#phiilosophy

[bookofkhidr]

Never has there been more talk of “intelligence” and “genius” than in our epoch of intellectual night, and never has it been more difficult to agree on the meaning of these words; what is certain is that men have probably never been so cunning and ingenious as in our day. There is plenty of “intelligence” to spare, but truth is something altogether different.

Frithjof Schuon, from Form and Substance in the Religions

[noosphe-re]

God Himself is the first problem of diversity that has become manifest in the cosmos. The first thing that each existent thing looks upon is the cause of its own existence. In itself each thing knows that it was not, and that it then came to be through temporal origination. However, in this coming to be, the dispositions of the existent things are diverse. Hence they have diverse opinions about the identity of the cause that brought them into existence. Therefore the Real is the first problem of diversity in the cosmos.

Ibn Arabi

[so-rainripples]

Marry, and you will regret it; don’t marry, you will also regret it; marry or don’t marry, you will regret it either way. Laugh at the world’s foolishness, you will regret it; weep over it, you will regret that too; laugh at the world’s foolishness or weep over it, you will regret both. Believe a woman, you will regret it; believe her not, you will also regret it… Hang yourself, you will regret it; do not hang yourself, and you will regret that too; hang yourself or don’t hang yourself, you’ll regret it either way; whether you hang yourself or do not hang yourself, you will regret both. This, gentlemen, is the essence of all philosophy.

― Søren Kierkegaard

[omegarising]

Now.

I gave a ton of advice to someone that I know will not be used in full, but that’s how it is. You can’t hand hold anyone through their fight, they have to carry their own weight. You can only tell them how and what and why. Then again, every person brings their own hangups and issues to the mat and how I might think a solution might not be applicable to their situation. 

I’ve been thinking about this, the most important question in any situation is the why. And you have to have a really good, bulls-eye answer to the why. Then again, I write my thoughts on index cards so what the fuck do I know. 

what is the fun of writing a post when you get disturbed and moved from the desk twice in a span of ten minutes. Chalk this one under ramble.

[noosphe-re]

We say the map is different from the territory. But what is the territory? Operationally, somebody went out with a retina or a measuring stick and made representations which were then put on paper. What is on the paper map is a representation of what was in the retinal representation of the man who made the map; and as you push the question back, what you find is an infinite regress, an infinite series of maps. The territory never gets in at all. […] Always, the process of representation will filter it out so that the mental world is only maps of maps, ad infinitum.

Gregory Bateson

[ramyatr]

My philosophy of cooking

I keep telling my husband that there is nothing called a bad dish. Each dish is unique. Every mistake you make, every ingredient you add is leading you to creating a new taste. When I am in kitchen…

[salosion]

