The Grand Design (2010)
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The Grand Design (2010)
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Re: The Grand Design (2010)
#2>Traditionally these are questions for philosophy, but philosophy is dead. Philosophy has not kept up with modern developments in science, particularly physics.
I largely agree with this perspective on philosophy. Philosophy poses as a sort of higher level view of reality than physics or science. Rather than thinking of philosophy as a higher level view I think of it as a biased point of view.
Things like the philosophy of ethics or religion really drive this point through. Religion and ethics are human inventions that don't exist outside of the human experience.
I'm sure there are great ideas that have arisen from within philosophy, but the field as a whole tries to unionize religion, ethics, science, morality and logic as if these areas of thought are suppose to peers. Morality and religion is as specific to human behavior as the mating behavior of chimpanzees; they should not be put into the same bin as science and logic.
Re: The Grand Design (2010)
#3>Traditionally these are questions for philosophy, but philosophy is dead. Philosophy has not kept up with modern developments in science, particularly physics. I largely agree with this perspective on philosophy. Philosophy poses as a sort of higher level view of reality than physics or science. Rather than thinking of philosophy as a higher level view I think of it as a biased point of view. Things like the philoso…
Logic is a field of philosophy [1]. As most inductive reasoning is. It would be impossible to separate philosophy from math, and in turn math from physics. Philosophy is not intended to be a high level view but a low level one, willing to examine the core structures of any system, weather those are man made ones such as ethics or beliefs, or supposed nature laws such as the physical world.
It’s is true that some modern philosophers have done poorly to keep up with recent discoveries. However this is also true of many other proponents of different fields (i.e. neurology has been accused in lacking cognitive/computer science knowledge, biological science is often accused of lacking knowledge in statistical models). No matter the claim we don’t tend to decide entire fields of study are useless because we disagree with some of its practitioners.
Re: The Grand Design (2010)
#4>Traditionally these are questions for philosophy, but philosophy is dead. Philosophy has not kept up with modern developments in science, particularly physics. I largely agree with this perspective on philosophy. Philosophy poses as a sort of higher level view of reality than physics or science. Rather than thinking of philosophy as a higher level view I think of it as a biased point of view. Things like the philoso…
But that's exactly the point - science and logic are also specific to human behaviour. Our ideas of what constitutes science and logic are wholly subjective, and boil down to certain kinds of predictability, inference, and consistency within our own experience.
We have no idea how universal, representative, or complete that experience really is. Worse, whenever we've assumed in the past that our science and logic are complete and perfectly self-consistent, we've always been proven wrong.
So IMO it's likely that we're operating with a small subset of the experiential and philosophical sophistication available to more advanced sentiences - and it would be naive and irrationally self-congratulatory to assume otherwise.
Re: The Grand Design (2010)
#5 >Traditionally these are questions for philosophy, but philosophy is dead. Philosophy has not kept up with modern developments in science, particularly physics.
I'm sorry, what kind of non sensical bias is that? That's like saying that science doesn't care about truth, or is more important than truth. After all, "Truth is one of the central subjects in philosophy. It is also one of the largest." [1]
Re: The Grand Design (2010)
#6>Traditionally these are questions for philosophy, but philosophy is dead. Philosophy has not kept up with modern developments in science, particularly physics. I largely agree with this perspective on philosophy. Philosophy poses as a sort of higher level view of reality than physics or science. Rather than thinking of philosophy as a higher level view I think of it as a biased point of view. Things like the philoso…
But that's exactly the point - science and logic are also specific to human behaviour. Our ideas of what constitutes science and logic are wholly subjective, and boil down to certain kinds of predictability, inference, and consistency within our own experience. We have no idea how universal, representative, or complete that experience really is. Worse, whenever we've assumed in the past that our science and logic are…
Well of course you can get really abstract, but let's keep the topic on things that we know about to the best of our knowledge. As far as we're aware science and logic applies to things outside of our own experience.
This is a semantic issue. Yeah you're not technically wrong that science and logic is part of the human experience.
But at the same time there is a demarcation between science/logic and religion. What's the semantic word used for this demarcation? I chose "human experience" but I'm sure you can agree that's just a semantic choice and that the principles of science and logic as far as we're "aware" apply "outside" of the "human experience" while religion and morality do not.
