A Curious Little Blog

For some reason these lines from Billy Vera's song "At This Moment" have been running through my head recently.  Sometimes I like to think about hypotheticals, such as, "Would someone really give up 20 years of his life for a romantic interest?" I'm not a good candidate for this question, for two reasons.  One, I am happily married; and two, I am over 50, so losing 20 years off my life seems pretty dire at this point.  Let's assume, then, that we are dealing with a 20-something person who is desperately in love and appears not likely to win their beloved's heart.  Even in those circumstances, would you do it? At other times, I have used speculative questions like this to wonder how a person would assess the reality of the offer.  For example, if someone offered to buy your soul for $1 million, would you accept?  You probably would not think that this person could literally buy your soul even if he wanted to, but would you take a chance anyway? ...

I like to give credit where credit is due, and therefore I will point out a place that I agree with William James.  He writes, When I read in a religious paper words like these: "Perhaps the best thing we can say of God is that he is _the Inevitable Inference_," I recognize the tendency to let religion evaporate in intellectual terms. Would martyrs have sung in the flames for a mere inference, however inevitable it might be? I appreciate that, because many people who study religion try to reduce it to something easily explainable, something where they do not have to grapple with the question of divinity, and here James shows how little sense it makes to ignore divinity, or to add it in only as something inescapable but not really tangible. On the other hand, James himself reduces the mystical union with God to a person's union with his own unconscious, which seems to be going in the same directionl.  He says, Let me then propose, as an hypothesis, that whateve...

I am almost done with William James's "Varieties of Religious Experience."  Up until the last few chapters, I found it a fair-minded discussion of religion.  James seems not to believe in a religion, but he goes out of his way to treat it seriously.  The book provides a lot of interesting examples of conversions, spiritual despair, saintliness, and mysticism.  (Almost all but the last are from Christians.) Then he gets to a chapter on religious philosophy, and he burns through all the good will I had developed for him.  He begins by giving some academic theology by John Henry Newman about God, such as this:  "This makes Him absolutely unlimited from without, and unlimited also from within; for limitation is non-being; and God is being itself."  (He cites Newman at some length, which I will not do because it is boring.)  And he concludes that Newman's theology is fairly abstract and pointless, which I find difficult to argue with.  How...

In spite of the fact that I consider my two previous posts on the "Raven paradox" to be correct as far as they go, I have still been drawn to this problem because I have not addressed a central issue:  namely, how can enumerating non-black objects possibly prove that all ravens are black? To restate the issue, stating that "all ravens are black" is supposed to be logically equivalent to "all non-black objects are not ravens."  Therefore, if I find a non-black object and ascertain that it is not a raven, I have, theoretically at least, contributed to proving that all ravens are black. This seems counterintuitive, since I haven't even seen a raven and yet I have somehow helped to prove that all ravens are black.  Let's reduce the problem to marbles.  There is a bin filled with marbles, some of which are translucent, which we will identify with "ravens," and some are opaque, which correspond to "not ravens."  There are 100 marb...

I feel like the arguments I advanced against the Raven Paradox yesterday are valid, and yet not completely satisfying, because they do not address its strictly logical sense.  In other words, I think statements like "all ravens are black" are not categorical and thus can't be proven in the sense that mathematical theorems are proven; nevertheless, I feel that there is a deeper logical inadequacy in the raven paradox that would invalidate it even if it did not have this deficiency. The basis of the raven paradox is that the statement "all ravens are black" should be logically equivalent to its " contrapositive ," "all non-black objects are not ravens."  Nevertheless, there seems to be a difference between the two, because the first statement asserts something about ravens and the second does not.  To illustrate, let's consider unicorns.  Suppose I say that "all unicorns are white."  The contrapositive is that "all non-whi...

