Complex Numbers

Revisited: "More On Philosophy"

Today, my random time machine took me all the way back to the beginning of February, 2007, with this entry that turned out to presage many of my later musings: "More On Philosophy" 

In case it's not obvious, one thing I clearly remember after all this time about that title (while forgetting most of the contents) was that I deliberately crafted it to be a pun on "moron philosophy," a bit of self-deprecating humor because the entry was about my views on existence.

The entry begins with, and was inspired by, a quote from a comment made by a former site member: "Would you agree that nothing is truly 'discovered', that it is just a question of a new awareness of this or that, which may have existed all along?... we live in a bigger world than what we are 'aware' of, proven by many 'discoveries' starting with the planet not being flat... being newly 'aware' of its real shape does not take away the fact that it always was round."

I should emphasize here that I have exactly no formal training in philosophy. But my philosophy is that someone shouldn't have to in order to draw their own inferences about life, the Universe, and everything, any more than one needs a PhD in art history to decide whether they like a certain painting or not.

The danger, of course, is that you're just restating what Plato or Camus or Nietzsche or Springsteen, or whoever, has already said (or sung).

I like to think that my philosophy is pragmatic and realistic; that is, I don't concern myself much with the question of whether all y'all exist or not. Solipsism is an easy trap to get into, especially on the Internet, but it's also easy to get out of: I'm real, you're real; my computer is real.

I have, of course, joked around about solipsism many times since then.

I'm also not "a butterfly dreaming I'm a man;" that observation strikes me as some straw-grasping from a guy who doesn't want to deal with reality.

I'm not sure I'd put it exactly that way today, but I still don't think it's nearly as profound as some people make it out to be.

I'm willing to accept variant definitions of reality, but they all have to embrace the fact of me sitting here on my lunch break and typing in my blog; the idea that this is all illusion is simply preposterous, not worthy of consideration outside the walls of University philosophy departments and Buddhism.

With the cushion of time between then and now, I can see how this might come across as a rag on Buddhism. I doubt that was my intent. I think it was a reference to the "butterfly dream" above, which was first promulgated in Daoist philosophy, which at the time I confused with Buddhism, because I never did get everything right and never will. Even so, to "get" the reference, one must be at least glancingly aware of Eastern philosophical traditions, which contradicts my assertion above that one shouldn't need to study philosophy in order to do it.

Self-contradiction is a key component of human thought, in my view.

Now, that doesn't mean that we don't all run around with illusions, or that these illusions don't affect our reality. That's the symbolism of all the math discussion in my blog header, if you haven't figured it out by now: the idea that there's a real part and an imaginary part, and that most of what we see isn't purely one or the other but some mixture of both.

I can't be sure if that was my first attempt at explaining the title of this blog, but it might have been.

Finally, I get around to addressing the past member's comment:

So, yes, to me the definition of "discovery" is finding something that existed before you knew about it (as a species or an individual) AND incorporating that into your worldview. Like, for instance, I have a "Discover" card, so named because you have to run around and discover places that actually take it. They took it before I found them; I merely found what was already there, and others already knew about. Once I find them, they're on my mental list of "places that take Discover cards."

Again, I'd probably change the first part of that paragraph now (while keeping the funny bit about the Discover card). I'd emphasize that something had to exist before it could be discovered. Sometimes that existence is "real" as I view it: an exoplanet, maybe, or a fountain in a city I'd never been to before. The exoplanet discovery is universal to the human race, while the fountain discovery is unique to me; the people who live in that city would have already known about it.

In the former sense, Columbus never discovered America, as humans already lived there. In the latter sense, he did, as it was new to him. This is the source of much confusion and righteous indignation, but it turns out to be partly an issue of semantics.

A third sense of discovery is when someone discovers something that doesn't have a physical reality. One example would be the discovery of complex numbers. Another is Einstein's famous equation; E has always equaled mc²; but no one articulated that relationship before Al did.

All of which makes it difficult, sometimes, to separate invention from discovery. When the Wright brothers built and flew that first airplane back in 1903, they brought something new into the world, but was it invented, or did they draw from the Platonic realm of ideals? That's why we have discussions about these things, preferably while on mind-altering substances.

I won't bother with the rest of the blog entry. Suffice it to say that I saw in it the seeds of several later discussions, but, as is proper, my views have changed a bit over time.