I should note that the feeling of being overwhelemed is not necessarily a bad thing. That feeling can be a drive, a pulsion that motivates you forward, if you find ways and strategies to manage it. The moment you start feeling underwhelemed is when your interest and motivation wane.

. I don't have to study 3,000 years of philosophy to understand humanity. — T Clark

He didn't say you have to study all of it; just that you ought to know more than nothing about it. So some of it will do. Will try listen to the podcast when I have a moment; the Phil Zone stuff is usually pretty good.

Welcome to the site! You're asking an important set of questions, and what I say won't answer them directly so much as maybe help relieve the pressure that your questions have.

I'll start by saying that I used to approach philosophy much like you say here - a kind of desperate desire to 'know it all', to find the 'right way' that would settle all the questions and, as you say, find the 'pure, unbridled truth' of things. But if you study philosophy long enough, one of the things you learn - hopefully! - is that the world - or 'reality' - is interesting precisely because there's always 'more' of it. There's always something new, something novel that will challenge and call for your thought to be engaged: for you to put your noggin to work, as it were.

And what philosophy will teach you - if you can persevere long enough to get there - is a set of approaches to the world. A bunch of tools or lenses which you can put on and swap out when the need arises. And if you're really good, you might even be able to invent a couple of such tools for yourself. This is what all the best philosophers have done. Philosophy is meant to be put to work with the world, much like a hammer to a nail (one 'philosophizes with a hammer' as Nietzsche said).

Of course, the more you read, the more you study, and the more you write and talk, the more you'll refine those approaches. You'll learn not 'answers', necessarily, but - what is in my opinion far more important - how to ask the right questions, how to discover what is and is not significant about a problem. Philosophy is an art of questions (what Socrates called the 'dialectic'). And it's incredibly hard to ask good questions. So we devote an entire discipline to it: philosophy. When you start discriminating between questions, saying 'that's not a good one' or 'that's a good one', then you'll start to think like a philosopher. And this will prepare you for whatever you may come across, in all the world's diversity, so that you might think: a more fulfilling adventure than arriving at some static end-point of understanding.

hat exactly about the Constitution do you find fault with? — Noah Te Stroete

It is unrepresentative swill. But a specific discussion is beyond this thread.

You all ought to burn that constitution too. It's an awful, anti-democratic document.

Ah the good old fantasy threat of governement over the real, tens of thousands death count that has actually happened, and continues to be happening. What could happen over what has and is happening. They should all fucking die for that fantasy, it's worth it.

Also, they should just ban white men from owning guns. That'd solve a lot I think.

It is really any surprise? Science forums regularly get inundated with hacks trying to use 'philosophy' to prove whatever pet theories they have about the universe, or else prove [major and well-acceped scientific theory] wrong in some manner or another. 'Philosophy' being whatever tripe said person thought of in the shower 20 mins ago. We get that shit on a semi-regular basis. Not to mention that philosophers - professional and amateur - are notoriously undereducated with respect to science. Science is right to be weary of philosophy. That said, you'll occasionally get a science popularizer like Massimo Pigluicii or a Carlo Rovelli who argue for the necessity of philosophy in science, which is nice.

Gregory Bateson put it best: "The would-be behavioural scientist who knows nothing of the basic structure of science and nothing of the 3000 years of careful philosophic and humanistic thought about man - who can define neither entropy nor sacrament - had better hold his peace rather than add to the existing jungle of half-baked hypothesis". How many here can talk of both entropy and sacrament?

Experience is a species of thought. — Dfpolis

Experience is how we humans relate to [reality] -- and we can only deal with it as we relate to it. — Dfpolis

So if experience is a species of thought, and experience is how we relate to reality, I'm not sure how it follows that thought does not exhaust our relation to reality. Unless of course one admits extra-experiential 'relations to reality'. Or extra-cognitive 'relations to reality in general.

In thinking. — Dfpolis

So one 'works with experience' in thinking. Experience is how we relate to the world. Does thought then exhuast our 'relation' with the world? Or since experience seems anterior to thought in this topology, is there experience which is not subject to thought? If the former than you beg the question. If the latter then you've said very little, almost nothing, about experience.

