[HN Gopher] Daniel Dennett has died
___________________________________________________________________
Daniel Dennett has died
Author : mellosouls
Score : 922 points
Date : 2024-04-19 15:33 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (dailynous.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (dailynous.com)
| Bostonian wrote:
| RIP. His book Consciousness Explained (1992) was fascinating.
| canadiantim wrote:
| I've always heard it described as Consciousness Explained Away
| (1992); still tho, RIP
| markhahn wrote:
| Yes, it was traditional "philosphers of mind" who found him
| dismissive, mainly because those are all basically
| Mysterians.
|
| For instance, he cut Chalmers no slack on the incoherency of
| Philosophical Zombies.
| mannykannot wrote:
| The title promised more than it delivered, but nevertheless,
| Dennett's efforts in attempting to achieve that goal were a
| refreshing break from the incessant and fruitless bickering
| over whether the mind is a physical phenomenon.
| wzdd wrote:
| That isn't the witty riposte that it is apparently thought to
| be. It really does "explain away" consciousness by reducing
| it to plausible physical processes. This reduction also
| applies to things like qualia, which is where nonmaterialists
| get upset as qualia (or equivalents) are also invoked by
| people like Nagel and Chalmers to argue against the
| physicality of consciousness.
|
| The core argument from Nagel / Chalmers is that that there is
| a subjective element to consciousness which has no physical
| explanation. The reasoning for this is always an appeal to
| intuition. If you accept that there is "something that it is
| like" to see red, be a bat, etc, and that the "something that
| it is like" is above and beyond the physical processes of the
| brain -- the firing of neurons -- then you by definition
| cannot accept a purely physical explanation of consciousness.
| Dennett's book argues that this is mystical nonsense (or,
| charitably, wishful thinking) and the "something that it is
| like" is simply what happens when particular types of
| physical processes occur in the brain.
|
| It's no surprise, therefore, that "explained away" is a
| criticism if you're a nonmaterialist. But if you're a
| materialist, then "explained away" is actually a good thing
| and the purpose of the book.
| canadiantim wrote:
| the "something that it is like" happening when "particular
| types of physical processes occur in the brain" points to
| these being separate and distinct processes, yet
| materialists claim they are the same and identical process.
| Qualia isn't the same process as the physical processes in
| the brain; they are very highly correlated, but ultimately
| distinctly separate processes.
| acqbu wrote:
| Rest in Peace, Legend!
| errantmind wrote:
| I had the opportunity to hear a guest lecture of his in Colorado
| a little over 15 years ago which inspired my further study of
| philosophy at the time. He had a keen mind and will be missed.
| dosinga wrote:
| The Mind's I: Fantasies And Reflections On Self & Soul with
| Douglas Adams is from quite some time ago, but as relevant as
| ever
| x3n0ph3n3 wrote:
| Douglas R. Hofstadter (of GEB), not Douglas Adams
| apricot wrote:
| In the beginning, self-reference was created. This had made
| many people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad
| move.
| johngossman wrote:
| I want to read this book
| kkarimi wrote:
| Probably the most interesting modern thinker that I remember from
| my 6 years of studying Psychology and Neuroscience. RIP
| mkmk wrote:
| Very nice profile of him from 2017:
| https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/03/27/daniel-dennett...
| RIP
| vlowther wrote:
| One of the great thinkers of the modern era. He will be missed.
| ricardo81 wrote:
| Enjoyed his participations in the "four horseman of the
| apocalypse"
|
| Also https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IZefk4gzQt4 - From Bacteria
| to Bach and Back
|
| Apt for today's world.
|
| Could listen to him all day.
| arrowsmith wrote:
| _Non_ -apocalypse. That's the joke.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Dennett
| DylanDmitri wrote:
| Really liked this essay on cognition -
| https://aeon.co/essays/how-to-understand-cells-tissues-and-o...
| ithkuil wrote:
| I must admit I always scoffed at philosophers, but then I started
| reading Dennett and not only I finally met a philosopher that I
| respected, but he helped me unlock what other philosophers are
| doing and I started to see philosophers as a whole in new light.
| klodolph wrote:
| You're not alone. I think a lot of people, especially in STEM,
| pooh-pooh philosophy at first.
|
| The problem is that in any field, if you start digging to
| understand the underlying concepts of that field and how they
| are defined, at some point you hit philosophy and start working
| with philosophical concepts.
|
| The other problem is that there's some real quack philosophy
| around, too. Various traps that philosophers sometimes fall
| into.
| keiferski wrote:
| Whom would you describe as a "quack" philosopher?
| klodolph wrote:
| I picked the wording of my comment carefully... "quack
| philosophy" is what I said, not "quack philosopher". That
| was very, very intentional.
|
| I don't think I have ever described somebody as a quack
| philosopher.
| keiferski wrote:
| Ok, then what works would you describe as quack
| philosophy? I don't think the distinction is really that
| relevant.
| klodolph wrote:
| Ok. I think the distinction is important, and relevant,
| and even critical. It is a distinction I will continue to
| make.
|
| I put the concept of "philosophical zombies" as quackery.
| At best, the p-zombie thought experiment shows that we
| haven't really come up with a definition of consciousness
| that explains what we want it to explain. Some people use
| p-zombies as part of a larger argument against
| physicalism. Chalmers published a modal logic argument
| against physicalism using p-zombies. One of the tricky
| things about modal logic is that it requires a deeper
| understanding of modal logic in order for you (you,
| someone reading a modal logic argument) to make good
| decisions about which propositions you are willing to
| accept in a modal logic argument. Since most people only
| have an intuitive understanding of modal logic, it is a
| good way to win an argument but a bad way to explain your
| position.
|
| I'd say that this work (p-zombies) is quackery in the
| sense that it's consistently directed at something which
| I consider to be unproductive, which is the work of
| undermining or attacking physicalism / physical monism.
| At some point, in these discussions, you end up having
| some argument about the semantics of ontology and how you
| define "existence". If your semantics for "existence"
| admits non-physical things to exist (like, if you're a
| Platonist), and you're having a conversation with someone
| who believes in physicalism, then I don't think either
| person in the conversation is going to get much out of
| it, other than a better way to explain their own
| position.
|
| Edit: I hope that paints a complete enough picture and
| covers the important parts of my complaints about
| p-zombies. I don't have my finger on the pulse of
| philosophy and I may be missing something important,
| maybe there's some really important argument p-zombies
| are used for, and maybe I don't understand Chalmers;
| that's always a risk. My main complaint here is that it
| seems to be some tool to make an argument against
| physicalism, but this tool doesn't help you understand
| physicalism, or help you understand its alternatives.
| It's just an argument that you can have between somebody
| who believes in physicalism and somebody who doesn't,
| where neither person will agree with the other one after
| hearing the argument.
| keiferski wrote:
| I can see how you would find that unproductive, but I
| don't know if it really counts as quackery.
|
| _Quack: 1) A practitioner who suggests the use of
| substances or devices for the prevention or treatment of
| disease that are known to be ineffective.
|
| 2) A person who pretends to be able to diagnose or heal
| people, but is unqualified and incompetent._
|
| The inside baseball term more relevant to what you're
| talking about, I think, is "talking past each other."
| https://www.jstor.org/stable/25655279
|
| A quack philosopher would seem to me to be someone that
| claims to be doing philosophy or interpreting the ideas
| of a philosopher, but doing so in an egregiously wrong or
| misleading manner.
|
| You also might want to check out this article for more on
| p-zombies, by the way:
| https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/zombies/
| klodolph wrote:
| > I can see how you would find that unproductive, but I
| don't know if it really counts as quackery.
|
| Oh, here's the thing--it's not actually important to
| argue about what the word "quackery" means. I've
| explained what I meant by "philosophical quackery", and
| if you want to talk about the content of what I wrote,
| then by all means, respond to the content.
|
| If, instead, you want to start a fight about what the
| word "quackery" means, and whether I was wrong to use it,
| then I'm out. That sounds like a waste of time.
| keiferski wrote:
| You used the word quackery, and I pointed out that this
| is an inaccurate term and that yes, the phenomenon you're
| describing is a thing called "talking past each other"
| and that it is a frequent criticism from within
| philosophy itself.
|
| I'm not sure what else there is to say here. If you call
| people something, perhaps it's important to actually know
| what that thing means? This seems to happen often in
| conversations critical of philosophy: terms are used
| unclearly, and the attempt to actually clarify those
| terms is hand-waved away as "I don't want to argue about
| definitions."
|
| So I think your criticism here is not that there are
| quack philosophical works, but that there are
| unproductive ones that do nothing but restate established
| positions. Which is definitely a true thing.
| klodolph wrote:
| > If you call people something, perhaps it's important to
| actually know what that thing means?
|
| "Quackery" is not some technical term here. It is a
| mistake to rely too much on technical definitions of
| words. If you rely too much on technical definitions and
| dictionary definitions for non-technical words, then you
| will probably misunderstand what people mean, relatively
| frequently.
|
| I could also insert some comment about the history of
| philosophy and modernism / post-modernism, here. If you
| take the stance that a word means something
| independently, in some kind of platonic sense, then you
| agree with the modernists. If you take the stance that a
| word's meaning comes from how it's interpreted by people
| who read it, you agree with the post-modernists.
|
| I'm just trying to use a word to convey some sort of
| meaning. If that word didn't convey the intended meaning
| to you, I can use different words. Which I did.
|
| > terms are used unclearly, and the attempt to actually
| clarify those terms is hand-waved away as "I don't want
| to argue about definitions."
|
| Terms are generally used unclearly, it is unavoidable.
| When I say that "I don't want to argue about
| definitions", what I mean is that I want to talk about
| subject X, and I used the word "quackery" to describe it.
| I want to talk about subject X, not about the definition
| of "quackery", which is irrelevant.
|
| A discussion about the word "quackery" is immaterial
| because I can clarify things by re-explaining subject X
| using different words. I did that--but apparently you are
| not interested in clarifications, because your actions
| indicate a greater interest in fighting over whether I
| used the word "quackery" correctly.
| keiferski wrote:
| > I'm just trying to use a word to convey some sort of
| meaning. If that word didn't convey the intended meaning
| to you, I can use different words. Which I did.
|
| Yes, and I thought I understood that meaning and
| addressed it when I said this is typically called
| "talking past each other."
|
| > So I think your criticism here is not that there are
| quack philosophical works, but that there are
| unproductive ones that do nothing but restate established
| positions. Which is definitely a true thing.
|
| Can you clarify how this _isn 't_ what you mean? How is
| what you're saying different from what I interpreted it
| as meaning?
| klodolph wrote:
| > Can you clarify how this isn't what you mean? How is
| what you're saying different from what I interpreted it
| as meaning?
|
| No, because that's just an argument about "who said what"
| and nobody cares about that stuff.
|
| If you had some response you wanted to make about the
| content of what I said, then I missed it. I don't know
| what your viewpoint is at all, except about what the
| definition of "quackery" is, which is apparently
| important. If you made some kind of response to the
| content what I wrote, I missed it.
| keiferski wrote:
| This conversation is entirely unproductive.
|
| I've said twice now that the phenomenon you described
| (and mislabeled as quackery) is called "talking past each
| other" and it's a common criticism. I then linked you to
| a paper discussing this, and I agreed with you that this
| is a problem.
|
| The definition of quackery is relevant here, because it
| implies that philosophical works exist which are
| deliberately "fake" or pretending to be philosophy when
| they aren't. A doctor that is unproductive and wastes
| everyone's time isn't a quack, they're just unproductive.
| The phenomenon you described is therefore not quackery,
| it's just being unproductive in a way often referred to
| as "talking past one another."
|
| This is just a rehashing of the exact same thing I
| already said. I cannot make this any more clear.
| dse1982 wrote:
| You do care obviously, and understandably, since you want
| to be recognized as competent regarding language and
| communication. But then you should react more openly and
| be grateful for the feedback you get, since it enables
| you to improve your communication-skills. Not correctly
| using a term or not knowing a better one does not make
| you any less in any meaningful way.
| p_j_w wrote:
| Just because something is unproductive doesn't mean it's
| quackery.
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| I mean I share your belief about p-zombies.
|
| But if (when?) it was possible to empirically
| discriminate between these beliefs, it would stop being
| philosophy and would become science ! (Assuming you see
| them as exclusive rather than nested.)
|
| I guess that, unlike in the sub-field of philosophy that
| are mathematics, where starting with different axioms
| isn't as much of a deal (outside of turf wars of
| mathematics departments ?), the issue is that you have
| plenty of questions that most people deeply care about,
| so disagreements can turn quite violent indeed ?
| ithkuil wrote:
| I realized that it was mostly my problem of not
| understanding what philosophers do
| keiferski wrote:
| Yes, I think that's a common experience. Many people
| expect philosophers to be something like wise old village
| elders, whereas in reality they are more like lawyers
| working in extremely niche areas of law.
| bugbuddy wrote:
| Zizek comes to mind immediately. My younger self used to be
| more open minded but even then he was way out there and way
| too bombastic.
| keiferski wrote:
| Meh, Zizek may be redundant and attention-seeking, but I
| wouldn't call him a quack. He has done some legitimate
| work, even if I definitely wouldn't call myself a fan.
|
| I like his books, but someone like Alan Watts is much
| more prone to quackery, IMO.
| helboi4 wrote:
| Yeah Alan Watts is definitely way more of a quack. I like
| and respect Zizek though he's not a philosopher I rate
| highly.
| klodolph wrote:
| I think it's easy to get turned off by Zizek's kind of
| bombastic approach to explaining philosophy to lay
| people. It's also, I'd say, hard to develop sympathy for
| continental philosophy, especially if we are American,
| and a lot of his positions seem kind of like nonsense if
| you don't understand some of the underlying frameworks he
| uses (something he shares in common with a lot of
| continental philosophers) or if you don't bridge the
| wider gap between reader and writer that continental
| philosophers tend to have.
|
| Zizek has made comments about so many _different_ things,
| so publicly, that it's hard to avoid finding something
| you disagree with. But it's also hard to avoid finding
| something you agree with.
| kirubakaran wrote:
| Philosophers who study ducks' perception of reality
| keiferski wrote:
| Nagel really missed an opportunity to name his paper,
| "What Is It Like to Quack?" instead of "What Is It Like
| to Be a Bat?".
| lisper wrote:
| > a lot of people, especially in STEM, pooh-pooh philosophy
| at first.
|
| That's because a lot of philosophy is eminently pooh-pooh-
| able. There is a tiny minority of philosophers who are
| actually scientists pushing very hard on the boundaries of
| human knowledge. Dennett was one of them. Tim Maudlin is
| another. But the vast majority of people who self-identify
| professionally as philosophers, and especially the ones whose
| names are revered (I'm looking at you, Ludwig Wittgenstein
| [EDITED]), do work that seems to me to be little more than
| the obfuscation of trivial or false ideas.
| klodolph wrote:
| Could you elaborate on how Kant does work that seems to be
| little more than the obfuscation of trivial or false ideas?
| lisper wrote:
| Sorry, I made a mistake. I meant Wittgenstein, not Kant,
| who wrote one of the premier works of philosophical
| nonsense: the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus [1]. I
| believe that Wittgenstein himself once admitted that it
| was basically intended to be a practical joke kind of
| like the Sokal affair [2], but I can't find the reference
| right now. But some people seem to still take it
| seriously.
|
| The biggest problem in classical philosophy is that there
| were fundamental things they simply didn't know. In
| particular, anything written before 1936 doesn't have the
| benefit of Turing's results on universal computation, and
| so it suffers from all kinds of misconceptions about
| human exceptionalism. These mistakes are understandable,
| but nonetheless the products of ignorance, and should be
| of little more than historical interest today. But AFAICT
| contemporary philosophers still take them seriously.
|
| [1] https://www.wittgensteinproject.org/w/index.php?title
| =Tracta...
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair
| pdonis wrote:
| _> I meant Wittgenstein, not Kant_
|
| I think Kant would have been another justifiable example.
| I found Bertrand Russell's commentary on Kant to be apt:
|
| "Hume, with his criticism of the concept of causality,
| awakened him from his dogmatic slumbers--so at least he
| says, but the awakening was only temporary, and he soon
| invented a soporific which enabled him to sleep again."
| lisper wrote:
| > I think Kant would have been another justifiable
| example.
|
| He may well be, I just don't know that much about him.
| dsubburam wrote:
| What do you make of Wittgenstein's "no private language"
| argument?[1]
|
| I am not a professional philosopher, but I understand
| that that argument is offered as proof that "language is
| essentially social" (see article cited below), and so of
| some import.
|
| [1] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/private-language/
| lisper wrote:
| He's not wrong, but the right way to make this argument
| is in terms of Shannon's information theory. You don't
| need to resort to philosophical mumbo jumbo, as
| Wittgenstein did. And Wittgenstein actually had no excuse
| because Shannon published while Wittgenstein was still
| alive.
|
| This is the difference between the Wittgensteins and the
| Dennetts and Maudlins of the world. Wittgenstein just
| seems to be profoundly ignorant of science and how it
| applies to philosophical questions, while Dennett and
| Maudlin are really scientists first and philosophers
| second. Their work is chock full of references to actual
| scientific studies. Maudlin probably knows more about
| quantum physics than many physicists.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| Information-theoretical arguments are powerful, but
| they're not the only worthwhile approaches. You can't use
| an information-theoretic argument to teach someone
| information theory, and they'll find it easier to grok
| the consequences of information theory if they have other
| concepts to relate it to. Having multiple different
| routes to a given understanding is useful.
|
| Wittgenstein was studying the _nature of language_ ,
| something closer to mathematics than to physics. And he
| came up with these ideas no later than 1933: Shannon only
| published his work on information theory in 1948. That
| Wittgenstein's later work was validated by advances in
| science _over a decade later_ suggests that
| "philosophical mumbo jumbo" does not characterise it
| well. Indeed, perhaps there's something to learn from it.
| glenstein wrote:
| >Wittgenstein just seems to be profoundly ignorant of
| science and how it applies to philosophical questions
|
| ??? If anything his criticism of his own work was that it
| was excessively represented language as being the kind of
| language used by the natural sciences, which was a narrow
| slice of the full breadth of possible ways language can
| be used to convey meaning. The very thing that makes his
| career so fascinating is that he was purely an
| engineering bro, who cared more about math and logic, and
| he brought that perspective into philosophy, and
| challenged philosophy as being nonsense when measured
| against the standards of the hard sciences. That's
| essentially what the Tractatus is, and also the reason
| why it was retrospectively regarded as dogmatic.
|
| Shannon's information theory is brilliant, but born out
| of an interest in formalisms related information
| transmission, and while it can be treated like it's in
| conversation with theories of semantic meaning, I don't
| think it was ever considered a specific repudiation of
| any particular approach. There was a whole century's
| worth of "ordinary language" philosophy in the anglo
| world guilty of much graver offenses in regarding
| uncritical assumptions about ordinary language as some
| kind of conceptual or informational bedrock, and the ways
| you apply Shannon to any of that, while I think you can,
| are non-obvious.
|
| > And Wittgenstein actually had no excuse because Shannon
| published while Wittgenstein was still alive.
|
| Tractatus came out something like 20 years before
| information theory, and by the time it was published he
| had already taken his late career "turn" to self
| criticism, but again, I don't think anyone treated
| Shannon like it was any specific commentary on his
| philosophy, the topics are rather remote and while they
| can "speak to" one another in a sense, a lot depends on
| how you build out your conceptual bridge between the two
| topics.
| jolux wrote:
| Wittgenstein later repudiated the line of inquiry that
| produced the Tractatus but I'm pretty sure he was quite
| serious about it when he published.
| d0odk wrote:
| Someone who is discrediting all of philosophy shouldn't
| confuse Wittgenstein and Kant.
|
| Further, Wittgenstein disavowed Tractatus as a failed
| project and completely revised his approach to
| philosophy. His most important and influential works came
| afterwards.
| lisper wrote:
| > Someone who is discrediting all of philosophy shouldn't
| confuse Wittgenstein and Kant.
|
| Getting the names confused is not the same as getting the
| people confused. My poster child for philosophical
| nonsense has always been the Tractatus. I just somehow
| got it into my head that it was written by Kant, not
| Wittgenstein (I've always been bad at remembering names)
| and I didn't bother to check because I was writing an HN
| comment and not a paper for publication.
| d0odk wrote:
| Okay, but you initially criticized Wittgenstein, the
| philosopher, not Tractatus, the work. Wittgenstein
| himself would agree that Tractatus is deeply flawed. He
| wrote his more influential works later, and they went in
| a completely different philosophical direction. You're
| criticizing a philosopher as "pooh-pooh-able" for a work
| that he personally disavowed and does not represent the
| positions he is best known for.
| lisper wrote:
| I was intending to criticize the _field_ , and in a shot-
| from-the-hip in a moment of some passion chose
| Wittgenstein as my example.
|
| > Wittgenstein himself would agree that Tractatus is
| deeply flawed.
|
| So I am vindicated. I'm not actually criticizing
| Wittgenstein for writing Tractatus; there's nothing wrong
| with writing nonsense. Lewis Carroll was a master. The
| problem is writing nonsense and not recognizing it as
| nonsense. I'm criticizing the field of philosophy for
| elevating Wittgenstein to iconic status after having
| written such manifest nonsense without recognizing that
| it is manifest nonsense. That is an indictment of the
| field, not the man.
|
| BTW, the reason that this is a touchy subject with me is
| that I did my masters thesis (in 1987) on the subject of
| intentionality [1] in AI. After wading through dozens of
| inscrutible papers I came to realize that the whole topic
| was basically bullshit [2], and that the problem had been
| completely solved by Bertrand Russell in 1905 [3], but no
| one seemed to have noticed. Even today the vast majority
| of philosophers (AFAIK) think this is still an open
| topic.
|
| And BTW, Russell's solution is beautiful and easy to
| understand. Frankly, I think it has been ignored
| _because_ it is easy to understand.
|
| [1] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/intentionality/
|
| [2] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/intentionality/#In
| teInex
|
| [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Denoting
| glenstein wrote:
| >So I am vindicated
|
| I think there's a lot of confidently wrong histories
| being tossed around this thread, and it's not quite right
| to say he abandoned his old work as meaningless. He
| considered it dogmatic, but not nonsensical by any
| stretch.
| d0odk wrote:
| My gripe is that the commenter above cites early
| Wittgenstein as an example of the failure of philosophy
| as a whole, while ignoring (or perhaps being unaware)
| that later Wittgenstein is what is philosophical "canon".
| I'll concede there is some debate about how
| Wittgenstein's views evolved over his life and the extent
| to which he repudiated his earlier work. But I think
| you're going a bit far by characterizing what I said as
| "confidently wrong history," if that's directed at what I
| wrote.
| glenstein wrote:
| I'm actually quite agreeable to idea the that much of
| philosophy is incoherent nonsense. I would have
| completely gone to bat for this commenter if they said
| Heidegger was such an example. Or Searle for that matter.
| I can even see the case for Kant. And they all have their
| defenders, just not me.
|
| But even for someone as sympathetic to that argument as I
| am, I don't see _any_ version of Wittgenstein 's
| reflections on the Tractatus as agreeing it to be
| nonsense much less a paradigmatic example of it. It's not
| just a matter of the later Wittgenstein being the "good"
| stuff. The Tractatus built on the work of Frege and was
| incredibly dense in its logical expressions, and half the
| challenge is keeping up with him, because he did
| philosophy from the perspective of an engineer,
| knowledgeable in logical and mathematical notation. It's
| one of the essential works of philosophy from the 20th
| century.
| knightoffaith wrote:
| What do you think is nonsensical about Searle? My sense
| is that he's very much not obscurantist in the way one
| might think Heidegger or Kant is (of course, the defense
| is that they use technical language because they're
| discussing technical things). But maybe you just mean
| that his arguments fail.
| glenstein wrote:
| The deep dive version of this convo might be a topic for
| another time, but the most concise answer I can give is
| to grab a copy of I Am A Strange Loop by Douglas
| Hofstadter, and flip to chapter 2 where he discusses an
| idea proposed by John Searle about the so-called
| "terribly thirsty beer can." This is an argument from
| Searle that he believes is a knockdown argument against
| the idea of consciousness embodied in something that
| isn't a biological mind as we know it. It is, and I do
| not say this lightly, it is just stunningly naive.
|
| Hofstadter's dispensation of it in chapter 2 is to my
| mind, a completely decisive dressing down of the
| fundamental naivety of Searle's ideas about minds. I
| can't find any convenient quotation of the passage on the
| internet, but in my copy of the book it's page 29 chapter
| 2.
|
| I think it puts on perfect display how truly ridiculous
| Searle's ideas are, and I think the Chinese room idea is
| similarly discreditable, and ultimately I think that
| Searle was more a fraud who more appropriately belongs in
| the category anti-science apologists along the lines of
| intelligent design proponents, rather than a positive
| contribution to the canon of Western analytic philosophy.
| And the extent to which he has gained influence in
| academic philosophy is something I take as discrediting
| of it as a field, to the extent that Searle is it's
| standard bearer. So if the commenter above cited him
| instead of Wittgenstein I would be cheering it on as a
| legitimate observation.
| knightoffaith wrote:
| Thanks for the citation, I failed to get through GEB but
| you've piqued my interest in IAASL.
|
| Could you say something more about him being an anti-
| science apologist? I can see your case that his arguments
| fail, but I don't see the anti-science.
| d0odk wrote:
| Have you read later Wittgenstein?
| lisper wrote:
| I've read (parts of) Critique of Pure Reason. Does that
| count?
| d0odk wrote:
| lol
| lisper wrote:
| I'll take that as a "no". What would you recommend?
| d0odk wrote:
| Critique of Pure Reason is Kant. I thought you were
| making a joke based on the earlier mixup between Kant and
| Wittgenstein. Late Wittgenstein is Philosophical
| Investigations. There are also good texts on philosophy
| of language that excerpt from the major authors
| (including Wittgenstein) without requiring you to read
| the entirety of their books.
| lisper wrote:
| Nope, not a joke. Just the same mistake I made
| originally. I guess I have conflated Kant and
| Wittgenstein in my mind even more thoroughly than I
| thought.
|
| My bad. I've gotten pretty overwhelmed with all the
| activity in this thread, and I'm trying to get some
| actual work done in between responses so I'm a little
| distracted.
| Vecr wrote:
| Do you still have your master's thesis?
| lisper wrote:
| https://vtechworks.lib.vt.edu/server/api/core/bitstreams/
| 1d7...
|
| But just for the record, re-reading it now 37 years after
| the fact, I would not hold it up as a particularly good
| piece of work. It's a bit cringey actually.
| glenstein wrote:
| He disavowed is as comprehensive account of linguistic
| meaning, but I don't think he regarded it as false or
| meaningless, only that the full breadth of ways language
| conveyed meaning was wider than the account given in
| Tractatus.
| raddan wrote:
| I would love to see a reference to the claim that
| Wittgenstein regarded Tractatus as a joke. I took an
| analytic philosophy course as an undergrad that featured
| Wittgenstein prominently, and that prof certainly did not
| regard it unseriously.
|
| Anyone whose job it is to uncover the truth ought to be
| ant least a little curious about what we know and how we
| know it, and perhaps more importantly, whether there are
| true things that we can never know. These are mostly not
| scientific questions, but thinking about them helps us
| understand why science settled on the particular set of
| axioms that it did (eg, that there really is a world that
| exists independently of humans and their conception of
| it).
| lisper wrote:
| > I would love to see a reference to the claim that
| Wittgenstein regarded Tractatus as a joke.
|
| Apparently I was wrong about that too. According to
| another comment in this thread [1], he disavowed the work
| later, but intended it to be serious when he wrote it.
|
| It has always seemed like self-evident nonsense to me
| though.
