So then Hawking’s attack on philosophy was misguided?
From Nautilus:
Science can’t tell us whether science explains everything.
…
Even the greatest scientists have seen that the intelligibility of the world is a mystery.
Actually, it is generally the greatest scientists who do get that. It’s the talk show poseurs who don’t.
The logical independence of physical reality from mind and understanding gives science its point. The problem, as philosophers over the centuries have pointed out, is that this can open wide the gate to skepticism. If we are embedded in a reality that can be beyond our reach, how can we hope to achieve any knowledge at all? Perhaps Kant was right, and what we think we know may simply reflect the categories of the human mind. We can perhaps only deal with things as they appear to us. How things are in themselves may forever be beyond our grasp. Alternatively, the reality that we seek to understand may not even be subject to rational understanding. It may be sufficiently chaotic and disordered to be unintelligible. If we are told that this is impossible because science works, we are back with a pragmatic justification rather than a metaphysical one. It may appear convincing, but it is no defense to the worry that we could live in an accidental bay of order on the periphery of a great ocean of disorder. More.
Could metaphysics come down to thinking what we are thinking?