Sophie's World: A Novel About the History of Philosophy (FSG Classics) Paperback – March 20, 2007
by Jostein Gaarder (Author), Paulette Moller (Translator)
ISBN 10: 9780374530716
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Then along comes Plato. He is concerned with both what is eternal and immutable in nature and what is eternal and immutable as regards morals and society. To Plato, these two problems were one and the same. He tried to grasp a “reality” that was eternal and immutable
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I disagree with the supposition that reality has fixed rules. I believe that any self consistent set of rules is acceptable to reality. Physical constants don't have any innate reason to be the values they are, but the values they take are consistent with each other and the principles of motion they follow. That is sufficient reason they exist. I would need further evidence to accept that those values are necessary and unique. The universe could bifurcate into two or more allowable sets of physics under stressful states like before the Big Bang. Infinitely many set of constants and physics may exist that we don't experience because our physical bodies couldn't exist in that reality.
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Plato also believed that the soul existed before it inhabited the body, (it was lying on a shelf in the closet with all the cookie molds.) But as soon as the soul wakes up in a human body, it has forgotten all the perfect ideas.
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The concept of ideal forms existing in another universe is nonsensical. All possible forms would exist in this hypothetical universe, of things that have existed in our world and things that could exist too. There are infinitely many shapes we can create in our universe, just by creating an N-sided polygon as n goes to infinity, so that ideal form universe would be infinitely populated as well. To distinguish all infinitely possible forms would be effectively the same as distinguishing nothing. Distinguishing forms is matching a limited set of patterns to a larger set of data. So you can determine if a pattern manifested in the image. If every image trivially matches its own pattern, then there's no distinguishing value. A blank page holds the same usefulness of data as a page that is completely filled with ink. That ink filled page is the concept of a universe of all ideal forms.
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You see the shadow of an animal. You think it may be a horse, but you are not quite sure. So you turn around and see the horse itself--which of course is infinitely more beautiful and sharper in outline than the blurred “horse-shadow.” Plato believed similarly that all natural phenomena are merely shadows of the eternal forms or ideas. But most people are content with a life among shadows. They give no thought to what is casting the shadows. They think shadows are all there are, never realizing even that they are, in fact, shadows.
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There's an arbitrariness to deciding what is Shadow and what is ideal mold. Is the shape of the horse nose an ideal? Is the imperfections in its shape actually minutia idealizations of their own? Where does the ideal devolve into imperfect shadow? Everything is an ideal form and nothing is. It's an imprecise romanticized idea that offers no practical value.
When I skim a philosophy book off a university library written by a professor, it seems often to devolve into splitting hairs on whether something is or isn't an imprecise romanticized idea whose concept is ill defined to begin with.
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Why do I only find criticisms of philosophy to talk about, when I do enjoy thinking philosophically? I suppose its easier to find fault in what people have done, than to do a better job myself.
Maybe the tendency to contradict what I perceive to be wrong is a sneaky way of getting myself to divulge what I believe to be true.
The best way to get the right answer on the Internet is not to ask a question, it’s to post the wrong answer. - Cunningham's Law
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