I saw that when you first posted it. The frame of mind I was in at that time did not allow me to be able to read it open-mindedly. Therefore, my own recognition of that, did not allow me to deliberate the words very much.

I wonder now, however, much what I wondered then.

For me, it is important to expose myself to as much unfamiliar territory as possible. I personally believe that we are all students and teachers alike, regardless of whether or not this is recognized. It has also become apparent to me that 'my own' thoughts are actually just a combination of experience from which to infer, and that necessarily includes others' expressed beliefs/philospohies.

If I were to only ruminate within my own thoughts on a matter without pursuing the thoughts of others with a genuine intent, then I would necessarily stop 'growing'. My 'greatest' mental accomplishment was had in recognizing the intrinsic value which can only be seen when one looks inside themselves. That concept would not have been considered if I were to have remained self-contained.



My morals have been effected by everything that I have entertained in that way. Certainly my morals have changed from when I was much younger, if for no other reason than I have come to realize that there are no moral absolutes.

I agree. I also understand the importance of adopting your own personal philosophy and thinking for yourself. I don't think that would be very easy unless you have something else to gage it with. I have grown a lot by reading all kinds of different philosophies and religious concepts and find similarities linking all of them and weaving a path to truth.

To follow a path that eliminates other people's philosophies would totally slow the learning and growth process down to a crawl. Also, I don't think it would be possible to do that unless you lived as a hermit in some cave somewhere totally separated from society and other human contact.

This caused me pause as well, actually. When one studies and obtains the highest possible academic understanding in any of the physical sciences they get a PhD.

They get a doctorate of philosophy.

I guess that settles that.

No. Sorry I can't help you out there.

I learned about the numerical symbol of 10,000 things when I took a course on the history of number. The instructor explained that the interpretations of Mandarin symbols are abstract and often change with context. He stated that while it is believed that this symbol did indeed represent an actual count of 10,000 in a strict mathematical use, it was also used more often to simply represent many things, or an uncountable number of things, or even all things.

So that's how I learned about that particular symbol.

I learned from simply looking at several English translations of the Tao Te Ching that the Mandarin symbols are open to a wide variety of interpretations. Most authors who have attempted to create a translation warn of these in their own books before offering their version of the translation.

In fact, that interpretations are often quite diverse and because of this it leaves open the possiblity of creating a freelance interpretation based on a collection of various English interpretations. And interpretation of interpretations.

The idea is simply to read many of them until you get the general idea of what is being conveyed and they you are in a position to write your own interpretations from that.

I've been thinking about writing a very poetic interpretation simply as an art form.

I tend to view life and communication from the point of view that it should be an expression of thoughts, feelings, and a personal experience.

I'm not one to try to demand a precise rigid view that should only be interpreted in a very limited way. Especially when it comes to something like the philosophy of Taoism. I feel that any attempt to place a formal rigidity onto it would be the antithesis of what it is attempting to express.

Of course, that's just my own personal view.

I would agree.

I know a Chinese young man who will help me to get(hopefully) a 'closer' interpretation. I have read that the Tao Te Ching is the second most translated piece of writing next to the Bible. The ambiguity in Chinese characters is intrinsic in the traditional thought of the culture as well.

That which goes unspoken means a lot.

well you asked my why. now you have it. i understand that you might see it differently

well not being a phd, i wouldn't know. so i'll stick with my thinking that science and philosophy have nothing to do with each other. as i've often said, when i begin to think like the mainstream, i'll question my sanity.

i know of nobody who does.

Science and philosophy are intertwined. You can barely draw the line between them. If it were not for philosophy science would go no where and if it were not for science philosophy would have no starting point.

But go ahead and stick with your isolated thinking. You certainly wouldn't want to be contaminated with any "mainstream thinking."

I feel much the same as Jeannie.

What is science but our best attempt to record what we observe to be happening all around us?

What is philosophy but our best attempt to try to make sense of our existence?

How can these two things be seperated when one totally embraces the other?

In other words, science is merely a 'subset' of philosophy and therefore must be a valid inclusion into any philosophy that dares to embrace the question of reality in general.

On the other hand, I can see where someone might reject philosophical thinking when considering only the "Scientific Method of Inquiry".

So in other words, I can see where, from a scientific view, a person might not be interested in philosophy. But it doesn't seem to hold the other way around.

So to say that they have nothing to do with each other seems like overkill.

In fact, if science were truly reduced to only that which can be determined via the "Scientific Method of Inquiry", then scientists would need to give up their quarks because it's impossible to even verify the existence of a quark using the purest notion of the "Scientific Method of Investigation".

Even the mathematics that describes quarks does not even allow for a quark to exist as a single entity. Yet science still refers to this "behavior of reality" to be refered to as an individual 'thing'.

I sometimes wonder just what we could truly say about the world if we truly had to restrain ourselve to only adhering to the "Scientific Method of Inquiry". Quarks would be out for sure! And who knows what else?

So does this mean that quarks are a purly philosophical idea?

How much of Quantum Mechanics is pure philosophy, and how much can actually be called "science"? That's an interesting question in and of itself.

String Theory, on the other hand, is pure philosophy. Yet it's normally associated with science and does indeed constitute what the vast majority of modern day physicists are indeed working on.

Like Jeannie asks, "Where's the line between philosophy and science? Where do you even begin to draw such a line?"

I'd be glad to consider such a line if someone could show me where it can, or should, be drawn.

Of course.



No need to earn a PhD to know what it stands for, but whatever your reasons are for believing what you choose, they are fine by me and applied by you.

