| > Philosophy is not science in the same sense art is not music No, that is not at all the same thing. There was not a field of human intellectual endeavor called "art" which begat music. A much better analogy is that philosophy is not science in the same sense that alchemy is not chemistry, or astrology is not astronomy, or banging on a hollow log with a stick is not playing the violin. > Did we agree to that specific definition? This discussion is taking place in a thread whose topic is a blog post which defends that specific definition. So no, we didn't explicitly agree to it, but it's a reasonable assumption, a generally understood part of the HN social contract. > What is one piece of hard evidence that actually works as evidence to prove materialism Materialism is not the testable hypothesis. The testable hypothesis is "molecules is what causes us to flourish." And I should have said "falsifiable" not testable. The way you falsify it would be to demonstrate some aspect of human flourishing that cannot be explained as the actions of molecules. |
Not at all. Astrology is irrelevant, whereas philosophy is quite relevant in the sense that it is an integral part of scientific activity and takes place despite certain people forgetting that they do it even while doing it.
> or banging on a hollow log with a stick is not playing the violin
Yes, I actually edited my comment to provide a better analogy: philosophy is not science in the same sense music is not drumming.
> Materialism is not the testable hypothesis. The testable hypothesis is "molecules is what causes us to flourish."
These follow from one another. If you claim that molecules are the cause of some phenomena taking place in your mind, which flourishing, self-actualisation, happiness, suffering, etc. all are, then you implicitly claim materialism.
For anyone who claims that mind-state is the cause, you can claim that it is in fact the consequence (or an illusion, as some do), and it will be your word against theirs.
That’s where it stops being a scientific experiment and becomes a higher-level philosophical argument where testability is, unfortunately, out of our reach, but we can still judge theories by their elegance and logical soundness.
> The way you falsify it would be to demonstrate some aspect of human flourishing that cannot be explained as the actions of molecules
As above, if you claim that there is some aspect of flourishing that cannot be explained as “actions of molecules” (I would be hard-pressed to ascribe any agency to molecules, personally) you would likely be implicitly adopting monistic idealism (or some sort of dualism, which I personally find dubious due to even more drastic lack of elegance than in monistic materialism), and that is not testable since to anyone who claims that mind-state is the consequence you can very simply point out how it can be the cause—and since neither way can be proven or disproven, it is once again a higher-level philosophical argument.
That argument is more fundamental and more important, actually, than predicting some molecular activity or the like; and before you object, using the fact that scientific method is as of now limited and unable to provide evidence either way can’t serve as a justification for calling the question itself unimportant if we were to have this discussion with any rigour and truth-seeking determination (as opposed to mere desire to socially signal or appear “right”).