The End of Philosophy

In 100 years time, circa lets say 2120, Human beings will recognize the mid 20th and early 21st centuries as an important phase shift which essentially demarcates "real philosophy" and "confused philosophy".

I am currently reading Fromm, who in turn seems to enjoy referencing ancient philosophers like "Meister Eckhart". I think to myself, "you know, a lot of people around today think real knowledge comes from the past. They're mystified/enchanted by the thought of it. The present is so disenchanted, that they think the way to truth is to seek out "lost knowledge"".

This is true, and I know it so - because I myself went through such a phase. That this past became a "phase" to me to begin with a is a function of systems theory, and the sheer power of its framework.

Systems theory, in effect, is nothing more than taking the knowledge so far attained by science, and thinking about how all these processes interact to form a phenomenon in question. The Earth - its life, the biosphere, is all intimately linked with non-living processes like astrophysical radiation, geothermal magnetic events and volcanism. The Human, in turn is a "mega self-organizing system", involving an astronomical number of atoms (bout 26 zeros worth) around 50 trillion cells, all of which are timed to coordinate their activities in such a way to organize a coherent organic whole. Each element - each feature - has a logical diachronic cause. The history of our form is "written into us" by the environments we've moved through. Davinci's representation hides this fact; there is no history of the trees we once lived within that gave us our prehensile functions. Hands are intimately apart of what makes us Human. And hands required an earlier evolutionary stage of being.

Nietzsche and all so called "ancient philosophies", including Meister Eckhart, were attempts - attempts, at making sense of life when human beings weren't sufficiently organized enough to produce good knowledge. The childhood, or todays "adolescence", must be accepted, and the Human must grow up to understand what the real truth - or at least the truth as conceived by a systematic physical description of the emergence of Human consciousness itself.

I find it difficult reading these ancient works, not only because most of them are intrinsically ambiguous in their meanings, and so depend on interpolation by historian/scholars, but that compared to modern day knowledge and understanding, based in the sophisticated approaches of neuroscience and cognitive science and relational psychoanalysis, deprives people of a knowledge-system that would make clear, and thus modify, how our human minds operate, and how we experience ourselves in relation to one another.

Of course, no doubt, the paradigm shift is still underway, and not many would feel as confident or act as "brazenly" as I do by claiming that most philosophy (not all) written before the transition to a systems perspective, beginning in earnest in the late 80's, is so off-base and so over-confident in its assertions, that it does more good than bad. Seeding especially a simplistic idea of "being", in opposition to "having", setting itself in opposition with a borderline autistic alienation from feeling, which animates so much philosophy i.e. Daniel Dennett, Steven Pinker, Patricia Churchland, and the like, feel, and think, like self-alienated humans, trying their best, from their computer-like minds (having developed through that metaphor) to explain to normal humans how human thought works. Dennett for instance, doesn't think consciousness is real. Pinker thinks as if affect doesn't exist - or play any fundamental organization of an organisms teleodynamism (a term he doesn't even think with, to his loss). Churchland is the crudest of the bunch, wanting to replace "folk psychological" terms - such as love, kindness, etc, with "scientific terms" such as biophysical processes.

This sort of insanity - rightly insane - agitates the emotions of some thinkers that the whole endeavor of science and the remarkable "light switch" of systems theory as the discovery that matters - remains unknown, because they're embittered in their relationship to the sciences and so don't even recognize that the culture is changing and is gaining more and more momentum. The coming age is the "age of emergence", in contrast to the "age of reductionism".

This transition will also be accompanied by the "green revolution", which is natural and normal, as a 'greening' of our human environments represents the external manifestation of an internal and intellectual understanding of reality which returns us to the "whole". Understanding this whole is transformative, because it feels like a "final" sort of knowledge. To know how things are connected and how you emerge through this connection is the right sort of knowledge - the right pathway, that will lead humans to an even deeper understanding of reality.

Reductionism got us the ingredients of our reality, but it destroyed human social processes - and so human selves - in the process of doing it. The era is typified by fantasy - and no one who interfaced with this fantasy and was affectively enlivened with it gets away scot free. The enlivenment becomes assimilated, and the mind now has a "new thirst" - which, if not articulated and explicitly known, will play its role in directing the activities of consciousness.

