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Philosophy Has Made Plenty of Progress

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321–330 of 338 posts

Re: Philosophy Has Made Plenty of Progress

#321
post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like you. There's been a total over-correction away from religion and we've lost sight of why it evolved in the first place. Social scientists have long known that there is nothing rational about the decisions we make, and certainly not in groups. Religion may have led us to quite a bit of violence in the past and might not have given us self-driving cars, but simply understanding the universe is not going to be en…

> religion, unlike science, doesn't offer us any certainty. Not sure how to put this politely, but it's the other way around. Religion offers certainty (though a false one). It tells you exactly why we're here, why we suffer, and exactly what we have to do to alleviate the suffering. It is science that destroys that false certainty and replaces it with tentative truths and the obligation to find meaning.

[deleted]

Re: Philosophy Has Made Plenty of Progress

#322
post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. What? Why? I mean, yeah, "at all costs" is a little extreme, but the alternative isn't to only value the simple, close by, and cheap. I kind of like the fact that humanity strives for better and better things - it's what took us from the age of 50% of children dyin…

I also like for humanity to strive for better and better things. But do you get that mostly, "better" has just meant that someone else pays the cost? My point is that a real look into "better" will often (probably! Not necessarily!) lead a person to minimize his or her ill effects. Naturally, being decent, they'll try to maximize their good effects. I pointed to a tradition like zen to evoke minimalism, to evoke noti…

> But do you get that mostly, "better" has just meant that someone else pays the cost?

Well I don't really agree with that, what makes you think so? The economy is not zero sum. Progress is not zero sum. When polio was eradicated, it didn't mean somebody else pays the cost of anything. When doctors learned to wash hands before surgeries so that mothers wouldn't get infected in childbirth, who did that hurt? When Bourlag invented strains of wheat that fed twice as many people for the same land input, ushering in the green revolution, it was all upside.

Similarly, when Wikipedia came along to make a great database of most of the knowledge of the world, that was a great thing. When Apple created the iPhone and ushered in an age when almost everyone has access to all that info in their pockets, it was a great benefit.

Who are these people who are paying the cost? Worldwide poverty and health has also improved tremendously over the last 20 years.

> We are heating up the atmosphere and we don't have a solution

Well yep that's a major problem. Can't say we disagree there, but I don't think the solution is to strive for minimalism (this seems to be neither practical nor desirable).

Re: Philosophy Has Made Plenty of Progress

#323
post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but I don't think science and religion are as opposed as the cultural narrative would suggest. I agree. I take a fundamental interpretation approach to the Bible. I firmly believe that science must jive with my belief-set. If it doesn't, there are serious questions that I need to answer. Personally, this calls into question things like evolutionary theory, or creation theories that don't match what I can extract fr…

"Personally, this calls into question things like evolutionary theory, or creation theories that don't match what I can extract from the Bible." It's not clear the Bible has much to say about these at all. Fundamentalists insist that it does, but there are many other strands of Christian thought that disagree.

And thus more questions. One of the axioms I struggle with in these sorts of discussions is the idea of Truth, or ground truth, or absolute truth: this idea that there is some complete representation of reality that possesses is-ness (it exists and we perceive only a small piece of it).

If we assume there is a ground truth (as an axiom, inductively suggested by persistent results from physical experimentation), then we still can say nothing of the God that created it (this, all of this expansive and perplexing existence). In fact, science as it stands cannot answer questions that we cannot test.

How do you test for the existence of a being that is not a part of what we live in? Even if the God overlaps with our existence (a core tradition of Christianity being omnipresence) what test can we leverage to show He is here?

All of this leads to the dispersed opinions of many, many people. We have supposed two things so far: there is a God, and there is some absolute representation of our universe (above I called it existence).

Given ground truth, how might we approach the texts that are said to explain God? As a society (my guess is many people do this) we tend to overlay what we "know" onto things we don't understand.

For example, in Genesis we have words like erev and boker which are translated consistently as "morning" and "evening". But its ancient Hebrew, we don't actually have the meaning as it was intended. We have lost the societal context that informed the deeper meanings of those words. So we guess. We think they mean morning and evening. But that's at best ambiguous.

They could mean "order" and "disorder", as they are used in other contexts to mean that.

I'm sure I could meander about and come up with a logically sound chain of interpretations, but I only left this here to illustrate just how difficult the interpretation of simple things can be.

