the place for blind faith

Walking around Ica i came to realize that we despise religions mostly for their blind faith, but that, at the same time, it’s neither possible or desirable to get rid of blind faith. Again: not desirable.

It’s just too easy to find gruesome examples of blind faith, but there is also another dimension to it. We need blind faith — or something like it — to make us strong and beautiful. It’s a matter of pedagogy, and of politics.

invented or discovered

I just made friends with a mathematician, and apparently it is big right now whether mathematics was invented or discovered. Posed like that, i must answer this question with the first option, definitely, but i think the question implies a connection between externality and validity of knowledge, and this connection itself must be questioned.

mind/body problem untangled

The so called Mind-Body Problem is an older than dust problem in Philosophy, so old in fact that to really understand it we should talk about it in very different terms than originally proposed. It is also a problem which tends to sound trivial at first mention, but becomes harder and harder as we think further about it. Let’s put it like: how can an immaterial thing be produced from something material? There are things we know are “of the mind”: an idea, an information, an equation or even an opinion. And there are things we know are “of the material world”: a brain cell or a processor chip. But how can the later create the former? This is our circumstance:

how to avoid schizophrenia, or how realism and relativism stem from the same concerns, or why i cannot accept that we all believe the same things with different names

It’s become a kind of an habit with me to bash Realists. The problem is: i do agree with them in a lot of things. That led Gorm to declare that we both believe the same things, and that my insistence that “THERE IS NO TRUTH” was a mere confusion in terms.

Take for example Levi Bryant from Larval Subjects: he quotes all the guys i’m reading and liking, he’s got terribly cool post titles (that make his blog much harder to “Mark all as read” than it really is). He proposes the Flat Ontology, which i discussed in there is only circumstance. He’s got this Principle of Translation thing (“There is no transportation without translation”), which is great, indeed, and which i had tangentially touched when treating the Fundamental Problem of Communication. Me loves such ideas, but i believe they are actually proofs of my point of view, so: what gives?

We do not believe the same things with different names, but indeed we are trying to deal with the same issues. At that specific point, in our intellectual histories, we are trying to avoid schizophrenia.