Could someone with better understanding explain compatibalism to me? I’m struggling to grasp how it can allow for both determinism and free will.
"You can do what you want, but you can't want what you want."
- Lawrence of Arabia
Philosophy Has Made Plenty of Progress
111–120 of 338 posts
Re: Philosophy Has Made Plenty of Progress
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 pro…
Philosophy is also much more formal than it was 1000 years ago (e.g. compare [1] to [2]). Indeed, the formalization of mathematics was driven by philosophers trying to put mathematical reasoning on an adequate foundation.
[1] https://mally.stanford.edu/Papers/ontological.pdf
[2] https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/basis/anselm-proslogium.asp
Re: Philosophy Has Made Plenty of Progress
#113Philosophy 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 to me is a kind of fanciful thinking.
Then you don't properly understand philosophy.
One thing philosophy does is help you construct valid arguments and to recognize fallacies, which are very useful, practical skills.
I took a course on logic as part of my undergrad degree, and it was there that I learned about De Morgan's laws -- which I use frequently when I'm programming.
Moral philosophers confront some really big issues, but they're not all bizarre hypotheticals. Many of them have real-world consequences, such as the debate over euthanasia and assisted suicide.
Philosophy is not all about navel-gazing. It's unfortunate that so many people hold mistaken views about it.
Re: Philosophy Has Made Plenty of Progress
#114Sounds 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.
That is not the scientific method at all. The point of science is to make a plausible conjecture and try to prove it false. When you honestly can't falsify your conjecture, then you put some faith in it as a good explanation. This is a logically sound way to try and understand the universe, but you never prove or verify anything - you just get plausible beliefs. Math has proofs, and trusting someone else is politics.
Re: Philosophy Has Made Plenty of Progress
#115> Hasn’t quantum mechanics demolished the hope that science will make reality intelligible? > Not in the least. As Bell said, study Bohm’s pilot wave theory and you see that everything can be explained perfectly well, with no funny business at all logically or conceptually. We are stuck with non-locality, as Bell proved, but maybe in the end you need non-locality for the deep simplicity of law that I anticipate. I'm…
Yes, it is! I think that Bohm’s pilot wave theory is appealing to non technical people because it replace all the scary equations of quantum mechanics with a wave and a particle. The trick is that the wave has a scary equation, and the interaction of the wave and the particle has a scary equation, but you can hide the scary equations behind a nice animated graph of a wave and a ball. For a nonrelativistic particle, t…
I think you're being quite disrespectful in claiming that Bohm's theory is only appealing to "non technical" people, because it hides "scary" parts.
The appeal of Bohm is that it results in QM that is deterministic, without needing to resort to ill-defined notions of collapse.
I'm quite sure "hiding the scary equations" has absolutely zero to do with it, and it honestly comes across as offensive to suggest that it is.
Re: Philosophy Has Made Plenty of Progress
#116Is 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…
"These answers to age-old questions are popular right now, so I'm just going to declare 'Problem solved!' and attribute it to philosophical progress".
That's some hard-hitting philosophy right there.
Re: Philosophy Has Made Plenty of Progress
#117> Hasn’t quantum mechanics demolished the hope that science will make reality intelligible? > Not in the least. As Bell said, study Bohm’s pilot wave theory and you see that everything can be explained perfectly well, with no funny business at all logically or conceptually. We are stuck with non-locality, as Bell proved, but maybe in the end you need non-locality for the deep simplicity of law that I anticipate. I'm…
Yes, it is! I think that Bohm’s pilot wave theory is appealing to non technical people because it replace all the scary equations of quantum mechanics with a wave and a particle. The trick is that the wave has a scary equation, and the interaction of the wave and the particle has a scary equation, but you can hide the scary equations behind a nice animated graph of a wave and a ball. For a nonrelativistic particle, t…
I think you're unnecessarily dismissive of pilot waves and people who accept them. There are plenty of compelling properties of pilot wave theories, like a proper accounting of measurement.
Even John Bell of Bell's theorem suggested that the greatest problem facing physics was integrating the non-locality of QM with relativity, and the fact that pilot waves place this non-locality front and centre is a feature not a bug, because other interpretations can more easily sweep this under the rug only for difficulties to show up later.
Also, there are many perfectly fine relativistic extensions of pilot wave theories, so that claim is factually incorrect. They haven't settled on a canonical one, but pilot wave physicists get probably 0.01% of the funding of other physics work, so that's hardly surprising.
Re: Philosophy Has Made Plenty of Progress
#118Earlier 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.
That is not the scientific method at all. The point of science is to make a plausible conjecture and try to prove it false. When you honestly can't falsify your conjecture, then you put some faith in it as a good explanation. This is a logically sound way to try and understand the universe, but you never prove or verify anything - you just get plausible beliefs. Math has proofs, and trusting someone else is politics.
Science doesn't prove things. It fails to prove they are false, and in doing so it leaves you with things that are reasonable to believe.
Re: Philosophy Has Made Plenty of Progress
#119Sounds 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.
It's unprovable that science is the best method to arrive at truth about the universe. Remember that science attempts to come up with the best explanation for the evidence we have, often using experimentation to resolve questions. The answers are always tentative—ready to be thrown out if better ones come along.
Faith in science is not an unreasonable assumption—says me who holds that assumption—but it's faith nonetheless.
Re: Philosophy Has Made Plenty of Progress
#120Earlier 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…
> 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 research hypotheses that they can measure and confirm/refute their hypotheses, unlike the former.
They still remain in a framework of axioms we made. This gains nothing, and what's more, many scientists used to know this. Everything you measure you measure according to a ruler you or someoone else ultimately made. Yes, numbers are more precise, but more importantly, they're just numbers. And like what Douglas Adams said about money.. it's very odd how much revolves around numbers, seeing how it's not the numbers that are unhappy, guilty, and so on. Never bought into that, and always preferred the company that puts me in.
> And so in its actual procedure physics studies not these inscrutable qualities, but pointer-readings which we can observe, The readings, it is true, reflect the fluctuations of the world-qualities; but our exact knowledge is of the readings, not of the qualities. The former have as much resemblance to the latter as a telephone number has to a subscriber.
— Arthur Stanley Eddington, The Domain of Physical Science (1925)
> The danger of computers becoming like humans is not as great as the danger of humans becoming like computers.
-- Konrad Zuse
> But the moral good of a moral act inheres in the act itself. That is why an act can itself ennoble or corrupt the person who performs it. The victory of instrumental reason in our time has brought about the virtual disappearance of this insight and thus perforce the delegitimation of the very idea of nobility.
-- Joseph Weizenbaum
How would you measure something like nobility? Do things you cannot measure exist? Can things you cannot prove mathematically true? Can they be right? Should a person who doesn't love wisdom, or people for that matter, even be allowed program machines that decide over the lives of others?