Does anything exist?

[SpuriusMaximus]

Well that's the problem. If your mentality is infinite recursive "And then what? Okay prove that. And then prove that. And how can you know you really know that? And then and then and then and then and then...." where else do you expect to wind up?

That's I've always said all philosophy is solipsism. It's just a matter of waiting for it to eat itself into a corner.

I would disagree. SOME philosophy is solipsism, but then for others it wouldn't even make much sense to even consider solipsism.

E.g., there wouldn't be any point in ethics philosophy, if you really believed that everyone else are just figments of your imagination. You don't dedicate much thought to the wellbeing or at least to preventing suffering of fictive characters. Like, literally, utilitarianism (as in, the good of the many vs the good of the few) wouldn't even make any sense. If I'm the only real person, then who cares how many imaginary characters there are and in which categories they fall.

Hell, even in the philosophy of the mind, it's not all solipsism. Most of it could just pack its bags and go home if it all were in a solipsistic dream. (Mind you, it will probably have to anyway, since neuroscience is in the process of making it utterly obsolete.) Schools like functionalism, and especially the sub-school of teleological functionalism would literally make no real sense, if there are no actual external inputs for your functionalism to match. You literally can't talk about what purpose some mental mechanism evolved to serve (i.e., why it's teleological) if it's an arbitrary dream and there is no purpose to serve, as in, actual inputs like pain receptors to deal with.


But basically as you say, the problem with taking philosophy seriously is that it's an umbrella term for a gigantic domain. It covers literally everything from science to Beavis And Butthead thinking hard about "How come they call it taking a dump and not leaving a dump? I mean after all, you're not really taking it anywhere." Literally, the latter fits into the philosophy of language.

As such, you really can't make any generalizations about ALL of philosophy. Just as one can't really say that it all should be taken as gospel, one also can't say that it's all solipsism. It's like saying "all speech is X" or "all thought is Y". There's not a whole lot of Xs and Ys that will fit the sheer size of those domains.

 

[Thermal]

Reading the thread, is it pretty much assumed here that there is no difference between philosophy and metaphysics? The latter was a subset of the former in the school I went to. Philosophy was described as working out the right way of thinking about things, and included formal logic and reasoning. It wasn't all navel-gazing by a long shot.

 

[suren]

The problem with people studying to become professional philosophers (e.g. with doctorates & professorships and such-like), is that when modern science was discovered (starting roughly with Galileo circa 1600-ish) it slowly became more-&-more apparent that we could not genuinely understand & explain the universe around us merely by intellectual philosophical deliberations and pronouncements alone.

In fact, it has now finally become glaringly apparent (400 years after Galileo) that academic philosophy of that sort has a record and an ability that is only marginally better than religious faith when it comes to discovering real events and real objects in this world & accurately explaining those things. But unfortunately much of philosophy goes further than that ... further down the route of quite deliberately trying to engage people in a scandalous waste of everyone's time seemingly just to indulge the ego and pomposity of academic philosophers who think they still have something useful to educate us all about (e.g. trying to tell scientists what science is really doing, as if scientists did not have a far better understanding of that than most philosophers anyway, and telling science what it ought to be doing/studying and what it's limits are claimed to be … as if scientists had not long ago worked out all of that for themselves ).

Philosophy means 'I love thinking' and asks questions about existence, knowledge, logic, meaning, consciousness, etc. Some of these questions are outside the realm of scientific facts and cannot be directly observed or tested in lab. So they have their own place. Also remember that science started from philosophy and still utilizes some philosophical ideas. For instance, science is based on naturalism which is itself a philosophical idea.

Of course, I agree to some extent that sometimes philosophy goes too far and does intellectual masturbation.

 

[SpuriusMaximus]

I'd also like to point out that even this thread hasn't been all solipsism. E.g. Scorpion doesn't seem to be getting at "it's all my dream", but more like "it's all God's dream." I.e., literally he's a character in someone ELSE's dream. (Which, yes, is like saying that I'm the girl next door's imaginary friend) That's pretty much the polar opposite of solipsism. As in more like in the direction of making dreams real than making reality be just an illusion.

