Comments

  • The Concept of Religion
    When that is transposed to the domain of philosophy it is not only ‘scientism’ that results. That is what I think that TLP passage is driving at.Wayfarer
    It's pretty clear he is talking about treating the laws of nature as logical necessities in that section.

    So I am not sure that the context supports your interpretation.
    Banno

    It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists.

    The experience that we need in order to understand logic is not that something or other is the state of things, but that something is: that, however, is not experience.

    To say 'I wonder at such and such being the case' has only sense if I can imagine it not to be the case. In this sense one can wonder at the existence of, say, a house when one sees it and has not visited it for a long time and has imagined that it had been pulled down in the meantime. But it is nonsense to say that I wonder at the existence of the world, because I cannot imagine it not existing. I could of course wonder at the world round me being as it is. If for instance I had this experience while looking into the blue sky, I could wonder at the sky being blue as opposed to the case when it's clouded. But that's not what I mean. I am wondering at the sky being whatever it is. One might be tempted to say that what I am wondering at is a tautology, namely at the sky being blue or not blue. But then it's just nonsense to say that one is wondering at a tautology.
    ...
    At the basis of the whole modern view of the world lies the illusion that the so-called laws of nature are the explanations of natural phenomena. So people stop short at natural laws as at something unassailable, as did the ancients at God and Fate. And they both are right and wrong.

    Some kind of minimal 'being mysticism' seems to be sketched here. From the outside, it's just wandering at a tautology (any tautology will do). I don't see how anything could be added without spoiling the effect. This is like 'the pure witness' who is the world.
  • Popper's Swamp, Observation Statements, Facts/Interpretations
    This quote below reminds me of Hegel.
    In a manner of speaking, cognition remains embedded in discourse. But in more complex societies, cognition is lifted out of discourse, allowing the perception of the social structure within which it was constituted. Cognition is disembedded from discourse and reconstituted symbolically, then becoming re-embedded within the constraints of the symbol system by which it functions. Thus, elaborated code is seen as emerging out of restricted code as social structure becomes more complex and lowers the shared level of presuppositionality amongst speakers. This transformation occurs in tandem with societal complexification.

    Compare with this.
    Hegel posits (since concepts and judgments are kinds of “doings”) that language originally acquires meaning and content-fulness in social practices. Only later do we make the judgments implicit in antecedent actions something explicit in language...

    The social and pragmatic nature of semantic content is related to Wittgenstein’s argument about the impossibility of a “private language”, as well as the pragmatist notion of “meaning as use” rather than “meaning as reference,” as in the case of a semantic sign/signifer relation, or the idea that “dog” has some correspondence with the external world, eg. “dogness”. Reference theories of meaning tend to lead, due to their implicit Cartesianism, to skepticism about meaning (eg. semiotic deconstruction) or bullet biting about ideas having external reality (eg. Platonism). In the pragmatist interpretation, in contrast, if I say “It is raining outside” that entitles you to say “I shall get my umbrella” in our language game. Those explicit / discursive articulations are only meaningful because there are a set of “doings” behind them with pragmatic force and inferential implications.
    https://hamandcheese.medium.com/what-makes-me-hegelian-99d329dbd136
  • Popper's Swamp, Observation Statements, Facts/Interpretations

    I appreciate the friendly words.

    It'd be great to hear your thoughts on Popper's swamp, which has hardly been touched. Observation statements are tricky! 'Experience' is pre-logical, one might say, since logic is about relationships between statements. Which statements count as basic (not needing justification by still other statements) is maybe unformalizable. Reminds me of On Certainty.
  • The Pure Witness / The Transcendental Ego
    Is the hard problem of 'consciousness' a confusion? Or an attempt to point at something elusive? 'Why is there something? Why is there anything?' Is this a search for answers ? Or something else, something that dimly grasps that it's not really a question ?

    What is this thrust against the limits of language? Even granting that it's 'useless,' is it therefore meaningless? Does 'pure witness' aim at the thereness of the situation? For some it's stupid and empty. For others (Wittgenstein perhaps at one time) it's profound, important.



