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Philosophy Has Made Plenty of Progress

blogs.scientificamerican.com

181–190 of 338 posts

Re: Philosophy Has Made Plenty of Progress

#181
post #174
post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good response! To add to your points, GP also misses a really important distinction between science and religion and the way each system arrives at conclusions. Science is merely a set of tools and processes, nothing more. Seriously, NOTHING more. If, as GP says, you are taking it on faith that some "scientific conclusion" is true, you're merely deferring expertise on the matter. Much like when your tech support guy…

> Science is merely a set of tools and processes, nothing more. Seriously, NOTHING more. Nonsense - that ignores that fundamentally science is a human activity. Because it is a human activity it is open to the same biases, self-deceptions, fads, groupthink and political pressures as any other human activity. Apart from that, implicit in your defense of science and attack on religion is a belief that true knowledge ca…

The key phrase is 'falsifiable in principle' this God business (and it is indeed a business, if not all of it) is not. One can have all ones faith in flying spaghetti monster as one cares to have but there is no way even in principle to falsify it if it turns out that it is false.

Re: Philosophy Has Made Plenty of Progress

#182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Redefining "truth is knowable" to "truth is knowable with infinite certainty a la Descartes" is itself a deeply contentious epistemological stance, and still doesn't validate the use of the term "faith" for ordinary abductive reasoning from experience.

I did no such redefinition. Though I also didn't downvote you, because I think it's a valid misunderstanding.

I'm arguing that mere truth is unknowable without faith. We have evidence of derangement all around us and it takes faith to proceed as though our actions are our own and are unclouded. From a bayesian perspective, one of our priors must be that there is some probability that the very mind that is doing the thinking may be of a nature that is unable to effectively reason. But there is no escape because the mind is the centre of all investigation.

Re: Philosophy Has Made Plenty of Progress

#183

Philosophy has made progress -- backwards. Most developments since the end of the scholastic era have been failures.

100%. I was cringing throughout this entire article - first off, Philosophy in scientific journal. Those two domains are innately distinct from eachother. When people start talking about science and intermixing philosophy I cannot help but cringe. People need to really read and understand Aristotle before attempting the enlightenment authors, then the postmoderns. This whole article was nothing short of nonsense

Re: Philosophy Has Made Plenty of Progress

#184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> ill-defined notions of collapse

Actually, the wavefunction collapse is a very well defined mathematical construct; so, if you are ignoring or trying to avoid it, you are literally "hiding the scary equations."

Re: Philosophy Has Made Plenty of Progress

#185
post #171
post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You missed the "Nope, see above." part right before your quote.

No, I didn't miss it. The fact that the ad hominem was accompanied by another argument does not change the fact that it was an ad hominem. (The other argument was also mostly bogus IMHO, but making that case would take a lot longer.) UPDATE: actually, I've changed my mind. The other argument can also be dispensed with rather quickly: "Only the philosophers always make a good choice, because the ultimate thing they st…

>the unexamined life is not worth living [...] not worrying so much about what is "the good life"

Unexamined, not overexamined.

Re: Philosophy Has Made Plenty of Progress

#186
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.

I wonder what the AI (in the sense 'the true artificial super-intelligence') would have to say about philosophy.

Re: Philosophy Has Made Plenty of Progress

#187
post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The point of science is to make a plausible conjecture and try to prove it false. FWIW, and I'm not an expert, but I'd say that the Popperian view you summarise reflects philosophy of science circa 1960's, and things have moved on since then.

I don't want to sound too snarky, but "moved on" sounds like we're talking about fashion... Has modus tollens moved on too? I haven't studied modern philosophy (or Popper), but if there is a concise explanation I'd like to hear it.

I mean the biggest thing was Kuhn coming along and saying "experimentally, it doesn't work that way."

