And then the question is, what's the price we're willing to pay for that delay? You're calling it a grace period, but it means real, tangible benefits for a lot of real people? How do we even begin to weigh these against future risks? — Echarmion
Same way we do with all future risk assessment. In this case we know that science is the tasty poison that will eventually kill us. So we weigh the benefits against total destruction. Total destruction trumps those benefits and shows us that science is bad. — DingoJones
I think that you are right to see science as a tool rather than as end in itself. — Jack Cummins
Science is not just a tool. It's also an understanding of reality; quite at odds with an ideological understanding of reality. — counterpunch
it was the pursuit of science, as a way of triumphing over nature and ecology, which may have contributed to the problems which humanity are facing. — Jack Cummins
Science with respect to the COVID-19 epidemic — Wayfarer
Does it? This is a serious question. Why do we care about the ultimate survival of humanity? For one, as long as we don't figure out a way to get around the 2nd law of thermodynamics, total destruction will happen anyways. For another, future humans aren't actual people. They're potentials. Their moral standing seems questionable. How is it to be measured? — Echarmion
Sure, if you don’t care about the survival of humanity then science isn’t bad according to my argument. — DingoJones
Also, just because total destruction will happen anyways in billions of years doesn’t mean we should not care about being destroyed now. That’s fallacious, like saying there is no point to living because you eventually die. — DingoJones
Obviously I'm not just talking about what I care about in an emotional sense. This is a philosophy forum, I'm asking how to address the problem from the perspective of moral philosophy. — Echarmion
The difference to me is that I'm already alive and I want to keep being alive. This doesn't apply in the same way to potential future generations. And it's not just about having or not having future generations. It's about whether or not the advantages to actual people outweigh the drawbacks for potential people. — Echarmion
Right, and if the survival of humanity isn’t important to your moral philosophy then my argument wouldn’t apply. I’m not knocking that perspective I’m just conceding that my argument requires that you care about humanities survival. — DingoJones
Anyone who was following the WHO alongside, say, scientists like Yaneer Bar Yam, or statisticians like Nassim Taleb, saw a different story when it comes to COVID-19 and science. — Sunlight
I have absolutely no bad feelings towards Banno — Jack Cummins
it's also an understanding of reality — counterpunch
If science caused that stuff, science is causing global warming.
The missing piece is that all of that and science as well are the result of capitalism (among other material causes). — frank
I say, following Kant, that science is the understanding, not of reality as such, but of phenomena, of how things appear to us, and discovery of the patterns and principles (i.e. 'laws') that underlie them and can be used to make predictions. — Wayfarer
So the LHC is set up to examine primary attributes such as solidity, figure, extension, motion. There's a quaint truth in that.It concentrates on just those factors which are amenable to precise measurement and scientific prediction - the factors that came to be known as 'primary attributes' in the science of Galileo. — Wayfarer
...the problem with science is that it does what it says on the label? There is a mystery called "reality" that Kant's philosophical machinations render ineffable, so that his followers can criticise science for not being able to do what they themselves think impossible. That's not a problem for science, but for whatever else it was you expected from it...I say that the problem with science is when its methodological attitude is generalised to describe the universe in general. — Wayfarer
...there is for us no "reality as such"... — Janus
What if "reality" is exactly what science is dealing with? Don't play the giddy word game in which we can have no knowledge of the thing in itself. Instead pretend that what we do have knowledge of is exactly what is real. After all, that's a difference that makes not difference, but has the advantage of shorting out nonsens like
...there is for us no "reality as such"... — Banno
...the problem with science is that it does what it says on the label? There is a mystery called "reality" that Kant's philosophical machinations render ineffable, so that his followers can criticise science for not being able to do what they themselves think impossible. That's not a problem for science, but for whatever else it was you expected from it... — Banno
His work is opposed, as he once put it, to “the spirit which informs the vast stream of European and American civilisation in which all of us stand.” Nearly 50 years after his death, we can see, more clearly than ever, that the feeling that he was swimming against the tide was justified. If we wanted a label to describe this tide, we might call it “scientism,” the view that every intelligible question has either a scientific solution or no solution at all. It is against this view that Wittgenstein set his face.
Scientism takes many forms. In the humanities, it takes the form of pretending that philosophy, literature, history, music and art can be studied as if they were sciences, with “researchers” compelled to spell out their “methodologies”—a pretence which has led to huge quantities of bad academic writing, characterised by bogus theorising, spurious specialisation and the development of pseudo-technical vocabularies. Wittgenstein would have looked upon these developments and wept.
I wonder what you make of this interpretation — Wayfarer
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