2022-09-14 Class#

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Intro to The Situation#

#jjfff #treadmill

Skepticism and the Philosophy of Science#

  • Solipsism, the worst and only defensible philosophical position

    • The belief that only I exist and everything else is not real (everyone else = npc)

    • defensible, because only thing you can make assumptions (that others are also conscious)

  • Cogito Ergo Sum (1st level of knowledge)

    • “I think, therefore I am”–> only known fact ever is that you are having a conscious experience (not a functional belief)

    • Descartes “Essentially Solipism” -have to believe untrue things to get anywhere such as others also exist (2nd level of knowledge)

  • truth vs Truth

    • Rule#1 - Science is impossible

      • we want to get to Truth, but will never know anything for sure, many scientific theories proven false over the years, any theories now may be proven wrong in the future

      • we get “less wrong” over time

        • ex: optic study by Ibn al-Haytham –> anatomically correct, but lack of explanation for bending of light in lens

        • “fractional/gradients” of truth

      • no claim is possible without assumptions

    • first assumption: others exist and have conscious experiences

    • Truth - true facts of the universe and how everything works, “God eye view of the world”

      • we can’t access this -> only have approximations of truth –> essential gap between epistemology (ability to know things) and metaphysics (True facts)

    • truth - approximations of the truth

    • Knowledge is messy–>interpretations

      • textbooks don’t take this into consideration

  • Khunian paradigm shifts -opposed incrementalist approach: the idea that things get better over time

    • Thomas Khun - The Structure of Scientific Evolutions

    • ex. with phlogiston, pre pre cursor to chemistry (now known as oxygen)

    • people tend to ignore holes of a study until a new one comes along, causing them to forget the older studies

    • nonlinear progress, where we build “knowledge” from shaky foundations

  • Epistemology: the branch of philosophy concerned with knowledge, “what does it mean to know something?” “where does it come from?”

  • ability to know these things

  • Metaphysics: the true facts of the universe & what actually exists

    • ex. where do all of your beliefs about yourself come from? -Descartes: Empirical fact- something you look at and are reliable bc of that

2 scientific questions: “what am I” and “what is everything else in the world”

  • Descartes: “what can I know for sure? bc sensory intake can be wrong”–> we only know we perceive

–> the actual true fact of an experience is always imperfect because time has passed since the recorded data (measurements are imperfect)

The structure of Academia#

  • The heirarchy

    • undergrad

    • grad

    • post doc

    • prof

      • tenure and non-tenure track

      • asst prof

      • associate prof

      • ‘full’ prof

  • The journal system

    • mention markdown

    • peer review

    • “impact factor” and “H-index”

      • “once a metric becomes an outcome, it ceases to be a good metric”

  • Funding

    • Federal funds

      • NIH

      • NSF

      • etc

    • Private Foundations

      • HHMI

      • Sloan

      • Etc

    • Corporate

    • Military