Overlapping Magisteria of Science And Philosophy

One of the biggest problems with philosophy is that philsophers are often making claims about things that science has something to say about.

For example, ethics deals with what we should and shouldn't do. But, as philsophers have noted, ought implies can. There is a strong relationship between what we can and should do. There is no sense saying we ought to not do something we can't do, or that we should do something we can't do.

But what we're actually capable of doing, and the effect it has, is something that science deals with. This doesn't stop philosophers from inventing ideologies that do very little of this investigation and go straight to moral imperatives.

What we can and can't do is an empirical question. As is what constitutes well-being. It's something that could vary species by species. Our moral sense seems to be present in other mammalian species, and particularly other primates.

And yet philosophers seem to assume they're dealing with some sort of "homo-philosophicus" some abstract agent they can duduce logically from their armchair with very limited empirical work.

Or consider epistemology, which deals with knowledge, and good methods for knowing things. And here again, philosophers are forgetting that our brains learn things in specific ways and that the world works in specific ways, limiting the ways that our brains can interface with the world to learn about it.

Because of how the brain works, it's almost impossible to learn much using many epistemological methods.

This leads to most epistemological methods being confabulations. Stories made after the fact.

Two Sins Of Philosophers

There are two kinds of mistakes I see philosophers making because of how out of touch they are with science.

1. Lack of imagination. Philosophers like having fixed categories and dealing with concepts and intuitions that are familiar to them. For quite some time, things that many philosophers thought were fundamental, turned out to be false, or emergent, or a function of our address.
2. An overactive imagination. This seems like it contradicts the first point, but it's actually just another way of saying that their claims and science are not aligned, and that there are two ways they might not align. Philosophers can get quite far when discussing their entities and distinctions, that they invent all sorts of exotic concepts that appeal to other philosophers without checking in with reality.

These two mistakes are so prevelent that I have taken to calling them "philosophers mistakes", whenever I see a philosopher make them, and alarm bells begin ringing in my head. And this bothers me because I like philosophy but until this is addressed it's usefulness will be almost negative.

I think that philosophers make these mistakes because science is a party pooper for them. They enjoy what they're doing, and science tells them they can't have that because it's bullshit and they need to be a lot more guarded and read a lot more about the world of physical stuff rather than spend time in their mental playground.

They don't want to spend their days in a lab and do all the persnickety stuff surrounding making predictions and solving equations. They want to sit in their arm chairs and play with their distinctions.

It seems like I'm saying that philosophy should be sitting under the table, begging science for scraps.

This concern isn't completely wrong, but I think it's necessary and actually quite exciting. Because then real philsophical progress can be made. If philosophy carries on being disconnected from science, then rather than help us live in reality it essentially becomes the analysis of fiction, but without good characters, plot, or sci-fi premise, and, most importanly, without being honest about it.

But if philosophers become more scientifically literate, then when they come up with their theories and distionctions they will make these mistakes far less frequently. When they ask questions, they'll be good ones.

They can inform science, and even inform how we live our lives. Then we can finally achieve Sellars' aim to tell us "how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term".

One area where this sin is particularly egregious, in my opinion, is the philsophy of the human condition. Existentialism.

My view is that existentionalists are depressed. But they have falsely universalised their experience and attempted to make it seem like a reasonable reaction for any human to hold. I think that this is the best way to make sense of what Sartre and Camus wrote. For example, Camus's the Myth of Sisyphus begins like this:

There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.

People that aren't depressed don't ask this question that often.

Rather than trying to understand it scientifically and seek solutions, they treat it like a philosophical problem. And people who don't agree with them aren't logical, and are demonstrating "bad faith".

But without empirical testing, their philosophical solution could be as ineffective as a placebo.

People who are prone to depression and anxiety relate to what they wrote, and do what they say.

I think that this is very problematic. The correct way to address this area, in my view, is to do a lot of scientific study, and then synthesise that knowledge into something more accessible, perhaps a cohesive life philsophy.

