I have never had a girlfriend - is that weird?
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Icarus
Ostrich
The Lizard of Oz said:
If you were ridiculing some effeminate academic who never left the comfort of the Ivory Tower and who lived through the books written by greater men, I would take your objections a bit more seriously.
However, Ernst Jünger spent almost 4 years in the trenches on the western front in WWI, he led 100s of men into battle, he stormed the British and French trenches numerous times, participated in most major battles, saw hundreds, perhaps thousands, of men getting killed on the battlefield, killed enemy soldiers, was wounded over 10 times. He was also in France during WWII as a military intelligence officer and witnessed several German deserters getting executed by firing squad. Several of his friends and acquaintances in the German Officer Corps were involved in the failed attempt to murder Hitler in 1944 and were executed by the Nazis. His own son was forced to join a penal battalion of the Wehrmacht for ridiculing Hitler and was killed in action by the Allies in Italy in 1944. His other son committed suicide in the 1970s. And the book from which the passage was taken was written in the 1970s, when Jünger was in his 80s, over 3 decades after the end of WWII, and 2 decades before his own death in 1998 (some 8 decades (!!!) after the end of WWI).
Apparently, you have greater life experience with death than he did. After all, he only saw entire platoons of his own company of Hanover fusiliers getting blown to smithereens by British artillery in WWI. You obviously have seen much more war and death, and you know absolutely everything about life because you are a "man of substance" (whatever that means) and will never have any regrets and doubts whatsoever, because only weaklings deviate from the worldview they held at the peak of their lives.
Let's say that the only thing we agree on is that the Santa Fe Institute never produced anything of value, and is little more than a cushy country club for bored academics.
And thanks for telling me what Jünger thought about life and death. I have been reading his books for years and trying to understand his worldview, but your brilliant and succinct paragraph enlightened me once and for all!
Icarus, I respect your passion for Jünger. It was certainly not my intention to ridicule him, and I'm sorry if it came off that way.
But it is not only, or even mainly, effeminate academics whose minds were benighted by what I call nihilism. So was virtually every brilliant and literary man since Nietzsche. No amount of experience, manliness, courage, or even nobility, is enough to allow a man to see through the dominant metaphysics of the age. (Although a very few brilliant men of the past century have escaped its onus more or less by accident of disposition, personality, and involvement with certain supreme American energies whose nature and provenance has nothing to do with that metaphysics -- hence my seemingly random examples of Jack LaLanne and Richard Feynman).
The utterly felt conviction of "meaninglessness" as metaphysical truth drove the most brilliant and sensitive men of the past 100+ years -- of whom Jünger was certainly one -- into a frenzy of more or less intensely expressed literary gestures. But these gestures, however they may impress us with their pathos or nobility, are not the same as a thoughtful understanding of objective reality. They are indeed, strictly speaking, vacuous -- to take the most prominent example, Samuel Beckett's entire writing is little more than the alternation of such gestures with reflections on their vacuity. The world falls away from those who experience it as "meaningless" all the way down the line -- their thinking is deranged by the metaphysical conviction of nihilism. If one wishes to hear a truly sane, wise, and balanced general discourse, one is obliged to go to an earlier time -- that is why I so often find myself quoting Dr. Johnson when I need to find the best and most trenchant expression of some human or moral truth.
It can be hard to reconcile one's love for a writer as a man of emotional depth, pathos, and nobility, with the understanding of his limitations as a man of his time, beset and tormented by a dominant metaphysical view of the world. But I believe that this is necessary to get a good handle on almost every figure of note in the past century or more.
But it is not only, or even mainly, effeminate academics whose minds were benighted by what I call nihilism. So was virtually every brilliant and literary man since Nietzsche. No amount of experience, manliness, courage, or even nobility, is enough to allow a man to see through the dominant metaphysics of the age. (Although a very few brilliant men of the past century have escaped its onus more or less by accident of disposition, personality, and involvement with certain supreme American energies whose nature and provenance has nothing to do with that metaphysics -- hence my seemingly random examples of Jack LaLanne and Richard Feynman).
