Engineer, huh?

1. Every theory must have a good "foundation".

2. Brain "architecture" is what interests.

3. The "structure" of Plato's metaphysics.

4. We must "buttress" our claims with good reasons.

5. Philosophy served as a "bridge" between religion and science.

6. I'm trying to be abstract but sure, a "concrete" example will aid us well.

7. This claim, if true, opens a "window" to realism.

8. This particular approach can be used as a "blueprint".

9. Kant's "plan" was to show that morality is basically logic.

So and so forth!

Update

There seems something physical (messy) about geometry and something nonphysical (crystal clear) about arithmetic.

Immanuel Kant, likely for profound reasons, associated space with geometry and time with arithmetic. — TheMadFool

Platonic Forms? @Wayfarer

This defines the quality of G. "This statement" could be any statement - but if it isn't unprovable, it's not G because we defined it as being unprovable. — Hermeticus

It is, I fear, not what you think it is.

This is always true — Hermeticus

Nothing that wasn't obvious.

This is never true. We defined G as unprovable. There may be a statement that looks exactly the same like G; but it's not G because G is per definition unprovable. — Hermeticus

Okey dokey.

This is always true because G is defined as being unprovable. — Hermeticus

Yep.

Yes, we said so in the beginning! — Hermeticus

It's not a statement that we made so much as it is a statement we discovered.

this assumes something that is impossible. It's an invalid argument. An error in definition. — Hermeticus

What exactly have we assumed that's impossible?

I mean isn't it really more so the ego's attachment to it's own thoughts. Thinking has always just been useful, but it's not a miracle worker. We work at this problem like we're going to find some underlying wisdom, but what if there is none? What if it's just the illusion of sense created by consonants and vowels? What's the difference between a paradox and gobbledygook? — theRiddler

Sorry, but how does $\uparrow$ prove that, and I quote, "It just kind of begs the question of thinking itself"?

Update

There seems something physical (messy) about geometry and something nonphysical (crystal clear) about arithmetic.

Immanuel Kant, likely for profound reasons, associated space with geometry and time with arithmetic.

You've lost me but that's the point I susppose.

To suggest that the universe is geometric would assume that there are geometries outside of our universe?

Otherwise where does this geometry fit?

Can something be discordant without some sort of nominal instrument? — Varde

Kindly elaborate on the topics these questions touch upon.

Can't remember I wrote that. — GraveItty

Then your point is moot. Right?

but that begs the question. — GraveItty

How?

It just kind of begs the question of thinking itself. — theRiddler

What means this?

looking only at the sentence itself - the sentence would not have the same force. — Pantagruel

I've focused on those aspects of Gödel's argument that are general:

1. A proposition is a sentence that has a truth value.

2. The principle of bivalence (statements can have only two truth values viz. true and false)

How informative!Then I get it. Hawking just commented in his usual, science-indoctrinated way. Even with a mechanized voice, hiding him from an unconscious fear of gods, elevating himself to a god-like status. "God is a Mathematician". While in fact he ment: "Yo! I'm the master! The master Math. Dig that! And now listen y'all! It's me who makes the call! Time to see, that, I'm the math!" My math math math. Mad mad mad. OMM!" — GraveItty

Focus on the word "God" in OMG! and Hawking's statement.

@Wayfarer

Explanatory gap :point:

The 1% DNA difference between chimps and humans explains/does not explain the difference between a chimp mind and a human mind.

Yeah, Hawking's comment is like how atheists (still) use "OMG!" as an expression of surprise/shock.
— TheMadFool

I'm not sure I get this. When I scream OMG, to what comment of his does this correspond? — GraveItty

Either you get it or you don't.

They are the cutting points of a continuum, the irrational lies in the point where you tear it up. Tearing up is irrational. Unless you apply the scissor to a well rationally determined way. Which is impossible. You can't hit the continuum at a rational point. Eventhough it contains an infinity of them. You will always be slightly irrational. Rational are an idealization. Though for buying 3/2 kilograms of ice-cream they suffice. The dark torn apart. Amaranthine, as I learned above! The are the consequence of irrationally tearing apart. — GraveItty

So, it's not possible to tear at a rational point. I suppose there's no point in asking why?

"You will always be slightly irrational". You as in me? Why?

The explanatory gap" is misinterpreted by many philosophers as an "unsolvable problem" (by philosophical means alone, of course) for which they therefore fiat various speculative woo-of-the-gaps that only further obfuscate the issue.
— 180 Proof

Not at all.

