Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Philosophy Has Made Plenty of Progress

blogs.scientificamerican.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

221–230 of 338 posts

Re: Philosophy Has Made Plenty of Progress

#221

Post by mitchty »

Retric wrote: post #178
blueprint wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not the definition. What is the methodology ?

It’s a recursive definition. Methodology that works is science, that which fails is not. Things like peer review are accepted practice, but practice changes over time based on research. People simplify things like to use hypothesis > experiment loop as Science. But, in practice simple observation is often used for things like Botany. Ex: Philosophy is not science becase it does not work. You can’t argue from first pr…

> Philosophy is not science becase it does not work.

I'm slightly amused by this statement, as modern science is descended directly from philosophy. Indeed without philosophy, I could easily argue there is no science as we know it.

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

Re: Philosophy Has Made Plenty of Progress

#222

Post by ripsawridge »

The only thing our world needs now is a reorientation away from growth at all costs into a mode of life that values the simple, the close by, the cheap.

I don't see this guy giving a damn about that problem. Instead he tosses off bon mots about Popper and Gödel, and intones comfortably that in his view his peers have the right idea because they converge on atheism/agnosticism. Wow. The world is saved.

There is a class of people who value a "small life," the kind we all need to adopt: zen monks. Unfortunately, such people are afflicted by the disease of irrationalism in their ideas about God, or some similar concept that offends the sensibility of the excessively rational so much that they can only paint Belief in the most lurid colors.

Highly unfashionable to study such people. Instead, a professional philosopher keeps giving interviews, attending conferences and publishing papers. I'll be glad when we can no longer afford them. I also apologize for my lack of charity but there it is.

Re: Philosophy Has Made Plenty of Progress

#223

Post by wwweston »

visarga wrote: post #177
Emma_Goldman wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. The OP has a very parochial view of philosophy, and what philosophers study.

Please point me to a paper treating consciousness from the point of view of agent, environment and rewards (reinforcement learning). I have searched and found very few papers taking this angle. I concluded that philosophers don't know about it. In my view even using the word 'consciousness' is a bad thing because it is not well defined and has too much baggage (some people relate consciousness to spirit or soul, for…

The question about which concepts you should use and why (and the arguments supporting them) might be a decent philosophical one.

"Too much baggage" isn't particularly well defined, though, nor is it a strong argument to say that some people relate consciousness to spirit or soul (some people also use terms like "momentum" or "norm" in imprecise ways but it doesn't keep practitioners for whom those terms have precise well-defined meanings from deploying them effectively).

"we should use different concepts... All are concrete and well defined"

Or perhaps we should use concepts from clockwork engineering or mill machinery. Very concrete and well defined.

Re: Philosophy Has Made Plenty of Progress

#224

Post by vinceguidry »

blueprint wrote: post #170
mfoy_ wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Science" is just a collection of tools and processes. "Scientisits" use those processes to attempt to arrive at true conclusions. This can be very difficult. Over time, "science" (the nebulous institution) can build up enough accrued "truths" that it can make interesting conclusions with a decent degree of confidence. (Note: scientific studies that are reported by clickbait headlines are not what I'm talking about.)…

That's not the definition. There are many tools and processes that do not constitute science. If you want to define science as that which uncovers truth, then, for that to be true, you must be able to define truth without resorting to tautology (that is, there must be a way to verify 'truth'). Excluding a subset of what's false doesn't necessarily lead you to discovering or being able to accept (integrate) the truth.

> That's not the definition. There are many tools and processes that do not constitute science.

They didn't say that. They said science was a collection of tools and processes. Obviously tools and processes exist that aren't a part of that collection.

Re: Philosophy Has Made Plenty of Progress

#225

Post by mfoy_ »

vec wrote: post #217
mfoy_ wrote: 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…

> With Religion, there is nothing you can do to understand it. You can only "have faith". If your spiritual leader or holy book tells you the world is a certain way, you can only believe it, or disbelieve it, you cannot do anything to investigate the veracity of those claims. Truly, this is the most authoritarian of world views: Believe this because I tell you to! There's a few thousand years of Talmudic scholarship…

Correct me if I'm wrong, but the Talmud is basically the collected notes on the study of the Torah, which was was supposedly (capital-R) Revealed by a supernatural authority on Mount Sinai.

