Jean,

I already explained to you that Philosophy is 99% crap, playing with words, of no relevance to knowledge and understanding, so I have no interest in what they are talking about.

So now you want to see 'Process' as a philosophical topic?? LOL!

The last thing I would care about is how it is defined by Philosophy.

Typical dictionary definition is how I am using the term:

About Empiricism, I described how I come to understand things, which is basically in accord with the scientific process.

Another dictionary reference (for 'empirical'):

It doesn't mean logic is not employed, but not purely logic, just to make sure you have no excuse to misread that.

So I am happy to label the way I obtain the data about reality as 'empirical', but that seems to conflict with a usage of the term in Philosophy to refer to a some more formal system, so I was simply avoiding it to avoid confusing you - you do seem to find it hard to get your head around such subtle distinctions.

The problem with Philosophy for me is that it is so open-ended; it depends so much on the intelligence and focus of the individual philosopher for useful and interesting discussion. It is far too easy for totally nonsensical ideas/systems to get traction among philosophers.

This is the down-side of the freedom of discussion, the 'brainstorming', which occasionally allows a real gem of an original and genuinely insightful idea to emerge.

I was originally 'into' philosophy pretty heavily, read Russell's 'History of Western Philosophy' while at University, but have progressively become disenchanted as I have come across more reality-based discussion coming from the leading edge of Science. Typically the contrast between the deeply-informed discussion, inspired by the latest research in many fields, coming from Science, with the mostly vacuous philosophical discussions, still mired in many medieval concepts, became distressingly obvious to me. The rarity of a genuinely interesting discussion/article from a Philosophical perspective lead to me pretty much giving up on programs/podcasts on Philosophy.

The 'last straw' was probably listening to a series of podcasts from the BBC on the historically important/famous philosophers. To me, most of them were batshit insane in their ideas, even those who are remembered for some famous phrase, like 'cogito ergo sum'.

I have heard a few references to a movement to 'empirical philosophy' among some younger philosophers, who seemed like they recognized the same thing I saw, and were trying to rescue 'philosophy' from the blind alleys and rat-holes it was prone to going down. But I would now rather keep listening to the many science and skeptical podcasts I have come to enjoy to keep me 'in touch' with current knowledge and progress in understanding in general.

Jean seems to have got pathologically stuck on all the worst faults of philosophy.

I think the major point Jean and the philosophers he refers to don't get is that we don't really 'verify' any given proposition or theory absolutely or in isolation, otherwise you do end up with the problems of how you verify the verification, etc.

It is all about how well any given new idea fits in to what we have already have. We don't have ultimate, verified knowledge of reality, we have a 'model' of it, an approximation to it. We compare how predictions about reality we make using that model match up with what happens, and we use probability calculus (eg Bayes' Theorem) to assign degrees of confidence in the model, we score its performance.

If a new observation comes along which is highly confirmed by repeated independent testing, yet doesn't really fit our current model, its time for some new hypotheses, significant modifications to the model.

The point is that there are now so many points at which different areas of research touch, that the cross-correlation allows the consistency of the models in different disciplines to be checked in so many ways, we can have increasing confidence in the accuracy of the basic ideas across Science.

The irony is that our very success in being able to probe ever deeper into reality keeps turning up details which don't quite fit our current picture, presenting new puzzles for science to address. But if it wasn't already so effective, we would never have had any idea about these new mysteries.

Our 'reference point' for any explanation, any new reasoning about the nature of things, is what we have already modelled successfully, IOW it is the rest of reality itself.

Jean's approach is to make a grand assumption at the beginning ( 'God' ) and then proceed to force everything else to fit. If it can't be made to fit, then it must be wrong, so ignore it or ridicule it, never consider adjusting your initial assumption.

Here is an analogy:

If you are putting a jigsaw puzzle together, it is certainly much easier if you have a picture of what it should look like (a reference), but if it's the wrong picture , it makes it harder, but even if you have no picture of what it 'should' look like, it is still possible to solve it. The only assumption required is that there is a solution, an arrangement of the pieces where they fit together without being distorted. That we can be confident about, since we are talking about reality. Since we do exist, it is a reasonable assumption.

The alternative is to assume the pieces are being arbitrarily shuffled or modified  all the time, or could be. If that is the case, then no coherent, consistent knowledge would be possible, by any approach, and we are stuffed.

So we might as well continue with the additional assumption that there is some consistent basis for reality, and carry on. So far, we have come a long way, from the sub-atomic realm to the beginnings of the Universe, the evolution of Life, even hints of its origin, getting deep into the workings of our own minds, sending craft to the edge of our Solar System, possible cures for Cancer, etc, etc. I'd say that is a reasonable justification for pushing forward. So far, so good.