Philosophy Discussion Forums

What do you mean by "exist"? What do I mean by "what do you mean?"? Aaaaaaaaaaaahh.

This is why I admire Samuel Johnson's approach:

http://www.samueljohnson.com/refutati.html

I think my time on this philosophy forum may have convinced me that I'm not a philosopher.

Steve3007 wrote:What do you mean by "exist"? What do I mean by "what do you mean?"? Aaaaaaaaaaaahh.

This is why I admire Samuel Johnson's approach:

I think my time on this philosophy forum may have convinced me that I'm not a philosopher.

Asking questions which seem stupid is the proof that one IS a philosopher. Now that I said "is"... Wasn't the greatest philosopher of the latest century which questioned what "Is" is?

Oh, OK. I'll be a philosopher again for a bit then.

Back on the subject of conscious beings understanding their own consciousness and what-not, the geneticist J B S Haldane said this:

"It seems to me immensely unlikely that mind is a mere by-product of matter. For if my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain I have no reason to suppose that my beliefs are true. They may be sound chemically, but that does not make them sound logically. And hence I have no reason for supposing my brain to be composed of atoms."

Steve3007 wrote:Oh, OK. I'll be a philosopher again for a bit then.

Back on the subject of conscious beings understanding their own consciousness and what-not, the geneticist J B S Haldane said this:

"It seems to me immensely unlikely that mind is a mere by-product of matter. For if my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain I have no reason to suppose that my beliefs are true. They may be sound chemically, but that does not make them sound logically. And hence I have no reason for supposing my brain to be composed of atoms."

True. One electron is one electron. Many electrons are many electrons. How can many electrons be a "thought"?

Yes, but, now I come to think of it, the reason I remember that Haldane quote was because I used it as the basis of a whole thread a while ago in which I attempted to refute it:

onlinephilosophyclub.com/forums/viewtop ... 190#p65190

But you don't have to read it. It's a bit long. I've just re-read the opening post of that thread myself and I don't think the attempt was wholly successful.

Steve3007 wrote:Yes, but, now I come to think of it, the reason I remember that Haldane quote was because I used it as the basis of a whole thread a while ago in which I attempted to refute it:

onlinephilosophyclub.com/forums/viewtop ... 190#p65190

But you don't have to read it. It's a bit long. I've just re-read the opening post of that thread myself and I don't think the attempt was wholly successful.

Arguing against your self. That is what Kierkegaard did. That is what true philosophy is about! If only scientists did that.

It seems to me, in reading through all these posts, that what we are all saying is this:

There are limits to science because there are limits to thought.

It is a conceit to believe we can know everything. We are not capable of any kind of absolute or total knowledge. Not by using any modes of thought, or building any sort of technology, or observing anything in nature. We have our own nature as a limiting factor. We cannot, in a very real sense, imagine all that could be. If this is true, then our current confusions could be because we see just a portion of a greater whole whose entirety we are incapable of perceiving or understanding.

This line of reasoning would seem to place severe limits on our knowledge, science included.
"There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Scientist, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
- with apologies to William Shakespeare.

Logicus wrote:It seems to me, in reading through all these posts, that what we are all saying is this:

There are limits to science because there are limits to thought.

It is a conceit to believe we can know everything. We are not capable of any kind of absolute or total knowledge. Not by using any modes of thought, or building any sort of technology, or observing anything in nature. We have our own nature as a limiting factor. We cannot, in a very real sense, imagine all that could be. If this is true, then our current confusions could be because we see just a portion of a greater whole whose entirety we are incapable of perceiving or understanding.

This line of reasoning would seem to place severe limits on our knowledge, science included.
"There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Scientist, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
- with apologies to William Shakespeare.

The limits of thought apply to religion as well. There are MORE limits to Science simply because science uses only a limited set of the tools human thought has. And it is for sure based upon a much more limited set of initial principles (axioms). And especially when it forgets that it uses those principles, they turn into Dogmas which limits its scope even further...

Skakos wrote:The limits of thought apply to religion as well. There are MORE limits to Science simply because science uses only a limited set of the tools human thought has. And it is for sure based upon a much more limited set of initial principles (axioms). And especially when it forgets that it uses those principles, they turn into Dogmas which limits its scope even further...

Essentially, I will agree with your statements. I only singled out science for the OP, "The Limits of Science".

There is a limit to what we can think, but there may be realms we can experience without thought. In fact we do: feelings, for example. In spiritual terms, we can experience God (or different states of consciousness, if you prefer) - note the phrase is not "know God" . Science, though, is more limited. It has a narrow view, and doesn't want to admit that anything outside its tightly controlled environment can be real.

H G Wells regarded himself more historian, when he wrote the future..and indeed he told us what the atomic bomb would do before it was invented. Although his power of accurate observation was fuelled through mysticism and imagination, it came true as real science. Such was his pre accuracy in these matters, that both him and Einstein teamed up together and sent a letter to the President, outlining the need to have such a weapon before the wrong side achieved it first. That letter kicked off the project to make a nuclear bomb. Science is but a tool, that makes happen what we already believe in the first place. Usually though, like radar, we stumble upon it whilst looking for other things, therefore other things are more responsible for the success of science, rather than the will to put faith in science to certain things. From the beginning, it is the imagination that guides us through the will of mysticism, to apply accurate observation...that which is all science really is, and therefore I can see no limit for science, other than what limited imagination we may have to apply, in the first place. Without writers like H G Wells, who reflect the past toward the future and leave it presently before us, and scientists like Einstein who see imagination greater than knowledge, science would be void of these other things, that so rightly go before us, and wait only to be found by such. I guess.

