• My favorite verses in the Tao Te Ching
    ↪T Clark
    My take on the Tao Te Ching. I offer a Hobson's choice of course but that's just me and nothing to do with what Laozi really wanted to share regarding reality and our place in it.

    I suppose my approach to the Tao Te Ching is heavily influenced by my fascination with detective fictions like Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot - I look at everything, at least try to, as a mystery that needs a solving. I tried to piece together the puzzle that the Tao Te Ching is into a coherent story and what came out of that is what I put on the table. Perhaps it wasn't as convincing as I had initially thought.

    This is where I sign off...

    Good luck!
  • Hi, I am Moon Jung. an.
    I've come here to find true love, a pot of gold, and the elixir of eternal youth — god must be atheist

    :rofl:
  • Which belief is strongest?
    Look at Christianity for example. Many say they don't teach truth, however, Christianity is the most popular religion in the world and has one of the biggest impacts on history. I think it has a lot to do with their belief of utter disregardance for THIS life and THIS planet and reaping the temporary rewards as such. I want to know a belief that is very empowering that serves to cherish the life and planet here and now. — Thinking

    I don't know if it's true or not but all religions have that hard-to-ignore sense of desperation that characterizes a person who knows fae's doomed. No, not empowerment at all but a last ditch effort to escape from the inevitable...end [death & decay].
  • What is a 'real' philosopher and what is the true essence of philosophy ?
    There are two aspects to being a real philosopher:

    1. How to think? A way of thinking that includes diverse elements that begins with understanding questions, includes clarifying the meanings of words, thinking critically, being skeptical, being imaginative and creative, and ends when a satisfactory solution, understanding, answer, or even impasse has been reached. Socrates is a classic example of such a philosopher.

    2. What to think? Knowledge, knowing how much ground has been covered in a particular branch of philosophy, understanding the different perspectives offered by past philosophers. The basic idea here being that it would be a pathetic waste of time to reinvent the wheel and a philosopher's time and energy are better spent picking up where other's have left off.

    A real philosopher would know both how to think? and what to think?
  • Can you use math to describe philosophy?
    Exactly; and wonderfully reminiscent of Orwell too. — Aryamoy Mitra

    Well, kindly show us the way then. How can we marry philosophy with math?
  • My favorite verses in the Tao Te Ching
    I'm ok with this, as long as, when you say "reality" you mean "the 10,000 things" and not "the Tao." — T Clark

    To be frank, the interpretation of Taoism as presented in my last few posts is definitely not the final word on the subject. It's just one of possibly hundreds and thousands of ways of understanding the cryptic Laozi. It made sense to me for I don't see a purpose in being more obscure than is necessary, a principle Laozi must have some familiarity with. That being the case the paradoxes in Taoism must be absolutely necessary. Therefore, if we're to apprehend Laozi's message, assuming he even had one, the obvious place to start is the nature of paradoxes and how they relates to language and such. I offered my own personal perspective in that context, that's all. If you have doubts as to whether this is the correct way to understand Taoism, I have no real reason to counter that.

    That out of the way, what do you think "the 10,000 things" means? For my money, the exact figure of 10,000 is not as important as what it suggests viz. multiplicity, plurarlity, or what Laozi is really worried about viz. division that then becomes the cause of strife, chaos, and, of course the main antagonist, suffering.

    Laozi wants us to see past differences, the very foundation of all division, "the 10,000 things", and try and grasp what I can only refer to as the unity which is the Tao. In order to do that Laozi resorts to paradoxes, contradictions, because these are the extremes of division; we could make the case that grey is black or that grey is white but to say black is white, as the Tao Te Ching's many paradoxes eventually reduce to, is to defy all reason.

    We need to pay close attention to "...to defy all reason..." the words that appear at the end of the last sentence in the paragraph above because Laozi isn't proposing that we should now give up on logic and reason, embrace irrationality. Quite the "opposite", he wants us to realize that, to continue with my example of black and white, though black isn't white, they're opposites, they share a certain characteristic viz. they're extremes and in that sense, black and white are same - they are both at the very ends of a spectrum that extends gradually from one to the other. Isn't that what yin-yang is about? The eternal dance of opposites, the masculine dominating, the feminine yielding, and our job, according to Laozi, is not, as I thought earlier, to be some kind of harmonizing force, heroically bringing balance to the world but simply to yield willingly and to the best of our ability to the yin and the yang as both converge on us as both do on each and every one of us.


