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

[John 6IX Breezy]

Ethics and aesthetics are, among other things, methods of knowing oneself.

"Know yourself" is, famously, good advice.

But knowledge of oneself, of this type, is not scientific knowledge. It is not empirical, quantifiable, or repeatable by distant researchers. It is also more than mere opinion.

Knowing everything there is to know about physics while NOT knowing oneself would be a poor choice of values.

Can you clarify this point further? Specifically, how ethics and aesthetics are methods of knowing oneself. But more broadly, how you would apply this argument with a branch of science like psychology as opposed to physics?

[The Grand Nudger]

Classical examples of causality arise because macroscopic things are made of a LOT of quantum level things. The *averages* of the probabilities have a deterministic, even Newtonian, structure. The fact that Avagadro's number is big is why we can even talk about causality at the macroscopic level.

I don't see philosophers grappling with this basic set of facts. Instead, they seem to think that causality is an a priori truth that *must* hold for science to be done. But that is clearly wrong.

Instead of causality upholding the laws of physics, we now see that the laws of physics *allow* for causality in some circumstances.

The answer to why philosophy historically did that is nestled in the question.  Up until the point that it was discovered that the underlying physics may be fundamentally acausal, another idea was better evidenced.  Not so much anymore, which is why it's easy to find find contemporary philosophers discussing things that philosophers from a century or more ago did not.

And so what else is required above consistency? You cannot determine the truth of falsity of a consistent statement by simply sitting and thinking about it. At some point, you *need* to do some sort of observation. That is why some empiricism is required. It is an additional filter to weed out falsehoods. And it does this incredibly well, as witnessed by the advances of science once it became prominent.

Valid inferences and sound premises.  Empiricism has been helping with sound premises since before there was a thing called science. The only things you can know by consistency are issues of definition. A married bachelor is incoherent, so is an incompetent omnipotence.

Yes, this is required to 'live the good life'.

And, if philosophy limited itself to such *opinions* that can vary from person to person because of differences in personality, it would maximize its value.

Again, the main value of philosophy is in *asking questions* and *challenging assumptions*, not in finding truth or knowledge. When it comes up with grand over-reaching theories, it tends to fall on its face.

The entire concept of knowledge and truth are both philosophy.  We call a conclusion derived from sound premises in a valid inference "true".  That's all that means. That's all an objective statement is, in any context, even ethical and aesthetic contexts. We think that the true positions we hold are "knowledge". Thus, moral knowledge, or knowledge of beauty, or the rich tapestry of symbolism. All that jazz. You've been thoroughly steeped in a philosopy about ethics, too, and believe it's true, that it's knowledge - that's what's informing your objections and the specific language of those objections. Realist philosophies are uninterested in opinions, though, and the ethical theory you're expounding here is as out of date as classical mechanics.

The trouble with your position here, is that you have neither a sound premise nor any voiced rationale for declaring all x opinion - and these two mistakes are propping up an unspoken value system which you purport to report as a fact. It's a snake eating it's own tail kind of mistake. This, no matter how many examples you're presented with that speak to each concern directly.

[Belacqua]

Can you clarify this point further? 

Uh oh. Money where my mouth is time.

Specifically, how ethics and aesthetics are methods of knowing oneself. But more broadly, how you would apply this argument with a branch of science like psychology as opposed to physics?

In physics and the other so-called "hard" sciences, knowledge has to be as far away from personal experience as possible. In fact personal experience doesn't count as knowledge in those fields. 

Knowledge in physics is detached from the individual experiencer, interpreted through the lens of theory (which is a historical group project, contingent on its own genealogy and institutional approval) and expressed as abstractly as possible. Ideally in the abstract language of mathematics. It is a fiction, or an image, made to refer in some abstract way to the real world. 

(Blake called the knowledge that science abstracts from experience the "Spectre," because it is dead, unexperienced. He thought that the only reality is what we experience. This is sort of what Romanticism is, in a nutshell.) 

Ethics and aesthetics and phenomenology take as their subjects real people's real experiences. 

In this sense there is a great deal of overlap with psychology, as well as with anthropology, sociology, all kinds of cultural and emotional fields. 

Once we start talking about psychology as a real field of research (pure and applied) then you'll know more about it than I do. I'm thinking that when we stay in philosophy, as opposed to psychology as science, then part of what's different is the is/ought distinction. It is part of a philosopher's job to talk about the oughts. 

