Re:Why Paul Graham is sort of wrong about philosophy
by peterashford on Tuesday May 27, 2014 @12:39AM
(#7802889)
I have very often seen people criticise Philosophy from a point of ignorance and then follow up by espousing their own very bad philosophy. It's kinda like criticising a Mathematical proof without understanding Math. You can do it, but you're highly likely to be off the mark.
It's not that Philosophy doesn't have areas worthy of criticism. I personally believe that the best reason to study metaphysics is to learn why metaphysics is useless. Ironically, understanding why it's useless is actually quite useful :o)
Yep, as soon as I read that, I knew someone on HN would point to Godel somewhere in the comments. I'll agree with you as well on Godel and his importance. His theorem is easily one of the most important things to come out of the 20th century. I'd go: penicillin, atomic bomb, better farming tech and chemistry, Godel.
I've not got the chops for the actual proof, but the many 'for the layman's' books Ive read on it just point out how incredibly important it is. From AI research to Turing's tape to the nature of reality itself, the proof is just astounding. To put him up on Aristotle's level is obvious even to a math layman like me. Likely because of the difficulty of the proof, it is not very well known, and that is a shame. I'd love a torn-down proof easy enough for a high schooler to understand. The best I've found is: https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/453503/can-someone-...