Category: Kids/Padawans

Physicist Carlo Rovelli explains that when traditional physics begins by describing the motion of a swinging pendulum while comparing it to a clock, it is a misunderstanding to think the pendulum is really held up to “time,” but rather the movement of the pendulum is held up to the movement of the hands on a clock.  Similarly, saying I woke up at 8:00 am really means I woke up when the sun was at such and such a position. 

We seem to hold onto the belief of time as an entity because we fail to clarify what we mean when we use time as an explanation.  And, at the level of the very small (the quantum level), our everyday descriptive category of time (as well as “substance with properties”) doesn’t work well any more to describe reality, because while at the macro level everything seems to move according to one time (though it doesn’t the higher up you go in the atmosphere), at the micro level everything doesn’t. More than this, time seems to flow forward (I’m working for the weekend -> I’ve arrived at the weekend -.Now I’ve arrived at Sunday), but also can be felt as flowing in the opposite direction: backward (the weekend is coming -> the weekend is here – the weekend has passed). One time measures me going forward, while the other measures the weekend moving in the opposite direction toward me.

Question: What Is Time

Philosopher Heidegger shares the following thought experiment:

• We take a slip of paper and write down the truth: “Here is the chalk.” We lay this transcribed truth next to the thing, about which it is the truth. When the lecture is finished, both doors are opened, the lecture hall is aired, there is a draft and the slip of paper—let us suppose—will flutter out into the hallway. A student discovers the slip of paper on his or her way to the cafeteria, reads the statement “Here is the chalk,” and realizes that this does not hold at all. By way of the draft, the truth has become an untruth. We write on the blackboard: “Now it’s afternoon.” Now, right now, on this afternoon. After the lecture—let us suppose—the lecture hall will be locked up, so that nobody can approach the transcribed truth and secretly falsify it. Early the next morning, the janitor may enter in order to clean the blackboard. He reads the truth: “Now it’s afternoon.” And he discovers that the statement is untrue, that this professor has made a mistake. Overnight the truth has become an untruth.

Using these ideas, can you describe what “untruth” is?

The philosopher Hegel said “Being” is the most general, and empty, way of talking about something that “is.” Of anything, from an idea in your head to a rock in a stream, we can say that it “is,” that it has “Being,” but what exactly “Being” means is confusing because it seems to refer to everything without meaning anything in particular.

In general, “Being” is said in many ways, but in philosophy usually refers to the “meaning” of something, and the “sense” of something. The meaning of something answers the question WHAT it is, and the sense of something answers the question HOW it is. So for example, a table may be brown and hard in terms of “what” it is, and badly positioned in terms of “how” it is if it is in the middle of the floor in a gym if you are trying to start a basketball game. In fancy philosophy words, Being is called the essential (what) way of looking at an entity, and the existential (how) way of looking at a being. So, we can say Being refers to the “what” and “how” of something, and so has this basic difference in itself.

QUESTION: The word “existential” used above contains the word “exist” in it. What does “exist” mean? When I say something exists, I mean I understand it in such a way that it seems to have Being apart from anything my mind is doing. So, if I say the table I am looking at exists, I mean it has Being on its own, that I am not dreaming or imagining or hallucinating it. But, my mind is still contributing something, because to say the table exists “in itself” still involves my understanding because I don’t sense “in-itself-ness” like I sense brownness and hardness. So oddly, existence both refers to how I am understanding the table just as much as the table having Being apart from my mind. What, then. does existence mean?

Did you know one of the most important words in philosophy is “AS?” Let’s think why …

One of the great discoveries of Greek Philosophy was discovering thinking means combining. So, when I think, I combine, which we call a “judgment,” we think something “as” something, which is to say something “as” something else: The dog as brown, the table as hard, the flower as it is merely in itself. The mind separates and combines in this way. This “difference” thinking involves when thinking beings is called the “ontological difference” in philosophy language. In the history of Philosophy, this type of thinking was most fully developed by philosopher Kant who said thinking is also done based on “categories,” and so for instance I think/experience “the sun warms the stone” by combining sun warms and stone in thought, but do so by the mind applying the category of “cause and effect.” So, we don’t just think, but think something as something: something as something else.

