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

Apologies: "isolating the subject or rather of showing"

No, I'm not in the least supernatural.

The problem is two fold. How could one ever judge that some thing or event was supernatural? And what possible explanatory function could it possibly have?

Noggin

The world of the Tractatus is the world of facts, about which statements can be made, truly or falsely.

Certain things we deal with daily do not fit into the category of true-or-false facts: values, ethics, free will, personality and the big question of life the universe and everything ("Not *how* the world is, is the mystical, but *that* it is" -- Tractatus 6.44).

The facts we can observe, and make verifiable statements about, are indifferent to these things. Wittgenstein used the phrase "outside the world" ("The sense of the world must lie outside the world") which is what I understand by "supernatural".

<"The sense of the world must lie outside the world.">

Why? This seems to me only to beg the question of what it is for something to *have* sense or meaning.

Noggin

Absolutely. Having sense or meaning is a very noumenous concept.

Numinous or noumenal?

Noggin

Noumenal, I suppose. Though numenous wouldn't be far off either, if there were such a word; Chambers hasn't heard of it, or of numinous, just numen and numina, neither of which the Shorter Ox has.

The S.O.D. isn't as humorous
As Chambers, it's sullen and gloomerous
So it's seldom I look -
Besides, the red book
Has entries a long chalk more numerous

Hmmm; I'd have thought

numinous - of or relating to a numen; supernatural

Sense and meaning would seem to be phenomenal rather than noumenal on any account.

Noggin

Noggin. Davidson famously agrees with you by insisting that any theory of meaning be empirical.

toxx

http://www.bu.edu/wcp/Papers/Lang/LangBagh.htm

Best if luck

toxx

The theory should be empirical or the meanings should be empirical?

Noggin

The theory, Noggin. Wouldn't 'an empirical meaning' be a category mistake?

toxx

"tis wondrous to contemplate the world empty'd of intelligences" -- Berkeley

Try it.

Imagine there's no people
I wonder if you could
No names, no concepts
Nothing bad or good

Imagine all the planets
In unthought-of space

You may say that you can do it
And perhaps indeed you can
But that's not the world I live in
I'm don't get it without Man*

Imagine there's no free will
It's been tried before
We're following a pathway
Laid out for evermore

Imagine there's no choices
For the human race

You may say that you can do it
And keep living just the same
But why is it we're thinking
If thought has no place in the game?

*And Woman, thank you Loretta.

'Ere RMan. That must be good stuff. What is it? Magic mushroom or LSD?

toxx

Food poisoning I think. Spent Wednesday in bed taking nothing but sleep and water; feeling a lot better now. Apologies.

"tis wondrous to contemplate the world empty'd of intelligence."

Well, as an alternative you could always try and contemplate intelligencies empty'd of the world.

Noggin

Hard, but no harder than the other way round.

[LTP]

greetings!

A letter to Scientific American magazine:

"I was intrigued by two claims made in your issue. The first: that physicists "who have read serious philosophy generally doubt its usefulness" ["A Hole at the Heart of Physics," by George Musser]. The second: that "clock researchers have begun to answer some of the most press­ing questions raised by human experience in the fourth dimension. Why, for exam­ple, a watched pot never boils" ["Times of Our Lives" by Karen Wright].

As a professor of philosophy, I thought that I might be useful by addressing that watched-pot question. So I called my three daughters to witness a science ex­periment. I poured a small amount of water into a small pot and placed the pot on the hot stovetop. One of us served as timekeeper, and the other three watched the pot. At 130 seconds, the water was at a rolling boil. Triumphantly, I an­nounced that I would publish our fully reproducible findings in a scientific forum no less respectable than the Letters col­umn of Scientific American. But then my 11-year-old daughter pointed out that while we did observe the water in the pot boil, we did not actually see the pot itself boil, which is what the adage claims. And if the pot itself actually boiled, my 16-year-old chimed in, it would first have to melt, at which point it would no longer be a pot. Consequently, a pot, let alone a watched pot, could never boil.

One of my sons was asked once whether he had ever taken a philos­ophy class. He responded that his life was a phi­losophy class. I regret that as a philosopher I cannot contribute much to pressing science ques­tions, except perhaps teaching young peo­ple how to think carefully. Do you think science can find such young people useful?

Murray Hunt
Brigham Young University Idaho"

-- who will I am sure excuse the quotation of his letter in full.

~Recumbentman