Why is the race, age, gender or ethnicity of the thinker relevant to the credibility of their ideas?
Race, gender and class in this case are clearly connected because he embodies all the stereotypes of the white male STEMlord. It makes sense, he summarized readings from others like him to appeal to a crowd of people like him. The crowd is becoming aware of this echo-chamber/safe-space for engineer and questions his motives, because they have been fed the same ideas over and over and he doesn't challenge them but just reinforces them.
You're absolutely right: our thoughts and ideas are biased and impure. That's why it's so important to test them with science and reason.
Also for example, mathematics and physics are usually fields that rarely have direct applications and most of the time they provide tools for other fields. What if the physics and maths we have now, or the way we frame the problems these fields should solve, are biased? What if this bias is preventing the creation of useful tools for other fields?
The problem is that we must acknowledge the impossibility to "think outside of the box" of reason. By doing so we open ourselves to a wider spectrum of possible discoveries and constructions, even within science and engineering. What exists might not be biased in itself, but the fact that we reached some results instead of others is dependant on cultural biases that exist outside the field itself and inside the individuals and organizations pursuing science and engineering.
It's rather the opposite here; some are trying to forbid reason to stray outside the box they believe it belongs in. The possibility that reason might explain mental processes appears to be so threatening that many people are attacking this video for daring to try.
And not with any specific objection, but simply with attacks on reason itself.
Reason itself can understand its limits. That's a good thing, we are lucky and we got to that poitn.
> It's rather the opposite here; some are trying to forbid reason to stray outside the box they believe it belongs in.
Nobody is forbidding anything, as long as you don't make it dangerous. Excesses of reason led to great crimes in the last centuries but this is not the case.
> The possibility that reason might explain mental processes appears to be so threatening that many people are attacking this video for daring to try.
Reason can explain mental processes for sure: it's called neuroscience and it's a thriving field. But consciousness or intelligence are not only about mental processes. I mean, you can believe so but then we say your opinions are naive, because there's plenty of evidence that mechanicism is not enough to explain human experience. We are not attacking this video, we are criticizing it for making the same mistakes of so many reductionists before him. If the attacks seem vague is because probably you're missing the whole discourse going on in the last 20 years in the Philosophy of Mind and related fields.
Also reason is not sacred, get over it.
"You can believe [something] but then we say your opinions are naive" is not actually an argument, nor is it productive discussion.
https://books.google.it/books?id=r0Bf3lLys6AC&printsec=front...
https://books.google.it/books?id=OVGna4ZEpWwC&printsec=front...
These are just a couple of modern books with an anti-reductionist approach.
It simply says "i was wrong about all those other things, but this next thing you can't explain in principle, because reasons (many books of untestable claims here)".
Even if we assume that consciousness or intelligence cannot be explained by physics, the anti-reductionist position still doesn't add anything because we need to try to explain it with physics anyway to find out that it is not possible.
I can tell you I'll never read those books. Philosophy is a field that's never contributed anything useful and never actually reached a conclusion on anything.
Perhaps one day we'll really understand intelligence and consciousness. Perhaps not. But if we do, I'm confident the answers will come from neuroscience, psychology, and/or AI, rather than philosophy.
Without epistemology there's no science. Period. Science needs philosophy because they have two complementing roles. If philosophy (or non-scientific thinking in general) doesn't define concepts, science has nothing to work with. Science's role is not to make up concepts. Sometimes a single person does that during scientific inquiry but he's stepping outside of science's responsability and ill-defined concepts created so many complications throughout science's history. Just think about psychiatry.
> and philosophy abandoned evidence-based inquiry.
Big citation needed.
> Perhaps one day we'll really understand intelligence and consciousness. Perhaps not. But if we do, I'm confident the answers will come from neuroscience, psychology, and/or AI, rather than philosophy.
That's not the point. For sure the scientific understanding of intelligence and consciousness will come from science. The role of philosophy is different: it's to define what's the intelligence your trying to make sense of, it's trying to frame the problem you want to solve with science, it's about pointing science towards the evidence you want to model and let it do its course because now the exchange is always been: "Go science, fetch there" and science replied "there's nothing there, but I've found neurons". "Oh nice, let's try there", "Still nothing, but I've found networks in the brain and processing in the visual cortex and the rest of the body", "Umh, weird. Maybe it's an emergent property". "Try there" and so on. Neuroscientists are heavily involved in philosophy in the first place because this back and forth is much more intense than in other fields and there's evidently something wrong in how the problem is framed.
That's certainly not true. Physical concepts were invented by the physicists. Viruses, bacteria, prions, etc were discovered by biologists. Algorithms were invented by computer scientists and mathematicians. Philosophers had very little if anything to do with it.
> philosophy abandoned evidence-based inquiry
If I'm wrong about this you can easily prove it. Just point me to the evidence-based philosophy.
> the exchange is always been: "Go science, fetch there"
No philosopher pointed the way for Einstein or Planck or Euler. You could claim that they were practicing a non-scientific mode of thought but it was based on a scientific, not philosophical, education, and personally I think that's a very narrow, mechanical view of science.
I don't mean to completely dismiss your chosen field. There might be value in it that I'm not seeing, and even if it's merely interesting but unproductive there's still value in that.
I just mean to say two things: 1) it's not for me, and 2) when it intersects with other fields philosophers need to contribute something more specific/productive than "you should read these philosophy books". Practitioners of different fields collaborate by sharing relevant information, not by expecting people in other fields to learn their field.
I am most interested in the fact that he said that his theory could not be improved by drawing on thinkers from other cultures. Why? Because his theory itself implies that other cultures have things to contribute.
As he said, cultures have more intelligence (i.e. better theory creation powers) than individuals. One would guess, then, that he would say a good theory should maximize the number of cultures it draws from and the degree to which it draws from them.
However his theory is at best the product of one culture or at worst (and I think this is what he implied in his question and answer response) the product of one individual.