Experience is the data we have to work with — Dfpolis

One wonders how to make sense of this. One works with hammers, data sets, roadways, and other people. Does one work with 'experience'? It's hard to know what this means. Is there a contrast here that is not just sheer negation (not-experience)? Is there some other thing that we could instead, in principle, might 'work with' besides 'experience'? The OP says 'experience' is 'how one relates to the world'. Is it? I 'relate' to the road by walking on it. I 'relate' to the hammer by hitting the nail and building the hut. I 'relate' to the other by sharing in our laughter and work. 'Experience' tends to be a shadow word, a word that looks to do conceptual work but does not. It conjures phantoms. It usually does. The OP doesn't seem to alter this situation.

If possible OP, you should try and check out Girogio Agamben's recently published Taste on this subject:

"The relationship between truth and beauty is the centre of the Platonic theory of Ideas. [For Plato], beauty cannot be known and truth cannot be seen—yet it is this very intertwining of a double impossibility that defines the Idea and the authentic salvation of appearances in Eros’ ‘other knowledge’. In fact, the significance of the term ‘Idea’ (with its implicit etymological reference to an e-vidence, to an idein) is entirely contained in the play (in the unity-difference) between truth and beauty. Thus it is that, in the dialogues on love, every time one appears to be able to grasp beauty, there is a return to the invisible; every time that one appears to be able to close in on the consistency of the truth through episteme, there is a return to the vocabulary of vision, seeing and appearing.

Only because the supreme act of knowledge is split in this manner into truth and beauty (‘wisdom is knowledge of the most beautiful’ and the beautiful is ‘that which is most apparent’, but science is ‘science of the invisible’), wisdom must be constituted as ‘love of knowledge’ or the ‘knowledge of love’ and, beyond any sensible knowledge as much as episteme, must present itself as philosophy."

There are none. All philosophical thought is a risk, taken without guarantee and always open to failure. And it is a risk because it does not concern itself with 'answers', but with problems. Philosophy is a pedagogy of questions, an attempt to ask - if at all possible - the right question at the right time.

Adorno's take on happiness has always haunted me, in a good way:

"To happiness the same applies as to truth: one does not have it, but is in it. Indeed, happiness is nothing other than being encompassed, an after-image of the original shelter within the mother. But for this reason no-one who is happy can know that he is so. To see happiness, he would have to pass out of it: to be as if already born. He who says he is happy lies, and in invoking happiness, sins against it. He alone keeps faith who says: I was happy." (Minima Moralia).

In it's classic Aristotelian formulation, matter is simply that which can act or be acted upon; it is what Aristotle calls 'potential'. So matter = potential. This identifies matter not with some kind or substance or substances, but with anything whatsoever which has the capacity to act or be acted upon. It is substrate neutral, if you will. This is a far more interesting understanding of matter than any attempt to equate it with this or that particular kind of 'stuff'. The latter - along with the OP - is just vulgar philosophy.

lmao.

Piotrek Świątkowski - Deleuze and Desire: Analysis of "The Logic of Sense"
Gilles Deleuze - The Logic of Sense

Prep for a seminar on the LoS next week :D

Anyone with any sense. Still, have a read of the first chapter of this.

Oh good. There have been few more oppressively onerous ideas than that of the 'real you'. Nice to see it being done away with.

He chronicled the development of his son's speech. Time accelerated motion analysis from bud to blossom, if you like. But really from 'gaga' to 'water'. Real world. And mostly jargon-free.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=RE4ce4mexrU — Amity

That was really cool. That kind of data visualization though is everywhere right now. When you hear 'big data', that's what it involves. That kind of stuff is now the bread and butter of Facebook, Google and so on.

He writes like an Italian, which is always a good thing. Also the whole book is so... Deleuzian.

Augustine was puzzled by time. But as I explicitly said when I invoked the example, I'm using the example in a different way than Augustine intended.

