The linked article for this thread is about how "tree" biology keeps springing up and disappearing - the molecular biology, genetics, convergent evolution -- and how the human concept of "tree" doesn't really map cleanly. All of that, to me, is intuitive.
But philosophy is lost on me. Neither your linked Wikipedia article or the article on the book you suggest [1] make much sense to my non-philosophical science brain. My eyes just glaze over.
^This applies mostly to epistemology.
I like my philosophy in the format of what the youth calls 'schizo-posts'. Weird, out-there, grasping to find right words and closer to art than anything else.
Philosophy is also not science, since there is no attempt to rigorously test the theories with experiments or data.
So I lump philosophy with art. It's strongly tied with a person's sense of aesthetics as well as the culture around them.
The philosophical sciences (I use this word in the classical sense, not the narrow modern/Anglo-American sense) can be said to couple the deductive rigor of math with general empirical observation. For example, consider metaphysics. Metaphysics often begins from very basic and general observations like "things change", observations that, btw, everyone generally presupposes, including the empirical scientist. From these observations, we can infer what must be true about reality in general and necessarily so. Metaphysics gives us the principles characteristic of being as being, or being in general. Such principles are therefore true of all things. If this seems very abstract, you would be right, as metaphysics concerns the most general things. Concrete-minded people will have a difficult time.
Sadly, because of ignorance, many take philosophy to be some kind of idle speculation or some kind of put on where anything goes. This may be a result of either bad experiences or simply a lack of preparation to understand what is being said. Also, certain philosophical "schools" seem to be notorious for their unintelligibility (Derrida has this reputation). But read someone like Aristotle or Thomas Aquinas, or better yet, recent commentators and didactic works, and you will breathe fresh air and feed your mind. Perhaps it won't be easy, but the clarity and value are there and there is plenty to chew on.
Philosophy also investigates the entailments of various held positions. For instance, your view of philosophy, science, mathematics, aesthetics, of what constitutes knowledge, etc, all very much present in your comment, all fall under the jurisdiction of philosophy. The assumptions you are making are philosophical in nature and they have profound logical consequences that make shock you and cause you to revise your views. For instance, a kind of quasi-/amateur positivist, scientistic materialism seems to be popular on HN. But a rather modest philosophical examination shows that logical positivism, scientism, and materialism are all self-refuting or incoherent. You can't escape philosophy. You can either do it well, or do it poorly.
Physics and maths tend to poopoo any line of thinking which considers human experience - and there is amazing utility in that! No opinions are important for calculation of a trajectory. However, human experience does exist, and operating rationally on it, despite the lack of ability to experiment, leads one into a world that mathematicians might scoff at, but is still a completely valid field of inquiry.
People will say “philosophy is a soft science! No experiments!” Without understanding that experiments cannot be done in this realm.
I recommend Michael Segrue on YouTube - his lectures are fantastic as an intro to philosophy. Particularly his into to Kierkegaard touches on the birth of existentialism out of the furnace of pure scientific rationality.
That isn't the only way to subject philosophical ideas to empirical scrutiny, but whenever people use the historical evidence to determine things like how well different economic systems behave, for example, all of a sudden a lot of people get very angry and defensive and refuse to acknowledge the validity of prior experience.
> People will say “philosophy is a soft science! No experiments!” Without understanding that experiments cannot be done in this realm.
Some kinds of philosophy can be experimented on in some respects. For example: Does unquestioning obedience produce an ethical system that minimizes arbitrary killings? Well, I think we can look to the historical record and find the answer to that one, and conclude that it doesn't.
More deeply, though, how do we conclude that we care about arbitrary killing? That's a kind of question that we can't answer through experimentation, because the world doesn't outright tell us what values we should adopt. The most we can do is reason through the problem and then use experimentation (even retrospective experiments, as in history) to try to figure out which ethical systems support those values best.
That said... We're not blank slates. We're humans, we're social animals, so we care about certain things instinctively and, thus, some ethical systems are more humane than others in their outcomes.
Kind of a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for a question to be a philosophical one.
I mean, I tend to agree here with the straw man! That's why, for example, when arguing against commonwealth planning, one can't point at the Soviet Union as an example. One instead has to start from epistemology[1]! Then, folks don't respond with anger, they respond with glazed eyes.
[1] https://cdn.mises.org/economic_calculation_in_the_socialist_...
It's actually the reverse—multiple sciences started out as subfields of philosophy, that got useful enough on their own that they were peeled out into their own thing. It would be more useful to think of as philosophy as a soup of proto-sciences that are developing, that some might prove useful, and some might die out.
That's not really all philosophy is, but at least it's a more historically accurate way to look at it.
Does that mean "they figured out ways to make it reproducible and/or validate it"?
Whereas the other subfields of philosophy don't (yet) have ways to fully validate them, and/or make them reproducible?
I think it depends on the field. Reproducibility is more of a recent concern, whereas this process has been going on since the ancient Greeks, I'm sure.
Probably more recently the criterion is "commercial value".
The problem here is postmodernism, which is absolutely a meaningless word salad designed solely to impress the gullible.
I think this is basically the point. Understand the world around you, and especially the connections and influences between different components of a system (broadly defined), to form and verify more holistic, nth-order models rather than disconnected, first-order-only analyses.
I think it goes beyond "cool idea" and really strikes at the same kinds of intuitions that many on HN appreciate as regards simple models that explain complex phenomena. In this sense, then, D&G's work is a sort of "meta-model" for guiding intuitions when building specific models about specific systems.
It is not a predictive framework. I guess I would call it an "ontological/architectural" framework.
(I laughed)
> I find it basically useless in my every day life and work
D&G is of utility in architecture, for one. You need to have some philosophical decoration for your doodle. The art is in mapping bs to doodle. In general, useless philosophy is a faithful companion in bullshit fields. Where in software we could use D&G then? I suggest crypto space.
A rhizome, maybe. IDK, I barely understand what's going on here.
If instead we used a D&G rhizome that “connects any point to any other point” — we’d be dropping the notion of time (ie, ancestors precede descendants). Which when we’re talking about evolution, seems bad.
If horizontal gene transfer were a big part of the story here, that’d be different. Or if your ecology has time travel, or interstellar exchange ala Butler’s Xenogenesis, then sure, rhizome away.
and that's exactly what we see here, right? if a species took a path A-B-C-D to exhibit features of D, and another took A-F-G-D and so also exhibits features of D, then isn't there more to the history there than simply genetic change via ancestry over time? there's a reason why convergent evolution is so weird and surprising.
epigenetics, for example, is an interesting manifestation of what sorts of new domains you can explore as you broaden the horizon for asking questions beyond "linear ancestry" or "natural heirarchy" - arborescent vs rhizomatic thinking.
I think we see the opposite! We start with a naive and non-hierarchical view of relatedness: trees are tall woody things, fish live in the water and have fins. And the piece argues that we should let go of our common-sense categories and use the descent-based ones, like the biologists do.
Anyway --- I didn't say that ancestry is the only factor. I said it was natural, and useful. Epigenetics is fascinating, really! But it's not 'blasting out' of anything, it adds a bit of detail and complexity around the edges. A sense of proportion is important; we shouldn't miss the forest for the...never mind.
The piece has a list of conclusions at the bottom
> taxonomy is not automatically a great category for regular usage.
> (You can, at least, say that a tree is a strategy. Wood is a strategy. Fruit is a strategy. A fish is also a strategy.)
> insisting that “wood” is not a useful or comprehensible category would be the most fascinatingly obnoxious rhetorical move. Just the pinnacle of choosing the interestingly abstract over the practical whole.