Saturday, March 31, 2007

Why is the world mathematical

Mu: I got! I got it!

Tal: Got what?

Mu: Why math and logic work.

Tal: What do you mean?

Mu: For quite sometime, I have been wandering why 2 + 5 = 7. Likewise, I wonder about why the laws of logics are reflected in the world. Today finally I understood why that I was wrong. It is the other way around. Math and Logic reflect the world.

Tal: Explain yourself.

Mu: I give you a simple example without going into complex details of explaining the concept of number, counting, and other trivialities that the philosophers love. Let supposed we say that 2 + 5 = 12. Then we go and check with 2 apples and 5 oranges. We count them. We find that truly it is not 12 but 7 the correct answer. Wouldn’t you say that we have reasons to reject 12 and accept 7 as the answer? You would say that 7 works and reject the 12 because it does not work.

Tal: Meaning?

Mu: Math works because otherwise would be rejected as useless. Math works because of pragmatic reasons. Likewise for logic. If the identity law were false, then we would not be able to understand each other. If you think that you are Napoleon, we probably take you to the mad house. Math and Logic work because they reflect the world. Otherwise, we have Alice’s adventures in Wonderland.
My point is that the world is not mathematical but that math is worldy

Tal: Are you saying that the truth is what works? Are you a pragmatist?


Mu: Truth? What is that? That is another story.

Saturday, March 24, 2007

Popular arts: our religions

Tal: Where are you today?

Mu: Puzzling.

Tal: Puzzling? Do you mean you are thinking hard?

Mu: Not really. I just remember, when I read Warret's The irrational man, that I am totally ignorant of art. I wonder.

Tal: Explain yourself.

Mu: Hegel was right: we are historical 'beings.' If so, popular arts reflect the soul of our times. It is not Picasso's genious and Schoenberg's boredoom but Spielberg's fantasies and Elton John's love songs. There we find ourselves.

Tal: Meaning?

Mu: That the elite is totally dead, that the masses rule and that in understanding popular art we understand ourselves.

Tal: We? What are we?

Mu: Lost souls, my friend. We are lost souls.

Tal: But you puzzle. Why?

Mu: Because we cannot overcome our loneliness. Lost souls are lost because they are absolutely alone; they cannot reach the other and dead awaits them.

Tal: Death?

Mu: It is coming and we cannot do a thing to stop it.

Tal: And art?

Mu: It replaced philosophy and religion as our guide in life. Reason cannot understand it.

Tal: Let us drink to that.

Sunday, March 18, 2007

Hegel’s own alienation

Mu: Hegel is disgusting.

Tal: Why?

Mu: He tastes wrong.

Tal: Explain.

Mu: There are dualities. True? Sure. So subject and object are dualities that come together –they arise simultaneously. True? If so, they cannot be separated and none of them is the cause of the other. True? If so, idealism is wrong and realism is wrong because mind does not cause reality nor reality causes mind. Hegel as idealist confused the whole thing and created a world of madness. He confused causality with correlation. A very shameful thing for a smart person.

Tal: I see. Why should I care?

Mu: My problem? Even though the man was wrong, Engel and Marx created a monster out of Hegel’s ideology. Hegel’s views of progress and alienation compels to action and that action is devastating.

Tal: A monster?

Mu: Sure. They inverted him. They took the dialectic method –by the way, another crazy idea to be discussed another day- and discarded the crazy system. The point? Madness can kill us. If you doubt it, consider the millions of people murdered under communist regimes.

Tal: Drunk?

Mu: A little and still angry about history determined by crazy people –another example of Hegel’s madness.

Tal: Time to sleep. Tell me about Hegel’s dialectic another day.

Mu: Sure, but first, let us move into Schopenhauer. Let us get depressed!

Saturday, March 17, 2007

Where both Kant and Hegel went wrong

Tal: welcome back.

Mu: Good time. I am upset.

Tal: You upset.

Mu: No. I am really angry.

Tal: What happened?

Mu: Image a word without emotions, where every one of your actions is dictated by reason, a where where everything is thought out and define by a clearly thought and plan. Would you live there?

