Racist Texans suck?

[Merryprankster]

Ah, Braden..we're both getting awfully close to a resolution--make it stop

Seriously, I think we both come round to the same general set of conclusions, but we reach it by vastly different means.

I tend not to believe in a priori knowledge. I do believe in instinct, which is not 'quite' the same thing, in my mind. For instance, a person has a circadian rhythm, but if they had never seen the sun before, they would have no concept at all of what it was and would quite probably be scared by it.

Of course, the mess of it all, is that we present these as though they were in a vacuum, and of course, they are not

I may have misunderstood you, but I think you said that my particular way of being moral relativist still leads to moral absurdism. I find this to be not true at all. The fact that I individually retain my right to moral judgment allows me to judge any action in the spectra, regardless of cultural differences. Of course it will be flavored by my society and upbringing, but that doesn't stop me from making the judgment. I'm qualified to say that something is morally wrong simply BECAUSE I possess the capacity for moral judgment. It leaves you (universal you) free to disagree with me, as well.

Where we really disagree, of course, is in the idea that morals evolve over time. Quite frankly, I think morality changes over time. I also think it IMPROVES over time. It zig-zags a bit, but there is no doubt, in my mind, that taken as a whole, mankind treats each other better and more fairly than they ever have in history.

But that's also because I happen not to believe in the "sinful," nature of people, with religion and society somehow being the only check on our "natural vices." I believe in the human race generally, and I think we just keep getting better as we move along in time. Naively optimistic? Perhaps.

[myosimka]

Favorite examples of a priori knowledge.

Similarity. The simple act of recognizing 2 things that look alike as being similar. Without it babies couldn't learn to identify their parents. They can't learn anything at all because every time they open their eyes it would be a new flood of sensory information unconnected to any other. Bizarre thought.

Continuity in time. That the object that you are seeing is the same one you were looking at a milisecond ago. This transfers to general continuity of existence issues which development specialists argue over whether they are learned or inherent. If Dad walks out of the room does, he still exist questions. But you have to have continuity of direct perception before you can learn anything else.

Flip side of similarity is distinction. This object is dissimilar from that one. Otherwise sensory information is just that. A meaningless picture.

Sense of self. You have to have some notion that you exist as a separate entity in the universe. You learn what is which through experience(ever watch a baby discover their hands? Very cool) but the basic concept is there to begin with.

Some people argue that this is not true knowledge. That it's the hardware and knowledge is the software. Using the computer analogy I view this stuff as the operating system. But the point is that these are concepts and without them you can't make any sense of sensory input. Even if you don't know what a person is you have to see a pinkish blob that moves while the rest of the room doesn't to learn what a person is. Identifying movement can't be done without recognizing continuity in time. Identifying pinkish blob can't happen if each time you see it it doesn't look like the previous pinkish blob. And seeing it as separate from the room can't occur without the notion that things can be separate. It sounds like circular reasoning because the concepts are so basic but mull it over with the idea of transitioning from general abstracts to specific situations.

Epistomology, it may be worthless but it sure is cool. That was our college motto in a naturalism and skepticism class.

Philosophy students, we forget more worthless crap than you'll ever learn. That was the department motto. That's why I became an econ major. Then I realized all college departments have basically the same motto and decided to stick with econ anyway.

[reemul]

If the palestinians quit bringing hurt upon themselves and take part in the peace negotiations most of this would come to a head. Both sides need to accept their losses (as far human life) and move on. The palestinians cant seem to let go, and the Israeli's aren't willing to roll over.

But hey if it takes another vietnam to learn these guys oh well, you would think they would have learned by our example.

[Merryprankster]

myosimka,

Hume's dungeon man

Would an individual raised from birth completely deprived of sensory input of any kind ever develop a sense of self since there is nothing to compare the self to?

That is, a sense of self is a relationship...not an absolute... or is it? That's the question posed.

And we must wonder for all eternity because executing such an experiment would be the most hideous act of individual cruelty I could ever imagine.

[apoweyn]

"And we must wonder for all eternity because executing such an experiment would be the most hideous act of individual cruelty I could ever imagine."

barring the collective works of aaron spelling, that is.


stuart b.

