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Kent Palmer started a conversation 1 year ago
Philosophy in General
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    All-- I have created a similar service which is called OurTalk.net but I allow 2500 words in a post, because it is hard to say anything of philosophical significance with short messages. We will see how 1500 words works here. There are a smattering of conversations about Philosophy here on Namesake, but quite a few people with philosophy in their profile which is surprising. So I thought it would be a good idea to have one general conversation about philosophy so that those of us interested in philosophy could get to know each other. I am interested in Philosophy of Science but from a Continental Philosophy perspective. I study Ontology, and especially as it tells us something about the structure of the Western worldview. I answer a lot of questions on Quora that have to do with philosophy. See http://quora.com...t-Palmer, then I post http://OurTalk.net and a blog that reposts my messages at http://think.net. In general my goal is to facilitate more serious conversation on the internet and that might be possible at these new services like Namesake and Quora. It seems to me that Namesake is much like Convore where I tried to set up some philosophy conversation sites as an adjunct to Quora but no one was interested. But they might be more interested in Namesake because it has a design much like that of Quora. I find that Quora is a bit stilted because there is no actual interaction going on there, so something that allows actual interaction is needed like Namesake. --Kent
    Kent Palmer  •  Punt  •  Delete Comment  •  Mention Kent  •  +1
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    @Kent Palmer Good to see another philosophy fan on Namesake. I was quite interested in philosophy of science as an undergraduate, and I found that much of my interest lay with the analytical school. I am an admirer of Daniel Dennett's work on evolution and minds; if I had gone to graduate school as a philosophy major still, I would have included in my thesis his contributions to philosophy of science/mind.

    So you're interested in the ontology of the Western worldview, Kent? That sounds like a rich field full of hard but important questions. Are there any particularly fascinating/troubling issues in the Western worldview that you would like to talk about? I think it's interesting that you approach philosophy of science from a continental perspective, for that's a rarity indeed; and it's a bit refreshing as well.
    Mark Anthony Brown  •  Punt  •  Delete Comment  •  Mention Mark  •  +1
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    @Kent Palmer There are a ton of philosophy nerds in the Namesake community. You are at home.
    Brian Norgard  •  Punt  •  Delete Comment  •  Mention Brian  •  +1
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    @Mark Anthony Brown , @Brian Norgard thanks for the greetings. I am quite interested in whether Namesake can be a complement to Quora and vice versa. Quora is really about NOT interacting dynamically, It is mediated conversation based on Q&A. But participants do not really interact very much with each other except through the mediation of the question. But you always want to talk directly to someone to get a sense of who they are. And that is lacking on Quora, and I think that may be some of its charm. But if we could have this kind of Direct interaction along with that mediated interaction, that might allow us to improve both. Bateson says you get higher quality information if you study two subjects at the same time. I am thinking that if you have medated and unmediated channels of conversation at the same time it might also improve the quality of information exchange. But I don't know, I guess we will see.
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    @Kent Palmer This is one of the most interesting comments I've read in a long time, "Bateson says you get higher quality information if you study two subjects at the same time."
    Brian Norgard  •  Punt  •  Delete Comment  •  Mention Brian  •  +1
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    @Kent Palmer You said, "I am thinking that if you have mediated and unmediated channels of conversation at the same time it might also improve the quality of information exchange." Conversation is the glue that holds humanity together. Everyday we challenge ourselves to build a more relevant and human experience around conversation? Why? I think it brings out the true person. There's no hiding behind a text editor. The unfiltered, slightly messy, is often way more interesting than the curated. That's my thesis anyways.

    What can we do to make the experience even more interactive?
    Brian Norgard  •  Punt  •  Delete Comment  •  Mention Brian  •  +1
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    @Mark Suster Anthony Brown, Thanks for asking about my fascination with the structure of the western worldview and ontology. You can see that in my very long and somewhat intimidating Quora posts. My favorite comment was the one that asked if I just randomly put words together to construct them. Let me say in brief something I have said many times on Quora and which is the core of my study of the Western worldview. Only the Western worldview has Being. It is a linguistic anomaly from a global perspective. And as Heidegger said understanding the Meaning of Being is a key pursuit that we must all engage in if we are interested in our worldview. It is the structure of Being that gives structure to the Western worldview which is also unique. Since we are in the worldview that has dominated the known world (and most of it is known by now) it behooves us to think about the relation of that dominance to the uniqueness of the worldview itself, and of course that is through technology, and as Heidegger said the essence of Technology is nothing technological but is Nihlism.