In philosophy of mind and consciousness, the explanatory gap is the difficulty that physicalist theories have in explaining how physical properties give rise to the way things feel when they are experienced. It is a term introduced by philosopher Joseph Levine.[1] In the 1983 paper in which he first used the term, he used as an example the sentence, "Pain is the firing of C fibers", pointing out that while it might be valid in a physiological sense, it does not help us to understand how pain feels.

The explanatory gap has vexed and intrigued philosophers and AI researchers alike for decades and caused considerable debate. Bridging this gap (that is, finding a satisfying mechanistic explanation for experience and qualia) is known as "the hard problem".
— Wikipedia

As I've shown already in this thread, the hard explanatory problem has scientific validation, namely, that of the subjective unity of consciousness, and how to account for it in neurological terms. This is one aspect of the well-known neural binding problem, which is how to account for all of the disparate activities of the brain and body can culminate in the obvious fact of the subjective unity of experience.

As is well known, current science has nothing to say about subjective (phenomenal) experience and this discrepancy between science and experience is also called the “explanatory gap” and “the hard problem” (Chalmers 1996). There is continuing effort to elucidate the neural correlates of conscious experience; these often invoke some version of temporal synchrony as discussed above.

There is a plausible functional story for the stable world illusion. First of all, we do have a (top-down) sense of the space around us that we cannot currently see, based on memory and other sense data—primarily hearing, touch, and smell. Also, since we are heavily visual, it is adaptive to use vision as broadly as possible. Our illusion of a full field, high resolution image depends on peripheral vision—to see this, just block part of your peripheral field with one hand. Immediately, you lose the illusion that you are seeing the blocked sector. When we also consider change blindness, a simple and plausible story emerges. Our visual system (somehow) relies on the fact that the periphery is very sensitive to change. As long as no change is detected it is safe to assume that nothing is significantly altered in the parts of the visual field not currently attended.

But this functional story tells nothing about the neural mechanisms that support this magic. What we do know is that there is no place in the brain where there could be a direct neural encoding of the illusory detailed scene (Kaas and Collins 2003). That is, enough is known about the structure and function of the visual system to rule out any detailed neural representation that embodies the subjective experience. So, this version of the Neural Binding Problem really is a scientific mystery at this time.
— Jerome S. Feldman, The Neural Binding Problem(s)

Your continual invocation of 'woo of the gaps' only illustrates that you're not grasping problem at hand. It's a hard problem for physicalism and naturalism because of the axioms they start from, not because there is no solution whatever. Seen from other perspectives, there is no hard problem, it simply dissolves. It's all a matter of perspective. But seen from the perspective of modern scientific naturalism, there is an insuperable problem, because its framework doesn't accomodate the reality of first-person experience, a.k.a. 'being', which is why 'eliminative materialism' must insist that it has no fundamental reality. You're the one obfuscating the problem, because it clashes with naturalism - there's an issue you're refusing to see which is as plain as the nose on your face.

'Speculative woo-of-the-gaps' is at bottom simply the observation that there are things about the mind that science can't know, because of its starting assumptions. It's a very simple thing, but some guy by the name of Chalmers was able to create an international career as an esteemed philosopher by pointing it out. — Wayfarer

Great post! :up: Clarified some of my doubts on the hard problem of consciousness specifically that it's about the explanatory gap between physical theories and consciousness.

The way I see it, materialistic explanations are of 2 kinds:

1. Explanatory materialism: A phenomenon/object is explained in terms of materialism e.g. lightning is an electric discharge between and from clouds.

2. Eliminative materialism: This is my area of interest. Depending on probably the way a theory is crafted, certain questions/concepts stop making sense of are nonsensical. Daniel Dennett's claims that consciousness is an illusion is of particular interest to me. I haven't read his original work on that topic but in the videos I saw of him conveying this point of view are more beating around the bush rather than a clear-cut statement with an argument to back it up.

An example of the eliminative method would be category mistake kinda dismissals - what does the bark of a dog taste like? This question is declared as nonsensical. Similarly, consciousness my not be amenable to a physicalist/materialistic description and so might be rejected as meaningless. This, you might already notice, is the hard problem of consciousness - forget an explanation, we can't even translate consciousness in materialistic/physicalist terms.

