So you think scientists invented science, huh? Logic, anyone?

So you think scientists invented science, huh? Logic, anyone? — Olivier5

Who invented philosophy then?

A lot of people: us all. We all do it, including you. You are here for a reason.

A lot of people: us all. We all do it, including you. — Olivier5

And yet we needed to call in specialists to invent science?

'Trust me guys, if you just do [some difficult thing] then you'll see how right I am!' It's like asking a stranger to read your novel. In theory, you are possibly right, and maybe you are best friends with god. But there's something iffy about gesturing to prerequisites on a forum. Lots of people are eager to share their religion. It's a thing. And most people have come to some decision about it by now. — norm

That's not what I said. What my position is, is very clear: whether we come to know the meaning/purpose/nature etc. of existence or not, we shouldn't give up on that question. In other words, the whole point of existence is that question. If we never come to knowledge of the answer, that doesn't mean we give up. You seem to believe that "philosophers and philosophy can't answer that question, so that question is unsolvable, so I'm done with philosophy and good riddance." Well, I don't accept that.

I might not have the answer, nobody might very well have the answer. It's possible that getting that answer is impossible. But that doesn't mean we throw in the towel, and accept nihilism. First, that is a logical non-sequitur to say "because we cannot know x, therefore there is no x." That's a fallacy. Second, that's not the point of philosophy. The point of philosophy is to know the Good, know the Truth, know what is Real. Socrates went to his death asking those questions, and all should model his life in that regard. He never said, "I don't know the answer yet, so I guess I'll just stop asking the questions." That's laziness. That's a cop-out. That's what I'd call philosophical suicide.

Philosophers invented science and philosophy. Isaac Newton was a philosopher, he didn't call himself a scientist. Neither did Galileo. Plenty of others. Copernicus. Kepler.

Kidney function: people talked about their pees, but they could not talk about their kidneys producing the pees.

Well, peeing isn't identical to kidney function, but I can anticipate your response: peeing is identical to biological functions XYZ, so when ancient people meaningfully talk of peeing, they must be meaningfully talking about biological functions XYZ, but of course they didn't know about such functions.

I ran my argument about ancient people talking about mental states by David Chalmers and he said that water=H2O, and that if ancient people meaningfully were talking about water, they have to also be meaningfully talking about H2O, but of course they had no idea what H2O is.

That stumped me for a long time. However, I think I know what's bugging me: it's not obvious that water=H2O. I think Kant would say there's an unjustified move there in going from "water", which is a collection of perceptions of a thing to an ontological claim about the actual thing itself: H2O exists and it's what water actually is. When you unpack the claim water=H2O (or peeing=biological functions XYZ), it's not just a case of label switching, like bachelors=unmarried men. You're going to have to argue that peeing is a set of biological functions XYZ, and I think you're going to end up in a circular argument because you're going to end up assuming materialism is the case by asserting the material existence of organs and biological processes in order to address an objection to materialism being the case.

That probably wasn't the clearest thing in the world.

Who invented philosophy then? — Isaac

Philosophers invented science and philosophy. Isaac Newton was a philosopher, he didn't call himself a scientist. Neither did Galileo. Plenty of others. Copernicus. Kepler. — Dharmi

Descartes, Leibniz, Giordano Bruno, Gassendi, Averroes, Avicenna...

Ari-fuckin-stotle.

I doubt It's much influenced by Kant though. The majority of scientists I know just tend to get on with what they do and any underlying assumptions and broader frameworks are questioned (when they're questioned at all) by their own intellect - coffee room discussions. They don't feel the need to borrow the intellect of an eighteenth century German. Just weird like that I suppose. — Isaac

That’s true, but for me the significant point is that the scientists are usually playing catch-up with the philosophers. I’m glad they don't feel the need to borrow the intellect of an eighteenth century German, but knowing a bit about my perspective , I don’t think you’d be surprised if I suggested that they could do worse that to borrow the intellect of certain 20th century philosophers, since they seem to be playing catch-up again.

Looking at your conversation with Olivier, I should add that there are no fixed boundaries between what constitutes science vs philosophy. There are more and less theoretical or applied sciences , and the same goes for philosophy( analytic vs continental) . I’m less interested in whether a particular set of ideas is labeled philosophy or science that how profound and useful
those ideas are. I should add that all other areas of
culture including poetry, literature , music and art , contribute to the shaping of theoretical ideas. That’s why I’m fascinated by the way a particular scientific theory belongs to a large cultural
movement.

