Philosophy and science

Does it support my glass? Can I put my feet up on it? Not true. I can put my feet up on it and still reach my glass. Therefore it exists.

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Anyone so limited that they can only spell a word one way is severely handicapped!

Fine - if you are satisfied with that level of abstraction then no problem. It will serve you at a pragmatic and limited level. Your glass will be ok and you have somewhere to put your feet.You could then say 'what more is needed'? Well for the scientist there is a deeper understanding of what the table can do, what it implies, what it could lead to. By examining the table can we make general statements of a wider nature about our surroundings?
From studying your table and going down into the structure we get transistors, atom bombs and a heap of other stuff that requires some knowledge of 'under the surface'.Will a quantum field view lead to new applications/materials? Dunno..but I think our experience says that understanding something at a deeper level than present is generally a worthwhile enterprise and will generally spawn things which could not be predicted at the time...just my take on it.

BUT that additional understanding does not negate the fact that my feet and my glass agree that it is a table.Don't confuse philosophy with reality or understanding.

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Anyone so limited that they can only spell a word one way is severely handicapped!

Your implication seems to be that the pragmatic, physical level is somehow the lowest, or the least real.I'm thinking that at each level of remove from the pragmatic level of putting your feet up on the table and resting your glass on it, you're moving away from the real. Your notion of what a table is? Less real than the table. Your notions about what the notion of a table involves? Less real, still.Sometimes it's useful to get away from what is real, sometimes that's a source of useful knowledge, but again I think you've fallen for the greatest con of philosophers - that thinking is real and things aren't. But the exact opposite is true. Your mind only exists because of a brain. But brains don't need minds to exist.

Never said brains needed minds. The point is that the 'animal reality' of things is useful yes, but unless we want to go back a few centuries it isn't nearly enough. That isn't a philosophical issue, it is a scientific issue. Modern science is not something you can treat in this pragmatic common-sense way because the universe doesn't obey common-sense laws. The very limited part of it that we perceive appears to, that's all.

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Don't confuse philosophy with reality or understanding.

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You don't think that might be the slightest bit patronising?

Not exactly saying you did, but that's more a necessary consequence of the philosopher's world of the primacy of thought - things like brains should cease to exist once the thoughts keeping them around evaporate. Indeed if you want to disprove the notion that this world is merely a figment of your imagination, have someone open up your skull and take a picture of your brain. Sure, your body could be imaginary, a fictional avatar with which you interact with the imaginary world around you, but what could be the purpose of an imaginary brain?World of Warcraft avatars don't have virtual organs, because they serve no purpose. The surface of the avatar represents the interface between the virtual world and the virtual representation of your mind; a virtual brain wouldn't represent anything. It would have no purpose and therefore is omitted.But our world is full of brains, many that have minds running inside them, the vast majority without. That's significant evidence that the world is real and concepts only imaginary. Well, but how do you think science works except by perception? The microscope does nothing on its own; the science is done by me, using perception to make observations through it. Obviously what I can see with my natural senses is limited, but our scientific tools all operate by extending the power and scope of those senses. Extending our perception.

I hope not, it was not meant that way. BUT... even the additional things we learn will eventually be judged at the feet and glass level. It is at that level that we as humans live.

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Anyone so limited that they can only spell a word one way is severely handicapped!

Of course, but those perceptions colour the way we interpret the data.
It is very easy to demontrate how flawed we are at both perceiving and then understanding that perception. Nearly everyone has fundamental and very basic misconceptions which lead to similarly basic errors in decision/logic which we aren't even aware of most of the time. Whether that perception is through an electron microscope or our eyes doesn't make much difference.Who could possibly work in particle physics and retain the notion that reality is what we perceive? Shift a few things around and that perception is completely different. Hell, we don't even need to invoke quantum physics to see that - relativity on its own is enough to show us that what we think is real is far from it.PS - I recommend having a bash at the following to test your own perceptions, sense of consistency and reality...http://www.philosophersnet.com/games/
Philosophy Experiments Edited by Bikerman, : No reason given.

