IAmA theoretical physicist. Ask me anything (via reddit)

Re:IAmA theoretical physicist. Ask me anything (via reddit) by Confusion on Friday June 04, 2010 @07:12AM (#1404003)

  Math is just symbols that happen to have congruence with\
  something deeper in reality.

In which you already sidestep an enormous debate about whether such a thing as 'a deeper reality' exists. Nietzsche's 'God is dead' doesn't apply to the Christian God or Gods in general: it applies to every absolutist philosophy. Wittgenstein's work on the limits of language may have consequences for even what thoughts can possibly make sense. Their whole lineage, including people like Heidegger, Davidson and Rorty, is completely ignored by such an implicit, seemingly innocent, assumption.

  The danger is the philosophers who misunderstand, or who
  ignore the advancements in mathematics and scientific
  knowledge we've been making.

Philosophers tend to have a pretty good understanding of the meaning of physics. It is taught to them at length, because of the importance of the scientific advances you refer to. It's certainly not the other way around. The fact is that most intelligent people are mostly unaware of the last 150 years of philosophy. The time before that is all they hear about, because it is pretty easy to explain. After that, it gets hard. However, those folks, among each other, just keep repeating the debates of back then, without realizing the advancements that have already been made. It's a damn shame. Even when you have progressed as little as I have, just to understanding how complicated these dualities are, discussing the Cartesian mind/matter duality with them over and over again gets like teaching yet another kid to integrate. They may be top-notch phycisists, but they simply don't know philosophy.

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Re:IAmA theoretical physicist. Ask me anything (via reddit) by Retric on Friday June 04, 2010 @09:51AM (#1404261)

Philosopy is as far removed from reality as math.

Philosopy like math is only limited by being self consistant, but it need not be consistant with our reality.

PS: It's not hard to argue that there been zero progress in Philosopy since http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyrrho ;-)

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Re:IAmA theoretical physicist. Ask me anything (via reddit) by eavc on Friday June 04, 2010 @12:58PM (#1404852)

Since when does philosophy only need to be self-consistent?

I don't think you know what philosophy is.

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Re:IAmA theoretical physicist. Ask me anything (via reddit) by Retric on Friday June 04, 2010 @01:35PM (#1404984)

Really? Name three other constraints on philosophy.

Note: They must apply to philosophers of antiquity and modularity, secular and of faith, eastern and western, human and non human etc.

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Re:IAmA theoretical physicist. Ask me anything (via reddit) by eavc on Friday June 04, 2010 @03:03PM (#1405262)

You said that philosophy is only limited by the need to be internally consistent.

Well, for one, religious philosophy is often not internally consistent. Same for eastern philosophy. And most of the history of western philosophy, for that matter. So even your one criterion doesn't work when you force it to be universally applied to everything that's ever been given the title of philosophy.

And that's the problem with your statement. It takes the broadest possible subject in the history of man and makes a generalization about it that at best applies to some small sub-set and at worst applies to absolutely nothing.

What you are talking about is the validity of a philosophical argument. But just about every discipline in philosophy is also concerned with the soundness of the argument.

Even things like ontology or metaphysics are concerned with correlating their arguments with the way things actually are in the world.

Otherwise, all philosophical discourse would occur in symbols. But instead, the factual accuracy of the argument's constituent premises is also important.

So epistemology, ethics, political philosophy, aesthetics, philosophy of law, religion, mathematics, and language... 100% of these things are concerned with much more than being internally consistent.

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Re:IAmA theoretical physicist. Ask me anything (via reddit) by Retric on Friday June 04, 2010 @08:29PM (#1406044)

Subset's of philosophy are often defined by their individual constraints. Huge areas are devoted to various assumptions such as "the bible is literally accurate" or "how people actually behave" (descriptive ethics), but the only thing they all have in common is a drive for reasonable levels of consistency. Taken to an extreme you end up with Math in all it's glory, but a complete lack of such consistency results in meaningless gibberish.

Consider the amount of effort spent to explain evil in a world created by a good, perfect, and all powerful god. Or the winding paths to define "truth" without creating a tautology etc etc. IMO, Philosophy sit's in the middle ground between religion which is happy to make inconsistent things up, math which requires self consistency, and science which must be grounded in reality.

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Re:IAmA theoretical physicist. Ask me anything (via reddit) by jayruy on Friday June 04, 2010 @02:42PM (#1405186)

huh? define a philosophical constraint and i'll undefine it for you... i believe the import is that it helps us come to terms with our humanity, which has no formal definition, by definition

mathematics certainly informs philosophy, the most pertinent example that comes to mind is godel on the works of wittgenstein... if you look at philosophy post godel/wittgenstein it has become continental philosophy (analytically formed 'novels') and analytic philosophy (which informs the impact of logic on natural language)...

each of these activities carries as much or as little weight as you would like to give it... but conservative thinkers might say the same of even pure sciences - are we really better off with all the devices/distractions of modern life?

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Re:IAmA theoretical physicist. Ask me anything (via reddit) by RevRal on Friday June 04, 2010 @07:31AM (#1404014)

To a very large degree, I agree with what you say. If we go any further I think it would amount to nit picking.

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