Retitled: Modern philosophers are full of it!

[Odin]

Originally posted by Agathon

yet here they are getting slapped around in the last page or so by GePap

No, GePap is the one using faulty logic.

[Asher]

Originally posted by Agathon
This is funny.

Asher and Kuci are arguing that the humanities and philosophy are useless, yet here they are getting slapped around in the last page or so by GePap, who is giving an excellent example of the sort of broad based knowledge and critical thinking skills that an education in the humanities is supposed to give a person.

He's giving an excellent example of the sort of thinking that is common in modern philosophers, and in an odd twist -- he got owned in the process. What a coincidence, what kind of conclusion can we draw from this?

[GePap]

Originally posted by Odin
Poor, poor GePap. To him, if it hasn't reached poor, 3rd world peasants, it's not important. Let me guess, you think the printing press was unimportant because most of the world was illiterate 500 years ago? After all, it was "just" a communications improvement, like the Internet.

I guess you are not reading. Did literacy miss you?

Do you have anything to say about the quantitative-qualitative divide?

[Odin]

Originally posted by GePap


I guess you are not reading.

Really?

So I am still waiting for any of you to make an arguement worth **** talking about just HOW the improved movement of data has made such a huge difference to the lives of humanity. To make it easier, ignore the 2 billion people who barely have access to electricity, and concentrate on the people in the rich countries.

I wonder who said this...

[GePap]

Originally posted by Odin


Really?



I wonder who said this...

To claim humanity has seen itself transformed by a technology that in an age of near immidiate global transportation has yet to spread significantly to a huge portion of the wolrd's population is a rather significant point to explain, NO?

It again brings up the simple quantitativem qualitative question.

[Odin]

Originally posted by GePap


To claim humanity has seen itself transformed by a technology that in an age of near immidiate global transportation has yet to spread significantly to a huge portion of the wolrd's population is a rather significant point to explain, NO?

It again brings up the simple quantitativem qualitative question.

If only "revolutionary" qualitative improvents that reorganized society fundamentally were important, than agriculture, writing, electricity, the steam engine, and public education would be the only important innovations and inventions.

[Kuciwalker]

Not even all those.

[Asher]

Originally posted by Odin
If only "revolutionary" qualitative improvents that reorganized society fundamentally were important, than agriculture, writing, electricity, the steam engine, and public education would be the only important innovations and inventions.

Nope, because as GePap already pointed out, life would continue without these innovations somehow.

"It would be more expensive, more cumbersome, and less useful, but it could still be there."

[GePap]

Originally posted by Odin


If only "revolutionary" qualitative improvents that reorganized society fundamentally were important, than agriculture, writing, electricity, the steam engine, and public education would be the only important innovations and inventions.

Asher's claim is that computing is on the level as industrialization and such.

There is a difference between important and world changing. I accept wholeheartedly that the modern advent of computing is an important change. I do not accept that it ranks as one of the most fundamental changes in the lives of humanity as Asher claims.

[GePap]

Originally posted by Asher

Nope, because as GePap already pointed out, life would continue without these innovations somehow.

"It would be more expensive, more cumbersome, and less useful, but it could still be there."

Not as a civilization, making the question of great advances in civilization moot.

And yet, interspection and attempts at understanding humanity and its role in the world would still live on. Anything so fundamental as to trancend civilization obviously has to be more fundamental to the HUMAN condition than something that can only come to exist in a world of artifice.

Good to see you helping the navel-gazers with your point.

[Asher]

Originally posted by GePap
Asher's claim is that computing is on the level as industrialization and such.

There is a difference between important and world changing. I accept wholeheartedly that the modern advent of computing is an important change. I do not accept that it ranks as one of the most fundamental changes in the lives of humanity as Asher claims.

Again, if you understood the ramifications of the Information Age you would see the comparisons.

Just as industrialization made factories widespread and urban life the norm, computers allow for global collaboration and puts information from around the world at your fingertips.