But it took until Einstein before time was known as part of the four spacetime dimensions. And it took a knowledge of entropy and cosmology to understand f the arrow of time (somewhat). There's a possibility that we live in a frozen block universe where all points in time exist, and the passage of time is just an experience our brains create. — Marchesk

But this is all irrelavent to knowing the meaning of the word 'time', when used in most circusmtances. Certainly, it was all irrelavent to Augustine, and did not compromise his ability to use the word properly in conversation.

Ah, it's eating me inside that I've not yet read Vygotsky. That said, 'concept' is perhaps what I'm looking for; what are defined are concepts; meaning is words in use. That works, I think. So: the concept of 'function' is something our three year old does not have. Nonetheless, she can, and does, mean things by words.

Or yet another revision: words don't mean things; we mean things by way of words.

One (too obvious?) reference point this brings to mind is Augustine's famous discussion on time, where he says that if no one asks him what time is, he knows very well what it is. But were someone to ask him, he'd have no idea what to say. So what do we say: does Augustine know what time is? (Augustine's point is usually invoked in discussions of ontology or metaphysics - I bring it up here as a matter of language).

In the context of the discussion, I want to say: yes he does. He knows what time is. As we all do. But he's missing the additional skill of being able to say what it's meaning is, which requires more knowledge, something extra.

What I'm struggling with is that there's only really one word - 'meaning' - to express two different things. On the one hand, there's the game of asking 'what is the meaning of such-and-such word?'. One thing I'm trying to say is that answering this question is it's own kind of language-game, one which presupposes, but does not coincide with, knowing how to use a word meaningfully. Call it meaning+, if you will. On the other hand, this knowledge of knowing how to use a word meaningfully, just is to know the meaning of a word.

We use plenty of words - probably the vast, vast, majority of our words - without once having given any thought as to defining them in terms of meaning+. Most words we know we've learned 'passively', absorbing their use from the linguistic environment around us, employing them and occasionally being corrected, complimented, or responded to in ways which confirm or deny our correct use of a word. And it's only very, very occasionally that we really presented with a situation in which we are asked 'what is the meaning of that word?' - and I want to say that answering this question is a different skill from knowing how to use a word meaningfully, a skill which is additional to being able to use a word meaningfully.

Part of the issue is that the explicit question of 'what a word means' generally only tends to crop up in academic discussions like this, where the question 'what is the meaning of a word?' is taken as a model for being able to use a word meaningfully. But almost none of the words we use are learned in this manner, save some extravagant ones like, 'crepuscular', say. Trying to articulate this distinction between (knowing how to) use a word meaningfully, and knowing the meaning of a word, is a bit of a struggle.

John Sellars - Stoicism
Carlo Rovelli - The Order of Time

Rovelli is the physicist humans need right now.

But this is circular: if people acted like in my model, my model would work. Sure, but...

This would lead to a tragedy of the unfucked commons.

As I read your post and then all the follow ups, I kept thinking about it from the other direction - the process you're describing is how the little girl learns the meaning of "function." — T Clark

I agree, but might phrase this differently: the process I'm describing is how the little girl learns what it is to ask and give an answer to 'the meaning of 'function'. My motivation for this rewording is that I want to emphaize that there is nothing 'missing' in the girl's current employment of 'function'. Her use of the word 'function' is not, as it were, 'half-way there' - rather, for the purposes at hand, it is perfectly adequete. Another thing this implies is that 'to know the meaning of the word 'function'', (to define it?) is not the same as being able to use the word meaningfully (although the latter is how one goes about learning the former, as you said).

This reminds of a passage in Deleuze on the nature of learning: "A well known test in psychology involves a monkey who is supposed to find food in boxes of one particular colour amidst others of various colours: there comes a paradoxical period during which the number of 'errors' diminishes even though the monkey does not yet possess the 'knowledge' or 'truth' of a solution in each case". The girl's case in analogous to this: her use of the word 'function' is meaningful, even as she would not yet be able to say exactly what it means.

What are our usual approaches to the subject ? — Amity

I want to flesh this out more. I think one way to think of what I consider a common and usual approach is to consider meaning primarily a matter of definition. To have a meaning is to be defined, as it were. I think one of the things the example brings out is the inadequacy of that model: I don't think our three year old would be able to define 'function', if asked. Nonetheless, she means something by it, or rather, she means something by her manner of employing it among a wider constellation of actions (a sad face, a whine in her tone, a stiffened grip on the blanket).

