I know, but read what you wrote.
“If you aren’t doing metaphysics, then you aren’t doing science.”
IOW, “If you are doing metaphysics, then you are doing science”
Sorry, I know it is nitpicking but kinda funny… 
No, that’s an abuse of logic. The opposite is not always true.
Sure religion is doing meta-physics.
And science studies physics, matter and the rules matter follows.
Or would you disagree?
From the rules of science.
Abstract
Science has transformed, if not solved, some metaphysical problems while posing new ones.
Metaphysical ideas such as those of the ancient atomists have sometimes proved helpful in developing new scientific theories.
But the widespread agreement on the empirically grounded progress achieved in science has often been contrasted with what seem to be abstruse and interminable disputes over metaphysical theses.
Karl Popper sought to demarcate scientific from metaphysical and other claims by appealing to their empirical falsifiability, while Rudolf Carnap and other logical positivists dismissed metaphysical claims as cognitively meaningless since they are neither empirically verifiable nor true by virtue of meaning.
This article considers some contemporary views on how science relates to metaphysics only after examining the impact of science on more specific metaphysical issues—composition, identity and individuality, time and change, determinism, causation, laws, probability, and the primacy of fundamental physics.
Okay we have hard science, our physical world, and soft science psychology and such.
Which brings us back to the need to really understand the Physical Reality ~ Human Mind divide.
The Metaphysics of Causation
First published Thu Apr 14, 2022
Consider the following claims:
- The drought caused the famine.
- Drowsy driving causes crashes.
- How much I water my plant influences how tall it grows.
- How much novocaine a patient receives affects how much pain they will feel during dental surgery.
The metaphysics of causation asks questions about what it takes for claims like these to be true—what kind of relation the claims are about, and in virtue of what these relations obtain.
So we are back in the world of the mindscape.
That’s where philosophy steps in.
I’ll let someone who’s a bit of an expert on that area of study take it from here.
Oct 5, 2024 - Sabina Hossenfelder
In which I get very depressed that nothing has changed in 20 years.
I prefer the old fashioned definition of science and being clear on what’s our mind processes and philosophy and what’s hard science, matter, biology, Earth and the natural rules she follows. Then there’s all the beautiful stuff going on within our brains, as we interact with the outside world.
That is a fine distinction, but it’s a real one.
Yes I have and the need to start appreciating the rest of creation out there.
This is about our relationship with what we understand - it about learning to appreciate who we are, and not worrying about figuring out the mind of god or what happened before the Big Bang. You know, first things first.
Even there,
not a mention of the body,
as if the brain were something distinctly on its own.
That is a problem for this new age we have created for ourselves.
That non-existent brain in the vat, that hair splitters lover to fawn over, while forgetting about the rest of our body and biosphere that makes us possible in the first place.
That’s what I’m talking about.
Yeah and airline pilots talk about how many souls on board, what’s your point?
Mind, spirit, soul … are you going to ask me about heaven and hell next, because I used the word soul?
Let me try again:
The physical reality our individual thoughts are embedded within,
that is the universe, Earth, her biosphere, and fellow travelers (flora, fauna).
Are you saying your thoughts are physical?
As for none of that is unreal, haven’t I pointed out that God is as “real” as we want him to be, but he remains a product of the human mind and not a fixture of the physical world. God is a fixture of our mindscape.
How we get to start splitting hairs regarding the meaning of “real”.
Interesting hearing you say that.
Your quote agrees with me.
That you think that is a simple question is the problem.
Now you’re making arguments where there is none.
What’s biology? If you want to argue just to argue, go over to reddit
[quote=“citizenschallengev4, post:226, topic:10251”]
Sure religion is doing meta-physics.
Yes, but religion is not doing science.
And science studies physics, matter and the rules matter follows.
Or would you disagree?
I disagree with the wording of Lausten’s statement .
As posited it suggests that religion is doing science because it does Meta-physics.
IMO, religion does “spirituality”, which is “meta-physics”, but is not “science”.
That’s your twisting of it. You can easily tell good metaphysics from psuedo-science
But can you tell religion from good metaphysics? That is the question.
That is no twist. It is what you said. That’s why I commented on it.
I know what you meant! But that’s not what you said.
It is what I said. And above, just replace “religion” with “pseudoscience” and that answers your question. They’re the same thing. Theology is pseudoscience.
Little afterthought on this long road. A woman who lives an odd life, but makes a good point; that we’re wired to be inquisitive, to be in conversation about everything, to question everything not as a rule but as an approach. We do it for love and death because we admit they are hard topics, but even then there are many options to adopt answers that are canned.
“It is true,” she says, “that you can view life as a comedy or a tragedy, but I really think that Socrates thought there’s a third possibility. That is, you can refute things. You can investigate them, never settle on an answer. There’s an inquisitive mode of living, in which you’re living your life at the same time as not assuming you know how to live it.”
Makes me think of setting off on my first serious cross-country hitch-hiking trip, Yosemite to Chicago, via the Grand Canyon, and host of facinating characters.
