I'm an undergrad, majoring in philosophy. I really like philosophy of mind,...
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"Two things fill the heart with renewed and increasing awe and reverence the more often and the more steadily that they are meditated on: the starry skies above me and the moral law inside me."
--Immanuel Kant
I love it. Look up N.W.A., it got rid of some of my confusion about the late 80s slang in "Fuck tha Police" (for example, "rolling off an 8" refers to Olde English 800, not to an 8-ball of coke). If you are both a rap fan and a nerd, this is pretty sweet.
From the page: I heard South Carolina Senator Jim DeMint proclaim: "I really don't think that collective bargaining has any place in representative government."
The incredible hostility toward basic union rights on the part of many elite politicians and intellectuals just shows how Marxist their worldview is; they see everything as a struggle between them and the plebians, and they're engaged in real class warfare, trying to curb any ability of the non-rich to gain a modicum of power.
So when the rich want to exert power, they use their money and connections in the public and private sectors; when you want 11 instead of 10 bucks an hour, you certainly can't team up with other people who want 11 instead of 10 per hour. After all, what does the voluntary organization of ordinary people with common interests and goals have to do with democracy? That's the insane logic.
Hitler's motivation was pure material power, not Christendom.
Wow. That's like saying we evolved to enjoy Skittles because our taste receptors react so favorably to them.
From the page: "I am sure I have said this before, but here I am saying it again, for the Guardian's editors to hear: you just cannot exaggerate the stupidity of the brigade of morons who carry on the 'things they don't have words for' trope. (I should add that I hope it's stupidity. It may be worse than that: mere bullshit, written by sophisticated people who know they haven't looked for the relevant facts but couldn't care less...)"
It's a disorder in children who deliberately annoy other kids, lie and blame others for things they do. Not adults who make a rational decision to support civil disobedience. This is all in the first paragraph of the document on the page.
No squiggle or sound is inherently meaningful. That much is obvious. But maybe the point behind this is that some phonemes are always interpreted by the human mind as representing some specific thing.
Then why don't we constantly find the same phonemes signifying the same things across languages with different origins, like English and Chinese?
That's the only real test of this hypothesis. And the hypothesis fails. Given the obvious fact that the same sounds carry radically different meanings in different languages, and that radically different sounds carry the same meanings in different languages, it's baffling why anybody would take this idea seriously.
EDIT: And onomatopoetic words don't help either. In fact, they prove the idea wrong. Words like "thud" and "squirt" and so on do indeed bear meaning partially because their sound resembles the sounds they refer to -- but that's what makes them special, and different from all other words! Furthermore, we only have onomatopoeia for sounds, not for any other quality. The word "house" carries no "houseness," which is why "casa" can bear the same semantic value: semantic value is invented, assigned, created, not discovered in intrinsically meaningful signs.
From the page: "[T]he protestors' speech 'cannot be restricted simply because it is upsetting or arouses contempt.'"
From the page: "The first instance of the use of this phrase was in response to criticism of The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins; a standard criticism was that Dawkins had not studied theology and was therefore unqualified to discuss evidence for or against the existence of God. This is fallacious because, although as a non-theologian he is not technically qualified to discuss the nature of God, as a scientist he is extremely qualified to discuss the nature of evidence."
How does being a biology professor make you "extremely qualified to discuss the nature of evidence" when the evidence in question is a bunch of philosophical arguments? I'm not saying Dawkins had no right to write a book on philosophy because he isn't a philosopher, but what he did in fact do was write a book that took a strong stance on an ancient philosophical problem without sufficient knowledge of the key arguments against his position.
I don't want to seem like I'm just making declarations, so I'll give you a concrete example. In The God Delusion, Dawkins considers the ontological argument, an argument that is nearly one thousand years old and has appeared in many different forms, most famously by St. Anselm (11th c.), Descartes (17th c.), and Alvin Plantinga (20th c.). He says Kant refuted it by denying that existence is a perfection, when Kant said nothing like that (Kant actually denied that existence is a predicate like "red") [p.107]. Then, when he talks about how he "piqued" a group of philosophers by applying the ontological argument to flying pigs, they "felt the need to resort to Modal Logic to prove I was wrong" [p.108].
The argument is that a necessary being--i.e., God--exists (the "necessary" part is what makes it different from flying pigs). Modal logic is the logic of necessity and possibility. So, the argument is by definition about modal logic, and you can't even state it (let alone refute it) without "resorting" to modal logic. He apparently couldn't be bothered to read Kant's roughly five page definitive refutation of the argument, and seems not to have read any form of the argument itself from the past 500 years. And yet he aims to refute it, or the caricature of it he has in his mind.
Imagine a creationist who "applies" evolutionary theory to social theory and comes up with an egregious form of Social Darwinism. In fact, creationists make this bullshit move all the time. Imagine someone doing it to a group of biologists, who then show him why natural history is different from social and political theory, and imagine the creationist mocks them for being "forced to resort to Natural History," like it's some obscure, academic trickery. That person is clearly ignorant of the subject and their opinions can be dismissed.
