one of the videos from hunter & wolfe’s recent string of shows in NYC.

Photos from our show at the Cake Shop with Travis Bilenski.

Thanks to Dan Bracaglia for the great pics.

http://hunterandwolfe.com

Thought I would give a shout out to a project being undertaken in part by a friend of mine, Mark Nerys.  Mark will be providing the artwork on hunter & wolfe’s self-titled debut EP (marknerys.com, hunterandwolfe.com).

Our School aims to set up a wide variety of workshops to better encourage critical thinking and free expression and…well you can see it all on the site.  Check it out! 

Let’s move onto the second portion of my quarrel with William Lane Craig in his debate against Hitchens: the cosmological argument.  

The cosmological argument is something that many people ask themselves; I found myself asking the very question when I was young: what started ‘it all’?  If we believe in cause and effect, there must be a first cause, or as Aristotle famously put it, a prime mover.

I’ll start with something a bit more grounded in empiricism and work my way to a more abstract view.

Supposing that causality is true, it’s not so absurd to figure that there is a natural ‘first cause’.  Most scientists would point to the big bang.  Furthermore, recent findings in physics have shown that, in fact, ‘something’ can come from ‘nothing’: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ImvlS8PLIo.  Supporters of the cosmological argument can simply say to this ‘well fine, but what caused the big bang?’  Firstly, supposing there is a first cause in no way substantiates any argument for God(s) in my mind.  If God needs no reason, or cause, why does the big bang need substantiation? But, supposing that people are so inclined to take the what-caused-the-big-bang-then hypothesis in a more pious light, I will go a bit further.

This is where my knowledge of physics does me little to no good.  Here I postulate that time is not so much different than the other three dimensions we perceive.  If I were to ask you ‘how long is length?’ or ‘how wide is width?’, I would hope you would respond with something akin to ‘things [or rather length per se] can be infinitely long’; there is no end to the dimension of length, as there is no beginning.  Length does not simply END somewhere; even at the edge of the universe things don’t simply fail to have extension [**perhaps it can be argued that length is a dimension within the universe and, therefore, it is only as long as the universe.  If we could draw an analog to time: the universe used to have infinitesimal extension before the big bang and has since extended into infinity just as time started from (near?) zero and progresses on into infinity**].  My point is that perhaps time does not have a ‘beginning’ or a ‘cause’.  

[Since I’m reading Nietzsche: “Cause and effect: there is probably never any such duality; in fact there is a continuum before us, from which e isolate a few portions; just as we always observe a motion as isolated points, and therefore do not properly see it, but infer it” (The Gay Science, §112).]

I believe Kant also said that cause and effect are simply part of the mechanism with which we experience phenomena.  I can’t say for sure, but we certainly do like to frame things in terms of cause and effect; we rarely stop to think of the possibility that time has always been…but if we can conceive of a God who has always been, how difficult can this be?

I am not precluding the existence of God entirely; to do so would be presumptuous in the same ways that religious zealots blindly believe the opposite.  What I am saying in this passage is that if you plan on making such grandiose claims, at least back them up with something worthwhile!  At best, the cosmological argument only stands to put the apologist in the precarious position of haphazardly assigning a supernatural first cause over a natural one.    

Following the recent passing of Christopher Hitchens, a friend of mine made mention of what a brilliant debater Hitchens was.  I have since listened to many of his debates, and I will admit that he does a much better job of giving pointed, hard-hitting responses than most of his contemporaries (I think Dawkins is quite a bright man, perhaps smarter than Hitchens, but he is not as quick witted in spite of his equally impressive accent).  Now, I won’t go into my misgivings with religion, nor will I make any sort of attempt to change any minds about their spiritual orientation.  This post is centered largely on a debate Hitchens had with William Lane Craig (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4KBx4vvlbZ8).  He is a widely known philosopher and Christian apologist [the mere term ‘apologist’ just reeks of ‘backpedaling’ if you ask me…but you didn’t ask].  What bothers me, is that people actually take him seriously as a philosopher.  