I have been enjoying the "Up and Atom" videos on YouTube, which discuss various logical questions.  I particularly found the Raven Paradox interesting.  The principle is pretty simple:  if we think that all ravens are black, then seeing more black ravens helps confirm our hypothesis.  However, saying "all ravens are black" is logically the same as saying "all non-black objects are not ravens," and therefore, seeing non-black objects that are not ravens would also seem to confirm our hypothesis.  Which seems weird, since it means that seeing, for example, a white shoe would help confirm that all ravens are black! There are actually several different ways of approaching this question, but I want to address Karl Popper's argument (raised in the video) that we can never positively prove anything, we can only disprove things.  As the approximately, um, zero people who follow my blog are sure to know, I have been interested in Popper's assertions for ...

I stumbled onto a very interesting article about a scientist, Michela Massimi, who was making waves by promoting the idea that philosophy has an important role in science.  It seems fairly obvious to me, but I don't work in science so my perspective is very different.  Then again, I also felt that philosophy had an obvious role in history, and many historians don't.  It often seems that way as long as you're taking some of the fundamental things for granted, but the moment they become questioned, you need philosophy to help you out. The interesting thing is not just that Massimi defends philosophy, but that she takes a contrarian view that science is actually closely related to physical reality.  This probably seems to most people like a silly thing to debate, but it is a major issue in philosophy.  Do scientists describe what actually happens, or do they just give us a model that can account for what happens but bears no actual relation to what is going on?...

I am strangely attracted to the concept of Taoism.  I say "strangely," because I normally have no interest in mystical thought.  I was nearly an adult when "The Tao of Pooh" became a bestseller, and I was not impressed at all.  Somewhere along the line, however, I found myself attracted to Taoist thought, in particular the concept of wu-wei.  When I recently read the Tao Te Ching, therefore, it was not the first time I had done so.  It is a challenging work, deliberately so, and one can read it repeatedly without fully comprehending it.  Fortunately, it is also very short and therefore easy to re-read.  The real question is whether there is something to understand at all, or whether it is a lot of nonsense. I have not devoted myself to understanding Tao the way I have to Christianity, but I have been curious about it for a long time and so I was happy that recently I could read some excerpts from the work of Zhuangzi, a Taoist thinker who lived about...

I have taken a small detour to read some Chinese classics:  the Analects, the Tao Te Ching, Zhuangzi, and Sun Tzu's Art of War.  They are all short works, but challenging. I thought about trying to learn Chinese once, but I don't think I'm cut out for it.  On one hand (and feel free to correct me if any of this is wrong), it seems to have a very simple grammar:  no cases or declensions, no real verb conjugations, no moods, simple markers for tenses.  On the other hand, the very simplicity of it makes it difficult to interpret.  I saw the following example of a Chinese sentence, each word translated directly into English:  "Tiger father no dog son."  I stared at it for some time without having any idea what it meant.  The explanation:  "if the father is a tiger, his son will not be a dog" -- i.e., the apple doesn't fall far from the tree.  Now that I know it, it makes sense, but I suspect that in reading there must be many cases wh...

I felt like I had a revelation recently toward understanding Plato and the realm of forms.  Upon re-reading my previous blog entries ( here and here ), I actually expressed pretty much the same ideas that I am going to say here, except that I now understand them somewhat differently. To be brief:  Plato says that things on earth are not real, they are poor copies of the "real" things from the realm of ideas.  This has never made sense to me before, because I could not understand what the real idea behind common things (chairs, rocks, dogs, etc.) would be.  And that was the problem:  I had been trained to look from the realm of the immanent to the transcendent.  This is natural, because we can see the immanent, but it is also backwards, because we are looking for the essences of things that don't have a permanent existence. What Plato meant, I now feel certain, was not that there was an ideal corresponding to a particular object, but that representation...

It was a treat finally to read Lucretius's masterpiece, "On the Nature of Things" ("De Rerum Natura").  I knew it was an exposition of atomism, but I didn't know what to expect in the way of reasoning behind or developement of the idea.  It is actually a poem, and, thanks to the excellent translation, the writing style makes it easier to understand rather than more difficult.  (I can't imagine trying to tackle it in Latin, however.)  It was written explicitly to argue against religion; right at the beginning, Lucretius makes clear that he thinks religion is nonsense and he is going to prove it by explaining physical phenomena without reference to the gods. The central argument of his explanation is that the world is composed of atoms, and he can use atoms to explain everything from a purely physical point of view.  It is truly extraordinary to see how far reason can work out things about the physical world even when observations are made at such a gros...

