Philosophy Has Made Plenty of Progress • Hacker News Board

Re: Philosophy Has Made Plenty of Progress

#91

Post by Chathamization » Mon, Nov 05, 2018, 12:56 PM UTC

gepi79 wrote: post #70

YorkshireSeason wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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'd say that it is usually what we treat philosophy as when these discussions come up. As you said, it's probably too restrictive, and the truth is we're all philosophers to some degree, and all working off of certain philosophical underpinnings. But the article (and many philosophers) end up treating philosophy as the above poster describes ("what academics who work in philosophy departments do").

If we use a broad definition of philosophy then of course it is useful, and of course its changed over time (most would consider it progress, some wouldn't). But this doesn't seem to say anything about whether or not the small subsection of philosophers who work as academics in philosophy departments have made useful contributions recently. The fact that they struggle so much with this question suggest that they might not have.

Re: Philosophy Has Made Plenty of Progress

#92

Post by yesenadam » Mon, Nov 05, 2018, 1:14 PM UTC

garmaine wrote: post #26

dalbasal wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The is how philosophy is, in relation to stuff outside of philosophy. For example, there's the discipline of epistemology, study of knowledge. There are actual working versions of science, that deals with all the hairy compromises and complications of reality. Car Vs picture of a car. Still the contribution is philosophers had a major role in creating the scientific method (eg Karl Popper).

Describing the scientific method, not creating it.

I take your point. But actually, not so. 'Scientists' from the ancient Greeks until the 19th C were called natural philosophers, studying natural philosophy. The Greek philosophers all give their theories of the universe, they were the scientists of the day - maybe Socrates was the first to concern himself with just the human world. The word 'scientist' was coined only in 1834.

"Modern meanings of the terms science and scientists date only to the 19th century. Before that, science was a synonym for knowledge or study, in keeping with its Latin origin. The term gained its modern meaning when experimental science and the scientific method became a specialized branch of study apart from natural philosophy.

From the mid-19th century, when it became increasingly unusual for scientists to contribute to both physics and chemistry, "natural philosophy" came to mean just physics... chairs of Natural Philosophy established long ago at the oldest universities are nowadays occupied mainly by physics professors. Isaac Newton's book Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (1687), whose title translates to "Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy", reflects the then-current use of the words "natural philosophy", akin to "systematic study of nature". Even in the 19th century, a treatise by Lord Kelvin and Peter Guthrie Tait, which helped define much of modern physics, was titled Treatise on Natural Philosophy (1867)."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_philosophy#Origin_and_...

Re: Philosophy Has Made Plenty of Progress

#93

Post by whatshisface » Mon, Nov 05, 2018, 1:20 PM UTC

goatlover wrote: post #81

AstralStorm wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That's what analytic philosophy has been trying to do for the past century. How well it has succeeded is debatable. Maybe instead of thinking of language as poor, ambiguous version of logic, we should think of logic as a limited version of language. Logic can't tell us what we should care about, how we should feel, what's worth pursing, what it means to exist as an animal with needs. We suffer, we desire, we wonder.…

Language can tell us all of that but it doesn't seem to get any closer to letting us know which ones are true and which ones aren't.

Re: Philosophy Has Made Plenty of Progress

#94

Post by igravious » Mon, Nov 05, 2018, 1:24 PM UTC

myWindoonn wrote: post #83

I can see why this guy is popular. I wonder whether he'd be so quick to dismiss Gödel and Quine if presented with an utterance like, "This sentence is true, but cannot be proven true by any human nor any human-crafted device." I'm quite confident that this sentence is true, but cannot put forth a proof which would convince anybody; at the same time, just like any other mathematical object, its proof is generated by t…

Quotation marks enable self-reference.

To quote myself, "Quotation marks enable self-reference".

To quote myself again, “To quote myself, "Quotation marks enable self-reference".”.

A formulation is that which is formal (Gödel) and the act of forming (Turing). A computation is the act of computing (Turing) and that which is computable (Gödel).

The less said about Quine the better.

Re: Philosophy Has Made Plenty of Progress

#95

Post by wildmusings » Mon, Nov 05, 2018, 1:33 PM UTC

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 hard problem and qualia are still as unsolved as they were five years ago. I don’t know what makes you think otherwise.

If anything, it is a large portion of scientists and engineers who are engaged in denialism about consciousness.

Re: Philosophy Has Made Plenty of Progress

#96

Post by balfirevic » Mon, Nov 05, 2018, 1:44 PM UTC

cyborgx7 wrote: post #66

malmsteen wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Another good way to frame that is to say that we have reasonable expectation (based on previous accomplishments) of scientific discoveries being true.

