- #1
Mentat
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"Problems" (Wrong Turns 2)
There is a bizarre phenomenon, that one observes when they try to understand philosophy (in its current form) from "outside" of it. The question would inevitably come up, in the inquiring mind: Why do philosophers like problems?
I have discussed some bad turns that philosophy has made throughout its history ("Wrong Turns"), but what interests me even more than those mistakes is that philosophers refuse to turn around and make a different turn.
I don't think that this has much to do with being too arrogant to ever admit you've made a mistake (though, I guess, that's a possibility). I think it's more to do with a strange brand of acquiescence. Philosophers look at these "problems" (which are, essentially, dead-ends along a path that proceeded from a "wrong turn") as though they need to be solved. We're stuck with them, so we might as well do something about them. The concept that they took a wrong turn almost never comes up.
In any other discipline, a dead-end is treated as the best indication that you were on the wrong path, and that one of the "turns" you made was a wrong one. In philosophy, such dead-ends as (for example) the "hard problem of consciousness" are embraced!
Now, I may seem like the nagging wife that won't stop telling her husband to ask for directions, but that doesn't change the fact that our historical bad turns aren't going to be made any better by looking for ways around (or, worse yet, through) the dead-ends.
I think we need to turn around and try again. We need to remove jargon that has no meaning outside of this particular path, since this path is clearly the wrong one. When we speak of "qualia", "a perception" (rather than the process of perceiving), "mind-body relations", etc, we are (to my mind) simply refusing to go back to the Descartes intersection, and see if incorrigibility really need find its basis within our thinking processes. Or, better yet, maybe we should go all the way back to our first turn, the Platonic one. Should we be seeking bases for perfect incorrigibility and absolute truth at all?
There is a bizarre phenomenon, that one observes when they try to understand philosophy (in its current form) from "outside" of it. The question would inevitably come up, in the inquiring mind: Why do philosophers like problems?
I have discussed some bad turns that philosophy has made throughout its history ("Wrong Turns"), but what interests me even more than those mistakes is that philosophers refuse to turn around and make a different turn.
I don't think that this has much to do with being too arrogant to ever admit you've made a mistake (though, I guess, that's a possibility). I think it's more to do with a strange brand of acquiescence. Philosophers look at these "problems" (which are, essentially, dead-ends along a path that proceeded from a "wrong turn") as though they need to be solved. We're stuck with them, so we might as well do something about them. The concept that they took a wrong turn almost never comes up.
In any other discipline, a dead-end is treated as the best indication that you were on the wrong path, and that one of the "turns" you made was a wrong one. In philosophy, such dead-ends as (for example) the "hard problem of consciousness" are embraced!
Now, I may seem like the nagging wife that won't stop telling her husband to ask for directions, but that doesn't change the fact that our historical bad turns aren't going to be made any better by looking for ways around (or, worse yet, through) the dead-ends.
I think we need to turn around and try again. We need to remove jargon that has no meaning outside of this particular path, since this path is clearly the wrong one. When we speak of "qualia", "a perception" (rather than the process of perceiving), "mind-body relations", etc, we are (to my mind) simply refusing to go back to the Descartes intersection, and see if incorrigibility really need find its basis within our thinking processes. Or, better yet, maybe we should go all the way back to our first turn, the Platonic one. Should we be seeking bases for perfect incorrigibility and absolute truth at all?