And normal logical people then wonder why Feynman said that philosophy is for the birds! Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
My take at this question is very simple, "Life is for living". We are given some time here on earth. There is no deeper purpose. We come into existence and we vanish again. In between we can try to do something with the time. What we do is to a good amount our decision, but society also plays a big role. If you feel your life is lacking purpose, this is because there is no purpose until you chose some.
Feynman was talking out of his arse if he said that. (And I'm not sure anyone has actually sourced any explicit quotation, have they?) As you and I have previously discussed (with a measure of agreement, I think? Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!) philosophy of science at least has a vital part to play in determining the demarcation between science and not-science, such as creationism, politics, religion, astrology, homeopathy etc. In public discourse, for instance on this very forum, we constantly come up against this problem - people claiming things are science when they aren't and resulting confusion, aggression and hot air. If you read the newpapers you see the same thing - people abusing statistics to draw conclusions that are not justified by the evidence, claims for and against climate change, say, on the basis of exaggerations and political myths, and so on. So I am prepared to stand up for the value of the philosophy of science, as a minimum at least. And actually I think philosophy more broadly illuminates other aspects of human experience, though I might have to research that a bit to justify it with examples.
In part, yes we did have some level of agreement. But when ridiculous statements such as arise then quotes attributed to Feynman and many others do come to mind. https://sinistredestre.wordpress.co...ful-to-scientists-as-ornithology-is-to-birds/ “Philosophy of science is as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds. “ Posted on November 5, 2009 by NoumenalRealm "Philosophy of science is as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds. So says Richard Feynman, apparently. Alan Sokal, in a recent interview with Jullian Baggini, wrote that this analogy is suggestive of the lack of epistemic merit that philosophy has to the structuring and adding of new knowledge to physics. Analogies like this are apt for the contribution that philosophy has to physics, granted; but I have found it wanting in other cases. A musician, who was largely an autodidact once said to me that he did not care very much for music theory as it did not fit with performance skills and apprehension as a musician. I fell silent, not bothering to tell him that he was playing music predominantly in a mixolydian mode, while utilising tritones, ostinati, parallel 5ths, 8ths, dominant sevenths, suspensions, passing notes, arpeggiations, and so on… I can appreciate the view that being steeped in a particualr style limits one and the musical options that they have. I have recently started to play the guitar, and I like playing on blues scales. This is largely to impress my friends at my ability to naturally create riffs and hooks, but there is another sense in which I communicate my utter disdain for a style by its ease, there is a sense of comfort and familiarity when I play a ragtime. I’m not very good at sightreading Bach, even less if I attempted Beethoven or Chopin. Joplin and Lamb, by contrast, are a joy to practice at sight, this is because of my own insecurity as a piano player, but also there is a joy in seeing the immediate fruit of one’s labour by my immediate apprehension of the musical style and its playing ease. There is not as much ease, by contrast, in heavier romantic styles. In short, sometimes knowing the rules of the game enhances our performance as players. This is certainly true for olympic or professional atheletes; who, while being introduced to a professional level normally at university or younger; sometimes furnish their career with a doctoral thesis that relates either to their performance or training as an athelete. Our inspiration may come from other things; engineers and technologists can sometimes draw their innovations from the observation of nature. Coming back to the philosophy example, a later point was made that physics is just as successful and unhindered by philosophy. Physicists like Feynman and Wolpert are distinctly anti-philosophical, in contrast to the likes of Einstein, or if one really wants to go back, Newton. Newton after all, had written about his empiricist leanings and nature of his methodology. Kant reacts critically to Newton’s ’empiricist’ methodology, but not the results. This kind of philosophical engagement of a physicist, by the standards of the day, were by no means amateur and are taken seriously by philosophers today. The so-called philosophically oriented physicists of the 20thC, by contrast, are not terribly interesting in terms of our contempoary philosophical tools. Einstein’s ‘Spinozism’ has been talked about by the likes of Dawkins and Hitchens, as a caveat so as not to be interpreted into religious terms. Having an understanding of Spinoza’s metaphysics, by contrast, is not even addressed. Spinoza’s approach to life was one of emotional calm against the overwhelming and sometimes uncontrollable temperaments that we suffer in life. One of the enjoyments that we can have in life is an apprehension of the unity of nature that is, in his metaphysics, how the nature of our inner consciousness subsumed in no small part to the larger reality as a whole, as well as the underlying propositional language that both support. This may sound mystical, but really, it is a form of naturalism. The two prejudices that Spinoza’s philosophy had were: admitting that his metaphysics was fundamentally correct, and we put scientific development and knowledge on a pedestal. None of this is really addressed in the ‘Einsteinian’ view so bastardised by the atheist popularisers. Stephen Hawking’s own popular books try to establish a so-called philosophically interested reading of M-theory, string theory and general relativity. There are moments where his reading is somewhat patchy. But perhaps the real thing that is important, and that Hawking succeeds in, is making the current understanding of science understandable to a general public. This is what I would consider the most socially important thing that phyiscists can do outside of their work. Sokal’s perspective by contrast is one where physicists do their science between monday-saturday and then their speculation on a sunday. What succeeds about Hawking’s presentation is that the physics is presented in a manner that has religious and humanistic dimensions, rather than one of a technical ‘philosophical’ merit. Does the universe have a beginning? Does the universe have an end? What is our place in the grand order of things? Is there life beyond earth? Physics goes on well without philosophy’s involvement, however, it should be attributed to the death of the polymath that there are less physicists more interested in philosophy. The rise of continental philosophy that fails to acknowledge the work in physics with any real expertise is also a reason why physicists may dislike philosophy as a whole, that is the whole point of the Sokal hoax in a sense. Perhaps the most interesting, and important thing that physicists can do for the public is to be understood. Conspiracies such as the moon landing being fake, or the belief that miniature black holes will destroy the universe; are harmful to science, harmful to reason and pander to a mindset that hurts rationalism and rationality".
