Philosophy the next big thing ?

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...after the rail and the steam, after electricity the oil and the car, after robotics and computers there are ever more increasing signs that we are up for yet another Industrial Revolution, one that started with the print but that only properly took shape with the Internet global high speed network in the past five years...

...After the DNA resequencing big bang, after Biology most recent rebirth, after Neuroscience promising last years and the greed energy revolution on the track its time for "software/information " convergence one might guess...although such assessment its not fresh news since the 90´s to my view only now science fiction best hopes is actually becoming a fact...

In the established stream of confusion while surfing the web paradigmatically many well know public profiles admit these increasing strong impression of convergence of knowledge from all fields of study in sciences springing out from the inevitable fights and bruises that the clash of classical field boxed information provides...

...at first, the imagery of "noise" comes to mind very much like the collision of two Galaxy´s, and an apocalyptic chaos takes shape when the foundations of the classical boundary´s in between Sciences slowly starts to blur... the fight for territory darkens and muds the water with the illusion of fair knowledge in sight at drift...it goes by the minute now and corporate interest and Institutional Darwinism is to blame, but its quite natural, the Roman empire its on its knees...such time its a time for debate with no consensus, full scale war and who knows the extinction of some old out of place dinosaurs long due in the natural order...it all will come to pass as it always does...

...accommodation comes next, sinks in, and the gravitational pull of the new established rhythms does the remaining of the job...awkwardly while some like Hawking's were betting in the extinction of Philosophy I personally am convinced of the opposite...never like now there was a full scale debate in all possible imaginable wave length arenas...from pop culture to hard core science turmoil is in place no doubt... given the reasoning, what do you say, how do you measure the pulse of Philosophy ?

PS (I apologise for the ill glued sound byte style that my English exponentially imprints)
Nevertheless I am up for opinions.

Regards>FILIPE DE ALBUQUERQUE

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@Fil Albuquerque,

obviously it should read :

Quote:

...After the DNA resequencing big bang, after Biology most recent rebirth, after Neuroscience promising last years and the grid energy revolution on the track its time for "software/information " convergence one might guess...although such assessment its not fresh news since the 90´s to my view only now science fiction best hopes is actually becoming a fact...

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@Fil Albuquerque,

I like to consider the movement of the human mind through history. And in the west, I blame christianity for the sometimes exaggerated emphasis on reason and logic.
The trend that started in philosophy to carry doubt and scepticism to the extreme was in many ways a response to the church's effort to suppress reason in favor of blind faith. This created a divorce between human capacity for faith and knowledge. It created the belief many of us hold that the two cannot be reconciled.

In my opinion, it is complete reliance on critical thinking and technology and no value placed in beliefs that has led us to the point where we are divorced from any true feeling of belonging to the universe. Ironically, the idea biblical creation put into our heads; that the world was created and then man was put into it as something not of it, is reinforced by our scientific and reasonable behaviour, and meanwhile science prides itself on disproving all of the false notions of the bible.

But I believe that we will come to a point where our capacity for faith and our capacity for knowing will merge again. Simply because we will discover the limits of our science.

Reasoning should be guided by faith, but only if faith is guided by reasoning. Then the two exist with a synergetic effect within an individual rather than as two sides at war.

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@Cyracuz,

I would instead, trade the term faith for intuition, and in that sense I can see what you mean... Wink

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@Fil Albuquerque,

I tend to think of intuition as "creative association". It can involve both fact and belief, together or apart.

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@Fil Albuquerque,

Quote:

awkwardly while some like Hawking's were betting in the extinction of Philosophy I personally am convinced of the opposite

To make any sense at all, I think Hawking primarily meant metaphysics in that broad swipe of his. Since it was arguably passe once before in the Anglophone world when this and that version of positivism reigned, I guess his lingering affection for that era made him wistful to see metaphysics put down again like an elderly, flea-bitten hound. Then he turns around and endorses so-called "model-dependent realism" -- go figure. Wink

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@Cyracuz,

Cyracuz wrote:

I like to consider the movement of the human mind through history. And in the west, I blame christianity for the sometimes exaggerated emphasis on reason and logic.
The trend that started in philosophy to carry doubt and scepticism to the extreme was in many ways a response to the church's effort to suppress reason in favor of blind faith. This created a divorce between human capacity for faith and knowledge. It created the belief many of us hold that the two cannot be reconciled.

