Paraphrased Philosophy

29 Jun 2018 - Berkeley, CA

NB: Apocrypha claims that all Wikipedia links ultimately lead to “Philosophy”.

Giorgio Agamben, Italian Philosopher

Introduced the concept of “Homo Sacer” (Latin phrase), representing bare human rights. Homo sacer: Philosophical concept (term) relating to the reduction/stripping of the human being to her most bare/fundamental human rights without killing her (e.g., USA prisoners at Guantanamo Bay who are tortured for years and have yet to be charged with any crime or put on trial; illegal immigrants in the USA; or, sans-papiers in France - those who are uncounted by the state).

Anthropic Principle

The universe had to be such as to allow for observers to evolve within it. A universe without conscious observers would be logically inconsistent. No surprise that the universe is “improbably” tuned for life.

Apriorism

Belief in categories of knowledge as simple givens; irreducible and immanent in the human by virtue of its inherent makeup (as opposed to, say, empiricism).

Julian Assange, Australian Editor

Full transparency leads to global peace.

Alain Badiou, French Philosopher

Truths that force knowledge lead to new truths; thus, old truths are ancestors of new truths; thus, old truths are eternalized when conceived (an Evental moment).

On Georg Cantor, Mathematician: There is the infinity of real numbers (real), there is the infinity of whole or natural numbers (imaginary), and there is a gap in between.

Charles Baudelaire, French Poet

Regarded each new innovation, each new promise of an ideal existence within consumer society, as a failed enterprise. Regarded new commodities as already dead things. Our desires for new goods are ultimately self-defeating because soon enough our shiny new purchases will be forgotten junk stored in our attics and garages. All that is left after all those purchases are the debts and desire to feel at home while connecting to something larger than ourselves.

Dialectical turn: By embracing self-defeat, we actually get in closer touch with our shared fantasies and desires.

Cultural constructs are historically-contingent.

“Natural history” is human history.

Consider how words, acts, policies, etc. will be seen 50, 100, etc. years from now. Consider what is historically contingent. Consider how to frame words, acts, policies, etc. such that they may readily evolve more in sync with cultural evolution.

Samuel Beckett, Irish Novelist

Waiting for Godot: Nothing, or the wait for something that is never going to happen.

Source: https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Godot

Walter Benjamin, German Philosopher

History changes the past. (“History” changes how the past is present today as part of our historical memory.)

Panopticon: Allows authorities maximum control of the populace with minimum effort

Tim Bergling (Avicii), Swedish DJ

From Tim’s own writings, as documented in the book “Tim: The Official Biography of Avicii” by Måns Mosesson:
“"”And love is the feeling we love, the perfect compass to keep the system in balance and to remember our purpose even when we don’t know it.

So the purpose of this system we call life has to be to, as cheesy as it sounds, to follow love.

Not because it’s a sweet idea, but simply because the logic is sound.”””

George Boole, Mathematics Educator

1 + 1 = 1 (Boolean logic: True + True = True)

Fred Brooks, American Software Engineer

The Mythical Man-Month: Adding a new person to a late project will make the project later.

Brené Brown, American Professor

Be vulnerable, or live with regrets.

Albert Camus, French Philosopher

At bottom, everything’s meaningless. Nonetheless, you can make meaning.

Charles Darwin, Naturalist

Evolve or go extinct.

Decadence

Literary movement of late 19th century France and England characterized by refined aestheticism, artifice, and the quest for new sensations. (Dictionary.com)

Jacques Derrida, Algerian-French Philosopher

In order to say something, we must repeat what has already been said.

Use negation as a tool to get beyond our present boundaries of thought.

The more architectural something is, the more engineered something is, the more social something is.

The city is architecture’s “Other” (capital “O”); that which supports and drives architecture but cannot be explained by it or understood.

Truth is to be found in the void. Emptiness is the space that defines the space of the real.

