Richard Feynman on hungry philosophers (or do we see objects or only their light)

I dunno about the rest of you, but I clicked on the link to her Twitter account, which so far has much higher quality stuff than this thread on HN. Some fun links: "Lightning makes new isotopes" link "P-values--abused but not abandoned" (includes some nice background on p-values for those of us for whom the concept is a little fuzzy) link A cute video of Feynman answering the question of whether you're seeing an object, or only the light from an object, when looking at it: ▶ this video A single-molecule magnet: link ...and all that's just in the last 24 hours. She's got a fantastic Twitter feed for the science-interested.

I respect philosophy, but am more persuaded by Richard Feynman's perspective, when asked what he considered a philosophical question. ▶ this video This NY Times story gets that philosophy isn't that necessary, but then got so bogged down in philosophical writing it was a chore to get through and I don't consider it worth my time to have read it. Socrates said "The unexamined life is not worth living." I've examined my life a bunch and have benefited from the examination, but the people I know who seem to enjoy their lives the most haven't examined theirs at all. I tend to examine mine less now and I think I'm living better. But maybe that's from figuring things out earlier.

> It's like proving a negative. "You can't prove a negative" is one of dopey philosophical slogans[1] that are meaningless in practice. It gives undue weight to absolutes that do not exist in reality. The statement "money doesn't grow on trees" is obviously true, yet you can't logically rule out the existence of such a tree. What are the practical implications of this? None. If we tested a hypothesis thoroughly, we can say that it is true or not true, not with absolute platonic certainty , but for all intents and purposes . [1] ▶ this video

A parallel in defining words. A word dictionary has to be self referential, or you need an ever increasing vocabulary, or just accept some axioms that don't require verification (you know what a word like cat is by some interaction escaping out of the context of word descriptions) Another parallel ▶ this video we were computationally evolved to make sense of the world... and making sense is a computation

"Western metaphysics typically holds that – in addition to the existence of any thoughts, emotions and physical sensations – there is some entity to whom all these experiences are happening, and that it makes sense to refer to this entity as ‘I’ or ‘me’. However, according to Buddhist philosophy, there is no ‘self’ or ‘me’ to which such phenomena belong." This reminds me of this quip by Richard Feynman: ▶ this video

Not anti-intellectualism at all, and not even anti-philosophy. If I'm anti- anything, I am against those philosophers who refuse to make disprovable assertions and instead use rhetoric and non-formal logic to make their points. The reason is simple, their stuff comes and goes. They contradict each other -- and often do not accept scientific fact simply because they do not understand it. Philosophy was once the only way to investigate some particularly hard problems, such as "where do we come from?" or "what is the mind?". With recent scientific and technological advances, we actually got some fact-based answers there. Cosmology, standard model, evolutionary biology, neuroscience are evidence-based sciences that override, and often contradict, most philosophical speculations of the past. A lot of philosophers simply do not have the domain knowledge anymore. I know that some argue that those sciences are philosophy, but, frankly, that's stretching reality. Last point, my dislike for philosophers is not a "new" position. See what Richard Feynman had to say about them: ▶ this video