Science starts with observations and then summarizes them into theories. Math starts with axioms and then generates theorems via a series of proofs.
Nice. And close to how I defined these for myself a long time ago:
Math is everything valid (in the strict sense if being derived by a consistency-preserving process).
Physics is everything useful (in the strict sense of tracing back observable reality)
Hm, translating to English this doesn’t come out too well. But anyway, I agree that it is possible to carve truth in different ways. One with a focus on consistency and one on observability.
I don’t feel like I learned anything from Socrates and Aristotle.
My guess would be because you already knew all of the facts. We don’t learn philosophy to learn true facts. You have to read philosophy backwards: How did people arrive at truth?
Rationalism defines truth as that which is observable, legible and tautologically consistent. Science is useful for the “observable” part. Math is useful for the “consistency” part. Both are necessarily legible, since without well-defined terms you end up back in the quagmire of meaningless philosophy.
I think you are misreading what philosophy does (or at least did fir most of the time): Struggling to build words that describe difficult to describe things. Creating legibility out of nothing.
Yes, you need legibility, but where does it come from? Once you have words like “observation” or “particle” (aka atom) or force you can do stuff with it. But reality is not legibile enough to provide these for free. Reality has joints but they are obscursed by a lot of messy flesh that is in the way. You have to throw words around that you gave an intuition that may or may not be right and see what sticks. And you don’t do this alone because it is too easy to spot fake patterns. Other people will try to catch yiu. But you can’t exchange intuitions directly. You have only words with all their imprecision. You can try definitions—but they must be circular because nothing is grounded—yet. That’s philosophy: Creating legibility out of nothing. At least that’s some idealized view of philosophy. Reals philosophy is not like that. But ideal math is also not like real math.
Anyway, I think you can observe this process of creating legibility about something in real time with consciousness. I think progress is being made with recent posts by Scott Alexander and others as well as real studies—putting a meditator into a CT and measuring what goes on.
Nice. And close to how I defined these for myself a long time ago:
Math is everything valid (in the strict sense if being derived by a consistency-preserving process).
Physics is everything useful (in the strict sense of tracing back observable reality)
Hm, translating to English this doesn’t come out too well. But anyway, I agree that it is possible to carve truth in different ways. One with a focus on consistency and one on observability.
My guess would be because you already knew all of the facts. We don’t learn philosophy to learn true facts. You have to read philosophy backwards: How did people arrive at truth?
I think you are misreading what philosophy does (or at least did fir most of the time): Struggling to build words that describe difficult to describe things. Creating legibility out of nothing.
Yes, you need legibility, but where does it come from? Once you have words like “observation” or “particle” (aka atom) or force you can do stuff with it. But reality is not legibile enough to provide these for free. Reality has joints but they are obscursed by a lot of messy flesh that is in the way. You have to throw words around that you gave an intuition that may or may not be right and see what sticks. And you don’t do this alone because it is too easy to spot fake patterns. Other people will try to catch yiu. But you can’t exchange intuitions directly. You have only words with all their imprecision. You can try definitions—but they must be circular because nothing is grounded—yet. That’s philosophy: Creating legibility out of nothing. At least that’s some idealized view of philosophy. Reals philosophy is not like that. But ideal math is also not like real math.
Anyway, I think you can observe this process of creating legibility about something in real time with consciousness. I think progress is being made with recent posts by Scott Alexander and others as well as real studies—putting a meditator into a CT and measuring what goes on.