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On July 31 2014 02:54 Sox03 wrote:
In my opinion there just is no challenge. I am well aware of the fact that classical mechanics is imperfect. Is your goal to get a "perfect" mathematical theory? Claiming that alone would imply that mathematics itself is indeed the language of the universe and it would imply a lot of other things that make me very skeptical if we will ever be able to know.
I mean i dont think any theory in physics is accurate but i am happy with what we get, because it seems to me that the level of precision is pretty high.
I dont know much about Galileo so i dont know what he did exactly. If we go one step further you get the classical mechanics example i mentioned earlier.
What i dont understand aswell is what you mean with my tower of science babel?
People are working hard to figure out the best possible models about our universe and everything in it.
Models are not exact. Sometimes you linearize stuff. I am well aware of that but i dont really see where the problem is?
I think it's really impressive and wonderful how much we got to know in the last couple of years esp because of the natural sciences. It's not perfect but it is as best as they could get until know and it will probably only get better over time.
Please educate yourself on the history and philosophy of science if you don't see a problem. You want to discuss examples but don't even know why Galileo is important.
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Croatia9455 Posts
On July 31 2014 03:07 IgnE wrote:Show nested quote +On July 31 2014 02:54 Sox03 wrote:
In my opinion there just is no challenge. I am well aware of the fact that classical mechanics is imperfect. Is your goal to get a "perfect" mathematical theory? Claiming that alone would imply that mathematics itself is indeed the language of the universe and it would imply a lot of other things that make me very skeptical if we will ever be able to know.
I mean i dont think any theory in physics is accurate but i am happy with what we get, because it seems to me that the level of precision is pretty high.
I dont know much about Galileo so i dont know what he did exactly. If we go one step further you get the classical mechanics example i mentioned earlier.
What i dont understand aswell is what you mean with my tower of science babel?
People are working hard to figure out the best possible models about our universe and everything in it.
Models are not exact. Sometimes you linearize stuff. I am well aware of that but i dont really see where the problem is?
I think it's really impressive and wonderful how much we got to know in the last couple of years esp because of the natural sciences. It's not perfect but it is as best as they could get until know and it will probably only get better over time. Please educate yourself on the history and philosophy of science if you don't see a problem.
That's what philosophers are for 
Scientists will continue on not seeing the problem and continue making the progress.
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Well adressing the linearity issue. I have once been told by my math professor that you can distinguish a good and a bad physicist by their ability to know when to approximate stuff.
In the branch of numerics there is the rule that as long as the error is smaller than what the engineer can measure you're doing just fine. And there is a lot of nonlinear behaviour in physics that seems to be quite well understood but all that should just be a side comment.
IgnE You hide behind your comparisions and your language and you haven't been able to explain your point to me at all. I would appreciate if you could just keep it simple a single time for me and explain your point without looking down on me (sorry but thats just what it feels like).
I showed you that i am able to discuss examples because i presented you an example i can provide more examples if you wish, you just need to say a word.
What you did in response to my physics example (it was about physics not about names) was just to throw words at me that may contain an example which i am unable to grasp though. So would you please explain exactly why my examples are bad or what is wrong with them, because i just heard galileo and i associate a lot with that name (galileo transformations for example but thats almost it) but nothing that seems relevant.
So i tell you that science provides a very accurate explanation of the world that is by no means perfect but gets a lot better and it WORKS, in physics you can justify a lot of stuff because it works (okay i see it coming please dont misinterpret the last very sentence). So please tell me what is the problem with this simple principle of science that doesnt seem to fail us? Yes maybe some effects hide from us, maybe because of the nature of science or mathematics, things are unreachable to us (let alone the human mind) but it is the best that we can do and i think having this amount of complex knowledge is great.
So i would have to read a couple thousand pages probably to understand your point which i honestly won't do because even though i'm on "vacation" now, i will rather improve my understanding of mathematics and physics and preparing for the next semester. I think it would be easiest for philosophically "illiterate" people like me if you could just tell me what the problem is so i could start thinking about it.
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On July 31 2014 03:10 2Pacalypse- wrote:Show nested quote +On July 31 2014 03:07 IgnE wrote:On July 31 2014 02:54 Sox03 wrote:
In my opinion there just is no challenge. I am well aware of the fact that classical mechanics is imperfect. Is your goal to get a "perfect" mathematical theory? Claiming that alone would imply that mathematics itself is indeed the language of the universe and it would imply a lot of other things that make me very skeptical if we will ever be able to know.
