Twokinds ARCHIVE Forums

Hey! :D
It's time for the second official philosophical rant on this forum.
The subject: Aristotle and his final cause.

Aristotle (384-322 B.C.)
~Pupil @ Plato's Academy for nearly 20 years.
~Born in Macedonia, came to Athens.
~Came to the academy when Plato was 61 years old.
~Father was a respected physician.
~Considered Europe's first great biologist.

Some of you may heard of his philosophy about "substance" and "form".
Although I find this very interesting, this will not be what I discuss here.
I will be talking about the final cause.

Cause --> HOW something came to happen.

Aristotle suggested that there were 4 different causes to every even.
Let's take a common instance: RAIN!

Material Cause - The moisture was there at the precise moment when the air cooled. The materials which the event requires were present.

Efficient Cause - The moisture cools. What needs to happen simply happens.

Formal Cause - The nature of the water is to fall to the earth after cooling. How the objects present behave satisfy the requirements of the event.

Final Cause - Plants and animals need rainwater to grow. The rain has a PURPOSE. With an egocentric view of the world such as what you are allowed to experience, you can easily conclude that everything that happens happens because of you. Without you to experience it, would it exist? Would it have purpose? Perhaps, and perhaps not. One cannot know.
But there is a possibility.
Think about it; everything that you see around yourself, does it not have a purpose that applies to you?
Here's a quick list of the things around me and their purpose's:

-Computer --> I can type this.
-Rain outside --> Keep in inside to type this or otherwise. If I had gone outside, its purpose would be to get me wet.
-TV --> Entertain me.
-Pencil sharpener --> Something for me to look at and write about. If I had broken a pencil, its purpose would have been to sharpen it.
-Will Durant's 'The Story of Philosophy' --> Reference for info and something to write about.

It seems like the purpose of everything is simply what I do with it or what it does to me. This is natural. I personally don't believe in true conscience, and purpose clearly doesn't require it.

DISCUSS!!!

Aw man, I already took philosophy. I got a B-. I didn't like the class because I found myself thinking, hundreds of times - "Why does anyone care if we exist or not? Why should I spend my life wondering about the metaphysical if it doesn't affect me? I'd rather be thinking about beer and [insert things not suitable for this forum] and ping-pong."

If you ask me, the point of life is to have as much fun as you can while learning as much as you can. Get the best of both worlds, don't do anything stupid that puts you in jail (where you don't get much fun or learning) and try to not get yourself killed.

There you have it, the secrets to a happy life.

That's Epicureanism! :D

"Without you to experience it, would it:"

"exist?" Yes - things existed before I did, and will continue to do so after I am gone...

"Would it have purpose?" - Only if someone else observed it. Purpose is given - it does not exist independently...

As for things I can see having a purpose for me: Only the purpose I assign it. If I see a bird flying in the distance, and think nothing of it, it will continue to hold no purpose.

This is all just an exercise in how a person can imagine everything having a purpose, or will, or destiny, or whatever you wish to imbue it with, of its own...just because you can imagine it does not make it so...

Agree with Graham on this one. I like musing about this kind of stuff, but it always comes back to the same conclusion. Does it really matter? Maybe we're all in an illusion. Maybe we're all dreaming. Maybe we're all actually batteries. But until I actually have to deal with being a battery, I'm pretty fine with staying put and being charged up or whatever.

On the other hand, discussing why people do the things they do is more fun.

Blech, philosophy kicked my keester during my freshman year of college. Barely scraped by with a B, and that was only because the final was an essay.

What, I'm not good enough to agree with about everything? Well. Fine then. I see how this is. I'm going to go get drunk and pass out because that's how people like me traditionally end their days when on leave. At least I know an officer who agrees with me about everything. Captain Morgan.

I'm living my philosophy on how to enjoy life to the fullest extent and so far I'm enjoying life pretty well.

Well, I disagreed that getting drunk and frolicking nude on a Saturday afternoon in the middle of Buckingham Palace was a good idea. Unless you happened to be drunk on Guinness. In which case it's a political message.

[EDIT] Wikipedia has enlightened me on your good friend the Captain. Seems like a nice fellow.

But does it make it necessarily not so? What is the real difference between imagination and reality? What I perceive, what I imagine, is reality to me. I know no other reality other than that within my own mind, for there is nothing that I can perceive without my mind.