Right. I'm not convinced that Feynman was really as dismissive of philosophy as Paddoboy presents him as being. Feynman supposedly said some things that, if taken out of context, sound that way. But I suspect that in context they were actually expressions of frustration with specific philosophical views that Feynman himself didn't like. After all, Feynman was something of a philosopher of science himself. The lectures collected together as 'The Character of Physical Law' are nothing if not philosophical. And there's this: To the best of my knowledge Feynman never formally studied philosophy. If he really was as dismissive of it as Paddoboy presents him as being, which I strongly doubt, then it's unlikely that he studied it informally either. If that's so, then why should anyone take his opinions about philosophy seriously? He would be talking about matters that he knew very little about and didn't understand.
I'm not sure what this person you quote at length is trying to say, to be honest. It seems to be rather badly written. But there is indeed no quote from Feynman here. I rather agree with Yazata's comments about all this. Actually I would not be surprised if Feynman had made some disparaging remarks about some of the philosophy (and literary theory) that was in vogue when he was in academic life. All that dreary French bullshit about claims of truth being really about power, the silly notion that science should be seen as just a collection of stories about the world, qualitatively no different from those told by a tribal witch-doctor, and so forth. In fact I think physical science and philosophy (in a broad sense) do inform each other quite significantly. I've given the example of the value to science that the philosophy of science has, by defining what science is and is not. An example of the synergy operating the other way round might what QM and relativity have done to the way humanity sees the world. The Newtonian deterministic clockwork that the c.19th assumed, with such a confident intellectual swagger, has been swept away, to be replaced by more unsettling ideas, such as that your point of view affects your picture of reality and even when events occur, and that there are limits to how much we can ever know. I think these concepts have been quite influential in the world of ideas during the c.20th, and I think it is important for philosophers to think about what they may mean and what they may not mean, i.e. how far to apply such ideas outside physics.
I read a philosophy of science journal article at least a decade ago about the interactions between the philosophy of science and practicing scientists, that (if I remember correctly) suggested that the context of Feynman's disparaging remarks was his frustration with those philosophers of science, particularly the 50's-60's positivists as I recall, that presumed to pontificate to scientists about scientific methodology, on how they should proceed in addressing their scientific questions. Feynman believed that those prescriptions were of no use to him in doing his science. So I've always kind of considered Feynman a fellow-traveler regarding my own skepticism about "The Scientific Method". Yes, I certainly agree with you in expecting that Feynman would have no time at all for philosophy of science practiced in the style of French literary criticism and with things like 'feminist standpoint theory' that infest too many university departments these days. Perhaps Feynman was addressing that stuff in some of his disparaging quotes. The word 'scientist' was only coined in the 1840's by William Whewell. Prior to that, they were 'natural philosophers'. Science and the philosophy of science are very closely related subjects. Scientists have an annoying tendency to do a lot of what they do rather unthinkingly (just as birds are still dependent on aerodynamics despite their having no interest in learning about it). They use logic and mathematics, without really understanding what those things are or what kind of reality they have. They assume that physical reality conforms to logic and mathematics, without being able to fully justify that metaphysical assumption. They explain things, without worrying a great deal about what explanations are or what they accomplish. They assume that experimental results can justify their hypotheses, without worrying about precisely how that happens. They reduce particular kinds of things to others without worrying about what's being gained or lost. They continue to employ teleological conceptions, especially in biology. They employ concepts like 'observe' that can become problematic in problem situations. They use concepts like 'species' or 'gene' that still need better definitions. They create taxonomic schemes and phylogenies, that have their own problems, as with the controversies about cladistics. As long as science works smoothly and continues to produce what appear to be useful results, many scientists seem to feel that they don't need to address those more conceptual kind of questions. Maybe they are right. But when problem cases arise, as they did with relativity and (especially) quantum mechanics, the philosophical questions jump into the forefront as scientists start to pay closer attention to whatever it is that they are doing when they write out their mathematical hieroglyphs and conduct their experiments. Einstein was acutely aware of that, as were most of the pioneers of QM, who became self-taught philosophers in hopes of coming to terms with the implications of their own work. That 'demarcation problem' is certainly of interest to Paddoboy in his Quixotic battle to defend orthodox science against encroachments by pseudoscience. He seems unaware that describing and justifying that distinction is a philosophical as opposed to a scientific problem. I agree. QM's many interpretations have big-time ontological implications (and not always consistent ones) about what the nature of reality is really like down there on the microscale. Relativity has important things to say about space, time and space/time intervals. Philosophers ignore those kind of discoveries at their own risk. And I'm personally convinced that the philosophy of mind is unlikely to make much progress without additional input from neuroscience. The relationship between philosophy of science and science proper is dynamic, cross-fertilizing and synergetic.
I always feel confident I am on the right track when you and I are aligned. When we are not, I always at least think twice about my position. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
Scientific studies using patients under cardiac arrest. Pim van Lommel MD Nonlocal Consciousness: A concept based on scientific studies in NDE Are Mind and Brain the Same? (NDEs) - by Dr. Peter Fenwick, neuropsychiatrist Proof of Consciousness out of body (Nonlocal Consciousness) - Dr. Pim van Lommel (2011 Seminar) Well worth watching.
