that does need to be elucidated since such an account is not ubiquitous. — Pfhorrest

And here is my elucidation:

George Berkeley famously said that "to be is to be perceived", and as I've already detailed in my previous essay against nihilism, I don't agree with that entirely, in part because I take perception to be a narrower concept than experience in a broader sense, and because I don't think it is the actual act of being experienced per se that constitutes something's existence, but rather the potential to be experienced. I would instead say not that to be is to be perceived, or that to be is to be experienced, but that to be is to be experienceable. And I find this adage to combine in very interesting ways with two other famous philosophical adages: Socrates said that "to do is to be", meaning that anything that does something necessarily exists; and more poignantly, Jean-Paul Sartre said that "to be is to do", meaning that what something is is defined by what that something does. Being, existence, can be reduced to the potential for or habit of some set of behaviors: things are, or at least are defined by, what they do, or at least what they tend to do. (Coupled with the association of mass to substance and energy to causation above, this notion that to be is to do seems to me a vague predecessor to the notion of mass-energy equivalence). To combine this with my adaptation of Berkeley's adage, we get concepts like "to do is to be experienced", "to be experienced is to do", "to be done unto is to experience", and "to experience is to be done unto".

This paints experience and behavior as two sides of the same coin, opposite perspectives on the same one thing: an interaction. Our experience of a thing is that thing's behavior upon us. An object is red inasmuch as it appears red, and it appears red inasmuch as it emits light toward us in certain frequencies and not others: the emission of the right frequencies of light, a behavior in a very broad sense, constitutes the property of redness. Every other property of an object is likewise defined by what it does, perhaps in response to something that we must do first: an object's color may be relative to what frequencies of light we shine on it (e.g. something that is red under white light may be black under blue light), the shape of the object as felt by touch is defined by where it pushes back on our nerves when we press them into it, and many other more subtle properties of things discovered by experiments are defined by what that thing does when we do something to it.

We can thus define all objects by their function from their experiences to their behaviors: what they do in response to what it done to them. The specifics of that function, a mathematical concept mapping inputs to outputs, defines the abstract object that is held to be responsible for the concrete experiences we have. Every object's behavior upon other objects constitutes an aspect of those other objects' experience, and every object's experience is composed of the behaviors of the rest of the world upon it. All of reality can then be seen as a web of these interactions, the interactions themselves being the most concrete constituents of that reality, with the vertices of that web constituting the more abstract objects, in the usual sense, of that reality. We each find ourselves to be one complex object in that web, and the things we have the most direct, unmediated awareness of are those interactions between our own constituent parts, and between ourselves and the nearest other vertices in that web, those interactions constituting our experience of the world, and also our behavior upon the world. By identifying the patterns in those experiences, we can begin to build an idea of what the rest of the world beyond that is like, inferring the existence and function of other nodes beyond the ones we are directly connected to by their influence in the patterns of behavior of (and thus our experience of) those nearest nodes.

On some accounts they are, including mine, but the reason for that does need to be elucidated since such an account is not ubiquitous.

I don't think arguments have been shut down without consideration have they. Perhaps review the line of argument? — Isaac

I suggested that the reason he and I disagree about whether philosophy makes progress is that we disagree about what philosophy even is and what it’s trying to do. He defines philosophy in a way that it’s clearly impossible to do what he thinks it’s trying to do; I define it differently (right in the OP) and see progress at that goal as not only possible but evident. Then he replied:

“I don't care. You're just going to keep moving the goalposts. The problem is, on no reasonable moving of the goalpost will philosophy have made any progress anyway. So move them wherever you want.“

Seems pretty straightforwardly shutting down to me.

I agree that the thing he thinks philosophy is trying to do (answer big questions about the world just by talking about them) is not possible and so of course no progress can be made at that. I just disagree that that is an accurate characterization of what philosophy, either historical or contemporary, is trying to do. Historical philosophy (back when that included natural philosophy) didn’t constrain itself to just talking, and contemporary philosophy isn’t usually trying to directly answer questions about the world (but rather about how to answer such questions).

Stoicism will improve mental health if you come to the conclusion that stoicism is really true. — boethius

I am interested in hearing more on your thoughts about Stoicism and similar philosophies like Buddhism. I wanted that to be the focus of the conversation I was trying to start, but you barely said anything about it.

