The peculiar business of being human

[Xamonas Chegwé]

On the serious side.

I'm with Buddha when it comes to this question.
Don't bother with the question why? It can drive a man insane. There may not be a why?

Actually, I think your previous post was the more serious.

[FBM]

On the serious side.

I'm with Buddha when it comes to this question.
Don't bother with the question why? It can drive a man insane. There may not be a why?

Actually, I think your previous post was the more serious.

I think he was being serious. The 'imponderables' in Buddhism were defined because chasing the answers to them doesn't lead to wisdom or happiness. We can describe how gravity works, for example, but we still don't have the slightest notion of why it behaves thus. Why do opposite charges attract? Why is angular momentum conserved, but not photon number? Fucked if I know, and I seriously doubt there will ever be such answers. I think 'why' questions unavoidably lead to infinite regress.

[Xamonas Chegwé]

On the serious side.

I'm with Buddha when it comes to this question.
Don't bother with the question why? It can drive a man insane. There may not be a why?

Actually, I think your previous post was the more serious.

I think he was being serious. The 'imponderables' in Buddhism were defined because chasing the answers to them doesn't lead to wisdom or happiness. We can describe how gravity works, for example, but we still don't have the slightest notion of why it behaves thus. Why do opposite charges attract? Why is angular momentum conserved, but not photon number? Fucked if I know, and I seriously doubt there will ever be such answers. I think 'why' questions unavoidably lead to infinite regress.

Actually, there almost certainly are theories for all of those, and quite possibly work in progress to test those theories. The discovery of the Higgs Boson by the LHC at Cern would go a long way towards ticking a few more fundamental physics boxes - and obviously reveal a lot more.

But my post was dead serious too. The only reasonable answer to "Why is there something instead of nothing?" is "Why not?" IMO.

[FBM]

On the serious side.

I'm with Buddha when it comes to this question.
Don't bother with the question why? It can drive a man insane. There may not be a why?

Actually, I think your previous post was the more serious.

I think he was being serious. The 'imponderables' in Buddhism were defined because chasing the answers to them doesn't lead to wisdom or happiness. We can describe how gravity works, for example, but we still don't have the slightest notion of why it behaves thus. Why do opposite charges attract? Why is angular momentum conserved, but not photon number? Fucked if I know, and I seriously doubt there will ever be such answers. I think 'why' questions unavoidably lead to infinite regress.

Actually, there almost certainly are theories for all of those, and quite possibly work in progress to test those theories. The discovery of the Higgs Boson by the LHC at Cern would go a long way towards ticking a few more fundamental physics boxes - and obviously reveal a lot more.

Yes, but those theories will just lead to more 'why' questions, right? No end to the regress...

But my post was dead serious too. The only reasonable answer to "Why is there something instead of nothing?" is "Why not?" IMO.

Yeah, that's kinda where I was going, but more along the lines of, 'That's just the way it is. Get used to it.'

[Rum]

Not as peculiar as being a testicle.

Bollocks.

[Animavore]

Not as peculiar as being a testicle.

Bollocks.

Whatever you want to call it, its pretty strange.

[Trolldor]

I have put this in the atheism and religion section, though I am not sure it actually belongs here. Never mind.

Does the sheer bizarre strangeness of being human ever enter your mind? Today I had a sudden insight into it and it occurred to me that everything is contingent, contextual, human centred (from our perspective) and actually virtual in that we project all our meaning onto the world.

Before people understood light there were theories that it was generated in the eye and went out to the world to see it. It seems to me that this is exactly what the mind does. There is no 'chairness' just the idea of a chaor projected onto some wood, for example.

And this is just one small example of peculiarness.

I knew the acid would bite back over the years..

The chairs is there, it is as much a chair as it always will be. How we see it is irrelevant. The chair is exactly as we see it, as well as all the ways we don't.

[ScholasticSpastic]

The chairs is there, it is as much a chair as it always will be. How we see it is irrelevant. The chair is exactly as we see it, as well as all the ways we don't.

The chair is there, I'll agree. But I think what is being said is that the designation 'chair' is a designation of purpose rather than being. The chair is a collection of wood/metal/fabric/plastic which has been assembled to serve as a chair. The materials exist independently of our perception of them, but the chairness is entirely a product of our mind. A tired hiker may assign chairness to a fallen log or an opportune rock. There is no chairness in or of the objects which we assign the designation 'chair.' It's all in our heads.

I would argue, though, that assigning purpose to things is not a human peculiarity. I would imagine that purpose assignment preceeds observation of materials as we progress up the slope of sentience. Our ancestors were probably assigning purpose to things before they were constructing things for purposes. Our pets likely assign purpose to things with little or no thought about what they're made of. Categorization is probably not the sole domain of human intelligence.

We should keep in mind that our brains are very much like the brains of other mammals. It would be a big surprise if our basic perceptual processes didn't match up with analogous processes going on in other mammalian brains. The real mystery is how much brain is required for basic categorization. Mammals categorize. Birds categorize. Do reptiles categorize? Do fish? What about insects? That's a much more exciting question, for me, than the question of why we do it.