[Merryprankster]

Ap,

You may be right.

There was a place in Boston's North End that had burgers that were very close to individual acts of cruelty. I tried to feed what I had left to the pigeons but they ignored it completely.

[apoweyn]

well, they're locals. they know better.

[myosimka]

MP,
I think they'd have a sense of self but they wouldn't have gone through the process of clarifying what was self and what wasn't. But then again some of the notions of existence would be a bit bizarre without sensory data. For that matter, how could they ever communicate concepts on this order since language shapes our thinking? Whoa, I need to sit down.

Seriously I think that the notion of self exists innately we then just go through life putting things in the self-external to self bins. But the bins are there.

Oh and I'd say that the sensation/notion/idea is an absolute but it's expressed as a relationship. In other words, I know I exist. Proving it's tough but the idea/concept are clear to me. But then the notion of defining self is conveyed in: I am a man, I am not the chair I sit on, I am more than the neurons in my head, my thoughts are influenced by external forces, etc.

Tangential-Freud had an interesting theory on the origin of faith and belief as incomplete progressions in this classification process. People maintain a sense of connectedness with the universe and so have faith in a power external to them that they are also part of because they haven't adequately developed the disassociation that begins in infancy. Surprisingly this notion has not caught on with the general public. Surprisingly Freud was an atheist. Hmmm. Still an interesting idea though.


But then again, I could be wrong.;-)

[Merryprankster]

myosimka--

the discussion about language shaping our thinking is sounding suspiciously like it's headed in the direction of logical positivism. Last time I tried to read that stuff I gave my brain a hernia

Question for you--do you feel that philosophy has lost sight of the original goal? After all the search for truth should apply to life, shouldn't it? That is, philosophy seems to have been originally searching for the truth about human nature and our relationship to the world around us, but contemporary philosophy (1950's say and on) seems to have degenerated into a set of abstract concepts with little bearing on the way we live.

What say you?

[apoweyn]

that's what i always liked about hinduism and daoism. their immediately obvious applicability. (i know they're not unique in that regard.)

questions about whether we exist or no fall squarely into the realm of what one of my philosophy professors termed 'mental masturbation.' it might feel good, but it's not really getting you anywhere.


stuart b.

[Braden]

Hey guys. Cool that this discussion is interesting to more people.

I don't have much time to read thoroughly and post, just got home from Easter bidness and am busy with school.

Some interesting ideas though...

As for the poor individual devoid of sensory input; I believe he would have a sense of self. The specifics of his sense of self may be quite different than ours though. There are some interesting 'experiments' concerning sense of self from behavioral neurology and cognitive neuropsychology. It seems that it's an important characteristic of mind, but it's not as rigid as we'd like to think. It's fairly easy to get you to extend your sense of self into fake hands using mirrors and simultaneous mimiced stimulation (rubbing your real hand and the fake, presented hand in the exact same way). Curiously enough, it's not much harder to extend sense of self into tables and other clearly inappropriate things in similar ways. More classically, there are a number of attentional disorders that profoundly affect sense of self (eg. hemineglect); although they're often dismissed as "just" attentional disorders, I think it's clear that attention as a process is instrumental in many other processes, including sense of self. Similarly, there are dramatic affective disorders called monothematic delusions (ok, I'm jumping the gun a bit calling them affective disorders) where connection to self is disrupted - we have people believing their mirror images are strangers following them around, or that their body is no longer theirs (often 'explained away' delusionally as the belief that they have died).

Interestingly enough, we have analogous processes going on with how we attribute selfness to other things. In a seemingly related disorder, we have people who stop attributing the same selfness to their parents that they had premorbidly. Again, we have delusional processes at work where the anomaly is 'explained away' as 'my parents have been replaced with robots/aliens/strangers/clones/have died' but it seems to me these are clearly primarily sense-of-self and sense-of-other disorders, and the delusional aspects which are seen as the main characteristics of the disorder are a result of a certain failsafe mechanism in the brain that is responsable for delusions (which I'm not just making up myself, there are diverse observsations for such a mechanism, such as in the delusions of split brain patients).