I gather from this comment that you are saying that if one believes in the Stoic metaphysics of determinism and inability to effect change, then one will attain the Stoic state of ataraxia, which is a positive state of mental health.

But I was asking more, what do you think about trying to maintain ataraxia, regardless of any metaphysical beliefs, in a context of social injustice? Like when an average person who themselves has very little social power, exercises that tiny power they have as best they can, and then just tries to stay “stoic”, i.e. as calm and unperturbed as possible, despite the injustice that still continues around them.

Do you see that as a good thing or a bad thing? And do you not see at least some practices of modern clinical psychology/psychiatry as aiming to facilitating something like that?

Wikipedia has a pretty good overview:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent

I started discussing Snakes answer and then he didn’t like the way I was discussing it, so I decided not to proceed further since apparently anything but agreement with him would just get shut down without consideration. I’m not interested in talking to someone arguing in bad faith.

The comment about hedonic experiences is meant to be analogous to empirical experiences,
— Pfhorrest

But the mere analogy doesn't go very far. — David Mo

This is becoming a topic for another thread, but I elaborate much further upon that analogy elsewhere:

With regards to opinions about reality, commensurablism boils down to forming initial opinions on the basis that something, loosely speaking, looks true (and not false), and then rejecting that and finding some other opinion to replace it with if someone should come across some circumstance wherein it looks false in some way. And, if two contrary things both look true or false in different ways or to different people or under different circumstances, commensurablism means taking into account all the different ways that things look to different people in different circumstances, and coming up with something new that looks true (and not false) to everyone in every way in every circumstance, at least those that we've considered so far. In the limit, if we could consider absolutely every way that absolutely everything looked to absolutely everyone in absolutely every circumstance, whatever still looked true across all of that would be the objective truth.

In short, the objective truth is the limit of what still seems true upon further and further investigation. We can't ever reach that limit, but that is the direction in which to improve our opinions about reality, towards more and more correct ones. Figuring out what can still be said to look true when more and more of that is accounted for may be increasingly difficult, but that is the task at hand if we care at all about the truth.

This commensurablist approach to reality may be called "critical empirical realism", as realism is the descriptive face of objectivism, empiricism is the descriptive face of phenomenalism, and what I would call a critical-liberal methodology is more commonly called just "critical" as applied to theories of knowledge.


With regards to opinions about morality, commensurablism boils down to forming initial opinions on the basis that something, loosely speaking, feels good (and not bad), and then rejecting that and finding some other opinion to replace it with if someone should come across some circumstance wherein it feels bad in some way. And, if two contrary things both feel good or bad in different ways or to different people or under different circumstances, commensurablism means taking into account all the different ways that things feel to different people in different circumstances, and coming up with something new that feels good (and not bad) to everyone in every way in every circumstance, at least those that we've considered so far. In the limit, if we could consider absolutely every way that absolutely everything felt to absolutely everyone in absolutely every circumstance, whatever still felt good across all of that would be the objective good.

In short, the objective good is the limit of what still seems good upon further and further investigation. We can't ever reach that limit, but that is the direction in which to improve our opinions about morality, toward more and more correct ones. Figuring out what what can still be said to feel good when more and more of that is accounted for may be increasingly difficult, but that is the task at hand if we care at all about the good.

This commensurablist approach to morality may be called "liberal hedonic moralism", as moralism is the prescriptive face of objectivism, hedonism is the prescriptive face of phenomenalism, and what I would call a critical-liberal methodology is more commonly called just "liberal" as applied to theories of justice.



When it comes to tackling questions about reality, pursuing knowledge, we should not take some census or survey of people's beliefs or perceptions, and either try to figure out how all those could all be held at once without conflict, or else (because that likely will not be possible) just declare that whatever the majority, or some privileged authority, believes or perceives is true. Instead, we should appeal to everyone's direct sensations or observations, free from any interpretation into perceptions or beliefs yet, and compare and contrast the empirical experiences of different people in different circumstances to come to a common ground on what experiences there are that need satisfying in order for a belief to be true. Then we should devise models, or theories, that purport to satisfy all those experiences, and test them against further experiences, rejecting those that fail to satisfy any of them, and selecting the simplest, most efficient of those that remain as what we tentatively hold to be true. This entire process should be carried out in an organized, collaborative, but intrinsically non-authoritarian academic structure.


