Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Philosophy Has Made Plenty of Progress

blogs.scientificamerican.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 338 posts

Re: Philosophy Has Made Plenty of Progress

#71

Post by AstralStorm »

paganel wrote: post #55
nyc111 wrote: post #2

> Philosophy, in its purest form, contains the study of what it is to live a good human life. I don't think this a properly general definition of philosophy (although he says "contains",maybe he is not after generality). I would say philosophy is the science of definitions. This is why it is fundamental.

> I would say philosophy is the science of definitions It depends, I guess. If it matters I for one stand on Socrates's side when it comes to what philosophy is and I find definitions to be just "syntactic sugar", they don't bring anything new to the table. This is also one of the reasons for why I found Aristotle pretty boring, I think he started this trend with categorizing things and defining terms, without trying…

Axiomatized mathematics and logic too complicated, compared to undefined meanings in philosophy?

There is no grand view in philosophy either, but millions of tiny conflicts coexisting from which no truth can be gleaned as the philosophers will wriggle out with sophistry. (Just like politicians for that matter.)

It is a good old Wittgesteinian challenge.

Hope so you define concept of free will in axiomatic logic? Should we start with axiom of choice perhaps?

Re: Philosophy Has Made Plenty of Progress

#72

Post by YorkshireSeason »

foldr wrote: post #64
YorkshireSeason wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Which philosopher has laid down the foundations of the field? One good starting point for AI is Leibniz' Calculemus!, and Leibniz was a mathematician/programmer and not a philosopher in the sense that the original article by Tim Maudlin seems to defend. Leibniz even built automata, formaliesed (propositional logic) etc!

Re: Philosophy Has Made Plenty of Progress

#73

Post by goatlover »

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.

But not everyone who has faith agrees with that. You have apologists, theologians, and even philosophers (more so in the past) who argue that the faith can be defended via logic and evidence.

I don't agree with their arguments. Just pointing out that not everyone thinks faith is this Kierkegaardean leap.

Jewish and Christian scriptures also don't define faith that way, for the most part. The Gnostics would have been more on board.

Re: Philosophy Has Made Plenty of Progress

#74

Post by foldr »

YorkshireSeason wrote: post #72
foldr wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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?

Which philosopher has laid down the foundations of the field? One good starting point for AI is Leibniz' Calculemus! , and Leibniz was a mathematician/programmer and not a philosopher in the sense that the original article by Tim Maudlin seems to defend. Leibniz even built automata, formaliesed (propositional logic) etc!

I've had this discussion on HN several times before. As soon as you start pointing out the contributions of philosophy to various fields, people start denying that the people in question were philosophers. So you really can't win. By this logic, any philosopher who made a contribution to mathematics or science was ipso facto a scientist or mathematician and not a philosopher.

Re: Philosophy Has Made Plenty of Progress

#75

Post by goatlover »

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…

Recent progress in AI hasn't made a dent in questions related to consciousness and intentionality. And all those things you mentioned such as embodiment, agents, environments, etc. have been explored in psychology, cognitive science and philosophy (also computer science) prior to the last 5 years. They're not new terms.

Re: Philosophy Has Made Plenty of Progress

#76

Post by FabHK »

MrScruff wrote: post #49
Ephem wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As Wikipedia phrases Harry G. Frankfurt (1969): "A compatibilist can believe that a person can choose between many choices, but the choice is always determined by external factors" A bit sloppily put, a compatibilist believes a choice is free if the agent making it is not coerced or constrainted, even if the choice that the agent will make is determined. Different compatibilists approach this as either being descript…

So is it the case that the compatibilist imagines three possible classes of decision. 1) Where the decision is coerced. 2) Where the decision is not coerced and so ostensibly 'free' but determined by external factors (ie. the laws of Physics). 3) Where the decision is genuinely 'free', thus violating the laws of Physics as we know them. Compatibilists would reject 3) but would describe 2) as the exercising of 'free w…

Yes, that's my understanding as well.

(Not sure what you mean with "reject 3)" - they basically say it doesn't happen, and it need not happen for free will.)

The thought experiment is always "suppose we could turn back time, and arrive in exactly the same situation as we were before - could I have decided differently?". The traditional notion of free will sort of requires that you could have decided differently. The compatibilist notion of free will implies that, no, you could not have decided differently - but that doesn't mean that you have no free will.

EDIT to add: Sam Harris has a book about his version of compatibilism:

https://samharris.org/books/free-will/

Re: Philosophy Has Made Plenty of Progress

#77

Post by Ephem »

MrScruff wrote: post #49
Ephem wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As Wikipedia phrases Harry G. Frankfurt (1969): "A compatibilist can believe that a person can choose between many choices, but the choice is always determined by external factors" A bit sloppily put, a compatibilist believes a choice is free if the agent making it is not coerced or constrainted, even if the choice that the agent will make is determined. Different compatibilists approach this as either being descript…

So is it the case that the compatibilist imagines three possible classes of decision. 1) Where the decision is coerced. 2) Where the decision is not coerced and so ostensibly 'free' but determined by external factors (ie. the laws of Physics). 3) Where the decision is genuinely 'free', thus violating the laws of Physics as we know them. Compatibilists would reject 3) but would describe 2) as the exercising of 'free w…

In a nutshell that about sums it up. I do think many compatibilists think that 1->2 is a scale and that there exists a lot of nuance here though.

Interestingly enough, maybe it's not the meaning of the word "free" that is under debate here, but instead that of the word coerced?

Re: Philosophy Has Made Plenty of Progress

#78

Post by charlysl »

nyc111 wrote: post #42
charlysl wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bertrand Russell: Philosophy, as I shall understand the word, is something intermediate between theology and science. Like theology, it consists of speculations on matters as to which definite knowledge has, so far, been unascertainable; but like science, it appeals to human reason rather than to authority, whether that of tradition or that of revelation. All definite knowledge—so I should contend— belongs to science…

This seems a qoute from the Introduction of his History of western philosophy [1]. But I think the next sentence is important too: Almost all the questions of most interest to speculative minds are such as science cannot answer, and the confident answers of theologians no longer seem so convincing as they did in former centuries. [...] To such questions no answer can be found in the laboratory. Theologies have profes…

You are right about the quote.

It seems that what Russell considers definite knowledge is ... answer can be found in the laboratory. It depends on what is the best available method for proving, to the extent to which this is possible, a given hypothesis. Whenever an experimental method in the scientific sense is possible, then he considers that kind of knowledge definite. I agree that the fact that it is also provisional is confusing, but I think that it's just a matter of language in this case, maybe definite is not the best word.

I agree that maybe his definition is not fully satisfactory. But this book's audience is lay people like me, it is not as much an academic work as a book of popular philosophy (like popular science). For this reason, he probably preferred to write engaging prose, rather than being totally precise but dry.

I posted this quote because whenever there is an article about philosophy in HN, people invariably enter a debate as to what exactly is philosophy. I find that for the lay man his definition is very clear, simple, memorable and beautifully written. I find it very useful in practice, for people like me it is a powerful definition.

Re: Philosophy Has Made Plenty of Progress

#79

Post by goatlover »

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…

Only if you think philosophy of mind is the same thing as computer science. I would consider neuroscience and psychology to be more informative for questions about the mind.

Re: Philosophy Has Made Plenty of Progress

#80

Post by [deleted] »

AstralStorm wrote: post #69
tkyjonathan wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 app…

[deleted]
Post reply on HN