Re: The Grand Design (2010)
#7>Traditionally these are questions for philosophy, but philosophy is dead. Philosophy has not kept up with modern developments in science, particularly physics. I largely agree with this perspective on philosophy. Philosophy poses as a sort of higher level view of reality than physics or science. Rather than thinking of philosophy as a higher level view I think of it as a biased point of view. Things like the philoso…
Logic is a field of philosophy [1]. As most inductive reasoning is. It would be impossible to separate philosophy from math, and in turn math from physics. Philosophy is not intended to be a high level view but a low level one, willing to examine the core structures of any system, weather those are man made ones such as ethics or beliefs, or supposed nature laws such as the physical world. It’s is true that some mode…
Religion and morality is part of philosophy as well. Does this mean it is impossible to separate Morality and Mathematics?
What is the mathematical formula for good and evil?
>Philosophy is not intended to be a high level view but a low level one,
We're talking about the same thing, high or low is just the choice of symbolic direction as nothing is really "lower" or "higher." Let's remove that from the semantics to remove the confusion. I mean a universal framework that unionizes all viewpoints into a cohesive whole similar to how assembly language unionizes all programming languages into a single cohesive language.
Re: The Grand Design (2010)
#8>Traditionally these are questions for philosophy, but philosophy is dead. Philosophy has not kept up with modern developments in science, particularly physics. I largely agree with this perspective on philosophy. Philosophy poses as a sort of higher level view of reality than physics or science. Rather than thinking of philosophy as a higher level view I think of it as a biased point of view. Things like the philoso…
> Morality [...] is as specific to human behavior as the mating behavior of chimpanzees
It's true that a lot of what has been written about morality and ethics turns out to make a lot of assumptions that tend to limit it to human beings; Kant's "rational agents" are pretty clearly just humans, certainly adult, likely neurotypical. Although he probably intended for it to be a truly universal concept, the definition he provides is so narrow that it actually excludes many ordinary humans, much less non-human intelligences.
The frontier of ethics is to consider a more generalized ethical framework that can encompass other forms of intelligence. In the short term we'll need theories like that to deal with AI; in the long term perhaps also for aliens, uplifted animals, digital copies of human brains, or other even stranger things.
Re: The Grand Design (2010)
#9>Traditionally these are questions for philosophy, but philosophy is dead. Philosophy has not kept up with modern developments in science, particularly physics. I largely agree with this perspective on philosophy. Philosophy poses as a sort of higher level view of reality than physics or science. Rather than thinking of philosophy as a higher level view I think of it as a biased point of view. Things like the philoso…
> Morality [...] is as specific to human behavior as the mating behavior of chimpanzees It's true that a lot of what has been written about morality and ethics turns out to make a lot of assumptions that tend to limit it to human beings; Kant's "rational agents" are pretty clearly just humans, certainly adult, likely neurotypical. Although he probably intended for it to be a truly universal concept, the definition he…
>The frontier of ethics is to consider a more generalized ethical framework that can encompass other forms of intelligence.
You cannot derive morality from pure logic. Good and evil has nothing to do with a truth table.
In addition there is a huge body of evidence that are specific moral behaviors are the result of natural selection. https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Natural_morality. Morality are just arbitrary behavioral principles that assisted us in survival,. In the same way that feeling hungry helps us survive so does feeling guilty, the two are one and the same. Moral behavior is no different then behaviors caused by hunger. Why not create a philosophy of hunger?
Once you think things through you will realize that an ethical framework does not exist outside of the human experience. You can create your own axiomatic morality framework to encompass aliens and AI but realize that you are just creating an arbitrary set of rules, you are not discovering anything profound about the universe.
Re: The Grand Design (2010)
#10Earlier quoted context omitted.
But that's exactly the point - science and logic are also specific to human behaviour. Our ideas of what constitutes science and logic are wholly subjective, and boil down to certain kinds of predictability, inference, and consistency within our own experience. We have no idea how universal, representative, or complete that experience really is. Worse, whenever we've assumed in the past that our science and logic are…
Well of course you can get really abstract, but let's keep the topic on things that we know about to the best of our knowledge. As far as we're aware science and logic applies to things outside of our own experience. This is a semantic issue. Yeah you're not technically wrong that science and logic is part of the human experience. But at the same time there is a demarcation between science/logic and religion. What's…
> principles of science and logic as far as we're "aware" apply "outside" of the "human experience"
On the contrary if you take a critical thinking course, you'll see that your logic does apply to the human experience