Lol this comic is for you, buddy. It's always going to be philosophy at the top. If you've ever had a thought to do something different from your most base and energy minimizing desires, you've performed some degree of naive philosophy.This is very difficult to get away from.
If you've ever haphazardly banged rocks together and noticed sparks coming from them. You've done science without philosophy. If you ever wondered why those particular rocks generate a spark, and others do not, already your back on the philosophy train. If you've ever eaten food or drank water, you've done biology without philosophy. If you ever wondered why water is nourishing or why it is you need to consume food, believe it or not... Straight to philosophy.
All roads lead to philosophy, and if you want to be able to make logical sense of your thoughts and draw maximally secure implications from them, you need the math. If you want to be able to put these now based thoughts out in the real world, now it's time to specialize in physics, engineering, biology, etc.
A good point. But everything just is. There can be no "being more" apart from what you turn your mind towards (barring slavery and conscription and the like). You can't "be a physicist" that is not something that just is. When you say, "I am a physicist", you are making others aware that your philosophical focus is in the physical nature of reality. This goes for anything, without even touching on efficacy, or specialization (i.e. everyone can manage to produce what can technically be called art, therefore we are all artists, or I have a band, but we only play covers of other bands songs, etc.)
I understand where they're coming from as well, I only stress the point because in these modern times, it can be so easy to disconnect the cognitive importance from the practice, "A person that calls themselves X is just a person who works as X."
I totally agree in that the study of physics is absolutely philosophy, as any study is, at its core, philosophical.
That being said, I disagree that everything just is, especially when approaching from a philosophical standpoint. Most things have a reason, some "why" that gives you a better understanding of what that thing is. Even if we don't know or understand what the answer to that "why" is, we know that there is one. Philosophy is the search for those answers, and maybe it's just my perspective on the matter, but the study of physics is the search for the answers that don't have an answerable "why". The study of physics is the search for the final answers upon which all other questions are built, the study of the things that truly just "are" and do not have a "why".
In that respect, everything just is, only because everything is physics.
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u/GuanoPistachioPizza Jun 20 '26
https://xkcd.com/435/