The Age of Emergence is bound to be the age of psychodynamic self-understanding. The Self as a system will become essential knowledge in education because without it, Humans inevitably return to their antisocial proclivities. Changing a system is never neutral. It is hard, painful, and traumatic, because a system change for a Human being means depression - acceptance and mourning of losses - before the transition occurs. It's the fear of the transition - of the depression, anxiety, and fear that one is left in - that underlies human stubbornness. But of course - the fact that love, care, and attunement to another's specific needs, is what underlies brain-expansion, it should not be surprising that the expression of such behavior equilibrates minds which feel fear. It is the embodiment of a "deeper symmetry", where the embodiment of the other one interacts with exists with care in the thinkers mental stream. Such a state is continuity. It is consistent with and operates from earlier truths: such as the symmetry of connection that brings animals into play; or humans into friendly connection. The situation of trauma - or being "miswired", produces feelings of sadism and masochism, the wedding of pleasure with death, which Freud certainly had an accurate sense of, that makes self-knowledge ABSOLUTELY necessary to any societal rehabilitation. Psychodynamics, then, will serve that, when the time is ready, as the general traumas of Human history and the evolution of masculinistic cultures which champion certain values, like competition, greed and fun, really serve to hide/dissociate from the responsibilities we all have to one another and the natural world itself if we want to survive and continue.

In the end, Humans will become more humble. The assumptions of "knowing" will be constrained by a more philosophically oriented education which absorbs the facts of science/reality, and so accepts the necessity of a certain 'agnostic wonder' at the reality we exist within.

Maybe there is real meat in what we are told not to consider ...lest we find the truth ...Banned TED Talk: The Science Delusion - Rupert Sheldrake at TEDx Whitechapel www.youtube.com...

oh and my fave theory

a reply to: Astrocyte

you have raised some very good points here. it is true that a strictly materialist perspective can be detrimental to psychology. but i would argue that what you call the "reductionist argument" has been instrumental to the humility and self awareness of mankind. its hard to feed the ego when you realize the mundane components of our physical presence. its hard to dismiss the individual pieces of the seemingly miraculous puzzle when you are aware of the most minute mechanisms that give structure and motion to the synergetic whole. i feel the real issue here is finding a balance between reductionism and sentimentality, the sweet spot between a majestic painting of the sunrise and a grasp of the physics that hide beneath its deceptive simplicity. i suppose you might call it a tactful blending of the HOW and the WHY. the how gives us the means to comprehend the world so that we might better maintain our relationship within the framework of reality. the why gives us a reason to do so wisely and lovingly, and why it matters that we do so. each by itself has its own rewards, but together...together you have an understanding of understanding, a fractal insight that reflects the world reflecting its organs reflecting the cosmos reflecting subatomic physics reflecting thought reflecting flesh. intuition begets intuition and for those with both philosophical lenses and technical savvy, it is all a vast game of connect the dots. and that introspective self aware understanding is the soil in which all of our virtues and lessons take root. not just doing, not just being, not just feeling, but groking that which we produce and behold for it is the personification of our relationship with reality and a reflection of what we are inside. if that makes any sense.

Have a nice pic for u.

a reply to: TzarChasm

that introspective self aware understanding* is the soil in which all of our virtues and lessons take root.

But it's not just an understanding, it's also an experience, where we are constantly receiving information from our senses yet to be understood..

Omnipotence would be incredibly boring if it were possible. Thankfully it's not. but science has not yet come to terms with that.

a reply to: Astrocyte

Accuracy and completeness. How do you know you've achieved accuracy and completeness?

No matter how solid you think you model for reality represents nature's behaviors, there will always be rogue waves of measurements not explainable by the artificial limitations imposed by the abstractions of your representation. Nature is not the map we use to represent it. Nature always has much more detail than anything we can do to represent it.

When you talk about completeness you have take into account the thinking of Kurt Gödel:

What are the philosophical implications of Gödel's First Incompleteness Theorem?

I've studied Gödel's incompleteness proof in college. Mathematics is a language for symbolic abstraction. It seemed to me Gödel's proof had meaning to any symbolic system of abstraction. Although Gödel claimed many times his proof only had implications to systems of arithmetic I think he was just avoiding being controversial.

So when I hear someone say we've reached the "End of Philosophy" it makes me wonder. The more we know less we know. One man's dogma is another man's delusions.

originally posted by: 0racle
a reply to: TzarChasm

that introspective self aware understanding* is the soil in which all of our virtues and lessons take root.

But it's not just an understanding, it's also an experience, where we are constantly receiving information from our senses yet to be understood..

Omnipotence would be incredibly boring if it were possible. Thankfully it's not. but science has not yet come to terms with that.

Science hasn't come to terms with omnipotence being boring or omnipotence being impossible? Aside from the ambiguity of what science has yet to come to terms with, let's assume the idea is omnipotence in the sense of understanding everything.