This is the role of philosophers. Not to make grand claims about human nature from their armchairs. As though human nature is obvious or fundamental, and not an accident of evolutionary history. There is no logical way to feel about any situation. That has to be a combination of evolved nature and the situation, discovered through empirical means.

One problem philosophers have to deal with when they make these kind of claims is: "why don't rocks do this?".

Are humans just latching on to some sort of "consciousness force" that gives them certain motivations and reactions to situations? This is also called the robot challenge. How can you build a robot that does this? And when you do, what else does it do?

To do this you need to come up with a scientific mechanism and a design specification. You can't skip steps and create philosophically idealised agents.

And this is why I don't think philosophers are going to solve consciousness.

Objections To This

My criticism of philosophy is not new. Similar criticisms have been made before, and philsophers have responses.

Before I address them, I will clarify what I am saying, and what I'm not saying.

I'm not claiming that all of philsophy belongs to science and that it has no legitimate territory. I'm not claiming that science is the only way of knowing things or the only appropriate activity. That's an entirely separate question.

What I'm claiming is that there exists scientific territory that philosophy oversteps on, and that this is a signficant problem in philosophy.

Hopefully this adaquately addresses "your argument for why philsophy is bad is philosophical". Naturally, I think that my argument is one of the good ones, and I should work to make it more scientific.

The other objections made by philsophers range from "stay out of my room" to "don't take my baby".

One area where philsophers mark their territory is consciousness. For many philsophers, introspection is something that science can never hallenge. Even if, after much poking and production, science has something to say, our experiences are the only thing that we can be sure of.

The first problem with this is that philsophers often lump together our their experience with their analysis and description of it.

In many cultures, the same sorts of experience get described using a different framework. That's where different supernatural customs come from. By removing the extra layer of analysis, there is often far less conflict between experience and science. The conflict comes from the codification of the experience into their distinctions that cause them to claim more than they actually experience. I've written software where people who used the software tried to describe how it works based on their experience interacting with it, and they've often ended up being completely wrong because they've implicitly brought in a framework that makes it easier to describe. Mother nature is getting the same treatment from philosophers.

In summary, philosophers introspect less than they think they do. This makes it harder for philsophers to use experience to keep back scientists.

The other issue with this is that we challenge experience and introspection all the time. If someone is hallucinating, we don't assume that their experience is veridical. People notoriously have the ability to misremember their experiences in predictable ways, they can be nudged. This is why witness trials are unreliable, and why courts go to great pains to minimise the "contamination" of a witness.

We also scientifically investigate other domains where we have introspective experiences. For example, bodily functions such as digestion. We feel hunger, we sometimes feel our stomach rumbling.

And yet, when we're dealing with the topic of digestion and the human condition, we almost completely ignore the introspective experience. We focus on the inner workings of the body, nutrition, and we can pay attention to how that correlates to how people act. We can sometimes ask people how they are feeling, but that's not where the bulk of the work is done. We don't treat the experience of a rumbling stomach as the chief arbiter.

Another way that philsophers try to stop scientists from invading and taking their babies is by coming ready with distinctions. The philsopher imagines that they can build up their theory and leave spaces for the different results that science might uncover, and then just "import science" and be done with it. All scientists have to do is figure out which option the philosopher thought of is the right one.

The problem with this is the aforementioned lack of imagination. The other problem is that science is far more precise than philosophy. Whilst philosophers can be very persnickety with their distinctions, their level of precision is very laughable in comparison to science. In science, it's often very clear what is made. There are predictions for what will and won't happen, often equations. There are proposed mechanisms and real mechanisms.

The third way philosophers try to keep out scientists is by laughing at them and pointing out their lack of philosophical knowledge.

"That's an elementary philsophical mistake! You see, we distinguish between X and Y". And philsophers are always ready with distinctions. But, maybe by learning all of these distionctions, philosphers have actually poisoned their minds.

Imagine an astrologer, making fun of sceptics for not understanding the distinctions made by professional astrologers.

