Tag: philosophy

I love Kant, the later Wittgenstein, Derrida, post structualism, postmodernism and the philosophy of language.

What is Object-Oriented Ontology?

Warren Tang10 Comments

I have been trying to get into Speculative Realism lately. Not an easy philosophy but then again philosophy is dealing with anything but easy subjects. Nothing less then the what exists and how we know.

During this little adventure I came across a term – object-oriented ontology – that, at first, seemed illogical but made sense after careful inspection. Here is an excellent jargon-free definition of it by Ian Bogost:

Ontology is the philosophical study of existence. Object-oriented ontology (“OOO” for short) puts things at the center of this study. Its proponents contend that nothing has special status, but that everything exists equally–plumbers, cotton, bonobos, DVD players, and sandstone, for example. In contemporary thought, things are usually taken either as the aggregation of ever smaller bits (scientific naturalism) or as constructions of human behavior and society (social relativism). OOO steers a path between the two, drawing attention to things at all scales (from atoms to alpacas, bits to blinis), and pondering their nature and relations with one another as much with ourselves.

Essentially, it is a kind of trying to be objective about something by stepping into every objects’s shoes. The language is nuanced to be human center-free.

It feels like something David Suzuki would agree to (this would make sense since he is a geneticist-turned-activist). In sustainability, it seems to have something in common with the animal rights movement opting to be less anthropocentric.

(Monologue: There seems to be a move away from human-centred views and looking at the world from what I call The Other. But whether we can learn to avoid projection of The Self in performing this act. Perhaps I can call this project Willful Philosophical Out-Of-Body Re-embodiment.)

The world has a characteristic

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From experience you and I “know” that the world has a characteristic. For example, we play the game of tennis by following the “rules” or laws of physics. Otherwise, the game would not be very fun to play. We share the world which is “out there” from “in here”. And I understand the outside through the senses and the mind. I also understand the inside through the mind and its concepts and knowledge, and accordingly interact through my object, the body.

In this way, I have inducted (not deducted) that there is a world with independent objects and I am one of those objects.

the empty machine

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minds do not emerge
as metaphors
would like them to
the machinery, empty
mysteriously move through
space, time

how are we to know
if any thing exists at all
if this, our greatest illusion
kept up its charade
until the very last
and beyond

i cannot know anything
a god or a self
but only
to have concepts of them
trust them
to be our creations

that the world
out there
is void and full
all at once
from the beginning, and
until the very end

I have no direct knowledge of God

Warren Tang2 Comments

It took me a while to figure this out.

I cannot say that I have ever had direct knowledge of God. I have had notions of God pitched to me for as long as I can remember, but I have never had direct contact from him (if it is a him).

Christians may say I am not “chosen”. But I would rather think of it as maybe there isn’t God.

Buddhism has gods and whatnot in their “pantheon”, but they are imports from other religions and systems such as Hinduism, Taoism and Esoteric Buddhism. I, for the most part, ignore them but accept somehow gods were created to represent the teaching, as manifestations of these ideas, and that the concepts and ideas (the teachings) are more important than the gods. To me, this seems to be the healthier attitude to have than to believe (more often than not, blindly) in God or gods.

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.

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.

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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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.