Science vs. Philosophy

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I meant, 'of no material consequence,' but I do see your point in that otherwise meaningless issues, existing only in the brains of people, have caused those people to go to war, murder others, cover up the rape of thousands of children, and occasionally provide succor to the helpless, all without any previously existing real-world solidity.

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Not sure what your point is with that. My point was that arguing over whether Jesus or Krishna is a better avatar to worship cannot be tested in the real world, and the argument is basically pointless except in people's heads (and, as you pointed out, except to the point that those people become violent or benevolent over the issue).

Well right, intangibles that can yield in the end the material value of better human efficiency through culture or perhaps building other hypotheses on learning how we learn or what the most salient factors are that lead the platform from which we think.


Got it. Have to admit, it might have just been how I learned it in college and it may be that it had never been brought in as such but my philosophy courses never really touched on religion - it was more Plato, Socrates, Bentham, Hume, Kant, Nietchze, the Existentialists, etc. - some had philosophies that were wild speculations about reality, science, and the human condition which were to be scientifically disproven (particularly the earliest) while others had wild speculations about the future, others were more interested in deconstructing the human state and addressing that it was vacuous. I think certain people did need turn-arounds in their thinking and some of these brought at least some dialog to topics where religion of the day made these things difficult to talk about outside of a formal medium. Today the pressures aren't on quite as deep but there still seem to be things that we have a hard time reaching for simply because we have to almost get behind our own sense of consciousness in certain ways that we can best pretend to be third person or get behind our a priori assumptions, understand what they are and where they are, then proceed to test them - and the best way still seems to be proofs. I will admit, I've always found it sneaky and utterly junk/farce when I see a philosophical proof that sets out to prove something and one of the first steps automatically says its true in some form where it might be a bit hidden and they simply excavate what they planted in the proof to begin with hoping no one saw it - to me that's where it really just becomes low-handed politics and gameplaying (yes, masturbation as well) or the ideas that can be easily disproven but they still circulate because some college kids smoking dope think they sound far out in a cool way.

The quick and dirty version of the paragraph above - I think proofs help give form to the intangible. You have a big wad of 'something' out there that you're carving up (taking the whole haystack and bringing it down to processable pieces) with proofs and ideas, from there it can often trickle down to testable and verifiable experiment however, on the very front line, it seems to need to start there to get at least the highest level of organization behind a concept or idea before it can be taken to the lowest level which is lab-testing it into theory or law.

"Cosmos" by Carl Sagan (1980, 1985):
"In love with whole numbers, the Phythagoreans believed all things could be derived from them, certainly all other numbers.....[they] suppressed the knowledge of ..[square root of 2]... and the dodecahedron.....Plato urged astronomers to think about the heavens, but not to waste their time observing them....A Phythagorean named Hippasus published the secret of the 'sphere with twelve pentagons,' the dodecahedron. When he later died in a shipwreck, we are told, his fellow Pythagoreans remarked on the justice of the punishment. His book has not survived." pages 151-152.

"...Its analogue we may call hylephobia, or morbid fear of materialism, also a very modern distemper, which afflicts, now and then, a philosopher with a horror of contact with the fresh facts of science so necessary to his survival in the world of modern thought, and impels him to try to purge every element of matter from facts he cannot escape. Hylephobia, however, is now often regarded as a sacred madness, as epilepsy used to be. It befalls only the good; and the richer and fairer the world of sense, and the more violent the phobia against it, the more surpassingly rich and fair and real must the purely subjective, rational, ideal world appear. All the wisdom of scientific psychology melted in this author's [Dr. Borden Parker Bowne's] crucible is but slag and dross,...."

Tadzio