While this may not be obvious to a lowly civil servant working for a muninical government, that doesn't mean that it isn't a huge change that is fundamentally changing how business is done and people live their lives. It is one of the major contributors to globalization, as well.

[Asher]

Originally posted by GePap
Not as a civilization, making the question of great advances in civilization moot.

Seems to me that you draw the line between important innovations to civilizations and otherwise just as arbitrarily as you make your arguments.

Remember what this argument started as? About how modern philosophers are full of it and useless. You made a lame troll about computers and got your ass handed to you, and now you're uncomfortably squirming with a bunch of arguments that you've spun off from that, desperately looking for a way to obfuscate the fact that you were entirely wrong to begin with.

This thread, and your argument specifically, are some of the best examples anyone could give regarding modern philosophy's uselessness. The people who study it are looney and irrelevant to the real world.

[GePap]

Originally posted by Asher

Again, if you understood the ramifications of the Information Age you would see the comparisons.

Just as industrialization made factories widespread and urban life the norm, computers allow for global collaboration and puts information from around the world at your fingertips.

And what you have yet to show, in any substantial form, is just HOW that movement of information actually changes people's lives to such a degree that that change can be compared to the immensity of the changes due to say industrialization and the transport revolution. Platitudes about Globalization don't cut it.

See, as a civil servant dealing directly with dozens of actual human beings daily, I could see just how things do affect people. For example, taking the way people were affected by Hurracane Katrina- the fact that the hurricane hit at a time in which many people had yet to get thier welfare check meant those people lacked the funds to move, and thus could not evacuate as well as people with money. The simple fact of when people got their checks probably cost human lives.

So unlike a computer geek siting in some corporate office looking at ones and zero's, I actually had to deal with those things called PEOPLE, you know, HUMAN BEINGS, and had to deal with those things that they actually care about on a daily basis, like feeding themselves and having a home. But of course, I am sure a boy who has had everything handed to him on a silver platter (OK, silver gilded) all his life is certainly the person to ask about human impact....

So, to return to the point: care to explain just HOW being able to get any piece of data from anywhere in the world (which still is not true, but lets imagine that as bieng true for this purpose) actually changes people's lives in a fundamental manner?

[Peter Triggs]

Originally posted by Kuciwalker

Originally posted by Peter Triggs
And actually Alonzo Church was a logician who (shock, horror) counts as a philosopher. In the Introduction to his Introduction to Mathematical Logic he puts forward a Fregean type of Philosophy of Language.

From wiki:

Alonzo Church (June 14, 1903 – August 11, 1995) was an American mathematician and logician who was responsible for some of the foundations of theoretical computer science.

Wiki is not always the source of the most complete information. It linked, however, to H.B. Enderton's memorial of Church in The Bulletin of Symbolic Logic. Enderton is a distinquished logician/mathematician at UCLA, where Church was Professor of Mathematics and Philosophy until his retirement in 1990. Enderton wrote (in 1995):

Alonzo Church's first published paper, Uniqueness of the Lorentz transforÂ
mation, appeared in the American mathematical monthly in 1924. His most
recent paper, A theory of the meaning of names, was published in The heritage
of Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz, Rodopi, 1995. This amazing span of seventyÂtwo
years embraces a remarkable collection of publications on a wide range
of topics in logic and in adjacent parts of philosophy, mathematics, and
computer science.

http://www.math.ucla.edu/~asl/bsl/0104/0104-005.ps

[Asher]

And what you have yet to show, in any substantial form, is just HOW that movement of information actually changes people's lives to such a degree that that change can be compared to the immensity of the changes due to say industrialization and the transport revolution.

Because that's a bull**** request. It's not something I can do, not because it's not true, but because it's impossible for me to argue it to someone who doesn't understand the fundamentals of the modern world.

You deal with the simpler, low-level aspects of life. If you look at life from a bigger scale, or appreciate the direction the world is heading in, it's very hard to dmiss computers and the internet as the important inventions that they are.

And I would reckon that somebody whose profession is studying computers and translating that into use in society would have more of an idea of how computers affect society than a bean counter working for a city.