Comment by xoac
2 years ago
You seem to think that this is some sort of battle between the wordcels and the shape rotators or whatever, it's not. Extremely smart people have been in these fields for thousands of years and they didn't think that math and philosophy are opposites or in some tension. Even a cursory familiarity with the history of math and philo will reveal this.
>Extremely smart people have been in these fields for thousands of years and they didn't think that math and philosophy are opposites or in some tension. Even a cursory familiarity with the history of math and philo will reveal this.
Yeah it was actually progress when the field largely separated the philosophical mumbo jumbo away from the pure math. In the past math text books were littered with this mumbo jumbo because people couldn't separate the philosophy away from the axiomatic logic. Textbooks were just a mess. Nowadays there's a clear delineation. I believe it was Newton who started this separation trend with his laws of motion.
Mathematics is an entirely separate department that is NOT under philosophy in most schools because of this.
I studied philosophy at a department with an analytic slant. So essentially with philosophers who have a hardon for math and science. Still, even there people were not talking nonsense like this.
Pure math is really nice, but there are so many aspects of human activity where this math is just totally useless. This is where we have to use the fuzzy words and stuff and where rigorous interpretation that you get trained in philosophy and other wordcel departments comes useful.
I really encourage you to engage with some history of philosophy. You'll probably enjoy it and maybe change some of your views. Maybe try some history of science?
I'm well versed in the "philosophy" of science.
Personally though because philosophy encompasses stuff like animism I don't give the entire field much weight. Aspects of it are interesting but the entire field as a whole is a category error that encompasses everything on the face of the earth. What is not philosophy? I mean it sounds like philosophy is the study of anything and everything.
Anyway to your point physics supposedly is a mathematical model that can model everything down to the tiniest atom. There are holes where not everything can be calculated in a closed form equation and there are holes where the fundamental primitive is true randomness which is something hard to replicate or define.
In this sense physics can model almost (key adjective) everything in the the universe. Including most of all human activity. Because in the end that's of what's going on. Atoms.