Other Philosophy

Armageddon in pieces

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Human being espouses friendship and enmity with equal conviction. Indeed, the intensity of the one easily converts into the intensity of the other when emotions run wild. And all the advances of technology are rendered primitive in the hands of those ready to wage war, whilst civilisation is reduced to a merciless grab for money in the belief that it solves all problems and makes us wealthy. But our final degradation is sealed of the power to lie to ourselves.

27.1.15 – 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz.

The appearance of evolution

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Evolution is meant to have its limits, it is not meant to be everything, and it is meant to be understood within those limits; otherwise it will set limits to our understanding, otherwise we will tend to see it as the it that is meant to make possibility possible.

We see nature revolving around evolution and its possibilities, instead of looking at evolution revolving around nature and its possibilities. We see things change and call it evolution, and then we say the evolution explains the change. Yet evolution is not everything. It does not determine the possibility of what can happen, though it certainly appears to – that is, if certainty can be attributed to appearances. But did Copernicus not teach us a lesson in that regard?

“It’s true to say that evolution is not an ascent. There is no march towards complexity in evolution.” Professor Brian Cox. (20.10.14). http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-29686627

Mike Laidler

Climbing Montaigne

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What do we know? Just posing the question is suggestive of something remarkable – of looking to the unknown behind the known with an implicit wisdom that transcends the explicit knowing, with a doubt that makes a mockery of not doubting.

But the moment we stop doubting we stagnate – for ignorance is born of what we think we know, and no certainty is as certain as the desire for the truth to be ours.

And science has found that we can carry on indefinitely, gathering mountains of evidence in support of our pet theories, and still be wrong.

© Mike Laidler 2015

Naked Emperors

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Logic and reason and their derivatives in the language of persuasion and explanation, are like naked emperors in the face of truths yet to be revealed, being adorned in the semblance of their own authority, to authorise the facts that authorise them to be right in the meantime – whilst followers rally to the call: ‘Here is the reason for the facts being true’.

Mike Laidler

Taking chances

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Looking at the chances of the universe being the way it is, the supposed possibility that its causes can happen by chance neither explains how chance happens nor how inevitabilities intervene – to establish boundaries of possibility, which delimit what happens next. And there is no calculator in pure unbounded chance for considering the possible range of consequences, including the possibility of chance being overridden by the occurrence of something else – such as the emergence of deliberation and the known non-random results of its calculations.

Nevertheless, we continue to wonder how possibility is possible, even if by chance, as we observe in reality, possibilities for chance that invite us to perceive the outcome as made possible by chance.

© Mike Laidler 2014

Theories to Order

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If we take ourselves off into science to explore the second law of thermodynamics, quantum mechanics or genetics and their implications for the question of how order arises from chaos, we will afterwards be able to return to the debate armed with the knowledge that the question still remains unanswered.

© Mike Laidler 2014

‘Orangality’

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Scientific studies show that mankind and great apes share ‘personality dimensions’. We are all very intelligent animals. The Orangutan is said to qualify especially for the title ‘non-human person’ – because of their social abilities, they have been observed to spend less time on social issues and more time thinking.

Mike Laidler

A fact by what fact?

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In what belief do we conjure a fact? As if the facts we discover do the seeing for us, as if it is the evidence that makes us see; as if knowledge is more secure when attached to facts that see nothing and know nothing of themselves?

Then is the claim to make a factual discovery not a figment of our perception, implying that the facts are the cause of the seeing, when all we see is our version of the seeing?

So does knowledge not come down to our ascriptions of authority – such as when ‘we’ claimed to discover America as representatives of a knowledge that the indigenous inhabitants could not equal?

© Mike Laidler 2014