    I think it's more than that. It looks like your quote comes from Verse 45, so we'll get back to it. We could skip directly to that verse, but some don't like my habit of jumping around. — T Clark

    :up:
  • Can you use math to describe philosophy?
    ↪Aryamoy Mitra
    Well, if it doesn't make sense to you then it doesn't. I, on the other hand, see opportunity where you see incompatibility. I see a very profitable synthesis where you see irreconcilable conflict. All that aside, I must impress upon you that from what I can glean from your posts, you're a very knowledgeable 17 year old. By my standards, those are 17 years well spent. Ergo, given your insightful reservations on my proposal of a union between philosophy and math, I suppose that makes you the right person for the job of doing exactly that. In my humble opinion, a man who wants war knows exactly what peace is, right?
  • Something that I have noticed about these mass shootings in the U.S.
    A government which does not trust its citizens to be armed is itself not to be trusted — Niccolò Machiavelli
  • Something that I have noticed about these mass shootings in the U.S.
    I think you are oversimplifying things. Mass murderers aren’t necessarily out for revenge, so to speak. There are other possible motivating factors involved. The hope of fame seems to be a rather obvious one, but also simply living a miserable life and twisting that into envy. So you get it in your mind that others should pay. You know the saying “misery loves company.” — Pinprick

    I did mention, hinted perhaps, that my analysis was not meant to cover all the cases, only a small fraction of mass shooters may fit my description.

    I wonder if there's any point in trying to find a rationale for irrational behaviour. — Wayfarer

    :up: :clap: Deep!!!
  • My favorite verses in the Tao Te Ching
    You haven't exactly answered my question.
    Your original verse is from the film 'Circle of Iron', not as you know from the TTC.
    I don't see how either the TTC or Zen koans are resolved by using language arbitrarily.

    You say you resolved the paradox in the verse by arbitrarily naming 'up' 'down'. You use words.
    Then you say that the TTC is not about words. Sure but we need to use words to try and understand the meaning of the TTC as written.

    To help me understand, perhaps you could provide an example of the TTC where a paradox is resolved by redefining the language arbitrarily.     — Amity

    Well, I must've read a cheap knockoff version of the Tao Te Ching then. Sorry. But for what it's worth a few verses that prove my point that the Tao Te Ching is about paradoxes:

    The most straight seems curved. — Tao Te Ching

    The easy seems hard — Tao Te Ching

    the path forward seems like retreat — Tao Te Ching

    Yes, I'm using words to express my views on the Tao Te Ching but that can't be helped. How do you want me to communicate my understanding of the Tao without using a system of communication (language)?

    That said, the following verse seems apposite,

    Those who speak don't know and those who know don't speak — Tao Te Ching

    That "those who speak don't know and those who know don't speak" is an explicit statement on the nature of the Tao as something beyond language and in order to give eager enthusiasts of Taoism a feel for that Laozi resorts to paradoxes because,

    1. To understand paradoxes, we have get down to the level of semantics - what the words mean - and semantics is, if you really look at it, reality itself, the many ways it presents itself to us. Words are there only as labels for aspects of reality, be it an object, state, or phenomenon. Thus, paradoxes serve the important function of forcing us to think about reality itself.

    2. A method to resolve paradoxes is to play with words as I demonstrated in my previous post. Take the verse, "the most straight is curved" which is a paradox given straight and curved are opposites i.e. one can't be the other as the verse claims. However, if I were to say "straight"' means curved, then the contradiction's resolved.

    Note how I tackled the problem: I didn't do anything to the words themselves but I tinkered around with the semantics which I already informed you is reality as it is. This technique of resolving contradictions is a cheap trick, yes, but only if resolving paradoxical contradictions were the aim; the paradoxes in the Tao Te Ching are not meant to be resolved at all. Au contraire, they're meant to put pressure on the mind to look past the words and go into semantics which, as I explained earlier, is reality itself, beyond words.

