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Originally Posted by Kriminal99
I don't like it when people give others the idea that philosophy is some necessarily arcane investigation that all but the most intellectual people are barred from. It isn't. It is something that everyone needs to study and understand so that the efficiency of the human race can be increased.
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Yes, definitely.
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I feel like minimalism is an important product of epistemology. Meaning that in order to be able to understand our surroundings, we must assign to the definitions of ideas the normal context in which they appear.
It is a more general form of what makes science, math and even simple logic useful tools.
Science deals with objects and finding all properties of those objects so that we can better determine how they interact with other things. Math and simple logic deal with simple ideas that retain a minimalist definition because it is obvious to append them with additional information would change their essence.
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And in terms of our worldview, whatever math you use to describe reality, that math is describing the behaviour of some elements that you have decided to tack with identity. The problem being, we did not begin science with a set of "objects" whose behaviour we are just trying to probe. Instead, we decide what constitutes an "object" (or any defined entity like "space" or "time"), the large deciding factor in these definitions being "what makes it simple to understand/predict the behaviour of reality"
I mentioned space and time; notice that in most cases that math is describing the behaviour of those "sensible things" in some "space" (whose properties/essence you defined), and in some "time" (also that you defined). As a related note, it should be clear to see that there's no point in defending some arbitrarily chosen ontological take on spacetime, just because it happens to seem particularly aesthetical or elegant together with the rest of one's worldview.
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Ideas like honesty and even infinity are different because they complex enough that people can begin to append additional information on to them.
If I define honesty as "what people aren't when they knowingly fail to provide correct and useful information that someone needs to act upon".
When you collect a large number of such contextual definitions, philosophical matters become trivial and as precise as mathematics.
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Well, a lot of craziness ensues when people have defined some specific semantics on concepts like "good and evil" or "freedom", and then try to force their view as the true and correct one. Anything you say about such concepts might make a perfect sense inside your worldview, like good and evil make perfect sense if one believes there is a god who decides who goes to heaven and who goes to hell (or some other cosmic justice). But then it is once again plain to see that a lot of "arbitrary" assumptions have been made before we ended up with those definitions for "good" and "evil". Relevant as this may be, it is leading us away from the core of the topic...
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According to this reasoning, I wouldn't spend time reading a thread where philosophical issues were being referred to metaphorically with all kinds of made up formulas etc...
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The formulas are there just to extend our logical abilities. A mere tool. Like the formula for quadratic equation.
-Anssi