Isn’t the experience of space just seeing a large container? Philosopher Kant said no, and that there is wonder when we look up at the starry skies at night. Why? Think about it! We know that the stars we see are just randomly scattered lights in the sky. But, do we see randomness when we look at them? No, we see order: eg., the constellations.

QUESTION: What is our mind doing to what we sense so that we see constellations rather than just randomly scattered lights?

• “When the word nature is taken only in a formal sense, because it means the first inner principle of everything which pertains to the existence of a thing.” Nature in the formal sense means, e.g., “nature” of fire, “nature” of plants—the inner principle of a being as such.

When we say the word “nature,” sometimes we mean it in the sense of “It’s not in his nature to sit around watching tv,” but we also mean “nature” like streams and trees etc.

Given this, what is “nature?”

What does philosopher Heraclitus mean when he says “physis kryptesthai philei”= “nature loves to hide” ?

A long time ago in Germany, which was always an important place for ideas, the thinkers made a distinction between the natural sciences and the human sciences.  The natural sciences were thought to produce the most exact knowledge (like physics), while the human sciences like the study of literature were more about interpretation.  Since then the human sciences have been jealous of the respect the natural sciences get.

So, the human sciences became jealous of the natural sciences and wanted to become more like them.  They focused on what was “math like” in them.  Some historians thought that they could show Jesus “probably (math)” didn’t exist, with ideas like this: If we put all the names of figures who were as heavily mythologized as Jesus into a hat, the likelihood of pulling the name of a historical figure out of the hat is 1/3.”  So, such historians said based on these kinds of ideas there is only a 1/3 chance Jesus existed.  So who was Jesus?  These mythicist historians say Jesus was originally thought to be a mythological figure who was never on earth, but was later put in earthly stories like Hercules.  Jesus was thought to be a space being crucified in outer space by sky demons.  So, are they right?  Did Jesus Exist?

In doing history, we are mainly doing hermeneutics, which means strategies for interpretation.  Some of our earliest New Testament bible documents are the letters of Paul, which inspired the first gospel: the gospel of Mark.  What was Paul most known for?  His success at spreading the message of the cross of Christ to the pagans.  And in fact, we see a tribute to this success with the pagans of Paul in Mark when the soldier looks up at the crucified Jesus and says “Truly this is the son of God,” and similarly in the Gospel of Luke the soldier says “Truly this is an innocent man.”  What is going on here?  The New Testament writers are saying when a society wrongfully puts a good person to death, it uncovers our hidden faults and is an opportunity for ethical growth.  Sound familiar?  This is how Plato interpreted the death of Socrates.  And it worked, because society no longer executes people like Socrates for being a what Plato called a gadfly/nuisance.  In other words, we can conclude Jesus existed on earth because how does an outer space Jesus who was never on earth and killed by sky demons un-cover my guilt and inspire repentance?!

Where did these mythicist Jesus mathematic historians go wrong?  While there is math (quantitative) in history (finding out what “probably” happened), the main task is a hermeneutic/interpretive (qualitative) one.  In the mathematical example I gave earlier in support of the outer space Jesus model, this is actually a type of hermeneutic reasoning mistake called a “type fallacy,” and is very common in interpreting literature and history.  Why?  While the “hat” thought experiment tells us the likelihood that Jesus existed is 1/3, if we look at it a different way and say the lens of looking at Jesus is figures around that time who claimed to be the messiah, all of those were 100% historical figures.  So, doing historical thinking in this “type fallacy” way is an error, or what we would call a “typology fallacy” if we want to sound impressive!

Question: How would you demonstrate King Arthur probably did, or didn’t, exist?

