This place sure goes in "spurts"

[Peter Garrett]

On Tue, 21 Jul 2009 21:31:26 +0200
Donn <donn.ingle at gmail.com> wrote:

> Reason can encompass anything that is real. 

This is highly (philosophically) debatable, but I don't think sounder
is quite the place to go into detail. Language has limitations, and
verbosity becomes tedious. ;)

> If you want to glory in
> that which is not real then you have ghosts and ESP and gods for
> company. Keep them.

If that was directed at me, you missed the mark  by a wide margin. As a
generalisation it falls flat on its face too. All of this comes back to
the point I was making about stumbling over words. The desire to
"label" everything seems to be common in humans. 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begging_the_question

What is "real"? Do you see the problem here? Is there a nice comforting
equation of the form

reality=something_knowable

?

> As to art/creativity -- this argument is of the form "feelings can't be 
> experienced by reason." Well, that's actually sensible - I agree, but it does 
> not make those feelings somehow supernatural.

I did not suggest that they were :)

What I was suggesting was that we can't "know" everything - and at some
point the concept that there are things that are beyond human knowledge
starts to look , umm, "reasonable". Now the classic hard-line
rationalist reaction is probably "Then those things are irrelevant."

I suppose that's what I meant by a worship of rationality.

Another tangential or analogical way to explain this with reference to
the brain, for example, is to point out that once you reduce all
psychological phenomena to chemistry and physics, you are left with a
tautology - a valuable tautology no doubt, but a tautology in the same
sense that mathematics is a powerful tautology. Neither is experiential
or subjective - but our subjective experience is valid and transcends
the limits of such tautologies. 

We are actually getting into some deep philosophical waters here, but
there are a couple interesting leads to read:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Mysterianism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greedy_reductionism

Note that I am not a follower of either camp :)

Peter
-- 
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