-
Security incident: ISF was recently accessed by intruders. Please change your password, and change it anywhere else you used it. Read more
Does anything exist?
- Thread starter Scorpion
- Start date
Roger Ramjets
Philosopher
No they aren't. They have made up their minds to ignore evidence and only accept what agrees with their prior conclusions. That's not being empirical rational and scientific, and they know it.
Flat-earthers willfully deny reality in order to bolster their egos. They knew the Earth wasn't flat the instant someone told them, just like they knew Santa wasn't real. But having to conform to what others think is no fun. It sucks you into a collective consciousness that weakens your identity and lowers your sense of self-worth. When you don't have much of that to begin with you have to break free from reality.
But don't kid yourself that you are above that kind of thinking. Everybody has their delusions, and most will go to great lengths to maintain them even in the face of overwhelming evidence. Very few people are able to look at the evidence objectively when it conflicts with their preconceptions. Instead they cherrypick, misrepresent, obfuscate, use faulty analysis and deliberately draw wrong conclusions to try to make it say what they want. Even top scientists, highly trained experts and so-called 'skeptics' do it when they need to - because nobody wants to admit that they were wrong about something.
Roger Ramjets
Philosopher
You are wrong. We are not robots programmed to do nothing but 'produce results'. Philosophy allows us to ponder questions that have no satisfactory scientific answer. This 'thinking outside the box' may sometimes produce results, but even if it doesn't it still exercises our brains and provides us with entertainment. Which isn't pointless.
Philosophy can help us deal with questions such as - Is doing anything worthwhile, or is it all pointless? Science cannot answer that question, but that doesn't make it pointless to ask.
“Don’t give up” what? Praying to a god? Debating whether the keys exist or not? Continuously looking in an area where the keys aren’t? If it’s don’t give up using logical, practical, rational scientific methods then it’s those methods that helped to find the keys. “Don’t give up” is useless and pointless unless applied to an effective method. Besides, “Don’t give up” is a silly philosophy if all long and vigorous scientific searches have failed and the value of the keys have become much less than the value of the time and effort wasted by not giving up.
ETA - “Don’t give up” isn’t a method for finding keys. It’s a method of applying a method for finding keys.
Last edited:
Given these are purely subjective questions how does philosophy help to deal with them?
How has philosophy EVER helped to deal with them?
What IS the the point of asking such obviously unanswerable questions?
Belz...
Fiend God
What a dumb thing to say. First of all, yes we are (biological) robots programmed to do nothing but produce results, when you think about it... but that's not even implied by what I said. I was answering a very specific question about a specific scenario. Don't try to widen it and pretend like I was making a statement that applies to everything, all the time.
If you propose a solution to a situation that cannot possibly lead to tangible results then it's useless. I can't think of any definition of the term "useful" where this doesn't apply. Prove otherwise.
Also known as making **** up.
Neurology has done more in a few years to help us understand the human mind and how to solve issues with it than philosophers in 4000 years of mental masturbation.
If your best defense of philosophy is that it's taking the piss and that we're engaging in it for fun only then I'm sure you have a point.
No it can't.
Wanna know why? Because you don't need philosophy to answer such a stupid question. We do things because we WANT to, or because we NEED to. How many times does someone actually stop and seriously wonders something like that? It's no better than solipsism, because at the end of the day you will NEVER follow through on that idea.
This thread has been a fantastic demonstration of how useless philosophy really is. When you finally manage to shed a light through the deliberately thick haze that defenders of philosophy throw out to avoid being pinned down on anything, and get an actual answer to a question, or an example of what the discipline can do, it turns out that it's either useless or surpassed by the scientific process greatly.
Belz...
Fiend God
I've got this one: the point is that philosophy was never meant to actually find answers. It's about the "journey", not the "destination"; or, in other words, it's about feeling smart and deep about using words "cleverly" when in fact your are engaging in a pointless and ultimately fruitless exercise.
I wonder if they know that too much brain wanking can make you go blind to certain realities?
Last edited:
It doers not require a special subject with degree courses & doctorates and professors to lecture it all, just to ask questions about what seem to be puzzling aspects of the universe. Anyone can do that!
Anyone can ask "what is consciousness"? You do not need a philosophy doctorate to ask about that!!
Even as children (say 10 to 13 years old), many of us who were interested in things like astronomy, asked ourselves questions like "where did all the stars and planets come from?" ... "have they always existed, or when did they begin?" ... I remember as 12 year old, a friend of mine (who I still know very well) was talking about how we think of things and he said something like "all of this is in my head, all that I know"; that was 50 years ago and we'd never even heard of the word "philosophy", and yet just in the course of a normal children's conversion he actually mentioned something which is essentially very similar to philosophers now asking about "the hard problem of consciousness" ... you do not need any professor of philosophy to tell you what questions you might ever want to ask about anything.
Do you think that scientists cannot ask themselves those all questions about the nature of the universe around us? Do you think that philosophers know better than professors of cosmological physics what questions to ask about how or why our universe ever formed? ... none of those philosophers knew a single thing about it until science started to explain the Big Bang with all the vast complexity of science which that entails.
Science can answer that as well as philosophy can. Or in fact, science can answer such questions vastly beyond anything philosophers can even imagine!
Scientists don't need any philosophers to tell them what questions need answering. In fact none of us need philosophers to talk us to death about what questions we should ask about anything.
abaddon
Penultimate Amazing
Interesting claim. Philosophy has no need at all to be logical.
I don't actually want to say that all of philosophy is useless, or that it's just not very relevant any more. If only because it's a long established part of university courses all over the world, and you'd naturally think that it must surely have some properly important use.
But we've had countless threads like this one, where philosophy is pitted against science, and where some of us have repeatedly asked “well, what actually is the value of such philosophy teaching, what is the value of anyone taking philosphy degree courses, passing the exams and then using what they have learned to guide their thinking in life etc?” … and in all of these many threads with all of the thousands of posts from people endorsing philosophy, I still don't think I've seen a single convincing answer that clearly shows any real use for philosophy any more in the 21st century.
It was useful before we discovered science. That was a time when people believed that philosophers were the great thinkers who were explaining the universe for us all. But when we discovered modern science, it quickly turned out that the earlier answers from philosophy had been a case of “The Emperors New Clothes” … ie, there was really nothing of substance there at all! It was just a whole lot of conjecture which had turned out to be either mistaken, or far too superficial, or else just plain completely wrong.
But we've had countless threads like this one, where philosophy is pitted against science, and where some of us have repeatedly asked “well, what actually is the value of such philosophy teaching, what is the value of anyone taking philosphy degree courses, passing the exams and then using what they have learned to guide their thinking in life etc?” … and in all of these many threads with all of the thousands of posts from people endorsing philosophy, I still don't think I've seen a single convincing answer that clearly shows any real use for philosophy any more in the 21st century.
It was useful before we discovered science. That was a time when people believed that philosophers were the great thinkers who were explaining the universe for us all. But when we discovered modern science, it quickly turned out that the earlier answers from philosophy had been a case of “The Emperors New Clothes” … ie, there was really nothing of substance there at all! It was just a whole lot of conjecture which had turned out to be either mistaken, or far too superficial, or else just plain completely wrong.
Hey, do those goalposts have a hemi? They sure have impressive acceleration.
If you don't give up searching, you're more likely to find your keys. Many methods for solving many problems require perseverance to be their most effective. Not giving up can also lead to seeking more effective methods. I know people who didn't give up trying to get sober, and eventually succeeded by trying different methods that included praying to gods. (If those gods don't actually exist... so what? Their present sobriety does anyhow.)
Have you ever been advised, when facing difficulty, not to give up? Did you upbraid the advisor for such useless advice? If so, you and your parents and teachers must have had some interesting times.
Of course "don't give up" isn't a complete philosophical system (it's, um, three words) but it's a topic of philosophy. Perseverance is emphasized in some philosophical systems and deprecated (in favor of e.g. adaptability or non-attachment) in others.
Right back to this stupid, already addressed nonsense.
"But philsophicalability answers questions that science can't!"
HOW? WHEN?
bruto
Penultimate Amazing
I think you miss the point. The idea being addressed was that no suggestion has a point unless it, itself, produces results. This would include the suggestion (which some might consider within the realm of philosophy) that one stop dithering and panicking, and approach the problem scientifically. The suggestion to use science or logic is not itself science, is it? Is it inherently, by definition, pointless?
I think there's a lot of nonsense in philosophy, and a lot of what used to belong to philosophers has been co-opted by scientific progress. There's not much room any more for cosmology and ontology, and great gobs of epistemology belong in the trashcan of medical waste. I don't think that means that all philosophy is all nonsense. Figuring out how people ought to behave (or why) is still not the behavior itself, and wondering about the meaning of the universe (even if you conclude, as some of us have, that there is none) is still something many feel is an appropriate thing to think about, and I think we need at least to be careful not to define philosophy out of existence simply by saying that anything that works is something else.
Belz...
Fiend God
You don't think such a suggestion can produce results?
I'm starting to think people didn't read what I posted.
Pixel42
Schrödinger's cat
Is there a way of determining which is best?
Did you need a philosophy degree or doctorate before it was possible to search for your keys (or guess where they might be)?
The vast majority of people in the world have at some time mislaid their house keys or car keys. Only a miniscule fraction them have philosophy degrees. Yet they all eventually found their keys ... how on earth was that possible without a philosophy degree??? ... Wow one of life's great mysteries there, right?
Last edited:
Belz...
Fiend God
Pretty sure we can do philosophy without a degree. In fact, philosophy is probably the thing you need the least education to actually do.
Note science does not produce answers, it produces explanations/predictions for observations. It does not answer questions re the nature of things - it is not even baked into science to net a singular explanation/answer for anything.
Ptolemy used epicycles and etc. to justify/save his observations - - - No scientist can ever claim his/her explanations and predictions are more than justifying/saving their observations.
Science may be the best thing going, but like everything else in this world, science and philosophy, they is what they is, and they isn't what they isn't.