On Sun, Jun 3, 2018 at 2:40 PM, Telmo Menezes <[email protected]> wrote:
>* * > > *There have been tremendous philosophical advances in modern history > outside of the natural sciences.* Like what? Edwin Hubble was not payed by the philosophy department of any university and yet he made philosophical discoveries that surprised everyone even Einstein, he found that the universe was, at the very least, 100 billion times larger than previously thought and could very well be infinite; and as if that wasn't enough he discovered that the entire universe was expanding. No academic philosopher has ever found something that was in the same ballpark in terms of philosophic importance as even one of Hubble's discoveries, or even in the same galaxy. > *> Some of the American founding fathers were philosophers,* Yes many were perhaps even most, but the only one who actually advanced the field of philosophy was Franklin. > > > and so was Karl Marx. Karl Marx is a odd example to make if you're trying to defend philosophers. Few people have caused more misery in the world than Karl Marx, and most of those that have were his disciples. And from opposition to Darwin and genetics and relativity and even Godel few things have slowed the pace of science more than Marxist philosophy, > > > I could also mention ethics OK lets do that. At one end of the ethical spectrum you have Marxist monsters like Lenin and Stalin and Mao Zedong and Pol Pot; and at the extreme opposite end you have Norman Borlaug. Borlaug was not a philosopher he was a plant geneticist and the father of the green revolution, he was far less famous than the monsters but it is estimated that because of him a billion people did *NOT* starve to death. Can you name a philosopher who did more good in the world? > *> We could also discuss issues of meaning, and the many viewpoints > surrounding one of the original philosophical questions:"how to live a good > life?".* And how much good have all those endless discussions about how to live a good life actually done? Not much, certainly nothing that would give Norman Borlaug a run for his money for the title of having actually lived the best life and not just talked about it. > *>We could also discuss issues of meaning, * Maxwell changed our meaning of light, Boltzmann changed our meaning of energy and temperature and Einstein changed our meaning of space and time. Name a philosopher who has done something more fundamental. Hell philosophers didn't even know what entropy means until scientists explained it to them. *> You are imposing your own metaphysics on the article* It was a metaphysical article, whose metaphysics should I impose on it if not my own? > > *> In the materialist view, mind is secondary to matter,* Forget something as complex as mind, for the guy who invented the term "primary matter" even form came from "secondary matter", all primary gave us was continuity. > >> > >> And by the way, the number of >> >> times the phrase "primary matter" is mentioned in that article is exactly >> >> the same number you will find it mentioned in any modern physics >> journal. Zero. > > > > > > *I assumed I was not arguing with a string matching algorithm. In this > case it does take a bit of semantic parsing: "To materialists, matter is > primary[...]"* > If all matter is primary then secondary matter can't exist, but at the same time the guy who invented "primary matter" also invented "secondary matter". Hey don't blame me, it was Leibniz's idea not mine. > *> allude to AN. For example you could write the equivalent sentence:"Materialists believe in primary matter." N is A, where N is a noun and A is an adjective, you can equally* But do they also believe in secondary matter? Leibniz did. *> * > > *Now, I am not a native English speaker, but I am fairly convinced that* > > > *if you find the pattern:N is A, where N is a noun and A is an adjective, > you can equallyallude to AN. For example you could write the equivalent > sentence:"Materialists believe in primary matter."* Those are not equivalent sentences. If "to materialists, matter is primary" then materialists don't believe in secondary matter and it would be silly of them to even talk about primary matter because that's the only type of matter there is. But if "Materialists believe in primary matter" then its a open question, they may or may not believe in secondary matter. *> You illustrate the belief in primary matter frequently, when you argue > with Bruno that a physical computer is necessary for computations to exist, > or that physics is more fundamental than math. This is a position of belief > in primary matter.* If I believe in primary matter then I must believe in secondary matter too but I'm not Leibniz, he never gave clear real world examples of primary or secondary matter and I think the entire thing is a muddled mess. Philosophers make a mess a lot. 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 "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
