Fido wrote:
cicerone imposter wrote:
Not loving knowledge, but truth. Knowledge is a subjective term. There's a huge difference between knowledge and truth.
You are mistaken... We like to think of truth as absolute, and objective... TRUTH is a moral form, and a form of relationshp...And, something else... Truth is life, for each of us the most objective of all possible truths... But if knowledge is not true, it is not knowledge, and is worse than knowledge, for untruth accepted as knowledge is an impediment to survival... If i am correct, then Kant concluded that knowledge is judgement, just as our ideas and forms of the physical world are both knowledge, and judgements, and truth, at least to the extent we know...Whether we frame truth as an absolute or not, all we need of truth, and all humanity needs of truth is enough...
And just how does relation impede the possibility of Truth ? Is dialectics about lies ? maybe for some, I heard it before... but not for me, I see it the other way around.
Truth is about what is and not about my knowledge or even my ability to describe it which is yet another instance, another degree in the matter...
To say there is no Truth is to say there is no World...no nothing.
If I can describe Truth in ten thousand different way´s this does n´t mean there is no truth but only that the ONE Truth is ten thousand different things, and as a set, One and the same !...
Truth is about the length of the string of Information. Not just the one that which as become already, but also the potential which is yet to be...And it will ! (here´s why I am a Determinist, I believe in Truth !)
Tell that to the astrophysicists who are looking into other life forms. They would be interested in your intellectual input.
cicerone imposter wrote:
Tell that to the astrophysicists who are looking into other life forms. They would be interested in your intellectual input.
Most of those geeks would probably **** their britches to have a chance at a good close up look at a girl; and I hate to point out the obvious to you, but before anyone can look into other life forms, they must have the other life form to look into, and if they do, I have not heard about it...
Quote:I would be happy to agree that thought involves reacing new conclusions from a process that is not directly logical, and yet, what I said remains true: Before anything can be taught, the logic of it must be taught... Cause and effect are strictly logical, for example, but insight, or knowledge guided speculation is not necessarily logical, but to give proof to insight one must understand what occurs in terms of cause and effect..
You obviously haven't got a clue about the status of "causality", "logic" , "proof" and "understanding" in either particle physics or biology. And it is from these so-called "narrow areas" in which classical notions have fallen apart, that philosophers hide. You/they simply haven't got the metalanguage to handle it. What, for example, are you going to make of "backward action in time" , "non-locality", or "observations conforming to the symmetry of an equation"? Or what analysis can you offer for the interaction of structure and function in aspects of teleological reasoning in biology ?
Let me hear the views of a philosopher who has studied the biological basis for the emergence of "logical thought" such as that undertaken by Piaget. Or let mehear from a philosopher who understands "an observation event" as an interaction between observer and observed, neither being a priori. Then I might take them seriously !
Only an insult if you think that teaching older philosophical ideas is no longer relevant. Otherwise, you're just talking about philosophy as fashion.
In many ways that philosophy is dead, music is dead. It's not to say that new and inventive music isn't being produced today. For instance, take something like chords or time signature, when was the last time an original chord progression was used? How many songs are written in 6/6? I think that too many are interested in finding new lakes than swimming in the one's we have.
Imagine the depression of the cartographer when aerial images of the earth began assembling the world in more accurate ways than their own.
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What they know? What answer would please you? Contemporary verses more classical notions of philosophy seem to be you preempting that that they could have any authority on any matter philosophical. As for authority itself, what authority has any great philosopher ever really had?
We aren't talking about two pieces of soggy toast we found in the gutter here.
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re physics and philosophy, I had an amusing experience in one of Sydney's better bookstores. There was a philosophy lecturer holding forth to a student who was considering a PhD. This man was obviously an amazing scholar, he had the most perfect middle-English accent and a huge range of knowledge. They were talking high philosophy - what the subject really is about, why is there something rather than nothing, what Duns Scotus said about it, as opposed to what Indian philosophy says about it, and so on.
Two of the statements that really stayed with me: "You only need to know what the Greeks said, what the Medievals said, and what the Germans said.
