Antiphilosophical Dictionary - Peter Naur

[Asolsutsesvyl]

How interesting. When I was getting into what is 12th grade here and called in france, terminale (!) like it's your last year of education , if you were in the literature section you would study philosophy in some sort of attempted depth. At the time, ( I was a nerd) I was discovering buddhism and was really attracted to physics because it seemed in my mind to be linked somehow to buddhism, and I remember having sometimes discussion with our philosophy teacher why physics were more interesting than philosophy, being less of an airbag. Pretty arrogant of me lol That wouldn't go too well. On most of the weekly philosophical essays we were supposed to give back , I would get back an annotation of 'Interesting, but no' and a grade like 9 out of 20, which is probably a C. lol, I still remember her voice and she didn't wash herself much, nobody wanted to sit on the first row, next to her desk.

I haven't really been into physics like that, myself, and mainly have a curiosity about big picture stuff and some smaller tidbits. Basically like others interested in "popular science". But I understand philosophy seeming boring to problem-solvers who don't care much about the culture of philosophical arguments which fail to actually bring understanding.

Peter Naur points out that science is basically about creating useful descriptions of stuff. That's about it, and it has very little to do with ultimate truth or falsehood. For example, neither Newton's physics nor Einstein's is true or false. Both approximate aspects of reality imperfectly, Einstein's giving a smaller difference between measured values and theoretically calculated values. Either way, a difference is there, as always when measured carefully enough.

Separately from physics itself, there's been endless philosophizing about the truth and falsehood of theories in physics. Those are the wrong categories and approaches for the theories, since the theories were never true or false, making all the philosophizing about them nonsense from the start.

Different from all that is if you find mystical inspiration in physics without declaring the physics to be this or that in itself.

The part about Buddhism sounds like it resonated with some deeper basic way you looked at the world, and the combination of that and physics seems to "fit", roughly, with your later spiritual interests.