Blathering Philosopher · 6:53pm Aug 3rd, 2015
I'm taking a metaphysics course at the moment. This is the branch of philosophy devoted to... Well, actually, one of the first conundra posed in the class is how to characterize metaphysics. So yeah. In any case, I just wanted you all to appreciate just what I'm studying/putting up with at the moment:
We have already seen that philosophers who believe in the possibility of spatially extended mereological simples may have a good reason to posit the existence of stuff in addition to things. And we will shortly examine another possible reason for positing stuff. Indeed, some philosophers have suggested that our ontology of the physical world should include stuff only, without any things at all. But before we can address these issues, we must first get clear on what exactly stuff is supposed to be, and how we should understand the alleged distinction between things and stuff.
—John W. Carrol and Ned Markosian, An Introduction to Metaphysics, (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 210. Italics theirs.
I have been there: you have my sympathies. In the phil 101 class I tried when I was a fresh student there was a - I kid you not - Readers Digest Metaphysics book, which was so full of bullshit I could not comprehend that it was on the syllabus. Seriously, I remember at one point it said that if you stand astride the threshold of a door, you are in two different places at the same time, and therefore time travel must be possible.
The professor did not believe there was a single sensible thing in this book, mind you, but that didn't stop him from making us buy and read it, and as is typical this slim and painfully bad volume was ludicrously expensive, and I was young and broke -_-
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A spatially extended mereological simple is an object that is both three-dimensional (i.e. larger than a point particle) and indivisible. Yes, even though you could, say, paint half of it red and half of it blue. This is from a book that discusses the possibility of invisible laser-based brain surgery a few chapters earlier; it's ridiculous. Frustratingly ridiculous when it discusses science, hilariously so otherwise. It is genuinely thought-provoking at times, but most of the time, I'm just entertained by the ludicrous scenarios metaphysicians dream up to refute arguments.
I took metaphysics when I was in seminary school.
All it did was leave me with questions. More and more questions. It screwed up my mind.
Philosophy is weird. I'm all for it on issues of ethics and suchlike, but most of the time it feels like it's asking questions better suited to science and/or ignoring what reality is in favor of how their brains model it.
And this is why I prefer math. People can argue about it and posit as many ridiculous theories as they want, but at the end of the day, 1 plus 1 still equals 2.
And they call economics the dismal science.
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This is beginning to sound like the joke about the physicist trying to help a farmer with his milk production problem, who starts by walking up to his blackboard and saying "Assume a spherical cow…"
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Which in turn reminds me of one of my favorite physics problems, which literally said "Assume a spherical walrus."
If it is any consolation, a fair bit of quantum physics now falls under the metaphysics banner. So much of it is speculation and thought exercise. Philosophy. Theory-craft. The theory that quantum physics proves consciousness and possibly even some faint explanation of a spirit or a soul, due to quantum entanglement. Human beings and vague ideas of telepathy due to mirror neurons interacting on a quantum level, a literal mind to mind connection.
It feels like we are right back in the dark ages, making bold explanations involving the unknown, guessing about invisible forces all around us to try and explain how stuff works.
I actually love metaphysics...but that's practically gobbledegook. A better text for understanding might be 'The Blackwell's Guide to Metaphysics'.
3291897 Hey! Economics is delightful!
But what about thingies? Are they a combination of the two, or an entirely different thing?
... I claim no knowledge of metaphysics...
Bad Horse Blog: The Annihilation of Art
(Read related blogs in the "Literary Theory" section of the Bad Horse Blog Index
Stuff and things.
What's the difference? This has piqued my interest ;-;
3291767 Well, that does explain a lot...
3291791 And that's about as far as you can go into the field of Math before it gets weird and debatable. Go ask Horizon or Bad Horse.
3291939 ...of uniform density...
3292584 Stuff⁽¹⁾ are Things you can carry. It's a sub-set.
(1) According to G. Carlin, Prof. Public Performance Philosophy
3292976 Thank you kindly ^^
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Funny thing is, I got tossed out of seminary school.
Why?
Asking questions. I challenged what was being taught by going back to the original Greek and Hebrew and started proving my teachers wrong, challenging them on dangerous subjects, like Hell, which doesn't actually exist, not in the sense that modern preachers say it does.
Literally translated, Hell means the grave. And everybody who is dead is resting there. Until the trumpet sounds and the dead rise from hell, which is not at all a place of fire, or flames, or anything like that. In the Book of Revelation, it says that Death and Hell are thrown into the Abyss, and both are destroyed, meaning you can't actually burn in Hell forever. Because it stops existing.
This, along with many other things I brought up, got me in a world of trouble, tried by a disciplinary council for heresy, and I was eventually tossed out of school and condemned to an eternity in Hell by a bunch of twits that honestly believed that they had the authority to do so.
I have since become a Discordian and now worship a homeless crazy lady. I got better.