What I mean is, people don't find an experiment about nanostructures that doesn't work and start going "hey I think I have disproved quantum mechanics!". Even when the OPERA faster-than-light neutrino debacle was going on, physicists were largely saying "We are pretty sure that there is some mistake in either the model or the experiment such that these neutrinos are not moving faster than the speed of light." In fact the objection goes a little further than that: according to Newtonian mechanics, geocentrism is perfectly admissible. There is absolutely nothing wrong with constructing a geocentric frame of reference and doing Fourier expansions of the motions of planetary bodies. No experiment has disproven it because it's just a mathematical choice of accelerated reference frame to analyze the motion of the planets. According to unmodified Popper, each of the first two should have led to a rejection of the scientific principles which led to them, while the latter would mean that geocentrism and heliocentrism are pseudoscience and there was never any scientific switch between them -- all of that sounds wrong.

So Kuhn introduced the idea that there is a separation of science into two parts, "theory" and "model". A scientific theory like quantum mechanics or heliocentrism is a platform for building models and deciding what questions are worth asking and how one goes about asking them. They are a "platform for computation" in a sense, and most of them are "Turing complete," there is nothing that they can't model somehow. So classical mechanics turns out to be able to do something with quantum mechanics if we use something like Bohm's pilot wave theory. And Couder and Fort's droplets on a vibrating oil bath show an experimental realization of particles which nevertheless diffract in a classically explicable way, underscoring this point. Kuhn said that theories need to be abandoned during some sort of "scientific revolution" but was very hazy on how exactly that happened. But he was a huge fan of Popper and wanted to say that Popper was fundamentally right about the way that we model systems, discarding models immediately when they do not fit experiment and coming up with better models.

Kuhn picked up a lot of flak because one of the things Popper's works were trying to do was to discredit things like psychiatry and astrology as being "pseudoscience" rather than real science because they could explain everything and thus never stuck their neck out -- thus Kuhn's work seemed to need some extra structure about the manner that we actually conduct such a revolution, otherwise astrology might not be a pseudoscience but an "eventual science" or so: if theories are just some sort of aesthetic agreement on behalf of the existing scientists then what stops us all from deciding that we rather like reading our weekly horoscopes?

This challenge was to my mind best resolved by the "research programmes" idea of Imre Lakatos. He philosophizes that theory choice -- fundamental progress in science -- is best seen as motivated by lazy grad students. Like, laziness is a virtue on this account: grad students have to make a contribution to the published literature that excites their peers and makes a name for themselves, and they do not have much time to do it.

So, why do people use the Copenhagen interpretation for everything if very few people philosophically accept its ontology? Because it is mathematically equivalent to all of the other interpretations but is astonishingly easy to use, just "yeah the wavefunction collapsed so now this is reality, I don't strictly have to care about that collapse happening across spacetime instantaneously because that's not observable anyways, so here are my experimental results." Lazy grad students will choose that ten times out of ten over coming up with the correct pilot-wave mechanics and simulating it. Why did heliocentrism win if Newtonian mechanics says that geocentrism is 100% experimentally valid? Because the heliocentric models are easier to build and reason about with straight mechanics, and lazy grad students will take Newton's law of gravity any day over those epicycles.

You can in some respects view this as Occam's razor but Occam's razor is painfully ill-specified. A better view of it is that it's a survival-of-the-fittest, a theory of scientific evolution. So, theories are "genes" which make it easier or harder to publish interesting discoveries that are modeled with those theories in scientific journals. Based on others reading those papers and extending those results in various ways, theories "reproduce" and the ones that reproduce most effectively are the ones that best adapt to their (ever-changing) environment.

Re: Philosophy Has Made Plenty of Progress

#188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think it would be fair to say that the goal science aspires to is "not obviously wrong". It is indeed a moving target and a tough one.

Re: Philosophy Has Made Plenty of Progress

#189

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

I believe this SMBC provides an easy to understand explanation of the concept:

https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/compatibilism

Re: Philosophy Has Made Plenty of Progress

#190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> ill-defined notions of collapse Actually, the wavefunction collapse is a very well defined mathematical construct; so, if you are ignoring or trying to avoid it, you are literally "hiding the scary equations."

It's well-defined mathematically but ill-defined philosophically. There is no agreement on what an "observation" is -- that is what is ill-defined:

> The Copenhagen interpretation is the oldest and probably still the most widely held interpretation of quantum mechanics. Most generally it posits something in the act of observation which results in the collapse of the wave function. According to the von Neumann–Wigner interpretation the causative agent in this collapse is consciousness. How this could happen is widely disputed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Measurement_problem

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