Going to Office Hours is Terrifying

After a lifetime of being ordered around by teachers in in loco parentis roles, visiting a professor during office hours is way more terrifying than it should be.

Sure, the professor determines my grade in the class, and, sure, he's much, much smarter than I currently am or can ever hope to be. But I shouldn't have to leave abruptly after five minutes, insisting I have somewhere to be, carefully avoiding the professor's eyes. I shouldn't have to feel uncomfortable when tells me to sit down across from him at an empty table which seems to have been reserved solely for this purpose.

Not that it's anyone's fault, really. If anything, it's my own. I'm a nervous person. Furthermore, it seems important that one should respect one's professors, since they are invariably way way smarter than their students. And they have all the power. Yet I think there's a difference between respect and fear. Perhaps it's a difference I need to learn.

On science, philosophy, consciousness, and the ethics of belief

Science is the empirical study of nature. It's clear that science doesn't prove. We can say that science has "proved" the law of gravity by experience, but who's to say the ball won't float the five hundredth time we drop it? Are explanations of underlying mechanisms science, or philosophy? They are philosophy.

A scientific theory, like Einstein's relativity or Darwinian evolution, which explains some aspect of reality in simpler terms than we see it--gravity is just the curvature of space, speciation is just the natural outcome of genetic inheritance--can be shown to be almost certainly correct. But we can never prove it. There is no way of knowing that the dinosaur fossils weren't tricks planted by Satan. Occam's razor tells us to believe this is foolish, yet it CAN be believed. The statement "this ball will fall when I drop it" is a result of science, but the rationalization "because the Earth's mass curves the space around it" is a kind of philosophy.

Similarly, positing any kind of object permanence is philosophy. We are only presuming that that table is still there when we are not looking. Predicting that the table will still be there when we turn around is science, but positing, on seeing this, that THE TABLE WAS THERE THE WHOLE TIME--that is philosophy.

Therefor, explaining consciousness at large must always be a project of philosophy. The only consciousness that we can examine directly is our own, and even that is arguable. We can predict the physical manifestations of consciousness--look at neuroscience and psychology--but we cannot predict the habits of consciousness itself, since it cannot be accessed physically. We can of course observe our own consciousnesses, and there may be some value in this, but because of the subjective nature of such observation it will always remain unscientific.

So what should be the goal of an explanation of consciousness? It cannot make predictions for us, the way that the empirical study of behavior can. We will never see a consciousness particle under a microscope; such a particle might be an electron, but if it were we would have no way of knowing. We cannot interface directly with other minds.

So since the goal cannot be to make predictions and the explanation cannot be proveable, our aim should be to find different ways of looking at or explaining consciousness in order to improve the quality of human life.

Would an animistic or panpsychic view increase human mental health? Would believing in free will create more efficacy and confidence? These are things which we could in theory test scientifically, through randomized controlled trials, although methods may be less robust in practice because ethics is a concern.

If philosophy doesn't improve our lives, then what can be its purpose?

College, college, college

Hello, all. It's been a while.

I now attend a small liberal arts college in the northeastern United States, just a few hundred miles from my high school. It's been good so far.

I've been writing occasionally, and I'll probably post my musings here. Wish me luck!