Has there been progress in philosophy? | Hacker News Reader

Has there been progress in philosophy?

marginalrevolution.com

159 pointsmathattack247 comments

I argue that we live in an anti-philosophy era. I'm not sure this will change in our lifetimes, but I think it will necessarily change if we survive for long enough.

To illustrate: there is common belief that metaphysics became irrelevant -- that it was replaced by science. This is, in itself, a metaphysical position, and a misunderstand about what science is and does. Of course, reasoning about what science is and does is part of philosophy. So is the discussion of knowledge itself, what is knowable and how can we trust the various methods of seeking more knowledge. A lot of stuff surrounding these topics happened in the XX century.

The acritical use of the yardstick of "progress" as the ultimate value for everything (along with its little cousin: "productivity") is, in itself, a philosophical position. One that is currently maintained by social norms and authority. Which does not mean it is "wrong". I am only claiming that it is accepted by most people without any reflection.

Some boundaries of scientific knowledge are quite visible. For example, consciousness. You might argue that consciousness emerges from matter interacting in a complex way (emergentism), and you might be right, but this is accepted as a serious scientific theory although it has zero content -- no way to falsify empirically, no explanatory mechanism proposed.

Real philosophy is a very subversive endeavor at the moment. Perhaps it always was. It's something for those who love knowledge, but not for those who expect any public recognition.

> reasoning about what science is and does is part of philosophy

Only if you approach Philosophy with a lot more rigor and math than what people have historically done. The useful parts of discussing what you call the 'philosophy of science' involves quite a bit of statistics for example.

What people call useless is cruft dealing with Known Unknowable's which suck up time without getting anywhere.

IMO, it's not that Philosophy is dead, it's just when you keep calling the useful bit's something else eventually people don't care about the leftovers.

> Only if you approach Philosophy with a lot more rigor and math than what people have historically done. The useful parts of discussing what you call the 'philosophy of science' involves quite a bit of statistics for example.

I disagree. For example, Karl Popper's positions on the philosophy of science became the current mainstream view. His positions are not based on statistics, but on good-old-fashioned qualitative reasoning. I know many scientists who mention Popper by name when discussing such matters. Carl Sagan also helped popularize it in his book "Demon-Haunted World", with his "invisible dragon in the garage" story.

The ability to do statistics at incredible scales (currently known as Machine Learning) raises further questions about what science should be. Questions about such quantitative methods themselves. Rigor does not have to be quantitative in nature -- and let's not forget that the very idea of quantitative science was introduced by Descartes, another famous philosopher.

> What people call useless is cruft dealing with Known Unknowable's which suck up time without getting anywhere.

Depends on where you want to get. Noncommunicable knowledge is a very interesting topic, for those with the inclination. It is ok if you are not curious about such things, but I would argue that it is also ok to be. It deeply intersects mathematical logic (e.g. Gödel) and theoretical computer science (e.g. the halting problem). Will it help us create better gadgets? Probably not? Will it help us better understand the human condition? Probably yes.

Gödel is vast overkill. The list of things you can't compute with small finite amounts of processing power is vastly longer than the list of things you can't compute with infinite processing power.

AKA, Gödel is true but irreverent because it's not on the border of anything decidable. If you say the bonds are between 9^9 and 9↑↑↑↑9 that's just not useful.

The general idea that certain statistical problems are intractible is fair though.

But we don't exactly discourage the idea that we will solve, say, nutrition some day.

>"Gödel is true but irreverent"

quite sure "irrelevant" is the intended word here. :)

I don't know where the idea that philsophy doesn't involve rigor and maths comes from. Leibniz came up with the entscheidung's problem, for god's sake! If you take the most basic interest in logic, maths, or even computers, you can't swing a cat without hitting a philosopher.

I am referring to computation, not abstractions. What's the trade-off between X and Y is the kind of place where having some specific numbers is very helpful.

EX: At what point if any can you say testing theories on public data produces more value than noise.

I'm having trouble seeing how any of that relates to your original comment or the responses to it. You said "[reasoning about what science is and does is part of philosophy] only if you approach Philosophy with a lot more rigor and math than what people have historically done." That comes across as a broad comment about levels of rigor in philosophy, not a comment on the usefulness of quantitative data in making trade-offs.

"reasoning about what science is and does is part of philosophy."

I am saying some of that analysis benefits from real hard data. So, if your saying all of that analysis falls under philosophy, then I don't think that's what most people mean when the use the term.

Sure, but philosophers usually do look at hard data where appropriate.

I actually think 'hard data' is typically about as relevant to philosophy as it is to maths. Not everything is reducible to stats.

I just find it weird to be using a machine that's a recognizable descendant of the work of philosophers, as much as engineers or mathematicians, then to be saying casually that philosophy isn't rigorous.

>I actually think 'hard data' is typically about as relevant to philosophy as it is to maths. Not everything is reducible to stats.

Oh yes, I agree entirely on that point.

You could argue using hard data is less rigorous. But, in practice people make mistakes so without verification Philosophy and math is again arguably less rigorous, depending on what you mean by that word.

Rigour is pretty hard to rigorously define. If we could, then epistemology would be complete.

Science didn't replace philosophy. Science is philosophy. That's why scientists used to be called natural philosophers. Yes, in the modern era we have gotten much more specialized in the modern era and that arguably is a loss. But it is kinda necessary given the depth that many fields have gotten.

You appear to be a PHD.

>"Science didn't replace philosophy. Science is philosophy."

More precisely, science is a subset of philosophy.

> To illustrate: there is common belief that metaphysics became irrelevant -- that it was replaced by science. This is, in itself, a metaphysical position

That argument doesn't seem valid. The notion that fairies don't exist is, in itself, a fairyological position; still, few would accept that fairyology is a legitimate field of endeavour.

> I am only claiming that it is accepted by most people without any reflection.

Many things are accepted by most people without much reflection. Often that's because they really are as simple as they look.

> Some boundaries of scientific knowledge are quite visible. For example, consciousness. You might argue that consciousness emerges from matter interacting in a complex way (emergentism), and you might be right, but this is accepted as a serious scientific theory although it has zero content -- no way to falsify empirically, no explanatory mechanism proposed.

What are the outstanding empirical questions about consciousness? As soon as you go down to an empirical level, you find that no mysticism is necessary: there are valid, interesting questions to be asked and answered, but they are no more outside science than questions about how, say, protein folding works.

> That argument doesn't seem valid. The notion that fairies don't exist is, in itself, a fairyological position; still, few would accept that fairyology is a legitimate field of endeavour.

You are using Popper's criterion for what constitutes a valid scientific theory, but I think you misunderstand me.

My claim is that saying that theoretical physics is the ultimate explanation of reality is a metaphysical position. Cosmology describes the big bang but it does not answer the question "why is it so?". Maybe there is no answer. Maybe it is not knowable. Maybe theoretical physics cannot have the total picture. These are all metaphysical questions that seem perfectly legitimate to me. If you are not allowed to ask or talk about these questions, I would say that you just accepted a religious faith. I am not trying to sell you anything except doubt and curiosity :)

> Many things are accepted by most people without much reflection. Often that's because they really are as simple as they look

Perhaps. Perhaps not.

> What are the outstanding empirical questions about consciousness? As soon as you go down to an empirical level, you find that no mysticism is necessary: there are valid, interesting questions to be asked and answered, but they are no more outside science than questions about how, say, protein folding works.

You are implicitly making the strong claim that knowledge can only be attained through empiricism. This is clearly not the case. I know that I am conscious and I assume that you are, but I cannot use empiricism to test this hypothesis, not can you use it to verify that I am, indeed, conscious. So there is something very fundamental -- in fact the only thing I know with 100% certitude -- that cannot be empirically tested.

Your use of the word "mysticism" betrays the current bias against such questions. I am not proposing any woo. I'm just curious. Even being curious about certain topics nowadays gets you labelled and a "mystic". I think this illustrates the point that I wanted to make in the beginning.

> Cosmology describes the big bang but it does not answer the question "why is it so?". Maybe there is no answer. Maybe it is not knowable. Maybe theoretical physics cannot have the total picture. These are all metaphysical questions that seem perfectly legitimate to me. If you are not allowed to ask or talk about these questions, I would say that you just accepted a religious faith. I am not trying to sell you anything except doubt and curiosity :)

I see no reason to assume that question is beyond the reach of empiricism, which has been (both by its own standard and by naive common sense) effective in a way that alternatives have not. Non-empirical approaches may be able to construct self-consistent theories, but there is an infinitude of self-consistent theories, the overwhelming majority of which are useless under naive common sense. I trust empiricism because I was able to get there in Neurath's boat fashion from the everyday naive common sense that we all live by in practice.

> You are implicitly making the strong claim that knowledge can only be attained through empiricism. This is clearly not the case. I know that I am conscious and I assume that you are, but I cannot use empiricism to test this hypothesis, not can you use it to verify that I am, indeed, conscious.

