The study of atoms in the brain doesn't explain the redness of red;Materialism = FAKE

[Sideroxylon]

Maybe it would be better to think things through, rather than giving a knee jerk emotional reaction to everything.

I didn't think it was controversial that the pioneers of formalised logic were figures like Aristotle and Chrysippus and that they were philosophers.

If you dispute this can you provide the details?

Not only them but old mate the German with the name nobody can spell (lucky we don’t have to pronounce Frege). He is massive in computer logic and some of the questions he spent his time on would have certain people howling with incredulity.

The story that is our tellings of the history of ideas from hominid ancestors to present day is glorious. What we might consider common sense or common knowledge is hard earned.

 

[Robin]

Nevertheless, Deepak remains touted as a deep philosopher.

Again, I have gone through a lot of stuff and have not heard that and certainly the philosophic community would not consider him to be a philosopher.

He does not appear to consider himself a philosopher.

But even if he was considered a philosopher, so what?

Michael Behe is considered a scientist. William Dembski is considered a mathematician.

Personally, I remain on the side that he is full of it.

Yet some folks buy the nonsense.

Personally, I remain on the side that Behe and Dembski are full of it.

But I don't try to generalise that to biology and mathematics.

I have no objection to philosophy per se, Dan Dennett springs to mind.

And I have no objection to science and mathematics, per se. Darwin and Turing spring to mind

But Chopra? That is abject nonsense that he spouts.

Of course it is. It is the sort of thing that gives science a bad name.

 

[arthwollipot]

Science=natural sciences?
Science includes human sciences also?
In any case: common sense, philosophy, art are alternative ways to knowledge.

What knowledge is gained by common sense, philosophy, or art? What new facts have been learned through these methods?

Didn't Aristotle discuss whether the Universe could be infinitely old or infinitely vast? That sounds like investigating reality, but he certainly wasn't doing science in the sense of conducting experiments.

What new facts did Aristotle learn? Almost every claim Aristotle made about the universe has turned out to be wrong.

What has been mentioned may indeed be alternative ways to something, but that something is not knowledge.

 

[Sideroxylon]

What knowledge is gained by common sense, philosophy, or art? What new facts have been learned through these methods?

What new facts did Aristotle learn? Almost every claim Aristotle made about the universe has turned out to be wrong.

What has been mentioned may indeed be alternative ways to something, but that something is not knowledge.

Zero new facts, arth. What do you see, if any, as the contributions of ancient Greek philosophy?

 

[Sideroxylon]

Could we consider Aristotle’s taxonomy and mapping of syllogisms, making explicit the right and wrong ways of doing deductive logic new facts about the world? I see it more of mapping the landscape (even bad mapping is useful if you show your rigorous workings) and the creation of new concepts. A map and concepts that established a foundation for the computing machines were are using now.

Wondering, are we polarised over the classic debate around the role rationalism and empiricism in human understanding?

 

[Robin]

As I have said elsewhere, Aristotle did both science and philosophy.

His science was a pretty good effort for the time. His dissection if bird eggs at various stages of development gave him about as much information about the embryonic development that you can get without a microscope.

His suggestion for the classification of animals was imperfect (as Aristotle himself noted at the time) but it became the basis, for example, on which whales and dolphins could be classified alongside mammals rather than with fish

And he always insisted that any conclusion that didn't accord with observational data must be wrong.

Of course he got many things wrong, including the observational data. But all scientists get things wrong.

 

[arthwollipot]

As I have said elsewhere, Aristotle did both science and philosophy.

His science was a pretty good effort for the time. His dissection if bird eggs at various stages of development gave him about as much information about the embryonic development that you can get without a microscope.

His suggestion for the classification of animals was imperfect (as Aristotle himself noted at the time) but it became the basis, for example, on which whales and dolphins could be classified alongside mammals rather than with fish

And he always insisted that any conclusion that didn't accord with observational data must be wrong.

Of course he got many things wrong, including the observational data. But all scientists get things wrong.

So you're saying that when he did science, he learned new facts.

 

[sir drinks-a-lot]

What knowledge is gained by common sense, philosophy, or art? What new facts have been learned through these methods?.

Lots of laws of logic, as has already been previously mentioned. That we can never show all that can be known about numbers. That time is not absolute.

 

[arthwollipot]

Lots of laws of logic, as has already been previously mentioned.

Is logic knowledge, or is it a means to knowledge?

That we can never show all that can be known about numbers.

That's mathematics.

That time is not absolute.

That's science.

I will concede this. Logic and mathematics are ways to learn new facts about the universe that inform and are used by science, but are not themselves science. That constitutes one answer to my question. Thank you.

 

[sir drinks-a-lot]

Is logic knowledge, or is it a means to knowledge?

False Dilemma. <- logic!

It is both.

That's mathematics.

Well, it's logic. You can call it mathematics if you want, but if you go to most Universities it is taught in the Philosophy department.