Still interesting, (Re: Freud's atheism), there seems to be the same 'hardwired' capacity for religious experience in the brain, which seems to be analogous to sense-of-self, and sense-of-other. Most widely discussed in experiments where a region of the temporal lobe are stimulated resulting in 'perception' of a religious experience (compare similar observations from temporal lobe epilepsy). Curiously, some people wrote articles on this finding as proof that God and religion are but curious artifacts of our biology and culture. I like to point out that extending the same logic to the visual system would, by their standards, be proof in the non-existance of light.

The picture that is being painted here is analogous to the one I alluded to previously regarding language and Chomsky's early work on the topic. (Yes, his politics are crazy, but he did some great science). Chomsky's concept (my linguistics is rather weak, so I encourage anyone with a stronger background in it to correct me or elaborate) was that we are 'hardwired' (eg. a priori knowledge, in the truest sense) for language. However, the hardwiring is peculiar. There is a certain universal 'structure' which includes a number of variables. There is a critical period during childhood for learning from your culture (parents, school, whatever) the particular variables which will fill out this hardwired stucture for your language. Thus... getting back to the picture that is being painted... it's one of hardwired capacities (in this case language, I would argue analogously for sense-of-self, other, god, as well as a variety of other processes), however the hardwired capacities are general structures with variables, and it is cultural learning which sets the particular variables. With respect to language, it's interesting to note that 2nd generation users of fabricated languages (that is, children who grew up learning from their surroundings languages which were fabricated, such as ASL or mocked up trade languages where foreign cultures meet) will spontaneously generate a rich rule and subtle expression structure characteristic of a true language (and consistent with the variables and structure idea Chomsky put forth), which was utterly absent in what they had been taught.

As for philosophy losing it's way, I think that we've seen recently a wide-scale return to science among it's practitioners, notably in the cognitive science movement. I think the cross-feeding of these two discplines will and has been the key to keeping both on track.

P.S. Logical positivism is evil. Almost as evil as moral relativism.

[myosimka]

I think that the answer is sort of two- or maybe even threefold.

Yes, I think it should be applicable to life. And honestly the only philosophy that seems useful is the fields that deal with ethical and moral issues. And even then it's use is limited an a bit dangerous. I have seen Nietsche and even Kant twisted beyond belief. And often it's not even deliberate but rather taken without the proper contextual basis. Math analogy again-you don't use a Taylor sum to do multiplication tables although you could. But if the only math you had ever read was an advanced multi-variable calculus book, you might try it. The good news about math is it's immediately clear you need to understand the basics before stepping up. Many people don't get that on philosophy. And a little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing.

On the other hand, are crossword puzzles applicable to life? Is a game of chess? How about novels? Movies? Not directly. But they do hold a place and that is entertainment. And for some of us, discussing the nature of knowledge is entertaining. Obviously- Alec Baldwin said something on the Actor's Studio that summed it up for me. [Don't let anyone tell you that what you do is any less a noble calling than anything else. Doctors save lives and that's noble thing. But that's about HOW we live. But entertainment, drama and laughter, is Why we live.] (I used brackets because I stole the gist but could not remember the precise quote to save my life.) So for many of us philosophy and asking the questions that don't put food on the table or solve the great dilemmas stills applies to life.

Plus I think that much of this is going to come back into the forefront as our lives become more complicated and societal/scientific growth outpace our socialization. We have a generation alive today that knew a world without electricity, one that lived with the threat of nuclear war, one that saw the private sector surpass the tech nightmare outlined in 1984, and one that's grown up with the internet, cloning, satellite communications and biological weapons as preestablished realities not scifi. How in he11 can we have consistent socialization? And it's just getting faster. And without concensus on social mores, ethical conflicts are going to get more and more common. So I think that we may see a good bit more philosophy in years to come. Look at the number of schools that have begun biomedical ethics programs in the last 10 years.


That was threefold wasn't it?

[Merryprankster]

Myosimka and Braden--

To sum up:

Moral Crises keep philosophy on track (to serve humanity, vice mental masturbation)