I don't accept your claim. To the extent that "consciousness" refers to something meaningful, it refers to something empirical. (At least, my experience - under formal empiricism, naive common sense, and along the path between them - is that theories that involved entities detached from empirical consequences were misleading, and less effective than theories that did without such entities).

> To the extent that "consciousness" refers to something meaningful, it refers to something empirical.

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

You are taking a very strong (and controversial) philosophical position without perhaps realizing it.

I'm aware. I've not found the counterarguments listed there convincing. Quine's argument seems to be that since he can't see how to make the analytic/synthetic distinction rigorous it must be impossible to do so, which simply doesn't follow. And since I take the position not as an a priori principle but based on my empirical experiences of what kind of theorising has been effective or ineffective, it isn't self-defeating at all.

>And since I take the position not as an a priori principle but based on my empirical experiences of what kind of theorising has been effective or ineffective, it isn't self-defeating at all.

That is the same defense Ayer used. It doesn't amount to much, since if you don't mean to say that non-empirical statements are meaningless in some kind of objective sense, then saying that they're meaningless is just a highfalutin way of saying that you personally disapprove of them.

Non-empirical statements are meaningless in the same sense that fairies don't exist. It's not a priori impossible that a non-empirical but constructive/valuable/useful statement could exist - a black swan - just as it's not impossible that a fairy could exist - but it seems very unlikely and I'd put a very low weight on someone's claim to have seen one, given how often such claims have turned out to be false. When I dismiss something as non-empirical, that's the same kind of dismissal as saying something's a conspiracy theory - formally I'm not claiming that it's outright impossible, just unlikely (though in everyday language I might say "impossible", just as we do for conspiracy theories or fairies).

The strained analogy with fairies is obscuring your point. You seem to be using "meaningless" in a very unusual sense.

Whether or not non-empirical statements can be constructive or valuable is a separate question. Mathematics is non-empirical and strikes me as pretty constructive and valuable. But those terms are, ironically, so vague as to be almost meaningless in any case.

Maybe conspiracy theory is a bad example because they’re true often enough to not be like fairies or black swans at all.

Domestic mass surveillance is a debunked conspiracy theory, remember

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_swan

Do you think you contributed to the conversation or that anyone might have been missing part of the picture but you pointing out that black swans are a literal thing that are not uncommon unlike fairies that don’t exist or “black swans” (like “bull runs”) that are by definition extremely rare?

I once said “there’s no such thing as a bull run” in some context with a group of friends. Do you think you would have chimed in to say that there’s a big one in Madrid every year?

> "Non-empirical statements are meaningless"

This is a non-empirical statement, given that you probably don't believe that you can demonstrate the truth of it empirically.

Putting it another way, perhaps you might agree with the following statement?

"All legitimate knowledge is gained empirically."

But how do you know this? Did you reach this conclusion empirically?

So there must be some things that you know through non-empirical means.

> But how do you know this? Did you reach this conclusion empirically?

Yes I did, that was my point. I haven't solved and am not claiming to have solved the problem of induction - the generalisation from "a bunch of empirical knowledge turns out to be valuable/effective/legitimate and all the supposed non-empirical knowledge I've seen turns out not to be valuable/effective/legitimate" to "all valuable/effective/legitimate knowledge is empirical" rests on potentially shaky ground. But that's a problem that already exists when making ordinary, object-level generalisations about the universe; it doesn't render the conclusion any weaker than ordinary scientific conclusions.

That's only an empirical generalization if you can cache out "valuable/effective/legitimate" in genuinely empirical terms (at minimum, in terms of observer-independent observations free from value judgments).

> That's only an empirical generalization if you can cache out "valuable/effective/legitimate" in genuinely empirical terms (at minimum, in terms of observer-independent observations free from value judgments).

I can cash it out empirically as "generates accurate empirical predictions and suggests fruitful avenues for future investigation" (fruitful in the sense of ultimately leading to more detailed and accurate empirical predictions). That the measure of a theory is the accuracy of its predictions is of course a subjective human position (there are an infinity of possible measures on which to evaluate theories, and a priori no reason to prefer one over another), but again that's (a cautious Neurath's boat extension of) the common-sense way that we all evaluate theories in practice in everyday settings.

No, that's not even close to cashing out the generalization in empirical terms. To do this you'd need to specify exactly which observations would confirm or disconfirm it. Without the parenthesized parts, your gloss of the generalization remains vague and value-laden. With the parenthesized parts it is virtually tautological, since it's in the nature of empirical knowledge to generate accurate empirical predictions. It's surely not news to anyone that if forms of knowledge which lead to detailed empirical predictions are superior to other forms of knowledge, then empirical knowledge is superior to other forms of knowledge.

What you really seem to want to do, then, is argue from the nature of empirical knowledge itself to the conclusion that it is better than other methods of empirical knowledge. But that requires rational argument to back up the italicized statement above, not (just) an inductive generalization. And then we come back to the problem that it is impossible to find suitable premises for such an argument which can themselves be known empirically.

(For reference, the generalization we're talking about here is that "a bunch of empirical knowledge turns out to be valuable/effective/legitimate and all the supposed non-empirical knowledge I've seen turns out not to be valuable/effective/legitimate".)

> But that requires rational argument to back up the italicized statement above, not (just) an inductive generalization.

Why? Everyone evaluates ordinary, everyday knowledge in terms of its empirical predictions, so everyone seems to accept the italicised statement in practice, even if they'd argue for some sophisticated alternative in the abstract.

That sounds like you're saying something like this:

"I believe empiricism is true because empiricism seems to be true."

We strive to live our lives based on reason, so we should look for ways to understand the world that go beyond a circular argument.

Such lines of thinking exist. They have been well argued and debated and have much going for them. Plenty of places to start learning about them, but maybe start with Aristotle.

> We strive to live our lives based on reason

I don't think we do. Reason is a means to an end, not a goal in itself.

> so we should look for ways to understand the world that go beyond a circular argument.

I don't see it as circular, but even if it were, my point is it's impossible to do better: all of us accept everyday common sense before we can even begin to argue technical philosophy, and if we're willing to set it aside then there are infinitely many self-consistent things we could think and no reason to prefer one over another. So no amount of sophistry will ever get you away from having to believe in everyday common sense.

> Such lines of thinking exist. They have been well argued and debated and have much going for them. Plenty of places to start learning about them, but maybe start with Aristotle.

Please. You're dismissing rather than engaging. If you're not willing to actually contribute to the discussion then don't post at all.

I'm sorry you thought I was being dismissive. I felt I had reached the limit of my own pursuasiveness on the question and wanted to point you to somewhere better than me.

One final point I will try to make is that in thinking about how we know things, there's no suggestion that we need to set aside common sense. It's about starting with common sense and then seeing what we can add to it.

But you were talking about the mechanism of consciousness, not verifying whether someone is conscious or not.

It may be impossible to verify if someone is conscious in the same way that I know I am, but we can associate a set of behaviors with an intelligent creature. If we empirically prove that those behaviors emerge from a collection of neural impulses, then it takes a simple assumption (almost a cognitive axiom) that the creature exhibiting those behaviors is conscious, to conclude that emergentism has been empirically verified.

I feel like your position that emergentism is empirically impossible to verify is itself a strong position, and attempts to define a boundary on science when your stated goal is to place doubts on where the boundaries are. Yes it requires a few assumptions, and yes those assumptions are impossible to verify empirically. But then so are the mathematical axioms. We don't go around saying "physics is impossible to empirically verify because mathematical axioms are impossible to prove and are incomplete"

Try imagining yourself as a system of molecules all responding to their environment. It is reasonable that your complexity might be a good indicator of your potential for intelligent responses. I don't think that holds for your consciousness though. If it did, that would imply either consciousness is a spectrum or the universe has a hard coded on/off switch for consciousness. The on/off hypothesis has problems with conservation of information, and if consciousness is defined as "having an internal experience" it isn't clear how that could be non-binary.

Did you say an on-off switch for consciousness? There may be one for humans.

https://gwtoday.gwu.edu/gw-researchers-disrupt-consciousness...

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S152550501...

That area may be important for higher brain functioning and memory. I don't think those are equivalent to consciousness though.

I think it's likely an emergent phenomenon. Still, being able to turn it on and off with specific components hints they're either the source of conciousness or a big part of it.

"...we can associate a set of behaviors with an intelligent creature. If we empirically prove that those behaviors emerge from a collection of neural impulses,..."

Beware! Here be the dragon of pure behaviorism, which potentially denies that "consciousness" is a valid noun.

On the other hand, mathematics is the last refuge of the hardcore platonist (and worse, allows them to run around loose); the rest of us are true formalists who realize it's all a game whose basic rules happen to coincide with reality suspiciously well.