The utterly felt conviction of "meaninglessness" as metaphysical truth drove the most brilliant and sensitive men of the past 100+ years -- of whom Jünger was certainly one -- into a frenzy of more or less intensely expressed literary gestures. But these gestures, however they may impress us with their pathos or nobility, are not the same as a thoughtful understanding of objective reality. They are indeed, strictly speaking, vacuous -- to take the most prominent example, Samuel Beckett's entire writing is little more than the alternation of such gestures with reflections on their vacuity. The world falls away from those who experience it as "meaningless" all the way down the line -- their thinking is deranged by the metaphysical conviction of nihilism. If one wishes to hear a truly sane, wise, and balanced general discourse, one is obliged to go to an earlier time -- that is why I so often find myself quoting Dr. Johnson when I need to find the best and most trenchant expression of some human or moral truth.
It can be hard to reconcile one's love for a writer as a man of emotional depth, pathos, and nobility, with the understanding of his limitations as a man of his time, beset and tormented by a dominant metaphysical view of the world. But I believe that this is necessary to get a good handle on almost every figure of note in the past century or more.
Maybe I can split the difference between you two? 
Nietzsche was interested in how we can find meaning in a meaningless universe with no God.
One of his ideas was to imagine that the universe would repeat its history over and over forever.
As such - every action you take in the universe will not be taken just once. But an infinite number of times.
He called this Eternal Recurrence.
I am not sure if he actually believed this idea - or if instead (as I suspect) he was throwing it out there as a way of framing your life. Such that every moment of it takes on more meaning for you. Since each decision you take will be repeated over and over again for all eternity.
Nietzsche was interested in how we can find meaning in a meaningless universe with no God.
One of his ideas was to imagine that the universe would repeat its history over and over forever.
As such - every action you take in the universe will not be taken just once. But an infinite number of times.
He called this Eternal Recurrence.
I am not sure if he actually believed this idea - or if instead (as I suspect) he was throwing it out there as a way of framing your life. Such that every moment of it takes on more meaning for you. Since each decision you take will be repeated over and over again for all eternity.
cardguy, that goofy notion of the eternal return is a good little illustration of the kind of vacuous literary gesture that brilliant men since Nietzsche have been compelled to make under the sway of the totalized conviction of "meaninglessness".
I suspect it is not possible to ask questions about whether or not the universe has meaning.
It takes you past the limits of sense in the use of language and becomes a senseless question (ala Wittgenstein and the Tractatus).
As such everyone's account of what meaning they feel life and the universe has is as equally valid as any other.
I suspect the universe is like one of those Rorschach tests:
Everyone has a different opinion and response to what they see.
This is where God would come in handy. Since he is outside the universe - he might be able to come to a viewpoint which would give the correct sense of meaning to our universe.
With all that said - I live my life in a very shallow and ironic way. I enjoy the fact that the universe is meaningless (to me) since it fits in with my inability to take anything seriously.
It takes you past the limits of sense in the use of language and becomes a senseless question (ala Wittgenstein and the Tractatus).
As such everyone's account of what meaning they feel life and the universe has is as equally valid as any other.
I suspect the universe is like one of those Rorschach tests:
Everyone has a different opinion and response to what they see.
This is where God would come in handy. Since he is outside the universe - he might be able to come to a viewpoint which would give the correct sense of meaning to our universe.
With all that said - I live my life in a very shallow and ironic way. I enjoy the fact that the universe is meaningless (to me) since it fits in with my inability to take anything seriously.
Icarus
Ostrich
The Lizard of Oz said:
And what is objective reality?
Only physical, non-human reality is truly objective. Physicists and chemists work with objective reality. The behavior of electrons, photons, atoms, and molecules does not depend on the thoughts of the experimentalist studying them. Feynman's Quantum Electrodynamics does not depend on the political winds of the era. Feynman's work is eternal.
When humans enter the picture, it's a total mess. If humans believe something, then they create human reality out of mere thought, and this reality is always subjective. Perhaps the only objective reality about humans is that every human was born and every human will die one day.
