Author: Warren Tang

I write about linguistics and philosophy. I also write poetry and take photographs.

We can only ever be inductive

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Inductive reasoning is reasoning in which the premises are viewed as supplying strong evidence for the truth of the conclusion. While the conclusion of a deductive argument is certain, the truth of the conclusion of an inductive argument is probable, based upon the evidence given.

From Essentials of Logic by Copi, Cohen and Flage.

I do not think we can ever come to a certain truth, because we have only access to the reality through our senses and perception. It must forever be probable. So philosophy will always be an argument of who has got the better probability.

Sooooo happy to be signature103.blog

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Finally, an address I like. 

From today onwards I am signature103.blog. Simple. Elegant. Easy to remember.

Like a well chosen name for your child I feel the blog is now taking shape again to be something like what I had wanted it to be – a personal space of sorts.

And the blog will continue to be ad-free for your reading pleasure.

Not Materialism

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I mentioned to a friend that perhaps there are physical or material things only. He said that is rather naive.

If I were to take the impermanence seriously, then even physical things (like mental things) do not exist as such. What is to say the appearance of things seemingly longer than thought is not as immaterial as thought itself. Just because the length of appearance is longer and seemingly more permanent does not mean it is permanent. So there is justification that things are not real as well.

Let’s start having dialogues again – comments on

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There was a time when I had great conversations with people online. We would argued about finer points of things. I was open to opinions. But that was until I got trolled.

These days I Periscope a lot. And there everything is in real-time, including interaction with your audience as well as trolling. But this also had meant blocking trolls had become real-time as well, which is a good thing. By interacting with viewers who felt trolls a nuisance had meant blocking was no longer a problem I faced alone. To know other people feel the same way as you about trolls had meant that I can now block without feeling I was shutting out perhaps a valid opinion.

At times people disguise their trolling as views, and one must learn to deal with it as much as one does in real life.

So let’s get back to dialogues. Let me build again a good community of readers as I once had had. Let me be free to speak my mind without fear.

No evidence for other universes

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After I wrote this post I did some reading. And, yes, people do think about what is outside our universe, but have found no evidence for other universes interacting with ours. But neither is there evidence for a god-creater (if you ignore secondary evidence such as the Bible) either.

There is nothing like consilience, the convergence of evidence to something.

What is wrong with rationalism?

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This was supposed to be posted here instead of my other blog. 

Warren Tang's avatarghoti

The assumptions.

Rationalism assumes that reason gives us all knowledge. It overrides emotion and belief. It also override the senses as the path to truth. It is directly opposed to empiricism.

Reason takes on a mysticism similar to that of the soul, whereby a body is unnecessary. So it is part of the mind-body problem in Western philosophy, culture and thinking.

Sensory knowledge is not perfect. But neither is rational knowledge. Both should be considered inseparable. And both should be considered necessary to any knowledge.

Rationalism and Empiricism should not opposing ideas. There should be a philosophy of Rational Empiricism or Empirical Rationalism.

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An alternative theory to multiverses (parallel universes)

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Most talk on multiple universes tend to be about parallel universes and are trendily called “multiverses”. But why do universes have to be parallel? Why can they not be independent universes occupying their own patch of space, its light yet to have reached us. 

I call these non-parallel universes. Perhaps beyond our universe’s edge in space is another universe created out of a big bang like our universe had been. Who is to say there has to be only one universe? Perhaps two (or more) universes have come together already and we have not noticed the evidence. 

Rationalism and Empiricism (not Rationalism versus Empiricism)

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The dispute between rationalism and empiricism concerns the extent to which we are dependent upon sense experience in our effort to gain knowledge. Rationalists claim that there are significant ways in which our concepts and knowledge are gained independently of sense experience. Empiricists claim that sense experience is the ultimate source of all our concepts and knowledge.

From Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy.

I agree with Rationalists that concepts and knowledge can be gained independently of sense experience, insofar as there is nothing outside of space-object-time. Some kind of knowledge must exist first of space-object-time before other kinds of concepts and knowledge can come into being independently.

Empiricist are therefore right to claim also that sense experience is the source of all our concepts and knowledge, insofar as rational concepts and knowledge depends on the first source of sense experience.

There are therefore two sources of knowledge – sense experience and reasoning. Rationality must come from the first instance of sense experience, be it a lifetime of one second or one hundred years. Without that “spark” there are no rational concepts and knowledge.