Thoughts on Philosophy (to quote my brother "Mental Masturbation")
Knives and Fences
In philosophy, science and almost every other form of study we as species tend separate things. More and more it seems to me that this is a very destructive way to look at it. When it comes to philosophy I like to think of a wood carver with a very sharp knife taking off different part of the world in little slices, in order to revile some beautiful underling work of art. But always with this analogy I get this image of the carver getting frustrated because his vision for the piece of art is always changing. So he goes around and collects all the small little flakes and bit that he cut off and glues them back to gather and starts anew. He must glue and rework because he has only been given one piece of wood to make his art from. The philosopher must cut, and shave because it is in his nature and it is all that philosophy is about. The philosopher must put his knife to the world and dived and dived until he can gain an understanding of an individual piece then he looks to another piece and notes its differences. Then he realizes the the second piece of the world is not all that different from the first piece and he must put them back to gather. The philosopher does not realizes that they were together be begin with and by separating them in the first place he has weakened his concept of what they are.
I often think of the every branching web of sectioned and sub-sectioned thought as land that has been divided up using fences. They say that barbed wire tamed the west. I'm not sure that I agree with that idea. I think if any thing it put the wilderness of the defensive and it lashed out harder and harder until it broke itself. But that is a different topic. It seems to me that philosophers like to lay down fences. They like to be able to say that this is this and that is that. When in reality the fence is just a wire and all but the dumbest of domesticated animals simply jump over it or go through it or go under it. In philosophy this becomes that and that becomes this and the lines that the philosophers put down thinking they are barriers are not such thing they are simple there to keep that philosophers thinking that there are edges to what they are looking at and they need not worry about getting lost in the infinite reaches of reality. I say get lost. Let reality be wild because that is what it is.
I will admit, though, that I am not all that good at letting go of my own fences. It is hard to look at the whole when there is such a huge amount of beautiful detail. And I will be the first to admit that a great many insights come when looking at only a small subset of reality. However, my point in the above was not to forget where that chip of the world that is being looked at came from or that just because you set up a defined border it does not mean that what is in that border is the same as what has always been and what always will be.
PolyMe
I was an odd child, instead of just one imaginary friend I had five and they were all named Ron. The odd thing was that I get the feeling that I knew they were not real. I feel that I knew that they were just different parts of me and a rationalization of what my inner monolog was. As I grew older I put aside such things as imaginary friends. I'm starting to wish that I had not. Recently I taken the, abhorred, philosophical knife to my own mind and I found that there were parts of my mind that seemed to act on their own as separate entities each with different personalities. They seemed almost an internal reflection of the world and people around me. I often found my self having conversations with them within the landscape of my mind. At first I only thought there were two or three entities contributing to who I was but I quickly realized that these were just the dominant ones. In reality there seemed to be one for every brain cell and every combination of brain cells (that is a lot). When this idea and realization became fully bloomed in my mind I was a little afraid but I quick found the benefit of viewing my mind in such a way. I could work things out on my own I could talk to those who thought the best way for the job and if I did not like something I did I was not forced to hate the whole of who I am as I had done in the past rather I could hate a small part of me and love the rest of me. And I began to grow comfortable in my novel way of imagining myself.
As the philosopher often does I began to look at the individuals within my self. I began to see that just as I was subdivided into many so were they. I looked deeper and deeper into those within those within me and I got to a point where is started to see something familiar in the alien minds of my own. I began to see myself. I began to see that not only did these entities make up who I was but I made up who they were. All of the division I had made with my knife of philosophy dissolved in that instant and I began to see that the boundaries in my mind were not as impermeable as I had thought they were.
When I began to see that the personalities in my mind were really reflections of the world in which I live I began to see the world more as part of myself rather than something to be survived.
Note:
I had a long debate with myself about whether of not to share these thought for fear of being locked up as a mad man. I have heard that a person with multiple personalities don't realize that the personalities are part of them. So I wonder what happens to a person when they recognize that there are others within them and embrace the idea whole hearted. I feel like this many entity view of my own personality is something that I should be fighting against rather than rooting for it and hoping it grows.
Determinism vs. Free Will
To look as the world without divisions beings can resolve a great many philosophical debates. One such is the debate is the debate about whether a person's actions are determined entirely by their surrounding or if they have the free will to chose what they are going to do. (I'm going to do this in a dialog form because I'm tired of talking.)
Phil: This debate is easily resolved. The environment gives the person a limited number choices and then the person picks from this smaller set.
Pal: I have never like this idea it always seemed like a cheep way of avoiding the issue. It not resolve the problem because I could still be argued that the person has the choice to change the environment to give him the options that he wants or that the environment is simple allowing the person to think that he was given choices when he was not at all. The problem is not with the answer to the question it is with the question itself. Before you can ask whether environment or person dictates the course of events, you must ask what is the difference between the environment and the person.
