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The Dream of Enlightenment by Anthony Gottlieb review

theguardian.com

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Re: The Dream of Enlightenment by Anthony Gottlieb review

#41

Post by abecedarius »

pmoriarty wrote: post #33
abecedarius wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In "Cargo Cult Science" Feynman showed a lot of insight into the current replication crisis decades before it blew up -- at least, that's how it looks to me as an outsider. Did any philosopher do better? (Ahead of time, again.) It wouldn't surprise me, and I'd like to check out their work, but from my own reading I can't think of anyone. By "do better" I mean in an equivalent few pages to advise a new graduate about…

"Did any philosopher do better? ... By "do better" I mean in an equivalent few pages to advise a new graduate about how to discover things that are true" Philosophy of science is less about telling scientists how to behave than trying to understand what actually happens when scientists do what they do, what science accomplishes on a theoretical level, what the difference between science and non-science is, etc. It's…

If a philosopher of science studied contemporary scientists and judged "these practices common to this field tend to produce more accurate far-reaching knowledge of the world, compared to these other practices accepted in this other field", and a few decades later we could judge that the philosopher was basically right, then I'd want more to read their work. They of course may have broader concerns.

Re: The Dream of Enlightenment by Anthony Gottlieb review

#42

Post by mannykannot »

pmoriarty wrote: post #3
M_Grey wrote: post #2

The only lasting source of enlightenment seems to come from science, and “The philosophy of science is as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds.” -Feynman

I would be very interested to know how much Feynman actually knew about the philosophy of science. My guess would be not very much at all. Feynman, like some other famous scientists, gave in to the temptation of pontificating on subjects he knew very little about. Philosophy in general was something he seemed to have contempt for, without knowing much about it. I'd take his pronouncements on it with a huge grain of s…

> Feynman, like some other famous scientists, gave in to the temptation of pontificating on subjects he knew very little about.

I suspect that is what some physicists think philosophy does in their field, but if so, I don't see that there is anything for them to get worked up about. A lot of water has flowed under the bridge since Bergson annoyed Einstein.

Re: The Dream of Enlightenment by Anthony Gottlieb review

#43

Post by mannykannot »

pmoriarty wrote: post #36
eli_gottlieb wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I say nothing supernatural, because the precise meaning of "naturalism" is contested in philosophy. For rather complex reasons, you can accept evolution, accept that modern physics is essentially accurate (only inaccurate so far as we're still discovering things and refining theory, etc), deny that there are immaterial souls or Cartesian dualism, yet not count as a naturalist. I am not sure if naturalism is necessar…

"If you can't show them to us, we're not going to accept that they exist in the same sense as books, chairs, and alpha particles." Most scientists believe in plenty of things they can't see, such as magnetism, viruses, gravity, etc. What they can see of these are, arguably, their effects or the behavior of instruments that can detect them. But many scientists also believe in plenty of things that can neither be seen…

Is this use of a rather silly caricature an example of philosophical thinking?

Re: The Dream of Enlightenment by Anthony Gottlieb review

#44

Post by M_Grey »

pmoriarty wrote: post #26
oldmanjay wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not interested enough to take time for something so elusively abstract that seemingly no one can even summarize it convincingly

Please summarize physics for me.

The study of the underlying physical constants and interactions arising from those constants.

Re: The Dream of Enlightenment by Anthony Gottlieb review

#45

Post by hyperpape »

eli_gottlieb wrote: post #34
hyperpape wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't true. The majority of contemporary philosophers do not believe in anything supernatural, but plenty of scientists still dismiss their work. I say nothing supernatural, because the precise meaning of "naturalism" is contested in philosophy. For rather complex reasons, you can accept evolution, accept that modern physics is essentially accurate (only inaccurate so far as we're still discovering things and re…

>I say nothing supernatural, because the precise meaning of "naturalism" is contested in philosophy. For rather complex reasons, you can accept evolution, accept that modern physics is essentially accurate (only inaccurate so far as we're still discovering things and refining theory, etc), deny that there are immaterial souls or Cartesian dualism, yet not count as a naturalist. I am not sure if naturalism is necessar…

Please tell me you're using Platonic Form as a (stupid) way of mocking some idea (god knows what) rather than as a literal description of what modern philosophers believe.

Re: The Dream of Enlightenment by Anthony Gottlieb review

#46

Post by mannykannot »

mannykannot wrote: post #43
pmoriarty wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"If you can't show them to us, we're not going to accept that they exist in the same sense as books, chairs, and alpha particles." Most scientists believe in plenty of things they can't see, such as magnetism, viruses, gravity, etc. What they can see of these are, arguably, their effects or the behavior of instruments that can detect them. But many scientists also believe in plenty of things that can neither be seen…

Is this use of a rather silly caricature an example of philosophical thinking?

On reflection, that was a cheap shot, and I would retract it if I could.