It's funny how science uses abstractions and models to represent nature. As computers become more power, more information is added to the models which requires even more processing power. What if the amount of information needed to understand reality is equal to reality itself. And the computational speed you would need to simulate would have to be so fast that the speed would have to equal the speed of reality itself. In other words, reality is so complicated and so much is going on, there just isn't a computer big enough to hold all of the information. If you did have one, the computer would be reality itself in size.

This is kind of like imagining how imagination-works-in-the-mind actually works when your mind is only capable of imagining it's own thoughts. Imagination may not be powerful enough to imagine just how imagination works.

a reply to: dfnj2015

It's funny how science uses abstractions and models to represent nature. As computers become more power, more information is added to the models which requires even more processing power. What if the amount of information needed to understand reality is equal to reality itself. And the computational speed you would need to simulate would have to be so fast that the speed would have to equal the speed of reality itself. In other words, reality is so complicated and so much is going on, there just isn't a computer big enough to hold all of the information. If you did have one, the computer would be reality itself in size.
[/quote AI's biggest problem is that it needs a body . We have a intelligence but we also have a body ...the computer does not . I think its Jordan Peterson that makes some good points about that .

a reply to: 0racle

Nice boobs

Ta Panta: The Re-Enchantment of Chaos

It's all imaginary
it's all real

it's all ephemeral
all eternal

every little gesture
every racing emotion

every breathless whisper
every dark and mystical room
overflowing with night air and moonlight

nothing is ever lost
truth is what is not forgotten
suffering, we learn
learning is remembering
the pain you give me
brings me back to myself
and I remember
who and what I was
before I had eyes or ears or even chloroplasts

the symbol on my hand is changing
on fire
like all of gleaming reality itself
the pearl of price which blinds the impoverished merchants
who wander naked and lost
hawking all their wares on every noisome corner

the fire is all consuming
all sanctifying
all purifying
all changing
all revealing

I am in the fire
and in the fire, all is holy
and every last thing is eternally in flames (even the merchants)
and sleep is the great activity
and death is a dear friend
who betrays with one kiss
but whose betrayal is love incarnate

I am one
with my many selves
and though I may be above you
you hear my voice
you fumble after the meaning until it finds you

I am
the light bursting out of a broken lantern
the diamond with an infinite number of perfect cuts
the voice crying milk and honey into the wilderness
the children's song that flies above the lamentation up on the desert plane
the melody that found its way into your equations
the dream that startles you wide awake
the life that pulsates in decay and corruption
the happily ever after horror story

I am
the unstoppable force
that meets the immovable object
and the result is nothing

nothing but the purest, clearest light
that has never entered the mind

take heart, my love
the raging storms of your own neurochemical electricity
will give birth to their own silence
all thought is designed to produce its own resounding negation
all speech is born to fade beautifully
all music is played until it is over
and it's closing time
and the bars empty
and the streets grow silent and still under the street lights

and the last enemy, who you fear with the Great Fear
unmasks herself, a friend and a lover
The Lover of lovers
and trembling
you fall forever into her holy and erotic embrace

Copyright © Justin Aptaker | Year Posted 2017

www.poetrysoup.com...

Philosophy ends when mankind is all knowing and implying otherwise is complete bull#.

a reply to: Kashai

knowledge is the HOW. philosophy is the WHY.

a reply to: TzarChasm


Knowledge at this very moment could in a billion years be an equivalent to how we described knowledge, before Humans figured out how to make fire.

a reply to: dfnj2015

So when I hear someone say we've reached the "End of Philosophy" it makes me wonder. The more we know less we know. One man's dogma is another man's delusions.

On a related epistemological issue, can I ask you a question? How much knowledge do you have vis-à-vis fields like physics or biology? Have you read into systems biology, epigenetics, the work of Ilya Prgogine (dissipative structures), Stuart Kauffman, Terrence Deacon, Mae Wan Ho, Brian Goodwin, Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson, Arthur Zajonc, Jesper Hoffmeyer, Wendy Wheeler, Frederick Stjernfelt, Harold Morowitz, Allan Schore, Dan Siegel and many others who stand "behind me" as the specific books I've read, and therefore, information I've assimilated into my brain?

This is a grating issue for me, because its obvious: the mind is not built to know "everything". It is, or becomes, what it is functionally involved in. The environment and mind "link up", but in a dissociative world which compartmentalizes Human beings into performing cognitively myopic routines, the mind-brain will become functionally "fit" for a reduced range of behavior, and therefore, perception. Knowing - or cognition - depends upon perceiving, or being attuned to what is there.

