Did any of you read that link I posted earlier? Trees

I did.
But haven't scientific ideas always started as philosophy (speculation/hypothes)?
If you cannot observe something does that mean that it doesn't exist?
That means for instance that Big Bang didn't happen, Black hole doesn't exist, the quantum world doesn't exist.
Who belive in thought experiments?

It's not just philosophy, quantum physics also says Reality doesn’t exist until you look at it, pioneering quantum physics experiment finds

What we are dealing with here may just be semantics and a re-hash of the two-slit experiment.

I seem to recall that the two-slit phenomenon has since been seen in a new light which removes some of the duality conundrum. Does anyone have a reference to this --I can't remember where I saw this a few years ago.

Ah yes do a google on "The double (or two slit) slit experiment revisited" and you will get some good references.

Ah yes light or a photon is a disturbance in the electro-magnetic field. They oscillate in two different planes. The designation is TEM for Transverse Electro Magnetism. They used TEM1 which has a single maximum. Whichever maximum occurs when the particle (wave) hits the two slits will allow it to pass through one or the other.

i used TEM 13 for my masters thesis concerning characteristics of a microwave interferometer.

What we are dealing with here may just be semantics and a re-hash of the two-slit experiment.

I seem to recall that the two-slit phenomenon has since been seen in a new light which removes some of the duality conundrum. Does anyone have a reference to this --I can't remember where I saw this a few years ago.

Ah yes do a google on "The double (or two slit) slit experiment revisited" and you will get some good references.

Double Slit Experiment explained Anton Zeilinger.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tZwm9CKE-60

Without philosophy there wouldnt be any science.

Yes.

But it is well known that measurements alter the experimental landscape. If you try to measure position and momentum you have disturbed the ability to measure one or the other. This is true at the very small. So the detector in the two slit experiment acts in the same way.

This is misconstrued by some to say reality does not exist. Careful experiments and analysis explain what really happens and therefore preserves the concept of reality.

in other words "Cogito ergo sum" or if you prefer the original "je pense dunc je suis"

What is reality? From Through The Wormhole whole episod.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W81N9WHx7MI

Descartes said he exist. I don't Think he said his perceptions are real.
He was both a philophoser and a mathematician.

We don't know what the world is actually like.
For example sight is just how we interpret light that has been reflected off something else.
We know only that this something other changed the light and we call this change colour.
We can never know anything outside of ourself for sure 100%.
Since our main way of learning things are indirect by bouncing light off of it.
We can infer and theorize a lot, but in the end we struggle when the light disrupts the thing we are trying to study.
What we are doing in particle physics is like playing billiard with a blindfold
and trying to infer where all the other balls are from where the white one ended
up after the spread.
Sure we can learn a lot and theorize even more, but at the end of the day we really don't know what is going on.
Reality keeps adding balls to our table and they keep getting smaller,
while out white ball detector stays the same.

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Yesterdays liberating insight is todays bullshit and tomorrows jail of stale explaination.

I got A's in most of my philosophy classes in college, but I never really knew what I was talking about. ;~)

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The mind is a weird and mysterious place

I still say philosophy is bunk!

Why are you wasting your time and infinite wisdom here? Go tell these institutions, that you have solved everything, and they can close down:
http://www.phil.cam.ac.uk
http://www.philosophy.ox.ac.uk
http://www.bbk.ac.uk/philosophy/.

Yes!
If only the institutions got the right answer then philosophy would be solved.
I'm sorry, but I think that philosophy primarily belong in the private sphere.
To give the impression that an institution can take care of it for us,
well that is probably one of the gravest sins man has done onto man.
It is an encrouchment upon mans most private sphere, namely subjectivity.
Subjectivity is all you really got in the end and you better take good care of it.

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Yesterdays liberating insight is todays bullshit and tomorrows jail of stale explaination.

Can you make a living beeing a philosopher?

Can you make a living beeing a philosopher?

If you write a book that hits home with a lot of people.
If you get paid by an institution to regurgitate other peoples views.
If you become a guru that gets taken care of by your followers.
Might be some others I can't think of right away.

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Yesterdays liberating insight is todays bullshit and tomorrows jail of stale explaination.

He was both a philophoser and a mathematician.

A lawyer, soldier and a tutor to the queen of Sweden also.

Died in 1650 ::: perhaps the first true Renaissance man.

He was both a philophoser and a mathematician.

A lawyer, soldier and a tutor to the queen of Sweden also.

Died in 1650 ::: perhaps the first true Renaissance man.

The first true Renaissance man was Leonardo da Vinci IMO.
However René Descartes has contributed very much to math.

The integral is an important concept in mathematics. Integration is one of the two main operations in calculus, with its inverse, differentiation, being the other.

Newton only refined it.

In the 17th century, European mathematicians Isaac Barrow, René Descartes, Pierre de Fermat, Blaise Pascal, John Wallis and others discussed the idea of a derivative. In particular, in Methodus ad disquirendam maximam et minima and in De tangentibus linearum curvarum, Fermat developed an adequality method for determining maxima, minima, and tangents to various curves that was closely related to differentiation.[10] Isaac Newton would later write that his own early ideas about calculus came directly from "Fermat's way of drawing tangents.

About Descarte's visit in Sweden.
It didn't turn out so well...

In a letter dated 15 January 1650, Descartes expresses reservations about his decision to come to Sweden. He sees himself to be “out of his element,” the winter so harsh that “men's thoughts are frozen here, like the water”. Given the sentiment expressed in the letter, this remark was probably intended to be as much Descartes's take on the intellectual climate as it was about the weather. In early February, less than a month after writing Bregy, Descartes fell ill. His illness quickly turned into a serious respiratory infection. And, although at the end of a week he appeared to have made some movement towards recovery, things took a turn for the worse and he died in the early morning of 11 February 1650.

Some suggest he met with foul play. Perhaps he got too close to the Queen of Sweden.

Some suggest he met with foul play. Perhaps he got too close to the Queen of Sweden.

I don't know about foul play, but Queen Kristina liked to hang out with scientists and philosophers.
Some suggest she was a hermaphrodite.

I would add Kurt Goedel and John (Jancsi) von Neumann.
Tullio

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Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself.I am large, I contain multitudes! (Walt Whitman, "Leaves of grass").
This is pure Goedel who says that in a logic system powerful enough to include arithmetic, there are statements that cannot be proved either true or false.
Tullio

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Philosophy is very much about logic.
Without knowing about logic, computers wouldn't exist.

To be or not to be that's true!
That's boolean logic.

It was David Hilbert who tried to build mathematics as a consequence of Logic, followed by Bertrand Russell. Goedel destroyed this effort.
Tullio

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Is this philosophy?
Mathematical logic is a subfield of mathematics exploring the applications of formal logic to mathematics.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_logic

In the early 20th century it was shaped by David Hilbert's program to prove the consistency of foundational theories. Results of Kurt Gödel, Gerhard Gentzen, and others provided partial resolution to the program, and clarified the issues involved in proving consistency. Work in set theory showed that almost all ordinary mathematics can be formalized in terms of sets, although there are some theorems that cannot be proven in common axiom systems for set theory.

One thing that cannot be solved without a philosophic mind is how to deal with infinity.
Quiz time.
What is bigger? All integers or all even integers?