The rest of it is dispensable."
"Cosmology? We don't have a cosmology."
Because I can say it, and get away with it, I think a lot of theoretical physics is complete nonsense, utter tripe. None of it will ever be verified, much of it will be forgotten, and most of it is completely meaningless and totally useless. It has all the disadvantages of scholastic metaphysics, but with no moral core.
Anyone who disagrees can argue with one of the other versions of me in the next couple of universes.
failures art wrote:
Only an insult if you think that teaching older philosophical ideas is no longer relevant. Otherwise, you're just talking about philosophy as fashion.
In many ways that philosophy is dead, music is dead. It's not to say that new and inventive music isn't being produced today. For instance, take something like chords or time signature, when was the last time an original chord progression was used? How many songs are written in 6/6? I think that too many are interested in finding new lakes than swimming in the one's we have.
Imagine the depression of the cartographer when aerial images of the earth began assembling the world in more accurate ways than their own.
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The same thing you say of music is true of tragic literature since the basic antiheroes have not been improved upon since the time of the Greeks...
Once one has the building blocks, one finds they can be combined in any number of fashions...
It is physics which without morals is dead, and which will kill us all if we cannot rein it in...
I mean, those people who reject the physical world for the moral/spiritual world are just as mad as physicist who live purely in the physical,
but the physicist have more power, and yet, all that power may well end in the hands of nut case spiritualists who blame everyone but themselves for the general immorality and would burn down the good to get at the evil...
It does not matter to me if the whole world dies from knowledge or stupidity because it will be just as dead...
Physics needs to reach all those who have been driven into spirituality by the hoplessness of their existence, and give them some good, and the moralists, who see to what extent our spiritual conception of reality troubles us and puts us at odds with others have got to reach the physicists and tell them the danger of knowledge without morals...
We cannot go on like this with only a relative few having knowledge, and only a few having the benefit of knowledge and technology while the rest of the world is living little better than cave men, and in fear that their meager lives and goods will be snatch from them....
Physics has made many rich,
and many poor,
but it has not conquered want
or fear,
and rather added to the later...
failures art wrote:It has always been the question of influence verses authority...
What they know? What answer would please you? Contemporary verses more classical notions of philosophy seem to be you preempting that that they could have any authority on any matter philosophical. As for authority itself, what authority has any great philosopher ever really had?
We aren't talking about two pieces of soggy toast we found in the gutter here.
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Too often, the influence of the philosopher stood behind the authority of the tyrant...
And what else is physics without morality than a tyrant since might follows might until reason means nothing...
Not loving knowledge, but truth. Knowledge is a subjective term. There's a huge difference between knowledge and truth.
Art, knowledge is power is physics without morality...
Knowledge is virtue and all it really implies is physics with morality...
When people find they are working on a particular problem the solution of which will enable great destruction, and at that point those consequences will be out of their control, then, going on is irresponsible and so, immoral...
The knowledge people need is self knowledge... What are they doing, and what is their responsibility to others and self...
After a thousand years of Western Law, we are all broken off into so many individuals thinking only of ourselves... That is immoral, and that whole situation is immoral and breeds immorality...
Certainly science can be conceived of as a community; and it is a form of relationship...
But science is not apart, or above all other human activities...
We have the right to demand that all such activities serve a truly human purpose...
You seem to suggest that Scientist like Copernicus and Galaleo were in some great danger from the earthly church...The church was preserving its power, whcih was not in the least moral... They were no so much against truth as concerned with control of the truth in such a fashion that it did not wreck their power...
More recent government have been more sensible... I mean, the Nazis cleaned the Jews, whose minds they feared, out of the universities at exactly the moment when they most needed those minds, after victory in Poland bagan WWII... A lot of able engineers were turned into storm troopers, and the expectation was that brawn and not brains would win the war...
Where America found the will, the resources, and the brains for the Manhattan district project is beyond me... We were exceptional for that... But even soldiers who showed intelligence and ability were spared front line duty and made available for the work...
We once were everything the Nazis were not...