When it comes to tackling questions about morality, pursuing justice, we should not take some census or survey of people's intentions or desires, and either try to figure out how all those could all be held at once without conflict, or else (because that likely will not be possible) just declare that whatever the majority, or some privileged authority, intends or desires is good. Instead, we should appeal to everyone's direct appetites, free from any interpretation into desires or intentions yet, and compare and contrast the hedonic experiences of different people in different circumstances to come to a common ground on what experiences there are that need satisfying in order for an intention to be good. Then we should devise models, or strategies, that purport to satisfy all those experiences, and test them against further experiences, rejecting those that fail to satisfy any of them, and selecting the simplest, most efficient of those that remain as what we tentatively hold to be good. This entire process should be carried out in an organized, collaborative, but intrinsically non-authoritarian political structure.

Chomsky's work on mass media manipulating public desire ("Manufacturing Consent") is probably relevant here.

I was just about to start a thread like this myself. Glad I did a search for it first.

Mine was also going to include race, gender identity, and orientation, with more than just binary options, and yours includes some interesting questions mine didn’t, so maybe I should do mine too, if you all think that’s a good idea.

I wonder why Snakes is even here if he hates philosophy so much.

Is it like the old usenet trolls who would go into comp.sys.foo.advocacy and argue that Foo is the worst OS ever and everybody who uses it is stupid?

Also FWIW on the topic of clinical mental health care and its interaction with capitalism, the last time I saw a therapist it was about work specifically, about how I was self-harming in fits of rage over stress at work, and her recommendation was to leave that job. I was reluctant to do so because despite how stressful it was it was still the best job I had ever had, and lifted me further out of poverty than I had ever been. I came to her wanting a way to be mentally stronger and keep on doing that stressful job even though I also know that reasonably no job should put someone through that kind of stress, but out of all the shitty options available that was the least shitty. She had nothing useful to help make me a better worker better able to quietly keep dealing with the piles of stress I was trying to deal with.

Point is, my experience kinda flies in the face of boethius’s account. No psychologist of any kind is trying to tell me I’m crazy for not being able to put up with this bullshit capitalist world or trying to make me shut up and deal with it. I’m the one looking for help in dealing with it, and they always tell me I’m doing admirably and the problem is with my circumstances, not with me. But of course they can’t fix those circumstances; it’s not like a therapist can buy me a house or something.

“We only torture the folks we don’t like; you’re prolly gonna be okay. Yea-ea-ea-eah, it’s a party in the CIA.“

Fundamentally all particles travel at the speed of light always: apparent slowness is just a particle being rapidly absorbed and re-emitted (by the Higgs field if nothing else), and that slowing-down also manifests as rest mass. From a lightspeed particle’s perspective, its entire existence just is the interaction between whatever emitted it and whatever absorbed it. Time and space and everything else are constructed out of a network of such interactions, in a way elaborated by philosophers like A N Whitehead.

I couldn't find anything about generating new energy. — Echarmion

It’s not so much a matter of needing new energy, but of being able to keep using the same energy instead of it becoming useless waste heat. “Useless waste heat” becomes usable again if some new cold sink is found to dump it i to, doing work in the process.

In any case, current cosmology does suggest that most of the energy in the universe is dark energy inherent to space itself and that that is always increasing, but it’s unclear (so far as I’ve discussed it) how one would go about making use of that. The closest illustration I can think of is that if you take uniform white noise and blow it up to a huge scale, there will then be large gradients in the picture, which is exactly what you need to get useful work done. But how exactly that translates to the physical is still unclear to me.

I assume that you are hoping to leave behind some of your personal ideas (memes) in lieu of children (genes) to make your mark on the world --- perhaps to add some bit of personal insight to the lore of philosophical literature. That's an honorable goal, and a common aspiration among those who seek abstract Wisdom instead of the usual food, shelter, and sex. Self-actualization is at the top of Maslow's hierarchy of human needs. All I can suggest is, "sow your meme-seed, and hope for the best". :smile: — Gnomon

Yep, and also whatever other impact I have on other people’s lives, who then go on to have impact on others, and so on.

