Thursday, August 16, 2007

Scientists and Philosophers

Hey, Philosophy can be fascinating.
But one has to ask at some point why it is that it has essentially failed in many respects. Sure, philosophers will disagree with my criteria for failure. One of my reasons is that the same questions keep popping up, unsolved, and sometimes in different guises.

The questions of Philosophy might be eternal because they're relevant to the existential anxieties of humans (but do not have universal significance); I suspect religion shares this feature with philosophy, and naive, first-year-at-school philosophy probably activates the same areas of the brain (logic, ethics and philosophy of language would be less likely to do so!!)

Or Philosophy's questions be eternal because they are poorly phrased questions.
They might be poorly or imprecisely phrased. They might be phrased as well as is possible, but natural language itself is obviously inadequate for understanding natural processes, which, say, are modelled by computer models governed by mathematical equations or any number of other things. Why wouldn't the same be true for the brain, leaving neurobiology as the vital tool to understanding questions of identity, belief and other issues which appear in philosophy?

The questions often seem to basically refer to nothing, just artefacts of the human mind. They often create artificial dichotomies, contradict scientific evidence (which renders the question non-sensical eg Identity Theory), or contradict themselves when taken as a set.

Doing philosophy can give insights but eventually frustrates. Not because it raises more questions; that, I find an advantage. But because it never answers your questions. And science will. That is the lesson of the last few centuries; the scientific method answers questions to the required degree of certainty, metaphysical postulating does not. All that does is create religious warfare or leave humans too preoccupied to manage their own existence.
This is probably essentially the same problem religious people have - introducing a God may help you to "solve" your questions, only if you are complicit in convincing yourself that they're solved. Which usually involves NOT OBSERVING THE PHYSICAL WORLD, instead postulating axioms and drawing the logical conclusions from them.

I think Philosophy is best used as a tool to clarify one's thought processes, although I will think along the lines of its varying branches for the rest of my life.
I am becoming more aware of the fact that I agree with Rudolph Carnap and his Vienna circle of logical positivists. They call themselves the defenders of the scientific method.
Philosophers could claim that "only knowledge acquired through the scientific methods of hypothesis, test" and the techniques of skeptical enquiry, conservatism etc is itself a philosophical statement, an epistemological belief. That would like trying to claim somebody else as their own. Perhaps a Christian saying that a Muslim really is Christian at heart or something else weird like that.

1 comment:

Eastcoastdweller said...

It's over my head, although I make an effort to understand it.