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>Sorry but you'll have to explain how universality makes an area of knowledge more important, useful, serious or any other similar adjective. The human experien

>Sorry but you'll have to explain how universality makes an area of knowledge more important, useful, serious or any other similar adjective. The human experience not only exists, but it's by definition central to us, so how is this not extremely important? Because to be unbiased is to separate yourself from the human experience. What makes your experience more central than the experience of a dolphin? Does a dolphin know morality as we know it? I don't know. Though I do know that the dolphin is bounded by the laws of logic just as we are bounded. >And your argument about science being different from religion therefore grouping both under philosophy is wrong simply ignores what "philosophy" is supposed to mean Probably does. I'm not arguing for the definition of philosophy. If the definition of philosophy actually involves a unionization of faith based principles and science than I'm not arguing for a new definition. I'm more arguing more for the fact that philosophy should not be labeled as something more fundamental than science. It is because of the category error that does not make philosophy more fundamental than science/logic. So in a sense if you want to find out the reason for existence, you likely need to get more fundamental than science and logic and because philosophy involves things like ethics or religion it is, imo, not the true path to answering these fundamental questions. Much of mathematics in the early days involved philosophical speculation... It was only later on that the field learned to separate the metaphysical speculations from the actual mathematics. I think philosophy is kind of suffering from the same issue.

entropicdrifter 6y ago
>So in a sense if you want to find out the reason for existence, you likely need to get more fundamental than science and logic and because philosophy involves things like ethics or religion it is, imo, not the true path to answering these fundamental questions. Some philosophies and branches of philosophy involve ethics or religion. Some don't really touch on them at all. The scientific method could be described as a philosophy about the best way to approach the accrual of knowledge, armed only with the assumption that reality outside one's mind is real and that we can observe it in a reproducible way. Likewise, you could describe mathematics as another branch of philosophy, since it is literally logic represented in a more abstract form. Just as an aside, it's pretty ironic for you to say, "don't use the prescriptive branches of philosophy, just the descriptive ones like logic and the scientific method" because that is itself an example of prescriptive philosophy, borne of the logical conclusions of a subjective opinion rather than objective fact
farias0 6y ago
Sorry, I'll drop the philosophy discussion because I don't find it interesting (don't mean this as an attack to you in any way though) On the first discussion: I think it's interesting that you keep using "unbiased" when you maybe should be using "objective". I'll take a shot and say that you want to reinforce the negative connotation the word "bias" carries so you can further demerit the humanities. And this is really ironic because this only reveals your own biases. See, it doesn't matter that you don't like how imprecise we humans are. We are all we directly experience during our lives. Everything you see and feel comes tinged with human subjectiveness. There is us and there is the rest. Hell, if I think, therefore I am, the first, and so far the only thing I can say for sure that exists is me. So we are arguably the single most important thing we should study. Now, if you are able to create mathematical and computational models that describe we humans, then great, humanities became as pointless as Plato's theory of atoms. I mean, social sciences often use math tools. But we're doing the best we can with what we have, and it's not because it's easier to predict a chemical reaction than a social trend that one becomes more important. Again, your argument on objectivity holds no water. The importance of a field isn't related to how easy it is to find absolute answers.
- nendroid 6y ago
  It has nothing to do with imprecision. Nor does it have anything to do with objectivity. I'm more talking about the neutrality and "centrality" of the choices of study. Something like ethics and religion are more a biased choice that say something like logic from my perspective. What if we encountered an alien race or intelligent beings with no form of religion or ethics? Dolphins or chimpanzees perhaps? It's certainly possible but I would argue it's hard to imagine finding an intelligent race of beings not governed by the rules of logic. That's why I consider logic an unbiased choice and religion and ethics a biased and arbitrary choice. Our bias tends towards the the human experience as opposed to a truly more neutral perspective.

entropicdrifter 6y ago

>So in a sense if you want to find out the reason for existence, you likely need to get more fundamental than science and logic and because philosophy involves things like ethics or religion it is, imo, not the true path to answering these fundamental questions. Some philosophies and branches of philosophy involve ethics or religion. Some don't really touch on them at all. The scientific method could be described as a philosophy about the best way to approach the accrual of knowledge, armed only with the assumption that reality outside one's mind is real and that we can observe it in a reproducible way. Likewise, you could describe mathematics as another branch of philosophy, since it is literally logic represented in a more abstract form. Just as an aside, it's pretty ironic for you to say, "don't use the prescriptive branches of philosophy, just the descriptive ones like logic and the scientific method" because that is itself an example of prescriptive philosophy, borne of the logical conclusions of a subjective opinion rather than objective fact

farias0 6y ago

Sorry, I'll drop the philosophy discussion because I don't find it interesting (don't mean this as an attack to you in any way though) On the first discussion: I think it's interesting that you keep using "unbiased" when you maybe should be using "objective". I'll take a shot and say that you want to reinforce the negative connotation the word "bias" carries so you can further demerit the humanities. And this is really ironic because this only reveals your own biases. See, it doesn't matter that you don't like how imprecise we humans are. We are all we directly experience during our lives. Everything you see and feel comes tinged with human subjectiveness. There is us and there is the rest. Hell, if I think, therefore I am, the first, and so far the only thing I can say for sure that exists is me. So we are arguably the single most important thing we should study. Now, if you are able to create mathematical and computational models that describe we humans, then great, humanities became as pointless as Plato's theory of atoms. I mean, social sciences often use math tools. But we're doing the best we can with what we have, and it's not because it's easier to predict a chemical reaction than a social trend that one becomes more important. Again, your argument on objectivity holds no water. The importance of a field isn't related to how easy it is to find absolute answers.

nendroid 6y ago
It has nothing to do with imprecision. Nor does it have anything to do with objectivity. I'm more talking about the neutrality and "centrality" of the choices of study. Something like ethics and religion are more a biased choice that say something like logic from my perspective. What if we encountered an alien race or intelligent beings with no form of religion or ethics? Dolphins or chimpanzees perhaps? It's certainly possible but I would argue it's hard to imagine finding an intelligent race of beings not governed by the rules of logic. That's why I consider logic an unbiased choice and religion and ethics a biased and arbitrary choice. Our bias tends towards the the human experience as opposed to a truly more neutral perspective.