"You know you're an engineer if you've ever modeled a cow as a sphere." - Ancient engineering joke And here's where a lot of philosophy strikes me as superfluous - it's all about the reference frame. Right now, I am at rest on my couch. I am not moving, my potential energy is zero, my kinetic energy is zero. Ahhh - but the couch breaks! Suddenly I am no longer at rest, for my potential energy derived from being above the floor unsupported transforms into kinetic energy hurtling my ass the fifteen inches it can go (*you know you're an engineer if you've modeled a couch as the void*) at 29 feet per second per second. Or, we take out the building. Now I'm dropping 30 feet at 29f/s^2. My reference frame changes. And hey - there could be an alien on an asteroid with a reference energy of zero, sitting on his couch, that suddenly hurtles into Los Angeles with a reference energy of zero, and suddenly all sorts of kinetic energy erupts out of the nothing because the reference frame of the discussion is the zero between two very impressive vectors. So which is real? Well, it's all real, but none of that shit matters at the moment. I'm at rest on the couch and if I concern myself with the other reference frames, I can have a nice flight of fancy (or terror, depending on one's attitude) but I cannot suddenly plummet to the earth through sheer force of will. Further, my reference frame is egocentric only out of habit. Does the bullet hit me or do I hit the bullet? The math is easier if I hit the bullet, actually, but from my perspective I'm much more interested in a me-centric analysis. That doesn't make it more valid, it makes it more selfish. So is this a dream? Is this a simulation? What is real? Well, okay, yeah, we can go there. But what's the point? If it's all a dream, I have to play by the rules of this dream. If it's all a simulation, I have to play by the rules of this simulation. The morals I abide by are the ones that function here, regardless of where "here" is. So until Deus ex Machinas his way out here, my "real" is as "real" as "real" gets, regardless of how fake it is from other reference frames. And should I suddenly find myself in need of a new reference frame to solve the equation, I'll do my best to model the situation to give me an answer. Maybe I'll even find the centroid of the cow since the spherical model tends to make it too simplistic. TL;DR: Nihilism
I really enjoyed reading that, especially since it sounds exactly like my roommate, who is an engineer. Although you are a lot better at articulating your thoughts. I'm a design student who really enjoys art. So whenever we go up to the roof to smoke, it's a fantastic clashing of his thought process and mine. Our other room-mate (his girlfriend) describes our conversations as "Jayden (engineer student) thinks with rules and numbers and PJ (me) thinks with colours and shapes." But that's also the fun of philosophy. For me, it's purely recreational and I agree with you to an extent. There is no end-game and it's all dependant upon the reference frame, but I find it really fun to explore everything within that reference frame, then get rid of the reference-frame, add another, stretch it out, squeeze it, add God, try to combine two reference frames, see if one of them bleeds, and so on. Now I'm just curious about you (especially because there's also a chance you might be my room-mate). Have you ever studied philosophy academically or read any philosophical text?
And that, I believe, is why I end up with so little patience for philosophy: once you change the reference frame, get rid of the reference frame, add another, stretch it out, etc you've lost any anchor. To me, the relation to the anchor is what matters: "what do I get out of studying this?" A thought experiment left unhinged is fiction and while I'm fond of fiction, I prefer it full of characters and plot. The last time I debated philosophy was 1994. The last time I had a roommate was 1997. So while there's a chance I'm your roommate, it would involve some serious abuse of the space-time continuum.
You're definitely not wrong, but I do believe there is a lot to be gained from philosophy, especially since we know that we won't actually answer any of the questions that we ask in philosophy. For example, once I began studying philosophy, I definitely found myself more curious and open to other ideas and perspectives. Although this may be because I'm still very young and lots of things are new to me. So do you think your attitude towards philosophy is caused by your "engineer perspective"? Because as I explained earlier, I've observed a small correlation between engineering students and an attitude that is reluctant to accept philosophy as constructive haha.
I think I'm a fundamentally pragmatic person and I have a prejudice against things I find lacking pragmatism, such as philosophy. I don't say this with pride - I say it to illuminate a personal blind spot of mine. I also agree with you as far as curiosity and perspective, but I think I'm far more open to, shall we say, "applied philosophy." This is one of the things I love about Kundera - his works are very much an exploration of "what would you do? And why?" while Daniel Quinn drives me up the fucking wall ("allow me to contrive an artificial situation so that I can make a point that has no basis in real life"). It probably is related to an engineering background- or at the very least, an engineering mindset. Theoretically, you should be able to divide a bar of chocolate in half an infinite number of times. Practically, you're going to hit the wall just a little bit south of "chocolate chips." Theoretically, I can walk halfway to the wall forever. Practically, I'm going to bump my nose after a few minutes. Asymptotes are very real but so is precision, and there are very few things in life where the precision of the problem permits asymptotic behavior. So I look at a list like this and think "Qualia? Who fucking cares? So long as we can all agree what blue looks like does it really matter?"
Ha! Exactly! But that's still a form of philosophy. It's just divergent from the main stream (the main stream, in this case, is incorrect, IMO). That's why I argue that bad philosophy can hold us back quite a bit, scientifically speaking, but that good philosophy can help us look in interesting places and form new ideas. (As an aside, your statement is almost exactly what Wittgenstein, the most hated of philosophers by philosophers, argued in The Philosophic Investigations; the book is written in conversational form; the quote: “How is he to know what color he is to pick out when he hears ‘red’? — Quite simple: he is to take the color whose image occurs to him when he hears the word.”)"Qualia? Who fucking cares? So long as we can all agree what blue looks like does it really matter?"
I'ma read me some then. Fukkit. I've been building a studio and mainlining audiobooks at double speed for the past three weeks and could use a change. On the plus side, I now understand the middle east, terrorism, islam and the PNAC. On the minus side, it'd take me a week to explain.
His two major works are The Philosophic Investigations and Tractatus Philosophicus Logico. Do read Investigations; don't read Tractatus. Tractatus is his early work that made him really famous, and he completely retracted it when he wrote Investigations. Many people criticize Investigations for inventing the precursor to what became relativism. I would argue, however, that physicists already invented relativism decades before. But that's just my naive view.
I can be fun to kick around some philosophic arguments with friends, but make no mistake, philosophy matters. A lot. Especially to science and politics. Quite a bit more depth exists to philosophy than tired epistemological word games. Philosophy has given us such great things as The Enlightenment, and such terrible things as the USSR. The world's first public park (in Edinburgh), started as a philosophic exercise of David Hume. Data aren't truth. That is the misconception of science. Edit: Here is another shameless plug for a blog I wrote about the importance of philosophy to biology and politics.
I agree, philosophy is quite important for science and especially engineering. Not the word games, but things like ethics and the philosophy of science. For example, what is the ethical impact of the machine I am making. How can I improve my scientific progress. This too is philosophy. It is not just metaphysics. Edit: I'll read your shameless plug later :P