I don't think I misunderstand, I disagree, at least in part. — T Clark

You don't think but you do. A philosophy can't exist on its own. Maybe for you, but then you misunderstand me.

Second - Some distinctions, such as the one between philosophy and science, are important and useful. — T Clark

Indeed. Like I said. But they mustn't be considered apart. Only in relation to the other. Torn apart, they become empty.

So... Yes... Epistemology is real and important and the distinction between knowledge and epistemology is real and important. — T Clark

Here I disagree.

By this logic, we should go through the world not making distinctions — T Clark

Here you misunderstood what I read. I wrote you divisions are made. But what's divided should be kept also. It's the mutual interaction between the divisions, science and philosophy, that gives the quality absent from each apart. The fire that can only be produced by a lighter with gas only (science) and a lighter with a firestone only (philosophy). So you should divide but not tear apart.

The Nothing can't challenge God as it has to be created by God in the first place. It can try damn hard though.

Protons and neutrons require only up and down quarks, and not the other four quarks. — PoeticUniverse

Very true! The other four quarks though are virtually absent. If you consider them as mere exitations of the up- and down-quark, then you could say they are necessary entities, like the excited state of the hydrogen atom is one in a body of cold hydrogen. In extreme situations, the two extra families of quarks and leptons can come into play. They might even be considered necessary, not wasteful, but absent in the grand scheme.

. the laws of physics are not material things, you can't touch or eat them. — SpaceDweller

Still, they are very natural. So can be ghosts. Something uncommon to do can be a very natural. Like singing loudly during a seminar where D. Hofstadter explains that our brain is in fact a computer, or jearking off when Verlinde explains emergent gravity. Though jearking off when emergent gravity is explained is quite unnatural, on second thought. Naturally, I wouldn't do that!

The laws of physics would be very unnatural if it appears obvious that the laws don't hold in a new unterritoried realm of chemistry.

A ghost can behave very natural, when making principally no use of tech (I'm serious!).

Don't you think Dawkins's selfish gene and meme view on evolution is a rigid static approach, or model? The model is closely connected even to a dogma: the central dogma of biology. Even questioning this model is considered blasphemy in the church based on this dogma, inhibiting progress in science. The Lamarckian view is a priori dismissed.

Wasn't notified about your comment and I assume it's addressed to me. I don't agree as far the methodology is involved. I don't believe in a reality that can't be known because the Ding an Sich can't be known. The Ding an Sich can be known and depends on the parameters of das Ding. We can say we are satisfied with a set of parameters and a mental image.That's the thing. Das Ding comes into existence by the parameters and an image corresponding to it. Of course, the thing can resist in certain conditions and varying contexts. The thing will change accordingly. But not because of some unknown thing causing it. Das Ding cannot be known from the inside though. In principle. Not even in approximation.

Now even if those parameters were adjusted to be as wide as possible you still would not get an accurate interpretation of reality because an explanation is never the thing itself it is just a perspective and a perspective is not the same thing as existence so no matter how many semantics are used you're only getting an opinion and not the real thing unfortunately. — MAYAEL

This is a perspective also. It's corresponding to the methodological rule that we never actually make touch-down with reality. That parameters need to be adjusted continuously, however small, but they will always stay out of touch.

This rule doesn't hold in scientific practice. New parameters are invented, others dismissed, while still others are declared to be out of touch with reality altogether, after new discoveries are made.

The standard model in physics is a static model in the sense that its parameters are fixed and unchanging through the evolution of the universe, only in a madly short time or high energy in need of new parameters non-existent at the natural energy scales globally present. So creation was in need of new parameters only at a tiny spacetime scale, while before beyond and after the static, precisely defined parameters maintain their rigidity in a standard model.

My basic contention is that scientific models have a tendency to be less static than their non-scientific counterparts, such as the pre-scientific ideas of the past and the pseudo-scientific ideas of the present that address the same questions. — onomatomanic

Not sure I follow...Scientific models can be static as hell. What pre-scientific ideas of the past or pseudo-scientific ideas of the present have as a counterpart a scientific model? Can you give an example?

