Its the artsy types that only read Sartre and Heidigger an Derrida, and never got their hands dirty by working in a lab, doing sufficiently higher level math, engineered and built modern tech are the annoying ones.

FWIW, I have also seen the dismissive STEM attitude toward the philosophical tradition. It helps to remember that the philosophical tradition predates the scientific tradition significantly, and that it does not take logical positivism or reductionism as givens. Having studied both disciplines, I feel like philosophy has seriously enhanced my understand of the world even if I don’t use it in my day-to-day scientific work.

And they probably know other people in the department who teach things that might be interesting to a STEM student even if that student hardly knows it yet.

Logicians are somewhat different in studying formal systems, and there are strong links to (foundations of) mathematics. But logics are typically developed and analyze to study some otherwise philosophically motivated questions.

Few generalisations hold of philosophy departments across traditions and regions, and this is untrue of departments in the analytic tradition of which Dennett was part. Philosophical logicians are often interested in more than logic for logic’s sake, and other philosophers share that interest; see e.g. Williamson’s /Modal logic as metaphysics/.

Perhaps finding it confusing is a recent development.

That's an interesting point.

I think there's also a cost to that-- philosophy lugs around a lot of pre-scientific baggage that is poorly specified but historically important. Free will comes to mind, especially within the Christian history of resolving the apparent contradiction of horrific natural/manmade evils existing in the face of an omniscient, omnipotent, and benevolent god.

There are of course other historical contexts to notions of free will. But when philosophers talk about any of these in places where laypeople here them, it seems like those historical contexts are gone and they end up strongly implying a general purpose free will that is neither well-specified or in some cases even coherent.

It would be like a bunch of programmers debating "functions," with one meaning functional programming, another meaning any programming language where functions are a first-class citizen, and yet another meaning the set of all keywords "function" or "FUNCTION" in any programming language in history. That's not going to be a fruitful discussion.

So I'd speculate people in STEM can smell the lack of systematic thinking in some of these discussions and unfortunately throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Edit: clarification

It be be tautological, but a lack of systemic thinking makes a discussion bad philosophy, or epistemic bunk as they say in the trade.

Or maybe his point, in a discussion like this on HN, a lot of people are jumping into the conversation in-the-middle, without catching up on the history.

Perhaps, but seeing poor thinking in others is a lot easier than seeing it in oneself. I don't recall encountering any STEM folks who haven't made a logical/epistemic/other error on the proposition of whether we have free will. It is one of those questions that seems to put the mind into some sort of a weird downgraded mode.

This entire comment section is...interesting.

>implying a general purpose free will that is neither well-specified or in some cases even coherent.

To the contrary, I find that it is the layman who has an airy-fairy conception of free will that couldn't possibly exist, while the philosophers are generally more down-to-earth and use "free will" that normal people use the term in a non-philosophical context.

>So I'd speculate people in STEM can smell the lack of systematic thinking in some of these discussions and unfortunately throw the baby out with the bathwater.

I'm not sure if there's any baby in the bathwater if philosophy lacks systematic thinking, if by "lacking systematic thinking" you mean something like "not thinking definitions and arguments through". Luckily it doesn't seem that philosophy does this. But maybe I'm misunderstanding you - maybe you're talking about the philosophical discussions that laymen generally overhear, which tend not to be discussions held by philosophers but by other laymen. And I do think you would be right to say that these discussions generally aren't very coherent, and reflect poorly on philosophy as a discipline.

It's like the first programming language you learned. It will shape your perception of what programming is all about for a long time afterward, and might even turn you away from programming altogether. But there are lots of programming languages, and they're just different ways to make the same silicon do something interesting!

The silicon argument might be right if we treat it on its own. Input, process and output. But one think of the system where the silicon or multiple of them plus some analogue or biological input and output. It is not the same. The process affect the speed and response … you can imagine one use lisp, basic or cnn to drive a car … can you.

The turning complete is not physical as above and real world ish. Hence it sound all true. But people forgot we do not have unlimited memory. Our tur8ng complete is in practice not.

To sum it all may be we kick human out of the loop all silicon and human language might have a chance the same using the same language (but still physical real world above …)

Philosophers shoud better stay away from physics. Not saying here, that the thought experiments can't provide valuable insights. It's just they can't be used to define the truth about the reality.

To a t, these people were dullards. They rarely had deep knowledge about anything, most of the time not even about the field they professed such dedication to. The entire point of an undergraduate education is to establish a foundation of baseline knowledge to allow you to contextualize new information, and if you don't engage with it, there's not a lot of opportunities to make up for it later.

A lot of philosophy ignores biology, sometimes even physics. In topics where biology would be immensely relevant, like with philosophy of mind. Dennett didn't try to ignore biology, he was deeply aware and well read in biology as well.

Most of the philosophy I'm familiar with is concerned with abstract notions and concepts like morality. I'm really having a hard time seeing how biology or physics would inform it one direction or another.

Like, what sort of biology would have made Kant's notions of morality different?

Relativity overturned those Newtonian assumptions on which Kant depended, although he might say we nevertheless have to experience time as constant and space in three dimensions, regardless of how those things turn out to "really" work, since that's the only way we can do it.

So it's no longer obvious that time and space are just given absolutely, and due to that, they no longer make for a comfortable starting point for philosophical assumptions. If nature itself is different, then we might not even be experiencing it that way in the first place.

More tentatively, I think our advancing understanding of how brains and machines embody concepts, our understanding of the differences of biological creatures combined with new physics, is suggestive at a bare minimum that reality could be experienced differently, and/or that we can understand how we experience these things empirically with better knowledge about brains, instead of asserting that everything is governed at the outset by this or that philosophical assumption.

Only in *very* specific situations which are extremely extremely extremely unrelated and WELL out of both practical and theoretical bound to the human perception of reality.

Relativity is kind of the trivia of physics, it really has not informed much technology apart from a few things in space - compare this to, say, quantum electrodynamics which tells us why weird stuff happens in things we've made quadrillions of (not to mention quantum computing, etc.)

The only time we would have ever brushed up against it naturally might have been when we put clocks into space so that we could better send nukes into other parts of the globe.

GPS is kind of a huge one, though it technically is just a few clocks in space.

I think you are more wrong than right here. My understanding (informed by Onora O'neill, Dan Bonevac, and various Stanford Encyclopedia entries :-)) is that Kant does not specifically depend on Newtonian assumptions but that human perceptions have to be mediated by time and space. Instead of overturning Kant, relativity and QM put even more distance between what we, as mortal, physical beings, can perceive versus whatever is really going on in the world.

Kant's project was to discover, given all of that, what anyone can say about things like ethics. He even goes so far to say that what he is trying to do is universal and he would like it to apply to other forms of intelligent beings.

I understand the point about mediation, and I tried to speak to it directly in the portion you quoted. You are exactly right about the way Kant uses that in his argument. It's flexible enough that it can be understood as resilient, I think.

I tried show how science can nevertheless speak to it in several ways. One is the convenient equivalence between Kant's necessary conditions and nature as we understood it at the time. That equivalence makes it easier to be comfortable positing time and space as we understand them as necessary conditions that are prior to nature. It would be harder (but not impossible!) to entertain if there was daylight between what we believed our faculties to be and what we believed the natural world to be, if what was "necessary" was something different than what we thought we experienced (such as, say, a singular loaf of unified spacetime). An implication of Kant's view, as I understood him, was that we should be ready to believe it's different anyway, but nevertheless, it's easier to swallow when it perfectly aligns with how we thing the world really is.

Second, for a different way of stating a similar point, if time and space are non-newtonian in some important way, we may have to understand that that is what we experience in the first instance, and we would have to wrestle with the fact that our intuitions may attest to a variety of possible underlying necessary conditions. (Wittgenstein has been mentioned in this thread, so for a paraphrase of something he supposedly said, in reply to a student noting that it looks like the sun goes around the earth: "What would it look like if the earth went around the sun?" So it may be with the nature of our faculties.)

Third, as we gain deeper understanding of brain functions of ourselves and other creatures, we may have inroads to how certain of our conscious experiences depend on conceptual abstractions or models. And if so, it transforms it into an open empirical question rather than one where we are simply stuck presuming necessary conditions. Kant might insist that that is all already through the lense of our faculties such as they are, but we, with more information, would be increasingly comfortable just not entertaining them as we get increasingly robust empirical understandings of conscious experience.

None of these is a "defeater" argument by itself and there's a lot that can be talked about here of course, but I think given 21st century science, if Kant were trying to present his vision for the first time we might find it more challenging to reconcile with what we know of the natural world.

Ok... this is non sequitur. It really doesn't matter that time moves at different speeds for any of Kant's philosophical positions. 2 people could be traveling at 0.5c and 0.00000001c and that makes no difference in Kant morals on how they should behave.

And, practically speaking, unless there's a drastic development in propulsion the only bearing relativity has on day to day life is making sure the GPS works correctly. It is, otherwise, completely non-impactful to anyone beyond astrophysicists.

This wasn't about Kant's morals. This was about the idea that Newtonian conceptions of space and time familiar to Kant were necessary preconditions to experience.

My understanding is that post-relativity, Neokantians have been trying to reconcile Kant's thought with the implications of relativity. Philosophy as a discipline is, as I understand it, happy to work with new scientific discoveries, and not going to stick with philosophical dogma in the face of contradicting science. Besides, beyond a certain level, doesn't science have to give way to philosophy? I don't see holding certain philosophical assumptions (not really assumptions, but intuitions or propositions argued from intuitions) as a necessarily bad thing or even an avoidable thing, as long as it's open to both philosophical and scientific criticism, where applicable.

The fact that the relation is one of an amendment or a reconciliation to new data is a point in favor of skepticism against his original assumptions, but not a defeater.

I would agree that we can credit intuitions as being more than mere assumptions, and I think you're right about The legitimacy of positing assumptions as long as they're posited in a spirit of openness and responsiveness to philosophical and scientific criticism. What do you know, a healthy and reasonable of reply on philosophy. To tie this to Daniel Dennett, I have found one of his most valuable contributions to be a notion of the principle of charity, which is to credit the person you correspond with with the most reasonable possible interpretation, and I think the best philosophical exchanges are carried out in that spirit, and so I think he would highlight yours as the response in this thread that best embodies that principle.

I find it interesting that you say: "although he might say we nevertheless have to experience time as constant and space in three dimensions". The physicist/philosopher/physiologist/mathematician Hermann von Helmholtz (who was, I think, very much inspired by Kant) wanted to prove that, given some basic measurement axioms (demanding constant curvature etc.), Euclidean geometry is necessarily the geometry of our internal perceptual manifolds (Kant's view is, I believe, essentially that these internal manifolds must have the same geometry as physical space-time). But it turned out that pseudo-spherical geometry also satisfies these axioms. So, although there is something, as far as your general description goes, to your 'defence' of Kant, and I think Helmholtz himself would've said that he's working within Kant's framework, it is still insufficient to vindicate everything that Kant said. I believe Helmholtz agreed, however, that our spatial imagination is three dimensional.

And Kant furthermore asserts that: 4. In addition to (1), there is no mind-independent space-time, space and time as such are mind-dependent. This means that our descriptions of the world are necessarily, e.g. Euclidean.

I don't think (1), (2), (3) are at all controversial, although only (2) and its consequences are a contribution of Kant himself, but (4) is, I'm pretty sure, quite universally rejected nowadays.

That's because a lot of philosophy is eminently pooh-pooh-able. There is a tiny minority of philosophers who are actually scientists pushing very hard on the boundaries of human knowledge. Dennett was one of them. Tim Maudlin is another. But the vast majority of people who self-identify professionally as philosophers, and especially the ones whose names are revered (I'm looking at you, Ludwig Wittgenstein [EDITED]), do work that seems to me to be little more than the obfuscation of trivial or false ideas.

That you would deride Wittgenstein on a math/CS forum, when he is literally the person who thought up the concept of truth tables, seems quite egregious.

Yes, Wittgenstein is one of the most frustrating philosophers to read (I know, I took a class on his work), but his impact on the development of computer science, as one of the main people trying to harness the logic of thought/language, seems obvious to me.

That would be Charles Peirce, in the XIXth century, not Wittgenstein.

I think it's pretty clear that Wittgenstein's truth tables are those that guided the development of computer science.

>In a manuscript of 1893, in the context of his study of the truth-functional analysis of propositions and proofs and his continuing efforts at defining and understanding the nature of logical inference, and against the background of his mathematical work in matrix theory in algebra, Charles Peirce presented a truth table which displayed in matrix form the definition of his most fundamental connective, that of illation, which is equivalent to the truth-functional definition of material implication. Peirce’s matrix is exactly equivalent to that for material implication discovered by Shosky that is attributable to Bertrand Russell and has been dated as originating in 1912. Thus, Peirce’s table of 1893 may be considered to be the earliest known instance of a truth table device in the familiar form which is attributable to an identifiable author, and antedates not only the tables of Post, Wittgenstein, and Łukasiewicz of 1920-22, but Russell’s table of 1912 and also Peirce’s previously identified tables for trivalent logic tracable to 1902.

PDF of Anellis's paper: https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1108/1108.2429.pdf

>But even if that conclusion is challenged, it is now clear that Russell understood and used the truth-table technique and the truth-table device. By 1910, Russell had already demonstrated a well-documented understanding of the truth-table technique in his work on Principia Mathematica. Now, it would seem that by 1912, and surely by 1914, Russell understood, and used, the truth-table device. Of course, the combination of logical conception and logical engineering by Russell in his use of truth tables is the culmination of work by Boole and Frege, who were closely studied by Russell. Wittgenstein and Post still deserve recognition for realizing the value and power of the truth-table device. But Russell also deserves some recognition on this topic, as part of this pantheon of logicians.

>In this paper I have shown that neither the truth-table technique nor the truth-table device was "invented" by Wittgenstein or Post in 1921-22. The truth-table technique may originally be a product of Philo's mind, but it was clearly in use by Boole, Frege, and Whitehead and Russell. The truth-table device is found in use by Wittgenstein in 1912, perhaps with some collaboration from Russell. Russell used the truth-table technique at Harvard in 1914 and in London in 1918. So the truth-table technique and the truth-table device both predate the early 1920s.

PDF of Shosky's relevant paper: https://mulpress.mcmaster.ca/russelljournal/article/download...

Margaret Masterman, who was Wittgenstein's student in Cambridge, may have passed some of that on to her student Karen Spärck Jones -- later of TFIDF fame (Spärck Jones, 1972; [1]) --, and Karen's Ph.D. was on semantic clustering, which years later were published as a book [2]. Her husband Roger needham published a paper about the notion of a "clump" theory of meaning [3]. So it seems Wittgenstein put some precursor ideas to clustering (linkage?) out in the Cambridge air for others to pick up...

[1] https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.1108/eb026526...

[2] https://dl.acm.org/doi/book/10.5555/22908

[3] https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/document?repid=rep1&type=pdf&d...

Sure, just as alchemy is the birthplace of chemistry. That doesn't mean we should still be studying alchemy for anything other than its historical significance.

New sciences happen very infrequently, but they happen, and when they do, they are typically created in philosophy departments. Computer science is the most recent, which came in large part from philosophy departments. Before that was psychology.

Alchemy is exactly a framework-free type of empiricism. The point of philosophy, and philosophy that happens in other sciences, is that we live inside of a model, and we interact with that model, and change the model while we are doing empirical research using the rules of the model. This is a type of reflexive framework development, where metaphysical ideas become obvious physics as people propose changes to the standard model we use.

This dance between induction and deduction is exactly the field of philosophy.

Empiricism cannot be justified without a reason-based framework, and that deductive framework is by definition arbitrary, and needs to map to empirical findings.

Yes, it can. Empiricism can be justified empirically: it just works better than anything else humans have yet come up with.

You have to have an explanation of what counts as a valid empirical relation. And that depends on a whole lot of things worked out by philosophers and scientists.

Including, for example, that you can safely ignore correlations that can't have a basis in physical laws. Or that you can write certain symbols on a blackboard and compute the probability that your correlation is worth spending more time on.

No, I don't think it can. I challenge you to give me an example of mathematical knowledge that you can justify without reference to any sensory experience, keeping in mind that reading and hearing people talk are both sensory experiences.

It doesn't even have to be math. I'll bet you can't even define the distinction between "true" and "false" without reference to sensory experience.

But also your definition is wrong. Empiricism is usually taken to be the belief that the sole source and justification of knowledge is ultimately sensory data.

It stands in contrast with the only sane POV IMO, which is that knowledge is combination of empirical and rational sources, as pointed out for example by Kant.

I did:

"empiricism is an epistemological view which holds that true knowledge or justification comes only or primarily from sensory experience and empirical evidence."

Note the phrase "or primarily".

> knowledge is combination of empirical and rational sources

The "or primarily" hedge is all I need to refute you (or at least to show that we are not actually in disagreement). However, rationality can itself be justified by empiricism if the Church-Turing thesis is correct, which I believe it is.

If that's something along the lines of what you believe, then sure I'd say we're on the same page and we're not actually in disagreement.

But I wouldn't describe that belief system as saying empricism is self-justifying. Empiricism in practice goes off the rails pretty quickly with things like subjective idealism and the belief that there are no external entities, only sense data etc.

The thing we have now, where theory and experience mutually constrain each other seems obviously correct to me both in the academic sense (e.g. I think that Kant was right that the mind provides structure to raw sensory data). I also think it's true in the broader sense (e.g. that the applied sciences tend to move more slowly on their own and advance much more rapidly when combined with theory).

That's true, but like so many traditions, it's wrong. Science can be justified entirely in terms of empiricism.

To be clear, it is not at all obvious that this is possible (it relies on the Church-Turing thesis), and so people can be forgiven for making this mistake. But it's still a mistake, and it's grounded in ignorance.

> Empiricism in practice goes off the rails pretty quickly with things like subjective idealism and the belief that there are no external entities, only sense data etc.

Unless your sensory experiences are radically different from mine, then you have to concede that those experiences behave, to a very close approximation, as if external entities exist, and a good explanation for that is that external entities do in fact exist.

Ironically, that explanation turns out to be wrong, but to see that you need to dive into quantum mechanics. And the justification for quantum mechanics grounds out in the sensory experience of perceiving the results of experiments. There is no escape from empiricism in the world we live in.

I do think we must have pretty different sensory experiences then, because my awareness of sensory data is entirely of processed data and nothing at all like the raw output of my retina (which I personally don't have accesss to although we can access it in animals if we cut their heads open). My ears have a high pitched ring constantly, and although it's indistinguishable from a sensory perspective from hearing a high pitched noise out in the world, my brain has somehow never attributed it to an outside object. Similarly with occular migraines.

I think a reasonable test would be whether you could build a useful embedded device out of only a sensor and no logic to interpret the output of that sensor.

The thing that lets us even talk meaningfully about computable functions is that they have a logical description. We wouldn't be able to say anything meaningful about the entire class of such functions if we were restricted to those we have experience of. It's not even clear what it would mean to universally quantify over a class of logical structures in a purely empirical world. We don't even need to get as fancy as computable functions. We couldn't even meaningfully talk about the class of natural numbers.

And the thing that lets us translate little dots on some quantum mechanical detector is that we have a mathematical theory that predicts that dots will look one way if such and such is the case. And they will look another way if such and such is the case. If sense data are all you need, then you have to give an account of why a trained experimental physicist can see different things in those dots than a toddler does.

Yes. Obviously.

> my awareness of sensory data is entirely of processed data and nothing at all like the raw output of my retina

Yes, obviously.

> I think a reasonable test would be whether you could build a useful embedded device out of only a sensor and no logic to interpret the output of that sensor.

A more useful test would be if you could build a useful embedded device with no sensors.

> The thing that lets us even talk meaningfully about computable functions is that they have a logical description.

But that logical description is a description of a physical process. The whole notion of computability is inherently physical. Even the lambda calculus is a description of a process of symbol-manipulation, and symbols are physical things.

> If sense data are all you need

That's a straw man. Empiricism does not claim that sense data is all you need. It is the claim that sense data are the primary source of knowledge. All knowledge -- even mathematical knowledge -- starts with sense data, is ultimately grounded in sense data, but is obviously not just raw sense data.

> The senses, although they are necessary for all our actual knowledge, are not sufficient to give us the whole of it, since the senses never give anything but instances, that is to say particular or individual truths. Now all the instances which confirm a general truth, however numerous they may be, are not sufficient to establish the universal necessity of this same truth, for it does not follow that what happened before will happen in the same way again.

So sense data are necessary but not sufficient, especially for logic. If you believe that empiricism is self-justifying then it does seem like you have to start with the manifold of sense data and somehow build up logic from it. Otherwise you're going to end up #include-ing logic somewhere that may not be obvious, and you've landed to the position you were originally arguing against that you need a reason-based framework to justify empiricism.

A lot of smart people have tried to work out a version of empiricism that attempts to build of logic from sense data. For example, Russell's work and early Wittgenstein. But it always ends up getting pretty crazy.

The easiest way, IMO, to see why it won't work to build up human knowledge from sense data is to realize that the human knowledge system is a distributed system. Empiricists are working with the wrong unit of analysis. The words we have for thought are things like "logic" from logos or "word" and "rational" from ratio or "account" or "reckoning". They're both words that are fundamentally about multiple parties (in CS we can think of them as nodes) doing computation together. Some of the oldest ideas we have about reasoning are dialogs, and that basic idea persists to this day with things like game theoretic semantics. There seems to be something fundamentally "distributed systems" about thought and knowledge.

The individual nodes and their sensors aren't the whole story or even the bulk of the story. That's even more true when you consider that how we interpret sense data depends on billions of years of evolution. Yes we operate on sense data, but we do so using a logical structure that heavily constrains what we see, hear, taste and so forth.

Sense data plays a role, as Leibniz says, just as network cards play an important role in the Google data center. But I don't think anyone would really argue that the value of any large knowledge base is ultimately grounded in network packets.

But they are sufficient.

> it does not follow that what happened before will happen in the same way again.

Yes, that's true. It does not follow that sense data are insufficient. All that follows is that induction is not a valid mode of reasoning (which is true -- it isn't).

> The easiest way, IMO, to see why it won't work to build up human knowledge from sense data is to realize that the human knowledge system is a distributed system.

Nonsense. Distributed systems can do logic. Being distributed is completely irrelevant.

This reminds me of scientists who completely shit on astrology for lacking any predictive power. At the very least it has some predictive power because people believe in it and subtly conform to its predictions. Beyond that, there are obviously cycles in the universe and we know biological cycles synchronize with natural ones (melatonin is any easy example, but animals synchronize to year level cycles as well). Are the stars causing the correlations, and are all the correlations astrology talks about present? Clearly not, but there is a mountain of poorly controlled empirical observations that hint to more being there than we've laid out with regard to human character that science is content to shit on because it can't do anything else without looking bad.

https://www.amazon.com/Fabric-Reality-Parallel-Universes-Imp...

especially chapter 7.

It's so obvious you haven't engaged with the subject matter.

In his own words, in the section on the problem of induction in The Logic of Scientific Discovery:

"My own view is that the various difficulties of inductive logic here sketched are insurmountable. So also, I fear, are those inherent in the doctrine, so widely current today, that inductive inference, although not ‘strictly valid’, can attain some degree of ‘reliability’ or of ‘probability’."

He then goes on to provide the (now contentious) falsification-based view of science after conceding that inductivism can't work.

No, I am saying that. Popper may have said it too, I don't know. I'm citing Popper to support my claim that science doesn't involve induction.

(The formal problem of induction argument with its charge of circularity is best and most simply put here https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/induction-problem/#Reco)

Hume himself thinks that inductive reasoning is grounded in "custom or habit", and thinks it's rational to proceed this way---a solution you'd probably agree with.

Who said anything about inductive reasoning? I'm defending empiricism, not induction. Induction is just flat-out wrong.

The reason it's not circular is that it grounds out in actual reality.

I suppose you could deny the existence of actual reality. If you want to do that, you are beyond my ability to help.

1: If you try to pick a fight with reality, reality will win. (Empirical reasoning is evolutionary useful, etc.) 2: Thus, empirical reasoning is justified by empirical reasoning.

2 doesn't follow from 1. I accept 1, and I accept the rationality of empirical reasoning, but I don't accept 2.

You've actually moved the goal posts here. The original claim was: empiricism can be justified empirically. But "empiricism" and "empirical reasoning" are not synonyms.

(You also threw in induction at some point, which is just a red herring.)

So let me try this again: to quote Wikipedia, empiricism is an epistemological view which holds that true knowledge or justification comes only or primarily from sensory experience and empirical evidence. This can be justified empirically (I claim) by observing (empirically!) that people who do not base their actions on sensory experience will do stupid things like walk into walls or fall off cliffs.

If you want to dispute this, tell me how you would define the words "true" and "false" without making any reference to sensory experience.

But it seems that empiricism is a view that you have to hold a priori as opposed to a posteriori. Like, how is seeing that people who don't base their actions on sensory experience evidence for true knowledge or justification primarily coming from sensory experience and empirical evidence? Seeing people who don't base their actions on all guns being loaded doing stupid things like injuring themselves or others unintentionally doesn't make it true that all guns are loaded. I think what you really want to say is that empiricism is a very intuitive idea, and that it's telling that people who deny the reliability of sensory experience do silly things. (Not that rationalists were denying the validity of sensory experience anyway, it's not like Descartes or Spinoza were denying sense-data).

Well, that's pretty stupid, since I was actually using that exact word. You are quite literally saying, "Oh, when you said X, I didn't think you actually meant X, I thought you meant Y." (And in this case your Y is something that I absolutely do not believe.)

> But it seems that empiricism is a view that you have to hold a priori as opposed to a posteriori.

Why? Why cannot I not simply observe that when I base my decisions on plausible explanations of things that I observe I get better outcomes than when I base my decisions on some other criterion?

>Why? Why cannot I not simply observe that when I base my decisions on plausible explanations of things that I observe I get better outcomes than when I base my decisions on some other criterion?

You can observe that, I'm just saying that this doesn't prove anything about sensory experience being the primary means for knowledge. Like, Descartes, the paradigmatic rationalist, is happy to do this. But he still thinks that logical truths arrived at through experience-independent reasoning are the primary source of knowledge.

Yeah, but that wasn't me, that was scoofy.

> this doesn't prove anything about sensory experience being the primary means for knowledge.

It does until someone comes up with a better idea.

> he still thinks that logical truths arrived at through experience-independent reasoning are the primary source of knowledge.

Well, yeah, but he's just obviously wrong.

2. Therefore, true knowledge or justification comes only from sensory experience and empirical evidence.

All that I'm saying is that (2) does not logically follow from (1), no more than "Socrates is mortal" follows from "All men are mortal". There's something missing here, an additional premise, (like "Socrates is a man" in the Socrates example).

That's a straw man. It's not "only", it's "primarily". Sensory experience is necessary, not sufficient.

1. I observe that people who do not base their actions on sensory experience do stupid things.

2. Therefore, true knowledge or justification comes primarily from sensory experience and empirical evidence.

You're telling me that 2 is a logical implication of 1? You're perfectly happy with the way I've framed this---there are no hidden premises or anything like that? 2 is a direct, logical implication of 1?

I would say that if someone doesn't base their actions on sensory experience (a very big if) then they will be totally unable to navigate reality. They will almost certainly injure themselves, possibly others, and likely even kill themselves and maybe take others down with them. It's so obvious and the consequences so severe that it would be unethical to actually conduct this experiment.

Also, 2 is not a logical implication of 1. One can never rule out the possibility that, say, all human behavior is controlled by evil demons. What I would say is that my version of 1 is very compelling evidence for 2, and one of the things that makes it compelling is that it is so obviously true that a sane person would never even contemplate it as anything other than a thought experiment.

BTW, would you have any interest in being a guest on a podcast?

Oh good, ok - you see my confusion, I thought you were saying that it was a logical implication. I would still say that 2 isn't really grounded in 1 so much as it is self-evidently true. Like, if we're being controlled by evil demons, 1 isn't even relevant---the question is fundamentally whether sense-experience gives us true knowledge bar extenuating circumstances or not; I think the answer is yes, but not because we see that this belief is a useful belief, it's because 2 itself is intuitively true. I don't believe that my perception of me sitting on a chair is good grounds for the proposition that I really am sitting on a chair not because of a thought experiment about lacking that belief leading to injury---I believe it because it seems true itself. And I think this is the right solution in general for related issues, whether it's inductive inferences (I think they're rational), belief in causality, belief in the validity of sense-data, or any other typical issue for empiricism.

The "X is key for survival, so X must be true" way of thinking has never been appealing to me---this seems to miss the point of what it means for something to be true. Like, I don't believe in 1+1=2 because it's useful for economics, physics, math, or whatever---I think it's true independently of its utility. Similarly for other truths.

>podcast

I'd prefer to not publicize my real name and face, so no, unfortunately (unless you'd be OK with that; I'd be happy to chat if so).

I actually doubt that. What do you think 11+27 is? If your answer was "38" then the followup question is: suppose it is 11:00. What time will it be 27 hours from now?

The "correct" answer to "what is 11+27" depends on circumstances in the real world (and so does 1+1). There are no Platonic truths, only preferred models.

> X is key for survival, so X must be true

It's not that. It's "X is a faithful reflection of the actual state of affairs in objective reality." That's what the word "true" means.

It just so happens that the actual state of affairs in objective reality has an impact on survival, so having a faithful reflection of it in your brain is handy. That's the reason "truth" is a thing.

> I'd prefer to not publicize my real name and face

Well, a podcast is voice only, so that's not really a show-stopper.

Yeah, I disagree, I think there's something mathematical truths reflect that are independent of the physical world. When we decide whether certain mathematical claims are true or not, say, Fermat's last theorem---we prove them mathematically, we don't want to appeal to their utility or lack thereof, right? My reasoning for not wanting to appeal to utility for the validity of sense-data is analogous.

>That's what the word "true" means.

I agree.

>It just so happens that the actual state of affairs in objective reality has an impact on survival, so having a faithful reflection of it in your brain is handy.

I agree.

>That's the reason "truth" is a thing.

Well, truth is a thing regardless of whether or not we evolved to be able to hold such a concept in our minds, no?

>podcast

Sure. Contact me at [email protected]

Well, sort of. We don't care about the utility of Fermat's last theorem per se, but the only reason we care about numbers, which is what Fermat's last theorem is about, is because numbers have utility. It turns out that, having invented numbers for their utility, they also make fun mental playthings. But they were invented to keep track of how many sheep you had.

> Well, truth is a thing regardless of whether or not we evolved to be able to hold such a concept in our minds, no?

No. Truth is a property of propositions, so it only makes sense to talk about truth in the context of something that can harbor a proposition. If such a thing does not exist then neither do propositions and hence neither does truth. It's kind of like talking about "the mass of an idea". Mass is a property of matter, so it doesn't make sense to apply it to something that isn't made of matter.

The thing that encodes propositions doesn't have to be a human brain, of course. It could be an alien brain, or a computer, perhaps even a thermostat (that one is debatable). But it has to be something.

All that's fine---but I think you would agree that Fermat's last theorem isn't true by virtue of its utility for counting sheep or anything like that. Similarly, I don't think that the fact the physical world exists in the manner suggested by sense-data is true by virtue of its utility for preventing us from dying.

>The thing that encodes propositions doesn't have to be a human brain, of course. It could be an alien brain, or a computer, perhaps even a thermostat (that one is debatable). But it has to be something.

Are you saying that if there were no humans (or anything capable of encoding propositions) to conceive of it, the proposition "the earth is round" wouldn't be true---in other words, it would not be true that the earth is round? That seems to defy common sense.

I actually would not agree with either of those.

> Are you saying that if there were no humans (or anything capable of encoding propositions) to conceive of it, the proposition "the earth is round" wouldn't be true---in other words, it would not be true that the earth is round? That seems to defy common sense.

Yes, I get that. This is not an easy concept to wrap your brain around, and I totally understand if you think it sounds like I'm absolutely crazy. But nonetheless, it is the case that if there were no humans (or anything capable of encoding propositions) to conceive of it, the proposition "the earth is round" would not be true. The reason is that if there were nothing capable of encoding that proposition, that proposition could not exist. A non-existent thing cannot have any properties, and so a non-existent proposition cannot be true.

Two important things to note: first, the proposition "the earth is round" would not be true in a world where there is nothing capable of encoding propositions, but neither would it be false. It would simply be non-existent. And second, despite the fact that the proposition "the earth is round" would be neither true nor false, the earth would still be round. But we can only make that observation because we live in a world where there are things capable of encoding propositions. It's really hard to imagine a world where that is not the case because we would not exist in such a world.

Here is a thought experiment that might help: consider some proposition P that has never been conceived of and will never be conceived of by anything capable of encoding propositions. Such propositions must exist because there are an infinite number of propositions but we live in a finite universe, and so only a finite number of propositions can ever be encoded. In fact, there must be an infinite number of such propositions. Are those propositions true or are they false?

This might help too:

https://blog.rongarret.info/2023/01/an-intuitive-counterexam...

It's not directly on point, but it describes a similar concept in math.

As you've said earlier. This sounds like a reasonable construal of the word true. But I don't see anything about propositions needing to be encoded in this definition. "The earth is round" is a faithful reflection of the actual state of affairs in objective reality. It was a faithful reflection of the actual state of affairs in objective reality even before anyone was around to conceptualize this as a proposition. You don't think so?

https://blog.rongarret.info/2015/02/31-flavors-of-ontology.h...

Did you read it? Do you accept it?

Propositions are ideas, i.e. they exist in a different ontological category than material objects like earth (note no quotation marks). The word "earth" (with quotes) is an idea, one that happens to refer to earth, i.e. the material object referred to by the word "earth", which happens to be round. The words "earth is round" (with quotes) is also an idea, one which refers to a particular property (roundness) of a particular material object (earth). That idea falls into a subset of the more general concept of ideas which we call "propositions" because they have a particular relationship to the states of material objects, i.e. "the earth is round" (with quotes) is true because the earth is round (no quotes).

Material objects are made of atoms; they cannot exist without the atoms that comprise them, but their existence is more than just the totality of the existence of their constituent atoms. All of the atoms that comprise the earth existed billions of years before the earth came into existence. Earth did not come into existence until the atoms that comprise it arranged themselves in a particular way.

Ideas are not made of atoms, they are made of information. Just like material objects, ideas do not come into existence until some information that encodes that idea arranges itself in a particular way, i.e. until they are thought of. A proposition that hasn't been thought of is like a poem that hasn't been written. Saying that an unthought-of proposition is true is like saying that an unwritten poem rhymes.

Consider the words "Darth Vader was Luke Skywalker's father." Do those words stand for a proposition? Is that proposition true? Was it true before 1977 (keeping in mind here that the Star Wars story ostensibly happened "a long time ago")? Would Rene Descartes be able to recognize it as a true proposition?

It's really hard to talk about ideas. With material object you can point at them, poke them, prod them, weight them, shine lights at them. You can't do any of those things with ideas. All you can do is refer to them using representations like "the earth is round" (with quotes) or "la terre est ronde" or "Die Erde ist rund" or "地球是圆的". It is the act of referring to them in a way that some being can recognize as referring to a proposition that causes the proposition to come into being, just as the act of composing a poem causes that poem to come into being. Unwritten poems do not rhyme, and they do not not-rhyme. They simply aren't. Likewise, unthought-of propositions are neither true nor false.

Accept what specifically?

Here's what I understand you to be saying, and you're free to reframe this.

1. Propositions are ideas. 2. Ideas can only exist if they are conceived. 3. "The earth is round" is a proposition. 4. Therefore, "the earth is round" can only exist if it is conceived. 5. Truth and falsity are properties of propositions. 6. If something does not exist, it cannot have any properties. 6. If it is not conceived, "the earth is round" cannot exist. 7. "The earth is round" cannot have any properties. 8. Truth and falsity are not properties of "the earth is round".

Sounds reasonable. But how do we square this with:

1. "The earth is round" reflects a state of affairs about objective reality. 2. If something reflects a state of affairs about objective reality, it is true. 3. "The earth is round" is true.

There's nothing here about "the earth is round" needing to be conceived by someone.

One issue I would raise is the first argument's 1 and 2. Propositions don't just exist insofar as they are conceived. Representations of propositions, sure, but not propositions themselves.

Cool.

> There's nothing here about "the earth is round" needing to be conceived by someone.

Yes, there is. You can't talk about a proposition without conceiving of it. The instant you wrote “"The earth is round"” (note the nested quotes) you conceived of the proposition "the earth is round" and brought it into being. This is impossible to avoid. So this:

> There's nothing here about "the earth is round" needing to be conceived by someone.

is false.

> Propositions don't just exist insofar as they are conceived. Representations of propositions, sure, but not propositions themselves.

I already gave you the answer to this in the parent comment but you ignored it.

"Ideas are not made of atoms, they are made of information. Just like material objects, ideas do not come into existence until some information that encodes that idea arranges itself in a particular way, i.e. until they are thought of."

etc.

So that is (still) my answer: you are simply mistaken when you say that "Propositions don't just exist insofar as they are conceived."

(You're in good company. Plato got this wrong too, and he was no dummy. But he didn't have Alan Turing's shoulders to stand on.)

BTW, note that the converse is not true. You can conceive of an idea without rendering it into a representation. Indeed, you can conceive of an idea without even being able to render it into a representation. (This is actually quite common!) But what you can't do is produce a rendering of an idea into a representation without conceiving of the idea being represented. (BTW, that is not quite true. There is a tiny loophole, but I'm going to leave it as an exercise for you to figure out what it is.)

In the second argument, could you tell me which of (1) and (2) are incorrect, and why?

If it's the quotes that are problematic, I'm fine to drop those.

The earth is round, regardless of whether people have this idea in their heads or not. You deny this?

>I already gave you the answer to this in the parent comment but you ignored it.

But I didn't disagree that ideas are not made of atoms. What I disagreed with is that propositions only exist insofar as they are conceived.

>(You're in good company. Plato got this wrong too, and he was no dummy. But he didn't have Alan Turing's shoulders to stand on.)

What did Turing do that proved that propositions only exist insofar as they are conceived? Or are you just talking about scientific progress in general?

No. What I deny is that "the earth is round" and "the proposition 'the earth is round' is true" are identical propositions. The first is a proposition that makes a claim about the roundness of the earth, and the second is a proposition that makes a claim about the truth of a proposition. Those aren't the same thing.

The earth is round whether or not anyone is around to contemplate it (the earth). But "the earth is round" is not true unless someone is around to contemplate it (the proposition).

> What did Turing do that proved that propositions only exist insofar as they are conceived?

That's a long story, and I have to run to a meeting right now. If you really want to know, remind me later. I may need to write a blog post about it.

But forget about propositions for the moment. Do you think that unwritten poems exist?

No, this is not just a linguistic disagreement. This is the crux of the matter. By saying that "the earth is round" and "the proposition 'the earth is round' is true" mean the same thing you are conflating two different ontological categories. When you do that, your reasoning is no longer sound.

Consider this:

P1: The U.S.S. Enterprise can travel faster than light.

Is P1 true? If yes, then how can that be when we know from relativity theory that nothing can travel faster than light? And if no, then what about these:

P2: The U.S.S. Enterprise is powered by a matter-anti-matter reaction controlled by dilithium crystals.

P3: The U.S.S. Enterprise is powered by squirrels running on treadmills.

---

P.S. It occurred to me that there is a TL;DR answer to the question of what Turing did that was so important: he invented general-purpose software.

> Evolutionary epistemology isn’t exclusively empirical.

Neither is empiricism.

Don't get me wrong, there's a lot of good "philosophy" out there, but it absolutely doesn't need to be its own academic discipline, it could just be a genre of nonfiction - "fun thought experiments taht will blow your mind"

I mean, maybe this is true for some people, but there are a lot of people who don't get confused and who find it interesting and enjoyable.

>Don't get me wrong, there's a lot of good "philosophy" out there, but it absolutely doesn't need to be its own academic discipline, it could just be a genre of nonfiction - "fun thought experiments taht will blow your mind"

Philosophers are particularly interested in reasoning about whether certain claims are true or false though, not just saying "what if". I mean, if you want the literature and philosophy departments to nominally merge together and for philosophers to continue doing what they're doing, that's fine I suppose, though there are institutional reasons why that's probably not going to happen.

For extra lulz you should ask him about which of the many meanings of the word "is" he is using here, for each instance of the word:

> That's because a lot of philosophy is eminently pooh-pooh-able.

Of all places, you'd think people on a hacker forum would know the difference between is and equals.

His philosophy does provide some interesting perspectives on language, even if I don't personally agree with his way of doing philosophy.

If you want to relegate philosophy to obfuscation and trivialities, a good starting place would be to demonstrate that you've made it past the undergraduate, foot stomping "science" phase that, honestly, not enough "actual" scientists seem to have made it past, bringing us mystical nonsense such as the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics.

No, I'm not taking these things for granted. I am simply making the empirical observation that the scientific method has produced vastly more tangible progress than other methods, and it has produced this progress in areas that were previously believed to be inaccessible to science. Science works in ways that no other method does.

> mystical nonsense such as the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics

It's not mystical nonsense, it's a logical consequence of the mathematics of quantum mechanics. You may find it distasteful, but it's the way the world appears to be. You may not like the idea that clocks in space run faster than clocks on earth, but that is also manifestly how the world behaves.

> It's not mystical nonsense, it's a logical consequence of the mathematics of quantum mechanics

you're both wrong. What the many-worlds interpretation is, is philosophy. It's thinking about what could be that would be explanatory, in the absence of being able to test it; just as atomic theory was philosophy before it was experimentally shown... and it's still philosophy to think about what has actually been shown, since it was not long after it was "shown" that indivisible atoms became divisible into fundamental particles, that they in turn turned out not to be fundamental either.

Aren't the various interpretations of QM all empirically indistinguishable from within the universe, which is why they are interpretations and not, say, hypotheses?

> It's not mystical nonsense, it's a logical consequence of the mathematics of quantum mechanics.

It's an interpretation of the mathematics of quantum mechanics. It's not the only possible interpretation.

> You may find it distasteful, but it's the way the world appears to be.

Yeah? I agree that quantum appears to be the way the world works; show me your concrete evidence for many worlds. You can't do it.

Most people would agree that the sun emits light in all directions, but there is no way to prove it with concrete evidence. The only thing you can prove with concrete evidence is that the sun emits light in the direction of objects in our solar system that we can see. We infer that the sun emits light in all directions because that is the best explanation that accounts for the data that we have.

Many-worlds is the same. We can't demonstrate their existence, we infer it from the current-best explanation that accounts for the data that we have.

Many-worlds is by far not accepted to be the "current-best explanation".

It's a candidate. It's not clear it's right.

I realize that's argument by authority, and that's considered a fallacy...

https://www.amazon.com/Philosophy-Physics-Princeton-Foundati...

https://www.amazon.com/Quantum-Mechanics-Experience-David-Al...

Or, if you don't feel like buying a book:

https://flownet.com/ron/QM.pdf

Or, if you prefer a video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dEaecUuEqfc

BTW, it may come as a surprise to learn that I am actually not a big proponent of many-worlds despite recognizing that it is in fact a logical consequence of the math. If so, you may find this interesting too:

https://blog.rongarret.info/2009/04/on-shadow-photons-and-re...

and a follow-up written ten years later:

https://blog.rongarret.info/2019/07/the-trouble-with-many-wo...

The chasm between my grades in linear algebra and my grades in quantum begs to differ... :(

That's true. But just because this is not a valid justification of the assertion that science does not approach an account of reality on its own terms, it does not follow that science does not in fact approach an account of reality on its own terms.

> To suggest otherwise is to postulate additional metaphysical baggage that even I, the lowly philosopher, find intolerable.

Really? Why? What aspect of reality do you believe is inherently beyond the scope of scientific inquiry?

A reference to the published literature is a cop-out??? Sorry, no.

> Sure, the methodical process of science doesn't, strictly-speaking, require induction, but we still have to decide whether to expect the result of scientific inquiry to be useful.

What??? No! We just have to observe empirically that the results of scientific inquiry are useful.

> Popper’s account appears to be incomplete in an important way. There are always many hypotheses which have not yet been refuted by the evidence, and these may contradict one another. According to the strictly deductive framework, since none are yet falsified, they are all on an equal footing. Yet, scientists will typically want to say that one is better supported by the evidence than the others. We seem to need more than just deductive reasoning to support practical decision-making (Salmon 1981). Popper did indeed appeal to a notion of one hypothesis being better or worse “corroborated” by the evidence. But arguably, this took him away from a strictly deductive view of science. It appears doubtful then that pure deductivism can give an adequate account of scientific method.

where "this issue" is:

> The new riddle of induction, perhaps?

The reference I gave you was not directly to Popper, but rather to chapter 7 of David Deutsch's book, "The Fabric of Reality", which you quite obviously did not read because it directly answers the problem described in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_riddle_of_induction

"In the high-stakes world of technology, where the choice of a programming language can either pave the way to efficiency or lead you into the depths of debugging hell, imagine if programming languages were as enigmatic and complex as the philosophers of yore. Here’s how I envision this quirky universe.

Plato: HTML

Plato’s ideal forms find their match in HTML. Much like Plato’s theory, where objects in the physical realm are mere shadows of their perfect forms, HTML is but the scaffolding of web content, giving structure but relying on the more material CSS and JavaScript to breathe life into its skeletal outlines. HTML, the philosopher of the web, contemplates the essence of web structure in a cave of its own making, illuminated by the flickering screens of web developers trying to decode the shadows of their CSS frameworks.

Aristotle: Python

Aristotle, known for his logic and systematic approach to the physical world, would be Python. Just as Aristotle classified flora and fauna, Python organizes data with lists, tuples, and dictionaries, making it ideal for developers who seek clarity and readability. Python’s philosophy is simple yet profound, mirroring Aristotle’s quest for understanding through empirical observation and not-so-metaphysical methods.

Descartes: C++

"I think, therefore I am," proclaimed Descartes, and so would any program written in C++. C++, with its complex syntax and powerful capabilities, reflects Descartes’ dualism. It can create almost metaphysical experiences in virtual realities but can also cause existential crises with its pointers and memory leaks, leading programmers to doubt everything, especially their choice of language.

Nietzsche: Assembly

Nietzsche, the philosopher of power, will to manifest, and the übermensch, resonates with Assembly language. Not for the faint-hearted, Assembly is for those who dare to manipulate the very fabric of hardware. Like Nietzsche’s writing, Assembly is tough to decipher, powerful in its capacity, and not commonly understood by the masses, often leaving one to ponder in solitude about the eternal recurrence of debugging sessions.

Kant: Java

Kant, who was all about rules and categorical imperatives, fits perfectly with Java. Java’s platform-independent mantra—write once, run anywhere—is a stern dictate akin to Kant’s moral imperatives. Both philosopher and language demand strict adherence to their defined structures and frameworks, leaving little room for moral or syntactic error.

Sartre: JavaScript

Existentialist par excellence, Sartre’s notion of existence precedes essence is the lived reality of every JavaScript framework. Just when you think you understand the essence of the JavaScript ecosystem, a new library or framework pops into existence, challenging the very core of your understanding. Sartre’s philosophy of radical freedom and existential angst mirrors the liberty and chaos of JavaScript’s untyped, loosely structured syntax.

Hegel: Haskell

Hegel’s dialectical method moves through thesis, antithesis, and synthesis, much like how Haskell approaches problems with its pure functional programming paradigm. It encourages developers to think in terms of transformations of data, often leading to a synthesis of solutions that are as elegant as they are abstract, reflective of Hegel’s complex philosophical constructs.

In this whimsical world where philosophers are programming languages, choosing the right one could well depend on whether you prefer the existential dread of debugging Sartre's JavaScript at 3 AM or contemplating the Platonic forms of your HTML content. In either case, the philosophical underpinnings of your chosen language might just lead to as many questions about the nature of reality as lines of code."

1: https://chat.openai.com/share/584f78d7-6a9e-438d-ab87-02cebd...

Like I said - I'm no expert and I've never read Wittgenstein first hand - but I do struggle when people casually dismiss the work of thousands of smart, sincere people over thousands of years.

Not much. But I don't have to know much to make my case here. All I have to do is point to the Tractatus, which really is manifest nonsense, and point out that publishing this bit of manifest nonsense didn't seem to hurt Wittgenstein's career much. Tractatus is not the only example of this sort of thing, just the one that sticks out in my mind as the most blatant.

And this is not to say that Wittgenstein, or philosophy in general, never produced anything of value. But the problem is that to find the value you have to wade through all this horse shit, so it's so much more effort than it needs to be. A stopped clock is right twice a day. That doesn't mean there is any value in consulting it to find out what time it is.

> Wittgenstein himself states that the Tractatus is nonsense in its closing pages.

> My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally recognizes them as senseless...

My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally recognizes them as senseless, when he has climbed out through them, on them, over them. (He must so to speak throw away the ladder, after he has climbed up on it.)

I think you may agree with the Wittgenstein of the Tractatus more than you realize. My understanding is that his main goal at that time was to show that many of the classic problems of metaphysics which plagued philosophers for centuries or more are literally just nonsense. He didn't write the Tractatus to convince regular people though, but to convince academic philosophers of his time. He earned his fame by being somewhat successful. Rather than making a logical argument for his point, I understand his aim as stimulating his audience to think things out for themselves by offering them carefully crafted nonsense that gave a fresh perspective.

I think you just have no use for the Tractatus because you're not preoccupied with metaphysical questions.

You can choose to draw one of two very different conclusions from this statement.

And if you want to disagree with the definition of science that I'm using here then that's OK. But at that point, you're also doing philosophy.

And all of this is fine because there's nothing wrong with doing philosophy. It's not just a word for "the stuff I don't like".

Nonsense. General Relativity and Quantum Field Theory make plenty of falsifiable claims. So do current cosmological theories. Not only do they make falsifiable claims, many of their claims are in the process of being falsified right now by the JWST.

One of the reasons it's hard for me to take philosophy seriously is that I see too many people defending it by making patently ridiculous assertions.

> And if you want to disagree with the definition of science that I'm using here then that's OK.

Another ridiculous assertion. You haven't given a definition of science. But it doesn't matter. Whatever your definition of science is, if it does not include GR and QFT and cosmology then it is not not worthy of serious consideration.

> there's nothing wrong with doing philosophy

I didn't say there was. There's nothing wrong with knitting either. That doesn't mean that there ought to be knitting departments in universities.

(Though lacking falsifiability isn't necessarily such a bad thing even for scientific theories anyway.)

Of course they do, at least QFT does: the reason there is something rather than nothing is that "nothing" is unstable.

(And note that "something" and "nothing" in that sentence are terms of art with more precise meanings than the colloquial ones.)

https://blog.rongarret.info/2015/02/31-flavors-of-ontology.h...

Not to say science isn't useful or that it hasn't made progress in explaining things. But the line of thought that this question is related to is, loosely, whether there need be any ultimate, necessary explanation to things and what kind of explanation that would be, or whether explanations bottom out at brute, contingent facts. This kind of topic, regardless of whether your answer is a necessary existence or brute fact, doesn't seem to be scientific---or would you disagree?

That's a longer story than will fit in an HN comment. But the TL;DR is that once you have atoms, that leads to chemistry, which leads to biology, which leads to brains, which leads to consciousness and all the other interesting things that brains do. But these are all emergent phenomena. There's nothing brains do that cannot be explained in terms of atoms.

> whether there need be any ultimate, necessary explanation to things and what kind of explanation that would be, or whether explanations bottom out at brute, contingent facts

You're flirting with teleology here. There's nothing wrong with that. I'm making an observation here, not a value judgement.

It is an open question whether there is an "ultimate, necessary explanation to things". But science can shed some light on that by demonstrating that if there is an "ultimate, necessary explanation to things" it almost certainly has nothing to do with us humans. We're just the result of rolling countless trillions of cosmic dice in one tiny corner of the multiverse. That's not the answer that most people who ask the question of "ultimate, necessary explanation to things" want to hear, but all the evidence points to that being the truth. And so the best explanation of people asking this question hoping for a different answer is that they are engaging in the same kind of wishful thinking as, say, erstwhile inventors of perpetual motion machines. Science can't prove that it's impossible to do an end-run around the laws of thermodynamics, but there is still a reason that perpetual motion is the canonical example of crackpottery.

But the relationship between brain chemistry and consciousness is at best correlating certain conscious states with certain neurological states. The question is why there is consciousness at all. Maybe it's an emergent phenomena, sure, but it's not clear to me how the arising of consciousness from matter can be completely characterized through science. One reason is because science deals only with physical things, but consciousness is a non-physical thing. No doubt there is relevant science, but I don't know that science alone provides an explanation for why we are not philosophical zombies. You can, of course, take Dennett's view that qualia don't really exist, but in defending this view he did a lot of... philosophy.

And QFT explaining laws of nature would be strange considering QFT is included in the laws of nature.

>teleology

Well, I'm not positing that there's any purpose or telos involved in these explanations, just that there are explanations---there are reasons why things are the way they are ("why" in the sense of material or efficient causes, not final causes).

>It is an open question whether there is an "ultimate, necessary explanation to things". But science can shed some light on that by demonstrating that if there is an "ultimate, necessary explanation to things" it almost certainly has nothing to do with us humans. We're just the result of rolling countless trillions of cosmic dice in one tiny corner of the multiverse. That's not the answer that most people who ask the question of "ultimate, necessary explanation to things" want to hear, but all the evidence points to that being the truth. And so the best explanation of people asking this question hoping for a different answer is that they are engaging in the same kind of wishful thinking as, say, erstwhile inventors of perpetual motion machines. Science can't prove that it's impossible to do an end-run around the laws of thermodynamics, but there is still a reason that perpetual motion is the canonical example of crackpottery.

So my point here is simply related to your first sentence---there are philosophical arguments as to why there must be an ultimate, necessary explanation, and there are philosophical reasons to believe these arguments fail. But I don't see science as being sufficient for adjudicating this dispute, as I think you'd agree.

(I would agree with your point about how science shows us just how small humanity is in the larger cosmos, though I'm not sure that's necessarily in contradiction with religion. But that's a whole other can of worms.)

How ironic that you would say that in a thread about Daniel Dennett's passing. You have obviously not read "Consciousness Explained."

> And QFT explaining laws of nature would be strange considering QFT is included in the laws of nature.

You should watch this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q1lL-hXO27Q&pp=ygUPZmV5bm1hb...

> there are philosophical arguments as to why there must be an ultimate, necessary explanation

Yes, obviously. There are arguments for why the earth must be flat too. Why should I care about either? They're just wrong.

I mean, Dennett is denying the existence of qualia altogether, as I said, via philosophical argumentation. The argument that science tells the full story here is itself a philosophical one.

>You should watch this:

Yes, the bottoming out of explanations is exactly what's at stake. The idea of a necessary explanation is that the answer to the question of "why?" is that it must be that way, that it could not have been any other way---that's what it means for an explanation to be necessary. And there are arguments why there must be such a thing that could not have been any other way, and arguments against it---it's within the realm of philosophy. Feynman is right to note that scientific explanations can go no further past a certain point. It's a bit ironic that Feynman was so anti-philosophy when he gave a rather philosophical answer to what might seem like a straightforward scientific question at first glance.

>Yes, obviously. There are arguments for why the earth must be flat too. Why should I care about either? They're just wrong.

Well, the discipline of philosophy also includes people pointing out reasons why such arguments don't work, which seems worthwhile, just like science includes reasons why arguments for the flatness of the earth are untenable and reasons why the roundness of the earth is a far better explanation for the data.

Not quite. Dennett's thesis is that qualia are illusions, not that they don't exist. Illusions exist, they are just sensory perceptions that don't reflect any actual underlying physical reality.

> The idea of a necessary explanation is that the answer to the question of "why?" is that it must be that way

Yes, I know that's the idea. But you can't get past the anthropic principle. Even if that is not the ultimate explanation, the fact that it could be, and the fact that there is overwhelming evidence that humans are not privileged in any way, means that even if there is a better answer, we can never find it because we can never rule out the anthropic principle. We have to make our peace with that, just as we have to make our peace with the Second Law and the halting problem.

> Well, the discipline of philosophy also includes people pointing out reasons why such arguments don't work, which seems worthwhile, just like science includes reasons why arguments for the flatness of the earth are untenable and reasons why the roundness of the earth is a far better explanation for the data.

Actually, scientists don't spend a lot of time debunking flat-earthers. They just write them off as crackpots who are not worth the bother. You're not going to get an NSF grant to study whether or not the earth is round.

I just mean to say that Dennett denies that there is anything that is "ineffable, intrinsic, private, [and] directly or immediately apprehensible in consciousness". But my point is that this is a particular philosophical term whose existence and nature is being disputed, and that this is being done on philosophical grounds.

>Yes, I know that's the idea. But you can't get past the anthropic principle.

Well, the anthropic principle is more relevant for fine-tuning arguments, the question here is more whether or not there can be brute facts, but that aside, my contention is just that this dispute is not one that science adjudicates.

>Actually, scientists don't spend a lot of time debunking flat-earthers.

I mean, sure, because the scientific arguments for the roundness of the earth have been laid out and there's not much more left to say, but cases don't generally get so neatly closed in philosophy.

All of this is really just to say that there are areas of discussion where it's philosophy rather than science that has to be our instrument for adjudicating disputes. Maybe this area of discussion isn't interesting to you, but that's fine, not every subject in academia has to be interesting to you.

That depends on what you mean by "brute fact". Can you give me an example of one?

> there are areas of discussion where it's philosophy rather than science that has to be our instrument for adjudicating disputes

And I dispute that, and I believe I can support my position by refuting that very claim with science. If it is true that there exist "areas of discussion where it's philosophy rather than science that has to be our instrument for adjudicating disputes" then you should be able to give an example of such an area of discussion, and I predict that you can't.

BTW, I would like nothing better than for you to actually prove me wrong about this. But I've thought about this for a very long time and posed this challenge to a lot of people. If you succeed, you will be the first.

Since we're talking about contingency...

I'll just lay out a version of the argument from contingency:

1. A contingent being (a being such that if it exists, it could have not-existed) exists.

2. All contingent beings have a sufficient cause of or fully adequate explanation for their existence.

3. The sufficient cause of or fully adequate explanation for the existence of contingent beings is something other than the contingent being itself.

4. The sufficient cause of or fully adequate explanation for the existence of contingent beings must either be solely other contingent beings or include a non-contingent (necessary) being.

5. Contingent beings alone cannot provide a sufficient cause of or fully adequate explanation for the existence of contingent beings.

6. Therefore, what sufficiently causes or fully adequately explains the existence of contingent beings must include a non-contingent (necessary) being.

7. Therefore, a necessary being (a being such that if it exists, it cannot not-exist) exists.

8. The universe, which is composed of only contingent beings, is contingent.

9. Therefore, the necessary being is something other than the universe.

I'd like you to tell me what premise you deny, and why you deny this premise on purely scientific grounds.

I will start by asking you to define what you mean by "exist". But before you do that you should read this:

https://blog.rongarret.info/2015/02/31-flavors-of-ontology.h...

But I will also happily concede that something other than the universe exists. Quantum fields exist and they are not part of the universe. (However, I do not concede that quantum fields are non-contingent. They may or may not be, we simply don't know. There could be an infinite hierarchy of causation.)

I mean, I'm not even concerned about the truth or falsity of the conclusion of this argument. I posed this argument to you, and right away, we've started talking about ontological categories and what it means for something to exist. Have we not already started doing philosophy? Wasn't this supposed to be a purely scientific discussion?

Potato, potahto.

> Have we not already started doing philosophy?

No. Establishing the meanings of words is part of science. You should read chapter 7 of David Deutsch's "The Fabric of Reality" and pay particular attention to the part where he says, "Languages are theories."

But maybe more seriously (and hopefully more fruitfully), I should ask, according to Deutsch's/your characterization, what would count as doing philosophy as opposed to doing science? I would normally say "the things that academic philosophers do as part of their discipline", but it looks like that definition isn't going to stand.

Bingo. You are using a much more specific definition than I was. As the other person commenting said - I was rather hoping you would grasp the spirit of my point rather than zoning on the rather hastily chosen examples. But let's stick with that for a moment.

I picked "Why is there something rather than nothing" because it's often used as the poster-child of unanswerable yet important questions. You have to understand it in that spirit and interpret "everything" and "nothing" in the broadest possible terms.

I wasn't claiming anything about the cosmology or quantum fields - I'm saying that "when you take into account everything science will ever be able to touch - there will be something that remains unknowable. (you'll find that at least since Kant, this is a fairly uncontroversial viewpoint within Epistemology and the Philosophy of Science)

I think maybe the reason you struggle to appreciate the value of philosophy is because you use the irreducible wiggle room that is always present in language to frame discussions in such a way so that philosophy is always at a disadvantage. You're straw-manning rather than strong-manning my points and you seem very keen to frame me as some anti-science merchant of woo. (A characterisation which anyone that knows me would have highly amusing)

I am a huge believer in the scientific method and it's primacy. But I don't believe anyone with any degree of reflection can maintain the view that every fact about reality will one day fall to science.

But this is exactly the problem. If what you meant to ask was, "Why do quantum fields exist" why didn't you just say that? Instead you asked, "Why is there something rather than nothing" which is a vaguely defined open-ended question with a lot of emotional appeal but no intellectual substance, i.e. typical of those parts of contemporary philosophy that are not part of science.

> when you take into account everything science will ever be able to touch - there will be something that remains unknowable

Yes, that's true. But it's not clear that what remains unknowable actually matters. We may never know why quantum fields exist, but so what? We can know that they were not created by a personal God who loves us and wants us to be happy or any such nonsense. We can know that our lives are finite and there is no afterlife and so we have to be judicious in how we spend our time, and so wondering why quantum fields exist might not be the most important problem for us to be addressing. It's enough to know that they exist, and that they behave according to simple mathematical laws.

> I don't believe anyone with any degree of reflection can maintain the view that every fact about reality will one day fall to science.

We know with absolute certainty that this is the case because (tada!) science can demonstrate this (e.g. the halting problem) so we have to make our peace with the fact that there are things we cannot know. But I see no reason to believe that any question that doesn't fall to science will yield to philosophy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Evolution_of_Cooperation

Though you don't actually have to get too deep into the weeds to answer that question: what you should do is whatever maximizes your odds of achieving your goals. The harder question is: what goals should you choose?

It sounds like you've already started with the assumption that the only way to expand human knowledge is by "science" and the people doing it are "scientists"? Maybe that's an assumption worth investigating. How would you know if that was true? What experiment or empirical observation would one need to conduct to know that the only way to extend human knowledge is by "science"?

I feel like you're trying to do a complement to some philosophers by saying that the good ones are honorary scientists, but perhaps there's more to know than objective truths about our specific material world.

No. I'm not assuming anything. I am making the empirical observation that the most effective method for expanding human knowledge is science. The people who understand this and consequently put effort into studying science I call scientists, and I don't intend that to be an honorary title but a genuine show of deep respect.

(And I say this as someone with a Ph.D. in a STEM field.)

> perhaps there's more to know than objective truths about our specific material world

Like what?

I think you're still basically begging the question here. Is it directly observable whether a belief is "knowledge", such that the efficacy of a method can be known by "empirical observation"? How would one know?

> Like what?

I think ethics are pretty important, but aren't about something that's objectively true in the world. One can know some of the characteristics of preference utilitarianism as an ethical model, for example.

But in this conversation, perhaps the most important gap is epistemology. You feel confident you know what knowledge is and isn't and how one can arrive at it -- did you arrive at that understanding by directly observing what is and is not knowledge in an objective external universe? What does it mean to know, or even for a belief to be "justified"?

Since you brought up Kant, and then re-canted (rimshot), Kant had the analytic vs synthetic distinction on propositions, where synthetic propositions are those which depend on how their meaning relates to the world -- i.e. can be true or false depending on what's true about the world. Math, logic, etc are analytic truths; we don't validate that e.g. arithmetic works the way we know it does by doing "experiments" and "empirical observations" of operations with large cardinality sets of physical objects.

Yes.

> How would one know?

Just look around you. You have computers, GPS, mRNA vaccines, etc. etc. etc. Those things were not produced by philosophers.

> I think ethics are pretty important,

I agree.

> but aren't about something that's objectively true in the world.

What can I say? You are simply wrong about that. Ethics are instincts produced by evolution. Like all instincts, they exist because they have survival value: genes that build brains with instincts about ethics reproduce better (in certain environmental niches) than genes that don't. Ethics are every bit as amenable to scientific inquiry as any other natural phenomenon.

> we don't validate that e.g. arithmetic works the way we know it does by doing "experiments" and "empirical observations" of operations with large cardinality sets of physical objects

Of course we do, because there are different ways of doing arithmetic. Some of them are better models of the world than others, and so those are the ones that we tend to think of as "the way" of doing arithmetic. But the only thing that makes standard arithmetic special is that it corresponds to the way that (parts of) the world work.

That sounds like a rather cheap version of evolution (and - not wanting to offend you, but in my view you sound rather too convinced that you have figured it all out for your own good).

The way you map moral values on survival smells like Skinner's cheap way to explain language in terms of behavioral stimulus-response pairs: not an adequate explanation. Beware that for every Skinner, there may a Chomsky around the corner to give his views a run for his money.

The format of an HN comment imposes some pretty serious constraints on communicating technical nuance and detail.

> Beware that for every Skinner, there may a Chomsky around the corner to give his views a run for his money.

Sure. Science is not a magic bullet. It can steer you astray. But in the long run it works better than any available alternative methodology.

I would also clarify: We have instincts about ethics. This does not imply that ethics are instincts, any more than having instincts about geometry implies that geometry is instincts or having instincts about physical quantities implies that measure theory is instincts.

You're clearly not getting this. Yes, you can see the products of scientific progress. That's not the same as seeing the absence of knowledge produced by anyone else. And one would expect that truths revealed about the physical world we live in should of course be the ones that give rise to physical artifacts you can point at.

> Ethics are instincts produced by evolution.

... and yet, our ethical beliefs are not biologically determined, but change as a function of culture, and at least in part through the work of philosophers. Our beliefs about the importance of freedom, equality, fairness (or what those mean) change dramatically over decades, far too quick for genetics to have any contribution to the change.

Re arithmetic, "the integers are closed under addition" is still something one can know without making any observations of the world, even if standard addition were somehow not useful in making predictions about the physical world. Further, by arguing that the importance of mathematical knowledge is only its relationship to making predictions about physical reality, you are once again begging the question.

But that's not what you asked, and it's not what I claimed. I didn't say that philosophy is entirely devoid of value, only that a lot of it is.

> our ethical beliefs are not biologically determined

What difference does that make? A lot of your physical characteristics aren't biologically determined. That doesn't put them beyond the reach of scientific inquiry.

> "the integers are closed under addition" is still something one can know without making any observations of the world

Really? How do you know what the word "integer" means without making any observations of the world? How can you even become aware of the existence of the word "integer", let alone what it is that that word denotes, without making any observations of the world?

> Further, by arguing that the importance of mathematical knowledge is only its relationship to making predictions about physical reality, you are once again begging the question.

Am I? What is it that made you decide to write "the integers are closed under addition" if not some prediction on the effect that writing those words rather than some other words (like, say, "pandas are partial to purple parkas") would have on physical reality?

You claimed you can empirically observe "that the most effective method for expanding human knowledge is science", which I think requires you to observe the efficacy of all methods of expanding human knowledge.

Regarding ethics, empirically gathering what people's ethical opinions are is surveying. This is distinct from knowledge about ethical systems. For example, preference utilitarianism sets the stage for social choice theory, in which theorems tell us about the properties and weaknesses of systems for groups of agents to collectively make choices (Arrow's theorem, Harsanyi's theorem etc).

> Really? How do you know what the word "integer" means without making any observations of the world?

I know the English word "integer" through interaction with the world; this does not mean that true properties of addition are "empirical" truths proceeding from science.

I should have hedged with "all known methods". It's possible that someone might invent a more effective method (but I believe there is actually good reason to believe that this is not possible, but that's a tangent).

> preference utilitarianism sets the stage for social choice theory, in which theorems tell us about the properties and weaknesses of systems for groups of agents to collectively make choices (Arrow's theorem, Harsanyi's theorem etc).

Sure. So?

Arrow's theorem is a great example. It's a theorem. It's math. It's not what is generally done under the rubric of "philosophy".

> this does not mean that true properties of addition are "empirical" truths proceeding from science

Yes it does. What is the "true" value of (say) 11 + 27? It could be 38, but it could also be 1 (mod 12) or 13 (mod 24) any of which might be the "true" value depending on the application.

The demarcation problem is distinguishing science from non-science.

Karl Popper theorizes that falsifiability is what makes the difference.

But there's nothing falsifiable about that theory! What would you test?

If you accept that there are meaningful theories outside of science, this works out fine. If you don't, you'll struggle to say what science is.

Perhaps rather paradoxically (at least if you see Popper as a champion of science over philosophy), Popper (who, in addition to his work on the philosophy of science, also wrote "The Open Society and its Enemies") felt that Wittgenstein was utterly wrong to deny that there are real philosophical problems.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wittgenstein/#RuleFollPri...

https://ditext.com/wordpress/2019/06/26/puzzles-vs-problems-...

Or we might need a philosopher or two to help us invent it.

So, if we all get mind-wiped and have to start over without this gift of the Gods, let's call the man who gets us back on track Francis Bacon, Jr.

Why? no particular reason

Here's my guess: the same thing that causes them to not be able to juggle: a lack of practice (and in the case of philosophy: a teacher who isn't also hallucinating).

As for why I consider such things important: I believe they are intimately related to why humans are continuously involved in wars and various other sub-optimal activities, which are easily[1] explained away with stories.

As for teachers, Graham Priest seems to be quite sharp:

https://youtu.be/ZGOMmGK4eeY?si=t0fmGJ3sA3iGN47T

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graham_Priest

[1] Like taking candy from babies.

Science practices a watered down version of epistemology (which is fine for the domain they are in as far as I'm concerned: speed matters, and errors can usually be corrected later), the dangerous part is that people think science is the gold standard of reasoning, truth discovery, etc. Just read the thread.

And the fan base seems often unable to even wonder what is true, let alone discern it.

I guess we'll have to agree to disagree about that too.

I am calling you out, you fast talking egomaniac coward, bring that big brain out of hiding and show off its real power: state clearly and explicitly, precisely what is incorrect in that comment.

And while you're at it: pay special attention to the final sentence in the comment you linked. Is it not rather perfect for the situation we are in?

Oh I would love to get into the mind of one of you people, even for 5 minutes just to see what it is like...would it be something like psychedelics, or would it be even weirder?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Is_It_Like_to_Be_a_Bat%...

> It isn't that science cannot, it is that they do not.

the referent for which was:

> You really believe that the question of human fallibility is beyond the scope of scientific inquiry? I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree about that.

So you claimed that science does not inquire into human fallibility. That is manifestly false, as a simple web search for "scientific inquiry into human fallibility" will reveal:

https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=scientific+inquiry+into+hum...

Here is the first hit from that search when I do it:

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/25152459211045...

It's a paper entitled "The Role of Human Fallibility in Psychological Research: A Survey of Mistakes in Data Management." That paper has 31 references.

Oh, and one more thing before I go:

> pay special attention to the final sentence in the comment you linked

No, that's not the part that merits attention. This is:

> people think science is the gold standard of reasoning, truth discovery, etc

That's right, people do think that. You might want to give some thought as to why that is.

It was an impressive "State opinion as fact, declare victory" mic drop though (the ending in particular, could it get any better). What do you give yourself, a 10/10?

I must say though, I do like the paper you picked as an example!

> I am calling you out, you fast talking egomaniac coward, bring that big brain out of hiding and show off its real power: state clearly and explicitly, precisely what is incorrect in that comment.

So you really shouldn't be surprised when, again against my better judgement, I obliged you.

I tried really hard to avoid this confrontation. I offered you a lets-agree-to-disagree olive branch not once but twice and you responded with ad hominems and insults.

So I'm going to offer you one last piece of advice (again against my better judgement, because I think the truth is that you are beyond my ability to help): you can sometimes get away with being obnoxious on the internet, but it works a lot better if you don't do it at the same time that you put your profound ignorance and unwillingness to do your homework on proud display.

I have one last question: the various things you state above in the form of facts, do you actually consider them to be exactly that, or have you been speaking casually/colloquially this whole time (as is the style of the era we are in)?

https://blog.rongarret.info/2024/04/three-myths-about-scient...

will answer your question. See myth #3.

Every single assertion of fact you made upstream in this conversation, or in the entire thread.

You have an impressive Motte and Bailey, Dumb Farmer (or at least I hope, for your benefit) routine going on.

If you would like, later I can go through the comments and choose some assertions you have made, and you can respond with proofs for each, which I will then critique. This seems like a fine way to demonstrate the superiority of your cognition, what do you think of the idea? Are you up for it? Can you participate without resorting to rhetoric and evasion?

And regarding your link and the very clever ontology it is based on: science is not composed only of the scientific method, it is also composed of human scientists. And if one is to replace "the scientific method" with "scientists" in that piece, the truth value of all of the statements changes drastically.

In my experience, scientists and their fan base don't like speaking with this level of precision, and will typically respond in a predictable manner, using predictable dismissive/evasive phrases, not unlike how a large language model behaves (which shouldn't be all that surprising if you put a bit of thought into it).

Yes, that's true. But I'm not defending scientists, I am defending science -- since you are demanding precision, I am defending the scientific method as described here:

https://blog.rongarret.info/2024/03/a-clean-sheet-introducti...

BTW, I am not claiming that as original work, just a statement of what I am prepared to defend.

So, assuming you've read that too, the answer to your question is: everything I say (and I do mean everything, including what I am saying right now) is a hypothesis. I have different degrees of confidence in difference hypotheses, ranging from ones that I have already rejected (in this thread I conflated Kant and Wittgenstein not once but twice) to those in which I have great confidence and am willing to give long odds against them being wrong. The hypotheses I've advanced above run the gamut, and the thread has been very long, so I'm not going to go through it all and assign confidence levels to everything I've said. If there's something specific you want to know, you'll have to ask about it specifically.

I will say this though: I'm pretty sure you are confusing motte-and-bailey on the one hand, and the appropriate levels of precision for different social contexts on the other. This is an HN comment thread whose main topic is the death of another human being. That calls for a very different approach than a technical paper for publication. Most people understand this implicitly. Apparently you don't. And before you respond to that, you should re-read the preceding paragraph very, very carefully because unlike you, I do learn from my mistakes (or at least I try), and so I am now choosing every word I write to you with exquisite care.

See, was that so hard?

Is there some reason you do not adopt a more sophisticated approach? I mean, you seem smart enough, and you certainly have the self-confidence.

> I will say this though: I'm pretty sure you are confusing motte-and-bailey on the one hand, and the appropriate levels of precision for different social contexts on the other.

Would you like to try proving out your hypothesis while I shoot holes in it, like one shoots fish in a barrel?

In this case I would start here:

"pretty sure"

"you"

"and the appropriate levels of precision for different social contexts"

"the"

"appropriate"

Presumably you can see the vast complexity that underlies these symbols (which we throw around daily as if they are simple trivialities), if you put some effort into it?

Maybe that's the thing though: if one puts little effort in, discerning reality is easy, whereas if one puts effort in, it becomes much harder. This is only one of the many ways in which reality is fundamentally paradoxical, and also funny (it is funny to watch people think they are thinking about it....which they are, but not in the way they think they are....which is funny. Funny upon funny...the gateway to all understanding? Now that would be funny!).

Like what?

> you seem smart enough

Thank you.

> Presumably you can see the vast complexity that underlies these symbols

Yep. But symbols are the only tools available here, so I have no choice but to use them despite their limitations.

> Maybe that's the thing though: if one puts little effort in, discerning reality is easy

I think you underestimate the effort I've put in. I've already smacked you down once for failing to do your homework. Please don't make me do it again, I really take no joy in it.

- explicitly revealing that your hypotheses stated in the form of facts are actually hypotheses

- wondering if your hypotheses are true

> But symbols are the only tools available here, so I have no choice but to use them despite their limitations.

There is more than one way to use symbols. For example, one can use them in a deceptive, misinformative manner, or one can use them in the opposite way.

> I've already smacked you down once for failing to do your homework. Please don't make me do it again, I really take no joy in it.

I offered you a challenge explicitly above, I recommend you take me up on it.

Is there a difference between 'belief' and 'knowledge'?

Why does the universe exist? (This is, I think, the core of 'why is there something rather than nothing?')

That's not a question.

> Is there a difference between 'belief' and 'knowledge'?

Yes. Knowledge cannot be wrong, beliefs can. A consequence of this is that true knowledge doesn't actually exist, but beliefs can become sufficiently reliable that calling them knowledge is a pretty reasonable approximation.

> Why does the universe exist?

We don't know.

> why is there something rather than nothing

That is a different question. We actually do know the answer to that: it's because "nothing" is unstable.

You could have picked so many good examples, instead you picked a legend of the 20th century. The first half of his career, centered on the Tractatus, even today is regarded as more or less on the right track as relates to how we use language to make the kinds of propositions found in the natural sciences (see modern philosopher A.C. Grayling's intro to his book where he says as much), but is less than a comprehensive view of the totality of meaning that it originally aspired to be.

And if anything, his latter career would be more pertinent, not less, as he spent it perhaps as the 20th century's most powerful advocate for the idea that philosophy spends too much time uselessly bewitching people with language. He was literally an engineering bro frustrated with pointless vagaries, known for flying into rages against what he regarded as frivolous philosophical nonsense. He might be the one guy from the 20th century who would most agree with you about the excesses of pointless language.

The biggest problem in classical philosophy is that there were fundamental things they simply didn't know. In particular, anything written before 1936 doesn't have the benefit of Turing's results on universal computation, and so it suffers from all kinds of misconceptions about human exceptionalism. These mistakes are understandable, but nonetheless the products of ignorance, and should be of little more than historical interest today. But AFAICT contemporary philosophers still take them seriously.

[1] https://www.wittgensteinproject.org/w/index.php?title=Tracta...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair

Anyone whose job it is to uncover the truth ought to be ant least a little curious about what we know and how we know it, and perhaps more importantly, whether there are true things that we can never know. These are mostly not scientific questions, but thinking about them helps us understand why science settled on the particular set of axioms that it did (eg, that there really is a world that exists independently of humans and their conception of it).

Apparently I was wrong about that too. According to another comment in this thread [1], he disavowed the work later, but intended it to be serious when he wrote it.

It has always seemed like self-evident nonsense to me though.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40089100

Further, Wittgenstein disavowed Tractatus as a failed project and completely revised his approach to philosophy. His most important and influential works came afterwards.

Getting the names confused is not the same as getting the people confused. My poster child for philosophical nonsense has always been the Tractatus. I just somehow got it into my head that it was written by Kant, not Wittgenstein (I've always been bad at remembering names) and I didn't bother to check because I was writing an HN comment and not a paper for publication.

> Wittgenstein himself would agree that Tractatus is deeply flawed.

So I am vindicated. I'm not actually criticizing Wittgenstein for writing Tractatus; there's nothing wrong with writing nonsense. Lewis Carroll was a master. The problem is writing nonsense and not recognizing it as nonsense. I'm criticizing the field of philosophy for elevating Wittgenstein to iconic status after having written such manifest nonsense without recognizing that it is manifest nonsense. That is an indictment of the field, not the man.

BTW, the reason that this is a touchy subject with me is that I did my masters thesis (in 1987) on the subject of intentionality [1] in AI. After wading through dozens of inscrutible papers I came to realize that the whole topic was basically bullshit [2], and that the problem had been completely solved by Bertrand Russell in 1905 [3], but no one seemed to have noticed. Even today the vast majority of philosophers (AFAIK) think this is still an open topic.

And BTW, Russell's solution is beautiful and easy to understand. Frankly, I think it has been ignored because it is easy to understand.

[1] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/intentionality/

[2] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/intentionality/#InteInex

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Denoting

I think there's a lot of confidently wrong histories being tossed around this thread, and it's not quite right to say he abandoned his old work as meaningless. He considered it dogmatic, but not nonsensical by any stretch.

But even for someone as sympathetic to that argument as I am, I don't see any version of Wittgenstein's reflections on the Tractatus as agreeing it to be nonsense much less a paradigmatic example of it. It's not just a matter of the later Wittgenstein being the "good" stuff. The Tractatus built on the work of Frege and was incredibly dense in its logical expressions, and half the challenge is keeping up with him, because he did philosophy from the perspective of an engineer, knowledgeable in logical and mathematical notation. It's one of the essential works of philosophy from the 20th century.

Hofstadter's dispensation of it in chapter 2 is to my mind, a completely decisive dressing down of the fundamental naivety of Searle's ideas about minds. I can't find any convenient quotation of the passage on the internet, but in my copy of the book it's page 29 chapter 2.

I think it puts on perfect display how truly ridiculous Searle's ideas are, and I think the Chinese room idea is similarly discreditable, and ultimately I think that Searle was more a fraud who more appropriately belongs in the category anti-science apologists along the lines of intelligent design proponents, rather than a positive contribution to the canon of Western analytic philosophy. And the extent to which he has gained influence in academic philosophy is something I take as discrediting of it as a field, to the extent that Searle is it's standard bearer. So if the commenter above cited him instead of Wittgenstein I would be cheering it on as a legitimate observation.

Could you say something more about him being an anti-science apologist? I can see your case that his arguments fail, but I don't see the anti-science.

But the essence of it is, if you consider optimists about the possibility of computers and AI, whether they be philosophers or programmers for major tech companies, and then you consider an opposing camp, made up of various 20th century philosophers, the most prominent of them being Hubert Dreyfus and John Searle, the second camp attempts to approach the problem by asserting that there's an essence to intelligence or consciousness, and that essence is captured in certain key pieces of vocabulary, such as insight, "thinking" and so on. They declare that these are special things that human minds have, that by definition, in some sense, cannot be modeled by any formal description or scientific investigation, and the essence of their definitions is always a moving target.

Their approach to the topic also parallels that of intellectuals who insisted that Darwin was wrong about evolution, and the essence of their insistence was a failure of imagination for the explanatory power of evolution. Obviously I'm oversimplifying, but in some ways you could consider the crux of the debate to be this posture of incredulity that the spectacular complexity of life could be explained the iteration of essentially simple and blind rules.

Searle and Hubert Dreyfus, but Dreyfus especially, looked at the logic gates of computing, and then looked at the dynamic, associative, poetic, analogy oriented aspects of human thinking and thought that these contain some magical essence that couldn't possibly be modeled by computers, and that the fundamental ideas of computing needed to be replaced by some new set of core ideas. However, our recent breakthroughs, while they are based on special and new principles that relate to vector databases, convolutional networks and so on, perhaps exhibiting the very core ideas that Dreyfus and Searle believed were missing, those breakthroughs have happened on

The same old boring foundation of computing, with logic gates and whatnot, and there was a failure of imagination on their part to understand that those foundational principles could give rise to the more dynamic concepts that they believed were necessary, and that these two things were not in fact in conflict at all. And the preemptive assertion that they belong to two a category inaccessible to computing principles as they understood them, indeed to any sort of in computational principles of any kind whatsoever, is something that I would contend is a fundamentally anti-scientific instinct that comes from a place of lacking imagination.

My bad. I've gotten pretty overwhelmed with all the activity in this thread, and I'm trying to get some actual work done in between responses so I'm a little distracted.

But just for the record, re-reading it now 37 years after the fact, I would not hold it up as a particularly good piece of work. It's a bit cringey actually.

I am not a professional philosopher, but I understand that that argument is offered as proof that "language is essentially social" (see article cited below), and so of some import.

[1] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/private-language/

This is the difference between the Wittgensteins and the Dennetts and Maudlins of the world. Wittgenstein just seems to be profoundly ignorant of science and how it applies to philosophical questions, while Dennett and Maudlin are really scientists first and philosophers second. Their work is chock full of references to actual scientific studies. Maudlin probably knows more about quantum physics than many physicists.

??? If anything his criticism of his own work was that it was excessively represented language as being the kind of language used by the natural sciences, which was a narrow slice of the full breadth of possible ways language can be used to convey meaning. The very thing that makes his career so fascinating is that he was purely an engineering bro, who cared more about math and logic, and he brought that perspective into philosophy, and challenged philosophy as being nonsense when measured against the standards of the hard sciences. That's essentially what the Tractatus is, and also the reason why it was retrospectively regarded as dogmatic.

Shannon's information theory is brilliant, but born out of an interest in formalisms related information transmission, and while it can be treated like it's in conversation with theories of semantic meaning, I don't think it was ever considered a specific repudiation of any particular approach. There was a whole century's worth of "ordinary language" philosophy in the anglo world guilty of much graver offenses in regarding uncritical assumptions about ordinary language as some kind of conceptual or informational bedrock, and the ways you apply Shannon to any of that, while I think you can, are non-obvious.

> And Wittgenstein actually had no excuse because Shannon published while Wittgenstein was still alive.

Tractatus came out something like 20 years before information theory, and by the time it was published he had already taken his late career "turn" to self criticism, but again, I don't think anyone treated Shannon like it was any specific commentary on his philosophy, the topics are rather remote and while they can "speak to" one another in a sense, a lot depends on how you build out your conceptual bridge between the two topics.

Wittgenstein was studying the nature of language, something closer to mathematics than to physics. And he came up with these ideas no later than 1933: Shannon only published his work on information theory in 1948. That Wittgenstein's later work was validated by advances in science over a decade later suggests that "philosophical mumbo jumbo" does not characterise it well. Indeed, perhaps there's something to learn from it.

I think Kant would have been another justifiable example. I found Bertrand Russell's commentary on Kant to be apt:

"Hume, with his criticism of the concept of causality, awakened him from his dogmatic slumbers--so at least he says, but the awakening was only temporary, and he soon invented a soporific which enabled him to sleep again."

He may well be, I just don't know that much about him.

This is typical philosophical nonsense. The word "philosophy" is so vaguely defined that anything can be considered "a type of applied philosophy". So science may well be "a type of applied philosophy" but that's not what makes science special. What makes science special, the thing that distinguishes it from all other branches of human intellectual endeavor, is that (to quote Feynman) experiment is the ultimate arbiter of truth.

How do you know that your wife loves you, and that she's not just pulling a long con?

Can you help me design experiments to prove the following?

* Simpler theories, with equal explanatory and predictive power, are preferable

* I'm not dreaming and there's no evil demon deceiving me

* The next swan will be white because all prior swans I've observed are

* Technology acts as a context of justification for scientific propositions, and proves its efficacy

* Experiment is the ultimate arbiter of truth

Sure.

> * Simpler theories, with equal explanatory and predictive power, are preferable

You don't need an experiment for this. A more complicated theory is undesirable, all else being equal, because it requires more effort to deal with. A simpler theory will let you avoid that wasted effort.

> * I'm not dreaming

Any experiment will do here. You can't perform experiments in dreams. That is one of the things that distinguishes dreams from reality.

> and there's no evil demon deceiving me

You can never prove that. You might be living in the Matrix, and the Matrix could be controlled by an evil demon. That possibility can never be completely eliminated. However, there is no evidence for it, and so neither the matrix nor evil demons are needed to explain observations, and so they can be discounted for that reason. In other words, the Matrix or evil-demon hypotheses have no predictive power.

> * The next swan will be white because all prior swans I've observed are

That's a false assertion so you can't design an experiment to prove it. Science does not rely on induction.

> * Technology acts as a context of justification for scientific propositions, and proves its efficacy

Do you have a better explanation for how technology comes to exist that is consistent with all the data?

> * Experiment is the ultimate arbiter of truth

Again, that is not a provable assertion. That is a heuristic that empirically produces better results than any other criterion that humans have come up with so far.

There is actually reason to believe that it can't be improved upon, just as there is reason to believe that an oracle for the halting problem can't be constructed in our universe. But you can't prove it.

Aren't you just re-categorizing to fit what you want.

"I don't like this field, so I'll cherry pick people I do agree with and re-define them to be in a different group that I'm more comfortable with".

Can't I say the same thing.

"Those Biologist aren't really scientist, they are just writing down observations not following the scientific method".(I've heard this argument on HN before).

Philosophers are the original scientist.

Is every philosopher today pushing boundaries and creating something new? No.

Is every scientist today pushing boundaries and creating something new? Also No.

Even his early work is about let us do this and done all philosophy so we as the whole humanity no need to do this rubbish anymore, be silence now as all done and for what cannot be said … he go to teach kids (and quite horrible as a teacher btw).

W as a P … crazy

Of these people how many of them come to their conclusion based on careful reasoning? Based on broad knowledge of philosophy?

My prior expectation would be that these numbers are very low. I would expect that people who dismiss philosophy do so from a position of relative ignorance.

This is not blame; the broader context matters: educational curricula, teaching quality, life experience, curiosity, competing interests, etc.

Let’s put the shoe on the other foot. How much applied computer science is worth reading? If you put a typical example of it in front of me (the code professionals write for example), I’m probably going think it is a hot mess. It becomes more bearable if I interpret it as a sequence of economically and culturally constrained suboptimal decisions. The same goes for philosophy.

That's entirely possible. It's even possible that my assessment is based on ignorance. I am certainly not an expert in the philosophical literature, and even more certainly not an expert in it recently. The last time I looked seriously at the philosophical literature at all was decades ago and maybe things have changed. But I am an expert in science, and computer science in particular (I have a Ph.D.) and so I can say with some authority that the philosophy literature that I looked at back in the day exhibited a profound ignorance of basic results in CS and math, and also a pretty profound lack of common sense. I found a lot of papers that were tackling non-problems that were based on false assumptions, the moral equivalent of fake proofs that 1=0 where the object of the game is to spot the flaw in the reasoning. And spotting the flaw in the reasoning wasn't even challenging. It was just obvious.

It also seems to me that a lot of what is nowadays called philosophy is just pretty transparent cover for religious apologetics.

Now, as you say, I could be wrong. I'm not an expert. If I'm wrong, I welcome being enlightened. But if you want to take that on I think you will find that I am not completely clueless. I suggest you start with citing an example other than Dennett or Maudlin of someone you think is doing good work in philosophy nowadays.

Yours sounds more like the now very tired "two cultures" argument, sounds like you are discussing more the sociology side of things than anything ?

(Would you throw out the baby of science with the bathwater of non-replicating papers ?)

And wasn't Wittgenstein (et al.) the one that specifically recentered philosophy around the questions of language, trying to prune the accumulated historical bullshit that philosophy has a much harder difficulty to get rid of than (empirical) sciences ?

OK. So what? The problem is that as philosophy moves closer to math it moves into the math department, and as it moves closer to empiricism it moves into the various sciences. The philosophy department is left with the dregs. That is what I claim results in a lot of pooh-pooh-able work.

> Yours sounds more like the now very tired "two cultures" argument, sounds like you are discussing more the sociology side of things than anything ?

Perhaps, but my focus here is much narrower. Snow was talking about everything that isn't science, and I'm talking only about those things that are commonly labelled "philosophy" for the last 300 years or so. Before that, science had not yet broken away from "natural philosophy" as a field in its own right. I'm not questioning the value of the arts.

> And wasn't Wittgenstein (et al.) the one that specifically recentered philosophy around the questions of language, trying to prune the accumulated historical bullshit that philosophy has a much harder difficulty to get rid of than (empirical) sciences ?

Maybe he was, I don't know. It's possible that I'm being unfair to him by focusing on the Tractatus, which has always struck me as just such obvious bullshit that it astonishes me that anyone can read it as anything other than some kind of practical joke.

But what I do know is that I don't see a lot of references to Wittgenstein when I read modern papers about natural language processing, and so his work doesn't seem to have had much impact. It's possible that this is because his work had so much impact that it's considered common knowledge, kind of like Turing doesn't always get referenced when the halting problem gets mentioned because everyone Just Knows.

And it's not just Wittgenstein. I don't see any philosophers having much impact on the world outside of university philosophy departments. That is what I am criticizing, not Wittgenstein per se. Tractatus was just an example.

Yeah. There is an ideal notion of a "love of knowledge" and following it where it leads, but almost everyone fails at some point. But it is a shame when a deeply flawed published work gets more attention than it deserves. In my opinion, teaching philosophy as a historic progression should not be the only nor default way. Sometimes it really is better to start afresh.

>religious apologetics

Most philosophers in the west are atheist, unless you mean they're secretly theist? What kind of undercover religious apologetics do you think is going on? I'm curious what you mean.

Good heavens, where to begin? Just about anything about natural language that came out of a philosophy department in the mid-80s. For that matter, a lot of what came out of CS departments in the mid-80s was bullshit too, but that's because people back then were basing their work on what turned out to be a false premise, that language and human reasoning could be effectively modeled by formal logic.

Two specific examples stick out in my memory as things that struck me as BS back in the day:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/B97809...

https://www.amazon.com/Situations-Attitudes-Jon-Barwise/dp/1...

The second example is a whole book pointing out that the meaning of a sentence depends on the context in which it appears. Well, duh!

> Most philosophers in the west are atheist, unless you mean they're secretly theist? What kind of undercover religious apologetics do you think is going on? I'm curious what you mean.

One of my hobbies is studying points of view with which I radically disagree, so I've spent a fair bit of time talking to religious fundamentalists and young-earth creationists. A lot of their foundational rhetoric is philosophical. It's actually pretty impressive how much thought they've put into it. These people are wrong (IMHO obviously), but they're not stupid.

On religious apologetics, that fundamentalists use philosophical arguments to justify their positions doesn't mean philosophy is largely transparent cover for religious apologetics, does it? I imagine fundamentalists are only using a small sliver of philosophical arguments. Most philosophers today don't think they're providing cover for apologetics, anyway.

Not in and of itself. But I don't see many other applications. Do you?

I'll grant you Popper. But he's the exception (along with Dennett and Maudlin) not the rule.

I don't know -- something. And it's not about the individuals, it's about the field as a whole. Classical music is not something I particularly enjoy, but I get that some people do, and so the efforts of all the composers and conductors and musicians who produce it have value for that audience. I can appreciate that even if I don't particularly care for the music myself. Likewise for Domino's pizza. Nascar. Cricket. Truck pulls. Rodeos. I don't get it, but I get that some people do.

Philosophy seems to have no audience beyond its own practitioners. That puts it on a par with things like yoga and homeopathy, and does not justify having entire departments at universities studying it.

God help us, it turns out that you can actually get a Ph.D. in both fields:

https://bellarmine.lmu.edu/yoga/

https://www.bircham.edu/doctor-phd-degree-homeopathy.html

You yourself like Dennett's work, don't you? I know you think that most philosophers haven't produced anything that interesting to you, but I think it's often the case that impact is Pareto-distributed across practitioners of a discipline, certainly not unique to philosophy. Like, I imagine a lot of people are only interested in a select few musicians/bands.

That depends on how you define "practicing philosophers". The vast majority of people who do yoga are not yoga masters. But no one gets value from watching yoga. The only value in yoga is doing it. This is not true for e.g. music. You can get value from passively listening to someone else play an instrument. It's not necessary for you to to it yourself.

I would claim that the vast majority of people participating in this thread fancy themselves armchair philosophers. It is indeed fun to argue about this stuff. But that doesn't justify paying anyone to do it as a profession.

> You yourself like Dennett's work, don't you?

I've already said that Dennett is a notable exception, and one of the things that sets him apart is that he bases his work in science more than what is traditionally called "philosophy". He's more like a massage therapist than a yoga instructor.

I really doubt that. I think you'd find it quite challenging to find people who have read these books who do not also enjoy engaging in philosophical debates.

But given the effort it would take to test this I think we should just agree to disagree.

Philosophical debates as in talking with other random people about philosophy? Sure, I'm sure most people who have read these books enjoy that. But that's not doing philosophy---such conversations are usually going to be riddled with errors and just not up to par for academic philosophical discussion.

I think we've gone so far down the rabbit hole about why the discipline of philosophy isn't justified that I've nearly forgotten why this current discussion is that relevant. Plenty of people enjoy philosophy, and it's something that humans have been discussing in a rigorous way for thousands of years. Somehow this isn't good enough? I really just don't see why music somehow meets the bar as being enjoyable enough for enough people, but philosophy doesn't. You don't have to be a musician to enjoy musician, and you don't have to be a philosopher to enjoy philosophy. "Oh, well, the people who do enjoy philosophy probably enjoy philosophical debates, so they're basically philosophers!" I mean, isn't this like me saying, "The people who enjoy music probably enjoy humming or singing tunes, so they're basically musicians!" The distinction seems to be getting continually more and more contrived.

That's my point: most philosophy is not rigorous. It might have a veneer of rigor but most of it is nonsense because it starts with false premises. Garbage in, garbage out.

What do you think is the relevant difference between philosophy and music that makes it silly to study the former formally but not the latter?

But whatever, we can set that aside if you'd like, I'm kind of curious to hear - what do you think was lost in the last 100 years ago? I'm a bit surprised to hear that, I would have thought you would say that we got more rather than less rigorous post-Frege. What do you think of philosophers today who specialize in studying the history of philosophy today, or philosophers who specialize in specific periods of pre-20th century philosophy (ancient philosophy, medieval philosophy, etc.)? Or specific pre-20th century philosophy?

And I have to ask, since you're a big fan of Popper---what do you think about Kuhn and Feyerabend? Quine (particularly the Duhem-Quine thesis)? Post-Popperian philosophy of science in general? All just nonsense?

(You don't have to address every question if you'd rather not take the time.)

No, we were talking about (or at least I was talking about) how many people get value out of philosophy who don't practice it, at least as amateurs. Is philosophy like music or is it like yoga? I'm on team yoga.

> what do you think was lost in the last 100 years ago?

It's not what was lost, it's what was gained. And what was gained is major breakthroughs in areas of science that allows science to answer questions that were traditionally the purview of philosophy. These include evolution, molecular biology, the theory of computation, quantum mechanics, and neuroscience.

> what do you think about Kuhn and Feyerabend?

I don't know much about Kuhn. I read "Against Method" a long time ago and it seemed like total nonsense to me at the time, one of the things that convinced me that philosophy as an area of intellectual inquiry was bankrupt.

> Duhem-Quine thesis

Yes, I think this is pretty self-evidently true. A finite amount of data, which is all we can ever have, will always be consistent with an infinite number of theories.

> (You don't have to address every question if you'd rather not take the time.)

I'm actually finding our exchange very interesting and worthwhile. You're keeping me on my toes.

Well, I've said that there are plenty of people who don't practice philosophy who enjoy books of philosophy taken seriously by philosophers. You responded that these people enjoy discussing philosophy, the implication being that these people are practicing philosophy. And I responded in turn that these people are no more practicing philosophers than people humming tunes are practicing musicians---so it's not clear what the relevant distinction between music and philosophy is supposed to be with respect to its enjoyability beyond practitioners of the discipline.

>It's not what was lost, it's what was gained. And what was gained is major breakthroughs in areas of science that allows science to answer questions that were traditionally the purview of philosophy. These include evolution, molecular biology, the theory of computation, quantum mechanics, and neuroscience.

How much of Plato's dialogues do you think were about these things? I don't deny that what used to be called natural philosophy is now just science, but it's rather extreme to say that the sciences have conquered everything philosophers were in the business of doing. And Plato isn't just some random exceptional example; I'm sure you're familiar with Whitehead's "footnotes to Plato" quote.

>I read "Against Method" a long time ago and it seemed like total nonsense to me at the time, one of the things that convinced me that philosophy as an area of intellectual inquiry was bankrupt.

Feyerabend is rather extreme, but I'm curious why you think it was totally nonsense.

>Yes, I think this is pretty self-evidently true.

And do you see the problem this poses for Popperian falsificationism? More generally, philosophy of science, beyond just Popper, is a good example of meaningful work done in philosophy.

Music can be enjoyed by someone who never practices it at all, not even humming or singing in the shower. Yoga cannot. You have to do yoga to get any value out of it at all. No one gets any benefit out of simply watching people do yoga.

My claim (and it's an empirical claim -- I might be wrong, but you'd need actual evidence) is that philosophy is more like yoga than music. Almost no one gets value out of it without actually participating in some way. (I hedge with "almost" because you might be able to find a few weirdos out there who really do enjoy reading Wittgenstein for its own sake and never engaging in philosophical discussion, but I'd be surprised if there are more than, say, a few dozen such people on the entire planet.)

> it's rather extreme to say that the sciences have conquered everything philosophers were in the business of doing

I'm not saying that. I'm saying that science has conquered a lot of what philosophers were once in the business of doing, and many of those things were things that people used to believe (and some still believe) were inherently beyond the reach of scientific inquiry, with human consciousness and Dennett's "Consciousness Explained" being my poster children. I'm not saying this project is complete, I'm predicting that science will continue to make progress monotonically until all that is left for philosophers is the Philosophy of the ever-shrinking Gaps.

> Feyerabend is rather extreme, but I'm curious why you think it was totally nonsense.

I'd have to go back and re-read it. It has been many decades and I don't remember any of the details.

I can tell you two things though: First, I was turned on to Feyerabend by someone I deeply respect and so I was predisposed to like him. And second, looking over the Wikipedia article on him I can see right away why I don't:

"Feyerabend's most famous work is Against Method (1975), wherein he argued that there are no universally valid methodological rules for scientific inquiry."

That is flat-earth kind of wrong. There is at least one obvious universal methodological rule for scientific inquiry, and that is the one voiced by Feynman: any theory that is inconsistent with experiment is wrong.

> And do you see the problem [Duhem-Quine] poses for Popperian falsificationism?

No. I can see why someone might think it poses a problem, but I don't see any actual problem.

BTW, note that even if DQ poses an actual problem for Popper, all that would do is falsify Popper as a theory of why science is effective. It would have absolutely no impact on the manifest fact that science is effective. That fact alone casts some pretty serious doubt on DQ being a problem for Popper because the only way it could possibly be an actual problem for Popper is if Popper is correct :-)

I would wager that most people who enjoy listening to music at some point have hummed some tune, sung in the shower, or something like this. If your point is that merely the act of listening itself is enjoyable, then that seems to apply to reading philosophy as well---there's enjoyment to be found in the mere pleasure of reading a philosophical work, and it's not like having a philosophical discussion is what "actualizes" this enjoyment or something strange like that.

(Though in any case I don't think this is the relevant criteria for whether an academic institution should be abolished or not, but.)

>I'm not saying this project is complete, I'm predicting that science will continue to make progress monotonically until all that is left for philosophers is the Philosophy of the ever-shrinking Gaps.

Suppose we accept the view that consciousness can be fully explained by science. Suddenly this means that actually all of philosophy will fall to science? And we should pre-emptively abolish the institution because of this prediction?

>That is flat-earth kind of wrong. There is at least one obvious universal methodological rule for scientific inquiry, and that is the one voiced by Feynman: any theory that is inconsistent with experiment is wrong.

Usually when people express this kind of, "X idea is wrong, and anyone who argues for it is intellectually bankrupt" will refuse to take seriously any discussion on the matter, so I won't say too much on this topic. But if you're interested, you can read Feyerabend's arguments, including case studies in the history of science where traditionally well-respected scientists have violated, e.g., principles of falsifiability. Chalmers has a nice book, What is This Thing Called Science?, that includes this view, though the book is far more nuanced than Feyerabend. "Any theory that is inconsistent with experiment is wrong" sounds plausible, but there are several issues, such as the theory-ladenness of observations and the inability to test any specific hypothesis in isolation, meaning it's difficult to know what particular theory or part of a theory an observation falsifies (Duhem-Quine).

>It would have absolutely no impact on the manifest fact that science is effective.

But nobody has suggested that the dichotomy is either a) Popper's falsificationism is correct or b) science isn't effective. None of Duhem, Quine, Kuhn, Feyerabend, or really, any philosopher of science disagreeing with Popper is saying science isn't effective.

>That fact alone casts some pretty serious doubt on DQ being a problem for Popper because the only way it could possibly be an actual problem for Popper is if Popper is correct :-)

But it's hardly a unique view to Popperian falsificationism that things can shown to be wrong, the view that things can be shown to be wrong is something all the thinkers mentioned and any sane person agrees on.

Sure. I'm just skeptical that the people reading philosophy for fun are reading Wittgenstein.

> Suppose we accept the view that consciousness can be fully explained by science. Suddenly this means that actually all of philosophy will fall to science?

Of course not. That's an obvious straw man. I'm just saying that the historical trend has been for science to solve philosophical problems at a much faster rate than new philosophical problems arise, and so the remaining pool of philosophical problems is shrinking monotonically, and I see no reason to believe that this trend will not continue.

I will also add that the current state of things seems to be that the extant pool of outstanding philosophical problems that science hasn't yet made a dent in is quite small.

> Usually when people express this kind of, "X idea is wrong, and anyone who argues for it is intellectually bankrupt" will refuse to take seriously any discussion on the matter, so I won't say too much on this topic.

I make it a point to engage with ideas that I vehemently disagree with. I put a lot of effort into studying young-earth creationism, to the point where I can channel their arguments pretty effectively. I even gave a public talk entitled "What I learned from young-earth creationists." (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ohY9ALuEfw) So I am not quite so closed-minded as you think.

I also recognize that the actual practice of science in the real world often strays from the ideal. But that doesn't mean that an ideal does not exist. Judging science by what (some) scientists do is kind of like judging Christianity by what MAGA people do. (I'm going to go out on a limb and guess from your user name, as well as the arguments that you are advancing, that you're a Christian?)

> it's difficult to know what particular theory or part of a theory an observation falsifies

Difficult != impossible.

> None of Duhem, Quine, Kuhn, Feyerabend, or really, any philosopher of science disagreeing with Popper is saying science isn't effective.

Happy to hear that. The impression I remember having when I read Feyerabend many decades ago is that his message was that the whole scientific enterprise was bankrupt and needed to be replaced with something radically different.

> But it's hardly a unique view to Popperian falsificationism that things can shown to be wrong, the view that things can be shown to be wrong is something all the thinkers and any sane person agrees on.

Yes, but you left out a crucial detail: it's not just that things can be shown to be wrong, it's that they can be shown to be wrong by experimental data. This is far from universally accepted. Many Christians, for example, believe that the Bible is the inerrant Word of God and so cannot be shown to be wrong. Muslims believe the same about the Quran. If experimental data conflicts with the Bible or the Quran, it is the data (or the interpretation of the data) that must be wrong, not the Bible or the Quran.

But that is neither here nor there. What matters is that we agree that science is effective, and so we can apply the scientific method to itself and ask why it is effective. And the answer is (I claim) because it uses experiment rather than intuition or divine revelation as its ultimate arbiter of truth. That still leaves a lot to argue about, but another empirical observation one can make is that scientific arguments tend to converge. The atomic theory was wildly controversial in the 19th century. Today not even the most radical flat-earther denies the existence of atoms. Entanglement was controversial, but that argument was settled by Alain Aspect's experiments. Plat tectonics. Helicobacter pylori. Heliocentrism. All of these were once considered flat-earth-kind-of-wrong.

BTW, the problem with flat-eartherism is not that it's wrong. There is nothing wrong with being wrong. Everyone is wrong about something at one time or another. The problem with flat-earthers is that they cherry-pick the data and advance conspiracy theories to explain the parts they don't like.

I'm sure a lot of them are.

>I'm just saying that the historical trend has been for science to solve philosophical problems at a much faster rate than new philosophical problems arise, and so the remaining pool of philosophical problems is shrinking monotonically, and I see no reason to believe that this trend will not continue.

Surely a large part of why this is is because what is now science used to be natural philosophy.

And I think there are many philosophical issues today that can be traced back to Plato that science hasn't resolved, and moreover, cannot resolve alone.

(Though, if you think trying to hash out definitions and the meanings of words is science, a lot of what is going on in Plato's dialogues is science, and the continued discussion of these issues in philosophy departments is also science.)

>I make it a point to engage with ideas that I vehemently disagree with. I put a lot of effort into studying young-earth creationism, to the point where I can channel their arguments pretty effectively. I even gave a public talk entitled "What I learned from young-earth creationists." (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ohY9ALuEfw) So I am not quite so closed-minded as you think.

I'm happy to hear that!

>I also recognize that the actual practice of science in the real world often strays from the ideal. But that doesn't mean that an ideal does not exist.

I think that the practice of science strays from the ideal so much is evidence that we shouldn't be too concerned about meeting this ideal, precisely because the practice of science has worked out so marvelously.

>I'm going to go out on a limb and guess from your user name, as well as the arguments that you are advancing, that you're a Christian?

Somehow I feel like I shouldn't give a response to this question here; I'll just say that the viewpoints that I'm defending---that there are domains of discourse over which philosophy rather than science must be our primary tool to adjudicate disputes and there aren't good grounds to abolish philosophy as an academic institution any more there are grounds to abolish, say, the literature department or the music department (and I guess, now, that Popperian falsificationism is not the best characterization of science or its ideal.)---aren't religious commitments and don't require religious commitments, as I'd think you'd agree.

>Happy to hear that. The impression I remember having when I read Feyerabend many decades ago is that his message was that the whole scientific enterprise was bankrupt and needed to be replaced with something radically different.

Oh no, far from it. What Feyerabend thinks is that the scientific enterprise shouldn't be constrained by methodological rules. His hero is Galileo, who in his eyes, is an archetypal methodological rule-breaker, who was originally thought to be advancing views that didn't explain the data any better than former views but still turns out to be right. If there's any radical change Feyerabend thinks should be made to the scientific enterprise, it would be something like being more open-minded to theories even if they don't seem satisfactory based on methodological rules---which isn't really that much of a radical departure from the practice of science anyways, as he argues.

>Yes, but you left out a crucial detail: it's not just that things can be shown to be wrong, it's that they can be shown to be wrong by experimental data. This is far from universally accepted. Many Christians, for example, believe that the Bible is the inerrant Word of God and so cannot be shown to be wrong. Muslims believe the same about the Quran. If experimental data conflicts with the Bible or the Quran, it is the data (or the interpretation of the data) that must be wrong, not the Bible or the Quran.

Well, for the conversation about philosophers of science, I think it's universally accepted by philosophers of science (most of which wouldn't subscribe to Popperian falsificationism) that things can be shown to be wrong by experimental data. Like, sure, if we see a black swan, we can show that "all swans are white" is false, nobody's disagreeing with this kind of reasoning.

>Many Christians, for example, believe that the Bible is the inerrant Word of God and so cannot be shown to be wrong. Muslims believe the same about the Quran. If experimental data conflicts with the Bible or the Quran, it is the data (or the interpretation of the data) that must be wrong, not the Bible or the Quran.

Well, one thing is that these people would probably actually agree that things can be shown to be wrong by experimental data---it's just that the Bible or the Quran or what have you cannot be shown to be wrong. For what it's worth, serious Christian or Muslim thinkers will agree that there are interpretations of these texts that can be shown to be incorrect through data---those just are not the right interpretations of these texts.

>What matters is that we agree that science is effective, and so we can apply the scientific method to itself and ask why it is effective.

I don't see how the latter follows from the former.

>And the answer is (I claim) because it uses experiment rather than intuition or divine revelation as its ultimate arbiter of truth.

That seems right.

And I would agree that science makes progress; I don't think many (sensible) people dispute that.

It is both funny and not.

In comparison, the Seven Bridges of Konigsberg is a bare introduction in Graph Theory and Hamilton carving quarternions into Broom Bridge is an amusing aside before you get to the meat of the subject. A lecturer might amuse you with Kekule's dream before telling you about a Benzene ring but the ring is the thing, not the dream.

Philosophy is a field with time-translation symmetry but is taught akin to fields without (e.g. Literature, History, Sociology). Fields without TTS need you to build up from the replay log. But fields with TTS can do something far better: they can distill "truths" into snapshots. Consequently, as a child I read about Galois Theory without reading Analyse d’un Mémoire sur la résolution algébrique des équations or a translation thereof.

Conjectures and Refutations shows how to accelerate through a replay log, indexing at key-frames so that we don't need to play every frame to get to the conclusions we're searching for. Good field. Bad practice.

Most students will not stay in academia, but making them think about questions like what is it to live a good life seems to me pretty important for the education of future citizens !

And in fact ancient philosophers being historically so remote is likely to be a good thing, to prevent emotional knee-jerk rejections that is at risk of happening with more recent philosophers too associated with current politics.

Žižek has made comments about so many different things, so publicly, that it’s hard to avoid finding something you disagree with. But it’s also hard to avoid finding something you agree with.

I like his books, but someone like Alan Watts is much more prone to quackery, IMO.

I don’t think I have ever described somebody as a quack philosopher.

I put the concept of “philosophical zombies” as quackery. At best, the p-zombie thought experiment shows that we haven’t really come up with a definition of consciousness that explains what we want it to explain. Some people use p-zombies as part of a larger argument against physicalism. Chalmers published a modal logic argument against physicalism using p-zombies. One of the tricky things about modal logic is that it requires a deeper understanding of modal logic in order for you (you, someone reading a modal logic argument) to make good decisions about which propositions you are willing to accept in a modal logic argument. Since most people only have an intuitive understanding of modal logic, it is a good way to win an argument but a bad way to explain your position.

I’d say that this work (p-zombies) is quackery in the sense that it’s consistently directed at something which I consider to be unproductive, which is the work of undermining or attacking physicalism / physical monism. At some point, in these discussions, you end up having some argument about the semantics of ontology and how you define “existence”. If your semantics for “existence” admits non-physical things to exist (like, if you’re a Platonist), and you’re having a conversation with someone who believes in physicalism, then I don’t think either person in the conversation is going to get much out of it, other than a better way to explain their own position.

Edit: I hope that paints a complete enough picture and covers the important parts of my complaints about p-zombies. I don’t have my finger on the pulse of philosophy and I may be missing something important, maybe there’s some really important argument p-zombies are used for, and maybe I don’t understand Chalmers; that’s always a risk. My main complaint here is that it seems to be some tool to make an argument against physicalism, but this tool doesn’t help you understand physicalism, or help you understand its alternatives. It’s just an argument that you can have between somebody who believes in physicalism and somebody who doesn’t, where neither person will agree with the other one after hearing the argument.

Quack: 1) A practitioner who suggests the use of substances or devices for the prevention or treatment of disease that are known to be ineffective.

2) A person who pretends to be able to diagnose or heal people, but is unqualified and incompetent.

The inside baseball term more relevant to what you're talking about, I think, is "talking past each other." https://www.jstor.org/stable/25655279

A quack philosopher would seem to me to be someone that claims to be doing philosophy or interpreting the ideas of a philosopher, but doing so in an egregiously wrong or misleading manner.

You also might want to check out this article for more on p-zombies, by the way: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/zombies/

Oh, here’s the thing—it’s not actually important to argue about what the word “quackery” means. I’ve explained what I meant by “philosophical quackery”, and if you want to talk about the content of what I wrote, then by all means, respond to the content.

If, instead, you want to start a fight about what the word “quackery” means, and whether I was wrong to use it, then I’m out. That sounds like a waste of time.

I'm not sure what else there is to say here. If you call people something, perhaps it's important to actually know what that thing means? This seems to happen often in conversations critical of philosophy: terms are used unclearly, and the attempt to actually clarify those terms is hand-waved away as "I don't want to argue about definitions."

So I think your criticism here is not that there are quack philosophical works, but that there are unproductive ones that do nothing but restate established positions. Which is definitely a true thing.

“Quackery” is not some technical term here. It is a mistake to rely too much on technical definitions of words. If you rely too much on technical definitions and dictionary definitions for non-technical words, then you will probably misunderstand what people mean, relatively frequently.

I could also insert some comment about the history of philosophy and modernism / post-modernism, here. If you take the stance that a word means something independently, in some kind of platonic sense, then you agree with the modernists. If you take the stance that a word’s meaning comes from how it’s interpreted by people who read it, you agree with the post-modernists.

I’m just trying to use a word to convey some sort of meaning. If that word didn’t convey the intended meaning to you, I can use different words. Which I did.

> terms are used unclearly, and the attempt to actually clarify those terms is hand-waved away as "I don't want to argue about definitions."

Terms are generally used unclearly, it is unavoidable. When I say that “I don’t want to argue about definitions”, what I mean is that I want to talk about subject X, and I used the word “quackery” to describe it. I want to talk about subject X, not about the definition of “quackery”, which is irrelevant.

A discussion about the word “quackery” is immaterial because I can clarify things by re-explaining subject X using different words. I did that—but apparently you are not interested in clarifications, because your actions indicate a greater interest in fighting over whether I used the word “quackery” correctly.

Yes, and I thought I understood that meaning and addressed it when I said this is typically called "talking past each other."

> So I think your criticism here is not that there are quack philosophical works, but that there are unproductive ones that do nothing but restate established positions. Which is definitely a true thing.

Can you clarify how this isn't what you mean? How is what you're saying different from what I interpreted it as meaning?

No, because that’s just an argument about “who said what” and nobody cares about that stuff.

If you had some response you wanted to make about the content of what I said, then I missed it. I don’t know what your viewpoint is at all, except about what the definition of “quackery” is, which is apparently important. If you made some kind of response to the content what I wrote, I missed it.

I’ve said twice now that the phenomenon you described (and mislabeled as quackery) is called “talking past each other” and it’s a common criticism. I then linked you to a paper discussing this, and I agreed with you that this is a problem.

The definition of quackery is relevant here, because it implies that philosophical works exist which are deliberately “fake” or pretending to be philosophy when they aren’t. A doctor that is unproductive and wastes everyone’s time isn’t a quack, they’re just unproductive. The phenomenon you described is therefore not quackery, it’s just being unproductive in a way often referred to as “talking past one another.”

This is just a rehashing of the exact same thing I already said. I cannot make this any more clear.

But if (when?) it was possible to empirically discriminate between these beliefs, it would stop being philosophy and would become science ! (Assuming you see them as exclusive rather than nested.)

I guess that, unlike in the sub-field of philosophy that are mathematics, where starting with different axioms isn't as much of a deal (outside of turf wars of mathematics departments ?), the issue is that you have plenty of questions that most people deeply care about, so disagreements can turn quite violent indeed ?

Spending a bunch of time figuring out why something that seems obvious is obvious probably seems like a waste of time to a lot of people, but it can certainly help in the long run. We can't see our own blindspots, so even if something seems obvious, I think it's useful to understand it.