[Trolldor]

We don't assign 'chariness' to anything, though.
There are rocks which "were chairs" long before we knew of chairs. The shape wasn't invented by us, nor the function. My dog likes to sit on soft ground. Our bodies are shaped in such a way that the 'chair shape' is comfortable to us.
That's all it is.
We give it names because we like to have names to identify things, it doesn't mean we made them, or the concepts of them, or purpose. I don't think of a chair as 'for sitting', I think of a chair as 'a place I like to sit'. But that doesn't mean I can't walk on it or jump on it or throw it around, or draw pictures on it or use it as a percussion instrument.

[ScholasticSpastic]

Are you arguing that there is 'chairness' in the world? I buy that there are rocks and trees and polymers, but 'chairness' seems a bit of a stretch. 'Chairness' has no specific object. It is an abstract concept, just like 'houseness' or 'society' or the boundaries of a garden. We create those containers in our minds. I certainly don't buy that there is some Platonic ideal of 'chairness' which is reified in a perfect dimension, after which all our terrestrial incidences of 'chairness' are modeled. (This should not be construed as a straw-man argument. I am not accusing you of Platonic Idealism, BAA.)

Some things simply do not exist beyond our minds. Social conventions. Some (admitedly dwindling) cultures do not have chairs. The film The Gods Must be Crazy made the point well, chronicling the journey of a glass Coke bottle through an African culture and all the uses to which they put it. Turns out it wasn't a bottle at all. It was all sorts of things, depending upon what they needed it to be. I don't think they once used it for a bottle in that film. Of course, this is a fictional example, but it makes the point well. We make things for purposes, those things exist, once made, independently of their purpose, and their purpose does not inhere in them. Their purpose inheres in us. (I'm realizing, right now, that my argument comes perilously close to the NRA's assertion that "guns don't kill people, people kill people." My only solace is that only an utter idiot would use a loaded gun for anything but shooting. Of course, an unloaded gun would probably make an exceptional hammer. Is there 'hammerness' in the gun?)

[Trolldor]

I am saying that we call it a chair because we like labels. We simplify things by assigning 'duties' to them. The shape of a chair is not an invention by man, the act of sitting is not exclusive to man, it just so happens that the two combined are what we use.
In other words, both these aspects exist externally and objectively, we just combine them internally.

[ScholasticSpastic]

I am saying that we call it a chair because we like labels. We simplify things by assigning 'duties' to them. The shape of a chair is not an invention by man, the act of sitting is not exclusive to man, it just so happens that the two combined are what we use.
In other words, both these aspects exist externally and objectively, we just combine them internally.

Let's see if I understand what you're saying by paraphrasing (a common conversational tactic which has often gotten me accused of building men of straw, when the actual purpose of the practice is more like mutual calibration of definitions):

We are embodied beings. The shape of our body necessitates certain universal behaviors which exist independently of our intentions. One of these behaviors is the need to periodically rest our large muscles. One way we rest our large muscles is by sitting down. There exist objects in the world with shapes condusive to sitting. Those objects, by virtue of their shape, have 'chairness.'

You seem to be building the case that the potential to be used as a chair, and the fact that our need to sit and the object's existence are both objective, conspire to produce objectivity in our assignment of 'chairness.' I would argue that there are a great many categories we build which, while anchored in objective existence, do not themselves exist objectively. I may assign 'chairness' to an object and sit when another would not agree with my assignment of 'chairness' to that object, either due to an objection to the materials of which my chair consists or due to their big, fat ass. The object is then not a chair for the objector. They have chosen not to assign 'chairness' to the object. The fact that not all chairs are chairs, and the dependency of this function upon the chair designator, would seem to indicate that 'chairness' is subjective, not objective.

[Trolldor]

Not all chairs are chairs, but not everything we sit on is a chair. We have stools and benches and couches, stumps, rocks, footpaths and so on and so forth. A chair designed specifically for sitting does not exist, there are only objects which are in the optimal (sometimes, depending on quality) position for us to comfortably sit which we call chairs because we need labels for things. Chairs exist objectively, merely as objects. The 'chairness', or the association of sitting on that shape, is a combination of objective elements. The sum of the parts constitute the whole, chairs exist objectively, it is the purpose which is invented. Apes, monkeys, and even canines and felines have used chairs in the same way we have, including body posture, which merely suggests that chairs are a shape which we give a label to, much like sitting is merely a label for the action. What it is actually used for is irrelevant. You don't call a stump a chair because it doesn't have the right shape, and yet a 420 foot steel model in that shape would be the world's largest chair despite the fact that nobody would ever sit on it.

[Xamonas Chegwé]

A chair designed specifically for sitting does not exist

I am sure that there are any number of designers that would disagree with that statement.

Chairness is a purely human concept but a well recognised one. If it were still possible to find an isolated tribe in a jungle somewhere, and could introduce a plain, wooden chair to them surreptitiously, they would recognise its function (or at least recognise 'being a chair' as one of a possible range of functions - along with firewood.)

To a woodworm, however, the wooden chair is merely food. To a wild cat, it could be seen as shelter from the rain or a vantage point from which to spy out mice. To a cow, it is of no interest whatsoever, unless it happens to be in the way, in which case it is merely an object to be walked around.

[Trolldor]

Designers do not determine the function of an object, only an intent.