Nietzsche:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_Nietzsche[url][/url]
Quote:In 1883 he tried and failed to obtain a lecturing post at the University of Leipzig. It was made clear to him that, in view of the attitude towards Christianity and the concept of God expressed in Zarathustra, he had become in effect unemployable at any German University.
Quote:According to a common myth, Nietzsche's ancestors were Polish. Nietzsche himself subscribed to this story toward the end of his life. He wrote in 1888, "My ancestors were Polish noblemen (Nietzky); the type seems to have been well preserved despite three generations of German mothers."[39] At one point Nietzsche becomes even more adamant about his Polish Identity. “I am a pure-blooded Polish nobleman, without a single drop of bad blood, certainly not German blood.”[40] On yet another occasion Nietzsche stated “Germany is a great nation only because its people have so much Polish blood in their veins [...] I am proud of my Polish descent.”[41] Nietzsche believed his name might have been Germanized, in one letter claiming, "I was taught to ascribe the origin of my blood and name to Polish noblemen who were called Niëtzky and left their home and nobleness about a hundred years ago, finally yielding to unbearable suppression: they were Protestants."[42]
Most scholars dispute Nietzsche's account of his family's origins. Hans von Müller debunked the genealogy put forward by Nietzsche's sister in favor of a Polish noble heritage.[43] Max Oehler, the curator of Nietzsche Archive at Weimar, argued that all of Nietzsche's ancestors bore German names, even the wives' families.[39] Oehler claims that Nietzsche came from a long line of German Lutheran clergymen on both sides of his family, and modern scholars regard the claim of Nietzsche's Polish ancestry as "pure invention."[44] Colli and Montinari, the editors of Nietzsche's assembled letters, gloss Nietzsche's claims as a "mistaken belief" and "without foundation."[45] The name Nietzsche itself is not a Polish name, but an exceptionally common one throughout central Germany, in this and cognate forms (such as Nitsche and Nitzke). The name derives from the forename Nikolaus, abbreviated to Nick; assimilated with the Slavic Nitz, it first became Nitsche and then Nietzsche.[39]
It is not known why Nietzsche wanted to be thought of as Polish. According to biographer R. J. Hollingdale, Nietzsche's propagation of the Polish ancestry myth may have been part of the latter's "campaign against Germany".[39]
Nietzsche can invent "truth" about his ancestry.
Quote:Nietzsche wrote Thus Spoke Zarathustra, therein introducing the concept of a value-creating Übermensch.
Quote:Another concept important to an understanding of Nietzsche's thought is the Übermensch. While interpretations of Nietzsche's overman vary wildly, here are a few of his quotes from Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Prologue, §§3–4):
"I teach you the overman. Man is something that shall be overcome. What have you done to overcome him? … All beings so far have created something beyond themselves; and do you want to be the ebb of this great flood, and even go back to the beasts rather than overcome man? What is ape to man? A laughing stock or painful embarrassment. And man shall be that to overman: a laughingstock or painful embarrassment. You have made your way from worm to man, and much in you is still worm. Once you were apes, and even now, too, man is more ape than any ape.... The overman is the meaning of the earth. Let your will say: the overman shall be the meaning of the earth.... Man is a rope, tied between beast and overman—a rope over an abyss … what is great in man is that he is a bridge and not an end."
Quote:Nietzsche's growing prominence suffered a severe setback when he became closely associated with Adolf Hitler and the German Reich. Many political leaders of the twentieth century were at least superficially familiar with Nietzsche's ideas, although it is not always possible to determine whether or not they actually read his work. Hitler, for example, probably never read Nietzsche, and if he did, his reading was not extensive,[82] although he was a frequent visitor to the Nietzsche museum in Weimar and did use expressions of Nietzsche's, such as "lords of the earth" in Mein Kampf.[83] The Nazis made selective use of Nietzsche's philosophy. Mussolini and Charles de Gaulle read Nietzsche.[84][85] It has been suggested that Theodore Roosevelt read Nietzsche and was profoundly influenced by him,[86] and in more recent years, Richard Nixon read Nietzsche with "curious interest".[87]
http://www.catholic.org/national/national_story.php?id=23327
Quote:NEW YORK (Commonweal Magazine) – Lurking behind this science-versus-religion controversy has been an issue that extends beyond creationists and evolutionists. Among the first to frame it was Friedrich Nietzsche.
