Philosophy Thread

@nebelstern Isn't that what every religion tries to do?

Indeed. But people can find transcendence in whatever thing they can find. A guiding morality alone is what some atheists are guided. For some it is one's family, or nation and other mundane concepts. For me, although humanity can find something to call "transcendent", I think (this is an opinion, as I cannot prove it) it is more objective.

One cannot be an expert in every sciences yet they keep an opinion of every field. Such an opinion does not derive from evidence based reasoning but from trusting other sources or reading online. Isn't such a trust the same as faith? Does that mean faith is the fundamental medium to transfer knowledge and not reasoning? So everyone has faith, whether they are religious or not? Ugh philosophy is alwasy a drag

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/646083798248980490/727047469355106324/106586934_161915082040971_7132801068822122401_n.png

The advent of modern physics rendered a lot of philosophy almost completely useless. Philosophy is very good at asking questions about the universe. But philosophy is not very good at answering those questions. The scientific method and scientific thinking is better suited to answer those questions. Such as the question of determinism. Under the laws of Newtonian mechanics. The universe is indeed deterministic. If a being had perfect knowledge about the universe. That is to say. A being knew the location, velocity, momentum, mass, etc of of every particle in the universe. Based on the perfect knowledge of the universe. A being could under the laws of Newtonian mechanics predict the future and also perfectly know the past. A past and future that is deterministically known. A being with perfect knowledge of the universe would know the outcome of all the events in the universe. In reality, it is impossible to have perfect knowledge of the universe. Omniscience God if you will. Humans have a finite level of measuring capabilities for the universe. Errors in measurements or rounding errors in numerical computation effect the initial conditions of the dynamical system. The sensitivity of initial conditions can leave dynamical system to apparent randomness. This apparent randomness is studied by the branch of mathematics called chaos theory. Chaos theory is related to the butterfly effect. Chaos theory is a slightly different topic. I won't go into that rabbit hole in this paragraph. Now returning to determinism of the universe.The universe does not fully operate under deterministic Newtonian mechanics. It also operates under laws of Quantum Mechanics. Quantum Mechanics involves a level of randomness that is simply not present in deterministic physics. Quantum mechanics introduced the uncertainty principle (Δx Δp≥ℏ2.). Where it is simply not possible to know a particle's exact position and exact momentum at the same time. The more certain a particles location is. The less certain its momentum is and vice versa. Quantum Mechanics introduces unknowns in the system. It is no longer possibly to know a precise future because of the uncertainty principle. Determinism also fails in explaining the probabilities of an element's half life. Half-life is the time required for a quantity to reduce to half of its initial value. Think of the time required for a gram of uranium-238 to probabilistic decay into half a gram. The key words is probabilistic. Because of the probabilistic decay. It is impossible to know the exact half life time. Determinism cannot fully explain the randomness of half life. If the fundamental particles of the universe don't behave deterministically then does the universe at a macro level behave deterministically? References: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40509-014-0008-4 Heisenberg, W.: Uber den anschaulichen Inhalt der quantentheoretischen Kinematik und Mechanik. Z. Phys. 43, 172 (1927) https://brilliant.org/wiki/chaos-theory/

@alephy I can't agree with you more, that's exactly what I think of metaphysics and physics But it's a standard mathematician vs philosopher debate though which is running for centuries. Mathematicians regard science as the grander one while philosophers regard philosophy as that.