Pointing to oneself and recognizing this as a unity body requires an intersubjectively shaped concept of one’s body. Before looking in a mirror, a child’s model of their body is piecemeal. The reflection for the fist time shows the body as a unitary phenomenon, but it also requires that the child recognize that others see them in this way, from the outside in. Schizophrenics often lose the ability to know where their body leaves off and the world begins, and many brain injuries can change our sense of whether and how our limbs belong to us. Now can this be? It is because concepts concerning the unity of the body involve complex correlations of perceptions and actions in the world. The unity of the body is an achievement , not a given.

I do not doubt any of that. But no matter the child’s or schizophrenic’s model of his body, it’s there, visible, available, measurable, if not to him than to other bodies. I am just unable to doubt that.

He also dissolves the self and yet still speaks in terms of perceptions, clinging to the image of a single something that perceives, that is separate from the world. — norm

William James thought Hume came close to recognizing the difficulty of maintaining an ideal separation of self and world , but settled for a traditional metaphysical explanation.

I think ordinary language should be the default starting position. J.L.Austin explains why:
— Andrew M

Yes. Start with that and the familiar world which doesn't even have to reduce to mind or matter or anything else. Why take such a project for granted? Especially after so many have shown what's questionable about it... Call it the 'lifeworld' or whatever. It's where we talk and what we talk about. — norm

:up:

As Peter Hacker (co-author of Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience) says:

Careful scrutiny of the use of the word ‘mind’ will enable us to resist, at least pro tempore, the temptation to answer the philosophical question ‘What is the mind?’ by giving a definition. ‘The mind’ being a nominal, ‘What is the mind?’ is commonly construed as ‘What sort of entity is the mind?’ But this is as pernicious a question as ‘What sort of entity is a number?’ It raises the wrong kind of expectations, and sends us along the wrong paths before we have had a chance to get our bearings. So the first step to take is to examine the use of the noun ‘mind’."
...
What then is the relationship between the mind and the body? The mind/body problem is insoluble. For it is a hopelessly confused residue of the Platonic/Augustinian/Cartesian tradition. It cannot be solved; but it can be dissolved. The mind is not an entity that could stand in a relationship to anything. All talk of the mind that a human being has and of its characteristics is talk of the intellectual and volitional powers that he has, and of their exercise. — Human Beings – The Mind and the Body: Wittgensteinian-Aristotelian Reflections - Peter M.S. Hacker, 2007

What my position is, is very clear: whether we come to know the meaning/purpose/nature etc. of existence or not, we shouldn't give up on that question. — Dharmi

I'm suggesting that within that pursuit we come to question the intelligibility of the project itself.
When we start, we think we are playing cosmic chess with fixed concept, but eventually we realize that we were jazz musicians the whole time, lost in a riff inspired by the vague image of cosmic chess, heavenly mathematics, ultra-super-physics in an armchair.

It's possible that getting that answer is impossible. But that doesn't mean we throw in the towel, and accept nihilism. — Dharmi

It's not just a matter of coming to think that finding the answer is impossible, though of course if one was certain of that then it would make sense to quit. Nor does one lurch into nihilism simply because ultra-physics is a bust. Quietism is more likely. No need to destroy the world or ourselves because we can't take word-math about god seriously anymore.

It's more like...the idea of what 'getting the answer' even means becomes uncertain. It's more like we finally realize how hazy our concepts were in the first place. Couple this with beetle-in-the-box realizations, and the whole enterprise looks funny in retrospect. What did we think we were up to? Why did we believe in some science beyond science? Why couldn't we be unpretentiously religious, or unpretentiously secular, etc.?

Excellent quote! Yes! And yet it's hard to get people immersed in the game to see how strange it is. Conventions of an obsolete genre are taken for granted as absolute starting points!

It seems like you're just a usual academic obscurantist.

This really isn't a language problem, though. I know full well what I mean by "it hurts to stub my toe" and I also know full well the meaning of "how does matter produce my subjective experiences?" There's no vagueness there. Even if I can't communicate to someone else what my subjective experiences are like, I certainly know what they're like for me. So the question "how does matter cause subjective experiences?", for anyone who has subjective experiences, is a meaningful question that needs to be answered.

It seems like you're just a usual academic obscurantist. — Dharmi

All this 'obscurantism' and 'nihilism' stuff reminds me frankly of conspiracy theory. Am I a cultural marxist too? We all do it to some degree. It's...economical...to paste some crude level on critiques we don't have the energy for. We all do it. I'm not going to read some 50 page proof of god's existence handed to me by a homeless person...or even an earnest undergrad...or a homegrown basement prophet. There are things we can and can't take seriously. Some ideas are too threatening to our current self-image or just too implausible to seem relevant.

From my POV, lots of armchair ultra-physics looks like circle-squaring by people who have refused to read proofs that such a thing is impossible (or just haven't been exposed to them yet, as I once wasn't.) In the realm of words, we don't proofs in the same way, but we do have something like 'soft' results, persuasive arguments, liberating metaphors...

