This is ludicrous. Failure to distinguish the person (“I”) from their recorded voice does not make a philosophical problem. It's pure and unadulterated stupidity.
If you want to tell me it's akin to astrology, or some other pseudo made up framework, fine.
I don't have a problem with fantasy. I have a problem with those telling me it's real.
"I took a series of university classes, where we examined the natural laws in The Land, and Thomas Covenant's ring, and derived a measure of predictive weather patterns! I know science!" <-- philosophy
I don't need to study astrology for years, to know it's nonsense in about 10 minutes.
Yet I've hear a lot more philosophical blather than that, and so yes, I have enough data to make a determination.
There's an inner logic to tarot cards, books and books on it, but that doesn't make it useful or valuable.
I've already clarified why this is not so. Thus, your main, true disagreement is that you do not agree with my assessment.
Copernicus deniers didn't need years of study either as their source material said differently.
I'm not saying anything either way on philosophy, I'm simply pointing out that your presented logic there is flawed
It relies on a pretty obvious mischaracterization of the situation at hand - there isn't a person saying "I am not here" at all, it's a machine playing a recording. With the necessary context, the dilemma becomes a pretty obvious non-dilemma.
If you're saying we should be willing to explore our minds through philosophical problems, I agree with you. I just think this particular philosophical problem is pretty lame.
Is the conclusion supposed to be that that formal meaning of any particular word is less important than the ability to communicate abstract ideas? That's an interesting notion though I'd argue that notion isn't helped by a half-broken analogy.
Another thing: The great thing about Philosophy is that there are no wrong answers. But, the bad thing about philosophy classes is there are wrong answers. Open-endedness and free thinking don't scale to 150-seat lecture halls, indifferent TAs, and PhD-candidate "professors" doing the bare minimum to get a diploma.
The programming analogy would be that processing a particular type of data will often have hidden pitfalls for the most intuitive approach. It might be easy to avoid those pitfalls by modifying your program, but someone had to notice and document the problem and the workaround.
"I am not here now". I'm not seeing the problem.
There are a lot of philosophy 'problems' like this, which leads me to think philosophers lead blessed, problem-free lives.
I agree, perhaps with the qualification of 'eventually', having been both of these people:
1) someone born dirt poor who had to spend every waking moment to feed myself
2) someone who can pontificate in comment sections
Those who can't do, teach. Those who can't teach wander philosophically.
Playing with ourselves. Man plans, god laughs. Everyone has a plan until they get hit in the mouth. I could go on.
PARADOX, in philoſophy, a propoſition ſeemingly abſurd,
as being contrary to to ſome received opinion, but yet true
in fact.
No ſcience abounds more with paradoxes than geome-
try: thus, that a right line ſhould continually approach
to the hyperbola, and yet never reach it, is a true para-
dox; and in the ſame manner, a ſpiral may continually
approach to the point, and yet not reach it, in any number
of revolutions, however great.
Encyclopaedia Brittanica, 1771,
Vol. 3, p. 455On the other hand, perhaps we should consider whether analytical philosophy, following the linguistic turn [1], is creating problems for itself when it tries to find metaphysical truth by analyzing human language as if it were a formal system. For example, when David Chalmers says "even God could not create a male vixen", is he mistaking an accidental lexicographical fact for a metaphysical insight?
(See also the 'Problem' of Induction, which I had to spend a great deal of time on in college, and even after reading centuries of debate about it, is the least problematic 'problem' I've ever encountered. Maybe this is a linguistic issue, and philosophers should stop calling things 'problems' when the rest of us have to make rent.)
It smells like you are just mocking people for being interested in thinking about things. Why?
In your example, "here" is semantically different from the "here" in the answering machine case and doesn't result in a paradox.
Zeno's paradoxes for example show us the weaknesses of Ancient Greek's system of reasoning, the weaknesses of their kid of logic and math. But will have troubles seeing them as paradoxes if they do not know logic at all or if they know modern logic and modern math which solve all of the Zeno's paradoxes (or most of them?). Now Zeno's paradoxes are not paradoxes at all, but the silly mistakes of reasoning.
It reminds me of edge-cases in programming, you designed a beautiful program and then edge-cases started to pop up, you patch your program, patch it some more, and in no time at all your beautiful program becomes a heap of spaghetti code. The only way to avoid it is to code something that you coded before many times and know all the shenanigans allowing you to combine beautiful design with the practical applicability.
Here is the same thing, if you do not know what the system the author uses, you cannot judge if his reasoning stupid or not.
I don't know either, but I believe, that it is an interesting observation. The person said "I'm not here now", and it was obviously false, when they said it, but when answering machine says it the statements becomes true. I'm not sure what the problem is, but I think, that the problem starts biting you hard, when you try to define a set of all such statements and to choose a condition of their truthfulness. Of course, you can use your intuition as a tool for demarcation, but philosophy doesn't work that way, it seeks an objective criteria, preferably a formal one.
But that's of course what an engineer would say.