[ExI] Philosophy and philosophers

[Anders Sandberg]

Rafal Smigrodzki <rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com> , 17/10/2014 10:58 AM:


On Sat, Oct 11, 2014 at 11:00 AM, Anders Sandberg <anders at aleph.se> wrote:
Another angle to this discussion is whether scientists or philosophers have influenced transhumanism the most. And I think the philosophers win.
### I would define philosophy as the art of answering questions you are too ignorant to ask.
Actually, I think it is more about asking the questions and trying to get a way to get answers. Once you start getting answers it stops being philosophy. 
A good example is the old "What is the world made of?" question. The presocratics attempted to find substances that could turn into anything. The Power Trio (Socrates, Plato and Aristotle) figured out what was wrong with their approach and dug deeper, asking what the heck substance was. In the process they formalised a fair bit of logic and the observation that there are phases of matter. Later philosophers continued the digging, somewhat confused by a paradigm that insisted that there *must* be an invisible world full of angels and an invisible alpha-male (which means substance becomes really strange). Then the *alchemists* got their act together thanks to a bit of sceptical thinking (Boyle, although he was also a theologian) and found the elements (although they borrowed the atom idea from Democritus, who just by luck had turned out to be right). The philosophers  lost interest. A while later, when the scientists demonstrated that matter was *really* strange (quantum field theory: really?!) and we no longer really know what stuff is made from the philosophers got interested again. Now we have a rather lively field of philosophy of physics (especially quantum mechanics) trying to pin down what kinds of answers actually would make sense.

There are many apparently innocuous questions leading to deep philosophical rabbit holes. How do you move your arm? What is time? Why is pain bad? Why do we ask questions? One can be satisfied with first order answers for many practical purposes, but when scrutinized they rarely hold up logically. 

Anders Sandberg, Future of Humanity Institute Philosophy Faculty of Oxford University
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20141017/c86f0c3f/attachment.html>