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40089100
| vehemenz wrote:
| I think your critique of philosophy would land better if
| you picked an easier target. The primary metaphor of the
| Tractatus (pulling up the ladder) often goes over
| people's heads.
| andybak wrote:
| The fact that you got Wittgenstein and Kant confused
| doesn't give me much faith in the depth of understanding of
| philosophy that led to your other opinions.
| keiferski wrote:
| Lol, yeah. For programmers unfamiliar with philosophy,
| this is like confusing Lisp with C. (Someone that is
| familiar with both might be able to make a better analogy
| here.)
| andybak wrote:
| You're not far off. I'm tempted to head off to write a
| "if philosophers were programming languages" post now.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| What the heck, I've got more hacker karma than the
| Digital Dalai Lama. I'll take -4 for the team and ask the
| English language for its own interpretation [1]:
|
| "In the high-stakes world of technology, where the choice
| of a programming language can either pave the way to
| efficiency or lead you into the depths of debugging hell,
| imagine if programming languages were as enigmatic and
| complex as the philosophers of yore. Here's how I
| envision this quirky universe.
|
| Plato: _HTML_
|
| Plato's ideal forms find their match in HTML. Much like
| Plato's theory, where objects in the physical realm are
| mere shadows of their perfect forms, HTML is but the
| scaffolding of web content, giving structure but relying
| on the more material CSS and JavaScript to breathe life
| into its skeletal outlines. HTML, the philosopher of the
| web, contemplates the essence of web structure in a cave
| of its own making, illuminated by the flickering screens
| of web developers trying to decode the shadows of their
| CSS frameworks.
|
| Aristotle: _Python_
|
| Aristotle, known for his logic and systematic approach to
| the physical world, would be Python. Just as Aristotle
| classified flora and fauna, Python organizes data with
| lists, tuples, and dictionaries, making it ideal for
| developers who seek clarity and readability. Python's
| philosophy is simple yet profound, mirroring Aristotle's
| quest for understanding through empirical observation and
| not-so-metaphysical methods.
|
| Descartes: _C++_
|
| "I think, therefore I am," proclaimed Descartes, and so
| would any program written in C++. C++, with its complex
| syntax and powerful capabilities, reflects Descartes'
| dualism. It can create almost metaphysical experiences in
| virtual realities but can also cause existential crises
| with its pointers and memory leaks, leading programmers
| to doubt everything, especially their choice of language.
|
| Nietzsche: _Assembly_
|
| Nietzsche, the philosopher of power, will to manifest,
| and the ubermensch, resonates with Assembly language. Not
| for the faint-hearted, Assembly is for those who dare to
| manipulate the very fabric of hardware. Like Nietzsche's
| writing, Assembly is tough to decipher, powerful in its
| capacity, and not commonly understood by the masses,
| often leaving one to ponder in solitude about the eternal
| recurrence of debugging sessions.
|
| Kant: _Java_
|
| Kant, who was all about rules and categorical
| imperatives, fits perfectly with Java. Java's platform-
| independent mantra--write once, run anywhere--is a stern
| dictate akin to Kant's moral imperatives. Both
| philosopher and language demand strict adherence to their
| defined structures and frameworks, leaving little room
| for moral or syntactic error.
|
| Sartre: _JavaScript_
|
| Existentialist par excellence, Sartre's notion of
| existence precedes essence is the lived reality of every
| JavaScript framework. Just when you think you understand
| the essence of the JavaScript ecosystem, a new library or
| framework pops into existence, challenging the very core
| of your understanding. Sartre's philosophy of radical
| freedom and existential angst mirrors the liberty and
| chaos of JavaScript's untyped, loosely structured syntax.
|
| Hegel: _Haskell_
|
| Hegel's dialectical method moves through thesis,
| antithesis, and synthesis, much like how Haskell
| approaches problems with its pure functional programming
| paradigm. It encourages developers to think in terms of
| transformations of data, often leading to a synthesis of
| solutions that are as elegant as they are abstract,
| reflective of Hegel's complex philosophical constructs.
|
| In this whimsical world where philosophers are
| programming languages, choosing the right one could well
| depend on whether you prefer the existential dread of
| debugging Sartre's JavaScript at 3 AM or contemplating
| the Platonic forms of your HTML content. In either case,
| the philosophical underpinnings of your chosen language
| might just lead to as many questions about the nature of
| reality as lines of code."
|
| 1: https://chat.openai.com/share/584f78d7-6a9e-438d-ab87-
| 02cebd...
| bitwize wrote:
| Wow, those are some... really arbitrary choices, but it
| would probably pass muster for an entertaining blogpost
| written by a twentysomething and posted to /r/programming
| -- or even here -- circa 2008.
| sdwr wrote:
| Sartre and Hegel are pretty solid, the rest feel tenuous
| at best
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| I don't know, pretty hard to argue with Nietzsche's
| pairing with assembly. Unless you wanted to play the HDL
| card.
| anthk wrote:
| Nietzche is Lisp. Thus Spoke Zarathustra it's basically
| what a REPL does and means. Read, eval, print, loop.
| Learn, apply, teach, repeat. Data is code, a list it's
| both data and a function to evaluate if you wish.
| dudinax wrote:
| It's more like confusing intercal with brainfuck.
| lisper wrote:
| What can I say? I've always been bad with names.
| andybak wrote:
| OK. Names aside I'm not sure how much you know about
| Wittgenstein. I'm far from an expert but - he did largely
| refute the Tractatus later in life but reasons that are
| probably the opposite of what you're implying. If
| anything his later works attempts to be _less_ rigorous
| because he reached the conclusion that attempting rigour
| in language was deeply flawed.
|
| Like I said - I'm no expert and I've never read
| Wittgenstein first hand - but I do struggle when people
| casually dismiss the work of thousands of smart, sincere
| people over thousands of years.
| lisper wrote:
| > I'm not sure how much you know about Wittgenstein.
|
| Not much. But I don't have to know much to make my case
| here. All I have to do is point to the Tractatus, which
| really is manifest nonsense, and point out that
| publishing this bit of manifest nonsense didn't seem to
| hurt Wittgenstein's career much. Tractatus is not the
| only example of this sort of thing, just the one that
| sticks out in my mind as the most blatant.
|
| And this is not to say that Wittgenstein, or philosophy
| in general, never produced anything of value. But the
| problem is that to find the value you have to wade
| through all this horse shit, so it's so much more effort
| than it needs to be. A stopped clock is right twice a
| day. That doesn't mean there is any value in consulting
| it to find out what time it is.
| keiferski wrote:
| Calling something "manifest nonsense" while not
| understanding it, or even attempting to understand it,
| seems like a clear example of "manifest nonsense" to me.
| lisper wrote:
| You apparently failed to note this sibling comment:
|
| > Wittgenstein himself states that the Tractatus is
| nonsense in its closing pages.
|
| > My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who
| understands me finally recognizes them as senseless...
| keiferski wrote:
| Senseless and nonsense are not the same thing, and if you
| had read the book, you'd understand this.
| steppi wrote:
| Wittgenstein himself states that the Tractatus is
| nonsense in its closing pages.
|
| _My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who
| understands me finally recognizes them as senseless, when
| he has climbed out through them, on them, over them. (He
| must so to speak throw away the ladder, after he has
| climbed up on it.)_
|
| I think you may agree with the Wittgenstein of the
| Tractatus more than you realize. My understanding is that
| his main goal at that time was to show that many of the
| classic problems of metaphysics which plagued
| philosophers for centuries or more are literally just
| nonsense. He didn't write the Tractatus to convince
| regular people though, but to convince academic
| philosophers of his time. He earned his fame by being
| somewhat successful. Rather than making a logical
| argument for his point, I understand his aim as
| stimulating his audience to think things out for
| themselves by offering them carefully crafted nonsense
| that gave a fresh perspective.
|
| I think you just have no use for the Tractatus because
| you're not preoccupied with metaphysical questions.
| mcguire wrote:
| You do realize you are doing philosophy at this moment,
| right?
| lisper wrote:
| Sure, but this is just a casual conversation. The problem
| is not with philosophy per se, the problem is with the
| academic field, which assigns (IMHO) outsized importance
| to undersized ideas.
| andybak wrote:
| Children often ask questions such as "Why is there
| something rather then nothing?" or "What happened before
| time?". These questions often cause great mirth for any
| adult in earshot.
|
| You can choose to draw one of two very different
| conclusions from this statement.
| lisper wrote:
| Do you think philosophy has produced better answers to
| these questions than science?
| NateEag wrote:
| I think his point is that these are important questions
| which science can't speak to.
| lisper wrote:
| How do you know it can't? What makes you think that these
| questions are beyond the scope of scientific inquiry?
| andybak wrote:
| If science is tackling these questions then it's most
| likely doing so by making non-falsifiable claims. And at
| that point it's doing philosophy rather than science.
|
| And if you want to disagree with the definition of
| science that I'm using here then that's OK. But at that
| point, you're also doing philosophy.
|
| And all of this is fine because there's nothing wrong
| with doing philosophy. It's not just a word for "the
| stuff I don't like".
| lisper wrote:
| > If science is tackling these questions then it's most
| likely doing so by making non-falsifiable claims.
|
| Nonsense. General Relativity and Quantum Field Theory
| make plenty of falsifiable claims. So do current
| cosmological theories. Not only do they make falsifiable
| claims, many of their claims are in the process of being
| falsified right now by the JWST.
|
| One of the reasons it's hard for me to take philosophy
| seriously is that I see too many people defending it by
| making patently ridiculous assertions.
|
| > And if you want to disagree with the definition of
| science that I'm using here then that's OK.
|
| Another ridiculous assertion. You haven't given a
| definition of science. But it doesn't matter. Whatever
| your definition of science is, if it does not include GR
| and QFT and cosmology then it is not not worthy of
| serious consideration.
|
| > there's nothing wrong with doing philosophy
|
| I didn't say there was. There's nothing wrong with
| knitting either. That doesn't mean that there ought to be
| knitting departments in universities.
| knightoffaith wrote:
| I think GP's point was specifically about science
| answering the questions like "why is there something
| rather than nothing?"; relativity and QFT don't say
| anything about this question.
|
| (Though lacking falsifiability isn't necessarily such a
| bad thing even for scientific theories anyway.)
| lisper wrote:
| > relativity and QFT don't say anything about this
| question.
|
| Of course they do, at least QFT does: the reason there is
| something rather than nothing is that "nothing" is
| unstable.
|
| (And note that "something" and "nothing" in that sentence
| are terms of art with more precise meanings than the
| colloquial ones.)
| knightoffaith wrote:
| I think the spirit of the question is why anything---
| atoms, consciousnesses, laws of nature, quantum fields,
| etc.---exists, instead of nothing at all---no atoms,
| consciousnesses, laws of nature, fields, etc. QFT doesn't
| answer this question, does it?
| lisper wrote:
| Yes, it answers these questions for all of those things
| except quantum fields. Why those fields exist we do not
| yet know, and may never know. But reducing the question
| to a single thing with an unknown origin rather than many
| things with (allegedly) unknown origins is still
| progress, particularly since that last remaining "thing"
| is not actually a thing that exists. And if you want to
| go down that rabbit hole, you should read this first:
|
| https://blog.rongarret.info/2015/02/31-flavors-of-
| ontology.h...
| knightoffaith wrote:
| How does it answer why consciousness or laws of nature
| exist? I included atoms as only one of the items on the
| list for a reason.
|
| Not to say science isn't useful or that it hasn't made
| progress in explaining things. But the line of thought
| that this question is related to is, loosely, whether
| there need be any ultimate, necessary explanation to
| things and what kind of explanation that would be, or
| whether explanations bottom out at brute, contingent
| facts. This kind of topic, regardless of whether your
| answer is a necessary existence or brute fact, doesn't
| seem to be scientific---or would you disagree?
| lisper wrote:
| > How does it answer why consciousness or laws of nature
| exist?
|
| That's a longer story than will fit in an HN comment. But
| the TL;DR is that once you have atoms, that leads to
| chemistry, which leads to biology, which leads to brains,
| which leads to consciousness and all the other
| interesting things that brains do. But these are all
| emergent phenomena. There's nothing brains do that cannot
| be explained in terms of atoms.
|
| > whether there need be any ultimate, necessary
| explanation to things and what kind of explanation that
| would be, or whether explanations bottom out at brute,
| contingent facts
|
| You're flirting with teleology here. There's nothing
| wrong with that. I'm making an observation here, not a
| value judgement.
|
| It is an open question whether there is an "ultimate,
| necessary explanation to things". But science can shed
| some light on that by demonstrating that _if_ there is an
| "ultimate, necessary explanation to things" it almost
| certainly has nothing to do with us humans. We're just
| the result of rolling countless trillions of cosmic dice
| in one tiny corner of the multiverse. That's not the
| answer that most people who ask the question of
| "ultimate, necessary explanation to things" want to hear,
| but all the evidence points to that being the truth. And
| so the best explanation of people asking this question
| hoping for a different answer is that they are engaging
| in the same kind of wishful thinking as, say, erstwhile
| inventors of perpetual motion machines. Science can't
| prove that it's impossible to do an end-run around the
| laws of thermodynamics, but there is still a reason that
| perpetual motion is the canonical example of
| crackpottery.
| knightoffaith wrote:
| >There's nothing brains do that cannot be explained in
| terms of atoms.
|
| But the relationship between brain chemistry and
| consciousness is at best correlating certain conscious
| states with certain neurological states. The question is
| why there is consciousness at all. Maybe it's an emergent
| phenomena, sure, but it's not clear to me how the arising
| of consciousness from matter can be completely
| characterized through science. One reason is because
| science deals only with physical things, but
| consciousness is a non-physical thing. No doubt there is
| relevant science, but I don't know that science alone
| provides an explanation for why we are not philosophical
| zombies. You can, of course, take Dennett's view that
| qualia don't really exist, but in defending this view he
| did a lot of... philosophy.
|
| And QFT explaining laws of nature would be strange
| considering QFT is included in the laws of nature.
|
| >teleology
|
| Well, I'm not positing that there's any purpose or telos
| involved in these explanations, just that there are
| explanations---there are reasons why things are the way
| they are ("why" in the sense of material or efficient
| causes, not final causes).
|
| >It is an open question whether there is an "ultimate,
| necessary explanation to things". But science can shed
| some light on that by demonstrating that if there is an
| "ultimate, necessary explanation to things" it almost
| certainly has nothing to do with us humans. We're just
| the result of rolling countless trillions of cosmic dice
| in one tiny corner of the multiverse. That's not the
| answer that most people who ask the question of
| "ultimate, necessary explanation to things" want to hear,
| but all the evidence points to that being the truth. And
| so the best explanation of people asking this question
| hoping for a different answer is that they are engaging
| in the same kind of wishful thinking as, say, erstwhile
| inventors of perpetual motion machines. Science can't
| prove that it's impossible to do an end-run around the
| laws of thermodynamics, but there is still a reason that
| perpetual motion is the canonical example of
| crackpottery.
|
| So my point here is simply related to your first sentence
| ---there are philosophical arguments as to why there must
| be an ultimate, necessary explanation, and there are
| philosophical reasons to believe these arguments fail.
| But I don't see science as being sufficient for
| adjudicating this dispute, as I think you'd agree.
|
| (I would agree with your point about how science shows us
| just how small humanity is in the larger cosmos, though
| I'm not sure that's necessarily in contradiction with
| religion. But that's a whole other can of worms.)
| lisper wrote:
| > But the relationship between brain chemistry and
| consciousness is at best correlating certain conscious
| states with certain neurological states.
|
| How ironic that you would say that in a thread about
| Daniel Dennett's passing. You have obviously not read
| "Consciousness Explained."
|
| > And QFT explaining laws of nature would be strange
| considering QFT is included in the laws of nature.
|
| You should watch this:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q1lL-
| hXO27Q&pp=ygUPZmV5bm1hb...
|
| > there are philosophical arguments as to why there must
| be an ultimate, necessary explanation
|
| Yes, obviously. There are arguments for why the earth
| must be flat too. Why should I care about either? They're
| just _wrong_.
| knightoffaith wrote:
| >How ironic that you would say that in a thread about
| Daniel Dennett's passing. You have obviously not read
| "Consciousness Explained."
|
| I mean, Dennett is denying the existence of qualia
| altogether, as I said, via philosophical argumentation.
| The argument that science tells the full story here is
| itself a philosophical one.
|
| >You should watch this:
|
| Yes, the bottoming out of explanations is exactly what's
| at stake. The idea of a necessary explanation is that the
| answer to the question of "why?" is that it _must_ be
| that way, that it could not have been any other way---
| that 's what it means for an explanation to be necessary.
| And there are arguments why there must be such a thing
| that could not have been any other way, and arguments
| against it---it's within the realm of philosophy. Feynman
| is right to note that scientific explanations can go no
| further past a certain point. It's a bit ironic that
| Feynman was so anti-philosophy when he gave a rather
| philosophical answer to what might seem like a
| straightforward scientific question at first glance.
|
| >Yes, obviously. There are arguments for why the earth
| must be flat too. Why should I care about either? They're
| just wrong.
|
| Well, the discipline of philosophy also includes people
| pointing out reasons why such arguments don't work, which
| seems worthwhile, just like science includes reasons why
| arguments for the flatness of the earth are untenable and
| reasons why the roundness of the earth is a far better
| explanation for the data.
| lisper wrote:
| > Dennett is denying the existence of qualia altogether
|
| Not quite. Dennett's thesis is that qualia are illusions,
| not that they don't exist. Illusions exist, they are just
| sensory perceptions that don't reflect any actual
| underlying physical reality.
|
| > The idea of a necessary explanation is that the answer
| to the question of "why?" is that it must be that way
|
| Yes, I know that's the idea. But you can't get past the
| anthropic principle. Even if that is not the ultimate
| explanation, the fact that it could be, and the fact that
| there is overwhelming evidence that humans are not
| privileged in any way, means that even if there is a
| better answer, we can never find it because we can never
| rule out the anthropic principle. We have to make our
| peace with that, just as we have to make our peace with
| the Second Law and the halting problem.
|
| > Well, the discipline of philosophy also includes people
| pointing out reasons why such arguments don't work, which
| seems worthwhile, just like science includes reasons why
| arguments for the flatness of the earth are untenable and
| reasons why the roundness of the earth is a far better
| explanation for the data.
|
| Actually, scientists don't spend a lot of time debunking
| flat-earthers. They just write them off as crackpots who
| are not worth the bother. You're not going to get an NSF
| grant to study whether or not the earth is round.
| knightoffaith wrote:
| >Not quite
|
| I just mean to say that Dennett denies that there is
| anything that is "ineffable, intrinsic, private, [and]
| directly or immediately apprehensible in consciousness".
| But my point is that this is a particular philosophical
| term whose existence and nature is being disputed, and
| that this is being done on philosophical grounds.
|
| >Yes, I know that's the idea. But you can't get past the
| anthropic principle.
|
| Well, the anthropic principle is more relevant for fine-
| tuning arguments, the question here is more whether or
| not there can be brute facts, but that aside, my
| contention is just that this dispute is not one that
| science adjudicates.
|
| >Actually, scientists don't spend a lot of time debunking
| flat-earthers.
|
| I mean, sure, because the scientific arguments for the
| roundness of the earth have been laid out and there's not
| much more left to say, but cases don't generally get so
| neatly closed in philosophy.
|
| All of this is really just to say that there are areas of
| discussion where it's philosophy rather than science that
| has to be our instrument for adjudicating disputes. Maybe
| this area of discussion isn't interesting to you, but
| that's fine, not every subject in academia has to be
| interesting to you.
| lisper wrote:
| > the question here is more whether or not there can be
| brute facts
|
| That depends on what you mean by "brute fact". Can you
| give me an example of one?
|
| > there are areas of discussion where it's philosophy
| rather than science that has to be our instrument for
| adjudicating disputes
|
| And I dispute that, and I believe I can support my
| position by refuting that very claim with science. If it
| is true that there exist "areas of discussion where it's
| philosophy rather than science that has to be our
| instrument for adjudicating disputes" then you should be
| able to give an example of such an area of discussion,
| and I predict that you can't.
|
| BTW, I would like nothing better than for you to actually
| prove me wrong about this. But I've thought about this
| for a very long time and posed this challenge to a lot of
| people. If you succeed, you will be the first.
| knightoffaith wrote:
| OK, I'd like nothing better than for you to show me that
| there's no such area.
|
| Since we're talking about contingency...
|
| I'll just lay out a version of the argument from
| contingency:
|
| 1. A contingent being (a being such that if it exists, it
| could have not-existed) exists.
|
| 2. All contingent beings have a sufficient cause of or
| fully adequate explanation for their existence.
|
| 3. The sufficient cause of or fully adequate explanation
| for the existence of contingent beings is something other
| than the contingent being itself.
|
| 4. The sufficient cause of or fully adequate explanation
| for the existence of contingent beings must either be
| solely other contingent beings or include a non-
| contingent (necessary) being.
|
| 5. Contingent beings alone cannot provide a sufficient
| cause of or fully adequate explanation for the existence
| of contingent beings.
|
| 6. Therefore, what sufficiently causes or fully
| adequately explains the existence of contingent beings
| must include a non-contingent (necessary) being.
|
| 7. Therefore, a necessary being (a being such that if it
| exists, it cannot not-exist) exists.
|
| 8. The universe, which is composed of only contingent
| beings, is contingent.
|
| 9. Therefore, the necessary being is something other than
| the universe.
|
| I'd like you to tell me what premise you deny, and why
| you deny this premise on purely scientific grounds.
| lisper wrote:
| You could have saved yourself a lot of typing by just
| saying that you are citing the ontological argument for
| God as your example. But OK...
|
| I will start by asking you to define what you mean by
| "exist". But before you do that you should read this:
|
| https://blog.rongarret.info/2015/02/31-flavors-of-
| ontology.h...
|
| But I will also happily concede that something other than
| the universe exists. Quantum fields exist and they are
| not part of the universe. (However, I do _not_ concede
| that quantum fields are non-contingent. They may or may
| not be, we simply don 't know. There could be an infinite
| hierarchy of causation.)
| knightoffaith wrote:
| For one, this isn't an ontological argument, this is a
| version of the cosmological argument.
|
| I mean, I'm not even concerned about the truth or falsity
| of the conclusion of this argument. I posed this argument
| to you, and right away, we've started talking about
| ontological categories and what it means for something to
| exist. Have we not already started doing philosophy?
| Wasn't this supposed to be a purely scientific
| discussion?
| lisper wrote:
| > For one, this isn't an ontological argument, this is a
| version of the cosmological argument.
|
| Potato, potahto.
|
| > Have we not already started doing philosophy?
|
| No. Establishing the meanings of words is part of
| science. You should read chapter 7 of David Deutsch's
| "The Fabric of Reality" and pay particular attention to
| the part where he says, "Languages are theories."
| knightoffaith wrote:
| I mean, talking about what things exist, and what things
| don't, and what it means for something to exist are
| things that philosophers do as part of philosophy
| (specifically ontology). I suppose there's nothing wrong
| with Deutsch's characterization, I guess we can just call
| the philosophers who, in doing philosophy, discuss the
| meanings of words (like what it means to exist or, as
| Dennett and many other philosophers have, what it means
| to have free will, or all kinds of other terms)
| _scientists who are actually doing science_. If we use
| the terms this way, the academic discipline of philosophy
| seems perfectly justified since it 's actually secretly
| scientific (they just don't know it themselves!).
|
| But maybe more seriously (and hopefully more fruitfully),
| I should ask, according to Deutsch's/your
| characterization, what would count as doing philosophy as
| opposed to doing science? I would normally say "the
| things that academic philosophers do as part of their
| discipline", but it looks like that definition isn't
| going to stand.
| andybak wrote:
| > (And note that "something" and "nothing" in that
| sentence are terms of art with more precise meanings than
| the colloquial ones.)
|
| Bingo. You are using a much more specific definition than
| I was. As the other person commenting said - I was rather
| hoping you would grasp the spirit of my point rather than
| zoning on the rather hastily chosen examples. But let's
| stick with that for a moment.
|
| I picked "Why is there something rather than nothing"
| because it's often used as the poster-child of
| unanswerable yet important questions. You have to
| understand it in that spirit and interpret "everything"
| and "nothing" in the _broadest_ possible terms.
|
| I wasn't claiming anything about the cosmology or quantum
| fields - I'm saying that "when you take into account
| everything science will ever be able to touch - there
| will be something that remains unknowable. (you'll find
| that at least since Kant, this is a fairly
| uncontroversial viewpoint within Epistemology and the
| Philosophy of Science)
|
| I think maybe the reason you struggle to appreciate the
| value of philosophy is because you use the irreducible
| wiggle room that is always present in language to frame
| discussions in such a way so that philosophy is always at
| a disadvantage. You're straw-manning rather than strong-
| manning my points and you seem very keen to frame me as
| some anti-science merchant of woo. (A characterisation
| which anyone that knows me would have highly amusing)
|
| I am a huge believer in the scientific method and it's
| primacy. But I don't believe anyone with any degree of
| reflection can maintain the view that _every_ fact about
| reality will one day fall to science.
| lisper wrote:
| > You are using a much more specific definition than I
| was.
|
| But this is exactly the problem. If what you meant to ask
| was, "Why do quantum fields exist" why didn't you just
| say that? Instead you asked, "Why is there something
| rather than nothing" which is a vaguely defined open-
| ended question with a lot of emotional appeal but no
| intellectual substance, i.e. typical of those parts of
| contemporary philosophy that are not part of science.
|
| > when you take into account everything science will ever
| be able to touch - there will be something that remains
| unknowable
|
| Yes, that's true. But it's not clear that what remains
| unknowable actually matters. We may never know why
| quantum fields exist, but so what? We can know that they
| were not created by a personal God who loves us and wants
| us to be happy or any such nonsense. We can know that our
| lives are finite and there is no afterlife and so we have
| to be judicious in how we spend our time, and so
| wondering why quantum fields exist might not be the most
| important problem for us to be addressing. It's enough to
| know _that_ they exist, and that they behave according to
| simple mathematical laws.
|
| > I don't believe anyone with any degree of reflection
| can maintain the view that every fact about reality will
| one day fall to science.
|
| We know with absolute certainty that this is the case
| because (tada!) science can demonstrate this (e.g. the
| halting problem) so we have to make our peace with the
| fact that there are things we cannot know. But I see no
| reason to believe that any question that doesn't fall to
| science will yield to philosophy.
| samatman wrote:
| Well, as Kant put it: "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof
| one must be silent".
| notresidenter wrote:
| Wittgenstein is not "pooh-pooh-able", not by a long shot.
| First of all, there are two really different philosophies
| belonging to Wittgenstein, the younger and the older, and
| the evolution between the two should be of interest to
| anyone, as it serves as essentially a cautionary tale about
| concepts and more generally abstractions, detached from
| empirical evidence.
|
| His philosophy does provide some interesting perspectives
| on language, even if I don't personally agree with his way
| of doing philosophy.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| Science is a type of applied philosophy, because grasping
| what is knowable by a given set of truths and tools (and
| what isn't) helps one define the problem.
| lisper wrote:
| > Science is a type of applied philosophy
|
| This is typical philosophical nonsense. The word
| "philosophy" is so vaguely defined that _anything_ can be
| considered "a type of applied philosophy". So science
| may well be "a type of applied philosophy" but that's not
| what makes science special. What makes science special,
| the thing that distinguishes it from all other branches
| of human intellectual endeavor, is that (to quote
| Feynman) _experiment_ is the ultimate arbiter of truth.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| Not truth per se, but scientific truth. For example you
| can't prove scientifically that your partner loves you :)
| lisper wrote:
| You can't prove anything scientifically. The best you can
| do is come up with an explanation that is consistent with
| all the data.
|
| How do _you_ know that your wife loves you, and that she
| 's not just pulling a long con?
| harwoodjp wrote:
| > experiment is the ultimate arbiter of truth
|
| Can you help me design experiments to prove the
| following?
|
| * Simpler theories, with equal explanatory and predictive
| power, are preferable
|
| * I'm not dreaming and there's no evil demon deceiving me
|
| * The next swan will be white because all prior swans
| I've observed are
|
| * Technology acts as a context of justification for
| scientific propositions, and proves its efficacy
|
| * Experiment is the ultimate arbiter of truth
| lisper wrote:
| > Can you help me design experiments to prove the
| following?
|
| Sure.
|
| > * Simpler theories, with equal explanatory and
| predictive power, are preferable
|
| You don't need an experiment for this. A more complicated
| theory is undesirable, all else being equal, because it
| requires more effort to deal with. A simpler theory will
| let you avoid that wasted effort.
|
| > * I'm not dreaming
|
| _Any_ experiment will do here. You can 't perform
| experiments in dreams. That is one of the things that
| distinguishes dreams from reality.
|
| > and there's no evil demon deceiving me
|
| You can never prove that. You might be living in the
| Matrix, and the Matrix could be controlled by an evil
| demon. That possibility can never be completely
| eliminated. However, there is no _evidence_ for it, and
| so neither the matrix nor evil demons are needed to
| explain observations, and so they can be discounted for
| that reason. In other words, the Matrix or evil-demon
| hypotheses have no predictive power.
|
| > * The next swan will be white because all prior swans
| I've observed are
|
| That's a false assertion so you can't design an
| experiment to prove it. Science does not rely on
| induction.
|
| > * Technology acts as a context of justification for
| scientific propositions, and proves its efficacy
|
| Do you have a better explanation for how technology comes
| to exist that is consistent with all the data?
|
| > * Experiment is the ultimate arbiter of truth
|
| Again, that is not a provable assertion. That is a
| heuristic that empirically produces better results than
| any other criterion that humans have come up with so far.
|
| There is actually reason to believe that it can't be
| improved upon, just as there is reason to believe that an
| oracle for the halting problem can't be constructed in
| our universe. But you can't prove it.
| harwoodjp wrote:
| The point is that naive (vulgar) empiricism is untenable
| because to perform and evaluate scientific practices you
| inevitably invoke premises that are rational or
| pragmatic, not empirical.
| lisper wrote:
| No, that's not true. If you want to dispute that, give me
| an example of a necessary premise (i.e. one that is
| "inevitably invoked") that you think cannot be justified
| by empiricism.
| Angostura wrote:
| "I'm going redefine these philosophers as scientists, so
| that I can ridicule philosophy more easily "
| vehemenz wrote:
| When you say "actually scientists" and "boundaries of human
| knowledge," you seem to be taking for granted naive views
| about metaphysical realism, scientific realism, and truth
| that are not trivial to defend, even for experienced
| philosophers.
|
| If you want to relegate philosophy to obfuscation and
| trivialities, a good starting place would be to demonstrate
| that you've made it past the undergraduate, foot stomping
| "science" phase that, honestly, not enough "actual"
| scientists seem to have made it past, bringing us mystical
| nonsense such as the many-worlds interpretation of quantum
| mechanics.
| lisper wrote:
| > you seem to be taking for granted naive views about
| metaphysical realism, scientific realism, and truth that
| are not trivial to defend, even for experienced
| philosophers.
|
| No, I'm not taking these things for granted. I am simply
| making the empirical observation that the scientific
| method has produced vastly more tangible progress than
| other methods, and it has produced this progress in areas
| that were previously believed to be inaccessible to
| science. Science _works_ in ways that no other method
| does.
|
| > mystical nonsense such as the many-worlds
| interpretation of quantum mechanics
|
| It's not mystical nonsense, it's a logical consequence of
| the mathematics of quantum mechanics. You may find it
| distasteful, but it's the way the world appears to be.
| You may not like the idea that clocks in space run faster
| than clocks on earth, but that is also manifestly how the
| world behaves.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| > > mystical nonsense such as the many-worlds
| interpretation of quantum mechanics
|
| > It's not mystical nonsense, it's a logical consequence
| of the mathematics of quantum mechanics.
|
| It's an _interpretation_ of the mathematics of quantum
| mechanics. It 's not the only possible interpretation.
|
| > You may find it distasteful, but it's the way the world
| appears to be.
|
| Yeah? I agree that quantum appears to be the way the
| world works; show me your _concrete evidence_ for many
| worlds. You can 't do it.
| lisper wrote:
| > show me your concrete evidence for many worlds. You
| can't do it.
|
| Most people would agree that the sun emits light in all
| directions, but there is no way to prove it with concrete
| evidence. The only thing you can prove with concrete
| evidence is that the sun emits light in the direction of
| objects in our solar system that we can see. We infer
| that the sun emits light in all directions because that
| is the best explanation that accounts for the data that
| we have.
|
| Many-worlds is the same. We can't demonstrate their
| existence, we infer it from the current-best explanation
| that accounts for the data that we have.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| > current-best explanation
|
| Many-worlds is by far _not_ accepted to be the "current-
| best explanation".
|
| It's a candidate. It's not clear it's right.
| lisper wrote:
| Sorry, I wasn't clear. The current-best explanation is
| not many worlds, it's the mathematical formalism of QM.
| Many-worlds is a logical consequence of that.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| Many worlds is _one possible interpretation_ of the
| logical consequences of that. It 's not nearly as
| definite or clear-cut as you're making it sound.
| lisper wrote:
| It seems pretty clear cut to me. I've seen no argument
| against it that doesn't involve some logical fallacy. If
| you think you know of one please enlighten me.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| Well, I'm not an expert. But I know that, among those who
| _are_ experts, many-worlds is not the consensus or even
| the majority view. So, while it may seem clear cut to
| you, it doesn 't to everyone. That's why I keep saying
| that no, it's not clear.
|
| I realize that's argument by authority, and that's
| considered a fallacy...
| lisper wrote:
| I'm not an expert either. I'm a computer scientist, not a
| physicist. But the math behind QM -- at least the parts
| that matter for this discussion -- is pretty
| straightforward linear algebra. Really, anyone can learn
| it. So don't take my word for it, look into it and decide
| for yourself. You can start here:
|
| https://www.amazon.com/Philosophy-Physics-Princeton-
| Foundati...
|
| https://www.amazon.com/Quantum-Mechanics-Experience-
| David-Al...
|
| Or, if you don't feel like buying a book:
|
| https://flownet.com/ron/QM.pdf
|
| Or, if you prefer a video:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dEaecUuEqfc
|
| BTW, it may come as a surprise to learn that I am
| actually not a big proponent of many-worlds despite
| recognizing that it is in fact a logical consequence of
| the math. If so, you may find this interesting too:
|
| https://blog.rongarret.info/2009/04/on-shadow-photons-
| and-re...
|
| and a follow-up written ten years later:
|
| https://blog.rongarret.info/2019/07/the-trouble-with-
| many-wo...
| knightoffaith wrote:
| >QM is pretty straightforward linear algebra
|
| The chasm between my grades in linear algebra and my
| grades in quantum begs to differ... :(
| lisper wrote:
| There are two different ways of approaching QM: the
| physicist's way and the computer scienctist's way. You
| were probably taught it the physicist's way, which is not
| wrong, but obscures the parts you need to know to
| understand the MWI. That part really is pretty simple.
| You should try again.
| 2snakes wrote:
| According to Einstein nature is parsimonious:many worlds
| is proliferate.
| lisper wrote:
| Sure, but parsimony only applies when all else is equal,
| and here all else is not equal. Newtonian mechanics is a
| lot more parsimonious than GR.
| 2snakes wrote:
| That's human theories which is way downstream of the
| classical interpretation/paradigm of nature being defined
| as physical processes.
| mcguire wrote:
| My understanding is that the best current interpretation
| of quantum mechanics is that there is no interpretation
| and that you just have to do the math.
| lisper wrote:
| Yes, that's right. But if you want to assign any meaning
| to the math, and in particular if you want to adopt an
| ontology where you exist, then the math leaves you no
| alternative than to conclude that parallel universes also
| exist (unless you resort to special pleading like the
| Copenhagen interpretation).
| vehemenz wrote:
| I mean, just doing the math and being agnostic about the
| strengths of different interpretations seems to be an
| interpretation. Maybe it's more of an epistemic position
| than a metaphysical one, but it still kinda counts.
| shawn-butler wrote:
| When you look at the actual history of science, this path
| of "tangible progress" you rely on is shown mostly to be
| a constructed narrative.
| lisper wrote:
| And yet somehow your computer seems to work.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > It's not mystical nonsense, it's a logical consequence
| of the mathematics of quantum mechanics.
|
| Aren't the various interpretations of QM all empirically
| indistinguishable from within the universe, which is why
| they are interpretations and not, say, hypotheses?
| lisper wrote:
| It turns out that all of the various interpretations are
| more or less equivalent, with the exception of the
| various collapse theories, which are empirically testable
| and have so far all been falsified.
| fsckboy wrote:
| >> _mystical nonsense such as the many-worlds
| interpretation of quantum mechanics_
|
| > _It 's not mystical nonsense, it's a logical
| consequence of the mathematics of quantum mechanics_
|
| you're both wrong. What the many-worlds interpretation
| is, is _philosophy_. It 's thinking about what could be
| that would be explanatory, in the absence of being able
| to test it; just as atomic theory was philosophy before
| it was experimentally shown... and it's still philosophy
| to think about what has actually been shown, since it was
| not long after it was "shown" that indivisible atoms
| became divisible into fundamental particles, that they in
| turn turned out not to be fundamental either.
| vehemenz wrote:
| To be clear, I never suggested the many-worlds
| interpretation isn't philosophy, but I still think it's
| mystical nonsense (as most indulgent metaphysical
| speculation is).
| vehemenz wrote:
| No one, even the most ardent of postmodernists, is going
| to disagree that science is a very successful human
| enterprise and produces progress that philosophy cannot.
| But that doesn't mean science approaches an account of
| reality on its own terms. To suggest otherwise is to
| postulate additional metaphysical baggage that even I,
| the lowly philosopher, find intolerable.
| lisper wrote:
| > that doesn't mean science approaches an account of
| reality on its own terms.
|
| That's true. But just because this is not a valid
| justification of the assertion that science does not
| approach an account of reality on its own terms, it does
| not follow that science does not in fact approach an
| account of reality on its own terms.
|
| > To suggest otherwise is to postulate additional
| metaphysical baggage that even I, the lowly philosopher,
| find intolerable.
|
| Really? Why? What aspect of reality do you believe is
| inherently beyond the scope of scientific inquiry?
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| The new riddle of induction, perhaps? You can dodge that
| by choosing suitable priors, or using heuristics like
| Occam's Razor, but then what justifies those?
| lisper wrote:
| The best answer to that question that I know of can be
| found in chapter 7 of David Deutsch's book, "The Fabric
| of Reality." But he's just channeling Karl Popper if you
| want to go straight to the source. The TL;DR is that
| science does not rely on induction at all.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| That's a cop-out. Sure, the methodical process of science
| doesn't, strictly-speaking, require induction, but we
| still have to decide whether to expect the result of
| scientific inquiry to be useful.
| lisper wrote:
| > That's a cop-out.
|
| A reference to the published literature is a cop-out???
| Sorry, no.
|
| > Sure, the methodical process of science doesn't,
| strictly-speaking, require induction, but we still have
| to decide whether to expect the result of scientific
| inquiry to be useful.
|
| What??? No! We just have to _observe empirically_ that
| the results of scientific inquiry _are_ useful.
| abeppu wrote:
| > There is a tiny minority of philosophers who are actually
| scientists pushing very hard on the boundaries of human
| knowledge.
|
| It sounds like you've already started with the assumption
| that the only way to expand human knowledge is by "science"
| and the people doing it are "scientists"? Maybe that's an
| assumption worth investigating. How would you know if that
| was true? What experiment or empirical observation would
| one need to conduct to know that the only way to extend
| human knowledge is by "science"?
|
| I feel like you're trying to do a complement to some
| philosophers by saying that the good ones are honorary
| scientists, but perhaps there's more to know than objective
| truths about our specific material world.
| lisper wrote:
| > you've already started with the assumption that the
| only way to expand human knowledge is by "science"
|
| No. I'm not assuming anything. I am making the _empirical
| observation_ that the _most effective method_ for
| expanding human knowledge is science. The people who
| understand this and consequently put effort into studying
| science I call scientists, and I don 't intend that to be
| an honorary title but a genuine show of deep respect.
|
| (And I say this as someone with a Ph.D. in a STEM field.)
|
| > perhaps there's more to know than objective truths
| about our specific material world
|
| Like what?
| abeppu wrote:
| > I am making the empirical observation that the most
| effective method for expanding human knowledge is
| science.
|
| I think you're still basically begging the question here.
| Is it directly observable whether a belief is
| "knowledge", such that the efficacy of a method can be
| known by "empirical observation"? How would one know?
|
| > Like what?
|
| I think ethics are pretty important, but aren't about
| something that's objectively true in the world. One can
| know some of the characteristics of preference
| utilitarianism as an ethical model, for example.
|
| But in this conversation, perhaps the most important gap
| is epistemology. You feel confident you know what
| knowledge is and isn't and how one can arrive at it --
| did you arrive at that understanding by directly
| observing what is and is not knowledge in an objective
| external universe? What does it mean to know, or even for
| a belief to be "justified"?
|
| Since you brought up Kant, and then re-canted (rimshot),
| Kant had the analytic vs synthetic distinction on
| propositions, where synthetic propositions are those
| which depend on how their meaning relates to the world --
| i.e. can be true or false depending on what's true about
| the world. Math, logic, etc are analytic truths; we don't
| validate that e.g. arithmetic works the way we know it
| does by doing "experiments" and "empirical observations"
| of operations with large cardinality sets of physical
| objects.
| lisper wrote:
| > Is it directly observable whether a belief is
| "knowledge", such that the efficacy of a method can be
| known by "empirical observation"?
|
| Yes.
|
| > How would one know?
|
| Just look around you. You have computers, GPS, mRNA
| vaccines, etc. etc. etc. Those things were not produced
| by philosophers.
|
| > I think ethics are pretty important,
|
| I agree.
|
| > but aren't about something that's objectively true in
| the world.
|
| What can I say? You are simply wrong about that. Ethics
| are instincts produced by evolution. Like all instincts,
| they exist because they have survival value: genes that
| build brains with instincts about ethics reproduce better
| (in certain environmental niches) than genes that don't.
| Ethics are every bit as amenable to scientific inquiry as
| any other natural phenomenon.
|
| > we don't validate that e.g. arithmetic works the way we
| know it does by doing "experiments" and "empirical
| observations" of operations with large cardinality sets
| of physical objects
|
| Of course we do, because there are different ways of
| doing arithmetic. Some of them are better models of the
| world than others, and so those are the ones that we tend
| to think of as "the way" of doing arithmetic. But the
| only thing that makes standard arithmetic special is that
| it corresponds to the way that (parts of) the world work.
| abeppu wrote:
| > Just look around you. You have computers, GPS, mRNA
| vaccines, etc. etc. etc. Those things were not produced
| by philosophers.
|
| You're clearly not getting this. Yes, you can see the
| products of scientific progress. That's not the same as
| seeing the absence of knowledge produced by anyone else.
| And one would expect that truths revealed about the
| physical world we live in should of _course_ be the ones
| that give rise to physical artifacts you can point at.
|
| > Ethics are instincts produced by evolution.
|
| ... and yet, our ethical beliefs are not biologically
| determined, but change as a function of culture, and at
| least in part through the work of philosophers. Our
| beliefs about the importance of freedom, equality,
| fairness (or what those mean) change dramatically over
| decades, far too quick for genetics to have any
| contribution to the change.
|
| Re arithmetic, "the integers are closed under addition"
| is still something one can _know_ without making any
| observations of the world, even if standard addition were
| somehow not useful in making predictions about the
| physical world. Further, by arguing that the _importance_
| of mathematical knowledge is only its relationship to
| making predictions about physical reality, you are once
| again begging the question.
| lisper wrote:
| > That's not the same as seeing the absence of knowledge
| produced by anyone else.
|
| But that's not what you asked, and it's not what I
| claimed. I didn't say that philosophy is entirely devoid
| of value, only that a lot of it is.
|
| > our ethical beliefs are not biologically determined
|
| What difference does that make? A lot of your physical
| characteristics aren't biologically determined. That
| doesn't put them beyond the reach of scientific inquiry.
|
| > "the integers are closed under addition" is still
| something one can know without making any observations of
| the world
|
| Really? How do you know what the word "integer" means
| without making any observations of the world? How can you
| even become _aware_ of the _existence_ of the word
| "integer", let alone what it is that that word denotes,
| without making any observations of the world?
|
| > Further, by arguing that the importance of mathematical
| knowledge is only its relationship to making predictions
| about physical reality, you are once again begging the
| question.
|
| Am I? What is it that made you decide to write "the
| integers are closed under addition" if not some
| prediction on the effect that writing those words rather
| than some other words (like, say, "pandas are partial to
| purple parkas") would have on physical reality?
| abeppu wrote:
| > But that's not what you asked, and it's not what I
| claimed. I didn't say that philosophy is entirely devoid
| of value, only that a lot of it is.
|
| You claimed you can empirically observe "that the most
| effective method for expanding human knowledge is
| science", which I think requires you to observe the
| efficacy of all methods of expanding human knowledge.
|
| Regarding ethics, empirically gathering what people's
| ethical opinions are is surveying. This is distinct from
| knowledge about ethical systems. For example, preference
| utilitarianism sets the stage for social choice theory,
| in which theorems tell us about the properties and
| weaknesses of systems for groups of agents to
| collectively make choices (Arrow's theorem, Harsanyi's
| theorem etc).
|
| > Really? How do you know what the word "integer" means
| without making any observations of the world?
|
| I know the English word "integer" through interaction
| with the world; this does not mean that true properties
| of addition are "empirical" truths proceeding from
| science.
| lisper wrote:
| > requires you to observe the efficacy of all methods of
| expanding human knowledge
|
| I should have hedged with "all _known_ methods ". It's
| possible that someone might invent a more effective
| method (but I believe there is actually good reason to
| believe that this is not possible, but that's a tangent).
|
| > preference utilitarianism sets the stage for social
| choice theory, in which theorems tell us about the
| properties and weaknesses of systems for groups of agents
| to collectively make choices (Arrow's theorem, Harsanyi's
| theorem etc).
|
| Sure. So?
|
| Arrow's theorem is a great example. It's a _theorem_. It
| 's _math_. It 's not what is generally done under the
| rubric of "philosophy".
|
| > this does not mean that true properties of addition are
| "empirical" truths proceeding from science
|
| Yes it does. What is the "true" value of (say) 11 + 27?
| It could be 38, but it could also be 1 (mod 12) or 13
| (mod 24) any of which might be the "true" value depending
| on the application.
| abeppu wrote:
| > Ethics are instincts produced by evolution.
|
| I would also clarify: We have instincts _about_ ethics.
| This does not imply that ethics _are_ instincts, any more
| than having instincts about geometry implies that
| geometry is instincts or having instincts about physical
| quantities implies that measure theory is instincts.
| jll29 wrote:
| > You are simply wrong about that. Ethics are instincts
| produced by evolution. Like all instincts, they exist
| because they have survival value
|
| That sounds like a rather cheap version of evolution (and
| - not wanting to offend you, but in my view you sound
| rather too convinced that you have figured it all out for
| your own good).
|
| The way you map moral values on survival smells like
| Skinner's cheap way to explain language in terms of
| behavioral stimulus-response pairs: not an adequate
| explanation. Beware that for every Skinner, there may a
| Chomsky around the corner to give his views a run for his
| money.
| lisper wrote:
| > That sounds like a rather cheap version of evolution
|
| The format of an HN comment imposes some pretty serious
| constraints on communicating technical nuance and detail.
|
| > Beware that for every Skinner, there may a Chomsky
| around the corner to give his views a run for his money.
|
| Sure. Science is not a magic bullet. It can steer you
| astray. But in the long run it works better than any
| available alternative methodology.
| card_zero wrote:
| _Well,_
|
| The demarcation problem is distinguishing science from
| non-science.
|
| Karl Popper theorizes that falsifiability is what makes
| the difference.
|
| But there's nothing falsifiable about that theory! What
| would you test?
|
| If you accept that there are meaningful theories outside
| of science, this works out fine. If you don't, you'll
| struggle to say what science is.
| mannykannot wrote:
| Definitions are hardly a problem just for science (if
| they are a problem - science seems to doing OK
| regardless), and I feel they are particularly difficult
| for those with a strong commitment to the view that
| ethics must somehow be grounded in something irrefutably
| true. In fact, I vaguely suspect that Wittgenstein's
| later position with respect to the rule-following paradox
| was that seeking such grounding is a doomed pursuit, and
| he somewhat famously contended that philosophy was not
| concerned with problems, only linguistic puzzles.
|
| Perhaps rather paradoxically (at least if you see Popper
| as a champion of science over philosophy), Popper (who,
| in addition to his work on the philosophy of science,
| also wrote "The Open Society and its Enemies") felt that
| Wittgenstein was utterly wrong to deny that there are
| real philosophical problems.
|
| https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wittgenstein/#RuleFoll
| Pri...
|
| https://ditext.com/wordpress/2019/06/26/puzzles-vs-
| problems-...
| card_zero wrote:
| Thank you, I knew there would be relevant Popper quotes
| about philosophy being meaningful, and I was trying the
| keyword "transempirical" without success. I forgot it was
| the underlying beef in the poker incident. :)
| samatman wrote:
| We're lucky that science just burst full-formed out of
| Zeus's forehead then.
|
| Or we might need a philosopher or two to help us invent
| it.
|
| So, if we all get mind-wiped and have to start over
| without this gift of the Gods, let's call the man who
| gets us back on track Francis Bacon, Jr.
|
| Why? _no particular reason_
| mcguire wrote:
| Unfortunately, there are questions that cannot be
| empirically answered. Some of those questions are
| important.
| lisper wrote:
| Like what?
| mistermann wrote:
| Here's one: what causes even smart people to hallucinate
| when practising epistemology, non-binary logic, and set
| theory ( _or not_ , as the case may be), as well
| demonstrated throughout this thread?
|
| Here's my guess: the same thing that causes them to not
| be able to juggle: a lack of practice (and in the case of
| philosophy: a teacher who isn't also hallucinating).
|
| As for why I consider such things important: I believe
| they are intimately related to why humans are
| continuously involved in wars and various other sub-
| optimal activities, which are _easily_ [1] explained away
| with stories.
|
| As for teachers, Graham Priest seems to be quite sharp:
|
| https://youtu.be/ZGOMmGK4eeY?si=t0fmGJ3sA3iGN47T
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graham_Priest
|
| [1] Like taking candy _from babies_.
| lisper wrote:
| You really believe that the question of human fallibility
| is beyond the scope of scientific inquiry? I guess we'll
| just have to agree to disagree about that.
| mistermann wrote:
| It isn't that science _cannot_ , it is that they _do
| not_.
|
| Science practices a watered down version of epistemology
| (which is fine for the domain they are in as far as I'm
| concerned: speed matters, and errors can _usually_ be
| corrected later), the dangerous part is that people think
| science is the gold standard of reasoning, truth
| discovery, etc. _Just read the thread_.
|
| And the fan base seems often unable _to even wonder_ what
| is true, let alone discern it.
| lisper wrote:
| > It isn't that science cannot, it is that they do not.
|
| I guess we'll have to agree to disagree about that too.
| mistermann wrote:
| If you were able to wonder if it was true it would be
| advantageous.
| lisper wrote:
| Sorry. Life is short, and there are certain ideas that
| are simply not worthy of serious consideration, like
| whether the earth might be flat. All you have to do to
| see that you are wrong is to do a web search for
| "scientific inquiry into human fallibility". If you're
| not willing to put in even that minimal effort you are
| not worth engaging with.
| glenstein wrote:
| > But the vast majority of people who self-identify
| professionally as philosophers, and especially the ones
| whose names are revered (I'm looking at you, Ludwig
| Wittgenstein [EDITED])
|
| You could have picked so many good examples, instead you
| picked a legend of the 20th century. The first half of his
| career, centered on the Tractatus, even today is regarded
| as more or less on the right track as relates to how we use
| language to make the kinds of propositions found in the
| natural sciences (see modern philosopher A.C. Grayling's
| intro to his book where he says as much), but is less than
| a comprehensive view of the totality of meaning that it
| originally aspired to be.
|
| And if anything, his latter career would be _more_
| pertinent, not less, as he spent it perhaps as the 20th
| century 's most powerful advocate for the idea that
| philosophy spends too much time uselessly bewitching people
| with language. He was literally an engineering bro
| frustrated with pointless vagaries, known for flying into
| rages against what he regarded as frivolous philosophical
| nonsense. He might be the one guy from the 20th century who
| would most _agree_ with you about the excesses of pointless
| language.
| scoofy wrote:
| Philosophy is the birthplace of sciences, which is why most
| philosophers are dealing with some kind of metaphysics.
| Yes, there are some philosophers that continue their work
| after developing it from a metaphysics into a physics, but
| that's sort of besides the point. The _point_ of philosophy
| is to create the framework for empirical research.
|
| That you would deride Wittgenstein on a math/CS forum, when
| he is _literally the person who thought up the concept of
| truth tables_ , seems quite egregious.
|
| Yes, Wittgenstein is one of the most frustrating
| philosophers to read (I know, I took a class on his work),
| but his impact on the _development_ of computer science, as
| one of the main people trying to harness the logic of
| thought /language, seems obvious to me.
| jll29 wrote:
| Wittgenstein's discussion of what _all_ games have in
| common (nothing, really) led him to the notion of "family
| resemblances".
|
| Margaret Masterman, who was Wittgenstein's student in
| Cambridge, may have passed some of that on to her student
| Karen Sparck Jones -- later of TFIDF fame (Sparck Jones,
| 1972; [1]) --, and Karen's Ph.D. was on semantic
| clustering, which years later were published as a book
| [2]. Her husband Roger needham published a paper about
| the notion of a "clump" theory of meaning [3]. So it
| seems Wittgenstein put some precursor ideas to clustering
| (linkage?) out in the Cambridge air for others to pick
| up...
|
| [1] https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.1108/e
| b026526...
|
| [2] https://dl.acm.org/doi/book/10.5555/22908
|
| [3] https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/document?repid=rep1&typ
| e=pdf&d...
| lisper wrote:
| > Philosophy is the birthplace of sciences
|
| Sure, just as alchemy is the birthplace of chemistry.
| That doesn't mean we should still be studying alchemy for
| anything other than its historical significance.
| scoofy wrote:
| No, this is an incorrect assessment. You have framed it
| as _post hoc_ , but the point is that _the philosophy_ is
| the development of ideas like, say, atomic theory in
| chemistry, or germ theory in medicine. Theories that
| define _the framework_ for study.
|
| New sciences happen very infrequently, but they happen,
| and when they do, they are typically created in
| philosophy departments. Computer science is the most
| recent, which came in large part from philosophy
| departments. Before that was psychology.
|
| Alchemy is exactly a framework-free type of empiricism.
| The _point_ of philosophy, and philosophy that happens in
| other sciences, is that we live inside of a model, and we
| interact with that model, and change the model while we
| are doing empirical research _using the rules of the
| model_. This is a type of reflexive framework
| development, where metaphysical ideas become _obvious_
| physics as people propose changes to the standard model
| we use.
|
| This dance between induction and deduction is exactly the
| field of philosophy.
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| Incorrect. Philosophers write about, "organize" and
| "codify" what people are doing in the trenches from trial
| and error. To say that the philosophers created the
| science is like saying that by dressing a man in a suit
| they have created life.
| scoofy wrote:
| I don't understand what you mean.
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| Philosophers of science have given us some axiomatic
| statements about the nature of deduction and the limits
| of inquiry, but research is a trade far more nuanced than
| a philosophical framework, with cultural transmission of
| domain specific problem solving strategies and learned
| intuitive guides. Those things are inherently
| a-philosophical, and also probably the most important of
| all.
| scoofy wrote:
| I still don't understand your point. If you have some
| disagreement with certain philosophy of science writers,
| I can certainly understand, but my point is that
| philosophy is exactly the interplay of the deductive
| frameworks and the induction "in the trenches" as you
| say. The process of philosophy is the interplay between
| the to, as neither aspect of that dichotomy can be
| demonstrated it's own.
|
| Empiricism cannot be justified without a reason-based
| framework, and that deductive framework is _by
| definition_ arbitrary, and needs to map to empirical
| findings.
| lisper wrote:
| > Empiricism cannot be justified without a reason-based
| framework
|
| Yes, it can. Empiricism can be justified empirically: it
| just works better than anything else humans have yet come
| up with.
| scoofy wrote:
| The Black Swan problem (the problem of induction)
| prevents empiricism (induction) from being justified on
| its own. You end up with solipsism (turkey problem, grue
| problem, etc.)
| lisper wrote:
| Science does not rely on induction. Yes, I know you can
| find many sources that say otherwise, but they are wrong.
| Read this:
|
| https://www.amazon.com/Fabric-Reality-Parallel-Universes-
| Imp...
|
| especially chapter 7.
| ants_everywhere wrote:
| This is the basis of all superstition. Our crops were
| doing poorly, but then I burned a chicken and now they're
| doing well. Let's keep burning chickens.
|
| You have to have an explanation of what counts as a valid
| empirical relation. And that depends on a whole lot of
| things worked out by philosophers and scientists.
|
| Including, for example, that you can safely ignore
| correlations that can't have a basis in physical laws. Or
| that you can write certain symbols on a blackboard and
| compute the probability that your correlation is worth
| spending more time on.
| lisper wrote:
| I think we have different definitions of empiricism.
| Empiricism is the belief that sensory experience is
| _necessary_ for knowledge, not that it is sufficient. It
| stands in contrast with the belief that knowledge can be
| justified by pure logic without reference to any sensory
| experience.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| Mathematical knowledge can be justified by pure logic
| without reference to any sensory experience. Is that not
| knowledge? (This is an old argument.)
| lisper wrote:
| > Mathematical knowledge can be justified by pure logic
| without reference to any sensory experience.
|
| No, I don't think it can. I challenge you to give me an
| example of mathematical knowledge that you can justify
| without reference to any sensory experience, keeping in
| mind that reading and hearing people talk are both
| sensory experiences.
|
| It doesn't even have to be math. I'll bet you can't even
| define the distinction between "true" and "false" without
| reference to sensory experience.
| ants_everywhere wrote:
| Your claim was that empiricism justifies itself, I was
| explaining why that's not the case.
|
| Your definition is overly broad IMO. Empiricism is
| usually taken to be the belief that the sole source and
| justification of knowledge is ultimately sensory data.
| See e.g. Wikipedia or Britannica.
|
| It stands in contrast with rationalism sure. But more
| importantly in the context of your comment and the
| parent, empiricism also stands in contrast to the only
| sane POV (IMO), which is that knowledge is combination of
| empirical and rational sources, as pointed out for
| example by Kant.
| lisper wrote:
| > See e.g. Wikipedia
|
| I did:
|
| "empiricism is an epistemological view which holds that
| true knowledge or justification comes only or primarily
| from sensory experience and empirical evidence."
|
| Note the phrase "or primarily".
|
| > knowledge is combination of empirical and rational
| sources
|
| The "or primarily" hedge is all I need to refute you (or
| at least to show that we are not actually in
| disagreement). However, rationality can itself be
| justified by empiricism if the Church-Turing thesis is
| correct, which I believe it is.
| ants_everywhere wrote:
| I suspect that you're using empiricism somewhat more
| broadly than philosophers do, and that you may include
| things like science as a whole. Science is more
| traditionally IMO considered to be a recursive process
| with rational (i.e. theory) and empirical (i.e. sense
| data) steps. In science, sense data provides a constraint
| on theory and theory (together with psychology) provide a
| constraint on the raw sense data (in the same way, for
| example, an AI provides structure to the raw input
| vectors).
|
| If that's something along the lines of what you believe,
| then sure I'd say we're on the same page and we're not
| actually in disagreement.
|
| But I wouldn't describe that belief system as saying
| empricism is self-justifying. Empiricism in practice goes
| off the rails pretty quickly with things like subjective
| idealism and the belief that there are no external
| entities, only sense data etc.
|
| The thing we have now, where theory and experience
| mutually constrain each other seems obviously correct to
| me both in the academic sense (e.g. I think that Kant was
| right that the mind provides structure to raw sensory
| data). I also think it's true in the broader sense (e.g.
| that the applied sciences tend to move more slowly on
| their own and advance much more rapidly when combined
| with theory).
| lisper wrote:
| > Science is more traditionally IMO considered to be a
| recursive process with rational (i.e. theory) and
| empirical (i.e. sense data) steps.
|
| That's true, but like so many traditions, it's wrong.
| Science can be justified entirely in terms of empiricism.
|
| To be clear, it is not at all obvious that this is
| possible (it relies on the Church-Turing thesis), and so
| people can be forgiven for making this mistake. But it's
| still a mistake, and it's grounded in ignorance.
|
| > Empiricism in practice goes off the rails pretty
| quickly with things like subjective idealism and the
| belief that there are no external entities, only sense
| data etc.
|
| Unless your sensory experiences are radically different
| from mine, then you have to concede that those
| experiences behave, to a very close approximation, _as
| if_ external entities exist, and a good explanation for
| that is that external entities do in fact exist.
|
| Ironically, that explanation turns out to be wrong, but
| to see that you need to dive into quantum mechanics. And
| the justification for quantum mechanics grounds out in
| the sensory experience of perceiving the results of
| experiments. There is no escape from empiricism in the
| world we live in.
| ants_everywhere wrote:
| Respectfully I think we just disagree.
|
| I do think we must have pretty different sensory
| experiences then, because my awareness of sensory data is
| entirely of processed data and nothing at all like the
| raw output of my retina (which I personally don't have
| accesss to although we can access it in animals if we cut
| their heads open). My ears have a high pitched ring
| constantly, and although it's indistinguishable from a
| sensory perspective from hearing a high pitched noise out
| in the world, my brain has somehow never attributed it to
| an outside object. Similarly with occular migraines.
|
| I think a reasonable test would be whether you could
| build a useful embedded device out of only a sensor and
| no logic to interpret the output of that sensor.
|
| The thing that lets us even talk meaningfully about
| computable functions is that they have a logical
| description. We wouldn't be able to say anything
| meaningful about the entire class of such functions if we
| were restricted to those we have experience of. It's not
| even clear what it would mean to universally quantify
| over a class of logical structures in a purely empirical
| world. We don't even need to get as fancy as computable
| functions. We couldn't even meaningfully talk about the
| class of natural numbers.
|
| And the thing that lets us translate little dots on some
| quantum mechanical detector is that we have a
| mathematical theory that predicts that dots will look one
| way if such and such is the case. And they will look
| another way if such and such is the case. If sense data
| are all you need, then you have to give an account of why
| a trained experimental physicist can see different things
| in those dots than a toddler does.
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| If you try burning a chicken repeatedly when crops are
| doing poorly, and it works every time, that hypothesis is
| supported by the evidence. There's obviously no chain of
| direct causality, but that is immaterial.
|
| This reminds me of scientists who completely shit on
| astrology for lacking any predictive power. At the very
| least it has some predictive power because people believe
| in it and subtly conform to its predictions. Beyond that,
| there are obviously cycles in the universe and we know
| biological cycles synchronize with natural ones
| (melatonin is any easy example, but animals synchronize
| to year level cycles as well). Are the stars causing the
| correlations, and are all the correlations astrology
| talks about present? Clearly not, but there is a mountain
| of poorly controlled empirical observations that hint to
| more being there than we've laid out with regard to human
| character that science is content to shit on because it
| can't do anything else without looking bad.
| harwoodjp wrote:
| > Empiricism can be justified empirically
|
| It's so obvious you haven't engaged with the subject
| matter.
| lisper wrote:
| How so?
| knightoffaith wrote:
| I would assume that GP is referring to the problem of
| induction. Basically, your reasoning seems to be
| circular.
| lisper wrote:
| Good grief, the problem of induction was solved by Karl
| Popper decades ago. Do people here really not know that?
| knightoffaith wrote:
| But Popper wasn't saying that empiricism could be
| justified empirically, was he?
|
| In his own words, in the section on the problem of
| induction in _The Logic of Scientific Discovery_ :
|
| "My own view is that the various difficulties of
| inductive logic here sketched are insurmountable. So
| also, I fear, are those inherent in the doctrine, so
| widely current today, that inductive inference, although
| not 'strictly valid', can attain some degree of
| 'reliability' or of 'probability'."
|
| He then goes on to provide the (now contentious)
| falsification-based view of science after conceding that
| inductivism can't work.
| lisper wrote:
| > But Popper wasn't saying that empiricism could be
| justified empirically, was he?
|
| No, _I_ am saying that. Popper may have said it too, I
| don 't know. I'm citing Popper to support my claim that
| science doesn't involve induction.
| knightoffaith wrote:
| Why is it not circular reasoning to justify empirical
| reasoning via empirical reasoning?
|
| (The formal problem of induction argument with its charge
| of circularity is best and most simply put here
| https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/induction-
| problem/#Reco)
| lisper wrote:
| Because the only reason you have to believe anything at
| all is that you perceive things. And the things that you
| perceive probably lead you to believe things like that
| you are a human being, that you exist in a particular
| subset of three-dimensional space, that there are other
| humans that exist in other subsets of that same three-
| dimensional space, that these other humans move around
| and do things that can reasonably be described as "saying
| things" and "writing things", and that the things that
| these other humans say and write correspond to
| circumstances in this three-dimensional space that you
| occupy so that it makes sense, at least in some
| circumstances, to label these sayings and writings with
| labels like "true" and "false" to indicate whether the
| way they correspond with circumstances is a positive or
| negative correlation, and if you get these labels right
| it can help you survive and flourish. Likewise, if you
| get them wrong (and that includes denying what I have
| just told you) it will greatly diminish your prospects of
| survival, and evolution will take care of the rest. In
| short, it isn't circular because if you try to pick a
| fight with reality, reality will win.
| knightoffaith wrote:
| I see where you're coming from, but none of this really
| means that justifying inductive reasoning through
| inductive reasoning isn't circular.
|
| Hume himself thinks that inductive reasoning is grounded
| in "custom or habit", and thinks it's rational to proceed
| this way---a solution you'd probably agree with.
| lisper wrote:
| > inductive reasoning
|
| Who said anything about inductive reasoning? I'm
| defending empiricism, not induction. Induction is just
| flat-out wrong.
| knightoffaith wrote:
| I suppose the confusion still remains about how
| empiricism can be self-justifying. You've laid out a case
| for why it's empirical reasoning is pragmatic, fine, but
| that doesn't mean that empirical reasoning is grounded in
| empirical reasoning, even if empirical reasoning is in
| fact rational. Whether you go with a Humean-style
| solution or a Popperian solution, it's just still not the
| case that justifying empirical reasoning through
| empirical reasoning is not circular.
| lisper wrote:
| What about the argument presented in
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40100070 did you
| find inadequate?
|
| The reason it's not circular is that it grounds out in
| _actual reality_.
|
| I suppose you could deny the existence of actual reality.
| If you want to do that, you are beyond my ability to
| help.
| knightoffaith wrote:
| I'm disputing something very specific. I'm not disputing
| that empirical reasoning is rational. What I'm disputing
| is that empirical reasoning is justified by empirical
| reasoning. This not being circular is not logically
| related to actual reality. Like, I'm just saying that
| this doesn't make sense:
|
| 1: If you try to pick a fight with reality, reality will
| win. (Empirical reasoning is evolutionary useful, etc.)
| 2: Thus, empirical reasoning is justified by empirical
| reasoning.
|
| 2 doesn't follow from 1. I accept 1, and I accept the
| rationality of empirical reasoning, but I don't accept 2.
| lisper wrote:
| > empirical reasoning
|
| You've actually moved the goal posts here. The original
| claim was: empiricism can be justified empirically. But
| "empiricism" and "empirical reasoning" are not synonyms.
|
| (You also threw in induction at some point, which is just
| a red herring.)
|
| So let me try this again: to quote Wikipedia, empiricism
| is an epistemological view which holds that true
| knowledge or justification comes only or primarily from
| sensory experience and empirical evidence. This can be
| justified empirically (I claim) by observing
| (empirically!) that people who do not base their actions
| on sensory experience will do stupid things like walk
| into walls or fall off cliffs.
|
| If you want to dispute this, tell me how you would define
| the words "true" and "false" without making any reference
| to sensory experience.
| knightoffaith wrote:
| Oh, I see, since we were talking about science, I figured
| you really just meant induction, I didn't think you meant
| empiricism, the philosophical school of thought (in
| contrast to rationalism), that's my bad.
|
| But it seems that empiricism is a view that you have to
| hold a priori as opposed to a posteriori. Like, how is
| seeing that people who don't base their actions on
| sensory experience evidence for true knowledge or
| justification primarily coming from sensory experience
| and empirical evidence? Seeing people who don't base
| their actions on all guns being loaded doing stupid
| things like injuring themselves or others unintentionally
| doesn't make it true that all guns are loaded. I think
| what you really want to say is that empiricism is a very
| intuitive idea, and that it's telling that people who
| deny the reliability of sensory experience do silly
| things. (Not that rationalists were denying the validity
| of sensory experience anyway, it's not like Descartes or
| Spinoza were denying sense-data).
| lisper wrote:
| > I didn't think you meant empiricism
|
| Well, that's pretty stupid, since I was actually using
| that exact word. You are quite literally saying, "Oh,
| when you said X, I didn't think you actually meant X, I
| thought you meant Y." (And in this case your Y is
| something that I absolutely do not believe.)
|
| > But it seems that empiricism is a view that you have to
| hold a priori as opposed to a posteriori.
|
| Why? Why cannot I not simply _observe_ that when I base
| my decisions on plausible explanations of things that I
| observe I get better outcomes than when I base my
| decisions on some other criterion?
| knightoffaith wrote:
| I mean, the first mention of empiricism was about
| classifying alchemy as a type of empiricism, which leads
| one to believe the discussion can't be about empiricism
| in the technical philosophical sense because being an
| empiricist or not doesn't have anything to do with
| alchemy technically speaking, and as the discussion went
| on there was a claim made that empiricism is justified
| empirically which is something that none of the three
| paradigmatic empiricist philosophers (Locke, Berkeley,
| Hume) said, so the context of the discussion didn't seem
| to suit the technical meaning of the word. The spirit of
| the discussion seemed to be more about empirical
| reasoning and its empirical justification, so I went
| along with that.
|
| >Why? Why cannot I not simply observe that when I base my
| decisions on plausible explanations of things that I
| observe I get better outcomes than when I base my
| decisions on some other criterion?
|
| You can observe that, I'm just saying that this doesn't
| prove anything about sensory experience being the primary
| means for knowledge. Like, Descartes, the paradigmatic
| rationalist, is happy to do this. But he still thinks
| that logical truths arrived at through experience-
| independent reasoning are the primary source of
| knowledge.
| lisper wrote:
| > the first mention of empiricism was about classifying
| alchemy as a type of empiricism
|
| Yeah, but that wasn't me, that was scoofy.
|
| > this doesn't prove anything about sensory experience
| being the primary means for knowledge.
|
| It does until someone comes up with a better idea.
|
| > he still thinks that logical truths arrived at through
| experience-independent reasoning are the primary source
| of knowledge.
|
| Well, yeah, but he's just obviously wrong.
| harwoodjp wrote:
| You're confusing empiricism with evolutionary
| epistemology. Evolutionary epistemology isn't exclusively
| empirical.