    Those who speak don't know and those who know don't speak — Laozi

    The Tao that can be named is not the Eternal Tao — Tao Te Ching
  • Which belief is strongest?
    believe only that which empowers you most, everything else is used to instill fear in you and doesn't serve you in any way, even if it is true. — Thinking

    Truth empowers you — TMF

    A person X believing something is hardly going have practical consequences without that belief being true. For instance, you would feel empowered - confident, influential - if you believed that you were the president of the USA but that wouldn't be real power if you actually weren't the US president, right? Much to your chagrin, you would find yourself in a mental asylum, constantly interviewed by men in white coats and that's definitely not what empowerment is.
  • Can you use math to describe philosophy?
    It's not as though I'm exalting mathematicians to an unassailable pedestal — Aryamoy Mitra

    Yes you are but I'm not sure whether you're doing it knowingly or unwittingly. Every time I try to build a bridge between philosophy and mathematics as I've tried my best to do in my previous posts, you immediately start pointing out how either this or that is flawed in my work. Of course I value your criticism and my impression of you is that you're more than qualified to critique matters such as this but, in my humble opinion, many great, productive interactions between disciplines involve a good deal of compromise and that usually involves relaxing the rules, ignoring differences that may even involve sweeping frank contradictions under the rug, and embarking on a cooperative venture that requires, in this case, math to meet philosophy halfway. Does this not seem reasonable?
  • My favorite verses in the Tao Te Ching
    ↪Amity
    The Tao is not about words, it's about what Kant calls "ding an sich" understood in the broadest sense possible. The "ding an sich" is precisely what words through "meaning" is supposed to capture. With paradoxes, the tension is not at the level of words which I explained in my previous post but at the level of "meaning" which is just another word for "ding an sich", raw reality itself. The paradoxes, therefore, by forcing us to go into "meaning", past the words themselves, are intended to provide a platform where our minds are pushed against the "ding an sich" - it's like someone holding you by the back of your neck and pressing your face against something. The artificial gap created by language between mind and reality is closed in that moment when you encounter a paradox. This view is counterintuitive and may even bear the hallmark of lunacy but...it can't be denied that when one is presented with paradoxes, one must eventually dive, headlong I suppose, into "meaning" for it's at that level where paradoxes exist. The benefit then is an appreciation of at the very least or an eureka moment regarding what true reality is.
  • My favorite verses in the Tao Te Ching
    And a horse has no udders,
    And a cow can't whinny,
    up is down,
    And sideways is straight ahead     — TheMadFool

    I don't know if this makes any sense but there seems to be something about paradoxes that I feel maybe important.

    Remember how Laozi begins the Tao Te Ching:

    The tao that can be told
    is not the eternal Tao
    The name that can be named
    is not the eternal Name.     — T Clark

    This verse, in a way, sets the tone for what the Tao is all about and what's that precisely? Well, correct me if I'm wrong, but take a look at the verse which I said is the only one I remember (quoted above). The last two lines, "up is down" and "sideways is straight ahead" manage to encapsulate the crux or the heart of Taoism as a philosophy dealing exclusively and whole-heartedly in paradoxes.

    Now, what about paradoxes makes them so damn important to Taoism? My hunch is, paradoxes vis-à-vis Taoism, are purposed for one specific task - to do an exposè on language itself but the question is what exactly about language is being revealed through paradoxes? To the extent that I'm aware, paradoxes shed light on one very important aspect of language; I don't know the linguistic term for it and if anyone has any information on it I'd be grateful if it's shared with me. Anyway, the "...one very important aspect of language" I'm talking about is...from where I stand...it's Olympic gymnast level flexibility which I suppose translates to arbitrariness.

    What do I mean?

    Take the paradoxical statement, "up is down" which appears above. Note that "up" and "down" mean entirely different, in fact opposite, states of an object and given these definitions. "up is down" is a bona fide paradox, a frank contradiction. However, suppose I were to assert, I can because of the arbitrariness of language I mentioned earlier, that the word "up" means down. If I did say that then "up is down" is no longer a paradox and is actually quite dull and uninteresting for all Laozi is saying is the tautology, "down is down". The paradox, however, has been resolved, and there is no residual contradiction to worry about.

