Anarch
01-23-2006, 02:38 PM
What philosophical problems have you been confronted with, and in being confronted, have spurred you on to read and form your own concepts/outlook on the world?
Several key problems for me:
1) Group behaviour vs individual behaviour, generalisations.
2) Determinism and the will.
3) 'Subjective' knowledge and determinism.
4) The agent-structure problem of sociology.
5) Subjective power vs objective power (i.e. Foucault's 'Power').
6) Identity vs flux.
7) Relation between memory, the percieving 'I', the thinking 'I', and personal identity.
The solutions I came up with.
1) Group behaviour vs individual behaviour, generalisations.
This problem largely evolved out of being confronted with the argument 'generalisations are incorrect therefore immoral' during English class when I was fifteen. I spent quite some time thinking this one over. The intermediate conclusion was the retort that 'generalisations work', the longer term conclusion was that generalisations fail for the same reasons that both laws in both the political and scientific realms fail: because they refuse to admit the possibility of human decision to recast the laws, to solve exceptions, and so fall prey to the inevitability of factors which were not taken into account at the time of the formation of these laws.
2) Determinism and the will.
Chaos theory interested me the moment I read about it on a Red Alert 2 forum in an argument with a guy from Idaho. Chaos theory basically states that if time were frozen, and all data on every possible factor were known, as were the laws which govern motion, human behaviour, etc., it would be possible to predict not only the future, but determine the past. My problem with this was that I read a bit about Schopenhauer when I was fifteen from a book on the history of philosophy, and I'd come to like his idea of the will as a sort of generative principle of human motivation/action, like water pressure that went in certain directions if it was channeled in certain ways. However, Schopenhauer seemed to select the human agent as the basic starting point where he pulled the rest of his philosophy from, and this seemed incompatible with objective determinism, in which humans are basically wind up toys that bump into things fairly predictably. My solution is that the concept of 'will' is invented to cover up the fact we're ignorant of all the factors which determine concrete examples of human behaviour (e.g. why I prefer to drink LA Ice over Coca Cola). The concept of the will, like the concept of the ego (as in, cogito ergo sum) is a fiction, of sorts. An epistemological necessity, but a metaphysical fraud.
3) Determinism and subjective knowledge.
The concept of determinism began to spook me in another way, too. Namely, the idea that if human mental processes are determined, and not free flowing (I'd rejected free will when I was 14), then it follows that human knowledge, too, is determined, which begs the question that if our knowledge is predetermined, then our understanding of natural laws is predetermined, and somehow it all got iffy from there on. I'd thought long and hard and come to the conclusion that if human consciousness is governed by what I term 'axiomatic' knowledge, (e.g. causality, identity, action) which permit the understanding of the world (Kant's crap, for the uninformed). What is fed into sense perceptions are traces of the world of becoming (flux, change, whatever you want to call it). Fade, I think, rejected the idea that the world is becoming by appealing to Alasdair MacIntyre's idea that there is stuff in the world, simply because we play with the stuff, throw some parts of the world at each other, eat some parts, wipe our arses with other parts, etc. :p However underneath this world of becoming (which is what we percieve - though human perception and the world of becoming connect together via axiomatic knowledge) I put the world we will never 'know' - the 'real world' (not angels and devils, but of objects that move around by cause and effect, pure determinism). It's unknowable because A) we infer the physical laws of the universe, given certain knowledge (knowledge being the synthesised product of axiomatic and pure empirical (i.e. flux) sense-data) information, B) we do not know all the various concrete factors (see chaos theory and weather prediction), and C) if our concepts finally do reach the real world, well, we'll never know if we get there. We might know it, but we'll never know we know it.
4) The agent-structure problem of sociology, and 5) Subjective power vs Objective power (i.e. Foucault's 'Power').
Around the time Fade started discussing Foucault, I immediately saw a few holes in it - namely, the problem of human action with relation to power-knowledge. I resolved this problem in favour of something that may or may not be similar to St Mike's favourite variety of sociology, 'symbolic interactionism' (which, btw, Mike, I never did get around to reading up on). It connected with my idea of chaos theory as a metaphysical truth. I'd already done away with the concept of free will and I turned to my cross between selfish gene theory and the will to power as an understanding of human nature so I could make sense of human action, and then with Carl Schmitt's decisionism the rest followed. Humans have some scope (or rather - humans are the mechanics by which communal identity changes) to re-form the identities they've inherited from their forefathers and intend on passing down to their children, but humans are social animals and something has to be inherited.
6) Identity vs. Flux.
This problem was resolved via my split of epistemology into pure empirical and axiomatics.
7) Relation between memory, the percieving 'I', the thinking 'I', and personal identity.
Something I had issue with against Descartes and his 'cogito ergo sum' rubbish, and something that became particularly pronounced when I was reading Stirner's The Ego and Its Own a few months ago. If I think, thefore I am, my am must preceed my thinking, but my thinking defines my being, therefore...? My solution to this problem came with splitting up and doing away with the idea of a unified 'ego'. There is a witnessing 'I', the site of experience: structuring this is axiomatic knowledge, and perceptions (thought being a perception too - you are conscious of your own thinking) are fed straight into memory. Elements of one's memory, combined with the thought-out hierarchy of goals (or goods) serve to produce a personal identity which is indeed liable to change.
