G'day, my name is Bruce Robertson and this is Pirate Philosophy. In these series of videos I will be discussing and describing an original philosophy, one that you won't find anywhere else, but it is one that is logical, rigorous and dynamic.
Welcome to Pirate Philosophy.
In today's video, I will be introducing the particular paradigm that I will be presenting, which we will call The Pattern Paradigm for reasons that will become apparent later.
So what does want one from a philosophical paradigm? Well basically one wants to make sense of the world; to find powerful theories that will explain many of the different facets of life. And in particular for a philosophical paradigm, one might want to find a paradigm that fits the criteria discussed in the previous video for which I used the acronym SCALES; i.e Self-consistency, Comprehensiveness, Accuracy, Logic, Explicitness and Simplicity. So that is what one wants from a philosophical paradigm. And to put the particular paradigm that I will be presenting: 'The Pattern Paradigm', into a historical perspective, it can be considered to be a continuation of the ideas, or at least some of the ideas, of David Hume.
For I agree with many of his ideas including his naturalistic approach, his denial that you could get a 'should' from an 'is', his denial that certain knowledge of the future is possible and his dismissal of any philosophy that does not fit with neither facts nor what he called 'relations of ideas'. But while Hume's worked focussed primarily on what is not possible, The Pattern Paradigm focuses much more on what is possible. And The Pattern Paradigm can be considered to be a philosophical synthesis from a few key ideas rather than the analytical approach favoured by Standard Western Philosophy. And certainly any discipline, including philosophy, has to start with a certain amount of analysis, but subsequently a synthesis is required in order to explain and understand those concepts that have been identified in the analysis.
It is like if one presented a motor vehicle to ancient Greek philosophers, what would they make of it? They would obviously start by categorizing and labelling all the different parts that were clearly visible, such as the doors, headlights, engine, wheels etc. And a further analysis of those components might well lead to some ideas about how these different components might connect to each other and what their function might be. But this analysis approach can only go so far. In order to get a good understanding of the motor vehicle and how it actually works one would have to start with a synthesis; this would mean beginning with how energy is released from the combustion of hydrocarbons in oxygen and then hypothesize how this energy can be transmitted to the wheels in a controlled manner. So through that one would get an understanding of how the motor vehicle actually works and one could construct a blue print of it. And this is what the pattern paradigm attempts to do within the discipline of philosophy. It starts with a few basic ideas and logic and processes of inference and goes on to describe the world and then to make sense of the world.
The Pattern Paradigm starts from a few basic assumptions and an explicit logical process to arrive at a description of the world that makes sense and emergent from this process one arrives, at among other things, the concept of truth, consciousness and morals. In this way it covers and encompasses the same domain of philosophy as Standard Western Philosophy, such as epistemology, ethics, mathematics, science and language. However it describes them in a very different way, and as such it is a different paradigm from that of Standard Western Philosophy. And I contend that overall the Pattern Paradigm constitutes a better philosophical paradigm than Standard Western Philosophy at least according to the SCALES criteria mentioned previously.
I have called this channel Pirate Philosophy to highlight and emphasize the distinct paradigm of The Pattern Paradigm and how it is different from that of Standard Western Philosophy. And it requires a paradigm shift to fully appreciate it. Although it covers the same domain as that of Standard Western Philosophy, it divides it up in different ways and uses different categories and different words in a much much simpler way. I have numbered the videos in this channel from PP1 onwards to emphasize that this is a progressive sequence of videos. So points covered in a particular video may reference points in an earlier video, but not in a later one. PP stands for either Pattern Paradigm or Pirate Philosophy; you can take your pick.
Well that is all I have for you today. If you have any interesting comments or questions about today's video please leave them in the comments section below. And if you would like to continue this journey with me then please subscribe to my channel, give it a thumbs up and ring the bell. Thank you.
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