6 month old babies employ these methods to establish predictable, useful models of their world. Is your claim that they're 'doing philosophy'? If so, I think most of it's been done by 6 or 7. — Isaac

If I was to claim anything about them it would be that they’re “doing science”, but since they’re not knowingly using those methods, I wouldn’t even say that really. The “doing philosophy” part comes when those kinds of methods are questioned — even if the answer to that questioning is yes, keep doing that, don’t do something else instead.

I don’t want to respond to Snakes with his obvious hostility or your agreement with him at the end of your post, but I will say that in that philosophy class we were reading primary sources by the figures in question where they were talking about the philosophical implications of their own scientific theories. We weren’t just reading commentary by someone else who extrapolated philosophy from their scientific publications. These scientists knew that their work had implications on outstanding philosophical questions and directly commented on it themselves.

As an avid hiker I like your analogy :smile:

That’s a combination of a bunch of comments from the other thread, so yeah it’s long.

You and I have been over the ethics thing before, and it now sounds like you agree in principle with what I’m trying to say but disagree with how I say it: that philosophy’s role in normative questions is figuring out the foundational principles to use to figure out what is good or bad etc, not in actually deciding what in particular is good or bad.

The comment about hedonic experiences is meant to be analogous to empirical experiences, not saying that hedonism can be empirically proven. My philosophical views on how to answer normative questions end up saying to appeal to hedonic experiences to answer them, in a way analogous to how science appeals to empirical experiences to answer factual questions.

But that’s way beside the point of that whole bit, which is simply that philosophy isn’t JUST about normative questions, and not ALL normative questions are philosophy: philosophical and ethics aren’t synonymous.

The point is why people bring up population sizes. Nobody is saying that blacks are targeted more than whites BECAUSE their population is smaller, like
causally somehow. They’re saying that the numbers being similar DESPITE the black populations being smaller SHOWS that they are target more; the numbers targeted COMPARED TO the population number is where the “more targeted” claim comes from, and that’s why people are mentioning populations.

Nobody is disputing that more men than women per capita are killed by police.

The point is that it’s also more blacks than whites per capita, even if it’s equal numbers of blacks and whites absolutely.

If there were 20x more men than women and 95% of victims were men, then that would be equal numbers per capita by sex.

If there were 20x more men than women and only the same number of men and women were victims, that would mean women were victims at a much higher rate than men.

Likewise, since there are many more white people than black, if whites and blacks have the same number of victims, that means blacks are victims at a much higher rate than whites.

Can the police line not proceed at a slower, less violent speed, so that the people who refused to clear the area are merely pushed back, with little enough force that they can stay on their feet but enough force that they can’t stay in place, rather than being harshly shoved to the ground risking serious injury?

That is an interesting thought. That process is what drives Hawking radiation, as one virtual particle passes the even horizon and the other becomes real. I wonder if the cosmic event horizon causes by the expanding universe could produce some similar effect?

@boethius What do you think about Stoicism in relation to mental health amidst societal injustice? (Which was the historical context in which Stoicism arose). I see clinical psychology and psychiatry as trying to serve the same ends as Stoicism by (sometimes) different means.

I have severe anger management problems that I’ve struggled with all my life, that I’ve always defended as reasonable anger in response to genuine wrongs, even though my angry responses only ever made things worse for me, not better. Last year I started having crippling panic and anxiety problems over nothing that I could identify (everything in my life was the best it had ever been at that time), which finally made me go looking for medication to help bring that under control. It did, I think, though it took a long time and was uneven in progress so it’s hard to tell.

I say “crippling” literally, in that I was not able to function as well in pursuit of my own goals, not able to get up the guts to face the things that I was panicking about. In retrospect I see my anger problems as crippling in a different way: I could have more effectively done something about the things I was angry about if I hadn’t been so overwhelmed with rage and out of control that I couldn’t think straight.

A calm, clear, focused mind is not necessarily one that is unquestioningly accepting of everything going on. It’s just a mind that is in control of itself, beholden only to its own reason, one that can decide rationally what is or isn’t actually a problem and what the best responding to that problem would be, and then most importantly, is able to do that best response because it is the best response, rather than feeling irrationally compelled to behave differently, hiding under the covers or punching holes in one’s own walls or whatever else one’s overwhelming emotions might otherwise push one to do instead of, you know, solving the problem.