Dexter

Dexter’s “Slice of Life”: Every human being’s experience is a mere “slice” of life–or, more precisely–a random slice of the universe while existing with human consciousness.

Diogenes, Greek Philosopher

Cynicism requires perspective of life lost.

Source: https://dev.lemmy.ml/post/33867

Albert Einstein, Theoretical physicist

The laws of physics are the same at constant velocities.

Curved space-time is matter and vice versa.

Empiricism

All knowledge is derived from sense experience (as opposed to, say, apriorism).

Epictetus, Philosopher

First decide who you would be. Then do what you must do.

Epistemology

Investigates the origin, nature, methods, and limits of human knowledge.

Existentialism

Existence precedes essence.

Frantz Fanon, French Psychiatrist

Decolonialization is always good - a return to what’s real.

Colonization is a violent process which can only be defeated with equal or greater, reciprocal violence.

Michael Faraday, Scientist

Matter can only be recognized by forces acting on it.

Nicholas Fearn, Philosopher

Analogy between quantum physics and computer game. Once you get to quantum level, everything becomes a probabilistic blur, just like in a computer game when you get to the edge a game (e.g., edge of forest or a room that is not really part of the game and the software developer blurs it out with random functions).

Richard Feynman, American Physicist

Don’t obsess over the names or naming of things (i.e., pure memorization); rather, focus on understanding the thing itself and how it works to the best of your abilities.

Science is imagination in a straight jacket.

Michel Foucault, French Historian

There is no such thing as “human” or “creativity”.

Power determines right vs. wrong.

Those who are marginalized experience power in ways that try to usurp that power.

Sigmund Freud, Austrian Neurologist

There is Truth to be extracted from every Freudian slip.

Game Theory

Tit for tat is the proven, most effective life strategy.

Kurt Gödel, Logician

This statement cannot be proved.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Philosopher

We assume the world is unified, but we cannot grasp the unity ourselves.

Our knowledge is unique to its time and place and is consequently partial and relational.

There must be a collective “Mind” (capital “M”) that grasps this sense of reality; referred to as the “Absolute” (capital “A”).

Reality is an Idea (capital “I”) in the Mind of the Absolute.

History is that Idea’s coming into consciousness itself.

The Idea is always present, but it can realize itself concretely only in the collective consciousness of human beings and through time.

Knowledge is in part a property of the whole; an organic living member.

The Absolute is realized not in thought but in the unfolding of History (capital “H”).

Self-realization is a necessarily social process.

The universal self is a power to realize itself in and through the materials of particular circumstances and opportunities into which an individual may be placed.

Empiricism is inadequate (empiricism, e.g., David Hume, defined below in Kant).

The body as an integrated organism.

Synthesizes: 1.) Subject and object, 2.) Matter and spirit, and 3.) Divine and human.

Reality is Mind; the universe is Spirit objectified.

Reality becomes itself retroactively through its symbolic registration (e.g., into language, social story-telling, the stories we call “history”).

The present is the inevitable result of all the historic events leading up to this point. There is no alternative, no other way except your life right now. The Spirit of History is within you; it constitutes human nature itself.

As humanity evolves, so does its reasoning and ability to reason. You cannot stop progress towards this end. This constitutes the Hegelian Spirit of History. Social “progress” (towards this end) is inevitable.

Master-slave dialectic: The boy is father to the man (or, the girl is mother to the woman); the “master” is slave to the slave.

Martin Heidegger, German Philosopher

Everyone is the other, and no one is herself.

Heraclitus, Greek Philosopher

The only constant is change.

Immanuel Kant, Philosopher

How can we explain what we know except through the senses?

Wants to find a way to marry this question with empiricism (i.e., Newtonian science).

Empiricism: Knowledge derived from observation of sense-experience of discrete phenomena.

Newtonian Science: 1. Causality, 2. Spatiality, 3. Temporality

All experience is different discrete phenomena, yet we are a congruent people with similar interpretations of 1, 2, and 3.

