User:Timpo/Philosophy

revise philosophy From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Philosopy is not truly 'love of wisdom', because φιλία, philia) means "affectionate regard, friendship". Aristotle, following Arete proposes "untellectual virtues" of knowledge, art, practical judgement, intuition, and wisdom. Kant’s Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals seems to agree, for it implies philosophy is simply respect for the opinions of others, no matter how odious they may seem to be.

According to my opinion, we humans have four constituent elements:

  • A body which in ancient times was the slave, in modern robotics the sensory and actuator mechanisms
  • A mind approximating the overseer or the operating system connecting the sensors and actuators to the application program
  • A spirit – the [[executive director|master] the intense fire that is the power driving operations (but see Mind-body problem)
  • A soul – those eternal traces we all leave behind, whether saints, sinners or simpletons (great men of the past still depended on the hewers of wood and drawers of water to survive) Without the warnings of the vanquished psychopath-dictators, would not humanity be the poorer?

Eternal souls?

The memories habits we inherit from long ago

Prehistory

A million or so years ago someone risked burning down the forest in order to control fire and develop cooking without which pre-digestion civilisation could not have got far!

The ancient world

Greek, Indian, Chinese philosophy flourished because they were linked by trade routes

Recent history

As a boy in the middle of the 20th century I remember polishing kitchen knives of tool-steel vigorously with a cork and abrasive paste, because the stainless steel variety we could afford was not sharp enough! Telephones were a rarity, bolted to the wall and lacking a dial. I was fortunate that my parents, as professionals were entitled to have a connection - in those post-war days denied to those without a specific need!

Modern times

Recently, looking at my smartphone, I realized how many of the failed projects of my youth were now mainstream: touch-screens, plasma displays, gesture control… These ideas were the stuff of private ventures – the major arms manufacturers we worked for “before Thatcher” then tolerated, rather than supported such initiatives. Those employers did occasionally patent our ideas, and reward us with a small salary bonus, but we had neither adequate technology nor the finance to develop such innovative designs into practical products. These are but a few of the “immortal souls” embedded in our daily lives today

The future?

As an atheist, I believe one should respect God! But perhaps not the anthropophilic gods of religion meaning either re-reading (and dogmatically reflecting on ancient texts) or re-binding (and humbly obeying superiors such as priests and their divinely appointed leaders).

I prefer Socrates ‘’(I know only that I know nothing – or at best very little) and Heraclitus one can not step into the same river twice, since the water flows swiftly, the banks erode slowly and one ages imperceptibly.

In law, truth comes in four qualities, the lowest of which is hearsay (gossip), followed by probability based on prior experience (arbitration), then the best probative truth based in contention and peer review. Finally there is absolute truth which in a complex and ever changing world, is ultimately known only unto to God (as a lawyer might say). Thus, in a world with both macro astrophysics and micro quantum mechanics and microbiology still in their infancy, we are beginning to realize how little we actually know! So God is merely a pace-holder for, well God only knows what we don’t yet know!

But perhaps we should now review (perhaps even re-edit) our heritage text in the light of these rather recent discoveries?

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