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In the words of biographer Curtis Cate, Nietzsche hailed Darwin’s “calm annihilation of the fairy-tale fable of the creation of the World” and welcomed the support it supplied in his campaign for a “transvaluation of values” to overthrow the “morality of slaves.” But Nietzsche disliked what he detected in Darwin as a genuflection toward English industrialists and imperialists, as if they were the end product of the contest for existence.
The relationship between the views of Nietzsche and Darwin is interesting both for the general insights it offers into the intellectual upheaval in 19th-century Europe and for the particular questions it raises about the impact of these two thinkers. In the case of Nietzsche, the question of whether he was a champion of artistic freedom and uncompromising individualism or, instead, a prophet of enslaving the weak and eradicating the unfit was examined in “The Gentle Nietzscheans,” a controversial and influential article by Conor Cruise O’Brien published in the New York Review of Books almost four decades ago (Nov. 5, 1970).
It was no accident, wrote Cruise O’Brien, that Nietzsche was remembered as an apolitical “man of thought and letters” who made major “contributions to psychology, German prose, and the critique of ethics.” This image of Nietzsche had been crafted by latter-day disciples-“Gentle Nietzscheans”-who insisted that his most violent and brutal teachings were meant to be “provocative” and “paradoxical,” always intended “in the most spiritual sense,” never as policies of state. Pictured in this light, Nietzsche becomes, in Cruise O’Brien’s analysis, “a benign schoolmaster, whose astringent and sometimes frightening quips conceal a heart of gold and a strenuous urge to improve the spiritual and moral condition of his pupils.”
In reality, Cruise O’Brien contended, Nietzsche sought a societal and political context in which the illusions and evasions of Judeo-Christian morality would be replaced by unflinching realism and unmerciful resolve. In The Will to Power, for example, Nietzsche posited that “society, the great trustee of life, is responsible to life itself for every miscarried life – it also has to pay for such lives: consequently, it ought to prevent them. In numerous cases, society ought to prevent procreation: to this end, it may hold in readiness, without regard to descent, rank, or spirit, the most rigorous means of constraint, deprivation of freedom, in certain circumstances castration.”
The enthusiasm Nietzsche expresses in this passage is for eugenics, a theory of biological determinism invented by Francis Galton, Charles Darwin’s first cousin. However extreme Nietzsche’s recommendation might sound today, by the first part of the twentieth century eugenics came to be widely practiced. In 1933, little more than thirty years after Nietzsche’s death, the Hereditary Health Courts set up in Nazi Germany were enforcing a rigorous policy of enforced sterilization; to a lesser degree, similar policies were carried out in societies from the United States to Scandinavia.
Perhaps like many philosophy students you lack general knowledge and the sciences. That you are ignorant of Nietzsche biography shows lack of scholarship. You wouldn't have to ask for quotes if you knew anything. I did the legwork for you.
Fido wrote:
[quote="
Fido wrote:
Once one has the building blocks, one finds they can be combined in any number of fashions...
Quote:I'd say that it's more the other way around. We have Lincoln logs (insert some classical philosophy) and then one day we have legos (insert some contemporary philosophy). Despite the new blocks, we will still assemble a square house. The dimensions of said house will be heavy influenced by what manufactured pieces exist (language). In the end, we think the creation as entirely new, but it is not.
Processes can arise through experimentation as well. The truly imaginative child will assemble at random and in the end figure out if they made anything at all (evolution). The child can easily explain why each piece is in its place after the fact, even if assembled in a chaotic method. Vestigial pieces may fall off or be removed. In the end, we get closer to understanding why we built a rectangular house in the first place.
