Philosophy has made progress -- backwards. Most developments since the end of the scholastic era have been failures.
Philosophy Has Made Plenty of Progress
101–110 of 338 posts
Re: Philosophy Has Made Plenty of Progress
#102Earlier 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…
> Compatibilists would reject 3) but would describe 2) as the exercising of 'free will'.
Compatibilism is "compatible with" determinism, it doesn't depend on determinism. So even if we turn out to be non-deterministic beings, that fact is irrelevant to Compatibilist free will.
The most common Compatibilist view is probably one that focuses on an agent's reasons for acting. If an agent acts for internal reasons, they are acting of their own free will (reasons are beliefs, judgments, inclinations, etc.). If an agent's reasons are subjugated to another agent's reasons (coercion), then they are not acting of their own free will.
Basically, Compatibilism is very similar to the way the law works. We judge whether a person's cognition is compromised in some way, and so whether they are "fit" and so can make choices of their own free will, and then we examine whether they actually did make a choice of their own free will in order to determine whether they are responsible.
Re: Philosophy Has Made Plenty of Progress
#103Could someone with better understanding explain compatibalism to me? I’m struggling to grasp how it can allow for both determinism and free will.
Compatibilists are inconsistent determinists. They claim we're "free" when we're doing what we want; not being forced by external circumstances to do something we don't want. Basically the idea of being free if you're a puppet and love your strings. I find the idea ignores how everything is one entity and what encompasses the puppet, "being the stage & props" must also be loved by the puppet for one to be free. So th…
Are you suggesting that you're constantly doing things you don't want all the time? And that you have no power to change this?
Re: Philosophy Has Made Plenty of Progress
#104Could someone with better understanding explain compatibalism to me? I’m struggling to grasp how it can allow for both determinism and free will.
To put it shortly but slightly inaccurately, compatibilism basically comes from the idea that "free will" is implied by "moral responsibility", and then it is noted that moral responsibility and determinism are compatible. For more detail, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/compatibilism/#FreWil .
> To put it shortly but slightly inaccurately, compatibilism basically comes from the idea that "free will" is implied by "moral responsibility", and then it is noted that moral responsibility and determinism are compatible.
It's actually the other way around: if you acted according to your own free will, then you are morally responsible for your choice.
Re: Philosophy Has Made Plenty of Progress
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
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,…
Of all the possible threats that science might pose to Christian doctrine, it's odd to choose heliocentrism and the age of the Earth as examples. Those facts are fully compatible with the Nicene Creed, and few serious Christain thinkers have ever thought that the Bible had to be interpreted as a scientific textbook. As far back as the third century, Origen was pointing out that the creation narrative shouldn't be tak…
Notably, the Catholic church doesn't have a problem with the current scientific theories of the creation of the world. They don't take Gensis literally.
They view the creation story in contrast with other creation stories of the religions of the time. Notably, that there is a single, eternal God directing all things for good rather than a pantheon of gods in conflict.
Re: Philosophy Has Made Plenty of Progress
#106Earlier 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…
Shouldn't you be making your own argument within a formal logic, to avoid this awful ambiguity that makes it impossible to understand what you're saying or argue with you?
Re: Philosophy Has Made Plenty of Progress
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
I completely agree with you. It's a difficult subject. I have proposed the following two definitions: 1. Philosophers in the original article: best understood as acedemic philosopers. 2. Progress in AI/maths/hard science: comes from those who actually "do the maths/implementation/repeatable measurement" as opposed to using natural language only for discussing their ideas. In my opinion the purpose of all science is t…
You seem to be assuming that philosophers are somehow restricted to using natural language only, but * the formalization and regimentation of natural language has always been a fairly central concern in philosophy (that's where formal logic comes from); * mathematics can be, and used to be, done in largely natural language.
What was a good definition of philosopher then is not what is a good definition now. Meaning evolves!
I invite you to think historically, and in terms of ongoing differentiation of science: the drive towards formalising/axiomatising mathematics which was started in earnest at the end of the 19th, beginning of the 20th century, has been accelerating. These days mathematics is partly verified in interactive theorem provers like Isabelle/HOL, Coq, Agda and Lean. A Fields medallist (Voevodsky) dedicated his post-Fields career towards more mechanisation of Mathematics. I predict that in 100 years from now, mathematics that is not formalised in a mechanical tool will not be publishable in reputable venues.
Re: Philosophy Has Made Plenty of Progress
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hubert Dreyfus claimed that AI was a test of the Cartesian theory of mind. Dreyfus was also pretty much right about everything AI related from the 1960s on. It will take nothing short of a true self-driving car to refute something he said.
Sorry, I have not spent time with the philosophy of other people. Could you explain what you mean, especially with regard to my previous comment ? This is my opinion: https://machineperson.org/ai.html https://machineperson.org/existence.html
I can't.
The essential blocks of Dreyfus are in Martin Heidegger (which I also haven't studied in depth). Helping you obtain a partially understood, utilitarian version of my partially understood, utilitarian version of Dreyfus's partially understood, utilitarian version of Heidegger would be... enabling.
You really need to "spend time with the philosophy of other people" if you want to move ahead with the notions explored in those two links.
Re: Philosophy Has Made Plenty of Progress
#109Earlier 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…
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.
No.
I am in awe of the empirical work in Neuroscience. The last few years have seen a "Cambrian Explosion" of new measurements. We can now measure live neurons at scale! I do think this work is also much more interesting than arm-chair thinking about the brain, consciousness, embodied cognition etc. However, as a working programmer/logician/foundations of maths person I'm in much better a position to compare and contrast formal work in my field with philosophers contribution than I can in neuroscience.
Re: Philosophy Has Made Plenty of Progress
#110> No amount of just grinding out the digits and checking will ever prove it: there are always more digits to check.
This guy doesn't know how mathematical proofs work. If the above was close to reality, nobody could ever proof Fermat's major theorem, because there are "always more triples of numbers to check".
> All Gödel did was find a clever way to construct a provably unprovable mathematical fact.
That not what Gödel did, and certainly not all he did. Gödel demonstrated that number theory expressed in first order logic is incomplete, i.e. admits more than one model. He did that by constructing a statement that is true in the smallest model, but does not have a proof, because it is false in others.
With these ignorant statements, Maudlin just reinforced my opinion that philosophers are simply professional bullshitters.