Philosophy

spicysaurus said:
jayjaya29, I think I understand better now what you're saying. And of course, science is happy to admit that it doesn't prove anything, it only disproves.
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What do you mean science only disproves things? The discovery of a new subatomic particle or the discovery of DNA is a disproval?
 
Okay, "only" was a bad word. But it never proves anything. It suggests, theorizes, hypothesizes. But never proves. Proof implies no room for doubt. There's always room for doubt.
 
You haven't shifted your position...what do you have to say about scientific discoveries? You can't prove something doesn't exist after its been found.
 
jayjaya29 said:
You haven't shifted your position...what do you have to say about scientific discoveries? You can't prove something doesn't exist after its been found.
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Addendum/caveat: You can still prove that something doesn't exist in the way it was thought to after it has been found. Example: Gravity. Everyone goes on questioning how magnets work, but the real question is fucking gravity, how does it work?

Is it gravitons? Is it some poorly understood property of massive objects (example: rush limbaugh)? Or is it just some property of thermodynamics? We may not know for a while, but we do know it exists.
 
OK, so when I first saw that Spicy had started this thread it made me feel a bit thick and certainly very under-read, however sitting down with a fresh cup of really hot tea and concentrating most of it makes sense to me in spite of different streams of thought and it has piqued my interest, particularly with regard to paradigms and scientific theory. I look forward to reading more and who knows, maybe even picking up a book or two on the subject if anyone can recommend any?

jayjaya29 said:
You haven't shifted your position...what do you have to say about scientific discoveries? You can't prove something doesn't exist after its been found.
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Sorry, but you made me think of this......

The Babel Fish

The babel fish is small, yellow, leach-like, and probably the oddest thing in the Universe. It feeds on brainwave energy received not from its own carrier but from those around it. It absorbs all unconscious mental frequencies from the brainwave energy to nourish itself with. It then excretes into the mind of its carrier a telepathic matrix formed by combining the conscious thought frequencies with nerve signals picked up from the speech centers of the brain which has supplied them. The practical upshot of all this is if you insert a Babel fish in your ear you can instantly understand said to you in any form of language. The speech patterns you actually hear decode the brainwave matrix which has been fed into your mind by your Babel fish.

Now it is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that anything so mind--bogglingly useful could have evolved purely by chance that some thinkers have chosen to see it as a final and clinching proof of the nonexistence of God. The argument goes something like this. ??I refuse to prove that I exist,? says God, ?for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing.? ??But says Man, ?the Babel is a dead giveaway, isn?t it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves you exist, and so therefore by your own arguments, you don?t. QED.?
??Oh Dear,? says God, ?I hadn?t thought of that,? and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic. ??Oh that was easy,? says Man, and for an encore goes on to prove that black is white and gets himself killed on the next zebra crossing.

Most leading theologians claim that this argument is a load of dingo?s kidneys, but that didn?t stop Oolon Colluphid making a small fortune when he used it as the central theme of his best-selling book, Well That about Wraps It Up for God.

Meanwhile, the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures, has caused more and bloodier wars then anything else in the history of creation.
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jayjaya29 said:
You haven't shifted your position...what do you have to say about scientific discoveries? You can't prove something doesn't exist after its been found.
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Has it really been found?

After your explanation of paradigm shifts I would really say that science doesn't prove the existance of anything. This doesn't mean that when we discover a new particle (just for the sake of an example) that particle doesn't exist, it means that that particle COULD well not exist. We don't know (and can't know for sure) if what our paradigm (to stick with that interpretation) explains as a new particle is really a new particle and not some manifestation of some different force we still know nothing about.

In fact, we can not be sure (with --absolute-- certainty) about the existance of the same keyboards we are using to type down our comments here. Does this mean they don't exist or we should not use them anymore until we don't have the absolute certainty of their existance? No, not at all. What all this undeletable uncertainty is telling us is just to not become fanatics of what we think we know, to remain open to new possibilities, so that when reality will bring it before our eyes we will be able to recognize it.

Because, on the other hand, while we can not be --absolutely-- sure of anything, I don't see why we should start thinking we really know nothing. Reality is all around us, it was there before, it will be there after, it's much greater than us and, most important, since we are some beings evolved in it we are well-equipped to grasp at least a part of it, reality is not trying to cheat us: much of what we see happening is a perception of something really happening. If we are cheated, it's because we listened more to what was in our imagination than to what was around us.