I think that rather than presenting the positive method of philosophy it is easier to say what philosophy is not: it is not science, poetry, religion, rhetoric... Why not? — David Mo

This was the approach I took in the What Is Philosophy? thread that spawned the thread that spawned this one:

As regards the definition of philosophy, a quick and general answer would be that philosophy is about the fundamental topics that lie at the core of all other fields of inquiry, broad topics like reality, morality, knowledge, justice, reason, beauty, the mind and the will, social institutions of education and governance, and perhaps above all meaning, both in the abstract linguistic sense, and in the practical sense of what is important in life and why. But philosophy is far from the only field that inquires into any of those topics, and no definition of philosophy would be complete without demarcating it from those other fields, showing where the line lies between philosophy and something else.


Philosophy is not Religion

The first line of demarcation is between philosophy and religion, which also claims to hold answers to all of those big questions. I would draw the demarcation between them along the line dividing faith and reason, with religions appealing to faith for their answers to these questions, and philosophies attempting to argue for them with reasons. While it is a contentious position within the field of philosophy to conclude that it is never warranted to appeal to faith, it is nevertheless generally accepted that philosophy as an activity characteristically differs from religion as an activity by not appealing to faith to support philosophical positions themselves, even if one of those positions should turn out to be that appeals to faith are sometimes acceptable. The very first philosopher recognized in western history, Thales, is noted for breaking from the use of mythology to explain the world, instead practicing a primitive precursor to what would eventually become science, appealing to observable phenomena as evidence for his attempted explanations.


Philosophy is not Sophistry

Despite turning to argumentation to establish its answers, philosophy is not some relativistic endeavor wherein there are held to be no actually correct answers, only winning and losing arguments. While there are those within philosophy who contentiously advocate for relativism about various topics, philosophy as an activity is characteristically conducted in a manner seeking out answers that are genuinely correct, not merely seeking to win an argument. Though the historical accuracy is disputed, a founding story of the classical era of philosophy ushered in by Socrates, at least as recounted by his student Plato, is that philosophers like them were to be distinguished from the prevailing practitioners of reasoned argumentation of their time, the Sophists, who on Plato's account were precisely such relativists uninterested in genuine truth, only in winning. It is from that account that the contemporary use of the word "sophistry" derives, meaning wise-sounding but secretly manipulative or deceptive argumentation, aimed more at winning than at finding the truth. And whether or not the historical Sophists actually practiced such argumentation, philosophy since the time of Socrates has defined itself in opposition to that.


Philosophy is not Science

What we today call "science" was once considered a sub-field of philosophy, "natural philosophy". This had been the case for thousands of years since at least the time of Aristotle, such that even Issac Newton's seminal work on physics, often considered the capstone of the Scientific Revolution, was titled "Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy". But increasingly since then, what was once considered a sub-field of philosophy is now considered separate from it. What remains still as philosophy is demarcated from science in that while philosophy relies only upon reason or evidence to reach its conclusions, rather than appeals to faith, as an activity it does not appeal to empirical observation either, even though within philosophy one may conclude that empirical observation is the correct way to reach conclusions about reality. It is precisely when one transitions from using empirical observation to support some conclusion, to reasoning about why or whether something like empirical observation (or faith, or so on) is the correct thing to appeal to at all, that one transitions from doing science to doing philosophy.


Philosophy is not Ethics

One may be tempted to conclude that this means philosophy is entirely about prescriptive matters, rather than descriptive ones; that philosophy is all about using reason alone, without appeals to faith, to reach conclusions not about what is or isn't real, but about what one ought or ought not do, or broadly speaking, about morality. In other words, that philosophy is equivalent to the field of ethics. But as described just previously, philosophy does treat other topics concerning not just morality but also reality, at least the topics of how to go about an investigation of what is real. And while ethics is currently considered soundly within the field of philosophy, I contend that it properly should not be, for as I will elaborate across several later essays, I hold that there are analogues to the physical sciences, what we might call the ethical sciences, that I consider to be outside the domain of philosophy, in that they appeal to specific, contingent hedonic experiences in the same way the physical sciences appeal to specific, contingent empirical experiences. I hold that philosophy bears the same kind of relation to both the physical and the ethical sciences, providing the justification for each to appeal to their respective kinds of a posteriori experiences, while never itself appealing to either of them, instead dealing entirely with a priori reasoning.