An analysis/critique:

Ok..., but... Somebody else pulled them apart and we're left here to deal — T Clark

True. In ancient Greece they were torn apart and we're left with the mess. So, they are separable, and in that sense no unseparable whole. What I mean though is that the whole is a wholistic whole, to which qualities can be assigned not present in one of both. If I have two lighters of which one contains gas only but no brimstone, and the other vice-versa, I can't light my cigarette with either of them. But combined, I can light it up. Which raises the question if the whole is better, because cigarettes kill. Not being a health mafia member though, I stick to the lighter.

Again, the hand we're playing. Also, nothing is an "inseparable whole." In a sense, metaphysics is the process by which we divide the original, primordial inseparable whole, the Tao perhaps, into apples, electrons, and mutual funds. — T Clark

It's the hand played on this forum. It's even called the philosophy forum. Why shouldn't there be a place for me? You don't say this directly, but I sense this from your wording, and that's all I can cling to. I don't deny philosophy or attack it, not at all. It's a pity though that no attempt is made to regain the connection with the stuff it talks about. Regaining the assembled whole doesn't destroy philosophy nor science. It merely brings to bear unimagined new qualities. Of the whole.

Beyond which, I think the distinction between metaphysics and science is a useful one. — T Clark

It can be a usefull one. But for making the distinction what is metaphysics or physics, one needs to know both first, because the division can't be made if there is nothing to divide.

f I'm going to use knowledge to make decisions about actions in the real world, I have to have a good idea of how much I can trust that knowledge. In order to do that, I need to establish and enforce rules for information gathering and processing. That's one of the things epistemology is. — T Clark

In order to trust knowledge, you don't need epistemology. You need to know that that knowledge works out fine for you. Knowing about the knowledge involved, or the methodology one must use for approaching a problem will only paralyze you. You may claim that epistemology or methodology are exactly what philosophy is about, and that that's the stuff discussed here, but philosophy is not invented to restrict knowledge and its gathering. Philosophy is meant to set free from restrictions. Or at least to further scientific knowledge.

So I think you've got it backwards. First comes the world, then comes metaphysics, then comes knowledge. At least that's the hand we're playing here on the forum. That's the hand I'm playing. — T Clark

Yeah, this backwardness is usually used in defensive rethorics. What's more fundamental, science or the talk about it? I make no distinction between the two though.

Philosophy and science form an inseparable whole. I don't know the word for that whole (naturalism?) but the both shape each other and to have a good understanding you need both. On their own they are empty talk.

An attitude found in the ultimate philosophical formal system known as mathematics. (inherited from the ancient Greek philosophers who started this trend, to be rediscovered in the Enlightement).Without physical knowledge, math becomes empty, fictious and abstract talk, but very enjoyable, and it has come a long way since Plato, the computer uncovering realms never before imaginable (though some mathematical geniuses might have done this).

Math is helpful in science, but it are the ideas, theories, models, that are just as important. And math certainly is not the language nature talks to us, let alone a universal language. If we ask a mathematically defined question then nature will answer back mathematically because we force it to in experiments. Just a philosophical thought. Just a hand I am playing.

Old Greece is the origin of the term "philosophy". Meaning love for wisdom. Wisdom about knowing, or talking about the knowing. Not about the knowing per se, but surrounding thoughts.

Any philosophy, be it eastern or western, is the love for talking about the specific knowledge contained in a specific knowledge system, be it science, the knowledge of the eight-fold way, the knowledge of nature and gods in the universe in a magical outlook, the knowledge of astrology, homeopathic knowledge, etc. You get the picture.

In most knowledge systems, this separation of knowledge and talking about it, is absent. There is no word for philosophy in eastern philosophy. It's a Greek invention. Of course, we speak nowadays about eastern philosophy, but in the original views of the eastern tradition this distinction was not made. Talking about knowledge and the knowledge itself were not separated.

