The Brain=Mind Fallacy

[Angrboda]

I'm not going to go into this debate, because I've had it before, and usually doing so only highlights what my opponents don't understand about science and philosophy. It was only the mid-twentieth century that the philosopher Karl Popper and Rudolph Carnap developed the standard of falsifiability and how it should be used to strengthen development and testing of scientific theories. Many people act like falsifiability just dropped out of the sky, or has always been there. It has not. And you cannot discover the principle of falsifiability by the scientific method; it's a philosophical product. Prior to falsifiability, the views of the Vienna Circle — philosophers — ruled scientific theory, and the test of a good theory or hypothesis was verifiability, a standard we crow about being weak and terribly vulnerable to confirmation bias today. But if it hadn't been for the philosophical work or Popper and Carnap, scientists would likely still consider it the gold standard, and our science and progress would be hobbled by that inferior philosophy.

I don't feel like getting in a fight, and I'm going to withdraw, but people who blithely argue that science is independent of philosophy, or even superior to it, are just stupid and ignorant about BOTH science and philosophy, in my view. In my opinion, our modern scientific world is resting on what is essentially a three legged stool: science, math, and philosophy are all dependent on each other to create the whole, and the thought that you can remove one without affecting the others, imho, would simply leave you with a broken world.

And you know what's funniest? I find that practicing scientists, and people well versed in science, tend to be the most myopic and ignorant of the connections between philosophy and science; they should be the most knowledgeable, not the least.