The old conclusion that form follows function still holds true, so even our building blocks tend to a certain shape... Let me point out that in the example of the Dog, evolution was managed by humans in a blink of an eye in time... Suddenly dogs were domesticated by selecting for a few simple traits we found desirable... It is because we have done the same with our entire environments that we have not evolved but adapted... If the form of our dwelling did not work in our climate, we changed our form of dwelling... We changed what we could change so we could remain the same... And we have, but much of what we do is not healthy for the species or life on earth, and it is because of our particular view of good... Out of an abstract concept of good, people have allowed their social forms to actually draw them away from moral living, break up their communities, and turn them all into individuals... All the progress of the last thousand years has been at the expense of the human misery, loneliness, anxiety, and neurosis, along with general poverty, and war... And such pain would not be conceivable without the breakup of communities into so many individuals, so the whole is immorallity on immorality.. Look at some cultures like the Muslims which have managed morality and to keep communities intact which produce very intelligent people but no technology... It is because if they do not allow the exploitation of their individuals then excess wealth, capital cannot be created... So our forms have first wrecked moral natural relationships, and has now reached the point where it endangers all life... Certainly, natural communities where ethics and morality got their meaning were often in conflict with each other, but it was small scale, and tended to keep all healthy and intelligent and honorable...
Quote:Fido wrote:
It is physics which without morals is dead, and which will kill us all if we cannot rein it in...
I believe history disagrees. I think it would take a very odd standard to say we as a species lived in a morally superior way prior to the study of nature.
I'm interested as to what you believe the alternative is: Physics with morals. Is that where a scientist withholds a discovery because they fear it's application? Or that it will challenge previous notions about nature (religion)?
Our local Lord Henry, spendius would agree with you. I do not.
There was a point were the Muslims advanced science, medicine, history, and philosophy generally and did not endanger moral relations... I think it is unfortunate that Suffi Islam turned Islam away from physics and science in general. .. But they have not nuked anyone yet... Morality, though it does not prevent knowledge does inhibit its use against humanity, if one considers themselves a part of the human community... Morality does no concern ones behavior outside of community unless it is likely to affect the community... The modern conception of the individual sets him apart from all communities...
Quote:Fido wrote:
I mean, those people who reject the physical world for the moral/spiritual world are just as mad as physicist who live purely in the physical,
Because you say so...
Fido wrote:
but the physicist have more power, and yet, all that power may well end in the hands of nut case spiritualists who blame everyone but themselves for the general immorality and would burn down the good to get at the evil...
That's kind of a telling admission isn't it? The nut case spiritualists when push come to shove aren't waiting for a supernatural advent, but rather going to physical world for their leverage.
Right... The nut cases reject reason, and the train of logic and science that result in bombs and computers, but have no objection to using either..
Quote:Will you be less or more dead regardless???Fido wrote:
It does not matter to me if the whole world dies from knowledge or stupidity because it will be just as dead...
I've read many safety labels in my life, most were for my protection. These things address peoples poor assumptions. I've yet to read a warning label that says "Don't think about it so much. Go for it."
No. I'm not worried about dying from knowledge, but very concerned with death from stupidity.
Quote:Fido wrote:
Physics needs to reach all those who have been driven into spirituality by the hoplessness of their existence, and give them some good, and the moralists, who see to what extent our spiritual conception of reality troubles us and puts us at odds with others have got to reach the physicists and tell them the danger of knowledge without morals...
Here's the kicker. It's not the physical scientists that are making the morally questionable decisions here, it's the social scientists. Einstein didn't need to set off the A-bomb (in a war) to respect it's destructive power. His studies which lead to splitting the atom were not physics without morals. Quite contrary, they were a very moral intellectual pursuit.
So you think that after he does the footwork to make such a breakthrough that it is the role of some other actor (a "moralist" as you called it) to speak to the morals and ethics of such a technology? Again, I believe history disagrees. Einstein knew better the moral implication than some 3rd party philosopher. When you analyze the people involved with the decision to drop the bomb(s), you won't find that it was a bunch of morally vacant physicists with their fingers on the button.