Error seems to be the one constant in history. Every era is ridiculous in its own way. Progressives look at the past and see an endless sequence of blunders and massacres, and believe that their era is the first sane one in history. A born historian knows that the present era is also ridiculous. But why bother? Better enjoy my life peacefully and decoupled from the Zeitgeist. Of course, I must pay attention to the Zeitgeist to protect myself, i.e., to know what I can and cannot say at dinner parties and job interviews.
And what is "meaning"? It is a human construction. Atoms just exist. Humans are mere biological machines who assign meaning to things depending on what wild passions move them. I think that Feynman's work is much superior to Nietzsche's work, since the former discovered eternal truths, whereas the latter merely documented the insanity that characterized his era. But I don't expect everyone to agree with me.
cardguy said:
cardguy, I'm glad to hear that. But if you want to do yourself a real favor, don't start out by reading books on Wittgenstein. Just pick up the Philosophical Investigations and read it from the beginning (yes, I know you've read it before -- that does not matter).
It is impossible to exaggerate the fall-off in quality from LW's writing in the Investigations to the secondary literature. I wish there was a truly excellent primer on the Investigations but there is not. There is no substitute for the real thing.
Here is the book I am reading at that the moment:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Wittgensteins-Metaphilosophy-Paul-Horwich/dp/019966112X
And I have a collection of essays about the Tractatus I may get as well.
From there I will see how much further I want to get into it again. I haven't got the stamina to jump in and just read PI at the moment.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Wittgensteins-Metaphilosophy-Paul-Horwich/dp/019966112X
And I have a collection of essays about the Tractatus I may get as well.
From there I will see how much further I want to get into it again. I haven't got the stamina to jump in and just read PI at the moment.
Icarus, your post is in itself a good succinct statement of the dominant metaphysics of our age. That is not surprising since the things one believes most deeply strike one as self-evident truths to be taken for granted.
But there are real problems with it. A very big problem is that "atoms" are in fact every bit as much of a human construction as "meaning". It is important that nihilism with respect to meaning -- the conviction that there is no objective meaning to be found, and any claim to find one is nothing more than a species of subjective or emotional chatter -- always goes hand in hand with the most shrugging Platonism with respect to mathematical objects.
The picture is one of a universe necessarily disconnected from human meaning or purpose, governed by objective mathematical laws that exist independently of the human mind, and that we may only discover through mathematical science. These laws, because they exist "out there", independent of human cognition, have the privileged status of objectivity; all other assertions cannot aspire to this status and are merely "subjective".
The trouble is that mathematical Platonism is an almost self-evidently ludicrous idea if you really examine it for a second. There is no "pi in the sky"; there are no mathematical objects that magically exist outside of human cognition. What are these objects exactly? The quite obvious reality is that we invented all these mathematical objects, just as we invented everything else. "But they work!" Yes -- we invented them so that they would work. That is their point.
Once it becomes clear that there is no privileged domain of objective Platonic truth that is necessarily disconnected from human sentience, one can also see the confusion in the idea that statements about meaning are necessarily invalid merely because we "just make them up" -- as if there were statements of any other kind! Once the idea of a sacralized mathematical domain of the only "objective reality" is removed, one observes that we proceed in life at all times as if all sorts of statements are objectively true, as if there is very much such a thing as objective reality and we deal with it, more or less successfully, at every instant. It is only when we try to do philosophy that we are so mesmerized by the notion of some impossibly hard and perfect truth that we dismiss perfectly valid ways of thinking about the world as somehow secondary and inferior to that chimeric vision.
I believe that a good starting point for thinking about the meaning of the world is to realize that there are two different things: human sentience, and the materials that surround it and of which it is made. It is not easy to understand the nature of that difference, but everyone is aware of it and acknowledges it. It does no good to deny this difference by describing us as machines governed by some external mathematical laws -- since it is we, human sentience, that invented those laws and mathematics itself in the first place.
Once this difference between sentience and materials is seen, it becomes clear that the most fundamental activity that sentience is engaged in is attempting to gain increasing control of materials. The cumulative scientific and technological progress of mankind over time is the outcome of this relentless struggle of sentience to manipulate non-sentient matter and bend it to its will. That activity can be taken as almost the definition of meaning and purpose. Thus, the most basic occupation of sentience is one that involves it with meaning and purpose at all times -- whether or not this is consciously realized.