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| You can call someone's reasoning circular all you want
| but at the end of the day there's what you've
| accomplished, and the score is philospher 0 engineer 1.
| knightoffaith wrote:
| True, it's basically indisputable that engineers are
| better at engineering than philosophers are. But that
| seems orthogonal to the issues raised in the problem of
| induction.
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| My thrust was more that people are out doing stuff in the
| world, and for the most part philosophers don't do
| anything other than say things about what people are
| already doing. Engineering was an empirical science long
| before it was a deductive and analytic one.
| knightoffaith wrote:
| Philosophers make arguments for/against claims, I don't
| see why that doesn't count as doing something. I mean,
| maybe you're complaining that they're not building
| rockets or feeding the poor, but philosophers are far
| from the only ones who don't do these things.
| harwoodjp wrote:
| I don't think you understand what philosophy is.
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| Just like we shouldn't study history, because it is in
| the past?
| GrumpySloth wrote:
| _> That you would deride Wittgenstein on a math /CS
| forum, when he is literally the person who thought up the
| concept of truth tables, seems quite egregious._
|
| That would be Charles Peirce, in the XIXth century, not
| Wittgenstein.
| hollerith wrote:
| Also, his philosophical works might be bad even if he had
| invented truth tables: it's not like the truth table was
| hard to find the way, e.g., Newtonian mechanics was.
| scoofy wrote:
| Peirce, apparently, did develop a equivalent form of
| truth table earlier, but it would be misunderstand the
| history of computer science to attribute them to Peirce.
| Just because someone had the idea first, doesn't mean
| that work is the source of the idea going forward.
|
| I think it's pretty clear that Wittgenstein's truth
| tables are those that guided the development of computer
| science.
|
| >In a manuscript of 1893, in the context of his study of
| the truth-functional analysis of propositions and proofs
| and his continuing efforts at defining and understanding
| the nature of logical inference, and against the
| background of his mathematical work in matrix theory in
| algebra, Charles Peirce presented a truth table which
| displayed in matrix form the definition of his most
| fundamental connective, that of illation, which is
| equivalent to the truth-functional definition of material
| implication. Peirce's matrix is exactly equivalent to
| that for material implication discovered by Shosky that
| is attributable to Bertrand Russell and has been dated as
| originating in 1912. Thus, Peirce's table of 1893 may be
| considered to be the earliest known instance of a truth
| table device in the familiar form which is attributable
| to an identifiable author, and antedates not only the
| tables of Post, Wittgenstein, and Lukasiewicz of 1920-22,
| but Russell's table of 1912 and also Peirce's previously
| identified tables for trivalent logic tracable to 1902.
|
| PDF of Anellis's paper:
| https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1108/1108.2429.pdf
|
| >But even if that conclusion is challenged, it is now
| clear that Russell understood and used the truth-table
| technique and the truth-table device. By 1910, Russell
| had already demonstrated a well-documented understanding
| of the truth-table technique in his work on Principia
| Mathematica. Now, it would seem that by 1912, and surely
| by 1914, Russell understood, and used, the truth-table
| device. Of course, the combination of logical conception
| and logical engineering by Russell in his use of truth
| tables is the culmination of work by Boole and Frege, who
| were closely studied by Russell. Wittgenstein and Post
| still deserve recognition for realizing the value and
| power of the truth-table device. But Russell also
| deserves some recognition on this topic, as part of this
| pantheon of logicians.
|
| >In this paper I have shown that neither the truth-table
| technique nor the truth-table device was "invented" by
| Wittgenstein or Post in 1921-22. The truth-table
| technique may originally be a product of Philo's mind,
| but it was clearly in use by Boole, Frege, and Whitehead
| and Russell. The truth-table device is found in use by
| Wittgenstein in 1912, perhaps with some collaboration
| from Russell. Russell used the truth-table technique at
| Harvard in 1914 and in London in 1918. So the truth-table
| technique and the truth-table device both predate the
| early 1920s.
|
| PDF of Shosky's relevant paper: https://mulpress.mcmaster
| .ca/russelljournal/article/download...
| GrumpySloth wrote:
| I suspected Frege, which is why I went looking for a
| source, but found Peirce instead. Good catch.
| mistermann wrote:
| > That you would deride Wittgenstein on a math/CS forum,
| when he is literally the person who thought up the
| concept of truth tables, seems quite egregious.
|
| For extra lulz you should ask him about which of the many
| meanings of the word "is" he is using here, _for each
| instance of the word_ :
|
| > That's because a lot of philosophy is eminently pooh-
| pooh-able.
|
| Of all places, you'd think people on a hacker forum would
| know the difference between is and equals.
| ngcc_hk wrote:
| You know w think philosophy is a disease to be cured ...
| identify himself as philosopher is most shameful word you
| can say to him. He is anti-philosophy all his life.
|
| Even his early work is about let us do this and done all
| philosophy so we as the whole humanity no need to do this
| rubbish anymore, be silence now as all done and for what
| cannot be said ... he go to teach kids (and quite horrible
| as a teacher btw).
|
| W as a P ... crazy
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| "tiny minority of philosophers who are actually scientists"
|
| Aren't you just re-categorizing to fit what you want.
|
| "I don't like this field, so I'll cherry pick people I do
| agree with and re-define them to be in a different group
| that I'm more comfortable with".
|
| Can't I say the same thing.
|
| "Those Biologist aren't really scientist, they are just
| writing down observations not following the scientific
| method".(I've heard this argument on HN before).
|
| Philosophers are the original scientist.
|
| Is every philosopher today pushing boundaries and creating
| something new? No.
|
| Is every scientist today pushing boundaries and creating
| something new? Also No.
| xpe wrote:
| Let's make this testable. Tell me what percentage of
| technical people, defined however you like, generally view
| philosophy as a waste of time. (This could even be a
| thought experiment for now.)
|
| Of these people how many of them come to their conclusion
| based on careful reasoning? Based on broad knowledge of
| philosophy?
|
| My prior expectation would be that these numbers are very
| low. I would expect that people who dismiss philosophy do
| so from a position of relative ignorance.
|
| This is not blame; the broader context matters: educational
| curricula, teaching quality, life experience, curiosity,
| competing interests, etc.
|
| Let's put the shoe on the other foot. How much applied
| computer science is worth reading? If you put a typical
| example of it in front of me (the code professionals write
| for example), I'm probably going think it is a hot mess. It
| becomes more bearable if I interpret it as a sequence of
| economically and culturally constrained suboptimal
| decisions. The same goes for philosophy.
| lisper wrote:
| > I would expect that people who dismiss philosophy do so
| from a position of relative ignorance.
|
| That's entirely possible. It's even possible that my
| assessment is based on ignorance. I am certainly not an
| expert in the philosophical literature, and even more
| certainly not an expert in it recently. The last time I
| looked seriously at the philosophical literature at all
| was decades ago and maybe things have changed. But I _am_
| an expert in science, and computer science in particular
| (I have a Ph.D.) and so I can say with some authority
| that the philosophy literature that I looked at back in
| the day exhibited a profound ignorance of basic results
| in CS and math, and also a pretty profound lack of common
| sense. I found a _lot_ of papers that were tackling non-
| problems that were based on false assumptions, the moral
| equivalent of fake proofs that 1=0 where the object of
| the game is to spot the flaw in the reasoning. And
| spotting the flaw in the reasoning wasn 't even
| challenging. It was just obvious.
|
| It also seems to me that a lot of what is nowadays called
| philosophy is just pretty transparent cover for religious
| apologetics.
|
| Now, as you say, I could be wrong. I'm not an expert. If
| I'm wrong, I welcome being enlightened. But if you want
| to take that on I think you will find that I am not
| completely clueless. I suggest you start with citing an
| example other than Dennett or Maudlin of someone you
| think is doing good work in philosophy nowadays.
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| Shouldn't you be aware that mathematics and computer
| "science" are closer to philosophy than actual
| (empirical) sciences ?
|
| Yours sounds more like the now very tired "two cultures"
| argument, sounds like you are discussing more the
| sociology side of things than anything ?
|
| (Would you throw out the baby of science with the
| bathwater of non-replicating papers ?)
|
| And wasn't Wittgenstein (et al.) the one that
| specifically recentered philosophy around the questions
| of language, trying to prune the accumulated historical
| bullshit that philosophy has a much harder difficulty to
| get rid of than (empirical) sciences ?
| lisper wrote:
| > Shouldn't you be aware that mathematics and computer
| "science" are closer to philosophy than actual
| (empirical) sciences ?
|
| OK. So what? The problem is that as philosophy moves
| closer to math it moves into the math department, and as
| it moves closer to empiricism it moves into the various
| sciences. The philosophy department is left with the
| dregs. That is what I claim results in a lot of pooh-
| pooh-able work.
|
| > Yours sounds more like the now very tired "two
| cultures" argument, sounds like you are discussing more
| the sociology side of things than anything ?
|
| Perhaps, but my focus here is much narrower. Snow was
| talking about _everything_ that isn 't science, and I'm
| talking only about those things that are commonly
| labelled "philosophy" for the last 300 years or so.
| Before that, science had not yet broken away from
| "natural philosophy" as a field in its own right. I'm not
| questioning the value of the arts.
|
| > And wasn't Wittgenstein (et al.) the one that
| specifically recentered philosophy around the questions
| of language, trying to prune the accumulated historical
| bullshit that philosophy has a much harder difficulty to
| get rid of than (empirical) sciences ?
|
| Maybe he was, I don't know. It's possible that I'm being
| unfair to him by focusing on the Tractatus, which has
| always struck me as just such obvious bullshit that it
| astonishes me that anyone can read it as anything other
| than some kind of practical joke.
|
| But what I do know is that I don't see a lot of
| references to Wittgenstein when I read modern papers
| about natural language processing, and so his work
| doesn't seem to have had much impact. It's possible that
| this is because his work had so much impact that it's
| considered common knowledge, kind of like Turing doesn't
| always get referenced when the halting problem gets
| mentioned because everyone Just Knows.
|
| And it's not just Wittgenstein. I don't see _any_
| philosophers having much impact on the world outside of
| university philosophy departments. _That_ is what I am
| criticizing, not Wittgenstein per se. Tractatus was just
| an example.
| xpe wrote:
| > It also seems to me that a lot of what is nowadays
| called philosophy is just pretty transparent cover for
| religious apologetics.
|
| Yeah. There is an ideal notion of a "love of knowledge"
| and following it where it leads, but almost everyone
| fails at some point. But it is a shame when a deeply
| flawed published work gets more attention than it
| deserves. In my opinion, teaching philosophy as a
| historic progression should not be the only nor default
| way. Sometimes it really is better to start afresh.
| knightoffaith wrote:
| What kinds of papers made silly errors like that? Do you
| have any examples? I guess it was a long time ago for you
| - but maybe you have some ideas of some keywords to
| search up? I actually am genuinely curious.
|
| >religious apologetics
|
| Most philosophers in the west are atheist, unless you
| mean they're secretly theist? What kind of undercover
| religious apologetics do you think is going on? I'm
| curious what you mean.
| lisper wrote:
| > What kinds of papers made silly errors like that? Do
| you have any examples?
|
| Good heavens, where to begin? Just about anything about
| natural language that came out of a philosophy department
| in the mid-80s. For that matter, a lot of what came out
| of CS departments in the mid-80s was bullshit too, but
| that's because people back then were basing their work on
| what turned out to be a false premise, that language and
| human reasoning could be effectively modeled by formal
| logic.
|
| Two specific examples stick out in my memory as things
| that struck me as BS back in the day:
|
| https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/B97
| 809...
|
| https://www.amazon.com/Situations-Attitudes-Jon-
| Barwise/dp/1...
|
| The second example is a whole book pointing out that the
| meaning of a sentence depends on the context in which it
| appears. Well, duh!
|
| > Most philosophers in the west are atheist, unless you
| mean they're secretly theist? What kind of undercover
| religious apologetics do you think is going on? I'm
| curious what you mean.
|
| One of my hobbies is studying points of view with which I
| radically disagree, so I've spent a fair bit of time
| talking to religious fundamentalists and young-earth
| creationists. A lot of their foundational rhetoric is
| philosophical. It's actually pretty impressive how much
| thought they've put into it. These people are wrong (IMHO
| obviously), but they're not stupid.
| knightoffaith wrote:
| Thanks for the links!
|
| On religious apologetics, that fundamentalists use
| philosophical arguments to justify their positions
| doesn't mean philosophy is largely transparent cover for
| religious apologetics, does it? I imagine fundamentalists
| are only using a small sliver of philosophical arguments.
| Most philosophers today don't think they're providing
| cover for apologetics, anyway.
| lisper wrote:
| > that fundamentalists use philosophical arguments to
| justify their positions doesn't mean philosophy is
| largely transparent cover for religious apologetics, does
| it?
|
| Not in and of itself. But I don't see many other
| applications. Do you?
| knightoffaith wrote:
| Literally every philosophical stance compatible with
| atheism, no? Maybe I'm not understanding what you're
| saying.
| lisper wrote:
| Philosophy finds application as cover for religious
| apologetics to make it seem more intellectually
| respectable than it otherwise might. I don't see many
| other areas where philosophy has an impact outside
| academia.
| knightoffaith wrote:
| It finds application for atheists making arguments
| against religion as well. It finds application in
| defenses of free will. Scientists seem to subscribe to a
| Popperian falsifiability. Logic, part of philosophy, has
| found widespread use, as I'm sure you know.
| lisper wrote:
| I would argue that logic is more math than philosophy.
|
| I'll grant you Popper. But he's the exception (along with
| Dennett and Maudlin) not the rule.
| knightoffaith wrote:
| I mean, I think philosophers defending religious
| fundamentalism are also exceptions rather than the rule.
| lisper wrote:
| Yes, I agree. I think most philosophers are just gazing
| at their navels.
| knightoffaith wrote:
| What are you expecting exactly? Most people aren't going
| to have a massive effect on the world, whether in
| philosophy or not. Philosophy is far from the only
| academic discipline in which most practitioners don't
| have a significant impact on the world.
| lisper wrote:
| > What are you expecting exactly?
|
| I don't know -- _something_. And it 's not about the
| individuals, it's about the field as a whole. Classical
| music is not something I particularly enjoy, but I get
| that some people do, and so the efforts of all the
| composers and conductors and musicians who produce it
| have value for that audience. I can appreciate that even
| if I don't particularly care for the music myself.
| Likewise for Domino's pizza. Nascar. Cricket. Truck
| pulls. Rodeos. I don't get it, but I get that some people
| do.
|
| Philosophy seems to have no audience beyond its own
| practitioners. That puts it on a par with things like
| yoga and homeopathy, and does not justify having entire
| departments at universities studying it.
|
| God help us, it turns out that you can actually get a
| Ph.D. in both fields:
|
| https://bellarmine.lmu.edu/yoga/
|
| https://www.bircham.edu/doctor-phd-degree-homeopathy.html
| knightoffaith wrote:
| Wait, I'm sorry - philosophy has no audience beyond its
| own practitioners? Just look at all the people interested
| in philosophy in this thread. I'm willing to bet a large
| sum of money that the majority of people who have
| implicitly expressed interest in philosophy here are not
| practicing philosophers. I'm quite surprised by your
| reference to music; music is something I usually bring up
| when people tell me that philosophy is useless.
|
| You yourself like Dennett's work, don't you? I know you
| think that most philosophers haven't produced anything
| that interesting to you, but I think it's often the case
| that impact is Pareto-distributed across practitioners of
| a discipline, certainly not unique to philosophy. Like, I
| imagine a lot of people are only interested in a select
| few musicians/bands.
| lisper wrote:
| > Wait, I'm sorry - philosophy has no audience beyond its
| own practitioners? Just look at all the people interested
| in philosophy in this thread. I'm willing to bet a large
| sum of money that the majority of people who have
| implicitly expressed interest in philosophy here are not
| practicing philosophers.
|
| That depends on how you define "practicing philosophers".
| The vast majority of people who do yoga are not yoga
| masters. But no one gets value from _watching_ yoga. The
| only value in yoga is _doing_ it. This is not true for
| e.g. music. You can get value from passively listening to
| someone else play an instrument. It 's not necessary for
| you to to it yourself.
|
| I would claim that the vast majority of people
| participating in this thread fancy themselves armchair
| philosophers. It is indeed fun to argue about this stuff.
| But that doesn't justify paying anyone to do it as a
| profession.
|
| > You yourself like Dennett's work, don't you?
|
| I've already said that Dennett is a notable exception,
| and one of the things that sets him apart is that he
| bases his work in science more than what is traditionally
| called "philosophy". He's more like a massage therapist
| than a yoga instructor.
| knightoffaith wrote:
| I mean, there are plenty of people who read philosophy
| and enjoy it but don't publish papers in philosophy
| conferences or journals, discuss topics with academic
| philosophers, etc. Reading a work of philosophy without
| writing a work of philosophy is something that a lot of
| people do and enjoy.
| lisper wrote:
| I'd be really surprised if there are a lot of people who
| read philosophy journals (as opposed to pop philosophy)
| for fun.
| knightoffaith wrote:
| I'm sure there are some people who do. But books for
| popular audiences like Consciousness Explained are taken
| seriously by philosophers too. I don't see why there's
| any relevant difference between philosophy and music
| here.
| lisper wrote:
| Like I keep saying, Dennett is the exception, not the
| rule.
| knightoffaith wrote:
| Fine, I'll just pick some random books: Feyerabend's
| _Against Method_ , Kuhn's _Structure of Scientific
| Revolutions_ , Nietzsche's _The Antichrist_ ,
| Kierkegaard's _Fear and Trembling_ , Descartes's
| _Meditations_ , Spinoza's _Ethics_ , Plato's dialogues, I
| could go on and on. Maybe you don't like all of these,
| but there are plenty of people who read these for fun,
| and all of them are taken seriously by philosophers.
| quus wrote:
| lol bro, I can't imagine thinking that Wittgenstein is
| obfuscation. If anything that guy's entire life was
| dedicated to de-obfuscation through logical analysis.
| Probably you don't understand cause you casually picked up
| the Tractatus or Investigations without doing any
| background reading on what they were about
| raddan wrote:
| This is sad. I teach an upper-level undergraduate course on
| programming language theory, and one major component of the
| course is reduction proofs. Many students find proof by
| contradiction (reductio ad absurdum) to be a confusing
| concept. I have always directed those students toward
| Dennett's helpful video
| (https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=sVUMAqMmy7o) and most of them
| respond positively to Dennett's lucid style. RIP.
|
| FWIW, I have also seen the dismissive STEM attitude toward
| the philosophical tradition. It helps to remember that the
| philosophical tradition predates the scientific tradition
| significantly, and that it does not take logical positivism
| or reductionism as givens. Having studied both disciplines, I
| feel like philosophy has seriously enhanced my understand of
| the world even if I don't use it in my day-to-day scientific
| work.
| kijin wrote:
| I think it depends a lot on which tradition of philosophy
| one is first exposed to. Most STEM people will find Anglo-
| American analytic philosophy (where Dennett firmly
| belonged) much easier to approach than continental
| philosophy or the classical stuff, but unfortunately casual
| readers tend to get exposed to a lot more of the latter.
|
| It's like the first programming language you learned. It
| will shape your perception of what programming is all about
| for a long time afterward, and might even turn you away
| from programming altogether. But there are lots of
| programming languages, and they're just different ways to
| make the same silicon do something interesting!
| ngcc_hk wrote:
| In a sense that is a myth. Guess this is based on the
| idea of silicon and Turing complete.
|
| The silicon argument might be right if we treat it on its
| own. Input, process and output. But one think of the
| system where the silicon or multiple of them plus some
| analogue or biological input and output. It is not the
| same. The process affect the speed and response ... you
| can imagine one use lisp, basic or cnn to drive a car ...
| can you.
|
| The turning complete is not physical as above and real
| world ish. Hence it sound all true. But people forgot we
| do not have unlimited memory. Our tur8ng complete is in
| practice not.
|
| To sum it all may be we kick human out of the loop all
| silicon and human language might have a chance the same
| using the same language (but still physical real world
| above ...)
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| I'm pretty sure I was introduced to the concepts of proof
| by contradiction and by induction in the final year or two
| of high school, but that was fifty years ago in England.
|
| Perhaps finding it confusing is a recent development.
| strongbond wrote:
| Me too, fifty years ago in Wales
| spacechild1 wrote:
| Me too, 20 years ago in Austria.
| rsktaker wrote:
| Me too, 3 months ago in California.
| tehnub wrote:
| What, we're all just assuming the law of the excluded
| middle now?
| lanstin wrote:
| I don't really believe this stuff, but it is interesting
| project: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructivism_(ph
| ilosophy_of_...
| pgspaintbrush wrote:
| STEM often overlooks the fundamental work that was done in
| philosophy that led to breakthroughs within STEM. For
| example, Claude Shannon's undergraduate philosophy course
| is what taught him boolean algebra, which ultimately led
| him to design digital circuits.
| https://bentley.umich.edu/news-events/magazine/the-
| elegant-p...
| jhbadger wrote:
| Although formal logicians are quite isolated in
| philosophy departments -- while their colleagues are
| debating whether Plato or Kant had a better idea of what
| it meant to be "good", the logicians are basically doing
| math with symbols rather than numbers.
| jampekka wrote:
| Ethics are discussed very little in current philosophy,
| at least in the analytical tradition. Plato is mostly of
| historical interest, and of Kant's work it's mostly
| philosophy of mind, epistemology and metaphysics.
|
| Logicians are somewhat different in studying formal
| systems, and there are strong links to (foundations of)
| mathematics. But logics are typically developed and
| analyze to study some otherwise philosophically motivated
| questions.
| quus wrote:
| This is not accurate. Ethics is very well-studied in
| analytic philosophy, and discussion of Plato and Kant are
| central topics.
| pxc wrote:
| That's true, but in a way this is a good thing for CS
| students. In schools with analytic philosophy
| departments, you can expect to find a logician there. So
| every CS student can stop by their philosophy department
| and meet the logician, and when they do, they'll find
| someone who they can connect and communicate with in a
| similar way that they already (by junior or senior year,
| certainly) do with their math and CS theory instructors.
| Yes, they're specialized, but they're still guaranteed to
| be philosophically literate and they can help bridge some
| really interesting topics for CS students.
|
| And they probably know other people in the department who
| teach things that might be interesting to a STEM student
| even if that student hardly knows it yet.
| eynsham wrote:
| >formal logicians are quite isolated in philosophy
| departments
|
| Few generalisations hold of philosophy departments across
| traditions and regions, and this is untrue of departments
| in the analytic tradition of which Dennett was part.
| Philosophical logicians are often interested in more than
| logic for logic's sake, and other philosophers share that
| interest; see e.g. Williamson's /Modal logic as
| metaphysics/.
| virissimo wrote:
| jhbadger: But logicism, the idea that all of math can be
| reduced to logic, is itself a controversial philosophical
| thesis!
| jancsika wrote:
| > It helps to remember that the philosophical tradition
| predates the scientific tradition significantly, and that
| it does not take logical positivism or reductionism as
| givens.
|
| That's an interesting point.
|
| I think there's also a cost to that-- philosophy lugs
| around a lot of pre-scientific baggage that is poorly
| specified but historically important. Free will comes to
| mind, especially within the Christian history of resolving
| the apparent contradiction of horrific natural/manmade
| evils existing in the face of an omniscient, omnipotent,
| and benevolent god.
|
| There are of course other historical contexts to notions of
| free will. But when philosophers talk about any of these in
| places where laypeople here them, it seems like those
| historical contexts are gone and they end up strongly
| implying a general purpose free will that is neither well-
| specified or in some cases even coherent.
|
| It would be like a bunch of programmers debating
| "functions," with one meaning functional programming,
| another meaning any programming language where functions
| are a first-class citizen, and yet another meaning the set
| of all keywords "function" or "FUNCTION" in any programming
| language in history. That's not going to be a fruitful
| discussion.
|
| So I'd speculate people in STEM can smell the lack of
| systematic thinking in some of these discussions and
| unfortunately throw the baby out with the bathwater.
|
| Edit: clarification
| datadrivenangel wrote:
| Any competent philosopher will define terms, often
| spending most of their time defining terms!
|
| It be be tautological, but a lack of systemic thinking
| makes a discussion bad philosophy, or epistemic bunk as
| they say in the trade.