One intriguing facet to the problem is Wittgensteinian. His beetle-in-a-box gedanken experiment suggests that pure subjective experiences (consciousness for example) are such that we may simply be engaged with the issue at a synactic level - we can formulate grammatically correct sentences on consciousness - but when it comes to semantics (what we mean by "consciousness"), all bets are off.

Wittgenstein claims, rightly so in my opinion, that not only is it possible that there are different things in each one of our boxes but that it's possible that our personal, private boxes could actually be empty (eliminative materialism, p-zombies).

Bearing in mind that Hawking was a life-long and extremely vocal atheist. — Wayfarer

Yeah, Hawking's comment is like how atheists (still) use "OMG!" as an expression of surprise/shock.

Nevertheless, idealism, if true, seems to make the hard problem of consciousness a cinch to solve - the world out there (objective) is simply the world in here (subjective). We do get a third-person perspective on other minds.

Update

I have nothing to say vs. I have something to say but I can't find the words. A person with a limited or no vocab is very much like a person who's a master wordsmith trying to express that which is essentially inexpressible. Take a rock, it has nothing to say, it remains silent. Take a person, has something to say but can't:

Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

I'm not historian or literate to give answer to literacy or history of texts, but I know valid answer is given later by Jesus when disciples asked him, why does he speak in parables instead of telling what he means straight away so that everybody would understand his message. (Mt 13, 10-17) — SpaceDweller

Spoke in parables, eh? Why indeed? Was it a necessity or was it a preference? A lot depends on the answer.

Indeed it is, and it wouldn't help much with you original post — SpaceDweller

Why not?

Well... maybe you just mean talking about Witt's attempt to imagine an experience that I would know but that no one else could (that being the made-up quality/criteria of "private"), but the takeaway is not: that we do have personal experiences but that language just can't reach them, or that we have no experience that is not public. The point is that being known is not how our experience works--we can not get between a sensation and its expression for there to be the opportunity for knowledge (#245). That is not to say we can't talk about it, but only that we express our experience/sensations (even to ourselves, or repress them) — Antony Nickles

Indeed. Something to ponder upon.

Witt's scenario is an imagined one (like the builders), so we can release ourselves from the Gordian knot of picturing an experience that is private in the way Witt was attempting. Again the lesson is not that we do or do not have our own experiences. As I quoted Witt earlier (#243), our ordinary criteria for a private experience is just something personal, secret: a sunset, a trauma, what I focused on in seeing a movie. And we are able to draw out (express, "give voice to" Witt says) and discuss our inner experiences (or hide/repress them). — Antony Nickles

Right!

Well expressions of pain of course can be more than words (thus, opera). In imagining a quality (a thing? a referent?) we are here, again, searching for knowledge of something certain, of ourselves, for the other's reaction to us. The feeling that pain is inexpressible is the fact that the other may reject my expression of pain, that I may be alone with my pain. — Antony Nickles

Yep.

he other part of retaining something of pain within me is that I can remain unknown, untouchable, not responsible, special without having done anything, a unique person without differentiating myself. — Antony Nickles

A way of looking at it, yes.

rony aside, the idea of "qualia" still imagines our experience as a thing (the MacGuffan of neuroscience); it is a noun (you even have a word to refer to it)--we can "know" a thing (or can not!). Ineffable is an adjective as a qualification of our experience--too much to be expressed; not as if words leave some "thing" left over, but that our experience overflows our words. — Antony Nickles

I guess so. All words refer to our experiences. The converse, it appears, isn't true.

In fact, we could simply say, "words can not express", "it's just a sense of awe", "I don't know what to say except I feel alive". These are not to tell us (know) anything about our experience, but express that there is nothing to be told (even when singing, crying, or violence can't). — Antony Nickles

Spot on!

Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

:zip:

Why choose that particular tree of knowledge of good and evil then? Why not something else?
— TheMadFool

In other words, why is Genesis written using imagery? why not just telling straight away what happened, why not just telling straight that Adam and Eve defied God and then God punished them.

Those texts are thousands of years old, so what you're asking is why literature in that time was different from literature as we know today?
Or why did God inspire holly writers to write using imagery. — SpaceDweller

Why indeed?

IF God so commanded, but none of the God's commandment command such a thing as far as I know. — SpaceDweller

That's debatable.

Cheers!

Well, you need to be able to accept idealism is true, which comes with it's own problems. — Tom Storm

:up:

But isn't nonphysicalism close to idealism, close enough to be clubbed together?