Allow me to explain myself.  When I took a 100 level philosophy class, we first discussed the basics of religious philosophy.  These arguments included the teleological and cosmological arguments.  William Lane Craig used these arguments in a real, grown-up debate and I am here to make pretty quick work of these massively flawed bits of reasoning.  Where do we begin?

Teleological:  The teleological argument is based on the principle of design.  A famous example of such an argument was made my William Paley in his Natural Theology:

[S]uppose I found a watch upon the ground, and it should be inquired how the watch happened to be in that place, I should hardly think … that, for anything I knew, the watch might have always been there. Yet why should not this answer serve for the watch as well as for [a] stone [that happened to be lying on the ground]?… For this reason, and for no other; namely, that, if the different parts had been differently shaped from what they are, if a different size from what they are, or placed after any other manner, or in any order than that in which they are placed, either no motion at all would have been carried on in the machine, or none which would have answered the use that is now served by it.  

To paraphrase this concept: the very architecture of our universe appears to be so finely tuned as to suggest that it was designed.  Ergo, God designed it.  

Now, I know that many people could pan me as being reductionist [as I so often accuse myself], but allow me to prove why this argument is simply useless in proving…well just about anything.  I haven’t heard this terminology used, so let’s just call me approach the argument from hindsight.  

**

I guess we will work in a way similar to the ad absurdum method here.  

Of course, if there is a God, he, by definition, designed us.  Therefore, our architecture would be apparent as design.  So here we can see the religious reasoning.  But let’s consider the opposite, a position of hindsight: the only way I could possibly be here to marvel at my design was by my very existence [I was once told not to use italics so that my writing would allow itself to provide emphasis…then I read Nietzsche, who is often lauded for his prose].  I’m not sure this is as apparent as people think, so I will try to put it in more basic terms.  For the current state of affairs to be the case [lol using Wittgenstein-ian verbage gratuitously and out of context because it’s a blog and I can], a near infinite number of things have to go very right, even if you believe in the big bang as the beginning of our universe (I will get into the cosmological argument later!). 

If I flipped a coin 100 times and it came up as heads 100 times, I could look back and say ‘well that was clearly done by design’…or it could have just happened and we are able to look back at its regularity or beauty etc.  My point being that apparent design does NOTHING by way of proof in any realm.  It is easy to look back on a set of COMPLETELY RANDOM events and look for causality.  

And here we come full circle with what I’m reading:
Nietzsche claims that mankind has often done or thought things that are untrue, but are, nonetheless, advantageous to our species (here’s a good example of looking for meaningful patterns in meaningless things: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=patternicity-finding-meaningful-patterns.  We also have quite the proclivity for finding faces in all sorts of images wherein they don’t exist!).  I agree with good ol’ Friedrich on this one.  Perhaps religion, which has assigned to us some sort of special meaning in this universe, is yet another meaningful pattern that we find in meaningless data.  And here we are at this junction of history, “the most murderous of all murderers” as we have “killed” God, or rather the necessity for the idea, with our knowledge.  

The appearance of design does nothing to substantiate it.  To me, it just reminds me of how cool the universe is and how lucky I am to be a part of it all, even if I’m not part of some chosen species.

Will get into the cosmological argument next time.  Would really love to hear any problems you may have with my approach here. Thanks!    

My last post touched upon the intensionality of negation (i.e. ~x depends on x for its intension; there is no negative extensionality) as it pertains to good and evil.  I thought it would be a good time to at least briefly mention my disenchantment with Wittgenstein by relating his picture theory of language to this apparently meaningless train of thought.  Allow me to explain [briefly, I hope]:

[At the risk of being massively reductionist here] Wittgenstein claims in TLP (Tractatus-Logico Philosophicus)that we “…make pictures of facts.”  These facts consist of logically irreducible objects (i.e. we cannot break them down further in ‘thought’ (here, I suppose, I could get away with using the term as Wittgenstein’s own conception of a thought, or picture of a fact (i.e. state of affair(s))).  The interpretation of how facts are created though the relations between objects is often debated as is the definition of an ‘object’ [the latter giving me particular headaches.  Wittgenstein required objects to be logically irreducible and states of affairs to be mutually independent.  If objects fail to meet the above criteria, the mutual independence cannot exist (he even concedes this himself)…But how do we even define a logical object?  Can we really predicate the logical atomism of an object on the presupposition of mutual independence between states of affairs?  Isn’t that precisely the dependence of truth that Wittgenstein hopes to avoid?]

