Your position is self-refuting: you are dismissing philosophy, yet simultaneously making philosophical claims in doing so-claiming that all knowledge is empirical is itself a philosophical claim (empiricism)
> This is a philosophical argument, therefore dismissible by science.
The claim I just made - that dismissing philosophy on empirical grounds is self-refuting because it relies on the philosophical position of empiricism - is not “dismissible by science” - there is no experiment or observation capable of proving or disproving that claim.
Also, the assumption you seem to be making - that all genuine knowledge comes from empirical science - can be countered with the argument that mathematical theorems (e.g. those of Gödel) are true and can he known to be true, but they are not known or knowable by means of empirical science
> Unless you can rephrase your argument as something testable, it's philosophy and thereby not relevant.
What you just said is not testable, hence by its own terms is philosophy and thereby not relevant - it condemns itself as irrelevant
You're missing the point - your claim of "hypothesis has to be testable otherwise can be dismissed" is itself philosophical (philosophy of science). You're claiming that your claim can be dismissed.
There's no contradiction. Philosophy is something everybody does after a beer. No point in pretentding that it's a relevant profession for hundreds of years already.
There is such a thing as a philosophical mistake – almost everyone agrees that logical positivism was a failure, despite the fact that there was a period in the 1950s when it was all the rage in philosophy departments in the English-speaking world.
There are still a few philosophers who will try to raise logical positivism from the dead – but even they'll all acknowledge that in its classic formulation it doesn't work, so any attempt to do so will require significant revisions.
Philosophers may never agree on who is right, but sometimes they can reach a consensus on who is wrong.
A lot of philosophy is testable and the inspiration for scientific enquiry. Philosophy contains logic as a major area of study and the results of this work are core tenets in mathematics which enables the ability to conduct rigorous science.
Science itself is the product of philosophical enquiry.
The difference is that what we now call “science” actually did start out as a branch of philosophy, and only gradually became separated from it; and there are figures who made substantial contributions to both disciplines (e.g. Henri Poincaré, who made significant contributions to both mathematical physics and philosophy of science)
Al Gore’s relationship to the Internet can’t be compared
> The difference is that what we now call “science” actually did start out as a branch of philosophy, and only gradually became separated from it;
It was hundreds of years ago, when philosophers of nature, aka people who thought about usefull stuff, left to become scientists. What remains in philosophy since then is all the useless stuff.
There are practising scientists who take philosophy of science much more seriously than you do.
To give a random example, I'm quite a fan of Lynn Waterhouse's Rethinking Autism: Variation and Complexity (Elsevier Academic Press, 2013) which seeks to provide a critical evaluation of the strength of the scientific evidence behind the theory of autism, in its various incarnations (from Kanner's early infantile autism and Asperger's autistic psychopathy through to DSM-5 ASD). And Waterhouse actually draws on philosophy of science in the process, as this quote demonstrates (p. 24):
> In fact, the orphaned and disconfirmed theories that have failed to explain variation in autism are, in large part, examples of theory underdetermination. Science philosopher Peter Lipton (2005) argued, “Theories go far beyond the data that support them; indeed, the theories would be of little interest if this were not so. However, this means a scientific theory is always ‘underdetermined’ by the available data concerning the phenomena” (p. 1261). The theory of underdetermination, called the Duhem–Quine principle, is a formal acceptance that theories make claims that data do not fully support. Theory succession, as from Hippocrates’ theory of pangenesis to Darwin’s gemmules, to DNA and transcriptomes, moves from one underdetermined theory to the next. However, Stanford (2001) pointed out that not all theory underdetermination is acceptable. It can be a Devil’s bargain: a serious threat to scientific discovery.
And another quote from the same book (p. 27):
> Equally problematic, autism brain research findings have not uncovered the underlying complexity of the phenomena. Bogen and Woodward (1988) argued that what can be measured is “rarely the result of a single phenomenon operating alone, but instead typically reflect the interaction of many different phenomena ….Nature is so complicated that … it is hard to imagine an instrument which could register any phenomenon of interest in isolation” (pp. 351–352).
And the citations referenced in those quotes:
> Lipton, P. (2005). The Medawar Lecture 2004: The truth about science. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London Series B, 360, 1259–1269
> Stanford, P.K. (2001). Refusing the devil’s bargain: What kind of underdetermination should we take seriously? Philosophy of Science, 68, 3. Supplement: Proceedings of the 2000 Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association. Part I: Contributed Papers, pp. S1–S12
> Bogen, J., & Woodward, J. (1988). Saving the phenomena. Philosophical Review, 97, 303–352.
The book only cites three philosophy of science papers, compared to dozens and dozens of papers from neuroscience, genetics, psychology, etc – as you'd expect for a scholarly book focused on the science of autism. Still, the fact it cites philosophy papers at all is an example of how many practising scientists are more positive about philosophy of science than you yourself are.
> I don't care what your ideas are. If they aren't testable, they're your opinion.
Most of the life and the world involves beliefs that aren't testable. The lack of testability doesn't mean it's arbitrary; testing is just one tool (the most effective one, I believe). But if you restricted yourself to that, if we had no other qualification or judgment, we couldn't achieve anything.
Philosophy is precisely the domain of things that cannot be objectively testable because they are grounded in experience. You can not prove that you are conscious (especially in a world of LLMs) but you know it to be true. Should I assume you are an automaton simply because I can’t prove you are conscious?
Consciousness is not philosophy. In the past, it was. People didn't have the tools or theoretic background to even approach it in an empiric way.
However we now have at least the basics to hypothesize and perform experiments. So it's no longer philosophy and is in the realm of understanding what actually are the mechanisms of consciousness.
We can find "neural correlates" of consciousness, but nothing we do right now can prove that experience/awareness is taking place somewhere other than where oneself is experiencing/being aware.
Keep walking into a glass door a few dozen times. Is the door a reality even though you can't see it, or just a conceptual framework you keep bouncing off of?
At some point you have to stop thinking in your head why you can't walk through the window and start testing and figuring out what keeps breaking your nose.
You're describing the scientific method. Philosophy is not for "understanding the universe". Surely it cannot be blamed for not fulfilling a goal you only imagine it to have.
Well said. The gp's comment was mere snobbish verbiage since the article is not about various theories of Mind, but on biological research which is making us rethink our very fundamental assumptions. It is a pretty good one.