What is philosophy? Or is philosophy what is¿it

What is philosophy ¿❤️? Or is Philosophy what is ¿❤️? Philosophy is the wonder of thought in impressions of expressions that breathe our vitally functioning sentient animation of present that is presently (conscious) existence gifted. Philosophy is the wonder and fascination of the deep divine that inspirits conscious individual unique loving light to feel, experience grow and manifest back to what it is.We are the universe experiencing itself. Life was/is ultimately created to manifest back to what it is, (it already is what it is but it’s purpose is to out of conscious desire and determination create, only and only the pure energy that created itself is what created it and is its creator, Love. God is Love Love is God God is the greatest most powerful force He isn’t anything less He’s Love times the infinity we’ll never understand until we fulfill our purpose and mission like God created us to together to consciously make God greater. How can God become greater if He’s already the greatest thing that can ever be? Exactly because He is the greatest thing ever and nothing can ever even come close to matching or understanding it’s righteous entire glorious entity. God created us co-creators to make himself greater, it’s the only way He can ever make himself greater and create more Love by creating ignorant oblivious humans beings in a world where free-will exists along with the choice to do the good or bad, so that YOU out of YOUR own h🎁❤️rts desir💋s and int💦nti✨ns ch👊🖕se to do the g❤️👅d over the bad and literal⚡️y recreate that pure Godly energy that is Love back into the atmosphere and universe making God the Almighty All Loving perfect beautiful creator even greater.�Philosophy is the aroused heart thats induced by the seductive persuasion it’s meaning seeks, Love and it’s creator, Love. cleverly awakening our consciousness oblivious of any such definite evidence that there really is a God while at the same time the evidence is all around us, our meaning, everything and anything so that YOU out of your own hearts desires and intentions realize the mission and consciously decide to want to do it and partake in the existence and eternity of Love and its infinitude by choosing to do the good over the bad, literally creating that pure Godly energy that is Love back into the atmosphere and universe making God the Almighty All Loving perfect beautifulest greatest Creator even greater; Philosophy is the aroused heart thats induced by the seductive persuasion it’s meaning seeks, Love and it’s creator.�Philosophy is passion and affection in curios action that drives the intellectual desire of mans spirit, perception and understanding of all and its meaning.�After all, after all “philosophy” means “Love of wisdom”. Philosophy is a world, a relationship and the cosmos, Philosophy is a pedagogical scholastic discipline of the phenomenon that is Life. Philosophy envelopes it’s rising falls into several distinct flowery fields; among those of foundational concern are; metaphysics (the theory of reality), epistemology (the theory of knowledge), ethics (the theory of values), politics (the theory of legal rights and government), aesthetics (the theory of the nature of art). What is this, what is that, what is everything. Philosophers seek to perceive and understand the abyss that is staring right back at them, the unknown, and ALL, yearning to wonder how bright the radiance of enlightenment is, so as to be all knowing of sorts or at least to reach the mountains of illumination and enlightenment when man marry’s God and stopping abruptly at the orgasmic twists falling cliffs to one day rise again with the suns enlightened significance in harmony with the meaning that breathes all of what this is. What is the nature of existence? To let L❤️ve exist.

[bluewatsons]

Paul Trachtman, Wittgenstein's Ghost, Smithsonian Magazine (April 2002)

When two philosophers nearly came to blows, they defined a debate that rages a half century later

More than 50 years have passed since two famous philosophers squared off against each other at England’s Cambridge University. Though their raucous debate lasted only ten minutes, it still stirs the passions of their followers.

Both men were Viennese expatriates, refugees from the rise of Hitler and the ravages of World War II. But the war was only a backdrop for the clash of ideas as they faced each other for the first time, on October 25, 1946.

One of the two, Ludwig Wittgenstein, picked up an iron poker from the fireplace and waved it at the other, Karl Popper. Or maybe he only waved it in the air for emphasis, as he shouted "Popper, you are wrong! You are wrong!" Maybe the poker was red hot, or perhaps it was cold. Although the room was packed with eminent philosophers and their students, no one could agree afterward on exactly what took place.

When the illustrious philosopher Bertrand Russell ordered Wittgenstein to put down the poker, he did so and, after exchanging a few angry words with Russell, left the room. According to some, he slammed the door. Ever since Wittgenstein laid down that poker, colleagues and students who were present, and even those born many years later, have taken up the cudgels in an argument that was left unsettled.

The argument is back thanks to a lively new book, BBC reporters, David Edmonds and John Eidinow. They were inspired to write it by a bristling exchange of letters in the London Times Literary Supplement in 1998, over who said what, and when, during that infamous Cambridge seminar.

What stirs the passions of philosophers may seem trivial to the rest of us, who get by with mere common sense. Wittgenstein had sent Popper an invitation to discuss "some philosophical puzzle." That got Popper’s goat. He had real problems on his mind, not puzzles. In fact, that was the crux of the matter. Wittgenstein insisted there were no real problems in philosophy, only the puzzling way philosophers talked about the world. After one Cambridge seminar he was heard to say, "Bad philosophers are like slum landlords. It’s my job to put them out of business."

The authors of Wittgenstein’s Poker have fleshed out the philosophical ideas with warts-and-all portraits of the protagonists and their colleagues. There are warts aplenty. Wittgenstein was regarded as an austere, domineering genius who often destroyed students’ ability to think for themselves. One student called him "an atomic bomb." Popper was no less imposing; his aggressive style of argument, said a friend, "put me in mind of a blowtorch."

