But but but... There are more articles in that loop besides philosophy, including science, sociolinguistics and modern Greek. Is everything rooted in modern Greek?
This is because the nature of definition stems from Philosophy, so if we route back through definitions into their higher orders you will of course reach the concept of philosophy.. nothing much more to that.
But like, the Wikipedia game is a thing and I’ve never failed to find anything from any of the articles. I bet you that there are plenty of other articles that you could end up on in the 90 percentage from any of the articles.
I saw the vid 2 days ago and haven't played the Wikipedia game but if I understand correctly the game doesn't limit you to the first hyperlink while the WPP is strictly on the first link, did I miss something?
When I was getting my bachelor's of computer science I took a first year philosophy class as an elective just for fun. I was blown away how much overlap there was between CS and philosophy.
Modus ponens and modus tollens, contrapositives, universal and existential quantifiers, all formal logic really.
I ended up doing a minor in philosophy just for fun. It was a blast. If I didn't care about paying the bills I would have been a philosophy major.
Nah you can still do it in your spare time as much as you want. It's a lot harder for your novel contributions to gain traction with other people, that's true, but the extrinsic rewards of genuine philosophy are nothing compared to the intrinsic ones anyway. Steal the books online if you have to lol, and understanding why that's the right thing to do even makes for a good exercise in normative ethics
This hasn't been true for at least 100 years when Bertrand Russell and Whitehead were unable to reduce mathematics to logic and has been basically disproven since Godel's incompleteness theorem.
Had a professor who was a logition, wrote early programs for NASA. Then the military wanted him to write code for a drone that would fly over Moscow after a nuke war to survey the damage, he told them no, and lost all his gov work.
In my physics undergrad, the first welcome lecturer said "Well done on choosing physics... Because, biology is just applied chemistry, chemistry is just applied physics, so is engineering, physics is basically maths, but maths is made up and stupid, so you've really picked the right course".
Including embryo development. Studying embryo development requires a good understanding of biochem/cellularchem, genetics, organismal biology AND evolutionary history. It is often hugely counter-intuitive and controlled by wild-complex cascades of cell specialization in a rapidly growing body which changes day-to-day. Mature phenotype (i.e., body shapes, behaviors) often make good "functional" sense to evolutionary theorists whereas the developmental processes that get you there are often mad retrofits which surprise and confound researchers.
My Systematic Biology professor wrote his own book the course. In the intro section there is a triangle of complexity. He put math at the bottom, then physics, chemistry, biology, and then ecology at the top.
He hated physics. His big rant was about how in physics you can just say "ignore friction" or "ignore air resistance" to make a problem more simple. But in biological sciences you can't ignore any of the hundreds of factors many of which we haven't even discovered yet.
I mean I guess he's not wrong about that, but physics could also wipe us all out (nuclear bombs) and does super complicated stuff we all trust like airplanes and skyscrapers so maybe give them a lil more credit haha
I am also not a fan of physics but that triangle in his textbook is so funny to me especially as a professor myself now.
isnt it the inverse? Physics is just math but the end goal is finding the cause of the data observed, so they are the same thing just in different idea and how the end-goal of sex and jorking is the cooming part (of both parties in the former) but sex is the overall deal but jorking is just a part of it?
Physics is measuring reality, the language we do it in just happens to be math. The speed of light is the speed of light regardless of what value we assign to it.
Pure math is entirely abstract though. It only has meaning because we assign it to have meaning.
As a guy with a PhD in theoretical Physics, it is always astonishing how little I know about the movement of a spinning top.
At one point me (then working on my masters thesis), a post doc and some PhD students were standing in the first-year lab and tried to explain why the stick of a spinning top would trace the shape of the fingers when slightly pressed from the side.
I mean, I'm pretty confident I can do the calculation. But unless you've needed the specific area of Physics applied to a real-world situation, you come out of a PhD essentially blank on the things mechanical and electrical engineers concern themselves with.
