#wittgenstien

[francesannartist]

‘…the writers we are willing to call master are those who seem to us finally to be saying what we feel we have long had on the tip of our tongue but have been ourselves quite unable to express, those who put into words what are for us only inchoate motions, tendencies, and impulses of the mind, then I am more than happy to acknowledge Wittgenstein as my master.’ Geertz, C. (2000).

[keithurbancynic-blog]

Of that which we cannot speak, we must remain silent — Ludwig Wittgenstien With that in mind, here are my thoughts on God. ...

[cryptomnesian]

Dear Russell, Many thanks for your letter.  As you see, I am at home and unfortunately once again quite unproductive.  I only hope the ideas will start to flow again when I go back into isolation.  ( I am staying here for about another eight or ten days.)  As regards your American lecture-course, there was naturally no need at all, as far as I'm concerned to mention my name.  But -- as you wish --.  Here i feel different every day.  Sometimes things inside me are in such a ferment that I think I'm going mad:  then the next day I am totally apathetic again.  But deep inside me there's a perpetual seething, like the bottom of a geyser, and I keep on hoping things will come to an eruption once and for all, so that I can turn into a different person.  I can't write you anything about logic today.  Perhaps you regard this thinking about myself as a waste of time -- but how can I be a logician before I'm a human being!  Far the most important thing is to come to terms with myself! Yours ever L.W.

[sumpix]

I sit astride life like a bad rider on a horse. I only owe it to the horse's good nature that I am not thrown off at this very moment. Ludwig Wittgenstein

[doctorsax]

Do not be troubled by the fact that languages (2) and (8) consist only of orders. If you want to say that this shows them to be incomplete, ask yourself whether our language is complete; - whether it was so before the symbolism of chemistry and the notation of the infinitesimal calculus were incorporated in it; for these are, so to speak, suburbs of our language. (And how many houses or streets does it take before a town begins to be a town?) Our language can be seen as an ancient city; a maze of little streets and squares, of old and new houses, and of houses with additions from various periods; and this surrounded by a multitude of new boroughs with straight regular streets and uniform houses.

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations

[beckek]

According to Wittgenstien, language is importatnt to philosophy not just because the a priori nature of philosophical problems and propositions is rooted in linguistic rules, but also because there is an internal connection between thought and its linguistic expression.

Hans-Johann Glock

[melangle]

and like the implications of relativism applies to things more subtle than creationism, such as the idea of morality or ethics as defined by religious systems.

Obviously religion has significance to many people around the world and shit and like "relgion" is a pretty shitty descriptor as collectively the items and collections of beliefs that it describes are fairly disparate and hard to compare and like within them it's impossible for any two people to have the same ideas of what the set of rules as defined by their adoptive institution means (with meaning being integration into the personal subjective collective rules of signifier interrelations of which each person has thier own incompatible collection as determined by their life experiences and cognitive abilities.) but like "religon" in the generalization I'm making I'm not attempting to make positive assertions with relation to necessary or likely content or relations to concepts only rules limiting attempts to the acquisition of truths that they might attempt to make specifically focusing on those regarding the will and the application of rule or laws on the behaviour of individuals.

Now firstly like the system has valid claims like internally the conceptualizations of an afterlife can be said to have any relation to actions and behaviors that the religion (and when I say religion I mean as in defined by the institution not like the personal subjective interpretations that are necessarily deviant as subjective from the whole) claims about. Like Kosher and Halal are cogent valid demands or claims for a religion to make. The afterlife is a concept defined by religions. The model of the rules of the laws of interrelation between objects in reality is necessarily limited to mortal existence. The idea of the continuation of the activities of the collective neurochemical pathways and the like of the brain is an impossibility as the concept of the "brain" and the "body" and "atoms" and "chemistry" and "biology" and "physics" and "mathematics" and "empiricism" are the systems that define the concepts being refereed to and have authority over assertions about the relation asserted but like Islam and Juadism both assume the existence of a soul or something other than the ultimately indeterminable but approximately inferential actions of matter so their claims of the actions after the end of a life are valid because they are not talking about "life" as understood by western philosophical or scientific tradition by rather "life" as a concept that whilst it may easily be conflated and confused with the concept of the presence of self as give by the actions of thoughts and the like it is actually referring to something that shares no causal relations with the actions of the brain whatsoever. The concept of the "afterlife" being valid, and any relation to this afterlife is also valid, the adoption of the concept of a soul is not a rational, logical, philosophically grounded decision, so anything relating to the soul (provided it doesn't overstep it's authoritative areas) is valid to assume as "true"