Because that apple in the garden of Eden was just an ordinary apple, the act of physically eating those apples isn't what's wrong, instead it's disobedience toward God's commandment not to eat them what is wrong. — SpaceDweller

You mean to say it's just the act of defiance that God was angered by? Why choose that particular tree of knowledge of good and evil then? Why not something else? Your theory also seems to lead to rather dangerous conclusions - if God so commanded that we murder, rape, plunder, atrocities of all kinds, it would be wrong to disobey Him?

The hard problem of consciousness

There's a purely subjective aspect to consciousness (qualia as a catch-all) which science, being objective, is incapable of handling.

Can I show that this "purely subjective aspect to consciousness" can be observed objectively?

An interesting side to idealism is that all things exist because God is continually and simultaneously, 24×7, thinking (perceiving) about all things. In a sense then, as Stephen Hawking once said, we're reading "God's mind." We have now a third-person point of view of God's mind.

Coming to our own minds, wouldn't we gain the same third-person perspective into each other's minds; after all, we got into God's head, quite literally I might add.

That's what they say. But it's swapped with the hard problem of idealism... — Tom Storm

Whaddaya mean?

This might prove interesting:

As per idealism, everything is mental, everything exists only in the mind. If so, an apple on a plate on a table, which all of us can see qualifies as observing the mind, objectively, from a third-person point of view (@Wayfarer). There is no hard problem of consciousness.

God is all powerful — Bartricks

Omnipotence: Can do anything.

So, sorry posters to this thread, no use saying Bartricks is an idiot if by that you mean Bartricks'theory is riddled with contradictions. Bartricks is rejecting the law of noncontradiction from the get-go.

@Bartricks

I feel your fascination with omnipotence is a sign that what you're really interested in is paraconsistent logic and its more "violent" twin dialetheism. You might find this thread right up your alley :point:
Logical Nihilism. It's @Banno's thread and coincidentally Banno's post is the latest.

First, the argument from God. God is all powerful by definition. From this we can conclude that God created time. Why? Because if time exists, then one is subject to it. And so if God did not create time, then God would be subject to something he did not create, which is incompatible with being omnipotent. So, given that God would be subject to time if time exists, something which would be incompatible with his omnipotence were he not to have himself created time, God created time. — Bartricks

This makes sense to me. However, we have strung together some symbols here viz. God created time but what does that look like? When I say Rapheal created The School of Athens (painting), I can picture him working with a paintbrush on a canvas, palette nearby, etc. I can't seem to do that with the statement God created time. I have nothing I can turn to in my experience as to how such an act of creation would look like. It doesn't seem to refer to anything I know of and this is probably true for others as well.

Nonetheless, I have no issue at all with the logic of your argument.

About your second argument. It seems as though you're claming that true/actual time in terms of past and future are also real sensations and being thus, it requires a being whose sensations they are and that being is God. Thus, God exists.

How do you prove that time (past, present, and future) is a sensation? Oh! I see because the past is memory and the future is "anticipatory" or, in my book, imagination) - very mental in nature.

But then if all mental creatures, including God, were to somehow perish, time would cease to exist but then that means you're trying to say time is simply up here (TheMadFool points to his temple), in our heads, it's imaginary. Where do you want to go with this?

Re properties: temporal properties are properties, it's just they're not intrinsic properties. The same is true of spatial properties. My location is a property of my body. It is not an intrinsic property of my body, for my body would be the same body in a different location. But nevertheless, it is a property of my body that it is in the location that it is in. And temporal properties are the same, I think — Bartricks

If time is a property, define changeless.

The claim that time 'flows' is a metaphor and, I think, a misleading one, as it invites us to think of time as a kind of liquid. Yet if my arguments are correct, that is quite the wrong way to conceive of time. Time is relevantly analogous to, say, pain or love. We might talk of the ebb and flow of pain or love, but we mean by this the manner in which they become more or less intense. That is how things are with time too. An event becomes more past, not by 'flowing' further down the river of time, but by the sensation of pastness becoming more intense in God. — Bartricks

Ok. What's the ticking of a clock if time doesn't flow?