    The experience that we need in order to understand logic is not that something or other is the state of things, but that something is: that, however, is not experience.

    It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists.

    When the answer cannot be put into words, neither can the question be put into words.
    The riddle does not exist.

    If a question can be framed at all, it is also possible to answer it.

    To say 'I wonder at such and such being the case' has only sense if I can imagine it not to be the case. In this sense one can wonder at the existence of, say, a house when one sees it and has not visited it for a long time and has imagined that it had been pulled down in the meantime. But it is nonsense to say that I wonder at the existence of the world, because I cannot imagine it not existing. I could of course wonder at the world round me being as it is. If for instance I had this experience while looking into the blue sky, I could wonder at the sky being blue as opposed to the case when it's clouded. But that's not what I mean. I am wondering at the sky being whatever it is. One might be tempted to say that what I am wondering at is a tautology, namely at the sky being blue or not blue. But then it's just nonsense to say that one is wondering at a tautology.

    ... what the solipsist means is quite correct; only it cannot be said, but makes itself manifest.

    I am my world.
    — Witt
    http://people.loyno.edu/~folse/WittCant.html#(4)%20the%20special%20mystical%20feeling%20%60that%20the%20world

    But we share this world with others. We can leave marks on some shared space. Christopher McCandless could write down happiness is only real when shared before he died, and this message waited in some kind of 'physical' stuff unwitnessed before eventually reappearing in the 'microcosm' of its discover. Many are willing to put color on the side of the subject (as not 'really' there in the world), but where do we draw the line? Notions of elementary particles might also be thought of in terms of mediation added by the subject. The situation reminds me of:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C3%B6bius_strip
  • Popper's Swamp, Observation Statements, Facts/Interpretations
    Some quotes from Vygotksi, Popper, Lock, and Piaget (from the link) that seem relevant:
    The central characteristic of elementary functions is that they are totally and directly determined by stimulation from the environment. For higher functions, the central feature is self-generated stimulation, that is, the creation and use of artificial stimuli which become the immediate causes of behavior
    ...
    The inclusion of a sign in one or other behavioral process ... reforms the whole structure of the psychological operation as the inclusion of a tool reforms the whole structure of a labor operation
    ...
    The origin of all, specifically human, higher psychological processes, therefore, cannot be found in the mind or brain of an individual person but rather should be sought in the social 'extracerebral' sign systems a culture provides.
    ...
    the two results which seem the most interesting to me are, first, the time that Darwin needed to become aware of ideas which were already implicit in his thought, and, second, the mysterious passage from the implicit to the explicit in the creation of new ideas ... One might have believed that this passage concerned only the relationship between thought and action, and that, on the level of thought itself, the passage from 'implicit' schemas ... to their reflective explication would be much more rapid. [But] ... even in a creator of the greatness of Darwin the passage is far from immediate. This delay establishes ... that making things explicit leads to the construction of a structure which is partially new, even though contained virtually in those structures which preceded it
    ...
    It is not planned - it is an unintended consequence of the need for easy or swift movement. This is how a path is originally made - perhaps even by men - and how language and any other institutions which are useful may arise .... In this way, a whole new universe of possibilities or potentialities may arise...
    ...
    ...social structure is the ground against which meaningful communication is established. In simple societies, that structure does not itself become a topic of the discourse practices it affords. In a manner of speaking, cognition remains embedded in discourse. But in more complex societies, cognition is lifted out of discourse, allowing the perception of the social structure within which it was constituted. Cognition is disembedded from discourse and reconstituted symbolically, then becoming re-embedded within the constraints of the symbol system by which it functions. Thus, elaborated code is seen as emerging out of restricted code as social structure becomes more complex and lowers the shared level of presuppositionality amongst speakers. This transformation occurs in tandem with societal complexification.
    https://www.massey.ac.nz/~alock/
  • Popper's Swamp, Observation Statements, Facts/Interpretations
    I wasn't meaning to offend you; I thought that was what you were referring to; your multiple personas on this site. I have had only one, but it's true I did change the name of that one from John to Janus.

