07.18.08

more of my metaphysics

Posted in marketing, metaphysics, ontology, philosophy at 2:58 pm by nogre

I’ve put up another paper under ‘My Metaphysics‘ entitled ‘The Imperius Curse‘. No, it is not about the Imperius curse from the Harry Potter books exactly - it is about control, determinism and free will - but I am re-purposing the term for my own uses (just like the paper entitled ‘Occlumency‘).

When I approached the subject of free will and determinism from my metaphysical perspective, I felt that philosophers have focussed upon naturalistic or religious or logical issues and not enough upon our influence over each other. Basically, since we have to be convinced by some person (ourselves included) that the world is determined in some way, I see this as a more fundamental kind of control. Convincing someone to do or believe something is a Leadership skill, and I strongly believe that the concept of leadership has been neglected in philosophy. Hopefully some of my discussion of leadership will be of interest to non-philosophers as well (Charm is defined in this essay as well, which is fun.).

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Also, through the wonderful statistics that you can get for your website, I know that exactly 0 people have actually read any of my metaphysics and I’m sure this message will fall on deaf ears. Nonetheless I push on with the same expectations. I’m thinking that one day I’ll have enough for a proper book, which no one will read either, but this all makes me happy, so it’s going to happen.

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05.24.08

Demise, the Fallen and Annihilation

Posted in Heidegger, metaphysics, ontology, philosophy at 10:05 am by nogre

In Being and Time Heidegger makes a distinction between death and demise: death is the ending of Da-sein, or Being, and demise is physical perishing. I think this is a good distinction and since I break up ontology into 3 sorts of things - commitments, objects & descriptions - I will have three ways to die:

Fallen: the perishing of all commitments of a living person.
Demise: the perishing of physical attributes of a living person (traditional death).
Annihilation: the perishing of all descriptions that a person has made.

Now Heidegger’s use of death was meant to be a fundamental orientation that Da-sein ‘has’ towards its own end (Those are his quotes around has, not mine- see p. 247 of B&T, p. 229 of Stambaugh) and demise was as above. Hence death and demise are somewhat separate because demise is the physical end and death is the way we are oriented to the end of being.

My view is that demise is one kind, a subset, of overall metaphysical death. I am less concerned here with the existential questions about death (though these are important) and more concerned with the ontological relationship between demise and other sorts of perishing. What follows is the insight separating overall metaphysical death from the three particular ways of perishing.

I’m using fallen in a (only somewhat) technical sense to mean the loss of all commitments. If you lose all capability to have commitments, then you have fallen, almost as in ‘fallen off the map.’ “Gone” is similar- you may not be physically dead, but if you are gone (e.g. to some foreign place never to return) you are dead to those with whom you had made commitments. Comatose, but without physical symptoms, is another example. You’re body may still live and for all anyone knows your mind may be as sharp as ever, but you are incapable of keeping commitments and are therefore ‘dead to the world’.

Demise is death as is traditionally defined: when you have met your demise your body is destroyed. Of course there may be some afterlife in which you may keep your commitments (think Ghost, the movie) or your descriptions of the world may continue (Plato will live forever through his writings - I wonder if someone, somewhere is discussing Plato at every instant of every day), but you’re physically dead as a doorknob after your demise.

Annihilation is the destruction of a person’s descriptions of the world. Describing things is perhaps the most basic of human accomplishments - we reward babies (and philosophers) handsomely for accurate descriptions - and if this is taken away from a person, then that person will not have even achieved the simplest of human accomplishments. Annihilating someone is making the world forget that he or she is a person: it is to become nameless. Perhaps the way to think of it is as in Kafka’s Metamorphosis: Gregor is changed into a vermin/bug that has a working body and (for a while) can fulfill some commitments, but eventually is unable to communicate how his/its world has changed. At this point any future that Gregor had has been annihilated: the thing he became could continue living, but its life would bear no resemblance to what was formerly Gregor. If all evidence of Gregor’s history was erased, even if the thing he turned into still lived, then Gregor would be completely annihilated.

So to completely metaphysically die, you need to be dead (traditional), gone and forgotten.

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05.20.08

What is philosophy?

Posted in ontology, philosophy at 11:08 am by nogre

The question of what philosophy is always made me squirm. People would ask me what I do, I’d tell them, and then they would ask me what it exactly was that I do. But now I have a answer.

A while back I heard a quote attributed to Russell that went roughly:

Philosophy starts out with propositions that everyone would accept as true, and then ends up with propositions that no one would accept as true.

I thought this made philosophers sound like jerks, but there was something to it: we do end up in weird places for some reason. Here’s why:

Writing philosophy is like writing an instruction manual. You have some act or object or situation that you want to explain because it is hard to use or complicated or dangerous for some reason. So you set out to make a manual for the thing, starting from the most obvious and basic features. Now if you don’t know the thing perfectly, in and out, you end up having bad instructions, regardless of where you started. Then when you try to do something, or understand your object, when you follow the instructions you become hopelessly lost. Both your instructions and whatever the instructions were for are completely inscrutable. But if the instructions are good, then you can do things that were impossible for you to do before hand (program you VCR (or DVR), explain why mathematics is incomplete, that sort of thing). Philosophy is an attempt at writing instruction manuals for confusing things.

This answers the ontological questions of

Whether or not philosophy is true: it is true if it accurately describes the phenomenon it is attempting to explain. However, since many times we are in the position of not knowing the phenomenon in question, philosophy is often of indeterminate truth.
Why philosophy is inherently obscure: who ever reads the manual? (I do by the way)
How best to characterize the strange layouts of philosophical treatises, a la manuals: the beginning is packed with warnings about what is wrong and and dangerous, then basic, most common functions are listed and the interesting and difficult features are buried in jargon somewhere towards the end.
What are thought experiments: Thought experiments are to philosophy as visual aids/examples are to instruction manuals. They are not needed, but when you can connect the instructions to the actual objects you’re working with, everything becomes easier.

I’m sure this is somewhat silly but when someone presses me on what philosophy is, I’m telling them it’s pretty much writing instruction manuals for confusing stuff.

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01.29.08

Metaphysics Intro.

Posted in Relativity, logic, metaphysics, mind, ontology, philosophy, religion, science, wittgenstein at 12:16 am by nogre

I didn’t think I’d be able to write this at all and I am still surprised now. It was only a few weeks ago that I had believed that it could be up to three years before anything would have been started. That said, I can’t speak much for the quality of the work. My own naiveté and lack of scholarship leads me to think that better people have long dismissed the few ideas that I have presented here. Still, in my defense, what I do present is what I sincerely believe and if there is nothing new here, then I at least have accomplished stating with whom I agree.

Writing this has made me feel more free than perhaps anything else in my life. All criticism is welcome.

Metaphysics 1

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