Our keyboards, for example, are there, and even if their true nature could be much more complex than what we think, they are still there nonetheless, they (most probably) have those characteristics we say they have (the same characteristics that make it possible for us to use them) and we are able to not only use them, but even build them, so we are surely able to control and reproduce the mechanisms behind their working that are relevant to us. Are those mechanisms really what we think they are? It is not important, but we know those mechanisms work in a way that has made possible for us to replicate them. maybe some day we will know something more and we will see that what we thinked was essentially limited, but it still worked.

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An absolute truth exists, but it's not necessarily within our possibilities to know it. I am really doubting we can really understand the full extent of reality, it really surpasses our skills. I remember an episode that hit me: two pictures: the first one was an image of roughly half of our galaxy, and contained a million (literally) visible stars (which were visible in the image). The second one was a picture of some part of deep space: it had another million lights, but this time every one of them was a galaxy. My mind is simply not able to fully understand a number that big. And that was only a part of it.


Are we able to know everything? We don't know (probably not). Do we know the real essence of at least something? We don't know (probably not). Will we ever know? We don't know (probablt not). Maybe we will stick forever in some interpretation. Is this interpretation valuable in some ways? Yes. Extremely, because for what stupid we are we know how to bend part of reality to our will. Our interpretation is extremely valuable. But let us never forget it is an interpretation. We are able to kill -with- it, but we can not kill -in the name- of it.

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This thread really has two different topics in it (material philosophy and spiritual philosophy? Or am I just delirious some more?).

As for the second, I enjoyed Frankiess explanation of his way of life. It made me think.
 
jayjaya29 said:
You haven't shifted your position...what do you have to say about scientific discoveries? You can't prove something doesn't exist after its been found.
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Was I supposed to be shifting my position?

And actually, you CAN prove something doesn't exist after it's been found. Or rather, that what we thought existed isn't actually what exists.

For example, we know about this stuff called DNA. We think we know that DNA makes RNA which makes protein. In fact, we're so married to that idea we call it the central dogma of life.

It entirely possible, and I'd even go as far as to say probable, that this central dogma will be broken down and replaced with another mechanism. At its most basic level, yes, DNA makes RNA. But it makes all kinds of RNAs, many (most?) of which don't go out into the cell to be the message used in making proteins. And aside from that, there are thousands, millions even, of bases of DNA that don't ever get transcribed in the first place (we think). What's that DNA doing? Surely it's not just sitting around taking up space.

These gaps in our understanding point to a flaw in our knowledge. There may very well come a time when evidence proves the central dogma of life incorrect. Of course, it may not happen. But we're open to the possibility. And it's equally likely, if and when this evidence comes to light, that a new theory will be proposed which DOES align with current evidence, and this theory will replace the central dogma of life.

Scientists as a whole are quite proud of the fact that science only proves things to be incorrect, and never proves them to be correct. We are happy to admit that we could be wrong, not just about one thing, but about absolutely everything. That's part of what makes the scientific journey so wonderful and exciting. And this insistence on asserting proof of incorrectness is built into the scientific method: when you create your hypothesis, you're just as bound to create your null hypothesis. A supporting conclusion both satisfies your hypothesis and fails to satisfy your null hypothesis. Not only that, sometimes we learn as much by finding the evidence supports the null hypothesis after all.
 
^^ You've shifted the focus to the area of epistemology...which concerns itself with how much humans can know and understand. Fascinating area of philosophy but its a bit tricky to discuss properly because semantics and language use is a big issue.

I am still not off the idea that science is all about disproving things...its bugging me that people take hold in this idea. Along with my BA in philosophy I also have a BS in chemistry and am currently interning at a national lab here in the states, so I'm no stranger to how science works. Science is a piecemeal process, its all about small steps that over time leads to big advancements in technology and human understanding. To me, or at least how I see things from my field, is separated into two sections: applied science and discovery science. Applied science is dependent on discovery science. Discovery science is exploring the natural phenomena of this world in order to learn more about it...the LHC for example or the Hubble telescope. It advances what we know about this universe we exist in. Applied science uses what we know and have discovered to advance our technologies and quality of life, etc. I work in the field of applied sciences...trying to create more efficient solar cells, but the information that comes out from my research increased overall human knowledge. Im kinda blurring the categories I just setup haha.

Anyways, I still don't see how science can be about disproving things. Mixing yellow paint and blue paint together creates green paint, how can this ever be disproven? Of course there are limits (inductive logic(not 100% sure the sun will rise tomorrow)), but for practical purposes science is a constructive field, not a destructive one. How can science disprove things it doesn't even know exists?

