Getting too economics nowadays, and the philosophical mind slips into inquiry into behaviour that does little to question purpose of fundamental existence or the reason behind non-economic emotions. I scurried through some blogs and found how sentimental people around me are. Cool. At least for the hungry philosophical mind. Then economics mode set in and all sorts of question concerning the utility people obtain from being labeled ‘philosophical’ or more colloquially, ‘cheem’, or the kind of incentives that pushes people to thinking in ‘philosophical’ ways despite overwhelming social pressure that considers philosophical inquiry out of modern context or simply put in the most Westernized way, ‘uncool’. That, is supposed to be more of my concern – what exactly drives people to be philosophical? Innate curiosity about the world, pure divine inspiration, or just for the exclusive label forced upon by the society that has some form of mixed-blessing effect?
The last driving force seem the most powerful, though the second last may be as valid. The fundamental things that drives people is based on the incentives involved and thus the utility gained from the action. If the action of inquiry provides such high absolute utility, blogging these thoughts would have such low marginal utility that the action is unlikely to be carried out, so we can be rather sure that innate curiosity is insufficient to make people think philosophically, or at least, insufficient to allow us to perceive the philosophical-ness of a being. The fact that this property is detectable leads us to the next 2 plausible driving forces.
Divine inspiration is an attractive solution to the problem but it’s in no way a stable conclusion to this little problem we have over here. The fact is that people around me shares some similar properties about perception of social forces and they way of handling it leads us closer to the justification of social forces. However, in a bid to remove the ‘divine inspiration’ theory, we first have to present the empirical situation. The circumstances is such that many people are feeling sentimental, philosophical, emotional and they blog about it, and they convey if with such cliche statements that unless ‘divine inspiration’ is a mere software programme that behaves like a virus, that should not happen. The question naturally comes – if everyone’s having this divine inspiration, why not me; or perhaps now is the time? No. The answer is that there’s no divine inspiration to discuss, for everyone’s merely succumbing to this social pressure that innate desire to question seems to fuel. The word is ‘seems’, for it doesn’t. The forceful incorporation of humanities’ way of inquiry in Sciences have upset our youth’s way of thinking. We are ‘forced’ to think of something meaningful to ask about rather than having questions naturally arise from us when we have our encounters. That’s a clear example of pure information overload.
So, what the crap is this social force making people inquire about the natural world, the humanly interactions, and the things we perceive? It is a high level kind of social pressure, one that works it’s way not from interaction, or mirroring the rest, it works through imposing a barrier, that ‘exclusifies’ the author and encourage them to immortalize themselves, at least within their narrow scopes of perception. This sort of crap inquiry, pseudo-philosophy, may be capable of destroying our foundation of humanities, our roots in questioning about the world. Scientists, can never become the sort of philosophers who have asked the great questions we spent centuries seeking to answer, and the effort to make them so can have devastating results to the field of inquiry itself; for the wrong method of inquiry naturally leads one to the wrong solution and thus the wrong answer to the true inquiry. There’s a philosophy version of Alchemy and it’s brewing. Better whip out your Philonomics to clear the way.