It was unfortunate but inevitable that while dismissing the kinds of Platonism involved in religious faith, we overlooked the very similar confusions inherent in mathematical Platonism and were led to the current dominant metaphysics of nihilism. I think that this situation will eventually be rectified once the brute force consequences of technological progress -- our ability to affect the physical circumstances related to our own bodies and brains in truly game-changing ways -- begin to show people the real point of progress, and give them an instinctive understanding of how sentience proceeds vis-a-vis materials; all while increasing our raw intelligence, which will make these conclusions easier to arrive at. At some point, Wittgenstein's work in the Philosophical Investigations will also be rediscovered and it will be seen that it laid the foundations for seeing through the confusions inherent in Platonism of every variety.
But there are real problems with it. A very big problem is that "atoms" are in fact every bit as much of a human construction as "meaning". It is important that nihilism with respect to meaning -- the conviction that there is no objective meaning to be found, and any claim to find one is nothing more than a species of subjective or emotional chatter -- always goes hand in hand with the most shrugging Platonism with respect to mathematical objects.
The picture is one of a universe necessarily disconnected from human meaning or purpose, governed by objective mathematical laws that exist independently of the human mind, and that we may only discover through mathematical science. These laws, because they exist "out there", independent of human cognition, have the privileged status of objectivity; all other assertions cannot aspire to this status and are merely "subjective".
The trouble is that mathematical Platonism is an almost self-evidently ludicrous idea if you really examine it for a second. There is no "pi in the sky"; there are no mathematical objects that magically exist outside of human cognition. What are these objects exactly? The quite obvious reality is that we invented all these mathematical objects, just as we invented everything else. "But they work!" Yes -- we invented them so that they would work. That is their point.
Once it becomes clear that there is no privileged domain of objective Platonic truth that is necessarily disconnected from human sentience, one can also see the confusion in the idea that statements about meaning are necessarily invalid merely because we "just make them up" -- as if there were statements of any other kind! Once the idea of a sacralized mathematical domain of the only "objective reality" is removed, one observes that we proceed in life at all times as if all sorts of statements are objectively true, as if there is very much such a thing as objective reality and we deal with it, more or less successfully, at every instant. It is only when we try to do philosophy that we are so mesmerized by the notion of some impossibly hard and perfect truth that we dismiss perfectly valid ways of thinking about the world as somehow secondary and inferior to that chimeric vision.
I believe that a good starting point for thinking about the meaning of the world is to realize that there are two different things: human sentience, and the materials that surround it and of which it is made. It is not easy to understand the nature of that difference, but everyone is aware of it and acknowledges it. It does no good to deny this difference by describing us as machines governed by some external mathematical laws -- since it is we, human sentience, that invented those laws and mathematics itself in the first place.
Once this difference between sentience and materials is seen, it becomes clear that the most fundamental activity that sentience is engaged in is attempting to gain increasing control of materials. The cumulative scientific and technological progress of mankind over time is the outcome of this relentless struggle of sentience to manipulate non-sentient matter and bend it to its will. That activity can be taken as almost the definition of meaning and purpose. Thus, the most basic occupation of sentience is one that involves it with meaning and purpose at all times -- whether or not this is consciously realized.
It was unfortunate but inevitable that while dismissing the kinds of Platonism involved in religious faith, we overlooked the very similar confusions inherent in mathematical Platonism and were led to the current dominant metaphysics of nihilism. I think that this situation will eventually be rectified once the brute force consequences of technological progress -- our ability to affect the physical circumstances related to our own bodies and brains in truly game-changing ways -- begin to show people the real point of progress, and give them an instinctive understanding of how sentience proceeds vis-a-vis materials; all while increasing our raw intelligence, which will make these conclusions easier to arrive at. At some point, Wittgenstein's work in the Philosophical Investigations will also be rediscovered and it will be seen that it laid the foundations for seeing through the confusions inherent in Platonism of every variety.
Icarus
Ostrich
The Lizard of Oz said:
I get the impression that you never devoted much thought to philosophy of science, especially the philosophy of physics. How can you admire Feynman and call him a "man of substance", if you don't even understand the foundations of his field?
