When your scientific theory runs into trouble, either it's unable to explain certain things that were observed, or it just gave false predictions with regards to what you were supposed to observe, you generally have two options. You can 1) modify/expand your theory - so that it accomodates to the newly gathered data; or you 2) reject it and adopt a new one.
Introduction: The Discovery of Neptune
It's never completely obvious which option one ought to choose. For example, in 1821 French astronomer Alexis Bouvard published tables of the orbit of Uranus, making predictions of future positions of the planet based on Newton's laws of motion and gravitation (Bouvard 1821). However, subsequent observations revealed his predictions to be wrong - his tables were substantially off from what was actually observed.
In 1954, Aldous Huxley wrote an essay, in which he elaborated on his psychadelic experience under the influence of mescaline. Now, the work has gathered strong reactions for its evaluation of psychadelic drugs as facilitators of mystical insight with great potential benefits for science and philosophy.
For a general summary, Wisecrack has a great short take on the work:
We won't stress over any of that here. Rather, I want to take a closer look at the analogy itself, perception as a kind of door - what kind of door and where does it lead to? Why a door in the first place? What's up with the wall?
Not sure. I was always interested in questions about reality, I mean, what is reality? What is the world? Is that world mediated through our senses? Does our cognition actively process sensory data into a completely different whole? Is my world, the human world, the modern-millenial-world, the stupid-philosopher-jerking-off-to-arguments-world, is it completely detached from the world as it is?
Then I gradually realized that those questions are too big for me. For anyone, maybe. - ♫But together we stand a chance!♫- We need to communicate. Develop ideas together. Poke into each other's arguments. Get rid of bad ones. Heap up good ones, and build up a cathedral of knowledge.
Would be cool if we could just hook up to a cloud and directly transmit those ideas from one brain to another. But we can't, I think. So, we have to mediate those ideas. Through language. Sigh.
Philosophy of language! My passion. My curse. My excuse, so I can pretend like I'm doing something useful with life.
That's what I'm doing, I guess. In life. And I try to be useful, so I transmit those ideas via Youtube. But certainly, I could be more effective at transmiting those ideas? I guess I try to have fun with the channel. Do a bunch of stupid shit. Can't help myself, really.
Anyways, that's my long-term goal. Get some neat ideas out there, minimize the spread of fallacies that relate to language and stuff. Maybe provide some useful tools for viewers, who'll know to use them better.
For now, I just want to finish processing Wittgenstein's ideas (still reading Philosophical investigations) and find some sort of synthesis with another author that completely gripped me, Merleau-Ponty. They have a lot in common and their ideas do provide a different, a more dynamic, a more fruitful world-view than the rigid, static ontologies of modern science.
Language as a organic system of localized rules of useage? Consciousness as an embodied self, whose dynamics are shifting in relation to situational context? Dynamic semantics? A dynamic world?
After I finish that study, I'll familiarize myself with recent scientific developments and start presenting them through the lens of the acquired philosophical perspective on things. Oh, and meanwhile, I'll be posting a bunch of stupid shit, because that makes me happy:
