Again, I think you're pigeonholing philosophy into this one category of useless shit.

Is there useless philosophy? Absolutely! Most of it probably is in fact. But there's a lot of new, interesting, important philosophy as well (like above, discussions on the possible implications of machine superintelligence of which the biggest work was written just a month ago and it's absolutely teeming with original and important ideas).

Philosophy of mind is often deeply intertwined with neuroscience and the understanding of consciousness (and by deeply intertwined I mean philosophers are often important in the field of neuroscience ex: David Chalmers), which if we ever figure it out will be among the most important advances in scientific understanding in history.

This post was edited by Voyaging on Oct 8 2014 10:50am

You've just said it yourself. Philosophy's relevance comes from the subject. It is irrelevant on it's own.

Fair enough. Again I think you would like his book "A Universe from nothing", you would most likely find it a good read. From his book he mentions how people tend to believe Einstein came up with relativity in isolation but that's just not the case. He followed experiments, observations and after learning new mathematics and following false theoretical leads he was finally able to produce relativity. He was competing with David Hilbert at the time.

i looked up that first one thinking it's gotta be fake but apparently it's real....

and what do you know? It's outside a baptist church....

It's a quote from Martin Luther from the 1500s before Decartes, Newton, and Galileo. He was basically saying humans can't rely on reasoning because our ability to reason lead to the downfall of the Roman Empire and barbarianism in the Middle Ages.

Why the fuck that church took his quote out of context and tried to apply it to a modern audience, however, is completely baffling...

Because whoever did it obviously didn't think through what it was saying very hard.