Re: The Dream of Enlightenment by Anthony Gottlieb review

#47

Post by eli_gottlieb »

pmoriarty wrote: post #36
eli_gottlieb wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I say nothing supernatural, because the precise meaning of "naturalism" is contested in philosophy. For rather complex reasons, you can accept evolution, accept that modern physics is essentially accurate (only inaccurate so far as we're still discovering things and refining theory, etc), deny that there are immaterial souls or Cartesian dualism, yet not count as a naturalist. I am not sure if naturalism is necessar…

"If you can't show them to us, we're not going to accept that they exist in the same sense as books, chairs, and alpha particles." Most scientists believe in plenty of things they can't see, such as magnetism, viruses, gravity, etc. What they can see of these are, arguably, their effects or the behavior of instruments that can detect them. But many scientists also believe in plenty of things that can neither be seen…

>But many scientists also believe in plenty of things that can neither be seen nor (again, arguably) measured, like love, freedom, happiness, and even God.

If you claim to be unable to observe love, freedom, and happiness, and to believe there can be no possible observation of God (such as a revelation at Sinai, for example, and its archaeological after-effects), then you're just being plain silly.

>What they can see of these are, arguably, their effects or the behavior of instruments that can detect them.

Yes, we do see their effects. Science deals with latent properties and objects all the time. After all, scientifically speaking, everything beyond our sensory nerve-endings is latent and is inferred.

Nothing abnormal here.

(Never mind the philosophers who claim to know their perception is veridical because it's more intuitive that way rather than because they examined how it was working.)

>I am reminded of this anecdote about a dedicated neurophisiologist writing to his wife:

I am once again reminded of how philosophers completely fail to understand science and scientists, and thus caricature us as blind idiots every chance they get.

Re: The Dream of Enlightenment by Anthony Gottlieb review

#48

Post by eli_gottlieb »

pmoriarty wrote: post #38
eli_gottlieb wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Sir Karl Popper is not really a participant in the contemporary professional philosophical dialogue; quite the contrary, he has ruined that dialogue. If he is on the right track, then the majority of professional philosophers the world over have wasted or are wasting their intellectual careers. That doesn't really mean Popper is wrong.

Let me ask you this, then: can the principle of falsifiability itself ever be falsified? If it can't then by its own measure, it's not "scientific". Further, if one scorns anything "unscientific" as valueless, then the principle of falsifiability must also be valueless.

>Let me ask you this, then: can the principle of falsifiability itself ever be falsified?

In the relevant sense, yes. We switch out conceptual definitions when they fail to encompass the relevant empirical instances. If falsifiability turned out to allow, for example, theology to be considered a science, then we would have to throw out falsifiability. As it is, it's only a coarse-grained principle for demarcation, hence the arguments about string theory.

Re: The Dream of Enlightenment by Anthony Gottlieb review

#49

Post by hyperpape »

eli_gottlieb wrote: post #47
pmoriarty wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"If you can't show them to us, we're not going to accept that they exist in the same sense as books, chairs, and alpha particles." Most scientists believe in plenty of things they can't see, such as magnetism, viruses, gravity, etc. What they can see of these are, arguably, their effects or the behavior of instruments that can detect them. But many scientists also believe in plenty of things that can neither be seen…

>But many scientists also believe in plenty of things that can neither be seen nor (again, arguably) measured, like love, freedom, happiness, and even God. If you claim to be unable to observe love, freedom, and happiness, and to believe there can be no possible observation of God (such as a revelation at Sinai , for example, and its archaeological after-effects), then you're just being plain silly. >What they can se…

"After all, scientifically speaking, everything beyond our sensory nerve-endings is latent and is inferred."

This is not a scientific claim, it is a philosophical one, and a dubious one at that (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/sense-data/).

Re: The Dream of Enlightenment by Anthony Gottlieb review

#50

Post by eli_gottlieb »

hyperpape wrote: post #49
eli_gottlieb wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>But many scientists also believe in plenty of things that can neither be seen nor (again, arguably) measured, like love, freedom, happiness, and even God. If you claim to be unable to observe love, freedom, and happiness, and to believe there can be no possible observation of God (such as a revelation at Sinai , for example, and its archaeological after-effects), then you're just being plain silly. >What they can se…

"After all, scientifically speaking, everything beyond our sensory nerve-endings is latent and is inferred." This is not a scientific claim, it is a philosophical one, and a dubious one at that ( http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/sense-data/ ).

You don't seem to understand. I wasn't making a philosophy-of-mind claim about philosophical sense-data. I was making a claim, a very basic claim, in neuroscience. In some theories, the nerves don't even pass unaltered signals up to the brain! Everything beyond the sensory nerve-ending itself may involve some amount of inference, inferences performed in the spinal cord and sensorimotor cortex themselves long before a percept enters conscious awareness.
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