The amount of woo that usually follows that line of reasoning though is probably why the prejudice exists.

It's kinda like this: "Sure, blockchain has potential but 98% of the space is blatant scams at the moment".

> I'm just curious.

Yet you attack the scientific study of consciousness. I am not sure that you are as open-minded as you are presenting yourself.

Things like Newton's Laws are, in a strict technical sense, not true. We still use them because they are very nearly true. But, strictly, they are approximations of something more fundamental. That extends to a great number of very intelligent figures of the past who described reality as they saw it but, in the end, turned out not to have sufficient measuring technology to be as correct as we would understand it now.

It is an extremely reasonable position that large swathes of what we believe today is also going to be wrong in this sense. For example, the great debate about whether reality is discrete or continuous (currently I think the evidence is discrete, but philosophically maybe we are a simulation run in a continuous universe).

We should try and work to the current state of knowledge of the researchers, but we all know that there is a high risk of something big and impressive being discovered that changes the name of the game, like when they split the atom. We just don't know what happens next.

Our understanding of consciousness also depends on who controls the dictionary and defines consciousness and surrounding terms.

> Our understanding of consciousness also depends on who controls the dictionary and defines consciousness and surrounding terms.

I think that arguing over dictionary definitions is something of an anti-pattern in philosophical (-like) discussions. If we have a common agreement that there is something that we call consciousness, but it is a thing that we do not really understand, then pedantic arguments about exactly what the word does and does not denote are putting the cart before the horse when it comes to understanding the thing itself. It substitutes a lexicographical dispute for an examination of the thing itself, and it is not uncommon for such arguments to be used to talk around the issue by attempting to take certain positions off the table.

As for scientific theories not being strictly true, that hardly distinguishes science from philosophy in general (logic excepted), where there are at least two opinions on every issue of note.

Just want to say that I'm enjoying reading this discussion greatly. Please keep up the civil discourse!

Metaphysics is basically a question of axioms. Reasoning can't get off the ground without some unproven assumptions. We can certainly talk about our assumptions without proving them!

I would argue that most axioms used by thinking brains ultimately derive from evolutionary processes. But again, this is different from proving them, and brain development is far from simple.

I'd argue that in practice everyone believes in everyday common sense - even philosophers who claim to follow some philosophy that's radically contradictory to it (in a similar sense to the economist's notion of "revealed preferences"). So someone who relies on a novel set of axioms is relying on a bigger and more dubious foundation than someone who's able to "Neurathian bootstrap" starting with just the everyday common sense that we are already all relying on.

>> I am only claiming that it is accepted by most people without any reflection.

> Many things are accepted by most people without much reflection. Often that's because they really are as simple as they look.

I think it's because people are used to some 'credible' person telling them what to think. People are trusting science way too much in my opinion.

> People are trusting science way too much in my opinion.

Scientism is also rampant.

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

> As soon as you go down to an empirical level, you find that no mysticism is necessary

There are plenty of things that cannot be observed. There are plenty of things that should not be observed. There are plenty of things that can be observed but cannot be understood well enough to achieve the goals we want.

I don't find it controversial to claim there are limits to empiricism. The fact that we expect juries and judges to rule on incomplete information is a concession to that reality.

And because there are limits on empiricism, there are limits on science.

An example of the limit of empiricism: how do you measure the moral of a story, when you read a good novel? Because you cannot measure it, does the moral not exist?

You devise a test for obeying the moral, and administer the test to a bunch of subjects before and after reading the story. For example, if the story is Hamlet, you can give an opportunity to back-stab their boss in order to get yet another promotion. Are they less likely to do it after seeing how badly it went for the young thane? Not an easy test to do, but possible in principle.

Joshua Greene's lab at Harvard (http://www.joshua-greene.net/) measured subjects making major moral decisions and found, for example, that people who'd received training in medical ethics made more utilitarian decisions about life and death. You could apply the same methods to morals of stories in a randomized trial by having some subjects read them and some not.

That's not measuring the existence of morality though. It's measuring whether certain things can influence behavior. And because it's a lab study, the behavior tends to be fairly trivial in practice.

Besides studying whether people behave morally is begging the question if the question is "do morals exist?".

I'm confused, what about things that can be deduced based on other things that can be observed? If I see someone's shadow, and deduce that there's a person there, whom I can't see directly, casting that shadow, will my claim "there's a person, casting a shadow" be outside of the "limits of empiricism"?

If all you've seen is a shadow, all you've seen is a shadow. How do you know it's not someone's twin? Or some sort of puppet facsimile?

Now, that's a contrived example. More realistically, I doubt we'll ever be able to get enough detailed measurements to really understand how genetics, nutrition, exercise, and environment all play together to affect human health. Clearly each is complex enough on its own and to combine them together quickly magnifies the observation problem to be entirely intractable. We can imperfectly generalize and work with populations to come up with various guidelines that seem to work well with populations. We can break down the problems, measuring particular cells or organs. But to recompose all the experimentation and observation into a full system view is much more complex than solving chess or go. It's much more complex than predicting the earnings forecast of a single company. The complexity of the problem space is just ridiculous.

So we try to push the boundaries of the complexity we can deal with, but there are diminishing returns over time. And clearly there are outer bounds we will never be able to approach.

True enough, but I don't see how any of that is specific to empiricism? This doesn't sound like a case where empiricism overcomplicates and a non-empirical approach could do better; rather it seems like reality is just that complex, and our only options are to deal with it or to simplify and accept a coarser picture (which is perfectly compatible with empiricism).

> The fact that we expect juries and judges to rule on incomplete information is a concession to that reality.

I think that arises from practical difficulties in finding all the relevant information, not from a certainty that it is, in principle, undiscoverable.

I notice how you slip easily from a personal opinion in your penultimate paragraph to the pronouncement of a universal truth in the final one. This seems to be characteristic in philosophy, as displayed, for example, in Searle's 'Chinese Room' paper.

Nevertheless, I agree with the general position that there are unobservable things (that's just my opinion, of course.) I also believe that there are limits to reason alone as a means for discerning truth, and consequently I believe there are limits to what philosophy can achieve (though I see no limits on how much discussion it can generate.)

> ...not from a certainty that it is, in principle, undiscoverable.

In principle if we have to violate rights to obtain all of the relevant information, then some information must be undiscoverable.

In a more scientific bent, you have the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle and the existence of intractable computers science problems to support the idea that there opinion-free realms where science cannot provide solutions.

And I find labeling claims as opinion to dismiss them a bit facile. The underlying point is that there we conceded that there are practical considerations that make us act on incomplete information. Therefore we concede on a practical level that all things cannot be knowable. Conjecture and guesswork pervade everyday life.

It is interesting that you present the rights issue, as, while it is a valid response to the claim I made, it works just as well as the claim I made as a counter to your original claim about what the instructions to jurors tell us about the limits of knowledge.

Similarly, your use of quantum uncertainty is valid, but its discovery did not put a stop to physics - on the contrary, the discovery of QM has led to vast new areas of knowledge, and has even had metaphysical and epistemological implications (such as the constraints on realism that follow from Bell's inequality) that were never imagined in millennia of navel-gazing. Therefore, if anything, quantum uncertainty tends to stand as a counter-example to the apparent premise behind your claim that incomplete knowledge sets limits on science (I weasel-worded that sentence because I do believe that it could ultimately become a problem, if humanity survives long enough.)

I am not labeling a claim as opinion to dismiss it - in fact, if I cannot offer a definitive counter-argument, then my own position on the matter is an opinion - it is the transition from opinion to certainty that I find interesting. Searle's Chinese Room paper, for example, is an elaborate argument ultimately hung on the unexamined premise that syntax cannot give rise to semantics, and the non-sequitur that a model of a thing is not the thing itself, yet he declares that he has proven that a digital computer can never have a mind. This passing off of opinion as certainty may just be an issue of style within philosophy, but if so, it is an unfortunate one, as it makes it difficult to keep track of what has definitively been established and what remains as conjecture or premise. Certainly, there are many people who think Searle proved something in that paper, yet there is disagreement within that group as to what exactly that is.

Conjecture and guesswork pervade everyday life, science, and even philosophy.

>there are valid, interesting questions to be asked and answered, but they are no more outside science than questions about how, say, protein folding works.

Questions about consciousness are much different than protein folding, because protein folding can be objectively observed and tested.

Consciousness cannot be objectively tested, because in order to test consciousness, you must use your consciousness to do so -- there's no way to control for that variable.

Fire doesn't burn itself, and water doesn't wet itself, maybe consciousness cannot understand itself -- just like our eyes cannot directly see themselves.

If hard science is based on objective observations, perhaps the limits of science are at that which we use to make those observations -- our consciousness.

> just like our eyes cannot directly see themselves.

And yet, with a mirror, we can work around that difficulty - or we can study someone else's eyes.

