/phil/ - Philosophy General

[Thricegreat]

Any philosophical discussions are welcome.

[Thricegreat]

To start with the Tractatus because I guess it is what most of you are interested in, I especially like the Proposition 1. Which is not what people are usually interested in from that book.

1 The world is all that is the case.
1.1 The world is the totality of facts, not of things
1.11 The world is determined by the facts, and by their being all the facts.
1.12 For the totality of facts determines what is the case, and also whatever is not the case.
1.13 The facts in logical space are the world.
1.2 The world divides into facts.
1.21 Each item can be the case or not the case while everything else remains the same.

It argues that what really exist are only facts, not things. Things can exist only as the characters of facts. I guess this ontology is also a bit similar to Whitehead's process philosophy. I still don't know much about Whitehead, but Amlux told me about this matter via email.

Also 1.11 implies what usually called The One (τὸ ἕν). A part of the world cannot independently exist from the world itself. If there is no world, it cannot exist. So The One exists first. And other things can exist only as parts of it.

Though these are just my interpretations. Other interpretations are also welcome.

[zen]

I was in a big Whitehead phase last year but I forgot most of the fine details. Maybe we should do a Whitehead reading group?

Wittgenstein is cool. Not much to say about TLP imo because he already said it all. But other early/middle Wittgenstein is also very good (eg notebooks, blue and brown books, philosophical grammar, foundations of math). Late Wittgenstein is booooring boring boring read other analytic phil guys instead of wasting your time on it

Kripke could also be fun to subject to a reading group ; post-Wittgenstein guy but he is about as clear as a mug of milk tea.

[Amlux]

I was in a big Whitehead phase last year but I forgot most of the fine details. Maybe we should do a Whitehead reading group?

That would be cool. I'm reading Beyond Good and Evil by Nietzsche right now, but it would be very nice to do something like this for Process and Reality, which is the Whitehead book that interests me most. Some people say Science and the Modern World is important to read as a foundation, but I just went to PAR and found it decently self-contained, though if anything more complicated by its references to earlier metaphysical thinkers (Descartes, Locke, Hume). What did you read?

[satoridepon]

Does anyone feel that they're alive or born in a weird time in human history? I have nothing to support my question but basically as we can all see, this time period (lets just say since the 90s, or more broadly, since the 20th century) we are currently in is completely different to any other time period. Well who knows, maybe its just an illusion and there is nothing weird about it at all, but I would like to see some thoughts for it.

[diamorphine]

Does anyone feel that they're alive or born in a weird time in human history? I have nothing to support my question but basically as we can all see, this time period (lets just say since the 90s, or more broadly, since the 20th century) we are currently in is completely different to any other time period. Well who knows, maybe its just an illusion and there is nothing weird about it at all, but I would like to see some thoughts for it.

I could be lazy and just say "you'll grow out of it", but in the end you somewhat realize that this is not something you can answer; no person who does not have has access to the entirety of human history (including the future), i.e., everyone, would be able to tell.

Consider this: we've been making steady progress over time, and that roughly holds true, and we indeed have made unbelievable strides in the past century. *However*, this is from our perspective. The sentiment of "we've made so much progress in this era" more likely than not is what most people regardless of when they were alive believed.

We still don't have cures for practically any disease, and definitely not if we add the precondition "works almost invariably". Antibiotics and antivirals are the only "cures" we have (antivirals are already a bit of stretch, and don't even get me started on chemo), and even them these medications are nowhere near perfect. I could go on and on about how far from actual progress we still are, not to mention we're only beginning to figure out how to not make software implode when looked at the wrong way.

I went off on a bit of a tangent but to answer your question: sure, but you would've thought the exact same thing had you been born a century earlier.

[ccloverclub]

Does anyone feel that they're alive or born in a weird time in human history? I have nothing to support my question but basically as we can all see, this time period (lets just say since the 90s, or more broadly, since the 20th century) we are currently in is completely different to any other time period. Well who knows, maybe its just an illusion and there is nothing weird about it at all, but I would like to see some thoughts for it.

i don't think we've ever seen such a gap between the highest and lowest economic classes. compare the richest and poorest person in the world hundreds of years ago compared to now. even if the former had a more comfortable life, there were still things that were impossible back then (poor healthcare, limited travel, little communication with other countries). nowadays, the glass ceiling for luxury lifestyles has skyrocketed, while there are some people who still live it's the 18th century. some people are buying their 6th home and 2nd yacht while there are millions who can't read or access clean drinking water. it reminds me of those people who document their travels to dangerous third world countries. a person who's traveled to every country in the world meeting a population who are trapped inside their own creeps me out

[Amlux]

Does anyone feel that they're alive or born in a weird time in human history? I have nothing to support my question but basically as we can all see, this time period (lets just say since the 90s, or more broadly, since the 20th century) we are currently in is completely different to any other time period. Well who knows, maybe its just an illusion and there is nothing weird about it at all, but I would like to see some thoughts for it.

I think about this a lot, because everyone in history seems to always have thought that they were living in a unique time of it (usually a uniquely bad one, haha). Some philosophers concerned with existential risk think we are living in the most existentially risky time humanity has ever known (given things like a heating climate, nuclear weapons, synthesized pandemics, unaligned superintelligence, and the like). I'm not sure I agree with that (perhaps it would have been much easier to wipe out the human race when there were far fewer of us and we were all hunter-gatherers?), but it's probably what feels the most unique. Toby Ord wrote a book called "the Precipice" and put forward the idea that we will look back on this era in time as something like the Renaissance or Enlightenment, but as a period where we all had to get through the most overwhelming existential risks, and he proposes the name the Precipice for it. But he believes that if we do manage to get through these things, we are almost certainly going to be able to survive for millions of years after and probably eventually start colonizing other planets. The idea makes me uncomfortable, but one upshot he mentioned which is interesting is that if we become a multi-planet species we might start to start differentiating ourselves culturally and in thought again and a lot of the interconnectedness we now take for granted could revert as it becomes more difficult to have instantaneous communication with distant planets. That would make "the Precipice" a unique point in human history where the whole globe was uniquely interconnected.