 

[JoeMorgue]

As such, you really can't make any generalizations about ALL of philosophy. Just as one can't really say that it all should be taken as gospel, one also can't say that it's all solipsism. It's like saying "all speech is X" or "all thought is Y". There's not a whole lot of Xs and Ys that will fit the sheer size of those domains.

Well that's sort of what I was getting at earlier.

Since "Philosophy" has up and declared itself the "Everything about everything" epistemology, if you're doing something and the best you can describe it is with "I'm doing Philosophy!" it's almost certainly... I'll be charitable and say "less than useful."

When "Philosophy" actually does something it immediately, almost by definition, becomes something else. It becomes science or neurology or ethics or whatever.

It's like if you meet someone and and they told you they were an expert and when you asked them "An expert in what?" they replied "Stuff" and would never clarify it beyond that. It's a Mathematicians Answer, not technically wrong but completely meaningless and useless, and providing absolutely no actual information.

I get it. "Philosophy" as a word and a concept has a lot of history, a lot of prestige, and a lot of baggage and people always rush into defend it but listen to what I'm actually.

If someone is doing something all it is is Philosophy and it can't be described any further, in 99% of cases they on somewhere between "Silly word games" and "mental masturbation" on the scale, and at least 50% of the time with "Therefore Woo" at the end of it.

 

[dudalb]

But that mostly-empty-space brick still hurts like hell if it falls on your head....

people
I prefer the person who said ,talking people about the "nothing is really real" philisophy should be cured of that by five minutes of a really bad toothache.

 

[LarryS]

I don't understand what you mean in relation to my post.

What I meant is that the fundamental quantum field IS the context in which everything else exists.

my point is that quantum fields are what exists and are not the 'context' - ie, we observe a set of constants that allow for a limited types of particles - but have no idea how or why these constants originate, or if they are fixed, etc.

 

[theprestige]

It's not that short quote that was later critiqued but his larger arguments.

It reminds me of when people quote Shakespeare's "To be or not to be", thinking that's some sort of deep existential declaration, apparently completely unaware of the larger context, and of the fact that Hamlet is with those words contemplating suicide.

One doesn't need to get into his larger arguments to answer the question posed in the thread title. The aphorism itself is sufficient for that purpose.

In fact I think that the principle is so self-evident that I doubt very much any philosopher has ever taken the position that nothing exists. Which is the question posed in the OP itself.

Has there been any philosopher or branch of philosophy that calls into serious question the fact of existence itself?

 

[Belz...]

Philosophy means 'I love thinking' and asks questions about existence, knowledge, logic, meaning, consciousness, etc. Some of these questions are outside the realm of scientific facts and cannot be directly observed or tested in lab.

Horsefeces.

First of all, we each find meaning individually and as groups without having to do mental gymnastics, and second they absolutely can be tested scientifically.

 

[Belz...]

my point is that quantum fields are what exists and are not the 'context' - ie, we observe a set of constants that allow for a limited types of particles - but have no idea how or why these constants originate, or if they are fixed, etc.

Sorry, Larry but I have no idea what you would call context. Any "origin" to those constants (which, by the way, are probably the quantum fields) would still 'exist'. So what would you consider context?

 

[Belz...]

One doesn't need to get into his larger arguments to answer the question posed in the thread title. The aphorism itself is sufficient for that purpose.

For that narrow purpose, sure.

But I would narrow it further: the very fact that something is perceived means something exists. It doesn't even need to be me, or specified.

 

[dudalb]

Philosophy means 'I love thinking' and asks questions about existence, knowledge, logic, meaning, consciousness, etc. Some of these questions are outside the realm of scientific facts and cannot be directly observed or tested in lab. So they have their own place. Also remember that science started from philosophy and still utilizes some philosophical ideas. For instance, science is based on naturalism which is itself a philosophical idea.