To choose the life examined, as opposed to going down the path everyone tells one to. At first it’s intimidating, scary, but that’s pre-stage jitters, once the trip is underway, it’s all one knows and things seem to work out and we live and learn.
Some people have way too much free time.
Nabbed this off of “Philosophical Thoughts”. I need find the original. I read Zarathustra a long time ago, but didn’t catch my this. The idea is, there isn’t some “beyond”, there’s our body and that’s how we access everything we can.
If one wanted to situate Friedrich Nietzsche within the broader tradition of Western philosophy, one could plausibly describe him as the great anti-Plato. Nowhere is this contrast more vivid than in Nietzsche’s subtle satire of Plato’s famous allegory of the cave.
In Plato’s allegory, human beings are imagined as prisoners chained inside a dark cave, mistaking shadows cast on a wall for reality. The philosopher is the one who breaks free, turns away from illusion, and ascends out of the cave into the light of the sun, which represents eternal truth, beauty, and the good. Philosophy, for Plato, is thus a movement away from the world of appearances and toward a higher, more real realm that exists beyond it.
Nietzsche turns this entire picture on its head. In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, his philosophical protagonist also begins in a cave—but not in the depths below. Zarathustra’s cave is situated high in the mountains, and it is precisely there, in solitude and darkness, that he gathers his wisdom. This is not a coincidence but a deliberate inversion. Where Plato’s philosopher escapes the cave to find truth, Nietzsche’s thinker begins there and has no desire to ascend toward some supposed higher world.
This reversal reflects a deeper philosophical disagreement. For Plato, the limitations of human experience—our embodiment, our senses, our immersion in the everyday world—are obstacles to knowledge. They are marks of a kind of deficiency, something to be overcome if we are to grasp reality as it truly is. Nietzsche rejects this framework entirely. What Plato treats as a weakness, Nietzsche reinterprets as a condition of life itself. The idea that truth lies “beyond” the world we inhabit is, for Nietzsche, not a discovery but a projection—a way of devaluing the only world we actually have.
Accordingly, Nietzsche transforms Plato’s suspicion of the body into an affirmation of it. Zarathustra declares, “Body am I through and through, and nothing besides; and soul is only a word for something in the body.” The body is no longer an impediment to truth but the very ground of our existence. The self is not a detached, rational spectator standing apart from the world; it is embodied, situated, and inseparable from the perspectives through which it encounters reality. As Zarathustra puts it, behind our thoughts and feelings stands a powerful commander—the self—which does not merely inhabit the body but is the body.
Seen in this light, Nietzsche’s use of the cave is not just a literary flourish but a philosophical critique. He is challenging the assumption, inherited from Plato and deeply embedded in the Western tradition, that knowledge requires transcendence—that we must rise above our human condition in order to access truth. Nietzsche denies that such a standpoint exists. There is no view from nowhere, no escape from perspective, no higher realm waiting to be discovered beyond appearances.
What, then, becomes of truth? For Nietzsche, truth is not a matter of correspondence with an eternal reality but something bound up with life, interpretation, and perspective. This does not mean that anything goes, but it does mean that our claims to truth are always situated within particular ways of seeing and valuing the world. The shadows on the wall are not distortions of a more real world behind them; they are part of the only reality we have.
Nietzsche’s satire of the cave therefore serves a larger purpose. It forces us to question whether the philosophical impulse to escape the world—to seek certainty, permanence, and absolute foundations—has come at the cost of denying life itself. In place of Plato’s ascent toward the light, Nietzsche offers a different task: not to transcend the cave, but to revalue it, to affirm the conditions of human existence, and to find meaning within them rather than beyond them.
BINGO now we’re cooking with gas !!!
That’s beautiful, and to think I worked it out on my own dime. 
Quoting the first paragraph, I went to GPT to find the source, got loads of info, including:
3. What your quoted passage really is
That paragraph you brought is almost certainly from:
- A modern philosophy essay
- A textbook
- Or a lecture-style explanation
It’s stitching together:
- Plato’s cave (accurately summarized)
- Nietzsche’s critique (loosely paraphrased across multiple works)
Bottom line
- The quote is not traceable to a single Nietzsche text
- It’s a secondary interpretation of his anti-Platonic philosophy
- The real sources behind it are:
- Plato → Republic, Book VII
- Nietzsche → On Truth and Lies, Beyond Good and Evil, and related works
Interesting how it got all of that out of only the first paragraph.
Regarding
You could have slid this in to your comment over there, if you wanted to point out that I’ve said nothing new, {except of course, I understand the modern science that supports my case, lightyears beyond what Nietzsche could have known about our evolved-biological body.}
Which I don’t think is a trivial distinction.
Also, I wonder why that statement and sentiment is so obscure, when what he’s saying is so important to a sober adult understanding of our human condition, … as opposed to melodramatic philosophical idealizations (such as the contrived Hard Problem) that does more salve our sensitive human ego, rather than offering some solid understanding.
It deserves being loudly and explicitly discussed !