Just because people spent a long time debating the interpretation of their holy book (and accompanying oral tradition) does not make it any less grounded in the supernatural, at the end of the day. Followers still have to either believe it, or not, where "it" is that some divine revelation inspired those original sources.

Re: Philosophy Has Made Plenty of Progress

#226

Post by 13415 »

brownbat wrote: post #127
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…

> he cites a consensus in personal belief in atheism and agnostics among philosophers... as a good reason for philosophy not accepting the existence of God... It seems incredibly unlikely someone would cite the popularity of agnosticism to establish the certainty of atheism, so I am fairly confident that was not the move he was making. Looking back at the prompt: > "Your colleague David Chalmers has fretted that “the…

The two are not mutually exclusive, you can be an atheist or theist agnostic, but also a positive or negative atheist.

You probably mean the colloquial use of agnostic fornegative atheist - the position of someone who does not believe that a god/supernatural being exists -, in contrast to positive atheism, the position of someone who believes that there is no god/supernatural being.

There is no problem with this colloquial use, I just wanted to clarify that the "professional" terminology does not match it.

Re: Philosophy Has Made Plenty of Progress

#227

Post by gjm11 »

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…

You have simply misunderstood if you think he

> cites a consensus in personal belief in atheism and agnostics [sic] among philosophers [...] as a good reason for philosophy not accepting the existence of God

because that isn't what he's doing at all.

The interviewer asks him what he thinks about David Chalmers's lament that philosophy isn't converging to agreement on the truth on big questions like the existence of God. (Note: Chalmers's actual paper on the subject, which you can find by chasing a couple of links from the OP here, puts the existence of God in its list of big questions but concedes later on that on that particular question there is convergence. So the interviewer has misrepresented him a bit.)

He responds by saying he doesn't agree: that philosophy is converging to agreement on the truth on the big questions the interviewer asks him about.

Of course he doesn't go into why he thinks the positions he says philosophers are converging to are correct. The arguments on any of them could fill many books, and have in fact done so. The interviewer asked him a short question about philosophy converging to the truth; he gave a short answer to that question.

[EDITED to add:] After writing that, I notice that FabHK's reply points out the same thing. I'm leaving this here in case the extra detail I give is helpful.

Re: Philosophy Has Made Plenty of Progress

#228

Post by mattmanser »

lisper wrote: post #197
FabHK wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It wasn't ad hominem. He had addressed the argument, and refers to that, before adding that Popper was an egocentric jerk. That might be abusive, but it's not ad hominem (because it's in addition, not instead of, a rebuttal of the argument). See the excellent "Ad Hominem Fallacy Fallacy": https://laurencetennant.com/bonds/adhominem.html

We'll just have to agree to disagree about that. It's pretty clear to me that "egocentric jerk" was intended to impugn Popper's credibility and not just a random insult. But if it wasn't an ad hominem, then it was a non-sequitur. Either way, it's not the most effective way to support the position the philosophy has made progress IMHO. Hence: irony.

Being an egocentric jerk makes you no less credible, it just makes you unpleasant.

Re: Philosophy Has Made Plenty of Progress

#229

Post by JackFr »

memonkey wrote: post #193
JackFr wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

If anybody is curious about the work of Science being a fundamentally human activity, check out Bruno Latour. I'm sure there are others, but this is one I've recently discovered. NYTimes did a good article on him: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/25/magazine/bruno-latour-pos...

Nice piece.

Re: Philosophy Has Made Plenty of Progress

#230

Post by clairity »

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'm leaning toward a belief in an outcome where we eventually prove strong determinism false, simply because of the probabalistic underpinnings of the universe. in that scenario, compatibalism would be an acceptance of a weak determinism based on the likeliness of probabalistic outcomes (particularly at larger scales), rather than an absolute certainty.
Post reply on HN