Analogies, by themselves, are not an argument for anything, and without a basis to justify the comparison, they are just appeals to intuition.

In this case, the whole argument collapses when we realize that one mind can study others - and plenty of people have been doing that.

>one mind can study others - and plenty of people have been doing that.

Of course, but that's not objective, hard science like biology (and protein folding) is.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_and_soft_science

"psychiatric diagnosis still relies exclusively on fallible subjective judgments rather than objective biological tests"

-Allen Frances

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allen_Frances

Even if we accept the questionable assertion that no study of any aspect of the mind so far has been objective, you have provided no argument that it cannot be so in principle.

I notice that the link you provide on 'hard' vs. 'soft' sciences contains passages that cast doubt on whether the distinction is significant. Biology is classified as less objective than physics, yet biology explains many things very well, and, in fact, actually better than a reduction to the underlying physics would (evolution, for example, or genetics.) By your original argument, however, human biology could not be an objective science.

>Even if we accept the questionable assertion that no study of any aspect of the mind so far has been objective, you have provided no argument that it cannot be so in principle.

Perhaps if we had aliens or god study our minds, then it could be objective and not influenced by the biases of our own human minds. There's no argument that they can't exist in principle.

So do you consider the discipline of human biology to be the work of aliens or of gods, or do you consider it to be devoid of objectivity?

Seems like a false dichotomy. Quantum physics has shown that the mere act of observing fundamental reality changes it's state, so perhaps our consciousness of reality is much more subjective than we thought.

https://plus.maths.org/content/physics-minute-double-slit-ex...

The more sensible interpretation of the available facts is not that making observation changes reality, merely that we are ourselves part of reality. In any case the precise, constrained observations of QM are by no means a license to make arbitrary assumptions about "consciousness".

Yes, it is a false dichotomy, but the point is that it is one that follows directly from your argument: all your 'just like' comparisons apply as well to human biology as they do to the study of the mind, and if a thing studying itself is hopelessly compromised by subjectivity, then, by your argument, this must be so for human biology.

History is another example of human self-study that is not rendered impossible by subjectivity. In this case, there is a term, 'whig history', for one form in which the investigator's bias is applied to his analysis of past events. The fact that this term exists, and that the phenomenon it labels can be identified and corrected for, shows that it is possible to work around the subjectivity of self-study.

As for quantum mechanics, it seems there is indeed a good deal of subjectivity, at least in the Copenhagen interpretation. By your argument, that should have destroyed physics as an objective science, yet physics has been extraordinarily fruitful since the discovery of QM. Here is an example of Luboš Motl dealing, in his characteristic style, with subjectivity, and, in fact, discussing the topic "Why subjective quantum mechanics allows objective science."

https://motls.blogspot.com/2012/11/why-subjective-quantum-me...

It is somewhat ironic that all your arguments for the impossibility of understanding the mind, on account of a lack of objectivity, are themselves subjective.

You are, of course, free to hold the opinion that there is something about consciousness that will put it forever beyond our understanding, and I cannot prove that there is not, but until we run into that barrier, I prefer to apply Occam's razor to the proposition.

I think the anti-philosophy era you are referring to is actually more like an anti-intellectual, anti-science, and generally populist movement that seems to be picking up steam. The most irritating manifestation of which says that you can't learn anything from books, something I increasingly hear people saying. I'd say the progress in more recent philosophy has been the efforts of multidisciplinary types like those in neuroscience and philosophy (ie Sam Harris) to enable more useful and practical 'popularizations' like the realization that meditation has benefits. Unfortunately debates about what 'grue' and 'bleen' are, while actually fascinating when you dig into it, and potentially even having practical consequence, generated an anti-philosophy populist movement that resembles general anti-intellectualism, and isn't helpful.

> To illustrate: there is common belief that metaphysics became irrelevant -- that it was replaced by science. This is, in itself, a metaphysical position, and a misunderstand about what science is and does.

This reminds me of religious people who say "Ha! Atheism is just another religion!" In both cases, there's an inability to conceive of what a truly apathetic position looks like.

It is a theological position, but it'd be silly to call atheism a religion just as it would be to call theism a religion.

> The acritical use of the yardstick of "progress" as the ultimate value for everything (along with its little cousin: "productivity") is, in itself, a philosophical position.

There it goes again! It would seem philosophy is unavoidable.

> I am only claiming that it is accepted by most people without any reflection.

If you discuss philosophy with a scientist/tech-person, on most occasions this happens, or at least from my experience. Questions about usefulness, measurability etc are the ones that are discussed first. And that's fine on an individual level. But as a generation on a whole, it's a turn into a somewhat morally ambiguous direction.

Algebra is based on five axioms [1], and an axiom by definition is a condition that is assumed to be true. How can you prove that 1+1 is really 2? There have been attempts to prove this, like in Pricipia Mathematica [2].

So basically what I am trying to say is that there is no absolute and not everything must have a value.

[] http://www.aaamath.com/ac11.htm [2] https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/278974/prove-that-1...

> How can you prove that 1+1 is really 2?

Worse, we're often tripped up figuring out if 1 + 1 is the correct expression in the first place. A lot of science and technology is bottlenecked on getting accurate and useful inputs.

I did not know about that aspect of the problem. What do you mean, that "we're often tripped up figuring out if 1 + 1 is the correct expression in the first place"? That we might be using the wrong paradigm for mathematic formulations?

In real life, there are problems like classification and precision that cause problems in making broader conclusions. If you are measuring poverty rates, for instance, you could be basing your decisions on several different benchmarks. The statistics, math, machine learning, etc., are all downstream from what we're even measuring and counting in the first place.

In a more elementary formulation, we could say one bag of rice plus one bag of rice is two bags of rice. But one bag of rice is underfilled and the other is contaminated with pests. So you don't really have two bags of rice after all. So maybe 8/10 + 0 is the correct expression in that case.

isnt 1+1=2 true in the same way that 0=0 is true, namely by definition? its proven analytically, 2 is defined as 1 greater than 1, 1 less than 3, 1/2 of 4, etc, all of which derive from 0=0, which is a tautology. I really don't understand the difficulty in proving something that is true by definition, it's like saying "prove all white swans are white." To me, it seems a harder thing to prove would be something empirical such as "prove the moon and stars exist during the daytime"

> isnt 1+1=2 true in the same way that 0=0 is true, namely by definition?

In the "traditional" formalism, it matters exactly what you mean by "+1" :-).

People normally define a binary addition relation (two operands -> sum) using a "more fundamental" unary successor relation (one operand -> successor).

Zero is just a constant, and numbers are defined in terms of it and the successor relation: one is "S(0)", two is "S(S(0))" and so on. So if the "+1" in your post is an invocation of the successor function, it certainly is axiomatic (from the axioms of equality):

  S(S(0)) = S(S(0))

On the other hand, if we're using actual addition, it might take another step or two, using axioms of addition, like:

  X + 0 = X, and

  S(X + Y) = X + S(Y)

So the proof might go something like

  S(S(0)) = S(S(0)), by axioms of equality,

  S(S(0)) = S(S(0) + 0), by the first axiom above, then

  S(S(0)) = S(0) + S(0), by the second axiom above.

And I guess I got lucky that the second axiom was not written

  S(X + Y) = S(X) + Y

or I'd have been stuck for a day trying to prove that addition is commutative :-).

That makes sense, thank you. However, at what point is the symbol "2" introduced in such a scheme? Is it before addition, or after? At some point it is given a definition, like S(S(0)) where S(0)=1 and S(X)=X+1, at which point isnt it easy to substitute

  2 = S(S(0))= S(0)+1 = 1+1

is this simple equivalence really not provable with sufficient axioms?

Obviously from the downvotes I am missing something fundamental, I would very much like to know what that is but am at a loss. Perhaps I am just missing mrleiter's original point.

Normally it's defined exactly as S(S(0)) like you said, so the above should constitute a proof that 1+1=2.

Anyone disputing that sort of proof normally needs to take issue with one or more of,

- The axioms,

- The rules of inference.

So someone might say, "In step one, you used an axiom of the form X=X. What basis do you have for assuming it's true?"

It's worth looking up the Munchausen trilemma for a little more on that sort of thing, but I'm not sure how many people would seriously argue against the validity of that proof (or one just like it if I've made a mistake :-)

As for why you've been downvoted, I have no idea. I think your question was perfectly fine, asked politely enough, and there are no doubt many perfectly reasonable logical systems in which 1+1=2 is trivially true (and not just "a short proof away.")

Anything you can prove is tautological, by definition.

Empirical statements cannot be proved; the best you can do is provide evidence for belief.

Right. So is 1+1=2 not a tautology then? Mrlieter seemed to be implying it could not be proven.

Bertrand Russell proved it via set theory [1]. Which is again based on the axioms of set theory, so as repsilat said above, you end up in one of the Münchhausen trilemmae, in this case you end up in some mix of regressive and axiomatic argument: there's an axiom, you cannot prove it within itself, but with another axiom and so forth.

