Philosophy is Alive and Well

“Philosophy is dead.” 

These words were uttered by the renowned physicist Professor Stephen Hawking at Google’s Zeitgeist Conference held in 2011, ”Why are we here? Where do we come from? Traditionally, these are questions for philosophy, but philosophy is dead, Philosophers have not kept up with modern developments in science. Particularly physics.” Dr. Hawking went on to say, ”Scientists have become the bearers of the torch of discovery in our quest for knowledge.” He added  that new theories ”lead us to a new and very different picture of the universe and our place in it”.

I have known of this quote for some time now and shrugged it off along with other colleges of mine. It is hardly new to encounter  a science-minded person who thinks in such way, though they are usually not well versed in philosophy at all, which often leads me to wonder why they have opinions about it in the first place. It was a bit shocking to hear  Prof Hawking decree this absolute and final demise of a field I have devoted my life to, as he is very well educated and surely has had at least some training in philosophy, but I never gave it much thought beyond attributing it to over zealousness of the scientific framework. However, a colleague of mine posted an article with this quote to Facebook recently and I thought I should give a quick statement as not only a student of philosophy, but as a teacher. 

First and foremost, science is a philosophical discipline, this is not some great secret of hidden knowledge, science itself is philosophical. Philosophy is a very broad field of study that deals with existence, asking questions of what reality is and how we know of it. Science takes a particular stance at describing reality, one that deals with explaining interpretations and predicting actualities of existence through the collection of evidence, induction of causality, theory-construction, valid inference, hypothesis testing, and so forth. Science also deals with speculative reasoning in developing ideas to test for in the first place. The framework of this field is very much philosophical, taking empirical judgments and reasoning out a possible reality. That being said, many people feel that science has diverged completely from the realm of philosophy in that its theories can be tested and verified. We can take this stance for the sake of argument, science is not philosophy, though it is not a stance I agree with.

So, science, the field of explaining reality based on the induction of verified conclusions arrived at through testing hypotheses inferred from empirical judgments, is not the same as philosophy, the broad study of what reality is in itself and how we know of it. Even then, philosophy plays an intricate role in how we deal with science. Karl Popper has, in my opinion, the best way to verify scientific inquiries; that being a method wherein which constant attempts are made to falsify them. In this way, we should never think that we hold an absolute answer to what reality really is; rather, we hold answers  based on induction. This is a continuation of thought from David Hume, who said that assuming, or the induction of, empirical judgments of the senses as an exact correlation with what reality is in itself is always problematic; this is the famous problem of induction. This would include our perception of the continuity of reality itself, and cause and effect. The best scientific position is to assume that the best answer science has may, in fact, be wrong and attempts at a better answer should be made while trying to falsify the present claim, With this being said, how could we not look to philosophy with questions about reality itself? These are questions that concern our very perception of reality, questions that address the very problems that Popper and Hume were so worried about.

We do not know if our interpretation of reality is what reality is in itself, and good science would agree with that statement. However, let's say that we somehow knew that our perception of reality was an exact replica of what that actual reality is. Would philosophy then be dead? Absolutely not. We still have a quality of reality that is not being examined by our experiments upon actualities of existence, that being perception itself. Awareness of experience, i.e. consciousness, can not be fully explained by dissecting particulars of existence. No matter how much one studies the brain, or the eye, it will never fully explain the experience of seeing a tree. That experience of seeing a tree must be studied from within the perception of seeing the tree, there is no physical chunk of matter to study here. Even if consciousness was just a condition of electrical currents  in the brain, and I am not sure that is the case, but even if it was, that will not explain what the awareness of a tree is from within awareness. There is something that exists within reality that is beyond the cold, empty, material world, and that is one's knowledge of that world, that being, one's interpretation of that world. Even if an interpretation of the tree is pure and exact, and represents the real world perfectly, that interpretation is still a quality that is not being studied while looking at the particulars that the interpretation is intending. In other words, perception, not the object of perception, but perception itself, is a quality of reality that is not studied when one is only looking at the object of perception.

So, let's say that Prof Hawking does indeed find the answers to everything, and we are able to perceive the truth of reality and know all that can be known via scientific inquiry. Well, that sounds fantastic. That is wonderful. Except, what about knowledge itself? What about the perception of truth, not the truth as it is perceived, but the perception in its own right?

Even if we did find an equation to explain absolutely everything in the universe, what would explain the equation's existence? 

I have tried to be exact and precise with my statement, which is not meant to be taken as a detailed argument upon Prof Hawking's claim, more of an observation. In my precision, I left out the problem of ethics, especially in light of today's technological advancements, and other questions such as beauty and virtue of character, not to mention communication and language. These are also important problems, problems philosophy addresses. However, I kept my statement within the realm of what science attempts to answer and tried to show why philosophy is important in regards to those attempts.

 Philosophy is very much alive, and it is in no danger of dying anytime soon.