| The point is that philosophy is not about getting a claim and considering it substantial to eliminate other probabilities. But this is precisely what PG identified as being wrong with philosophy as it is currently taught. Metaphysics is not feasible they are part of a material world. What? they react with it of course but it exists whether you can accept it or not. If it reacts with the material world, it leaves the realm of philosophy, and enters the realm of testability (and hence, science). It ceases to be metaphysics, and becomes normal physics. Everyone is trying to understand what happened to all that antimatter that was created during the bing bang. For every molecule there is another anti. As I understand it, we have a pretty good idea as to what happened to all the anti-particles. Nature seeks the state of equilibrium at all times. Anti-particles would be attracted to their opposites, and destroy each other; this would be detected today as the cosmic background radiation, and represents the boundary in time at which the universe ceases to be opaque. The question should be, why is there more matter than anti-matter? This is the actual question that is being pondered by cosmologists. And what about time? who can explain that mystical concept? Einstein. In all these strange ideas, it's impossible to be satisfied that everything is only molecules. These ideas happen to be testable in a laboratory, and the results are reproducable. If everything is a chemical random chain reaction how can we all have similar ideas or visions of the future? Because we communicate with each other. You didn't learn what you know today in a total vacuum. You were raised in a family. You went to school. Everything you know and value in your life is through indoctrination via institutions external to you. As you grow older, you internalize them. And as we all know from studying everything from perceptrons to propeganda, the more you beat something into someone's brain, the more they're going to accept it as truth. This is what happened in philosophy. Three Greeks decided to write down what they thought they knew. Three people. Only three. Yet, they shaped the course of ALL humanity, directly or indirectly. We're still feeling the repurcussions of their thoughts today. The very fact we're having this discussion is because of them. Only recently did Chemistry claim it's independence. You state this as if it were some kind of political movement, just in its ways, and noble in its endeavors. In fact, most chemists of yesteryear thought that chemistry (which evolved from alchemy, remember, and had nothing to do with physics at all) was not related to physics. But as time progressed, there was an ever-increasing unification between physics and chemistry. Today, a chemist will more often than not agree that it's a narrow subset of what we call physics. It's very highly specialized, but it is still physics. When I was most recently going through college, that was the first thing that the instructor mentioned. Chemistry is so thoroughly influenced by quantum mechanics that to deny it is itself pseudo-science. Nearly all of the early atomic research was performed by chemists (who, at the time, did NOT think of chemistry as a branch of physics). It was only when chemists wanted to peer into the behavior of their chemical reactions (from ionic bonds to fission, and all points in between) that the seeds for what we now call Quantum Physics were planted. No, the realization that (quantum) physics and chemistry are essentially concerned with the same things is itself a very recent phenomina -- late 20th century at the earliest. |