    What does this reveal about language? What about how arbitrary words and the meanings assigned to them are? I could without fear of contradicting myself say that "fire" means water and that "black" means white. Nothing holds me back from doing this and thereby hangs a tale. Taoist paradoxes can be resolved by redefining words like I did with the word "up" in the preceding paragraph.

    So what?

    The question that pops into my mind is, what exactly do we mean a Laozi paradox has been resolved? The answer is as simple as is profound (at least to me): semantic rather than word congruence. What do I mean? The way I dealt with the paradox of "up is down" above is by redefining "up" as down but make note of the fact that though the meaning has been made to agree (both "up" and "down" mean down), the words are still distinct.

    What's intriguing about this rather devious technique of resolving Laozi paradoxes is that it forces us to think about semantics/meanings and what is semantics/meanings but reality itself, that which words are aimed at capturing. In a way then, Laozi paradoxes are designed to make us confront, come face to face with, reality directly by arranging rendezvous with semantics/meanings, get past the confusion of words, language.
  • Something that I have noticed about these mass shootings in the U.S.
    I think the unfortunate truth is that mass-shootings have become a meme. They’re a behavioural template for disordered minds. Right now there are any number of people, usually men, thinking about it, or with a propensity to. It’s become normalised in American culture and I can’t see any way that it’s going to be stopped. — Wayfarer

    "Behavoiral template" :up: Copy cat murders!

    I was just wondering as to how a mass shooter gains satisfaction from killing random people.

    There are two points to consider:

    1. One is the rather specific act of settling a score with someone who wrongs you. This needn't be further clarified as it's commonplace enough.

    2. Then there's the obviously non-specific or general acts of getting even but the targets are completely random folks. This is what all mass shootings are.

    1 above is not so much an issue. X hurt me, I want to hurt X back. Case closed.

    2, on the other hand, is fallacious. X hurt me, I want to hurt Y. Something doesn't add up unless...mass shootings are a domino effect kinda phenomenon.
  • Truth vs Pleasure
    "...It is not for man to seek, or even to believe in God. He has only to refuse to believe in everything that is not God. This refusal does not presuppose belief. It is enough to recognize, what is obvious to any mind, that all the goods of this world, past, present, or future, real or imaginary, are finite and limited and radically incapable of satisfying the desire which burns perpetually with in us for an infinite and perfect good... It is not a matter of self-questioning or searching. A man has only to persist in his refusal, and one day or another God will come to him."
    -- Weil, Simone, ON SCIENCE, NECESSITY, AND THE LOVE OF GOD, edited by Richard Rees, London, Oxford University Press, 1968.- ©     — Nikolas

    Simone Weil and his ilk of similar thinkers are precisely what I'm talking about. Truths about this world don't matter to them because to them truths about this world are, in their own words, "...finite and limited and radically incapable of staisfying the desire which burns perpetually within us for an infinite and perfect good..."

    As a matter of clarification, by "truths about this world" I refer to facts such as which berries are edible, which poisonous going all the way up to those about the universe itself. It's to be distinguished from any and all claims about "truths" beyond this world i.e. claims like heaven, nirvana, moksha, salvation, etc. which take place in different realms.

    That out of the way, let's pick up where we left off. As far as I can tell, Simone Weil's "...infinite and perfect good..." (above) is just another way of saying pleasure. It's difficult to say whether Simone Weil and others who share his sentiments are aware of this or not but to be fair, the clever disguise pleasure uses to fool people that it's something else viz. "...infinite and perfect good..." is very convincing and hard to see through. Good whether one conceives of it as "...infinite and perfect..." or not is, after all, ultimately associated with pleasure (heaven, nirvana, etc.).

    Now, some may say that, congruent with Simone Weil's thoughts, that "...infinite and perfect good..." is truth of the highest order, an ultimate truth and thus that we, humans, are not actually pleasure-seeking as I'm positing by actually truth-seeking. The apparent disdain and rejection of truths about this world being simply a natural response arising from the realization that there are greater truths like the "...infinite and perfect good..."