The difference between imagination and reality is this: If you imagine that someone is hitting you in the head with an axe, you will freak out, but not die...if it is reality, on the other hand...
XD

Bugger all, how can I get this "imagination is reality" thing to work for me? 'Cause, you know, it'd be nice to wake up some morning next to a wolf girl, instead of alone.</snark>

More seriously, if what we imagine is reality, then why have all the negative consequences of so much of reality? Where does surprise fit in? After all, it's all your own conceptions. To reference the above, why don't I have a wolf girl wife right now? Unless reality is something outside of me, impressing itself on me, there's no reason for (my) reality to be different from my most pleasant dreams.

The problem with relative truth is that it is self-contradictory. The statement "All truth is relative," has a corollary, "There is no absolute truth." The problem is that the statement (and thus it's corollary, which is more obvious) is self-contradictory. In the land of rhetoric, we call that a logical fallacy. Now, if someone is silly enough to base their worldview on something which is easily demonstrable to be false, I suppose that's their prerogative, but I'd much prefer that my worldview be at least based on something that's, at the very least, a statistical unlikelihood. (Which would be what Richard Dawkins has defined God's existence as, so there we are -- my worldview is based on a statistical unlikelihood, just how I prefer it. :P)

Perception and reality are bound together, but not strongly or inexorably bound. Ask someone who has gone on an "acid trip," or taken other hallucinogens. What they perceived might have been quite different from reality. A blind person cannot perceive color as someone like myself does, but that does not mean that color is not real. If you close your eyes and stand up from your chair, taking a step forward, the chair has effectively left your perception. Has it ceased to exist? Just let yourself fall backward: I'll guarantee that reality asserts itself despite your inability to perceive the chair. What you are left with is memory and faith that your memory is still correct. It's possible that someone has replaced the chair with a mattress, or it "magically" was transmogrified into one. So if the only thing you trust is your perception and not on anything outside of it, you cannot make any assertion beyond what you are perceiving in this instant. That is obviously counter to all science and understanding. Perhaps it is simply because I am an engineer, and I count on things operating in the way I understand them to operate, but I find it ridiculous to try to define reality on something so limited and transient as perception.

If you really want to bind reality and perception or imagination, you have to do it like White Wolf did through "Paradox." The collective subconscious of everyone else enforces a sensible reality on you, which you may or may not contribute to, but attempting to break causes severe repercussions.

I understand what your saying, but are you not assuming that there are other entities around you that reality is relative to? You could be imagining a person telling you that what you are seeing is not real, after all.

I suppose that, technically, yes, I do believe there are other entities which my reality is relative to. That's part and parcel of believing in God. ;) But what about, for instance, the atheist? Who or what is their reality relative to?

The issue isn't that I'm imagining someone telling me that what I'm seeing isn't real, the issue is when I'm alone, things I would like to imagine happening do not happen. If reality is only personally relative, then why is it that it does not change when I am alone? Why can't I introduce objects or people to my reality when I want to believe in them and there aren't other influences affecting my thought? Again, shouldn't I be able to "believe" myself a wolf girl? Why can't I do that?

To use a less ridiculous example, why don't people always find their dream guy/girl on the first try? Why is love a difficult trial? Why are there times when life is depressing? Why are there negative consequences and events when we define our own realities?

Maybe so you keep believing that Con Fett is wrong? That does require the presence of an external power controlling you, though. Something bent on ensuring you believe that everything you experience is real, not just imaginary.

Furthermore, just because your mind might be rendering everything around you solely in your conciousness, doesn't mean it doesn't adhere to or create certain rules and restrictions for itself to follow. You might be too used to the rules your mind set itself, so that anything your mind couldn't render, like say for example pooping rainbows, would fall under the category of impossible. A child wishing for ink stains to disappear is only wishing, he doesn't believe that they are gone. Unfortunately, a child jumping out of a window thinking he's superman doesn't take off into outer space either, so.

Or it could be that the entity I mentioned earlier feeds you these stories so you don't try it yourself. I have to go lie down now; my mind's all screwy.

[By the way, an example I'm sort of surprised no one's pulled out yet would be stuff like the Matrix. Since you people are going on about believing and perception, this seems like a natural thing to bring up.]