Starboy

Good point Indian! It wasn't untill people ditched the philosopical point of view that science started making headway.

Starboy

King's Indian

Ouch! But at least it must have had some use once...

This is good fun, but I have tickets for tonight... If you like, I can recommend a couple of really good books about how some philosophers get their knickers in a twist. Of course, they misguidedly argue from a position of "Good" philosophy, but even if you skip those bits, it should be right up your alley.

Catch up later,
KI.

Cod

I completely agree with Keith when he says philosophy is the "study of humanity." That is exactly what the point of philosophy is in my opinion and others around me agree.

Starboy

Last time I checked, anthropology was the study of humanity.

Frotiw

I am not sure how much I bother write. My posts does not seem to justify an answer.

Anyway Startway's attempt seem to be philosophy!

Amos

That might be true but that should be to our chagrin because we were forced to. Had we remained true to our mythology we would not now have to extrapolate the science of our day from our own very omniscient mind (the "higher self" of Mali5).

So what I am suggesting here is that if we can become omniscient in our own mind why should we go the long way around and find ways to extract inspirations from our own mind to do the scientific experiments on.

Starboy

Greetings Amos,

How have you been?

Amos, if you are wrong then no amount of exploring our own mind will reveal reality.

Starboy

King's Indian

Yeah, I know, replying to my own posts is a bit incestuous, but I'm lazy. and I did have a serious point...
...whcih was that the decision to remove God as a necessary factor to describe nature was a philosophical one. You can thank Descartes for that, when he came up with the mind/brain thing. Of course, he felt he had to stick Him somewhere, so he made him the link between the two. And come to think of it, even Galileo used thought experiments for his ideas on accelleration of bodies (you don't think he really started dropping lead shot from the Tower of Pisa? Who'd stand for it?)
Ner-night,
KI

Amos

Hello Starboy. I realize that what I wrote remains hypothetical. However, the fact remains that -- even as we have seen in another thread here, by John Page I think it was-- that "we can only have knowledge about that which we know" it becomes evident that we extracted the hypothesis from our own mind to do the experiment on. From this follows that if we did know the full extent of our own mind we would not have to do the experiment because we would know the end before we started. Apart form this accidents happen and if we are lucky we uncover somthing we did not know.

Starboy

Which Descartes are you talking about? The only one I know of coined the ontological argument for god. For Descartes god was crucial for the reliability of human cognition. In any case his greatest contributions were in mathematics and not in science.

It is a myth that Galileo dropped weights from the tower of Pisa. Anyway it was his insistence that philosophical debate was useless for understanding reality and no substitute for actual experimentation that separated him from the philosophers of the time and today and made him a scientist.

I just want everyone to know that Indian and I are not in cahoots. It is purely coincidental that he continues to bring up points that support my claims as he tries to defend the relevance of philosophy.

Starboy