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    @Kent Palmer "Only the Western worldview has being."

    Why did this happen? How did this worldview emerge? Can you define being?
    Brian Norgard  •  Punt  •  Delete Comment  •  Mention Brian  •  +1
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    "Only the Western worldview has being." @Kent Palmer What does that mean? Can you help me understand that more?
    Andrew Skotzko  •  Punt  •  Delete Comment  •  Mention Andrew  •  +1
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    @Brian Norgard The idea of Bateson appears in Mind and Nature. This is an excellent book that talks about Bateson's own style of study which was always to pursue two topics at the same time, and interleave the study of them. I have been doing that since the beginning of my intellectual career, and I was surprised when I found that Bateson also did it before me. I am sure that many scholars have done this, and it really does work, as many of you may know for yourselves. Here is my hypothesis why this is true. Information is surprise. To have information rather than just data as G. Klir says in ASPS (a big book on structural systems theory with a long title) to have information you must have background and foreground variables to constitute information. Information is a flow. Thus if you have two streams of flowing information channels open you have two background variables, two foreground variables, and two sources of surprise. But if you interleave these two channels then the surprise in one can reverberate against the background of the other. In other words one channel is always the background of the other which is in the foreground, so we are kind of repeating the essential structure of the information channel itself. Also this is related to the duality between gestalt and flow. We also probably in this duality of channels convert one to a gestalt and the other to a flow in relation to that gestalt, and that transformation could make the two channels into a higher synthesis.
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    @Kent Palmer I am so interested in these subjects. You said, "Thus if you have two streams of flowing information channels open you have two background variables, two foreground variables, and two sources of surprise."

    Are you saying in some strange universe Namesake and Quora are the channels or that Namesake relies on interaction between two people, thus forming a dynamic relationship?
    Brian Norgard  •  Punt  •  Delete Comment  •  Mention Brian  •  +1
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    @Brian Norgard @Andrew Skotzko Be happy to explain this question about the uniqueness of Being in the Western worldview. It is a linguistic fact. Other languages have existence, copula, and other constructs but none has the peculiar construct that we call Being (Sein, Sat) in the Indo-European languages. We don't notice that because almost all the languages of Europe are Indo-European and we more or less assume that the rest of the world is like that too. But Linguistics has discovered that this is not true and in fact Indo-European languages like Sanskrit, Greek, English, German, French, Latin, etc are an anomaly when you consider the global situation of the incredible variety (ever shrinking due to our cultural dominance based on colonialization and globalization). I think this quirk plays a large role in how we got to have the global dominance we do have through the invention of technologies of Warfare and other technological innovations. I think Being lends us a hand in Synthesizing new inventions based on Metaphor and other Tropes that Being makes possible.
    Kent Palmer  •  Punt  •  Delete Comment  •  Mention Kent  •  +1
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    @Kent Palmer Let me reduce to the core bits: our Western worldview is centered around an arrogant idea of narcissism? Just want to decouple some complicated ideas swirling about my brain.
    Brian Norgard  •  Punt  •  Delete Comment  •  Mention Brian  •  +1
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    @Kent Palmer so glad to see this thread! Thanks for the invite to the conversation. It's very enjoyable to see a trained Western philosophical thinker on Namesake. I have been trained on Aristotelian and Thomistic principles by personal PhD tutors, though lack the formal academic training myself. It is something I plan to pursue in the future as it is my biggest passion. And it's nice to see an advocation of the uniqueness of Being in Western vocabulary, which in a Thomistic sense, is equated with Existence. I look forward to fruitful philosophical discussions...