Re: Philosophy Has Made Plenty of Progress

#97

Post by rwnspace » Mon, Nov 05, 2018, 1:54 PM UTC

majewsky wrote: post #25

MrScruff wrote: post #13

Could someone with better understanding explain compatibalism to me? I’m struggling to grasp how it can allow for both determinism and free will.

The English Wikipedia article was not very enlightening, so I went over to the German Wikipedia which includes this helpful example: > According to [David] Hume, free will is not the ability to choose otherwise given the exact same inner and outer condition. He considers it the hypothetical ability to choose otherwise, had the actor been in a psychologically different state because of different wishes or beliefs. (So…

Regarding your quote of Joscha Bach, I wonder what we make of Executive Function disorders (ADHD) and their relationship to free will. Particularly, I wonder if philosophers with executive function disorders are more likely to prefer determinism...

Re: Philosophy Has Made Plenty of Progress

#98

Post by naasking » Mon, Nov 05, 2018, 1:57 PM UTC

myWindoonn wrote: post #83

I can see why this guy is popular. I wonder whether he'd be so quick to dismiss Gödel and Quine if presented with an utterance like, "This sentence is true, but cannot be proven true by any human nor any human-crafted device." I'm quite confident that this sentence is true, but cannot put forth a proof which would convince anybody; at the same time, just like any other mathematical object, its proof is generated by t…

> Gödel's entire point was that this formulation was rigorous and could not be escaped by a mere change of (syntactic or semantic) venue.

Well that's not true, because there exist logics that are both consistent and complete, they simply don't have the expressive power of full arithmetic. This is a syntactic or semantic change, depending on how you frame it.

Re: Philosophy Has Made Plenty of Progress

#99

Post by mbrock » Mon, Nov 05, 2018, 2:00 PM UTC

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…

How do you see the influence of the Heideggerian critique of cognitivism, via Hubert Dreyfus, on the "Heideggerian AI" movement which preceded the shift away from classical symbolic AI towards connectionism and embodied learning?

Here's from the introduction to his paper Why Heideggerian AI failed and how fixing it would require making it more Heideggerian:

> When I was teaching at MIT in the early sixties, students from the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory would come to my Heidegger course and say in effect: “You philosophers have been reflecting in your armchairs for over 2000 years and you still don’t understand how the mind works. We in the AI Lab have taken over and are succeeding where you philosophers have failed. We are now programming computers to exhibit human intelligence: to solve problems, to understand natural language, to perceive, and to learn.” In 1968 Marvin Minsky, head of the AI lab, proclaimed: “Within a generation we will have intelligent computers like HAL in the film, 2001.”

> [...] As I studied the RAND papers and memos, I found to my surprise that, far from replacing philosophy, the pioneers in CS had learned a lot, directly and indirectly from the philosophers. They had taken over Hobbes’ claim that reasoning was calculating, Descartes’ mental representations, Leibniz’s idea of a “universal characteristic” – a set of primitives in which all knowledge could be expressed, — Kant’s claim that concepts were rules, Frege’s formalization of such rules, and Russell’s postulation of logical atoms as the building blocks of reality. In short, without realizing it, AI researchers were hard at work turning rationalist philosophy into a research program.

Dreyfus agrees with you, in a way, although where you criticize philosophers doing AI, he criticizes the philosophical prejudices of AI practitioners, who often hold beliefs derived from Cartesian views on the mind. He especially criticized the grand claims of early AI researchers, but I think the criticism is still easily applicable.

Here, for example, from his book Being-in-the-world:

> Having to program computers keeps one honest. There is no room for the armchair rationalist's speculations. Thus AI research has called the Cartesian cognitivist's bluff. It is easy to say that to account for the equipmental nexus one need simply add more and more function predicates and rules describing what is to be done in typical situations, but actual difficulties in AI—its inability to make progress with what is called the commonsense knowledge problem, on the one hand, and its inability to define the current situation, sometimes called the frame problem, on the other—suggest that Heidegger is right. It looks like one cannot build up the phenomenon of world out of meaningless elements.

Re: Philosophy Has Made Plenty of Progress

#100

Post by naasking » Mon, Nov 05, 2018, 2:02 PM UTC

skissane wrote: post #20

MrScruff wrote: post #13

Could someone with better understanding explain compatibalism to me? I’m struggling to grasp how it can allow for both determinism and free will.

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…

I think you pretty fairly describe the current landscape of this debate, which is unusual in itself. Kudos!

> Part of the dispute is over whether such a definition of "free will" matches people's everyday pre-philosophical usage, and also whether it works for the purposes of other disciplines in which the concept of "free will" might be invoked, such as ethics or law.

Fortunately, this is an empirical question that has been explored by experimental philosophy [1]. It turns out that most lay people employ Compatibilist reasoning, so I think this question has also been answered.

[1] The latest that I've seen on the topic: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/274892120_Why_Compa...