    Why so upset, such as even to refer to me as "bitch"?
    Janus

    I apologize for the insult, and I regret losing my temper. We've discussed this topic before, and it wasn't a terribly pleasant conversation, so your bringing it up again seemed hypocritically aggressive. If you review, I think you'll see that it was a misreading, that I was clearly talking about more than a mere name change.
  • Popper's Swamp, Observation Statements, Facts/Interpretations
    Researchers in enactive cognition like Evan Thomson and Ezekiel DePaulo define a living body as a self-organizing system that can be defined by a certain operational closure or autonomy with respect to its environment.Joshs

    I'm aware that one can stretch the term. Recall that I've insisted on a perhaps necessary ambiguity when it comes to specifying the 'practical' foundation of bodies in a world. Some kind of hazy indirect realism seems implicit in the philosophical enterprise. We are either talking about the same world or writing poetry. If you tell me we are co-creating the world (which may be true if limited to the social world), then you are saying something that's true only if/because everyone believes it.

    I don't deny that the body/environment boundary is blurry or imperfect, an abstraction. I'm just floating the radical hypothesis that we are animals on the same planet who communicate using sounds and marks, primarily for 'animal'/practical reasons (to feed, breed, safely crowd into cities...)
  • Popper's Swamp, Observation Statements, Facts/Interpretations
    Two would be enough if we could force folk to be have both a self and anti-self. You would have to show a dialectical self-duality by being jasOn and anti-jasOn .... just like the only Superman plot twist that was worth a damn.apokrisis

    The move from one to two would be decisive. In the practical world, we need to track bodies, feed or age the right one, so merely changing one's legal name requires a preliminary public notice, almost nullifying this change, ensuring the legal name's function as a kind of toe-tag.

    Of course going farther and performing opposed personalities is just madness. One is one around here, probably because it's an efficient way to integrate an organism into its group, and I'd guess there's even a biological basis as well at this point.

    It seems norms proper to that realm are thoughtlessly dragged along into an online space that offers new possibilities.

    Using two handles simultaneously violates the spirit and perhaps the letter of the rules, so I haven't and won't do it. But if the norms were different, I'd love to try to outdo some of my opponents at their own game, show them the opposition I'd love to see (because it'd force the best out of 'me.')
  • Metaphors and validity
    we share a biology that would, in my humble opinion, mean that my experiences (inner ones included) are going to be very similar if not identical to another's. So, my pain will feel exactly like your pain or someone else's.Agent Smith

    I feel you, but we have no data to support/falsify such a conclusion.

    It's good to be skeptical, but as 180 Proof reminds me, there's gotta be a good reason to be doubtful like that and we have none.Agent Smith

    I don't deny that it's as impractical as lots of other varieties of metaphysical handwringing. To me what makes it interesting is its connection to the problem of meaning and to epistemology. Some philosophers have postulated 'clear and distinct ideas' as foundational, while others have proposed 'sense-data.' Then they try to construct the everyday world from such 'bricks.' Hence the concern that one is living in a simulation, that others are p-zombies, that my red isn't your red....

    Relating this to the OP, are we to believe that all of our current supposedly literal concepts are pre-installed in the brain ? That we merely have to attach names to them? Maybe with the help of metaphor?
  • The Pure Witness / The Transcendental Ego
    ...we have the capacity to judge and come to conclusions based on available evidence and consequences, which are not absolute and are subject to modification based on subsequent evidence and experience...Ciceronianus

    I just thought this was too obvious to be worth mentioning. Perhaps the fault is mine. Let me try again, summarizing some exploratory hypotheses.

    (1) The 'foundation' of fancy metaphysics is 'pre-theoretical' worldly know-how, including ordinary language.