We must not say, “The complex sign ‘aRb’ says ‘a stands in relation R to b;’” but we must say, “That ‘a’ stands in a certain relation to ‘b’ says that aRb.”    

I find this to be fairly indicative that relations per se are not objects, but they are semantic tools for describing the way in which objects stand in relation.  There are no relations per se, only descriptions of the manner in which objects stand together ([crappy, reductionist] e.g. given a ball sitting on a table, there is no object of ‘on’, rather it is the way in which the objects (ball and table) stand to one another that provides that relation.)  What a digression!

How does this all count toward the ideas of good and evil?  Simple [maybe].  I will start with the problems suggested by the TLP and move to my rudimentary understanding of later Wittgenstein [which I am yet to read].  TLP would present us with the following problem: how does one picture good?  The word “ball” represents some set of qualities that we can definitively picture…but what about good?  According to the TLP, any attempt to philosophize in such terms is ‘nonsense’.  

Now there is a twist to Wittgenstein’s thought later on: use as definition.  Wittgenstein was harshly opposed to Platonic Forms [as am I, though one of my objections is the irreducibility of the Forms.  Given any Form, we can certainly find a subset of that form ([another poorly thought out] e.g. Me —> Man —> Human Being —> Orgamism —> … [but you get the idea]).  This is also what made me take issue with locigal atomism…].  Instead of searching for some static ‘essence’ as Plato’s Sophist, Wittgenstein takes a sort of perspectivism of use: the term ‘good’ can be functionally defined; never pinned down.  To best define ‘good’, we can only ask what items employ the description of good.  Wittgenstein gives the example of beauty.  He claims there is no beauty per se, rather beautiful things.  It is not like alcohol being a part of beer and liquor wherein we can separate the ‘essence’ from the items.  And to Wittgenstein, this is a sufficient definition for most symbols (words). [Pretty simple explanation and contrast to the Sophist here: http://www.roangelo.net/logwitt/logwitt6.html].  

Anyway, I’m not quite sure what I set out to do.  I might post later today with my short, final blurb on TLP in terms of the ‘elucidations’ Wittgenstein sets forth as the purpose of philosophy.  I’ll try to be concise…but I always try, don’t I? 

As always, thoughts & criticisms are greatly appreciated.  Currently following up on a suggestion to learn about Buddhist nonduality (thanks!).

note: Ever write or say something you think is remotely meaningful only to stop and think ‘wait…is this really dumb?’ Well, that’s where I am at the moment, but I will stick to my no rereading rool!  Open to any comments readers may have.  I’ll be the first to admit that I’m a n00b.

I’ve been trying to think of a concise, digestible way of talking about the Tractatus, and I have to admit I’ve had no luck.  Instead, I would like to go back to a discussion I recently had about good vs. evil (or more generally about the existence of negation).  The proposition [oh gosh listen to me using basic Tractarian terms] was simple: “you cannot have the good without the bad”.

Let’s talk!

I begin by conceding that the negation exists in an object per se (i.e. the concept of “bad” is part of the concept of “good”).  I can make some mild Tractarian sense of that, too.  Think of ‘good’ (G) and ‘bad’ (B) such that B = ~G (i.e. bad = not good).  In order to define what ~G is, we must know the boundaries of G (how else could we know what G isn’t?).  

I can now take some time to talk about good and evil in the world (though will I take a fairly metaphysical dance around it and get to definitions shortly).  This gives me a chance to talk about objective[ish] good as it can be socially defined.  Nietzsche [thank you spellcheck [spell check]] famously said [something like] ‘What doesn’t kill us makes us stronger’.  He gets into that quite a bit in what I’ve read of The Gay Science: our capacity to experience joy is directly tied to our experience of pain [this goes back to an older post I had about being a “yea-sayer”; to accept joy is to also validate the pain in your life as they are intertwined…whether I entirely agree with that entire sentiment I cannot yet say, but it’s certainly not worth rejecting offhand].  

