Thursday, August 27, 2009

We Should not Ask Why, or Should We?

Some scientists ridicule philosophers that philosophers always ask, "Why." Scientist’s job is to answer "How." I exhausted all these categories of people who do not engage with our discussions in previous posts. If somebody has not any question or any qualm or interest in knowing about the beyond, this place has nothing to add to his knowledge. Those classes of people do not exist in our world and we do not exist in their world. I categorized different groups that never enter in our discourse. Those scientists are among them. One can enter into argument with another if both party can negotiate on some basic, fundamental starting points for their argument. After this reminder, I am interested to see if there is any non-scientific discourse in the world. From the ancient time the question exist in our mind that if all of our knowledge is gained through the experiment of nature or we know things from the beginning by ourselves. For instance, when you leave your house every morning to go to your work place, you do not comeback every hour or every ten minutes to check that the house is not on fire or being looted. How are you certain? Or why are you certain? Is it due to experience? experience by induction? Have you ever checked it once or twice and then decided that it is safe to be far for a long time perhaps weeks or months in a trip or in a journey abroad? Or from the first day you were confident that you could leave your house without checking it frequently? Or did it start from the time that we were in the caves, or perhaps earlier when we were on the trees, and gradually we gained experience? We do not know if this is an individual insight or it is a collective insight shared by other humans. Our experience frequently breached in centuries when we were back and bandits had attacked our houses. But sooner or later we had to leave it again for a long time for gaining the bread. So for having such a feeling we become engaged in a philosophical argumentation. Even we could not decide what should we use: how or why.

Sunday, August 23, 2009

Between Two Layers

To begin our study of human life we have to inspect our environment that has cradled, nurtured and flourished the life of ours and other living things. For a moment disregard the destructions and fouls created recently by humans, the last two centuries or better try to imagine the earth twelve thousand years ago when villages were proliferating on the face of earth. Just visualise it in your mind. Yes, it is like a paradise resort that you can find only in advertisements. Even the horrifying diseases we know in middle ages did not exist at those times. Those diseases were due to populated spots and travel of population to other places who carried germs of illness to other populated areas and made the death of masses of people possible. This is one paradise lost. You might believe that at that time there were cold and strife for food and attack of beasts using human flesh as a prey for their own survival, and incurable ailments of individuals and overall fear and ignorance of human about the natural phenomena and other terrorising factors. Still, these shortages did not have any effect on the fact that the earth was a paradise as far as we consider the existence of the life and with all destruction still has kept many of its original features. Where this beautiful safe habitat is placed in the whole universe? It is a thin layer between two layers. It is with all its diversity of objects inside it a layer of at most fifteen kilometre in its thickness, from the bottom of deepest ocean that you might find any shape of living thing to the top of highest point in the atmosphere that life can sustain. Arguments of observing very basic elements of life such as the amino acids in the dust of galaxies does not falsify my present discussion. This thin layer is confined immediately by two hostile layers: one under very hot and suffocating and one at the top very cold and again suffocating. That goes to infinite at the top. As far as you go in either direction there is no place to host any type of meaningful life. Well, as much we are busy of any non-sense the reality is what I described. There is no help, no miracle, no solution in either direction. It is death and death and death without any angel, any way around any bypass path. How can you grab galaxies as marbles in your hand. Have a look at night sky. Invent something to make a relation between you and that at the top or under the bottom.

Thursday, August 13, 2009

Spectrum of Natural Phenomena

One very observed consequence of modern mind is recognition of spectrum in all phenomena happening in nature. It means that when you single out a class of inter-related events in nature you can infer that those come in a full spectrum. You can see it in very weakest form. Then you can see it in stronger form. Then you move towards more stronger and at last it become very dominant to the extreme. Usually you start to categorise the phenomena at hand. At first different types inside the class seems to become separated easily and strongly but when you want to start to describe them then individuals of each category show border line characteristics that blur their boundaries with the neighbouring category and defuse together the lines that you have drawn to separate cases. For instance, in their chart, among chemical elements you say this group of elements are halogens. They are not metal and they are in gaseous form, aha except bromine which is liquid. And now you have another halogen which is solid and you become happy that bromine is transition from gaseous halogens to solid halogens. Yes iodine is solid but not as solid as iron. Even for attributing the modifier "solid" you cannot sharply categorize ideas. Iodine is solid but it easily sublimes due to the partial pressure of its surface layers that do not satisfy a sharp definition of solidness. It is solid but it shows characteristics of a gas besides, as you expect from a halogen. It is this and it is that. Then again there is another halogen, astatine, if we could have it enough we could not say halogens are non-metals. Astatine is a complete metal and you can imagine that any halogen a layer after astatine is as metal as iron. If you study that little place that you call the chart of chemical elements all the laws of nature until the end of the world are outlined from the view point of philosophy of science. You start from the element then you have to modify every attribution, and attributions of attributions need to be modified again and at the end you are at the beginning. You have one hundred items and one hundred types, only vaguely categorised in groups perhaps just to satisfy a taste. They are all different from each other as they should and they come in a full spectrum from the lightest to heaviest and each item has attributions that again cannot be described comprehensively with a fully agreed phrasing. You only compromise for the practicality: to be practical and pass to another stage. You draw the curtain back but behind the curtain there is no news; there is only another curtain. The satisfaction comes from drawing the curtain and from the fact that human lives span but for a short moment in the life of the material world and he has not a goal of understanding the entire creation and the truth of the world but likes to solve the problems of living with less fear and hardship while he is alive. He is pragmatic all the way. The beauty of the world and appreciation of its ultimate truth only remains for god, and human to get rid of this qualm assumes that such a being exists who in surrogacy is capable of such an endeavour. But there comes moments in the life of any human that he hears a voice, a sweet melody, from afar that invites him to something unknown and something familiar and something very sweet and something lost that he craves to feel and see and hear and touch and taste and embrace and he knows that none of these feelings are helpful for him to satiate that crave and to quench that thirst.