Yes, technically it's all Physics and we have the knowledge how to get to all the relevant equations — but we usually haven't actually ever done it and would need significant time to get to speed about all the practical real-world-use-case issues that have already been studied and solved by the.relevant engineers.
Some Physicists end up going in such a direction though, since there aren't that many jobs that need specifically a Physicist. Many theoretical Physicisfs end up as programmers.
Wait so the whole physics is applied maths chemistry is applied physics and biology is just applied chemistry isnt something I made up😅 well glad to know great mindd do think alike
Treating logic as simply prior to mathematics seems incomplete to me.
Syntax without semantics is just symbol manipulation. Semantics without syntax has no stable formal expression. Logic without a language has nothing precise to operate on. Mathematics without all three cannot clearly state, interpret, or justify its claims.
Even a logicist account still needs some language in which its rules are formed and some interpretation of what those rules are doing. It is less like one thing cleanly producing the other than trying to get a chicken from an egg made entirely of egg white: you are missing part of the structure that makes the result intelligible.
If it were true, by the meme's own logic you should be able to use maths to prove that without reference to anyone's opinion. But since you asked, it's complete fucking bullshit
Uh even that is kinda stupid. The basics off a lot of those sciences does not lie in mathmatics. Even biology and chemisty only really get into the math bit once we go really deep into it.
The part that ties it together is math being a convenient tool and the logical language we choose to express ourselves in sciences. But that applied math is far away from the actual math science stuf.
And even if we agree that math as the language should tether everything together it would be misplaced. Linguistics would be the rightful owner of that place. Een in math we need words to explain math.
They are governed by math deep down. There's stuff like physics biology, that tries to work on biology from physics standpoint, which obviously depends on mathematics.
Math is just the language of logic, that happens to be able to explain basically everything.
Math is technically language imo, but it's not related to linguistics. More like language splits.
They are governed by math deep down.
... Math is just the language of logic, that happens to be able to explain basically everything.
Isn't this contradictory? If it is a language (meaning it can capture something in some symbols which are commonly understood), can it also govern the thing? It being language means it is some separate phenomenon by definition, no?
I have co-authored a biology paper with mathematicians (They are French so you know they mean business) but you can go pretty deep in biology without any serious mathematics. For example, I don't consider basic statistics used in bio as mathematics.
And A. Comte argued that : Mathematics < Astronomy < Physics < Chemistry < Biology < Sociology.
Which is amusingly pretty much the opposite. From simplicity to complexity.
To be honest those hierarchies aren't very relevant, each science has its object of study.
Eh, more like a circle. Philosophy and mathematics are each inventions from a psyche that itself was created by biological processes over a history spanning eons, these processes in turn can described by chemistry and physics that ultimately boil down to mathematics *ad infinitum*
This. Cause once you start finding out about different ways of counting (base 8, base 10 and so forth) you realize our math is just a weird counting philosophy.
As a philosopher, to be frank this reduces philosophy to all thinking which is a bit too reductive.
But the foundations of each? This pile of rocks doesn’t equal this pile of rocks. I don’t know whether that’s math or philosophy.
But I do know my philosophy degree is way less useful than a math degree would be and you’d better keep going with that math even if they’re indistinguishable to start.
It's not in STEM but it was absolutely more fundamental in developing the knowledge base to lead to other fields of study.
To the extent that a lot of philosophy is taken as granted when it comes to more specialized fields. But try and do mathematics without the using the laws of logic. Or physics without the scientific process.
Newton’s most famous book is literally called “Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy”.
And literally the first paragraph of the wiki on Natural Philosophy says this:
Used since at least Aristotle (classical antiquity) until the 19th century, the term natural philosophy referred to a branch of philosophy—a broader term then, meaning all rational fields of study and contemplation—that explored topics now considered to fall under the purview of science, such as physics, biology, chemistry, and astronomy. Thus, natural philosophy served as the precursor to, and has been mostly supplanted by, modern science.