Maybe they should get rid of them and observe the world around them to see which distinctions make sense in light of that, rather than seeing which scientific theory makes sense in light of their distinctions.

Science As A Set Of Constraints

I've complained about what I think philosophy is doing badly. But how can science help with this?

I think that science can help by constraining philsophical discourse, to save decades of pointless discssion.

Let's describe a few examples of science acting as a constraint on philsophy. Aristotle wanted to explain why things moved when you pushed them and then stopped, and why things fell towards the ground. His explanation was that things had natural places to be. That they had goals. The rock "wanted" to be on the ground. If you want to move something, you had to disrupt the natural course of things, you had to push things, before they settle. His view, essentially, was the Force = Mass x Velocity (F = MV or momentum, rather than F = MA).

He had a hard time explaining why arrows kept moving for a while even after nothing was pushing on them, and came up with a weird explanation involving the air the arrow was pushing turning around and pushing the arrow.

This view was involved in his ethics - that we have a nature that we should act in accordance with. He thought that some people were naturally slaved.

With Newton's laws on the other hand, where Force is Mass x Acceleration, there's no natural place for things to be. They just keep moving, or stay stationary, until a force acts on them. With this came the Laplacian paradigm - you don't need to describe things in terms of places and goals, you can describe them like a state at one instant and an application of a rule that changes the state at the next system.

With this metaphysical paradigm, ethical theories made changes.

I don't think that this kind of learning from science impacting philosophy only applies to everything between Aristotle and Newton. I think that this applies to scientific knowledge from Netwon to Einstein and beyond.

General relativity has things to say about space and time. In particular that space is not just relationships between things, but a substance in its own right that has its own geometry and is affected by gravity. That time is not absolute for all reference frames. And philsophers often talk about time but treat it as though it's an absolute fundamental thing. And by doing this, they're, well, wasting time. They're building on scientifically shoddy foundations.

But if you had the constraints that scientific knowledge gives you, then you can cut the crap and do good philosophy. With lower bullshit density. As I am finding, the more I familiarise myself with science, the more philosophical theories sound like bullshit. But not all of them. Unfortunately the good ones are given the least airtime and resources.

I'm not suggesting that philsophers all pack their bags and go home. I'm saying that most of them should, or they should be careful, and read more science before making claims that science has something to say about.

I've been a little hard on Aristotle here, but I think he was doing the best he could. I actually think of him as more of a scientist than a philsopher. Some of his discoveries were only recently confirmed. He contributed to many fields, and he was fastitious in his attention to detail.

Aristotle was one of the most empirical people at the time. Far more than his teacher Plato. This is what, in my view, makes him a much better philsopher than Plato. Virtually nothing Plato wrote was useful. Plato lived in the imaginary world of forms, where occasionally he would make some made screech about the world and politics.

Another philsopher I'd like to discuss is John Stuart Mill. He's one of my favourite philosophers, because of his clear thinking, his fairness towards positions that he disagrees with, and his non-dogmatic defences of his own positions. When talking about, for example, womens rights, he would concede that there might be fundamental differences in male and female brains that are not a result of culture, and say that this is an empirical question that he won't take a position on, but then point out that the people against women's rights also cannot take a position on that, and that it wouldn't justify their policies either way. He also considered how we might test that, and what current scientific knowledge indicated whilst realising that it's inadeqaute. Many people arguing for a position try to defend any argument that may help their cause, but a good scientist should do what Mill does.

Despite this, Mill and many of the early liberal philsophers, such as Locke and Hume, justified their political and ethical philsophy on their own views of human nature (notably the blank slate) which are becoming more and more in conflict with the evidence. And whilst the polical positions can be decoupled from the stance of human nature, in many people's minds they are often tied. This makes investigating the scientific view difficult, since it is likely to offend the sensibilities of many people, people who typically have similar political values to scientists.

Had these philsophers not greased the wheels by describing a view of human nature that gave no chance for alternate political views, perhaps their liberalism may not have become influential. But it's also possible that it could still have become influential without holding back science.

