Our success is killing us

actually i think philosophy has the same problem. there needs to be more creativity in the intellectual process, not just trying to come to a logical black and white consensus on everything.

you want to have a very long and detailed discussion about technology. okay fine, but is there a bigger picture? i mean, suppose you have a long and detailed discussion about technology. is it going to be so dry that few people participate? should all thinking be done by a select group of people that like that sort of thing? would we have more ideas to work with if it was more inclusive?

i don't think we need to dumb down things any more than we already do, but there are important discussions we need to have as people in the 21st century, and i think the well-being of humanity depends on that.

hopefully i'm wrong, and everything will sort itself out. i just think that philsophy has a history of passionate thinkers, without any passionate contemporaries. we're just rehashing, expecting something new to come out of it. that's the definition of madness, isn't it?

make it interesting this time, coberst. change philosophy instead of following it, because i can't see anything coming of the discussions that intellectuals have but thinktanks about how we can destroy the earth. technology is a people problem, let's talk about people, and what they're missing out on, philosophers included. otherwise it's just a textbook exercise, no good for solving problems in life.

i bet there are about fifteen different logical fallacies i've made in this post, leap of faith being the most popular. that's fine, thinking ahead is fallacy, it's also creative and vital.

epistemology can find the flaws in black and white arguments, but are we going to do philosophy, or are we going to use philosophy as a component in actual problem solving? when did asking the question become the whole of the game, and when did practical answers take a back seat? why don't we care about the outcome, is it because there's nothing intellectual or ontological about simply caring?

native americans didn't have this problem, they simply posited: "let's not do anything unless we've considered the implications for the next seven generations." now that's philosophy. and to me it seems perfectly logical, but really it's just a responsible belief. why seven? just because, no reason.

i think logic is a very useful tool, but not a solution, as people treat it. a hammer is not part of a finished product, hammers do not hold wood together, they don't give shape to anything either. similarly, logic does not solve problems. logic and hammers are just part of the process. however, if you use a hammer long enough on the same building, you'll knock your work back down again.

we live in a world where we have more access to ideas than ever. it's good to weigh those ideas, but i think that we've taken logic and the elimination of fallacy to the point where we can find fallacy in anything, and throw out every idea as imperfect. great. so we'll run out of ideas.

there's something to be said for doing anything to help people (even ourselves) at all, but i think we've perfected the art of just talking about it instead. we really need a better philosophy, but for now, we could weigh some of the ideas we've thrown out, and maybe they will inspire new ones.

currently, whenever someone has a good idea, it's attacked from a variety of angles and no group of people of any real size is there to make it work. we have non-profit organizations, and very few people working in them that are paying attention and content that the mission is successful. everyone seems to excel at demonstrating the logical faults of everyone else's solutions, yet we're supposed to cooperate to make the world better.

i don't think there is even a liberal and conservative party anymore, just an anti-liberal party we call "conservatives" and an anti-conservative party we call "liberals." what good is philosophy when everything is "anti-" to being devoid of meaning?

take technology, technology is power. power corrupts. but power can be balanced, as well. where do we get that idea? frankly i don't care where we get it, if we can use it to heal, and we know that it works, and have some cause to believe that it helps the next seven generations. i agree that things are out of balance. i'm not surprised, when our thinking is so very one-sided.

and logic will never prove anything to anyone, not even philosophy professors. what we call proof is really just a more concrete form of evidence. proof is a personal thing. we need something a lot more creative than epistemology to put the world back together again, we need a philosophy based on an open mind, based on putting things in balance instead of eliminating everything. and you know? such philosophy exists, and great minds have talked openly about such ideas for thousands of years, but that's an appeal to authority.

do you think that technology has influenced philosophy in a negative (or imbalanced) way? and how? perhaps we've recited the promise of "progress" so many times, we have a new god that we can wait to make everything okay? isn't that what technology is, a more generous god that gives us everything we want? wouldn't such a belief mean that we can return to not caring about people? what do they contribute? did they create linux or a new way to ship twice as many cans on the same cost? and do we really have to reward anyone? in the future, we'll be able to replicate anything we want, right? have faith in the future.

for that matter, do we even need to think anymore? are there no televisions, no ipods?

oh i wouldn't draw the line there, i don't know where i would, but lots of fundamentalists have "clarity." and lots of reasonable people have no ideas at all. i think there's plenty of confusion on both sides, possibly arising from the complete lack of ambassadors between your two "worlds."



so how can there be a "problem" at all? science can't answer that question. perhaps we obliterate ourselves. okay, that happens. science will show that it happens to all kinds of species. it wouldn't be any different from us, obviously driving ourselves to "early" extinction is just a textbook issue. no moral quandaries there, no problem, and thus no solution.