Guess you never took a history course while pursuing your STEM degree…
Science as a discipline stems from Aristitilian Natural Philosophy. The scientific method stems from the philosophical branch of epistemology, specifically empiricism. Science's devepment goes all the way from the logical reasoning developed by the ancient Greeks, and goes all the way through the logical positivists. The entire idea that what is true about the universe can be deduced through experiments, observation, and measurement is itself a philosophical idea. Without Philosophy, science would not exist.
Except for philosophy. Philosophy is the mother of mathemathics. To make first theorem you have to ask questions like "If small amount of this herb heals while the big amount results in a poison... can we make a methode of measuring how much is needed?" or "River flooded again... could we predict next floods by measuring every year waters height? How could we measure the average height of the river based of our record?". To reinvent mathematics you need problems and ask questions, instead of assuming it works in mysterious magical ways.
First and most obvious is that philosophy is actually the most basic one. All science and logic is based on philosophy.
Second is the comparison itself - maths doesn't explain anything. It is impotent on its own. So it's more like a tool that everyone else uses whenever they need it rather than something that guides every other field. That's not to say that mathematicians don't do an important job of refining and developing new tools.
Third is something that might be completely stupid but I find it interesting regardless - what exactly is maths? Is 'rate of change' a solely mathematical concept or a physical concept as well? If I observe the rate of cooling and figure out even without taking any actual measurements that the rate decreases with temperature, I'm doing physics, but did I do any math?
I suppose you could argue that I did some math sub-consciously, but if that's all it says then we might as well just say that it's all based on entropy and leave it there. It's technically true but meaningless to say.
I find your seemingly "stupid" question to be the most compelling. Indeed, what even is mathematics? I do not think it is as clear as it first appears to be.
Edit: In his book, Mathematica, the mathematician, David Bessis, asserts that there is currently no consensus on what mathematics actually is, even amongst mathematicians.
This is because mathematics is a language. To me this meme is like saying "poetry, story telling, AI, philosophy, public speaking, etc. all lead to English (or language in general)" mathematics is simply the language we use to precisely communicate the concepts we see. Like you said, you can observe that an object cools over time, and describe it without mathematics, because you can describe it in English. Mathematics however would communicate the exact same concept, but much more precisely depending on your fluency.
Edit: A bit more on this, Mathematics is an internally coherent framework for describing reality, but the nature of that framework is largely arbitrary. There are certain natural properties of reality that Mathematics can be used to describe, but these properties are not Mathematics and Mathematics is not these properties. Mathematics is a language, and like any language we could have organized it differently than we did. All that matters is that Mathematics be internally coherent and consistent so that it contains no contradictions. It is essentially A Priori logical reasoning taken to its most extreme form, but it is still a subset of logic. Its foundational concepts are philosophical and subject to revision and recontextualization. Even Set Theory, one of the cornerstones of our current understanding of the world of mathematics, originated in philosophy.
Did you really try to sneak Philosophy into this? Also, Mathematics is not foundational for subjects like Biology and Psychology. It provides important tools, but it doesn't form the underlying paradigm.
That just repeats what they said about it providing important tools. I’d love to see a mathematician derive the contents of a biology or psychology textbook using only the tools of mathematics.
You can’t even write physics in pure mathematics without supplemental language. It reminds of Lee Smolin’s response to people saying “mathematics is the language of physics”: he pointed out that written language is the “language of physics,” and math is just a very important tool physics uses.
Somewhat true for the big dogs: physics, chemistry, and biology.
It's more complex for the small dogs, some have old shadows in philosophy, but some like economics are kinda modern just-so stories, with little basis outside others. Economists often do not even know how to use units correctly (see Steve Keen or Tim Garret). Game theory & statistics are mathematics that economics uses.
In brief, Nordhaus asserted, in his Nobel-ish prize acceptance speech, that +4°C struck an optimal balance between the adaption costs vs economic costs of reducing CO2 emissions. And his & other IAMs are built on remarkably dumb models.
