Why do we even bother? (with metaphysical questions)

Great Debates
1

We were looking at some old pictures today with my daughter (who is under seven) and there was a picture with “Santa” visiting some gathering of children. I said “Oh, there’s Santa”. She said “No, that’s just <some family friend>”. I said “How do you know?”.

She went on to use some logical arguments, based on how the “real Santa” acts, to show that the person in the picture could not have been the real Santa.

What interested me was the fact that, even though she got the conclusion right (i.e. that person was not Santa, it was the family friend my daughter suspected), and even though her arguments were logical, her arguments were based on an erroneous assumption, namely, that Santa Clause exists and that he behaves in a certain way.

She can not even fathom (at this age), that the central assumption in her arguments was false. Which made me see how futile her efforts at logical reasoning based on this false assumption were.

This in turn made me think how futile our efforts most probably are when we try to reason about the nature of existence/reality. This is because many of our assumptions (about what it means to exist, what it means for something to be “outside” our universe, etc) are most probably wrong.

The question for debate is, is it futile to logically debate about the ultimate nature of reality, when, no matter how logically correct our arguments might be, they are likely based on some erroneous assumptions, and we can never know which assumptions are correct or not.

To put it simply, to make a logical argument, you need some assumptions and then you need to follow the rules of logic to come to some conclusion. Sometimes logic can be used to show that the assumptions are false (e.g if they are logically inconsistent), but most “well constructed” assumptions are not logically inconsistent, and therefore cannot be shown to be false using logic.

In that case, you are arguing correctly, but your conclusions are meaningless.

My experience today made me think that maybe all of our (as humanity) metaphysical discussions and logical reasonings are meaningless.

What say you?

2

And yet she would in future recognise a real elephant having only ever seen photos and being told properties thereof. She has been showed images of an old bearded man in red and been told that this entity had properties of immortality, flight and the ability to negotiate any chimney. The image you showed her seemed, to her, inconsistent with those properties. Whether, somewhere in the universe, there is an entity having these properties is irrelevant to your daughter’s cognitive processes.

It passes the time pleasantly before I die. Is that “futile”?

Neuroscientifically, “meaning” and “significance” appear to be judgements made in the brain’s temporal lobes. When I have discussions like this, it feels like my significance-judgement modules are outputting higher than during, say, sorting my washing.

3

That has probably been the most definitive lesson I’ve taken from away from debating here on the SDMB. More distressingly, there’s no end in sight to this dialectical wankery. I’ve sullied myself enough with the effort, and have learned through the exercise (I’ll call it an heuristic revelation, so I won’t feel quite so dirty) perhaps the best way to combat this wasting disease of ill-spent neuronal metabolism is to simply disengage. There are enough difficult problems that are at least soluble in principle to stimulate the mind and hone logical analytical skill; and they have the benefit of yielding more than the appearance of a victorious argument for the effort.

I do recognize that some people find philosophizing pleasing for its aesthetic benefits, and for them I think the practical uselessness of the typical subject matter is more than compensated for by the percieved beauty of it. To each their own, of course, when it comes to tastes. I personally find the arts far more satisfying in that capacity, even moreso because good art needn’t cloak its “mere” aestetic value with the abstruse and esoteric in a effort to inflate its apparent importance to problems where pragmatic considerations are the only ones which will yield demonstrative answers to all who might apply themselves (when such answers are attainable, at least).

Why do people even bother? I have no idea anymore. I suspect it’s something of a self-perpetuating tic of the mind, an autoreenforcing need to both seek the unattainable and flatter one’s own conceptions of themselves and their self-affirming view of “reality”. Without the metaphysical they feel they are aimless and worthless, and perhaps they are right.

4

Cruel words, Loopy! I give in! I’ll contribute to this thread no more and go and play my guitar! :slight_smile:

I guess that even though my most fundamental premises might be, it is still worth exploring the logical consequences of all the various paths, drawing a complete philosophical “map”, so that important new apparent facts (such as the discovery under a Finnish glacier of an advanced flying robot who manufactured and delivered toys) don’t immediately leave me lost.

