Should I object that my use of "necessary" was pretty clearly circumscribed in what I wrote? — Srap Tasmaner

Necessity is just a statement about history. For example, Schrodinger said we need to transform the concept of necessity in science to observations of behavior.

It should bother people who believe the universe wanted to have humans in it and that is the sole purpose of the universe. — Jackson

A lot of counter-intuitive facts disturb such anthropomorphic naïveté (e.g. inhabiting the surface of a spinning round planet moving around a sun that's eight light-minutes away, etc). Knowing trumps believing (C. Sagan).

Au revoir. — Agent Smith

Hopefully just à bientôt.

The universe can exist without us.
— Jackson

And did, practically forever.

Should that bother us? — Srap Tasmaner

Can you perceive of any purpose for the universe during this time apart from its happenstance progress towards a lifeform capable of asking questions? What do you think it means if we cant? Does it matter to YOU? It's perfectly fine if your answer is something like I don't know as that would currently, probably be my answer but I am still 'excited,' by the question.

Can you perceive of any purpose for the universe during this time apart from its happenstance progress towards a lifeform capable of asking questions? — universeness

What, indeed, is the point of it all?

Some time back, there was a thread that amounted to attempting to answer this question:

Where is the universe?

Okay, there are some problems there, and it's not hard to see that there are problems there. And yet we ask. Why? Why are we so inclined to ask questions that don't quite make sense?

One common answer is that we are misled by the surface similarity of this question to a question like "Where is Belarus?" As it happens, Ryle's original example of a "category mistake" was a visitor being shown libraries, dining halls, classroom buildings, and so on, and then asking, "Yes, but where is the university?" We know that we can engage some little sentence generator within us to produce "Where is X?" for any token X, but why would we? What did that young student want to know that he was not getting from his tour guide? Why do we think of the universe as being somewhere? Why do we think it might or might not have a purpose?

There are two sorts of responses to questions like these that I want to head off:
(1) Your question is just a mistake; don't do that.
(2) It's a question, so let's start arguing for one answer or another.

Answer (1) often involves an argument that some canon of logical, or, more often, semantic, purity has been violated. Answer (2) generally presumes that a sufficiently pure (logically and semantically) analysis is available, and once discovered will yield an answer. (Thus if you've never beaten your children, you should cheerfully answer "no" when asked if you've stopped -- because logic.)

If your suspicion is that something like answer (1) is appropriate -- that, say, it makes no sense to ask where the universe is -- how will you proceed? Well, that's a curious point, because the natural thing to do in many cases is look for situations where answer (2) is appropriate -- that is, where we believe we are already in possession of the correct analysis, like "Where is Belarus?" -- and then point out that our situation is not enough like these. Hence the violation. But that's a pretty weird place for philosophy to end up -- are we only to ask questions we already know the answers to, or at least know how to get the those answers? "No one's ever asked that before," should be about the highest praise we can give, but that's not the vibe here at all.

If answer (1) shows, in some sense, too much humility, is too deferential to received wisdom, answer (2) shows too little: we presume we can or already do understand what's at stake, what the question means, where it comes from, why it's asked, how to go about answering it, what the answer will look like. It's impatient, which ought to be a sin in philosophy. (It was Kafka who said that all sins spring from impatience.)

I started this thread with the idea that we should stop turning away from the phenomena that puzzle us in our rush to have some explanation or some answer to the questions we begin with, but more and more I seem to have been defending the moment of questioning itself, that engagement with the world in wonder and curiosity; I also want us not to be in such a hurry to get un-puzzled.

I'm genuinely sorry this is all so meta, but actual philosophy is hard.

Does the universe have a purpose? If it makes sense, that's a yes or no question, so three options are immediately available. Must we choose among those? Must we simply choose among those?

I'd counsel not thinking much about the answer yet at all. It's a question people can and do ask. Even philosophers. What's going on there? Why do we ask the question? Is it a matter of psychology? Before even getting to the why, maybe we should spend some time just thinking about the situation the question implies -- here we are, considering our home, the universe in which we evolved, and on the one hand this is unquestionably where we belong, and yet we have this doubt, or uncertainty, about what that belonging really means, a doubt so strong we wonder if this is our true home or whether we have come from elsewhere. ("I ain't nothing but a stranger in this world. I've got a home on high.") Which word in "Why am I here?" gets the emphasis?

There's a lot of territory covered in your post, much of it of high quality. But I'm unclear on the main question being asked.

These answers obviously will vary depending on which school of philosophy you believe is on the right track, phenomenology will differ from analytic philosophy which will differ from strands of continental philosophy and so on.

