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Philosophy Has Made Plenty of Progress

blogs.scientificamerican.com

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Re: Philosophy Has Made Plenty of Progress

#61

Post by acqq »

brobdingnagians wrote: post #45

Sounds like a clever, witty, and charming guy. Would be very interesting to talk to him; I like his style of talking. Curiously ironic that he cites a consensus in personal belief in atheism and agnostics among philosophers (at least, modern philosophers, most philosophers in history believed in God..) as a good reason for philosophy not accepting the existence of God, which appears to be a popularity contest (and ec…

That the gods are man made is not a discovery of recent times but was known by the thinkers in antique and started to be obvious again some 500 years ago, as the whole continents were discovered that appeared nowhere in the holly texts. Soon enough, the heliocentrism was discovered and got the magnificent scientific explanation with Newton. And so on and on: today we know that the Universe is 13.7 billion years old, that we’re all made of the stuff either made in the Big Bang or inside of the stars... It’s simply not matching any “holly” text. So whichever of those you’d like to believe, there’s your main problem, not the people who typically just don’t believe in one more diety than you.

Re: Philosophy Has Made Plenty of Progress

#62

Post by tkyjonathan »

mapcars wrote: post #27

Philosophy to me is a kind of fanciful thinking. Article mentions something about being "purely theoretical", but is your life theoretical or real? If it's real you can't approach it by pure theory. As well as there is much more to life than just thinking.

Philosophy is the study of concepts. To get to something purely theoretical, you need to abstract the precepts of your original concepts. Then it becomes a floating abstraction.

Take for example Einstein: he found some mathematical formulas, proved they were right and then used them as the abstraction for everything else. His example of 'what if I stand on a train traveling at the speed of light and it gets hit by lightning' is no longer something that you can prove in reality.

Ideally, you need precepts and concepts to work together and keep validating that your concepts work in reality.

Re: Philosophy Has Made Plenty of Progress

#63

Post by tkyjonathan »

visarga wrote: post #4

I don't think philosophy is keeping up with the progress in AI, neuroscience and game theory. If it did, there would be less discussion about the 'Chinese room', qualia and 'hard problem' of consciousness. Instead, we'd head about embodiment, rewards, agents vs environments, learning, representation, exploration-exploitation tradeoff, and such. There are theories of language and meaning in philosophy, but in AI there…

The reason why philosophy is not keeping up is that there are 'misintegrating' frameworks with in it that take it down the wrong track and can no longer integrate new concepts into it.

But you have that problem in science too like quantum mechanics, string theory..

Re: Philosophy Has Made Plenty of Progress

#64

Post by foldr »

YorkshireSeason wrote: post #54
dstrohmaier wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whether or not these topics fall under the domain of philosophy, let me assure you that people in philosophy departments are covering them. Especially philosophers working in the philosophy of mind and cognitive science have a lot to say about issues such as embodiment, the relation between agents and environment (consider the extended mind debate or the debate about affordances), representation (e.g. Fodor), and man…

In my experience when philosophers say something about those things, they say it in natural language (typically English), and that is not precise enough for measurement. All problems can be handwaved away with ad-hoc modification. The difference between philosophers 'doing' AI and what e.g. DeepMind do is that the latter are precise enough (indeed as precise as possible -- pace the Church-Turing thesis) about their r…

>Whence all progress in AI since Turing, Shannon, Zuse et al has come from programmers and not philosophers.

You mean, all of the progress since the philosophers who laid down the foundations of the field?

Re: Philosophy Has Made Plenty of Progress

#65

Post by skissane »

MrScruff wrote: post #44
skissane wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no single universally agreed definition of the term "free will". So, it is possible to define "free will" in such a way that it is compatible with determinism (e.g., "my will is free if its decisions are the product of my ordinary processes of thinking–even if those ordinary processes are determined by natural laws–as opposed to the product of any extraordinary external interference such as drugs, brainwashi…

So it seems the crux of the matter is how we regard the process of a person making a decision. A compatibilist would say that for the purposes of discussion we describe this event as the exercising of will, even though from a physics perspective the outcome could be predetermined. Is that correct? If so that seems similar to a recent discussion on Bohr's view of the irreducibility of biology to physics. https://news.…

Certainly that's one way a compatibilist could put it – that "free will" is part of psychology, which ultimately reduces to/emerges from/supervenes upon lower layers of biology/chemistry/physics which may be fundamentally deterministic. (Although exactly how deterministic they are may depend on which interpretation of quantum mechanics is correct.)

A point worth adding – there are different forms of determinism. Physical determinism says people's decisions are predetermined by physical laws and initial conditions. Theological determinism says people's decisions are predetermined by God's will. A compatibilist could be either. (Although most compatibilists you'll encounter these days are in the physical not theological camp.)

