Philosophy in a Factory

So when I was in my intro to logic class this semester my professor at one point was talking about Descartes and his skepticism and I described it to a friend of mine with an example that was something along the lines of "Imagine you have a favorite pen. One that you know everything about, all the sights smells feel etc. and one day you let me bring it home as a favor and I bring it back to you the next day just totally burnt up. Its no longer the same color, shape, size, feel, any of that. How do you know its the same pen you gave me?" thinking I was being a real smartie with the thought experiment. Fast forward a month or two and I'm reading Descartes's meditations and come across the exact same thought experiment, only using a block of wax instead of a pen. My "original idea" turned out to be something like 500 years old. So I got a real kick out of the irony of that but at the very least I'm thinking like a philosopher!

       So the last month or so Ive been noticing a lot of talk (or writing I guess) about the concept of Free Will or really more of the lack there-of. I bought a book for my birthday specifically on the subject even and found a lot in it that I didn't agree with and a lot of arguments I felt weren't very well backed up or argued but it got me thinking and talking and a common theme I've noticed is that everyone seems to define "Free Will" something along the lines of "Thought or action free from any outside influence" which is ludicrous to think about.     And I really wanted to post here about my remarkable progress on the subject and how Ive come up with a better alternate definition because a day ago I would have sat on my high horse and claimed to and then my friends humbled me and got me thinking even more than the initial spur.     I and a friend initially settled on the suitably vague definition of "Thought or action free from an...

     The other day I picked up a book that I hadn't read in a while. I was maybe halfway through when I got distracted and put it down, always meaning to pick it back up after it had fallen to the wayside. It was Phillip K. Dick's The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch - Dick being probably my favorite author of all time and a major influence on me and my personal philosophies.     The part I had left off on was just after Barney Mayerson volunteers for the harsh task of emigrating to Mars to colonize it and work on terraforming it and just prior to the introduction of the new competing hallucinatory drug of Chew-Z and reading it I was struck by Dick's consistent views on the nature of reality and the preferability of the real definable and objective truth of the world as compared to a convenient subjective truth.     In the following chapters, Barney takes the drug for the first time and is transported into his past before he had divorced his...

      Tonight at lunch I finished re-reading my favorite book of all time, John Steinbeck's East of Eden And I happened to check Linkedin and saw a post by Tiara Yacht's CEO Thomas Slikkers where he spoke about Transparency and the need for a leader to speak the truth, even if it didn't suit their needs and I thought of my last post expounding on both the need to understand and the need to find Truth in this modern world and I wanted to write some about it. (Spoilers for a 70 year old novel)     One of my favorite characters in East of Eden, Samuel Hamilton, had an interesting Idea of what The Truth is and, to paraphrase his stance, would say something like "The Truth is just as likely to kill a man as it is to liberate him" and this is a major theme in East of Eden.      Throughout the novel, both the Trask family and the Hamiltons struggle with facing the truth. Whether it be Adam's facing the truth of where his father's money came fr...

     Lately I've been really into learning about existentialism which is a philosophical movement that sprung up in France around the time of WWII, but has deep roots throughout the history of the subject of Philosophy. Its categorized by its focus on the human experience- the love, the pain, the sheer absurdity of it all- rather than treat such things as a detriment to rational thought. And, in particular, I've been intrigued by the whole concept of absurdity and what it meant to people at the time. The time before World War II was certainly no stranger to the absurdity of life, but it was nothing compared to what happened during the war.       To the people living in Europe at the time, it seemed like there was no rationale to what was happening. People seemingly lived and died by the random whim of the insane who were in power, so the absurdity because a sticking point in the thoughts of the countless living, not only in France but around the g...

Hi everyone! My name is Joe Atwood and I am an aspiring philosopher who has been working in a factory for the last fifteen years of their life. Ive started this blog to house whatever musings and silly thoughts that pop into my head while im at work and to showcase things im learning in school. To be honest, it will probably mostly be me thinking out loud but I am always open to comments of all kinds but especially discussions of whatever I'm rambling about!