I guess the gist is explaining how recursion works and how it creates intelligence. But it’s a fucking Odessy of an explanation. It’s seems rambling at first; the book it alternates between straight philosophy/explanation, and dialogues between a bunch of characters that illustrate points and raise new ones. Ultimately, though, he ties a ton of ideas together that work really well. He explains how Godel’s incompleteness theorem works, why Bach and Escher are appealing, and some stuff about DNA, computers, and zen. It’s a great mix of light and heavy, and it’s just brilliant.
From what I remember LD deals with value oriented discussion of current events. Books relevant to the values that you will be using include those written by or concerning the ideas of Jeremy Bentham, John Stewart Mill, John Locke, Jean-Jaques Rousseau, “The founding fathers”, Marx, and critical theory in general. That is, you probably want political or social philosophy in reference to American political values, and all these people represent the foundation and subsequent refutation of those values.
So should I study philosophy such as ethics, good and evil, or other books to that extent? I love philosophy but will studying these kinds of books make me better at debate?
Studying any philosophy will make you better at debate because it develops your critical thinking skills and creativity. however, if you’re looking to actually use the philosophies themselves, then what you mentioned isn’t particularly relevant. With that said, the kind of quick tutorial of philosophy that we all want does not really exist. There are very good introductions that go over all the major concepts, but they are more like a history of ideas than philosophy. All is not lost though, because reading certain philosophers can result in you quickly changing the way you think about problems…they will make you “philosophically minded” in a very general way and in a relatively short amount of time. And being philosophically minded is probably more important for highschool? debate than knowing particular arguments. If this is what you want, i recommend Plato, Nietzsche, and Hume.
I think debating, at least in social, political and folk psychological matters is just a matter of memorizing all the shit that can possible be said.
There are only a handful of real debatable things out there in the world, and because they’re really debatable, they’ve gone resolved, and thus debated forever.
Fact is, there are only a few real things that people ever say in most of these debates. Memorizing those cliche positions is probably the easiest way to be a good debater on most subjects.
On the other hand, I don’t think that learning alot of logic really helps as much as people think that it does. It’s not like there are alot of logical people out there debating things. Most people debating things are just emotion-mongers who can’t keep thier feelings about things to themselves. I’d just learn lots and lots of shit. Lots of history, trivia, those sorts of things. At the very least you’ll be able to cross reference your own point of view with more things, and it seems that lots of debates are won that way.
and the missionary went to proselytize…
-Imp