this post was submitted on 13 May 2024
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Showerthoughts
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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.
Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts:
- Both “200” and “160” are 2 minutes in microwave math
- When you’re a kid, you don’t realize you’re also watching your mom and dad grow up.
- More dreams have been destroyed by alarm clocks than anything else
Rules
- All posts must be showerthoughts
- The entire showerthought must be in the title
- No politics
- If your topic is in a grey area, please phrase it to emphasize the fascinating aspects, not the dramatic aspects. You can do this by avoiding overly politicized terms such as "capitalism" and "communism". If you must make comparisons, you can say something is different without saying something is better/worse.
- A good place for politics is c/politicaldiscussion
- Posts must be original/unique
- Adhere to Lemmy's Code of Conduct and the TOS
If you made it this far, showerthoughts is accepting new mods. This community is generally tame so its not a lot of work, but having a few more mods would help reports get addressed a little sooner.
Whats it like to be a mod? Reports just show up as messages in your Lemmy inbox, and if a different mod has already addressed the report, the message goes away and you never worry about it.
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Yeah, pretty much. Philosophy people can be helpful though, their idea processing systems are fairly robust, and unlike a statistician or scientist, they sort of end up with a side-specialization in communication. Which is extremely valuable these days.
The problem with philosophy in terms of understanding the bigger questions in life is that advanced physics (edit: and neuroscience, chemistry, math/stats, etc) has answered many questions that were previously in the realm of philosophy, and you can't really understand what's possible in reality / what constraints there are on abstract philosophy without understanding advanced physics and science.
Of course the problem with advanced physics is that it takes so much time and effort to learn and understand thoroughly that you often end up as a not great communicator to the average person.
Or, to be cheeky: physics aims to take the largest and most complicated concepts in the universe and explain them in the simplest possible language, and philosophy is the opposite.
That's true if you're only talking about what was once called 'natural philosophy', but there are still many areas where philosophy and physics don't really overlap - ethics, epistemology, aesthetics, language, existentialism, etc.
I would argue that it absolutely applies to both existentialism and epistemology. Epistemologists frequently concern themselves with questions about the limits of human knowledge and understanding without actually going there themselves.