Complex Numbers

More On Philosophy

panthera: Would you agree that nothing is truly 'discovered', that it is just a question of a new awareness of this or that, which may have existed all along?... we live in a bigger world than what we are 'aware' of, proven by many 'discoveries' starting with the planet not being flat... being newly 'aware' of its real shape does not take away the fact that it always was round.

(for full text see comments to "The Father of Invention" )

Thanks for the thoughtful comment, Chatty.

I like to think that my philosophy is pragmatic and realistic; that is, I don't concern myself much with the question of whether all y'all exist or not. Solipsism is an easy trap to get into, especially on the Internet, but it's also easy to get out of: I'm real, you're real; my computer is real. I'm also not "a butterfly dreaming I'm a man;" that observation strikes me as some straw-grasping from a guy who doesn't want to deal with reality. I'm willing to accept variant definitions of reality, but they all have to embrace the fact of me sitting here on my lunch break and typing in my blog; the idea that this is all illusion is simply preposterous, not worthy of consideration outside the walls of University philosophy departments and Buddhism.

Now, that doesn't mean that we don't all run around with illusions, or that these illusions don't affect our reality. That's the symbolism of all the math discussion in my blog header, if you haven't figured it out by now: the idea that there's a real part and an imaginary part, and that most of what we see isn't purely one or the other but some mixture of both.

So, yes, to me the definition of "discovery" is finding something that existed before you knew about it (as a species or an individual) AND incorporating that into your worldview. Like, for instance, I have a "Discover" card, so named because you have to run around and discover places that actually take it. They took it before I found them; I merely found what was already there, and others already knew about. Once I find them, they're on my mental list of "places that take Discover cards."

It's the "incorporating that into your worldview" that's tough for a lot of people. There are still people who think the world is flat, despite all evidence to the contrary, and despite this being known since at least as far back as Aristotle. Others deny that anyone ever walked on the Moon, or that the Holocaust happened. You can deny all you want; it doesn't change the facts - but it does change your worldview, your perception of the meaning of events (or even if events have meaning, which I'd dispute).

So I'd turn around what Chatty said: Being newly aware of the Earth's real shape doesn't take away from the fact that a lot of people have thought it was flat. And for some, even all the evidence to the contrary won't convince them.

We're just stubborn that way, we (mostly) hairless apes.