    This, however, is again deception at a grand scale. Pleasure has once again managed to pull the wool over our eyes by masquerading itself as not just truth but now as ultimate truth, "...infinite and perfect good..." This scam if I may refer to it as such is so good that it makes people irrational to the point where to them one bird in the hand (truths about this world) is no longer worth two in the bush (truths pleasure beyond this world)".
  • Truth vs Pleasure
    ↪Nikolas
    It has to be acknowledged that Plato was an ancient philosopher, and that the ancients lived in a very different world to our own, as Jack Cummins says above. I agree on the distinction between 'truth and pleasure' but I would express more in terms of the distinction between intelligence or rationality, and sensation. Intelligence is refective and intepretive, where sense-pleasures are essentially physical and habitual. As Aristotle said, we share sensory pleasure with animals but rational intellect is unique to us. So, I subscribe to a form of Platonic dualism, but I think it has to be interpreted carefully — Wayfarer

    This may come across as crazy since you seem to subscribe to the notion that non-human animals are about pleasure and humans are about truth, in line, of course, with Aristotle.

    However, the situation may actually be the other way round. Non-human animals have or seem to have one objective to wit, to live, and equally important, to live in this world. Naturally then knowing truths is paramount for the simple reason that this will extend their lifespans and make their lives easier. Think of it, how do predators get close enough to their prey to make a kill? By lying of course and by that I refer to the many ingenious ways hunter-killers camouflage themselves and blend into the background. A similar argument can be made for prey that have similar abilities with the ultimate goal of starving their predators. In short, if there's any living organism that puts truth above all else, it has to fall into the category of non-human animals.

    On the flip side we have humans and the relevant dissimilarity between humans and non-human animals is that we, with our powerful imagination, look to beyond this world - paradise, heaven, nirvana, are all conclusive proof of this fact and notice how all of these are essentially about pleasure. Since we've lost interest in this world, truths no longer matter to us for truths are important only to the extent that they allow us to live to see another day. The world beyond, a place of pure pleasure is what drives, what motivates us.

    To sum up then, contrary to how Aristotle thought it was - non-human animals being about pleasure and humans being about truth - it appears that the "truth" of the matter is actually the exact opposite.
  • Something that I have noticed about these mass shootings in the U.S.
    To be philosophical about mass shootings, I'd say there's an underlying pernicious fallacy at work in "the mind of a killer". If what I've read about the psychology of mass murderers of the kind that's become an American phenomenon, they, the perps, usually bear a grudge borne of slights, mistreatment, ostracization, shaming, etc. Of course I maybe reading too much into the reports but suffice it to say that mass shooters have a, to put it mildly, a bone to pick with...and here's where it gets interesting.

    Mass shooters, if what I said about them is true, must've experienced a lot of negativity from people but these people, for certain, must be identifiable individuals in the social lives or what passes for of mass shooters. Yet, puzzlingly, they choose to lash out, shoot and kill, completely random people some of whom might have even been willing to come to the mass shooter's aid.

    What I'm trying to get at is the assumptions that go into the inference from I hate what V, W, and, X did to me, now I'll go and murder Y and a whole bunch of random people. Somewhere inside the mind of a mass shooter X = Y and a whole bunch of random people. For my money, in a mass shooter's eyes, his misery is the handiwork of society and not of individuals and thus when ge contemplates revenge, his target is society and the deaths of totally random people will satisfy faer. Perhaps mass shooters of the specific kind I'm referring to are of the view that everybody needs to care what everybody does and if a handful of individuals fail to behave well towards the mass shooter, they are guilty, no doubt, but the rest are seen as accomplices, complicit in the suffering of the mass shooter and therefore as valid targets of their vengeance and no matter how warped and repulsive this logic may appear to be, I'm going to stick my neck out and say, "there might be a grain of truth in it". If anything then, mass shootings, despite the immediate response of condemning the mass shooter as diabolically evil, it also has, even if buried under a pile of lifeless bodies, the feel of a desperate, last-minute cry for help, sympathy, and compassion.
  • G.K. Chesterton: Reason and Madness
    I think they are. For example: someone, one day, thought about the creation of a nuke bomb. Then, this dream/idea put it on reality. This is could be one of the worst things created by humans. They are genius for creating such complex arm but evil too. I don’t want to underrate them as scientists because somehoe we have to understand the context but I rather see a poet or an artist showing their nightmares than a scientific put in practice the reason. — javi2541997

