(no subject)
Current Song: Alice in Chains -- Man in The Box.
Current Mood: In the Yes.
My sleep schedule is fucked. Got a new book to start in conjunction with the other one. The Tao Te Ching.
Descartes once proposed that the intellectual climate of any culture could be defined by the sophistication of its technology. His idea originated, surprisingly premature, in the age of remote-response machines. Philosophically, the "ghost in the machine" was the best chance at explaining the power of reflexes and automatisms at that point in history. On the grounds that the field of Western reasoning was based on the unifying principle of technology, Descartes went on to propose that as our pool of knowledge has advanced from self-propelled actions, to unexplained cause-and-effects, up to his day of very simple robotics and pully-mechanisms; so too has our philosophical understanding progressed from free will, to the atonement of responsibility on action and then to possibly unfree will (due to the unconsciousness of reflexes). Taking this proposal into account, if you look at what Western reason has become today, based fully upon algorithmic determinants and a lack of free will based upon chemical interaction, one may parallel these conclusions with our current technology. We have a knowledge-base fueled by computers, which themselves are based upon a series of algorithms and heuristics. Now, to the best of our knowledge, our spirit and even our brain is characterized by electrochemical interactions; the will, much like the user of a computer, has been deducted from the inference of causation. Soft-determinists clad with higher learning will today claim that we are nothing more than a heap of chemicals that are merely orienting themselves to the outside world. The same question plagues us now as it has all along, the philosophical riddle; the mental claptrap of the willer of the will. The causer of the cause.
Wrote the word Penguin on a donut last night. Someone was very offended.
From within an apartment now housing four.
/Marc
"Never in all the world could there be found two lovers so wholly suited to one another as paradox and passion."
--Soren Kierkegaard.
Current Mood: In the Yes.
My sleep schedule is fucked. Got a new book to start in conjunction with the other one. The Tao Te Ching.
Descartes once proposed that the intellectual climate of any culture could be defined by the sophistication of its technology. His idea originated, surprisingly premature, in the age of remote-response machines. Philosophically, the "ghost in the machine" was the best chance at explaining the power of reflexes and automatisms at that point in history. On the grounds that the field of Western reasoning was based on the unifying principle of technology, Descartes went on to propose that as our pool of knowledge has advanced from self-propelled actions, to unexplained cause-and-effects, up to his day of very simple robotics and pully-mechanisms; so too has our philosophical understanding progressed from free will, to the atonement of responsibility on action and then to possibly unfree will (due to the unconsciousness of reflexes). Taking this proposal into account, if you look at what Western reason has become today, based fully upon algorithmic determinants and a lack of free will based upon chemical interaction, one may parallel these conclusions with our current technology. We have a knowledge-base fueled by computers, which themselves are based upon a series of algorithms and heuristics. Now, to the best of our knowledge, our spirit and even our brain is characterized by electrochemical interactions; the will, much like the user of a computer, has been deducted from the inference of causation. Soft-determinists clad with higher learning will today claim that we are nothing more than a heap of chemicals that are merely orienting themselves to the outside world. The same question plagues us now as it has all along, the philosophical riddle; the mental claptrap of the willer of the will. The causer of the cause.
Wrote the word Penguin on a donut last night. Someone was very offended.
From within an apartment now housing four.
/Marc
"Never in all the world could there be found two lovers so wholly suited to one another as paradox and passion."
--Soren Kierkegaard.