    (2) Comprehensive metaphysical visions, which a cynic or commie might call intellectual luxuries, tend to 'break down' as they are elaborated/specified. (Consider the attempts to reduce the lifeworld to mind or matter. )

    (3) Something like Freud's 'ego ideal' structures a personality, and one approach to this ego-ideal is through the shadow it casts, that which it defines itself against, its giant-or-windmill. For instance, a crude scientism can't help being haunted by the ghost of theology, while scientism is itself the shadow cast by an identification with lost spiritual wisdom. Your anti-skeptical position (if I read you correctly) may have inspired you to read too much skepticism into my posts above. I was just saying that inquiry is endless and historical, that it has a personal/mythic aspect, and that totalizing visions tend to have problems, whether or not their proponents will acknowledge these problems. Yet totalization (comprehensiveness and coherence) is what we strive toward.
  • Popper's Swamp, Observation Statements, Facts/Interpretations

    I was just looking into Vygotsky, found some online texts. A summary will be helpful. Thanks.
  • The Pure Witness / The Transcendental Ego
    ....people learning and enlarging their perspectives...may well be the project of philosophy summarized...Tom Storm
    :up:
  • Popper's Swamp, Observation Statements, Facts/Interpretations
    ...peculiar emphasis on self-belonging, assimilative consistency and similarity, pragmatic relevance and thematic continuity...Joshs

    These qualities seem to apply to both the individual 'subject' and the tribe's self-understanding as a whole. That fits a distributed operating system metaphor. If 'I' am an experimental version of the tribal ego, then 'I' am going to be similar to 'us.'
  • Popper's Swamp, Observation Statements, Facts/Interpretations
    The self is a synthetic achievement, not an a priori. The self can be lost though depersonalization, schizophrenia, etc.Joshs

    :up:
  • Popper's Swamp, Observation Statements, Facts/Interpretations
    Endlessly deferring reference and infinitely plural interpretation may exist in theory...The business in hand for the social organism is surviving and spreading in the real world.apokrisis
    :up:

    The plurality of possibility is what the relevant optimisation function erases.apokrisis

    :up:
  • Popper's Swamp, Observation Statements, Facts/Interpretations
    “In other words, it is possible to conceive the relationship between two or more persons not in terms of "interacting" individuals, but of elements of an inseparable system in which the relationship precedes the individual psychologies.Joshs

    Yes. And I generally agree with the other quotes too.

    Let me stress again the distinction of body and ego. The 'ego' is an 'effect of language' or a habit or a convention.* It's a piece of tribal technology. The body cannot be dissolved... or not consistently dissolved. Accounts dissolving the 'foundation' of bodies in a world tend to depend on what they dissolve and lapse into an absurdity that's hard to recognize in all the smoke.

    I think we are both challenging the assumption that "reason is a cognitive faculty of the individual thinking subject that is employed as an instrument for apprehending truths." Feuerbach understands the alternative as "thinking is not an activity performed by the individual, but rather by “the species” acting through the individual....In thinking,I am bound together with, or rather, I am one with—indeed, I myself am—all human beings.”
    https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ludwig-feuerbach/

    Of course different bodies have obtained different degrees of participation in 'one and the same' reason. Feuerbach's transitional account is still trailing clouds of glory from Hegel. So we can jump forward to Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Derrida...or to any thinker who dissolves the subject (not the body) into culture or language or social habit.

    *The issue of whether it makes sense to talk of a 'pure witness' is something else. I can only grok it in terms of a collapse of consciousness into being. 'It's not how but that the world is there that is the mystical.' A healthy brain in some external world is the condition of possibility for experience a world in which there are healthy brains.
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C3%B6bius_strip ?
  • The Pure Witness / The Transcendental Ego
    How do we know they are in our way except when we are ready to replace them?Joshs
    Glad you mentioned that. I love Gadamer on this.
    Gadamer also takes issue directly with this view of prejudice and the negative connotations often associated with the notion, arguing that, rather than closing us off, our prejudices are themselves what open us up to what is to be understood.
    ..
    ...all interpretation, even of the past, is necessarily ‘prejudgmental’ in the sense that it is always oriented to present concerns and interests, and it is those present concerns and interests that allow us to enter into the dialogue with the matter at issue...
    ..
    The prejudicial character of understanding means that, whenever we understand, we are involved in a dialogue that encompasses both our own self-understanding and our understanding of the matter at issue. In the dialogue of understanding our prejudices come to the fore, both inasmuch as they play a crucial role in opening up what is to be understood, and inasmuch as they themselves become evident in that process. As our prejudices thereby become apparent to us, so they can also become the focus of questioning in their own turn.

