Markus Strasser

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Bad Philosophy

Bad philosophy is often parochialism hailed as philosophical sophistication

We need false instead of bad philosophy to make progress; we need conjectures that try to grasp a great explanation

A good explanation is hard because reality doesn’t fit expectations

EXAMPLES of Bad Philosophy:

The myth cloud around quantum physics:

Copenhagen interpretation: Niels Bohr's anthropocentric, vague, instrumentalism aka “shut-up-and-calculate" interpretation

"If you think you understand quantum physics, you don't understand quantum physics"

"Only observing makes something real" was a philosophy that ignored multiverse histories and saw consciousness seen as a fundamental force

Ernst Mach's positivism didn't allow for discoveries from Ludwig Boltzmann, who united mechanics with thermodynamics

Boltzmann committed suicide shortly before this bad philosophy was replaced by another one again

(logical) positivism: Truth only from things we can derive from observations. Anything that can't be verified is meaningless, a definition renders positivism itself meaningless

Ludwig Wittgenstein then took it further and proclaimed all philosophy, including his work, to be meaningless and we should all STFU about it.

instrumentalism: Truth only from what we can measure with instruments

postmodernism: Everything is a narrative and constructed by people. Truth is only the memes that these groups interchange (intersubjective)

empiricism: Truth comes only from experiment. Gives central role to experiments in science

Here David Deutsch disagrees with Feynman’s “If it doesn't agree with experiment it is wrong” : Many bad explanations share the same data and our best theories often don't have data

We don't have the fossil records for most of evolution yet we still conjecture it's true

linguistic philosophy: Words fence in reality and it's pointless to talk about reality underneath those word-puzzles

Bad Philosophy