[Serious] Generally speaking, is philosophy a worthwhile subject of study?

[polymath257]

I'm not sure there isn't a parallel between ethics and math.  You say the aliens would come to the same conclusions in math if given the same axioms, well it's quite likely the same is true of ethics.  The problem with the alien test is that philosophy is about thinking and reasoning correctly, so if aliens think and reason differently, they're going to reach different conclusions.  You've acknowledged that math is much the same.  There's a good deal of human-centricity to any domain that focuses on thinking and reasoning.  But it's possible physics would be the same.  The human mind has limits, such as the number of items it can hold in conscious awareness, depth of indirection, and so on.  While Kant was wrong about various things, his observation that our experience of the world is pre-structured by things like spatial dimension seems correct.  Try as we might we can't think in four or five dimensions.  An alien species that could, or that could simultaneously contemplate hundreds of thousands of items would be able to conceive of things that we can't.  In that case, we would be the alien species who doesn't agree with the science of that other species.  Does our not being able to think the same scientific truths as them indicate those truths aren't objective?  I think not.  It seems the alien test is more a test of how similar or different an alien is than us, than any test of objectivity.

ETA:  An even stranger possibility is that the aliens don't understand certain concepts necessary to physics.  Various animals like crows are able to solve problems, indicating animal intelligence, but do they have reasoning like we do?  An alien species could have no concept of cause and effect, with any 'reasoning' about such happening subconsciously.  Would they understand our physics?  It seems we're in a parallel situation with math and ethics in that for an alien species to be able to embrace our physics, they have to have a lot in common with us or else they'll fail the test.  It's looking like the alien test is less about objectivity and more about similarity to humans.

I think there is such a thing as correct reasoning. It just doesn't go nearly as far as philosophers would like. Most of ethics and aesthetics, for example, is ultimately opinion, possibly based in our biology, but also based on our society, etc.

The problem is that 'correct reasoning' doesn't give you the fundamental assumptions from which you reason. And, ultimately, there are no 'clearly true' assumptions.

Because of that, the sensitivities that lead to ethics would likely be different if an alien has substantially different biology.

Yes, our biology channels our thought processes. In many cases, it takes a great deal of training to overcome, even partially, that biology. That is one reason math is hard for many people: logical thinking isn't natural for us.

I guess I see physics to be much more objective than ethics and would expect even very different aliens to agree on it while disagreeing with the ethics. Even if they cannot see the same part of the spectrum as we do, they would be able to acknowledge the physical aspects of electromagnetic waves. The same if they see many more colors than we do or see neutrinos. it is the same universe for us all. Ethics, however, is more based on what is pleasant or unpleasant and that, I would suspect, would be very different for even fairly close species.

BTW: it *is* possible to learn to visualize four dimensional figures. It takes practice and is imperfect, but it is possible. But, most people don't even have very good 3D visualization.