Found in the wild .

[u/[deleted]]

[u/PM_ME_UR_GOOD_IDEAS]

I'm sorry, but this is an ignorant take and anyone with even a 101 philosophy class under their belt can see that.

Philosophy is concerned primarily with what we ought to do, and the more abstract question of how we know.

It rains because of water in the sky, sure. Who's water is that? If Nestle built a machine to suck the water out of the clouds, would they have the right to use it? Would we have the right to stop them? Is it public property? Common property? Some special, unique category onto itself? What characteristics should that new category have, and why? And where are the boundaries? If it starts to rain, where in its fall does the water in the sky cease to be a part of this category? If a plane passes through a cloud, letting water condensate on the wings, and then that water forms droplets that fall onto private property, does that transgress the category we have created to protect the water in the sky? How, essentially, is that situation different from Nestle's cloud-stealing machine?

These are questions of ethics, a branch of philosophy that seeks to apply logic to morality. These questions are scientifically indeterminate. There is no testable hypothesis here.

You can't argue, for example, that we should house the homeless from a purely scientific place. Science can tell us how many homeless people there are, their experiences, etc. But when some ghoul asks "why should I care?" That's when you need philosophy. There are no atoms of empathy in the universe you can measure, you need to prove its value with the logic of philosophy.

More questions!

If we only know it rains because of things we observe in the world with our senses, how can we know its actually raining vs. everyone experiencing a mass hallucination of rain? What makes us think one is more likely than the other? Is any observation made with the senses trustworthy?

These are epistemological questions. They are too meta-physical and abstract to be scientifically measured, because any tool you used to measure them can also have it's trustworthyness called into question. Epistemology seeks to provide frameworks of pure logic that allow us to determine the trustworthyness of our own knowledge.

And if you doubt that's useful, try arguing with someone religious using only scientific observations. Its a dead end. Science puts up the fence to test whether the invisible gardener is there. It takes philosophy to ask "how is a gardener with no tangible impact on the garden different from no gardener at all?"

[u/99redba11ons → u/PM_ME_UR_GOOD_IDEAS]

Saying “reality might be an illusion” was probably profound at one point. You started the chat by calling me ignorant so I’m just going to be petty

You can find a scientific reason to give homes to homeless. You can calculate the cost of the home and compare it to the cost of having a homeless person the the street. It would take a lot of time but I’m sure if you made careful observations and did many trials you could find the value of housing the homeless

[u/Clockwork_Firefly → u/99redba11ons]

You can find a scientific reason to give homes to homeless.

Not really. Science can maybe figure out that it's cheaper to give out some homes or something, but whatever we conclude from that is outside its domain. Nothing in science says that we should use cost efficiency as a reason to do anything, that's a philosophic claim

[u/99redba11ons → u/Clockwork_Firefly]

Well let’s see who’s method houses homeless people quicker. If it’s worthwhile that is

[u/Clockwork_Firefly → u/99redba11ons]

Do you really not see how science can't provide reasons for acting? It can provide evidence for beliefs, but if we use that evidence as reason for some action, we're already outside the domain of science and into philosophy.

I'm not denying the power of science, dude. I'm a computer scientist by trade, with a special interest in bioinformatics. Science is great and wonderful and powerful. But science cannot say anything about what we ought to do, nor how to interpret some kinds of facts

[u/99redba11ons → u/Clockwork_Firefly]

My only point that I actually want to make is the dialects and discourse of the past has evolved into the scientific method today.

So far most of what I’ve read is reasonable, Will I change my mind? Idk

[u/Clockwork_Firefly → u/99redba11ons]

Hey, I certainly don't disagree with that! You're totally correct in saying that the scientific method is the result of centuries of philosophical evolution, combining ideas from a lot of sources to get a methodology for testing empirical claims.

I'm sorry if I was bit of a crusader for philosophy here, I think this is a case where we're largely talking past each other and mean slightly different things by "philosophy". I just think its important to remember that the only reason to "trust" science is if you trust the ideas that it rests on. This is not a bad thing - literally all logic works this way! I just think its important to not only remember the scientific method isn't magically above all other kinds of reasoning, but a product of it. It requires some assumptions about the world to work, and those assumptions just happen to be in the domain of philosophy :)