The point is that, on the grand scale of the Universe, where time guides everything that exists towards the complete entropic annihilation, both the ideas of "Utopia" and "Dystopia" would be nothing more than the conscious or unconscious actions of humanity to act accordingly with the progress of universal entropy. — Gus Lamarch

Isn't this just a prosaic way of saying "nothing really matters"?

↪Pantagruel The point is debatable but you must admit my argument is a lot stronger than OPs. — Garth

If I thought that I wouldn't have made the comment.

2. The past does not exist — Garth

This is not true. The past is a previous state of the present. When a physical object moves through space, its current position and trajectory can be plotted as a vector, which includes its motion through time. It is only our limited perspective which restricts us to perceiving current states of affairs in a temporally restricted fashion. Think of the intellect as an organ for perceiving "temporal depth."

Nice. Thanks for taking the time. :up:

I would also not recommend Russel. He is very much into the analytic tradition, which is not where existentialism comes from. — Tobias

If you really want to understand something, you need to understand what it is not, and where it came from. The first two philosophy books I ever read at age 17 were Being and Nothingness, and Beyond Good and Evil. I wish that I had taken a more balanced approach then. All authors have a perspective. On the whole, I find Russell to be reasonably balanced, and an excellent writer. If you only ever read what you prefer, you will quickly develop myopia.

This completely sidesteps existentialism. Russell didn't consider it important. — Kenosha Kid

It certainly does, since the book was written while existentialism was essentially in the process of self-definition by Sartre. As I said, a good way to establish a background. It still covers Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, etc. I think building up a context for existentialism that predates the explicit self-formulations of existentialism is a sensible and balanced approach.

If you want to start building a background then Bertrand Russell's History of Western Philosophy would be my suggestion. In order to understand existentialism you also need to understand the traditions from which it arose.

In fact, that people can pass the reverse Turing test is why we're all still members of this forum, having outwitted the moderators into thinking we're not human or that we're state-of-the-art chatbots capable of a decent conversation with another human being and not ruffling anyone's feathers along the way. — TheMadFool

:lol:

A generalization that plays a role in my thesis: No chatbots can simulate emotions. Where's the "faulty" generalization? — TheMadFool

Well, in the reverse, that there could be a 'reverse turning test'. The Turing Test targets chatbots, but the reverse Turing Test doesn't target all 'real human beings' but only the set whose exaggerated emotions rise to the level of unreasonable display. So you aren't leaving behind only a "machine-like" residue. It's a faulty generalization.

Instead of doing a Turing test and weeding out chat-bots, they're actually conducting a Reverse Turing Test and expelling real people from internet forums and retaining members that are unfeeling and machine-like. — TheMadFool

Since you put this in the philosophy forum as opposed to the lounge I'm going to point out this is a faulty generalization. Just because 'bots cannot simulate feelings does not imply that those who are not 'bots are not necessarily like 'bots in respect of not having feelings.There is a whole spectrum between being too passionate, to the point where emotion compromises reason, and having no feelings at all.

One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society
by Herbert Marcuse

Everything lacks something. — Kenosha Kid

Only from a normative perspective.

So you're saying that the properties of a generalised set can be used to infer the properties of any member of that set simply by virtue of its membership? — Isaac

No, I never made that claim anywhere. I said that ex nihilo nihil fit doesn't explicitly refer to consciousness, nor should it, that isn't it's role in the syllogism. I'm not going to repeat myself a fourth time. If you don't like the structure of the argument that's fine. Nevertheless, that is my argument, and it is the basic form of a syllogism, general premise, specific premise.

Quid pro quo isn't about what's being exchanged, so we woudn't expect it to tell us. Ex nihilo nihil fit is about {all the things}, so we'd expect it to tell us about one of the things. — Isaac

They are both generalizations. This, that. Something, nothing. Your categorization seems spurious to me Isaac.

I was referring to your first premise, as I had hoped was made clear by me quoting your first premise. — Isaac

Well, a premise contains what it contains, so saying that ex nihilo nihil fit doesn't refer to consciousness is like say quid pro quo doesn't tell you what is being exchanged.

Ex nihilo nihil fit is intuitively, logically, and scientifically satisfying.

What did I exclude?
— Pantagruel

Consciousness.

You either knew all along that it didn't come from nothing, or your premise "nothing comes from nothing" is speculative because there exists a known thing whose origin is unknown. — Isaac

Actually the final premise was cogito ergo sum. So far from excluding consciousness, it was (is) integral to the argument.