In ancient Greece, the roots of modern science and democracy were tiny structures, like capillaries. Nature was looked at analytically and tried to be placed in a mathematical frame. Philosophy was still part of this knowing. The talking about the knowledge was still a part of the whole. Philosophy of nature.

Then science, under the influence of the very idea that there is a difference between knowing and the talking about it, like the idea got hold that there is an independent reality about which things can only be known approximately, like Plato's realm of an independent realm of mathematics. The stuff known likewise separated from the subjective talk about it.

So science and philosophy became two different disciplines. Ethics, methodology, epistemology, ontology, logic, etc. were disconnected from scientific knowledge, a separation induced by the idea of a separation between an subjective observer and an objective reality.

The philosophy of science is the talking about scientific knowledge, and it is this scientific knowledge that western philosophy is talking about. But science is a large area, an philosophy is talking about political knowledge. Philosophy of the mind is talking about the knowledge of the mind. Philosophy of math, physics, the law, economy, theology, history, language, philosophy about any subject taught at the academia, being taught at a separate faculty. Western philosophy is philosophy of science. Showing love for scientific wisdom, as is the usually ascribed meaning. The subject matter being science.

In short, western philosophy is a Grreek invention to separate the knowledge from the talking about it. A separation being present in western thought only.

Haha! Similar thought passed my mind!

I'd argue then when a scientific experiment reaches the theorum phase it is philosophy, for this and that together create 'it'(pronoun). — Varde

I'm not sure if an experiment can reach a theorem phase, as the theorem phase comes mostly before the experiment phase. When quarks were first thought of (theorem phase) it took another ten years to experimentally confirm them, molding reality to make their existence explicit and almost tangible. A good accout of this process (sending the scientific method home at the same time) s given by Pickering,:

https://philpapers.org/rec/PICCQA

Recently, in one of the most complicated, extensive, and expensive experiments ever, designed to measure a simple quantity of one of the smallest particles, the muonic g2 factor, a miniscule deviation from a standard value was registered. And there are a variety of theorems to explain it, apart from the standard reaction of re-calculating the value in the standard model, which oddly enough is called the standard model. But the standard is under attack. Future experiments must decide. Strangely enough, in the spectrum of new theories, composite quarks and leptons are not present, or just thrown from the table.

What should I refute? Is refuting showing my face? You wanna be refuted?

In the face of other realities I don't show mine. I let people live in their reality. I'm rather faceless about it. Who am I to judge their reality? It can be as mad a one as my own. I don't take all these realities too serious either. If showing a face it,'s a laughing one. Though I'm not sure what you mean by faceless. You want me to show my face?

A child is born - why - reality.
A child is born - why - it's quality of life would be good. — Varde

How can the reality of a child being born the cause of birth? How can quality of life be an answer to the why? Birth is a quality of life indeed, but is that the cause?

Our increasingly inhumane treatment of animals and indeed virtually every other life on Earth is a direct result of our evergrowing population that has to have its needs met. That's where I would start. The conclusion that 7,9 billion humans is quite enough. — Tzeentch

Funny enough, I wanted to ask the question here if there is overpopulation. I just read that 50 000 BC there were only one million people living on Earth. That's 7000 times as much, these days. Quite a lot. I think there is no mammal in nature living in such a quantity. Though it seems we push each other of the planet, there is actually a lot of room! I think nature can provide for all, but there is not much nature left anymore, although this might be a too narrow vision. In the birthyear of the holy savior, a billion people walked the Earth. More or less. I can't see a very big difference with 7 billion. All pee in the year zero could be fed without a too great impact on nature. For every person back then, an area of a quarter squared kilometer could be assigned. That is about 1/30 of a squared kilometer in our time. That is about 3 hectares or 7.5 acres. The problem not lies in the increase of people, but in the disproportional growth of products, which is way out of hand. Nature can provide for all. The modern trend of global development, in the service of the capital, is turning increasingly vicious to the face of nature. It's material development that is to fear, not an increasing population. Nature, including all life in it, is basically innocent. But it can show us a mad face one day.

Dogs are not as innocent as thought. They can act. Fooling us (me) to believe they have a painfull leg. But on second thought, that's pretty innocent.

