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If you have a good understanding of consciousness / mind, you can derive the answer for most philosophical problems from that.
by RivieraKid 14y ago
If you have a good understanding of consciousness / mind, you can derive the answer for most philosophical problems from that.
- Evbn 14y agoThat is a big IF. If I had a million dollars, I could buy your love.
- RivieraKid 14y agoI think I have a relatively good understanding of consciousness: * Content of consciousness is the only thing that we can be sure of. Let's say I'm scared. This fact is true no matter if I'm in a dream or hallucinating. (We could argue if "scared" is the correct label for the feeling but that's not the point.) * It's impossible to define consciousness objectively. Subjective definition is simple: Consciousness is my current feelings, perceptions, thoughts, etc. There's no way to create a definition, that 1) is logically consistent 2) matches our intuitive understanding of consciousness 3) is objective: you can say whether some group of atoms (like brain) is conscious or not.
- pessimizer 14y ago>Content of consciousness is the only thing that we can be sure of. Let's say I'm scared. This fact is true no matter if I'm in a dream or hallucinating. I admire your confidence.
- RivieraKid 14y agoThanks :)
- aaimnr 14y agoThe admiration seems to be sarcastic, though...
- RivieraKid 14y agoAs was the "thanks"... If there was a rational counterargument hidden in that, I didn't find it unfortunately.
- bornhuetter 14y agoWhat you have just said doesn't in any way help answer most of the questions on the survey.
- RivieraKid 14y agoIt does help to answer most of the true philosophical problems about reality etc. Many problems on that page are IMHO psychological or sociological problems, e.g. the ethical problems.
- memla 14y agoI think this claim is just confusing descriptive and normative ethics. Probably the most common confusion about ethics there is. True, descriptive ethics is almost entirely composed of various facts about human psychology and sociology, but no normative claim can be deduced from these facts alone.
- RivieraKid 14y agoMy view of ethics is that it's basically just a (often vague) set of principles in our minds. Some of ethics is in our genes, some of it is cultural. Different cultures may have different ethical principles. Fundamentally, it's about feelings – something is good, because it feels good.
- PaulHoule 14y agoThe success of science in explaining everything else, however, means that practically we can treat the mind as an epiphenomenon.
- RivieraKid 14y agoWhat do you mean by "practically we can treat the mind as an epiphenomenon"?
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- RivieraKid 14y agoI'm sorry, but your comment makes zero sense to me.
- knowtheory 14y agoNice, you almost managed to get a spit-take out of me for this post. I'll just note that the philosophers who answered this survey do not appear to agree with you.
- RivieraKid 14y agoYes, I'm aware that majority of people don't agree with my philosophical views, but I think they're pretty rational, not the usual philosophical babble :)
- knowtheory 14y agoYour prejudice is showing. Philosophy is about knowing and reasoning about reality. There are charlatans who try to pass off their weak ideas through obfuscation, but there is a core to the endeavor of philosophy, and good philosophers out there making noteworthy observations about reality.
- RivieraKid 14y agoWell, from my experience, the problem with most of philosophy is not being able to get to the core. Significant part of philosophy is just arguing what is the meaning of some word or what is the correct label for some idea (ie. it's about matching meanings with words). Another thing that bugs me is that many psychological and sociological problems are considered to be philosophical problems.
- Herring 14y agoI think if you're running experiments you're called a scientist. Talking about has limited utility.
- knowtheory 14y agoIt's sad that more people don't study the philosophy and sociology of Science, especially people in engineering and the sciences. Scientists make ontological and metaphysical claims about the nature of the universe, and unless they avail themselves of the philosophy of science there are a lot of arguments that one can't defend against.. There are a lot of fundamentalists who avail themselves of Thomas Kuhn's argument that scientific progress is entirely just cultural consensus amongst scientists, and has no additional metaphysical reality. Fighting off that argument is squarely in the philosophy of science, as is being able to articulate what it means to observe, theorize about, and know reality.
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