That's science.

Well, the first guy really talking about it seems to have been Hume who was questioning whether space and time were really absolute and independent. He went into great detail on this. Einstein said if he hadn't read Hume's work on this he very possibly wouldn't have come up with the Theory of Relativity.

I will concede this. Logic and mathematics are ways to learn new facts about the universe that inform and are used by science, but are not themselves science. That constitutes one answer to my question. Thank you.

Correct. As a matter of fact, the large majority of mathematics has no practical application that we are aware of. As you probably know, we call it pure math in order to distinguish it from applied math which has a real world application in physics, for one example. But there have been quite a few cases where there were purely mathematical constructs that were studied for decades (or more) and then someone finally found an application for them.

 

[Robin]

So you're saying that when he did science, he learned new facts.

Yes, I was disagreeing with the other poster that Aristotle was doing philosophy when he was talking about facts about cosmology and physics.

Obviously he would not have this distinction on his time and, although he discussed these as different approaches at the time, the "science/philosophy" distinction is a modern one that we can apply in retrospect.

On the philosophy side he had the insight that knowledge about the world cannot be deduced from first principles, rather has to be gathered by an inductive process from empirical data and that conclusions that contradict observations should be rejected.

That is not the scientific method as we have it today, refined over centuries, but it was a good start.

That seems to me to qualify as a fact about reality. Rather an important one at that.

So yes, Aristotle came up with facts using an early draft of the scientific method, but he also came up with that early draft using philosophy.

 

[Sideroxylon]

Aristotle did no experiments. I would have thought this a necessary condition to call an activity science. Nor did he quantify his subjects and examine relations. Surely both are essential ingredients to the scientific method. It is these elements that allow us to generate new facts about the workings of the cosmos.

 

[Sideroxylon]

In popular tellings of the history of ideas, the pre-Socratics began methodological naturalism. They began to explain phenomena in terms of causation by other natural phenomena instead of supernatural beings. Aristotle was a keen cataloguer of observations and explanations but that is hardly doing science.

There are a couple of proto experiments and great observations by the pre-Socratics but their ponderings on the nature of substance/atoms was metaphysics that they could not even dream of demonstrating in the way we can with science today. An excellent argument can be made that the concept of atoms was unproven metaphysics until Einstein mathematically modeled Brownian motion a couple of millennia later.

 

[Robin]

Aristotle did no experiments. I would have thought this a necessary condition to call an activity science. Nor did he quantify his subjects and examine relations. Surely both are essential ingredients to the scientific method. It is these elements that allow us to generate new facts about the workings of the cosmos.

As I said,, not the scientific method that we have today, refined through centuries, but an early first draft.

He did not design or perform experiments but he had the step that any conclusion that contradicts observations must be wrong.

Famously his own practice often fell short of this rule.

 

[Robin]

I think science is something that began before history records and is still developing.

I don't think you can pick out a time and say - there - science began there.

 

[Sideroxylon]

As I said,, not the scientific method that we have today, refined through centuries, but an early first draft.

He did not design or perform experiments but he had the step that any conclusion that contradicts observations must be wrong.

Famously his own practice often fell short of this rule.

Appreciate what you are saying. He is the proto empiricist pointing down to the earth in contrast to Plato at the heavens in Raphael’s School of Athens.

Not sure however without quantification and experiments that he generated any new facts about the world in the sense that some here, including myself, might define.

 

[Sideroxylon]

I think science is something that began before history records and is still developing.

I don't think you can pick out a time and say - there - science began there.

I do too and hence my phrasing. Philosophy is continuous with science. All definitions must have some utility in mind.

 

[David Mo]

What knowledge is gained by common sense, philosophy, or art? What new facts have been learned through these methods?

A child learns a lot of things without being a scientist (common sense).
A friend told me that he saved a difficult stage of his life by applying what he had learned from an Ingmar Bergman's film. (Art).
Philosophy tells me whether science is the only way to know things or not.

Naturally you can go through life without these things. Even common sense. But it's your loss.

 

[David Mo]

I will concede this. Logic and mathematics are ways to learn new facts about the universe that inform and are used by science, but are not themselves science. That constitutes one answer to my question. Thank you.

-Is there knowledge outside of science?
-This and that.
-But they're not science!

Are we discussing what science is, or are we discussing whether some kind of knowledge can exist outside of science?

 

[David Mo]

Aristotle did no experiments. I would have thought this a necessary condition to call an activity science. Nor did he quantify his subjects and examine relations. Surely both are essential ingredients to the scientific method. It is these elements that allow us to generate new facts about the workings of the cosmos.

Do you mean that nothing was discovered about astronomy or physics before Galileo started doing experiments? This doesn't make much sense. The Sumerians knew a lot about eclipses and didn't experiment with planets. Primitive cultures know quite a bit about the healing power of certain plants and do not have laboratories with guinea pigs.