RE: Is God a logical contradiction?
February 14, 2020 at 6:58 pm
(This post was last modified: February 14, 2020 at 6:59 pm by John 6IX Breezy.)
(February 14, 2020 at 6:23 pm)Objectivist Wrote: There's a lot of bad philosophy out there, and some of those bad philosophical ideas have wormed their way into the hard sciences and the humanities are riddled with it. Most people start in midstream with philosophy and take a whole bunch of stuff for granted. They never examine fundamental principles. Everyone could benefit from a conceptual understanding of knowledge. In fact if you want to change the world for the better this is what needs to happen. Children should be taught what concepts are, how they're formed, how they're validated, what the relationship between concepts and percepts is. What universality really means. How concepts are integrated into more abstract concepts. How to think in terms of essentials. They should be taught the proper method of induction. When they get older they should be taught the principle of measurement omission which is the key to understanding universality. My kids had no trouble understanding these things. One day my daughter pointed out a stolen concept in something we heard on the radio. I was so proud. You want to put a serious dent in racism, Teach an understanding of concepts. The whole time I was in school, both public and in college, I was never taught any of this. I was never taught how to reason. I was never even given a definition of reason. Instead, I was taught what to think and to memorize a bunch of floating abstractions which I promptly forgot because none of it had any connection to reality, no objective meaning. I wish I had been taught about all this stuff in school. I would have been philosophically armed against irrational bullshit. But the last thing the powers that be want is people able to think for themselves.
I think the reason this fallacy is so pervasive is that our education system is designed to stunt the conceptual faculty of children. It's expressly designed to create anti-conceptual, concrete bound mentalities.
Well, I hope this helps. I'll be glad to point you to some more detailed information about stolen concepts if you'd like.
I agree with you that philosophy is important; scientists rarely get taught any, or are taught to look down on it. I definitely wish I had a better foundation which is why I'm enrolled in a Cognitive Science program. Cognitive Science is an interdisciplinary approach to cognition, so it incorporates psychology, neuroscience, computer science, and philosophy. We've had philosophy teachers come in and teach us a thing or two about the philosophy of science and the philosophy of mind, and last year I had to take a course on the philosophy of neuroscience specifically. But as you mentioned it feels as if we're starting midstream, and theres a bunch of basic stuff that I feel we should know, but there's just not enough time to learn.
I have a pretty good grasp of psychology and neuroscience; but when it comes to philosophy and computer science its a foreign language to me. That's part of the reason why I was listening to an artificial intelligence podcast interviewing David Chalmers, where they brought up the Simulation Theory.