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Question: What is a cult?

• Feb 18, 2023
  

• “516 days since the Taliban BANNED girls from going to school. Afghanistan is the ONLY country on earth that forbids women and girls from getting an education. To deprive the women & girls of Afghanistan the basic human right of an education is a grave crime against humanity. (Shabnam Nasimi).”

Do you think education is a basic right everyone should have?

You may know we evolved from apes, but did you know even earlier we came from sea creatures?

“Evolution is wonderful. Here’s the incredible walking fish, Tiktaalik, – part of the fins-to-limbs story showing how aquatic vertebrates transitioned to becoming walking, air-breathing land animals. (Prof Alice Roberts).”

If God knows everything, why do you have to remind him you need help?

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” ?