Rationalist vs empiricist debate

"Science is what you know. Philosophy is what you don’t know."

Philosophy is examining our understanding of reality and knowledge. Philosophy consists of three major branches:

1. Metaphysics - What is true about existence.
2. Epistemology - How we can know that it is true. Epistemology has given us science, logic/reason, economics, psychology, and other theories of knowledge.
3. Ethics - What actions we should take as a result of this knowledge. Ethics contains concepts such as democracy, human rights, the treatment of animals, and the environment.

When you order your thoughts into a coherent belief system, you are engaging in philosophy. To criticize philosophy, you must rely on philosophy.

When stories are done well, they are like artificial sweeteners - they fool the mind into thinking we're consuming the real thing.

For example, children sometimes really believe that puppets are alive. Even animals sometimes react to pictures as if they are real things.

The rational part of our mind knows that what we're looking at, or reading, isn't real. However, the perceptual areas of our brains are very closely connected to our emotions.

Emotions force us to interpret the world differently. Research reveals how fear can affect vision, moods can make us more or less susceptible to visual illusions, and desire can change the apparent size of goal-relevant objects.

A polymath sees the world with a unique perspective, making connections that are not apparent to others.

Early polymaths had the advantage of a wide-open field, and went deep in their disciplines, yielding branches and sub-branches of specializations. Deep down, these different branches lead to the same trunk and roots.

Polymaths differ from specialists, as they are on to a highway that is getting wider, and specialists are parked in a spot that is getting deeper.

Polymaths have the advantage of learning new fields of study, and forming new connections, while specialists start having a narrow vision by going deep, learning less. The learning ability of the polymath is the required skill-set of the future.

It cannot be acquired by pleasurable experiences but only by identifying and realizing our own potential, moral and creative, in our specific environments, with our particular family, friends and colleagues, and helping others to do so. 

More time means that a person can attain more knowledge, but as knowledge is a passive acquisition of facts and data, having more knowledge does not mean having wisdom.

Wisdom tends to be less affected by time, as it requires additional steps of applying judgement, drawing conclusions and adapting one’s behaviour accordingly.

• Wisdom is related to knowledge, just as practice is related to theory. Wisdom is intrinsic whereas knowledge comes from external sources.
• Application of wisdom requires more than facts and data, like speculations, feelings, moral and ethical values. Applying knowledge is a much simpler and more linear process.

Example: Development of nuclear weapons requires knowledge, but during wartime, using nuclear weapons on a country requires wisdom.

"Mysterian" thinkers give an important role to biological arguments and analogies.

Late philosopher Jerry Fodor argued that there are bound to be thoughts we are unable to think. Similarly, philosopher Colin McGinn claimed that all minds suffer from "cognitive closure" about particular problems. Just as animals will never understand prime numbers, so human brains are unable to consider some of the world's wonders.

Mysterians present the question of cognitive limits in fixed terms: either we can solve a problem, or we will never be able to.

A possibility that eludes mysterians is one of slowly diminishing returns. We keep slowing down, even as we exert more effort, and there is no point where progress becomes impossible.

Our existence is invaded by science and technology as never before. For many of us, this brings comfort and rewards, but this existence is also more complicated and sometimes agitated.

Our lives are full of real and imaginary risks, and distinguishing between them isn’t easy. We have to be able to decide what to believe and how to act on that.

“Science is not a body of facts. Science is a method for deciding whether what we choose to believe has a basis in the laws of nature or not.”

• When we encounter unfamiliar information on a social network, we verify it in one of two ways. We either go through the burdensome process of countless claims and counter-claims to understand if it is true, or we rely on others by way of social proof.
• If we search for online information, instead of coming up with our own way of assessing the quality or the usefulness of every website,  we rely on Google's PageRank algorithm to come up with the best sites. In essence, we rely on other people to source information by use of user traffic, reviews, ratings, clicks and likes.

Infostorms are like actual storms: they are a product of climatic conditions. Different climates can produce different results.

The more we understand the chain of events that led to a particular view, the better we are equipped to appreciate it if we are skeptical or take into account other perspectives.

If we look at our dreams and the brain’s capacity to hallucinate, we can see that nothing outside our existence may be real.

Everything could be an illusion, a long dream, and we could be the only person that existed in a world of ‘Maya’. This is what solipsism is all about.

The philosophy of idealism states that reality is something that exists on a mental level, and many or most of our outer experiences could just be imagination.

Some people do their parenting in difficult circumstances, and nothing that is done by them as parents is fully under their control.

The good and bad traits that parents possess can find their way in the child, with them having no say as to what the child will eventually become or do.

Due to so many factors at play, parents are relying on good luck, pulling off a gamble on the child that is being raised. They don't have much leverage on the outcome, the net result of the actions of their offspring.

There is an inner paradox, a duality that exists in the minds of parents, which can make them accept and also reject the responsibility they have towards their kids' actions.