Phil: Everything outside of the person is the environment.
Pal: What of the air that he must breath. or the food that he must eat. These thing are passing from the environment into the person by your definition.
Phil: Ok, the mind is the person. Not the brain, so you can not argue that the blood that sustains it is from that environment. I mean the mind as in the consciousness of the person.
Pal: That is reasonable. But the consciousness of the person is not something that is physical. How can something that the environment (something physical) cannot interact with; interact with the environment.
Phil: Through the body of course.
Pal: So you are saying that the person defined as the consciousness can only effect the environment by being intimately tied to the that environment through the body, which is part of the environment.
Phil: Yes I believe that is what I'm saying.
Pal: So then the obvious answer to the question of determinism vs. free will is that there is no such thing as free will.
Phil: No, where did you get that crazy idea?
Pal: Well if the body is part of the environment then its actions are the actions of the environment and the consciousness in no way can effect the bodies actions because the body is physical.
Phil: No the body acts on the behalf of the consciousness.
Pal: So the body is not entirely part of the environment but not entirely part of the consciousness either. It is a kind of medium between the two.
Phil: Yes, Yes that is exactly it.
Pal: This seems a bit ridiculous we could be here all day dividing and sub-dividing the connection between the person and the environment. Would it not be easier to completely illuminate the idea of person and environment altogether. The person is part of the environment and the environment is part of the person. Neither is complete without the other and but neither is completely defined by the other. They are part of a whole. You can not separate the person from the environment, to do so would be to lose the definition of the environment. And the same goes for the environment from the person. They can not be separated, so to define either without the other is to destroy both.
Phil: I can see what you mean and it might make things easier. But it seems to easy.
Pal: I am a lazy man Phil. I like easy.
Phil: But, Using your definition still does not resolve the question of determinism vs. free will.
Pal: I know it doesn't.
Phil: So how is it helpful?
Pal: Because the question does not even come up. By making the person and that environment one thing there is no question to ask. The will of the environment is the will of the person and the will of the person is the will of the environment. They move together like a liquids mixing, not like two solid objects butting heads.
In philosophy, science and almost every other form of study we as species tend separate things. More and more it seems to me that this is a very destructive way to look at it. When it comes to philosophy I like to think of a wood carver with a very sharp knife taking off different part of the world in little slices, in order to revile some beautiful underling work of art. But always with this analogy I get this image of the carver getting frustrated because his vision for the piece of art is always changing. So he goes around and collects all the small little flakes and bit that he cut off and glues them back to gather and starts anew. He must glue and rework because he has only been given one piece of wood to make his art from. The philosopher must cut, and shave because it is in his nature and it is all that philosophy is about. The philosopher must put his knife to the world and dived and dived until he can gain an understanding of an individual piece then he looks to another piece and notes its differences. Then he realizes the the second piece of the world is not all that different from the first piece and he must put them back to gather. The philosopher does not realizes that they were together be begin with and by separating them in the first place he has weakened his concept of what they are.
I often think of the every branching web of sectioned and sub-sectioned thought as land that has been divided up using fences. They say that barbed wire tamed the west. I'm not sure that I agree with that idea. I think if any thing it put the wilderness of the defensive and it lashed out harder and harder until it broke itself. But that is a different topic. It seems to me that philosophers like to lay down fences. They like to be able to say that this is this and that is that. When in reality the fence is just a wire and all but the dumbest of domesticated animals simply jump over it or go through it or go under it. In philosophy this becomes that and that becomes this and the lines that the philosophers put down thinking they are barriers are not such thing they are simple there to keep that philosophers thinking that there are edges to what they are looking at and they need not worry about getting lost in the infinite reaches of reality. I say get lost. Let reality be wild because that is what it is.
I will admit, though, that I am not all that good at letting go of my own fences. It is hard to look at the whole when there is such a huge amount of beautiful detail. And I will be the first to admit that a great many insights come when looking at only a small subset of reality. However, my point in the above was not to forget where that chip of the world that is being looked at came from or that just because you set up a defined border it does not mean that what is in that border is the same as what has always been and what always will be.
PolyMe
I was an odd child, instead of just one imaginary friend I had five and they were all named Ron. The odd thing was that I get the feeling that I knew they were not real. I feel that I knew that they were just different parts of me and a rationalization of what my inner monolog was. As I grew older I put aside such things as imaginary friends. I'm starting to wish that I had not. Recently I taken the, abhorred, philosophical knife to my own mind and I found that there were parts of my mind that seemed to act on their own as separate entities each with different personalities. They seemed almost an internal reflection of the world and people around me. I often found my self having conversations with them within the landscape of my mind. At first I only thought there were two or three entities contributing to who I was but I quickly realized that these were just the dominant ones. In reality there seemed to be one for every brain cell and every combination of brain cells (that is a lot). When this idea and realization became fully bloomed in my mind I was a little afraid but I quick found the benefit of viewing my mind in such a way. I could work things out on my own I could talk to those who thought the best way for the job and if I did not like something I did I was not forced to hate the whole of who I am as I had done in the past rather I could hate a small part of me and love the rest of me. And I began to grow comfortable in my novel way of imagining myself.
