Philosophy surely is not useless, but some of their arguments just do not make sense to me.
Physicists tend to express bafflement that philosophers care so much about the words. Philosophers, for their part, tend to express exasperation that physicists can use words all the time without knowing what they actually mean.
My experience is that philosophers often carelessly use words to avoid conveying a clear statement, that could be refutable.
This leads directly to the other common misunderstanding among physicists: that philosophers waste their time on grandiose-sounding “Why?” questions that may have no real answers. Perhaps “misunderstanding” isn’t the right word – some such questions are a waste of time, and philosophers do sometimes get caught up in them. (Just as physicists sometimes spend their time on questions that are kind of boring.)
To me, there seems to be a huge difference between “boring” scientific questions and “grandiose-sounding Why?-questions that [..] have no real answers” what Yudkowsky calls wrong questions, e.g. “Why is there anything instead of nothing?” where it remains very unclear how an answer to that problem would look like.
The quest for absolute clarity of description and rigorous understanding is a crucially important feature of the philosophical method.
As Jacob Bronowski and Bruce Mazlish state in The Western Intellectual Tradition, “our confidence in any science is roughly proportional to the amount of mathematics it employs—that is, to its ability to formulate its concepts with enough precision to allow them to be handled mathematically.” In my experience, some philsophers sometimes confuse precision with difficult to read sentences, use of latin words etc. If they knew mathematics (or other formalisms) better, they’d probably produce less material that is of no use (in other scientific disciplines) due to lack of precision.
Science often gives us models of the world that are more than good enough [...]. But that’s not really what drives us to do science in the first place. We shouldn’t be happy to do “well enough,” or merely fit the data – we should be striving to understand how the world really works.
How do they expect an answer to the question of how the world really works to look like? More specifically, what would stop one from responding to any answer with: Yeah, but … how does the world really, actually work?
Philosophy surely is not useless, but some of their arguments just do not make sense to me.
My experience is that philosophers often carelessly use words to avoid conveying a clear statement, that could be refutable.
To me, there seems to be a huge difference between “boring” scientific questions and “grandiose-sounding Why?-questions that [..] have no real answers” what Yudkowsky calls wrong questions, e.g. “Why is there anything instead of nothing?” where it remains very unclear how an answer to that problem would look like.
As Jacob Bronowski and Bruce Mazlish state in The Western Intellectual Tradition, “our confidence in any science is roughly proportional to the amount of mathematics it employs—that is, to its ability to formulate its concepts with enough precision to allow them to be handled mathematically.” In my experience, some philsophers sometimes confuse precision with difficult to read sentences, use of latin words etc. If they knew mathematics (or other formalisms) better, they’d probably produce less material that is of no use (in other scientific disciplines) due to lack of precision.
How do they expect an answer to the question of how the world really works to look like? More specifically, what would stop one from responding to any answer with: Yeah, but … how does the world really, actually work?
If they do it with the purposes of not making a statement that’s open to certain refutations I don’t see how that’s careless.
Oops… ;-)