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> This comment started out good but then stumbled in to some odd critique of philosophy as being incapable of dealing with unknowable things when indeed that seems to be perfectly within the purview of philosophy. What does it mean to "deal with" unknowable things in this case? If philosophy is claiming this as their purview, what are they going to do with it? I'd posit philosophers have two options: 1. Say, "I don't know." This is the better option, in my opinion, because it's honest, but scientists already said that, so why do we need philosophers to say the same thing? You can speculate beyond this and posit it from the beginning as "if this thing we don't know is true is true, then it would have this effect". But in other fields this would generally be a very low-value sort of discussion--respectable institutions would not, for example, give a lot of funding to scientific experiments which presuppose unstudied phenomena. You'd study the unstudied phenomenon first and come to conclusions there before moving on to further experiments which presuppose it. Philosophy isn't hurting anything by taking this approach, but it's not adding anything to what science has already done. 2. The second option is, you do what philosophers do all-too-often: simply present your speculation as fact, perhaps hiding a "I don't actually know" in a footnote somewhere so you can point to it when criticized. A common variant of this is teaching ridiculous ideas as equally valid, and then saying you're just teaching history of philosophy when criticized. This is how, for example, you get the categorical imperative taught in schools: it's trivial to come up with counterexamples where everyone behaving a certain way would be horrible, but if you point this out, philosophers will often simply say that they're just teaching Kant because he's historically important. Yet Kantian ethics are taught right next to much more realistic ethical ideas, and students often can't differentiate which ones make any sense and which ones don't. This would be like teaching flat earth-ism in science class, and then saying "it's history of science" when criticized. It's a motte and bailey argument[1] and it's dishonest and harmful to rational thought. It seems to me that science has taken us as far as it's useful to go with regard to determinism, and philosophy has nothing of value to add on the subject. Hume's Problem of Induction isn't comparable here. In that case, Hume is asking a question which science hasn't/can't ask, which is somewhat useful. I don't think, however, that Hume really answers the question, and I don't think it would be useful to pretend that we know the answer. In the case of Hume's Problem of Induction, philosophy adds the question but not the answer: with superdeterminism, science has already asked the question, and philosophy can't answer it any better, so philosophy has nothing to contribute. [1] https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Motte_and_bailey |