Richard Dawkins: A Knack for Bashing Orthodoxy • Hacker News Board

Re: Richard Dawkins: A Knack for Bashing Orthodoxy

#141

Post by loup-vaillant » Wed, Sep 21, 2011, 8:42 AM UTC

davesims wrote: post #140

loup-vaillant wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Philosophical insight is not the same species as math, and doesn't "build" the same way […] Err, I think this one is a non-sequitur. The actual argument would be to say that science and philosophy aren't the same. But, as a believer of reductionistic materialism myself, I fully expect science to confirm or disprove nearly every philosophical insight there ever was (except maybe the moral ones, but even then, moral…

Nice to see this thread keep going. So.. "I fully expect science to confirm or disprove nearly every philosophical insight there ever was" "Any philosophical result prior to the science that falsified it can be disregarded" These are the non-sequiturs. Science is a sub-species of philosophy, whether you're willing to acknowledge it or not. Any reasonable survey of the history of science and its foundations must ackno…

I think I agree with most of what you just wrote. Now, regarding my "correct" phrasing, I did not reduce the sentence to its essence. If I do, there's not much left: "Any result that has been falsified can be disregarded", which is a near-tautology (sorry about that).

About science being a sub-specie of philosophy, well, it certainly looks like so. I am not well versed in the history of science and philosophy, but I do recall that many scientific fields either spawned from philosophy, or answer what was once philosophical questions. As for philosophical foundations, well, there's Bayes, Occam's Razor, and of course the plain old scientific methodology. We indeed don't have to look very far.

Now about my assumptions:

In a trivial sense, there's only one reality (or world, or universe). Each of us looks at it from a different window, of course, but if it weren't the "same" reality, we wouldn't be interacting at all. Now the trick is to figure out what this reality is.

Relativism is bullshit. More precisely, for any given two contradictory models of reality, at least one of them contains mistakes. Yes/no questions are even easier: the correct answer is bound to be either "yes" or "no". Not neither, not both. For instance, for any definition of "God", there is a God, or there is none.

Bayesianism is most probably the best we'll ever have to understand reality. Note that it rules out the possibility of ever forming absolutely correct answers: for any yes/no question, I am bound to qualify my answer with probabilities, and that will not match reality itself. For instance, if reality says "yes", while I say "yes with probability 90%", I am wrong. Less wrong however than "yes with probability 65%".

Reductionist materialism is very probably correct. That is, there is no such thing as an indivisible mental entity. Minds are composed of parts (like neurons), and so are love potions (if there's such a thing). In principle, anything, whether it thinks or not, can be studied and ultimately understood in non-thinking terms. It may be beyond the grasp of our mere human brains, however.

Determinism is probably correct. Given current knowledge, it means that the universe probably follows some form of the Everett branches (the Copenhagen interpretation is just crazy).

Re: Richard Dawkins: A Knack for Bashing Orthodoxy

#142

Post by davesims » Wed, Sep 21, 2011, 3:14 PM UTC

loup-vaillant wrote: post #141

davesims wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nice to see this thread keep going. So.. "I fully expect science to confirm or disprove nearly every philosophical insight there ever was" "Any philosophical result prior to the science that falsified it can be disregarded" These are the non-sequiturs. Science is a sub-species of philosophy, whether you're willing to acknowledge it or not. Any reasonable survey of the history of science and its foundations must ackno…

I think I agree with most of what you just wrote. Now, regarding my "correct" phrasing, I did not reduce the sentence to its essence. If I do, there's not much left: "Any result that has been falsified can be disregarded", which is a near-tautology (sorry about that). About science being a sub-specie of philosophy, well, it certainly looks like so. I am not well versed in the history of science and philosophy, but I…

I really appreciate this answer. What you're doing here is some good philosophical reasoning, setting up an epistemological foundation for the practice of science. Popper would have something to say about your use of inductive/Bayesian reasoning as a foundation -- I think you've mixed a little Popper in here with your use of 'falsification'. If you're interested in this stuff, you might look into the problems with induction as an epistemological foundation, and how Popper attempts to solve that problem in his Objective Knowledge.

Good stuff.

As far as reductionism is concerned, my problem with it, in a nutshell, is that at its core it is dogmatic and built on core metaphysical assumptions that a reasonable person doesn't have to accept. I suggest to you that your confidence in materialism/reductionism is inherited and only seems likely and intuitive to you because most moderns are steeped in materialist metaphors and abstract confidence in reductionism and the hope for prediction and control it provides. But that hope is really based on the triumphs of Newton, not the last hundred years, as your citation of Copenhagen and String, etc., demonstrates. At the very least it must be acknowledged that physics has not progressed as it was hoped 150 years ago, and our expectations for what we eventually can and can't know are being truncated or qualified into increasingly abstract and near-poetic models. Does the boson exists? Branes, strings? Will we ever get a GUT? Those are live questions and at the very least should cause the triumphal materialist a measure of humility.

Any number of philosophers in the last 100+ years have pointed out that reductionism is not the only possible model and has never been the only possible scientific model. In the modern era, from Leibniz on we've had basic philosophical systems and metaphors that would fit very nicely into modern physics, but would require a basic inversion of our idea that at the core reality is dead matter, rather than something like rudimentary/primitive mind. Spinoza, Husserl, Whitehead, Bergson are just the biggest names that advocated some version of this.