God was bored that morning. Despite His eternal being, in his all-encompassing potency and sapiency, in His infinite goodness. He wished there was something He couldn't do or didn't know.To be devilishly bad. To even die! And the world came into existence with a big flashing bang...

A reality does need an observer as much as an observer needs that reality. Without each other they can't exist, they would be lost. It can be a very unhappy love affair, and they try to keep away from each other frequently. Nevertheless, they are in love, and make love. Holding themselves back from the brink of insanity, from the psychotic realms of madness.

Personally, I think it is okay to kill and eat animals in the same way that wolves kill and eat animals. However, the way we do it lacks respect, grace, gratitude and a personal relationship with the prey in such a way that we hone their edge (and lose, more often than not) at the same time that they hone our edge (when we don't stack the deck with domestication and long range weaponry). — James Riley

I can't agree more. I saw a documentary about the modern way of fishing and damned captain Iglo, so invitingly asking us to purchase the fish he caught in his small fishing boat, on which children are having a good time. If you know the grim reality behind this white-bearded fellow, you would throw him over his own board at the spot. The real boats are huge floating factories, scraping over the bottoms of the seas, to collect as much fish as possible and killing many non-wanted fish, like about a hundred million sharks. How different from the fishermen on the sea around my small island, in small boats.

In the same documentary (I forgot the name) someone sad, very wisely, that all creatures on Earth are traveling on spaceship Earth and that all forms of life are like natural engineers to keep the planet habitable for one another. So I think it would be good to show respect for nature.

Well, to be honest, I didn't read the OP. Only the title. It asked about the difference between science and philosophy. I gave a direct answer: science is knowledge, philosophy is talking about it.

The philosophy of science is simple. Science tries to capture the natural world. By means of gaining knowledge about it. By examining the stuff that constitutes it. By breaking her op into elements. By examining these elements and trying to fit all other stuff within its power of being. By putting elements to the test. By uniting seemingly different stuff under the flag of particular elements or unifying power of math, which claims formal similarities prevail over plain differences. By proposing abstract elements out of which nature can be built or builds herself. By inventing laws, called natural laws, according to which nature should behave in certain situations and to which nature is said to be subjected.

The philosophy of science is to gain knowledge about the creatures, organisms, the heavens above, the deep of the oceans, the behavior of stuff in different circumstances, in the light of theories based on earlier knowledge, in the process sometimes annihilating previous theories, changing the ontology, or extending the old one. Science counts, slices, tears apart, smashes, heats up, drills, shakes, mixes, pulls, pushes, measures, observes, on the smallest as well as biggest scales, incorporating even the distant heavens to the urge and hunger for knowledge.

The philosophy of science is trying to unify. and reduce while natural reality is reshaped, trying to mold it such to be in agreement with the paradigm in fashion, or the mathematically exactly solvable. At the same time the limits of the paradims are pushed, in order to know what lies behind the limits, and more often than not unexpected new observations makes one cross a border to arrive at knew stages of knowledge, claiming that a breakthrough has been made. Experimental practice changes accordingly planning for new in the context of a new emerging paradigm.

The philosophy of science encourages the dissection and close investigation of plants, animals, and people (adequately named Homo Sapiens, the knowing man), gain knowledge of their workings and to try to frame them in some overarching vision, regardless cultures.

The philosophy of science stimulates the creation of a virtually endless succession of new means to create new forms of knowledge. Ad nauseam. It brings into play the concept of an objective, consciousness-detached reality (quantum mechanics trying in vain to bring it into play by means of an observer, after the damage has already been done), only to be known or approximated by science. In this process, man places himself outside nature and all beauty it contains (like people).

And on and on. The philosophy of science includes the scientific methodology, which is just a quasi-scientific attempt to frame the whole scientific enterprise in the quasi-scientific language of The Methodology. As if the human enterprise, erratically, non-rationally, non-programmed, or even maybe randomly, evolves. Scientists try crazingly to stick to this method, but that's merely empty verbiage.

