This post is about why I've become disillusioned with Philosophy generally. I've got major issues with its approach as a discipline. With each of its branches. Philosophy might always be around...and doing it was rewarding for me; it helped me to analyse statements, clarifying my thoughts tremendously. And I do "love knowledge". But now I'm more interested in science, onto whose turf Philosophy illegitimately wanders.
I often wondered why philosophy books appeared in the same section as religious books. I thought it was because both tried to answer similar questions, albeit differently and often with mutual suspicion and intolerance, much like those between competing religions. I no longer see as great a distinction between their methodologies and habits, and I see science as something else entirely to philosophy and religion.
I don't consider it an accident that so many people, infant and adult alike, ask themselves these eternal questions at some point, but many adults find that there are problems with these eternal questions. Rarely do I see philosophers question their various methodologies as often or as seriously as I see them arguing over qualia, ethics, art, empiricism or determinism.
Firstly there was my recognition of the complete failure of philosophers to make sense of the way that the world works. This failure is shared with each and every religion. Over the millennia, only recently-developed scientific methods have added to the store of human knowledge and predictive power. Philosophers, like religious people should take this failure of their discipline/ideology/religion to discover facts about how the world works enormously seriously. Philosophers should be wondering why they're making no more progress on their eternal questions about the universe and the experience of life through their metaphysical arguments than religious people did for countless blood-soaked millenia. Or why they've spectacularly failed to create values out of thin air and alter human behaviour, as religion has failed to ground ethics in the Will or nature of God, and has failed to change human behaviour. Philosophers; now turn your attention to your inability to uniformly validate the scientific-mathematical method as the only successful route towards understanding nature.
What ultimately makes philosophy powerless is that philosophers courageously but futilely attempt to use language techniques alone (mostly populated by scientifically outdated concepts and other archaic words) to wrestle with their eternal questions. They do not experiment or observe nature uniformly - like religious people, they're biased towards using intuitively appealing, often introspective approaches cloaked up within a quasi-logical framework, legitimised by convenient but ancient natural language terms. Conceptual confusion abounds in philosophical discourse. The greatest symptom of the problem of using natural language is evident in Descartes' Error, or dualism, from which Western Philosophy has been suffering for a long time. Abandoning it would merely be acknowledging the superiority of the empirical approach. This tendency of the human brain, infused with language, to think using the word "I", has been one of the major sources of confusion over the years, which have led philosophers astray in so many of their questions. Using such a word with such obvious connections to the false notion of a soul, it is not surprising that philosophers scratch around in conceptual confusion. Witness the philosophical debates about free will, ethics, art the like and you see the problem with "I". Read about memetics and you start to see the general scope and power of evolutionary theory and its analogues first to kill the concept of God and then the idea of the soul, and then the human "mind", leaving only the brain. Always at the cutting edge of science, we see reductionist thinking.
Another good step would be to recognise that just as the physical difference between colours of the rainbow are merely different wavelengths and not completely different things (radically different colours, as we perceive them) (and we use our sensory systems to feel, so philosophy is no better equipped to study our phenomenal experiences than are any other disciplines), there is no real distinction between mind and body. The movement of our bodies affects our thinking!! For example, when rotating an object mentally, we do it worse if we're rotating our hand in the opposite direction to when we do it while rotating our hand in the same direction to which we're mentally rotating the object. The act of thinking about an object rotating, which occurs mostly in the visual thought area, is affected by inputs from the sensor-motor cortex which reports about hand movements. Similarly, self control is object control "The boxer picked himself up from the canvas". Self-control is being in one's normal location: "I'm besides myself with anger". Causing the self to act is the forced movement of an object "You're pushing yourself too hard", and self-control is having the self together as a container "She's falling to pieces". Self is an essence that is a found object'"He's trying to find himself in India". Even the Declaration of Independence in the United States invokes our understanding of the Newtonian independence of free bodies. It is no accident that we talk like this. Right from our births, our thoughts are dependent on the use and perception of our whole body. Those who've had fewer sensory systems eg the blind from birth think quite differently. Yes, our visual systems, like our sense of smell, affect our thoughts in many different ways! So no brain-in-a-vat could ever think like a brain inextricably attached to a body like ours could.There are no disembodied minds, no independent, questioning souls, no "I's", unless you are as much your body as you are your mind. And as for "consciousness", whatever this is supposed to be seems to be the tiny, fleeting recollection of whatever happened in the last 500ms, a fragment of your mind's powers to analyse other people briefly turning to analysing themselves, and entering and cycling around in the short term memory and other parts.
