But, isn't it kind of gross to touch yourself there?

I have often heard it said that metal music is musical masturbation. These long haired and generally small brained musicians whip their musical wangs out and stroke furiously for about 3-5 minutes at a time, demonstrating their truly awesome technical prowess. Sometimes the music can be rather enjoyable, other times not; however, the common thread in almost all metal music is that there just isn't really any point besides demonstrating just how brutal your shreading licks are. If we just replace a few words, we've come up with a pretty good explanation of philosophy.

Instead rapid strings of notes, we instead must deal with slowly delivered but carefully constructed strings of words that ultimately, bear no real significance to anything other than the participants' own satiscation. Philosophy discussions are rarely one sided, so what we really have here is mutual masturbation - a far more perverse concept. To compilcate matters, the rules and standards vary from one philosophical discussion to another and so if you try to apply what you've learned in one argument to another, it will often fall short of the nebulous demands you're required to meet.

Debating philosophy has some of the same problems as discussing politics: everybody has an opinion but not everyone is right, and passion often gets in the way of true intellectual thought. Now, to understand how truly awful philosophy is, imagine if every political issue went back to religion. Ponder the myriad ways in which absolutely nothing would ever be accomplished because everything finally comes back to some absurdly indemonstrable belief that is supposedly supported by a chain of technicalities. If you're really lucky, you might even find yourself in an argument where you can't even agree on its basic terms! If this is the case, before you can even begin to waste your time talking about the idea you came to discuss, you must spend hours talking with your opponent about your repective beliefs that you each take for granted. Perhaps an example is in order.

The brain in a vat and skepticism

The brain in a vat hypothesis: I am just a brain in a vat being experimented on by alien scientists

The problem of skepticism via the brain in a vat argument
(1) I can't know that the brain in a vat hypothesis is false
(2) If (1) then I don't know anything about the external world
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(3) I don't know anything about the external world

The skeptic usually acknowledges that we aren't actually brains in vats, so we can facilitate this discussion by changing the above argument to:

The problem of skepticism via the brain in a vat argument (revised)
(1) Brains in bodies can't know that the brain in a vat hypothesis is false
(2) If (1) then I/brains in bodies can't/don't know anything about the external world
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(3) I don't know anything about the external world

My professor proposed an objection to this problem (which I happen to accept), saying that brains in bodies could have justified true belief and thus know that they were not brains in vats, busting premise one and proving the argument unsound. He claims that:
-He believes that he is not a brain in a vat (that's a gimmie)
-He is truly not a brain in a vat (given because we are talking only about brains in bodies)
-He is justified in beliving this according to the evidentialism theory of justification because most of the evidance indicates that he is not a brain in a vat.

Now personally, I'm okay with evidentialism (which says that if most of the evidance supports a belief, then you are justified in believing it) so there isn't really a problem there. The problem exists when you try and give this objection to someone who doesn't support evidentialism, and since there are 5 or so major views on justification this isn't too unlikely. If someone does disagree with evidentialism, you can't even really debate the objection itself and now have to wander down an even more wasteful path where you discuss an even bigger and more nebulous concept.

Go philosophy!