Mind equipped with “categories” of knowledge outside our sensory conceptualizations.

Space and time are symbolic tools of the human consciousness for relating matter and symbolic meaning.

Correlation does not imply causation.

Categorical imperative: “Act only according to that maxim whereby you [would], at the same time, will that it [] become a universal law.” (Paraphrased: Act in such a way that the maxim of your action would become a universal law.)

Categorical imperative: Always act so that you can will the rule of your action to be a universal law. (Always act so you can will the rule of your action into universal law.)

Søren Kierkegaard, Danish Theologian and Philosopher

I know that God exists, but I will act as if (S)He doesn’t.

Jacques Lacan, French Psychoanalyst

The world is a fantasy through which thought sustains itself.

Ernst Mach, Austrian Physicist

Mach asks, “What constitutes a melody?” It seems incorrect to say that the actual sound vibrations constitute the melody as we have just seen that numerous different sounds can make the same melody. But on the other hand, it seems empirically odd to say that a melody is not constituted out of its sounds. The actual melody, then, exists in our ability to recognize it. It is formed by experience of one or more examples of the melody, but it is an idealization of that experience. Significantly, the idealization captures not the actual sounds, but the relationships of the sounds to one another. Thus a melody can be sung in a high or low pitch, etc., but as long as the relationships remain the same we recognize it as the same melody. For Mach, this process is at the basis of all perception. Experience requires an “a priori”, but that a priori is itself formed by experience. This process is also at the root of evolutionary processes.

Source: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ernst-mach/

Niccolò Machiavelli, Italian Diplomat

You have to be cruel to be kind. –David Ignatius, Journalist (in BBC’s The Forum Ep. on Machiavelli - Master of Power, and based on Cruel to be Kind by Nick Lowe, British Singer-songwriter)

Cormac McCarthy

“I don’t believe in God. Can you understand that? Look around you man. Can’t you see? The clamor and din of those in torment has to be the sound most pleasing to his ear. And I loathe these discussions. The argument of the village atheist whose single passion is to revile endlessly that which he denies the existence of in the first place. Your fellowship is a fellowship of pain and nothing more. And if that pain were actually collective instead of simply reiterative then the sheer weight of it would drag the world from the walls of the universe and send it crashing and burning through whatever night it might yet be capable of engendering until it was not even ash. And justice? Brotherhood? Eternal life? Good god, man. Show me a religion that prepares one for death. For nothingness. There’s a church I might enter. Yours prepares one only for more life. For dreams and illusions and lies. If you could banish the fear of death from men’s hearts they wouldn’t live a day. Who would want this nightmare if not for fear of the next? The shadow of the axe hangs over every joy. Every road ends in death. Or worse. Every friendship. Every love. Torment, betrayal, loss, suffering, pain, age, indignity, and hideous lingering illness. All with a single conclusion. For you and for everyone and everything that you have chosen to care for. There’s the true brotherhood. The true fellowship. And everyone is a member for life. You tell me that my brother is my salvation? My salvation? Well then damn him. Damn him in every shape and form and guise. Do I see myself in him? Yes, I do. And what I see sickens me. Do you understand me? Can you understand me?” –Cormac McCarthy, The Sunset Limited

Herman Melville, American Novelist

Bartleby, the Scrivener: I would prefer not to.

Friedrich Nietzsche, Philosopher

We manifest our will to power.

In order to survive, at every moment we must exert our will to power and impose our unique selves unto the world.

M. Ng, Philosopher Friend

Paired with capitalism, new forms of representation (e.g., new identities) = new forms of materialism.

Parallax View

Looking at something from radically different perspectives; the only way to break through a dialectical stalemate and make real progress as a society.

Karl Popper, Austrian-British Philosopher and Academic

In the real world, science happens by falsifying currently held beliefs. Science is like the chipping away of falsehoods until we get to something like the truth.

Willard Van Orman Quine, American Philosopher

Words only have meaning insofar as we humans place meaning in them.