I mean i dont think any theory in physics is accurate but i am happy with what we get, because it seems to me that the level of precision is pretty high.
I dont know much about Galileo so i dont know what he did exactly. If we go one step further you get the classical mechanics example i mentioned earlier.
What i dont understand aswell is what you mean with my tower of science babel?
People are working hard to figure out the best possible models about our universe and everything in it.
Models are not exact. Sometimes you linearize stuff. I am well aware of that but i dont really see where the problem is?
I think it's really impressive and wonderful how much we got to know in the last couple of years esp because of the natural sciences. It's not perfect but it is as best as they could get until know and it will probably only get better over time. Please educate yourself on the history and philosophy of science if you don't see a problem. That's what philosophers are for Scientists will continue on not seeing the problem and continue making the normal science.
fixed it for you 
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On July 31 2014 03:25 Sox03 wrote:
Well adressing the linearity issue. I have once been told by my math professor that you can distinguish a good and a bad physicist by their ability to know when to approximate stuff.
In the branch of numerics there is the rule that as long as the error is smaller than what the engineer can measure you're doing a ok. And there is a lot of nonlinear behaviour in physics that seems to be quite well understood but all that should just be a side comment..
It works fine for boring stuff, but not for interesting stuff. Your rule only works for certain sorts of systems, usually those in a low enough energy state to preclude the onset of chaotic nonlinearity. But you will never make any progress in understanding really interesting phenomena (like say, economics or history) by thinking like that. Maybe you don't care about hard problems, but only easy problems in which this rule works for you (which is fine, and thinking about easy problems is also useful). But you can't elevate that into a general epistemological claim for reasons which should have been well known since the late eighties but have not yet been incorporated into our worldview (because the philosophical task is not yet complete).
edit: why do people in this thread subscribe to the following unspoken claim: "If philosophy is to have a purpose, it is to be the handmaiden of science; therefore, if it is not, it doesn't."
edit: Badiou speaks of philosophy as migratory and nomadic. I think it is a bumblebee. Science is only one of the flowers which we philosophers flit about pollenating And sometimes it stings you
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There's a lot of condescension (is that even a word?) coming pretty hard from both sides. I think if we ever want to actually talk about this stuff we should stop treating each other like this. I've enjoyed reading responses from both sides but it's sometimes hard to see past the "you're dumb" "he's dumb" and find the actual arguments. Obviously, I think philosophy is important or else I wouldn't have started this shitstorm and I wouldn't be majoring in philosophy. I think a lot of the "evidence" we've been giving is pretty shitty even by my "just finished one year of college" standard. So in the future I would ask that we a) stop attacking each other and b) give relevant evidence (for example, don't say something like "my school's philosophy department is shitty therefore I assume philosophy departments/students everywhere are shitty" or "all science students don't realize that x y or z" because neither of these are fair). Word. Dope. Swag. Keep up the debate. I might start chirping in more if people are less aggressive <3 
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edit: Badiou speaks of philosophy as migratory and nomadic. I think it is a bumblebee. Science is only one of the flowers which we philosophers flit about pollenating And sometimes it stings you
Beautiful. I like the analogy.
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Oh well were talking about things like conciousness and economics and very complex physical systems^^
Yes i agree you cant apply that there but i covered that in my statement i think because those models probably wouldnt make any useful prediction and would probably be rather useless.
I think a lot of mathematicians are looking down on financial mathematics a bit^^ (references to 2009 in a lot of conversation for example^^)
But for me its not the interesting stuff you know... I mean economics is manmade i dont really feel interested in that kind of stuff ;D (purely personal views)
I think the "easy" questions can be pretty damn hard ^^, but i agree with what i understood from your post
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On July 31 2014 03:37 Sox03 wrote:
I think the "easy" questions can be pretty damn hard ^^, but i agree with what i understood from your post
yes, you're right! And if those are the easy problems just think how hard the hard problems are 
Finance happens to be one of my main interests. The point of thinking about nonlinearity is to understand in a RIGOROUS way why our models are not very good at describing reality (with the aim of producing alternative epistemologies and pragmatics for acting in the world despite our constitutive finitude). Philosophy is what you have to do if you are going to think about a world in which all of these things exist together (that is, how can we think of the world which contains both "easy" linear problems and "hard" nonlinear problems all together at once, as a single world - that is the difficult problem and it's not one that can even be well-formed in a "scientific" way, it is a philosophical problem. Because also you have to think issues of human concern like morality and the meaning of life all together ALSO with these others things - that is, philosophy is what you have to do if you want to think about a world that has classical mechanics and quantum things and fluid turbulence but also love and beauty in it, all at once, together).