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| I think his point was that, lets say some philosophers or
| programmers, are having a detailed discussion. But are
| overheard by lay-people, maybe mid-argument, without the
| background, having not heard the definitions, would
| takeaway a lot of misunderstandings.
|
| Or maybe his point, in a discussion like this on HN, a
| lot of people are jumping into the conversation in-the-
| middle, without catching up on the history.
| mistermann wrote:
| > So I'd speculate people in STEM can smell the lack of
| systematic thinking in some of these discussions and
| unfortunately throw the baby out with the bathwater.
|
| Perhaps, but seeing poor thinking in others is a lot
| easier than seeing it in oneself. I don't recall
| encountering any STEM folks who haven't made a
| logical/epistemic/other error on the proposition of
| whether we have free will. It is one of those questions
| that seems to put the mind into some sort of a weird
| downgraded mode.
|
| This entire comment section is... _interesting_.
| knightoffaith wrote:
| Free will is prescientific baggage? Why so? What do you
| think about the famously atheist Dennett's defense of
| free will? I think this is the kind of free will
| generally talk about whether laymen are around to listen
| or not.
|
| >implying a general purpose free will that is neither
| well-specified or in some cases even coherent.
|
| To the contrary, I find that it is the layman who has an
| airy-fairy conception of free will that couldn't possibly
| exist, while the philosophers are generally more down-to-
| earth and use "free will" that normal people use the term
| in a non-philosophical context.
|
| >So I'd speculate people in STEM can smell the lack of
| systematic thinking in some of these discussions and
| unfortunately throw the baby out with the bathwater.
|
| I'm not sure if there's any baby in the bathwater if
| philosophy lacks systematic thinking, if by "lacking
| systematic thinking" you mean something like "not
| thinking definitions and arguments through". Luckily it
| doesn't seem that philosophy does this. But maybe I'm
| misunderstanding you - maybe you're talking about the
| philosophical discussions that laymen generally overhear,
| which tend not to be discussions held by philosophers but
| by other laymen. And I do think you would be right to say
| that these discussions generally aren't very coherent,
| and reflect poorly on philosophy as a discipline.
| ngcc_hk wrote:
| For that example my exposure is shocking when first exposed
| to this line of argument. Is sq root of 2 is rational?
| Assume it is ... Never heard of his example. But that is
| better as it involves no maths.
| xpe wrote:
| I find philosophy essential even though many philosophers
| can be painful and/or seemingly irrelevant to read. Still,
| I think I'm at a point now, where finding intellectual
| discomfort is preferable to not.
| zqna wrote:
| Thought experiments (including "reductio ad absurdum"
| method) aren't the best to explain the phenomenons of
| physical world:
| https://www.richardcarrier.info/archives/17279
|
| Philosophers shoud better stay away from physics. Not
| saying here, that the thought experiments can't provide
| valuable insights. It's just they can't be used to define
| the truth about the reality.
| sampo wrote:
| > I think a lot of people, especially in STEM, pooh-pooh
| philosophy at first.
|
| A lot of philosophy ignores biology, sometimes even physics.
| In topics where biology would be immensely relevant, like
| with philosophy of mind. Dennett didn't try to ignore
| biology, he was deeply aware and well read in biology as
| well.
| cogman10 wrote:
| This seems like a really weird statement to me.
|
| Most of the philosophy I'm familiar with is concerned with
| abstract notions and concepts like morality. I'm really
| having a hard time seeing how biology or physics would
| inform it one direction or another.
|
| Like, what sort of biology would have made Kant's notions
| of morality different?
| glenstein wrote:
| Kant used Newtonian assumptions about the time and space,
| treating them as absolute, and treating them not as
| properties of physics but necessary preconditions for us
| being able to experience anything.
|
| Relativity overturned those Newtonian assumptions on
| which Kant depended, although he might say we
| nevertheless have to experience time as constant and
| space in three dimensions, regardless of how those things
| turn out to "really" work, since that's the only way we
| can do it.
|
| So it's no longer obvious that time and space are just
| given absolutely, and due to that, they no longer make
| for a comfortable starting point for philosophical
| assumptions. If nature itself is different, then _we_
| might not even be experiencing it that way in the first
| place.
|
| More tentatively, I think our advancing understanding of
| how brains and machines embody concepts, our
| understanding of the differences of biological creatures
| combined with new physics, is suggestive at a bare
| minimum that reality could be experienced differently,
| and/or that we can understand how we experience these
| things empirically with better knowledge about brains,
| instead of asserting that everything is governed at the
| outset by this or that philosophical assumption.
| cogman10 wrote:
| > Kant used Newtonian assumptions about the time and
| space, treating them as absolute, and treating them not
| as properties of physics but necessary preconditions for
| us being able to experience anything.
|
| Ok... this is non sequitur. It really doesn't matter that
| time moves at different speeds for any of Kant's
| philosophical positions. 2 people could be traveling at
| 0.5c and 0.00000001c and that makes no difference in Kant
| morals on how they should behave.
|
| And, practically speaking, unless there's a drastic
| development in propulsion the only bearing relativity has
| on day to day life is making sure the GPS works
| correctly. It is, otherwise, completely non-impactful to
| anyone beyond astrophysicists.
| glenstein wrote:
| >no difference in Kant morals on how they should behave.
|
| This wasn't about Kant's morals. This was about the idea
| that Newtonian conceptions of space and time familiar to
| Kant were necessary preconditions to experience.
| mcguire wrote:
| " _Relativity overturned those Newtonian assumptions on
| which Kant depended, although he might say we
| nevertheless have to experience time as constant and
| space in three dimensions, regardless of how those things
| turn out to "really" work, since that's the only way we
| can do it._"
|
| I think you are more wrong than right here. My
| understanding (informed by Onora O'neill, Dan Bonevac,
| and various Stanford Encyclopedia entries :-)) is that
| Kant does not specifically depend on Newtonian
| assumptions but that human perceptions _have to be
| mediated_ by time and space. Instead of overturning Kant,
| relativity and QM put _even more distance_ between what
| we, as mortal, physical beings, can perceive versus
| whatever is really going on in the world.
|
| Kant's project was to discover, given all of that, what
| anyone can say about things like ethics. He even goes so
| far to say that what he is trying to do is universal and
| he would like it to apply to other forms of intelligent
| beings.
| glenstein wrote:
| > is that Kant does not specifically depend on Newtonian
| assumptions but that human perceptions have to be
| mediated by time and space
|
| I understand the point about mediation, and I tried to
| speak to it directly in the portion you quoted. You are
| exactly right about the way Kant uses that in his
| argument. It's flexible enough that it can be understood
| as resilient, I think.
|
| I tried show how science can nevertheless speak to it in
| several ways. One is the convenient equivalence between
| Kant's necessary conditions and nature as we understood
| it at the time. That equivalence makes it easier to be
| comfortable positing time and space _as we understand
| them_ as necessary conditions that are prior to nature.
| It would be harder (but not impossible!) to entertain if
| there was daylight between what we believed our faculties
| to be and what we believed the natural world to be, if
| what was "necessary" was something different than what
| we thought we experienced (such as, say, a singular loaf
| of unified spacetime). An implication of Kant's view, as
| I understood him, was that we should be ready to believe
| it's different anyway, but nevertheless, it's easier to
| swallow when it perfectly aligns with how we thing the
| world really is.
|
| Second, for a different way of stating a similar point,
| if time and space are non-newtonian in some important
| way, we may have to understand that _that_ is what we
| experience in the first instance, and we would have to
| wrestle with the fact that our intuitions may attest to a
| variety of possible underlying necessary conditions.
| (Wittgenstein has been mentioned in this thread, so for a
| paraphrase of something he supposedly said, in reply to a
| student noting that it looks like the sun goes around the
| earth: "What would it look like if the earth went around
| the sun?" So it may be with the nature of our faculties.)
|
| Third, as we gain deeper understanding of brain functions
| of ourselves and other creatures, we may have inroads to
| how certain of our conscious experiences depend on
| conceptual abstractions or models. And if so, it
| transforms it into an open empirical question rather than
| one where we are simply stuck presuming necessary
| conditions. Kant might insist that that is all already
| through the lense of our faculties such as they are, but
| we, with more information, would be increasingly
| comfortable just not entertaining them as we get
| increasingly robust empirical understandings of conscious
| experience.
|
| None of these is a "defeater" argument by itself and
| there's a lot that can be talked about here of course,
| but I think given 21st century science, if Kant were
| trying to present his vision for the first time we might
| find it more challenging to reconcile with what we know
| of the natural world.
| dontupvoteme wrote:
| >Relativity overturned those Newtonian assumptions
|
| Only in *very* specific situations which are extremely
| extremely extremely unrelated and WELL out of both
| practical and theoretical bound to the human perception
| of reality.
|
| Relativity is kind of the trivia of physics, it really
| has not informed much technology apart from a few things
| in space - compare this to, say, quantum electrodynamics
| which tells us why weird stuff happens in things we've
| made quadrillions of (not to mention quantum computing,
| etc.)
|
| The only time we would have ever brushed up against it
| naturally _might_ have been when we put clocks into space
| so that we could better send nukes into other parts of
| the globe.
| xpe wrote:
| Relativity did overturn the previous assumptions! It
| converted what were assumptions into the consequences of
| another theory.
| glenstein wrote:
| A beautiful way of putting it. I like this phrasing
| because I think it shows how progress in science actually
| elevated our confidence in Newtonian behaviors by having
| them as a special case of a theory with a stronger
| foundation.
| vmladenov wrote:
| > Relativity is kind of the trivia of physics, it really
| has not informed much technology apart from a few things
| in space
|
| GPS is kind of a huge one, though it technically is just
| a few clocks in space.
| knightoffaith wrote:
| It's true relativity was problematic for Kant's project
| (particularly re: his thought about Euclidean geometry),
| and you're right to point to this as an example of
| science informing philosophical thought.
|
| My understanding is that post-relativity, Neokantians
| have been trying to reconcile Kant's thought with the
| implications of relativity. Philosophy as a discipline
| is, as I understand it, happy to work with new scientific
| discoveries, and not going to stick with philosophical
| dogma in the face of contradicting science. Besides,
| beyond a certain level, doesn't science have to give way
| to philosophy? I don't see holding certain philosophical
| assumptions (not really assumptions, but intuitions or
| propositions argued from intuitions) as a necessarily bad
| thing or even an avoidable thing, as long as it's open to
| both philosophical and scientific criticism, where
| applicable.
| glenstein wrote:
| At the end of the day I think you're right that Kant's
| notion of necessary conditions is probably flexible
| enough to accommodate the findings of general relativity.
|
| The fact that the relation is one of an amendment or a
| reconciliation to new data is a point in favor of
| skepticism against his original assumptions, but not a
| defeater.
|
| I would agree that we can credit intuitions as being more
| than mere assumptions, and I think you're right about The
| legitimacy of positing assumptions as long as they're
| posited in a spirit of openness and responsiveness to
| philosophical and scientific criticism. What do you know,
| a healthy and reasonable of reply on philosophy. To tie
| this to Daniel Dennett, I have found one of his most
| valuable contributions to be a notion of the principle of
| charity, which is to credit the person you correspond
| with with the most reasonable possible interpretation,
| and I think the best philosophical exchanges are carried
| out in that spirit, and so I think he would highlight
| yours as the response in this thread that best embodies
| that principle.
| sampo wrote:
| "Morality and Evolutionary Biology" in
| https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/morality-biology/
| scoofy wrote:
| This honestly makes sense to me. Philosophy basically teaches
| you how to think about things really well. When talking about
| STEM folks, however, you're already dealing with _extremely
| analytical_ people, but to them, analytical thinking is just
| intuitive.
|
| Spending a bunch of time figuring out why something that
| seems obvious _is_ obvious probably seems like a waste of
| time to a lot of people, but it can certainly help in the
| long run. We can 't see our own blindspots, so even if
| something seems obvious, I think it's useful to understand
| it.
| rvense wrote:
| The amusing thing is that these quick dismissals of
| philosophy are all instances of philosophical thought.
| Usually neither good, nor consistent, nor original thought,
| but nevertheless.
| mistermann wrote:
| Threads like this strongly reinforce my belief that we live
| in a simulation, this comment section is _surreal_.
| rvense wrote:
| Ah, but is it so different to other HN threads?
| Tribalism, misunderstanding, attempted witticisms...
| mistermann wrote:
| When contemplating technology stuff people are usually
| very disciplined about striving correctness...on certain
| topics though, it seems like the opposite becomes true:
| no effort, and _don 't you dare_ suggest it.
|
| It is both funny and not.
| omginternets wrote:
| One of the most delicious ironies in life is to ask these
| people why they think philosophy is poo-poo, and then revel
| in the fact that their answer is exactly philosophical in
| nature.
| OkayPhysicist wrote:
| That mindset frustrated me a lot in university. My school
| required a pretty broad survey of academia, with a class each
| in lower and upper division math, science, history,
| philosophy, and theology to graduate, and there were a lot of
| students (especially, for whatever reason, engineers) who
| _hated_ it.
|
| To a t, these people were dullards. They rarely had deep
| knowledge about anything, most of the time not even about the
| field they professed such dedication to. The entire point of
| an undergraduate education is to establish a foundation of
| baseline knowledge to allow you to contextualize new
| information, and if you don't engage with it, there's not a
| lot of opportunities to make up for it later.
| renewiltord wrote:
| That's because the majority of Philosophy courses are History
| of Philosophy courses whereas other logic-oriented fields
| occupy less time on "History of". While top departments like
| Princeton still focus on the quality of the arguments, they
| do devote entire course lengths to readings of ancient
| philosophers which are less elucidative about logic and
| reasoning than they are about the History of Philosophy.
|
| In comparison, the Seven Bridges of Konigsberg is a bare
| introduction in Graph Theory and Hamilton carving
| quarternions into Broom Bridge is an amusing aside before you
| get to the meat of the subject. A lecturer might amuse you
| with Kekule's dream before telling you about a Benzene ring
| but the ring is the thing, not the dream.
|
| Philosophy is a field with time-translation symmetry but is
| taught akin to fields without (e.g. Literature, History,
| Sociology). Fields without TTS need you to build up from the
| replay log. But fields with TTS can do something far better:
| they can distill "truths" into snapshots. Consequently, as a
| child I read about Galois Theory without reading _Analyse
| d'un Memoire sur la resolution algebrique des equations_ or a
| translation thereof.
|
| _Conjectures and Refutations_ shows how to accelerate
| through a replay log, indexing at key-frames so that we don
| 't need to play every frame to get to the conclusions we're
| searching for. Good field. Bad practice.
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| Isn't this focusing on these courses too much as an
| academic pursuit ?
|
| Most students will not stay in academia, but making them
| think about questions like what is it to live a good life
| seems to me pretty important for the education of future
| citizens !
|
| And in fact ancient philosophers being historically so
| remote is likely to be a good thing, to prevent emotional
| knee-jerk rejections that is at risk of happening with more
| recent philosophers too associated with current politics.
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| Having done a deep dive in philosophy at one point, the vast
| majority of it is ego stroking half-nonsense designed to be
| maximally unintelligible, because academics tolerate
| ridiculous amounts of jargon and equate hard to understand
| with meaningful or important. People like Robert Nozick,
| Thomas Nagel, John Searle and David Chalmers are by far the
| exception rather than the rule.
| SJC_Hacker wrote:
| The philosophers that did STEM seem to be the good ones.
|
| Its the artsy types that only read Sartre and Heidigger an
| Derrida, and never got their hands dirty by working in a
| lab, doing sufficiently higher level math, engineered and
| built modern tech are the annoying ones.
| naasking wrote:
| Philosophy, like every field, follows Sturgeon's law: 90% of
| it is crap.
| swatcoder wrote:
| I was on the opposite side of that when I was young and first
| read his work. I eagerly read piles and piles of philosophy and
| quickly shelved any interest in him and his work as building on
| completely unconvincing premises.
|
| But many many years later, there's been a lot of churn in whose
| work I value and whose I don't. I wouldn't be surprised if I
| see his work in a very different light now. This news may be
| what gets me yo pick it up again and find out.
| sameoldtune wrote:
| I enjoyed him mostly for his crusade against philosophy
| purporting that the mind has something other than a physical
| basis. Modern day philosophers that want to resurrect the
| "mind body problem" and panpsychism and the "hard problem of
| consciousness".
|
| He consistently argues that studying consciousness and
| perception is difficult but not impossible, and we will
| slowly make progress in this scientific endeavor just like
| all others we have attempted thus far. In philosophy circles
| he is sometimes derided as having too scientific a mindset,
| but that is what draws me to him. He's very endearing to
| listen to as well--very idiosyncratic.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| The hard problem hasn't died so it doesn't need
| resurrecting. (Unless you redefine the hard problem into an
| easy one that is :))
| naasking wrote:
| It is slowly dying, just like vitalism before it.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| That's just the demographic crisis playing out:)
| smnplk wrote:
| It's actually getting popular again even among quantum
| physicists.
| omerta wrote:
| So you don't think your belief that the scientific mindset
| is a preferable mindset is a philosophic belief rather than
| a scientific belief? Because it is, since that is a belief
| that can't be proven empirically, rather it is reasoned to
| philosophically.
|
| Now to address your misguided belief on the mind being
| reduced to the brain.
|
| Under atheistic materialism what is happening is matter in
| motion. This means even the matter in your brain. What does
| that mean? Your brain is determined by the laws of physics,
| chemistry, etc and even your comment was determined. You
| destroy the possibility of justified knowledge claims under
| that worldview when taking it to its logical conclusion.
| Also as Sean Caroll noted, quantum physics and stochastic
| probabilities don't mean anything, taking the worldview to
| the logical conclusion means determinism of the movement of
| matter.
|
| You also can't account for universals and particulars on
| that view and solve the problem of the and the many.
| vixen99 wrote:
| Doesn't a crusade, which I think it was, imply a set of
| strong beliefs not a dispassionate analysis of what might
| be the case? David Berlinski's 'The Devil's Delusion - The
| atheism and its scientific pretensions' offers some serious
| counter arguments.
| aragonite wrote:
| Dennett himself (like his teacher Quine) is very deflationary
| about the kind of philosophy practiced by most of his
| colleagues. See e.g. his "Higher-order truths about chmess"
| (https://sci-hub.ru/10.1007/s11245-006-0005-2):
|
| > Some philosophical research projects ... are rather like
| working out the truths of chess. A set of mutually agreed upon
| rules are presupposed -- and seldom discussed -- and the
| implications of those rules are worked out, articulated,
| debated, refined. So far, so good. Chess is a deep and
| important human artifact, about which much of value has been
| written. But some philosophical research projects are more like
| working out the truths of chmess. Chmess is just like chess
| except that the king can move two squares in any direction, not
| one. I just invented it -- though no doubt others have explored
| it in depth to see if it is worth playing. Probably it isn't.
| It probably has other names. I didn't bother investigating
| these questions because although they have true answers, they
| just aren't worth my time and energy to discover. Or so I
| think. There are just as many a priori truths of chmess as
| there are of chess (an infinity), and they are just as hard to
| discover...
| gavmor wrote:
| > I just invented it -- though no doubt others have explored
| it in depth to see if it is worth playing. Probably it isn't.
| It probably has other names.
|
| Ah, I believe this is the same "mess we're in" from Joe
| Armstrong's eponymous 2014 Strange Loop conference talk[0]:
|
| > This is a device that we can imagine. I try to find a big
| sausage machine where you put sausage meat, you know, you
| turn the handle. So we put all programs into it, and we turn
| the handle, and a smaller number of programs come out. Then
| we can throw away all the other programs. And that breaks the
| second law of thermodynamics. The trouble with software, you
| see, its complexity increases with time. We start with one
| program, and it splits and becomes two programs and four
| programs.
|
| > Files and systems, they mutate all the time. They grow in
| entropy. Disks are absolutely huge. And there's all these
| problems with naming. Naming's horrible. If you've got a file
| or something, what file name should it be? What does it have?
| What directory should I put it in? Can I find it later?
|
| (68% match)
|
| > When you have an idea, you have a little box and you type
| something into the box. I've done this, I've implemented it.
| You have a little box and then there's a little icon,
| Sherlock Holmes at the bottom. You type this stuff into the
| box and you press the Sherlock Holmes button. And the idea is
| that will find among all my files that I'm interested in, the
| most similar thing to what I've just put in this box. So I
| want it to find the most similar thing to this new thing. And
| then I want to know, is it different? So once it's found
| them, it makes a list of them in order.
|
| (64% match)
|
| Edit: Just had the revelation that I am posting these quotes
| straight out of a RAG on the transcript of his talk.
|
| 0. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lKXe3HUG2l4
| xanderlewis wrote:
| > just as many a priori truths of chmess as there are of
| chess (an infinity)
|
| I guess Mr Dennett never came across the ideas of Mr Cantor.
|
| [Yes, yes... I know they're both countable.]
| ajb wrote:
| A useful rule of thumb for evaluating a field you're not
| familiar with is 'Sturgeon's law'. Sturgeon's law is a
| refutation of claims of the form "don't bother looking at that
| because 90% of it is crap". The law states that 90% of
| _everything_ is crap, and hence such claims prove too much.
| walkhour wrote:
| What books in particular would you recommend?
| dotsam wrote:
| Sad news. I aspire to be as intellectually acute in old age as
| Dennett was. His recent autobiography was engaging, although
| somewhat too indulgent at times. I admire how he created a life
| and a world-view that worked so well for him.
| IncreasePosts wrote:
| What do you mean old age? He died at the same age that our
| (most likely) President will be next year.
| dustfinger wrote:
| Consciousness Explained [1] absolutely filled me with wonder
| during my university days.
|
| [1]: https://www.amazon.ca/Consciousness-Explained-Daniel-C-
| Denne...
| Barrin92 wrote:
| Incredibly sad news. I don't have much to add but to share some
| of my favorite work by him, one is an essay exploring Jaynes idea
| of the Bicameral Mind, and another is a talk he gave on Ontology
| and Philosophy of Science. Always admired his ability to bridge
| disciplines and look at ideas from a slightly unorthodox angle.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nx5OZ1AZ5Vk
|
| https://www.julianjaynes.org/pdf/dennett_jaynes-software-arc...
| ggpsv wrote:
| Oh, I did not know about this essay! Thank you for sharing.
|
| To others reading this, this short essay [0] by Julian Jaynes
| is a good introduction to his idea of the Bicameral Mind. He
| later developed the idea further in his book "The Origin of
| Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind". If
| you've watched the series "Westworld", how the androids begin
| to develop something akin to consciousness is inspired by
| Jaynes' ideas.
|
| [0]:
| https://www.julianjaynes.org/resources/articles/consciousnes...
| johngossman wrote:
| Thank you! Great essay.
| superb-owl wrote:
| Unlike most of you, I strongly disliked Dennett's philosophy. But
| he seemed like a wonderful human, and he always made me think.
| atentaten wrote:
| What do you dislike about it?
| foldr wrote:
| Dennett and Fodor had a lot of amusing (though sometimes
| rather bitter) exchanges. Here's a review by Fodor that gives
| a critical perspective on some of Dennett's work:
| https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v25/n05/jerry-fodor/why-
| woul...
| pdonis wrote:
| I found Dennett's responses to Fodor to be spot on. I think
| Fodor simply could not grasp what Dennett was actually
| talking about--and Fodor was not the only one.
| foldr wrote:
| Dennett's response concedes all of Fodor's main points
| and proceeds via innuendo and ad hominem. But there you
| have it. Dennett was important and influential, and is
| worth reading, but his appeal as a philosopher has always
| been a mystery to me.
| pdonis wrote:
| _> Dennett 's response concedes all of Fodor's main
| points and proceeds via innuendo and ad hominem_
|
| I strongly disagree, but I doubt we'll resolve that here.
|
| _> his appeal as a philosopher has always been a mystery
| to me._
|
| Not to me, but again, we won't resolve that here. We
| agree that he was important and influential, and that's
| what matters for this discussion in his memory.
| bschmidt1 wrote:
| Dennett is a mainstream eliminitavist, his appeal is that
| he removes extra fluff around philosophical concepts like
| consciousness and the brain. In a world where half the
| consciousness gurus are talking about unproven quantum
| stuff, souls, ghosts, aliens, gods, we need a Dennett to
| keep us grounded in reality as we ponder these mysteries
| that nobody knows the answers to.
|
| His only weakness was occasionally indulging in
| speculation himself (like his Multiple Drafts) - he was
| better at eliminating speculation rather than offering
| it, regarding consciousness at least.
|
| I highly recommend his talks on Closer To Truth (on
| YouTube) and all those videos actually.
| dudinax wrote:
| Dennett wasn't particularly good at speculating, but then
| almost nobody is.
| pdonis wrote:
| _> Dennett is a mainstream eliminitavist_
|
| He is often described that way, and even used the term
| himself sometimes, but he was not (and was careful to
| _say_ that he was not) an eliminativist about everything.
| For example, he was not an eliminitavist about
| consciousness or free will. He believed those things are
| real--they just aren 't like what many people think they
| are like; they don't have the properties that many people
| think they have.
|
| With regard to consciousness and free will, Dennett was a
| physicalist: he believed consciousness and free will are
| physical processes that obey physical laws. That does
| place limitations on what consciousness and free will can
| do, and I think an unwillingness to accept those
| limitations, to accept that those limited concepts of
| consciousness and free will are the only ones we can
| actually have, drove a lot of the opposition to Dennett,
| though his opponents did not explicitly admit it.