Tal: Of course not.

Mu: Why?

Tal: I am not a walking calculator.

Mu: Agree. That is the point. Kant and Hegel want us to live a life of reason. This is madness.

Tal: Why?

Mu: Most of our emotions are not rational. They do not conform to reason, but they are the honney that give taste to life.

Tal: Who care?

Mu: You do. No emotion and then you are a calculator. The human spirit is dead.

Tal: So what?

Mu: Kant and Hegel preached it. That was clearly a signed of madness, just a consequence of Newton physics. -Ayn Rand preached the same. She was either crazy or ignorant.

Tal: Agree. There is more to life than counting stars. To live is not to do more than math. There is also the smile of someone we love. Is that rational? There is also the hope of a better tomorrow. Is that rational? There is the belief that to be alive is better than to be dead even though we know that for most of us living is pure hell and uncertain. Clearly not rational at all. A rational man would commit suicide.

Mu: Kant and Hegel. The poor souls!

Wednesday, March 14, 2007

Kant did not drink enough

Doom: I am here.

Mu: Good. I tell you something. Last night I read that Kant believed that there is a thing-in-itself which includes the ‘I’ that could not be known because reason could not reach it. I felt that something was really wrong with Kant. It does not make sense to me.

Doom: Oh, really.

Mu: You bet. Think about this. If the ‘I’ is a point of reference, then there is actually nothing to be reached by reason. Points of references are not knowable but experienced. Do you understand?

Doom: No

Mu: Let me give you an example. Imaging that I am walking on the woods on a beautiful afternoon. Tell me, where is the walking happening? Of course in the woods. Where is the woods happening? Of course, in the country. Now, where is the ‘I’ that experience the walking happening? In the mind? Where is the mind happening? In the brain. If so, then the mind depends of a physical vehicle; it is an action of the brain and -oh terrible- Kant was totally wrong- it is not in another unreachable world. The ‘I’, a transcendental subject, is no more than one of the many behaviors of the brain in the world.

Doom: So what?

Mu: Then there is no really a phenomena and noumena world. It is just a darn language game. It means that after Kant’s ‘critique of pure reason’ he had nothing else to say. Kant was swimming on his own culture damnation and we are left facing a life of faith.

Doom: Why do you care?

Mu: I think Kant’s major contribution is the view that experience gives content to knowledge and reason completes knowledge with its form. The rest is junk.

Doom: Do you mean no ethics, no esthetics?

Mu: I mean it. Ethics must be junk because we live always considering the consequences of our acts –not duty or sin. There is not duty but the one that we imposed on ourselves, there is no sin but the one what we allow Religions to impose on us. Likewise, Kant’s esthetics is lost because beauty seems to be culturally determined. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

Doom: Are you laughing now?

Mu: No. It is just that I have the thought that Kant was already too old when he moved into ethics and esthetics. I think that because he did not have a wife and was going alzhemic his later philosophy was too loose and probably wrong. Pure junk after ‘pure reason.’

Doom: A life without a wife is tough in the frontier with Russia, specially when vodka is not available. Give another drink.

Sunday, March 11, 2007

What is important to us

Mu: I will tell you a secret today.

Tal: Go ahead.

Mu: There are 2 types of questions: questions of truths and questions of values. 'Questions of truth' entertain the mind and 'questions of values' justify life.

Tal: What do you mean?

Mu: Questions of truth' deal with knowledge and understanding. For example, 'Is reality knowable? Is the world flat or is there life in another planets? Is there any God? What do I mean when I say 'do you understand that?' These questions are questions dealing with some abstraction, very far away from my pains of being alive. They are the domain of methaphysicals, logical positivists, and crazy linguists. Reason rules here and we are in real trouble when we reach the end of both language and thought.

Tal: And questions of values?

Mu: These are the one that I need to answer to convince myself that life is really worthy, that to be alive is better than to be dead. For example, 'if life is suffering -and obvious fact-, why to choose life instead of dead? Why not to commit suicide? Faith not logic is king. You find Nietzche, Sartre and Christ sharing this universe. No abstractions. They resides in our bones and bath in our own blood. We are them.

