User:Leucippus

Seeing through a glass darkly
What is it to be Lynchian? To quote David Foster Wallace: [‘Lynchian’] refers to a particular kind of irony where the very macabre and the very mundane combine in such a way as to reveal the former’s perpetual containment within the latter. The unbelievably grotesque existing in a kind of union with the unbelievably banal. A particularly caliginous, yet lucid, example is Jeffrey Dahmer’s fridge; victims’ heads beside groceries.

Things I'd like to contribute to

 * Methodological naturalism
 * Rationality
 * Intelligence

Some of my views
Nature, of which we are a part, is what compels and fascinates me; opulence and starkness, beauty and disfigurement, complexity and simplicity — her myriad ways. We always start from within nature, us, her sapient parts.

When I say this, I say this all full of admiration for the jungle. It’s not that I hate it—I love it! I love it very much …—but, I love it against my better judgement. Usually, I don’t go for this kind of documentary, I would cast it aside as pretentious obscurantism, as having its place … perhaps in art? …but not in serious philosophy. However, this is a Herculean documentary. Herzog’s reflections on nature in The Burden of Dreams are startlingly profound and, also, consonant with my own views. Nature does contain beauty and things worthy of positive evaluation, but I strongly believe that bleakness and things worthy of negative evaluation overcrowd any of nature’s merits. I think Camus (at least as I interpret him) encapsulated one of nature’s defining characteristics—the absurd. No other adjective so-fully characterises the response of a conscious mind to nature, and to human existence; quite simply everything a conscious mind wants: reasons, knowledge, hope, relief from physical suffering and mental anguish, meaning, etc., etc., … none of these perplexing questions are answered in a satisfying way—the cosmos remains silent.

William James once described the prelinguistic-child’s experience of the world as a “a blooming, buzzing confusion”—this is a fine description of nature herself. Senseless. Senseless. The very idea of a God (or Gods) has always puzzled me: debates regarding deities always seem to surround the idea of God as it is espoused by religions. But I am more puzzled by the very idea of a God (i.e. the idea considered from outside the framework of any particular religion) — why is this concept treated as if it makes any sense in the first place? The arrogance to assume that this human conceptualisation, couched in our language, is somehow isomorphic with how the world actually is.... Needless to say, the idea of God ( or Gods) is fundamentally — incoherent, unintelligible, riddled with inconsistency, and utterly devoid of evidential support.

I believe that the idea of God was proposed at a primordial stage in human history, as a desperate hypothesis, to try and manage the welter of neural input, to manage the complexity of experience — but, alas, it did this job (extraordinarily) poorly. I believe, like Quine, that what separates God(s) from the theoretical constructs of advanced science is just a matter of the degree of evidential support, not between radically different kinds. The very notion of an object, after all, is part and parcel of the mythmaking we engage in, in our attempts, however pathetic, to try and understand nature. Some of my intellectual influences: David Hume, Rudolf Carnap, Otto Neurath, Wilfrid Sellars, John Dewey, the late Wittgenstein, J.L. Austin, Mark Wilson, W.V. Quine, early Hilary Putnam. As a naturalist, I see philosophy—the study of our most general questions—as continuous with science. Pragmatism and common sense are also integral to naturalism. Naturalism is concerned not with philosophy of science but with scientific philosophy, with approaching all philosophical questions from within science, and hence bringing the intellectual rigour of science to philosophy. The inception of scientific philosophy, of naturalism, began with – undoubtedly! – Archimedes—he of whom, was an entire civilisation in itself—, and attained its conscious avowal in the nineteenth century, where it was championed by Hermann von Helmholtz, Heinrich Hertz, Ernst Mach, Oliver Heaviside and Pierre Duhem. &#10086; Often when I think about naturalism or nature, certain sensations and images are immediately present in my mind: images of a pristine forest accompanied by sensations of coursing, surging, flumes of lush verdant-green.

Intellectual perfection—C.F. Gauss
If we except the great name of Newton it is probable that no mathematicians of any age or country have ever surpassed Gauss in the combination of an abundant fertility of invention with an absolute rigorousness in demonstration, which the ancient Greeks themselves might have envied. It may seem paradoxical, but it is probably nevertheless true that it is precisely the efforts after logical perfection of form which has rendered the writings of Gauss open to the charge of obscurity and unnecessary difficulty. Gauss says more than once that, for brevity, he gives only the synthesis, and suppresses the analysis of his propositions. If, on the other hand, we turn to a memoir of Euler's, there is a sort of free and luxuriant gracefulness about the whole performance, which tells of the quiet pleasure which Euler must have taken in each step of his work. It is not the least of Gauss's claims to the admiration of mathematicians, that, while fully penetrated with a sense of the vastness of the science, he exacted the utmost rigorousness in every part of it, never passed over a difficulty, as if it did not exist, and never accepted a theorem as true beyond the limits within which it could actually be demonstrated.

“Allons Travailler!”—Get on with it!
Discovered this maxim from Hitchens, who in-turn attributed its imperative form to the great naturalist Emile Zola. A maxim by which I would like to live.

Here is, what I take to be, one of its canonical expressions: