Scientism

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I'd have to ramble to discuss that and I'm not in the mood.



depends on who you're eating and why.



off the top of my head, thanking God for things. I might be able to come up with more in time, but that's beside the point because nothing needs to be good or evil under all circumstances because that isn't how good and evil work.



while mathmatics is a science, it is only one field of science. scienece as a whole deals generally in theory, not fact.

That's because good and evil are 'squishy'. We all seem to have a sense of good or evil actions in many cases, but theologians and philosophers like to poke and prod. But being squishy, when you poke and prod the ideas of good and evil, they bend and distort, never fully submitting to our efforts at a definitive description. Because of this, some ultimately declare that good and evil do not exist. I prefer to accept their existence and instead blame our rather limited intellectual powers and descriptive abilities.

Pure mathematics is NOT a science since it contains no empirical assertions and is never tested by empirical means (experiment and measurement).

ruveyn

Actually, mathematics is not a science (it has no empirical basis). And science deals primarily with facts. It attempts to generalize from facts to theory, but theory is a secondary matter.

True; what I posted was an empirical geometric fact, rather than a mathematical theorem. You're free to check it yourself, which is true of all the most useful facts. (As opposed to philosophy, in which nothing can ever be proved, and since they are devoid of data, nothing can ever be checked for oneself.)

There's also an issue of language here. When a philosopher, or an English major, uses the word "theory", it's interchangeable with "wild-ass guess". When a scientist uses the word "theory", it means "something that once occurred to me as a wild-ass guess, so I ran some experiments, the experiments were reproduced by other people as well, I did some calculations which were also double-checked by colleagues (some of whom stood to profit by my being wrong), and this still stands. I acknowledge that one day there may come along an observation that invalidates my every conclusion."

There's a fanfic online called Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality (link), based on the question, "What if Harry's aunt had married a brilliant college professor instead of the dullard she married in the books?" In this version, young Harry has spent his life (up until the age of 11) studying logic, physics, and mathematics, and does his best to apply these principles to his studies at Hogwart's. At one point, he's working on seducing Draco Malfoy to the study of science, which Malfoy seems to distrust because he thinks it comes too easily...

"But make no mistake, Draco, true science really isn't like magic, you can't just do it and walk away unchanged like learning how to say the words of a new spell. The power comes with a cost, a cost so high that most people refuse to pay it."

Draco nodded at this as though, finally, he'd heard something he could understand. "And that cost?"

"Learning to admit you're wrong."

I agree.

The only types of philosophy I could be bothered studying were political philosophy and ethics, because they're the only ones with an apparent use. However, a lot of what you try to investigate with philosophy is too difficult to do so. What parts of philosophy that haven't turned into hard sciences are tricky. The ones that have been turned into soft sciences, like sociology and....(I'm going to get killed for saying this) psychology, haven't returned such useful results in their more 'scientific' form.

I'm quite fond of reading about aesthetics, though. I like to try and understand why I find something beautiful, although I never will completely. You can investigate human ideas of beauty using biology and neuroscience, but I find those as inadequate to the task as philosophical aesthetics. Maybe mathematical ideas are the best tool for that

If math isn't a science, that just helps my point further. I wasn't sure if math was a science or not because I've always hated math so I just looked it up in my mactionary which called it a science. But then, the wiki article on logic calls it a science... it seems like people are calling everything a science.

DeaconBlues: I know what the word theory actually means. it is one of the most misunderstood words in our language, up there with chaos, irony, and belief, but I know what it actually means.

If you think nothing philosophical can ever be proven, then argue against Descartes's "cogito ergo sum" rationality. It can't be done.

I've actually tried. The big issue is whether Descartes is begging the question by presupposing the existence of the agent that he is trying to prove.

"I think" is an observation, not a presuppostion. If you observe something, it exists.

Not necessarily. Observations are not completely independent of theory.

An eliminative materialist might argue that it's possible that you don't think; that thoughts don't exist. I've never seen an eliminativist directly attack thoughts, but there are eliminativists who deny the existence of beliefs, desires, pains, and many more commonsense mental states, and I don't see you couldn't apply similar arguments to 'thoughts' under a more restricted definition of the word.

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"Cogito ergo sum"? "I think, therefore I am"?

I must start with an axiom: What I observe is reality. If this axiom is false, then nothing can ever be known, and this conversation is even more pointless than it seems.

Taking this axiom, I can observe that my body has physical existence. Further, there are other bodies with physical existence, which seem to be able to communicate concepts with this body.

"I"? Define "I", please, using rigorous terminology. Without a solid definition of what "I" am, anything else said on the subject is mere opinion.

For that matter, please define "think". Is the electrochemical process occurring within the mass of tissue in "my" skull truly a process of consciousness, or is it just colloidal chemistry run amok?

As you can see, in the absence of anything even vaguely resembling a rigorous definition of terms, "Cogito ergo sum" is nothing more than a supposition, with absolutely no empirical evidence behind it. Certainly not a rigorous truth on the order of Newton's Laws of Motion...

The human brain isn't a good observer.

Of what? Of anything? Of itself? Of things other than itself? It's equally a terrible observer in all areas or is it better in some areas than in others? Or is this a word game whereby the functions of the brain in logical thought, verbal composition, auditory comprehension, visual comprehension, motor control are to be brought up to claim that its nature isn't that of an observer in and of itself?

Richard Feynman told me that you're lying. He was a scientist. He probably had a labcoat somewhere. Quad erat demonstrandum.

It's easily victim of optical illusions, riddles and trying to make patterns out of things (look at clouds in the sky for example).

So, due to the possibility of error, it is thereby impossible to make correct observations?