Eastern philosophy says the self is an illusion

Cypress said:
What sets apart the science of Bacon, Galileo, and Newton was testing, quantification, verification. Not observation.

Observation is as old as the hills. Aristotle and Anaximander were doing observation and reasoning about the natural world 2,000 years before Newton.

But there were no rapid and dramatic advances in scientific knowledge until scientific inquiry started to include testing, quantification, verification during the scientific revolution of the 16th and 17th centuries.

Let's say that was the mojo, the rocket fuel, the key ingredients, if you don't like the term meat and potatoes.
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Arguably "testing", "verification", "quantification" are all different forms of observation.
 
Cypress said:
The modern scientific method wasn't around.

But people have been studying the natural world in a systematic way for two thousand years. The ancient Greeks, Chinese, and Arabs actually had some keen insights on atomic theory, the size and circumference of the earth, even evolution and astronomy.

They didn't have the mojo of testing and verification, which really originates around the time of Galileo.

Scientist as a word didn't even appear until the 1800s. It was all natural philosophy before that.
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They thought a lot of weird things in ancient times. Most were attributed to supernatural beings.

Another was Humorism, which had nothing to do with stand-up comedy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humorism
Humorism, the humoral theory, or humoralism, was a system of medicine detailing a supposed makeup and workings of the human body, adopted by Ancient Greek and Roman physicians and philosophers.

Humorism began to fall out of favor in the 17th century and it was definitively disproved in the 1850s with the advent of germ theory, which was able to show that many diseases previously thought to be humoral were in fact caused by microbes
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The same for burning witches. The fact witches were so feared is still with us today as "witch hunts". LOL

R.10ce275b67320a357902f2c150588ae0
 
The Limitations of Philosophy:

Plato thought light emanated from the eye and combined with sunlight to create vision.

Aristotle apparently thought that the heart was literally the seat of thought. Apparently his hypothesis for the brain was as a "cooling organ".

This is not simply to point up the wrong ideas of the great philosophers, but to note that the self-same reasoning that led them to believe these things is also at the heart of the philosophy for which they are so well known. Did they get it right? Well, in matters that can be technically tested we see the possibility of great error. Thankfully for a lot of philosophical musings it is possible to have ideas which may or may not comport with reality so long as they are logical and internally self-consistent.

I'm honestly not taking a swipe at the great philosophers here, but noting that simply pointing to these great minds as if they discovered something brilliant that mere science could not possibly have had any say on it is insufficient. It is appeal to authority.

And I'm still rather convinced that any meaningful philosophical concept really only has value when it applies to how humans actually function. That means that there's a significant observation component which means that anything meaningful is probably more closely modeled by "scientific type approaches" than it is through pure reason.
 
Doc Dutch said:
They thought a lot of weird things in ancient times. Most were attributed to supernatural beings.

Another was Humorism, which had nothing to do with stand-up comedy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humorism


The same for burning witches. The fact witches were so feared is still with us today as "witch hunts". LOL

R.10ce275b67320a357902f2c150588ae0
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Burning witches was a Catholic thing, not a Greek thing.

Greek medicine went down the wrong path with Galen.

But I think we tend to be to quick to pat ourselves on the back and point and laugh at the Greeks.

The pre-Socratic natural philosophers, Aristotle, Ptolemy, Democritus et al were studying the natural world in a systematic way invoking only natural forces and causes, while the rest of Europe, Near East, and Central Asia were mired in myth, ritual, and superstition.

Even Galen was looking for natural causes to disease rather than blaming spirits and demons.

That is an extraordinary leap forward in human intellectual development. And while they got things wrong, they did have key insights on atomism, astronomy, math, geography, geology, and logic.

What they lacked was the experimental method and technology of Newton and Galileo. But any history of science course at an accredited university is going to spend several lectures paying homage to the Greeks and their landmark investigations into the natural world.


Newton was playing around with alchemy and divination, so he got things wrong too.
 
