. What do we have? We have in a void universe (non-universe) something at the center (non-center, since before the Big Bang there was presumably no directionality). Presumably this center/non-center was some kind of universal stem cell, composed of matter-energy dualism. Things blew up and the universe began expanding. It's still expanding.
Now let us take two aspects of the BBT (Big Bang Theory). The first aspect is from the here and now. Why is the universe still expanding? Maybe because new matter is being created. Right. So where did this new matter come from. Can the formation of galaxies and stars not be considered a type of life? What defines life?
Let's go to the beginning of the "beginning", in other words at the moment of the BB? What was there before this master-energy dualism appeared? How did this mass-energy duality begin in the first place? What was there you might say "nothing" existed before the BB as there was no time and no space or any other dimension. This still does not answer the basic failing of pretending that any system of belief about the origin and meaning of life, whether Deist or Quantum, can prove it's point. You can no more convince me that other than faith there is a way to know what set everything in motion, no matter what mathematical formulas are used.
I am not a theist, I'm agnostic. I neither believe nor disbelieve in the nature of the "origin" of life and the universe itself. I lack the faith to do so--perhaps due to my understanding on the limits of what we know and what we can never know.
For every argument put forward about the existence of God, prime mover or BB, I can produce, recursively, a counter argument. The number of recursions are infinite.
Aristotle advanced the notion of prime-mover
We have no disagreement on this:
This is an error committed by the likes of Deepak Chopra.
Quantum physics as a foundation to "reality" is not about "the meaning of life" and thank you for illuminating that very important point. This will be addressed in the series, albeit with language not usually used in classical philosophy classes. I hope you get involved with the series as it develops.
My pleasure to do so.
Two interesting books by physicists
Lee Smolin, Time Reborn. Smolin argues that instead of being emergent, time is the fundamental reality and everything else is emergent. I think the lack of understanding of time is the elephant in the room of modern physics.
Henry Stapp, Mindful Universe. Stapp is a leading theorist on the measurement problem, and talks about mind (in some sense) as being a fundamental aspect of reality.
I don't think their ideas are completely compatible, but that is part of the fun!
We can’t save the world by playing by the rules, because the rules have to be changed.
- Greta Thunberg
This is going to be fun.
I have been debating about whether I should make this announcement for about three weeks. There is no question with respect to the OLLI beamer presentations, maybe I should consider constructing an HTML version of same.
In Ashland, and other higher frequency parts of the West coast
…you might want to avoid ideas like this: "New Age Eastern Woo-Woo." Particularly in reference and in context of physics.
Eastern "philosophy" nailed binary numbers and high level mathematics and the fundamentals of relativity during the same century that Plato kicked off "Western philosophy." Which has always been irrelevant to practical reality.
Along the Pacific Rim, the enlightened often look East. Early books like "The Dancing Wu Li Masters" and "TheTao of Physics" established Eastern thought as an intuitive window into physics. Theoretical physicists are not unfamiliar with the usefulness of the Eastern approach in physics, often eliciting concepts with fewer boundaries yet more places to land. Physics, itself, is unobtrusively woven into popular culture in the far West
Looking forward to your follow-up.
"Eastern" Hubris
Pre-1900s thought is pre-1900s thought. I do not buy into the notion that Eastern thought provides a window upon our understanding of quantum mechanical processes per se. Eastern thought allows us a way to free our patterns of thought. I use these techniques "all the time" to get students to think creatively. One of the worst things about the emphasis on standardizing curriculum and standardized testing is the lack of creativity needed to facilitate getting the next generation to the next level.
It is the process of discipline that produces the conditions for creative thought.
Hubris is not just limited to schools of philosophy
It extends its tentacles (shackles) to every field of human endeavor.
"One of the worst things about the emphasis on standardizing curriculum and standardized testing is the lack of creativity needed to facilitate getting the next generation to the next level."
The "core curriculum" now practically demanded in all school district is the most mind-numbing ideologies in existence. It reduces learning to sheer rote memory, crushing any creative impulse all but the most curious students might have possessed. In my opinion, the current educational, dysfunctional "system" might well be called anti-epistemologic.
For you, PriceRip
PS: this is not my writing. Shared from the collected writings of my favorite scientist/philosopher who almost no one ever heard of. I thought you might enjoy it.
I like this.
This ties in nicely with my discussion of the false dichotomy in the argument of experiment versus theory as the foundation of science.
Exactly why I thought you might like it. :)
I'm delighted to find someone here who appreciates this kind of writing.
Well, to quote a great Yankee philosopher:
"In theory, there's no difference between theory and practice, but in practice, there is."
The earth is a multibillion-year-old sphere.
The Nazis killed millions of Jews.
On 9/11/01 a Boeing 757 (AA77) flew into the Pentagon.
AGCC is happening.
If you cannot accept these facts, I cannot fake an interest in any of your opinions.
Yogi Berra?
oui
The earth is a multibillion-year-old sphere.
The Nazis killed millions of Jews.
On 9/11/01 a Boeing 757 (AA77) flew into the Pentagon.
AGCC is happening.
If you cannot accept these facts, I cannot fake an interest in any of your opinions.
could you define "classical philosophy"?
you mention "100 years ago".
I'm wondering if you mean Wittgenstein and such, as opposed to Descartes or Socrates.
Certainly . . .
. . . I suppose I could write a descriptive (but not a prescriptive) definition. Such a descriptive definition would include . . .
I mentioned "about 100 years ago" because that was the time frame in which it was becoming obvious that classical logic was inadequate to the task at hand. In fact the whole wave-particle duality silliness and the various interpretations of QM are a result of imposing classical concepts on an inherently non-classical situation.
A big part of Understanding Reality will be about how we need to develop a new toolbox (an allusion to Feynman) filled with modernized versions of linguistic, logic, et cetera attachments. The challenge, as I have suggested, is to accomplish this (retooling) task without losing touch with reality.
. . . and probably much more. It is not yet clear to me what sort of "definition" would be universally acceptable. After all biologist still argue over species classifications. You would think by now those issues would be well settled.
duplicate comment
due to the site being slow and me being impatient
And Asynchrony . . .
Don't forget asynchrony, the bane of all computer architects. I remember when a space mission was "going south" until someone decided to shutdown the computers. Upon restart, all was well.
A great deal of the issues, concepts, and concerns of western
culture presume, assume and incorporate various versions and variations of those considered by classical philosophy. They permeate most education, literature and discussion. Though Plato's "ideals" and "das ding an sich", as concepts are irrelevant to a proper model of the universe, understanding how and why they are so is important, and, IMHO, best understood, applied and generalized from if the idea and understanding of their irrelevance was worked out and formulated by the individual rather than accepted as a fact because said fact is part of the current weltanschauung. This is true, again IMO, of much of classical philosophy, which also, here and there, drops some really great nuggets worth keeping or working from. This gives them a certain utility, because variants of many of them are flung at one daily by everybody from our friends and family to politicians to newscasters, to instructors and authors in a great many fields. Having studied and vanquished them in their classic form really prepares one to deal with their various mutations wherever they pop up.
That, in its essence, is fascism--ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power. -- Franklin D. Roosevelt --