However as religions have only the authority over the concepts they define internally and only insofar as these internal concepts aren't conflated or confused with the concepts that share the same words outside of the religon, they can't create prescriptive judgements that apply to anything other than inconsequential personal choices. Systems of morality have authority on moral judgements, like you take the categorical imperative or the hedonistic calculus and it's all cool but like you can't apply "christian" ethics to a situation that effects people. "People" being the mechanical entities we understand via our primary model of reality, that being materialist and hence the "christian" definition of "person-hood" being as the possession of a "soul" not applying, as the "soul" is a concept that can only be integrated into the mind of someone who adopts the institution and it has no meaning to anyone but those within the institution. Abortion, murder, rape, adultery, jaywalking, indecent exposure, crop rotation etc have different meanings at the root of the epistemological reality of the person judging. The epistemological reality that has validity is the one in which the concepts defined have greatest probably of reflection to the state of affairs of the objects to which the concepts refer. i.e. the concept of abortion is the act of preventing a cluster of cells exiting the womb in a form that would grant it legal protection from termination of the activities that would allow it to become an adult entity. That the "baby" is a baby is determined by interpretation of the form of the cell clusters matching the baby concept held within our minds. The presence of a soul is not inferentiable as the soul is defined by terms other than those that describe reality. Hence moral determinations about the act of abortion are invalid if the presence of a soul is what they define their judgment in relation to. Deciding what the "right" thing is, when you are considering relations between "real" objects like people and stuff, requires that you ground yourself in the systems that define what those concepts are, and if you choose systems that define them in terms of ethereal, immaterial, metaphysical ideas like the soul then you must limit your judgements only in relation to the inconsequential hypothetical fictions you have chosen to adopt. Otherwise it's just you making semantic conflations and looking like an idiot.

[melangle]

ok so like if a system has legitimate claim to authority on "truth" on items contained and defined by that system and "truth" is simply reflection of the form of the assertions or claims in the grammatical rules upon which that system operates. This means if I construct my own system that lays claim to truths it's impossible to illegitimise them as long as I am only asserting thier truth within and under the system. Like in monopoly provided you follow the game rules the claims that you make within the grammar of laws can be determined as true if the state of affairs the proposition lays claim to is actual as defined by the terms of the game and that one may violate the rules of the game does not invalidate the capacity for internal definiations of the game as the laws of the outside of the game are not those to which the game claims authority onto.

And this idea is utilized in the allowance of religion to exist in secular society, it allows that religion be utilized by people in the lives as a source of meaning but only insofar as it is acknowledged by all participants in religions that their religion only has truth within the "game" of state of events contained within them. If you use your religious beliefs to attempt to assert something about the state of affairs of the objective reality shared by living real people as opposed to simply the fictional "spiritual" ideas then you are making an invalid claim. For example, the concepts of dinosaurs, history, evolution and time are all scientific ideas defined by an "atheist" (insofar as deities do not enter into the understand of causal relations between them) system of truth. For a Religion to attempt to irresolute immutable truths about what the objects interpreted as bones by the inferential comparison to the concept of a bone plus the elimination of plausible/possible alternative explanations are is an attempt at the reconciliation of a symbolic reference to a collective grouping of objects founded on a complex grammatically structured system in which inference with the use of mathematical systems upon multitudes of empirical data arises at a series of theoretical but with an almost mathematically incontestable premisies with a system of truths in which symbolic relation to the arrangement of signifiers from obsolete linguistic systems in a text is the sole interpreted root source of "truth". It is the application of a value ("truth") determined by a system that defines the value as "interpreted as similar to an arrangement of a set of arbitrary symbols" to a concept that has meaning only within it's own system, a system defined in terms of inferred relations between objects existing outside of, and with any conforming with any determinable necessity to the state of affairs describable by our system of symbolic interrelations.

To expect that your system of "truth" that simply attempts to compare infantile conceptualizations against a set of meaningless sentences could provide anything that would provide even the most megre reflection of the objective realm as we interpret through the combination of inference and mathematical modeling is pretty much a sign of some sort of cognitive disorder.