Philosophy is not Math

That in turn may raise the question of how philosophy is to be demarcated from mathematics, which also deals entirely with a priori logical reasoning without any appeal to a posteriori experience. Indeed in some ancient philosophy, such as that of Pythagoras, mathematics and philosophy bleed together in much the same way that what we now consider the separate field of science once did with philosophy as well. But today there is a clear distinction between them, in that while philosophy and mathematics share much in common in their application of logic, they differ in that mathematical proofs merely show that if certain axioms or definitions are taken as true, then certain conclusions follow, while philosophy both does that and asserts the truth of some axioms or definitions. So while mathematics says things of the form "if [premise] then [conclusion]", philosophy says things of the form "[premise], therefore [conclusion]". Mathematics explores the abstract relations of ideas to each other without concern for the applicability of any of those ideas to any more practical matters (although applications for them are nevertheless frequently found), but philosophy is directly concerned with the practical application of the abstractions it deals with. It is not enough to merely define axiomatically some concept of "existence", "knowledge", "mind", etc, and validly expound upon the implications of that concept; it also matters if that is the correct, practically applicable concept of "existence", "knowledge", "mind", etc, that is useful for the purposes to which we want to employ that concept.


Philosophy is not Art

Similarly, philosophy has many similarities to the arts, broadly construed (as I will elaborate in a later essay) as communicative works presented so as to evoke some reaction in some audience. Philosophy is likewise an evocative, more specifically persuasive, discipline, employing not just logic, as with mathematics above, but also rhetoric, to convince its audience to accept some ideas. But philosophy is not simply a genre of literature. Whereas works of literature, like all works of art, are not the kinds of things that are capable of being correct or incorrect, in the way that scientific theories are, but rather they are only effective or ineffective at evoking their intended reactions, with works of philosophy correctness matters. It is not enough that a philosophical theory be beautiful or intriguing; a philosopher aims for their theories to be right.


Philosophy uses the tools of mathematics and the arts, logic and rhetoric, to do the job of creating the tools of the physical and ethical sciences. It is the bridge between the more abstract disciplines and the more practical ones: as described above, an inquiry stops being science and starts being philosophy when instead of using some methods that appeal to specific contingent experiences, it begins questioning and justifying the use of such methods in a more abstract way; and that activity in turn ceases to be philosophy and becomes art or math instead when that abstraction ceases to be concerned with figuring out how to practically answer questions about what is real or what is moral, but turns instead to the structure or presentation of the ideas themselves.

For this view of philosophy as bridging the abstract, concerning thought and language in themselves, with the more practical, concerning the direction of our actions, I name my metaphilosophy here "analytic pragmatism".

The word "philosophy" derives from Greek words meaning "love of wisdom", in a sense of "love" that in Greek meant attracted to or drawn toward it. The characteristic activity of philosophy is the pursuit of wisdom, not the possession or exercise thereof. Wisdom, in turn, is not merely some set of correct opinions, but rather the ability to discern the true from the false, the good from the bad; or at least the more true from the less true, the better from the worse; the ability, in short, to discern superior answers from inferior answers to any given question.

I'm tempted to say that every thoughtful person does at least some kind of informal or amateur philosophy. — path

This ties in closely to the next two threads I intend to start, one of them on the faculty needed to do philosophy (spoilers: it’s personhood or sapience), and then another on who is to do philosophy (professional vs amateur, basically).

focus, not on a point, but on the process of living. And that's my approach to dealing with pointlessness. — Gnomon

Yeah, that’s why I’m over it now.

But I’m still interested in what this Information Philosopher has to say about it, if anyone can find that.

No it isn't. Philosophy has never succeeded in 'grounding' the sciences, and the sciences don't take seriously any attempts it's made to. Scientific method (to the extent there is such a thing) develops from cultural and economic pressures on the one hand, and methodological disputes internal to the sciences on the other. — Snakes Alive

I suspect you are, like many, thinking of the supposed scientific method as something much narrower than what I’m talking about in the OP. I just said a critical, empirical, realist approach. That’s something in common to all science, and what distinguishes it from non-science.