Tal: Thanks. Now let me go back to sleep.

Monday, March 5, 2007

Hume wrote noir poetry

Talo: Look what I found. One day Hume wrote, 'If it be conveyed to us by our senses, I ask, which of them; and after what manner? If it be percieved by the eyes, it must be a color; if by the ears, a sound; if the by the palate, a taste; and so of the other senses. But I believe none will assert, that substance is either a color, or sound, or taste. The idea of a susbtance must therefore be derived from an impression or reflection, if it really exist. But the impressions of reflection resolve themselves into our passions and emotions, none of which can possible represent a sustance. We have therefore no idea of substance distinct from that of a collection of particular qualities, nor have we any other meaning when we either talk or reason concerning it.'

Mu: I see. What did he mean?

Talo: Do you see it? He meant that when we ask about the relations between the mind and the soul, we are actually asking about the relation between a nothing and another nothing. In other words, phylobabbles.

Mu: Are you saying that when the perceptions and reason are removed therere nothing left?

Talo: Indeed. No perception and no abstract thinking concerning quantity or number implies that we have nothing. We have nada.

Mu: What else did he say?

Talo: Something very funny. He said, ' When we run over libraries, persuaded of these principles [that is, Hume's empirical principles], what havoc must we make? If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school methaphysics, for instance; let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter or fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames; for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.'

Mu: Tough. He just dummped all the religions of the world. And people die for them. What a shame!

Talo: What shall we do?

Mu: Oh well...I think that we need to figure out what makes valid a question. Clearly, not all question are valid. Some are just asking nothing about nothing -a way of being waste in philoland.

Talo: Asking questions? How?

Mu: That is what we are trying to figure. How do we know that the question makes sense? What is that sense we want to have before reaching for an anwer? I feel tha Wittgenstein was wrong, that when we ask for the sense of a question we are asking for something beyond a usage or game meaning? I feel that there is a thing that our finger want to reach. I think a lot about the value of common sense.

Talo: Maybe there is a thing in common sense of value. At least sometimes.

Mu: Sure, though common sense can make the world go flat and the moon into a Goddes.

Talo: Not really. Only when you are a fool.

Mu: Sorry, my friend. We are already fools and reaching for the stars.

Thursday, February 22, 2007

Is an illogical world madness or wisdom?

Tal: You said that “A=A” is a good starting point to think about logic. But why should I care about logic?

Mu: Logic? Another mess! Our life is full of confused people.

Tal: Messy business here? I do not believe you. It is probably a boring topic.

Mu: Imagine a world where the laws of logic are invalid and tell me about the consequences.

Tal: Ok, in the absence of the identity law A = Not A. Things would not be equal to themselves. A cow would be a cow no more and a dollar suddently has not value. What an identity crisis!

Mu: What about the law of contradiction?

Tal: Aristotle said, "One cannot say of something that it is and that it is not in the same respect and at the same time." If, in that world, we could see that something is and it is not simultaneously, then we ended up again into another huge identity crisis. No way of figuring out head from tail.

Mu: What about law of the excluded middle?

Tal: It states that every proposition is either true or false. In this case, we could not separated true from false. This is a deep knowledge crisis; we would be paralized because learning and actions would null. -It feels even as we would have a moral crisis because how to distinguish right from wrong. How come I feel that true and false belong to the same network that right and wrong belong to?

Mu: What is this telling us?

Tal: That in a world that lacks logic all things would dissolve into themselves. This world would be covered by ignorance. Clearly, the first two tell us that our world would not be possible and the second, that we would not be possible either. We live neccessarily in a logical universe.

Mu: It seems that logic tell us a lot about the world and us. We live in a world that to us appear logical. In other words, a world that makes sense to us because an illogical world is really unthinkable. We cannot even think much about such a world. If you find yourself surprised with paradoxes or illogical views, you better consider that maybe you are confused and need more clarity. Maybe you better stop drinking.

