Posted on 05/16/2007 6:54:51 AM PDT by SirLinksalot
Neither time nor space exist. There are no patterns in nature. Also, information is inessential. Makes no sense, for sure, but in claustral philosophy, also called organic philosophy, it begins to.
I am so glad for being pinged to your worthy post, and grateful most of all for this perfect (precise and concise!) conclusion. Amen!
And thank you for the kudos, but truly when cornelis and betty boop get into a brisk discussion of philosophy - or when RightWhale asserts a new theory - I have to spend a lot of time researching the word concepts and thinkers before I can even comprehend much less respond. So I'd greatly benefit from one of the primers, too. LOL!
I would, but believe me this is evolved far from my own starting point. I was merely looking for the origin of rights and the state. There is darned little on that of any use, and I have even read Hegel and some other names including Aristotle, which is possibly a translation from Latin, which was from Arabic, which was from Aramaic, and who knows if he wrote it in Aramaic to begin with.
Plotinus was quite the jokester and sometimes it is easy to forget that he was pre-Christian. He apologized every day for presenting himself in corporal form.
Which is probably one of the silliest statements imaginable. As others have said, it leaves you with both feet planted firmly in the air. Every statement you make about science is rife with philosophical presuppositions. The problem is that "science" today operates in an overwhelming presupposition of naturalism, so that when you challenge those presuppositions, you get the same tired old cant about putting up the lab equipment and "praying about it" or other such rubbish.
Not at all. Science is a branch of philosophy descended from street-smart Aquinas. Thomists.
That's almost as bad as Kierkegaard...
Have you considered reading any of the enlightenment French, or nosing about among the Federalist papers to find *their* cited sources?
Cheers!
Which is probably one of the silliest statements imaginable. As others have said, it leaves you with both feet planted firmly in the air. Every statement you make about science is rife with philosophical presuppositions.
Sorry you disagree. But that's OK; you go ahead and make whatever philosophical statements you want about science. Science, on the other hand, will keep on doing what it does whether philosophers say yea or nay. We'll see where each is in fifty or a hundred years. (I'm betting on science.)
The problem is that "science" today operates in an overwhelming presupposition of naturalism, so that when you challenge those presuppositions, you get the same tired old cant about putting up the lab equipment and "praying about it" or other such rubbish.
Science works with the natural world, that is, with things that can be measured or observed in some manner. Things that cannot be observed or measured are left to philosophy, religion, and other fields. I see this as a strength, not a problem.
Philosophy, theology, and other fields are free to take whatever assumptions they want and run with them. Knock yourselves out! But when you claim results, you need to make sure they can be verified in some manner, and that they are not just the product of somebody's fevered imagination.
I am currently reading Lessing and Herder, who were reacting to the French revolution. Also, I am reading Ockham and Bacon, Roger, having read Bacon, Francis a couple years ago. There is a lot of reading. The trail became clear not long ago when I finally stumbled across a book in the Public Library and found that the author actually appeared to know what he was talking about. Fom there I followed his cites, and then the cites of those cites. After a while it starts to make some sense. Since I have been power reading for effect I have been doing what I can to preserve my eyes, which are still functional—that is important. I do not spend much time reading articles on the PC monitor since that will ruin the eyes. I find most of the modern writing on these topics is silly and may be disregarded without missing anything. Read the AntiFederalist papers, which is the stenographers note of the 1787 Constitutional Convention, there being no journalists reports allowed. Closed-door, bipartisan, secret, rushed through—sound familiar?
Not at all. Science is a branch of philosophy descended from street-smart Aquinas. Thomists.
Science may be descended from philosophy, but the greatest advances came when science divorced itself from the shackles of philosophy and theology and began to look for answers on its own, using its own assumptions and methods.
Currently, working scientists pay almost no attention to philosophers and their mumblings.
That's true since the colleges don't require philosophy except possibly an Ethics for dummies course, however, many scientists dig into philosophy when they are more mature and not working so hard on making their nut. Many of the best and most influential philosphers were scientists before. Kant was a physicist.
Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm 1646-1716
Whatever it is, it is older than both ID and the Rapture.
Is that how you can tell when senility sets in? ;-)
Positivism is dead. Has been since the 1930s.
For one thing, you’ve been speaking of Whitehead for several threads, so if you are resting in his view of organic philosophy – a reconciliation of math/science and theology/philosophy - I must hasten to note that he was born in 1861 – and thus, like Hegel (born 1770) and Nietzsche (born 1844) – to whatever extent they address the physical, none of them had the insights of modern physics, cosmology, et al.
That of course doesn’t mean the philosophers were ipso facto in error in whole or in part, but rather that they were not as informed as we are today and thus it falls to us or modern thinkers to put their insights in context.
There is also some dispute in the interpretation of Whitehead vis-à-vis theology as we can see here: Process Theism
Nevertheless, those who maintain that “all that there is” is an illusion or a dream (e.g. I am a figment of your imagination) – have no basis for correspondence with math or science at all. It is a statement of faith – much like the statement that “God created ‘all that there is’ last Thursday.” Indeed, if Lanza's speculations were taken to the extreme, it would suggest that "reality" comes into existence as a result of the observation itself.
Einstein famously said that “reality is an illusion, albeit a very persistent one” – but he was speaking of local realism in physics.
It seems we are always coming back to the epistemic divide. If all of science and math would adhere to Bohr’s counsel, then it would limit itself to what it can say about the physical and nothing about the meaning of it. That would leave the broad reach to the philosophers who have the “toolkit” including the wisdom over the ages, to address the essence – and to the theologians to put all of the knowledge in context with revelation, doctrine or tradition, i.e. systematic theology.
But of course that only works if the philosophers and theologians make an effort to understand modern math and science, e.g. Wolfgang Pannenberg.
I had to look that one up. One definition I found was:
the form of empiricism that bases all knowledge on perceptual experience (not on intuition or revelation)No wonder the philosophers dumped it! It was about to put them out of business!
Whitehead explained relativity to Einstein. Philosophy was a second career for Whitehead, after he retired from mathematics. He is hard to read, but he has to be read first hand since translations suffer from the usual failure to transmit meaning.
Indeed, whatever is not observed has as much significance as whatever is observed. And, truly, the observation - or ommission - is causal to what happens next and thus contributes to the unfolding of reality.
Lanza's speculations are very useful to us in our research of God and the Observer Problem - but I still hesitate on quoting him directly because his speculations are often applied to the extreme which would lead to the "reality is illusion" deadend.
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