Applying This Line Of Thinking

I'm going to provide some scientific context, and then apply it to some contemporary philosophical discussions.

Lets start with a brief history of the universe.

About 13.8 billion years ago, the Big Bang happen. Everything was concentrated in hot dense state, called The Singularity. We don't know what happened before then, if there was a before then, but we know that our equations break down at that point, because weird things happen when you divide by infinity. This rapidly expanded. At first it was too hot for particles, but eventually matter and anti-matter anihilated each other. Matter won out. Quarks and gluons combined, and eventually hygrogen formed, and even helium.

At this point there are no intentional agents. No life. Not even mechanisms, just very basic elements.

Eventually dense regions of matter begin forming stars, which can make heavier elements though nuclear fusion. After a few cycles of this, only a few billion years, we have heavier elements that can make planets with metals.

There are still no intentional agents, there's just gas and rock.

9 billion years after the Big Bang, we have our solar system. A star exploded to give birth to our solar system, and the debris eventually collected into planets under its own gravity. About a half a billion years after, the Earth begins to cool down. You get natural processes and the beginnings of life. Way before cells..

We're about 10 billion years into the history of the universe but nothing resembling consciouness. Eventually we have eukaryotic life and oxygen, and bigger life forms. At some point animals, and we're beginning to have something with some of what we would call consciousness. Not the stuff philosophers talk about, but basic control systems, perception, limited planning.

About 6 million years ago, the humans diverged from chimps. At this point I think you have something that has a large percentage of what we would call consciousness. Eventually you get to humans, they develop language, and you get the rest of what we would call consciousness.

Less than 1% of the time the known universe has existed, we have evidence of consciousness. Our planet is an imperceptable speck in the galaxy, which is an imperceptible speck in the local supercluster. On our own planet, most things aren't conscious. And consciousness is fickle. A hit on the head, or waking up, or genetic variation, and much of what we call consciousness can change dramatically. When certain parts of the brain are affected, our conscious abilities change in predictable ways. Certain parts of our brain are involved in remembering names, or recognising things in certain parts of our visual field, or processing grammar, or language production, or language comprehension. This tells us that consciousness is not some fundamental force permeating the universe, like pansychists might have you believe, but the result of complex mechanisms, just like our ability to digest, or reproduce, or run.

Looking for consciousness earlier than that, without evidence, and using that to explain things, like pansychists and religious people do, is like looking for cars in the Mesozoic era, and saying "maybe it's not made of the same metals and rubber and plastic, and doesn't have a physical engine, but it can still take you places at 60 miles per hour and taps into some sort of "car force".

Imagine if they said "oh, but you already accept the idea that cars exist, why not a car that isn't made of any car things?".

What Should Philsophers Do?

Hopefully, I've convinced you that philsophy is not as good as it can be, and that being scientifically knowledgable can help you do better philsophy.

In future essays I'd like to explore more about what I think philsophers should do, but here I will address how I think they should approach science.

First of all, scientists already exist. There's no point in making philsophers identical to scientists. Instead, I think that philosophers should know enough science to become consumers, without necessarily being producers or experts. They should produce some scientific work at the start, if only to make sure they are capable of precision, but they from then on they can just read what scientists produce. Philsophers should also not specialise into a single scientific field, but have a broad scientific knowledge, that is far deeper than a layman, but not much deeper than an undergraduate's. There are philsophers who specialise in certain philosophical fields, such as philsophers of science, and they should keep doing what they're doing. I'm garden variety philsophers should be knowledgable in many different sciences.

This is not as difficult as it sounds. Although mastery takes a long time, proficiency does not take very long, when compared to a full career.

Armed with better bullshit detectors, and a better metaphysics, philsophers are now in a position to laugh out the non-sense, and improve their work.

If the siloing problem could be solved, also the topic of a future essay, then their work can become even more useful, as they are put in contact with people with different fields and symbiotically helping each other.

This is my vision of philosophy. It's something I myself hope to practise. Some day, I will have enough scientific knowledge to become a good philsopher.