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Comment by tgv | Hacker News Reader

I agree, string theory isn't very respectable. It looks like an attempt to piggyback a convoluted mathematical structure on existing theories, without much benefit.

> Like you don't understand Panpsychim.

It posits the existence of some force of nature to explain consciousness. It can't explain what consciousness is, it can't explain why consciousness has never been observed outside animals with a (reasonably large) brain (and even those are rare) .There's no explanation for that. If there is one, it will include something like "you need a lot of consciousness particles in a particular structure for it to emerge."

Panpsychism is based on the rejection of the possibility that physical processes can explain consciousness. Which makes it all the weirder that it needs an extra physical force to explain it.

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>It can't explain what consciousness is, it can't explain why consciousness ...

You are stating the obvious. Its not a science but philosophy. You looking at is as if it were science explaining reality misses the point. That perspective does not apply here.

You are doing the exact same thing you are concerned about, treating a philosophy like a science. Just that you are worried about it being applied and relied on like as science while at the same time trying to verify or discredit it like a science. Your initial idea of it not being a science was quite right, you just havent applied that insight throughout your model. This includes what standards you apply and how you look at it.

Or to put it differently, Plato didnt loose anything when we figured out that matter wasnt just a combination of fire, water, earth and air. That wasnt the relevant point, it was a reference allowing you to think about something else in a specific way. Trying to look at details of that story from a scientific perspective is not much different from trying to build a physical model of the solar system from the bible.

Its just not a sensible thing to do. It corrupts your reality model and lets you do not very sensible things based on not very sensible convictions and judgements.

I seem to have an entirely different opinion of philosophy. Your take is: we shouldn't take philosophy serious? It's just a bunch of random ideas that sometimes help you think in another way? That would explain the esteem for Heidegger and Derrida.

Unfortunately, someone posted a list of articles written on panpsychism. It's really well beyond "your" style of philosophy. And people in all kinds of branches of science (used to) apply Derrida's ideas. So when the original comment wrote "a respectable philosophical theory", I didn't take it to mean: a toy for the empircally challenged.

> we shouldn't take philosophy serious?

We shouldnt treat it as a science. Empiricism is a pointless frame here. That applies standards its not meant for.

Regarding what its good for, it allows you to think about higher complexity problems. For example, you wont be able to create a complete ontological description of reality, but there is still some insight you can gain. Epistemology has value, it gave you the scientific method. Its just that that is a later step that has to stand on its own.

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