Tal: To be illogical is either a sign of madness or of confusion. A point in case is Meister Eckhart when he says, “All things are contained in the One, by virtue of the fact that it is one. For all multiplicity is one, and is one thing, and is in and through the One. . . The One is not distinct from all things. Therefore all things in the fullness of being are in the One by virtue of its indistinction and unity.” [Sermon LW XXIX]

Mu: What a theological mess running around logic! The many is the one and the one is the many…I’d better hold my wallet.

Wednesday, February 21, 2007

Creating a meaningfull soup

Tilo: No much today but a nagging thought.

Tal: What?

Tilo: What do you mean by meaning creators?

Tal: I mean that only human create meanings. I do not see cows or tabled asking me ‘what do you mean?’

Tilo: I see.

Tal: Surely, it does not tell us what meanings are but it shows that we are the only beings –as far as we know- that entertain that type of questions. I guess we are somewhat crazy!

Tilo: If so, then we could classify all things in the universe as either meaning creators or meaning sustainers.

Tal: Meaning sustainers? What is that?

Tilo: The meaning creators use the other things to cook meanings. You, know, like making a salad with lettuce and tomatoes. You add an once of little of value, a pinch of purpose, and a pound of lettuce and then you are ready for lunch. I mean, you either fall in love or find meaning in your life.

Tal: I guess that it what makes us different from the dogs and cats, from the tables and apples.

Tilo: So, what is that that we create, what is that thing that we call meaning? No. Probably it is better to ask, why do we create that that has disturbed the philosophers the last centuries? Why do we care about meanings so much that without them we prefer death? Why?

Tal: I do not believe Wittgenstein or Kant care about that salad. I think they were into chicken soups.

Monday, February 19, 2007

Why philosophy?

Tilo: Why do you care about philosophy and questioning the obvious? Is it not better to enjoy the next TV ball game or to admire the new young stars discovered by the media?

Mu: Because with Descartes, we lost our roots. We became divided between a body and an unreachable soul.

Tilo: Why shall we care about the meaning of this and that, the value of a worthy live, or what distinguish man from animal?

Mu: Because of certainty. Since Kant, we have not truth. We know that our own mind constrains all knowledge. We are damn to live in ignorance of what is real.

Tilo: But you know that the only sure things are taxes and death. Why shall we care about God and beliefs, about reason and faith, about truth and freedom?

Mu: Because of emptiness. Since Nietzsche, we have no God and good and evil are totally confused –some say these two are just perspectives. We are orphans in an unknowable and complex world and sadly we know that there is no tomorrow. We suffer in secret our despair.

Tilo: Why shall we care about good and bad when everyone knows that the answer ‘it depends.’?

Mu: Because when we stop caring about the important questions then and only then we become empty shells ready to be eaten by the birds of time. At that time, it is probably better to be dead. At that time, we cease being human.

Meaning of ‘meaning’. What a mess!

Tal: Sure. You know what I mean.

Fal: Not really. I do not understand you meaning.

Tal: Why?

Fal: Crossing along the dictionary, I began to read about the meaning of meaning. What a fight! We have the reference theory telling us that word means that they point to, and others telling us that “it is that makes what would otherwise be mere sounds and inscriptions into instruments of communications and understanding.” The first could be debated and, the second, sounds like rubbish.

Tal: That is very deep.

Fal: We have problems here. I could say ‘an empty hole is full of nothing” and you would understand clearly that empty and nothing point likewise. The sentence could be converted into ‘ A p hole is full of p.’ In other words, ‘p hole = full p’ or, even better,‘A=A’. The sentence is empty of new information, there is nothing here to mean at all. It is meaningless to say that ‘A=A’. Our intuition says ‘No way, Jose. We understand it very well and like it. That sentence mean a lot to me.’

Tal: What about communication?

Fal: Clearly there is neither communicating nor pointing to a real thing in that sentence, but our intuition says that the sentence is really fine. We have a puzzle here. Somebody is wrong.

Tal: But remember, Wittgenstein and his ‘meaning is the usage.’