In my opinion, it is complete reliance on critical thinking and technology and no value placed in beliefs that has led us to the point where we are divorced from any true feeling of belonging to the universe. Ironically, the idea biblical creation put into our heads; that the world was created and then man was put into it as something not of it, is reinforced by our scientific and reasonable behaviour, and meanwhile science prides itself on disproving all of the false notions of the bible.

But I believe that we will come to a point where our capacity for faith and our capacity for knowing will merge again. Simply because we will discover the limits of our science.

Reasoning should be guided by faith, but only if faith is guided by reasoning. Then the two exist with a synergetic effect within an individual rather than as two sides at war.

Interesting thoughts, though I'm not sure I can agree. But I do have a question. When you say "West", do you mean the US or the Western Hemisphere? Just curious.

Fil, I think you write well given that english isn't your native tongue. I'm sure things will get lost in translation on both sides, but that is probably more a cultural barrier rather than your translating to the English. I'm impressed with how well your present your ideas overall.

Regarding the pulse of Philosophy. I think you'll find this somewhat a polarizing question based off how people consider philosophical values within the context of their upbringing. In my opinion, this is the beauty of Philosophy, Theology, Sociology, etc... People will view and process the success or failures of philosophical thought from very different view points. I love it - with the caveat they can discuss it with an open mind!

I think we'll always need philosophy for any kind of progressive thought. It prevents science from dehumanizing the process of progression. Conversely, philosophy needs the scientific process just as much. Of course, I'm being very general here on definition of "science" and "philosophy." But I'd rather not bore anyone with the minutia.

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@G H,

Quote:

In his latest book, The Grand Design, Hawking opens with the idea that "philosophy has not kept up with modern discoveries in science, particularly physics."

More specifically he asserts that science, in place of philosophy, has moved into position to be responsible for answering such questions as, "How can we understand the world in which we find ourselves? How does the universe behave? What is the nature of reality? Where did all this come from? Did the universe need a creator?"

Source

I imagine he gives more detailed descriptions of his ideas in the book, which I haven't read, but there are many ways to view this situation.

A notable consideration may perhaps be that there exists no metaphysical interpretation of quantum physics. At least not anything that is widely considered viable. But this is more due to a reluctance to take that step that is perhaps intrinsic to the scientific method than a lack of suggestions.

Classical metaphysics predates science. Philosophy predates science, but in delving into the sub atomic realm quantum physics has uncovered a world that was previously unconceptualized. It was unknown, at least in western societies. This offers an oportunity to create a metaphysical understanding that is removed from the human perspective to a much greater extent than classical metaphysics.

This needs to be done, and Hawking is partially right that if falls to sciene. More specifically, the scientists who are working on uncovering the realm of quantum physics are perhaps the people who are best qualified to come up with viable models of "quantum metaphysics".
But like I said, it needs to be done, simply to bring humanity forward in time to our moment.

Most people still think of big bang. But those who investigate cosmological models these days don't think "big bang", they think "unified field".

(This is not to say that big bang theory is false. It just means that quantum physics is uncovering aspects of reality that put it in a different context, and will perhaps be able to bring about a much more comprehensive explanation than big bang theory.)

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@MrSandman,

By "in the west" I mean primarily Europe from the end of the dark ages and America from the time it was "discovered". It's not intended to say anything specific about this area that isn't so about another. I just wanted to limit my statement to what I have a little knowledge about.

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@Cyracuz,

Cyracuz wrote:

By "in the west" I mean primarily Europe from the end of the dark ages and America from the time it was "discovered". It's not intended to say anything specific about this area that isn't so about another. I just wanted to limit my statement to what I have a little knowledge about.

Thank you for clarifying Smile

. I understand your ideas better, I hope. With that said, I'm not sure I agree that Philosophy was a response to Christianity since some philosophical thoughts stemmed from Pre-Christianity. Yet, you do make a point regarding early Church as a hindrance to the common man's ability to unify faith and reason (you said knowledge, but am I putting words in your mouth to assume you meant reason? Or do you have a different definition for the use of "knowledge" within your statement?). Not to point fingers but Catholicism was the leading church at the time and it was common practice that they prevented the commoners from actually getting the Scripture for their own collection. This was one of the reasons for Martin Luther's frustration with the Church and why he hammered his thesis's on the front door of the church.