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On July 31 2014 02:58 bookwyrm wrote:Show nested quote +On July 31 2014 02:45 Jerubaal wrote:On July 31 2014 02:27 bookwyrm wrote:Sorry, it's impossible  you either have to care, or you don't care, which is also fine. Whatever you do don't trust the philosophy students, they don't know anything and they're trained to keep it that way. If you're gonna do philosophy you have to want it. I don't even think that philosophy can be supported by institutions, because if philosophy is done right it's dangerous and the institutions don't want it. Institutionalized philosophy is therefore either 1) imperial propaganda or 2) irrelevant scholasticism You can't learn philosophy by yourself. Moonfire- you're going to have to be more specific about what you want. Luckily there are a lot of people who wrote down their thoughts in books and you can read them. Much more interesting than talking to most people who are alive today. Some people are good philosophers, but most of them aren't in philosophy departments. I've studied philosophy in school, and I've taught myself philosophy sitting in my room with an amazon account, and I can assure you I learned much more philosophy the second way (and had to unlearn some stuff I learned the first way) Show nested quote +On July 31 2014 02:54 Sox03 wrote:
Sometimes you linearize stuff. I am well aware of that but i dont really see where the problem is? hahahaha that is the whole problem! that is the scientific and philosophical revolution we are living through at this moment which is not yet complete! how to think nonlinearity! it's the whole problem!
You can, but it can only take you so far. I, for one, read The Republic in high school, but it was not until 3 university courses later that I got what I thought was a full interpretation of it. If I had never taken these courses, I probably would have thought I "understood" the text. Attempting to study philosophy by yourself can be horribly stultifying. For one, you miss out on, shall we say, the sociological aspects of philosophy; it's just too cold and sterile. You also run the risk of turning into Bertrand Russell where you think you're a special snowflake in a sea of ignoramuses. Philosophy should be understood as a long running conversation and you can't fully grasp it if you're not part of that conversation.
I can agree with many of your criticisms of contemporary academic philosophy but it isn't always so and doesn't have to be: Part of it is Modernity telling philosophy students that their ideas must be merely private, personal and wholly subjective (why wouldn't they develop this way?); part of it is the development of suitably dreary areas such as Rawlsianism and Analytic Phil, which seem to demean the role of philosophy why destroying it from the inside; part of it is just the segregation of the Anglophone community from the continent.
In my experience much of the best philosophic work in the last century has come from Political Science/Government departments and I don't think that's a mistake. Unlike the Philosophy departments, which seem to have turned into monks, The PoliSci departments are still trying to connect their ideas to the world.
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The last PoliSci presentation I went to was laughably incompetent, so if there's good work coming out of that I haven't seen it. I agree about all this russell and rawls and whatever, that's just boring anglo stuff.
I agree that philosophy is a running conversation but I think most "professional" philosophers have isolated themselves from it.
FWIW I have a B.A. minor in philosophy but it wasn't until years after graduating from college that I learned anything about philosophy. You really just have to sit down in a room and spend a lot of time reading infuriatingly impenetrable texts. Then you can go talk about it, if you can find anybody who also has put in the effort to actually read the books (but those people are very rare). It would be nice to be in a group of people who were studying philosophy together, but honestly those places don't really exist - you kinda have no choice but to study philosophy yourself, if you want to study it. I guess what I'm talking about is AFTER you've read Plato in high school and didn't get it, AFTER you've taken the three university courses and now you have some kind of handle on The Republic, and THEN you decide that you actually want to spend your life studying philosophy. If they could teach it to you in school, it wouldn't be philosophy, because everything you read in a philosophy class is there only because it's something that the person who wrote it didn't and couldn't learn in school. You can learn about what philosophy WAS DOING in school, but you can't really DO it, I don't think.
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The first polisci lecture I went to was about philosophy. I enjoyed it. But I'm a total simpleton so my opinion probably doesn't count.
Also this topic feels very masturbatory.
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Also this topic feels very masturbatory.