Fal: Sure, but here thing get messy. For him, meaning is created at the moment of usage. The word ‘play’ means an act on the baseball field and another in the theater. Fore a moment, let us image a lonely rock on the floor that is hidden from every one. Of course, the rock has no meaning for anyone. You hear me. It takes to have one, a person, to have a meaning on hand. Bob comes and sees the rock. He just sees the rock. For Bob, the rock means that there is something with some properties on the floor. That thing has no particular use until Bob sees it as mean to and end. What we got here? First, things means something to someone and second, things not words are meaning carriers.

Tal: And your point?

Fal: We do not need to have a sentence to have meaning at all but a thing and a person facing that thing. It looks more like a communication between the thing and the person than a communication between to persons. Of course, a person could become a thing. Imagine Bob suddenly becoming a cow.

Tal: That would be fun. I wonder what Wit would say about it. It reminds me a lot of Kant.

Wednesday, February 14, 2007

Fallibilism or ignorance on fancy clothing

Theo: Look what I found today from Xenophanes:

“The Gods did not reveal, from the beginning,
All things to us; but in he course of time,
Through seeking, men find that which is the better,
But as for certain truth, no man has known it,
Nor will he know it; neither of the gods,
Nor yet of all the things of which I speak.
And even if by chance he wee to utter
The final truth, he would himself not know it;
For all is but a woven web of guesses.”

Fifo:
What a tragedy! Do you hear that echo on Kant and Stirner? Do you hear The Tractatus’ voice of logical and ethical agony of silence here? Do you hear Nietzsche turning and laughing in his grave? They despair. Xenophanes stole their ignoramus glory with his terse and clear verses of truth.

Theo: Dah…Xeno mocked then and dear to announce ‘fame that will reach all of Greece, and never die while the Greek kind of songs survives.’ Those greeks! Those greeks!

Fifo: A new visitor in this cave. Epicurus, Wie geht es Ihnen? Did you believe that the world was knowable. I think that you screwed up!

Tuesday, February 13, 2007

At the beginning

Theo: Guess me.

Thao: Sure. What?

Theo: Maybe the asking of the questions is more important than getting to the answers.

Thao: Sure. When we ask questions we go under.

Theo: Going under? What do you mean?

Thao: Underneath the surface, beyond the obvious. We see that we dance a buggy-buggy of suppositions. We actually know very little and probably understand even less. Remember Socrates. He made his point about our ignorance and then he committed suicide to give an example to his dumb students. The rest? It is probably just a game with words.

Theo: Are you saying that we need to look into suppositions?

Thao: I am sorry, but that is the case. We are completely trapped in a web of suppositions. We have very little real knowledge but live a life of faith. I go even further. I believe that even Kant would tell us that Real knowledge is not for us because we cannot escape ourselves and face the real itself beyond reason.

Theo: Wait a minute. What do you mean?

Thao: No much. I give you an example. How do you know that the sun will come out tomorrow morning, or that you will be alive 1 hour from now? You do not, but you hope, have faith, that the sun will come up and that you will be there to see it coming up in its full glory. A good question is to ask about our dependence on faith. We turned faith into our highest trade and receive its blessing in the middle of our despair.

Theo: Too deep for me. I’d better get going.

Thao: No so fast. You asked me ‘what do you mean?’ I have the right to ask you if you know what you mean by asking this question. Do you know what is meaning itself?

Theo: Too obvious. I am saying that I do not understand.

Thao: There. What is understanding? That is my point. One last point, I bet that you believe that you will live forever. No? You say that you know that you will die one day, but you truly behave as you were going to live forever. Why? Because if you accept that you will be dead any time soon you would be terrorized, you life would be disassembled, and the cat would be thrown out the window. Now you can go and have fun. Adios.

Monday, February 12, 2007

The mother of the questions

Scene: Lustro and Fifo walks on Main street. Lustro pulls a paper out of his left pocket.

Lustro: Last night in the middle of my loneliness and before bed I wrote some thoughts. I want to read them to you.

Fifo: Sure, but we careful. Sometimes the last thoughts at night start long conversations and in Blog space attention is very short.