No, you just clearly say what you mean.

This really isn't a language problem, thought. I know full well what I mean by "it hurts to stub my toe" and I also know full well the meaning of "how does matter produce my subjective experiences?" There's no vagueness there. Even if I can't communicate to someone else what my subjective experiences are like, I certainly know what they're like for me. So the question "how does matter cause subjective experiences?", for anyone who has subjective experiences, is a meaningful question that needs to be answered. — RogueAI

Thanks for the reply. I remain skeptical about any of us knowing these things full well. Personally I attribute that the deceptiveness of familiarity, to the ease with which we talk. The underlined part basically just unwinds the grammar of the word subjective. It's (all-too-vaguely) what we mean by subjective. IMO, it's like the discovery that bachelors are unmarried.

I do think that it's weird that we are conscious. Existence is mysterious. I say that because I'm not in the camp of the denialists who ignore the claims of 'subjectivity.' (I would critique vague materialism in the same way, fishing after what 'physical' is exactly supposed to me outside of all contexts.) Anyway, what kind of answer would even make sense here? Can you even imagine a correct answer? If not, the issue may be a discovery about thinking and language. What exactly do we even mean by explanation? Really we can zoom in on any word and find a hollowness. They make approximate sense working together in a specific practical context. Float away from that and it's poetry, sometimes good sometimes bad.

No, you just clearly say what you mean. — Dharmi

IMV, it's an illusion/assumption that important things can be said clearly. Yes, you can tell me that the dishes are done. That's pretty clear. But talk about gods and ultimate truth....that stuff is far from clear.

Okay, but then making things even more unclear doesn't help anyone solve those problems. This is one thing Wittgenstein is right about. Trying to conjure up obscurantistic vocabulary to bewilder and confuse, doesn't help one get closer to the truth.

Okay, but then making things even more unclear doesn't help anyone solve those problems. This is one thing Wittgenstein is right about. Trying to conjure up obscurantistic vocabulary to bewilder and confuse, doesn't help one get closer to the truth. — Dharmi

I don't like obscurantism either, but I've seen great thinkers called obscurantists because they are difficult, perceived as political foes, or because some of those who champion them don't write clearly.
It's not as if all thinking people agree on who's obscure and who's not. I know that I used to find writers obscure that now make pretty good sense to me (are we ever done clarifying?). I remember (and it embarrasses me now) calling excellent thinkers dismissive names. It was the usual self-flattering bigotry, which is perhaps the intellectual type's worst enemy, the worm in the apple.

Also, you are clearly a believer in God (or something like that), so when you attack secular thinkers it's all too tempting to read it as religious bias. Here's my bias: when believers barge in so aggressively, pejoratively labeling otherness in little bins, I find them less convincing. If I really and deeply believed in God, I expect that I'd be at peace. I'd be magnanimous, an insider with nothing to prove.

Really we can zoom in on any word and find a hollowness. They make approximate sense working together in a specific practical context. Float away from that and it's poetry, sometimes good sometimes bad. — norm

Still. for Dharmi there is a range of contexts that he is likely putting together with his concepts without realizing the synthetic act he is pulling off, and this range of contexts has a certain stability , at least enough of one to appear to him to indicate grounded truths. He is likely hearing you saying that we have to dissolve that stability( thus the accusation of nihilism), when in fact to follow Wittgenstein here would be to respect that relative contextual stability and show how we can see our concepts as intertwined in much more intimate ways as interpersonally founded events than as the abstractive templates that dualist thinking sees them as. So what you are doing isnt substituting chaos for his ordered truths , as it appears to him, but enriching and interrelating his
notions. The problem , though , is that the most superordinate understandings that we carry with us are very resistant to transformation.

hat's not what I said. What my position is, is very clear: whether we come to know the meaning/purpose/nature etc. of existence or not, we shouldn't give up on that question. In other words, the whole point of existence is that question. If we never come to knowledge of the answer, that doesn't mean we give up. You seem to believe that "philosophers and philosophy can't answer that question, so that question is unsolvable, so I'm done with philosophy and good riddance." Well, I don't accept that.

I might not have the answer, nobody might very well have the answer. It's possible that getting that answer is impossible. But that doesn't mean we throw in the towel, and accept nihilism. First, that is a logical non-sequitur to say "because we cannot know x, therefore there is no x." That's a fallacy. Second, that's not the point of philosophy. The point of philosophy is to know the Good, know the Truth, know what is Real. Socrates went to his death asking those questions, and all should model his life in that regard. He never said, "I don't know the answer yet, so I guess I'll just stop asking the questions." That's laziness. That's a cop-out. That's what I'd call philosophical suicide. — Dharmi

That's a very dramatic way of phrasing the dilemma but it seems appropriate and I like your wording. I also think sometimes people give up by finding the answer - one that satisfies but is really just a holding statement of sorts. "I'm an X..."