If you consider my thinking to be mainstream, you have yet to understand my thinking.



It's all good!

In my experience, the modern study of literature has more to do with the modern study of philosophy than the modern study of science does. So I lean in your direction, JR. The use of "Ph.D." is influenced by historical circumstance - science grew out of philosophy. I'm not trying to downplay the connection - many, many fields of study rely on other fields, and studying one field will often aid a person in studying another (I've often heard that studying music will make someone a better software developer.)

I just think Science & Philosophy are grouped on this site to balance 'the total number of forums' with 'the activity levels in any one forum'.

If u want to know about taoism u must read taoupnishad by great thinker Osho

i think that the line between science and philosophy becomes more vivid every day. as our scientific tools improve we can more easily differentiate between what is science phenomena and what is philisophical, spiritual or supernatural thought. a thousand years ago we had no tools such as telescopes so there was nothing to lend credibility to the notion that the earth was not the center of the solar system and that a god or gods must exist because of that "fact". over the years as science has gained credibility in society, we'd never imprison galleleo today would we, the "psuedo sciences" have desired to grab science's coat tails in their quest for respect. the recent court case where a pennsylvania school board was trying to pass intelligent design off as a science to be taught along side evolution for example. a thousand years ago they'd have gotten away with it because the evidence for evolution did not exist then. the whole damn theory didn't exist then. fortunately the court recognized this as nothing but a sham to pass creation off as a science by simply renaming it. so even the courts have drawn a line between what is science and what is philosophy and more specifically religious philosophy.

lol. i think you have a point there. have you ever visited a purely science forum where most people are "science minded". has to be the most boring place on the planet. first off, damn near everybody agrees. the posts on this forum number in the dozens on any given day. the atheist/agnostic forums gets a handful of new posts in a whole week. in a science forum people would miss work not because they're engaged in mindless debate but because they fell asleep. lol.

absurd. to believe that one would have to believe that the scientific method of investigation is stagnant. it's far from it. new tools for investigating are coming on board daily. hell even new sciences and their languages keep appearing. quantum mechanics? with every new discovery we uncover questions that we never even thought to ask before. you could say the more we learn the more we realize how little we actually know. how much we have yet to learn. have you not heard of hubble? how deep into space can we now investigate compared to fifty years ago? how deep will we be able to investigate in the next fifty years? you say you agree with jb on this "fuzzy line" between science and philosophy. of course the line is fuzzy or does not exist for the two of you. you both simply have no clue what science really is so how could you see a distinction?

Science maintains one thing, that the world(universe) is as we see it, and therefore science is necessarily empirically grounded.

Philosophy does not and therefore is not necessarily.

I was going to reply to JR's post just previous to this one, but since this is basically attempting to say the same thing I bounce of it for the sake of brevity.

The bottom line is quite simple, and it relates to the bottom line in your post.

"Philosophy does not and therefore is not necessarily."

This statement is erroneous. It attempts to state something in general about "philosophy", yet philosophy is entirely a personal and subjective vantage point. Therefore to say that "Philosophy does not "do" anything" is an erroneous and presumptuous statement.

You can't many any statements about "Philosophy" until you know who's philosophy you are commenting on. The best you can hope to do is make statments about the philosophical thoughts of specific individual philosophers.

As I've always held, (and will continue to hold), my philosophical beliefs and views are entirely compatible with everything that I know about science. So to suggest that my philosophy is incompatible with science would be totally incorrect. Not only would it be incorrect, but it would be the antithesis of what my philosophy is actually based on.



What does any of this have to do with anything?

I'm fully aware of all of the important discoveries of the cosmologists. This doesn't conflict with my philosophy. On the contrary my very knowledge of these observed facts is part of what has brought me to my philosophy contrary to what many people may erroneously think.

I accept everything that science truly knows. I have no problem with any of it. However, I will argue about things that science truly doesn't know.

I've been involved in science long enough to know the difference between what it truly knows, and what it truly doesn't know.

My philosophy is deeply rooted in science and totally compatible with it. Therefore it would be ludicous to suggest to me that science and philosophy could be seperated. That would be to do nothing other than to suggest to me that my philosophy is nothing more that arbitrary guesses that don't even take scientific knowledge into consideration. But that would be total untrue.

Please Read the Following Carefully

The real truth is quite simple. Some people have convinced themselves, for whatever reasons, that science is incompatible with any idea of spirituality and therefore they believe that they can push that opinion onto other people as some sort of absolute truth. But it's nothing of the sort. It simply their own personal view. Nothing more.

I have no conflicts between the knowledge that we've gained from observation and my own personal spiritual philosophies. For anyone to suggest that I must seperate my spiritual philosophies from science is utter nonsense. Science is a inseperable part of my philosophy.

To suggest that I seperate science from my philosophy would be the same as to demand that I abandon my philosophy altogether and start all over again from scratch attempting to avoid all scientific knowledge in the process. That would be utterly ludicous.

Sorry folks, but my spiritual philosophy is intimately entwined with my understanding of science and there is no way that I could ever extract my philosophy from my understanding of science and retain anything meaningful.

I can't even imagine anyone suggesting such an absurd thing. To even suggest such a thing is to do nothing more than display a total ignorance of what my philosophy even consists of. Of course I'm sure that most people have no clue. I don't expect them to. But for them to tell me that I must refrain from mixing scientific knowledge with philosophy is about as absurd as anything can get.

It's just utterly absurd. What more can I say?

Perhaps it is you who confine science to its narrow boundaries in your own mind. If you want to confine yourself that is your business and its fine, but maybe you should not attempt to confine others to your way of thinking.