Egotism is basically an affective disturbance. When listening is necessary - list, as in to "to aspire", the mind becomes conceptually open, because it has instituted an attitudinal change that lets itself feel vulnerable, instead of putting up a resistance.

What are the philosophical implications of Gödel's First Incompleteness Theorem?

See, this is not sound reasoning. Were talking about determinable patterns in nature which are inherently based in symmetrty. Symmetry because the primary metaphor - the new "it" term, because describes an essential dynamic that underlies material processes from quarks all the way ecosystems. Balance and complementarity pervades everything.

"In a universe where A no longer causes B, it turns out that A and B can be two sides of the same coin. To give an example from the natural world, in Africa, lions and gazelles share the same water holes. In the scheme of things, lions eat gazelles run away from lions. But when it comes to water, they coexist. The lions can't keep the gazelles from drinking entirely or else their prey would die of dehydration. The gazelles can’t run away automatically, because then they would get no water. Over millions of years, the two species have found a way to make complementary compromises with their opposites roles as eater and eaten." – Deepak Chopra, Menas Kafatos, You Are The Universe, pg. 135, Harmony, 2017

The main thing I want to emphasize is this: your knowledge is limited to your relations. There is no possible source of knowledge that isn't earned, or attained, via some interaction with a system outside you. This being the case, when you criticize me for "how do I think I know", I of course am making that state in terms of the world we live within - how it works - the laws of transformation it follows. That's a complete sort of knowledge since it describes quarks all the way up to Human minds.

If a problem persists, or if the issue doesn't solved, I don't understand how Gödel's theorem should dominate our attention. Gödel's theorem, of course, is chaos. It describes chaos, so why on earth would one want to station his mind/being in such a place, as if that were a Human's natural abode?

It takes years of psychotherapy to unearth a persons infatuation with death and dysfunction. Affective orientations i.e. the basis of our values, are strictly under the laws of transformation we call "early life development". Yes, certain affective states and states of consciousness felt by a parent will communicate and "in-form" the developing affective systems of the child. This is a fact, and I would hope, be accepted as an important and useful piece of information - and not be dissociated and treated as irrelevant as if the issue - and your beliefs - weren't wound up in a condition of unresolved traumas?

Some people don't like that word "trauma", or "shame", because they activate us in ways that sort of compel the thought "pussy", if you happen to be "attracted", teleodynamically speaking, to identifying with a tough-guy image.

Even more generally, we live in society that conditions us - and so constrains our capacities for knowing - because it makes us afraid to acknowledge how our amydgalas have been imprinted. A$$hole faces and voices are not unnoticed, and our consciousness is not unaffected in it's orientedness by such cuing. We are constrained and shaped by our environments whether we like to admit it or not, that's an ontological fact. Your brain is "around" your consciousness, setting the parameters for how you know. From the visual representations and audial representations, etc, to affective representations - or 'experiences', since affect in a very real since "bounds" all sense modalities into an enlivened percept - all this is happening because neurons in my brain are somehow converting external light into an "internal light": my consciousness. My dog has a light, but it doesn't know that it knows. Its social connections are limited, and, perhaps, not having hands, have not been placed at any evolutionary advantage to evolve a more evolved cognition.

Here's a question to you though: if systems theory and its laws of transformations becomes recognized as an official explanation of the universe up until the present moment, it changes, it seems, our whole existential relationship to the universe around us. Symmetry, of course, is reflected in Human beings as love. Inter-subjectivity, or "thinking about the other's needs", is a literal symmetry of the other, or internalization of the other in one organisms mind and vice versa. This is a temporal symmetry of transformation - or synchronized interaction between forebrains.

People fail to realize that Humankind is 200,000 years old. That number is mammoth - very old. We only have a recorded history that goes back 5,000 years. We have evidence of cities going back 7,000 years, and villages 10,000 years ago. Do you understand the span of time, nevermind the originating context, and, perhaps, how an originatin context may have fostered a completely different brain-structure, inasmuch as the amygdala is an uncertainty detecting system, and uncertainty, as this modern world shows, is about differences and distinctions i.e. "strangers". Truth is, our unconscious memory is true: there really was an eden, and it really did produce a difference sense of human reality while it lasted. It ended, evidently, and most likely, via some traumatic environmental disturbance that set humans on a different behavioral course. That's my theory, anyways.

But as to the symmetry thing. This is a view assumed by many scientists, foremost Camelo Castillo.

the speed would have to equal the speed of reality itself. a reply to: dfnj2015
Now that is living phylosophy! seems to be never ending to me.