Physical laws were "invented" by Nature, and humans merely discovered them, wrote them down using human mathematical notation, and named the mathematical equations after humans. Any sufficiently advanced extraterrestrial civilization has the obligation to have discovered Newtonian Mechanics and Electromagnetism. In fact, one could define "sufficiently advanced extraterrestrial civilization" as "extraterrestrial civilization that has discovered as many physical laws as humans did discover until the end of the 19th century".
Mathematical symbols and equations exist in a platonist's heaven, of course. How is that a deep realization? The point is not whether they exist or not, but that physical laws can be described mathematically, and that such mathematical descriptions have explanatory and predictive power. How can you doubt this assertion when most technology is the living proof of this? Man can tame Nature because physical laws are very well understood.
No one expects to touch wavefunctions and the like. The whole point is that these mathematical objects allow one to perform computation and make predictions that are validated by experiment. It's not the mathematical objects and equations that make physics, but the fact that mathematically described physical laws are validated by experiment, as demanded by the scientific method.
Perhaps all human constructions are born equal, but they don't develop equally. Those that are subjected to experiment and pass this strict test are worth something. Game is the scientific method applied to picking up women. Come up with hypotheses on the nature of women, test them in hundreds of women, and derive "laws" that compress all the information that one acquired from empirical experience. However, since human realities change over time, and since humans are constantly under selective pressures, what works today may not work 10,000 years from now. I.e., Roosh's work is not as eternal as Newton's or Einstein's. Roosh re-discovered laws of human nature, not laws of non-human nature. Newton's laws will still be valid within their domain of applicability after the Sun explodes and the Earth is incinerated.
The problem is at the end of the day we stay at the point where Socrates was " We know nothing". We guys could be in a dream like existence and we wouldn´t know it. Even if science was somekind of objective we would be products of causality and without free will. In the bigger picture it´s totally meaningless. That´s why so many cultures give a shit about scientifical development. I am with cardguy life is totally meaningless. Life is brainwashing and there no absolute truth in life.
We are just some funny machines doing funny things and people are talking about great men. That´s funny.
And Cardguy should get a girlfriend ASAP because that would be funny.
We are just some funny machines doing funny things and people are talking about great men. That´s funny.
And Cardguy should get a girlfriend ASAP because that would be funny.
Icarus said:
Your impression might be a little inaccurate
. In any case Feynman himself, or virtually any mathematician or scientist for that matter, never devoted much thought to the "foundations" of his field and they all did just fine. They simply did their work. And whatever natural language chatter scientists and mathematicians occasionally produced about "foundations" contributed less than zero insight of any kind and only served to sow confusion.In your post, you merely repeat the hardest line mathematical Platonist position -- not that I expect any different, since you, along with almost everyone else, take it to be self-evidently true. And your only argument (even though you clearly feel that the self-evident truths you state do not really require an argument) is the one I already referred to in my previous post -- math and science work; therefore, it cannot be that we "just make them up".
So let me ask you, since you blithely assert that "mathematical symbols and equations exist in a platonist's heaven, of course". Where is this heaven located? How is it that we gain access to it? How do the eternal Platonic mathematical objects make themselves known to mere human minds? Where in the sky does pi live?
It does no good to evade these questions with weasel constructions such as "oh, of course we don't need to touch the wave function, it's just that its existence (in some realm necessarily distinct from the human mind!) enables us to discover laws that are then confirmed by experiment, etc". Can you see how this is no different at all -- again, what is this realm, distinct from the human mind, in which such "objects" exist? Where is the Wavefunction (with a capital W, as it were) located, and how do we know that it's out there?
"But these things work -- we make scientific predictions in a mathematical language, and they are confirmed by experiment!" -- quite true. "Therefore, we can't just be making them up!". No -- we don't "just" make them up. We make them up so that they work.
Icarus
Ostrich
The Lizard of Oz said:
When you declare a function in C or C++, where does this function live? It lives in silico, and it returns outputs when fed with inputs. The mathematical symbols live on sheets of paper and in the brains of those manipulating them.
The Lizard of Oz said:
Sure, we make them up so that they work! And do you think that is not an achievement? Of course electrons are not perfect spheres like they are depicted on high-school textbooks. Those are human constructions, like the mathematical constructions used to describe physical laws.