NiftyNiblick said:
Are those the guys that used to run that Greek restaurant with the blue mirror décor in Lowell, Massachusetts?
I believe so. Aristotle was one of them for sure, but maybe not the other two guys.

I was never a lamb guy, but their leg of lamb was absolutely delicious.
Haven't been there since the late 1970s, though.
Who knows if it's still open?

ps: not crazy about Greek wine, though.
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I like the dolmas, the stuffed grape leaves.

Takes a lot of nerve to name your kid Aristotle.
 
Cypress said:
Burning witches was a Catholic thing, not a Greek thing.

Greek medicine went down the wrong path with Galen.

But I think we tend to be to quick to pat ourselves on the back and point and laugh at the Greeks.

The pre-Socratic natural philosophers, Aristotle, Ptolemy, et al were studying the natural world in a systematic way invoking only natural forces and causes, while the rest of Europe, Near East, and Central Asia were mired in myth, ritual, and superstition.

Even Galen was looking for natural causes to disease rather than blaming spirits and demons.

That is an extraordinary leap forward in human intellectual achievement. And while they got things wrong, they did have key insights on atomism, astronomy, math, geography, geology, and logic.

What they lacked was the experimental method and technology of Newton and Galileo. But any history of science course at an accredited university is going to spend several lectures paying homage to the Greeks and their in investigations into the natural world.


Newton was playing around with alchemy and divination, so he got things wrong too.
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I don't know anything about Galen and would never laugh at the Greeks....except the joke about Greek men, Greek boys and a crowbar. LOL

I do recall the Islamic Golden Age of knowledge in Baghdad which existed about the same time as Western Europe was going through the Dark Ages.

As for the history of mankind's advancement of knowledge, no history would be complete without discussing the Greeks. Despite the width and breadth of the Roman Empire, they were really never known to be "scientists" except when it came to the military arts.
 
ZenMode said:
I think the term "electronics" has a fairly universally understood meaning and no current AI exists independent of electronic components.
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Agreed. Add this there is a difference between electronics and electrical.
 
ZenMode said:
I think the term "electronics" has a fairly universally understood meaning and no current AI exists independent of electronic components.
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I really have no idea what you are talking about. And I think you have no idea what artificial intelligence is--it is not word processing.
 
Telocollinite said:
The Limitations of Philosophy:

Plato thought light emanated from the eye and combined with sunlight to create vision.

Aristotle apparently thought that the heart was literally the seat of thought. Apparently his hypothesis for the brain was as a "cooling organ".

This is not simply to point up the wrong ideas of the great philosophers, but to note that the self-same reasoning that led them to believe these things is also at the heart of the philosophy for which they are so well known. Did they get it right? Well, in matters that can be technically tested we see the possibility of great error. Thankfully for a lot of philosophical musings it is possible to have ideas which may or may not comport with reality so long as they are logical and internally self-consistent.

I'm honestly not taking a swipe at the great philosophers here, but noting that simply pointing to these great minds as if they discovered something brilliant that mere science could not possibly have had any say on it is insufficient. It is appeal to authority.

And I'm still rather convinced that any meaningful philosophical concept really only has value when it applies to how humans actually function. That means that there's a significant observation component which means that anything meaningful is probably more closely modeled by "scientific type approaches" than it is through pure reason.
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You realize philosophy is not prophesy. Philosophers expect other to criticize their ideas.
 
Telocollinite said:
And I'm still rather convinced that any meaningful philosophical concept really only has value when it applies to how humans actually function. That means that there's a significant observation component which means that anything meaningful is probably more closely modeled by "scientific type approaches" than it is through pure reason.
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Most philosophers do not believe in "pure reason."
 
Telocollinite said:
Do you not observe how the person acts? Do you not feel a physical attraction to them? Surely it isn't "pure reason" that attracts you to someone. Given that you are an animal you are driven in much the same way animals are driven in terms of attraction and mating.
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But why should I marry Susan? I can have sex without marriage.
 
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