“Science shows us the world and new developments reveal the intricate structure of the world” This is not how it is. Science is the greatest, most popular road to nowhere. Why is this? I will tell you.
We began the enterprise of revealing the world by matching what was revealed in it to what we knew could be revealed in it. When this failed we invented quantum mechanics. And so failure played an honoured role in our revelations.
Science has partially accomodated the failure of discovery and called it quantum mechanics. But this failure is only partial. What we need is total failure, for there can be no discoveries. Science has yet to fail utterly, but it must, and will. For there are no objects in the world: the world of objects, appearances, and knowledge vanishes at our death.
We construct a world from utter vacuity. Quantum mechanics is not advancement - it is our first sign of this utter emptiness.
Quantum mechanics is in no way to blame for the failure of science. If anything qm reveals and helps us understand the great richness of life, what’s behind the physical world so to speak. I think it’s the inability to see science as a tool instead of as a be all end all for life that accounts for the great failure of this human experiment on earth. What many of us have failed to learn is that using science as a weapon of mass destruction means our own destruction too.
I wouldn’t push the big red button. I disagree because the experiment isn’t over… everything has it’s time. That’s what’s so nice about life and death. Once we realize it is our time we will have no problem closing our eyes and ultimately our minds one last time. I feel God went through the same and ultimately ended himself to make everything have it’s time, he created creation and creation created itself because it is unlike perfection; it is free.
No I see what you are saying and I agree to the degree that this universe is like a fence for our mind making us sheep. We think we have a shepherd…but we are free sheep if there is such a thing.
This is totally absurd. There are no objects in this world? The Wittgensteinian answer here is that we just have a faulty definition for the word “object.” What does it even mean to say, “There are no objects in this world.” That is meaningless gobbledygook. What is your definition of an object? You are raising problems of semantics. That is great, I love it, but don’t talk semantics and then make broad metaphysical claims about these semantic objects in the same breath. If you’re going to call into question “objecthood,” it only hurts your case to say something like “there are no objects in the world.” Doing so just reinforces the current flawed conception of the object. Is quantum mechanics a failure if there really are no objects?
This is solipsism at its finest. You are right to articulate this sort of claim in the context of your argument, because it is central to it. “Great materiality.” What does that mean? “The universe does not force us to do things.” What could that possibly mean? I think rather than actually stating something about human relation to the universe this statement broadly suggests a claim of autonomy for the human subject. It is the solipsism of, “None of this is real, you’re not the boss of me.” Thinly veiled cartesian skepticism.
Human experience is defined by agonism, power struggle. We make sense of our world through conflict with the “great materiality.” We can evade and combat it, but ultimately this struggle defines us.
It’s quite alright to say that there are no objects in the world, if, that is, another philosopher says that objects exist in the world in spite of us. Once you see what I mean it will seem commonsense:
If we say that a TV exists in the world then we would expect there to be a worldly property that marks out or delineates it from other material worldly objects. But that is a mad idea. There is nothing in the material world per se that distinguishes a TV from the carpet it stands on, from the air around it, etc. The same goes for any other material object, electrons, cars, stars, etc.
That is why Witt said that the world is made of facts, not objects. It is a fact that there is a TV in the room. BUT the TV, as a stand alone object existing in its own right, distinct from other objects, is animism gone mad. Kant would agree too.
By “great materiality” I refer to the animistic gesture that suggests that matter or the universe can, like some sort of agency lording it over us ("great - ") control what we do. Conntrol suggests purpose and agency after all.
But that isn’t solipsism either. Even if we are material, we can’t be affected by what we are.
The struggle of science with the material world isn’t a struggle of providing explanation, for that would be tautologous (…), but a struggle of putting food on the table in line with the restrictions of taboo and invention.
But this is exactly what I mean when I say “thinly-veiled Cartesianism.” You are assuming a dualist segregation where “mind activities” like creating explanations and making choices are ultimately autonomous from and “of a different substance” than “body activities” like being hungry, eating, sexuality, raising children.
This kind of dualism is a serious problem both in philosophical discourse and in social behaviors. i) Freudian psychoanalysis, which places a big emphasis on sexuality, has ultimately been most influential NOT in the fields of counseling or social work but instead in philosophy and political science. ii) Many mainstream religions consider eating and sex to be beneath the spiritual plane. I.e. clergy cannot have wives, noone should have access to reproductive control, fasting is a form of spiritual cleansing, don’t eat red meat on fridays, etc. iii) Denigration of the body is closely associated with ways of thinking which implicitly, if not explicitly, denigrate poor people and women. The Cartesian says: “The hedonistic unwashed masses are only interested in bodily things!” or… “Women are useless outside the kitchen/bedroom!”
I would hazard the observation that a lot of posts on the ILP forum explicitly denigrate bodily, material reality. Hopefully I’m just projecting or reading too much into things.