Comment by ogurechny | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ogurechny | Hacker News Reader

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The article doesn't seem to be posted on 1st of April, so I have to conclude that the author does not understand philosophy at all, and swims happily and carelessly in doctrinarianism about “scientific knowledge” instead. A philosopher should be able to see that the linear time and overlaying “progress” is just a transfer of educational imaginary model of physical experiment onto the whole world, and that any thought, no matter what it source is, can only exist in the present moment in someone's head. And even in that primitive linear model, every bit of “knowledge” we have is inherited from those horrible, horrible idiots from the past anyway.

It would be funny to read something like that for the first time, but the author doesn't seem to know that the same approach have been proclaimed (and subsequently ridiculed) for at least 200 years. The irony of ignoring history!

Also, it is mentioned that studying other sciences doesn't work the same way. Of course it doesn't, as for quite some time students haven't been sharing any state of mind with people whose portraits hang on the walls. They don't even share more than required between themselves, because they are given instant noodle type understanding with famous scientists simply printed on the packaging that results in everything, including theory, becoming applied, and never-ending compartmentalization.

> every bit of “knowledge” we have is inherited from those horrible, horrible idiots from the past anyway.

That's only true if you disregard all empirical observations you made yourself while living in this world, and relied 100% on things other people tell you.

> It would be funny to read something like that for the first time, but the author doesn't seem to know that the same approach have been proclaimed (and subsequently ridiculed) for at least 200 years. The irony of ignoring history!

The fact that some idea has been ridiculed for 200 years doesn't make it wrong. I can entertain the idea that it's pretty good evidence that it's funny though.

(Btw, I also find your strawman arguments and flippant attitude to be a bit in poor taste.)

You are almost completely what other people have told you, directly or indirectly. You wouldn't even be able to say “empirical observations” without someone teaching you the language, for starters. The tendency to imagine “individual” as a spherical Omnipotent Observer in a vacuum comes from the manner textbook explanations of imaginary model interactions are automatically spread onto the whole world, and from unquestionable individualism affecting most of the reasoning of current era, and so on.

It is simply ignorant to present the stitched corpses of vulgar materialism and its company as something “modern” (with a facelift to switch from “mechanistic” to “robotistic” model because engines stopped being cool for the public, computers are cool today). Ignorance can be ridiculed. Dostoevsky smirked at people making lecterns for Vogt, Moleschott, and Buchner, Goethe had fun with dialogues in Faust's study, but hey! We can safely skip all of that if we decide to call it “outdated”!

> You are almost completely what other people have told you

Yes. "almost".

> Ignorance can be ridiculed.

Yes.

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