Blog Adventure 5: 5 Key Problems & 5 puzzles in Philosophy

Here are 5 Key Problems in Philosophy.  Philosophy is not limited to these, but I think these ones keep coming up, as opposed to something like Alchemy, which went out with Disco, so to speak.

1)  Happiness

2)  Value theory and the theory of what matters

3)  Argumentation and Reasoning

4)  Epistemology

5)  Problem Solving

Here are some fun thought experiments and problems for you kids at home:

1)  The Blue-Green problem — is the fact that some languages don’t recognize the difference between blue and green.  It’s all blue or all green for them.  What is color?

2)  Nozick’s pleasure machine — is the machine which gives us pleasure all of the time, and this is frequently a science-fiction theme.  This is a counter-example to Utilitarianism, which is the value setting theory which sets values based on the utility of the action,with the most utility– the most average happiness — for the most people.  Utilitarianism was the foundation of John Rawls’ philosophy of Egalitarianism, which strives for a society with a best happiness for the most amount of people.

Yet people would reject this pleasure-seeking machine, at least they do in the science fiction short stories (example granted: pleasure machine in Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury).  Bonus thinker:  don’t they have to call upon an unhappiness in order to break out of the machine or to not want to get in the machine?  Aren’t these rejecters calling on unhappiness when they supposedly would have total happiness, anyway?

3)  Sorites Problem and the Problem of Definition — Take a piece of hay away from your imaginary hay pile.  Take another and another.  If you can take as much as you want, how is it still a pile?  Talk about an experience when you had trouble phrasing something.  What happened?  Talk about an experience when you were really pleased, but you couldn’t put it into words.  What was it like when you experienced something for the first time, with few loaded concepts (or fewer than normal).

4)  Homunculum arguments — I found out about these on Wikipedia, but they pop up from time to time.  I knew about them before I knew the word for them.  A homunculus is a tiny man inside of a man.  The Eddie Murphy movie with him as an alien inside of a giant robot is one of them.  The movie Men in Black with Will Smith had one of these characters.  The Homunculum argument in philosophy is an answer which, instead of answering the problem, knocks it up a level.  If a philosopher doesn’t know something, he might say he solved the problem by saying the attribute is located somewhere else.  Descartes thought he found the soul in the pineal gland in the brain.  Modern psychology sometimes points out the “central processor” part of the brain.  These are homunculum arguments because instead of answering about the man (the mind), they are saying there’s another little man in the body (there’s a mind inside of the brain).  This doesn’t help too much.

5)  What makes you happy?  What makes you really happy?  How can you phrase these terms best for yourself?  How can you phrase these terms best for other people?  How can you phrase these terms without words?