For some reason it's very difficult for us moderns to give up the basic dogma that reality must be dead matter, or mute energy or some paradoxical balance of the two (paradox?! in science?! that's mysticism!)

Re: Richard Dawkins: A Knack for Bashing Orthodoxy

#143

Post by loup-vaillant » Wed, Sep 21, 2011, 5:30 PM UTC

davesims wrote: post #142

loup-vaillant wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think I agree with most of what you just wrote. Now, regarding my "correct" phrasing, I did not reduce the sentence to its essence. If I do, there's not much left: "Any result that has been falsified can be disregarded", which is a near-tautology (sorry about that). About science being a sub-specie of philosophy, well, it certainly looks like so. I am not well versed in the history of science and philosophy, but I…

I really appreciate this answer. What you're doing here is some good philosophical reasoning, setting up an epistemological foundation for the practice of science. Popper would have something to say about your use of inductive/Bayesian reasoning as a foundation -- I think you've mixed a little Popper in here with your use of 'falsification'. If you're interested in this stuff, you might look into the problems with in…

Thanks for the heads up. Now about reductionism: I believe it is true because it looks like so. To me, at least. Before Darwin, Newton, and the discovery of neurons, reductionism was an incredibly hard sell. Now however, I'm quite confident about it. But should something unexpected happen, I may well change my mind (it would be hard, but not as hard as forsaking Bayesianism itself). Sure, there are some (huge) loose ends, but it still looks like there's reasonable hope. And of course, Occam's razor strongly favours reductionism, though it could still lose.

Regarding "dead matter", I'm not sure the term is useful. The wave function, which is supposed to be at the bottom of all things (according to current physics), isn't even close to what we intuitively call "dead matter". Its behaviour certainly is (conceptually) simple and deterministic, though.

I hadn't exactly Popper's falsification in mind. But even from a Bayesian perspective, most experiments that don't end up as predicted still deal huge blows to the underlying theories.

Re: Richard Dawkins: A Knack for Bashing Orthodoxy

#144

Post by davesims » Wed, Sep 21, 2011, 6:50 PM UTC

loup-vaillant wrote: post #143

davesims wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really appreciate this answer. What you're doing here is some good philosophical reasoning, setting up an epistemological foundation for the practice of science. Popper would have something to say about your use of inductive/Bayesian reasoning as a foundation -- I think you've mixed a little Popper in here with your use of 'falsification'. If you're interested in this stuff, you might look into the problems with in…

Thanks for the heads up. Now about reductionism: I believe it is true because it looks like so . To me, at least. Before Darwin, Newton, and the discovery of neurons, reductionism was an incredibly hard sell. Now however, I'm quite confident about it. But should something unexpected happen, I may well change my mind (it would be hard, but not as hard as forsaking Bayesianism itself). Sure, there are some (huge) loose…

"simple and deterministic" -- I do like that better, although "dead" does indeed convey the essence here: it's not alive, it's not thinking.

Occam had prior philosophical assumptions to support the Razor of reknown, namely his metaphysical nominalism, which I reject in favor of something closer to a reformed Aristotelian formalism, which to me is far more intuitive than nominalism or reductionism.

Lastly, reductionism was actually not a hard sell at all, it had its advocates long before Darwin and in fact the advent of Darwin was really highly desired and favored by this camp. The fact that Wallace and Darwin were pursuing very similar agendas at the same time speaks to this. We had the notion of evolution and atomism since the pre-socratics, just no plausible scientific evidence to give it public political traction and philosophical (in the sense of epistemological) credibility.

So I guess I end up agreeing with you -- it was a hard public sell before Darwin, but reductionism's advocates had been around for thousands of years. Also see F.A. Lange's _History of Materialism_. That also may be of interest to you. Lange was a Kantian who had tremendous influence on other atheist thinkers, especially Nietzsche.

Re: Richard Dawkins: A Knack for Bashing Orthodoxy

#145

Post by loup-vaillant » Thu, Sep 22, 2011, 8:16 AM UTC

davesims wrote: post #144

loup-vaillant wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the heads up. Now about reductionism: I believe it is true because it looks like so . To me, at least. Before Darwin, Newton, and the discovery of neurons, reductionism was an incredibly hard sell. Now however, I'm quite confident about it. But should something unexpected happen, I may well change my mind (it would be hard, but not as hard as forsaking Bayesianism itself). Sure, there are some (huge) loose…

"simple and deterministic" -- I do like that better, although "dead" does indeed convey the essence here: it's not alive, it's not thinking. Occam had prior philosophical assumptions to support the Razor of reknown, namely his metaphysical nominalism, which I reject in favor of something closer to a reformed Aristotelian formalism, which to me is far more intuitive than nominalism or reductionism. Lastly, reductionis…

Hmm, I'm a bit lost by your paragraph about Occam. (I know next to nothing about the distinctions between nominalism and formalism, maybe I should check this out.) For now, I just trust the formal version of Occam's razor, based on Kolmogorov complexity (or Solomonov induction, the two are equivalent), but I don't fully understand those yet. (I should definitely check this out).

So, for now I must admit, that feels like a leap of faith. I am very confident, but my curiosity isn't satisfied yet.