
Can Quantum Mechanics subsume Philosophy? - marojejian
http://marojejian.tumblr.com/post/25310182446/why-is-there-an-argument-instead-of-nothing
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zenogais
I find most scientists I know startlingly bad at philosophy, and startlingly
arrogant about how much science actually tells us. If only more people read
philosophy instead of Popular Science.

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derleth
It would be great if there were popular philosophy books _not_ written by the
lunatics of the philosophy world. Focus on a question the mainstream
philosophers have answered and lay out the answer step-by-step, like a popular
science book that goes through how we know what goes on inside the Sun, for
example, and how we found out.

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shasta
Can you give an example of one interesting question that philosophers have
answered?

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planetguy
Questions that can be answered aren't the domain of philosophy, and if these
questions ever do get answered the question gets retrospectively moved out of
the philosophers' domain. Often philosophers _do_ answer questions -- e.g.
Russell answered a whole bunch, but we call the bits where he actually got
definite answers "mathematics".

Philosophy, done right, isn't about answering questions but it is about
refining them. Consider a difficult question, consider the logical
consequences of a bunch of possible answers, and hopefully pop out at the
other end with a _better_ question. A question like "What is the right way to
behave?" might not ever get answered definitively, but at least we can put
labels on various possible schools of thought and distinguish between them in
a bunch of rather contrived situations involving lifeboats and runaway trains.

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derleth
I'd deny that mathematics is at all related to philosophy except to about the
same level physics, for example, is. Mathematics is a wonderful intellectual
game that occasionally (and unpredictably) has results useful for science and
engineering.

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planetguy
So where, in your opinion, is the boundary between philosophy and mathematics?
On which side is logic?

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derleth
Philosophy discusses human problems. Mathematics is a symbol game.

Logic is (at least) two concepts referred to with the same term and I won't
answer until I know which one in specific you're talking about.

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rsanchez1
Philosophy does not discuss human problems. Philosophy discusses human
thought.

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SideburnsOfDoom
See also, Betteridge's Law of Headlines
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridges_Law_of_Headlines>

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planetguy
The two linked articles

[http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/25/books/review/a-universe-
fr...](http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/25/books/review/a-universe-from-nothing-
by-lawrence-m-krauss.html?_r=3) being David Alpert's review of Lawrence
Kraus's book, and

[http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/04/has-
ph...](http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/04/has-physics-made-
philosophy-and-religion-obsolete/256203/) being an interview in which Kraus
responds to the charges,

are far more interesting than this piece of borderline-blogspam, which claims
to settle the question merely by overstating what Kraus originally said (I
don't think he ever claimed that physics subsumes _all_ of philosophy, only
some areas).

