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Re: Bishop Dawkins smells heresy...
Posted: Wed Aug 22, 2012 5:06 am
by vegetariantaxidermy
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Re: Richard Dawkins as 'Anti-Philosopher'
Posted: Wed Aug 22, 2012 10:27 am
by Notvacka
Bernard wrote:Forgive me for saying but I think you're clutching at straws, yet very understandably so, as I understand that my views are basically insane. My view for instance that stars, trees, ants, cells etc are all beings that perceive and that see things as separate as we see things as separate' but not of course not in the way we do, but according to whatever their differing modes of perception demand. It is also my contention that whatever we perceive is a living thing or some aspect of a living thing, and that there is nothing outside of living things: life, existence, is just the infinity of living things. That we perceive the earth as a physical object, for instance, is just a limitation of our perception, as far as i see it, because our perception is physically orientated to the max. In the case of our perception of the universe our perception is likewise held fast, but is even less capable of seeing it as a whole.
I have no problem with this. It's an interesting speculation.
Bernard wrote:As anology, we may be looking at the universe as if looking at the spot on a giraffe and never seeing the giraffe in its entirety.
That might indeed be the case. But as far as science is concerned, if a spot is all we can observe, a spot is all there is. We may speculate about a giraffe, but unless we can come up with a method of observation, the giraffe remains pure speculation.
Bernard wrote:...but what we do know is that if it is another catogory of thing, then from our observation of things there MUST be more of like things to it: there will be more spots and there will be more giraffes!
This capital "must" of yours refers to our imagination, not physical reality. If we encounter something new, we give it a name and define it as a "thing". If we can see one, we can imagine more, thus we have a new category. This, however, does not mean that there
must be more. It's perfectly possible to have a category of one, or
none for that matter. Categories and "things" are human constructs. They exist in our imagination. They might or might not denote something in physical reality.
Bernard wrote:We want to see the universe as something singular and only original to itself.
Not necessarily. Many people, including scientists, want to see the universe as one of many universes. The "many worlds" interpretation of quantum physics is rather popular, for instance.
Re: Richard Dawkins as 'Anti-Philosopher'
Posted: Wed Aug 22, 2012 12:07 pm
by Bernard
Yes thanks, I understand the last point. I would bring your attention to my earlier challenge of being able to identify one thing, that isn't a human ideation that is not one of many other like things to it.
Re: Richard Dawkins as 'Anti-Philosopher'
Posted: Wed Aug 22, 2012 2:11 pm
by Notvacka
Bernard wrote:I would bring your attention to my earlier challenge of being able to identify one thing, that isn't a human ideation that is not one of many other like things to it.
I'm not sure that I understand what you mean here. The dividing lines between "things" are human constructs and could be drawn anywhere. If you make a category narrow enough or wide enough, what you get is one of a kind. Let's look at a tree. There are many trees, but "tree" is a very wide category. This tree happens to be a spruce. Still a rather wide category. There are about 35 known species of spruce. This happens to be a
Picea abies - Norway Spruce, the original Christmas tree. Plenty of those too. If we decorate it for Christmas, it's indeed a Christmas tree. So far, this "thing" we are looking at belongs to at least four categories; tree, spruce, Norway spruce and Christmas tree. If we narrow it down to Christmas trees standing in my living room the Christmas of 2011, we get a category of one. You might think that this is not a "proper" category, but nothing prevents us from naming categories any way we like.
Re: Richard Dawkins as 'Anti-Philosopher'
Posted: Wed Aug 22, 2012 10:25 pm
by Bernard
Okay, lets eliminate humans from the equation, especially Kant....
Before hominoids there were plenty of trees and each one of these trees is alike to many other things called trees. Can you then present and example of a an individual which is not one of many other similar things to it?
Re: Richard Dawkins as 'Anti-Philosopher'
Posted: Wed Aug 22, 2012 10:31 pm
by chaz wyman
Bernard wrote:Okay, lets eliminate humans from the equation, especially Kant....
Before hominoids there were plenty of trees and each one of these trees is alike to many other things called trees. Can you then present and example of a an individual which is not one of many other similar things to it?
Without humans you cannot speak meaningfully about a human category.
Before there were homonids there were no trees as such.
Re: Richard Dawkins as 'Anti-Philosopher'
Posted: Wed Aug 22, 2012 11:39 pm
by Bernard
No, I'm not talking about conceptual catagories as these are formed in ideation, which I asked not to include. I'm talking about actual things. If actualities copied categories and there were no actual apes without homo-sapiens to catagorize them, then there would have been nothing that could evolve into humans, via reproduction, which takes at least two as far as mammals are concerned.
So, I think the stumbling block I have is that I assume others consider, as I do, that the universe is more than a concept formed in ideation. It is an actual thing or, at least, some actual aspect of an actual thing, as a giraffe spot is an actual aspect of an actual thing. What that thing is is not what I'm after, although that is interesting in itself
http://www.space.com/17217-big-bang-pha ... heory.html, but I'm looking for the agreement that it is an actual thing and therefore MUST be one of many like things, as where there is one actual thing there are many of the same type of actual thing. A fallen leaf in autumn, for instance, is an actual aspect of an actual thing: a tree, of which there is observably many more things alike to it, ie: many more trees. The universe may be similarly an actual aspect of an actual thing, or an actual thing in its entirety. Imagine,say, that the universe is like a bubble of space within a huge block of something very dense, and there are other bubbles like it in that very dense block. Or perhaps the universe is something very dense compared to an imaginary substrate it floats in, as a drop of rain is very dense comparatively to the air it floats within, and there are many other drops of rain around it.