So, last time I was talking about how causality ( eg. The irreversibility of the cooked egg) is not simply the mind, nor the world, but a MIDDLE between the two.  Let’s think about this middle.  In the history of philosophy, especially with philosophers Brentano and Husserl, we have the idea that the basic truth is consciousness (intentio in Latin) is always consciousness of something (intentum in Latin).  We put these 2 Latin words together to call the issue “Intentionality.”  So, for instance, I see (intentio) the house (intentum). 

This position of the basic-ness of intentionality in philosophy later changed when philosopher Husserl’s greatest student philosopher Heidegger looked at the work of the poet Holderlin and philosopher Nietzsche.  Heidegger said our “being-in-the- world”  is more basic than the separation between intentio and intentum, and makes the two possible.  For example, I experience boringness to be a characteristic of the book, like plot and setting and characters, even though we know it isn’t because the next person may not experience to book as boring at all.  Just the same, boringness isn’t just simply in my mind, because there are specific things about just this book that are causing me to find it boring.  So, this unity of being-in-the-world as (i) the boringness of the book and (ii) my being bored emotion is a middle something that is more original and shapes my being bored (intentio) and the boring book (intentum). 

The philosopher Kant raised this problem of the middle without properly solving it when looking at causality and so tried to fix the difficulty by saying along with the Mind and World, there is also a third thing he called The Imagination which allows the 2 to work together.

One of the important topics for Philosophy is cause and effect. For instance, if we heat water to 100 degrees Celsius, this will cause the water to boil. Philosopher Immanuel Kant pointed out the mind plays a trick here. As a middle “something” between the mind and the boiling water, we experience the cause and effect as different kinds of “irreversible.” For example, cause and effect is the (i) least irreversible when a ball hits another ball, (ii) more irreversible when there is a temporary change of form when water boils (the steam going back to liquid when the heat is removed), and (iii) permanently irreversible in cases like cooking an egg, because the egg can’t be uncooked.

So, since we don’t see irreversibility, just this, then this, then this, the mind is doing something to create the experience of cause and effect! It’s not just the mind being creative, since it depends on the object (only the cooked egg in the three example is permanently irreversible), so cause and effect is not purely mind nor purely object, but in the middle.

Note: Cause and effect works differently in humans, because while heat always causes water to boil, a difficult childhood may or may not cause problems when the child grows up. Nietzsche famously said “From the military school of life: That which does not kill me makes me stronger.”

We know philosophers quest for truth, but what is truth? There are many different ways for something to be true. Here are the most popular

Truth:

(1) Genuine

Genuine or true gold, instead of false gold
(2) Correct
The agreement of the judgement with the thing. Eg the table is brown or 2+3 =5
(3) Certain
From Thomas to Luther and finally Descartes, truth as correctness slowly changed from correct to certain, because the most important truth had to be certain in the sense of free from doubt, in particular having no doubt about the salvation of the soul. Certainty is seen as the highest form of truth to this day.

(4) Un-cover from hiddenness (“a-letheia” or truth in ancient Greek)

When I tear a sock, unity is no longer hidden but made obvious in the tearing, precisely as a lost unity. Philosopher Hegel, in his inaugural address, Heidelberg, 1816, says “The Being of the universe, at first hidden and concealed, has no power which can offer resistance to the search for knowledge; it has to lay itself open before the seeker — to set before his eyes and give for his enjoyment, its riches and its depths.” Philosopher Heidegger says “Both scientific and prescientific comportments are a knowing in the sense of uncovering what is previously concealed, of revealing what was previously covered up, of disclosing what so far was closed off.” Eg, the first time a child has 2+2 = 4 modeled for them with blocks.
(5) Exemplary
True Friend, instead of an average friend or a fake friend. Or a mansion (Now that’s a house), instead of an average house or a broken down shack. It refers to the different ways “hosueness” shines through the house
(6) Truths
The great truths of what it means to be human

QUESTION:
If these are all related, since they are all truths, can you define truth? What is truth?