| bschmidt1 wrote:
| > he's not eliminative with consciousness
|
| Feel like he is though, second only to maybe Michael
| Shermer, or AI investors (zing!) The definition:
|
| > Eliminative materialism is a materialist position in
| the philosophy of mind. It is the idea that the majority
| of mental states in folk psychology do not exist.
|
| There's no way I'll find the video, but he said at one
| point in some interview almost exactly this: That most of
| the mental states we think we have don't really exist. I
| think it's also in his book Consciousness Explained
| (1991), but I didn't read it so can't be sure.
|
| I always thought this is what upset people so much about
| Dennett - the apparent total denial of experience.
|
| Yet this is an incredibly slippery slope! Anyone familiar
| with Chalmers' _Hard Problem_ should intuit that there
| are "primitives" of experience that when put together
| make up the total experience. I agree that the _Hard
| Problem_ is an accurate assessment of the issue, but
| given this "primitives" concept I agree with
| eliminativism in that _" most"_ of the mental states we
| believe we have never existed, we were somehow "filled
| in".
|
| I'll namedrop 3 more philosophers: John Searle
| (Berkeley), Donald Hoffman (Irvine), Colin McGinn
| (London, Oxford) - all of whom have excellent content on
| YouTube that will blow your mind, and these are maybe the
| best I've heard from on the subject.
| pdonis wrote:
| _> he said at one point in some interview almost exactly
| this: That most of the mental states we think we have don
| 't really exist. I think it's also in his book
| Consciousness Explained (1991), but I didn't read it so
| can't be sure._
|
| I can't speak about whatever interview you saw, but in
| the book Consciousness Explained he does _not_ say what
| you are describing. He says the same thing he says in one
| of his papers, I think it 's "Real Patterns", which
| appeared in one of his later collections: Real
| consciousness _does_ exist, but it is not like what many
| people think it is like. It does not have all of the
| properties that many people think it has. He _does_ say
| that things with _those_ properties don 't exist--because
| nothing with those properties can exist. But he does
| _not_ say that consciousness does not exist--just that it
| doesn 't have those properties.
|
| _> the apparent total denial of experience_
|
| He doesn't say this either, although many of his
| opponents misdescribe him as saying that--because they
| cannot understand what he is actually saying. The only
| concept of consciousness they can grasp is the magical
| concept they have in their heads--I call it "magical"
| because it cannot exist if consciousness is a physical
| process working according to physical laws. And the
| latter kind of consciousness, the physicalist kind, is
| the kind Dennett describes and the kind he believed
| existed. So for opponents of his who can't even grasp
| that there _is_ such a concept of consciousness, the only
| way they could interpret what Dennett was saying was that
| he was denying that consciousness existed.
|
| But that is a gross misrepresentation of his views: he
| was _not_ saying that people don 't have experiences or
| thoughts. He was just saying that those real things, when
| you actually do the hard work of figuring out _how_ they
| work in accordance with physical laws, turn out not to
| have some of the properties that people thought they had
| before that hard work was done. This is no different from
| any other concept once we try to build an actual
| scientific understanding of it.
|
| _> John Searle_
|
| Whose Chinese Room thought experiment was debunked in The
| Mind's I (though that's hardly the only rebuttal that has
| been published), and I suspect that chapter in the book
| was written largely by Dennett, since he published other
| similar rebuttals later on.
| bschmidt1 wrote:
| > he does not say what you are describing
|
| Starting to think you don't know Dennett, this is what he
| was all about haha.
|
| > John Searle debunked
|
| You're starting to reveal your lack of experience here.
| It's not something that can be debunked, it's just an
| observation and one that is widely considered
| foundational :)
|
| Not only that, but that's like from his youth, he's done
| a lot more interesting stuff since Chinese Room - this
| seems like you just quickly googled.
|
| I wish this was a better conversation, brush up!
| bschmidt1 wrote:
| This pdonis is a jackass - here are direct quotes from
| Dennett:
|
| - "There is no reality of consciousness independent of
| the effects of various vehicles of content on subsequent
| action (and hence, of course, on memory)." - from
| _Consciousness Explained_ , page 132.
|
| On page 113 he says:
|
| - " _Unlike mental states_ taxonomized folk
| psychologically, "content-fixations" are each precisely
| locatable in both space and time".
|
| ^ he is saying mental states are not locatable in space
| and time.
|
| Page 138:
|
| - "There are no fixed facts about the stream of
| consciousness independent of particular probes"
|
| An interview:
|
| - "The reason [consciousness] is so puzzling is that
| people think they ought to be able to study it from the
| inside, using pure phenomenology, those give you hints
| but they are illusory. That's not what's really going
| on."
|
| Source for this interview (New Scientist):
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wm8M_xQrgCk
|
| From David Rosenthal's _Content, Interpretation, and
| Consciouness_ :
|
| - "There is good reason, in any case, to construe
| Dennett's pandemonium model as positing only subpersonal
| events of content fixation, _rather than full-fledged
| intentional states._ Thus he writes:
|
| "We replace the division into discrete contentful states-
| beliefs, meta-beliefs, and so forthwith a process that
| serves, over time, to ensure a good fit between an
| entity's internal information-bearing events and the
| entity's capacity to express (some of) the information in
| those events in speech. [10]
|
| 10: Dennett speaks throughout _Consciousness Explained_
| of such nonconscious, subpersonal events
|
| Wikipedia on Multiple Drafts:
|
| - "Dennett argues that [consciousness theories] share a
| common error in supposing that there is a special time
| and place where unconscious processing becomes
| consciously experienced, entering into what Dennett calls
| the "Cartesian theatre".
|
| A couple more Dennett quotes:
|
| - "There does not exist ... a process such as
| 'recruitment of consciousness' (into what?), nor any
| place where the 'vehicle's arrival' is recognized (by
| whom?)"
|
| - "the Multiple Drafts model goes on to claim that the
| brain does not bother 'constructing' any
| representations..."
|
| I could go on forever because this was his main jam. I
| find it hilarious this pdonis person has such a high
| karma/score/whatever on this site after such awful takes.
|
| I won't even get into Searle who pdonis just Googled for
| the first time, bringing up Chinese Room (1980) as if
| it's a scientific theory. What a joke, I wish he could be
| downvoted.
| Simplicitas wrote:
| A philosopher who appreciated engineering. RIP Daniel Dennett.
| dsubburam wrote:
| I liked the debate he had with Sapolsky, where he explained why
| free will is compatible with determinism (arguments that were new
| to me), and that Sapolsky's book ("Determined") did not grapple
| with those arguments.
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aYzFH8xqhns&t=2273s
| johngossman wrote:
| I just watched this recently and thought "he looks old." But he
| was as sharp as ever. I hope my brain still works right up to
| the end
| fsckboy wrote:
| They are both largely incoherent in that debate because they
| both think "the right next move" is to test "free will" against
| their notions of morality. Morality has nothing to do with free
| will. If you consider morality important, then you might care
| about free will within your moral framework; but you can debate
| free will without any notion of morality, and neither of them
| can see that. (is - ought, which they both are aware of)
| astine wrote:
| On the contrary, morality has everything to do with free
| will. It's one of the central motivations of the concept and
| always has been. From the greeks right up through the
| enlightenment, the question was always "in what sense are we
| capable of making responsible choices," with that term
| 'responsible' just dripping with moral implications. Without
| the moral implications, free will would not have the place it
| does in our cultural ethos.
| fsckboy wrote:
| you might be making a case that you can't talk about
| morality without talking about free will.
|
| but you have not made a case that talking about free will
| requires talking about morality
| astine wrote:
| You can talk about free will without talking about
| morality in the same way that you can talk about ICBMs
| without talking about nuclear war. Sure you can do it,
| but complaining when other people discuss both things
| together is silly.
| spmurrayzzz wrote:
| Breaking the Spell is a book I still recommend to friends today.
| Sad to hear.
| mamonster wrote:
| Whilst he is probably the most respectable member of the "Four
| Horsemen"(Hitchens is probably the most revered but his early
| death seems to have given him a halo, a lot of his arguments
| would not stand up today), New Atheism will end up IMO as
| something that is seen very negatively by posterity(very little
| of it stands up today as anything more than fedora tipping).
| tanepiper wrote:
| Unfortunately a lot of "New Atheism" has aligned itself with
| some very problematic people and views so I tend to agree.
| Jun8 wrote:
| Whether you like his theories and positions or not, he was a
| great philosopher, an influential thinker, and an interesting
| character.
|
| NY Times interview with him:
| https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/08/27/magazine/dani...
|
| NYer profile:
| https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/03/27/daniel-dennett...
|
| Interesting thread on /r/askphilosophy on philosophers' pushback
| against him:
| https://www.reddit.com/r/askphilosophy/comments/2cs8kz/do_ma...
|
| Big loss indeed, RIP.
| Fripplebubby wrote:
| For anyone who enjoyed the titles of those links but found that
| there was just, _something_ in the way of really digging into
| them, try:
|
| NY Times interview with him: https://archive.ph/knd9C
|
| NYer Profile: https://archive.ph/Snm8g
| Mesopropithecus wrote:
| RIP. When I wasn't sure what to make of Goedel, Escher, Bach, his
| writings tipped the scale. Thanks!
| AlbertCory wrote:
| So sad. I was on the team that brought him to Google, and my task
| was to get his signature on the video release form. Here's the
| talk:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Q_mY54hjM0
|
| I told him that his book _Darwin 's Dangerous Idea_ was one of
| the few where, when I got to the end, I immediately wanted to go
| back to the beginning and read it again.
|
| He said, "I'm not sure that's a good thing."
| greentxt wrote:
| He was nothing if not honest. Truly the best of the New
| Athiests and deserving of almost Rorty-esque fandom.
| dwh452 wrote:
| Very sad for me, he was one of my favorite thinkers and his
| books were the few that made me feel smarter after having read
| them. His thinking tools remain a great aid to my thinking. The
| reason for this post though, is to mention that Darwin also
| died on April 19th.
| eternauta3k wrote:
| Could you explain his answer?
| n4r9 wrote:
| My guess: Dennett took it to mean that his exposition wasn't
| clear enough to the layman first time round and was
| disappointed by this.
|
| C.f. the famous quote attributed to Einstein "If you can't
| explain it to a six-year-old, you don't understand it
| yourself.". (Does anyone know if he actually said anything
| like that?)
| datascienced wrote:
| Could also mean it ended up for this reader as being
| entertainment. Wanting to read again because it is joyful.
|
| In terms of learning I can't read a book and remember it
| all. I would need to apply it.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| That's what I meant: there was so much to think about
| that I'd gain a whole lot by reading it again.
|
| What _he_ meant: well, he 's dead now, isn't he?
| pdonis wrote:
| I first came across Daniel Dennett through Douglas Hofstadter,
| when I read The Mind's I because I liked Godel, Escher, Bach.
| Once I had read Dennett's contributions to The Mind's I, I
| started looking up everything I could find of his writings; I
| think at this point I've read every one of his books and a fair
| number of his papers. He will be missed. RIP.
| hobbescotch wrote:
| Very sad news. Had the pleasure of having him be the keynote
| speaker at an aesthetics conference some friends and I organized
| during uni. Brilliant mind. RIP
| tum92 wrote:
| Had the pleasure of taking a course of his in undergrad as a
| newly decided philosophy major. The material was excellent and
| right up my alley, but more than anything I was stunned by how
| fluidly and clearly he communicated. Huge loss
| tony_cannistra wrote:
| I had the same experience, except I was definitely not a Phil
| major. He had a "class for every major" where we read chapters
| of the book he was writing (Toolkit for Thinking) and basically
| gave him feedback. It was an amazing strategy for him to get
| reviews on his book that way from totally non-Phil folks. And
| my name is in the book!
| Fripplebubby wrote:
| Great teacher, great writer. I took one of his undergrad
| classes, and one day I went in to his office hours to chat - I
| still remember how relieved he was that I wasn't there to try
| to debate with him about God, that I wanted to talk about
| something else! I think that happened to him quite a lot due to
| his reputation.
| nathan_compton wrote:
| Good to finally have the question of whether he is conscious or
| not definitely resolved.
| motohagiography wrote:
| Can't say I met or knew him, but his essays in "The Mind's I" and
| "Brainstorms" are what got me to pursue tech as a teenager in the
| early 90s. Along with Hofstader, his ideas were foundational to
| hacker culture. What a time to go, where there has been a kind of
| cog.sci winter for the last 20 years, but the last year of LLMs
| has forced philosophy of mind back into the public consciousness.
| Though largely today under the guise of "AI Safety" and
| "alignment," Dennet's articulations form the tools we're going to
| be using to reason about ethics as they relate to these things we
| think of as minds - and regarding how we relate to these things
| that increasingly resemble other minds. Without too much
| lionizing (even though he has, however, just died), it would be
| hard to say that new ideas in philosophy as a whole have had more
| impact in a lifetime or more than that.
|
| A lot of very clever people disagreed strongly with him. However,
| since not one of them could deny they were shaped by the forces
| they opposed, those controversies became the shape of his own
| huge and formidable influence. I'm sure he would want to be
| remembered for something else, and I have the sense
| sentimentality was not his thing at all, but his popularization
| the term "deepity," was in the character of many of his ideas,
| where once you had been exposed to one, it yielded a perspective
| you could afterwards not unsee.
|
| I hope an afterlife may provide some of the surprise and delight
| he brought to so many in this one.
| fsckboy wrote:
| I'm afraid an afterlife would not leave Dennett in good humor.
| pmarreck wrote:
| I think it would.
|
| Even if he was wrong about it, it's important to air the
| thinking around it regardless of belief.
|
| The proposition, for example, that consciousness is basically
| an illusion without empirical basis, one would have to take
| up as belief, I guess (paradoxically), since to most of us,
| that would seem like gaslighting (i.e., "if your conclusion
| is that Descartes was wrong and that we can't even know we
| are conscious, then I beg to differ")
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| I think that I think, therefore I think I am.
| pmarreck wrote:
| no point in not making it recursive
|
| I think that I think that I think, therefore I think that
| I think I am
|
| It's kind of interesting that this is still on HN front
| page at the same time:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40092985
| arduanika wrote:
| I'm guessing that was GP's joke.
|
| Similar to Vonnegut's joke at a memorial service for Asimov
| at the American Humanist Society: "Isaac is up in Heaven
| now".
|
| It's amusing that when I searched for the exact quote just
| now, I found this HN comment from 2011, on the "in memoriam"
| thread for Dennett's fellow horseman:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3360710
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Whether Dennett was right or wrong about a deity, he's
| meeting his maker ;-)
| erickhill wrote:
| Man I miss Hitchens something fierce.
| freedomben wrote:
| Indeed. Do yourself a favor and don't watch any of the
| videos of him on youtube. That razor sharp wit combined
| with spontaneous humor will make you really mad at
| cancer.
| tzakrajs wrote:
| Also: Do yourself a favor and (dont? er do?) read/listen
| to his brother's books! Particularly The Phoney Victory.
| He writes polemics as good as Christopher. Truly a yin to
| the yang. I like the way they argue, although I don't
| necessarily agree with everything they argue.
| undershirt wrote:
| God forgive us. May his memory be eternal.
| swat535 wrote:
| He may forgive but I am not sure his soul would have wanted
| to be with Him, based on what I have seen from him he would
| rather be in oblivion than an Eternal Church.. Obviously I
| don't claim to know his true heart.
| robwwilliams wrote:
| LoL. We will have to live for him and breathe his dust.
| samatman wrote:
| > _Along with Hofstadter, his ideas were foundational to hacker
| culture._
|
| Dennett was an influential thinker, probably more so than
| Hofstadter overall, but I can't agree with this assessment. For
| one thing, he became widely known after _Consciousness
| Explained_ , in 1992, which is simply too late to be
| foundational to hacker culture, which was well and truly
| founded by then.
|
| I won't broaden my case here, lest anything I say be
| interpreted as speaking ill of the dead. I'm certain he was a
| major influence for many who post here, yourself included, and
| I don't intend to detract from that.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| Maybe _you_ discovered Dennett after 1992, but he was a well-
| known and widely published philosopher long before.
|
| "Elbow Room: the varieties of free will worth wanting" was a
| landmark work and was published in 1984.
|
| "The Minds I" (w/Hofstadter) was, relatively speaking, a
| hugely popular work published in 1981.
|
| In 1993, the cover of "Dennett and his critics" began
|
| > Daniel Dennett is arguably one of the most influential yet
| radical philosophers in America today.
|
| Doesn't sound much like someone who "became widely known"
| after a book published in 1992.
| ska wrote:
| You both have a point. Hacker culture was well established
| by the 70s, so still a decade before Dennett's earlier
| works.
|
| I do think its true that some of his work has resonated
| with many people who _also_ resonate with "hacker
| culture".
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| Hacker culture was _not_ well established by the 70s,
| simply because so few people worked with computers in
| that decade. You can certainly trace its roots back to at
| least 1970, but it really did not become established
| then.
|
| What most people identify as "hacker culture" today arose
| in tandem with (a) relatively affordable "personal"
| computers (b) modem-based communication.
|
| The rise of these two things is more or less entirely
| cotemporal with the most productive phase of Dennett's
| career.
| biofox wrote:
| I'd argue hacker culture goes back much further than the
| 70s, e.g., with MIT hacks during the 1930s and 40s (see
| Feynman) and in Cambridge UK, as well as the early HAM
| radio enthusiasts in the 1900s...
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| There are certainly antecedents and ancestors for hacker
| culture long before the 1970s, but in the post I was
| replying to, the term used was "hacker culture was
| established", and I would argue that none of these early
| anticipatory elements represented the "establishment" of
| a new culture.
| Retric wrote:
| It's the same culture made by the same people entering
| and leaving across that full period. Hacker culture is
| really a continuation of the same ad hock machinist
| culture dating back to the Industrial Revolution. It
| jumped to computers from the days of analog computers.
|
| You can trace things flowing all over the place with say
| MIT's Tech Model Railroad Club being often sited as an
| early example. But it's really just refinements of the
| same basic culture, and computers is one of the few
| places it survived unlike say pinball.
| beacon294 wrote:
| I think about this a lot with reference to the mechanics
| institute in San Francisco. Who were these mechanics and
| why did they have a 4 story institute still home to a
| chess club and private library? Certainly not a direct
| crossover to a modern car mechanic, even a "hacker" type
| car mechanic wouldn't stereotypically also be thinking
| along the philosophy of hacker culture, although I am
| sure some do.
| samatman wrote:
| The book _Hackers_ was first published in 1984 https://en
| .wikipedia.org/wiki/Hackers:_Heroes_of_the_Compute...
|
| Jargon file was published as _The Hacker 's Dictionary_
| in 1983 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jargon_File
|
| I consider this definitive evidence that the foundational
| period of hacker culture was before these books were
| published. I'm not sure what the point of trying to shift
| that period forward so as to include Dennett's works is.
| It's neither true nor necessary.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| Shifting it forward?
|
| His first three books were published in 81, 84 and 86.
|
| I agree with you that the foundational period _slightly_
| predates these, but I don 't consider the foundational
| period to be the same as when "hacker culture was
| established".
|
| I began to encounter it myself starting in about 1979 via
| CoEvolution Quarterly/Whole Earth Review, but it was
| still very, very much evolving and continued to do so in
| very noticeable ways as I started programming in 1984.
|
| I tend to consider the general use of IP as probably one
| of the main signifiers of hacker culture being
| established, and that was far from common in the 75-85
| period (though growing rapidly).
| samatman wrote:
| > _I don 't consider the foundational period to be the
| same as when "hacker culture was established"._
|
| This is wrong by definition, is the thing. That's what
| foundational means: to found something is to establish
| its foundation.
|
| Dennett was simply not a significant part of that. The
| timeline isn't the reason for that, but it in fact
| suffices to make the case.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| It wasn't actually my claim that Dennett had much
| influence on hacker culture. I was originally disputing
| the idea that Dennett became well known after 1992.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| I don't really agree on this distinction between
| foundational and established. But we can just agree to
| disagree on that.
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| Didn't a bunch of hackers start up as phreakers ?
| Upvoter33 wrote:
| Agree. Dude was a consequential philosopher but had little to
| do w hacker culture.
| Optimal_Persona wrote:
| What do you mean by "cog.sci winter of the last 20 years"?
|
| The research of Dr. Bruce Perry, Bessel van der Kolk and others
| into the effects of trauma on brain development, behavior and
| social functioning has had a profound impact on the
| understanding of cognition, the mind-body continuum, and the
| treatment of human suffering in this time frame.
|
| https://earlylearningnation.com/2023/02/author-bruce-perry-a...
| stevofolife wrote:
| I think what he means is that many of the seminal work
| related to cognitive science were produced back then. For
| example, Chomsky, Minsky, John Searle, David Chalmers and
| many more.
|
| Things still move during winter, just not as much.
| bbor wrote:
| Beautifully said, honestly brought me some solace. Echoing your
| endorsement of _Brainstorms_ -- I expect /hope this will be his
| enduring legacy!
|
| Death touches us all, but I totally agree, it especially hurts
| me to see these AI pioneers passing away right when so many
| groundbreaking cognitive science discoveries are being made.
| _Especially_ in the cases of Dennett's "opposition" like Lenat
| (and soon Chomsky...) where they die appearing "disproven" or
| "outmoded" by LLMs in the eyes of Silicon Valley celebrities
| like Hinton and Friedman. Oh well, I'm sure their time on their
| earth has prepared them for a little bit of criticism and
| uncertainty, a-la Schopenhauer's "Only with time, however, will
| the period of my real influence begin, and I trust that it will
| be a long one."
|
| Luckily, Dennett is under no such cloud, and he died more or
| less a hero in my eyes; certainly among the most influential
| Connectionist philosophers (+ Dreyfus & Clark?), who seemed
| very helpful in re-legitimizing ML. I, for one, don't think it
| would be odd to see philosophers like Dennett and Hofstadter in
| a Turing Award announcement someday...
| generic92034 wrote:
| > Death touches us all [..]
|
| While the anecdotal evidence is overwhelming, that still
| remains to be seen. ;)
| seydor wrote:
| AI safety is moralism of the boring kind, not even some new
| moral philosophy. AFAIK Dennett did not hold strong moral
| positions , let alone moralist, so i feel he was orthogonal to
| it
| xpe wrote:
| What moralism is interesting to you?
| dudeinjapan wrote:
| Anything to do with trains and levers.
