ON THE SHALLOWNESS OF PHILOSOPHICAL ARGUMENT On Maverick Philosopher (blog) Bill

ON THE SHALLOWNESS OF PHILOSOPHICAL ARGUMENT

On Maverick Philosopher (blog) Bill Vallicella argues that Philosophical problems are deep by listing the common philosophical questions: “What is (the nature of) X? What is knowledge? What is consciousness? What is the self? What is free will? What is causation? What are properties? What is motion? Time? Existence?” And then he goes on to describe how these questions are ‘deep’ and complex.

However, notice that the are all stated as ‘is’ questions: metaphysical questions made nonsensical by the magical word ‘is’. Yet, if these questions were asked in operational, scientific, language, they would be stated as “when we use the term knowledge, what examples do we refer to, and what do they have in common?” Or “When we use the term ‘time’, what experience do we refer to?” Or “given that we experience something we call the passage of time, what causes us to possess this experience.”

Nothing ‘is’. We experience things that we manufacture independent of the physical world. We experience things directly. We experience things through the narrative of others – in many forms. We experience things through instrumentation and measurement. Experiences are changes in state of physical sensations, and of the physical sensation of changes in memory.

Properties are patterns that increase or decrease inclusion in a concept. A concept is a set of related patterns. EAch of which is a set of related patterns – all of which is represented by sets of physical neural relations. And all of which are created through one of the experiences above. And as such our concepts are limited to those things which we can reduce to some complex set of experiences.

All of the phenomenon Vallicella lists are trivial concepts before science and impossible concepts before philosophy, because the instrumentation available to the physical sciences is greater than our ability to perceive our inner workings without science.

The interesting question of consciousness, (Having had many episodes of losing consciousness and regaining it myself) is that it slowly emerges from complex layers of stimuli. But what is obvious to the person experiencing it, is that the part we call ‘me’ seems to coalesce, but once it does, and we are ‘aware’ of the passage of internal time, it ‘feels’ consistent with ‘the experience of being me’ prior to the availability of either external sensations, or memories. The ‘me’ personality feels emotionally consistent regardless of state. (At least in me it does. And that ‘me’ sense has been the same since childhood.) Then as memory starts to come back, we become the complex creatures that we are, because of our memories. Until we are able to process information around us in physical reality.

This tells us most of what is useful. (And it probably explains why psychedelic drugs appear to help people with psychological disorders obtained from behavior (experiences), but not disorders obtained from physical defects (say, schizophrenia). That’s because the ‘i’ can be separated from the experience of a traumatic memory, long enough to objectively correct the emotional relationships caused by the memory (or memories).

That diversion aside, the problem plaguing philosophy is the same one that has plagued it since Kant: the desire to find something mystical there, that does not exist, most of the time, by the artful use of language to construct paradoxical puzzles that are computationally difficult for humans to solve because they are framed as problems with a solution, but in fact are nothing more than arbitrary artifacts of imprecise language that remains from our mystical past – largely religious dialog.

The cure for most philosophical puzzles is the use of operational language.

Like most puzzles, philosophy’s metaphysical questions consist largely of parlor games created by very bright people who may or may not have been aware of what it was that they were doing. Infinite sets, and all that derives from them included.

Philosophy is, at least today, useful in understanding the evolution of human thought – primarily so that we do not repeat past errors – and for assisting us in interpreting the findings of the physical and economic sciences.

That’s it. Science and Economics Won.