Re: Richard Dawkins as 'Anti-Philosopher'
Posted: Wed Aug 22, 2012 11:54 pm
by Bernard
Notvacka:
That might indeed be the case. But as far as science is concerned, if a spot is all we can observe, a spot is all there is. We may speculate about a giraffe, but unless we can come up with a method of observation, the giraffe remains pure speculation.
Well and good, and maybe science is only able to see the universe as a conceptual item, and therfore it can only be regarded as a conceptual catagory for philosophy. I don't think though science would admit that the universe is only conceptual.
I feel if philosophy is good for anything it would be to help establish what the truth of the matter is. So in good philosophical spirit I will keep hold of the horns, keeping this bull down to the ground until it either throws me or I subdue it!
Re: Richard Dawkins as 'Anti-Philosopher'
Posted: Wed Aug 22, 2012 11:55 pm
by chaz wyman
Bernard wrote:No, I'm not talking about conceptual catagories as these are formed in ideation, which I asked not to include. I'm talking about actual things. If actualities copied categories and there were no actual apes without homo-sapiens to catagorize them, then there would have been nothing that could evolve into humans, via reproduction, which takes at least two as far as mammals are concerned.
But I'm afraid that thinghood is also a category of ideation too! So without a conceptual framework we cannot speak of things in any sense either.
t.
Re: Richard Dawkins as 'Anti-Philosopher'
Posted: Wed Aug 22, 2012 11:58 pm
by Bernard
Forgive me, but I am getting the feeling that this is some sort of sacred cow I'm dealing with and not a bull at all. I don't know how else to take the responses, which seem very protective of something I can't quite pinpoint
Re: Richard Dawkins as 'Anti-Philosopher'
Posted: Thu Aug 23, 2012 12:37 am
by chaz wyman
Bernard wrote:Forgive me, but I am getting the feeling that this is some sort of sacred cow I'm dealing with and not a bull at all. I don't know how else to take the responses, which seem very protective of something I can't quite pinpoint
It's what they call an Idealist position.
It has much merit.
Whilst it is possible to agree on an intellectual level that before humans
trees did in fact exists. It is also true to say that the only basis upon which we can make such a statement still has to comply with the limits of our perceptual frameworks given to us by the notion that we form our ideas of reality via the senses and are constructed by ideas.
I suppose point is that the "tree" is not a natural category in an ultimate sense. It is possible that an alien with a great deal more intelligence than us would reject the category as invalid and may well have completely different ways of looking a the world. We tend to conceive our categories by visual criteria; a tree is a thing that looks like a tree. This is not necessarily the only way, the correct way, the best way, or the most useful way - but it is a human way of categorising. Maybe an alien way of categorising would not even seek to separate the 'tree' from its wider ecosystem, maybe it would not make a distinction between the molecules from which it is comprised and the molecules that make up the air or the soil?
Re: Richard Dawkins as 'Anti-Philosopher'
Posted: Thu Aug 23, 2012 12:46 am
by Bernard
Why can't we just stay with agreeing on an intellectual level rather than complying with a perceptual framework? It seems this is antithetical to the sort of individual thinking so necessary of philosophy. Did we go wrong somewhere in the twentieth century. Was it post-modernism that formed this prison of compliance? I know it was there before, but why is it so rigidly enforced now?
Re: Richard Dawkins as 'Anti-Philosopher'
Posted: Thu Aug 23, 2012 12:50 am
by chaz wyman
Bernard wrote:Why can't we just stay with agreeing on an intellectual level rather than complying with a perceptual framework? It seems this is antithetical to the sort of individual thinking so necessary of philosophy. Did we go wrong somewhere in the twentieth century. Was it post-modernism that formed this prison of compliance? I know it was there before, but why is it so rigidly enforced now?
I have no idea what you are talking about. No one is demanding that you comply with anything.
Re: Richard Dawkins as 'Anti-Philosopher'
Posted: Thu Aug 23, 2012 1:06 am
by Bernard
Sorry:
It is also true to say that the only basis upon which we can make such a statement still has to comply with the limits of our perceptual frameworks given to us by the notion that we form our ideas of reality via the senses and are constructed by ideas.
Do we always need to construct reality with ideas? And isn't it the case that with philosophy we are deconstructing ideas, looking at what is actual, and reconstructing ideas according to what we may have gained by looking reality in the face?
In the matter at hand I am sdeconstructing the idea that the universe is not known to be either a singular one-off phenomenon and am saying - through viewing how things actually are in reality, not just conceptually - that it must be the same as all other things that are actual, and is therefore one of many like things to it, that is; other universes.
Re: Richard Dawkins as 'Anti-Philosopher'
Posted: Thu Aug 23, 2012 1:17 am
by chaz wyman
Bernard wrote:Sorry:
It is also true to say that the only basis upon which we can make such a statement still has to comply with the limits of our perceptual frameworks given to us by the notion that we form our ideas of reality via the senses and are constructed by ideas.
Do we always need to construct reality with ideas? And isn't it the case that with philosophy we are deconstructing ideas, looking at what is actual, and reconstructing ideas according to what we may have gained by looking reality in the face?
In the matter at hand I am sdeconstructing the idea that the universe is not known to be either a singular one-off phenomenon and am saying - through viewing how things actually are in reality, not just conceptually - that it must be the same as all other things that are actual, and is therefore one of many like things to it, that is; other universes.
What is reality? That is a construct too.