3292987 Wow, it's like a little pocket of the Dark Ages still surviving to this day.
As for FOME's thing about three-dimensional indivisible things, that is complete nonsense. Anyone who understands the basics of atomic theory knows that we already know whether these things exist or not, and the answer is "No. Even the point-particles that we think of as being indivisible have component parts, things just get weird if you try to separate them further." Like, the question is settled. We should be laying those "debates" to rest and dreaming up new ones.
Any "intellectual" discipline that's that unconcerned with actually being correct is a waste of time and breath.
For me, the only philosophy class I had to take was about ethical dilemmas. We did get to entertain hypothetical about people-trees that grow out of your carpet if you leave the window open, doctors surgically conjoining you to a terminally injured person without your consent (from the same essay even, or at least the same debate) and the infamous malevolent trolley car, but at least the goal of the debate was grounded in reality (is X or Y the moral thing to do in real situations).
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In a thermodynamics textbook, written by two of my lecturers, there is a rather wonderful passage entitled "The Problem of the Spherical Chicken" which is, of course, a spherically symmetric solution to the thermal diffusion equation made interesting with an analogy to cooking. The bit that made me laugh was the footnote:
Because, apparently, even our silly spherical analogies have to have a vegetarian option
Please note I am paraphrasing here because I may have left my copy of the textbook halfway across Britain oops.
Metaphysics is so simple, it becomes alien to all common modes of human cognition.
Much of the arguments you will deal with will be nothing more than demands of proofs of the "correctness" of your own thought processes, meaning your efforts hinge entirely upon your social communication skills.
A pure AI would be better at metaphysics, but a gifted communicator can pass metaphysics.
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The nice thing about science is that, unlike mysticism, we can and do actually test the claims, bringing some sanity back to the discussion.
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Ooh, I'll need to look into that. Thanks.
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While Bad Horse blogs are always a thought-provoking delight to read, this implies that philosophy is art. There are certainly some parallels here with what he describes, but I'm not sure I'd go that far.
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Actually, it's the other way around: Things are made of stuff, though there may actually just be distributions of stuff throughout the universe rather than actual things. (More precise terms would be "objects" and "matter," but then they couldn't talk about stuff theory. Yes, that's what they call it.)
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Philosophers are entirely unafraid to resort to the ludicrous in order to tear down one another's arguments. They'll posit an entire universe that consists solely of a single particle moving at a constant velocity, then use it to question the nature of the laws of physics.
Yeah, that was one of the more frustrating chapters to read.
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Not true.
Some things are impossible to test. By observing them, we change the outcome. All we can do is speculate.
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Compared to what you're studying, is it so strange to posit that Philosophy can be created, displayed, presented, spoken, debated, performed, critiqued, etc. etc. the same as other creative endeavors? I would argue that the idea that Philosophy is fully separated from art might be the more dangerous sentiment. /edgy
3293954 Mysticism can actually be tested and observed at the basic level. Or else we wouldn't have the charts for opposing elements...that all gamers have grown used to.
3293905 Please tell me that the single-particle universe was meant to question the concept (or meaning) of "velocity". Because otherwise, for god's sake you should know what words and concepts mean before you use them in an argument.
As for the comparison to Bad Horse's blog, it actually seems pretty apt to me. Philosophy isn't art, no, but a lot of the more abstract philosophy is subject to the same self-crippling social patterns that "high art" like poetry and classical music are, that he spelled out there. Only it's worse, because with philosophy there's a nominal goal (better understanding/become closer to the truth of whatever, for both the philosopher and the reader) that an outsider can understand and can recognize that it's not meeting (Exhibit A: This comment thread). At least with poetry, you can argue that you're not getting it because it's an acquired taste.
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You do make a good point about philosophy's inner spiral towards self-annihilation. A good, worrisome point.
As for the one-particle universe, it was meant to illustrate a concept called lawful underdetermination. Basically, we can't tell whether that universe adheres to Newtonian dynamics, or if it's a law that all particles in that universe move at that velocity. From this, the text goes on to posit that we can't know for certain whether some things are illegal without trying to do them, and we can't try some things. Therefore, there could be physical laws we can never know about.
As I said, a very frustrating chapter, that one.
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So, something unfalsifiable? That's all right then, the thing about unfalsifiable things is that they present no problems and you can safely ignore them completely
3293954 You don't test physical things; you test (confirm or disprove) hypotheses, which are statements in the form "when action X is performed under conditions Y, effect Z will happen". To say "by observing something, we change the outcome, so all we can do is speculate" is meaningless verbiage. All things are observed. If there is no observation, no evidence of something happening, then it might as well have never happened. If we encounter persistent evidence of an event (finding a fallen tree, for example), we have to assume that the usual transient effects of the event (the sound of a tree crashing to the ground) occurred, not as speculation but because that's one of the fundamental assumptions of the scientific method. A philosopher's answer to "if a tree falls and no-one hears it, does it make a sound?" might vary depending on his or her school of thought, but a scientist's answer to the same question is always going to be "is there any reason to assume otherwise?".
If something cannot have testable statements made about it, then it simply isn't a valid subject for scientific investigation.