    Arturo Perez  •  Punt  •  Delete Comment  •  Mention Arturo  •  +1
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    @Kent Palmer I'm glad you are starting this convo! We've had a few conversations about it here... I think there's a need for more! (i'm a bit over my head with this topic though)
    Andrea Fuentes  •  Punt  •  Delete Comment  •  Mention Andrea  •  +1
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    @Brian Norgard I like what you said about the messiness of real conversation verses "curated" conversations. Curation is a buzzword these days. But like you say it is something like the museums of natural history that are full of dead animals, it was a long time before they had the idea of a zoo, and even longer before they had the idea of making the zoo like the natural habitat of the animals imprisoned there. We like those animals are imprisoned behind our desktops, but via that imprisonment we can reach across the world, a strange set of affairs afforded to us by this new technology. In this new kind of mediated relation, that is also the ability of each of us to broadcast and interact globally, i.e. with mediation comes a lot of power (of the personal press), but also much peril as we now have reputations online to maintain. It helps someone like me who is interested in very esoteric subjects, because ecologically there are just not too many people in my neighborhood who I can have messy ontological conversations. So I thought from the beginning that this might open new possibilities for serious conversations. Boy was I disappointed. Instead there is the endless chatter of the last man as Nietzsche called him, i.e. the one who blinks. In this time of peril for the planet mostly there is meaningless conversation. It is a pitty. But tells us something deep about human nature that Nietzsche too was aware of, because he had few whom he could have interesting conversations with.
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    @Brian Norgard "What can we do to make the experience even more interactive?" I am not sure. I am still exploring Namesake and I don't think I understand it all yet. But one thing that is clear there is not the kind of censorship that occurs a Quora here because these are realtime conversations. And that is definitely a relief. The whole question revolves around whether it is possible to keep up the conversations we start here. Anything that would allow them to continue would be good. I have not found the secret to that. I am willing to go on and on but others give up, and it is seldom that we get anywhere significant. I think most of the really good conversations are occurring over personal email, telephone, and in person. This is an adjunct to those conversations. But the pitty is that what is needed are examples of deeper conversations, so people can learn to make the non-nihilistic distinction between chatter and good conversations that have a point. Someone asked "What is the point of Namesake?" I noticed. If the point were to sponsor and facilitate deeper and more profound conversations, then I think that it could have a really important niche in the revival of intellectual culture in America. But that of course is probably only a fond hope and mere wishfulness.
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    @Kent Palmer I think Namesake CAN serve a role for more profound intellectual conversations, as well as just friendly interactions about whatever. There is a sense of community here and a respect for others' opinions.
    Andrea Fuentes  •  Punt  •  Delete Comment  •  Mention Andrea  •  +1
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    @Andrea Fuentes Andrea I am glad to hear that. Also if what I say is over your head just ask me to explain further. I mostly get blank looks when I give talks, so you are not alone in not understanding what I am going on about. In fact you are in with the majority of my interlocutors.
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    @Kent Palmer thanks. I wasn't clear on the linguistic comment; about Being/Existence being a concept limited to western languages (Indo European?)... how does this concept differ in other cultures? I am thinking of the Hindu concept??
    Andrea Fuentes  •  Punt  •  Delete Comment  •  Mention Andrea  •  +1
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    @Brian Norgard "Are you saying in some strange universe Namesake and Quora are the channels or that Namesake relies on interaction between two people, thus forming a dynamic relationship?" I only talk about Quora because I have been fascinated by it lately. It is a way to get my ideas out to a larger community, and since I am off in philosophy where most people do not venture I am pretty safe there.
    But I have lots of critiques of Quora after using it for a while, and the greatest of those is the lack of dialectic, i.e. dialog, which Namesake has is spades. So the very thing I found missing in Quora, that makes me call it mediated conversation, is what namespace exemplifies. But on the other hand normally chat-like conversations like this degenerate, so no real dialog that could be called a dialectic takes place. It is only in my mind that there is any relation between Quora and Namesake, but then again this is an example of interleaving the study of two things at once. If you see how Quora works, and then discover Namesake as I did when someone was kind enough to invite me, then Namesake is going to be seen in a different light by such a person as myself coming from immersion in Quora. If I had found Namesake first I would be talking about it on Quora when I first arrived. Interesting how we base our view of something new on what we already know. But this is what schemas are all about, and that is what I did my recent dissertation on, so that explains my fascination the comparison.
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    @Brian Norgard In fact Brian I see that it is you that invited me here. Thank you very much. This is a very interesting environment and in fact just the kind of place I have been looking for and was trying to set up myself using status.net at http://ourtalk.net.
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    @Brian Norgard One suggestion would be to invite invite people from Quora who seem active and write interesting posts. In fact I know some people like that and will use my few invites to try to get them to have a look at Namesake and see what they think. I think they will like it. It is a lot of work answering questions, and then when you don't get actual feedback one becomes frustrated after a while. Rather what is irksome is the arbitrary and random nature of the censorship on Quora. So I think that Quora people will find Namesake very refreshing and are likely to put in at least some of the effort they are making in Quora here because of the difference between the environments. Anyway, just a thought.