The English language needs to adapt to use as much scientific terminology as best it can or the knowledge generated by English-speaking peoples will slow, and their works will fade in to irrelevancy faster without the aid of new scientific words. Why do we not read Ancient English books anymore? [Well, some people read Bronte, fewer read Milton, and fewer still read 5th-century literature..]. Why do English monolinguals not read Modern French books? Same answer.We don't read things if....insert a million reasons OR If we cannot understand the author. Which is the case for Modern French and Ye Olde English books, as Modern French and Old English are both different languages to English. Sure, modern speakers of English can understand some Old English, but modern speakers of English can also understand some French through their English vocabulary alone...Even if ancient England did more strongly resemble the world that we live in today (which couldn't occur in any real sense without an accompanying change in the vocabulary used by its citizens), the book wouldn't be intelligible to us...because Old English people speak a different language...because the world has changed and language is used to communicate things, many of which are about the world [we also talk about things which aren't part of the world, such as Santa Claus and God]. I find it depressing that the best authors of today will likely be practically unintelligible to readers in the 23rd century, and not so at all to those later. Likewise, words like "kidney" will cease to mean anything concrete after humans have evolved different kidneys thousands of years down the track. So we should reduce knowledge wherever possible and practical to more basic terms. That is, Chemistry books of today will be of more use to doctors of the next century than will Biology books. And physics books will be even more 'timeless' than Chemistry books because of their superior generality.
SO WHAT FILLS THE VACUUM WHEN WE STOP DOING PHILOSOPHY?
- Epistemology could somewhat be replaced by theories and empirical studies of perception, linguistic theory and anthropology (that is, they'd each contribute in the "epistemological vacuum" that would follow)
- Ethics could somewhat be replaced by social and political sciences like psychology as well as by Economics
- Metaphysics simply will collapse on its arse; we have physics, chemistry, biology, history and the like
- Aesthetics; hmm. Art, Music, Dance, Drama, literary theories
******
I don't exist. I'm not conscious! Sometimes, "I" could be hungry, at other times "I think that X", at other times, "I'm absent", or tired, or happy, depressed, or 'conscious', or asleep, or funny. The word "I" has stopped making sense to me and I often actually get confused when I use the word now. Although not here. "I'm hungry" seems to make more sense nowadays compared to "I like X, Y, and Z" or, worse, "I like the idea that X, Y, or Z". "I" is supposed to be the way I remember many things (by relating things back to me), and the way that I make sense of everything that goes on or that went on in my brain. It is all-encompassing and infinitely vague term. It has become unavoidable to use such words, although lately I've done so more successfully when I've wanted to without thinking anything was wrong, and avoided confusion. I won't attempt to do so with this post.
5 comments:
wow abel. we are going to have a fiery discussion. pretty much each sentence in this post provoked in me a tirade of outraged thoughts and arguments in response. i have a lot to say about this. also i am disappointed that you did not raise and refute some of the points i brought up with you via email! anyway... it's going to be a fun talk. looking forward man. peeeeeeeeeeeeees.
some initial, pre-talk comments.