Try “doing science” without at least tacitly admitting that your claims are tentative and open to further question, which is what I mean by “critical”. Try “doing science” without at least tacitly admitting that there is some actual objective reality we’re investigating together, which is what I mean by “realist”. Try “doing science” without appeals to observation or regard for concordance with observation, which is obviously what “empirical” means.

Any real scientist will tell you you’re “doing science” wrong, not actually doing science at all; and if they give you the time of day further, may tell you some reasons why that is an inferior way to do things than the proper scientific way. At that point, they are doing philosophy, even though they’re not a professional philosopher.

No they didn't. The important physicists and chemists weren't important philosophers, and vice versa. The closest that ever came to happening was Descartes, maybe. — Snakes Alive

The most influential pre-modern physicist was Aristotle, whose status as also a philosopher I hope I don’t need to explain. The most influential physicist of the scientific revolution was Isaac Newton, who titled his seminal work as being about “natural philosophy”, and whose philosophical views about the nature of space and time were taught in my philosophy degree. Much more recent physicists like Mach and Einstein were taught in that same class, not their empirical findings, but their philosophical arguments. At the fringes, even today science and philosophy still bleed together.

In any case, you seem to be categorizing people by whether they are scientists or philosophers by reputation, not addressing whether particular things they did were science or philosophy.

still. philosophy would have made no progress with respect to what its methods and goals have always been (goal: figuring out broad truths, method: talking). — Snakes Alive

This is the real core of our disagreement. You define philosophy in a way that it is trying to do something impossible, and then decry that of course it fails at that. Look at the definition of philosophy the OP begins with: it’s about trying to figure out HOW to “figure out broad truths“, not necessarily figuring them out itself.

“By doing science” is a possible answer to at least part of that question, and that has proven a very successful answer to that part of the question, to the point that philosophers arguing against it today are on the back foot, as a philosophy that denies the soundness of science is seen as prima facie suspicious. Most of the people actually doing science don’t engage in the remaining arguments about its foundations because to their satisfaction the matter has already been settled.

That is a sign that progress has been made, a satisfactory answer had been found, and all that’s left are minor quibbles. When sufficient progress had been made on a construction project, the amount of construction going on there drops precipitously, besides a little ongoing maintenance.

If you think this is not an accurate definition of philosophy in the OP, maybe take it up over at the What is philosophy? thread that this thread spun off from.

But any argument about why to do things the scientific way instead of some other way is philosophy.

And the sciences spun off from natural philosophers investigating the kinds of things science investigates, and convincing each other as a discursive community (and enough of the rest of the world) that doing things the scientific way was the way to that kind of investigation.

See the OP, last paragraph especially.

"It's obvious" is a pretty lacking argument.

Why mass protest works to make your shitty leaders slightly less shit:

https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/501035-gop-shifting-on-unemployment-benefits-as-jobless-numbers-swell — StreetlightX

This is great news, even if it's only slightly less shit.

One thing that frustrates me though is that the Republicans don't see the obvious solution to the problem of high unemployment pay discouraging return to work. Portman there is suggesting that "pay people to go back to work" idea, but if you're willing to do that and willing to give people unemployment money, why not just give people money unconditional of their work status? So that any money they make from work is on top of their "unemployment" money, and they have incentive to go back to work because it doesn't cost them to do so. I mean, if they want to call it a $450 unemployment boost plus a $450 back-to-work bonus, I don't care, it works out to the same thing, but it's dumb that they don't see it for what it is.

It's like some kind of income that's, at least at a basic level, universally available. Like a... a... universal... basic... income.

It seems like real change would be the only way to unify the Trump base with the rest of America anyway. They’re largely a bunch of poor white men who are looking for anyone they can to scapegoat for their poverty. If real change that addresses the needs of poor people across the board happens, then they will have nothing’s more they need a scapegoat for, and the peace of a prosperous life that’s needed to begin social and emotional healing.

For instance, we all just know that there is one soul or consciousness per skull. — path

Eh, the unity of personal identity can get pretty fuzzy and I’m far from the first person to talk about that.