That's a very dramatic way of phrasing the dilemma but it seems appropriate and I like your wording. I also think sometimes people give up by finding the answer - one that satisfies but is really just a holding statement of sorts. "I'm an X..." — Tom Storm

Yes, but if that is meant to refer to norm’s comments here concerning the relation of language in a Wittgensteinian sense to issues like mind versus body I think it would be missing the point of his argument.

I don't know why theists think "God" will guarantee the validity of science. All he might do is interfere with scientific studies in any ways he wishes in order to produce "faith". All they are left with is the subjective, just as they say is the case with materialists

Yes, but if that is meant to refer to norm’s comments here concerning the relation of language in a Wittgensteinian sense to issues like mind versus body I think it would be missing the point of his argument. — Joshs

You're right, he is not addressing the point as such but then both guys are talking past each other, which seems the necessary end result of competing epistemologies like this. I am more in sympathy with Norm's worldview than Dharmi's.

However, I was just taken by Dharmi's succinct words on this matter of finding wisdom which would apply in a range of contexts and it occurred to me that the old joke, 'I have abandoned my search for truth and am now looking for a good fantasy' might be applicable. Hence my point about holding statements. Probably too obtuse... sorry.

But this is as pernicious a question as ‘What sort of entity is a number?’ — Human Beings – The Mind and the Body: Wittgensteinian-Aristotelian Reflections - Peter M.S. Hacker, 2007

A number is simply a concept. There's no difficulty that I can see here.

The mind/body problem is insoluble. — Human Beings – The Mind and the Body: Wittgensteinian-Aristotelian Reflections - Peter M.S. Hacker, 2007

That sounds both defeatist and strangely preposterous.

and this range of contexts has a certain stability , at least enough of one to appear to him to indicate grounded truths. — Joshs

Indeed, and I like to think of them as chunks of heroic identity. People kill and die for such things. Flags made of words. Perhaps you'll agree that communities swim in a certain shared stability, and this is what makes deviations or adjustments more or less intelligible within that community. (This is the who of the everyday dasein, form of life, etc.)

He is likely hearing you saying that we have to dissolve that stability( thus the accusation of nihilism), when in fact to follow Wittgenstein here would be to respect that relative contextual stability and show how we can see our concepts as intertwined in much more intimate ways as interpersonally founded events than as the abstractive templates that dualist thinking sees them as. So what you are doing isnt substituting chaos for his ordered truths , as it appears to him, but enriching and interrelating his
notions. The problem , though , is that the most superordinate understandings that we carry with us are very resistant to transformation. — Joshs

Exactly! Very well said. In other words, we are networks of beliefs and desires, some more central at the moment than others. And who of us posting publicly doesn't wrestle with intellectual vanity? Who enjoys submitting to a just rebuke?

Another issue: 'understanding Wittgenstein' is very enjoyable first-person but comes with no superpowers. I can't turn water into wine. Why should dharmi or a believer trade what they have for what I have? I'd describe what I have as a hard-won revolution in my vision of language. I see what we never know exactly what we are talking about and that we usually don't even know that we don't know. The superstition is that we have to try to be ironic or subversive, when in fact it's difficult not to lie. The goal is adjusted so that one strives for the least wrong way of saying an 'it' that's never definitely possessed. Would a nihilist bother? Sadly it's the caution and seriousness in trying for something like truth that gets one mistaken for an obscurantist.

You're right, he is not addressing the point as such but then both guys are talking past each other, which seems the necessary end result of competing epistemologies like this. I am more in sympathy with Norm's worldview than Dharmi's. — Tom Storm

I realize that @Dharmi in fact won't understand what I'm getting at. It might not even be in their interest to understand me. The question remains: is Dharmi an evangelist? If someone is content with their god, why enter the realm of reason? Isn't philosophy essentially critical? So I'm guilty of using Dharmi as a foil just as he wants to cast me as a nihilist or obscurantist. FWIW, I think of myself as having a common-sense informed-by-science practical epistemology. I think this can be done without grand theories about the 'physical' and the 'mental' as they feature in old-fashioned debates that simply ignore the best of 20th century philosophy (like Wittgenstein, but not only him.) But maybe old-fashioned believers should ignore more recent philosophy. Who needs philosophy if they have God? I do understand that theology can bleed into philosophy, since I made that transition myself, wrestling with religious absurdities many years ago.