Lustro begings.

Lustro: After long thoughts, the most important question that any man could ask is if it life really worthwhile. I mean, is it better to be alive than to be dead? The crazyness of this question is that only those men that answered in the afirmative can be present to say yes. The others are already dead.

Fifo: I totally agree. First we choose life from the conviction that life is better than death, and then we have the horrible trouble of figure out what is the best live worth living.

Lustro: So you go it. But I read these thoughts to Merli and she told me that it depends on the belief of an after life, that fear of the consequences of would stop some people of ending their lifes, and that it takes a lot of courage.

Fifo: She misses the point. If the consequences of choosing death is damnation in hell, then choosing life, even when it is full of suffering, is better than an eternity of pain in hell. In other words, a little suffering today in life is much better than eternal suffering in hell as penalty for commiting suicide.

Lustro: Indeed. 'Is life worth living?' becomes the primary question that any self conscious being ask. The other questions follow afterward.

Sunday, February 11, 2007

Most silly question: A=A

Scene: In a coffee shop, while sipping tea and Coca-cola, 2 young kids talks. The taller of the two opens a book. He is bored. With shaking fingers, he peruses its pages and suddenly asks a question.


Deuterious: Tell me, when I tell you that "A is A", have I say a thing?

Pronious: Probably not. You have not tell me anything. It is meaningless.

Deuterious: Why does it sound right, obvious that this is the truth? In other words, why do we accept this identity as meaningfull? I do not see anybody question it.

Pronious: Probably we need to look deeper. When I say, "It is meaningless.", I am saying that nothing is convey in the proposition. No communication between you and. You did not learn anything from me. I might as well say that the proposition is rubish.

Deuterious: But did not Aristotle say "Now 'why a thing is itself' is a meaningless inquiry (for -- to give meaning to the question 'why' -- the fact or the existence of the thing must already be evident-e.g. that the moon is eclipsed-but the fact that a thing is itself is the single reason and the single cause to be given in answer to all such questions as why the man is man, or the musician musical', unless one were to answer 'because each thing is inseparable from itself, and its being one just meant this' this, however, is common to all things and is a short and easy way with the question)." - Metaphysics Book VII, Part 17?

Pronious: Sure. It is equivalent, as Aris says, that "A is itself." It seems to be unavoidable that you cannot be but who you are. Now let us assume that you are somebody else, then you would not be yourself. So A cannot be the opposite of A. In other words, either you are yourself or you are NOT you but somebody else. These are the law of identity and the Principle of contradiction.

Deuterious: Why should I care?

Pronious: Because it shows that those that say that God is both individual and collective are illogical as where as those that believe that God is the one and the many at the same time. Remember the Trinity of the Catholic church. It is the same problem here.

Deuterious: The problem of the existance of God behind a simple affirmation of "A=A." Hard to belief.

Pronious: Yes, as white as mozzarella cheese.

Deuterious: What about if logic is man made?

Pronious: That get us into Kant, I think, and into another day.

Saturday, February 10, 2007

Talking about the moon

Pedro: What is your problem?

John: I am just a little confused, a little scared.

Pedro: Why?

John: Things do not seem to be as I always thought.

Pedro: Tell me more.

John: It seems that all the problems that we have under the sun are interconnected as if they were part of a net. When we believe that we have solve a particular problem, another one suddenly pops out in the middle of nowhere. I tell you, Pedro, if you solve the money problem, then the love one will show up to grasp your head. If you solve the love one, then the religious one will raise its head and rabish your tail. If you find meaning and purpose, then sex will reach under you and pull the darn carpet. Nothing is really clear. We swim in the mud.

Pedro: I see. I want you to to consider that maybe there are only 3 type of problems for us to face: to be, to think, and to do. The first deals with what makes what we are; the second, with how we know the world and our own existance; and the third, with whatever we do in this world we exist. In other words, we are here, we know that we are here, and we do something about it.

John: Sure. What about the problem of God and Evil? What about with the problem of language and the meaning of life? Tell me about what is a life worth living.

Pedro: That is something to think about. Now let rest.