I spend a fair amount of time wondering whether "ideas" count as real things, as I have written about elsewhere in this blog ( Things and Ideas , Degrees of Being , et al.).  So it was a matter of considerable interest to me to read about the following exchange between Margaret Thatcher and British politician Enoch Powell: On one occasion, just before the Argentines invaded the Falklands, Mrs. Thatcher spoke about the Christian concept of the just war and Western values. "We do not fight for values," said Powell. "I would fight for this country even if it had a Communist government." "Nonsense, Enoch," snapped Maggie. "If I send British troops abroad, it will be to defend our values." Powell stuck to his guns. "No, Prime Minister, values exist in a transcendental realm, beyond space and time. They can neither be fought for, nor destroyed." (From SteynOnline ).  Now, Thatcher is known for having once said, ...

The first thing that struck me about this work was how much it sounds like the Bible.  In several places, Marcus Aurelius admonishes his reader to be ready for death at any point, which is a recurring theme in the Bible, especially in the New Testament.  More often, I find the Meditations to have a resigned tone, reminiscent of Ecclesiastes:  "it makes no difference whether a man shall see the same things during a hundred years or two hundred, or an infinite time," which sounds like the oft-repeated "nothing new under the sun" in the Biblical book.   Or a striking passage in the Meditations:   soon, very soon, thou wilt be ashes, or a skeleton, and either a name or not even a name; but name is sound and echo. And the things which are much valued in life are empty and rotten and trifling, and like little dogs biting one another, and little children quarrelling, laughing, and then straightway weeping. But fidelity and modesty and justice and truth ...

I have always felt sympathetic toward Aristotle even though I have read very little of his work.  I had to read The Republic and several Platonic dialogues in college political theory classes, and I found the arguments unconvincing, to say the least.  Aristotle seemed much more down to earth as a thinker, which appealed to me. Now that I have finally read this seminal work, I am glad to say that my impressions have been confirmed.  Not that it was at all pleasant to read; to the contrary, it was incredibly tedious.  I think I got a bad translation, but I'll leave that question to the side. Early on, Aristotle assures us that "precision is not to be sought for alike in all discussions," which already gets my respect.  I'm all for being as precise as possible, but also for recognizing the limitations of our understanding.  In fact, I would say that this is one of the principles of my approach to learning. After making some basic arguments, Aristotle...

I mean the title of this post to convey the idea that humans are never satisfied; each time one desire is quenched, another arises, so we are in a constant state of anticipation.  My thoughts came in direct response to what I read in Schopenhauer, and, by projection, to the general Buddhist approach to psychology.  I was surprised to find that a Google search on "human desire is never satisfied" actually brought back mainly Christian sites, chiefly in reference to Proverbs 27:20:  "Hell and destruction are never full; so the eyes of man are never satisfied" (KJV).  Not that it should be surprising that this subject is present in Christianity as in other religions and philosophies.  In fact, the nature of human longing is central to any study of man.  It is what I think of as the problem of motivation, which indicates that I approach it largely from the other direction:  how to convince myself or someone else to do something, not how to deal with the fa...

I read a few weeks ago that Elon Musk, and apparently a lot of other people, think we are very likely living in a simulation .  His argument goes like this: The strongest argument for us probably being in a simulation, I think, is the following: Forty years ago we had Pong--two rectangles and a dot. That is what games were. Now 40 years later we have photorealistic, 3D simulations with millions of people playing simultaneously and it's getting better every year. And soon we'll have virtual reality, we'll have augmented reality. If you assume any rate of improvement at all, then the games will become indistinguishable from reality. Although this seems to be a popular view among the technological elite in San Francisco, there are people who disagree.  Some people think it is more likely that humanity will destroy itself before we get to the level of simulations required.  Another line of argument is that the technology is harder than Musk is giving it credit ...