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Philosophy Has Made Plenty of Progress

blogs.scientificamerican.com

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Re: Philosophy Has Made Plenty of Progress

#81

Post by goatlover »

AstralStorm wrote: post #69
tkyjonathan wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Philosophy is the study of concepts. To get to something purely theoretical, you need to abstract the precepts of your original concepts. Then it becomes a floating abstraction. Take for example Einstein: he found some mathematical formulas, proved they were right and then used them as the abstraction for everything else. His example of 'what if I stand on a train traveling at the speed of light and it gets hit by li…

Mathematics and logic are more of a study of concepts than philosophy, highly contaminated by language and imprecision, could ever warrant to be. (These are earliest branches out of philosophy by the way.) Use of natural language makes most of the ideas entertained by philosophy highly ambiguous until they get formalized. Even ethics can be strictly formalized in a more advanced logic system, making the ideas and app…

That's what analytic philosophy has been trying to do for the past century. How well it has succeeded is debatable.

Maybe instead of thinking of language as poor, ambiguous version of logic, we should think of logic as a limited version of language.

Logic can't tell us what we should care about, how we should feel, what's worth pursing, what it means to exist as an animal with needs. We suffer, we desire, we wonder. Natural language captures that in a way that logic cannot.

Re: Philosophy Has Made Plenty of Progress

#82

Post by n4r9 »

opaque wrote: post #51
n4r9 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Theory" is a much broader term than "scientific theory", which is what you're defining. For example, in mathematics you have the "theory of natural numbers", or in art you have the "anti-essentialist theory". These aren't required to be hypotheses about the real-world. Rather they are like frameworks or languages which enable us to discuss and explore complex structures.

Perhaps I'm inclined to read it that way from working in physics, which is divided into theory and experiment. He also refers to 'experimentalists' in the preceding sentence, which adds to the effect. Also if you take the fully general meaning, it's so vague I don't understand how it's something you can 'love', but then maybe that's why I'm not a Philosopher. Edit: The author's work https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_…

I understand where you're coming from but I think a charitable (and perfectly reasonable) interpretation is that he's making a generic theory/practice distinction.

I'd disagree that theory is something you can love since I strongly identify with this sentiment myself. I am not a practical man (as my wife is more than happy to vouch for), but I'm in love with ideas, concepts and abstractions. I love mulling them over and discussing them with like-minded people. It often doesn't matter much to me whether an idea has physical grounding or can be put into practice.

> I want to start off by emphasising that I am not proposing to take sides on the propositions expressed in this book. I’m an intellectual. Ideas are my trade. Show me an idea and i’ll taste it. Belgians are foodies; my much-loved colleague Andre Petry lives out in the country. Once when I was staying with him the field opposite his house delivered overnight a vast harvest of a kind of particularly delicious toadstool called coprina comatus, a delicacy regrettably of incontestably phallic appearance known to English country people as Old man’s tool. Most people I have met express shock and horror at being asked to eat it. Not so Andre. No Belgian will allow anything to get in the way of a new taste experience. It is the same with me and ideas.

https://www.dpmms.cam.ac.uk/~tf/jaynes.pdf

Re: Philosophy Has Made Plenty of Progress

#83

Post by myWindoonn »

I can see why this guy is popular.

I wonder whether he'd be so quick to dismiss Gödel and Quine if presented with an utterance like,

    "This sentence is true, but cannot be proven true by any human nor any human-crafted device."
I'm quite confident that this sentence is true, but cannot put forth a proof which would convince anybody; at the same time, just like any other mathematical object, its proof is generated by the observer, who convinces themselves of its truth while simultaneously acknowledging the paradox.

Gödel's entire point was that this formulation was rigorous and could not be escaped by a mere change of (syntactic or semantic) venue. Turing's point was that this formulation extends to computation and effective methods of producing results. Quine's point was that it is the quotation mark, and not the self-reference, that leads to the incompleteness/inconsistency.

I probably wouldn't mind so much, but he seems like the kind of guy who believes in physical cause and effect.

Re: Philosophy Has Made Plenty of Progress

#84

Post by nyc111 »

charlysl wrote: post #78
nyc111 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems a qoute from the Introduction of his History of western philosophy [1]. But I think the next sentence is important too: Almost all the questions of most interest to speculative minds are such as science cannot answer, and the confident answers of theologians no longer seem so convincing as they did in former centuries. [...] To such questions no answer can be found in the laboratory. Theologies have profes…

You are right about the quote. It seems that what Russell considers definite knowledge is ... answer can be found in the laboratory . It depends on what is the best available method for proving, to the extent to which this is possible, a given hypothesis. Whenever an experimental method in the scientific sense is possible, then he considers that kind of knowledge definite. I agree that the fact that it is also provis…

Yes, I agree. He theologian's knowledge is definite in the sense of absolute. But knowledge gained in the lab is definitely knowledge under given circumstances, but absolute kndwledge.

This turned out to be a good example about the importance of clear definitions of words in philosophical discussion.

