Archive for the 'A Cat Named Schrödinger' Category

Holism

Published
by
aaron
on March 2, 2008
in A Cat Named Schrödinger and holism
. 4 Comments

I really enjoyed working on the A Cat Named Schrödinger series on epistemology, and I hope it will continue. However, lately I’ve been interested in how those epistemological commitments explored are expressed and developed as applied to our daily lives. I’ll be calling this new series ‘Holism’, as in developing the ideals to be holistic, or wholly coherent in their application.

This entire blogging project has been more about archiving the development of my thinking in a semi-academic way, taking seriously thought and reasons and history. I am still very much open to it changing. However, after having some time to read and write and work on these ideas, I only have some flimsy understanding of how to apply them in the “real world” (whatever that means). It has, and will continue to be, a drafting process for something larger. Books, papers, theses, etc. so please bear with me. As the reader, I hope you feel a compulsion to not let me get away with anything. I like to consider this entire experience as a kind of directed reading with Aaron, and I’d like to develop it to be even more interesting in that regard. Continue reading ‘Holism’

A Cat Named Schrödinger Mk III: “Cogito Ergo Sum”

Published
by
aaron
on December 9, 2007
in A Cat Named Schrödinger, books, language and thoughts on...
. 0 Comments

In thinking about the difference between mind and body, internal and external, consciousness and the world and how they further relate to the epistemic foundations of knowledge we’ve been discussing so far in the A Cat Named Schrödinger series. In particular the issues raised in the comments of the most recent Mk II apply to these overall notions of epistemology. By clarifying the problems of knowledge, or at least attempting to clarify them, it will further give us an idea of how to go about systems of social and political ways of living.

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I’d like to make the case that there is no real distinction between mind and body, mind and world, or any inside and outside dichotomy. In order to show this, it requires a great deal of work in regard to foundationalism, and epistemology. Epistemology is the study of the base forms of knowledge. It is the area of philosophy that deals with the question “What can we know?” In doing so, we are opened to the foundations of knowledge, and all of those things assumed as the first premises. The issue of course, being that these premises are up for grabs themselves.

In working toward an understanding of epistemological foundations, let’s look at the grand-daddy of them all, Rene Descartes and The Meditations. The central claim in the Second Meditation is “Cogito Ergo Sum”, or “I Think Therefore I Am”. Often touted as a kind of self-help mantra whereby your willing something to be the case makes it the case, this conception is entirely missing the substance of Cartesian epistemology.
… Continue reading ‘A Cat Named Schrödinger Mk III: “Cogito Ergo Sum”’

A Cat Named Schrödinger Mk II

Published
by
aaron
on October 24, 2007
in A Cat Named Schrödinger, language and thoughts on...
. 11 Comments

I feel like I should to return to this… I’ve been revisiting Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations… In order to clarify some issues that arose in the previous ‘A Cat Named Schrödinger‘ entry.

What does it mean to say that a thing is “Without Meaning”. It cannot be that the thing in question is a vessel which is empty of a kind of substance that we call meaning. As if it is a difference between there being the physical constructional attributes of a thing, and then the quality or function of it.

To talk about meaning as though it has an object and a content is to entirely miss the point about meaning. Is our language so exact and inflexible?

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“Please, Mind your Step. When crossing … be careful of the footing sufficiently. Understood beforehand because the responsibility can not be assumed about the accident in case and so on.”

The meaning gets across, almost entirely to the same degree as it would in ‘proper’ English. It is the case that the linguistic structure fails, but this sentence is meaningful, is it not?

… Continue reading ‘A Cat Named Schrödinger Mk II’

A Cat Named Schrödinger

Published
by
aaron
on September 26, 2007
in A Cat Named Schrödinger, language and thoughts on...
. 7 Comments

I don’t know whether I’ve made a bit of a breakthrough in my own understanding of the issue, or it’s just that I am now again re-grasping the notion, but it’s just seeming much clearer to me this morning than it has been recently.the premise that:

‘a thing (an object in the world) is meaningless and is only invigorated with meaning by my viewing of it’

is entirely off track of how a thing has meaning, and about what meaning is entirely. there is no back and forth on meaninglessness. things that are without meaning are things that are unknowable, and really have no worth (or possibility) of explanation.

are the words on paper dead? no. entirely not. the point is that nothing is dead, if it enters in to your consciousness it is meaningful, it is something.

the recognition of an object suggests already that it has some kind of semantic weight. the spectrum of meaning is the spectrum of reality.

it depends on a kind of horizon of consciousness, not in ‘what you can see’ but in ‘what you can know’.

how does it come about that an arrow points?

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with all this in mind, let us think then about perspective.

the issue at hand might only be problematic in our pre-conceptions of it. for example:

Mathematically, in space and time parallel lines will never meet. However, we assuming here in this mathematical proof that we can have such a thing as a ‘god’s eye view’ or an objective viewpoint. Although it is the case that on paper we can draw itand on the ground we can follow it, but doesn’t it say something that we can truly never see a straight line? Even from space, there is always a concave.

Perhaps the problems what we encounter in quantum physics and in theories of time and space (as they also apply to issues of morality, or social contract) is that we are looking at the world entirely in the wrong way, and assuming that we can look at it through a clean lense.