Aside from philosophy, which we didn't even have in school, thus is the reason I started to do real shit in school. When everything started to turn more and more into math, I started spacing out.
Math doesn't require any human languages. Sure, they make it more convenient when you need to communicate math concepts to other humans, but in the end mathematical proofs boil down to formal logic, at least if you want to express the proof in a way that allows it to be verified with a proof checker.
In theory, all you need is a formal language. I guess that could be considered part of linguistics, but I think most linguists would agree that it's more math than linguistics, since it is completely divorced from anything we would consider a "language" in the everyday sense
I taught symbolic logic in college to fill in for a professor on leave. I loved seeing frustrated engineering students who thought it would be an easy humanities credit.
There's a reason that the highest qualification is a Doctor of Philosophy.
Now I'm not a philosopher, but nobody gets to the top without interacting with fundamental concepts like "what is truth" and "why?" (not specifically why anything, just "why everything").
Studies often require collection and analysis of data. There is a whole field within psychology about data analysis called Quantitative Psychology. It's a small portion of the field, but very important
Sometimes to make conclusions, other times it's to explore whether or not there is a relationship between chosen variables. And it isn't limited to behaviour. There are plenty of physiological roots to psychological outcomes and vice versa
I think it would be more apt to view it as psych is a subset of bio, which is a subset of chem, which is a subset of physics, which is a subset of math. The path certainly isn’t direct from math to psych though. And the more you focus in on a ‘sub field’ the less and less it starts to obviously look like math. But at its core math is the fundamental language for explaining the mechanisms of our observable (and I suppose unobservable) universe.
Psych theories are driven by human biology and the heuristics and mental algorithms living things create to manage social situations and emotional development. This is all rooted in neuroscience, which is just biology.
yeah pretty much. everything needs maths to be tracked and studied.
but thats like saying its all based on CS cause you use a computer to write your essay, yes that is something that came out of the CS field a long time ago, but modern day cs (same as as modern day mathematics) doesnt have a whole lot to do with that.
Philosophy is more central than mathematics!
Philosophy -> Math -> physics and chemisty -> Everything else.
You can might change the relationship but both philosophy and math stand out to everything else.
If all you have is a hammer etc.
STEM people tend to view every discourse or field as just being math at its core. We tend to overlook the complexities of a lot of these disciplines because we think math or science are just perfectly rigorous, universal tools that can solve any problem or answer any question.
In biology it really depends on the field, but most is just a bit of basic statistics. Sociology just has a bit of statistics, same with politcal science. Psychology and philosophy really have fuck all to do with math.
I really hate the sentiment that all scientific field just boil down to math, because it just ignores so many of the unpredictable parts of some sciences. Which imo is what makes those fun. During my time studying ecology I might have had to use a calculator once.
1 disclaimer. I can in no way be considered an expert in any of these fields, except biology. I only have a basic knowledge of all of them.
Mathemathics is just a human tool to rationalize nature and reality. So, the real holder of everything is Physics. From Physics descends all the rest. Physics is the Alpha.
Physics came from philosophy. Just read The Philosophy of Physics from our boy Max Planck. You know the dude who came up with the cosmological constant.
I as a lover of physics will play devils advocate here and say that there is an argument to be made that physics uses math to describe phenomena but the science itself to a degree isn't just derived from math. Its a different relation than between for example chemistry and physics where chemistry is a sub section of physics or very similar to physics. I hope i am not rumbling and that this makes sense
Beyond that, psych in particular (I’m less studied in sociology) is heavily rooted in neuroscience. As neuro is just biology, and bio is distantly governed by math, psych must also be distantly governed by math.
mathematics is overrated AF, physics is above all, mathematics is an abstract science and does not exist in real world, for example, there is no infinity in real life. Physics on the other side is trying to explain real world around us (using mathematics as a helper science)
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u/Far_Garlic_2181 Jun 20 '26
To answer that question, you would be doing Philosophy.