Re: Philosophy Has Made Plenty of Progress

#85

Post by foldr »

acqq wrote: post #61
brobdingnagians wrote: post #45

Sounds like a clever, witty, and charming guy. Would be very interesting to talk to him; I like his style of talking. Curiously ironic that he cites a consensus in personal belief in atheism and agnostics among philosophers (at least, modern philosophers, most philosophers in history believed in God..) as a good reason for philosophy not accepting the existence of God, which appears to be a popularity contest (and ec…

That the gods are man made is not a discovery of recent times but was known by the thinkers in antique and started to be obvious again some 500 years ago, as the whole continents were discovered that appeared nowhere in the holly texts. Soon enough, the heliocentrism was discovered and got the magnificent scientific explanation with Newton. And so on and on: today we know that the Universe is 13.7 billion years old,…

Of all the possible threats that science might pose to Christian doctrine, it's odd to choose heliocentrism and the age of the Earth as examples. Those facts are fully compatible with the Nicene Creed, and few serious Christain thinkers have ever thought that the Bible had to be interpreted as a scientific textbook. As far back as the third century, Origen was pointing out that the creation narrative shouldn't be taken literally.

Re: Philosophy Has Made Plenty of Progress

#86

Post by steve_gh »

Ephem wrote: post #77
MrScruff wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So is it the case that the compatibilist imagines three possible classes of decision. 1) Where the decision is coerced. 2) Where the decision is not coerced and so ostensibly 'free' but determined by external factors (ie. the laws of Physics). 3) Where the decision is genuinely 'free', thus violating the laws of Physics as we know them. Compatibilists would reject 3) but would describe 2) as the exercising of 'free w…

In a nutshell that about sums it up. I do think many compatibilists think that 1->2 is a scale and that there exists a lot of nuance here though. Interestingly enough, maybe it's not the meaning of the word "free" that is under debate here, but instead that of the word coerced?

So for (2). If my psychological state is manipulated by a targeted advertising campaign, based on Google-scale data, do I actually have Free Will in any meaningful sense?

Re: Philosophy Has Made Plenty of Progress

#87

Post by foldr »

myWindoonn wrote: post #83

I can see why this guy is popular. I wonder whether he'd be so quick to dismiss Gödel and Quine if presented with an utterance like, "This sentence is true, but cannot be proven true by any human nor any human-crafted device." I'm quite confident that this sentence is true, but cannot put forth a proof which would convince anybody; at the same time, just like any other mathematical object, its proof is generated by t…

Are Gödel and Quine mentioned in the article?

Re: Philosophy Has Made Plenty of Progress

#88

Post by gus_massa »

dghf wrote: post #47

> Hasn’t quantum mechanics demolished the hope that science will make reality intelligible? > Not in the least. As Bell said, study Bohm’s pilot wave theory and you see that everything can be explained perfectly well, with no funny business at all logically or conceptually. We are stuck with non-locality, as Bell proved, but maybe in the end you need non-locality for the deep simplicity of law that I anticipate. I'm…

Yes, it is!

I think that Bohm’s pilot wave theory is appealing to non technical people because it replace all the scary equations of quantum mechanics with a wave and a particle. The trick is that the wave has a scary equation, and the interaction of the wave and the particle has a scary equation, but you can hide the scary equations behind a nice animated graph of a wave and a ball.

For a nonrelativistic particle, the pilot wave is equivalent to the other quantum mechanics interpretations. The other interpretations can be extended to the special relativity case, moreover all the work in the last 50 (or more) years in particle physis use the extended versions. Nobody know how to extend the pilot wave theory, and perhaps it's impossible.

Re: Philosophy Has Made Plenty of Progress

#89

Post by YorkshireSeason »

foldr wrote: post #74
YorkshireSeason wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which philosopher has laid down the foundations of the field? One good starting point for AI is Leibniz' Calculemus! , and Leibniz was a mathematician/programmer and not a philosopher in the sense that the original article by Tim Maudlin seems to defend. Leibniz even built automata, formaliesed (propositional logic) etc!

I've had this discussion on HN several times before. As soon as you start pointing out the contributions of philosophy to various fields, people start denying that the people in question were philosophers. So you really can't win. By this logic, any philosopher who made a contribution to mathematics or science was ipso facto a scientist or mathematician and not a philosopher.

I completely agree with you. It's a difficult subject.

I have proposed the following two definitions:

1. Philosophers in the original article: best understood as acedemic philosopers.

2. Progress in AI/maths/hard science: comes from those who actually "do the maths/implementation/repeatable measurement" as opposed to using natural language only for discussing their ideas.

In my opinion the purpose of all science is truth, and truth (pace Socrates and the slave boy) must -- among other things -- be reproducable by others, ideally by every human. Technology for truth has improved over time, with mathematisation (and edge case programming and exectuion on a computer) as the current state of the art in reproducibility. When Frege succeeded in formalising first-order logic, the sacred heart of rationality, informal methods became second-class. All substantial progress in subjects formerly restricted to informal methods has since come from formalisation and empirical experiment.

If you don't agree with my (1, 2) above, than that's fine, we are talking abotu (slightly) different things.

Re: Philosophy Has Made Plenty of Progress

#90

Post by foldr »

YorkshireSeason wrote: post #89
foldr wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've had this discussion on HN several times before. As soon as you start pointing out the contributions of philosophy to various fields, people start denying that the people in question were philosophers. So you really can't win. By this logic, any philosopher who made a contribution to mathematics or science was ipso facto a scientist or mathematician and not a philosopher.

I completely agree with you. It's a difficult subject. I have proposed the following two definitions: 1. Philosophers in the original article: best understood as acedemic philosopers. 2. Progress in AI/maths/hard science: comes from those who actually "do the maths/implementation/repeatable measurement" as opposed to using natural language only for discussing their ideas. In my opinion the purpose of all science is t…

You seem to be assuming that philosophers are somehow restricted to using natural language only, but

* the formalization and regimentation of natural language has always been a fairly central concern in philosophy (that's where formal logic comes from);

* mathematics can be, and used to be, done in largely natural language.

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