    But then we have medicine. It looks like the case is sure to give any judge worth faer salt a pounding headache. I have a suspicion that we've derailed the thread.
  • Do Atheists hope there is no God?
    ↪Wayfarer
    Makes sense. To ignore the practical aspects - the whole body of prescribed conduct - that accompany a belief (here religion) is to completely ignore what seems to be the entire one-half of the picture. To emphasize or engage in mental manipulation of ideas about god - coming up with proofs of god, then refuting them and to repeat this cycle ad nauseum - and avoiding the recommendations on how god must become a part of daily living - prayer, ritual, meditation, etc. - is like trying to run with with one leg, impossible. Maybe God or faer counterparts, like nirvana, in other spiritual traditions are revealed only when the two halves (thought & action) come together. It takes two to tango I suppose.
  • G.K. Chesterton: Reason and Madness
    ↪javi2541997
    Astounding observation but then As a motif in fiction, the mad scientist may be villainous (evil genius)
  • My favorite verses in the Tao Te Ching
    “Tie two birds together, and even though they have four wings they cannot fly." – The Blind Man — Amity

    Awesome! :up:
  • My favorite verses in the Tao Te Ching
    The only verse I remember is:

    And a horse has no udders,
    And a cow can't whinny,
    up is down,
    And sideways is straight ahead
  • Do Atheists hope there is no God?
    ↪Wayfarer
    That'll take me a while to process. :up: By the way, for what it's worth, I concur that it was and is a
    profound observation — Wayfarer
  • Can you use math to describe philosophy?
    ↪Aryamoy Mitra
    Again you're doing what's unthinkable to the ordinary man - willingly, voluntarily, slipping into the straitjacket of logic and math; the men in white coats don't even have to lift a finger for this one.

    Of course your view of me is exactly the opposite - I'm taking subjects like logic and math which many luminaries have gone to great lengths to perfect as precise, well-organized, crystal clear mental constructs that seem almost muraculously suited for making sense of and describing the world and violating or intending to violate every possible meticulously formulated rule in them.
  • Why is there Something Instead of Nothing?
    Does this mean you concede that it does make logical sense for an actualist to say "there's a possible world where there is no world"?
    — Luke

    Nope, because that's like saying "before there was time...".

    You could talk about a time in which nothing existed though, or a possible world in which nothing exists. But that's still a time, or a possible world, respectively.     — Pfhorrest

    Tu quoque???
  • Do Atheists hope there is no God?
    "God does not exist. He is being-itself beyond essence and existence. Therefore to argue God exists is to deny Him. It is as atheistic to affirm God as it is to deny Him. God is being-itself, not a being." ~Paul Tillich, theologian-philosopher — 180 Proof

    This is true, but nevertheless Tillich, as a theologian, clearly believed that God is real. So here, he's making a claim about the difference between 'what is real' and 'what exists'. — Wayfarer

    An interesting point. I've asked this question a couple of times in the forum and never got a satisfactory answer.

    What's the difference between "exist" and "real"?

    What this query is meant to probe is the materialistic bias that the word "exist" has - to be perceived is to exist and vice versa but this fits the definition of the material too - to be perceived is to be material and vice versa. Basically, exist = material/physical the way the words "exist" and "material" are defined.

    The issue popped up in a discussion about god. A member claimed that god exists but is immaterial to which I pointed out that such is impossible because exist is just another way of saying material. If that's how this game is played then, yes, Wayfarer, you're right in that there's a...difference between 'what is real' and 'what exists'
  • Why is there Something Instead of Nothing?
    but none of them would be "nothing" and be a world at the same time. — FlaccidDoor

    That's how I see it.
  • G.K. Chesterton: Reason and Madness
    What you said reminds of me of the Survivorship bias: we only focus on the winners, forgetting how many people have to lose to "produce" one winner:
    - Survivorship bias or survival bias is the logical error of concentrating on the people or things that made it past some selection process and overlooking those that did not, typically because of their lack of visibility. This can lead to some false conclusions in several different ways. It is a form of selection bias.     — WaterLungs

    Firstly, I didn't claim anything at all. It was G. K. Chesterton who thought "poets do not go mad; chess players do" or something along those lines and his take on it isn't based on statistics, a necessity if your allegation that he's guilty of survivorship bias is to make sense.

