I have been this afternoon to the Meetup philosophical debate and I had to leave before the end of it: I could not stand the feeling I was speaking a completely different language (a very funny one) and nobody could really care about what I was saying at all. Maybe that was just the feeling everybody gets on their first philosophical debate experience.

At some point, it seemed to me that the debate was going nowhere and I tried to redirect it to the main points that we were supposed to be dealing with. “Have the modern sciences replaced philosophy as a way of investigating the world?” and “What is the place of philosophy in the modern world?” I know that this kind of starting questions are just a first spur to move people to talk about the topic even if they are later put aside .

But the fact is that nobody was bothering to answer them right from the beginning.
Everybody started trying to excuse the existence of philosophy on an era where most problems can be solved by science. In fact, the existence of philosophy (so you could understand by hearing the different opinions) is just a proof of the limits of science, and you could guess that what was meant is that, if science could be fully developped, then philosophy would be unnecesary.

To put it in a nutshell, everybody (except a gentleman who I think was a physicist) was taking for granted that science is the only true way of reaching reality, that it really explains the facts in an aseptic way, and that, as it evolves, it reveals truth in a more and more perfect and deep way. This is obviously quite an idealistic way of looking at things, but try to explain that to somebody who, trapped by the illusion of “common sense”, “facts” or “the universality of mathematical truths”, feels like an intellelectual joke the fact of putting these ideas into question.

Given human beings are so unpredictable, can psychology ever really be considered a science? It seems psychologists are often given too much credit in the courtroom and in the media.

This is not just a theoretical consideration.
It is an urgent issue which most people do not recognise as such.
It is a common mistake to worry about the earth instead of our own existence on it as the latest species to arrise on it. We cannot really hurt the earth itself only our own habitat on it.

Will it create an a larger class gap? An underclass of unmodified humans vs superhumans?