So what is all that about in context to what I’m getting at?  Simply put, I believe it would be possible (NOT PROBABLE, NOT EVEN FEASIBLE…I am talking strictly in metaphysical ideals here) in reality for only good to exist (though it must exist in a logical space, as I previously mentioned).  And I say this because I can look at some word of infinite utility (i.e. a net-positive, non-zero-sum game) wherein everyone can attain all they like while doing no harm to other.  My goodness there are a lot of presuppositions one has to make about human nature (or man making circumstances which then make man etc. etc.).  If anyone actually reads this enough to want to probe where the hell I’m coming from, please do and I can expand so I don’t seem to be making quantum leaps.  Just realize: yes, I am talking in ideals, but that does not preclude the metaphysical possibility [please note that I like thinking about useless things].  Let me wrap this bit up with an example: nourishment.  We all need nourishment for survival; I think we can characterize that as a general ‘good’ for the sake of this example.  If a starving child receives nourishment, I will certainly agree that he will enjoy more than a rich child having yet another daily meal.  However, can it be said that food is any less necessary fo the rich child (i.e. though the rich child may eat more than he ought to, he does require some food to live).  Sustenance as a minimum is just as ‘good’ for both boys, though the starving boy may appreciate it more.  The question then becomes, is appreciation really a facet of ‘good’?  Is ‘good’ predicated solely on perception?  How do we define good?  What a nebulous task…

Then in comes Wittgenstein with his wonderful picture theory of language and his battle against Platonic Forms and he goes and screws up all my fun!  Or so it remains to be seen…  

…But I think I’m rambling so I will save that for later.

I really hope this is entertaining or edifying in some way.  If you think I’m just talking out of my ass I do hope you will provide me some food for thought; I don’t mind being proven wrong if it means I can learn to be right.

Thanks! 

A. Not the original key of the song.  I am a half step down I think?  Pretty sure you want a capo on 1st fret.

B. I like to play a bassline along with the chords but if you can fill in the blanks the chords are: Am7 (x02213), D7 (xx0212), GM (320003), then I walk down from CM (x3201x) to some chord I don’t care to remember but it’s (x2003x) and right back to the Am7.  Hope that helps (sorry for any wrong chord names but the fingerings are OK).  Thanks for listening!

[Probably] for good this time.  

Why the hiatus? Well, a combination of a few things:

1. Just finished production on my next film that I have been keeping wraps on (and will continue to do so until post production is completed).
2. Constantly overcoming the fear of pontificating et al.
3. Nearly finished with hunter & wolfe’s debut EP (which I must say I am pretty excited about! hunterandwolfe.com [learning to shamelessly self promote will be nice, too]).

Won’t say much to the effect of item 1, but there is sure to be plenty of #2 to come!  As it turns out, people were reading this thing until I stopped, and I feel it is my duty to keep them preoccupied at their respective places of work.

I will be dividing my blogging duties between music @ hunterandwolfe.tumblr.com and my pseudo-philosophical pseudo-musings here…which leaves me to give a brief bit of the aforementioned musings.

I hope that I will be able to provide relatively concise visions of what I have been reading [as I believe that I think in fairly simple terms].  SO HERE WE GO!

What have I been reading?  Well I am currently foraying into a bit more Nietzche, but my last read was Tractatus-Logico Philosophicus.  I’ll try to give some points I came away with (though I found the book a bit uninspiring [though any book that relegates logic to, in essence, simple elucidations - I will get into it! - tends to do that to a man (such as myself) so interested in metaphysics, logic etc.]).

One catch…I have already spilled enough words for one post and I have committed to not checking anything I write (as any good thinker should [kidding, in case the sarcasm isn’t terribly apparent online]).  Let me leave you with some music my good pal Aymann sent me and I have been listening to quite a bit.  I give you: Bombay Bicycle Club!  Yes it violates my separation of bloggage…but who ever said I was good at this stuff anyway?  

Will return with stuffs from my readings tomorrow.  Oh, and a funny semantical [which is a damn word, tumblr!] discussion I had earlier today.

Enjoy! And stick around!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c1-tTZSz7Ws …aw yeeeeeeeeeeeaaaa…