h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

What is existance? If we dont truly know then do we cease to exist? If so then why the hell am i here and not making the most of my last days on earth? WERE ALL GONNA DIE.......... AAARGHHH

Calm it.

Human life might be short on say a geological scale, but that doesn't mean it actualy feels short.

"What is existance?"

-- not a thing.

"If we dont truly know then do we cease to exist?"

-- we don't know how to synthesise haemoglobin but that doesn't stop us doing it all the time.

"If so then why the hell am i here and not making the most of my last days on earth?"

-- good question.

"WERE ALL GONNA DIE.......... AAARGHHH"

-- but if we never existed to begin with, how is that realisation going to hasten our end?

'WERE ALL GONNA DIE.......... '

We're only gonna die.

At least you don't have to survive it. Think of it as the end of suffering, it's kinda comforting.

of course we're all going to die, if we didn't the population of the planet would sky-rocket, Sex would have to be made illegal, and the evolution of our specise would come to an abruptly stop.

"Sex would have to be made illegal"

What earthly difference would that make? Sex in most circumstances has been illegal in most places since laws began!

Would it work? Making it illegal? People'd probably go on having sex anyway.

But you can't meaningfully question everything at once. There's always something that must be accepted, and to which any answer must be connected.

Noggin

You can question everything, but only if you want to end up in a solipsistic world of one. Which'll get you nowhere, practically speaking.

Roadie. Descartes classically questioned everything at once. You could end up not being a solipsist, but disbelieving in even your own existence. In fact, all the various philosophical positions can start from sceptical questioning. We might not get it right, but at least we get better at justifying and debating our positions, IMHO.

toxx

Yeah, that's what I was getting at.

Better phrased, thanks very much toxx .

I was quite taken with Descartes when I started studying him, but with the cynicsm of age I now feel that he knew perfickly well where he wanted to come out before he jumped in the "systematic doubt" chute. Now I think of it I felt that then too, when I read his "if I am to establish something lasting in the sciences" ambition-giveaway .

I never said I wanted to question everything at once. Just what is assumed to be true. It is possible to accept, temporarily, everything but the one you are currently questioning, in order to maintain a frame of reference and some type of context to understand the answer. This does, however, lead to some repition of qeustions, because as I learn more, my frame of reference changes, negating my former understanding of one or more concepts at a time. This is a rather cumbersome method, but one that works for me. After years of working on the basics, I do have a firm piont of reference to assimilate all new knowledge.

R'man. Tut, tut! You have just provided us with an excellent axample of an argumentum ad hominem. We've just been discussing that on the GFoF thread. You tell us what Descartes intended, but you don't attempt to argue that he didn't succeed in his argument. There are plently of points to be made against him, but you don't offer any of them.

tozz

I don't think questioning his intentions is ad hominem. Descartes wrote somewhere "I must wear a mask" . . .

His intentions were clearly the same as his pal Galileo: to be the fountainhead of a new scientific Catholicism. The Catholic Church said no thanks to both of them.

At the time, early 17th c., Catholicism was scientifically ahead, and the Protestant states held back on things like the revised calendar. Some time later they changed places. So it goes.

Rman. It seems practically a paradigm of 'ad hominem' to me. No matter; it is a legitimate rhetorical device. We can have the real discussion sometime, maybe.

toxx

Well you have me bothered Toxx, as I know that other people's intentions are not open to our scrutiny, so your accusation of an ad hominem attack has some teeth to it . . .

But I think I can argue that talking of Descartes's intentions is just shorthand for the description of what he actually attempted -- his project -- which, I think it is generally agreed, was: to establish a firm post-Scholastic basis for Catholic theology.

His systematic doubt was not the blindfold free-fall he pretended in "Metaphysical Meditations"; his path had been beaten for him by Montaigne almost a century earlier.

"There is a plague on Man, the opinion that he knows something." -- Montaigne

Rman. Usually, we decide what our project was about after examining the results. To that extent, I both agree and disagree with you. The last thing I did with my thesis was to decide on a title and write the intro. This makes it more understandable to the reader although it doesn't reflect the history of the document. Since I don't care about history, but only people's arguments, I don't actually give a monkey's. Descartes is a good read until he tries to tell us where our ideas come from. At that point, he crashes and burns. The essentialism doesn't help him either. But then, he raised the questions which, even though he wasn't alone, gave a jolly good kick up the fundament to European philosophy. I think Condillac is worth reading too.

Cheers, toxx.