It's a difficult subject and I am by no means an expert in it.

[1] https://blog.plover.com/math/PM.html

PS: You are correct, 1+1=2 is not a tautology. With a tautology, both the statement and the negation of the statement are true. In this case either 1+1=2 or 1+1=!2 - but never both, if you get what I mean?

PPS: And sorry for all those downvotes - don't understand why. Your questions are perfectly fine.

This idea "... all of which derive from 0=0" is kind of interesting. I've got a fuzzy recollection of a terrific book about the number zero ("History of a Dangerous Idea", IIRC), and thought that historically, a surprising amount of math was developed prior to 0 being recognized as a number per se.

> I argue that we live in an anti-philosophy era.

Francis Schaeffer said that most (formal) philosophy today is really anti-philosophy - either it doesn't tackle the big questions, or it gives non-rational answers. He said that the real philosophy today is being done by people like film-makers and musicians.

> For example, consciousness. You might argue that consciousness emerges from matter interacting in a complex way (emergentism)

Define consciousness. It's hard, because the word is a suitcase of meanings.

On the other hand, define an agent. It's much easier. An agent has to have three things - sensing, ability to act and ability to learn from sparse rewards. It is embodied in an environment, learns from the environment and depends on the environment for its "complexity".

Many problems go away when you learn how to represent the question in a better way.

To be fair, a lot (all?) of philosophy is very old. Many new developments are to improve the detail and precision of philosophical terminology.

Real philosophy is a very subversive endeavor at the moment. Perhaps it always was. It's something for those who love knowledge, but not for those who expect any public recognition.

If you take the entire history of philosophy, it can be summed up as a discipline which inspires thoughts and questions. In a way, it's like a form of entertainment. I'm not sure it necessarily involves knowledge.

I have a suspicion, which I don't really have the training or references to back up, that what happened to philosophy is related to the self-destruction of Art as a direct result of the World Wars.

Before 1914, it was still possible to be naive in the West and believe that everything happens for some sort of supreme purpose. Then we saw the mass destruction of humans on a society-wrecking scale, senseless deaths among the shells and gas; an entire generation returning with unacknowledged PTSD. Then this power got turned on civilians. The only possible response artistically to Guernica was a sprawling, fractured, ugly painting. Inevitably the catastrophe scaled up: everything "traditional" was appropriated and turned to Fascism, and Fascism destroyed everything that it could reach that didn't support it. Finally we built the Bomb, and realised that there wasn't really anything standing between us and the power to destroy entire civilisations in an afternoon.

We were standing in the wreckage of our own ethical systems, and have had to gradually rebuild them. This gave us the principles of human rights, and the realisation that equality of respect was the only real moral imperative. If we allow humans to deem other humans to be inherently inferior, this will be used to justify mass atrocities. Nobody is coming to redeem us and there is no final judgement to look forward to; we have to liberate ourselves in this lifetime.

In the face of this challenge, philosophy could either collapse into post-modernism, an endless hall of mirrors of signifier and signified; or it could mobilise and be used to deconstruct power relations and correctly label injustices. That gave us post-colonialism, queer theory, multiple generations of feminism, and so on. We have to live with the Other, and the question is how.

(The question of consciousness will be solved by the first AI to win a Nobel Prize for writing in defence of its own consciousness. I have no idea whether that will be next century or next year.)

(Please insert references to Derrida, Foucault, Butler, Lacan, etc as applicable; I don't see too many other people referencing modern philosophy in this discussion? Or you could downvote as well, I guess that's a philosophical argument?)

It's simpler than that. Progress in critique continued, we got effective anti-capitalist critique and marginalization-based feminist epistemology, and everything else. We had tons of progress, and the only thing we didn't do was update our ontological models of the knowledge we generated, and roll them into our public school curriculums. The only reason every single person on this planet (barring WHO millenium development goal resistance areas) doesn't know the difference between a hack and academic philosophy is that we didn't formalize it in a way they'd understand and teach it to them.

Society doesn't have to build or rebuild ethical systems, compete with critique, or compete with noise, fascism, mental illness, policy, or a saturated marketplace. You can teach meta-ethics to people and watch them use informed consent in everything (since it's often identified as the best way to be an agent in self interested understanding of pursuing and developing what you want, while participating in society effectively to help others).

Meta-ethics.. you mean "live and let live"?

No, "live and let live," would be applied ethics. Meta-ethics asks what the source of meaning in an ethical claim is. It is easier to adopt meta-ethical relativism if you know about meta-ethics, but I don't have a persuasive goal in presenting it; I don't think people "should live and let live." I just think it's clear progress in ethics will come best from people being able to assess their own and others sources of meaning in their ethical claims. I think we'd get more effective activism, relationships, etc. than without it.

There's an unfortunate perception that philosophy is utterly divorced from reality or pragmatic concern. To be honest they might have a point, but I still find philosophy to be of great value to me personally.

I mean, they don't have a point. Even if you accept obscurantism as existent and harmful, and academic philosophical consideration a violation of exploit in exploit/explore, and normative ethics as confusing regarding discussion in social maturity, and descriptive ethics as confusing regarding discussions of philosophy of law or politics or government, the unfortunate perception that philosophy is divorced from reality comes from a lack of education in academic philosophy as a field and practice, and potentially a socially/politically condoned trend of publishing any "10 step" pop-philosophy book that makes the advertising/economy/adult-education/media engine keep humming.

>Some boundaries of scientific knowledge are quite visible. For example, consciousness. You might argue that consciousness emerges from matter interacting in a complex way (emergentism), and you might be right, but this is accepted as a serious scientific theory although it has zero content -- no way to falsify empirically, no explanatory mechanism proposed.

There is nothing wrong with it as a hypothesis. At least science is investigating the issue, while philosophy (with some exceptions) seems to be preoccupied with merely pumping its intuitions that this can never be - intuitions that, by the argument you presented in the above quote, have 'zero content.'

I don't think it's just this.

A philosopher must have a reasonably sufficient grasp of most extant practical working knowledge of the world. If a philosopher makes claims which are inconsistent with the working knowledge of some people, those people will quickly demonstrate the philosopher's claims to be false. Some particular contemporary examples include Noam Chomsky's[1] misapprehension of the Khmer Rouge, Eliezer Yudkowsky's[1] squabbles with quantum physicists, or the widespread abuses of mathematical concepts by "postmodern" continental philosophers as described by Sokal and Bricmont:

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

And these are the better examples of would-be contemporary polymaths who make stabs at using philosophy to achieve broader social aims (as opposed to continuing long-running arguments about the ontological status of possible worlds and what Wittgenstein really said about Godel's theorem). There's so much to know it's hard not to be wrong about some of it. That situation is unique to the modern era.

So I don't think it's just about an anti-philosophy mindset being popular. Philosophy has, for practical purposes, become harder to do.

1: please don't reply to tell me that Chomsky and Yudkowsky aren't real philosophers, I know that, but I wanted examples people would recognize, and anyway their beliefs are roughly consistent with the popular positions in philosophy, and they failed in the general way I am describing, so the shoe fits

consciousness: https://psyarxiv.com/387h9

> I argue that we live in an anti-philosophy era

Could be just the U.S. When Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone was published there, they changed its title to HP and the Sorcerer's Stone. Perhaps they knew anything mentioning philosophy wouldn't be bought by Americans.

>This is, in itself, a metaphysical position

I can't help but cringe every time I see this, which is a lot. It is not at all substantive to use a nominalist position in metaphysics as somehow vindicating the field. Nominalism about metaphysical issues is the opposite of vindicating or substantiating the field.

You're missing the point. The purpose of the statement is to show that the speaker who says "science has superseded philosophy" can't possibly really believe in what he's saying, because he's using philosophy to justify the superiority of science. Which makes no sense. If the physical sciences were really superior to philosophy, then they wouldn't need to rely on philosophy for their justification.

The statement is meant to expose a common hypocrisy. It is not meant to be an actual argument to support philosophical study, which could still be totally useless. It would be more convincing if the science-lover could use empirical methods to disprove the need for philosophy.

>because he's using philosophy to justify the superiority of science.

But saying something is a philosophical position doesn't mean he is using philosophy to justify that position! Philosophy purports to be a general analysis of how things are, so in some sense everything is a philosophical position. But this doesn't bootstrap the value of philosophy, not in any substantive sense.

Isn't the real issue that meta-physics is that it always follows actual-physics? That is, if the metaphysicist says something like "guns don't really exist" and the physicist says "but I made a real gun, can I shoot you with it to prove it?" the metaphysicists always back down. Or put less aggressively, it is metaphysics that has to conform to discoveries in physics, not the other way around.

So the point the pro-science people are making is that any metaphysicists who deny the efficacy of science can't possibly believe what they are saying because they are not willing or able to actually live their lives according to their beliefs.