    G. K. Chesterton formed his opinion from an analysis of the mindset of poets and chess players and the categories of people they stand for and I'm simply following his lead. G. K. Chesterton did not come to the conclusion that "poets do not go mad; chess players do" based on a statistical analysis of poets and chess players. Ergo, no way survivorship bias has any relevance to G. K. Chesterton's views on this issue.

    That said, you probably thought of survivorship bias because of the direction our conversation took with my comment on "exceptions" and "generalizations".

    Survivorship bias is about how "survivors" (those who make it big) give us the wrong picture as regards the perils inherent in the activity the "survivors" participate in and madness is one. Many "poets" and "chess players" may have fallen to insanity and that wouldn't show up in our investigation if we only focus on the successful.

    Yet, comparing the "survivors" of two categories, as is the case when we study successful "poets" and "chess players" together, has its own story to tell. My hunch is that more eminent "chess players" have mental issues than great "poets" and this fact serves as the basis of a cogent statistical argument.

    Plus, if there's a survivorship bias, it applies to both categories - the crème de la crème of "poets" and "chess players" are the subgroups we've decided to concentrate on. You know, of course, that when a certain factor is present in equal measure in both categories that we're doing a comparative study on, it no longer matters or doesn't skew the results or simply put the bias doesn't lead to erroneous conclusions.

    The truth is I haven't checked medical records/statistics to see the the number of cases of madness in this two "different" groups, namely, mathematicians and artists:
    - First Problem: Define what madness is, I don't believe it's merely a social construct, there's a biological reality to it, but still it's very difficult to define, since in psychological/medical literature a disease is defined by it's symptoms and it's possible cures - a functional definition. This goes against my belief that it's not a social construct, but it's very hard to define what "madness" is.     — WaterLungs

    Indeed, definitions are always a problem but we can avoid that pitfall of confusion by sticking to psychiatric definitions for they probably were the ones G.K. Chesterton himself used when he made the comparison between "poets" and "chess players" and how the latter class of people were more likely to go cuckoo.

    - Second Problem: What makes an artist or a mathematician? Someone with an artistic or mathematical inclination is not an artist or mathematician? They have to be professionals? To have a relevant impact in knowledge creation to be a "true" mathematician? — WaterLungs

    There can be no doubt on that front. "Chess players" depend on logic, thinking inside a box, not crossing boundaries that logic sets up - that's where their daily bread comes from. "Poets" are more about unrestricted creativty, thinking outside the box. crossing boundaries wherever they happen to encounter one.

    - Third Problem: What's the difference between an artist and a mathematician? Can we be both at the same time? Da Vinci was, to a certain extent. Is he the exception or the rule? Maybe most people share both traits, but since they weren't as good as Da Vinci, they were forgotten — WaterLungs

    There can be "poetic chess players" and such people would be mighty interesting to follow on twitter I suppose. How do they manage two opposing forces inside them? The "chess player" in them would want to follow rules, adopt a formulaic approach to life and so on while the "poet" in them would be happy to break rules, try out the novel, the unorthodox, the radical.
  • Can you use math to describe philosophy?
    That may be, but I was merely seeking to reassert the epistemic character of Mathematics, as a discipline. It's not as though two, distinctive modalities can be integrated seamlessly (and there are few modalities less comparable, than that of purely subjective Philosophy, and Mathematics).