And between them there’s Bertrand Russell, whose academic achievements in logic and mathematics paled before his public notoriety as the philosopher—and proselytizer—of free love. Russell had helped Wittgenstein publish his first book, composed in the trenches of World War I. He even wrote the introduction. At first, Russell saw Wittgenstein as a brilliant young successor. He told a friend, "His avalanches make mine seem mere snowballs."

No doubt Wittgenstein agreed; he thought Russell’s introduction to his book completely missed the point. Russell eventually soured on Wittgenstein, describing his former protégé’s writings as "completely unintelligible." Russell, who had also assisted Popper in getting established, ended up taking his side in the brouhaha with Wittgenstein.

Edmonds and Eidinow have told this story with an evenhanded treatment of all parties. Yet, like Russell, they’ve missed the point. They have stirred the ashes of the debate but not the fire. What that waving poker was pointing at was not a distinction between puzzles and problems, but something more urgent and relevant. It was a warning, to all of us, that whenever philosophers, or scientists, or any other intellectual elite claim to possess some truth that runs counter to common sense, they are talking nonsense.

Wittgenstein had a hard time getting this point across. The simple truth at the heart of his argument was unacceptable to thinkers convinced that philosophy could address many problems plaguing humanity. To take his point would put a lot of professors out of work. Yet he tried desperately to make himself clear, from his earliest words to his last. In the preface to his first book he wrote, "The whole sense of the book might be summed up in the following words: what can be said at all can be said clearly, and what we cannot talk about we must pass over in silence." Indeed, he has often been called a mystic.

In fact, he wanted philosophers to shut up about most of what matters in everyday life: ethics, aesthetics, nature, religion. On such subjects, formal languages like logic and science can only send us off "in pursuit of chimeras." It is because these formal languages follow strict rules and rule out contradictions that they lack common sense and give a misleading view of the world. "It is like a pair of glasses on our nose through which we see whatever we look at," he admonished his colleagues. "It never occurs to us to take them off." As for his attacks on philosophy, he said, "What we are destroying is nothing but houses of cards."

Poor Popper didn’t have a clue. He was a paragon of pure reason armed only with logic, confronting the mind of a mystic uttering paradoxes and waving a poker in the air. Popper was best known for his book The Open Society and Its Enemies, which attacked Communism and challenged Marxist theory as pseudoscience. Wittgenstein waved this off as the concern of sociology. He had more universal fish to fry. "Philosophy," he said, "is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language."

Although Wittgenstein, who died in 1951 at age 62, did not live to see the most striking example of this bewitchment—the pursuit of artificial intelligence in computers—his ghost sat next to me at a seminar on this subject at the Smithsonian Castle in the 1980s. Bill Woods, a scientist who had struggled to make computers understand ordinary language, offered a confession. "We assumed," he said, "we could start with simple children’s stories and work our way up to complex fields like physics and astronomy. It turned out that understanding physics and astronomy is extremely simple compared to the problem of understanding children’s stories." Bewitchment indeed, muttered Wittgenstein’s ghost.

The ghost turned up again a few years later when I was talking to another artificial intelligence pioneer, John McCarthy, at Stanford University. McCarthy was explaining his efforts to impart reason to computers. "I estimate there are only about 12 or 13 rules that are needed for the logic of common sense," he said. "I’ve figured out 5 of them, and I’m sure we’ll understand the rest in a few years. Then we can program any computer with common sense." That achievement, as it turned out, has proved elusive.

Our scientists and philosophers are still misleading us in their pursuit of chimeras. Lately, the talk of cloning people has got Wittgenstein’s ghost reaching for his poker again. We are dealing with imponderables once more, and talking as if we knew what we’re talking about when we don’t.

The actual poker Wittgenstein waved at Popper back in 1946 mysteriously disappeared after the incident. But Wittgenstein’s ghost, ever skeptical, still brandishes it.