Passion and Knowledge

People should be passionate in their pursuit of knowledge. Also, some thoughts on the reason/emotion dichotomy and its origins.

Category:

People & Blogs

Tags:

• passion
• knowledge
• reason
• empiricism
• ontology
• scientific
• method
• epistemology
• philosophy
• emotions
• psychology
• memes

[modelmark]

I don't think what is generally meant with value free theory, is that the person pursuing the theory has no values. He/she can be passionate like crazy about it. It is just that the theory itself does not require values.

'If you want to be healthy, you have to eat vitamins.', is a value free theory. Is does not say health is a value.

[XOmniverse]

I actually did a video in my ethics series called Rational Oughts that you should watch. It addresses how even if statements like that can't truly be value free.

[modelmark]

what values are buried in the statement :2+2=4 ?

[XOmniverse]

The better question is; what values are buried in the person that motivates them to say 2+2=4?

[modelmark]

this person is indeed motivated and not value free, like no person is value free. But the statement 2+2=4 itself, seems value free. You can see that statement independent of the person uttering it.

[XOmniverse]

I could be wrong, but somehow I think the statement "2+2=4" contains stuff like "mathematical accuracy is good."

[krustyegg]

The phenomenon of mechanistic thinking, follows the age old tradition of fads and fashions; and also comes from the trap of function fixedness of heuristics: i.e. this method of thinking has worked so well so many times that it is the first schema used to answer a question.

Something that really pisses me off is all these guys talking about the body and mind as a machine/computer: It is not and here is why: a machine is made for a purpose where as I am not made and don’t exist for a purpose!

[stealthswimmer]

yeah, I think i get what you're saying when you say "nothing is value-free" but what I think people mean when they say economics is value-free is that there is not any sort of moral connection is has to anything.

[ediblepet]

I can see two reasons why other people aren't as passionate about knowledge as you and other philosophers are. The first is that you are abnormally intelligent. Most people don't have your intelligence and will get frustrated and even resentful towards knowledge. Another I think is psychological. The truth can be a real downer and people are trying to keep their sanity and contentedness together. You should read The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker if you haven't.

[modelmark]

I do not think it says that. It just states a fact of reality, I think

[Sepero1]

I agree that nothing we take action towards is without value.

Mises based his economics primarily on a foundation of utilitarian cosequentialism.

[Cailwyn]

I don't don't think that it is scientists, or intellectuals in general, that have become dispassionate, but rather the cultural perception of intellectuals that has changed. Before the 20th century, intellectuals were the rock stars of their day. Now they are considered to be nerds and know-it-alls.

I think, on a cultural level, people are less interested in intellectual endeavors because of the noise of cheap amusements out there; people forgot how to sit and think and be awed.

[nine9s]

(cont.) Or, at least, that's a dominant reason. There's a lot of plain, unavoidable personal preference at work too. But you don't see art or history getting a reputation for being dry and cold. I'm sure there are plenty of people who are just upset that they can't BS their way through science the way they do the humanities.

[nine9s]

The predominant epistemology and metaphysics among scientists at the time didn't allow them to definitively state "This is true." Yet science is all about discovering the truth. Imagine embarking on a career where one has to go through the motions of doing something that can't be done. Horrible. And it only got worse as physics became more and more incomprehensible.

So in summary, science became dry and cold when its end goal was undercut by bad philosophy.

[nine9s]

As science became a statistical description of appearances, the old accusation of science as a dry cold undertaking came true. There's nothing inspiring about intricately studying something that doesn't really exist. In fact, physicists started talking about "modern physics" vs. "classical physics" in the 1880's, decades before Einstein, because everyone was already explicitly dismissing the idea of studying what exists outside the observer. (cont.)

[nine9s]

Even as atomic theory had all the evidence necessary for its acceptance in 1870, scientists were still unwilling to say anything definite about what exists. Even as late as the early 1900s there were scientists who said that atoms were only a mental aid, not a description of what is. In fact, a seller of molecular model kits (balls and wires) was laughed out of a scientific conference for the effrontery of presenting molecules as something that actually existed. (cont.)