    This suggests that 'self'-knowledge is a necessary byproduct of interpreting the other.


    The fact that understanding operates by means of such anticipatory structures means that understanding always involves what Gadamer terms the ‘anticipation of completeness’—it always involves the revisable presupposition that what is to be understood constitutes something that is understandable, that is, something that is constituted as a coherent, and therefore meaningful, whole.
    ...
    Hermeneutics concerns our fundamental mode of being in the world and understanding is thus the basic phenomenon in our existence.
    https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/gadamer/#PosPre
  • Are there any scientific grounds for god?

    You were correct (genuinely philosophical) to start discussing (not simply pontificating about) what makes a claim wise (or rational or trustworthy.) But we've derailed this thread long enough. So maybe we'll actually do philosophy elsewhere at some other time.
  • Are there any scientific grounds for god?
    Ok we know that you will defend your magical ideology to the end even if it means you have to embarrass yourself.Nickolasgaspar

    By their windmills ye shall know them.

    https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Quixote

    Perhaps the best abbreviation for someone's heroic ego-ideal is the choice of their windmill.

    Perhaps the heroic role tends to be of equal complexity and interest as the shadow it casts.
  • Are there any scientific grounds for god?
    what makes a claim wise...in your opinion?Nickolasgaspar
    Be careful. We might find ourselves doing philosophy if you keep this up.
  • Are there any scientific grounds for god?
    explain why we should accept a claim as wise when it doesn't have epistemic supportNickolasgaspar

    'Hello. I'm Nick. I define a wise (philosophical) claim to be one with epistemic support. Now, given this uselessly vague definition, I challenge you to accept and challenge this definition simultaneously.'

    See the problem?
  • Are there any scientific grounds for god?
    I am pointing the issue in claims that are epistemically disconnected....they are not philosophical.Nickolasgaspar

    I am trying to draw your attention to the fact that you are basically repeating a mantra. You are making a trivial deduction from your pet definitions.
  • Are there any scientific grounds for god?
    I am asking a question...how can a statement be accepted as wise when it has not epistemic foundations.Nickolasgaspar

    How can a statement be accepted as false if it is true? Riddle me that !
  • Are there any scientific grounds for god?

    Trivialities, Nick.

    Read some more philosophy. You'll see folks articulating and discussing what it means to be rational, wise, scientific, and so on.

    You can not have wise claims without epistemic support.Nickolasgaspar

    This is an awkward tautology. The hard part (the actual work) is figuring out what all that otherwise vague babble means.
  • Are there any scientific grounds for god?
    well there you have it, by dismissing valid critique you allow pseudo philosophy in the philosophical realm.Nickolasgaspar

    Your 'valid' critique was a few pejorative adjectives, a few platitudes, and a few links to books/videos that maybe were supposed to supply the actual critique....
  • Are there any scientific grounds for god?
    -You are feeling sour because of the facts I put on the table.Nickolasgaspar

    You have hardly provided any facts, just recycled deepities about the sorry state of philosophy.

    Do you have any real arguments that could justify epistemically unfounded principles in Philosophy....like Supernaturalistic ones?
    how can you tie conclusions based on supernatural assumption to wisdom, knowledge and logic.????
    Nickolasgaspar

    That seems to be all you have, this obsession with the supernatural. Philosophy is dominated by atheists. I'm an atheist. This forum also seems to lean atheist/agnostic. For many people the whole supernatural issue is so settled that it's not even interesting.

    Your biggest gripe about philosophers? That they didn't become scientists or engineers instead....

