Science can't answer every question, but it can answer any meaningful question, because there is no finite list of all the questions that one could ask. [EVERY is different to ALL!]
A big strength and weakness of mine is my desire to rationalise everything - every tragedy and every joy. A sense of power in my life is important, and through understanding the world I acquire the power to control things. But I cannot control my friends or lovers, and I probably can't control myself either. If my heart just pumps, circulating blood, and my eyes just view, causing visuals, then my brain just works, causing thoughts.
The distinction between man and a machine is the greatest illusion you have ever experienced. Man proves that is not a question of IF machines could think, but what kinds of machines could think. So the myth of our free will as well as the meaningfulness of your name over time is so deeply entrenched that it re-asserts itself however often it may shatter. [People, preferring a consistent paradox, integrate their personalities in to an "I", rather than have multiple personalities]
Which means that the Buddha was right about one thing. Every serious artist has a moment when they realise how retarded they are. Every conscious animal suffers, if only because of the illusion that you will eventually understand and control yourself. The primary advantage of emotion today is that it quickly terminates our reasoning processes. In its absence our brains would rhuminate on one hard question until our deaths as computers assigned to find the last decimal place of Pi will do.
You don't have to suffer as much as The Buddha did though if you analyse things carefully, check periodically for cancer, and have sex. One of his great mistakes, as I understand it, was to think that happiness can come only from within [Correct me if this is a misinterpretation]. It is exasperatingly contradictory to think that all matter is connected and yet to also believe that something should attempt to exist in isolation, so it is analytically false that destroying your ego, which is connected to everything else, could create happiness. His task could never have been complete, the poor guy.
A human brain MUST segment reality in to categories so that the aspects of reality that you're interested in can be communicated using language. It slices up time, space and matter/thoughts, creating words like "green", "day", "Lance", and "ignores".
So awareness is different to thought. Wow, that feels accomplished. I'm off to party.
-- The TUBE: Totally Unnecessary Breast Examination
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3 comments:
"Science can't answer every question, but it can answer any meaningful question, because there is no finite list of all the questions that one could ask."
How might science (I assume by science you mean an empirical method of investigation) attempt to answer the following, I would say 'meaningful' questions:
I am hoping for testable hypotheses and possible methods to be used..
(1) Can science answer all meaningful questions?
Note about (1): This question is obviously a bit tongue in cheek, but I mean it seriously. In defending your position in the original quote you will be answering the meaningful question (1) above, and so in defending this position, I am hoping you will do so empirically, scientifically and without recourse to anything 'philosophical' or un-scientific.
(2) Whose writing can be more rightly said to contain an artistic component: J.M. Coetzee or Fiddy Cent?
(3) Is morality purely subjective?
i am thinking you may treat (3) as not being meaningful. In this case, or even not in this case, here is question (4):
(4) Is question (3) a 'meaningful' question?
(5) Is question (4) a meaningful question?
Obviously, to say that (4) is not a meaningful question would be to supposedly say something meaningful. This would necessarily then make (5) meaningful.
Email me if you have further queries as some of this may well be unclear!
Loving the blogging you crazy crazy fucking hilarious genius man......!!!!
Heh Max, nicely done
(1) is the Russell paradox...which comes from the Godel Incompleteness Theorem. Quite right, there's always one thing missing...and no method of investigation can justify itself. Not even standard logic. Why, for example, then, say there's something wrong with a contradiction? How could one justify that? The most 'meaningful' answer to this question is that it is necessary to construct a system with defined rules and work with it.
(2). Fiddy Cent is pretty insightful, man. That'd be my answer. Haahhaha. But seriously yeah, this would not be considered a 'meaningful' question. Consider that if you defined precisely what 'artistic' means, there would be a meaningful answer as to whose work contained more instances of 'artisticness'. But if there is no defined meaning for 'artistic', and so no procedure for seeing whose work is more artistic. So, provided the debate is between two people who have not explicitly agreed as to what 'artistic' means, there is no meaningful answer. If such an agreement has been reached, there is.
(3). Would the answer to this question be satisfying if there were criteria for judging whether an act is moral or not?
If criteria were introduced to precisely define how we judge the morality of an act (external or internal), then this could be a well-defined question.
If, for example, we agreed TO DEFINE a moral act as one which causes more pleasure than pain, then an investigation could take place. Other alternative definitions of the morality of an act might also support such investigation, and potentially, different results would be found.
Gotta go to uni, I'll respond to 4/5 later...although I think you'll know by now, this relates to philosophy of language. And to support my argument, I'm going to portray sentences whose meaningfulness is unknown as vague.
Nice work with the pasting back of what I wrote, btw. I am responsible for what I wrote, and a perfectly reasonable and convenient debating prompt. Curiously, I have a friend who flies in to a fit of rage whenever I paste back to her what she wrote. But anyway.
To finish off:
(4) No.
(5) Yes.
Roughly speaking, (4) asks whether or not, when we analyse (3), we find it, as it stands, it is well defined. While dictionaries exist, the words contained within them are embarassingly undefined relative, to say, the mathematical concept of the "second derivative". Consider the word "good" (in the 47? senses that we use it in everyday language), or "morality" . So I take it that question (3) as well as the various other forms in which it is posed in normal intellectual discourse, isn't well defined.
However, if we settled on a definition, then absolutely, the question of what is or is not good would be a meaningful question.
And if morality meant "the study of what is the good", then the question as to whether or not morality it is subjective, (3), would be well defined.
This is the Maths view...but, my idea is that you make meaningful new symbols if you define them well. Language ie words work like this too, it's just that it is much much harder to do, which is why maths describes a relatively small number of things of interest, and language describes a lot, but not very well. Just as only a well-formed equation has a solution
consider (5=4/=6+a), only where a precisely defined questions are asked will two parties have to agree with the conclusion, as they would in Maths.
I'd be interested to hear your responses mate.
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