And that should make us less willing to trust our intuition and the notions we derive by philosophy, not more. It should make us pay more attention to the empirical data we generate by observation, not less.It's precisely because our cognitive apparatus is so error-prone that we should be very distrustful of the claims of philosophers, because every step of philosophical reasoning both begins and ends with cognition. In philosophy it's cognition all the way down. In science, cognition is balanced by data received from the objective physical world. I don't know. I do know that particle physics specifically is used, or misused, by philosophers to support the notion of a universe determined by perception. Didn't you see "What the *&^% Do We Know?" Or maybe you missed Deepak Chopra, one of the nation's foremost authorities on "wellness":

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Because with physics arriving at the quantum world, neuroscience at the most minuscule operations of brain cells, and biology at the finest fabrics of DNA, all three have hit a wall. At the finest level, Nature is too complex to unravel through such weak ideas as randomness, materialism, and unconscious mechanics. Nature behaves, and as we know from ourselves, behavior is tricky. Science has tons of data about phenomena that don't fit any explanation. For example:

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How does an observer cause light to change from acting like a wave to acting like a particle?
How can a group of ordinary people cause a random number generator to turn out more ones than zeros simply by wanting it to?
How do millions of monarch butterflies migrate to the same mountainous regions of Mexico when they've never been there before and were not born there?
How do twins connect at a distance, so that one knows immediately when the other has been hurt or dies?
Where in the brain does the self live? Why do I feel like myself and no one else?

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It's unfortunate that people at work in the physics world are unaware, apparently, of the degree to which people outside their field are using quantum physics as a pseudoscientific justification for magic. Not that it's their fault, of course, but we could use your help on the pushback. Not falling for philosopher nonsense would be a good start, I think.

Philosophy has had at least 2,500 years to get it's act together and to make some serious contributions.The most productive areas have been in logic and the early contributions to scientific method.But what we seem to hear from Philosophy lately is "But what about us? We were here first!" along with reminders that Ph.D stands for Doctor of Philosophy.As far as science and serious learning are concerned, Philosophy simply has not kept up. To most working scientists that field is largely ignored as unproductive.

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Religious belief does not constitute scientific evidence, nor does it convey scientific knowledge.

From memory......It was something like the basis of Popper's rejection of purely inductivist methods applied equally to his own proposed falsification alternative.Applied in the sense that it is purely inductive to think that if a theory has survived prior falsification attempts it will necessarily be better placed to survive future falsification attempts.Thus meaning that simply having survived a number of falsification attempts should make no difference to how confident one is in ones theory.Something like that anyway........If that makes no sense I will look it up. It was in my philosophy of sci class but that was going on 20 years (gulp!) ago now.

But you are doing it again - appealing to the example of a charlatan to say something about philosophers. Deepak Chopra is a woo-woo merchant with no more knowledge of quantum physics than my 10 yr old Nephew. Actually strike that - my 10 yr old nephew knows more, because what little he DOES know is correct. Nobody educated beyond the level of a common newt thinks that Chopra has anything truthful, let alone meaningful to say about anything.
If I said that physics was baloney because Erik Von Daniken uses it to show how alien spaceships work...well that has about the same validity of quoting Chopra to say anything about anything....

Or any philosopher. That's sort of the point - I could really point to anybody in the field of philosophy opening their piehole about quantum physics - they're invariably using it to support their fiction of the primacy of thought and perception. I guess, but Von Daniken is a well-known crank. Deepak Chopra is a widely-known and well-regarded national figure. Don't get me wrong, I think he's a charlatan too; the problem is, he's a charlatan with a lot of support from the philosophers who think that perception is more real than what it is you're perceiving.

Yes I see that but I think that is to overstretch what Popper actually said about Falsification. He didn't rule out inductive reasoning completely. His main point was one of demarcation - if an hypothesis makes testable (falsifiable) predictions or it doesn't. That, to my mind, is still the best way of dividing science from pseudo and non science.
The fact that an hypothesis is falsifiable says nothing about it's veracity - and Popper was in error with his later work on this - but I still maintain it is the best test for making sure that such an hypothesis qualifies as scientific, even if wrong.Edited by Bikerman, : sp