An even bigger problem is that we have to assume the apparatus that allows us to have knowledge (modes of understanding, realized in the brain, stimulated by the environment) is itself not explainable. We have to assume that our mode of understanding must be right in different circumstances, without giving it a foundation which we are able to account for.

Many of these questions seem to me to be well argued for by Hume, who says, that despite our ability to cast very serious doubts on the most evident things, we have no choice but to postulate them. What nature causes us distress through reason, nature too relaxes our doubts.

Well, that was an interesting trip through your personal musings regarding the universe.

Does the universe have a purpose? — Srap Tasmaner

In my opinion, the answer is absolutely yes! The totality of all conscious life within it gives the universe purpose and the main purpose for me is to ask and try to answer questions. When all the answers (if ever) are known. The universe may then 'become.' I have no idea what it will 'become.' The limits of my imagination fail at that point. I will not use the soiled label 'god' but if all questions are answered then omniscience is achieved in a collective, totality sense. If omniscience is achieved then omnipotence is probably consequential.
I assume omnipresence would be plausible at that point and I don't think omnibenevolence will be relevant. Just thought I would offer you back some of my own playful musings.

the philosopher believes that the ordinary person is either unfamiliar with the distinction or fails to apply it properly, and that if they did they too would be in the pickle philosophers are, unable to bridge the gap. Most people just don't notice, or don't understand what a big deal this is, that's the mantra of philosophy. (The other example that leaps to mind also comes from Hume: how do you know the sun will rise tomorrow?) — Srap Tasmaner

Interesting approach. I think perhaps a lot of the time the philosopher is in the job of classifying the habits of thinking which accompany our particular forms of life and mistakes happen when he mistakes his classification for a discovery. The librarian noting that "How to make Curries" is a book about cookery is not discovering something about the book, they are classifying it, it's not a necessary part of the process, the book didn't need classifying to be understood, and used.

Likewise one could say (of Hume's problem of induction, for example) that his contribution was to classify the assumption that the sun will rise tomorrow as that kind of thinking habit and not this kind. It is not of the kind where we can write it down in logical notation, or convert it to maths. It's of the other kind, the kind where we simply find ourselves thinking that way and it works.

The mistake is to then go on to think that Hume has discovered something wrong, something which needs fixing (@Banno's 'plumbing'). That a habit of thinking is of this kind and not that kind is not a problem that needs fixing, it's a classification exercise.

I think this kind of error is what's behind a lot of the "if p then q - p therefore q" kinds of arguments where q is some surprising conclusion. The OP of @Bartricks from which you derived this thread is just such a case. The problem appears to be that q derives from p plus a habit of thinking we want to hold as being flawless (logic), therefore we must accept q no matter how odd. But we don't accept q (perhaps as a result of that other kind of thinking habit). It's a mistake to assume something's gone wrong there. Obviously, there's two solutions to the surprising q. Just as it's valid that "if p then q - p therefore q" it's also valid that "if p then q - ~q therefore ~p"....and choosing which is not something done with that kind of thinking habit, but with another. The philosopher's error is in think that, by rendering one (or other) side of the choice in a clear rational manner he's somehow influenced that choice itself, where what he's done is merely classify it as being that kind of choice.

All of which is just a rehash of Quine - nothing new under the sun and all that... But I think it applies to philosophical propositions no less than it does to empiricism.

(The other example that leaps to mind also comes from Hume: how do you know the sun will rise tomorrow?) — Srap Tasmaner

Part of the problem is the error bars get wider if you base your musing on an inaccurate base such as the one stated above. The Sun DOES NOT IN FACT RISE OR SET, it is the Earth that turns.
Quantum physics shows that there is some 'missing physics' between classical physics and quantum physics so it is likely that classical mathematics and classical propositional logic such as If p then q conditionals do not apply to phenomena such as quantum tunnelling.

"It's quantum" has much the same utility as "God did it".

"It's quantum" has much the same utility as "God did it" — Banno

Nonsense! Quantum is real god is not.

I think perhaps a lot of the time the philosopher is in the job of classifying the habits of thinking which accompany our particular forms of life — Isaac

This is an interesting and valuable enterprise but I would call it "cognitive psychology" rather than "philosophy". A whole lot of what I post, including almost* everything in this thread, also isn't philosophy, but "psychology of philosophy" -- at least as I'm inclined to use the terms, which is no doubt idiosyncratic.

