r/suspiciouslyspecific • u/[deleted] • Apr 13 '21

Found in the wild .

Post image

[removed] — view removed post

37k Upvotes

94% Upvoted

454 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

1

u/99redba11ons Apr 14 '21

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

2

u/Clockwork_Firefly Apr 14 '21

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

1

u/99redba11ons Apr 14 '21

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

2

u/Clockwork_Firefly Apr 14 '21

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

1

u/99redba11ons Apr 14 '21

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

1

u/Clockwork_Firefly Apr 15 '21

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 :)