Several key problems for me:
1) Group behaviour vs individual behaviour, generalisations.
2) Determinism and the will.
3) 'Subjective' knowledge and determinism.
4) The agent-structure problem of sociology.
5) Subjective power vs objective power (i.e. Foucault's 'Power').
6) Identity vs flux.
7) Relation between memory, the percieving 'I', the thinking 'I', and personal identity.
The solutions I came up with.
1) Group behaviour vs individual behaviour, generalisations.
This problem largely evolved out of being confronted with the argument 'generalisations are incorrect therefore immoral' during English class when I was fifteen. I spent quite some time thinking this one over. The intermediate conclusion was the retort that 'generalisations work', the longer term conclusion was that generalisations fail for the same reasons that both laws in both the political and scientific realms fail: because they refuse to admit the possibility of human decision to recast the laws, to solve exceptions, and so fall prey to the inevitability of factors which were not taken into account at the time of the formation of these laws.
2) Determinism and the will.
Chaos theory interested me the moment I read about it on a Red Alert 2 forum in an argument with a guy from Idaho. Chaos theory basically states that if time were frozen, and all data on every possible factor were known, as were the laws which govern motion, human behaviour, etc., it would be possible to predict not only the future, but determine the past. My problem with this was that I read a bit about Schopenhauer when I was fifteen from a book on the history of philosophy, and I'd come to like his idea of the will as a sort of generative principle of human motivation/action, like water pressure that went in certain directions if it was channeled in certain ways. However, Schopenhauer seemed to select the human agent as the basic starting point where he pulled the rest of his philosophy from, and this seemed incompatible with objective determinism, in which humans are basically wind up toys that bump into things fairly predictably. My solution is that the concept of 'will' is invented to cover up the fact we're ignorant of all the factors which determine concrete examples of human behaviour (e.g. why I prefer to drink LA Ice over Coca Cola). The concept of the will, like the concept of the ego (as in, cogito ergo sum) is a fiction, of sorts. An epistemological necessity, but a metaphysical fraud.
3) Determinism and subjective knowledge.
The concept of determinism began to spook me in another way, too. Namely, the idea that if human mental processes are determined, and not free flowing (I'd rejected free will when I was 14), then it follows that human knowledge, too, is determined, which begs the question that if our knowledge is predetermined, then our understanding of natural laws is predetermined, and somehow it all got iffy from there on. I'd thought long and hard and come to the conclusion that if human consciousness is governed by what I term 'axiomatic' knowledge, (e.g. causality, identity, action) which permit the understanding of the world (Kant's crap, for the uninformed). What is fed into sense perceptions are traces of the world of becoming (flux, change, whatever you want to call it). Fade, I think, rejected the idea that the world is becoming by appealing to Alasdair MacIntyre's idea that there is stuff in the world, simply because we play with the stuff, throw some parts of the world at each other, eat some parts, wipe our arses with other parts, etc. :p However underneath this world of becoming (which is what we percieve - though human perception and the world of becoming connect together via axiomatic knowledge) I put the world we will never 'know' - the 'real world' (not angels and devils, but of objects that move around by cause and effect, pure determinism). It's unknowable because A) we infer the physical laws of the universe, given certain knowledge (knowledge being the synthesised product of axiomatic and pure empirical (i.e. flux) sense-data) information, B) we do not know all the various concrete factors (see chaos theory and weather prediction), and C) if our concepts finally do reach the real world, well, we'll never know if we get there. We might know it, but we'll never know we know it.
4) The agent-structure problem of sociology, and 5) Subjective power vs Objective power (i.e. Foucault's 'Power').
Around the time Fade started discussing Foucault, I immediately saw a few holes in it - namely, the problem of human action with relation to power-knowledge. I resolved this problem in favour of something that may or may not be similar to St Mike's favourite variety of sociology, 'symbolic interactionism' (which, btw, Mike, I never did get around to reading up on). It connected with my idea of chaos theory as a metaphysical truth. I'd already done away with the concept of free will and I turned to my cross between selfish gene theory and the will to power as an understanding of human nature so I could make sense of human action, and then with Carl Schmitt's decisionism the rest followed. Humans have some scope (or rather - humans are the mechanics by which communal identity changes) to re-form the identities they've inherited from their forefathers and intend on passing down to their children, but humans are social animals and something has to be inherited.
6) Identity vs. Flux.
This problem was resolved via my split of epistemology into pure empirical and axiomatics.
7) Relation between memory, the percieving 'I', the thinking 'I', and personal identity.
Something I had issue with against Descartes and his 'cogito ergo sum' rubbish, and something that became particularly pronounced when I was reading Stirner's The Ego and Its Own a few months ago. If I think, thefore I am, my am must preceed my thinking, but my thinking defines my being, therefore...? My solution to this problem came with splitting up and doing away with the idea of a unified 'ego'. There is a witnessing 'I', the site of experience: structuring this is axiomatic knowledge, and perceptions (thought being a perception too - you are conscious of your own thinking) are fed straight into memory. Elements of one's memory, combined with the thought-out hierarchy of goals (or goods) serve to produce a personal identity which is indeed liable to change.