Anatol Rapoport, American Mathematician

Tit-for-tat is the winning strategy (to the Prisoner’s Dilemma invented by Merrill M. Flood, American Mathematician and Albert W. Tucker, Canadian Mathematician).

John Rawls, American Philosopher

How would you want the world to be if before you were born you did not know your place in it?

John Ray, Naturalist

Don’t give someone the rope to hang you with.

Allow someone to continue on a course and then suffer its consequences. For example, “The auditor knew something was wrong but decided to give the chief accountant enough rope.” This expression, a shortening of enough rope to hang oneself, was already proverbial in John Ray’s English Proverbs (1678).

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Philosopher

From “The Social Contract”: People will begin to conform in their opinions and conglomerate into small “cliques” or larger parties. Eventually, it will essentially become two people with opposing opinions voting against each another.

Ferdinand de Saussure, Swiss Linguist

Language is a purely relational system. Words have no inner essence.

Erwin Schrödinger, Austrian-Irish Physicist

The growth of the bacterium could be analyzed as a reduction in the entropy of its part of the universe. –From Erwin Schrödinger book: What is Life? (1943)

Max Weber, Sociologist

The collapse of values proliferates in capitalism.

Alan Watts, Writer

There aren’t the millions of dishes ahead of you to wash. There’s only the one dish in front of you that you must wash now. (In other words, it’s a call to live in the moment. You can only do one thing at a time, and that’s enough to occupy your focus for the time being. Try not to let other thoughts in to distract you from the singular task at the given, present time.)

John Archibald Wheeler, American Physicist

“It from bit.”

“What we call the past is built on bits.”

Every it–every particle, every field of force, even the space-time continuum itself–derives its function, its meaning, its very existence…from bits. Why does nature appear quantized? Because information is quantized. The bit is the ultimate unsplittable particle.

“Probability, like time, is a concept invented by humans, and humans have to bear the responsibility for the obscurities that attend it.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosopher

The following sentence “breaks” the objective Truth (capital “T”) of language: This sentence is false. Or, as kids would say: “It’s opposite day.”

Nothing changes. Anything that we say changes is all part of a “language game” (linguistic representation of reality).

Physics is not “True” (capital “T”), but it is useful.

Philosophy is “above” physics in this way. All there is for humans is the “language game” (which is not really a game as it has real implications). There is power to language and danger of getting lost in it and using it to manipulate others. Language, which is the same as knowledge, also encompassing physics, should only be used for good. It is the philosopher’s job to establish and maintain definitions of good.

Stephen Wolfram, American-British Computer Scientist

PhD thesis related to cellular-genetic approach of embedding within something the ingredients and algorithm to make itself, as with genetic code that encodes and writes the makings of a biological organism.

Physics is inherently a computation in the form of cellular automata. Source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23520632

Slavoj Žižek (Zizek), Slovenian Philosopher

Climate change is an existential crisis for humanity.

A choice is always a meta-choice–a choice of the modality of the choice itself. (Modality: The mode in which something exists or is experienced or expressed.)

The semblance of what appears as reality is a veil which veils nothing.

Essence is real only as appearance.

Essence has no existence independent of its manifestation in appearance.

There is a truth, and not everything is relative, but this truth is the truth of the perspectival distortion as such, not a truth distorted by the partial view from a one-sided perspective.

Ideology is like a coordinate transform of our experienced reality.

History is not an objective development but a dialectical process in which what really goes on is inextricably mediated by its ideological symbolization. (From “Heaven in Disorder”)

Kierkegaard: I know that God exists, but I will act as if (S)He doesn’t. Now replace God with Scientific Determinism: Yes, I know science is telling us that we are not free, but I will do crazy things - I will act as if I am free.

Language, at its most basic dimension, is an instrument of lying. To tell the truth, you have to think in language against language. (From Robinson’s Podcast, Ep. 213, ~24-min.)