Re: Philosophy Has Made Plenty of Progress

#324
post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only point I was making is that Eli's comment was not, contrary to your claim, an argumentum ad consequentiam. That's an entirely separate question from (e.g.) whether it involves something you can call "faith". But: If you define "faith" broadly enough then sure, everything with any element of belief to it involves "faith". Derive everything rigorously from axioms? That means having "faith" in your axioms! Do li…

You're right. I conflated argumentum ad consequentiam and affirming the consequent. If X works, then I should believe X is true is not the same thing as if I don't believe in X then X won't work. I rushed my response to you because I was between meetings. But my core argument here is that we have no starting point. If you want to call them axioms that's fine, but I'm not here to quibble about language. Even if we had…

> Even if we had no experience of senses and minds leading to erroneous perceptions and thoughts, we would still have no way to prove that our minds are reliable

This is pure mental masturbation. It's gratifying for some, but not terribly interesting for others. Yes I could be a brain in a vat and there's no way for me to know, but that line of reasoning doesn't get us anywhere in a practical sense.

> If you want to take it as an axiom that your mind is reliable, that's fine for you, but it isn't something that's necessarily true.

Sure, there is a chance that I am actually in a vegetative state and that I'm making you and reality up... but how is that a useful starting point for practical science?

They're fun mental exercises, and lots of good has come of philosophy (i'm not discounting it at all), but at some point people want to send space probes to Mars, getting bogged down in questions like: what if I am a brain in a vat? would kind of get in the way of that.

Re: Philosophy Has Made Plenty of Progress

#325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Redefining "truth is knowable" to "truth is knowable with infinite certainty a la Descartes" is itself a deeply contentious epistemological stance, and still doesn't validate the use of the term "faith" for ordinary abductive reasoning from experience.

I did no such redefinition. Though I also didn't downvote you, because I think it's a valid misunderstanding. I'm arguing that mere truth is unknowable without faith. We have evidence of derangement all around us and it takes faith to proceed as though our actions are our own and are unclouded. From a bayesian perspective, one of our priors must be that there is some probability that the very mind that is doing the t…

> I'm arguing that mere truth is unknowable without faith

Does the infantry man's faith in ballistic charts affect where a mortar will land? Yes it turned out that Newtonian physics doesn't describe absolute truth, but it sure is useful if you need to blow that enemy up over on that hill.

> one of our priors must be that there is some probability that the very mind that is doing the thinking may be of a nature that is unable to effectively reason.

An interesting thought experiment, but what practical use can I apply it to?

btw I'm not implying that only lines of inquiry that result in practical uses are worthwhile, but, science for the most part is related to this.

I guess there is a distinction to be drawn between faith and blind faith. "Faith" in the atomic model allowed prediction of elements that had not yet been discovered. That faith was rewarded when the elements turned up exactly where expected (even though the orbital model of electrons turned out not to be the absolute truth). "Faith" in Einsteins theories required a belief in time dilation. Turns out we can't have GPS without accounting for it.

This is quite different to, for example, religious faith which so far has not had any of these predictive powers.

Re: Philosophy Has Made Plenty of Progress

#326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'm not sure what you're getting at here. What you say sounds like a perfectly interesting starting point for thinking about consciousness (although I'm not sure how it's supposed to fit with the fact that we're not computers, and have a distinct cognitive makeup, that mainstream psychology - 'cognitive psychology' - has committed itself to studying for several decades, with great profit). You would, in any case, hav…

The notions of agent, environment and reward are encountered in Reinforcement Learning which is a sub-field of ML but also relevant to biological agents. There is a great RL course on YouTube by David Silver (one of the creators of AlphaGo, which is probably the most famous application of RL so far).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2pWv7GOvuf0

The course can properly set the perspective of RL and shed new light on the philosophy of mind, if you take what it says and then extrapolate to humans and other agents.

What I find fascinating about RL is that it can be defined concretely. Consciousness can only be defined by reference to other words, in a less exact and concrete way. RL can also explain how meaning appears, based on future reward prediction. The rich sensations we have can be explained by an encoding-decoding architecture based on reconstruction error. Many difficulties in RL map back to difficulties humans have in choosing how to act - the exploration-exploitation tradeoff, instinct vs reason (two different ways to perform RL, one based purely on rewards and the other based on an internal model of the world and rewards). Some of the problems related to multi-agent RL are also covered in Game Theory, such as the prisoner's dilemma.

Regarding philosophy of language: we have today numerical representations of meaning in words and phrases. They are usually represented as vectors in high dimensional space or sets of vectors. For example it is customary to use 300-1000 dimensions for representing words. These vectors have a nice property - the closer two words are in meaning, the smaller the angle between the two vectors. They are derived by trying to predict a word by the context, or vice versa, on a corpus of text several Gb in size.

Many ideas from the philosophy of language, such as the meaning of words being related to the 'game' being played (activity with a purpose), emerge naturally from successful AI models. I'd say that where philosophy had a glimpse, AI has a testable implementation that can solve real world problems. Where philosophy uses mere words, AI uses probability distributions and datasets to define such models. The brain is probably doing something similar.