So no, it's not a "logical fallacy" to point out that somebody wrote a whole book on something they clearly have no knowledge of. Is there anything fallacious about responding to the creationist that he obviously doesn't know what he's talking about?
"Power: How Power Powerfully Powers Power"
Reality is so annoying, isn't it? -- http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2009/06/whos-responsible-for-the-debt.html
Not serviceable as a font, but hilariously creepy (creepily hilarious?)
"Koch: Bring a baseball bat. That's what I'd do.
Walker: I have one in my office; you'd be happy with that. I have a slugger with my name on it."
I don't think the book qualifies as philosophy; it's the sort of insane stitched together hodge-podge of commentary on social issues, and opinions on philosophy that are either unoriginal and have been refuted by real philosophers or aren't even coherent, that is all over the place on the internet. He reads Nietzsche, maybe some more recent French guys, and now he can categorically state that he knows the meaning of life and the meaning of life is death. [The book contained over 200 citations of Nietzsche, according to this article: http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2010/09/27/book_details_motives_for_suicide_at_harvard/ ]
Take this bit, which is probably relevant to the mental pathology that led him to kill himself:
"There is a very popular opinion that choosing life is
inherently superior to choosing death. This belief that life is
inherently preferable to death is one of the most widespread
superstitions. This bias constitutes one of the most obstinate
mythologies of the human species.
This prejudice against death, however, is a kind of
xenophobia. Discrimination against death is simply assumed
good and right. Absolutist faith in life is commonly a result
of the unthinking conviction that existence or survival, along
with an irrational fear of death, is "good". This unreasoned
conviction in the rightness of life over death is like a god or a
mass delusion. Life is the "noble lie"; the common secular religion
of the West."
First, notice that it would be impossible for this bias not to be universal. If there were a group of humans who thought being dead was better than being alive, then they wouldn't be around because they would all be dead! Hence the only humans that we actually find in reality tend to prefer being alive to being dead. That is a very uninformative fact.
Second, he acts as though this is a peculiar "mythology," a "faith," a "delusion," a "religion." But the preference for life is obviously not any of those things, as anybody who is not deeply disturbed (Heisman) or a well-educated charlatan (Nietzsche, etc.) immediately recognizes. Being alive is the one necessary condition for all human action. If we desire to do anything at all--to make the world better, to be selfish, to do philosophy, literally any conceivable human act, even the most abstract and non-physical--then that desire logically entails a desire to live. Unless a person has zero desires, then the desire not to live entails a conflict, an outright contradiction (as in, "I want to write a book, and I want to die before I do"). Conceivably, pain and assurance of imminent but drawn-out death, as in the case of people with terminal illnesses, could lead to a rational desire for death, but only because the life offered is short, full of suffering, and devoid of freedom and possibilities. But life isn't inherently like that. In fact it's rarely like that, and humans have plenty of perfectly reasonable desires, like connecting with others, understanding and improving the world, etc., and these reasonable desires entail a preference for life. The desire for death is therefore deeply irrational. To piss and moan because you don't feel that "society" has done enough to prove to you that wanting to live and accomplish things is "rational," by your own twisted and inhuman redefinition of "rational," does not constitute a philosophical contribution.
This book is unfortunately nothing more than the depressing and insane ramblings of a sick man.
left-libertarian like a boss
This is terrible.
"But are we [self-aware]? I think not. I
know that sounds ridiculous, so let me explain.
If by awareness we mean knowing what is in our minds, then, as every
clinical psychologist knows, people are only very slightly self-aware, and
most of what they think about themselves is guess-work. We seem to build
up networks of theories about what is in our minds, and we mistake these
apparent visions for what's really going on. To put it bluntly, most of
what our "consciousness" reveals to us is just "made up"."
But we're aware of feelings, aware of being in the cognitive states we're in, like looking at a computer or thinking about AI, and so on. Is there a "network of theories" that you're employing when you're aware of feeling hungry, or aware of the fact that you're listening to music? Obviously not, which is why he couches his language. He has to put "consciousness" and "made up" in quotes to soften what he's saying, because it's so blatantly absurd. His argument is that clinical psychology has shown that people aren't aware of all aspects of their minds, therefore people are not self-aware at all. The whole point of his discussion is to show that computers can have the same kind of intelligence as humans, so he either has to say that computers can be self-aware or argue that humans are not. For some bizarre reason, like many other philosophers, he argues that humans are not self-aware, and that consciousness doesn't really exist or is at least so laden with "networks of theories" that its testimony is null and void. So you're just misapplying your "folk psychology" concepts when you think you feel pain or hunger, because there is no such thing as feeling or self-awareness. It's much easier to believe that sufficiently complex computers might be self-aware than to claim that self-awareness doesn't exist.
no
Damn, what a sad and terrifying story.
As someone who loves film and studies psychology and philosophy of perception, this is completely fascinating. And it reminds me that I need to take an internet/Stumble break, back to fucking work