Well, philosophy proper wants to understand the limits to knowledge, but this is something that has been almost completely forgotten in post-Enlightenment philosophy.

When I said that science 'assumes nature', what I mean is that science assumes the intelligent subject situated in the natural world. Philosophy asks questions of a different order. The value in philosophy lays in its making intuitions we hold about life, about ourselves and about the categories with which we view the world explicit. One, for instance, is the intuition that a researcher can impartially view the natural world. Kant showed that the mind itself brings fundamental ordering principles to reality, without which nothing would make sense at all. Those principles are neither 'out there', in the sense of existing in the world itself, but neither are the internal to the mind, in the sense of being available to conscious inspection. This is why they are called 'transcendental'. To really grasp that is outside, or prior to, the purview of science. It is something presupposed by the stance of natural philosophy, but not made explicit by it. That is the kind of thing that philosophy wants to make explicit.

All this is understood in Continental philosophy, particularly phenomenology. But in English and American philosophy, so-called, it is either forgotten or not understood. This is why we have scientists such as Lawrence Krauss and Stephen Hawking, declaring that philosophy is dead or obsolete, and that all philosophers can do is comment on the sterling work being undertaken by physics. Unfortunately, many analytical philosophers agree with that. And I say that this kind of thinking is non-philosophical or anti-philosophical. There's a lot of it about.

I say the limits of science, indeed of what we can know, are not over the horizon or in the depths of the atom. Science is limited as a particular mode of cognition, as a way of being in the world. When it comes to utility and power, it is unparalleled, obviously. It is not too much of a stretch to say that science is the methodological enrichment of knowledge; 'scientia' is the Latin word for knowledge. But considerations of the nature of knowledge and the limits of knowledge is another thing, which is called 'sapience', Latin for wisdom, or judgement.

This is a distinction that Eastern philosophy has retained and one of the main reasons I study it.

Simply Wee wrote:H G Wells regarded himself more historian, when he wrote the future..and indeed he told us what the atomic bomb would do before it was invented. Although his power of accurate observation was fuelled through mysticism and imagination, it came true as real science. Such was his pre accuracy in these matters, that both him and Einstein teamed up together and sent a letter to the President, outlining the need to have such a weapon before the wrong side achieved it first. That letter kicked off the project to make a nuclear bomb. Science is but a tool, that makes happen what we already believe in the first place. Usually though, like radar, we stumble upon it whilst looking for other things, therefore other things are more responsible for the success of science, rather than the will to put faith in science to certain things. From the beginning, it is the imagination that guides us through the will of mysticism, to apply accurate observation...that which is all science really is, and therefore I can see no limit for science, other than what limited imagination we may have to apply, in the first place. Without writers like H G Wells, who reflect the past toward the future and leave it presently before us, and scientists like Einstein who see imagination greater than knowledge, science would be void of these other things, that so rightly go before us, and wait only to be found by such. I guess.

I am glad imagination is mentioned here. Would you consider imagination as part of science? I do. But I am not sure many scientists do as well. And given that imagination is irrational by nature and surely not "structured" at all (as many believe scientific thought must be) a great deal of "problems" are created when one mentions this word in such a topic. Wouldn't you agree?

Skakos wrote:I am glad imagination is mentioned here. Would you consider imagination as part of science? I do. But I am not sure many scientists do as well. And given that imagination is irrational by nature and surely not "structured" at all (as many believe scientific thought must be) a great deal of "problems" are created when one mentions this word in such a topic. Wouldn't you agree?

I thought Einstein's 'Imagination is more important than knowledge' would have gave credence to the role of imagination even it is irrational and unstructured.
At present imagination is not an essential element of the conventional scientific framework.
While what is imagined should not be regarded as scientific conclusively, imo, the activity of 'imagination' (especially for brainstorming of ideas) should be co-opted as a critical side-activity into every aspect of science to assist the opening up of mental blockages.

Feyerabend would surely disagree with that. He thought (and I agree) that pure, genuine, innovative scientific work is basically unstructured. How can you be a genius and create new theories if you think inside the box?

One supporter of 'imagination' in Science, I am sure there are many out there.
yalescientific.org/2010/10/from-the-edi ... n-science/

Imagination in Science Melissa StoneOctober 2, 2010

“Every great advance in science has issued from a new audacity of the imagination.” — John Dewey


Welcome to Issue 83.3 of the Yale Scientific Magazine! Since our humble beginnings 116 years ago, the Yale Scientific has come a long way and in the past few months, we have been advancing more than ever before. We have revamped our website (ysm.research.yale.edu) and started tweeting (@yalescientific). We have also given the cover a more modern look and updated the layout. Please enjoy this issue of our magazine and I would love to hear from you if you have any suggestions to further advance the Yale Scientific.

Countless great advances in science have contained elements of luck and skill but for the most part were consumed by imagination. We cannot discover what we do not know or explain what we do not understand without the creativity of envisioning what we cannot see. From Joseph Priestley’s finding of oxygen in the 1770s to Mendel’s rules of heredity in the 1850s coupled with the discovery of oncogenes in 1975, these breakthroughs exemplified great imagination but scientific researchers at Yale have been taking it a step further.
... ... Thousands of researchers must have worked on the ribosome in that 35 year time span, making vital discoveries that each unveiled one more piece of knowledge but they were never awarded Nobel Prizes. Perhaps it is imagination that enables a scientist to make that starting or final advance and separates his or her research from all the rest. ...