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Philosophy Has Made Plenty of Progress

blogs.scientificamerican.com

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Re: Philosophy Has Made Plenty of Progress

#141

Post by claudiawerner »

brobdingnagians wrote: post #53
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.

Ancient philosophers didn't believe it was purely theoretical. They thought it was a way of gaining wisdom and living a good life (or study of physics, but again, practical). But, then again, it is kind of an equivocation to say that most modern philosophy is philosophy in the sense it was taken before. It was taken to be highly practical in days of yore.

It's worth noting that a good part of the continental tradition since Marx doesn't view it as purely theoretical either, after all:

"The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it."

Re: Philosophy Has Made Plenty of Progress

#142

Post by Koshkin »

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…

On faith in science, see Penrose: https://press.princeton.edu/titles/10664.html

Re: Philosophy Has Made Plenty of Progress

#143

Post by stromgo »

eli_gottlieb wrote: post #121
wl wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 noneth…

>Faith in science is not an unreasonable assumption—says me who holds that assumption—but it's faith nonetheless. Faith is when one acts on a belief without having any rational reason for it. My rational reason for believing in science is simply: it works!

Indeed. Subway cars move forward without any horse pulling them, how is this miracle possible? What turned out to work was the steam engine, and now electromagnetism, explained by science. What didn't turn out to work was an elite team of people praying for the train to move.

Re: Philosophy Has Made Plenty of Progress

#144

Post by brownbat »

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 Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is a great resource for common sense and exhaustive coverage of these sorts of things:

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/compatibilism/

Classical free will, going back to Hobbes, is really just that sometimes we act unencumbered by external forces. Determinism posits that no one can act other than how one ultimately does.

Those could be compatible.

There is a difference between me deciding to stay in a room after careful deliberation, and me being chained to a wall in that room in spite of my protest.

Even if the future is fixed, there's still a difference between a person being forced to do something by an external actor and a person doing something they would ordinarily do.

Re: Philosophy Has Made Plenty of Progress

#145

Post by fjsolwmv »

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.

Compatibilism rests upon the concept of philosophical zombies. It says that since you can't know someone else's internal state, you can assume they have free will, because assuming they don't gave free will doesn't change anything you can observe. It basically says that free will is an unanswerable question, so it swaps in a different question that is answerable.

Its akin to p-values in statistics (probability of evidence given hypothesis) being used in place of a what we really want to know (probability of a gypothesis given evidence).

Re: Philosophy Has Made Plenty of Progress

#146

Post by fjsolwmv »

brownbat wrote: post #144
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 Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is a great resource for common sense and exhaustive coverage of these sorts of things: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/compatibilism/ Classical free will, going back to Hobbes, is really just that sometimes we act unencumbered by external forces. Determinism posits that no one can act other than how one ultimately does. Those could be compatible. There is a difference betwee…

And that Hobbesian definition was ignorant of modern neuroscience.

Re: Philosophy Has Made Plenty of Progress

#148

Post by 3pt14159 »

eli_gottlieb wrote: post #121
wl wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 noneth…

>Faith in science is not an unreasonable assumption—says me who holds that assumption—but it's faith nonetheless. Faith is when one acts on a belief without having any rational reason for it. My rational reason for believing in science is simply: it works!

Look, I don't want to get all in the weeds here because it would complicate things unnecessarily, but if it's really that simple to you then you should know that this argument contains a logical falacy:

Argumentum ad consequentiam or appeal to consequences.

Once you let go of thinking that truth is knowable you'll realize that there is some faith that you have.

It's not in science per-se; but it might be faith that you exist. That you can reasonably conceive of thoughts. That those thoughts order the world and that the world that you perceive is a representation not unduly clouded. That the actions of your being are guided by your own will.

Truth might not be knowable in an absolute sense, but you can use these little starting points of faith then come to appreciate that there is a truth continuum and science is a good approach to discovering knowledge.

Philosophy seems so stupid before you start learning it, but it really is beautiful and I regret not being able to pour over it more.

Re: Philosophy Has Made Plenty of Progress

#149

Post by wwarner »

08-15 wrote: post #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 Gö…

I don't know if it makes him ignorant, but I agree the statement sweeps the philosophical issues Gödel addressed under the rug. There were two major works of the 20th century that would never have been attempted if the authors had known of Gödel's proof. First, Whitehead and Russel's Prinicpia Mathematica, which attempted to "describe a set of axioms and inference rules in symbolic logic from which all mathematical truths could in principle be proven". The other was Wittgenstein's Tractatus, which was a similar attempt to provide a foundation for language. To be fair, Gödel's theorem didn't end scientific inquiry, and I'm sure that Maudlin knows about these titanic failures. I'd like to know what he thinks of them.

Re: Philosophy Has Made Plenty of Progress

#150

Post by brownbat »

fjsolwmv wrote: post #146
brownbat wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is a great resource for common sense and exhaustive coverage of these sorts of things: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/compatibilism/ Classical free will, going back to Hobbes, is really just that sometimes we act unencumbered by external forces. Determinism posits that no one can act other than how one ultimately does. Those could be compatible. There is a difference betwee…

And that Hobbesian definition was ignorant of modern neuroscience.

Modern neuroscience wouldn't tell you very much that's useful about external forces.

All Hobbesian free will is committed to is that being chained to a wall changes your circumstances. Being kidnapped deprives you of meaningful options.

There is a separate version of free will that insists that agents are the ultimate cause of their actions, rather than mediated causes, which would not be consistent with determinism. But that is not the only definition of free will (and I don't think a very common one, except by incompatabilists).

A lot of this hinges on what people actually mean by the individual phrases.

If you sometimes engage in deliberation, and sometimes deliberation changes your mind, then even if that deliberation would have always inevitably come out the same way, you still know that in those cases deliberation affected your subsequent actions. Your deliberation (informed though it may be by external factors) is sufficient for most sensible versions of agency.

(EDITED to be more comprehensive.)

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