You realize that in 200 years people will be saying the same thing about us, right? We have no unified theory of physics and many metaphysical debates on the interpretations of our physics. We have no working theory of intelligence and are random-walking to one as gamers subsidize the hardware needed. We still think neoliberal economics and representative democracy are kind of the best governing systems, but we’re one military leapfrog away from a new authoritarian world order. I think we’re not so different from our predecessors!
> What I'm arguing is that hard sciences are the only pathway to real understanding...
Aristotle said that women had fewer teeth than men. To him, this was logically necessary. He was married twice, but he never bothered to open his wife's mouth and count.
So, yeah. A little actual data can cut short a lot of philosophical nonsense. But I think you go too far the other direction.
Determining morals from science seems to me like either nonsense or the path to disaster, maybe both. Determining aesthetics from science is unlikely to produce anything beautiful. Determining politics from science... well, Marx and those who followed him claimed to be doing exactly that, and it worked out very badly. Determining epistemology from science is putting things exactly backwards.
And even the things that can be determined from science, you have to be careful to not let everything become science. There's a great quote from Hemingway, which I tried and failed to find, where he says that you can count the spines on the dorsal fins of a certain kind of fish simply by getting a specimen and counting. But when that kind of fish hits the end of your fishing line, you get a whole different kind of truth. Then he says that the scientist who counts the spines in the fin has recorded one truth, and experienced many lies. The fish is not that cold, that color, that dead, nor does it smell that way.
Science can tell us useful things. Philosophy that ignores science is likely to wander off into unreality and therefore uselessness. But no, the hard sciences are not the only pathway to real understanding, and trying to make it so will neuter philosophy.