    I do concur with you, on the front that it's one of many facets to reality; I solely believe that mitigating the chasms it shares with other facets of reality, is not a straightforward objective.     — Aryamoy Mitra

    Well, I was contemplating how we maybe able to both numericize and geometrize philosophy because we do to talk of philosophical "landscapes" and, for me, that's an open invitation for mathematicians to get involved in philosophy. In addition, the divine is closely linked to the concept of infinity; philosophy, my friend, is a mathematician's paradise.
  • G.K. Chesterton: Reason and Madness
    artists like Van Gogh [or mathematicians like John Nash] who go mad — WaterLungs

    I'm going against my instincts not to generalize but it seems exceptions don't imply the absence of a dependable generalization. I mean by focusing on Vincent Van Gogh, an exception, you're wilfully and dangerously ignoring the vast majority of artists who are mentally healthier than the lot of mathematicians.
  • G.K. Chesterton: Reason and Madness
    ↪WaterLungs
    To be fair though, there's a "sense" in which the great (was he great?) G. K. Chesterton is right on the money. The world, if you haven't already noticed, is mind-bogglingly complex and by "complex" I mean take the most difficult problem you ever faced - could be a concept, a book, a puzzle, your tax returns, whathaveyou - and multiply that by infinity. That's how complex the universe is.

    Given this is what the lowly human brain is faced with, it needs to be, what's the word, feminine/receptive in order to take it all in an stay sane rather than masculine/projective like when we demand that the world obey every single rigid rule of reason and when that fails and failure is certain, the inevitable happens...we lose our minds.
  • Can you use math to describe philosophy?
    ↪Aryamoy Mitra


    Well, I'm only guessing at this point but your objections seem to have its roots in a weltangschauung that, true or false, gives math a kind of privileged status which I presume is that of math as some kind ultimate Tertön but I'm taking a different approach, an approach which treats math as only one of many facets to reality, comparable in more ways than just that of being different windows to the world.
  • The Limitation(s) of Language
    mysticism — Jack Cummins

    I recently watched a series of videos on philosophy and it had a 30-40 minute episode on mysticism and what really caught my attention was the words, "...to be conscious without being conscious of anything..." Is that possible? Not so from a Western perspective on consciousness which is defined as awareness, awareness of something (the world, the self). I brought this up because to be in a mystical state as defined above, I wouldn't be able to describe the experience as my mind is literally emptied of all its contents. Doesn't that qualify as an ineffable experience?
  • The Limitation(s) of Language
    Sure, but that is not germane to the issue. Thanks anyway! — 3017amen

    I guess I went off on a tangent. I'm always distracted but generally by beauty. So, if you want to use me as a beauty-meter here you might want to give what I wrote a second look. Disclaimer: I suffer from Quasimodo syndrome and of course as Shakespeare said, "beauty lies in the eye of the beholder."
  • G.K. Chesterton: Reason and Madness
    Poets do not go mad; but chess players do... — WaterLungs

    Is G. K. Chesterton mad? How did he chance upon this sparkling nugget of exquisite wisdom? Poetry or Reason?
  • Can you use math to describe philosophy?
    They may bear mathematical significance, but is their invocation necessarily in a mathematical context? — Aryamoy Mitra

    To me, yes. All the words I listed can be made precise with math and thereby hangs a tale.
  • Can you use math to describe philosophy?
    ↪Huh
    Words like "congruence", "symmetry", "asymmetry", "equality", "function", and loads of other words with mathematical meaning do pop up frequently in philosophical discourse.
  • Do Atheists hope there is no God?
    ↪Georgios Bakalis
    I hope that god doesn't exist but my reason is going to sound a little weird and that reason is for god's own sake. If god exists, god has a lot of explaining to do - the little baby mice being devoured alive by ravenous army ants, the only child of parents dying slowly in the desert sand from starvation as a vulture waits for the inevitable end, and this is just the tip of the iceberg.

    By the way, there's a part of me that, paradoxically, hopes that god does exist. It would make a world of a difference to many people who put all their faith in his benevolence. Paradoxes, I love paradoxes - they're uncomfortable to hold in the mind but there's something about them which at this moment I can't quite put my finger on.
  • Abstractions of Gödel Incompleteness
    Yes, it is. Now. Either you satisfy yourself with the level of understanding that English sentence, "This sentence is false," provides, or you do some reading. . — tim wood

    I want to see something like this: AxAy(x + y = y + x) in a Godel sentence but I don't and if that's the case, the Godel sentence isn't about mathematical theorems. Just so you know, if there's a side to me that's wise which I doubt, I would take your word for it. Thanks. :up:
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