This is extremely masturbatory. I think I was doing some light stroking in the original post but now... I don't even know"
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On July 31 2014 01:50 zulu_nation8 wrote:
Scientists take philosophical positions derived from empirical activity, which is more philosophically noble than what moral philosophers can claim.
Aside from the fact that I'm not exactly sure what you mean by "moral philosophers", is it really true that scientists take philosophical positions derived purely from empirical activity? Even if the vast majority of scientific work is empirical work, which is the way it should be and is a methodological position that needs to be respected and upheld, I don't think that the ontological presuppositions of contemporary natural sciences is derived from empirical analysis, let alone that most scientists even really think about the ontological grounds of their methods. Again, I don't think this is all that important anyway, but methodological naturalism isn't derived from empirical activity - it's a method used to interpret empirical data in a particular way, and it presupposes particular ontological and metaphysical stances whether or not this is consciously apprehended or not. I'm really sympathetic to methodological naturalism because it works and I agree that these metaphysical problems shouldn't bog down the practice, but it gets silly when scientific method gets presented as some kind of monolithic answer to everything and becomes a scientism that doesn't really have any real resemblance to the actual ethos of the scientific method, which is noble precisely because of its open acknowledgement of its limits. I was born into a family of scientists and I was raised to follow that line since I could read. It's because of my love for the sciences which I grew up with that makes me react with such revulsion to this pop-science crap that has such a huge market these days in North America.
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^The problem is that the academic polemicists against 'scientism' are even more infuriating than their opponents. Like Latour and the rest of his "science studies" ilk, who are just a bunch of sophists.
I wish Latour and Dawkins would just collide and annihilate each other so we could get on with things in peace.
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On July 31 2014 04:19 koreasilver wrote:Show nested quote +On July 31 2014 01:50 zulu_nation8 wrote:
Scientists take philosophical positions derived from empirical activity, which is more philosophically noble than what moral philosophers can claim. Aside from the fact that I'm not exactly sure what you mean by "moral philosophers", is it really true that scientists take philosophical positions derived purely from empirical activity? Even if the vast majority of scientific work is empirical work, which is the way it should be and is a methodological position that needs to be respected and upheld, I don't think that the ontological presuppositions of contemporary natural sciences is derived from empirical analysis, let alone that most scientists even really think about the ontological grounds of their methods. Again, I don't think this is all that important anyway, but methodological naturalism isn't derived from empirical activity - it's a method used to interpret empirical data in a particular way, and it presupposes particular ontological and metaphysical stances whether or not this is consciously apprehended or not. I'm really sympathetic to methodological naturalism because it works and I agree that these metaphysical problems shouldn't bog down the practice, but it gets silly when scientific method gets presented as some kind of monolithic answer to everything and becomes a scientism that doesn't really have any real resemblance to the actual ethos of the scientific method, which is noble precisely because of its open acknowledgement of its limits. I was born into a family of scientists and I was raised to follow that line since I could read. It's because of my love for the sciences which I grew up with that makes me react with such revulsion to this pop-science crap that has such a huge market these days in North America.
moral philosophers such as brian leiter who sits in his law school ivory tower while writing blogs about his misbehaving philosophy professor colleagues and condemning anything he sees as immoral or unethical in upper education all the way to Israel. Literally like 80% of his blog in the past couple of months has been about sexual harassment lawsuits in American universities.
I dn't know what you mean by the ontological presuppositions of contemporary natural sciences, but as a simple example, a physicist who is familiar with Schrödinger's cat might adopt a Kantian, Noumenon/phenomenon view of reality. And all theoretical physicists must have some opinion on the matter no matter how implicit their assumptions are. I never argued the scientific method is the answer to everything, and the term scientism seems to have varying meanings in this blog. I'm actually trying my best to maintain a neutral and unprejudiced perspective.
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I think quantum mechanics is a PROBLEM for kantian transcendental idealism, not a reason to ADOPT it... Doesn't it point to a more problematic mutual constitution of subject and object (and the transcendental schemas) that that allowed by kant... (?)
idk what the scholiasts think about this, these days. I'm not exactly a kantian
On July 31 2014 04:55 zulu_nation8 wrote:
2 advanced 2 discuss 4 dis blog
probably
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I never argued the scientific method is the answer to everything.
I wonder what would happen if we all just agreed to this. Would we be able to just love each other? I like to think so.
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loving one another is another problem entirely, it's probably the hardest problem
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2 advanced 2 discuss 4 dis blog
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EPT