Not to make this a 'Bible' thread, but your post makes a point in the role the early church had with the progression of philosophy within the general populace in the West. I'd never really thought about that before. Thanks. It will give me something to consider whilst on the the way to work tomorrow. =)

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@MrSandman,

I did not say that philosophy was a response to christianity. I said that the trends that developed in western philosophy at the end of the dark ages were partially in response to the dictature of faith that was losing its hold. Christianity's blunt dismissal of new discoveries led philosophers to mistrust the human capacity for faith. They became obsessed with the knowable, doubting the existence of anything that was intangible. This has all inquiry of our culture up to this day. The division between faith and reason is a "personality disorder" our culture teaches us.

Perhaps I should have said "belief and knowledge". Because religion required people to believe despite knowledge to the contrary, people came to think in terms of faith and reason being opposing forces within humans. I believe it is a direct consequence of this that very many people seem to feel that reason discredits faith.

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@Cyracuz,

Quote:

This needs to be done, and Hawking is partially right that if falls to sciene. More specifically, the scientists who are working on uncovering the realm of quantum physics are perhaps the people who are best qualified to come up with viable models of "quantum metaphysics". But like I said, it needs to be done, simply to bring humanity forward in time to our moment.

Yes, but unfortunately there seems to be little actually new here. Hawking's model-dependent realism ironically sounds like a re-hash of certain philosophical trends since and including Kant's (perspectivism and positivism among the former). He mourns that philosophy is out-of-date and ill-equipped to deal with the idea of multiple universes and their differing laws that emerge from M-theory, apparently ignoring the "possible-worlds" turn that revived metaphysics in analytic philosophy, now decades ago. If only Hawking had a physicist version of Kant around to arrange the explosion of diverse models in theoretical physics into antinomy-like relationships, the deeper past would be mimicked in a rough way. Wink

Hawking writes: "The world we know is constructed by the human mind employing sensory data as its raw material and is shaped by the interpretive structure of our brains. […] The way physics has been going, realism is becoming difficult to defend. [...] Instead we adopt a view that we call model-dependent realism [...] According to model-dependent realism, it is pointless to ask whether a model is real, only where it agrees with observation. [...] We make models in science, but we also make them in everyday life. Model-dependent realism applies not only to scientific models but also to the conscious and subconscious mental models we all create in order to interpret and understand the everyday world. There is no way to remove the observer—us—from our perception of the world, which is created through our sensory processing and through the way we think and reason."

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@G H,

What a wonderful statement by Hawking. It is not real in that many (so-called interpretive) social scientists have been aware for a long time that they are modeling the world rather than depicting it, as some objectivist positivists claim to do. I particularly appreciate his recognition of the "subconscious" level of activity in our "everyday" intellectual life.

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@G H,

There are many contemporary "Kants" about. And the next thing up for a copernican twist may be consciousness. Check out a particle physicist named John Hagelin. Check out quantum consciousness.
This is philosophy based on quantum physics. It's as controversial today as Kant's ideas were in his time.

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@Cyracuz,

I in turn hold to myself that Consciousness, a fancy word for measurement, comes in several layers from the sub particle world up to us...in the first degree of complexity things are "aware" of forces like gravity or electromagnetism and that which they "observe" are the most simple patterns of matter and energy which directly interfere with their own pattern and its "behaviour" in the local context..."we" in turn, as complex systems, patterns of patterns, are capable of processing more than the direct influence of this or that force looking instead at entire systems of relations that we regard as objects, things and subjects, capable of a poli-functional operativeness that we can integrate as meaningful, although and to finish, I don´t necessarily consider that we are the final step in the chain of such an extensive word...to where I modestly stand it all comes down on processing information patterns with more or less complexity with more or less extension...

As for Hawking´s delusional comment upon the Institution of Philosophy, one must remember that organizing information in meaningful ways does not amount to retrieve senseless data it never did. Analysing hypothesizing and modelling is an intrinsic part of Science as is primarily of Philosophy and one activity cannot be separated from the other in the name of territorial turf interest and similar such like indulging nonsense...

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@Fil Albuquerque,

I can relate to that. Good description.

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@G H,

Go figure indeed... Wink

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@MrSandman,

You certainly won´t bore me with your minutia, and in general I agree with your assessment ! Wink

To where I stand its not the case that we can thrown Philosophy at a corner and say its there...by its intrinsic nature Philosophy thrives on anything...specific forms of Science are only the mediums and the rules of modelling by which Philosophy can operate inside the Science itself, thus borrowing being just one more necessary step in the process, and a very natural one...on the other hand Philosophy as external differentiated activity is about reviewing and bringing in the large scale picture onto the larger wild ecosystem of several models and sciences integrating them and their activity into a comprehensive explanation of the world we live in...

Regards>FILIPE DE ALBUQUERQUE

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