That's not true.

Which part: the subservience of metaphysics or the the hypocrisy of the metaphycisists who deny science?

>To illustrate: there is common belief that metaphysics became irrelevant -- that it was replaced by science. This is, in itself, a metaphysical position

I think that is wrong. What happened is that we realized we knew so little about physics that most of our meta-physical ideas were basically a case of "garbage in, garbage out." We had bad physics, and so we also had bad meta-physics. So we put meta-physics on hold until we had a body of physical knowledge that wasn't garbage to get meta about.

That's why all these "advances in metaphysics" are all physics discoveries.

Calling things like Claude Shannon's work on information "progress in philosophy" is like claiming Einstein's theory of General Relativity "progress in linguistics".

It is only true in a way that makes it essentially meaningless. Unless the people doing the work considered themselves philosophers, or drew on schools of thought from philosophy, you're claiming credit to philosophy from something that philosophy had nothing to do with.

Einstein's Theory of Relativity _was_ progress in philosophy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernst_Mach#Philosophy_of_scien...

Philosophy, yes. But not linguistics.

Any advanced system of philosophy should incorporate information theory.

What about information theory excludes a love of wisdom? All disciplines stem from Philosophy and Math.

Question of free will as a fundamental philosophical question is settled in a sense that it made only sense together with dualism and soul (there are still people who are dualists and believe in individual entity called soul. For them the question remains).

Albert Einstein:

>I do not believe we can have any freedom at all in the philosophical sense, for we act not only under external compulsion but also by inner necessity. Schopenhauer’s saying— “A man can surely do what he wills to do, but he cannot determine what he wills”—impressed itself upon me in youth and has always consoled me when I have witnessed or suffered life’s hardships. This conviction is a perpetual breeder of tolerance, for it does not allow us to take ourselves or others too seriously; it makes rather for a sense of humor.

Modern version of free will has degenerated into question of deterministic vs randomness and few other more vague branches. If human makes random decision, he is making random decision not free decision. Calling it "free will" is just a way to make the question sound more important.

>Question of free will as a fundamental philosophical question is settled in a sense that it made only sense together with dualism and soul

It might be settled from your own point of view, but it's certainly a matter of current philosophical controversy whether physicalism entails the absence of free will.

The modern question of free is very different from the "the will does not have to be such as it is".

Remaining issues in physicalism and free will requires a radical revision of the term. It's like asking something completely different.

No, whether or not free will in the classical sense exists is still debated, even among physicalists.

Sources and not just fringe sources please.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/freewill/

Same level counterargument:

https://www.iep.utm.edu/freewill/

Not sure what you mean. This article also confirms that the issue remains controversial.

Free will is arguably the hard problem for physicalists who feel that they have it.

The concept is a bag of very different meanings.

Define "free will" as acting mostly based on internal reasons and we all have it. And this is the meaning of the word for the masses.

Define "free will" as a kind of supremacy of human will over physical determinism and nobody has it.

I don't think anyone has ever defined free will as a supremacy of human will over physical determinism.

You're skipping over the question of whether some version of free will worth it's name can be compatible with determinism. Dennett wrote a book on it.

Also, there is the question of what role our conscious choice makes in decision making. Some people have suggested that our consciousness is just along for the ride, instead of being in the driver's seat. But that interpretation is controversial.

Yes. These are the branches of the original question.

But they are not center issues in the philosophy. They are not burning questions of utmost importance as the question of fundamental freedom of will once was.

> Dennett wrote a book on it.

Lots of people have written books about lots of things. That doesn't always mean those things are worth studying or thinking about. Witness the vast plethora of literature about minute points in Christian/Muslim/etc. theology. You could fill libraries with the books that have written about these subjects, none of which have any real basis in reality.

Modern version of free will has degenerated into question of deterministic vs randomness and few other more vague branches.

I don't think that is accurate, I think the more important aspect is [still] the definition of free will. It was rather surprising to me that at least some and maybe most people mean something entirely different when they use the term free will then what I thought free will should obviously mean. I always thought it should obviously mean that in given situation one has several possible actions and one can make a free choice among them but it turns out that is not what some or even most people mean or are interested in when talking about free will.

In any case the classical definition of free will has been solved.

The question of free will in voluntary action implicitly was important in the context of soul and dualism. Any action that originated "inside self" could be done at least in principle without outside influence, "the will does not have to be such as it is". There was at least possibility of fundamental free will.

If there is no fundamental system boundary, the question of free will is defining less fundamental boundaries and the question loses its status as fundamentally important question.

Generating new definitions for free will can of course continue.

In any case the classical definition of free will has been solved.

What is the classical definition and how has it been solved, in case it is not obvious from the definition? Or, in case it takes to much text to answer that, who proposed the classical definition or who wrote a good book on it? I did not put a huge amount of effort into this topic but at least quite a bit, but I am still puzzled what a common, the most common, or a classical understanding of free will is.

The Aristotle's definition and others like it.

For Aristotle there was three causes for things: chance, necessity, chance, a third thing (the agent-causality) or "up to us".

In the Nicomachean Ethics virtue and vice are "up to us". We have desires and we deliberate and make voluntary choice. What is left unsaid because it was self evident at the time was that there was something called soul or person separate from the environment.

In the modern sense "up to us" is not same level ultimate origination concept as change and necessity.

It seems a question of whether, given that you made a decision y[c] and the prior state of the world is x, how much of y[c] could we have determined just knowing state x.

That is what I thought, free will means that, when I face a decision, my choice is neither determined by the current state of the universe - me and my entire environment - nor is my choice independent of the current state of the universe, i.e. it is not purely random. If you rewind the universe to the same decision again and again, I will make different choices in different iterations, i.e. the choices are independent of and therefore not predictable from the state of the universe, but they are also not just random because that would not be free will either.

And we can also allow mixtures of both, say for example were the current state of the universe determines a probability distribution and the choice is random but distributed according to that probability distribution. With this interpretation of free will it seems almost obvious that it can not exist, how could a choice neither be depended nor independent of the current state of the universe? I can not even start to imagine such a thing, it seems we would have to have missed something very fundamental about the world, like discovering that two things can not only be the same or not the same but that there is actually a third option.

But as it turns out some and probably many people don't think of that when they say free will. They mean something a lot weaker, namely that their choices reflect their desires, that they do what they want, at least to the extend that external constraints allow it. For that definition of free will it is totally fine that your choices are determined by the current state of the universe as long as they align with your desires. I would say it seems quite obvious that humans have this kind of free will, we mostly do what we want as far as allowed by external constraints. I would also say that we generally do not perfectly have this free will, an arachnophobic person, for example, may desire not to be scared by a small spider but may be unable to control their instinctive reaction.

So my current point of view is that free will does and doesn't exist, it just depends on what precisely you mean when you say it. I also wanted for quite some time to go over all the common views on free will and see how many of them are really conflicting views, I could well imagine that there are far less real conflicts than it may seem at first glance.

>If you rewind the universe to the same decision again and again, I will make different choices in different iterations, i.e. the choices are independent of and therefore not predictable from the state of the universe, but they are also not just random because that would not be free will either.

That is still randomness, it's a random distribution conditioned on the world state.

No, what I mean is that the choice must not be determined by the state of the universe, that would not be free will in the sense I try to define here, and it must not be independent of everything, i.e. it must not be random, because that would not be free will either. I am defining free will and I am requiring specific properties, among others non random choices, I am not looking at the properties of a given definition, for example whether choices are just random. So the challenge is, if you want to argue that this kind of free will exists, to find or invent something, that can influence your choices but that is neither the state of the universe nor randomness. It is the inability to do this - assuming we really can not do this - that proves that this kind of free will does not exist.

The example I usually use is that you are sitting in a restaurant and you have to choose between ordering steak and fish. And we repeat this over and over again by rewinding the universe to the point just before you make your choice. If you have free will in the sense I am just trying to defining with this, you will not always make the same choice in every iteration, or at least not necessarily, but maybe you really don't like fish, I wich case the experimental setup is just bad. But the important thing is that your choice it not simply a deterministic function of the current state of the universe, including your personal history and the environment you are in.

On the other hand I also require that your choice is not simply random, possibly according to a probability distribution depending on the state of the universe reflecting your past experiences with and preferences for steak and fish, maybe in the specific restaurant, maybe depending on your mood or whatever else may play a role. If it were just random, then I would not consider it free will either under this definition.

And now the challenge is to identify something that could influence your choice but that is not the state of the universe and that is not randomness. If you can find such a thing, then you can have free will according to this definition of it, otherwise there is no free will in this sense. This is obviously quite hard because there are not that many things remaining after taking away the current state of the universe and randomness.

Nevertheless you could try to come up with souls or minds or, I don't know, maybe Platonic mathematical objects that are not part of the state of the universe and outside of space and maybe even time and then you could investigate whether those things could somehow provide what is required for you to have free will in this sense. Personally I don't think you can come up with something that works and that is consistent with itself and the world as we know it, but what do I know?

EDIT: While I edited out some mistakes, I got an idea that I had not thought about before and that is not too esoteric. Your choices could not only depend on the current state of the universe but also on a past state of the universe or its entire history so that you could not necessarily predict choices by just looking at the current state of the universe. It also would not just be a random choice.

That does not, as far as we know, work in our universe because the evolution of the universe is unitary so that all past - and future - states of the universe are implicit in any one state of the universe, but one could probably imagine a consistent universe with certain laws of nature where the current state of the universe does not entail all information about the past and the future. So maybe, but certainly not obviously, that could be a path towards free will in the sense I defined it, by messing a bit with the laws of nature so that the current state of the universe looses some if its power.

Even if there is something that could influence our choice but that is not the state of the universe and that is not randomness, it would still be something, not yourself, pulling your strings, would it not?

No matter how much I think about it, I keep on concluding - against my intuitions, if not my will - that the only rationally resolvable position is that we don't have free will, in the sense that we get to make meaningful choices.

But when I think I have found the only rational answer, I ponder how apparently impeccable reasoning led Zeno so badly astray.

> Even if there is something that could influence our choice but that is not the state of the universe and that is not randomness, it would still be something, not yourself, pulling your strings, would it not?

Very interesting thread on free will! I think the key to a solution lies on a clear definition of words used to refer to the self, such as "our", "ourself", "yourself", "I", "we" and such. When you say "I"; what or who do you refer to?

I can not recommend the Yale course on death by Shelly Kagan [1] (26 lectures of 45 minutes) enough, it is really extremely good. And I think about the first half of the course is about identity and all the things like souls that could play into this.

I did not mention this topic, because I think it is only secondary for free will in the sense I talk about in my comments, because I think the hard part is already finding anything at all that could affect your choices. Only when you have identified something that fits the requirements, say a god, and the whole thing is consistent, only then you have to worry whether you want to consider that thing part of you. That might be easy if the answer is everyone has its own soul or it might be harder, that is why I choose a god as the example, because some might argue that a god is a separate entity while others might argue a god is part of all of us. I added a lengthy comment to the parent one going into more detail why I think finding anything that could possibly work is already hard.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLEA18FAF1AD9047B0

It could be, for example if it was a god that influenced your choices and assuming we would neither consider this god part of the universe nor part of you. But that is also not necessarily the case, for example if your choices would be influenced by your soul assuming we would not consider souls part of the universe but still part of you.

But it is also not obvious that this is possible in a meaningful way. Whether souls or gods, they must at least be able to affect you and your choices, otherwise they may also not exist at all, at least if we are only thinking about your lifetime in this universe, they could still of have consequences in a life after death or whatever. One could also argue that you, meaning the part of you within the universe, must be able to influence your soul because in which sense would it be your soul if it were unaffected by everything you experience and do? And similarly we usually think of a god as being influenced by us by observing what is going on in the universe.

So we have at least a one-way interaction between us and the universe in general and souls or gods. And for many interesting things we want to get out of souls or gods we would even need two-way interactions. Which raises the question why we would not consider them parts of the universe? And this is the case for all supernatural things, why would we not consider them part of the universe, after all they must at least be able to influence us at least by being observable. We could exclude them, for example ghosts, because we have no understanding of how they work, but that is a rather weak criterion not unlike yet undiscovered physics.

Or we could try to exclude them because the usual laws of nature do not apply to them [1]. But in order to be able to move the curtains in the bed room or to tilt all the picture frames in the living room, a ghost must at least be able to interact with the stuff in our universe, otherwise it would remain unobservable, and therefore supernatural things can not be totally disconnected from the normal universe and how it works. So it is not obvious to me that you even can separate things into a normal universe and another realm of souls, gods, or ghosts that is however still interacting with the normal universe without this distinction being rather arbitrary. Especially if you think of the universe as all the things that can potentially interact with each other, possibly only in a one-way fashion [2], than the universe is closed under this and everything outside the universe can not possibly affect anything in the universe by definition.

To return to the original topic, it may or may not be you that pulls the strings if your choices are influenced by something outside of the universe, but I think the hard part is actually finding something outside the universe that could have an influence on your choices and that is outside of the universe in a meaningful way and not just due to an arbitrary definition like well understood things are in the universe and things we do not yet understand are outside of it.

[1] Just as in the case of the universe with its laws of nature and free will one can ask what kind of rules can, could, or have to apply to souls and gods. What can affect their decisions, what can be affected by their decisions? Is a god or soul subject to any laws of nature or at least logic or whatever? And if not, what determines its behavior, it probably should not be randomness. Note that this are very similar questions as compared to free will, just as if we only pushed the hard parts of the question out of the universe but that of course does not answer them. Even if we conclude that our choices are influenced by our soul, that just means we now have to figure out how the soul works and makes decisions leaving us essentially with the same questions as before.

[2] Radioactive decay is an example, the decay certainly affects the universe but you can not do anything to affect the decay of a nucleus. At least in the classical picture of radioactivity, the quantum Zeno effect actually allows influencing decay rates.

In the spirit of Popper and Deutsch, I’d argue that philosophy makes progress in the same way all branches of knowledge do: filtering out bad ideas.

The Popperian notion of scientific progress as an evolutionary process of conjectures and refutations applies just as well to philosophy. Philosophy gives us the tools to stamp out bad ideas and let the better ones rise to the surface. (Better ~= survive refutation longer).

Without being able to run an experiment on a philosophical conjecture in most cases, however, it is much more difficult to refute a purely philosophical conjecture than a scientific one. But many old philosophical ideas have been refuted on the basis of logical inconsistency or bad premises. So I’d expect the kinds of philosophical ideas we debate today have a higher proportion of truth than what was debated 500+ years ago.

There can be no progress in philosophy because there's no clear definition or consensus on neither the content, the objectives or the method of philosophy. The very notion of "progress" implies a kind of scientific philosophy that is a very recent (20th century) development.

In my view Analytic Philosophy (that I studied while at university) reduces philosophical thought to linguistic and logical analysis and therefore is a depleted form of philosophy.

If you accept the premise that philosophy should enrich people's lives metaphysical and speculative thoughts clearly can't be excluded. This is also what the (later) Wittgenstein thought, for instance.

With the recent return to ancient thinkers like the Stoa I see that people might get more value out of philosophy. No progress there in the eternal wisdom of humanity.

Assuming I accept your argument. If there can be no progress what's the point?

It's fun is a perfectly valid justification IMO, but not something that necessarily brings prestige etc.

i think there is value in analytic philosophy, mostly when used as a tool to clear up otherwise muddy issues. Case in point, Jay F. Rosenberg's "Thinking Clearly About Death." In the second half he spends his time clearing up moral arguments about euthenasia, letting die, and rational suicide, using analytic philosophy. he only comes to a definite conclusion on the rational suicide argument, but his clarifications are invaluable in the other cases.

What do we mean by 'philosophy'? They don't seem to be referring to professional philosophers in university philosophy departments, but instead to patterns of thought widespread in society.

I see a comment there making much the same point - https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2018/05/ha...

That comment totally got it. When S. Hawking said, philosophy is dead, he was right, was death for him, the the gross of the world still doesn't understand what essentially philosophy is, and more important, how it can help you, therefore , when people will start questioning basic behevoirs and trying to understand basic things then , philopsohy will have reach the end , which is teaching the humans to think by themselves . At least this is what I think.

No, that doesn't sound right at all. The second paragraph of the linked comment has it right: professional philosophers are in the business of clarifying fuzzy ideas, such as for example, what is meant by 'free will'?

University philosophy departments are not in the business of teaching critical-thinking skills to the masses. That is the responsibility of high-schools. (Or at least, it should be.)

Indeed, the works of proper philosophers are generally completely unknown to those who haven't formally studied philosophy. I doubt your average STEM graduate could name 3 living philosophers. (I'm of the opinion that this says bad things about what philosophy has become, but that's not the point.)

That's how we end up with articles like this, which claim to summarise the recent progress of philosophy, but make no mention at all of any real philosophy, recent or not.

There cannot be "progress" in a field without agreed upon mechanism to decide what's "right" or "good".

In math, we have proofs. In science - experiments. For med we use double-blinded tests. In tech - what works is king. Philosophy as a discipline is too poorly designed to assign proper meaning to the term "progress".

In math, don't proofs only show whether something is consistent, not that something is 'better?' I'd wager the credit you are assigning math is based more on its utility when applied rather than to anything inherent to proofs. So, maybe the question to ask is 'Have there been changes in how philosophy is usefully applied?' Seems like there could be. For example, I'm wagering that there's plenty of applied philosophical work to be done in the ethics of automated machinery like, say, automobile braking systems.