Psychology, on the other hand, limits its oughts to two types: 1) professional ethics (you ought not sleep with your clients) or 2) utilitarian means toward decided ends -- that is, IF you want to relieve this guy's agoraphobia, you ought to use these methods. But deciding whether agoraphobia is a good life to have or not is a value judgment, and in my view philosophical -- part of the question: what is a good life?  

Maybe an example is in order. The trend in aesthetic philosophy these days is what they call "Environmental Aesthetics." The people who work with this want to think about how we experience the world around us. Obviously, no one has direct experience of the noumena -- everything is filtered, interpreted, and judged already before it appears to us as phenomena. Aesthetic philosophers want to examine those filters. 

Recently they are talking about how we tend to experience nature as if it were art. When we look out the car window and say, "oh, that's beautiful," what we mean is "that looks like a painting." We enjoy the environment (both natural and built) as if it were something else -- as if it were made by an artist. Japanese people are particularly susceptible to this, since just about all of Chinese and Japanese literature uses items from the natural world for symbolic meaning. Japanese appreciation of nature consists largely of matching a natural object with its literary meaning. There is even a famous haiku against this: something like "How fortunate is he who can see the cherry blossoms and not think 'life is fleeting.'"

So if you're so masochistic as to go to the International Conference of Aesthetics, you can hear a hundred papers on how to get away from traditional judgments. 

Some people suggest that experiencing the natural world without the lens of art means understanding it as science. Then a walk in the woods becomes a science field trip, and we experience things more greatly by citing the Latin names of the plants.

So art is the Scylla and scientism is the Charybdis, and aesthetic philosophers are thinking how we can get the most out of our experience of nature without going to ground on either extreme. 

How we know ourselves, given this problem, means deepening our understanding of how we interface, appreciate, judge, our environments, and how we select what we give our attention to. 

Verbosity, c'est moi.

[The Grand Nudger]

Let's see if this helps.

Let's say we observe philosophy getting things wrong. There won't be any argument, it's just wrong, all the time, we observe this. Let's come up with a hypothesis.

Maybe it's always wrong because it doesn't take contemporary science into account. If that were true, we should be able to look at those times It's Wrong™ and see that they didn't take contemporary science into account. No dice. Kagan, Cole, Dennet, and Crosby all explicitly premise their philosophy on contemporary science and yet It's Wrong™. Must be some other reason, since they can do science, and still get it wrong.

Maybe the problem is that there's no objectivity? If that were true then we should be able to look at those times It's Wrong™ and see that they didn't premise their conclusions on facts of a matter. No dice again. It must be some other reason, since every one explicitly premises their philosophy on facts of a matter, and still get it wrong.

It's a mystery. It's just plain wrong, but not for either of these reasons.

(I have others - maybe it's always wrong because some cosmic monkey in an organ box reshuffles the cosmos after every flip of the coin.)

[Disagreeable]

Not quite. Physics is the base science but it wasn't necessarily studied first and the other subjects didn't necessarily grow out of it. If anything, biology was most likely studied first because it is most familiar to the lay human. Physics may be more fundamental but the other sciences didn't necessarily grow out of it as a subject of study.

Science grew out of philosophy. That's why they are products of philosophy. Before science was called science it was called 'natural philosophy'. Philosophy was here first.

And chemistry grew out of alchemy. But then it matured into a science. Physics and biology became separate subjects when they matured into sciences.

People today doing physics or biology are not doing philosophy any more than chemists today are doing alchemy.

Indeed.

Although, there are philosophers of science who are also scientists.

It's more common in, for example, physics.

[polymath257]

Can you clarify this point further? 

Uh oh. Money where my mouth is time.

Specifically, how ethics and aesthetics are methods of knowing oneself. But more broadly, how you would apply this argument with a branch of science like psychology as opposed to physics?

In physics and the other so-called "hard" sciences, knowledge has to be as far away from personal experience as possible. In fact personal experience doesn't count as knowledge in those fields. 

Knowledge in physics is detached from the individual experiencer, interpreted through the lens of theory (which is a historical group project, contingent on its own genealogy and institutional approval) and expressed as abstractly as possible. Ideally in the abstract language of mathematics. It is a fiction, or an image, made to refer in some abstract way to the real world. 

(Blake called the knowledge that science abstracts from experience the "Spectre," because it is dead, unexperienced. He thought that the only reality is what we experience. This is sort of what Romanticism is, in a nutshell.) 