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    @Kent Palmer , @Brian Norgard , You two got deep on me pretty quickly--and that's coming from a philosophy nerd! I read Heidegger during two undergraduate courses: Phenomenology and Existentialism. Although I must confess that I thought the language, or the translation, of Heidegger was convoluted, I noticed some parallels with Wittgenstein, of whom I was a big fan for a while. Are you familiar with Wittgenstein?
    Mark Anthony Brown  •  Punt  •  Delete Comment  •  Mention Mark  •  +1
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    @Mark Anthony Brown Heidegger can be off putting if you start with 'Being and Time'. But actually Heidegger's other work is much easier to read. My favorite is 'What is called Thinking'. There are a lot of similarities between Wittgenstein and Heidegger, except those correspondences are normally ignored by those interested in Analytic Philosophy. At some level Meaning as Use is the same as the Ready-to-hand of Circumspective Concern discussed by Heidegger in 'Being and Time'. The problem is that most people do not have any framework to place what their reading in philosophy into and thus it can be very confusing. Much of my work is trying to develop a framework like that, for instance in framing the question concerning the nature of the Western wordlview and the uniqueness of Being. When you understand that Being is unique within the Indo-European that gives a different perspective on the importance of understanding what 'Being' might 'be'.
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    http://quora.com...Namesake
    http://quora.com...t-Palmer
    http://kdp.me
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    @Andrea Fuentes As I mentioned above in other languages there are many of the features that are fused together into Being like the copula and the idea of existence and other elements. But the important thing is that in Indo-European languages the two roots for Being and Having are fragmented and that shows that they were artificially produced within the Indo-European culture by fusing various elements of 'Being' into a single unified Idea which eventually came to mean something like Substance for Aristotle. This is a long and convoluted story which is recounted in my works or in my Quora answers to some extent. We could go through it all again here if there was some interest. But I think the key point is that what looks to us like the obvious nature of the world is in fact from a historical and linguistic perspective an extremely rare anomaly. That gives us a different perspective on the nature of ontology as a discipline and perhaps our worldview that has this unique characteristic in its founding languages.
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    My answer on Quora as to what is Phenomenology? http://quora.com...nology-1
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    My answer on Quora to What did Jean-Paul Sartre mean when he introduced the topics of existence and essence?http://quora.com...-essence
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    My answer on Quora to How can I 'succinctly distill complicated concepts into pithy expressions'? Which talks about my discovery of Special Systems Theory See http://quora.com...ressions
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    My anwswer on Quora to What is the difference between design thinking and analytical thinking? http://quora.com...thinking
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    Quora answer: What are some of the most mind-blowing facts? http://ping.fm/3vAFE Summary: http://bit.ly/mL867z See also http://bit.ly/ixL4aD
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    Greetings.. New to Namesake. I saw a post on Heidegger and a comment on confusion for lack of framework. I recall finding his "Introduction to Metaphysics" to be easier than others. I may be wrong, however a grasp of Husserl doesn't hurt - nor does a keen familiarity with De Anima and the Nichomachean Ethics. I'd also say those two are necessary (when combined with Kant) in order to see what Hegel is doing.
    Charley Bravo  •  Punt  •  Delete Comment  •  Mention Charley  •  +1
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    Welcome to Namesake and also to philosophical discussion here. There are not many philosophers as yet. Mostly startup folks, who hare interested in philosophy. However, philosophy is the ultimate startup because it is what got the whole worldview going in which startups are possible. It started up the metaphysical era and took us out of the mythpoietic era. And this is a start up of a worldview which is continually starting up by the advent of emergent events that discontinuously change everything. We are at one of those crossroads now with the advent of smartphones, html5, realtime web, cloud computing and storage, globalization, etc. The dot.com bubble was a false start, but this new bubble is probably going to be genuinely transformative in ways that we are hardly thinking of yet. So welcome to a place where we can discuss this new world as it is unfolding before our eyes using some part of the new technology that is making its appearance.
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    Quora answer: Do people value Twitter or Quora followers more? Why? See http://think.net...more-why
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    Quora answer: What next after nihilism? http://think.net...nihilism
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