science has made far more progress than philosophy in forming consensus as to 'how the world works'. fact. is this because of questionable methodology employed by philosophers? only insofar as when there is a disagreement in philosophy (and there usually is), at least one party's argument must be flawed. does this mean that both sides are wrong? no - in fact often it is impossible that neither side is right. abel if you are right that philosophy illegitimately wanders onto the turf of science, far more unsettling than philosophy's ability to answer its 'eternal questions' (a stupid term which i think you have misunderstood my use of), is science's completely and utter failure to make progress on them! This is hardly surprising though, as the questions answered by philosophers are of a distinct nature (their nature is such that they literally force you into doing philosophy if you are to make any progress) and cannot be solved by empirical methods. Let's ask: is there such a thing as an objectively immoral act? what will the scientist do? without explaining what 'immoral' means, what variables and results can show if an act was immoral? If he says 'a moral act is such and such,' he has philosophised. If he says 'there are no such things as immoral acts', he will have to show how he arrived at this conclusion empirically, and i challenge you to show me how he could do that. Importantly, to answer 'the question is not meaningful' digs his own grave, as an act can either be immoral or not-immoral. as with millions of philosophical questions: there often is no middle ground. to say 'immorality is the invention of philosophy' is to hold a very deep philosophical position. and what about the metaphysical assumptions on which science rests? that there is an objective reality, independent of minds. or that we can come to know facts about the world. these assumptions stand in direct contrast to idealism and scepticism respectively.
philosophers often fail to reach consensus because their questions are extremely hard to answer and it is easy to fail to see how deep a question. geniuses are always digging deeper, getting closer.. many questions have been answered and thus only remain 'eternal' for those still confused, or plainly wrong. of the questions that haven't been answered, we now understand a whole lot more about them: namely what is so difficult in answering them, and how many important distinctions need to be made, considerations considered.
philosophy without science is often still interesting (moral philosophy being an excellent point in case). science without philosophy is impossible. what a shame that a scientist like yourself doesn't realise this!
excuse all the typos
also, as with your post, my response is supposed to be provocative (especially the moral philosophy without science comment, you effing naturalist!). i'm looking forward to getting down to the finer points and speaking a little more directly about issues. bring your axe.
I agree that sometimes, it's impossible that two philosophers with contrasting positions are both wrong. other times, that's not necessarily true - if one says that killing is wrong, another claims that it is not, it is entirely possible that killing is neither right nor wrong, or that there is no consistent way to understand the words right and wrong
If asked "is there such a thing as an objectively immoral act?", the scientist will indeed shut down somewhat, and I imagine that future scientists will continue to do so if confronted with that question, or a future-speak version of that question. this is because most scientists would say that 'progress' can't really be made in understanding such a question, in the way that 'progress' could be made in understanding the way that the molecules of a particular gas move (although most scientists would also say that no more 'progress' has been made by the community of philosophers on this question than the community of scientists...none, and that would indicate a severe problem with the use of the word 'progress', at least in many contexts).
I disagree that "if somebody says that 'a moral act is such and such,' he has philosophised". I don't believe that the process of defining any particular word involves 'philosophising'.
One could say that one major concern of philosophers is being involved in teasing out the definitions of words and pointing out inconsistencies in the way we define words, but I see no reason why this activity of defining words should be restricted to people who would describe themselves as philosophers or doing philosophy.
Not surprisingly, philosophers usually think the task of defining words like "moral" to be naturally better candidates for being described as a philosophical task than defining other words.
I think that scientists, if pressed, could say 'there are no such things as immoral acts'. The empirical element could be the absence of evidence of acts in nature which are immoral. Here, we see the role that language plays in the conceptual confusion. Scientists form consensus because there is less opportunity to disagree about whether a chemical reaction is of the A type or of the B type, or whether or not an intake of a substance would kill a human. If scientists (or indeed philosophers) study human behaviour, there will be substantial disagreement about which acts are immoral; the evidence in the form of human behaviour is simply not intelligible in terms of the words 'moral' and 'immoral'.
This of course doesn't necessarily prove that there are no immoral acts, but the lack of consensus or of a consensus as to how to begin to define it or observe it is a strong hint that buried within the words 'moral' and 'immoral' are problematic, in part because they're loaded with numerous assumptions. In any case, these words would only not be problematic were some definition available for them which were as free from intepretation as words designed to describe natural processes such as oxidisation or erosion or acceleration. Were some definition created, the limitations of words like 'moral' or 'immoral' would be as obvious as they are now.
the part of your post where you describe the quest for enlightenment towards discovering truths which you say philsophers (or scientists, or both) are getting closer and closer to does sound to me like it acknowledges the difficulty in using the vaguer natural-language terms like 'immoral' and 'moral'.
btw though, science today understands the world less in terms of a mind-independent reality than it did say a century ago :)
talk to you more later
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