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Comment by gms7777 | Hacker News Reader

There are thoughts that are relegated to philosophy. An important field certainly, but one distinctly separate from modern science, which is concerned primarily with the observable. Is it possible that we are living within a simulated universe? Certainly. However, unless we begin to find evidence that suggests so, in the realm of science, it doesn't matter one bit.

As an aside, this happens to be my view on religion as well. I suppose though with the possibility of eternal damnation and all, it perhaps matter a bit more than the whole Matrix thing.

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You can perform empirical experiments on the topics philosophy is concerned with in the same way you can perform experiments in the realm of 'pure' mathematics. I don't think there's any such distinction as philosophy/science.

But philosophy can only offer logical proof, non-observable/measureable.

I would suggest logic is a tool for measuring and observing in the universe in the platonic forms just as the large hadron colider is in the universe of the physical.

I think logic is more a proxy or a heuristic. It helps you make conjectures about the world even if you don't necessarily have direct evidence.

But if your observations contradict your logic? Something must be wrong. It could easily be the observations, but the more you have, the less likely it is. I think, at the very limit, deduction would have to give way to induction.

This happened to Kant. In Critique of Pure Reason, he presents Euclidean geometry as a set of incontestable, fundamental truths that human beings understand intuitively, and uses that as a launching point to argue for the existence of an ideal universe outside of our own perceptions and experience. Problem is, Euclid's parallel postulate is contradicted by observable evidence, as per general relativity. Other fundamental logical ideas about causality seem to be contradicted by experiments involving quantum mechanics. For science to work, though, we do have to take one thing on faith: That the universe can be understood through observation. Everything else, even logic, is fair game.

Why is induction not a logical process while deduction is? They are both logical processes of reasoning. You can do induction in philosophy also.

I'm sorry, my particular choice of words is sloppy. Ricardobeat said that "philosophy can only offer logical proof, non-observable/measureable". In this context, I assumed that "logic" really meant deduction or, at most, observations much less rigorous than science.

Now, assuming that by "logic" I really mean reasoning without observations, I hope my point becomes more clear. My impression is that philosophers do not really go in for scientific studies and experiments; if an idea proved logically by a philosopher contradicted sufficiently good experimental evidence, for some value of "sufficiently good", I would side with the evidence.

Hopefully my thinking is clearer now. I'm working on improving my writing, so hopefully I'll be less needlessly ambiguous in the future :).

Neil deGrasse Tyson does a good job of explaining the difference between modern science and philosophy at the 1:02:00 mark in this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9zXYTwuwsyI

Tyson appears to distinguish between the two on the basis of topics under investigation, but not by any difference between the scientific method and the methods used by philosophers. I am not sure I agree with this distinction from an epistemological point of view.

> I suppose though with the possibility of eternal damnation and all

Pascal's Wager? Perhaps the way to avoid that eternal damnation is to not worship $DEITY.

That is not Pascal's Wager!

Pascal's Wager is about behaving as if Deity existed even though you're not sure in order to avoid damnation.

Moreover, why do you make Deity a global variable? What if everyone has his or her own's afterlife? If it's global it should probably be a constant anyway, it's one of those things you don't want to mess with…

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