Musings about philosophy, life, truth, Algebra, and leaps of faith

As a retired engineer,  I tend to go into philosophy with the same tactics of my trade.

Define the problem or issues, measure them, look for possible solutions, try the solutions, measure them to confirm success or failure.

What I have found is that philosophical and life issues are generally hard to define and harder to measure.  This generally stops the engineering approach cold.

There are also problems with the engineering approach to problem solving.  Logical as it may sound, we do not have infinite time to carry out these procedures.  With deadlines to meet,  every step of the procedure can potentially be incomplete before going to the next step.  While there may be a logical answer resulting from this procedure,  it is based on incomplete steps.  Unless we have hind sight, it is impossible to know when each step is complete.

I am impressed with some of the thinking of the great philosophers but somehow, there is always something missing and the answer is never definite enough to satisfy my engineering view.

Take Socrates example of how to choose a good politician.  He thinks above all,  there is nothing that beats experience.

However, since we cannot predict what kind of future situation this politician will have to face,  we cannot say for sure that he will have the experience to deal with it.

So the next best thing to direct experience is virtue.  What is virtue?  Here it gets vague, good character, good citizenship, vision, good judgement, are some of the things that come to mind.

But if we cannot nail down what good virtue is with a virtue meter, how are we to compare one political candidate against another on virtue?

Even if we do make a good choice of politicians, their service over their elected term is heavily influenced by luck and external events.  How do we know that our virtue meter is working correctly when we look back on our choice of politicians?  We need to calibrate our virtue meter properly to make a better choice next time but there is no way of reliably doing this.

The most common feeling I have with philosophy though is that I seem to be squeezing a balloon when I pursue an issue: When I try to nail down the choice of politicians, the balloon bulges out on the issue of virtue.  When I try to grasp what virtue is,  the balloon bulges out somewhere else on what good judgement is to form virtue.

This is where algebra comes in.

High school algebra tells us that if we have 2 unknowns, say x and y,  we need to have two independent equations in x and y to solve for the value of x and y.

The more unknowns we have, the more independent equations we need to solve these unknowns.

Each independent equation represents a new piece of information that we can use in logic to define the answer of what x and y is.

My dilemma with philosophy reminds me of trying to solve algebraic problems with less equations than unknowns.  If you have two unknowns, x and y, but only one equation,  you will not be able to find what the value of x or y is.

However,  you will be able to express x in terms of y or y in terms of x.  Therefore the analogy with squeezing the balloon again.  You will know x if only you know what y is.  Or, you will know y if only you know what x is.

Seems to me that we do not have enough equations (information) to solve for the algebraic unknowns (truth in life).   We are missing some more equations to nail things down.

For the religious, they take a leap of faith and then everything is defined and they have truth.

The leap of faith to me is the filling out of the missing equations in algebra.

We live in a world that we do not fully understand.

We can put up with this state of ignorance or take a leap of faith by adopting a bunch of equations that we cannot prove but can only accept on faith.  We can then have the comfort of knowing everything has an explanation but this is only base on faith that we cannot prove.

We can know x if we take a leap of faith in y.

Or else we accept in algebra that the solution of x and y is in a line.  We may not be able to define it to a point but we have narrowed it down from x and y being anywhere in the universe to being in this line.

That is not bad compared to trying to fix x by assuming y from a leap of faith.

Especially when hind sight shows holes in previous leaps of faith.

Comments?