As the philosopher often does I began to look at the individuals within my self. I began to see that just as I was subdivided into many so were they. I looked deeper and deeper into those within those within me and I got to a point where is started to see something familiar in the alien minds of my own. I began to see myself. I began to see that not only did these entities make up who I was but I made up who they were. All of the division I had made with my knife of philosophy dissolved in that instant and I began to see that the boundaries in my mind were not as impermeable as I had thought they were.
When I began to see that the personalities in my mind were really reflections of the world in which I live I began to see the world more as part of myself rather than something to be survived.
Note:
I had a long debate with myself about whether of not to share these thought for fear of being locked up as a mad man. I have heard that a person with multiple personalities don't realize that the personalities are part of them. So I wonder what happens to a person when they recognize that there are others within them and embrace the idea whole hearted. I feel like this many entity view of my own personality is something that I should be fighting against rather than rooting for it and hoping it grows.
Determinism vs. Free Will
To look as the world without divisions beings can resolve a great many philosophical debates. One such is the debate is the debate about whether a person's actions are determined entirely by their surrounding or if they have the free will to chose what they are going to do. (I'm going to do this in a dialog form because I'm tired of talking.)
Phil: This debate is easily resolved. The environment gives the person a limited number choices and then the person picks from this smaller set.
Pal: I have never like this idea it always seemed like a cheep way of avoiding the issue. It not resolve the problem because I could still be argued that the person has the choice to change the environment to give him the options that he wants or that the environment is simple allowing the person to think that he was given choices when he was not at all. The problem is not with the answer to the question it is with the question itself. Before you can ask whether environment or person dictates the course of events, you must ask what is the difference between the environment and the person.
Phil: Everything outside of the person is the environment.
Pal: What of the air that he must breath. or the food that he must eat. These thing are passing from the environment into the person by your definition.
Phil: Ok, the mind is the person. Not the brain, so you can not argue that the blood that sustains it is from that environment. I mean the mind as in the consciousness of the person.
Pal: That is reasonable. But the consciousness of the person is not something that is physical. How can something that the environment (something physical) cannot interact with; interact with the environment.
Phil: Through the body of course.
Pal: So you are saying that the person defined as the consciousness can only effect the environment by being intimately tied to the that environment through the body, which is part of the environment.
Phil: Yes I believe that is what I'm saying.
Pal: So then the obvious answer to the question of determinism vs. free will is that there is no such thing as free will.
Phil: No, where did you get that crazy idea?
Pal: Well if the body is part of the environment then its actions are the actions of the environment and the consciousness in no way can effect the bodies actions because the body is physical.
Phil: No the body acts on the behalf of the consciousness.
Pal: So the body is not entirely part of the environment but not entirely part of the consciousness either. It is a kind of medium between the two.
Phil: Yes, Yes that is exactly it.
Pal: This seems a bit ridiculous we could be here all day dividing and sub-dividing the connection between the person and the environment. Would it not be easier to completely illuminate the idea of person and environment altogether. The person is part of the environment and the environment is part of the person. Neither is complete without the other and but neither is completely defined by the other. They are part of a whole. You can not separate the person from the environment, to do so would be to lose the definition of the environment. And the same goes for the environment from the person. They can not be separated, so to define either without the other is to destroy both.
Phil: I can see what you mean and it might make things easier. But it seems to easy.
Pal: I am a lazy man Phil. I like easy.
Phil: But, Using your definition still does not resolve the question of determinism vs. free will.
Pal: I know it doesn't.
Phil: So how is it helpful?
Pal: Because the question does not even come up. By making the person and that environment one thing there is no question to ask. The will of the environment is the will of the person and the will of the person is the will of the environment. They move together like a liquids mixing, not like two solid objects butting heads.
posted by The Golden Retirver at 14:20
2 Comments:
I find it funny because I often write things that i do not even believe but I pretend that I do believe them just to see where they go. This is probably why I suck a religion.
hi there my friend
I love the metaphor that you used here about the wood chippings and there was a desperate note there that was all there was to use in philosophy and those wood chippings represent words to me and words aren't the universe so how can we uncover the universe through words. we are limited by words.
philosophy all depends on how you define words.
Nice to hear that you enjoyed my post. have a beautiful day filled with love and light.
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