If not, then how have you reached your premise despite knowingly excluding some 'things' from your gathering of evidence? — Isaac

What did I exclude?

The important part here is not that they are common (ordinary) words (@Pantagruel); the point of OLP is that words "embody" the unconscious, unexamined ordinary criteria (not made-up, or philosophically-important criteria)--all of the richness that is buried in them of all the different ways we live. — Antony Nickles

If ordinary dialogue does not reflect ordinary content then I don't know what else would. This sounds like a discontinuity between means and ends.

Anyway, clearly this is a "special technical" usage which doesn't carry the force of meaning of "ordinary dialogue" as it really exists, so I'll leave it at that. Perhaps it should be called "Strawson's method" or "Wittgenstein's way" or the "epoche".

It only makes sense that an inquiry into the nature of ordinary language usage should be an application of the principles of ordinary language. In any dialogue, there is always a "meaning differential" whose resolution is "conversational." The inquiry into meaning is conducted casually and the ongoing conversation is itself the mutual consensus as to ordinary usage.

Edit. Hence Nietzsche as an exemplary ordinary language philosopher. His tone is always highly critical or exhortative, like an animated and passionate conversation. It is rhetoric, powerful rhetoric. The longer he engages your mind, the more you are drawn into the consensus he creates.

The key characteristic of Austin's approach is the seeking of wisdom within our everyday language. — Banno

This is exactly what I am talking about.

This is why I initially quoted Collingwood:

The business of language is to express or explain; if language cannot explain itself, nothing else can explain it.

You either use language in its most fundamentally expressive way, or you don't. OLP may be a good way of identifying what is not ordinary language, but the best way of discovering what is is through the use of...ordinary language. As I mentioned elsewhere, there is the typical, and there is the exemplary. And both are in a sense ordinary. But they are also different.

without saying it in the way he does. — Antony Nickles

Right, it is genuine. There must be both "poor" and "good" ordinary usages. You can't do such an analysis without some kind of normative dimension.

Ordinary Language Philosophy is characterised by close analysis of key words in terms of their entomology and interrelationship. — Banno

So you use complex analysis to discover ordinary usage? Kind of like using a microscope to view an elephant?

Could there be an experience of the brain dying? I guess that is the question.

we are explicating and opening and expanding our ordinary criteria — Antony Nickles

So, making them less ordinary?

The kind of things that "happen" to consciousness are experiences. In fact, everything that "happens" to consciousness is an experience by definition. It is not like my consciousness is a soccer ball, that can get kicked around by external forces while I remain oblivious to them. If it "happens" to me, then I experience it. If I don't experience it, then it didn't happen to me.

So what happens when you die is you have an experience. When you stop having an experience, then things stop happening. But there cannot be any transition between the two, otherwise, that would be an experience and so, still happening....

..but it's not style that counts here; it's method. — Banno

Exactly my point. If you characterize something as "ordinary language" and then you modify that meaning to abandon one of its fundamental characteristics, then you turn "ordinary language" into exactly the kind of philosophical construct it criticizes.

Including Nietzsche renders the list too irregular - a list of one's favourites, not a list of philosophers with a common approach. — Banno

Nietzsche's style could certainly be characterized as more ordinary language than those philosophers for whom it is a methodology.....

So what is ordinary then? If there is a universe of discourse with a vocabulary of, say, 100,000 words. There is probably a core vocabulary of, say, 5,000 words that are well-known by 90 percent of the population. Maybe another 5,000 words that are well-known by another 9 percent of the population (in addition to the core set). From there, the vocabulary-groups begin to splinter into parallel factions associated with increasingly specific topics. So some experts know an additional 10,000 words in a certain area, some in another. Etc.

So does ordinary usage mean resolving more expansive universes of discourse down to less expansive, but therefore more universal, ones? Or can vocabulary be said to be of ordinary usage, even though it resides with a universe of discourse which, owing to its high degree of specificity, is itself not "ordinary"?

Nietzsche with his hyperbolic claims, often ending in exclamation points, mixed with rhetorical questions, and brimming with certainty, is more a philosophical rabble-rouser than physician. — Ciceronianus the White

I guess you could ask yourself, does ordinary mean typical? Or exemplary? Perhaps Nietzsche was not typical. Could he be exemplary?

Hmm. I thought OLP was all about what words actually mean in everyday use. As opposed to artificially constructed types of contexts which create the problems which they then try to solve.