Ethics and aesthetics and phenomenology take as their subjects real people's real experiences. 

In this sense there is a great deal of overlap with psychology, as well as with anthropology, sociology, all kinds of cultural and emotional fields. 

Once we start talking about psychology as a real field of research (pure and applied) then you'll know more about it than I do. I'm thinking that when we stay in philosophy, as opposed to psychology as science, then part of what's different is the is/ought distinction. It is part of a philosopher's job to talk about the oughts. 

Psychology, on the other hand, limits its oughts to two types: 1) professional ethics (you ought not sleep with your clients) or 2) utilitarian means toward decided ends -- that is, IF you want to relieve this guy's agoraphobia, you ought to use these methods. But deciding whether agoraphobia is a good life to have or not is a value judgment, and in my view philosophical -- part of the question: what is a good life?  

Maybe an example is in order. The trend in aesthetic philosophy these days is what they call "Environmental Aesthetics." The people who work with this want to think about how we experience the world around us. Obviously, no one has direct experience of the noumena -- everything is filtered, interpreted, and judged already before it appears to us as phenomena. Aesthetic philosophers want to examine those filters. 

Recently they are talking about how we tend to experience nature as if it were art. When we look out the car window and say, "oh, that's beautiful," what we mean is "that looks like a painting." We enjoy the environment (both natural and built) as if it were something else -- as if it were made by an artist. Japanese people are particularly susceptible to this, since just about all of Chinese and Japanese literature uses items from the natural world for symbolic meaning. Japanese appreciation of nature consists largely of matching a natural object with its literary meaning. There is even a famous haiku against this: something like "How fortunate is he who can see the cherry blossoms and not think 'life is fleeting.'"

I know this is beside the point, but this whole analysis confuses me. I don't say ;that is beautiful' because 'that looks like a painting'. I say it is beautiful if I think it is beautiful. And I *don't* look at it as if there was an artist (unless, of course, I know it was made by an artist). The filters are certainly there: we can only see part of the spectrum of light, we have per-conceptions that affect what we notice, we are subject to illusions, etc.

But I never look at cherry blossoms and think about how life is fleeting.

But then, I have never quite grasped why the difference between metaphor and simile is supposed to be important. Why is the use (or lack of use) of 'as' or 'like' such a big deal?

So if you're so masochistic as to go to the International Conference of Aesthetics, you can hear a hundred papers on how to get away from traditional judgments. 

Some people suggest that experiencing the natural world without the lens of art means understanding it as science. Then a walk in the woods becomes a science field trip, and we experience things more greatly by citing the Latin names of the plants.

So art is the Scylla and scientism is the Charybdis, and aesthetic philosophers are thinking how we can get the most out of our experience of nature without going to ground on either extreme. 

How we know ourselves, given this problem, means deepening our understanding of how we interface, appreciate, judge, our environments, and how we select what we give our attention to. 

Verbosity, c'est moi.

Strange. I find knowing the science of the rainbow enhances my aesthetic enjoyment of it. It's similar (but not the same) to knowing how the biography of an author can affect the enjoyment of their literature.

[The Grand Nudger]

We find ourselves in the strange position of being apprehended as lucky by the author of the haiku because - for reasons of literary tradition, cherry blossoms are a unit of communication for the idea that life is fleeting in their tradition - but from here, understanding that we're gawking at the reproductive organs of the plant - an objective philosophy might use cherry blossoms or blossoms of any kind as a stand in for permanence, perpetuity, and biological immortality. They do find that use in other parts of eastern (and western) philosophy.

[vulcanlogician]

Hume got a ball rolling, by noting that we cannot *observe* causality. But he still thought causality was basic. Kant thought of it as a basic way of thinking.

Modern quantum theory is acausal. It is probabilistic in essence and there are no 'necessary causes'. Instead, the main 'theory of causation' in modern physics is in quantum field theories and, essentially, says that correlations in probabilities don't travel faster than light.

Classical examples of causality arise because macroscopic things are made of a LOT of quantum level things. The *averages* of the probabilities have a deterministic, even Newtonian, structure. The fact that Avagadro's number is big is why we can even talk about causality at the macroscopic level.

I don't see philosophers grappling with this basic set of facts. Instead, they seem to think that causality is an a priori truth that *must* hold for science to be done. But that is clearly wrong.

