A Defense of Philosophy (against Paul Graham) • Hacker News Board

Re: A Defense of Philosophy (against Paul Graham)

#21

Post by qqq » Sat, Dec 20, 2008, 10:59 PM UTC

straiberman wrote: post #15

bigboote wrote: post #11

James cites the law as a good example of drawing fine lines around difficult issues, citing the definition for amounts of LSD. If you don't know about this, 500 micrograms of LSD is a dose, but you can't see anything that small so it's normally distributed on a chunk of blotter paper weighing 1000x as much. So when the law says that possessing X amount of LSD is a felony, does that include the blotter paper? The cour…

I think you're creating a straw-man here and end up proving jsomers's point. You jump on the delicacy of the language and that's the point. jsomers doesn't argue _about_ this particular law, he was only giving an example on how pushing and pulling language can have direct pragmatic purposes and real political ramifications. The point is that since law is mired in language, exploring language becomes an incredibly rel…

You say jsomers is defending analytic philosophy in this section.

Later jsomers says philosophy was bad but has reformed.

So on the one hand he defends old philosophy. And on the other he claims philosophy was bad, but is OK now because it has reformed. These defenses are incompatible.

Re: A Defense of Philosophy (against Paul Graham)

#22

Post by GavinB » Sat, Dec 20, 2008, 11:10 PM UTC

blader wrote: post #14

It's funny that he cites the Chinese Room paper, because that's probably one of the best examples of the kind of shoddy linguistic games that Paul pointed out. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room#Speed.2C_complexit...

The Chinese Room argument is wrong. That in itself does not make it useless.

It forces you to bite the bullet and really think about how systems must be able to give rise to intelligence, regardless of their physical makeup.

The wikipedia article that you linked has this quote: "The sheer volume of the literature that has grown up around it inspired Pat Hayes to quip that the field of cognitive science ought to be redefined as 'the ongoing research program of showing Searle's Chinese Room Argument to be false.'"

Incorrect arguments are an important step in establishing correct ones, which is a central point of jsomer's argument.

Re: A Defense of Philosophy (against Paul Graham)

#23

Post by derefr » Sat, Dec 20, 2008, 11:26 PM UTC

jsomers wrote: post #16

qqq wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The guy says: "The simplest flaw in PG’s account is its scope: it implicates most philosophers up to the present" That's what he's trying to argue with, and that is PG's claim (not that all philosophy is worthless). But then he simply concedes at the end, like he forgot his own thesis.

PG's "most" includes more than I'm comfortable with, which is why I wrote the essay -- to defend those parts of the subject that I thought were unfairly called a waste of time. My "most," in other words, includes less than his.

Your "most" is, I would say, just an application of Sturgeon's Law, which, like a sort of Thermodynamics of Information, gives a sort of comfortable minimum to the amount of value you can extract from any field of inquiry.

Re: A Defense of Philosophy (against Paul Graham)

#24

Post by Prrometheus » Sat, Dec 20, 2008, 11:31 PM UTC

The author mentions several ways that philosophy, and especially philosophy of the mind, have contributed to Computer Science and AI in particular. If that is the case, then why don't we see CS teams collaborating with philosophers?

He mentions that one particular philosopher of the mind generated some testable hypotheses about how the mind works. Why not, then, test them? Why don't we see many philosophers flitting back and forth between thought and action? In other words, where are the Hofstadters?

Re: A Defense of Philosophy (against Paul Graham)

#25

Post by byrneseyeview » Sat, Dec 20, 2008, 11:56 PM UTC

hsmyers wrote: post #3

If a philosophy is valid it doesn't need a defense.

So you'd agree that "No." is the only counterargument I need to offer, right?

Re: A Defense of Philosophy (against Paul Graham)

#26

Post by mnemonicsloth » Sun, Dec 21, 2008, 12:44 AM UTC

jsomers wrote: post #16

qqq wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The guy says: "The simplest flaw in PG’s account is its scope: it implicates most philosophers up to the present" That's what he's trying to argue with, and that is PG's claim (not that all philosophy is worthless). But then he simply concedes at the end, like he forgot his own thesis.

