Medications that change who we are

I definitely see things differently.

1. Plato doesn't get things wrong because the nature of his rhetoric is presenting provocative dialogue for thinking with. The questions he raises are still relevant: what is good, what is virtue, what is beauty. I'm of the opinion (it's disputable) that the purpose of Philosophy isn't finding "the truth" but in living better.

2. Standing on the shoulders of 21st century philosophers... Well, there have been some good ones. But consider this list -- wouldn't you be standing taller on Plato's shoulders than on any of these? https://bigthink.com/scotty-hendricks/10-living-philosophers...

3. Neuroscience can't validate what is good, what is virtue, what is beauty. As a neuroscientist, I find an incredible amount of value in reading the original texts of the oldest philosophers, particularly the Pythagoreans (all is number; Harmonious soul in a harmonious cosmos). Understanding cognition in terms of harmonization processes is, for me, of great value. It is actually an excellent framework for understanding phase-amplitude coupling and other neural dynamics. The notion of harmony passed from Pythagoras to Plato to Plotinus to Ficino to Kepler to Newton... And then largely died. Why? It was the tacit agreement between the church and the scientific establishment to clearly separate science and spirituality.

Today, some seek to deny the existence of science, some the existence of spirituality. The alternative to that rejection is an integration of the two. Yet, modern science simply isn't interested in that task-- and neither is modern philosophy. So, if one cares about that integration (and I'm not the only one), there is a lot of benefit in going back in time to when there wasn't a difference between the two fields. And that's why I love the Pythagorean - Platonic tradition: an empirical investigation of the spiritual mysteries of a mathematical universe. Good luck finding a modern philosopher to take that on!

If you are intrigued, try reading "mathematics useful for understanding Plato" by Theon of Smyrna (c. 100AD)

> My Python code ultimately runs on a circuit, but it feels lacking to say that my program is the circuitry. The program itself only has meaning inside of my mind, and in fact could exist equally well on paper. It exists conceptually even if it never manifests physically. So where do concepts like this exist, given that they don't exist as matter? What do we mean when we say that something like 1+1=2 is true - that that truth exists - and would exist even if there wasn't any matter to have 1 and 1 of?

You're claiming that these concepts don't exist as matter, but you've actually described how it exists in matter. Moving the program to paper just changes the matter from silicon and metal to paper and ink. You're saying it never manifests physically while describing its physical manifestation.

Even if the program exists only in your mind, all that means is that the physical manifestation is neurons/synapses instead of silicon/metal or paper/ink.

I won't claim to know completely how the human brain works, and I think it's unlikely that anyone completely understands everything. But it's unreasonable to claim that anything we don't completely understand the physical manifestation of must not have a physical manifestation. That's just the God of the Gaps argument[1] repackaged into a "Mind of the Gaps" argument. If you are defining the mind is every thought and mental process that we don't understand, then the mind is an ever-shrinking phenomena that slowly disappears as we apply the scientific method. In that case, I think we have a better word for that than "the mind": we typically call that "ignorance".

> Similar argument patterns permeate most ancient philosophies. The meme is that mind is the ultimate reality, of which the materialistic worldview is a surprisingly fragile inverse.

This is unsurprising, given that ancient philosophers lacked even basic scientific knowledge. The materialistic worldview seems fragile when you know next-to-nothing of the material world. We might draw the same conclusions as them if we only look at the evidence they had, but it would be foolish to only look at the evidence they had, when we have access to, for example, modern neuroscience. It would be extraordinarily improbable for people who believed fire came from phlogiston to come to the same conclusions about the nature of the mind, as people with access to decades of magnetic resonance imaging of the brain.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_of_the_gaps

Oh, we definitely haven't yet.

But the fact that we can't currently do so doesn't mean that it isn't relevant to the philosophical discussion of whether the mind is a separate entity from the brain.

It seems likely to me, though, that we'll be able to really make progress on that question in the next century or so for this very reason.

> 1. Plato doesn't get things wrong because the nature of his rhetoric is presenting provocative dialogue for thinking with. The questions he raises are still relevant: what is good, what is virtue, what is beauty. I'm of the opinion (it's disputable) that the purpose of Philosophy isn't finding "the truth" but in living better.

Plato absolutely gets some things wrong. For one, he favored dictatorship (self-servingly, he thought the dictator should be a philosopher).

Sure, some of what Plato says is relevant, but lots of modern philosophers are saying those things, only more refined. There's not much value in reading Plato if you can read the same thing by a modern author, with all Plato's mistakes ironed out by two and a half millenia of discovery and debate.

In fact, Plato's belief in dictatorship was a great example of where we have the benefit of two and a half millenia of experience that Plato didn't have: we've seen a lot of dictators, and had the benefit of comparing the results of dictatorship to other forms of government.

> 2. Standing on the shoulders of 21st century philosophers... Well, there have been some good ones. But consider this list -- wouldn't you be standing taller on Plato's shoulders than on any of these? https://bigthink.com/scotty-hendricks/10-living-philosophers....

No. You think this is a rhetorical question, but it isn't. I would absolutely rather stand on the shoulders of one of those philosophers, rather than Plato.

It's likely that all of those philosophers have read Plato, and are already standing on his shoulders. So by reading those philosophers instead, you get the parts of Plato that have value, plus the benefit of their having refined Plato's ideas. Plato might have been a giant in his time, but he's a child compared to those who have the benefit of his height in addition to their own.

Incidentally, the argument I'm making in this post is pretty similar to one made by Martha Nussbaum, one of the philosophers on this list.

"Now the fact that Aristotle believes something does not make it true." --Martha Nussbaum

> 3. Neuroscience can't validate what is good, what is virtue, what is beauty.

Nor can Plato.

> As a neuroscientist, I find an incredible amount of value in reading the original texts of the oldest philosophers, particularly the Pythagoreans (all is number; Harmonious soul in a harmonious cosmos). Understanding cognition in terms of harmonization processes is, for me, of great value.

The part that makes this palatable is where you speak for yourself. If you like it, I applaud your enjoyment of it!

> The notion of harmony passed from Pythagoras to Plato to Plotinus to Ficino to Kepler to Newton... And then largely died. Why? It was the tacit agreement between the church and the scientific establishment to clearly separate science and spirituality.

This not only ignorant of history, but it is also ignorant of the present day. If there's a agreement between the church and scientific communities to separate science and spirituality, neither side is holding up their end of the bargain. Did you read the part of the article you linked on Daniel Dennett? If you think Darwin or Einstein weren't spiritual, you can't have read much of their writings.

"The Darwinian Revolution is both a scientific and a philosophical revolution, and neither revolution could have occurred without the other." --Daniel Dennett

What makes you think Plato didn't have the benefits of thousands of years of previous thinkers to refine his ideas against? I'm not aware we have any evidence that cultures with oral traditions didn't have thousands of years of history of philosophical thought. They would have dressed them up in stories because that's how oral traditions work but they're still very philosophical.