On Sigmund Freud’s Fetishist Disavowal: Follows the formula, “I know very well, but…”

On Hegel’s Determinate Negation: Coffee without cream is not the same as coffee without milk.

Fetish = Pure fantasy; the true horror is the actual realization of it.

Theorem of Truth - Ideas and Paraphrasing Mine

Theorem of truth means consistency with a given set of rules; however, the fact that it is true (the “trueness”, or the quality of Truth) is not derivable from the rules themselves.

Theory-ladenness of Observation (Observation vs. Perception)

Compliments of: Norwood Russell Hanson, Thomas Kuhn, and Paul Feyerabend

Observations are some kind of interpretation that we give to them. So, “in a sense”, so to speak (no pun intended), we perceive nothing. Anytime we make a scientific observation, we’re not perceiving the phenomenon; it’s filtered through many, many layers of observation and interpretation and analysis. So, when we say we’ve observed - we’ve detected - this particle in this particle accelerator, what does that actually mean? Well, it means there was some cluster of photons in this detector that were produced by some Cherenkov radiation, which then stimulated some photovoltaic cells on the scintillator. And there are maybe 100 layers of models and theories and additional bits of interpretation in between whatever was going on in that particle accelerator and the bits of photosensitive cells that were stimulated in the scientists’ eyes as they looked at the screen and saw this thing. So, if you trace out how many levels of abstraction there are between the “perceptions” and the “scientific observations”, it’s huge. And it only takes one of those to be wrong or tweaked a little bit, and suddenly the model you have of the world, which is still just as consistent with your own perceptions, is completely different.

Re multiverse (as example only, and not necessarily in defense of this interpretation of quantum mechanics): When you see people saying the multiverse is fundamentally unobservable, well, it’s true that it’s not perceivable. But most things we care about in science aren’t perceivable as such. Here, David Deutsch invokes the example of dinosaurs, namely, that no one has ever seen a dinosaur. No one will ever see a dinosaur or produce a dinosaur in a laboratory. If you restrict science to only things we can directly perceive or test in the laboratory, then you can’t make statements about dinosaurs. But when we look at the composition and distribution of fossils, that perceptual data is consistent with a model of the world that logically implies the existence of dinosaurs, and that’s really what we mean when we say we have evidence of dinosaurs. So there’s an important distinction between saying the multiverse isn’t perceivable (true) vs. it’s not possible on the basis of perceptions that we can have to validate a model of the world that’s logically consistent with the existence of a multiverse.

Uncanny Valley - Everyday (Common Mundane/Worldly) Examples - Ideas and Paraphrasing Mine

Animals “doing it”: Hearing or seeing animals (e.g., cats or dogs) go at it is incredibly awkward not because you are “violating their privacy” (an absurd premise) but because it looks like what humans sometimes do, too, and, in turn, reminds us that we are animals, which is a fact that we do not like to accept for some (likely pretentious and highfalutin) reason(s).

Cover band: It is more weird when a cover band sounds just like the real band but strays off-key from time to time vs. a cover band that does their own unique variation of the original sound (and thereby always sounds “off-key”, so to speak, in reference to the original).

Electronic DJ: Everything is great–dancing, partying, all sorts of fun–until the computer suddenly freezes and everyone realizes that everyone is going crazy over a computer playing a track (likely made by a computer).

Freudian slip: The inevitable Freudian slip. Everyone’s gonna do it. You, too. And yea, it’s weird. And it’s real. That’s the uncanny valley, baby! Even more uncanny: When someone makes a Freudian slip and the other person(s) actually knows what that is (and has the good sense to properly psychoanalyze it as such)!

William Butler Yeats, Former Senator of the Irish Free State

Antithetical mask: Put on to discover your completeness. Throw off the one you were born with, that your parents gave you, that your friends gave you, that the principal gave you. (Compliments of James Pietragallo, from Ep. 71 of the podcast “Crime in Sports”, ~76 min.)