The claim that we cannot get between pain and its expression (#244-245) is to show us that the structure (the grammar) of our sensations is not that they are known, but that they are expressed or not. That they are meaningful to me is in releasing them into the world (or hiding them); that they are meaningful to you is the extent to which you accept them, that you accept me as a person in pain. "If I see someone writhing in pain with evident cause I do not think: all the same, his feelings are hidden from me." (p. 223 3rd.)(emphasis added) I do not know their pain (use a "criterion of identity" #288), I reject them, or I help them--as it were, beyond knowledge (Emerson's reliance, Nietzsche's human). This is the essence of experience/sensation. ( TheMadFool ) The picture of a word-referent mistakes this limitation of knowledge as the vision that no one could know me (my "sensation"/"experience"); that I am essentially, always unique/special--that the only failure/solution is a matter of epistemology. — Antony Nickles

:ok:

1. Yes, I agree. We can't talk about so-called private experiences can either be considered a limitation of language itself or that the sign-referent sense of meaning falls short of the mark.

2. I'm at a loss as to what exactly could be considered private experiences. Wittgenstein seems to have zeroed in on emotions (pain). Pain, it seems, has external/observable/public correlates ( :cry: :grimace: ) but then, if Wittgenstein is right, it must have a private component. What is it? The quality of pain? There's a certain character pain has that I can't put into words. Qualia? Is this exactly what Wittgenstein is referring to? The fact that I can't seem to speak/write about qualia is proof enough, won't you agree?, that Wittgenstein hit the bullseye - language is social in the sense it's domain is restricted to the public.

What's ironic is that there are (exclusively) private experiences has now become public knowledge. Now we can talk about it!

About qualia

We have a word viz. "qualia" that's now entered the social dimension. It refers to private experiences.

Can we now claim that language has made its first tentative steps into our private worlds which until now had been hidden and beyond the reach of language?

Yes and No.

Yes because "qualia" does mean something, it refers to the ineffable, the inexpressible. We can now have a intelligible conversation about our private experiences.

No because "qualia" doesn't tell us what these private experiences actually are. It's kinda like knowing that a person A has something they call a beetle and person B also has something they call a beetle. So we know there's something (qualia) but what that somethong really is is still hidden.

You seem to be suggesting that scientific approach gives insights into areas which religious forbids. — SpaceDweller

One possible interpretation, yes.

I think central point in the story of "The Fall Of Man" isn't to give any secular insights, but rather spiritual ones. Insights which can't be empirically measured or proved. — SpaceDweller

Why not.

:ok:

What you describe is belief (as heuristic) by acquaintance and not knowledge (as algorithm), so ... — 180 Proof

:ok:

Update (to all posters above and below)

It seems my post has multiple points of interest and please feel free to explore them all.

My main objective though was to explore the different methods by which we could gain knowledge. Perhaps a short clip will get my point across than words. Vide infra:



The woman in the scene is a terminator (T-X) and she sees a blood-soaked cloth on the floor. Scientifically, that's a sample/specimen. She then "tastes" it but what's actually happening is she's doing a chemical analysis of the specimen - actually a DNA analysis - and is able to identify the person ( John Connor) the blood came from. Couldn't we do the same? :chin:

I didn't realize this until now of course but I think we need to dig deeper into irrational numbers. What are they? Does it have to do with the continuous as opposed to discrete nature of reality? Geometry seems, in a certain sense, more physical than arithmetic. I'm not as certain about this as I'd like to be.

Changeless = Time doesn't exist.
— TheMadFool

But that's false, as I argued in the OP. If time exists, then an event will change in its temporal properties. So change cannot require time, but is instead something time requires.

If, as I have argued, God created time, then it is God who changes his temporal sensations about an event and, in so doing, brings it about that the event goes from being future, to being present, to being past. — Bartricks

I believe there's something wrong here. Time is usually not regarded as a property of an object just as spatial location is not. So, "an event will change in its temporal properties" doesn't make sense. Consider an object A in location L1 at time T1. It moves to point L2 and arrives there at time T2. Do you say A has acquired new properties L2 and T2?

It's interesting nonetheless to think of time and space as a property. Change would need a new definition and change would always occur because time is always flowing.

What's the standard definition of change? An object X changes if at one time it is something and at another time it is something else. As you can see, change uses time as kind of a backdrop, a frame of reference as it were. Basically, what happens, if anything does happen, to an object as time passes by. Notice here that time isn't treated as a property of objects.

What do you suppose God creating time means? What does it look like?

What we can/want to do is not the same as what we should/need to do.

God and time, the connection between them hinges on God as, sometimes, within time (immortal) and then also, other times, outside of time (again immortal). Has there been any discussions on that front? Why do these two points of view not conflict with each other?