5

“might be false”, sorry

6

Wittgenstein was wont to suggest to his better students that they should abandon philosophy and work with their hands, and that philosophy’s only use was to demonstrate the pointlessness of philosophy. This pissed off the other philosophy profs, as it threatened their livelihood.

Loopydude and Polerius, by their very comments, are philosophising.

7

I’ve wondered about that, and I must concede it’s quite possible that one cannot not discuss philosophy without philosphising. The first stage of healing, of course, is recognizing the problem, so it’s best to acknowledge that, I suppose.

Hence, no more to say on the subject!

8

Could there be a more ironic thread title? :smiley:

9

From The Book of Bokonon, as described in Kurt Vonnegut Jr.'s Cat’s Cradle:

*Tiger got to hunt
Bird got to fly
Man got to wonder why, why, why

Tiger got to eat
Bird got to land
Man got to tell himself he understand*

Bokononism is a most recondite religious faith. I urge you all to study it carefully: http://www.cs.uni.edu/~wallingf/personal/bokonon.html

10

Yes, but so what?

I didn’t say that philosophising might be futile. I said philosophising about the nature of reality might be futile.

But, that is not the only subject one can philosophise about. From Wikipedia, here are some questions philosophy can tackle:
[ul]
[li] What is truth? How or why do we identify a statement as correct or false, and how do we reason?[/li] [li] Is knowledge possible? How do we know what we know?[/li] [li] Is there a difference between morally right and wrong actions (or values, or institutions)? If so, what is that difference? Which actions are right, and which wrong? Are values absolute, or relative? In general or particular terms, how should I live?[/li] [li] What is reality, and what things can be described as real? What is the nature of those things? Do some things exist independently of our perception? What is the nature of space and time? What is the nature of thought and thinking? What is it to be a person?[/li] [li] What is it to be beautiful? How do beautiful things differ from the everyday? What is Art?[/li][/ul]

So, one can philosophise about all the above subjects (minus the one about the nature of reality) and it won’t be futile. It would be a non-practical endeavor (since, what practical value is there to discussing what it is to be beautiful?), but it won’t be futile in the sense that you make all these nice, logical arguments, only to have your conclusions being totally false because your assumptions about the nature of reality were false.

In some sense, the other questions are intellectual passtimes, and I don’t think it’s possible for your assumptions on what it is to be beautiful to be wrong. But your assumptions about the nature of reality can definitely turn out to be false.

So, the idea in the OP is that it’s OK to philosophise, but philosophising about the nature of reality seems futile.

11

No, I think not.

Wittgenstein, on reading this thread, would have emphatically agreed with the OP. He believed that all so-called “deep philosophical problems” were actually mere semantic puzzles that we created for ourselves without even realizing it.

My own opinion? I agree with SentientMeat. Even if all we are doing is pointlessly flexing our logic muscle, it certainly can’t detract from our knowledge of the universe, as long as we do it in the right way. The wrong way is to come to a set of beliefs and stay there, refusing to even listen to other options.

There’s a reason that “playing devil’s advocate” is so much fun.

12

It does seem to be some sort of tic of the mind.

I would much prefer it if I never had questions about the universe and the nature of reality pop up in my head all the time, and I could just go about my daily life experiencing the universe instead of analyzing it (since (a) questioning it and analyzing it seems like a futile endeavor and (b) people who experience life instead of analyzing it seem, on the average, happier).

But the questions return. It must be a tic of the mind. Or, I need to find a new way to find out more answers.

13

And therefore, he would have agreed that the thread title is ironic. Irony is a semantic construct.

14

This is an interesting point. That is, even if this philosophical map has no relationship to our actual universe or reality, it is the map that logically follows from the basic assumptions. And finding this map for any set of basic assumptions seems like an interesting problem. (As long as we don’t convince ourselves that this map describes this world)