Instead of causality upholding the laws of physics, we now see that the laws of physics *allow* for causality in some circumstances.

Philosophers do sometimes grapple with that basic set of facts. Karl Popper, for instance, pointed out that determinism can't be true because of QM. ie. "no cause necessitates a given effect." So, these days, metaphysicians don't analyse hard determinism in their papers. They analyze hard incompatibilism. The hard incompatibilist (like the determinist) denies free will, but the incompatibilist denies it because all states and events happen because of prior states and events. The determinist-- erroneously-- thinks that all states of the universe are necessary given its previous state. A quaint difference, sure. But all I'm trying to show is that philosophers do grapple with the basic facts of QM. Even if, ultimately, they are interested in whether we make our own choices in life, and not in details of QM that don't impact that question.

Sure philosophers don't work out equations and run QM experiments. But that job's already taken. Physicists do that. Physics is also STEM, which btw pays more than philosophy. And, as an added bonus, Brewer will take you seriously if you do STEM.

Me too, if you catch me at the right time. My mom was recently hospitalized and given multiple operations in order to save her leg. I brought some Plato along to read. But I found that all I could care about was that the surgeon knew what the fuck he was doing so my mom didn't have to undergo amputation. At that moment, I cared less about what justice is and more about the truths of biology. But the pendulum swings both ways. If you found yourself in some futuristic Nazi dystopia, where people with certain DNA strands are being scanned and executed in the streets... in that situation... "what is justice?" might be a more salient question than "how do we make our dna scanners more accurate?"

I'm not trying to oversell philosophy here. All I'm trying to say is, it's important sometimes. That's all. Most of the time it isn't important. But not all the time.

And so what else is required above consistency? You cannot determine the truth of falsity of a consistent statement by simply sitting and thinking about it. At some point, you *need* to do some sort of observation. That is why some empiricism is required. It is an additional filter to weed out falsehoods. And it does this incredibly well, as witnessed by the advances of science once it became prominent.

"Some empiricism" is a pretty low bar. And I'd argue that most if not all philosophers begin with observations. Plato was observant. Thales predicted a solar eclipse, so it seems like he looked at the moon every once in a while. (It surely wasn't a lucky guess.) Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz... the great "rationalists" who are often seen in contrast to pure empiricism, obviously based their theories on observations.

Not that you deny this, Poly. I know you don't. You were just getting to the principle of the matter: empiricism is obviously valuable. Agreed. I'm totally with you on that one. Empiricism is indispensable.

But, by the same token, we could take another vantagepoint when studying the issue. "Empiricism alone" (ie just looking at stuff... sensing stuff) is useless without trying to formulate the observed phenomena into a genuine understanding. After all, how do we know science has "advanced" at all? Because we have cell phones? Because science is "internally consistent"? (We can't use that one, and for good reason.)

I say what makes a scientific theory strong is that it withstands scrutiny. A sound theory opens itself up to challenge from those who might demonstrate otherwise. (Both in science and philosophy). Otherwise, it's hard to say by what metric science has "advanced." A future generation, where scientific knowledge has declined, might obtain their cell phones by worshipping our AI overlords. That doesn't mean they should believe that Hal-9000-ism is "more advanced" than investigating things for themselves. Even if the science of that era fails to produce cell phones.

[highdimensionman]

If your wondering if you should study philosophy and where you could apply philosophy in a career then you might want Philosophy backing some other pursuit.
Having debates on whats fathomable and whats possible and what so and so said or did without direction would only get you a few job opportunities and very few half decent ones.
If you just simply want to be more enlightened then a degree or big personal study into philosophy might turn out a bit more worth while than filling you head with notions of et helping us with advancing (2 things to say about that it's doing a crap job if some et is doing that, it could be a lot more likely that some et had a dump on earth in the past 1 billion years than wanted to know us across the last 10,000 years get some scope) .
i'd Be careful though not to get too blaza corruption of incentive in man can happen in all sorts of corners of mans institutions. However It would not be wise to focus all paranoia towards a small interest group but yes having billions can equal more power and more potential for abuse. Mind you though even the most well intended gesture from the poorest of people can cause tragedy.
Yes not long after birth you may easily be guilty of negatively impacting the environment. This unlike boggie mans condemnation is a fact of life at the moment which can be greatly improved on. Learning philosophy can help ones perspective in such ways if you work with a critical but positive approach when applying philosophy.