Changeless = Time doesn't exist.

Perhaps.

Empathy is still a relatively new word with a rather tortuous history. Apparently the word entered English around 1908 as a translation for a German term coined in 1858 to describe an alleged process by which a perceiver "projects" their personality into a work of art or other perceptual object. That's just about opposite to how the word's most commonly used today. Evidently the translation borrowed from Greek, but abused the original meaning of the Greek term.

I've begun to avoid the term in my own discourse in light of this confusion. In most contexts sympathy works as well or better. By and large, psychological studies that purport to be studies of empathy could be as fittingly or more fittingly described as studies of sympathy. Someone should notify the psychologists. — Cabbage Farmer

Let's not complicate matters by digging into the etymological roots of words but thanks anyway for the links. Now, kindly tell me the difference between empathy and sympathy in terms of their conventional meaning, as they appear in normal discourse.

Ordinarily, when we "feel another's pain", aren't we just recognizing their pain while feeling something similar to their pain? I feel something while I wince at the blow landed in a boxing match I'm watching, but what I feel is not the same as what I feel when I actually get punched in the face. Even if the feelings were as similar as the taste of the same apple in two mouths, is there some reason to suppose that I'm feeling their pain, instead of just feeling a pain that is very much like theirs? — Cabbage Farmer

As far as I know, there really is no way of actually experiencing another person's feelings. We can only imagine what someone must be going through but of course this is shaped by personal experience and other relevant data. Reason, it seems, plays a major role in empathy and sympathy.

I don't notice that. — Cabbage Farmer

Me too until I did that is.

was with you, Fool, up to this sentence. — 180 Proof

:grin:

I think religion does not explain anything, only pacifies existential anxieties with self-serving, tribe-centric, ritualized myths and cautionary fairytales, whereas science does not explain enough of "the big picture" for most people (especially nonscientists) producing only approximate, defeasible, probabilistic models of fragments of "the big picture". — 180 Proof

I catch your drift but frankly, from the perspective of a climate scientist or an ecologist we know too much, we're too smart for our own good is the expression apt for the occasion. I don't deny that this could be interpreted in the opposite sense - our ignorance of ecology, biology, and other matters proving to be a major setback - but, we're oh! so proud of our science, so mesmerized by it that I fear I would be taken as a madman if I even hinted at such a possibility. :grin:

Philosophy explores ways of making sense of the incompletable(?) set of puzzle-like fragments in the most general scope; religion today only mystifies and stupifies what its theologians and preachers do not understand or refuse to accept. Thus:
Napoleon: M. Laplace, they tell me you have written this large book on the system of the universe, and have never even mentioned its creator.
Laplace: Je n'avais pas besoin de cette hypothèse-là.
:fire: — 180 Proof

Yes, religion, despite its claims that it provides some kind of an overall framework to structure our lives with is guilty of ignotum per ignotius: what we don't understand is being "explained" by something that is even more inexplicable. :up:

As for the ramifications of modern technology, they result from mostly laissez-faire applications of science in the service of capitalist exploitation of human labor and natural resources (re: externalization of costs – material, social & psychological). Religion tends to aid and abet acquiescent conformity to debt-peonage & hedonic treadmilling, etc. — 180 Proof

:up: I have a lot to learn is all I can say 180 Proof. Feeling the full impact of the Dunning-Kruger effect here.

I believe religion , when it began, was on the right track - for people to be successful, they had to keep x happy or else... catastrophes in the form of diseases, pestilence, floods, earthquakes, etc. would follow. It's just that people, for some reason, thought beings, somewhat like us but more powerful, were the x they had to placate/proposition for stuff like bountiful harvests, cures, etc. Had they simply realized that it was not who? - gods - they had to please but what? - (mother) nature - I'm sure we wouldn't be in the sorry situation we are in today (climate catastrophe just around the corner).

By the time philosophy came onstage, it was too late - religion had already sprouted roots so deep and extensive that any attempts to correct the error in our thinking was a lost cause.

That was just the beginning of our tragic tale though. In time philosophy birthed natural philosophy (science) and it delivered the goods - explanation after explanation, theory after theory, hypotheses after hypotheses, science unravelled the mysteries of the universe. One particular component of this knowledge explosion was technology which despite making life so much easier had hidden costs which we're just beginning to realize.

To make the long story short religion, as an explanation was too less and science as one was too much!