You seem to have "bracketed", as they say, the issue of whether a classification, or a classificatory scheme, is "correct", in any sense. You might do that (1) for scientific reasons -- that is, that you don't care, since what you're investigating is the landscape of human classificatory habits. You might do that (2) for another reason, one we might call "logical" or "philosophical" or even "mathematical", that given any set of phenomena (or objects, whatever), there is no single way to classify them. (Which sounds like a theorem.)

Either is sufficient, but it's still slightly odd, since philosophers generally worry quite a bit about their classificatory choices and would never consider them all equivalent, as you implicitly do. You also imply that a classification is, shall we say, "external", "imposed" on the set:

The librarian noting that "How to make Curries" is a book about cookery is not discovering something about the book, they are classifying it, it's not a necessary part of the process, the book didn't need classifying to be understood, and used. — Isaac

The librarian has discovered that the book contains instructions for cooking; the predicate "... is a cookbook" is true of it, while many other predicates are not. It doesn't completely determine your final decision on how to classify the book (because there are many predicates you can use to partition your set, and many combinations of them), but it's now available. (As a bookseller, I can tell you I wouldn't trust the title alone: it could absolutely be a novel, and not unlikely a memoir.)

All this does relate to the sorts of things I've said earlier in this thread, like this: the usual way of classifying classificatory schemes is by their purpose. You pick the overlapping axes of your partitions based on suitability and usefulness for your purpose in so classifying items. (There is one section of the bookstore where I work that I have arranged, believe it or not, by the color of the book.) It might matter a great deal that "purpose" takes a possessive there -- any classificatory scheme might be treated sort of functionally, as itself the definition of "a" purpose, some purpose, but the issue in choosing it is whether that purpose is the same as yours.

And I've been suggesting that philosophy has no purpose, not in itself, so to speak, even though pointless activities, as a group, including, you know, art and all that, may have some purpose. Whether that's so, I've bracketed. I just take it as a fact that people do lots of pointless stuff, which kinda suggests there's a reason to do something pointless so I'm walking a bit of a tightrope here -- we need to do something we don't need to do, but that doesn't mean that something has to be philosophy, and philosophy only fits the bill if you don't need to do it.

And my reason for going through all that rigmarole is to bring us back to the moment of wonder, the moment of questioning, of curiosity. What is my purpose in watching a spider build its web? If there's survival value in that, it's a long, long way away. I don't think it's there at all. I can do that, because of how natural selection built me, but that doesn't mean I am constrained to act in ways that enhance my ability to survive and reproduce. And I am free not only of that purpose but of purpose as such. I don't have to have a reason to watch the spider build its web. That activity need have no purpose at all.

Which is not to say that there aren't psychological explanations for my spider-watching available. Of course there are. But they don't count as reasons for me. (We are still very close to the prompting thread after all.)

--- Anyway, this is all beside the point, because reasons and causes play no part in the moment of wonder itself. I can and do experience the world without there being any particular reason for my doing so. If philosophy ends up being striving to understand, it requires a beginning where understanding is absent, even if that must be relative rather than absolute. Which means I should backtrack a little: curiosity is a clue, a retroactive experience of recognizing that you have already not understood something. It is a valorization of that failure as the proper starting point.



* There is a single word in what I've posted here that, as I wrote it, I felt like I was verging on actual philosophy. There are a couple other points where I was at least in the neighborhood. The rest is chit-chat.

You seem to have "bracketed", as they say, the issue of whether a classification, or a classificatory scheme, is "correct", in any sense. — Srap Tasmaner

Mainly because I've no idea what 'correct' might constitute. I can see 'useless' (in book terms, a classification system based on paper thickness, for example, would be next to useless compared to one based on subject matter). But actually correct? There doesn't seem to be any clear criteria by which to judge.

You also imply that a classification is, shall we say, "external", "imposed" on the set: — Srap Tasmaner

Oddly concurrent with my discussion on realism... I don't mean to imply that it's entirely imposed, but partly so. Like the image of a man with a bow is partly imposed on the constellation Orion. It is definitely in the shape of a man with a bow. It's just that its also in the shape of lots of other things too. We've chosen to ignore those other possibilities and focus on the man with the bow, so in that sense it's imposed. But it's definitely not in the shape of next week's winning lottery numbers, so our choice to ignore that arrangement was intrinsic to the actual pattern of the stars, not imposed.

I'd see philosophical classification like that. Imposed, but from a constrained set of choices. Which I think might be what you're getting at with...

