(Nov 9, 2017 10:27 PM)stryder Wrote: [ -> ]Metaphysics to me is an autists adaptation of how they consider the world works.
One could say the same thing about all of science. I mean, just look at theoretical physics. These people think that the squiggles that they write on chalkboards give them some deep and special insight into how reality functions. From the perspective of somebody untrained in it, it's just strange, involuted, socially isolating and bizarre.
I conceive of metaphysics as an investigation into the most basic assumptions that we employ when we think about things like physical reality or natural science.
For example, what are logic and mathematics? Science certainly seems to presuppose them and relies on them heavily. But what are they? How do human beings know about them? Why does nature seemingly conform to them? (And how can we really be sure that it does?)
What are physical laws? How did they originate and why are they what they seem to be instead of something else? What justifies the belief that they hold true universally?
What are physical objects? What about them is substantial and what isn't? What does 'substance' mean? How are substances distinguished from properties and relations? Should those distinctions even be drawn?
What happens when complex wholes are composed of parts? Can our understanding of all complex wholes be
reduced without remainder to understanding their constituent parts and the principles that govern those parts? Or can new and unpredictable kinds of reality
emerge from increasingly complex structures? (Life and mind might arguably be examples.)
What's causality? How should we conceive of it and can we explain it?
Time is exceedingly mysterious. What are the past, present and future and why do they seem so different? How should we understand persistence through time and through change? (Which gets us back to substance again.) How should we understand the
passage of time?
What are possibility and necessity? How do they interact with logic, mathematics and thought? Do unrealized possibilities have any kind of physical reality? (Quantum physics' 'two-slit' experiment can be interpreted as suggesting they might.)
My point is that these are all reasonably obvious questions about reality that don't seem to me to be strictly scientific. Instead, science
presupposes particular kinds of answers. I don't see that as wrong exactly, since some of these questions are probably almost impossible to answer and if science had to wait for a satisfactory answer, it wouldn't get anywhere. Sometimes our initial preconceptions are modified in the light of subsequent scientific results in kind of a feedback loop.
This does contribute to my slight persistent skepticism about science and its attendant scientism. Proponents of the latter (such as we see over on that other board) never seem concerned or even interested that their whole wonderful edifice is constructed atop a whole set of unjustified and often unexamined initial assumptions. There's a lot of hostility to the very idea of examining them. But if any of those assumptions ever shift, the whole structure might come crashing down or at least need significant reconstruction.