Importantly, there's nothing 'lacking' in her meaning what she says. Her saying 'I just can't function...' has a point she wants to express, and for that point, what she says is perfectly adequete. So to this:

How does the term 'function' function for our precocious three year old girl? Perhaps "function" means "I want it" and she is not going to give it up. — Fooloso4

It's not clear that 'function' means anything at all for our child, at least not in isolation, as a word dangling by itself. She's used it, along with a bunch of other words and emotional and physiological cues, to mean something (roughly: "I need/want my blanket right now, don't make me take it back"), but 'function' on its own needs to be seen as operating with and among this wider constellation of actions and consequences without which it would be without significance.

But let's not stop with that... My brother was recently in Houston, Texas. He noted how overweight people are there. Indeed, Texas, according to statistics, has among the highest proportion of overweight people of both sexes in the U.S. — Baden

Clearly the conclusion is that Texas is one of the most feminist states in the US. Probably heralded by George "Fight the Patriarchy" Bush.

People die all the time every day and the universe continues to exist. Throughout human history, there have been plagues, wars and famines that have killed millions of people and the universe still existed. In fact, if every human died, just as the dinosaurs did, the universe would continue to exist.

Therefore we can say that universe exists whether humans exist or not. Another way to say this is :

It doesn’t matter if we exist or not, the universe will still exist.

It doesn’t matter if we exist or not. — SimonSays

Doesn't matter.

But what they're really soaking up is how to live in the context of people speaking, and the words and grammar are less important than the linguistic acts (in whatever form) that can be repeated and / or reformulated... in order to master the function that needs to be mastered. — Baden

Yeah, this is part of what I take away from Pitkin's comment that "The 'world' [the child] looked at was not just a collection of objects... [but] included people, and their feelings and actions, and consequences". One interesting question is how one gets from this to words as, as it were, free floating entities, imbued with 'meaning apart from such life-contexts. There was a phrase I was particularly struck by in one of my recent readings of Stanley Cavell where he complains about instances where words become 'nothing but their meanings': I take this to be what happens when words like 'function' eventually become dictonary-defined: then gain a sense of self-consistency at the price of detaching them from the life-world in which they gained their purchase.

an imitation or copying of the behaviour and context in which the parent used it. — Amity

But it isn't a copying of the context. (how does one 'copy a context?' A context is given, to a degree - one acts in it; the child does not purposely arrange the environment just so, so they can use the words). Or rather, it is a projection of the context; a decision made that this context is the same as the other context, itself a novelty.

A child learns to speak by imitation. Echoing. Parroting. — Amity

But this is not a case of that. The whole trust of the story is that the child has used the phrase in a new way, one that specifically doesn't simply parrot the parent.

This so-called 'real problem' just is what Chalmers called one of the 'easy problems', so I'm not sure what's all that new here. And until consciousness is understood as a dynamic loop between 'outside and 'inside - rather than just reversing the direction of things, there's very little that useful here.

Got an argument or line of reason or you're just throwing this out there? And what's any of this got to do with 'psycologism'?

Explain yourself.

Ha, I like it. If only because you're seeing cool stuff where it was just me being lazy haha.

Something I wrote in the PI thread not too long ago:

"I've always disliked calling language-games 'contexts', and on reflection I think I know why: the idea of a language-game captures something that the word 'context' seems to miss, which is a distinction among types or kinds of words. A language-game determines not 'just' the meaning of a word, but also, the kind of word any particular word is: the role it plays in that game.

'Contexts', to me anyway, seem to make words differ only be degree - ("in this context, this means that; in another context, something else"). Contexts are more general than language-games; they don't discriminate as much. It doesn't capture, in the same way, the typification at work when 'language-games' are employed. I suspect that it may be considerations of this kind that led Witty to invent the slightly clunkly neologism of the 'language-game', rather than resort to the already-available word 'context' to get his point across."

Pretty chuffed with my photoshopping here. Silly lady ruined my symmetry. So I got rid of her.

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