Einstien was what all scientist should be, what all philosophers are... In fact, since morals continually put us at odds with others it should always be the first consideration of every person... The problem is that with all our communities fractured, no one has the perspective, that is, the community perspective from which to judge their own behavior... Scientist in judging their behavior by scientist can justify anything...
Quote:Fido wrote:
We cannot go on like this with only a relative few having knowledge, and only a few having the benefit of knowledge and technology while the rest of the world is living little better than cave men, and in fear that their meager lives and goods will be snatch from them....
False dilemma. The science community sin't working to make technology exclusive. It has been the exact opposite. Technological endeavors have almost entirely been to grant accessibility to this knowledge and the tech. Think about the history of the internet. Hell, I can get online on my phone and watch youtube videos.
The fact that much of the world lives in poor condition is related to human lifestyles, but not to any sort of inherent morality of physics/science/engineering.
There is no inherent morality to physics, which is the problem... And you are correct that poverty is related to life styles, and the answer is not to hand poor people money....Nor is it to deny them money or technology, but to hand them technology without working on the moral understanding, which we cannot do from a position of moral ignorance, is more insanity... People who are slaves to their want of technology are no more moral than those who are slaves to the technology, or slaves as the technology... Slaves are not moral, and morality is essential to freedom and democracy... A plutocracy based upon science and technology is not going to produce a more moral humanity...
Quote:No!... Technology first made capture and slavery preferable to cannibalism... If technology did not make possible excess exploitation no civilization would be possible, but what has happened, and happens today, is that exploitation knows no moral bounds, and people in the end are exploited to death or just killed so their goods can be taken over... Is there a moral justification for war, or the use of technology for war... But, scientists are for the most part only hired help, and their inventions and discoveries are no more their property than one making hubcaps...So here's a question. Which pursuit is more morally dangerous: A cruise missile or viagra? I'm very interested in your answer here.
The reasons for such horrible economic depravity again falls on the laps of the social scientists, not the physical scientists. Who has actually left their moral post?
Fido wrote:there is no difference between social science and science in general, or physic in particular... The attitude that good can be determined in advance by reason and taught without regard to actual consquences is immoral...
Quote:Physics has made many rich,
What does this even mean? As in money? Sure, so has philosophy. So has culinary skills. Anyone skilled at something can find it lucrative.
Quote:The individual torn out of the womb of community is incapable of consideration of his actions... Every ones goals become their sole concern and so morality does not enter into it... If it is not immoral it is amoral...Fido wrote:
and many poor,
Physics has done this? An example perhaps? I want to know how physics SPECIFICALLY has done this.
Fido wrote:
but it has not conquered want
Was this a goal of physics? For that matter, I don't think any one thing has conquered want, whatever that means.
Fido wrote:
or fear,
We will disagree here. I think many people in gaining a greater understanding of nature and things like biology have been greatly comforted.
Fido wrote:
and rather added to the later...
Physics has added to fear? I'd say that any anxiety or fear surrounding scientific exploration is whipped up by the same people you would refer to as the "moralists."
I'd say the moralists are rarely the authority on morality, and also they are the ones adding to the fear in the world.
We have a vaccine for young girls that prevents 4 types of HPV. This is wonderful. Who should we go to for moral understanding? Those who set out to help fight the disease, or philosophers that make the vaccine into a moral sexual dilemma?
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I'm not sure what you are talking about here. If you have "read Piaget" you presumably understand the limits of binary logic, and you might also might be familiar with his "scientific" studies of "morality". Whether or not you are familiar with the latter, you are perhaps familiar with Dawkin's "scientific view" of morality in terms of genetic survival mechanisms.
The point I am making is that "philosophers" have no exclusive rights to the territory we call "morality", which your post seems to imply. Your language falls not far short of theistic warnings. Now, I am not saying that "ethical overviews" are not functionally desirable to monitor and perhaps limit the activities of scientists, but unless philosophers get an intimate knowledge of such activities themselves they will be shouting into the wind.
I'd like to reply, but you got some code sorted wrong. 