The librarian has discovered that the book contains instructions for cooking; the predicate "... is a cookbook" is true of it, while many other predicates are not. It doesn't completely determine your final decision on how to classify the book (because there are many predicates you can use to partition your set, and many combinations of them), but it's now available. — Srap Tasmaner

...? Only I'd say that the classification isn't the discovery. the librarian discovered the book was about cookery by reading it. The decision to then classify as a cookery book is not a discovery but a declaration (maybe it was also 'about' travel but the librarian decided it was more cookery than travel).

I think you're right to say much of this is then cognitive psychology, but that's the equivalent of reading the book. The aspect I was trying to get at was the declarative act of classification, which is slightly different to the investigative act of discovering the properties on which one might base a classification decision.

Which is not to say that there aren't psychological explanations for my spider-watching available. Of course there are. But they don't count as reasons for me. (We are still very close to the prompting thread after all.) — Srap Tasmaner

I think this is key to (my understanding of) what you're saying. What counts as a reason and what is sufficient cause are not the same, but what counts as a reason is personal, subjective, and yet seems to want to elbow its way into discussions which have the flavour of technical discussions, right/wrong. We can't have a technical discussion about the rightness or wrongness of what feels to me to be a reason... because (getting into the psychology of it), what you feel constitutes a reason is a post hoc construction which serves purposes usually quite apart from the matter at hand.

curiosity is a clue, a retroactive experience of recognizing that you have already not understood something. It is a valorization of that failure as the proper starting point. — Srap Tasmaner

Yes, I can agree on that, but I think where I might diverge is that there can be a fetishisation of such curiosity. One can over do it. Adding "...yeah but what is it really?" to the end of every answer is a commoditisation of curiosity, not curiosity proper, and I really get the feeling that some substantial portion of philosophy is of that latter sort.

So why does the specter of Chidi/Hamlet in that ivory tower hang over philosophy? — Srap Tasmaner

It hangs there insofar a philosophy doesn't propose to have the final answers.

The other thing that comes to mind regarding the OP I can't quite articulate clearly yet, but I can so far summarize it as follows: one either lives by the 48 laws of power, or one thinks there should be more to life than that, and then uses philosophy to find out.

To be "ordinary", one needs to live in a very small world, have a small mind, have a dog-eat-dog heart. Many people live this way, and they seem to do just fine.

A problem philosophers sometimes face is that they cannot come up with a viable alternative to the ordinary, or at least cannot show that their alternative is better than the ordinary.

A problem philosophers sometimes face is that they cannot come up with a viable alternative to the ordinary, or at least cannot show that their alternative is better than the ordinary. — baker

Not sure what you mean. It seems you're referring to what artists/novelists do.

A problem philosophers sometimes face is that they cannot come up with a viable alternative to the ordinary, or at least cannot show that their alternative is better than the ordinary. — baker

Could be. 'The unexamined life is not worth living' resonates with some and doesn't with others. If you don't share that impulse and you are not exposed to examples of philosophy that pique your interest, why should you care? Is there evidence that philosophy is of benefit to individuals and how would that be demonstrated?

To be "ordinary", one needs to live in a very small world, have a small mind, have a dog-eat-dog heart. Many people live this way, and they seem to do just fine. — baker

From my experience, there are many variations of an 'ordinary life' that do not necessarily involve a dog-eat-dog value system.

Do you have a view on where the boundary between reflection and 'proper' philosophy might lie? What I mean is, there are many people who reflect on their lives and purpose and values, without ever reading or learning philosophy - when does a partially examined life become actual philosophy?

What is my purpose in watching a spider build its web? If there's survival value in that, it's a long, long way away. I don't think it's there at all. I can do that, because of how natural selection built me, but that doesn't mean I am constrained to act in ways that enhance my ability to survive and reproduce. — Srap Tasmaner

It's not implausible to think that watching a spider build its web might relax you and enrich your understanding of the world, and thus enrich your life, and that these effects could contribute towards enhancement of your ability to survive and reproduce.

A problem philosophers sometimes face is that they cannot come up with a viable alternative to the ordinary, or at least cannot show that their alternative is better than the ordinary.
— baker

Not sure what you mean. It seems you're referring to what artists/novelists do. — Jackson

To illustrate with an example:

I live in a once rural area that is undergoing rapid suburbanization and gentrification. Many new people are moving in, and the town is developing an anonymous, hostile, tense atmosphere that is typical for cities. The new settlers tend to look down on the old ones, they don't speak the local dialect. For the most part, they don't greet when one meets them in the street, not even neighbors. Material wealth is what matters the most. The preferred form of dealing with any problem in the neighborhood is to call the police, to sue. Twenty years ago, this was unthinkable, and instead, people tried to talk things over, or, more frequently, acted with consideration first, so that many problems didn't come up at all.