    A 2014 survey by David Chalmers and David Bourget on nearly 1,000 professional philosophers from 99 leading departments of philosophy shows that 72.8% considered themselves as atheists, 14.6% considered themselves as theist, and 12.6% as something else.
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_atheism#:~:text=A%202014%20survey%20by%20David,and%2012.6%25%20as%20something%20else.
  • Are there any scientific grounds for god?
    Philosophy not only fails to experience the success of science, but it reprocesses old dead end ideas again and again.Nickolasgaspar

    This is the kind of grand-vague-trite criticism that I'm trying to point out. It's a conspiracy theory. Those postmodernist circles are engaged in an endless circle jerk with the same old useless ideas. As if anyone gives a fuck. As if philosophers run the world. As if there's a shortage of engineers whose idea of culture is video games.
  • Metaphors and validity
    So there can be no consensus on pain? What about analgesics like aspirin, paracetamol, etc.. They seem to have a good track record; why else do they sell?Agent Smith

    What if the meaning of 'pain' is everything 'around' the otherwise ineffable painfeeling? The 'pain itself' is the hole in a donut. The dough is buying aspirin, saying the word 'pain,' etc.

    The mess goes back at least to Aristotle:
    Spoken words are the symbols of mental experience and written words are the symbols of spoken words. Just as all men have not the same writing, so all men have not the same speech sounds, but the mental experiences, which these directly symbolize, are the same for all, as also are those things of which our experiences are the images.

    How can Aristotle know this ? Did he mindmeld with all his buddies when they complained of toothache? Or is this some kind of mostly unquestioned folk psychology that evolved as a convenience?
  • Are there any scientific grounds for god?

    It seems to me that you are mostly repeating platitudes. It's unfortunate that you didn't participate in the Popper thread. Basic observation statements are not so basic after all. From my perspective, you haven't shown much interest in doing philosophy. You've just evangelized for your own narrow concept of it, and that's why I called it your role.
  • Are there any scientific grounds for god?
    I want to know if there's ghost in a house. I can't know unless I go inside that house. Whether there's ultimate comprehension or not, one is forced to attempt it.Agent Smith
    :up:
  • Are there any scientific grounds for god?
    Mario Bunge critiqueNickolasgaspar
    Marketing of above:
    Is philosophy dead? Some philosophers have declared it to be so, and judging by some of the mental acrobatics now fashionable in postmodernist circles a reasonable person might have to agree. Though recognizing the moribund state of current academic philosophy, Mario Bunge feels that this is a crisis from which the discipline can and will recover.

    Beware postmodernist circles ! Don't read the books yourself. That'd be difficult. Buy an easier book that assures you that you aren't missing anything, that it's all a conspiracy. Whole industry of this stuff. Less interesting than the authors they attack, all saying the same thing, hoping common sense and yesterday's thinking is plenty. For practical life, it probably is. But they want to perform the intellectual too, and this kind of book offers a short cut. The starter kit is a bag of six words. Maybe all beginnings are at least as humble.
  • Are there any scientific grounds for god?

    I think I'm seeing your role in the drama. You are a debunker and a reformer, yes? Are you 100% sure you are qualified? Do you consider Ayn Rand a great philosopher?
  • Are there any scientific grounds for god?
    .
    misunderstanding is...a stage one must pass through towards full comprehension,Agent Smith

    And maybe one never quite achieves full comprehension ? Then what would we do? Sounds like death.

    ... pseudo-philosophy is part and parcel of true/genuine philosophy...Agent Smith
    :up:
  • PSR & Woo-woo

    Yes, and though statistical tests can be used to suggest fishiness (maybe you accidentally manifest a pattern), they never prove genuine order. A fair coin can come up heads 50 times in a row. Unlikely, but possible....
  • The Pure Witness / The Transcendental Ego
    Another helpful quote on the strange relationship of ego and language:
    ////////////////////////////////////////////
    With regard to the superstitions of logicians, I shall never tire of emphasizing a small, terse fact, which is unwillingly recognized by these credulous minds—namely, that a thought comes when "it" wishes, and not when "I" wish; so that it is a PERVERSION of the facts of the case to say that the subject "I" is the condition of the predicate "think." ONE thinks; but that this "one" is precisely the famous old "ego," is, to put it mildly, only a supposition, an assertion, and assuredly not an "immediate certainty." After all, one has even gone too far with this "one thinks"—even the "one" contains an INTERPRETATION of the process, and does not belong to the process itself. One infers here according to the usual grammatical formula—"To think is an activity; every activity requires an agency that is active; consequently"...