The purpose of physics is to come up with approximations of physical reality that are mathematically tractable and as invariant as possible. The models are developed so that they can compress knowledge about the physical world. It's all about compression. The success of physics is that with very few axioms and physical laws one can describe and predict an enormous number of physical phenomena.
The prime example would be high-school mechanics: one starts by studying special cases, say, the ball moving at a constant speed, or moving under constant acceleration, and then one gets equations of motions for each special case. Later, one learns differential equations, and can compress all special cases into Newton's equation plus other data. From then on, you only need to know integral calculus to perform decompression. The purpose of compression is to replace lots of raw data with algorithms that generate lots of raw data from only a little data. Differential equations are humans' representation of Nature's compression algorithms.
Of course, experiments in physics tend to be extremely simple. Just because one knows Maxwell's equations, it does not mean that one knows the values of permittivity and permeability in all points in space, and it does not mean that one knows the initial conditions with exquisite detail. But studying toy problems one acquires enough intuition to predict physical phenomena whose mathematical descriptions are intractable. It's really hard to model a bicycle mathematically, but human infants can learn how to ride them, as their brains develop via trial and error the control algorithms required to maintain equilibrium.
Sure, it was possible for 13th century European architects to build cathedrals without knowing anything about statics. I am not claiming that empirical knowledge is of no value, and that only mathematical descriptions of physical reality are of any use (which is clearly false).
Icarus said:
I'm glad you've just abandoned mathematical Platonism wholesale! Even though the above statement is not quite accurate as well -- but it's much better than the magical Platonist heaven.
In other words, you agree that there is no Platonic realm distinct from the human mind in which these objects live. In other words, we make them up.
Icarus said:
As I've made explicitly clear in a previous post, I think that it is in fact the signal achievement of mankind -- indeed, the most direct expression of its meaning and purpose.
Icarus said:
That is all beside the point. There is no difference in kind between Newtonian mechanics, or String theory, or everything in between. These details, while of great interest to the working scientist, are of no relevance to the basic points being discussed here. And I am not in any way denying the importance of mathematics and quantification -- quite the contrary! Their importance cannot be exaggerated. Mathematics is the way we make progress in mastering the material world.
The point, again, is that there is no privileged domain, distinct and outside of the human mind, in which mathematical objects and mathematical truths dwell. We make them up, just as we do everything else. The fact that they are extraordinarily useful does not confer on them a privileged metaphysical status.
To anyone seriously interested in these matters, I suggest that they read Ludwig Wittgenstein's "Philosophical Investigations" and secondarily, "Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics". In my opinion, there is no philosophical text that compares to these in importance.
Icarus
Ostrich
The Lizard of Oz said:
Mathematical objects are ideas. Ideas are software. Software requires hardware to exist. "Information is physical", said Rolf Landauer himself.
However, an hypothetical extraterrestrial civilization that is capable of developing technology to measure lengths can manufacture wheels, then measure the radius and the perimeter of the wheels, divide the latter by the former and obtain something close to 2*Pi. OK, perhaps these extra-terrestrials have 7 fingers in each hand and count in base 14, meaning that their Pi is not 3.14... but rather the expansion of Pi in base 14. Yet, numbers are not the same as their decimal or binary expansions.
The linear relation between the radius and the perimeter of a circle is an example of data compression. You don't need to measure both. You can measure one, and then obtain the other via multiplication or division by 2*Pi. This will be true if humans go extinct, but no one will be around to use it. Yet, extra-terrestrials could use it, even if their computers use base 14. There is no Pi in the sky, but the compressibility is present in the aforementioned example. Is that a mathematical truth? Perhaps it is a geometric truth, at least in reasonably flat spaces. What is a flat space? One where the perimeter of a circle is 2*Pi times its circle?
This is philosophically dangerous territory.
These are indeed philosophically complex matters, Icarus, and I've enjoyed our discussion a great deal -- however we have gotten a long way from cardguy's lack of a girlfriend.
cardguy said:
Cardguy is long gone but maybe this thread could use some reviving. I'm in the same boat.
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