EDIT: After reading your newest post I see where you are going now...your semantics are off though. At one point humans did not know that there was such a thing called DNA which contains our genetic code, after some brilliant work and some controversy (watson and crick didn't do most of the grunt work) DNA was discovered. I am still harping on the point that you can't disprove that DNA exists. However you are saying that our understanding of HOW DNA works can change and I am in total agreement with you...this would constitute a paradigm shift if it ever did happen. Sure the discovery of what telemeres and junk sequencing may be too much for the dominant paradigm to explain and a new paradigm may arise that better addresses the new knowledge and a paradigm shift would probably occur. However this does not invalidate the actual scientific work that has been done it is merely changing how we look at and interpret the data that comes from experiments.

Our explanations and understandings may change but the data doesn't.
 
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Jay said:
I do not know if this is a philosophy or not, but something I have been practicing as of some time ago: pacifism. Is anyone else here a pacifist?
I have found new outlooks on war, and while I appreciate those who serve, I find the concept of war sickening and repugnant, being that my God has stated clearly that no human shall take a life of another, and objectively, I agree with that. I think I am also one of the very few far right wing pacifists out there, oddly. :? And no, no matter how hard you try, the HELL if I am going the other side. :lol:
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Pacifism seems to be a quite good position, but i decided that it's none i can uphold facing the realities of this world. Both a) facing an agressor threatening the life of myself and the people next to me or the existence of the community i live in and b) facing crimes of indescribable scale being committed by third parties (don't have to be concentration camps, the fact that the possibility that a woman in africa has been raped several times before her 18th birthday is higher than the possibilty that she'll learn to read is enough) i think the use of deadly force is not only morally allowed, but even required.
Some people (one of my teachers is among them) argue that while what i just said is true and thus a categorical pacifism is no morally sound position, the amount of evil going to war produces surely is always too high compared to the amount of evil possibly prevented, and thus the requirements for going to war can never be met. I'll doubt even this.

EDIT: About god's stance on war, see: http://www.newadvent.org/summa/3040.htm and more important, on self-defense: http://www.newadvent.org/summa/3064.htm#article7 (shamelessly assuming that St. Thomas Aquinas and god share the same opinion).
 
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^^
I hope you are referring to the Christian god...other religions have completely other stances on aggression and self-defense.
 
jayjaya29 said:
^^
I hope you are referring to the Christian god...other religions have completely other stances on aggression and self-defense.
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Well, the three big monotheistic religions don't differ that much there... and i found it to be self-explanatory that when i refer to a catholic scolar, i am talking about the christian god.

But what's with the "i hope" bit? What would have happened if i would have not been referring to the christian god?
 
Just myself overreacting to your statement. I apologize.

I took a class called the philosophy of war and peace. Was pretty straightforward...what Aquinas says is pretty generic. I enjoyed the class more once we got to more modern works such as Michael Walzer's writings.
 
I'm working on my Ph.D on just war - Walzer has typical 20th century conflicts (large nations or blocks of nations against each other) pretty much nailed. There are some minor problems, i think, mostly regarding the concept of surpreme emergency. But when it comes to what's called "new wars", "low-intensity conflicts" or "asymmetrical conflicts", war where one or more sides do not consist of a regular army (this includes terrorism) it falls flat as some of his assumptions about the nature of warfare do not apply.
 
Yeah terrorism is a big problem for the conventional war theory as the whole population of a nation are not all terrorists. We spent half of the class on terrorism as it was the professor's field of interest.
 
jayjaya29 said:
Yeah terrorism is a big problem for the conventional war theory as the whole population of a nation are not all terrorists. We spent half of the class on terrorism as it was the professor's field of interest.
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Oh, who was the professor?
 
jayjaya29 said:
You haven't shifted your position...what do you have to say about scientific discoveries? You can't prove something doesn't exist after its been found.
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Sure you can. One of the things about science is that it always allows for a level of perception that was previously unavailable which could very well disprove something we previously knew to exist.

Hibbleton said:
I can end the religion discussion.
Here is the truth about all religion in a nutshell
http://vimeo.com/13726978
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zeitgeist debunked
 
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Regarding God...

[video]http://video.google.de/videoplay?docid=-869630813464694890&hl=de&emb=1#[/video]
 
jayjaya29 said:
Yeah terrorism is a big problem for the conventional war theory as the whole population of a nation are not all terrorists. We spent half of the class on terrorism as it was the professor's field of interest.
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This is what I'm interested in, given how one side isn't readily identifiable and may not follow the Geneva/Hague Conventions.
 
PelicanHazard said:
This is what I'm interested in, given how one side isn't readily identifiable and may not follow the Geneva/Hague Conventions.
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And sadly the side not following war conventions are, in many cases, not (only) the terrorists.
 
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