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| What is it like to be a trolley ?
|
| (I had misremembered the author of that original quote,
| but then :
|
| > Daniel Dennett, while sharply disagreeing on some
| points, acknowledged Nagel's paper ["What Is It Like to
| Be a Bat?"] as "the most widely cited and influential
| thought experiment about consciousness.")
| seydor wrote:
| None
| xpe wrote:
| what do you mean by moralism?
|
| I doubt that you reject the rationality of caring about
| behavior. Fair?
|
| There are philosophers who talk about morality from the
| point of view of rationality without making wild* claims
| about truth.
|
| * you have to start with some assumptions, but some are
| less attractive than others
| tim333 wrote:
| >AI safety is moralism of the boring kind
|
| It's not all boring - it makes for some great movies.
| Terminator 2, The Matrix etc.
|
| It's also moving to practical engineering questions like how
| can we have AI controlled drones kill invading Russians but
| ensure they won't turn on us later, more than philosophical
| waffle.
| robwwilliams wrote:
| Great start at a eulogy or thank-you note! I also thank Dennett
| for the originality, humor, and clarity of all of his work on
| consciousness and cognition. He wanted to communicate more than
| impress readers.
|
| His book Consciousness Explained is a good overview of the
| conundrum of brain-mind. And in the end he admits clearly that
| he actually did NOT explain consciousness (read the last two
| pages). But he framed the problem better than most
| philosophers, and brings readers into the discussion.
|
| Daniel Dennett, Richard Rorty, and Humberto Maturana: The three
| modern philosophers I read and respect the most as a practicing
| neuroscientist.
|
| Maturana by far the strongest scientist of this trio and oddly,
| the most radical neurophilosopher of them all. I would have
| loved to overhear a conversation of these three.
|
| Ah, perhaps too subtle humor in your closing comment. "Dennett
| in dust"---his comfortable afterlife, will have to be satisfied
| with all of us talking about ideas he nurtured and motivated.
| rthrfrd wrote:
| Very sad to hear. We'll certainly miss having his perspective to
| ground us in this era of AI hyperbole, as thousands of engineers
| start confronting the ambiguities of consciousness with
| incongruent mental frameworks.
| pixelmonkey wrote:
| Looks like dailynous.com server is having trouble responding
| (likely due to HN). But a cached copy of the page is here:
|
| http://archive.today/kHPfz
|
| Daniel Dennett was an important philosopher of mind, whose
| Wikipedia page is here:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Dennett
|
| When I studied philosophy in college (2002-2006), his ideas were
| among the most discussed and debated at NYU's philosophy
| department. I always enjoyed his thoughts and writings, even if I
| often didn't agree with them. RIP.
| pbsladek wrote:
| Love his work. Sad to see him go.
| abeppu wrote:
| In 2022, a GPT-3 model fine-tuned on Dennett's writing was good
| enough that "Dennett experts" could only pick a real Dennett
| quote from a list of 5 quotes about 50% of the time. I don't know
| that anyone's tried on newer models. He's gone, but I wonder if
| we could continue to get insights from him for a while longer.
|
| https://schwitzsplinters.blogspot.com/2022/07/results-comput...
| bschmidt1 wrote:
| > I wonder if we could continue to get insights from him
|
| I think so. His views were somewhat rigid and materialist. As a
| de-fluffer, he's great, and I'm sure he will continue to be
| quoted especially as we make progress on AI and get into the
| nuts and bolts of consciousness. In particular which things are
| extraneous or peripheral to the problem itself.
| tanepiper wrote:
| I tend to agree here, I found intuition pumps didn't make
| sense and illusionism a cop-out for materialism.
| goodgoblin wrote:
| I was unpacking and yesterday from a move and saw a copy of his
| "Darwin's Dangerous Idea" book and remembered he time he answered
| a fan email I sent to him with the simple reply "It's always nice
| to receive an email such as yours." - here's to hoping you are
| wrong about the soul Dan!
| raoof wrote:
| consciousness is like a joke, if you think it needs an
| explanation you already miss it. I struggled with myself to
| convince Dennett that his conscious so much that I ended up
| losing it myself I hope you don't make the same mistake that I
| did
| scoofy wrote:
| My background is in Analytic Philosophy, so I'm fairly familiar
| with Dennett. His rise to prominence during the early 2000's
| seemed appropriate given the huge shift in American religious
| belief. Though, I still certainly understand that folks can be
| exasperated by that movement, I just don't think that you can
| experience a 30% drop in religious affiliation, in a single
| generation, without annoying people.[1]
|
| I read his book _Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural
| Phenomenon_ , which I found really interesting in that I'd never
| thought about religion as a concept being an evolutionary
| adaptive (or "hijacking") feature. I found it fascinating, though
| not profound. That said, I think some of the best philosophical
| work is just that. Really insightful ideas that make perfect
| sense once you think about them, you just probably wouldn't take
| the time to think about them.
|
| 1. https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2022/09/13/how-u-s-
| reli...
| wslh wrote:
| Sorry, don't get your stats. In my family one generation passed
| from orthodox religious to the next: non religious without any
| issue. One example contradicts the whole point.
|
| The study focus on Christianity and not other religions though.
| MetaMonk wrote:
| Life and psychology are not neatly provable / disprovable
| structures all the way down though.
| listic wrote:
| It may be an aside, but could you you clarify what you mean by
| a huge shift in American religious belief? For the benefit of
| those of us, who are on the internet, but not from or have been
| to the US?
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| It only takes about five seconds. Open the link that GP
| shared and read the first paragraph. > as
| the early 1990s, about 90% of U.S. adults identified as
| Christians. But today, about two-thirds of adults are
| Christians.
| carlinm wrote:
| Sad to hear this. I had read his book "Elbow Room" back when I
| had been diving more deeply into free will and the various
| viewpoints associated. I don't know that I found it convincing
| but it was an interesting peek into the compatibilist argument.
| pknerd wrote:
| I am sorry that I did not know about him but mentioning of
| "Consciousness" in the linked article made me to google about his
| books. One of the book is "Consciousness Explained", I wonder
| whether it is for layman like me who do not know much about it?
| johngossman wrote:
| I would say it is. As usual, need to be aware that his
| conclusions are controversial. But the whole area is
| mkehrt wrote:
| It's extremely oriented towards laymen, and if you think it
| sounds interesting, you will probably enjoy it a lot. (Even if
| you don't agree with its conclusions)
| codeulike wrote:
| Its a great book, you might not agree that it 'explains'
| consciousness but it will give you a lot of new ways to think
| about it and it references a lot of interesting research.
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| Sad news. I loved "Minds I". After that he was always quantum
| entangled with Douglas Hofstadter for me. RIP a cool and fun
| philosopher, Mr. Dennett.
| mihaitodor wrote:
| Really terrible news... So glad I got to meet him in person in
| Dublin in 2018 when he gave a talk at
| https://www.tcd.ie/biosciences/whatislife and hung out for a chat
| in the lobby. He had this wonderful Gandalf-worthy cane that I'm
| not sure how he managed to manoeuvre when boarding airplanes.
| tombert wrote:
| I was one of those irritating edgy atheist teenagers (and am
| still kind of an irritating edgy atheist adult), so I used to
| have plenty of Daniel Dennett quotes in my back pocket when
| arguing with people online.
|
| He will be missed by me.
| alex201 wrote:
| I've never quite seen eye to eye with Daniel Dennett. His
| tendency to reduce the inexplicable to what he's confident he
| understands has always made me wonder if a challenging childhood
| might have fostered his distrust of the mysterious. Whenever I
| admire Nobel Prize laureates like Roger Penrose, who argue that
| consciousness isn't just software running on the brain's
| hardware, I can't help but feel a twinge of pity for Dennett and
| his like-minded peers. I can almost hear him reflecting, 'Wow,
| that was a wild ride, but boy, was I cranky! I wish I could have
| another go at it.
| n4r9 wrote:
| > made me wonder if a challenging childhood might have fostered
| his distrust of the mysterious
|
| Why this, and not simply an urge to understand things?
| alex201 wrote:
| Understand things? He has never successfully explained
| anything related to consciousness except by using the magical
| word: illusion. One might argue back, 'You're the illusion,
| Mr. Dennett,' and we end up as a bunch of ignorant folks
| pointing fingers.
| n4r9 wrote:
| I get that you disagree with him. Just saying it's unfair
| to assume that his natural curiosity stems from some kind
| of trauma.
| tasty_freeze wrote:
| There is an infinity of mysterious things one could posit,
| including an infinity of mutually incompatible mysteries. How
| do you decide which mysteries are worthy of consideration?
|
| Personally, I think starting with things are known to exist,
| which have a physical basis, is a great start, and untestable
| assumptions should be kept to a minimum. Just because it would
| be delightful to contemplate that ornately feathered
| technicolor quantum unicorns are actually underlying all of
| reality, it isn't productive to consider until there is a
| reason to.
|
| Penrose is no doubt a genius of high order in his domain, but
| consciousness is not one of his domains. Saying consciousness
| is the result of quantum effects in microtubules explains
| nothing -- it is just a very tiny rug which one could imagine
| is hiding the truth, as all the larger scale hiding places have
| been inspected and found lacking.
|
| You'd think that with the stunning (and mostly unexpected)
| success of LLMs would expose the fact that simple, soul-free,
| mechanistic computations can produce some really amazing
| capabilities. The human brain is orders of magnitude larger
| than GPT4, plus it has a wildly more complex architecture than
| today's neural networks. To me, it takes little imagination to
| see how everything could be explained in purely physical terms.
| astrange wrote:
| > Saying consciousness is the result of quantum effects in
| microtubules explains nothing -- it is just a very tiny rug
| which one could imagine is hiding the truth, as all the
| larger scale hiding places have been inspected and found
| lacking.
|
| It also doesn't conflict with physicalism. I think he's
| trying to argue that consciousness would need more than you
| can do with a classical computer, but it doesn't seem to
| imply that. Classical computers are made of hardware
| components that rely on quantum effects to work, but that
| doesn't make them "quantum computers".
| tasty_freeze wrote:
| Everything relies on quantum effects. Water wouldn't behave
| like water. Gold metal would have a different color, etc.
|
| All the same, I don't think there is special quantum magic
| above and beyond the "ordinary" quantum phenomena needed to
| explain our brains.
| alex201 wrote:
| Consciousness is the most obvious mystery, one that
| undoubtedly warrants considerable attention.
|
| Your point about starting with physical things is
| questionable, as highlighted by prominent figures like
| Penrose and Donald Hoffman. The fundamentalism of materialism
| is an axiom that lacks proof.
|
| Perhaps to you 'saying consciousness is the result of quantum
| effects in microtubules explains nothing', but so does
| Dennett's saying 'consciousness is an illusion', which equals
| 'I'm not sure what it is, but I will dismiss it because I
| would rather ridicule the unknown than accept my ignorance.'
|
| At least Penrose denies what is deniable to open the door for
| a broader perspective, something that Dennett failed at.
|
| I bet you think an LLM can experience what the color red
| feels like, or it can feel the scent of a rose, if it's fed
| enough 1/0's about it.
| astrange wrote:
| Being a Nobel laureate isn't evidence that you're right about
| anything after that. I'm sorry you'd like the supernatural to
| be true but you should find some ghosts first if you want
| anyone to believe in them.
| wzdd wrote:
| > His tendency to reduce the inexplicable to what he's
| confident he understands
|
| Coming up with theories to explain the inexplicable is
| literally science.
|
| Also, suggesting that Dennet's philosophy stems from a
| "challenging childhood" is argument ad hominem, because it
| focuses on the person, rather than on the content of the
| philosophy.
|
| To continue the discussion in the same tone that you began it,
| perhaps you don't see eye to eye with him because he challenges
| your beliefs.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| Something more descriptive in the title would be helpful like
| "Daniel Dennett, philosopher and cognitive scientist, has died"
| dredmorbius wrote:
| "<Name> has died" is something of an HN convention:
|
| <https://hn.algolia.com/?q=%22has+died%22>
| bbor wrote:
| RIP to a legend. If you haven't heard of him and are interested
| in the more philosophical side of AI I think he's at his best in
| dialogue with others, so I highly recommend skimming this 1993
| round table that made me fall in love with him. I can't find the
| stamp, but I know at some point he excitedly describes machine
| learning research to some guffaws from his interlocutors -- quite
| funny and vindicating in hindsight.
|
| https://youtu.be/RVrnn7QW6Jg?si=jenbni0Rg1dX5fd4
|
| At ~01:50:00, he talks very poignantly about death, the soul, and
| immortality. Obviously this video is 30 years old now, but I
| doubt he changed much and it seems his philosophy left him with
| good tools to handle the specter of death. Godspeed Dennett, the
| world is in your debt...
|
| Some other, perhaps more lighthearted timestamps:
|
| - @ 01:00:00; A Nagel discussion culminating in "I think we're
| making tremendous progress on knowing what it's like to be a
| bat!" Truly a Silicon Valley optimist before it was cool.
|
| - at 01:12:00; He tells a fun robotics story to back up his
| belief in the tractability of neurophilosophy.
|
| - @ 01:40:00; he discusses his general philosophy for the mind
| and why he thinks our brains can be broken down into a recursive
| hierarchy of agential machines.
|
| - 00:24:00 is the moment that made me love him. Love to hate him,
| perhaps! Like a more prestigious, less directly-aggressive Gary
| Marcus.
| mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote:
| I can also recommend this discussion.
|
| It makes me sad that Sheldrake is the last participant
| standing. Not because I want Sheldrake to die, but rather
| because it reminds me all those great thinkers are now thinking
| no more.
| bschmidt1 wrote:
| Dennett on Closer To Truth (just uploaded)
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IHvIXe4DOEc
| n4r9 wrote:
| Like others here, I found Consciousness Explained to generate a
| huge perspective shift in my worldview.
|
| My (now) wife and I went to see him speak in June 2012 in King's
| College Cambridge, on the event of Alan Turing's 100th birthday:
| https://philevents.org/event/show/2205
|
| I don't remember all the details, but I think he spoke about
| Turing's ideas about evolution and computers. It might be similar
| to this article from roughly the same time (though paywalled):
| https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/06/-a-pe...
|
| The only other talk I remember going to was Simon Singh (author
| of Fermat's Last Theorem) giving a great presentation on (and
| demonstration of!) the Enigma machine.
| spacetimeuser5 wrote:
| Ok. And how many professors of medicine and doctors die under
| 120. Monkeys got really cheap headset.
| arduanika wrote:
| With no disrespect to the other three, Dennett always struck me
| as the most serious and intellectually modest of the Four
| Horsemen. He mostly stuck to his own lane of academic expertise,
| and used the proper caveats when venturing out of it. He didn't
| lean on rhetorical flourish, strawman his opponents, or overstate
| his case. The other three are a lot of fun, but maybe there's
| something to be said for boring.
|
| He spoke at my college once, and came off as nuanced and
| considerate. I think I disagree with him about consciousness, but
| I'm not informed enough to know for sure. What's clear is that he
| was a constructive part of the conversation in his field.
| IncreasePosts wrote:
| I find it interesting that there is no mention of this on the
| cnn/foxnews homepage. If a philosopher of his standing died in
| France, I'm sure it would be on the front of Le Monde and Figaro
| CreepGin wrote:
| I also find it interesting that I graduated from Tufts (2011)
| and took a Philosophy class in 2010, and yet today is the first
| time I heard about Professor Dennett. I do wish I'd known him
| and his works earlier though. His notion of conciousness being
| a narrative created by the brain resonates well with me.
| Flatcircle wrote:
| Probably won't be going to heaven. (No offense)
| datascienced wrote:
| Is that because of unrepented sin, or heaven not existing.
| Flatcircle wrote:
| The latter
| JabavuAdams wrote:
| Wow, not that old.
| darreninthenet wrote:
| What books would people recommend starting with by this guy?
| abecedarius wrote:
| _The Mind 's I_ made the biggest impression on me. I don't know
| if that generalizes, you not being a 1980s teen now.
| codeulike wrote:
| I read Consciousness Explained 30 years ago and at first I was
| miffed that it didn't touch on the possibilties of Quantum
| mechanics and consciousness, a buzzword idea that I was keen on
| at the time. But then every chapter was so fascinating -
| blindsight, p-zombies, Libet, the cartesian theatre.
|
| If I can sum up in a very simple way, as a philosopher he was
| pointing to a simple but hard to grasp idea:
|
| Consciousness probably isn't what we think it is. Most of our
| preconceptions about it are likely wrong. Because we're right in
| it all the time, it seems like we 'know' things about it. But we
| don't. Quick example: our visual consciousness seems continuous.
| But we know from saccades that it can't be.
| meowface wrote:
| For the record, 30 years later most consciousness researchers
| still believe it's unlikely that quantum mechanics plays a
| special role in consciousness. It of course remains plausible,
| since we still don't have the true answers yet, but hypotheses
| like Penrose's have not yet been found to be credible.
|
| I really like your summary of some of his ideas, though.
| dudinax wrote:
| I bet we'll find there's more computation going on in neurons
| (and possibly other brain cells) than we currently know about
| which will necessarily be happening at much smaller scales
| than synapse firing.
| meowface wrote:
| I think this is likely, yes. I think there are already some
| leads pointing in that direction. I think it likely won't
| depend on quantum mechanics, though. (But of course, this
| is all idle speculation from a complete amateur.)
|
| Each neuron is itself a complex organism. They're
| unicellular, but each is still a robust lifeform.
| vga805 wrote:
| We don't know from saccades that consciousness can't be
| continuous. We just know that the physical impressions on our
| retina do not map 1 to 1 to our visual conscious experience.
| The brain does all sorts of things to the raw information it
| receives before that information rises to the level of
| phenomenal consciousness.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| this is just silly pedantry. The comment you're replying to
| was clearly, if implicitly stating "visual conscious
| experience cannot simply be the experience of the patterns of
| light falling on our retina, even though we experience it as
| such, because of saccadic motion, which is occuring
| constantly but which we rarely perceive".
|
| The point is that our intuition (for centuries!) about what
| visual conscious experience is driven by is wrong. You've
| summarized what we know now succinctly and usefully, but that
| in no way invalidates the point the comment was making.
| tehnub wrote:
| >p-zombies
|
| I looked up what he said about p-zombies on the p-zombies wiki
| and am happy to see he has a position I agree with.
|
| >Dennett argues that "when philosophers claim that zombies are
| conceivable, they invariably underestimate the task of
| conception (or imagination), and end up imagining something
| that violates their own definition".
| antonvs wrote:
| Wouldn't ChatGPT be a p-zombie? Unless of course one thinks
| it's conscious.
| meowface wrote:
| No. A p-zombie is a very specific hypothetical construct:
| something absolutely 100% identical to some equivalent
| conscious being in every way except that it has no
| consciousness.
| tanepiper wrote:
| Essentially an NPC on a script Vs the player in the game
| anon-3988 wrote:
| > Consciousness probably isn't what we think it is
|
| This is nonsense. Consciousness is exactly what it is. The only
| real that ever existed is the fact there's there there.
| Everything else can be an illusion, as you said. There's no
| reason why red appears they way it is.
|
| But the fact that i can seem to experience red cannot be
| denied. The seeming cannot be a mistake.
| steve_adams_86 wrote:
| What if it isn't exactly what it appears to be to us? If the
| answer was that simple, thousands of years of deep thinking
| would have been for nothing. I believe it's actually a
| difficult, perhaps even impossible question to answer.
|
| The experience of consciousness, or that it's like something
| to be you, doesn't necessarily mean anything about how or why
| that's possible or occurring in the first place.
| anon-3988 wrote:
| Perhaps our defintion of consciousness doesn't match. What
| I think of consciousness is something that can experience.
| It is not even experience, feelings, emotions, these are
| secondary things that arise in "consciousness".
|
| What you cannot deny is the fact there's something at all.
| You cannot doubt that there's something. If you doubt that,
| there's a contradiction. Not what is that something, but
| simply the fact that _there is_ something.
|
| So the fact there's something is something that has to be
| true. The question "I doubt there's something in this
| universe" doesn't make sense.
| ycombinete wrote:
| I think you're just saying " _cogito, ergo sum_ ".
|
| Yours sounds more like, "something seeming therefore
| something seeming".
| codeulike wrote:
| You misunderstand me. Consciousness definitely exists, but
| its workings are likely different to our preconceptions of
| how it should work. I offer saccadic masking as an example of
| how aspects of how it works are 'hidden' from us.
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saccadic_masking
| glennonymous wrote:
| I sent an unsolicited 25 page paper about memes that I wrote, as
| just some (fairly pretentious!) guy without a college degree, to
| Professor Dennett, in the early oughts. And he just went ahead
| and read the thing and gave me very kind feedback on it.
|
| I'm sure he was a busy person, and didn't have any obligation to
| respond to me, at all. It touched me deeply. What a generous and
| gracious soul he was.
|
| I mean these words in a non-supernatural way, of course. :-D A
| toast to Mr. Dennett's wonderful memory.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| NY Times obit: <https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/19/books/daniel-
| dennett-dead...>
|
| Paywall: <https://archive.is/EIsGd>
| tempaway3845751 wrote:
| _So I 'm going to speak about a problem that I have and that's
| that I'm a philosopher.
|
| When I go to a party and people ask me what do I do and I say,
| "I'm a professor," their eyes glaze over.
|
| When I go to an academic cocktail party and there are all the
| professors around, they ask me what field I'm in and I say,
| "philosophy" -- their eyes glaze over.
|
| When I go to a philosopher's party and they ask me what I work on
| and I say, "consciousness," their eyes don't glaze over -- their
| lips curl into a snarl.
|
| And I get hoots of derision and cackles and growls because they
| think, "That's impossible! You can't explain consciousness." The
| very chutzpah of somebody thinking that you could explain
| consciousness is just out of the question.
|
| ... It's very hard to change people's minds about something like
| consciousness, and I finally figured out the reason for that. The
| reason for that is that everybody's an expert on consciousness.
| ... with regard to consciousness, people seem to think, each of
| us seems to think, "I am an expert. Simply by being conscious, I
| know all about this." And so, you tell them your theory and they
| say, "No, no, that's not the way consciousness is! No, you've got
| it all wrong." And they say this with an amazing confidence.
|
| And so what I'm going to try to do today is to shake your
| confidence. Because I know the feeling -- I can feel it myself. I
| want to shake your confidence that you know your own innermost
| minds -- that you are, yourselves, authoritative about your own
| consciousness. That's the order of the day here._
|
| From Daniel Dennett's TED talk, 2003
|
| https://www.ted.com/talks/dan_dennett_the_illusion_of_consci...
| caturopath wrote:
| He's in a better place now.
| Ologn wrote:
| I have seen him on television and Youtube, reading these comments
| it seems his books are interesting as well.
|
| I very much enjoyed him in the documentary series "A Glorious
| Accident", the show featuring him was -
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5_bv7rDB5e8
|
| and the show in the series featuring a round table of him,
| Stephen Jay Gould, Freeman Dyson, Oliver Sacks and him is
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RVrnn7QW6Jg
| mwcz wrote:
| We were lucky to be privy to his wisdom for the past 18 years,
| since a heart-related close call in 2006, but even that doesn't
| feel like enough.
| quus wrote:
| a post which will spawn many bad takes on philosophy in the
| comments section by tech workers who barely know the subject but
| believe they are experts
| nighthawk454 wrote:
| Oh! I had just come across him via this recent YouTube video. I'm
| glad to be introduced to a new influential thinker. I guess I
| have some reading to do, thanks Mr. Dennett!
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nGrRf1wD320
| earthboundkid wrote:
| Fortunately, we have a chatbot that can simulate him perfectly:
| http://www.faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzPapers/GPT-3-Den...
| mjh2539 wrote:
| The favorite "philosopher" of non-philosophers.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I remember seeing him as one of the megaminds in Vim Kayzer's _A
| Glorious Accident_ [0]. That was a show that would put many
| people to sleep, but I profoundly enjoyed it.
|
| [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Glorious_Accident
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| There's a really good eulogy on Ars Technica[0], as he was
| personal friend of one of the reporters.
|
| [0] https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/04/philosopher-
| daniel-d...
| stevebmark wrote:
| Unfortunately, listening to Dennett debate Sam Harris on free
| will made me lose faith in Dennett's credibility. He was not able
| to understand the very clear argument of why we don't have free
| will. Hearing him literally being unable to understand was
| surprising.
| taco-hands wrote:
| There are a lot of weeds to get into on the subject of philosophy
| here and demonstrated by the comments. However, Dennett
| contributed a lot in terms of thinking and arguments...
|
| We don't 'think' enough as individuals/beings and for that I doth
| my cap in respect of the work that he did and however it's
| regarded by 'the mob'!
| qwerty456127 wrote:
| Philosophers never die. Our bodies are computers and our
| personalities are self-improving (or self-worsening in some
| cases) programs. To the moment a body of a philosopher dies, the
| case usually is it has became irrelevant already because the
| program already runs in the decentralized cloud of the society.
| api_or_ipa wrote:
| So sad. I just listened to an interview he gave to Babbage
| podcast from the Economist. Highly recommend listening to his
| thoughts, he was an incredible luminary.
|
| https://open.spotify.com/episode/5qNJBiPgkgf29cqpAcPfvf
| az09mugen wrote:
| I discovered him with the excellent Royal Institution talk "If
| Brains are Computers, Who Designs the Software?" [0]. And the
| quote which marked my mind is "How could a slow, mindless process
| build a thing that could build a thing that a slow mindless
| process couldn't build on it's own ?".
|
| [0] : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TTFoJQSd48c
| alexnewman wrote:
| Dennett clearly is an important mind. I do not disagree with
| anything he has opinions on. His belief that "self control is the
| arena of consciousness and emotional valence is what does all the
| pushing and pulling", I think expresses the limits of his theory
| and has some pretty obvious blindspots. I think both of these
| gentlemen would benefit by a study of islamic philosophy.
|
| I only wish the islamic religion was as tangible to me as its
| philosophy and sociology but I find it completely inscrutable. I
| might enjoy its theogony and stories if i spoke arabic.
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| Rest In Peace, do not return as a philosophical zombie.
| https://existentialcomics.com/comic/67
| SnoJohn wrote:
| His last interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VWpm2NOF2Zw
| nurettin wrote:
| I loved his "brights" vs "murkies" analogy.
| alsetmusic wrote:
| I just confirmed that I have a copy of Breaking the Spell on a
| bookshelf. I still haven't got to it. I buy books aspirationaly
| and read about a third of how many I buy. I have too many inputs
| to get to all of them.
|
| This was disappointing:
|
| > When the American Humanist Association revoked a lifetime
| achievement award it once gave to Richard Dawkins on account of
| his anti-trans tweets, Dennett was firmly on Dawkins' side. He
| also passively promoted an embarrassing article written by the
| head of the Center For Inquiry, claiming identity politics and
| cancel culture had "torn apart" the Humanist movement... mostly
| because people were criticizing Dawkins for perpetuating anti-
| trans talking points.
|
| https://www.friendlyatheist.com/p/what-ill-remember-about-da...
| cuile wrote:
| I think it's actually very reassuring that he didn't accept the
| type of uncritical groupthink that is exemplified by the "trans
| rights" movement.
|
| It's odd how so many so-called atheists ended up latching onto
| that cultish nonsense. Dawkins stands amongst the few who have
| cast a suitably critical eye over this "gender identity" belief
| system.
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