general remarks on various topics

>Topic: Truth and Critical Thinking

Guaranteeing truth is very difficult, if at all possible. Our physical and conceptual "tools" for discovering truths about the world are poor (they MUST be poor because we have no way of confirming anything we “know” to be absolutely true, and can usually assume that what we know about the world is NOT absolutely true), and human sensation and perception are not at all well-suited for recognizing "truth." But, if you are a fan of science, empiricism, and the like, there is hope that through these and similar methods we can know what about the world is likely to be as well as what is not likely to be. Additionally, there are scientific standards that, if you take them to be competent standards, can help us to decide what things we have good/sufficient reason to believe and what things we do not have reason to believe (regardless of one’s preconceptions). This is one way of seeking knowledge. There are other ways of seeking knowledge, but most aren’t as widely accepted as scientific investigation.

You don’t want to be “blown this way and that by the wind.” I think that’s smart, and I’m the same way. I take a lot for granted, and I’m probably not even aware of most of it. I hope that my experiences and course of study have trained me to think more critically, especially when making a decision or solving a problem (though I did not necessarily choose to study philosophy for this "benefit").

I also take a lot of things to be true that I have done no work whatsoever towards confirming that they are actually true. It just doesn’t seem possible / or practical to worry about whether a man named Abraham Lincoln really did exist, serve as 16th president of the U.S., and succumb to assassination on April 15, 1865. Such worrying would have to consume all of my waking life if I became skeptical of everything I “knew.” It would be a hellish preoccupation.

I am more likely to turn a critical eye to knowledge that concerns my sense of “right” and “wrong,” or topics and questions that are already hotly contested, in the first case because ethical matters are more gripping than ordinary matters and in the latter because controversy seems to be reason enough to become critical.

>New Topic: The tension between Evolution and Irreducible Complexity

I don’t think the complexity of the human organism as a product of evolution is nearly as miraculous as the fact that there is anything at all instead of nothing (which by-the-way is one of the very few indubitable truths we know about the world). (Am I sounding like a twip yet?)

I think that as human beings we may just be too full of ourselves to believe that we evolved from insignificantly simple microscopic organisms via a series of (in our opinion) small changes over a (in our opinion) long period of time. Why is this so miraculous? We are here. Rocks are here. We are just doing what we do. What of it?

I suppose I’m glad I exist, but, as far as I know, I did not have any desire to be conceived or exist at all – I simply was and do. Why do we prefer to think that we are any more miraculous than rocks? After all, a rock, to exist as it does today, probably came about through a process just as precise and remarkable as the supposed evolution of species. Which is more remarkable? Does it matter?

A thing’s remarkable-ness doesn’t seem to have anything to do with the explanation underlying its existence, probably because thinking something “remarkable” is a subjective judgment, while descriptive explanations consist of facts which are either true or false.

So if I put aside my wonder at my own existence or the existence of my species, then I can properly consider whether or not the theory of evolution works or does not work.

From the 2 minutes of research I just conducted…the notion of “irreducible complexity” seems, at best, highly controversial (among the general public) and (as regarded by “the scientific community”) probably not a valid challenge to evolutionary theory.

However, even if irreducible complexity happened to gain widespread support (as a cripple for the theory of evolution), I do not think it would tempt me to “put God in the gap.” That seems to be arguing from ignorance. Should evolution come to be seen as improbable because of disconfirmatory evidence, that would not make the idea of divine intervention (as it pertains to the existence of different forms of life) more possible.

>New Topic: Linguistic Confusions

The world we live in is not “post-modern,” and the world during the 18th and 19th centuries was never “modern,” though we might say so in casual conversation. These are only names that relate specifically to unique periods of human enterprise and their products. We tend to (over)use them a lot and they have become “buzzwords” by our constant bending and blurring of their original uses. See here.

But I'm going to have to undermine myself. Maybe the world we live in today IS a product of human enterprise. Do we live in a postmodern world? What does that mean?

I feel like all I'm doing is creating linguistic confusions. Wittgenstein thought (as have many others) that philosophy isn't really about answering the "big questions" or making genuine discoveries (those are for science), but that philosophy is "the untangling of linguistic confusions achieved by examining our words as they are ordinarily used, and contrasting that use with how the words are misused in philosophical theories and explanations" (Soames, The Age of Meaning).

"The results of philosophy are the uncovering of one or another piece of plain nonsense and of bumps that the understanding has got by running its head up against the limits of language. These bumps make us see the value of the discovery." (Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations)

Here's an unrelated Wittgenstein quotation that I want to remember:
"Uttering a word is like striking a note on the keyboard of the imagination." (Philosophical Investigations)