Deep down nothing has meaning, in the most basic concept we are born to die, we are in death row from the day we are born. Solve me that one and we can start talking.
Anything else we do, a career, have kids, sex, it's all a distraction. "Yeah but you are in death row since the day you are born but in the middle you do a lot of things", that's ignoring the issue. Let's say you live 80 years? What is 80 years in cosmic time? Comparing it to a blink would be sayig it's longer than it actually is.
That's just talking about teleological stuff. About consequences to your life you happen to find acceptable or desirable. And I think that's just distracting from the subject anyway.
I'm talking about linguistic meaning. Like, "Am I actually communicating an idea to you that informs behavior?"
Science and technology overwhelm reality objectifying it, making of everything a thing, giving it an order created by us, based in a language created by us. You talk about logic and linguistics, but that's a man made classification for ordering things artificially.
First off, you don't get to make logical arguments and try to appeal to logic in order to solve philosophical problems or communicate ideas to other people and then talk about positivism like it's this wholly antagonistic thing to philosophy. Theologians have always irritated me for this reason. Because they need you to take propositions on faith but still have to appeal to logic in order to persuade people about stuff or work backwards from the article of their faith to its practical implications.
Cut that shit out. You don't get to have a rational discussion using logic then complain about how positivism is ruining things.
Also the latter stuff has exactly been my point. They're man-made. But just because they're man-made doesn't mean they don't have to be
useful.
A chemist will say that chemistry was not created by men, but discovered, that it was in nature and was discovered by men. What would chemist today thingk about greek chemistry, that the elements water, fire, earth, wind, were all inside every object and could be released from inside them? Nonsense! That was 3.000 years ago, what will chemist say about pur current chemistry in the future? Scientific theories are currently changing paradigm in a 8 years basis.
Yeah, I don't want to rehash all the solipsism stuff again. The point is that there is stuff that is not subject to my will. Objective things still exist because even your own mind doesn't revolve around your ego. A lot of shit that's experienced by your mind isn't yours to control or of your own willful volition.
You can very well pretend that grabbing the tits of some other guy's girlfriend is just an illusion. And when he punches your teeth out, the distinction is hard to appreciate.
Also, claiming that water, fire, earth and wind was considered legitimate science is dishonest. Science didn't exist then as we understand it today. That whole classical elements thing caught on because of a
philosopher named Ptolemy. Nobody tested or questioned his claim. They just took his word for it. At best, you might charitably call that "natural philosophy." At worst, it's just baseless drivel.
Paradigms don't actually shift that much. The biggest one might be the transition from Newtonian physics to relativity and quantum mechanics. But that didn't render the Newtonian stuff useless. They just concerned themselves within a different scope and with a wider variety of working assumptions. (Mostly things that go really very fast or are really very small.)
We still teach Newtonian physics to people.
We live in a time of profound scientific conscience, a time of positivism, a theory that says that the only valid knowledge is the one given to us by experimental science, and that everything, even philosophy, has to be interpreted trough that method. So questioning if nothing is nothing or if it is something is not a serious knowledge fot positivism.
Who says?
You don't think scientists aren't interested in art or meditating?
Sam Harris is practically known for the meditation stuff, despite his great degree of secularism.
It's like a lot of people complaining about democracy because democracy isn't a perfect ideal government ruled by philosopher kings or infallible gods or something. That was never the point. It's a defensively engineered government.
Science produces useful and actionable information. It's a practical application of methodological naturalism, empiricism and rationalism.
For positivism Nietzsche and Heidegger are irrational, and positivism separates things between rational and irrational. It takes a scalpel and starts cutting and demarcating what is correct and what is not, it judges what sort of philosophy enters within a certain cannon and what should be left outside.
As much as I like Nietzsche, he had rather odd ideas about how evolution work and a lot of people since then have injected or modified science as a result of his thinking. If anything, a lot of the way people think about science owes a lot to him because he's running around with the idea of smashing mental idols and to stop falsely projecting emotional biases on things without any of the proper recognition that you are doing exactly that.
But philosophy exists because when the material world fails to give a satisfactory answer we can always ask ourselves, what the hell else is out there that we don't know about?
I deleted this comment earlier since I thought it was obvious to you.
But you're presenting a false dichotomy between science/positivism and philosophy.
Philosophy was always concerned with stuff like the study of logic and the nature of knowledge and blah de blah. Science is one of the few effective products to come out of that discourse.
Theology? Not so much. They've already got a fan theory, and when I was recently thinking about the paradoxes of omnipotence/omniscience, it gave me a headache and made me realize why so many Enlightenment thinkers became theists. (Because the pet idea of a God by conventional Christianity is really fucking annoying to think about and just seems to be the product of unimaginative hyperbole)
Also, think about what you mean by "matter" and "material." Because if you're just thinking in Euclidean and Newtonian terms and just calling everything else "supernatural" or "immaterial" simply because that makes it an easy contrast, then you're hardly thinking. Invisibility doesn't make something specially different from anything else. Neither does other-worldliness, awe or unfamiliarity.
You know, for a guy who is telling me that everything we experience about matter is just ghost shadows of the mind, you really have got that weird comparison-contrast thing bouncing around your head.
Philosophy is the question about what else is out there, not the answer. It does try to find an answer, but as soon as it gets one another question takes it's place. Because what impuses us to find more knowledge is the question, not the answer.
I'm criticizing a
badly asked question in the first place!
The world already has a lot of certainties, rigth at hand "after you die you cease to exist and you rot". But philosophy gives me the hability to take everything that surounds me, every bit of certain and contrasted knowledge and destroy it, make it tumble, with one word: "why".
Okay, stop there. Science doesn't deal in certainties. That's not what it is. Don't take this the wrong way, but I have very good reason to question your scientific literacy after this thread. Having pragmatic models in order to predict stuff for everyday life is different from the idea of "perfect" certainty. (Whatever the hell that is.)
In summary, the scientific method is a repeating cycle of observation, hypothesis, testing and falsification, conclusion and revision. It's an iterative and pragmatic process. There's also a little art involved in logic and critical thinking.
Most people have an unrealistic and naive idea about knowledge. I already gave you a brief definition of what I think counts as knowledge and I'm not about to repeat myself. Although there is another useful definition: "True belief."
And yes, "You die and you rot" is a perfectly valid philosophical interpretation of existing evidence. Because you know, those things are demonstrated happening. Anything additional qualifications you want to add to that has to be demonstrated, if only for practical purposes because then I can just say anything and have it be valid. (You go to a place where unicorns crap ice cream into your mouth after you die.)
I'm not going to waste energy on baseless claims because this isn't really just a game. The idea that there is a soul is ultimately misinformation because it implies things we ought to be doing in our everyday lives on account of that belief. The same goes for religion. Despite arguments to the contrary, the cost of acting on these beliefs is not
nothing.
For somebody who likes to claim that he knows nothing and that we should ask questions about stuff, you don't really spend a lot of time questioning your basic assumptions. (About the credibility of random internet journalists. Whether your idea of science is actually correct. Whether the question you're asking is even
valid.)
That's why I said the ,"I know nothing" comment comes across as sophomoric. A lot of people just say it to seem edgy and wise, when they're nothing of the sort.