We use the word 'I' with a blind skill that we mostly don't notice. — path

I’ve often wished that English had different words for “I” etc that referred to one’s id, ego, and superego, as it would make talking about certain kinds of self-experiences much easier to communicate. (E.g. if I-ego am talking to someone about what I-id want to do even though I-ego know better, or how I-superego am always berating my-ego-self for reasons I-ego know are unfounded).

Why are you worrying — Gnomon

I’m not anymore (except about much more mundane things like my job and financial future thanks to the current global crises), but last year when I was having constant panic attacks over nothing and my mind was searching for something to pin the feelings on, the reason the end of the universe seemed so bad despite being so far away was that it seemed to make everything pointless. I had always contented myself to leave some kind of informational legacy in lieu of the children I’ll probably never have, to make some kind of small difference to the world that would continue on without me. But if even all of that would eventually be lost too, within even leaving any kind of legacy of its own behind, it seemed to undermine any meaning, to make everything ultimately futile, everything making absolutely zero difference in the end.

As I said I’m over that now, but that was my thought process at the time.

Yeah I saw his credentials, I just thought his philosophy sounded very similar to yours, so if you weren’t familiar with him you might like to be. Good to see you already are.

Awesome infographic.

I was referring back to this bit where you were discussing the characterization of the ironic aphorist as self-critical:

As one becomes intensely critically minded, one invariably turns this criticism back on itself. — path

And so I was asking your thoughts on a “totalizing system” of philosophy which is just that criticism applied systemically to everything, including itself.

...with the caveat about not being cynical either, in a sense that basically means giving things a chance, and not tearing them all down before you even begin.

This ties back to the thing I said earlier that you didn’t respond to:

*Rather than this dichotomy being either the way you say it is or the way I say it is, perhaps we should apply the tactic of dissolution here too, and recognize that these are two different dichotomies. There ARE some who don’t acknowledge their biases and the impossibility of total objectivity, and some who do. Among those who do, there are those who try anyway, and those who just give up. Clear examples of the three are the naive religious folk who think God gives their lives meaning, the Absurd Hero of Camus, and the existential nihilist. — Pfhorrest

One of those dichotomies is basically the critical-uncritical axis. The other is the cynical-uncynical axis. They are orthogonal to each other, and I think conflating them is the source of all our apparent disagreement here. The critique of the earnest philosopher is that they aren’t self-critical enough. The critique of the ironic philosopher is that they are too cynical. But you can be critical without being cynical, which breaks this entire bipartite model. You can be neither the earnest stereotype saying “This is the objective truth” nor the ironic stereotype saying “Finding objective truth is hopeless”, but instead an “Absurdist Hero“ toward philosophy itself, saying “It may be hopeless, but I’m trying anyway”.

Right, and this Information Philosopher seems to argue that entropy gradients can go on forever because thanks to expansion the maximum possible entropy is increasing faster than the increase of actual entropy, so figuratively speaking things can keep “falling” forever (where that falling, the winding-down of entropy gradients, is what powers interesting stuff), without ever “hitting bottom” (heat death).

Graphics from his own site:





I can’t find any elaboration of what that would actually look like when it comes to the ways that far future civilization could be powered after the stars burn out etc., though. That’s what I’m hoping someone more familiar with his work can point me to.

May the god of the philosophers save us from the relativists who only preach the relativism of others. — David Mo

This. :clap:

@path What if the whole of one's systematic, "totalizing" philosophy boils down to / elaborates upon a principle along the lines of "be critical, but not cynical", where those terms are rigorously defined, and that principle's application to an organized variety of questions then laid out?

:clap: Very well-balanced post. :up:

Isn’t responding to complaints about someone being black in front of a white person’s house supposed to be one of the few things about the police system that does “work”?

Glad it was helpful. :-) If you want to read more of my writing, and see the ways I hybridize answers on different specific topics, there's a link in my user profile. (I've been asked not to post the link here, unless @Baden wants to clarify some kind of exception to that for cases like this; @Gnomon still links to his project all the time, so some kind of consistent policy would be nice).

Oh yeah, on that note, Gnomon has a kind of "hybrid philosophy" too, that you might find interesting.