Other things that AI has managed to do so far: to encode images into latent representations and back, to synthesise images. Same for speech - we have speech recognition and text to speech. Some modules used in neural networks are analogous to imagination, attention, memory, emotion, intuition and many other aspects of the mind. On narrow domains computers can already best humans at perception.

The piece that is missing in AI to match human level is the prior knowledge encoded in our genes. We have been optimised to learn and function well in our environment by evolution. That means our verbal areas in the brain have a notion of invariance to time translation, visual areas have invariance to space translation, and conceptual areas have an invariance to permutation. There might be more invariances but we just don't know yet and that's why AI models are not yet up to par with humans. But we can still learn a lot about ourselves by analogy with AI agents. And that's where I think philosophy should listen.

Re: Philosophy Has Made Plenty of Progress

#327
post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Religion does provide meaning and purpose, but that is hardly all it is "about." Religion also provides inclusion for those that would otherwise feel outcast. It provides social structure and identity. It provides a framework for you to build culture upon. It acts as a moral guide for behavior. It unifies communities around central goals. It uses myth to convey inter-generational wisdom. It teaches rituals that impro…

I agree with many of your points. Religion was a useful tool in the development of mankind. And we should replace it with something more useful, that doesn't suffer religions intrinsic downsides. Something that isn't built on dogmatic rules that cannot be adjusted to fit changing circumstances. Again, I do see religion helping lots of people. But we could do better, and the only reason we don't are political. Try set…

>But why does it have to be something based on a two thousand year book that pretends to be perfect in every way by definition.

It doesn't have to be anything. You don't have to have five fingers on your right hand. you could have six. Or four. You could have four arms instead of two. Lots of things don't have to be the case, but we take things as they are offered because supposing you can do better than a complex, evolved system is not a reasonable claim unless you actually, deeply understand the system you are criticizing.

Perhaps you can come up with a better alternative to the great religions of the world. Perhaps you can engineer a land animal faster, stronger, and better adapted to life on a savanna than the cheetah. Perhaps you can do lots of things.

Doesn't mean you actually can or will, especially not in this lifetime, especially not on your own.

Re: Philosophy Has Made Plenty of Progress

#328
post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Religion does provide meaning and purpose, but that is hardly all it is "about." Religion also provides inclusion for those that would otherwise feel outcast. It provides social structure and identity. It provides a framework for you to build culture upon. It acts as a moral guide for behavior. It unifies communities around central goals. It uses myth to convey inter-generational wisdom. It teaches rituals that impro…

> Religion also provides inclusion for those that would otherwise feel outcast. Except for those who don't fit in the religion narrow view of what is acceptable.. > It provides a framework for you to build culture upon.[cut]It provides dozens of important things. Proof needed: there are many countries which have a high share of atheists/agnostics (northern European countries), these countries have their own culture a…

Culture, with all its variations in values, art, and identity, develops over very long periods of time. To look at modern, irreligious countries in Europe and say they have culture without religion ignores the fact that they only lost their religious identity in the past couple of generations. They're eating meat that their ancestors already hunted.

Re: Philosophy Has Made Plenty of Progress

#329
post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The idea that consensus entails convergence to the truth, when the best thinkers have consensus on antithetical ideas in different time periods.

You're ignoring the different amounts of information those people had about their environments. Do you happen to have issues with a particular scientific consensus, is that where we're going here?

It might be that our modern thinkers are missing the forest for the trees because they are overwhelmed with information about their environment.

I don't have any issue with the current consensus, it just seems incorrect reasoning to say consensus is convergence to truth. Why isn't consensus just groupthink, a notoriously bad way to arrive at the truth?

Re: Philosophy Has Made Plenty of Progress

#330
post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Religion also provides inclusion for those that would otherwise feel outcast. Except for those who don't fit in the religion narrow view of what is acceptable.. > It provides a framework for you to build culture upon.[cut]It provides dozens of important things. Proof needed: there are many countries which have a high share of atheists/agnostics (northern European countries), these countries have their own culture a…

Culture, with all its variations in values, art, and identity, develops over very long periods of time. To look at modern, irreligious countries in Europe and say they have culture without religion ignores the fact that they only lost their religious identity in the past couple of generations. They're eating meat that their ancestors already hunted.

camelNotation,vanterdon: Reread what the GP said: he used the present tense, not the past tense. If you rewrite what he said in the past tense, I agree, but for the present tense? No, while it 's true that in many countries religions still shape the culture, there are some countries which mostly left religion behind so his generalization isn't correct.
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