Of course, I agree to some extent that sometimes philosophy goes too far and does intellectual masturbation.

You can love thinking but think that a lot of formal philosophy is pretty much useless .

 

[SpuriusMaximus]

At this point I'd like to propose once again my usual definition: "Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." -- Philip K Dick

I'm not joking or being flippant or whatever. It seems to me like that is really the key attribute. The person in your dream disappears when you wake up and forget them. The boss at work doesn't.

As such, it doesn't actually matter if it's 'really real' (whatever that may mean), or a simulation, or some God's dream, or a shared dream, or whatever. It only matters that its existence or the existence of whatever attributes/functions/whatever it may have, don't go away if you just disbelieve them really really hard. If a car is coming at you on the street, you can't just wish it out of existence, nor can you make its braking distance be shorter, nor anything.

Whatever the case may be -- simulation, dream, whatever -- then that's just what being real means. For all intents and purposes it's still real, and you still need to learn some science to make it work the way you want.

 

[Sideroxylon]

George Berkeley’s immaterialism.

 

[Sideroxylon]

You can love thinking but think that a lot of formal philosophy is pretty much useless .

Useless in an everyday sense because it is abstracted from what we do. Just as theoretical physics is. It has its place the history of ideas for furnishing our everyday lives with concepts.

 

[suren]

Horsefeces.

First of all, we each find meaning individually and as groups without having to do mental gymnastics, and second they absolutely can be tested scientifically.

Can you test the existence of qualia?

 

[IanS]

Philosophy means 'I love thinking' and asks questions about existence, knowledge, logic, meaning, consciousness, etc. Some of these questions are outside the realm of scientific facts and cannot be directly observed or tested in lab. So they have their own place. Also remember that science started from philosophy and still utilizes some philosophical ideas. For instance, science is based on naturalism which is itself a philosophical idea.

Of course, I agree to some extent that sometimes philosophy goes too far and does intellectual masturbation.

Which questions do you think are inherently beyond the ability of science to study?

Which questions do you think philosophy has answered where science cannot possibly answer?

I'm not sure/persuaded that science did "start from philosophy". Of course at the time of Galileo almost all the people who tried to think of explanations for what they considered the most important and puzzling aspects of the world around them, were called "philosophers"(or in fact, most of them were called theists, with religious miracle explanations!). But when some of those like Galileo started to use a different approach based upon actual measurements and actual observations & data, and then also upon a more rigorous mathematical analysis, they were really branching out of philosophy and into a new way of investigation that eventually became called science. In that sense I think science emerged more in spite of philosophy, rather than because formal philosophy was of any particular help to science.

But here we are in danger (I think) of getting into that mess of thinking or claiming that everything is really philosophy ... such that if scientists ever thought about what they were doing, then that's said to be "philosophy", so that we must give credit to "philosophy".

However if you look in any core science journals since about (say) 1900, you'll struggle to find more than a dozen, if any, genuine references crediting philosophy for what is being published in any scientific paper ... and just to put that in context - most scientific papers contain between 10 and 200 references, and at a rough guess about 500,000 papers are published in core science every year (by "core" I mean physics, chemistry, most of biology, and most of maths ... I'm excluding the softer sciences & fringe subjects called “science”.) ... that's not any sort of impact or reliance on any philosophy worth mentioning.

 

[suren]

Which questions do you think are inherently beyond the ability of science to study?

For example this.

 

[jrhowell]

Note, she was speaking from within a dream, and she's right on the money regarding the stuff dreams are made of. Regarding dreams, interesting that we create the entire contents of the dream, and then, seemingly forget that, to become an observer in the world we just created. hmmm, is that how God pulled it off?

To me it seems more likely that different parts of the brain are generating the content of the dream and observing that content simultaneously.

 

[JoeMorgue]

Can you test the existence of qualia?

Qualia don't exist. Problem solved.