Modern science is embedded in the market economy. Giving rise to new products growing on the scientific tree, and trying to convince the public of the wonders of technology, and making statements that a far-enough developed technology can't be distinguished from magic, overlooking the magic that can be found in nature. The formal language of math is used to quantify knowledge and it's even said that math is the language of nature, emphasizing its objectivity.

Once science and philosophy were not separated. Knowledge and talking about it were one and the same. In our time, I think philosophy should be more than just talking about science.

The corner points correspond indeed to to rational dyadics, as seen on rulers. The denominators being powers of two. The paradox here is that the stepped diagonal has length two, while appearing to have a length of the square-root of two.

It's indeed somehow similar to the use of Feynman diagrams in quantum field theory, each higher order diagram giving increasingly smaller and increasingly more contributions to an interaction process. The first stair represents the first order process. One right angle on the line. (inside the square). The second order process, introducing two extra vertices (which in a Feynman diagram can be put in in a variety of ways though), is corresponding to the second stair. Again two vertices are added for a third order diagram, corresponding to virtual particles. These four extra vertices can already be added in a lot of ways, each diagram contributing to the scattering process.On the staircase though, four new angles are added. Not two. The two more vertices are added again, giving rise to a new spectrum of diagrams. Ad infinitum! All contributing with a fastly decreasing weight. Normally second order contributions will do. I have done these calculations, but it's boring! The similarity with this staircase is enlightening! In any book on diagrammatics, this enormity can be seen.See, for a small example, here:

https://i.pinimg.com/736x/27/ad/3b/27ad3b1f4776c5d591a4b84e889433aa--feynman-diagram-science-art.jpg


To make a line infinite without adding a second dense dimension is impossible. A Peano curve (Giuseppe Peano already made this in the end of the 19th century) is a one dimensional infinite line that's fit in a square (like a 2-meter DNA string is fit into a small nuclei, though the two ends of DNA don't identify with infinity). This curve is a predecessor of fractals, which would occupy a fraction of the square.

Yeah, all-over indeed. It may be words only, but you stated that all is embedded in the genes. How often one hears, "it's all in the genes"? Well, almost nothing is in the genes and there are riceplants and worms who have the same number of genes as people, or even more. People have more non-coding DNA, I.e. junk DNA. I think even the record is held with to junk-DNA. 98% of the chromosomes. Maybe love is embedded in junk... A most likeable thought! Though I think it's the other way round, backwards if you like. Junk lies embedded in love. We should cherish junk. It makes us human.

The nothing alluded to in the videos in the thread refers to the nothing in space. Empty space contains virtual stuff though. This kind of empty space contains virtual,
no real particles at the singularity. They were pulled into reality by inflation, and that's called creation of the universe. What isn't explained though, is were this singularity came from. It's a mystery, even if it's an in-between singularity on an eternal, infinite space. Was it God?

You're just looking at it backwards: the story contains the words. The capacity for love is constructed of proteins — Artemis

I look not backwards, but upwards. Love contains the genes, but the genes don't contain love, nor selfishness. Nor altruism. They just are in service of the organism. To make life and love possible. But if you wanna see it bottom up, reductionist, with the purposes of the genes in the first place, then that's up to you. I'm not a follower of the central dogma in biology.

Reality doesn't require a spirit, it just is the state of affairs whence simulation becomes an experienced simulation. — Varde

So reality is an objective simulation we live in? That makes you are a simulation too. Fine with me, as long you don't consider me one too. Well, if you want to consider it like that... This is a simulation responding to your claim, another simulation.

That's kinda like retorting that books don't contain stories, they just contain letters from the alphabet. — Artemis

The words don't contain the story though. Like proteins don't code for love.

Homo sapiens may forever wrestle with selfish survival versus social good, they're both innate forces embedded in our DNA. — Artemis

Coded in our DNA? Only proteins are encoded in DNA.

Love can be said to be egoistic in essence. This is the cynic's approach. Love can be said to be altruistic in essence. Mother Teresa speaks. Love may not exist at all. So says the nihilist. Love can be all.