Both Collingwood and Habermas agree on the ultimate importance of ordinary language versus technical.

Collingwood says that "technical terms" are not fundamental within language because they require explanation, and:

The business of language is to express or explain; if language cannot explain itself, nothing else can explain it.

Habermas says that our communicative actions derive from a massively shared lifeworld (lebenswelt). This is a background set of assumptions so fundamental that they resist analysis. His observations on specialized languages are that the value of special theoretical domains can only be measured to the extent that they manage to re-integrate themselves into the universal community. Therefore, they must eventually find a way to communicate in everyday language. In fact, Habermas says that everyday language is the best meta-language. I'd agree.

Essays on the Sociology of Knowledge by Karl Mannheim
Looking forward to these. Structures of Thinking was a tour de force

But you can never know modern technology fully. — schopenhauer1

Exactly. And that is why you need to comprehend the use of technology within the scope of society as an organic whole. It is all about interdependence, and it applies to everyone. No man is an island.

I would say, attempting to restrict someone whose actions are not restricting anyone else.

On the other hand, if someone's actions do negatively constrain a great number of other people, then constraining that person actually contributes to individual autonomy at the collective level. As when small groups of people co-opt public resources.

But Is that really so? People throughout history have climbed the ladder of culture. An individual does not have to comprehend culture in its entirety to benefit from it, or contribute to it. Your description suggests a schism between the individual and the (social) world (s)he inhabits.

"You imply disparity where none exists"

Can you define those terms in layman's speak :D? I have not read prior definitions that would make me understand it any better than if I just made it up and nodded my head.. — schopenhauer1

Yes, the anthropological perspective is a little bit...messy I guess you would say. It is like philosophy wrapped up in flesh and blood, simultaneously highly theoretical and yet with all the layers of culture, tribalism, organicism.

I was hoping the description would be evocative. It really just speaks to the way that human ideas are instantiated though symbolic media, and how technology is just a very advanced manifestation of this. Per my comment, we don't need to understand technology to use it - and yet technology is really a kind of hypostatization or reification of knowledge, knowledge made tangible.

None of these aspects can grasp the whole of the technology.. We are a drops in the bucket of much larger networks of infrastructure and information far beyond what we can ever know fully. — schopenhauer1

Interesting. There is an additional question as to the instrumentality of knowledge in general. Machines somehow transform and inject human knowledge into the natural order. And yet we don't actually require that knowledge (in some cases) to utilize the instrumentality. I read a passage in Levi-Strauss this morning which nicely described this in the context of driving an automobile:

It is neither men nor natural laws which are brought exactly face to face but systems of natural forces humanized by drivers' intentions and men transformed into natural forces by the physical energy of which they make themselves the mediators. It is no longer a case of the operation of an agent on an inert object, nor of the return action of an object, promoted to the role of an agent, on a subject dispossessing itself in its favour without demanding anything of it in return; in other words, it is no longer situations involving a certain amount of passiveness on one side or the other which are in question. The beings confront each other face to face as subjects and objects at the same time;

One of the most fascinating descriptions of the interaction of mind and matter that I have encountered, the junction point of symbolic instrumentality and instrumental symbolicity I guess you could say.

Do you think that the pandemic will have any impact on capitalism? I have wondered if it will make an even greater divide between the wealthy and the poor, or whether it could cause such chaos, to make money obsolete. Have you any view or ideas about this? — Jack Cummins

I think practically everything that happens tends to increase the divide between the wealthy and the poor, Jack. That's the trend that we have to start reversing.

I have no beef with capitalism per se, but it has to be regulated, just like everything else in this world. Otherwise it just becomes an outlet for the most materialistic of human motives.

I think the pandemic is potentially a huge wake-up call. If we somehow manage a cohesive response, the pandemic could well teach us our true power as a coordinated collective. Great things could come of that. Unfortunately I see that opportunity daily slipping away.

I think that a significant part of the de-stabilization in our world (that precipitates unfortunate responses from individuals) comes from unregulated capitalism. Large corporations, following their nature, just naturally apply pressure upon governments and through media. This ends up recruiting a lot of dissatisfied individuals to get behind the corporate agenda.

I think rather than try to reconcile disparate ideologies we should just focus on a pragmatic governance platform oriented around reducing national debt, for example. Then the number one opportunity for large gains in that direction is through progressive regulation of corporations. Take away their privileges and make them accountable. I think that is the key to stabilizing both the economy and society.