Re: Philosophy Has Made Plenty of Progress

#66

Post by cyborgx7 »

malmsteen wrote: post #60
brobdingnagians wrote: post #45

Sounds like a clever, witty, and charming guy. Would be very interesting to talk to him; I like his style of talking. Curiously ironic that he cites a consensus in personal belief in atheism and agnostics among philosophers (at least, modern philosophers, most philosophers in history believed in God..) as a good reason for philosophy not accepting the existence of God, which appears to be a popularity contest (and ec…

The point of science is that its supposed to be verifiable/ provable at least by someone. Its "trust" (in that "someone" or "group of people" who can prove it)... not "faith". Faith is when its literally unprovable by anyone but you still believe it. Its completely different.

I've explained this to people a couple of times who make the "faith in science" argument. The difference is that you -can- verify it, not that you did verify it.

Your terminology of trust vs. faith is great. I will incorporate it into my arguments in the future.

Re: Philosophy Has Made Plenty of Progress

#67

Post by yters »

majewsky wrote: post #28
Veedrac wrote: post #17

Is it just me or is the title not supported by the article?

Just you. :) It probably refers to this part: > Q: Your colleague David Chalmers has fretted that “there has not been large collective convergence to the truth on the big questions of philosophy,” such as God, free will and consciousness. Does this lack of convergence bother you? > A: I disagree with Dave here. Overwhelmingly most philosophers are atheists or agnostics, which I take to be convergence to the truth. Mo…

When most ancient philosophers were theists and believed in libertarian free will and an immaterial soul, was that a convergence to the truth, too?

Re: Philosophy Has Made Plenty of Progress

#68

Post by gepi79 »

YorkshireSeason wrote: post #35
gepi79 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMO, progress in philosophy leads to science. First you think and imagine (philosophy) then you try and know and have made progress (science). From the article: Yes (with qualification) and yes. Already in Republic (Plato again!) we have an argument—a clear and compelling rational argument—that even the highest political office should be open to women. The argument? List what it takes to be a good leader of the state…

Already in Republic Given that Plato's Republic was written over 2000 years ago, that's pretty weak a claim to progress in philosophy.

IMO the interesting point was the approach:

- First thinking what could lead to progress.

- Then progress in the form of 2 lists that answer the question if women should be allowed for the highest political office.

Re: Philosophy Has Made Plenty of Progress

#69

Post by AstralStorm »

tkyjonathan wrote: post #62
mapcars wrote: post #27

Philosophy to me is a kind of fanciful thinking. Article mentions something about being "purely theoretical", but is your life theoretical or real? If it's real you can't approach it by pure theory. As well as there is much more to life than just thinking.

Philosophy is the study of concepts. To get to something purely theoretical, you need to abstract the precepts of your original concepts. Then it becomes a floating abstraction. Take for example Einstein: he found some mathematical formulas, proved they were right and then used them as the abstraction for everything else. His example of 'what if I stand on a train traveling at the speed of light and it gets hit by li…

Mathematics and logic are more of a study of concepts than philosophy, highly contaminated by language and imprecision, could ever warrant to be.

(These are earliest branches out of philosophy by the way.)

Use of natural language makes most of the ideas entertained by philosophy highly ambiguous until they get formalized.

Even ethics can be strictly formalized in a more advanced logic system, making the ideas and applicability clear.

Or are we trying for something more complex, such as creativity?

Re: Philosophy Has Made Plenty of Progress

#70

Post by gepi79 »

YorkshireSeason wrote: post #48
gepi79 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMO, progress in philosophy leads to science. First you think and imagine (philosophy) then you try and know and have made progress (science). From the article: Yes (with qualification) and yes. Already in Republic (Plato again!) we have an argument—a clear and compelling rational argument—that even the highest political office should be open to women. The argument? List what it takes to be a good leader of the state…

First you think and imagine (philosophy) I'd suggest that's not a good characterisation of philosophy, because according to that characterisation, everybody is a philosopher and doing philosophy all the time. That definition is not specific enough to do the question discussed in the article justice. The article defends (whether successful or not I'll leave open) philosophy against the common charge of not having prog…

Answering what is philosphy is philosophy. And thus, IMO, I am right.

> Philosophy is what academics who work in philosophy departments do.

IMO this is too restrictive. You reduce philosophy to a job title or diploma title. I guess, many philosophers would not agree with this definition.

> I make a strong counterclaim: all progress in philosophy comes from progress in the hard sciences.

I agree that new knowledge and new abilities lead to new ideas and questions and concerns. But philosophy is not limited to physics or chemistry; IMO the only hard sciences.

Physics and chemistry are hard sections within an open ended spectrum:

- The begin (1D view) or lower level layer (3D view) are unknown. Is string theory correct ? What are strings made of ? Is mental conscious the lower layer ? Is all a simulation ?

- The end (1D view) or upper layer (3D view) are soft science. Like biology, sociology, psychology, economics.

Regarding economics: Yanis Varoufakis: Live at Politics and Prose https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H38tZhPying&t=377

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