    ...where there is affinity of language, owing to the common philosophy of grammar—I mean owing to the unconscious domination and guidance of similar grammatical functions—it cannot but be that everything is prepared at the outset for a similar development and succession of philosophical systems, just as the way seems barred against certain other possibilities of world-interpretation.
    https://www.gutenberg.org/files/4363/4363-h/4363-h.htm#link2HCH0001
  • Are there any scientific grounds for god?
    I am criticizing people's efforts to seek validity by trying to place their superstitions under the umbrella of status called PhilosophyNickolasgaspar

    It's a fact that lots of classic battles are still raging under the tent of philosophy. To take one side is to think the other is wrong or at least less rational/convincing. Assuming that there is one right answer to questions like 'what is science?' or 'what is meaning?' (which may itself be superstition), you're going to have people on the wrong side of an issue who are nevertheless making a case for their position while incorporating criticism.

    As far as I can tell, you are trying to apply scientific standards to philosophy, without realizing that such an application needs to be justified. For instance, Popper's demarcation is not something that can be falsified. Is it therefore superstition? Hardly. It's an attempt to articulate what it means to try to not be superstitious. It's a suggested convention. 'Hey guys...maybe this is a way to be less stupid and wrong.' It's a part of philosophy. Alternative conceptions of science are also a part of philosophy.

    You seem to want to use 'Philosophy' for 'my current opinions' or 'the philosophy I like.' That's an aggressive and confusing approach that will interfere with productive conversation.

    Also, I'd like your opinion of this:
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumentalism

    Is truth only good as a means to get power? Or good in itself? Is it pretty ? Why do we care?
  • Are there any scientific grounds for god?
    because humans use the field as a comforting pillow to rest their anxieties and seek validity by just stating "its philosophy".Nickolasgaspar

    And you tell us this on a philosophy forum...using the field as a comforting pillow and a way to seek validity ? Perhaps you've described thinking in general ? Don't know about you, but I'm a mammal. I like soft pillows and social status. A big part of philosophy is maybe us figuring out how to live together while not starving in the cold with rotting teeth and an intestinal parasite dangling on our thigh.
    ///////////////////////////////
    They are all advocates who do not wish to be regarded as such, generally astute defenders, also, of their prejudices, which they dub "truths,"—and VERY far from having the conscience which bravely admits this to itself, very far from having the good taste of the courage which goes so far as to let this be understood, perhaps to warn friend or foe, or in cheerful confidence and self-ridicule.
    https://www.gutenberg.org/files/4363/4363-h/4363-h.htm#link2HCH0001
  • Popper's Swamp, Observation Statements, Facts/Interpretations
    To delegitimise the technocratic elite is to legitimate Trumpian rule by meme.apokrisis
    :up:
    Our knowledge as a species is so great (mirroring a super-differentiated economy) that the individual is forced to blindly trust a system which no one can see in its entirety...hence simplifying fantasies of heroes and villains with simple motives, with a real grip on the controls.
  • Popper's Swamp, Observation Statements, Facts/Interpretations
    Isn’t it a case of the science answer becoming too complex and sounding much more like nonsense than the “facts” one can make up to justify one’s own theories.apokrisis
    :up:
    Folks hate math and love interpersonal drama. As you know, some people like the weird stuff about QM woven into their new religion of virtuous aliens and channeling and so on.

    One of my big interests in philosophy/psychology has always been the stories individuals tell themselves to navigate the lifeworld. I think of a practical base (don't play in traffic, pay your rent) on which an elaborate often-unpractical (relatively optional) self myth is built (which includes the self heroically in a world myth, naturally.) The dominant constraints on this self-myth are social. Obsessing over fashion or the faddish moral vocab of the day, at the cost of understanding even basic physics, might be optimal for a young person trying to climb up the social ladder, get money, mate, and feed babies. This works as long as a specialized class invents and runs the machines...and suffers/articulates/navigates the ever-present constraints of nature (like the second law, working away, mostly ignored.)