[David Sklansky]

Your own words make my point:

"Anyway, simply put:

A being in itself doesn't have consciousness.

A being for itself does have consciousness"

Surely you realize that to the vast majority of people (including me) this is an unclear, imprecicse statement. Yet you make it without an accomanying explanation. That is either because

1. You want to appear smarter than you really are by using jargon unknown to the reader. or

2. There actually is no way to make this statement totally precise. So leaving it unexplained is both necessary and again makes you really look smarter than you really are.

As to:

Do you mean to say the following two things:

"1. For the most part, philosophers aren't smart enough to solve tough mathematical and/or scientific questions that can be 'proven'?

2. *And* instead, they spend time investigating answers to tough questions that cannot be 'proven' but think that they *are* proving the answers?"

Yes to #1. But I don't think they think they are proving anything. Rather I think they are well aware that they are invstigating questions that have no indiputable answer and choose to do that so they can hide their incompetance (even while looking smart). There are exceptions of course.

I realize that to major in philosophy you need to take a course in symbolic logic. So philosophers are smarter than average. However my guess is that the vast majority of philosophers struggled with that course. Whearas mathmeticians and physicists would almost always ace it.

I should say that everything above is an opinion. I wouldn't be totally shocked if it was wrong.