PG's "most" includes more than I'm comfortable with, which is why I wrote the essay -- to defend those parts of the subject that I thought were unfairly called a waste of time. My "most," in other words, includes less than his.

Abel, 1824. Not Galois, 1829. Your favorite joke a bout proto-emo math geeks here.

Also, while I'm sympathetic to the intent of this essay -- easy criticism of the humanities goes back to Aristophanes -- it falls flat because it reads like a philosophy paper. A philosophy paper written in defense of academic philosophy is going to lose in the gut regardless of how correct it is to the reasoning mind (this is also why we still love Aristophanes).

Re: A Defense of Philosophy (against Paul Graham)

#27

Post by jseliger » Sun, Dec 21, 2008, 1:37 AM UTC

GavinB wrote: post #22

blader wrote: post #14

It's funny that he cites the Chinese Room paper, because that's probably one of the best examples of the kind of shoddy linguistic games that Paul pointed out. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room#Speed.2C_complexit...

The Chinese Room argument is wrong. That in itself does not make it useless. It forces you to bite the bullet and really think about how systems must be able to give rise to intelligence, regardless of their physical makeup. The wikipedia article that you linked has this quote: "The sheer volume of the literature that has grown up around it inspired Pat Hayes to quip that the field of cognitive science ought to be re…

The Chinese Room argument is wrong. That in itself does not make it useless.

It might be useless, but it's also not optimally useful. That is, I think, a large part of the problem PG points out in his essay.

Re: A Defense of Philosophy (against Paul Graham)

#28

Post by Tichy » Sun, Dec 21, 2008, 2:02 AM UTC

GavinB wrote: post #22

blader wrote: post #14

It's funny that he cites the Chinese Room paper, because that's probably one of the best examples of the kind of shoddy linguistic games that Paul pointed out. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room#Speed.2C_complexit...

The Chinese Room argument is wrong. That in itself does not make it useless. It forces you to bite the bullet and really think about how systems must be able to give rise to intelligence, regardless of their physical makeup. The wikipedia article that you linked has this quote: "The sheer volume of the literature that has grown up around it inspired Pat Hayes to quip that the field of cognitive science ought to be re…

"The sheer volume of the literature that has grown up around it..."

So it inspired a huge waste of time. Doesn't really fit my definition of useful.

Re: A Defense of Philosophy (against Paul Graham)

#29

Post by gambling8nt » Sun, Dec 21, 2008, 2:10 AM UTC

The argument in this essay relies heavily on, among other things, the idea that extraordinarily abstract mathematical discussions are similar to extraordinarily abstract discussions in philosophy or literary theory. This premise (among the others refuted throughout this post) is flawed; while some of mathematics is not yet related to any applied field, that is because applied fields develop by using the mathematics available. Furthermore, unlike the linguistic gymnastics of much of philosophy and literary criticism, the abstractions used in mathematics have meanings that can be explained concretely in simpler terms. Anything published in a mathematical paper is either incontrovertibly true, contains some equally incontrovertible flaw, or is a conjecture after such a result. That mathematics contains this level of rigor is precisely why it avoids the contention against which fields such as literary criticism and philosophy fall--namely, that of containing form without substance.

Re: A Defense of Philosophy (against Paul Graham)

#30

Post by tc » Sun, Dec 21, 2008, 2:17 AM UTC

blader wrote: post #14

It's funny that he cites the Chinese Room paper, because that's probably one of the best examples of the kind of shoddy linguistic games that Paul pointed out. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room#Speed.2C_complexit...

The most interesting thing about the Chinese Room paper, I believe, is that most people who develop an intuitive understanding of how computers operate mentally confront this very question long before they ever hear of John Searle or the Chinese Room.