Art or science? | IMDB v2.1

Art or science? Jun 7, 2020 1:39:45 GMT

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Post by Eva Yojimbo on Jun 7, 2020 1:39:45 GMT

Jun 6, 2020 3:49:05 GMT gameboy said:

Jun 6, 2020 1:33:52 GMT Eva Yojimbo said:

I don't think Zen koan's are illogical, I think they're designed to tickle quirks in human intuition and thinking. Logic requires a proposition about reality, which most koans aren't really.

Fair point, though, about working within the parameters of the OP, but if I were to start a thread called "animal or vegetable" and offered "doorknob" as an example, I don't know how you could argue it was either. It's simply NOT either. But, OK, if you're going to force me to make a choice between astrology being science or art, I'd say art because it's far more about imagination than making any rational conclusions based on empiricism. In the end, what the people who write horoscopes or make up "personality profiles" are doing is just using their imagination, which is far more in the realm of art.

But one hand can't clap? It will never be able to clap. I've pondered that koan before and it boggles the mind. That's why I said making these illogical choices is Zen-like.

If forced to make a choice I'd say a doorknob is more vegetable because it's not sentient. And a doorknob can also be made of wood which is definitely vegetable. See how fun this can be when you suspend logic?

Aristotle is credited with being the father of science because he was the first to use empirical methods. Yet Aristotle believed that spontaneous combustion created frogs out of trash heaps!!! Science has not always been correct. Even 20th century science was rife with errors. And actually astrologers follow historical rules which ascribe personality traits to planets and stars. They are not really using their imagination. They are following precedent.

If you define "clap" as two hands coming together forcefully to make a sound then one hand can't clap and thus the sound produced is nothing. I don't know what's supposedly "mind-boggling" about this koan. It has something of the logic of a joke in that it's setup ("what's the sound...") sets up the expectation of things that make sound only to deliver a punchline ("...of one hand clapping") of something that doesn't/can't make a sound, while referencing the sound the thing can't make, at least by itself. It's clever, but not particularly difficult to understand.

Eh, I just don't see the point in a game of classifying things like X as Y or Z when X is clearly not Y or Z, but OK.

Aristotle was the first to emphasize empiricism, but the kind of rigorous empirical hypothesis testing didn't happen until the advent of modern science in the late Renaissance to The Enlightenment. Before that you still had a lot of reliance on philosophy and folk-ish ideas about how things worked, and something like spontaneous combustion was certainly never empirically observed. So all you're doing is showing that people have the capacity to, on the one hand, emphasize empiricism when it comes to knowledge but, on the other hand, believe silly/wrong things without any empirical evidence. It doesn't make the latter stuff science just because those people used science to believe some other things! Yes, scientists have plenty of wrong ideas, hypotheses, and theories, but the method exists to help weed them out over time as more is discovered. However, you need to make the distinction between things people used to think (or sometimes still do) which didn't/doesn't and never had any kind of scientific support (rigorous, empirical hypothesis testing), and things like Newtonian physics that had lots of evidence, but were superseded by General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics.