Can't say I met or knew him, but his essays in "The Mind's I" and "Brainstorms" are what got me to pursue tech as a teenager in the early 90s. Along with Hofstader, his ideas were foundational to hacker culture. What a time to go, where there has been a kind of cog.sci winter for the last 20 years, but the last year of LLMs has forced philosophy of mind back into the public consciousness. Though largely today under the guise of "AI Safety" and "alignment," Dennet's articulations form the tools we're going to be using to reason about ethics as they relate to these things we think of as minds - and regarding how we relate to these things that increasingly resemble other minds. Without too much lionizing (even though he has, however, just died), it would be hard to say that new ideas in philosophy as a whole have had more impact in a lifetime or more than that.
A lot of very clever people disagreed strongly with him. However, since not one of them could deny they were shaped by the forces they opposed, those controversies became the shape of his own huge and formidable influence. I'm sure he would want to be remembered for something else, and I have the sense sentimentality was not his thing at all, but his popularization the term "deepity," was in the character of many of his ideas, where once you had been exposed to one, it yielded a perspective you could afterwards not unsee.
I hope an afterlife may provide some of the surprise and delight he brought to so many in this one.
AI safety is moralism of the boring kind, not even some new moral philosophy. AFAIK Dennett did not hold strong moral positions , let alone moralist, so i feel he was orthogonal to it
It's not all boring - it makes for some great movies. Terminator 2, The Matrix etc.
It's also moving to practical engineering questions like how can we have AI controlled drones kill invading Russians but ensure they won't turn on us later, more than philosophical waffle.
(I had misremembered the author of that original quote, but then :
> Daniel Dennett, while sharply disagreeing on some points, acknowledged Nagel's paper ["What Is It Like to Be a Bat?"] as "the most widely cited and influential thought experiment about consciousness.")
According to a common definition, moralism involves judgment, but not necessarily imposition. From Wikipedia:
> The term has been used in a pejorative sense to describe the attitude of "being overly concerned with making moral judgments or being illiberal in the judgments one makes".
There is also the 19th century Moralism movement/philosophy, which may have inspired the more general sense of the word, but I’m not sure.
I think we should all step back and question whether we all even mean the same thing by the word “imposition”. When I think about imposition, I can see how people could interpret that to mean a wide range of things, including social pressure, religious rules, as well as the force of law. This is why (above) I interpret moralism (the general term) as a kind of judgment, but not necessarily an imposition of rules or punishments.
Similar to Vonnegut's joke at a memorial service for Asimov at the American Humanist Society: "Isaac is up in Heaven now".
It's amusing that when I searched for the exact quote just now, I found this HN comment from 2011, on the "in memoriam" thread for Dennett's fellow horseman:
Indeed. Do yourself a favor and don't watch any of the videos of him on youtube. That razor sharp wit combined with spontaneous humor will make you really mad at cancer.
Also: Do yourself a favor and (dont? er do?) read/listen to his brother's books! Particularly The Phoney Victory. He writes polemics as good as Christopher. Truly a yin to the yang. I like the way they argue, although I don't necessarily agree with everything they argue.
Even if he was wrong about it, it's important to air the thinking around it regardless of belief.
The proposition, for example, that consciousness is basically an illusion without empirical basis, one would have to take up as belief, I guess (paradoxically), since to most of us, that would seem like gaslighting (i.e., "if your conclusion is that Descartes was wrong and that we can't even know we are conscious, then I beg to differ")
He may forgive but I am not sure his soul would have wanted to be with Him, based on what I have seen from him he would rather be in oblivion than an Eternal Church.. Obviously I don’t claim to know his true heart.
> Along with Hofstadter, his ideas were foundational to hacker culture.
Dennett was an influential thinker, probably more so than Hofstadter overall, but I can't agree with this assessment. For one thing, he became widely known after Consciousness Explained, in 1992, which is simply too late to be foundational to hacker culture, which was well and truly founded by then.
I won't broaden my case here, lest anything I say be interpreted as speaking ill of the dead. I'm certain he was a major influence for many who post here, yourself included, and I don't intend to detract from that.
Hacker culture was not well established by the 70s, simply because so few people worked with computers in that decade. You can certainly trace its roots back to at least 1970, but it really did not become established then.
What most people identify as "hacker culture" today arose in tandem with (a) relatively affordable "personal" computers (b) modem-based communication.
The rise of these two things is more or less entirely cotemporal with the most productive phase of Dennett's career.
I consider this definitive evidence that the foundational period of hacker culture was before these books were published. I'm not sure what the point of trying to shift that period forward so as to include Dennett's works is. It's neither true nor necessary.
His first three books were published in 81, 84 and 86.
I agree with you that the foundational period slightly predates these, but I don't consider the foundational period to be the same as when "hacker culture was established".
I began to encounter it myself starting in about 1979 via CoEvolution Quarterly/Whole Earth Review, but it was still very, very much evolving and continued to do so in very noticeable ways as I started programming in 1984.
I tend to consider the general use of IP as probably one of the main signifiers of hacker culture being established, and that was far from common in the 75-85 period (though growing rapidly).
It wasn't actually my claim that Dennett had much influence on hacker culture. I was originally disputing the idea that Dennett became well known after 1992.
I'd argue hacker culture goes back much further than the 70s, e.g., with MIT hacks during the 1930s and 40s (see Feynman) and in Cambridge UK, as well as the early HAM radio enthusiasts in the 1900s...
There are certainly antecedents and ancestors for hacker culture long before the 1970s, but in the post I was replying to, the term used was "hacker culture was established", and I would argue that none of these early anticipatory elements represented the "establishment" of a new culture.
It’s the same culture made by the same people entering and leaving across that full period. Hacker culture is really a continuation of the same ad hock machinist culture dating back to the Industrial Revolution. It jumped to computers from the days of analog computers.
You can trace things flowing all over the place with say MIT’s Tech Model Railroad Club being often sited as an early example. But it’s really just refinements of the same basic culture, and computers is one of the few places it survived unlike say pinball.
I think about this a lot with reference to the mechanics institute in San Francisco. Who were these mechanics and why did they have a 4 story institute still home to a chess club and private library? Certainly not a direct crossover to a modern car mechanic, even a "hacker" type car mechanic wouldn't stereotypically also be thinking along the philosophy of hacker culture, although I am sure some do.
Great start at a eulogy or thank-you note! I also thank Dennett for the originality, humor, and clarity of all of his work on consciousness and cognition. He wanted to communicate more than impress readers.
His book Consciousness Explained is a good overview of the conundrum of brain-mind. And in the end he admits clearly that he actually did NOT explain consciousness (read the last two pages). But he framed the problem better than most philosophers, and brings readers into the discussion.
Daniel Dennett, Richard Rorty, and Humberto Maturana: The three modern philosophers I read and respect the most as a practicing neuroscientist.
Maturana by far the strongest scientist of this trio and oddly, the most radical neurophilosopher of them all. I would have loved to overhear a conversation of these three.
Ah, perhaps too subtle humor in your closing comment. “Dennett in dust”—-his comfortable afterlife, will have to be satisfied with all of us talking about ideas he nurtured and motivated.
Beautifully said, honestly brought me some solace. Echoing your endorsement of Brainstorms — I expect/hope this will be his enduring legacy!
Death touches us all, but I totally agree, it especially hurts me to see these AI pioneers passing away right when so many groundbreaking cognitive science discoveries are being made. Especially in the cases of Dennett’s “opposition” like Lenat (and soon Chomsky…) where they die appearing “disproven” or “outmoded” by LLMs in the eyes of Silicon Valley celebrities like Hinton and Friedman. Oh well, I’m sure their time on their earth has prepared them for a little bit of criticism and uncertainty, a-la Schopenhauer’s “Only with time, however, will the period of my real influence begin, and I trust that it will be a long one.”
Luckily, Dennett is under no such cloud, and he died more or less a hero in my eyes; certainly among the most influential Connectionist philosophers (+ Dreyfus & Clark?), who seemed very helpful in re-legitimizing ML. I, for one, don’t think it would be odd to see philosophers like Dennett and Hofstadter in a Turing Award announcement someday…
What do you mean by "cog.sci winter of the last 20 years"?
The research of Dr. Bruce Perry, Bessel van der Kolk and others into the effects of trauma on brain development, behavior and social functioning has had a profound impact on the understanding of cognition, the mind-body continuum, and the treatment of human suffering in this time frame.
I think what he means is that many of the seminal work related to cognitive science were produced back then. For example, Chomsky, Minsky, John Searle, David Chalmers and many more.
Things still move during winter, just not as much.
Some of Denett's works have been very influential in shaping my ideas about the world. Being a physicist by training, I did not (could not because of lack of exposure?) appreciate the concept of natural selection till I read his Darwin's Dangerous Idea. That book completely transformed my way of looking at principle of natural selection. The Mind's I anthology was another one which blew me away as a youngster. Finally his ideas on religion/atheism as presented in Breaking the Spell contributed to making sense of unorganised thoughts I had.
My background is in Analytic Philosophy, so I'm fairly familiar with Dennett. His rise to prominence during the early 2000's seemed appropriate given the huge shift in American religious belief. Though, I still certainly understand that folks can be exasperated by that movement, I just don't think that you can experience a 30% drop in religious affiliation, in a single generation, without annoying people.[1]
I read his book Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon, which I found really interesting in that I'd never thought about religion as a concept being an evolutionary adaptive (or "hijacking") feature. I found it fascinating, though not profound. That said, I think some of the best philosophical work is just that. Really insightful ideas that make perfect sense once you think about them, you just probably wouldn't take the time to think about them.
It may be an aside, but could you you clarify what you mean by a huge shift in American religious belief? For the benefit of those of us, who are on the internet, but not from or have been to the US?
Sorry, don't get your stats. In my family one generation passed from orthodox religious to the next: non religious without any issue. One example contradicts the whole point.
The study focus on Christianity and not other religions though.
I must admit I always scoffed at philosophers, but then I started reading Dennett and not only I finally met a philosopher that I respected, but he helped me unlock what other philosophers are doing and I started to see philosophers as a whole in new light.
Dennett himself (like his teacher Quine) is very deflationary about the kind of philosophy practiced by most of his colleagues. See e.g. his "Higher-order truths about chmess" (https://sci-hub.ru/10.1007/s11245-006-0005-2):
> Some philosophical research projects ... are rather like working out the truths of chess. A set of mutually agreed upon rules are presupposed — and seldom discussed — and the implications of those rules are worked out, articulated, debated, refined. So far, so good. Chess is a deep and important human artifact, about which much of value has been written. But some philosophical research projects are more like working out the truths of chmess. Chmess is just like chess except that the king can move two squares in any direction, not one. I just invented it — though no doubt others have explored it in depth to see if it is worth playing. Probably it isn’t. It probably has other names. I didn’t bother investigating these questions because although they have true answers, they just aren’t worth my time and energy to discover. Or so I think. There are just as many a priori truths of chmess as there are of chess (an infinity), and they are just as hard to discover...
A more charitable view is that a lot of research projects which seem like chmess to an outside observer become a lot more rational when properly contextualized. Often, the authors have justifications, ontological commitments or motivational factors for pursuing esoteric research that get lost in the writing process and only become apparent when familiar with the ambient conceptual framework.
> I just invented it — though no doubt others have explored it in depth to see if it is worth playing. Probably it isn’t. It probably has other names.
Ah, I believe this is the same "mess we're in" from Joe Armstrong's eponymous 2014 Strange Loop conference talk[0]:
> This is a device that we can imagine. I try to find a big sausage machine where you put sausage meat, you know, you turn the handle. So we put all programs into it, and we turn the handle, and a smaller number of programs come out. Then we can throw away all the other programs. And that breaks the second law of thermodynamics. The trouble with software, you see, its complexity increases with time. We start with one program, and it splits and becomes two programs and four programs.
> Files and systems, they mutate all the time. They grow in entropy. Disks are absolutely huge. And there's all these problems with naming. Naming's horrible. If you've got a file or something, what file name should it be? What does it have? What directory should I put it in? Can I find it later?
(68% match)
> When you have an idea, you have a little box and you type something into the box. I've done this, I've implemented it. You have a little box and then there's a little icon, Sherlock Holmes at the bottom. You type this stuff into the box
and you press the Sherlock Holmes button. And the idea is that will find among all my files that I'm interested in, the most similar thing to what I've just put in this box. So I want it to find the most similar thing to this new thing. And then I want to know, is it different? So once it's found them, it makes a list of them in order.
(64% match)
Edit: Just had the revelation that I am posting these quotes straight out of a RAG on the transcript of his talk.
You’re not alone. I think a lot of people, especially in STEM, pooh-pooh philosophy at first.
The problem is that in any field, if you start digging to understand the underlying concepts of that field and how they are defined, at some point you hit philosophy and start working with philosophical concepts.
The other problem is that there’s some real quack philosophy around, too. Various traps that philosophers sometimes fall into.
This is sad. I teach an upper-level undergraduate course on programming language theory, and one major component of the course is reduction proofs. Many students find proof by contradiction (reductio ad absurdum) to be a confusing concept. I have always directed those students toward Dennett’s helpful video (https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=sVUMAqMmy7o) and most of them respond positively to Dennett’s lucid style. RIP.
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.
STEM often overlooks the fundamental work that was done in philosophy that led to breakthroughs within STEM. For example, Claude Shannon's undergraduate philosophy course is what taught him boolean algebra, which ultimately led him to design digital circuits.
https://bentley.umich.edu/news-events/magazine/the-elegant-p...
Although formal logicians are quite isolated in philosophy departments -- while their colleagues are debating whether Plato or Kant had a better idea of what it meant to be "good", the logicians are basically doing math with symbols rather than numbers.
That's true, but in a way this is a good thing for CS students. In schools with analytic philosophy departments, you can expect to find a logician there. So every CS student can stop by their philosophy department and meet the logician, and when they do, they'll find someone who they can connect and communicate with in a similar way that they already (by junior or senior year, certainly) do with their math and CS theory instructors. Yes, they're specialized, but they're still guaranteed to be philosophically literate and they can help bridge some really interesting topics for CS students.
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.
Ethics are discussed very little in current philosophy, at least in the analytical tradition. Plato is mostly of historical interest, and of Kant's work it's mostly philosophy of mind, epistemology and metaphysics.
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.
>formal logicians are quite isolated in philosophy departments
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/.
> 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.
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.
Free will is prescientific baggage? Why so? What do you think about the famously atheist Dennett's defense of free will? I think this is the kind of free will generally talk about whether laymen are around to listen or not.
>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.
I think his point was that, lets say some philosophers or programmers, are having a detailed discussion. But are overheard by lay-people, maybe mid-argument, without the background, having not heard the definitions, would takeaway a lot of misunderstandings.
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.
> 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.
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.
I think it depends a lot on which tradition of philosophy one is first exposed to. Most STEM people will find Anglo-American analytic philosophy (where Dennett firmly belonged) much easier to approach than continental philosophy or the classical stuff, but unfortunately casual readers tend to get exposed to a lot more of the latter.
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!
In a sense that is a myth. Guess this is based on the idea of silicon and Turing complete.
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 …)
I'm pretty sure I was introduced to the concepts of proof by contradiction and by induction in the final year or two of high school, but that was fifty years ago in England.
Perhaps finding it confusing is a recent development.
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.
I find philosophy essential even though many philosophers can be painful and/or seemingly irrelevant to read. Still, I think I’m at a point now, where finding intellectual discomfort is preferable to not.
For that example my exposure is shocking when first exposed to this line of argument. Is sq root of 2 is rational? Assume it is … Never heard of his example. But that is better as it involves no maths.
That mindset frustrated me a lot in university. My school required a pretty broad survey of academia, with a class each in lower and upper division math, science, history, philosophy, and theology to graduate, and there were a lot of students (especially, for whatever reason, engineers) who hated it.
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.
> I think a lot of people, especially in STEM, pooh-pooh philosophy at first.
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?
Kant used Newtonian assumptions about the time and space, treating them as absolute, and treating them not as properties of physics but necessary preconditions for us being able to experience anything.
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.
"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."
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.
> is that Kant does not specifically depend on Newtonian assumptions but that human perceptions have to be mediated by time and space
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.
>Relativity overturned those Newtonian assumptions
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.
A beautiful way of putting it. I like this phrasing because I think it shows how progress in science actually elevated our confidence in Newtonian behaviors by having them as a special case of a theory with a stronger foundation.
I'm pretty sure you don't find any passage in Kant where he says anything remotely like "Gallilean/neo-Newtonian space-time is absolutely true and forever true" (these words or the term "Euclidean geometry" didn't, I'm pretty sure, even exist back then). What is usually meant by ascribing him these views, I assume, is that he proceeds as if this were the case, i.e. he doesn't specify any empirical method for determining what is the proper geometry of space-time. These were developed in the nineteenth century. But even remarkably smart people, like Poincare, had troubles with figuring out how empirical evidence can help determine us the physically valid geometry of space-time (he thought it was necessarily conventional - a view falsified by general relativity), so I don't think this in any way makes Kant's enterprise as such questionable.
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.
What I mean by "Kant's framework" is basically these three theses:
1. There are internal perceptual manifolds, distinct from mind-independent space-time.
2. Space adn time are preconditions of experience as such, i.e. we cannot ever get rid of them in our description of the world. They're not reducible to causal relations between events.
3. This doesn't require assuming Newtonian absolute space (relativism).
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.
It's true relativity was problematic for Kant's project (particularly re: his thought about Euclidean geometry), and you're right to point to this as an example of science informing philosophical thought.
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.
At the end of the day I think you're right that Kant's notion of necessary conditions is probably flexible enough to accommodate the findings of general relativity.
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'm pretty sure there were already in the 19th century people, like Helmholtz, Riemann etc. who saw themselves as Kantians, but nevertheless developed many of the techniques that later made GR possible (while acknowledging that they challenge Kant's own views) while preserving the core of Kant's theory. See my response above.
> Kant used Newtonian assumptions about the time and space, treating them as absolute, and treating them not as properties of physics but necessary preconditions for us being able to experience anything.
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.
>no difference in Kant morals on how they should behave.
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.
That's because the majority of Philosophy courses are History of Philosophy courses whereas other logic-oriented fields occupy less time on "History of". While top departments like Princeton still focus on the quality of the arguments, they do devote entire course lengths to readings of ancient philosophers which are less elucidative about logic and reasoning than they are about the History of Philosophy.
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.
Isn't this focusing on these courses too much as an academic pursuit ?
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.
Having done a deep dive in philosophy at one point, the vast majority of it is ego stroking half-nonsense designed to be maximally unintelligible, because academics tolerate ridiculous amounts of jargon and equate hard to understand with meaningful or important. People like Robert Nozick, Thomas Nagel, John Searle and David Chalmers are by far the exception rather than the rule.
The philosophers that did STEM seem to be the good ones.
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.
The amusing thing is that these quick dismissals of philosophy are all instances of philosophical thought. Usually neither good, nor consistent, nor original thought, but nevertheless.
When contemplating technology stuff people are usually very disciplined about striving correctness...on certain topics though, it seems like the opposite becomes true: no effort, and don't you dare suggest it.
One of the most delicious ironies in life is to ask these people why they think philosophy is poo-poo, and then revel in the fact that their answer is exactly philosophical in nature.
This honestly makes sense to me. Philosophy basically teaches you how to think about things really well. When talking about STEM folks, however, you're already dealing with extremely analytical people, but to them, analytical thinking is just intuitive.
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.
I think it’s easy to get turned off by Žižek’s kind of bombastic approach to explaining philosophy to lay people. It’s also, I’d say, hard to develop sympathy for continental philosophy, especially if we are American, and a lot of his positions seem kind of like nonsense if you don’t understand some of the underlying frameworks he uses (something he shares in common with a lot of continental philosophers) or if you don’t bridge the wider gap between reader and writer that continental philosophers tend to have.
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.
Meh, Zizek may be redundant and attention-seeking, but I wouldn't call him a quack. He has done some legitimate work, even if I definitely wouldn't call myself a fan.
I like his books, but someone like Alan Watts is much more prone to quackery, IMO.
Yes, I think that's a common experience. Many people expect philosophers to be something like wise old village elders, whereas in reality they are more like lawyers working in extremely niche areas of law.
Ok. I think the distinction is important, and relevant, and even critical. It is a distinction I will continue to make.
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.
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.
> I can see how you would find that unproductive, but I don't know if it really counts as quackery.
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.
You used the word quackery, and I pointed out that this is an inaccurate term and that yes, the phenomenon you're describing is a thing called "talking past each other" and that it is a frequent criticism from within philosophy itself.
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.
> If you call people something, perhaps it's important to actually know what that thing means?
“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.
> 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.
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?
> 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.
You do care obviously, and understandably, since you want to be recognized as competent regarding language and communication. But then you should react more openly and be grateful for the feedback you get, since it enables you to improve your communication-skills. Not correctly using a term or not knowing a better one does not make you any less in any meaningful way.
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 ?
Philosophy is the birthplace of sciences, which is why most philosophers are dealing with some kind of metaphysics. Yes, there are some philosophers that continue their work after developing it from a metaphysics into a physics, but that's sort of besides the point. The point of philosophy is to create the framework for empirical research.
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 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.
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.
Wittgenstein's discussion of what _all_ games have in common (nothing, really) led him to the notion of "family resemblances".
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...
> 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.
That would be Charles Peirce, in the XIXth century, not Wittgenstein.
Also, his philosophical works might be bad even if he had invented truth tables: it's not like the truth table was hard to find the way, e.g., Newtonian mechanics was.
Peirce, apparently, did develop a equivalent form of truth table earlier, but it would be misunderstand the history of computer science to attribute them to Peirce. Just because someone had the idea first, doesn't mean that work is the source of the idea going forward.
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.
>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.
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.
No, this is an incorrect assessment. You have framed it as post hoc, but the point is that the philosophy is the development of ideas like, say, atomic theory in chemistry, or germ theory in medicine. Theories that define the framework for study.
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.
Incorrect. Philosophers write about, "organize" and "codify" what people are doing in the trenches from trial and error. To say that the philosophers created the science is like saying that by dressing a man in a suit they have created life.
Philosophers of science have given us some axiomatic statements about the nature of deduction and the limits of inquiry, but research is a trade far more nuanced than a philosophical framework, with cultural transmission of domain specific problem solving strategies and learned intuitive guides. Those things are inherently a-philosophical, and also probably the most important of all.
I still don't understand your point. If you have some disagreement with certain philosophy of science writers, I can certainly understand, but my point is that philosophy is exactly the interplay of the deductive frameworks and the induction "in the trenches" as you say. The process of philosophy is the interplay between the to, as neither aspect of that dichotomy can be demonstrated it's own.
Empiricism cannot be justified without a reason-based framework, and that deductive framework is by definition arbitrary, and needs to map to empirical findings.
This is the basis of all superstition. Our crops were doing poorly, but then I burned a chicken and now they're doing well. Let's keep burning chickens.
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.
I think we have different definitions of empiricism. Empiricism is the belief that sensory experience is necessary for knowledge, not that it is sufficient. It stands in contrast with the belief that knowledge can be justified by pure logic without reference to any sensory experience.
Your claim was that empiricism justifies itself, I was explaining why that's not the case.
Your definition is overly broad IMO. Empiricism is usually taken to be the belief that the sole source and justification of knowledge is ultimately sensory data. See e.g. Wikipedia or Britannica.
It stands in contrast with rationalism sure. But more importantly in the context of your comment and the parent, empiricism also stands in contrast to the only sane POV (IMO), which is that knowledge is combination of empirical and rational sources, as pointed out for example by Kant.
"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.
I suspect that you're using empiricism somewhat more broadly than philosophers do, and that you may include things like science as a whole. Science is more traditionally IMO considered to be a recursive process with rational (i.e. theory) and empirical (i.e. sense data) steps. In science, sense data provides a constraint on theory and theory (together with psychology) provide a constraint on the raw sense data (in the same way, for example, an AI provides structure to the raw input vectors).
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).
> Science is more traditionally IMO considered to be a recursive process with rational (i.e. theory) and empirical (i.e. sense data) steps.
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.
> 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.
Nobody is disputing that sense data are necessary. The standard rationalist position is, to quote Leibniz since it's easily accessible on Wikipedia
> 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.
> So sense data are necessary but not sufficient, especially for logic.
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.
> Mathematical knowledge can be justified by pure logic without reference to any sensory experience.
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.
If you try burning a chicken repeatedly when crops are doing poorly, and it works every time, that hypothesis is supported by the evidence. There's obviously no chain of direct causality, but that is immaterial.
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.
The Black Swan problem (the problem of induction) prevents empiricism (induction) from being justified on its own. You end up with solipsism (turkey problem, grue problem, etc.)
You can call someone's reasoning circular all you want but at the end of the day there's what you've accomplished, and the score is philospher 0 engineer 1.
True, it's basically indisputable that engineers are better at engineering than philosophers are. But that seems orthogonal to the issues raised in the problem of induction.
My thrust was more that people are out doing stuff in the world, and for the most part philosophers don't do anything other than say things about what people are already doing. Engineering was an empirical science long before it was a deductive and analytic one.
Philosophers make arguments for/against claims, I don't see why that doesn't count as doing something. I mean, maybe you're complaining that they're not building rockets or feeding the poor, but philosophers are far from the only ones who don't do these things.
Making arguments for/against claims can be a noble pursuit, and mathematicians have done it to great benefit for humanity. I suspect the sum total of the benefit from philosophers' claims is much lower.
Maybe so, but I don't see why every discipline needs to be evaluated purely on "benefit for humanity" in the sense of scientific or technological progress, if that's what you're implying. There's more to humanity than just scientific/technological progress.
I mean, people love musicians for making interesting "what if" statements to music, and I'm not shitting on that. The difference is that music makes people happy and makes the time go faster, while most philosophy makes people confused for no good reason, is boring and even when "understood" doesn't provide any tangible benefit to people's lives.
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"
>philosophy makes people confused for no good reason, is boring and even when "understood" doesn't provide any tangible benefit to people's lives.
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.
Except that there are practically journals just for arguing about what one particular german guy who has been dead for 150 years meant when he said a thing. That is not a sign of clear writing.
I'm not sure how that contradicts what I've said or why this means we should abolish philosophy departments. And for what it's worth, philosophy today tends to be clearer (to us at least), e.g. Dennett's work.
But Popper wasn't saying that empiricism could be justified empirically, was he?
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.
Because the only reason you have to believe anything at all is that you perceive things. And the things that you perceive probably lead you to believe things like that you are a human being, that you exist in a particular subset of three-dimensional space, that there are other humans that exist in other subsets of that same three-dimensional space, that these other humans move around and do things that can reasonably be described as "saying things" and "writing things", and that the things that these other humans say and write correspond to circumstances in this three-dimensional space that you occupy so that it makes sense, at least in some circumstances, to label these sayings and writings with labels like "true" and "false" to indicate whether the way they correspond with circumstances is a positive or negative correlation, and if you get these labels right it can help you survive and flourish. Likewise, if you get them wrong (and that includes denying what I have just told you) it will greatly diminish your prospects of survival, and evolution will take care of the rest. In short, it isn't circular because if you try to pick a fight with reality, reality will win.
I see where you're coming from, but none of this really means that justifying inductive reasoning through inductive reasoning isn't circular.
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.
I suppose the confusion still remains about how empiricism can be self-justifying. You've laid out a case for why it's empirical reasoning is pragmatic, fine, but that doesn't mean that empirical reasoning is grounded in empirical reasoning, even if empirical reasoning is in fact rational. Whether you go with a Humean-style solution or a Popperian solution, it's just still not the case that justifying empirical reasoning through empirical reasoning is not circular.
I'm disputing something very specific. I'm not disputing that empirical reasoning is rational. What I'm disputing is that empirical reasoning is justified by empirical reasoning. This not being circular is not logically related to actual reality. Like, I'm just saying that this doesn't make sense:
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.
Oh, I see, since we were talking about science, I figured you really just meant induction, I didn't think you meant empiricism, the philosophical school of thought (in contrast to rationalism), that's my bad.
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?
I mean, the first mention of empiricism was about classifying alchemy as a type of empiricism, which leads one to believe the discussion can't be about empiricism in the technical philosophical sense because being an empiricist or not doesn't have anything to do with alchemy technically speaking, and as the discussion went on there was a claim made that empiricism is justified empirically which is something that none of the three paradigmatic empiricist philosophers (Locke, Berkeley, Hume) said, so the context of the discussion didn't seem to suit the technical meaning of the word. The spirit of the discussion seemed to be more about empirical reasoning and its empirical justification, so I went along with that.
>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.
1. I observe that people do not base their actions on sensory experience do stupid things.
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).
OK, let's be completely, utterly, crystal clear about this.
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 am not "perfectly happy" with it, no. For starters, I don't think there actually are people who do not base their actions on sensory experiences. Evolution mitigates against that pretty strongly.
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?
>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.
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 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.
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.
>There are no Platonic truths, only preferred models.
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?
> 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?
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 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.
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?
>It's "X is a faithful reflection of the actual state of affairs in objective reality." That's what the word "true" means.
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?
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.
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.
> 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?
> The earth is round, regardless of whether people have this idea in their heads or not. You deny this?
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?
So, I think if saying "the earth is round" is true and saying the earth is round mean different things, then we haven't construed the former properly, the former should be construed as expressing the same thing as the latter. If it's just a linguistic disagreement, then I think we can set that aside, I'm not very interested in that. The original point was that we can intuit certain things as being true, e.g. that sense-data reflects something about reality, and there's no need to appeal to how useful believing this is or isn't. Like, conceivably, nuclear wars could lead to the annihilation of humanity, but I don't see why that should have any bearing on whether atomic bombs exist or not.
> the former should be construed as expressing the same thing as the latter. If it's just a linguistic disagreement, then I think we can set that aside
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.
No, I'm not confusing them. At worst I'm using evolutionary epistemology to justify empiricism. And I'm only doing that because I'm presenting an informal argument. I can justify empiricism without resorting to evolution. But invoking evolution has more emotional appeal to entities that have evolved and so presumably don't have to be persuaded of the value of survival.
Wittgenstein is not "pooh-pooh-able", not by a long shot. First of all, there are two really different philosophies belonging to Wittgenstein, the younger and the older, and the evolution between the two should be of interest to anyone, as it serves as essentially a cautionary tale about concepts and more generally abstractions, detached from empirical evidence.
His philosophy does provide some interesting perspectives on language, even if I don't personally agree with his way of doing philosophy.
> There is a tiny minority of philosophers who are actually scientists pushing very hard on the boundaries of human knowledge.
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.
> you've already started with the assumption that the only way to expand human knowledge is by "science"
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
> I am making the empirical observation that the most effective method for expanding human knowledge is science.
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.
> Is it directly observable whether a belief is "knowledge", such that the efficacy of a method can be known by "empirical observation"?
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.
> You are simply wrong about that. Ethics are instincts produced by evolution. Like all instincts, they exist because they have survival value
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.
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.
> Just look around you. You have computers, GPS, mRNA vaccines, etc. etc. etc. Those things were not produced by philosophers.
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.
> That's not the same as seeing the absence of knowledge produced by anyone else.
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?
> 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.
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.
> requires you to observe the efficacy of all methods of expanding human knowledge
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.
Definitions are hardly a problem just for science (if they are a problem - science seems to doing OK regardless), and I feel they are particularly difficult for those with a strong commitment to the view that ethics must somehow be grounded in something irrefutably true. In fact, I vaguely suspect that Wittgenstein's later position with respect to the rule-following paradox was that seeking such grounding is a doomed pursuit, and he somewhat famously contended that philosophy was not concerned with problems, only linguistic puzzles.
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.
Thank you, I knew there would be relevant Popper quotes about philosophy being meaningful, and I was trying the keyword "transempirical" without success. I forgot it was the underlying beef in the poker incident. :)
Here's one: what causes even smart people to hallucinate when practising epistemology, non-binary logic, and set theory (or not, as the case may be), as well demonstrated throughout this thread?
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:
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.
It isn't that science cannot, it is that they do not.
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.
Sorry. Life is short, and there are certain ideas that are simply not worthy of serious consideration, like whether the earth might be flat. All you have to do to see that you are wrong is to do a web search for "scientific inquiry into human fallibility". If you're not willing to put in even that minimal effort you are not worth engaging with.
If you are so smart, why do you engage in evasive actions like this?
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?
> 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:
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.
You're missing many things, but one in particular: curiosity.
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!
Against my better judgement, I am going to respond to this: you appear to be one of the least self-aware people I have ever interacted with. You literally asked for that smack-down:
> 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)?
> Hard to say without knowing more specifically what you are referring to.
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).
> 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.
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:
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.
> 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.
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!).
> Is there some reason you do not adopt a more sophisticated approach?
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'?
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.
The fact that you got Wittgenstein and Kant confused doesn't give me much faith in the depth of understanding of philosophy that led to your other opinions.
Lol, yeah. For programmers unfamiliar with philosophy, this is like confusing Lisp with C. (Someone that is familiar with both might be able to make a better analogy here.)
What the heck, I've got more hacker karma than the Digital Dalai Lama. I'll take -4 for the team and ask the English language for its own interpretation [1]:
"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."
Nietzche is Lisp. Thus Spoke Zarathustra it's basically what a REPL does and means. Read, eval, print, loop. Learn, apply, teach, repeat. Data is code, a list it's both data and a function to evaluate if you wish.
Wow, those are some... really arbitrary choices, but it would probably pass muster for an entertaining blogpost written by a twentysomething and posted to /r/programming -- or even here -- circa 2008.
OK. Names aside I'm not sure how much you know about Wittgenstein. I'm far from an expert but - he did largely refute the Tractatus later in life but reasons that are probably the opposite of what you're implying. If anything his later works attempts to be less rigorous because he reached the conclusion that attempting rigour in language was deeply flawed.
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.
> I'm not sure how much you know about Wittgenstein.
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.
Calling something "manifest nonsense" while not understanding it, or even attempting to understand it, seems like a clear example of "manifest nonsense" to me.
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, 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.
Sure, but this is just a casual conversation. The problem is not with philosophy per se, the problem is with the academic field, which assigns (IMHO) outsized importance to undersized ideas.
Children often ask questions such as "Why is there something rather then nothing?" or "What happened before time?". These questions often cause great mirth for any adult in earshot.
You can choose to draw one of two very different conclusions from this statement.
If science is tackling these questions then it's most likely doing so by making non-falsifiable claims. And at that point it's doing philosophy rather than science.
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".
> If science is tackling these questions then it's most likely doing so by making non-falsifiable claims.
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.
I think GP's point was specifically about science answering the questions like "why is there something rather than nothing?"; relativity and QFT don't say anything about this question.
(Though lacking falsifiability isn't necessarily such a bad thing even for scientific theories anyway.)
I think the spirit of the question is why anything---atoms, consciousnesses, laws of nature, quantum fields, etc.---exists, instead of nothing at all---no atoms, consciousnesses, laws of nature, fields, etc. QFT doesn't answer this question, does it?
Yes, it answers these questions for all of those things except quantum fields. Why those fields exist we do not yet know, and may never know. But reducing the question to a single thing with an unknown origin rather than many things with (allegedly) unknown origins is still progress, particularly since that last remaining "thing" is not actually a thing that exists. And if you want to go down that rabbit hole, you should read this first:
How does it answer why consciousness or laws of nature exist? I included atoms as only one of the items on the list for a reason.
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?
> How does it answer why consciousness or laws of nature exist?
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.
>There's nothing brains do that cannot be explained in terms of atoms.
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."
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.
> Dennett is denying the existence of qualia altogether
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.
> the question here is more whether or not there can be brute facts
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.
OK, I'd like nothing better than for you to show me that there's no such area.
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.
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.)
For one, this isn't an ontological argument, this is a version of the cosmological argument.
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?
> For one, this isn't an ontological argument, this is a version of the cosmological argument.
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."
I mean, talking about what things exist, and what things don't, and what it means for something to exist are things that philosophers do as part of philosophy (specifically ontology). I suppose there's nothing wrong with Deutsch's characterization, I guess we can just call the philosophers who, in doing philosophy, discuss the meanings of words (like what it means to exist or, as Dennett and many other philosophers have, what it means to have free will, or all kinds of other terms) scientists who are actually doing science. If we use the terms this way, the academic discipline of philosophy seems perfectly justified since it's actually secretly scientific (they just don't know it themselves!).
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.
> (And note that "something" and "nothing" in that sentence are terms of art with more precise meanings than the colloquial ones.)
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.
> You are using a much more specific definition than I was.
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.
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?
> 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])
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.
When you say "actually scientists" and "boundaries of human knowledge," you seem to be taking for granted naive views about metaphysical realism, scientific realism, and truth that are not trivial to defend, even for experienced philosophers.
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.
> you seem to be taking for granted naive views about metaphysical realism, scientific realism, and truth that are not trivial to defend, even for experienced philosophers.
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.
No one, even the most ardent of postmodernists, is going to disagree that science is a very successful human enterprise and produces progress that philosophy cannot. But that doesn't mean science approaches 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.
> that doesn't mean science approaches an account of reality on its own terms.
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?
The new riddle of induction, perhaps? You can dodge that by choosing suitable priors, or using heuristics like Occam's Razor, but then what justifies those?
The best answer to that question that I know of can be found in chapter 7 of David Deutsch's book, "The Fabric of Reality." But he's just channeling Karl Popper if you want to go straight to the source. The TL;DR is that science does not rely on induction at all.
That's a cop-out. 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.
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.
> Karl Popper's position on this issue is a cop-out.
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
> It's not mystical nonsense, it's a logical consequence of the mathematics of quantum mechanics.
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 turns out that all of the various interpretations are more or less equivalent, with the exception of the various collapse theories, which are empirically testable and have so far all been falsified.
>> 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'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.
To be clear, I never suggested the many-worlds interpretation isn't philosophy, but I still think it's mystical nonsense (as most indulgent metaphysical speculation is).
> 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.
My understanding is that the best current interpretation of quantum mechanics is that there is no interpretation and that you just have to do the math.
Yes, that's right. But if you want to assign any meaning to the math, and in particular if you want to adopt an ontology where you exist, then the math leaves you no alternative than to conclude that parallel universes also exist (unless you resort to special pleading like the Copenhagen interpretation).
I mean, just doing the math and being agnostic about the strengths of different interpretations seems to be an interpretation. Maybe it's more of an epistemic position than a metaphysical one, but it still kinda counts.
Sorry, I wasn't clear. The current-best explanation is not many worlds, it's the mathematical formalism of QM. Many-worlds is a logical consequence of that.
It seems pretty clear cut to me. I've seen no argument against it that doesn't involve some logical fallacy. If you think you know of one please enlighten me.
Well, I'm not an expert. But I know that, among those who are experts, many-worlds is not the consensus or even the majority view. So, while it may seem clear cut to you, it doesn't to everyone. That's why I keep saying that no, it's not clear.
I realize that's argument by authority, and that's considered a fallacy...
I'm not an expert either. I'm a computer scientist, not a physicist. But the math behind QM -- at least the parts that matter for this discussion -- is pretty straightforward linear algebra. Really, anyone can learn it. So don't take my word for it, look into it and decide for yourself. You can start here:
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:
There are two different ways of approaching QM: the physicist's way and the computer scienctist's way. You were probably taught it the physicist's way, which is not wrong, but obscures the parts you need to know to understand the MWI. That part really is pretty simple. You should try again.
Let’s make this testable. Tell me what percentage of technical people, defined however you like, generally view philosophy as a waste of time. (This could even be a thought experiment for now.)
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.
> I would expect that people who dismiss philosophy do so from a position of relative ignorance.
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.
Shouldn't you be aware that mathematics and computer "science" are closer to philosophy than actual (empirical) sciences ?
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 ?
> Shouldn't you be aware that mathematics and computer "science" are closer to philosophy than actual (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.
What kinds of papers made silly errors like that? Do you have any examples? I guess it was a long time ago for you - but maybe you have some ideas of some keywords to search up? I actually am genuinely curious.
>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.
> What kinds of papers made silly errors like that? Do you have any examples?
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:
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.
> that fundamentalists use philosophical arguments to justify their positions doesn't mean philosophy is largely transparent cover for religious apologetics, does it?
Not in and of itself. But I don't see many other applications. Do you?
Philosophy finds application as cover for religious apologetics to make it seem more intellectually respectable than it otherwise might. I don't see many other areas where philosophy has an impact outside academia.
It finds application for atheists making arguments against religion as well. It finds application in defenses of free will. Scientists seem to subscribe to a Popperian falsifiability. Logic, part of philosophy, has found widespread use, as I'm sure you know.
What are you expecting exactly? Most people aren't going to have a massive effect on the world, whether in philosophy or not. Philosophy is far from the only academic discipline in which most practitioners don't have a significant impact on the world.
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:
Wait, I'm sorry - philosophy has no audience beyond its own practitioners? Just look at all the people interested in philosophy in this thread. I'm willing to bet a large sum of money that the majority of people who have implicitly expressed interest in philosophy here are not practicing philosophers. I'm quite surprised by your reference to music; music is something I usually bring up when people tell me that philosophy is useless.
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.
> Wait, I'm sorry - philosophy has no audience beyond its own practitioners? Just look at all the people interested in philosophy in this thread. I'm willing to bet a large sum of money that the majority of people who have implicitly expressed interest in philosophy here are not practicing philosophers.
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 mean, there are plenty of people who read philosophy and enjoy it but don't publish papers in philosophy conferences or journals, discuss topics with academic philosophers, etc. Reading a work of philosophy without writing a work of philosophy is something that a lot of people do and enjoy.
I'm sure there are some people who do. But books for popular audiences like Consciousness Explained are taken seriously by philosophers too. I don't see why there's any relevant difference between philosophy and music here.
Fine, I'll just pick some random books: Feyerabend's Against Method, Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Nietzsche's The Antichrist, Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling, Descartes's Meditations, Spinoza's Ethics, Plato's dialogues, I could go on and on. Maybe you don't like all of these, but there are plenty of people who read these for fun, and all of them are taken seriously by philosophers.
> there are plenty of people who read these for fun
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.
>who do not also enjoy engaging in philosophical debates.
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.
> something that humans have been discussing in a rigorous way for thousands of years
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.
I don't think it's silly to study either one. What I think is silly is the idea that philosophy is an intellectually rigorous field, that its practitioners generally deserve to be held in high regard, that it makes sense to have departments of philosophy in universities. This was not always true, I think it has become true gradually over the course of the last 100 years or so. I think that science has subsumed philosophy in exactly the same way that chemistry subsumed alchemy and astronomy subsumed astrology.
We were originally talking about how many people who weren't philosophers enjoyed philosophy---what happened to that?
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.)
> how many people who weren't philosophers enjoyed philosophy
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.
>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.
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.
> it's not clear what the relevant distinction between music and philosophy is supposed to be
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.
> If your point is that merely the act of listening itself is enjoyable, then that seems to apply to reading philosophy as well
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.
>Sure. I'm just skeptical that the people reading philosophy for fun are reading Wittgenstein.
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 also seems to me that a lot of what is nowadays called philosophy is just pretty transparent cover for religious apologetics.
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.
"tiny minority of philosophers who are actually scientists"
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.
Sorry, I made a mistake. I meant Wittgenstein, not Kant, who wrote one of the premier works of philosophical nonsense: the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus [1]. I believe that Wittgenstein himself once admitted that it was basically intended to be a practical joke kind of like the Sokal affair [2], but I can't find the reference right now. But some people seem to still take it seriously.
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.
I would love to see a reference to the claim that Wittgenstein regarded Tractatus as a joke. I took an analytic philosophy course as an undergrad that featured Wittgenstein prominently, and that prof certainly did not regard it unseriously.
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).
> I would love to see a reference to the claim that Wittgenstein regarded Tractatus as a joke.
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.
Someone who is discrediting all of philosophy shouldn't confuse Wittgenstein and Kant.
Further, Wittgenstein disavowed Tractatus as a failed project and completely revised his approach to philosophy. His most important and influential works came afterwards.
He disavowed is as comprehensive account of linguistic meaning, but I don't think he regarded it as false or meaningless, only that the full breadth of ways language conveyed meaning was wider than the account given in Tractatus.
> Someone who is discrediting all of philosophy shouldn't confuse Wittgenstein and Kant.
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.
Okay, but you initially criticized Wittgenstein, the philosopher, not Tractatus, the work. Wittgenstein himself would agree that Tractatus is deeply flawed. He wrote his more influential works later, and they went in a completely different philosophical direction. You're criticizing a philosopher as "pooh-pooh-able" for a work that he personally disavowed and does not represent the positions he is best known for.
I was intending to criticize the field, and in a shot-from-the-hip in a moment of some passion chose Wittgenstein as my example.
> 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.
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.
My gripe is that the commenter above cites early Wittgenstein as an example of the failure of philosophy as a whole, while ignoring (or perhaps being unaware) that later Wittgenstein is what is philosophical "canon". I'll concede there is some debate about how Wittgenstein's views evolved over his life and the extent to which he repudiated his earlier work. But I think you're going a bit far by characterizing what I said as "confidently wrong history," if that's directed at what I wrote.
I'm actually quite agreeable to idea the that much of philosophy is incoherent nonsense. I would have completely gone to bat for this commenter if they said Heidegger was such an example. Or Searle for that matter. I can even see the case for Kant. And they all have their defenders, just not me.
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.
What do you think is nonsensical about Searle? My sense is that he's very much not obscurantist in the way one might think Heidegger or Kant is (of course, the defense is that they use technical language because they're discussing technical things). But maybe you just mean that his arguments fail.
The deep dive version of this convo might be a topic for another time, but the most concise answer I can give is to grab a copy of I Am A Strange Loop by Douglas Hofstadter, and flip to chapter 2 where he discusses an idea proposed by John Searle about the so-called "terribly thirsty beer can." This is an argument from Searle that he believes is a knockdown argument against the idea of consciousness embodied in something that isn't a biological mind as we know it. It is, and I do not say this lightly, it is just stunningly naive.
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.
I would acknowledge that this is a rather original take of my own and you won't find many people who subscribe to it.
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.
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.
Critique of Pure Reason is Kant. I thought you were making a joke based on the earlier mixup between Kant and Wittgenstein. Late Wittgenstein is Philosophical Investigations. There are also good texts on philosophy of language that excerpt from the major authors (including Wittgenstein) without requiring you to read the entirety of their books.
Nope, not a joke. Just the same mistake I made originally. I guess I have conflated Kant and Wittgenstein in my mind even more thoroughly than I thought.
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.
I think your critique of philosophy would land better if you picked an easier target. The primary metaphor of the Tractatus (pulling up the ladder) often goes over people's heads.
What do you make of Wittgenstein's "no private language" argument?[1]
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.
He's not wrong, but the right way to make this argument is in terms of Shannon's information theory. You don't need to resort to philosophical mumbo jumbo, as Wittgenstein did. And Wittgenstein actually had no excuse because Shannon published while Wittgenstein was still alive.
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.
>Wittgenstein just seems to be profoundly ignorant of science and how it applies to philosophical questions
??? 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.
Information-theoretical arguments are powerful, but they're not the only worthwhile approaches. You can't use an information-theoretic argument to teach someone information theory, and they'll find it easier to grok the consequences of information theory if they have other concepts to relate it to. Having multiple different routes to a given understanding is useful.
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."
Science is a type of applied philosophy, because grasping what is knowable by a given set of truths and tools (and what isn't) helps one define the problem.
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.
> Can you help me design experiments to prove the following?
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.
The point is that naive (vulgar) empiricism is untenable because to perform and evaluate scientific practices you inevitably invoke premises that are rational or pragmatic, not empirical.
No, that's not true. If you want to dispute that, give me an example of a necessary premise (i.e. one that is "inevitably invoked") that you think cannot be justified by empiricism.
You know w think philosophy is a disease to be cured … identify himself as philosopher is most shameful word you can say to him. He is anti-philosophy all his life.
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).
lol bro, I can’t imagine thinking that Wittgenstein is obfuscation. If anything that guy’s entire life was dedicated to de-obfuscation through logical analysis. Probably you don’t understand cause you casually picked up the Tractatus or Investigations without doing any background reading on what they were about
A useful rule of thumb for evaluating a field you're not familiar with is 'Sturgeon's law'. Sturgeon's law is a refutation of claims of the form "don't bother looking at that because 90% of it is crap". The law states that 90% of everything is crap, and hence such claims prove too much.
I was on the opposite side of that when I was young and first read his work. I eagerly read piles and piles of philosophy and quickly shelved any interest in him and his work as building on completely unconvincing premises.
But many many years later, there's been a lot of churn in whose work I value and whose I don't. I wouldn't be surprised if I see his work in a very different light now. This news may be what gets me yo pick it up again and find out.
I enjoyed him mostly for his crusade against philosophy purporting that the mind has something other than a physical basis. Modern day philosophers that want to resurrect the “mind body problem” and panpsychism and the “hard problem of consciousness”.
He consistently argues that studying consciousness and perception is difficult but not impossible, and we will slowly make progress in this scientific endeavor just like all others we have attempted thus far. In philosophy circles he is sometimes derided as having too scientific a mindset, but that is what draws me to him. He’s very endearing to listen to as well—very idiosyncratic.
So you don't think your belief that the scientific mindset is a preferable mindset is a philosophic belief rather than a scientific belief? Because it is, since that is a belief that can't be proven empirically, rather it is reasoned to philosophically.
Now to address your misguided belief on the mind being reduced to the brain.
Under atheistic materialism what is happening is matter in motion. This means even the matter in your brain. What does that mean? Your brain is determined by the laws of physics, chemistry, etc and even your comment was determined. You destroy the possibility of justified knowledge claims under that worldview when taking it to its logical conclusion. Also as Sean Caroll noted, quantum physics and stochastic probabilities don't mean anything, taking the worldview to the logical conclusion means determinism of the movement of matter.
You also can't account for universals and particulars on that view and solve the problem of the and the many.
Doesn't a crusade, which I think it was, imply a set of strong beliefs not a dispassionate analysis of what might be the case? David Berlinski's 'The Devil's Delusion - The atheism and its scientific pretensions' offers some serious counter arguments.
Incredibly sad news. I don't have much to add but to share some of my favorite work by him, one is an essay exploring Jaynes idea of the Bicameral Mind, and another is a talk he gave on Ontology and Philosophy of Science. Always admired his ability to bridge disciplines and look at ideas from a slightly unorthodox angle.
Oh, I did not know about this essay! Thank you for sharing.
To others reading this, this short essay [0] by Julian Jaynes is a good introduction to his idea of the Bicameral Mind. He later developed the idea further in his book "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind". If you've watched the series "Westworld", how the androids begin to develop something akin to consciousness is inspired by Jaynes' ideas.
I told him that his book Darwin's Dangerous Idea was one of the few where, when I got to the end, I immediately wanted to go back to the beginning and read it again.
Very sad for me, he was one of my favorite thinkers and his books were the few that made me feel smarter after having read them. His thinking tools remain a great aid to my thinking. The reason for this post though, is to mention that Darwin also died on April 19th.
Authors @ Google? Was this his visit to the Kirkland office?
If so, I was one of the perhaps 5 (?) people who had lunch with him. I was astonished that more Googlers didn't seem the least bit interested in hanging out with Dan Dennett given the opportunity.
He seemed interested in my journey breaking free of religious indoctrination and what part his writings had in that. He said he had never heard of Joseph Campbell being the first step out. We had a brief discussion on how recognizing the universality of religious motifs can lead one to start asking the initial question, "What if my specific religion isn't so special after all?"
I asked him the admittedly-ambiguous question along the lines of, "If Google were to build something that seems to express intentional agency, would we have an ethical obligation relating to it?" I suspect his curt answer of "Yes" was him just being polite with a clueless armchair philosopher asking silly questions.
Then there was the Dawkins visit to Google Kirkland some time later. The failure to set up an audio system that didn't have an echo made me sad. Not sure why we couldn't have just kept the audio engineer present for the actual discussion. Later on Dawkins proceeded to walk through the line at the cafeteria backwards, but everyone seemed cordial enough regardless. That one dude pushing himself in Dawkins' face monopolizing all his time was obnoxious.
That whole program really jumped the shark when they later invited Fonzie to come talk about his children's book.
My guess: Dennett took it to mean that his exposition wasn't clear enough to the layman first time round and was disappointed by this.
C.f. the famous quote attributed to Einstein "If you can't explain it to a six-year-old, you don't understand it yourself.". (Does anyone know if he actually said anything like that?)
I read Consciousness Explained 30 years ago and at first I was miffed that it didn't touch on the possibilties of Quantum mechanics and consciousness, a buzzword idea that I was keen on at the time. But then every chapter was so fascinating - blindsight, p-zombies, Libet, the cartesian theatre.
If I can sum up in a very simple way, as a philosopher he was pointing to a simple but hard to grasp idea:
Consciousness probably isn't what we think it is. Most of our preconceptions about it are likely wrong. Because we're right in it all the time, it seems like we 'know' things about it. But we don't. Quick example: our visual consciousness seems continuous. But we know from saccades that it can't be.
For the record, 30 years later most consciousness researchers still believe it's unlikely that quantum mechanics plays a special role in consciousness. It of course remains plausible, since we still don't have the true answers yet, but hypotheses like Penrose's have not yet been found to be credible.
I really like your summary of some of his ideas, though.
I bet we'll find there's more computation going on in neurons (and possibly other brain cells) than we currently know about which will necessarily be happening at much smaller scales than synapse firing.
I think this is likely, yes. I think there are already some leads pointing in that direction. I think it likely won't depend on quantum mechanics, though. (But of course, this is all idle speculation from a complete amateur.)
Each neuron is itself a complex organism. They're unicellular, but each is still a robust lifeform.
We don't know from saccades that consciousness can't be continuous. We just know that the physical impressions on our retina do not map 1 to 1 to our visual conscious experience. The brain does all sorts of things to the raw information it receives before that information rises to the level of phenomenal consciousness.
this is just silly pedantry. The comment you're replying to was clearly, if implicitly stating "visual conscious experience cannot simply be the experience of the patterns of light falling on our retina, even though we experience it as such, because of saccadic motion, which is occuring constantly but which we rarely perceive".
The point is that our intuition (for centuries!) about what visual conscious experience is driven by is wrong. You've summarized what we know now succinctly and usefully, but that in no way invalidates the point the comment was making.
I looked up what he said about p-zombies on the p-zombies wiki and am happy to see he has a position I agree with.
>Dennett argues that "when philosophers claim that zombies are conceivable, they invariably underestimate the task of conception (or imagination), and end up imagining something that violates their own definition".
No. A p-zombie is a very specific hypothetical construct: something absolutely 100% identical to some equivalent conscious being in every way except that it has no consciousness.
> Consciousness probably isn't what we think it is
This is nonsense. Consciousness is exactly what it is. The only real that ever existed is the fact there's there there. Everything else can be an illusion, as you said. There's no reason why red appears they way it is.
But the fact that i can seem to experience red cannot be denied. The seeming cannot be a mistake.
What if it isn’t exactly what it appears to be to us? If the answer was that simple, thousands of years of deep thinking would have been for nothing. I believe it’s actually a difficult, perhaps even impossible question to answer.
The experience of consciousness, or that it’s like something to be you, doesn’t necessarily mean anything about how or why that’s possible or occurring in the first place.
Perhaps our defintion of consciousness doesn't match. What I think of consciousness is something that can experience. It is not even experience, feelings, emotions, these are secondary things that arise in "consciousness".
What you cannot deny is the fact there's something at all. You cannot doubt that there's something. If you doubt that, there's a contradiction. Not what is that something, but simply the fact that _there is_ something.
So the fact there's something is something that has to be true. The question "I doubt there's something in this universe" doesn't make sense.
You misunderstand me. Consciousness definitely exists, but its workings are likely different to our preconceptions of how it should work. I offer saccadic masking as an example of how aspects of how it works are 'hidden' from us. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saccadic_masking
With no disrespect to the other three, Dennett always struck me as the most serious and intellectually modest of the Four Horsemen. He mostly stuck to his own lane of academic expertise, and used the proper caveats when venturing out of it. He didn't lean on rhetorical flourish, strawman his opponents, or overstate his case. The other three are a lot of fun, but maybe there's something to be said for boring.
He spoke at my college once, and came off as nuanced and considerate. I think I disagree with him about consciousness, but I'm not informed enough to know for sure. What's clear is that he was a constructive part of the conversation in his field.
I'm always confused by these Islamophobia charges. Christianity has similar backwards and violent rhetoric. Before the Reformation, non-Christians were right to fear Christians. Has Islam had a similar reformation of its violent precepts?
> There’s no one Islam, so it depends on which Muslims you’re talking to.
There was no one Christianity either, but the question is, was it rational at the time to be cautious of any Christians if you didn't know their affiliations or religious zeal? It seems to me that charges of Islamaphobia are a convenience afforded only to those safe in developed countries far from the realities of life in Muslim theocracies.
You are correct the Reformation was not an end to violence, it was the start of the process of eliminating systematic violence at the behest of religious ideology. It's an ongoing process in all such religions, but it's not Islamaphobic to note that Islam is far behind the curve on this. I think Harris would agree that we shouldn't judge individuals based solely on their religious affiliation (and hence, don't stoke fear of Muslims), but to ignore the realities of Muslim theocracies is naive.
I liked the debate he had with Sapolsky, where he explained why free will is compatible with determinism (arguments that were new to me), and that Sapolsky's book ("Determined") did not grapple with those arguments.
They are both largely incoherent in that debate because they both think "the right next move" is to test "free will" against their notions of morality. Morality has nothing to do with free will. If you consider morality important, then you might care about free will within your moral framework; but you can debate free will without any notion of morality, and neither of them can see that. (is - ought, which they both are aware of)
On the contrary, morality has everything to do with free will. It's one of the central motivations of the concept and always has been. From the greeks right up through the enlightenment, the question was always "in what sense are we capable of making responsible choices," with that term 'responsible' just dripping with moral implications. Without the moral implications, free will would not have the place it does in our cultural ethos.
Morality motivates our interest in the question of free will, but I understand morality to be a concept only whereas free will is supposed to be a feature of reality. That’s why it seems crazy to me and probably the above poster that morality should be a test of free will.
Please excuse my probably oversimplified understanding of the debate as someone who hasn’t read most of the arguments yet.
You can talk about free will without talking about morality in the same way that you can talk about ICBMs without talking about nuclear war. Sure you can do it, but complaining when other people discuss both things together is silly.
When I studied philosophy in college (2002-2006), his ideas were among the most discussed and debated at NYU's philosophy department. I always enjoyed his thoughts and writings, even if I often didn't agree with them. RIP.
Sad news. I aspire to be as intellectually acute in old age as Dennett was. His recent autobiography was engaging, although somewhat too indulgent at times. I admire how he created a life and a world-view that worked so well for him.
Had the pleasure of taking a course of his in undergrad as a newly decided philosophy major. The material was excellent and right up my alley, but more than anything I was stunned by how fluidly and clearly he communicated. Huge loss
I had the same experience, except I was definitely not a Phil major. He had a "class for every major" where we read chapters of the book he was writing (Toolkit for Thinking) and basically gave him feedback. It was an amazing strategy for him to get reviews on his book that way from totally non-Phil folks. And my name is in the book!
Great teacher, great writer. I took one of his undergrad classes, and one day I went in to his office hours to chat - I still remember how relieved he was that I wasn't there to try to debate with him about God, that I wanted to talk about something else! I think that happened to him quite a lot due to his reputation.
I found Dennett's responses to Fodor to be spot on. I think Fodor simply could not grasp what Dennett was actually talking about--and Fodor was not the only one.
Dennett's response concedes all of Fodor's main points and proceeds via innuendo and ad hominem. But there you have it. Dennett was important and influential, and is worth reading, but his appeal as a philosopher has always been a mystery to me.
Dennett is a mainstream eliminitavist, his appeal is that he removes extra fluff around philosophical concepts like consciousness and the brain. In a world where half the consciousness gurus are talking about unproven quantum stuff, souls, ghosts, aliens, gods, we need a Dennett to keep us grounded in reality as we ponder these mysteries that nobody knows the answers to.
His only weakness was occasionally indulging in speculation himself (like his Multiple Drafts) - he was better at eliminating speculation rather than offering it, regarding consciousness at least.
I highly recommend his talks on Closer To Truth (on YouTube) and all those videos actually.
He is often described that way, and even used the term himself sometimes, but he was not (and was careful to say that he was not) an eliminativist about everything. For example, he was not an eliminitavist about consciousness or free will. He believed those things are real--they just aren't like what many people think they are like; they don't have the properties that many people think they have.
With regard to consciousness and free will, Dennett was a physicalist: he believed consciousness and free will are physical processes that obey physical laws. That does place limitations on what consciousness and free will can do, and I think an unwillingness to accept those limitations, to accept that those limited concepts of consciousness and free will are the only ones we can actually have, drove a lot of the opposition to Dennett, though his opponents did not explicitly admit it.
Feel like he is though, second only to maybe Michael Shermer, or AI investors (zing!) The definition:
> Eliminative materialism is a materialist position in the philosophy of mind. It is the idea that the majority of mental states in folk psychology do not exist.
There's no way I'll find the video, but he said at one point in some interview almost exactly this: That most of the mental states we think we have don't really exist. I think it's also in his book Consciousness Explained (1991), but I didn't read it so can't be sure.
I always thought this is what upset people so much about Dennett - the apparent total denial of experience.
Yet this is an incredibly slippery slope! Anyone familiar with Chalmers' Hard Problem should intuit that there are "primitives" of experience that when put together make up the total experience. I agree that the Hard Problem is an accurate assessment of the issue, but given this "primitives" concept I agree with eliminativism in that "most" of the mental states we believe we have never existed, we were somehow "filled in".
I'll namedrop 3 more philosophers: John Searle (Berkeley), Donald Hoffman (Irvine), Colin McGinn (London, Oxford) - all of whom have excellent content on YouTube that will blow your mind, and these are maybe the best I've heard from on the subject.
> he said at one point in some interview almost exactly this: That most of the mental states we think we have don't really exist. I think it's also in his book Consciousness Explained (1991), but I didn't read it so can't be sure.
I can't speak about whatever interview you saw, but in the book Consciousness Explained he does not say what you are describing. He says the same thing he says in one of his papers, I think it's "Real Patterns", which appeared in one of his later collections: Real consciousness does exist, but it is not like what many people think it is like. It does not have all of the properties that many people think it has. He does say that things with those properties don't exist--because nothing with those properties can exist. But he does not say that consciousness does not exist--just that it doesn't have those properties.
> the apparent total denial of experience
He doesn't say this either, although many of his opponents misdescribe him as saying that--because they cannot understand what he is actually saying. The only concept of consciousness they can grasp is the magical concept they have in their heads--I call it "magical" because it cannot exist if consciousness is a physical process working according to physical laws. And the latter kind of consciousness, the physicalist kind, is the kind Dennett describes and the kind he believed existed. So for opponents of his who can't even grasp that there is such a concept of consciousness, the only way they could interpret what Dennett was saying was that he was denying that consciousness existed.
But that is a gross misrepresentation of his views: he was not saying that people don't have experiences or thoughts. He was just saying that those real things, when you actually do the hard work of figuring out how they work in accordance with physical laws, turn out not to have some of the properties that people thought they had before that hard work was done. This is no different from any other concept once we try to build an actual scientific understanding of it.
> John Searle
Whose Chinese Room thought experiment was debunked in The Mind's I (though that's hardly the only rebuttal that has been published), and I suspect that chapter in the book was written largely by Dennett, since he published other similar rebuttals later on.
Starting to think you don't know Dennett, this is what he was all about haha.
> John Searle debunked
You're starting to reveal your lack of experience here. It's not something that can be debunked, it's just an observation and one that is widely considered foundational :)
Not only that, but that's like from his youth, he's done a lot more interesting stuff since Chinese Room - this seems like you just quickly googled.
I don't even agree with Dennett, just pointing out what his stance is in response to your weird attack. A stance that everyone knows except you apparently, didn't even know it was argued. He is eliminative of consciousness, and is basically famous as a philosopher for it, second to the religious stuff.
However, it's also obvious that the Dennett I agree with is not the Dennett that you disagree with. And what's more, it's obvious that we're not going to resolve that here. We agree he's a famous philosopher. That's enough for here.
This pdonis is a jackass - here are direct quotes from Dennett:
- "There is no reality of consciousness independent of the effects of various vehicles of content on subsequent action (and hence, of course, on memory)." - from Consciousness Explained, page 132.
On page 113 he says:
- "Unlike mental states taxonomized folk psychologically, "content-fixations" are each precisely locatable in both space and time".
^ he is saying mental states are not locatable in space and time.
Page 138:
- "There are no fixed facts about the stream of consciousness independent of particular probes"
An interview:
- "The reason [consciousness] is so puzzling is that people think they ought to be able to study it from the inside, using pure phenomenology, those give you hints but they are illusory. That's not what's really going on."
From David Rosenthal's Content, Interpretation, and Consciouness:
- "There is good reason, in any case, to construe Dennett's pandemonium model as positing only subpersonal events of content fixation, rather than full-fledged intentional states. Thus he writes:
"We replace the division into discrete contentful states-beliefs, meta-beliefs, and so forthwith a process that serves, over time, to ensure a good fit between an entity's internal information-bearing events and the entity's capacity to express (some of) the information in those events in speech. [10]
10: Dennett speaks throughout Consciousness Explained of such nonconscious, subpersonal events
Wikipedia on Multiple Drafts:
- "Dennett argues that [consciousness theories] share a common error in supposing that there is a special time and place where unconscious processing becomes consciously experienced, entering into what Dennett calls the "Cartesian theatre".
A couple more Dennett quotes:
- "There does not exist ... a process such as 'recruitment of consciousness' (into what?), nor any place where the 'vehicle's arrival' is recognized (by whom?)"
- "the Multiple Drafts model goes on to claim that the brain does not bother 'constructing' any representations..."
I could go on forever because this was his main jam. I find it hilarious this pdonis person has such a high karma/score/whatever on this site after such awful takes.
I won't even get into Searle who pdonis just Googled for the first time, bringing up Chinese Room (1980) as if it's a scientific theory. What a joke, I wish he could be downvoted.
Quoting Dennett out of context is the go-to move for people who can't be bothered to actually engage with what he's actually saying. I've read all of his books on consciousness, going all the way back to Content and Consciousness, published in, IIRC, 1969. And I've also read enough of his critics to understand the games they play. Sorry, not buying it.
> Wikipedia
So you consider Wikipedia to be a reliable source about a complex topic. It is to laugh.
Their his own words from his own books - including the book you said he never said that in. Why some of you on this site speak so confidently about that which you have no experience is beyond me.
> his own words from his own books - including the book you said he never said that in.
Sure, read and quote him out of context all you want. Still not buying it.
> that which you have no experience
Nonsense. I've already told you my experience.
> The fact you think Dennett is not eliminative about consciousness is all I need to know.
And the fact that you think he is is all I need to know. We're not going to resolve that here. Nor am I trying to; I'm not trying to convince you. I'm just putting on record my disagreement with your wrong and uncharitable description of one of the central areas of Dennett's work--one which unfortunately is made by many of his critics. They don't know what they are talking about and neither do you.
I'm a fan of Dennett (and the other horsemen) - Dennett's critics are almost all Christian apologists since he's widely known as being an atheist author. I'm not a critic at all.
But I can still disagree - I disagree with Dennett on is his dismissal of mental states and experience. Before you deny this again, here's direct evidence:
Interviewer: "This is the difference between having a phenomenal quality of blue instantiated in my brain and having the quality of blue represented by my brain"
Dennett: "The latter exists and the former doesn't"
Note in particular item (ii) on p. 2, which speaks directly to the distinction drawn in the video. And note that Dennett has no problem at all in the article with referring to "experiences" as real things, for example in item (iii) on p. 2:
"All the comprehension, appreciation, delight, revulsion, recognition, amusement, etc. that human beings experience must be somehow composed by the activities of billions of neurons that are myopic in the extreme, cloistered in their networks of interacting brethren, oblivious to the larger perspective they are helping to create."
He does not say that all those experiences aren't real--indeed they must be real in order to be "composed by the activities of billions of neurons".
Note also this comment on p. 1, describing a position with which Dennett did not agree:
"The hard problem, they surmised, will only be addressed by a return to some form of dualism, or panpsychism, or some yet to be articulated overthrow of what might be considered normal science."
This is the kind of viewpoint I was referring to by the word "magic" in my previous response.
Btw, I found the above article on this page which gives a fairly comprehensive list of Dennett's published papers and articles:
> He does not say that all those experiences aren't real
Yes he does, and has said it a lot, it's one of the main things he's known for, second to atheism. In the video I linked he literally says phenomenal states "don't exist". I've also seen numerous other interviews where he's said that. You're the only person I've ever come across who describes Dennett as someone believing in rich conscious experiences.
> indeed they must be real in order to be "composed by the activities of billions of neurons"
No that's the distinction - he says only the activity of the neurons are real that there is not an additional "mental state" or what he calls "double transduction". He simply dismisses that it happens.
Figure 7.1 shows a conscious observer seeing a red light and letting us
know that he's seen it by saying "Red light!" Some people think that
consciousness is a fundamental division in nature, which divides things
that are conscious from things that are unconscious. The things that are
conscious (sentient) engage in this very special sort of transduction. Of
course, just saying "Red light!" under this condition does not guarantee
that a person is conscious. After all, we might have an experimental subject
who stands all day saying "Red light, red light, red light, red light."
The fact that after someone flashes a red light in the subject's eyes, the
subject says "Red light!" is no indication that the subject is conscious of
the red light.
...
If you are tempted to think that way (and if you are not, I think you are a
very rare individual) you are making a fundamental mistake, the mistake I
call Cartesian Materialism. This idea is that there is a second transduction
somewhere in the brain (that is why this is a form of materialism). The idea is
that a privileged medium exists in the brain where and when the consciousness
happens, a place in which all the various features of a conscious experience
become "bound" - and then, most importantly, are appreciated.
He very clearly does not believe in the phenomenon of consciousness. At times he even conflates experience with self/identity (2 different things) at which point people usually ask him to clarify, and often he will confirm his stance by outright denying that mental experience happens. That's Dan Dennett.
He should have loved panpsychism, since it would coincide with his idea that there is no second transduction - that there's not a fundamental difference between the conscious and the unconscious - however, because he is an eliminative materialist he sticks with physicalism.
I'm sorry, but I strongly disagree. You are reading things into his writing that he is not saying.
> he says only the activity of the neurons are real
No, he says that the activity of the neurons is your conscious experience--that the real conscious experience you have is the activity of the neurons--or, if you like, the conscious experience is "made of" the activity of neurons. That's not the same thing as saying your conscious experience isn't real. It's just saying your conscious experience is not "made of" what many people think it's made of. It's not made of magic "consciousness stuff" or "mind stuff" or "soul stuff".
> that there is not an additional "mental state" or what he calls "double transduction". He simply dismisses that it happens
No, he looks at the actual evidence from cognitive science about what actually goes on in the brain, and concludes from that evidence that there is no such "double transduction"--because there is no evidence for any such thing. In other words, "double transduction" is a testable hypothesis about how our minds work, and we've tested it, and found it to be false.
> He very clearly does not believe in the phenomenon of consciousness.
Nonsense. I gave an explicit quote from a paper of his that describes various kinds of conscious experience. He believed all those things were real. What he didn't believe is that they were magic.
> He should have loved panpsychism
No, he shouldn't have, because he is, as you say, a physicalist.
> he is an eliminative materialist he sticks with physicalism.
Physicalism is not the same thing as "eliminative materialism" about everything. You are simply misrepresenting Dennett's actual position.
At this point I am wondering whether you are a physicalist or not. If you are, you should be agreeing with Dennett, because his views about consciousness are the only viable option if you are a physicalist.
If you are not a physicalist, on the other hand, then of course you will disagree with Dennett, but you should be clear about what you are disagreeing with him about. You are not disagreeing with him about whether consciousness exists. You are disagreeing with him about what kind of thing consciousness is. His position was that consciousness, really existing consciousness, is a physical process that goes on in (at least) human brains. Your position, if you are not a physicalist, is that consciousness, really existing consciousness, is some kind of non-physical thing. But his critics were simply unwilling (or perhaps unable) to frame their disagreement in these simple terms, so instead they misrepresented his position.
> You are reading things into his writing that he is not saying
I linked a video where he says it in full HD with audio: "The latter exists and the former doesn't" - did you watch it?
Not like it's the only time he's said it either, the downplaying of consciousness and the denial of a rich inner experience are things Dennett is known for.
> he says that the activity of the neurons is your conscious experience
Finally you said something that reflects reality. Yes he does say that. And more than one interviewer (don't make me find them, but I think they are Louis Godbout and Robert Lawrence Kuhn, or maybe Donald Hoffman) have asked for clarification in asking something like:
But the activity of the neurons are not identical with the redness of red, the aroma of coffee, the taste of chocolate, the blueness of the door in Godbout's example. The activity of the neurons are the activity of the neurons, little electro-chemical excitations. That's not, for example, the aroma of coffee.
To which Dennett will explain away that experience - it doesn't exist - often conflating raw experience with self/identity (different things) in doing so. It's a kind of rigid, ultra physicalist stance that you apparently really dig, but it's ultimately wrong because as Chalmers says it denies the datum of experience - we know there's an experience happening because we observe it ourselves (even though the self is illusory, the experience isn't). Empiricism means to be based on observational evidence - in this case it's your direct first-person observation or "experience".
I've gotten off track - the reason I'm arguing with you is because you grossly misrepresent the late, great Dan Dennett and I'm trying to figure out A) Why you think this or B) If you're just a hobbyist arguer.
> At this point I am wondering whether you are a physicalist or not. If you are, you should be agreeing with Dennett
> as Chalmers says it denies the datum of experience
Chalmers is a particularly ill-chosen example for this, because Chalmers also claims that his zombie twin--an atom-by-atom duplicate of him that is indistinguishable in all its physical properties and actions but lacks consciousness--is a coherent concept. But by his own definition, since Chalmers says his conscious experience is a direct "datum", so would zombie-Chalmers. And since zombie-Chalmers is an atom-by-atom duplicate of Chalmers, on what basis would Chalmers say that he is right when he makes this claim, but somehow zombie-Chalmers is wrong? If physicalism is true, this is simply false reasoning: zombie-Chalmers, since he is physically identical to Chalmers, must also be identical with respect to consciousness. So either Chalmers is simply denying physicalism--he has some mysterious non-physical property, in principle unexplainable in terms of the physical state of him, that zombie-Chalmers lacks--or he is simply failing to think clearly about his own position, and therefore believes that the concept of zombie-Chalmers as he defines it is coherent, when in fact it isn't.
Similar remarks could be made about other concepts that are trotted out by Dennett's critics, such as "qualia", but Chalmers makes the incoherence of such positions particularly obvious.
>And since zombie-Chalmers is an atom-by-atom duplicate of Chalmers, on what basis would Chalmers say that he is right when he makes this claim, but somehow zombie-Chalmers is wrong?
This isn't quite the right question to get at the issue. Zombie Chalmers is wrong by definition as he's a hypothetical creature defined not to have any conscious experience. Real Chalmers is right iff he has conscious experiences.
I think what you're getting at here is Chalmers' epiphenominalism about consciousness and its possible implications for whether or not Chalmers' belief that he has conscious experiences can be justified according to his own lights. Chalmers is well aware of this issue. It is rather a subtle one, as it is not so obvious on further examination that the belief that one has conscious experiences must necessarily be caused by conscious experiences in order to be justified. Thus, even though zombie Chalmers' belief has the same cause as real Chalmers' belief, it is conceivable that one belief may be justified while the other is not. It all depends on one's theory of justification – and it's probably an understatement to say that there are a lot of those to choose from. There is some summary of Chalmers' and others' takes on this here: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/epiphenomenalism/#SelStu
More broadly, I would say that if you are willing to indulge Dennett in some of his more counterintuitive speculations, you could stand to be a little more generous to Chalmers here, who is certainly no fool.
Only if you accept that Chalmers's definition of Zombie-Chalmers is consistent. But if you are a physicalist, it is not consistent, and any claims based on it are simply invalid. See further comments below.
> Chalmers' epiphenominalism about consciousness
Yes, that's part of the issue, but not the only part. It is true that I personally have never been able to make sense of epiphenomenalism about consciousness: the idea that my consciousness has literally nothing to do with any of my physical behavior (and remember that this doesn't just include easily observable things like the sounds I utter or the movements my body makes, but things like what can be detected in my brain in an fMRI scanner) to me seems daft. Furthermore, it doesn't make sense from an evolutionary perspective: why would organisms evolve consciousness if it had no effect on anything else?
However, over and above all of that, there is the issue that, as i said above, Chalmers's definition of Zombie-Chalmers is simply inconsistent with physicalism. If physicalism is true, then the idea of a physical duplicate of you, who are conscious, that is not conscious is a contradiction in terms. As I said in an earlier post, physically identical necessarily implies identical in everything, including consciousness, if physicalism is true.
> if you are willing to indulge Dennett in some of his more counterintuitive speculations, you could stand to be a little more generous to Chalmers here
Nothing I have said in support of Dennett anywhere in this discussion is "indulging" him in "counterintuitive speculations". I am simply describing the basic implications of Dennett's physicalism about consciousness. For example, I have not said anything about the "Multiple Drafts" model that he propounded in Consciousness Explained, which he himself said was speculation, but I think he expected it to get more traction than it has apparently gotten. I have tried to limit myself to just the basic things that have to be the case if physicalism is true at all.
Certainly Zombie-Chalmers is inconsistent with physicalism. Chalmers is not a physicalist, and the logical/metaphysical possibility of zombies forms part of his argument against physicalism. If you want, you can just stamp your foot down and insist on physicalism (and thereby dismiss whole swathes of the philosophical literature on consciousness), but from Chalmers' point of view you'd just be begging the important questions.
My point regarding Dennett is that his overall picture of consciousness also contains highly counterintuitive elements (such as e.g. his denial of any form of privileged access [1], which is not just an ad-hoc speculation tacked on to his main theory but a necessary consequence of it). I agree that Chalmers' epiphenominalism is counterintuitive too. I don't think anyone has succeeded in arriving at an overall philosophical account of consciousness that is entirely satisfying and free of implausible or counterintuitive elements. I think it's important to have a certain amount of empathy here and understand that people genuinely differ in their plausibility judgments in this domain. For example, I personally find epiphenomenalism, though implausible, to be less implausible than the denial of privileged access; I suspect you have the inverse judgment. It is unclear how to weigh these sorts of considerations against each other.
[1] > I see no other way to force this issue into the open than to defend an admittedly counterintuitive theory and await enlightenment on what, exactly, I have left out. The view that I wish to defend is that our privileged access extends to no images, sensations, impressions, raw feels, or phenomenal properties at all. There are indeed all sorts of interesting things going on in our heads that have characteristics or play roles that might tempt us to call them images or sensations or impressions, but our access to these events is not only not privileged; it is highly indirect, inferential and uncertain. https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-94-009-9479-9_...
> Certainly Zombie-Chalmers is inconsistent with physicalism.
Ok, good, we agree on that.
> his denial of any form of privileged access
Not of any form, no. Dennett was fine with the notion that we have privileged access to what it is like to be us (to use Thomas Nagel's phrase--Dennett's often-used term was "heterophenomenological world"). We have a direct experience of what it is like to be us, and that experience is real. Dennett just insisted that that, in itself, tells us nothing about how accurate our "what it is like to be us" is as a representation of the underlying processes going on in our brains. There are indeed images, sensations, raw feels, phenomenal properties in our "what it is like to be us"--in Dennett's terms, those are indeed intentional objects in our heterophenomenological worlds. But that, in itself, does not mean that, for example, if we say we have a mental image, there must actually be an image somewhere in our brains. There are real underlying processes going on, but we can't infer from our direct experience of having a mental image that any of those underlying processes involve images.
> I think it's important to have a certain amount of empathy here
It's not a matter of empathy; it's a matter of being consistent about the implications of one's views. I'm a physicalist, just as Dennett was. You agree that, for example, Zombie-Chalmers is inconsistent with physicalism. No amount of "empathy" can overcome that contradiction. I have to pick one or the other. I pick physicalism, not because of any lack of "empathy" for Chalmers or anyone else, but because, all things considered, that's what I pick. And having picked physicalism, I have to deny that Zombie-Chalmers is a valid concept, in order to be consistent. Just as Chalmers, to be consistent with his belief that Zombie-Chalmers is a valid concept, has to deny physicalism.
Pretty much everyone agrees that the existence of a distinction between zombie and non-zombie Chalmers is inconsistent with strong physicalism. That is the whole point. Regarding empathy, I'm saying that you appear not to understand why physicalism might not be the non-negotiable ur-assumption for someone else that it is for you. Chalmers is arguing against physicalism, so to point out that his position is inconsistent with it is not a very interesting response. You're certainly free to make your own judgment about the centrality of physicalism to your belief system; it just doesn't work as a rejoinder to Chalmers' arguments.
We could have an extended discussion of exactly which aspects of privileged access Dennett denies, but the broader point here is that he himself acknowledges the counterintuitive nature of his position on it.
> [Physicalism] is everybody's default assumption when dealing with anything that matters in practical terms.
No, it isn't. People assume that things which they take to be physical objects (such as cars) will obey physical laws. They can perfectly well do this without the additional assumption that the contents of the universe are exhausted by physical entities. Indeed, when dealing with people (who surely matter in practical terms!) it is probably a minority of the world's population who assume them to be wholly physical. The idea that non-physicalists must be worried about their cars exhibiting ghostly non-physical behavior is just silly. It is like saying that someone who does not believe that everything in the universe is made of wood must be worried that their wooden table might actually be made of chocolate. Believing in the existence of non-wooden things doesn't preclude treating wooden things as instances thereof. Almost everyone believes that there exist wholly physical objects governed wholly by physical laws, even if they don't think that all objects fall under this category.
> you appear not to understand why physicalism might not be the non-negotiable ur-assumption for someone else that it is for you
Oh, I understand that just fine. I just don't agree with non-physicalists.
I could equally well say that non-physicalists who claim that Dennett denied the reality of consciousness do not understand why their implicit assumption that consciousness must be something non-physical is not the non-negotiable ur-assumption for Dennett (and me) that it is for them. They simply fail to understand that physicalists like Dennett and me are not saying that consciousness doesn't exist. We're just saying that it's a physical process. Real consciousness--real feelings of pain, suffering, joy, and everything else that phenomenalists wax poetic about--is a physical process. It is no answer at all to say that, gee, I can't imagine how that could possibly be true, so I'm going to assume you actually mean that all those things don't exist. But that's basically what Dennett's critics have said for decades. You talk about empathy: I think that line of criticism shows an astounding lack of empathy.
> People assume that things which they take to be physical objects (such as cars) will obey physical laws.
No, they don't. Most people have no idea what the actual applicable physical laws are. People assume that things they are familiar with will show the regularities they are familiar with them having. Those regularities, to a physicalist, are all grounded ultimately in underlying physical laws, but the connection is very complex, even for objects much simpler than cars. Scientists still don't completely understand how molecules work in terms of the underlying laws of physics of atoms and elementary particles. That doesn't stop them from being able to build accurate models of molecules using higher-level regularities. The physicalist program for consciousness is simply applying to it the same methods we already apply successfully to all sorts of complex systems.
Galen Strawson has a good line about the "pizza theory of consciousness". Pizza theorists accept that consciousness is real but believe that it is pizza. Technically, this is not an eliminativist theory: pizza exists. But it is so manifestly obvious that pizza has none of the properties that we typically associate with consciousness that the theory is merely eliminativism in disguise. Perhaps those of us who reject the pizza theory simply lack the imagination to understand it. Or maybe the pizza theory is just obviously wrong.
>No, they don't.
I could have written that sentence more clearly, but I just meant to say that people will assume such objects to obey the typical regularities and constraints exhibited by physical objects (and not expect them to have weird ghostly properties). Which you seem to agree with.
> it is so manifestly obvious that pizza has none of the properties that we typically associate with consciousness that the theory is merely eliminativism in disguise
The problem with this, other than the obvious point that "extremely complicated physical processes inside the brains and bodies of humans, which we are only beginning to work out the details of" is very different from "pizza", is that no physical process can possibly have "the properties that we typically associate with consciousness", at least if "we" means Strawson and those who take his side in the debate. The only way for something to exist that has all of the properties that Strawson et al insist on is for that something to be non-physical, to violate physical laws.
Is this non-physicalism logically impossible? Of course not. That's why, as I said, nobody is going to resolve this debate with arguments. But lots of things are logically possible: Russell's teapot, Sagan's undetectable dragon in the garage, etc. That doesn't mean everything that is logically possible should be taken seriously.
The non-physicalist argument for taking them seriously with regard to consciousness boils down to a simple assertion without argument: it is just obvious to them that no amount of physical processes could ever produce the conscious experiences we all have. But this isn't science. It's just throwing up your hands and refusing to look any further. That is what Dennett and those on his side of the debate refuse to accept. There is a lot of science to be done in this area, and only a small part of it has yet been done. Let's do it and see where we end up. Is it logically possible that we will end up just where Strawson et al are now? Yes. But is that the way to bet? Dennett didn't think so, nor do many others, and nor do I. As I've already said, we'll see.
No-one would disagree with this. But you have to actually obtain scientific results before you can use them as the basis of your world view. Dennett has a tendency to gloss over the paucity of scientific results pertaining to consciousness by slipping into "pro science" vs. "anti science" rhetoric – as if to suggest that the science of consciousness would be complete by now if only it wasn't for the evil machinations of the superstitious anti-scientists. Strip away the rhetoric and all you are left with is optimism: Dennett thinks that science will explain consciousness eventually. That's a perfectly fine opinion, but being optimistic about future science is not fundamentally any more scientific or rational than being pessimistic about it.
Has had plenty of exchanges in the literature with Dennett. I have read most of them. I don't buy his counterarguments, although I admit has does have some good turns of phrase.
> you can just stamp your foot down and insist on physicalism (and thereby dismiss whole swathes of the philosophical literature on consciousness), but from Chalmers' point of view you'd just be begging the important questions
And to Dennett (and me), as a physicalist, Chalmers's claim that zombies are a coherent concept is begging the important questions. So if we're going to take that approach, we're just at an unresolvable impasse.
However, physicalism is not just a doctrinaire assumption. It's everybody's default assumption when dealing with anything that matters in practical terms. If Chalmers has a problem with his car, he's going to assume there is some physical reason for it and take it to a mechanic. He's not going to wonder if his car has lost some non-physical essence of carhood and become a zombie car. And cognitive science is taking a similar approach to consciousness, finding physical processes that underlie various conscious activities of people's minds (as well as unconscious ones). Dennett simply said that he expects that that process is sufficient to explain consciousness.
Chalmers disagrees (as do many others), saying that no matter how many discoveries cognitive science makes, it will never fully explain consciousness. In the end, though, neither Chalmers nor Dennett nor any other philosopher is going to resolve that issue just by making arguments. Ultimately it's going to come down to whether, once we have enough cognitive science under our belts, our intuitions about what that science is telling us will change or not. Particularly if, once we have enough cognitive science under our belt, we are able to build robots that are behaviorally indistinguishable from human beings, that tell us they are conscious and describe their conscious experiences the same way humans do. Some like Chalmers (or Searle) might still remain holdouts even then, saying that those robots are actually zombies, unlike us humans (because, in Searle's terms, our human brains have biological "causal powers" that the robots' brains don't), but those claims will seem a lot less plausible in the face of the actual existence of such robots.
Or perhaps it will turn out that we are never able to build such robots, and cognitive science ends up hitting blank walls where it is simply unable to account for some aspects of human consciousness, in which case our intuitions will go the other way, making Chalmers and Searle seem a lot more plausible and Dennett seem a lot less so. We'll see. I know which way I'm betting (and which way Dennett did), but we'll see.
I've already rebutted your claims about this video multiple times. Your response has been to repeat the same assertions without even bothering to address my rebuttals.
> the reason I'm arguing with you is because you grossly misrepresent the late, great Dan Dennett
Apparently we're never going to agree on who is misrepresenting Dennett. But I'm curious: how much Dennett have you actually read?
> I'm trying to figure out A) Why you think this
Because, as I've already told you, I have read every book Dennett ever published on consciousness and free will, and a fair portion of his papers on those topics that never got put into one of his books, and based on all of that reading, I think you are misrepresenting Dennett's position. What's more, the counter arguments I see you giving are the same ones Dennett responded to for several decades. I see nothing new whatever in anything you've posted that would change my mind about who is misrepresenting what.
Then please don't misrepresent what he's actually saying.
In the video you linked to, for example, he is not saying that your conscious experience of looking at the blue door doesn't exist. He's not saying that your mental state when you perceive the blue door doesn't exist. He's saying that what underlies that conscious experience and that mental state is not some magical "phenomenal quality of blue" in your brain but functional processes in your brain that represent blue (and a host of other concepts) in a functional way. In the video he even calls himself a "functionalist" with respect to "mental properties" like blue--those properties are functional properties, not "phenomenal" properties. But functional properties exist, and so do the conscious experiences and mental states they underlie.
Why does Dennett say that "phenomenal properties" don't exist? Because, to put it as briefly as possible, they're magic. Your mention of Christian apologists among his critics is quite apt, because, to a physicalist like Dennett (and like me), the Christian apologist's view of how minds work in general is magic. Why do you experience blue? Because God endowed you with a magical "mind" and "soul" that experiences blue--blue is a "phenomenal property" of your mind/soul. Whereas Dennett, as a physicalist, spent his career talking to experimentalists in cognitive science who were actually figuring out the physical processes that go on inside brains when people are experiencing blue (or anything else), and explaining them in functional terms.
If you go back to Dennett's earlier work in the late 1960s and 1970s, you find that he actually tried to use terms like "phenomenal qualities" (and "qualia", another term that pops up a lot in his writings) to mean functional properties--i.e., he tried to say something like: yes, "phenomenal qualities" exist, but they're functional properties, they're not magical. But he found that whenever he tried to do this, people would object: they would read his description of what functional properties are and say, No! That's not what "phenomenal properties" and "qualia" are! And they would go on to list properties that, to them, "phenomenal properties" and "qualia" must have--and they were properties that no physical process, no non-magical entity, could possibly have. So eventually Dennett decided that it was pointless to try to convince people to use terms like "phenomenal properties" and "qualia" to mean functional properties--they just wouldn't accept that. And that is what led him to take the line he took in his more recent work, and in the video you referenced, where he just says point blank that "phenomenal properties" and "qualia" don't exist--by which he means what I have just described, that no physical process, no non-magical entity, could possibly have the properties that proponents of "phenomenal properties" and "qualia" insist that those things must have. But that doesn't mean conscious experiences and mental states don't exist; it just means they are "made of" functional properties of brains, not "phenomenal properties" or "qualia".
In short, Dennett decided that the best place for him to draw a line in the sand was not at the meaning of terms like "phenomenal properties" and "qualia"--he found no useful alternative to simply letting proponents of those terms define what they mean and accepting their definitions, however useles he found them. He decided that the place to draw the line in the sand was at the claim that "phenomenal properties" and "qualia" are what underlie our conscious experiences and our mental states: no, he said, that's not what underlies them. Our conscious experiences and our mental states are not magic. What underlies them is functional processes in our brains. Those processes, and the conscious experiences and mental states they underlie, are perfectly real. They just aren't "phenomenal properties" or "qualia" as proponents of those terms insist on defining them.
Interviewer: "This is the difference between having a phenomenal quality of blue instantiated in my brain and having the quality of blue represented by my brain"
Dennett: "The latter exists and the former doesn't"
Has nothing to do with God or theism - you can be an atheist like myself and still recognize that we see things in the way a camera doesn't, that there's a difference between unconscious detection and conscious experience - and importantly that we don't know what it is. Doesn't have to be God or magic. As Searle says, "it's a biological phenomenon", we just haven't solved it.
And as Chalmers says, "To deny that we have an experience is to ignore the datum of consciousness".
Anyway the larger point is that Dennett was definitely eliminative of consciousness, not sure why you argue that so passionately when it's what he's known for and he's happy to admit it and argue for it.
Your last few sentences... he never said they are "perfectly real" and he said the opposite several times.
> Dennett: "The latter exists and the former doesn't"
Which tells you nothing about the actual question at issue--whether or not Dennett was denying that we have conscious experiences--unless you know what "phenomenal qualities" meant to Dennett. You are assuming, based on nothing, that it must have meant "conscious experiences". But anyone who has read Dennett in context, or even viewed that statement in the video in context (where, as I have already said, Dennett called himself a "functionalist" about mental states and properties), knows that "phenomenal qualities" to Dennett did not mean "conscious experiences". It meant "magical properties that some people claim are necessary in order to have conscious experience, but which actual cognitive science research has shown are not". So when Dennett said that "phenomenal qualities" don't exist, he was only saying that those magical properties don't exist; he wasn't saying that conscious experiences don't exist.
> Very likely the mainstream philosophical meaning of phenomenal
Again, if you had read Dennett's work in detail, you would know that in this particular area of philosophy, "phenomenal qualities" has a particular meaning, and it's not just "conscious experience"--it's a particular assertion about how conscious experience works. And one that cognitive science has shown to be false.
> > phenomenal doesn't mean conscious
You're not quoting anything I actually said in my post, so I have no idea what you think you're responding to here.
"I don’t deny the existence of consciousness; of course, consciousness exists; it just isn’t what most people think it is, as I have said many times. I do grant that Strawson expresses quite vividly a widespread conviction about what consciousness is. Might people—and Strawson, in particular—be wrong about this? That is the issue."
I think it's in the it just isn’t what most people think it is which we've already been more specific about in other comments, is where we'll find those details that can say whether or not Dennett can be classified as an eliminative materialist.
> it's in the it just isn’t what most people think it is which we've already been more specific about in other comments, is where we'll find those details that can say whether or not Dennett can be classified as an eliminative materialist
Of course the answer is in those details--which I've read and which I've described small portions of, as you say, in other comments--but it's not the answer to the question you give. Dennett cannot be classified as an "eliminative materialist" about everything. That's a gross oversimplification. A better description is that he was a functionalist about some things (and one of those things is conscious experience), and an eliminative materialist about others.
There are even in-between things about which he was what one might call a "metaphorical functionalist"--for example, "mental images". Yes, we have the experience of having mental images and doing various things with them mentally, but when you dig down into the details of what is actually going on in our brains, the best correlates we can find for such experiences are only "images" in a metaphorical sense. So when people talk about their mental images and what they do with them mentally, while we can grant that they are describing their real conscious experiences, those conscious experiences are not authoritative about what is actually going on in their brains.
That last sentence, in fact, illustrates the kind of confusion Dennett's critics have about what he is actually saying. When he says things like the last sentence--that people's conscious experiences are not authoritative about what is actually going on in their brains--his critics claim he's saying that there aren't any conscious experiences at all. That is because his critics have an unstated assumption that our conscious experiences are authoritative about what is going on in our brains--that if we say we experience having a mental image, there must be an actual image somewhere in our brains, not just a metaphorical one. If we say we experience seeing blue, there must be an actual blue quale somewhere in our brains. And so on. But cognitive science, in many cases, offers no support whatever for such claims, and so in general we cannot take our conscious experiences to be authoritative about what is going on in our brains. We have to do the hard scientific work to check whether that is actually true in each case.
> you can be an atheist like myself and still recognize that we see things in the way a camera doesn't, that there's a difference between unconscious detection and conscious experience
Sure--but what kind of difference is it? Is it a binary, yes/no, all or nothing difference? Or is it a difference of degree? Is it a magical little light that goes on inside some entities but not others? Or is it a physical process that can occur in varying degrees?
Denett believed it was the latter--on the basis of spending decades looking at actual research in cognitive science. Searle and Chalmers, among others, believe it's the former--on the basis of nothing except their bare assertion.
> we don't know what it is.
I understand why people like Searle and Chalmers take this position--because they simply haven't bothered to look at all the research that has been done to investigate what consciousness is and how it works, by looking at the underlying neural mechanisms. It's easy to believe we know nothing about a topic when you haven't actually looked at what we know. Dennett spent his career looking at such research and building his views on it, so he understood that, while we don't know everything about what consciousness is, we do know a lot of things about it.
> As Searle says, "it's a biological phenomenon"
Which, according to Searle, is some kind of magical "causal powers" that human brains have. Which he can't describe at all, can't say anything about, except that bare assertion. Which, as above, ignores all the things we do know about how brains work and how they do various things.
> as Chalmers says, "To deny that we have an experience is to ignore the datum of consciousness".
And in saying that he misrepresented Dennett's position, because Dennett never denied that we have experiences. He just didn't think they are magic. Searle's and Chalmers's positions, when you boil them down to their essence, are basically that consciousness is magic (but they use words like "causal powers" and "datum" to obfuscate what they are actually saying).
> not sure why you argue that so passionately
Because, as I've said multiple times now, you are misrepresenting Dennett's actual position. And the people you reference, Searle and Chalmers, did the same thing. And since Dennett is no longer around to defend himself against such misrepresentation, those of us who agree with him about these points need to do it.
Another comment with emphasis on the word "magic" so I guess let's dive in.
> Is it a magical little light that goes on inside some entities but not others?
Instead of magic, just say "consciousness", and let's identify it as things like: The aroma of coffee, the taste of chocolate, the sound of a drop of water, the feeling of warmth on your arm... those sensations are not nerve cells. Nerve cells are nerve cells. As you already know nerve cells are tiny biological structures that can pass on or mitigate electrical transmission in the body like in muscles and the brain. That's what a nerve cell is. None of that electrochemistry in a nerve cell is the aroma of coffee.
> Searle and Chalmers, among others, believe it's the former
Searle doesn't, and has said many times "it's a biological phenomenon". Chalmers went off the deep end with panpsychism - but since neither Chalmers or Dennett can tell the difference between conscious/unconscious I guess they ended up in mostly the same boat, didn't they?
> Searle hasn't bothered to look at the research
> according to Searle, is some kind of magical "causal powers"
Just a joke, worth a call out that you think this of Searle, but not worth a response
I mean bad take after bad take, it's too bad you don't brush up on this stuff, you seem interested in it.
> Dennett never denied that we have experiences. He just didn't think they are magic.
Nobody said it's magic, Searle specifically said it's not magic, and that it's a biological phenomenon (see his TED talk "I move my arm and the damn thing goes up" - that one).
> Instead of magic, just say "consciousness", and let's identify it as things like: The aroma of coffee, the taste of chocolate, the sound of a drop of water, the feeling of warmth on your arm... those sensations are not nerve cells
Of course not. Your voice is not vocal cords, but it is produced by them. Similarly, consciousness is not nerve cells, but it is produced by them. At least, that's what a physicalist like Dennett or myself says. Either you agree with that or you're not a physicalist. I don't really care at this point which it is, but I'm curious why you haven't said which.
> "it's a biological phenomenon"
Which is just a cop-out. It's the same as saying it's magic. Sure, it's a true statement in the sense that conscious beings, or at least all the ones we currently know about, are biological beings. But it tells us nothing at all useful about how consciousness works or how biological beings can have it.
> I move my arm and the damn thing goes up
Ok, but how does this happen? That's the important question. Dennett spent his career working on it. Searle, as far as I can see, has spent zero time working on it.
As far as the bare statement itself, Dennett has never denied it, and it's perfectly consistent with physicalism and with everything Dennett says about consciousness. So I have no idea why Searle thinks it's some sort of knock-down refutation of anything.
> Dennett's response concedes all of Fodor's main points and proceeds via innuendo and ad hominem
I strongly disagree, but I doubt we'll resolve that here.
> his appeal as a philosopher has always been a mystery to me.
Not to me, but again, we won't resolve that here. We agree that he was important and influential, and that's what matters for this discussion in his memory.
I don't think so. The person who you may be thinking of is likely Stephen Pinker, who has written on similar subjects: e.g. Dennett: Consciousness Explained; Pinker: How the Mind Works.
However, Professor Dennett's comments on twitter as linked by dmd apply to both Dennett and Pinker: One of Mr Epstein's occupations was basically getting close to many of the great and the good. Mr Epstein was skilled at it, and having large amounts of money to donate helped some. The bar for "involved" has to be higher than that.
Not that I’m aware of, and it seems unlikely. You may be thinking of his agent John Brockman who was indeed involved. The only connection I found after 10 min of googling was when Dan Dennett went with other clients of Brockman (Steven Pinker and Richard Dawkins; I know, weird trio, but this was back in 2002, well before Dawkins’ outing as a right wing weirdo) that attended a TED conference at Epstein’s island in 2002.
This is well before Dawkins was an active Eugenicist and before it was known that he was an Islamophobe. Also while Pinker certainly has problematic views on colonialism and class, as well as suffering from euro-centrism, I wouldn’t claim he is in scientific racism. Also this is in 2002 and Pinker hasn’t come out as a liberal democrat (i.e. capitalist ideolog) either. I think it was only in 2005 when he first sided with an anti-feminist on the gender equality issue (aside, that anti-feminist was ultra-capitalist Lawrence Summer, who was also involved with Epstein).
I think the only connection here is with Brockman, however, Brockman represented a lot of successful science writers, including in addition to Dennet, Pinker and Dawkins: Jared Diamond, Daniel Kahneman, David Gelernter, Brian Greene, Marc Hauser, Alan Guth, Jordan Pollack, Jaron Lanier, Lee Smolin, Martin Rees, Craig Venter, John Maddox, Chris Anderson, and Rupert Sheldrake.
Could you expand on this? I've googled around and can only find two supporting bits of info:
- In 2006 he tweeted "If you can breed cattle for milk yield, horses for running speed, and dogs for herding skill, why on Earth should it be impossible to breed humans for mathematical, musical or athletic ability?". He immediately followed up with "I deplore a eugenic policy. I simply said deploring it doesn't mean it wouldn't work"
- In 2014 he told a woman pregnant with a baby with Down's that he thought abortion was the moral choice.
Neither of these make him an "active eugenicist" imo!
> In the first quote he's promoting eugenics as effective
He's just saying it's possible. That's not the same as promoting or advocating it. He explicitly says that he deplores it!
> in the second he's recommending it as a concrete action
He's recommending an individual action but leaving it to individual choice. That's different to recommending a broad, enforced, population-wide eugenics policy.
The thing that makes the first quote eugenicist is the fact that this possibility is a lie, and he—as a scientist—knows that. Eugenics “works” by preselecting “desired” traits. For breeding cows this is no problem as the desired traits are well defined, for eugenics, these “desired” traits pretty much boils down to upper class, white, man. What he is saying is a dog whistle and what he is promoting is scientific racism. This makes him an active eugenicist.
The second quote is a recommendation the same way as governments “recommended” the poor, the disabled, and the indigenous, to use birth control. These “recommendations” were always secret policies.
> for eugenics, these “desired” traits pretty much boils down to upper class, white, man
That's entirely your extrapolation. One can advocate for the "breeding out" of hereditary genetic diseases. Not that I would. But such a thing is certainly in the realms of possibility.
> The second quote is a recommendation the same way as governments “recommended” the poor, the disabled, and the indigenous, to use birth control.
Governments may have had such policies in the past to reduce certain populations. But Downs isn't a hereditary disease and is just as likely for "upper class white" people as the categories you mention. Such abortions would not have any measurable genetic effect on the population. He's only saying that he thinks bringing the child into the world would cause more suffering than it's worth. I'm not sure I agree 100% but I certainly sympathise. As recent parents, my partner and I had to have the discussion about what we'd do if the 20-week genetic screening revealed something like Downs. To be frank, we probably wouldn't have gone ahead with it. Many, many other parents would make that choice in that situation.
The thing that makes this eugenicist is the fact that it is none of his business whether other people do with their bodies. If he decided for him self not to give birth to a baby with Down’s syndrome, that is his choose, but if he is claiming to be a moral arbitrator of what other people choose, he may be dabbling in eugenics.
Apparently he elaborated his position a little later:
> Given a free choice of having an early abortion or deliberately bringing a Down child into the world, I think the moral and sensible choice would be to abort.
> For what it’s worth, my own choice would be to abort the Down fetus and, assuming you want a baby at all, try again.
> Given a free choice of having an early abortion or deliberately bringing a Down child into the world, I think the moral and sensible choice would be to abort.
How is comparing the number of Muslim nobel prize winners to that of Trinity Collage[1] a thoughtful criticism of Islam? How is sharing a silly video meme[2] (irony intended) of nonsensical comparison between Muslims and feminists thoughtful criticism?
Recently he even tweeted about the cultural importance of Christianity while continuing to attack Islam. He had been careful about this in the past, claiming to attack all religion equally.
His anti-religious views are at odds with the scientific consensus around culture, which is very ironic coming from the scientist that first described the meme. And the fact that he attacks Muslim culture more then others seems to suggest that he has a problem with Muslim people rather then the Islamic religion.
In 2022, a GPT-3 model fine-tuned on Dennett's writing was good enough that "Dennett experts" could only pick a real Dennett quote from a list of 5 quotes about 50% of the time. I don't know that anyone's tried on newer models. He's gone, but I wonder if we could continue to get insights from him for a while longer.
> I wonder if we could continue to get insights from him
I think so. His views were somewhat rigid and materialist. As a de-fluffer, he's great, and I'm sure he will continue to be quoted especially as we make progress on AI and get into the nuts and bolts of consciousness. In particular which things are extraneous or peripheral to the problem itself.
I am sorry that I did not know about him but mentioning of "Consciousness" in the linked article made me to google about his books. One of the book is "Consciousness Explained", I wonder whether it is for layman like me who do not know much about it?
It's extremely oriented towards laymen, and if you think it sounds interesting, you will probably enjoy it a lot. (Even if you don't agree with its conclusions)
Its a great book, you might not agree that it 'explains' consciousness but it will give you a lot of new ways to think about it and it references a lot of interesting research.
I discovered him with the excellent Royal Institution talk "If Brains are Computers, Who Designs the Software?" [0]. And the quote which marked my mind is "How could a slow, mindless process build a thing that could build a thing that a slow mindless process couldn't build on it's own ?".
Really terrible news... So glad I got to meet him in person in Dublin in 2018 when he gave a talk at https://www.tcd.ie/biosciences/whatislife and hung out for a chat in the lobby. He had this wonderful Gandalf-worthy cane that I'm not sure how he managed to manoeuvre when boarding airplanes.
I was unpacking and yesterday from a move and saw a copy of his "Darwin's Dangerous Idea" book and remembered he time he answered a fan email I sent to him with the simple reply "It's always nice to receive an email such as yours." - here's to hoping you are wrong about the soul Dan!
Sad to hear this. I had read his book “Elbow Room” back when I had been diving more deeply into free will and the various viewpoints associated. I don’t know that I found it convincing but it was an interesting peek into the compatibilist argument.
That isn't the witty riposte that it is apparently thought to be. It really does "explain away" consciousness by reducing it to plausible physical processes. This reduction also applies to things like qualia, which is where nonmaterialists get upset as qualia (or equivalents) are also invoked by people like Nagel and Chalmers to argue against the physicality of consciousness.
The core argument from Nagel / Chalmers is that that there is a subjective element to consciousness which has no physical explanation. The reasoning for this is always an appeal to intuition. If you accept that there is "something that it is like" to see red, be a bat, etc, and that the "something that it is like" is above and beyond the physical processes of the brain -- the firing of neurons -- then you by definition cannot accept a purely physical explanation of consciousness. Dennett's book argues that this is mystical nonsense (or, charitably, wishful thinking) and the "something that it is like" is simply what happens when particular types of physical processes occur in the brain.
It's no surprise, therefore, that "explained away" is a criticism if you're a nonmaterialist. But if you're a materialist, then "explained away" is actually a good thing and the purpose of the book.
the "something that it is like" happening when "particular types of physical processes occur in the brain" points to these being separate and distinct processes, yet materialists claim they are the same and identical process. Qualia isn't the same process as the physical processes in the brain; they are very highly correlated, but ultimately distinctly separate processes.
The title promised more than it delivered, but nevertheless, Dennett's efforts in attempting to achieve that goal were a refreshing break from the incessant and fruitless bickering over whether the mind is a physical phenomenon.
I had the opportunity to hear a guest lecture of his in Colorado a little over 15 years ago which inspired my further study of philosophy at the time. He had a keen mind and will be missed.
RIP to a legend. If you haven’t heard of him and are interested in the more philosophical side of AI I think he’s at his best in dialogue with others, so I highly recommend skimming this 1993 round table that made me fall in love with him. I can’t find the stamp, but I know at some point he excitedly describes machine learning research to some guffaws from his interlocutors — quite funny and vindicating in hindsight.
At ~01:50:00, he talks very poignantly about death, the soul, and immortality. Obviously this video is 30 years old now, but I doubt he changed much and it seems his philosophy left him with good tools to handle the specter of death. Godspeed Dennett, the world is in your debt...
Some other, perhaps more lighthearted timestamps:
- @ 01:00:00; A Nagel discussion culminating in “I think we’re making tremendous progress on knowing what it’s like to be a bat!” Truly a Silicon Valley optimist before it was cool.
- at 01:12:00; He tells a fun robotics story to back up his belief in the tractability of neurophilosophy.
- @ 01:40:00; he discusses his general philosophy for the mind and why he thinks our brains can be broken down into a recursive hierarchy of agential machines.
- 00:24:00 is the moment that made me love him. Love to hate him, perhaps! Like a more prestigious, less directly-aggressive Gary Marcus.
It makes me sad that Sheldrake is the last participant standing. Not because I want Sheldrake to die, but rather because it reminds me all those great thinkers are now thinking no more.
Dennett clearly is an important mind. I do not disagree with anything he has opinions on. His belief that "self control is the arena of consciousness and emotional valence is what does all the pushing and pulling", I think expresses the limits of his theory and has some pretty obvious blindspots. I think both of these gentlemen would benefit by a study of islamic philosophy.
I only wish the islamic religion was as tangible to me as its philosophy and sociology but I find it completely inscrutable. I might enjoy its theogony and stories if i spoke arabic.
I first came across Daniel Dennett through Douglas Hofstadter, when I read The Mind's I because I liked Godel, Escher, Bach. Once I had read Dennett's contributions to The Mind's I, I started looking up everything I could find of his writings; I think at this point I've read every one of his books and a fair number of his papers. He will be missed. RIP.
I find it interesting that there is no mention of this on the cnn/foxnews homepage. If a philosopher of his standing died in France, I'm sure it would be on the front of Le Monde and Figaro
I also find it interesting that I graduated from Tufts (2011) and took a Philosophy class in 2010, and yet today is the first time I heard about Professor Dennett. I do wish I'd known him and his works earlier though. His notion of conciousness being a narrative created by the brain resonates well with me.
So I'm going to speak about a problem that I have and that's that I'm a philosopher.
When I go to a party and people ask me what do I do and I say, "I'm a professor," their eyes glaze over.
When I go to an academic cocktail party and there are all the professors around, they ask me what field I'm in and I say, "philosophy" -- their eyes glaze over.
When I go to a philosopher's party and they ask me what I work on and I say, "consciousness," their eyes don't glaze over -- their lips curl into a snarl.
And I get hoots of derision and cackles and growls because they think, "That's impossible! You can't explain consciousness." The very chutzpah of somebody thinking that you could explain consciousness is just out of the question.
... It's very hard to change people's minds about something like consciousness, and I finally figured out the reason for that. The reason for that is that everybody's an expert on consciousness. ... with regard to consciousness, people seem to think, each of us seems to think, "I am an expert. Simply by being conscious, I know all about this." And so, you tell them your theory and they say, "No, no, that's not the way consciousness is! No, you've got it all wrong." And they say this with an amazing confidence.
And so what I'm going to try to do today is to shake your confidence. Because I know the feeling -- I can feel it myself. I want to shake your confidence that you know your own innermost minds -- that you are, yourselves, authoritative about your own consciousness. That's the order of the day here.
There are a lot of weeds to get into on the subject of philosophy here and demonstrated by the comments. However, Dennett contributed a lot in terms of thinking and arguments...
We don't 'think' enough as individuals/beings and for that I doth my cap in respect of the work that he did and however it's regarded by 'the mob'!
I remember seeing him as one of the megaminds in Vim Kayzer’s A Glorious Accident[0]. That was a show that would put many people to sleep, but I profoundly enjoyed it.
So sad. I just listened to an interview he gave to Babbage podcast from the Economist. Highly recommend listening to his thoughts, he was an incredible luminary.
Oh! I had just come across him via this recent YouTube video. I'm glad to be introduced to a new influential thinker. I guess I have some reading to do, thanks Mr. Dennett!
I sent an unsolicited 25 page paper about memes that I wrote, as just some (fairly pretentious!) guy without a college degree, to Professor Dennett, in the early oughts. And he just went ahead and read the thing and gave me very kind feedback on it.
I'm sure he was a busy person, and didn't have any obligation to respond to me, at all. It touched me deeply. What a generous and gracious soul he was.
I mean these words in a non-supernatural way, of course. :-D A toast to Mr. Dennett's wonderful memory.
I was one of those irritating edgy atheist teenagers (and am still kind of an irritating edgy atheist adult), so I used to have plenty of Daniel Dennett quotes in my back pocket when arguing with people online.
Very sad to hear. We’ll certainly miss having his perspective to ground us in this era of AI hyperbole, as thousands of engineers start confronting the ambiguities of consciousness with incongruent mental frameworks.
I've never quite seen eye to eye with Daniel Dennett. His tendency to reduce the inexplicable to what he's confident he understands has always made me wonder if a challenging childhood might have fostered his distrust of the mysterious. Whenever I admire Nobel Prize laureates like Roger Penrose, who argue that consciousness isn't just software running on the brain's hardware, I can't help but feel a twinge of pity for Dennett and his like-minded peers. I can almost hear him reflecting, 'Wow, that was a wild ride, but boy, was I cranky! I wish I could have another go at it.
There is an infinity of mysterious things one could posit, including an infinity of mutually incompatible mysteries. How do you decide which mysteries are worthy of consideration?
Personally, I think starting with things are known to exist, which have a physical basis, is a great start, and untestable assumptions should be kept to a minimum. Just because it would be delightful to contemplate that ornately feathered technicolor quantum unicorns are actually underlying all of reality, it isn't productive to consider until there is a reason to.
Penrose is no doubt a genius of high order in his domain, but consciousness is not one of his domains. Saying consciousness is the result of quantum effects in microtubules explains nothing -- it is just a very tiny rug which one could imagine is hiding the truth, as all the larger scale hiding places have been inspected and found lacking.
You'd think that with the stunning (and mostly unexpected) success of LLMs would expose the fact that simple, soul-free, mechanistic computations can produce some really amazing capabilities. The human brain is orders of magnitude larger than GPT4, plus it has a wildly more complex architecture than today's neural networks. To me, it takes little imagination to see how everything could be explained in purely physical terms.
Consciousness is the most obvious mystery, one that undoubtedly warrants considerable attention.
Your point about starting with physical things is questionable, as highlighted by prominent figures like Penrose and Donald Hoffman. The fundamentalism of materialism is an axiom that lacks proof.
Perhaps to you 'saying consciousness is the result of quantum effects in microtubules explains nothing', but so does Dennett's saying 'consciousness is an illusion', which equals 'I'm not sure what it is, but I will dismiss it because I would rather ridicule the unknown than accept my ignorance.'
At least Penrose denies what is deniable to open the door for a broader perspective, something that Dennett failed at.
I bet you think an LLM can experience what the color red feels like, or it can feel the scent of a rose, if it's fed enough 1/0's about it.
> Saying consciousness is the result of quantum effects in microtubules explains nothing -- it is just a very tiny rug which one could imagine is hiding the truth, as all the larger scale hiding places have been inspected and found lacking.
It also doesn't conflict with physicalism. I think he's trying to argue that consciousness would need more than you can do with a classical computer, but it doesn't seem to imply that. Classical computers are made of hardware components that rely on quantum effects to work, but that doesn't make them "quantum computers".
Well quantum computers definitely have "quantum magic"; for some reason the universe lets us build something that can do Shor's algorithm in less than forever. Even if we can't actually do it yet.
But it doesn't seem like human brains are doing Shor's algorithm.
Being a Nobel laureate isn't evidence that you're right about anything after that. I'm sorry you'd like the supernatural to be true but you should find some ghosts first if you want anyone to believe in them.
Understand things? He has never successfully explained anything related to consciousness except by using the magical word: illusion. One might argue back, 'You're the illusion, Mr. Dennett,' and we end up as a bunch of ignorant folks pointing fingers.
> His tendency to reduce the inexplicable to what he's confident he understands
Coming up with theories to explain the inexplicable is literally science.
Also, suggesting that Dennet's philosophy stems from a "challenging childhood" is argument ad hominem, because it focuses on the person, rather than on the content of the philosophy.
To continue the discussion in the same tone that you began it, perhaps you don't see eye to eye with him because he challenges your beliefs.
Very sad news. Had the pleasure of having him be the keynote speaker at an aesthetics conference some friends and I organized during uni. Brilliant mind. RIP
consciousness is like a joke, if you think it needs an explanation you already miss it.
I struggled with myself to convince Dennett that his conscious so much that I ended up losing it myself I hope you don't make the same mistake that I did
Philosophers never die. Our bodies are computers and our personalities are self-improving (or self-worsening in some cases) programs. To the moment a body of a philosopher dies, the case usually is it has became irrelevant already because the program already runs in the decentralized cloud of the society.
Like others here, I found Consciousness Explained to generate a huge perspective shift in my worldview.
My (now) wife and I went to see him speak in June 2012 in King's College Cambridge, on the event of Alan Turing's 100th birthday: https://philevents.org/event/show/2205
I don't remember all the details, but I think he spoke about Turing's ideas about evolution and computers. It might be similar to this article from roughly the same time (though paywalled): https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/06/-a-pe...
The only other talk I remember going to was Simon Singh (author of Fermat's Last Theorem) giving a great presentation on (and demonstration of!) the Enigma machine.
Whilst he is probably the most respectable member of the "Four Horsemen"(Hitchens is probably the most revered but his early death seems to have given him a halo, a lot of his arguments would not stand up today), New Atheism will end up IMO as something that is seen very negatively by posterity(very little of it stands up today as anything more than fedora tipping).
Unfortunately, listening to Dennett debate Sam Harris on free will made me lose faith in Dennett’s credibility. He was not able to understand the very clear argument of why we don’t have free will. Hearing him literally being unable to understand was surprising.
I should go watch that debate. From "Elbow Room", the rough idea I've gotten out of it is that traditional Free Will is meaningless and so he invented a new definition which we might now call Agency.
I don't recall how far he took it, but for me determinism is very helpful (if not required) for predictability, and predictability required for meaningful Free Will. So I'll have to go watch the debate, but my bet is that Dennett was willfully (pun intended) refusing to accept the other-definition of Free Will in favor of his own. I'll report back after I listen to the debate :)
I just confirmed that I have a copy of Breaking the Spell on a bookshelf. I still haven’t got to it. I buy books aspirationaly and read about a third of how many I buy. I have too many inputs to get to all of them.
This was disappointing:
> When the American Humanist Association revoked a lifetime achievement award it once gave to Richard Dawkins on account of his anti-trans tweets, Dennett was firmly on Dawkins’ side. He also passively promoted an embarrassing article written by the head of the Center For Inquiry, claiming identity politics and cancel culture had “torn apart” the Humanist movement… mostly because people were criticizing Dawkins for perpetuating anti-trans talking points.
I think it's actually very reassuring that he didn't accept the type of uncritical groupthink that is exemplified by the "trans rights" movement.
It's odd how so many so-called atheists ended up latching onto that cultish nonsense. Dawkins stands amongst the few who have cast a suitably critical eye over this "gender identity" belief system.
A lot of very clever people disagreed strongly with him. However, since not one of them could deny they were shaped by the forces they opposed, those controversies became the shape of his own huge and formidable influence. I'm sure he would want to be remembered for something else, and I have the sense sentimentality was not his thing at all, but his popularization the term "deepity," was in the character of many of his ideas, where once you had been exposed to one, it yielded a perspective you could afterwards not unsee.
I hope an afterlife may provide some of the surprise and delight he brought to so many in this one.
It's not all boring - it makes for some great movies. Terminator 2, The Matrix etc.
It's also moving to practical engineering questions like how can we have AI controlled drones kill invading Russians but ensure they won't turn on us later, more than philosophical waffle.
(I had misremembered the author of that original quote, but then :
> Daniel Dennett, while sharply disagreeing on some points, acknowledged Nagel's paper ["What Is It Like to Be a Bat?"] as "the most widely cited and influential thought experiment about consciousness.")
I doubt that you reject the rationality of caring about behavior. Fair?
There are philosophers who talk about morality from the point of view of rationality without making wild* claims about truth.
* you have to start with some assumptions, but some are less attractive than others
> The term has been used in a pejorative sense to describe the attitude of "being overly concerned with making moral judgments or being illiberal in the judgments one makes".
There is also the 19th century Moralism movement/philosophy, which may have inspired the more general sense of the word, but I’m not sure.
I think we should all step back and question whether we all even mean the same thing by the word “imposition”. When I think about imposition, I can see how people could interpret that to mean a wide range of things, including social pressure, religious rules, as well as the force of law. This is why (above) I interpret moralism (the general term) as a kind of judgment, but not necessarily an imposition of rules or punishments.
Similar to Vonnegut's joke at a memorial service for Asimov at the American Humanist Society: "Isaac is up in Heaven now".
It's amusing that when I searched for the exact quote just now, I found this HN comment from 2011, on the "in memoriam" thread for Dennett's fellow horseman:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3360710
Even if he was wrong about it, it's important to air the thinking around it regardless of belief.
The proposition, for example, that consciousness is basically an illusion without empirical basis, one would have to take up as belief, I guess (paradoxically), since to most of us, that would seem like gaslighting (i.e., "if your conclusion is that Descartes was wrong and that we can't even know we are conscious, then I beg to differ")
I think that I think that I think, therefore I think that I think I am
It's kind of interesting that this is still on HN front page at the same time:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40092985
Dennett was an influential thinker, probably more so than Hofstadter overall, but I can't agree with this assessment. For one thing, he became widely known after Consciousness Explained, in 1992, which is simply too late to be foundational to hacker culture, which was well and truly founded by then.
I won't broaden my case here, lest anything I say be interpreted as speaking ill of the dead. I'm certain he was a major influence for many who post here, yourself included, and I don't intend to detract from that.
"Elbow Room: the varieties of free will worth wanting" was a landmark work and was published in 1984.
"The Minds I" (w/Hofstadter) was, relatively speaking, a hugely popular work published in 1981.
In 1993, the cover of "Dennett and his critics" began
> Daniel Dennett is arguably one of the most influential yet radical philosophers in America today.
Doesn't sound much like someone who "became widely known" after a book published in 1992.
I do think its true that some of his work has resonated with many people who also resonate with "hacker culture".
What most people identify as "hacker culture" today arose in tandem with (a) relatively affordable "personal" computers (b) modem-based communication.
The rise of these two things is more or less entirely cotemporal with the most productive phase of Dennett's career.
Jargon file was published as The Hacker's Dictionary in 1983 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jargon_File
I consider this definitive evidence that the foundational period of hacker culture was before these books were published. I'm not sure what the point of trying to shift that period forward so as to include Dennett's works is. It's neither true nor necessary.
His first three books were published in 81, 84 and 86.
I agree with you that the foundational period slightly predates these, but I don't consider the foundational period to be the same as when "hacker culture was established".
I began to encounter it myself starting in about 1979 via CoEvolution Quarterly/Whole Earth Review, but it was still very, very much evolving and continued to do so in very noticeable ways as I started programming in 1984.
I tend to consider the general use of IP as probably one of the main signifiers of hacker culture being established, and that was far from common in the 75-85 period (though growing rapidly).
This is wrong by definition, is the thing. That's what foundational means: to found something is to establish its foundation.
Dennett was simply not a significant part of that. The timeline isn't the reason for that, but it in fact suffices to make the case.
You can trace things flowing all over the place with say MIT’s Tech Model Railroad Club being often sited as an early example. But it’s really just refinements of the same basic culture, and computers is one of the few places it survived unlike say pinball.
His book Consciousness Explained is a good overview of the conundrum of brain-mind. And in the end he admits clearly that he actually did NOT explain consciousness (read the last two pages). But he framed the problem better than most philosophers, and brings readers into the discussion.
Daniel Dennett, Richard Rorty, and Humberto Maturana: The three modern philosophers I read and respect the most as a practicing neuroscientist.
Maturana by far the strongest scientist of this trio and oddly, the most radical neurophilosopher of them all. I would have loved to overhear a conversation of these three.
Ah, perhaps too subtle humor in your closing comment. “Dennett in dust”—-his comfortable afterlife, will have to be satisfied with all of us talking about ideas he nurtured and motivated.
Death touches us all, but I totally agree, it especially hurts me to see these AI pioneers passing away right when so many groundbreaking cognitive science discoveries are being made. Especially in the cases of Dennett’s “opposition” like Lenat (and soon Chomsky…) where they die appearing “disproven” or “outmoded” by LLMs in the eyes of Silicon Valley celebrities like Hinton and Friedman. Oh well, I’m sure their time on their earth has prepared them for a little bit of criticism and uncertainty, a-la Schopenhauer’s “Only with time, however, will the period of my real influence begin, and I trust that it will be a long one.”
Luckily, Dennett is under no such cloud, and he died more or less a hero in my eyes; certainly among the most influential Connectionist philosophers (+ Dreyfus & Clark?), who seemed very helpful in re-legitimizing ML. I, for one, don’t think it would be odd to see philosophers like Dennett and Hofstadter in a Turing Award announcement someday…
While the anecdotal evidence is overwhelming, that still remains to be seen. ;)
The research of Dr. Bruce Perry, Bessel van der Kolk and others into the effects of trauma on brain development, behavior and social functioning has had a profound impact on the understanding of cognition, the mind-body continuum, and the treatment of human suffering in this time frame.
https://earlylearningnation.com/2023/02/author-bruce-perry-a...
Things still move during winter, just not as much.
I read his book Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon, which I found really interesting in that I'd never thought about religion as a concept being an evolutionary adaptive (or "hijacking") feature. I found it fascinating, though not profound. That said, I think some of the best philosophical work is just that. Really insightful ideas that make perfect sense once you think about them, you just probably wouldn't take the time to think about them.
1. https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2022/09/13/how-u-s-reli...
The study focus on Christianity and not other religions though.
> Some philosophical research projects ... are rather like working out the truths of chess. A set of mutually agreed upon rules are presupposed — and seldom discussed — and the implications of those rules are worked out, articulated, debated, refined. So far, so good. Chess is a deep and important human artifact, about which much of value has been written. But some philosophical research projects are more like working out the truths of chmess. Chmess is just like chess except that the king can move two squares in any direction, not one. I just invented it — though no doubt others have explored it in depth to see if it is worth playing. Probably it isn’t. It probably has other names. I didn’t bother investigating these questions because although they have true answers, they just aren’t worth my time and energy to discover. Or so I think. There are just as many a priori truths of chmess as there are of chess (an infinity), and they are just as hard to discover...
Ah, I believe this is the same "mess we're in" from Joe Armstrong's eponymous 2014 Strange Loop conference talk[0]:
> This is a device that we can imagine. I try to find a big sausage machine where you put sausage meat, you know, you turn the handle. So we put all programs into it, and we turn the handle, and a smaller number of programs come out. Then we can throw away all the other programs. And that breaks the second law of thermodynamics. The trouble with software, you see, its complexity increases with time. We start with one program, and it splits and becomes two programs and four programs.
> Files and systems, they mutate all the time. They grow in entropy. Disks are absolutely huge. And there's all these problems with naming. Naming's horrible. If you've got a file or something, what file name should it be? What does it have? What directory should I put it in? Can I find it later?
(68% match)
> When you have an idea, you have a little box and you type something into the box. I've done this, I've implemented it. You have a little box and then there's a little icon, Sherlock Holmes at the bottom. You type this stuff into the box and you press the Sherlock Holmes button. And the idea is that will find among all my files that I'm interested in, the most similar thing to what I've just put in this box. So I want it to find the most similar thing to this new thing. And then I want to know, is it different? So once it's found them, it makes a list of them in order.
(64% match)
Edit: Just had the revelation that I am posting these quotes straight out of a RAG on the transcript of his talk.
0. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lKXe3HUG2l4
I guess Mr Dennett never came across the ideas of Mr Cantor.
[Yes, yes… I know they’re both countable.]
The problem is that in any field, if you start digging to understand the underlying concepts of that field and how they are defined, at some point you hit philosophy and start working with philosophical concepts.
The other problem is that there’s some real quack philosophy around, too. Various traps that philosophers sometimes fall into.
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/.
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
>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 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.
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 …)
Perhaps finding it confusing is a recent development.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It is both funny and not.
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.
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 ?
There are ton of scientific theories that seem legit but its def out there.
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.
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.
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...
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...
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.
Your definition is overly broad IMO. Empiricism is usually taken to be the belief that the sole source and justification of knowledge is ultimately sensory data. See e.g. Wikipedia or Britannica.
It stands in contrast with rationalism sure. But more importantly in the context of your comment and the parent, empiricism also stands in contrast to 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.
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.
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.
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.
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 knightoffaith123@proton.me
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.
His philosophy does provide some interesting perspectives on language, even if I don't personally agree with his way of doing philosophy.
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?
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
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-...
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.
"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?
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.
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.
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
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
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.
> 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... :(
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
How do you know that your wife loves you, and that she's not just pulling a long con?
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
But many many years later, there's been a lot of churn in whose work I value and whose I don't. I wouldn't be surprised if I see his work in a very different light now. This news may be what gets me yo pick it up again and find out.
He consistently argues that studying consciousness and perception is difficult but not impossible, and we will slowly make progress in this scientific endeavor just like all others we have attempted thus far. In philosophy circles he is sometimes derided as having too scientific a mindset, but that is what draws me to him. He’s very endearing to listen to as well—very idiosyncratic.
Now to address your misguided belief on the mind being reduced to the brain.
Under atheistic materialism what is happening is matter in motion. This means even the matter in your brain. What does that mean? Your brain is determined by the laws of physics, chemistry, etc and even your comment was determined. You destroy the possibility of justified knowledge claims under that worldview when taking it to its logical conclusion. Also as Sean Caroll noted, quantum physics and stochastic probabilities don't mean anything, taking the worldview to the logical conclusion means determinism of the movement of matter.
You also can't account for universals and particulars on that view and solve the problem of the and the many.
NY Times interview with him: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/08/27/magazine/dani...
NYer profile: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/03/27/daniel-dennett...
Interesting thread on /r/askphilosophy on philosophers' pushback against him: https://www.reddit.com/r/askphilosophy/comments/2cs8kz/do_ma...
Big loss indeed, RIP.
NY Times interview with him: https://archive.ph/knd9C
NYer Profile: https://archive.ph/Snm8g
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nx5OZ1AZ5Vk
https://www.julianjaynes.org/pdf/dennett_jaynes-software-arc...
To others reading this, this short essay [0] by Julian Jaynes is a good introduction to his idea of the Bicameral Mind. He later developed the idea further in his book "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind". If you've watched the series "Westworld", how the androids begin to develop something akin to consciousness is inspired by Jaynes' ideas.
[0]: https://www.julianjaynes.org/resources/articles/consciousnes...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Q_mY54hjM0
I told him that his book Darwin's Dangerous Idea was one of the few where, when I got to the end, I immediately wanted to go back to the beginning and read it again.
He said, "I'm not sure that's a good thing."
Authors @ Google? Was this his visit to the Kirkland office?
If so, I was one of the perhaps 5 (?) people who had lunch with him. I was astonished that more Googlers didn't seem the least bit interested in hanging out with Dan Dennett given the opportunity.
He seemed interested in my journey breaking free of religious indoctrination and what part his writings had in that. He said he had never heard of Joseph Campbell being the first step out. We had a brief discussion on how recognizing the universality of religious motifs can lead one to start asking the initial question, "What if my specific religion isn't so special after all?"
I asked him the admittedly-ambiguous question along the lines of, "If Google were to build something that seems to express intentional agency, would we have an ethical obligation relating to it?" I suspect his curt answer of "Yes" was him just being polite with a clueless armchair philosopher asking silly questions.
Then there was the Dawkins visit to Google Kirkland some time later. The failure to set up an audio system that didn't have an echo made me sad. Not sure why we couldn't have just kept the audio engineer present for the actual discussion. Later on Dawkins proceeded to walk through the line at the cafeteria backwards, but everyone seemed cordial enough regardless. That one dude pushing himself in Dawkins' face monopolizing all his time was obnoxious.
That whole program really jumped the shark when they later invited Fonzie to come talk about his children's book.
didn't lunch with him, unfortunately
C.f. the famous quote attributed to Einstein "If you can't explain it to a six-year-old, you don't understand it yourself.". (Does anyone know if he actually said anything like that?)
In terms of learning I can’t read a book and remember it all. I would need to apply it.
What he meant: well, he's dead now, isn't he?
If I can sum up in a very simple way, as a philosopher he was pointing to a simple but hard to grasp idea:
Consciousness probably isn't what we think it is. Most of our preconceptions about it are likely wrong. Because we're right in it all the time, it seems like we 'know' things about it. But we don't. Quick example: our visual consciousness seems continuous. But we know from saccades that it can't be.
I really like your summary of some of his ideas, though.
Each neuron is itself a complex organism. They're unicellular, but each is still a robust lifeform.
The point is that our intuition (for centuries!) about what visual conscious experience is driven by is wrong. You've summarized what we know now succinctly and usefully, but that in no way invalidates the point the comment was making.
I looked up what he said about p-zombies on the p-zombies wiki and am happy to see he has a position I agree with.
>Dennett argues that "when philosophers claim that zombies are conceivable, they invariably underestimate the task of conception (or imagination), and end up imagining something that violates their own definition".
This is nonsense. Consciousness is exactly what it is. The only real that ever existed is the fact there's there there. Everything else can be an illusion, as you said. There's no reason why red appears they way it is.
But the fact that i can seem to experience red cannot be denied. The seeming cannot be a mistake.
The experience of consciousness, or that it’s like something to be you, doesn’t necessarily mean anything about how or why that’s possible or occurring in the first place.
What you cannot deny is the fact there's something at all. You cannot doubt that there's something. If you doubt that, there's a contradiction. Not what is that something, but simply the fact that _there is_ something.
So the fact there's something is something that has to be true. The question "I doubt there's something in this universe" doesn't make sense.
Yours sounds more like, “something seeming therefore something seeming”.
He spoke at my college once, and came off as nuanced and considerate. I think I disagree with him about consciousness, but I'm not informed enough to know for sure. What's clear is that he was a constructive part of the conversation in his field.
There’s no one Islam, so it depends on which Muslims you’re talking to.
There was no one Christianity either, but the question is, was it rational at the time to be cautious of any Christians if you didn't know their affiliations or religious zeal? It seems to me that charges of Islamaphobia are a convenience afforded only to those safe in developed countries far from the realities of life in Muslim theocracies.
You are correct the Reformation was not an end to violence, it was the start of the process of eliminating systematic violence at the behest of religious ideology. It's an ongoing process in all such religions, but it's not Islamaphobic to note that Islam is far behind the curve on this. I think Harris would agree that we shouldn't judge individuals based solely on their religious affiliation (and hence, don't stoke fear of Muslims), but to ignore the realities of Muslim theocracies is naive.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aYzFH8xqhns&t=2273s
Please excuse my probably oversimplified understanding of the debate as someone who hasn’t read most of the arguments yet.
but you have not made a case that talking about free will requires talking about morality
[1]: https://www.amazon.ca/Consciousness-Explained-Daniel-C-Denne...
Also https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IZefk4gzQt4 - From Bacteria to Bach and Back
Apt for today's world.
Could listen to him all day.
http://archive.today/kHPfz
Daniel Dennett was an important philosopher of mind, whose Wikipedia page is here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Dennett
When I studied philosophy in college (2002-2006), his ideas were among the most discussed and debated at NYU's philosophy department. I always enjoyed his thoughts and writings, even if I often didn't agree with them. RIP.
His only weakness was occasionally indulging in speculation himself (like his Multiple Drafts) - he was better at eliminating speculation rather than offering it, regarding consciousness at least.
I highly recommend his talks on Closer To Truth (on YouTube) and all those videos actually.
He is often described that way, and even used the term himself sometimes, but he was not (and was careful to say that he was not) an eliminativist about everything. For example, he was not an eliminitavist about consciousness or free will. He believed those things are real--they just aren't like what many people think they are like; they don't have the properties that many people think they have.
With regard to consciousness and free will, Dennett was a physicalist: he believed consciousness and free will are physical processes that obey physical laws. That does place limitations on what consciousness and free will can do, and I think an unwillingness to accept those limitations, to accept that those limited concepts of consciousness and free will are the only ones we can actually have, drove a lot of the opposition to Dennett, though his opponents did not explicitly admit it.
Feel like he is though, second only to maybe Michael Shermer, or AI investors (zing!) The definition:
> Eliminative materialism is a materialist position in the philosophy of mind. It is the idea that the majority of mental states in folk psychology do not exist.
There's no way I'll find the video, but he said at one point in some interview almost exactly this: That most of the mental states we think we have don't really exist. I think it's also in his book Consciousness Explained (1991), but I didn't read it so can't be sure.
I always thought this is what upset people so much about Dennett - the apparent total denial of experience.
Yet this is an incredibly slippery slope! Anyone familiar with Chalmers' Hard Problem should intuit that there are "primitives" of experience that when put together make up the total experience. I agree that the Hard Problem is an accurate assessment of the issue, but given this "primitives" concept I agree with eliminativism in that "most" of the mental states we believe we have never existed, we were somehow "filled in".
I'll namedrop 3 more philosophers: John Searle (Berkeley), Donald Hoffman (Irvine), Colin McGinn (London, Oxford) - all of whom have excellent content on YouTube that will blow your mind, and these are maybe the best I've heard from on the subject.
I can't speak about whatever interview you saw, but in the book Consciousness Explained he does not say what you are describing. He says the same thing he says in one of his papers, I think it's "Real Patterns", which appeared in one of his later collections: Real consciousness does exist, but it is not like what many people think it is like. It does not have all of the properties that many people think it has. He does say that things with those properties don't exist--because nothing with those properties can exist. But he does not say that consciousness does not exist--just that it doesn't have those properties.
> the apparent total denial of experience
He doesn't say this either, although many of his opponents misdescribe him as saying that--because they cannot understand what he is actually saying. The only concept of consciousness they can grasp is the magical concept they have in their heads--I call it "magical" because it cannot exist if consciousness is a physical process working according to physical laws. And the latter kind of consciousness, the physicalist kind, is the kind Dennett describes and the kind he believed existed. So for opponents of his who can't even grasp that there is such a concept of consciousness, the only way they could interpret what Dennett was saying was that he was denying that consciousness existed.
But that is a gross misrepresentation of his views: he was not saying that people don't have experiences or thoughts. He was just saying that those real things, when you actually do the hard work of figuring out how they work in accordance with physical laws, turn out not to have some of the properties that people thought they had before that hard work was done. This is no different from any other concept once we try to build an actual scientific understanding of it.
> John Searle
Whose Chinese Room thought experiment was debunked in The Mind's I (though that's hardly the only rebuttal that has been published), and I suspect that chapter in the book was written largely by Dennett, since he published other similar rebuttals later on.
Starting to think you don't know Dennett, this is what he was all about haha.
> John Searle debunked
You're starting to reveal your lack of experience here. It's not something that can be debunked, it's just an observation and one that is widely considered foundational :)
Not only that, but that's like from his youth, he's done a lot more interesting stuff since Chinese Room - this seems like you just quickly googled.
I wish this was a better conversation, brush up!
Starting to think you haven't read very much of him, or haven't bothered to actually engage with what you've read.
> You're starting to reveal your lack of experience here. It's not something that can be debunked
Tell that to all the people who have written articles debunking it.
> I wish this was a better conversation, brush up!
I'm having the same thought about you. So I doubt we're going to make much progress.
I don't even agree with Dennett, just pointing out what his stance is in response to your weird attack. A stance that everyone knows except you apparently, didn't even know it was argued. He is eliminative of consciousness, and is basically famous as a philosopher for it, second to the religious stuff.
That's obvious. But I do.
However, it's also obvious that the Dennett I agree with is not the Dennett that you disagree with. And what's more, it's obvious that we're not going to resolve that here. We agree he's a famous philosopher. That's enough for here.
- "There is no reality of consciousness independent of the effects of various vehicles of content on subsequent action (and hence, of course, on memory)." - from Consciousness Explained, page 132.
On page 113 he says:
- "Unlike mental states taxonomized folk psychologically, "content-fixations" are each precisely locatable in both space and time".
^ he is saying mental states are not locatable in space and time.
Page 138:
- "There are no fixed facts about the stream of consciousness independent of particular probes"
An interview:
- "The reason [consciousness] is so puzzling is that people think they ought to be able to study it from the inside, using pure phenomenology, those give you hints but they are illusory. That's not what's really going on."
Source for this interview (New Scientist): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wm8M_xQrgCk
From David Rosenthal's Content, Interpretation, and Consciouness:
- "There is good reason, in any case, to construe Dennett's pandemonium model as positing only subpersonal events of content fixation, rather than full-fledged intentional states. Thus he writes:
"We replace the division into discrete contentful states-beliefs, meta-beliefs, and so forthwith a process that serves, over time, to ensure a good fit between an entity's internal information-bearing events and the entity's capacity to express (some of) the information in those events in speech. [10]
10: Dennett speaks throughout Consciousness Explained of such nonconscious, subpersonal events
Wikipedia on Multiple Drafts:
- "Dennett argues that [consciousness theories] share a common error in supposing that there is a special time and place where unconscious processing becomes consciously experienced, entering into what Dennett calls the "Cartesian theatre".
A couple more Dennett quotes:
- "There does not exist ... a process such as 'recruitment of consciousness' (into what?), nor any place where the 'vehicle's arrival' is recognized (by whom?)"
- "the Multiple Drafts model goes on to claim that the brain does not bother 'constructing' any representations..."
I could go on forever because this was his main jam. I find it hilarious this pdonis person has such a high karma/score/whatever on this site after such awful takes.
I won't even get into Searle who pdonis just Googled for the first time, bringing up Chinese Room (1980) as if it's a scientific theory. What a joke, I wish he could be downvoted.
Quoting Dennett out of context is the go-to move for people who can't be bothered to actually engage with what he's actually saying. I've read all of his books on consciousness, going all the way back to Content and Consciousness, published in, IIRC, 1969. And I've also read enough of his critics to understand the games they play. Sorry, not buying it.
> Wikipedia
So you consider Wikipedia to be a reliable source about a complex topic. It is to laugh.
The footnote is not from Wikipedia, but from the book I cited: https://davidrosenthal.org/DR-chapter-12.pdf
Have any other false assumptions?
The fact you think Dennett is not eliminative about consciousness is all I need to know.
Sure, read and quote him out of context all you want. Still not buying it.
> that which you have no experience
Nonsense. I've already told you my experience.
> The fact you think Dennett is not eliminative about consciousness is all I need to know.
And the fact that you think he is is all I need to know. We're not going to resolve that here. Nor am I trying to; I'm not trying to convince you. I'm just putting on record my disagreement with your wrong and uncharitable description of one of the central areas of Dennett's work--one which unfortunately is made by many of his critics. They don't know what they are talking about and neither do you.
But I can still disagree - I disagree with Dennett on is his dismissal of mental states and experience. Before you deny this again, here's direct evidence:
Interviewer: "This is the difference between having a phenomenal quality of blue instantiated in my brain and having the quality of blue represented by my brain"
Dennett: "The latter exists and the former doesn't"
Timestamp linked: https://youtu.be/eSaEjLZIDqc?feature=shared&t=763
https://tufts.app.box.com/s/7vo5d1wo8ur7f1wxoipeffok5as7kgmj
Note in particular item (ii) on p. 2, which speaks directly to the distinction drawn in the video. And note that Dennett has no problem at all in the article with referring to "experiences" as real things, for example in item (iii) on p. 2:
"All the comprehension, appreciation, delight, revulsion, recognition, amusement, etc. that human beings experience must be somehow composed by the activities of billions of neurons that are myopic in the extreme, cloistered in their networks of interacting brethren, oblivious to the larger perspective they are helping to create."
He does not say that all those experiences aren't real--indeed they must be real in order to be "composed by the activities of billions of neurons".
Note also this comment on p. 1, describing a position with which Dennett did not agree:
"The hard problem, they surmised, will only be addressed by a return to some form of dualism, or panpsychism, or some yet to be articulated overthrow of what might be considered normal science."
This is the kind of viewpoint I was referring to by the word "magic" in my previous response.
Btw, I found the above article on this page which gives a fairly comprehensive list of Dennett's published papers and articles:
https://sites.tufts.edu/cogstud/dan-dennett-recent-work/
Yes he does, and has said it a lot, it's one of the main things he's known for, second to atheism. In the video I linked he literally says phenomenal states "don't exist". I've also seen numerous other interviews where he's said that. You're the only person I've ever come across who describes Dennett as someone believing in rich conscious experiences.
> indeed they must be real in order to be "composed by the activities of billions of neurons"
No that's the distinction - he says only the activity of the neurons are real that there is not an additional "mental state" or what he calls "double transduction". He simply dismisses that it happens.
people convince themselves that there is a special sort of late transduction event occurring in the brain, a transduction event which is consciousness -Dennett (https://dl.tufts.edu/downloads/ht24ww75v?filename=v118rs17v....)
More from it:
... He very clearly does not believe in the phenomenon of consciousness. At times he even conflates experience with self/identity (2 different things) at which point people usually ask him to clarify, and often he will confirm his stance by outright denying that mental experience happens. That's Dan Dennett.He should have loved panpsychism, since it would coincide with his idea that there is no second transduction - that there's not a fundamental difference between the conscious and the unconscious - however, because he is an eliminative materialist he sticks with physicalism.
I'm sorry, but I strongly disagree. You are reading things into his writing that he is not saying.
> he says only the activity of the neurons are real
No, he says that the activity of the neurons is your conscious experience--that the real conscious experience you have is the activity of the neurons--or, if you like, the conscious experience is "made of" the activity of neurons. That's not the same thing as saying your conscious experience isn't real. It's just saying your conscious experience is not "made of" what many people think it's made of. It's not made of magic "consciousness stuff" or "mind stuff" or "soul stuff".
> that there is not an additional "mental state" or what he calls "double transduction". He simply dismisses that it happens
No, he looks at the actual evidence from cognitive science about what actually goes on in the brain, and concludes from that evidence that there is no such "double transduction"--because there is no evidence for any such thing. In other words, "double transduction" is a testable hypothesis about how our minds work, and we've tested it, and found it to be false.
> He very clearly does not believe in the phenomenon of consciousness.
Nonsense. I gave an explicit quote from a paper of his that describes various kinds of conscious experience. He believed all those things were real. What he didn't believe is that they were magic.
> He should have loved panpsychism
No, he shouldn't have, because he is, as you say, a physicalist.
> he is an eliminative materialist he sticks with physicalism.
Physicalism is not the same thing as "eliminative materialism" about everything. You are simply misrepresenting Dennett's actual position.
At this point I am wondering whether you are a physicalist or not. If you are, you should be agreeing with Dennett, because his views about consciousness are the only viable option if you are a physicalist.
If you are not a physicalist, on the other hand, then of course you will disagree with Dennett, but you should be clear about what you are disagreeing with him about. You are not disagreeing with him about whether consciousness exists. You are disagreeing with him about what kind of thing consciousness is. His position was that consciousness, really existing consciousness, is a physical process that goes on in (at least) human brains. Your position, if you are not a physicalist, is that consciousness, really existing consciousness, is some kind of non-physical thing. But his critics were simply unwilling (or perhaps unable) to frame their disagreement in these simple terms, so instead they misrepresented his position.
I linked a video where he says it in full HD with audio: "The latter exists and the former doesn't" - did you watch it?
Not like it's the only time he's said it either, the downplaying of consciousness and the denial of a rich inner experience are things Dennett is known for.
> he says that the activity of the neurons is your conscious experience
Finally you said something that reflects reality. Yes he does say that. And more than one interviewer (don't make me find them, but I think they are Louis Godbout and Robert Lawrence Kuhn, or maybe Donald Hoffman) have asked for clarification in asking something like:
But the activity of the neurons are not identical with the redness of red, the aroma of coffee, the taste of chocolate, the blueness of the door in Godbout's example. The activity of the neurons are the activity of the neurons, little electro-chemical excitations. That's not, for example, the aroma of coffee.
To which Dennett will explain away that experience - it doesn't exist - often conflating raw experience with self/identity (different things) in doing so. It's a kind of rigid, ultra physicalist stance that you apparently really dig, but it's ultimately wrong because as Chalmers says it denies the datum of experience - we know there's an experience happening because we observe it ourselves (even though the self is illusory, the experience isn't). Empiricism means to be based on observational evidence - in this case it's your direct first-person observation or "experience".
I've gotten off track - the reason I'm arguing with you is because you grossly misrepresent the late, great Dan Dennett and I'm trying to figure out A) Why you think this or B) If you're just a hobbyist arguer.
> At this point I am wondering whether you are a physicalist or not. If you are, you should be agreeing with Dennett
It's not that simple.
Chalmers is a particularly ill-chosen example for this, because Chalmers also claims that his zombie twin--an atom-by-atom duplicate of him that is indistinguishable in all its physical properties and actions but lacks consciousness--is a coherent concept. But by his own definition, since Chalmers says his conscious experience is a direct "datum", so would zombie-Chalmers. And since zombie-Chalmers is an atom-by-atom duplicate of Chalmers, on what basis would Chalmers say that he is right when he makes this claim, but somehow zombie-Chalmers is wrong? If physicalism is true, this is simply false reasoning: zombie-Chalmers, since he is physically identical to Chalmers, must also be identical with respect to consciousness. So either Chalmers is simply denying physicalism--he has some mysterious non-physical property, in principle unexplainable in terms of the physical state of him, that zombie-Chalmers lacks--or he is simply failing to think clearly about his own position, and therefore believes that the concept of zombie-Chalmers as he defines it is coherent, when in fact it isn't.
Similar remarks could be made about other concepts that are trotted out by Dennett's critics, such as "qualia", but Chalmers makes the incoherence of such positions particularly obvious.
This isn't quite the right question to get at the issue. Zombie Chalmers is wrong by definition as he's a hypothetical creature defined not to have any conscious experience. Real Chalmers is right iff he has conscious experiences.
I think what you're getting at here is Chalmers' epiphenominalism about consciousness and its possible implications for whether or not Chalmers' belief that he has conscious experiences can be justified according to his own lights. Chalmers is well aware of this issue. It is rather a subtle one, as it is not so obvious on further examination that the belief that one has conscious experiences must necessarily be caused by conscious experiences in order to be justified. Thus, even though zombie Chalmers' belief has the same cause as real Chalmers' belief, it is conceivable that one belief may be justified while the other is not. It all depends on one's theory of justification – and it's probably an understatement to say that there are a lot of those to choose from. There is some summary of Chalmers' and others' takes on this here: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/epiphenomenalism/#SelStu
More broadly, I would say that if you are willing to indulge Dennett in some of his more counterintuitive speculations, you could stand to be a little more generous to Chalmers here, who is certainly no fool.
Only if you accept that Chalmers's definition of Zombie-Chalmers is consistent. But if you are a physicalist, it is not consistent, and any claims based on it are simply invalid. See further comments below.
> Chalmers' epiphenominalism about consciousness
Yes, that's part of the issue, but not the only part. It is true that I personally have never been able to make sense of epiphenomenalism about consciousness: the idea that my consciousness has literally nothing to do with any of my physical behavior (and remember that this doesn't just include easily observable things like the sounds I utter or the movements my body makes, but things like what can be detected in my brain in an fMRI scanner) to me seems daft. Furthermore, it doesn't make sense from an evolutionary perspective: why would organisms evolve consciousness if it had no effect on anything else?
However, over and above all of that, there is the issue that, as i said above, Chalmers's definition of Zombie-Chalmers is simply inconsistent with physicalism. If physicalism is true, then the idea of a physical duplicate of you, who are conscious, that is not conscious is a contradiction in terms. As I said in an earlier post, physically identical necessarily implies identical in everything, including consciousness, if physicalism is true.
> if you are willing to indulge Dennett in some of his more counterintuitive speculations, you could stand to be a little more generous to Chalmers here
Nothing I have said in support of Dennett anywhere in this discussion is "indulging" him in "counterintuitive speculations". I am simply describing the basic implications of Dennett's physicalism about consciousness. For example, I have not said anything about the "Multiple Drafts" model that he propounded in Consciousness Explained, which he himself said was speculation, but I think he expected it to get more traction than it has apparently gotten. I have tried to limit myself to just the basic things that have to be the case if physicalism is true at all.
My point regarding Dennett is that his overall picture of consciousness also contains highly counterintuitive elements (such as e.g. his denial of any form of privileged access [1], which is not just an ad-hoc speculation tacked on to his main theory but a necessary consequence of it). I agree that Chalmers' epiphenominalism is counterintuitive too. I don't think anyone has succeeded in arriving at an overall philosophical account of consciousness that is entirely satisfying and free of implausible or counterintuitive elements. I think it's important to have a certain amount of empathy here and understand that people genuinely differ in their plausibility judgments in this domain. For example, I personally find epiphenomenalism, though implausible, to be less implausible than the denial of privileged access; I suspect you have the inverse judgment. It is unclear how to weigh these sorts of considerations against each other.
[1] > I see no other way to force this issue into the open than to defend an admittedly counterintuitive theory and await enlightenment on what, exactly, I have left out. The view that I wish to defend is that our privileged access extends to no images, sensations, impressions, raw feels, or phenomenal properties at all. There are indeed all sorts of interesting things going on in our heads that have characteristics or play roles that might tempt us to call them images or sensations or impressions, but our access to these events is not only not privileged; it is highly indirect, inferential and uncertain. https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-94-009-9479-9_...
Ok, good, we agree on that.
> his denial of any form of privileged access
Not of any form, no. Dennett was fine with the notion that we have privileged access to what it is like to be us (to use Thomas Nagel's phrase--Dennett's often-used term was "heterophenomenological world"). We have a direct experience of what it is like to be us, and that experience is real. Dennett just insisted that that, in itself, tells us nothing about how accurate our "what it is like to be us" is as a representation of the underlying processes going on in our brains. There are indeed images, sensations, raw feels, phenomenal properties in our "what it is like to be us"--in Dennett's terms, those are indeed intentional objects in our heterophenomenological worlds. But that, in itself, does not mean that, for example, if we say we have a mental image, there must actually be an image somewhere in our brains. There are real underlying processes going on, but we can't infer from our direct experience of having a mental image that any of those underlying processes involve images.
> I think it's important to have a certain amount of empathy here
It's not a matter of empathy; it's a matter of being consistent about the implications of one's views. I'm a physicalist, just as Dennett was. You agree that, for example, Zombie-Chalmers is inconsistent with physicalism. No amount of "empathy" can overcome that contradiction. I have to pick one or the other. I pick physicalism, not because of any lack of "empathy" for Chalmers or anyone else, but because, all things considered, that's what I pick. And having picked physicalism, I have to deny that Zombie-Chalmers is a valid concept, in order to be consistent. Just as Chalmers, to be consistent with his belief that Zombie-Chalmers is a valid concept, has to deny physicalism.
We could have an extended discussion of exactly which aspects of privileged access Dennett denies, but the broader point here is that he himself acknowledges the counterintuitive nature of his position on it.
> [Physicalism] is everybody's default assumption when dealing with anything that matters in practical terms.
No, it isn't. People assume that things which they take to be physical objects (such as cars) will obey physical laws. They can perfectly well do this without the additional assumption that the contents of the universe are exhausted by physical entities. Indeed, when dealing with people (who surely matter in practical terms!) it is probably a minority of the world's population who assume them to be wholly physical. The idea that non-physicalists must be worried about their cars exhibiting ghostly non-physical behavior is just silly. It is like saying that someone who does not believe that everything in the universe is made of wood must be worried that their wooden table might actually be made of chocolate. Believing in the existence of non-wooden things doesn't preclude treating wooden things as instances thereof. Almost everyone believes that there exist wholly physical objects governed wholly by physical laws, even if they don't think that all objects fall under this category.
Oh, I understand that just fine. I just don't agree with non-physicalists.
I could equally well say that non-physicalists who claim that Dennett denied the reality of consciousness do not understand why their implicit assumption that consciousness must be something non-physical is not the non-negotiable ur-assumption for Dennett (and me) that it is for them. They simply fail to understand that physicalists like Dennett and me are not saying that consciousness doesn't exist. We're just saying that it's a physical process. Real consciousness--real feelings of pain, suffering, joy, and everything else that phenomenalists wax poetic about--is a physical process. It is no answer at all to say that, gee, I can't imagine how that could possibly be true, so I'm going to assume you actually mean that all those things don't exist. But that's basically what Dennett's critics have said for decades. You talk about empathy: I think that line of criticism shows an astounding lack of empathy.
> People assume that things which they take to be physical objects (such as cars) will obey physical laws.
No, they don't. Most people have no idea what the actual applicable physical laws are. People assume that things they are familiar with will show the regularities they are familiar with them having. Those regularities, to a physicalist, are all grounded ultimately in underlying physical laws, but the connection is very complex, even for objects much simpler than cars. Scientists still don't completely understand how molecules work in terms of the underlying laws of physics of atoms and elementary particles. That doesn't stop them from being able to build accurate models of molecules using higher-level regularities. The physicalist program for consciousness is simply applying to it the same methods we already apply successfully to all sorts of complex systems.
>No, they don't.
I could have written that sentence more clearly, but I just meant to say that people will assume such objects to obey the typical regularities and constraints exhibited by physical objects (and not expect them to have weird ghostly properties). Which you seem to agree with.
The problem with this, other than the obvious point that "extremely complicated physical processes inside the brains and bodies of humans, which we are only beginning to work out the details of" is very different from "pizza", is that no physical process can possibly have "the properties that we typically associate with consciousness", at least if "we" means Strawson and those who take his side in the debate. The only way for something to exist that has all of the properties that Strawson et al insist on is for that something to be non-physical, to violate physical laws.
Is this non-physicalism logically impossible? Of course not. That's why, as I said, nobody is going to resolve this debate with arguments. But lots of things are logically possible: Russell's teapot, Sagan's undetectable dragon in the garage, etc. That doesn't mean everything that is logically possible should be taken seriously.
The non-physicalist argument for taking them seriously with regard to consciousness boils down to a simple assertion without argument: it is just obvious to them that no amount of physical processes could ever produce the conscious experiences we all have. But this isn't science. It's just throwing up your hands and refusing to look any further. That is what Dennett and those on his side of the debate refuse to accept. There is a lot of science to be done in this area, and only a small part of it has yet been done. Let's do it and see where we end up. Is it logically possible that we will end up just where Strawson et al are now? Yes. But is that the way to bet? Dennett didn't think so, nor do many others, and nor do I. As I've already said, we'll see.
No-one would disagree with this. But you have to actually obtain scientific results before you can use them as the basis of your world view. Dennett has a tendency to gloss over the paucity of scientific results pertaining to consciousness by slipping into "pro science" vs. "anti science" rhetoric – as if to suggest that the science of consciousness would be complete by now if only it wasn't for the evil machinations of the superstitious anti-scientists. Strip away the rhetoric and all you are left with is optimism: Dennett thinks that science will explain consciousness eventually. That's a perfectly fine opinion, but being optimistic about future science is not fundamentally any more scientific or rational than being pessimistic about it.
https://tufts.app.box.com/s/vvlgzbozt821qe9s3l3o8yxxzbr447kv
Of course neither one convinces the other, but I think this article describes the opposing viewpoints pretty well.
Has had plenty of exchanges in the literature with Dennett. I have read most of them. I don't buy his counterarguments, although I admit has does have some good turns of phrase.
And to Dennett (and me), as a physicalist, Chalmers's claim that zombies are a coherent concept is begging the important questions. So if we're going to take that approach, we're just at an unresolvable impasse.
However, physicalism is not just a doctrinaire assumption. It's everybody's default assumption when dealing with anything that matters in practical terms. If Chalmers has a problem with his car, he's going to assume there is some physical reason for it and take it to a mechanic. He's not going to wonder if his car has lost some non-physical essence of carhood and become a zombie car. And cognitive science is taking a similar approach to consciousness, finding physical processes that underlie various conscious activities of people's minds (as well as unconscious ones). Dennett simply said that he expects that that process is sufficient to explain consciousness.
Chalmers disagrees (as do many others), saying that no matter how many discoveries cognitive science makes, it will never fully explain consciousness. In the end, though, neither Chalmers nor Dennett nor any other philosopher is going to resolve that issue just by making arguments. Ultimately it's going to come down to whether, once we have enough cognitive science under our belts, our intuitions about what that science is telling us will change or not. Particularly if, once we have enough cognitive science under our belt, we are able to build robots that are behaviorally indistinguishable from human beings, that tell us they are conscious and describe their conscious experiences the same way humans do. Some like Chalmers (or Searle) might still remain holdouts even then, saying that those robots are actually zombies, unlike us humans (because, in Searle's terms, our human brains have biological "causal powers" that the robots' brains don't), but those claims will seem a lot less plausible in the face of the actual existence of such robots.
Or perhaps it will turn out that we are never able to build such robots, and cognitive science ends up hitting blank walls where it is simply unable to account for some aspects of human consciousness, in which case our intuitions will go the other way, making Chalmers and Searle seem a lot more plausible and Dennett seem a lot less so. We'll see. I know which way I'm betting (and which way Dennett did), but we'll see.
I've already rebutted your claims about this video multiple times. Your response has been to repeat the same assertions without even bothering to address my rebuttals.
> the reason I'm arguing with you is because you grossly misrepresent the late, great Dan Dennett
Apparently we're never going to agree on who is misrepresenting Dennett. But I'm curious: how much Dennett have you actually read?
> I'm trying to figure out A) Why you think this
Because, as I've already told you, I have read every book Dennett ever published on consciousness and free will, and a fair portion of his papers on those topics that never got put into one of his books, and based on all of that reading, I think you are misrepresenting Dennett's position. What's more, the counter arguments I see you giving are the same ones Dennett responded to for several decades. I see nothing new whatever in anything you've posted that would change my mind about who is misrepresenting what.
Then please don't misrepresent what he's actually saying.
In the video you linked to, for example, he is not saying that your conscious experience of looking at the blue door doesn't exist. He's not saying that your mental state when you perceive the blue door doesn't exist. He's saying that what underlies that conscious experience and that mental state is not some magical "phenomenal quality of blue" in your brain but functional processes in your brain that represent blue (and a host of other concepts) in a functional way. In the video he even calls himself a "functionalist" with respect to "mental properties" like blue--those properties are functional properties, not "phenomenal" properties. But functional properties exist, and so do the conscious experiences and mental states they underlie.
Why does Dennett say that "phenomenal properties" don't exist? Because, to put it as briefly as possible, they're magic. Your mention of Christian apologists among his critics is quite apt, because, to a physicalist like Dennett (and like me), the Christian apologist's view of how minds work in general is magic. Why do you experience blue? Because God endowed you with a magical "mind" and "soul" that experiences blue--blue is a "phenomenal property" of your mind/soul. Whereas Dennett, as a physicalist, spent his career talking to experimentalists in cognitive science who were actually figuring out the physical processes that go on inside brains when people are experiencing blue (or anything else), and explaining them in functional terms.
If you go back to Dennett's earlier work in the late 1960s and 1970s, you find that he actually tried to use terms like "phenomenal qualities" (and "qualia", another term that pops up a lot in his writings) to mean functional properties--i.e., he tried to say something like: yes, "phenomenal qualities" exist, but they're functional properties, they're not magical. But he found that whenever he tried to do this, people would object: they would read his description of what functional properties are and say, No! That's not what "phenomenal properties" and "qualia" are! And they would go on to list properties that, to them, "phenomenal properties" and "qualia" must have--and they were properties that no physical process, no non-magical entity, could possibly have. So eventually Dennett decided that it was pointless to try to convince people to use terms like "phenomenal properties" and "qualia" to mean functional properties--they just wouldn't accept that. And that is what led him to take the line he took in his more recent work, and in the video you referenced, where he just says point blank that "phenomenal properties" and "qualia" don't exist--by which he means what I have just described, that no physical process, no non-magical entity, could possibly have the properties that proponents of "phenomenal properties" and "qualia" insist that those things must have. But that doesn't mean conscious experiences and mental states don't exist; it just means they are "made of" functional properties of brains, not "phenomenal properties" or "qualia".
In short, Dennett decided that the best place for him to draw a line in the sand was not at the meaning of terms like "phenomenal properties" and "qualia"--he found no useful alternative to simply letting proponents of those terms define what they mean and accepting their definitions, however useles he found them. He decided that the place to draw the line in the sand was at the claim that "phenomenal properties" and "qualia" are what underlie our conscious experiences and our mental states: no, he said, that's not what underlies them. Our conscious experiences and our mental states are not magic. What underlies them is functional processes in our brains. Those processes, and the conscious experiences and mental states they underlie, are perfectly real. They just aren't "phenomenal properties" or "qualia" as proponents of those terms insist on defining them.
Dennett: "The latter exists and the former doesn't"
Has nothing to do with God or theism - you can be an atheist like myself and still recognize that we see things in the way a camera doesn't, that there's a difference between unconscious detection and conscious experience - and importantly that we don't know what it is. Doesn't have to be God or magic. As Searle says, "it's a biological phenomenon", we just haven't solved it.
And as Chalmers says, "To deny that we have an experience is to ignore the datum of consciousness".
Anyway the larger point is that Dennett was definitely eliminative of consciousness, not sure why you argue that so passionately when it's what he's known for and he's happy to admit it and argue for it.
Your last few sentences... he never said they are "perfectly real" and he said the opposite several times.
Which tells you nothing about the actual question at issue--whether or not Dennett was denying that we have conscious experiences--unless you know what "phenomenal qualities" meant to Dennett. You are assuming, based on nothing, that it must have meant "conscious experiences". But anyone who has read Dennett in context, or even viewed that statement in the video in context (where, as I have already said, Dennett called himself a "functionalist" about mental states and properties), knows that "phenomenal qualities" to Dennett did not mean "conscious experiences". It meant "magical properties that some people claim are necessary in order to have conscious experience, but which actual cognitive science research has shown are not". So when Dennett said that "phenomenal qualities" don't exist, he was only saying that those magical properties don't exist; he wasn't saying that conscious experiences don't exist.
Very likely the mainstream philosophical meaning of phenomenal which is relating to subjective experience.
> phenomenal doesn't mean conscious
It essentially does yes - why do you think Dennett would be interpreting it differently in this case?
I'm not even going to comment on your "magical properties" aspects - many problems.
Again, if you had read Dennett's work in detail, you would know that in this particular area of philosophy, "phenomenal qualities" has a particular meaning, and it's not just "conscious experience"--it's a particular assertion about how conscious experience works. And one that cognitive science has shown to be false.
> > phenomenal doesn't mean conscious
You're not quoting anything I actually said in my post, so I have no idea what you think you're responding to here.
https://tufts.app.box.com/s/vvlgzbozt821qe9s3l3o8yxxzbr447kv
"I don’t deny the existence of consciousness; of course, consciousness exists; it just isn’t what most people think it is, as I have said many times. I do grant that Strawson expresses quite vividly a widespread conviction about what consciousness is. Might people—and Strawson, in particular—be wrong about this? That is the issue."
I think it's in the it just isn’t what most people think it is which we've already been more specific about in other comments, is where we'll find those details that can say whether or not Dennett can be classified as an eliminative materialist.
Of course the answer is in those details--which I've read and which I've described small portions of, as you say, in other comments--but it's not the answer to the question you give. Dennett cannot be classified as an "eliminative materialist" about everything. That's a gross oversimplification. A better description is that he was a functionalist about some things (and one of those things is conscious experience), and an eliminative materialist about others.
There are even in-between things about which he was what one might call a "metaphorical functionalist"--for example, "mental images". Yes, we have the experience of having mental images and doing various things with them mentally, but when you dig down into the details of what is actually going on in our brains, the best correlates we can find for such experiences are only "images" in a metaphorical sense. So when people talk about their mental images and what they do with them mentally, while we can grant that they are describing their real conscious experiences, those conscious experiences are not authoritative about what is actually going on in their brains.
That last sentence, in fact, illustrates the kind of confusion Dennett's critics have about what he is actually saying. When he says things like the last sentence--that people's conscious experiences are not authoritative about what is actually going on in their brains--his critics claim he's saying that there aren't any conscious experiences at all. That is because his critics have an unstated assumption that our conscious experiences are authoritative about what is going on in our brains--that if we say we experience having a mental image, there must be an actual image somewhere in our brains, not just a metaphorical one. If we say we experience seeing blue, there must be an actual blue quale somewhere in our brains. And so on. But cognitive science, in many cases, offers no support whatever for such claims, and so in general we cannot take our conscious experiences to be authoritative about what is going on in our brains. We have to do the hard scientific work to check whether that is actually true in each case.
Sure--but what kind of difference is it? Is it a binary, yes/no, all or nothing difference? Or is it a difference of degree? Is it a magical little light that goes on inside some entities but not others? Or is it a physical process that can occur in varying degrees?
Denett believed it was the latter--on the basis of spending decades looking at actual research in cognitive science. Searle and Chalmers, among others, believe it's the former--on the basis of nothing except their bare assertion.
> we don't know what it is.
I understand why people like Searle and Chalmers take this position--because they simply haven't bothered to look at all the research that has been done to investigate what consciousness is and how it works, by looking at the underlying neural mechanisms. It's easy to believe we know nothing about a topic when you haven't actually looked at what we know. Dennett spent his career looking at such research and building his views on it, so he understood that, while we don't know everything about what consciousness is, we do know a lot of things about it.
> As Searle says, "it's a biological phenomenon"
Which, according to Searle, is some kind of magical "causal powers" that human brains have. Which he can't describe at all, can't say anything about, except that bare assertion. Which, as above, ignores all the things we do know about how brains work and how they do various things.
> as Chalmers says, "To deny that we have an experience is to ignore the datum of consciousness".
And in saying that he misrepresented Dennett's position, because Dennett never denied that we have experiences. He just didn't think they are magic. Searle's and Chalmers's positions, when you boil them down to their essence, are basically that consciousness is magic (but they use words like "causal powers" and "datum" to obfuscate what they are actually saying).
> not sure why you argue that so passionately
Because, as I've said multiple times now, you are misrepresenting Dennett's actual position. And the people you reference, Searle and Chalmers, did the same thing. And since Dennett is no longer around to defend himself against such misrepresentation, those of us who agree with him about these points need to do it.
> Is it a magical little light that goes on inside some entities but not others?
Instead of magic, just say "consciousness", and let's identify it as things like: The aroma of coffee, the taste of chocolate, the sound of a drop of water, the feeling of warmth on your arm... those sensations are not nerve cells. Nerve cells are nerve cells. As you already know nerve cells are tiny biological structures that can pass on or mitigate electrical transmission in the body like in muscles and the brain. That's what a nerve cell is. None of that electrochemistry in a nerve cell is the aroma of coffee.
> Searle and Chalmers, among others, believe it's the former
Searle doesn't, and has said many times "it's a biological phenomenon". Chalmers went off the deep end with panpsychism - but since neither Chalmers or Dennett can tell the difference between conscious/unconscious I guess they ended up in mostly the same boat, didn't they?
> Searle hasn't bothered to look at the research > according to Searle, is some kind of magical "causal powers"
Just a joke, worth a call out that you think this of Searle, but not worth a response
I mean bad take after bad take, it's too bad you don't brush up on this stuff, you seem interested in it.
> Dennett never denied that we have experiences. He just didn't think they are magic.
Nobody said it's magic, Searle specifically said it's not magic, and that it's a biological phenomenon (see his TED talk "I move my arm and the damn thing goes up" - that one).
Of course not. Your voice is not vocal cords, but it is produced by them. Similarly, consciousness is not nerve cells, but it is produced by them. At least, that's what a physicalist like Dennett or myself says. Either you agree with that or you're not a physicalist. I don't really care at this point which it is, but I'm curious why you haven't said which.
> "it's a biological phenomenon"
Which is just a cop-out. It's the same as saying it's magic. Sure, it's a true statement in the sense that conscious beings, or at least all the ones we currently know about, are biological beings. But it tells us nothing at all useful about how consciousness works or how biological beings can have it.
> I move my arm and the damn thing goes up
Ok, but how does this happen? That's the important question. Dennett spent his career working on it. Searle, as far as I can see, has spent zero time working on it.
As far as the bare statement itself, Dennett has never denied it, and it's perfectly consistent with physicalism and with everything Dennett says about consciousness. So I have no idea why Searle thinks it's some sort of knock-down refutation of anything.
I strongly disagree, but I doubt we'll resolve that here.
> his appeal as a philosopher has always been a mystery to me.
Not to me, but again, we won't resolve that here. We agree that he was important and influential, and that's what matters for this discussion in his memory.
However, Professor Dennett's comments on twitter as linked by dmd apply to both Dennett and Pinker: One of Mr Epstein's occupations was basically getting close to many of the great and the good. Mr Epstein was skilled at it, and having large amounts of money to donate helped some. The bar for "involved" has to be higher than that.
https://slate.com/technology/2019/08/jeffrey-epstein-science...
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/aug/18/private-jets...
I think the only connection here is with Brockman, however, Brockman represented a lot of successful science writers, including in addition to Dennet, Pinker and Dawkins: Jared Diamond, Daniel Kahneman, David Gelernter, Brian Greene, Marc Hauser, Alan Guth, Jordan Pollack, Jaron Lanier, Lee Smolin, Martin Rees, Craig Venter, John Maddox, Chris Anderson, and Rupert Sheldrake.
Could you expand on this? I've googled around and can only find two supporting bits of info:
Neither of these make him an "active eugenicist" imo!In the first quote he's promoting eugenics as effective, in the second he's recommending it as a concrete action.
He's a noted public figure with some degree of scientific authority in the public perception and he's using that platform to advocate for eugenics.
What else are you looking for? This is actively practicing eugenics he doesn't need to literally be the one holding the syringe.
He's just saying it's possible. That's not the same as promoting or advocating it. He explicitly says that he deplores it!
> in the second he's recommending it as a concrete action
He's recommending an individual action but leaving it to individual choice. That's different to recommending a broad, enforced, population-wide eugenics policy.
The second quote is a recommendation the same way as governments “recommended” the poor, the disabled, and the indigenous, to use birth control. These “recommendations” were always secret policies.
That's entirely your extrapolation. One can advocate for the "breeding out" of hereditary genetic diseases. Not that I would. But such a thing is certainly in the realms of possibility.
> The second quote is a recommendation the same way as governments “recommended” the poor, the disabled, and the indigenous, to use birth control.
Governments may have had such policies in the past to reduce certain populations. But Downs isn't a hereditary disease and is just as likely for "upper class white" people as the categories you mention. Such abortions would not have any measurable genetic effect on the population. He's only saying that he thinks bringing the child into the world would cause more suffering than it's worth. I'm not sure I agree 100% but I certainly sympathise. As recent parents, my partner and I had to have the discussion about what we'd do if the 20-week genetic screening revealed something like Downs. To be frank, we probably wouldn't have gone ahead with it. Many, many other parents would make that choice in that situation.
> Given a free choice of having an early abortion or deliberately bringing a Down child into the world, I think the moral and sensible choice would be to abort.
> For what it’s worth, my own choice would be to abort the Down fetus and, assuming you want a baby at all, try again.
> Given a free choice of having an early abortion or deliberately bringing a Down child into the world, I think the moral and sensible choice would be to abort.
https://www.standard.co.uk/news/uk/richard-dawkins-i-regret-...
This honestly seems like a reasonable statement to me, although I can understand why some would be upset by it.
Not sure why you mentioned that otherwise.
Recently he even tweeted about the cultural importance of Christianity while continuing to attack Islam. He had been careful about this in the past, claiming to attack all religion equally.
His anti-religious views are at odds with the scientific consensus around culture, which is very ironic coming from the scientist that first described the meme. And the fact that he attacks Muslim culture more then others seems to suggest that he has a problem with Muslim people rather then the Islamic religion.
1: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/aug/08/richar...
2: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/richard-dawkins-vd...
https://schwitzsplinters.blogspot.com/2022/07/results-comput...
I think so. His views were somewhat rigid and materialist. As a de-fluffer, he's great, and I'm sure he will continue to be quoted especially as we make progress on AI and get into the nuts and bolts of consciousness. In particular which things are extraneous or peripheral to the problem itself.
[0] : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TTFoJQSd48c
I very much enjoyed him in the documentary series "A Glorious Accident", the show featuring him was - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5_bv7rDB5e8
and the show in the series featuring a round table of him, Stephen Jay Gould, Freeman Dyson, Oliver Sacks and him is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RVrnn7QW6Jg
For instance, he cut Chalmers no slack on the incoherency of Philosophical Zombies.
The core argument from Nagel / Chalmers is that that there is a subjective element to consciousness which has no physical explanation. The reasoning for this is always an appeal to intuition. If you accept that there is "something that it is like" to see red, be a bat, etc, and that the "something that it is like" is above and beyond the physical processes of the brain -- the firing of neurons -- then you by definition cannot accept a purely physical explanation of consciousness. Dennett's book argues that this is mystical nonsense (or, charitably, wishful thinking) and the "something that it is like" is simply what happens when particular types of physical processes occur in the brain.
It's no surprise, therefore, that "explained away" is a criticism if you're a nonmaterialist. But if you're a materialist, then "explained away" is actually a good thing and the purpose of the book.
https://youtu.be/RVrnn7QW6Jg?si=jenbni0Rg1dX5fd4
At ~01:50:00, he talks very poignantly about death, the soul, and immortality. Obviously this video is 30 years old now, but I doubt he changed much and it seems his philosophy left him with good tools to handle the specter of death. Godspeed Dennett, the world is in your debt...
Some other, perhaps more lighthearted timestamps:
- @ 01:00:00; A Nagel discussion culminating in “I think we’re making tremendous progress on knowing what it’s like to be a bat!” Truly a Silicon Valley optimist before it was cool.
- at 01:12:00; He tells a fun robotics story to back up his belief in the tractability of neurophilosophy.
- @ 01:40:00; he discusses his general philosophy for the mind and why he thinks our brains can be broken down into a recursive hierarchy of agential machines.
- 00:24:00 is the moment that made me love him. Love to hate him, perhaps! Like a more prestigious, less directly-aggressive Gary Marcus.
It makes me sad that Sheldrake is the last participant standing. Not because I want Sheldrake to die, but rather because it reminds me all those great thinkers are now thinking no more.
I only wish the islamic religion was as tangible to me as its philosophy and sociology but I find it completely inscrutable. I might enjoy its theogony and stories if i spoke arabic.
When I go to a party and people ask me what do I do and I say, "I'm a professor," their eyes glaze over.
When I go to an academic cocktail party and there are all the professors around, they ask me what field I'm in and I say, "philosophy" -- their eyes glaze over.
When I go to a philosopher's party and they ask me what I work on and I say, "consciousness," their eyes don't glaze over -- their lips curl into a snarl.
And I get hoots of derision and cackles and growls because they think, "That's impossible! You can't explain consciousness." The very chutzpah of somebody thinking that you could explain consciousness is just out of the question.
... It's very hard to change people's minds about something like consciousness, and I finally figured out the reason for that. The reason for that is that everybody's an expert on consciousness. ... with regard to consciousness, people seem to think, each of us seems to think, "I am an expert. Simply by being conscious, I know all about this." And so, you tell them your theory and they say, "No, no, that's not the way consciousness is! No, you've got it all wrong." And they say this with an amazing confidence.
And so what I'm going to try to do today is to shake your confidence. Because I know the feeling -- I can feel it myself. I want to shake your confidence that you know your own innermost minds -- that you are, yourselves, authoritative about your own consciousness. That's the order of the day here.
From Daniel Dennett's TED talk, 2003
https://www.ted.com/talks/dan_dennett_the_illusion_of_consci...
We don't 'think' enough as individuals/beings and for that I doth my cap in respect of the work that he did and however it's regarded by 'the mob'!
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Glorious_Accident
https://open.spotify.com/episode/5qNJBiPgkgf29cqpAcPfvf
[0] https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/04/philosopher-daniel-d...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nGrRf1wD320
I'm sure he was a busy person, and didn't have any obligation to respond to me, at all. It touched me deeply. What a generous and gracious soul he was.
I mean these words in a non-supernatural way, of course. :-D A toast to Mr. Dennett's wonderful memory.
He will be missed by me.
Personally, I think starting with things are known to exist, which have a physical basis, is a great start, and untestable assumptions should be kept to a minimum. Just because it would be delightful to contemplate that ornately feathered technicolor quantum unicorns are actually underlying all of reality, it isn't productive to consider until there is a reason to.
Penrose is no doubt a genius of high order in his domain, but consciousness is not one of his domains. Saying consciousness is the result of quantum effects in microtubules explains nothing -- it is just a very tiny rug which one could imagine is hiding the truth, as all the larger scale hiding places have been inspected and found lacking.
You'd think that with the stunning (and mostly unexpected) success of LLMs would expose the fact that simple, soul-free, mechanistic computations can produce some really amazing capabilities. The human brain is orders of magnitude larger than GPT4, plus it has a wildly more complex architecture than today's neural networks. To me, it takes little imagination to see how everything could be explained in purely physical terms.
Your point about starting with physical things is questionable, as highlighted by prominent figures like Penrose and Donald Hoffman. The fundamentalism of materialism is an axiom that lacks proof.
Perhaps to you 'saying consciousness is the result of quantum effects in microtubules explains nothing', but so does Dennett's saying 'consciousness is an illusion', which equals 'I'm not sure what it is, but I will dismiss it because I would rather ridicule the unknown than accept my ignorance.'
At least Penrose denies what is deniable to open the door for a broader perspective, something that Dennett failed at.
I bet you think an LLM can experience what the color red feels like, or it can feel the scent of a rose, if it's fed enough 1/0's about it.
It also doesn't conflict with physicalism. I think he's trying to argue that consciousness would need more than you can do with a classical computer, but it doesn't seem to imply that. Classical computers are made of hardware components that rely on quantum effects to work, but that doesn't make them "quantum computers".
All the same, I don't think there is special quantum magic above and beyond the "ordinary" quantum phenomena needed to explain our brains.
But it doesn't seem like human brains are doing Shor's algorithm.
Why this, and not simply an urge to understand things?
Coming up with theories to explain the inexplicable is literally science.
Also, suggesting that Dennet's philosophy stems from a "challenging childhood" is argument ad hominem, because it focuses on the person, rather than on the content of the philosophy.
To continue the discussion in the same tone that you began it, perhaps you don't see eye to eye with him because he challenges your beliefs.
<https://hn.algolia.com/?q=%22has+died%22>
My (now) wife and I went to see him speak in June 2012 in King's College Cambridge, on the event of Alan Turing's 100th birthday: https://philevents.org/event/show/2205
I don't remember all the details, but I think he spoke about Turing's ideas about evolution and computers. It might be similar to this article from roughly the same time (though paywalled): https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/06/-a-pe...
The only other talk I remember going to was Simon Singh (author of Fermat's Last Theorem) giving a great presentation on (and demonstration of!) the Enigma machine.
Paywall: <https://archive.is/EIsGd>
I don't recall how far he took it, but for me determinism is very helpful (if not required) for predictability, and predictability required for meaningful Free Will. So I'll have to go watch the debate, but my bet is that Dennett was willfully (pun intended) refusing to accept the other-definition of Free Will in favor of his own. I'll report back after I listen to the debate :)
This was disappointing:
> When the American Humanist Association revoked a lifetime achievement award it once gave to Richard Dawkins on account of his anti-trans tweets, Dennett was firmly on Dawkins’ side. He also passively promoted an embarrassing article written by the head of the Center For Inquiry, claiming identity politics and cancel culture had “torn apart” the Humanist movement… mostly because people were criticizing Dawkins for perpetuating anti-trans talking points.
https://www.friendlyatheist.com/p/what-ill-remember-about-da...
It's odd how so many so-called atheists ended up latching onto that cultish nonsense. Dawkins stands amongst the few who have cast a suitably critical eye over this "gender identity" belief system.