I think the quality of our lives has dramatically diminished, despite all the new fancy houses, all the new asphalt, concrete, infrastructure. The sensibility and consideration in relationships with other people that were once the norm are now becoming alien. One now has to walk on eggshells at all times, and live in constant fear of the nasty things the new neighbors will do.

Philosophically, it's hard to make a convincing case for why the old way of relating to people is better than the new one.

A problem philosophers sometimes face is that they cannot come up with a viable alternative to the ordinary, or at least cannot show that their alternative is better than the ordinary.
— baker

Could be. 'The unexamined life is not worth living' resonates with some and doesn't with others. If you don't share that impulse and you are not exposed to examples of philosophy that pique your interest, why should you care? — Tom Storm

Ordinary people are in the position of power, so why do they play the victim?

Is there evidence that philosophy is of benefit to individuals and how would that be demonstrated?

If all you've ever eaten is cold pizza and you're closed off to the possibility of eating hot pizza, then the benefits of eating hot pizza cannot be demonstrated to you.

From my experience, there are many variations of an 'ordinary life' that do not necessarily involve a dog-eat-dog value system.

Describe three.

Do you have a view on where the boundary between reflection and 'proper' philosophy might lie? What I mean is, there are many people who reflect on their lives and purpose and values, without ever reading or learning philosophy - when does a partially examined life become actual philosophy?

When one stops whining and being silly.

Describe three. — baker

Sally, Matthew, Mark, Rowena, Tony - there's five people I know well who live outside of a dog-eat-dog worldview. I know a few people who live in the nastier world you describe, but most do not. Unless you take any interaction with the contemporary world as an example of your point.

When one stops whining and being silly. — baker

Philosophy starts when people stop whining and being silly? This begs the questions, what is whining and being silly? Isn't that what Nietzsche does and he's a philosopher?

Is there evidence that philosophy is of benefit to individuals and how would that be demonstrated?

If all you've ever eaten is cold pizza and you're closed off to the possibility of eating hot pizza, then the benefits of eating hot pizza cannot be demonstrated to you. — baker

So my question isn't about evoking a variation of Plato's cave. My question is can you (or anyone) demonstrate that philosophy is of benefit? What would it even look like for philosophy to be of use - would we see equality/world peace/environmental healing?

Philosophically, it's hard to make a convincing case for why the old way of relating to people is better than the new one. — baker

I think this example is a good one and this happened to us in our once rural area too twenty years ago. The quality and experience of life changes for the worse, but it's largely an aesthetic experience.

My question is can you (or anyone) demonstrate that philosophy is of benefit? — Tom Storm

It's perhaps telling that there's no Nobel Prize for philosophy.

:gasp:

Yeah well, Newton was not awarded the Nobel Prize, for several reasons, but he might have deserved one.

Descartes, Locke, Leibniz and Kant surely deserved on too, as do Plato and Aristotle.

The problem, then, is finding a suitable candidate after the middle of the 19th century. Russell did win one, as merited, but not for his intellectual contributions.

So, it's not that simple.

So, it's not that simple. — Manuel

I don't think J suggested it was simple. I took it as an acerbic and amusing observation.

My question is can you (or anyone) demonstrate that philosophy is of benefit? — Tom Storm

Is this a serious question? I will answer. But, why do you come to a forum on philosophy if you are not interested in philosophy?

Now, now... Not sure how you get I am not interested in philosophy from this question - which grew naturally out of a conversation earlier. Several people I know who have studied philosophy at university have told me they consider it a pursuit of no significant benefit to daily life. Philosopher Stanley Fish has argue this. This notwithstanding, as someone interested in philosophy I trust that you recognize it is often about asking questions that may seem obvious, even superfluous. It can be about testing assumptions and returning to fundamentals. I think if we can keep raking over 'Is there a physical world?", we can explore the benefits (or lack thereof) of philosophy. Especially in a thread called "How to do philosophy".

Ok.

It wasn't meant as a jab at Janus at all. It's was an comment that immediately came to mind.

And he is correct that we lack this award in "philosophy" as we now understand the field. Probably a good thing too. How can the judges possibly know which theory is correct on matters of metaphysics?

Epistemology may be a bit different, but it would be a hard award to justify.

How can the judges possibly know which theory is correct on matters of metaphysics? — Manuel

Influence. I don't agree with much by Quine but I know he was very influential.

It wasn't meant as a jab at Janus at all. — Manuel

Who said it was a jab at Janus ? Although that does have a nice alliterative ring to it.