Science and the Demise of Philosophy

            -- Erwin Schrödinger

Science and philosophy were once one. Aristotle, and Descartes where all hailed as both great scientists and great philosophers. But during the renaissance, critical thinking, creativity, and logic separated and became science. Everything that was left retained the name of philosophy.

To look at it another way, science has lead directly to a downfall in philosophy, in that it has provided a way for one to test theories and build upon ideas. In contrast to the progress of science, one sees that philosophy has developed into a useless branch of linguistic games ("What time is it on the sun?") and esoteric navel gazing ("Essence in this its self-movement is reflection"). Anything that can be tested or verified has been removed from the field called philosophy by the philosophers, who have today reverted to Platonists by abanding experimentation in lieu of problems of "pure" thought.

Consider any philosopher of the period since Descartes. Lets say Immanuel Kant. Now what is Kant's philosophy? What of Kant's philosphy has been accepted as true by the community. What of Kant's philosophical theory has been rejected as false by the community. How has the community settled these question of Kant's philosophy?

The answer is that there is no philosophical community. There are only philosophical camps. The only thing relating each camp to another is that they all at war with each other in a grand popularity contest. The community that gets the most air time is in the lead. There is no progress in philosophy, only novel ideas which supplantt the old due to the boredom inherent in parroting nonsense.

Most emphatically, no. Well, I suppose yes, for now, but that's only because your complete brain state is effectively hidden from the scientist because we don't have the technology to get a good picture of what's going on inside. Give us a decent real time high resolution scanner, and your "private" experience is just another data set on a big computer somewhere.

A C++ program would be pretty damn inscrutable, too, if we couldn't core dump when things went wrong...

Look at any red object and compare it with any "scientific" description regarding wavelengths and retinas, neurons, synapses, neurotransmitters, visual cortexes, atoms, molecules, or what have you. Clearly none of these thing are in any way related to what it's actually like for you to see that red object.

Look at any Youtube video and compare it with the "computer science" description, with bits and bytes and encodings, filtered through the Flash player, etc. One could argue that these things are clearly unrelated to some kid getting whacked in the nuts by his brother, but one would be wrong.

I'm extremely reluctant to accept the notion that our physical brains have no relation to how we experience the world (an idea you seem eager to accept) - we don't understand it very well, true, but that's partially because we're pretty stupid, and partially because we're not very far along in understanding it yet.

All that it takes for you to claim subjective experience is for your brain to be programmed to respond to the question "Do you have subjective experience of the color red?" in the affirmative. To me, that's a lot easier to swallow that that's the case than to imagine there's Magic going on here...and yup, I'm happy to apply the same logic to my own experience, I don't attribute anything special to it other than a mere self-reinforcing computational delusion.

Personally, I find that a far more fascinating thing than the alternative, anyways...

Now, you may well believe that what's going on when you look at a red object is "really" some interaction between what those scientific terms describe in some model of what's going on with your brain, sensory organs, etc. But this requires a sort of suspension of disbelief, as you have to set aside your actual "subjective" experience of the red object itself

It really doesn't, though, unless you already ascribe something mystical and aphysical to this "subjective experience," begging the question.

Someone else brought up the idea of a pzombie, someone that responds in every way as if they had subjective experience, but really doesn't. Getting past WTF that would actually mean, since nobody ever bothers to define "subjective experience," I think the heart of the question is this: if a pzombie responds internally as if it had subjective experience as well as externally, then isn't that enough for us to say that it does? That's why I'm happy to write the whole thing off as a non-issue, even when thinking about my own experience - the fact that I believe I experience "red" means nothing more than that I believe it.

IMO anyone arguing against that first has to figure out what it means for a pzombie to lack subjective experience even though it looks, walks, talks, acts, and thinks as if it did. Otherwise the argument is pretty pointless, kind of like asking what the world would be like if the prime number theorem was false.

The distinction between materialist and non-materialist is not that the non-materialist believes science is merely incomplete, as any materialist would agree with that stance; it is that he denies the very ability of science to investigate certain effects, and further, he believes those effects to be important and not mere hypothetical possibilities.

Contrast this to the materialist, who while he accepts that fundamentally there is a limit to what we can know about our universe (we're within the system, after all, and it's provably impossible to know everything about the workings of a closed system from within), still believes that we can figure out most of the important things by observing what we see around us and experimenting.

In particular the materialist doesn't think there's anything so special about humans that their workings are not completely susceptible to scientific investigation. Usually the non-materialist thinks that there's something magical happening in living creatures that makes them fundamentally opaque to observation and description.

Since it is impossible for anyone other than myself to verify that I exist as anything more than a series of chemical reactions (ie. I actually feel), it is a difficult problem to work with.

I'd argue that it's also impossible for you to verify this fact. Who's to say that you don't just think you actually feel things but in reality it's just your brain playing a trick on itself?

Taking that further (and getting into the definition problem others have mentioned), who's to say there's any difference at all between the delusion and the perception of experience?