Thursday, September 17, 2020

If it walks like a duck

We love to abstract--I'm no exception. I'm good at it, which enhances the temptation.

Unfortunately we also love to abstract according to things that interest us, and not always according to the nature, or even all the details, of the thing.

Yes, that. Does it have all the functions that interest us?

Treating things operationally is powerful. And the Scholastics wasted an amazing deal of time and thought on details about intrinsic nature that don't always seem to have clear meaning, let alone objective reality.

But just because Forms aren't fashionable, and that people can ask stupid questions about them, doesn't mean they aren't real, or aren't useful ways of thinking about reality.

The huge temptation of the operational approach is to ignore anything inconvenient. If you put lipstick on the pig, it becomes pretty--if you abstract away inconvenient details. A woman is a man after various surgeries and drugs--if you abstract away inconvenient details and just look at the cartoon; the same way a sex doll is a woman.

Are we just a computation engine with some built-in mechanisms and some sensing gear? We don't live as though we are--probably we can't. I'd have thought that would be a useful datum for the likes of Hume, but he didn't take the hint.

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