The point is there's no disagreement among mathematicians wrt the mechanism of (dis)proving claims. It has nothing to do with usefulness, consistency, or the set of axioms assumed.

There's plenty of disagreement among people who actually think about what it means to prove or disprove a mathematical claim (which is a tiny, tiny minority of mathematicians). See finitism, intuitionism, etc.

There is unlikely to be an agreed-upon mechanism for determining progress in philosophy for the obvious reason that what constitutes philosophical progress is itself a difficult and rather important philosophical question.

The groups you've mentioned set forth their axioms and accepted logic and construct their math accordingly. There's no disagreement here, as there's no "disagreement" between Euclid and Lobachevsky.

There is disagreement about what constitutes an acceptable mathematical proof. E.g., is proof by contradiction a proof?

Yes, it is certainly a proof (in a most commonly-used logic systems)

There may be some logic systems where proof by contradiction is not a proof. The existence of such logic systems does not mean there is any disagreement between mathematicians.

No, it doesn't, but as a matter of fact there has been disagreement among mathematicians on those issues. See e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brouwer%E2%80%93Hilbert_contro....

How about the philosophy of math? Do numbers exist outside the human mind/culture? Is the universe mathematical, or is it just a map? Does math say anything fundamental about existence?

> Does math say anything fundamental about existence?

I'd say yes. Using the tools of math, we can construct and study (within our mind) infinitely large and infinitely detailed structures that transcend the finite bounds and finite fidelity of our observable reality. This is what makes math beautiful and meaningful to me.

What exactly does that say about existence?

As they say, science answers questions, but philosophy answers which questions should be asked in the first place. Science is weaponized philosophy: once a field or subfield of philosophy matures enough, it turns into a science. If you accept this premise, then that is one way to measure progress in philosophy. It seems that this is exactly what the author has in mind.

It's not poorly designed, it's just too open ended. You have tools like logic to to assess arguments, but there isn't a limit on what questions can be asked or what avenues investigated for areas that fall outside other well defined disciples. Questions such as what makes life worth living, is this wrong or right, what is the nature of reality, how do we know, etc.

One of the things that philosophy is actively working on is determining what "right" and "good" actually mean. There are epistemic/analytic senses ("the answer on the test was right", "all bachelors are unmarried"), practical senses ("it's good to run"), normative senses ("you ought to run"), and so on. A great deal of contemporary philosophy is invested in further delineating these senses and explaining how they relate to our ontology, our metaethical views, etc.

I've heard more than one person say, too, that philosophy progresses by creating new subjects. When you consider that pretty much all of logic, political thought, and biology come from the tradition started by Aristotle, that claim sounds reasonable.

Encouraging. And how is that going so far? If I meet a fellow Philosopher now, can I prove him wrong in a way he'll accept?

It depends on what you mean by that. If someone presents a view that is inconsistent with the accepted facts, then you you can "prove them wrong" in that sense.

But that's not really the point of philosophical inquiry -- the point is to flesh out each view entirely, and look for the best possible explanation of the subject. Those kind of explanations don't always (or even usually) come from outright rebuttals -- they come from synthesis, refinement of the situations considered, improvements in clarity, etc.

I think the philosophy community (that was scared by behaviourism decades ago) needs to take a good hard look at reinforcement learning and representation learning. They can clarify many philosophical problems.

The hard-problem of consciousness was a detour, a wrong direction. It led to nothing in the end - just wasted decades. It was dualism in disguise.

You don't even need the notion of consciousness - just use the concept of agent, agent-environment relation and reinforcement - all being well defined, sound concepts unlike consciousness which doesn't even have an official definition.

"consciousness" has a definition: You.

It's a common misconception that there's no way to detect consciousness. It has no qualities and so cannot be measured, but consciousness can be detected by other consciousness. Since you are conscious you can detect consciousness in other beings.

What's actually happening is that what we call consciousness is unitary and co-extensive with the entire Universe. When two people merge consciousness' they are just increasing the bandwidth between themselves until they are effectively a single organism, the separate self-models in each person merge into an integrated self-model. People do this spontaneously sometimes when the sex is really good.

I give you a straight forward notion that is scientific and concrete (the notion of "agent") - in other words - all that the notion of consciousness isn't, and you reply with new age hocus-pocus.

Of course you're free to think about the macrocosmic consciousness and the tantric web of relations that tie subject to object. But that isn't getting us any closer to understanding the topic. It's just a 1000 year old mostly forgotten philosophy. Even in tantra, it is considered that the subject acts through three energies or processes - iccha: will, jnana: knowledge and kriya: action - the same three aspects that define an agent.

The agent approach has game theory and reinforcement learning to back it, with real applications and results (such as Alpha Go). It does not presuppose a spirit, it has no mind-body problem, and is testable (no "first person" firewall around it). Given all that, I think the agent theory is much more parsimonious that the spiritual and philosophical treating of consciousness.

> I think the philosophy community (that was scared by behaviourism decades ago) needs to take a good hard look at reinforcement learning and representation learning. They can clarify many philosophical problems.

I agree with that.

> The hard-problem of consciousness was a detour, a wrong direction. It led to nothing in the end - just wasted decades. It was dualism in disguise.

I don't agree with that.

> You don't even need the notion of consciousness - just use the concept of agent, agent-environment relation and reinforcement - all being well defined, sound concepts unlike consciousness which doesn't even have an official definition.

It does have a definition: you.

What is the goal or purpose for which "You don't even need the notion of consciousness"?

> I think the agent theory is much more parsimonious that the spiritual and philosophical treating of consciousness.

To what end?

Minsky thought that consciousness is pretty much just a meaningless word, and that it's more interesting to divide it into pieces that you can work on: https://youtu.be/AO7F0n2Dclc?t=20m13s

These are nice lectures in general, too.

> Minsky thought that consciousness is pretty much just a meaningless word

In a sense, it certainly is [a meaningless word], in that it is an attempt to refer to something that has no qualities, so you can't really talk about it. If it weren't for the fact that you yourself are conscious there would be no way (or reason) to talk about it at all.

Now, I don't object to the idea that Minsky's work (or "agent theory") would usefully inform philosophy. In fact I agree with that whole-heartedly. The relatively unsophisticated epistemological stance of much of modern philosophy could be improved by a greater familiarity with computers et. al., in my (pretty ignorant actually) opinion.

What I objected to was the idea the the study of the so-called "Hard Problem of Consiousness" was "a detour". It can't be studied scientifically but it can still be studied.

Philosophy is the womb of science and the vestibule of mysticism.

Anyone interested in this topic should read Chalmers' paper "Why Isn't There More Progress in Philosophy?"

http://consc.net/papers/progress.pdf

If I'm understanding correctly, it seems similar to saying that there's been progress in math because there's been progress in physics [1] and economics, both of which are largely based on math.

I think it would be more accurate to differentiate between "progress in other fields that utilize well-known, age-old x" and "progress in x."

[1] Some progress in physics has been as a result of new discoveries in math, such as the strong cosmic censorship conjecture being disproved recently

What's special, from a philosophical point of view, about Singapore? It's number 12 in the list, but is not explained why, besides the subclause of "in fact most other places/polities in the world." So, specifically, what's special about the Singaporean government?

That's the problem with meaningless nonsense: there's virtually nothing to it except the clickbait title.

How it combined a single party near-dictatorship with market success and lotsa consumption.

the author (Tyler Cowen) regularly talks about how Singapore has a particularly effective and well-run government.

If you've been following Marginal Revolution for a while, you'll know that Tyler Cowen (who has libertarian leanings) is endlessly fascinated by Singapore. It's one of the most free-market places in the world, yet it has huge government ("a high quality bureaucracy", as Tyler terms it).

This pushes against the thinking of libertarians just slightly. The qualifier though is that for this to work the government has to be good -- and once you go beyond the size of a city-state, that becomes more difficult to achieve.

Also, Tyler may not fully grasp the liberty you have to give up to achieve such a government in Singapore because he has never lived there.

[1] https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2015/08/wh...

[2] https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2016/06/my...

[3] https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2015/12/ho...

Disneyland with the Death Penalty (1993) https://www.wired.com/1993/04/gibson-2/

It's illegal to buy gum in Singapore without a prescription. You may like Singapore - here's a more positive take by Dan Sivers https://sivers.org/sg14 - but I've never heard it described as "free market" let alone anything that would appeal to a libertarian as such.

That was a really good read. Wired should pay Gibson to write a 25-years-later follow-up!

You should also know that that Gibson article is a one-sided view that was written on the basis of a very short stay in Singapore.

It's an entertaining opinion piece to be sure, but if you want to derive anything useful from it, I would advise reading it critically.

I think, philosophy has not answered all the questions posed by Plato and Aristotle but it has put up quite some more interesting questions since then. Science has answered some of these questions -- Nameley in the fields of astronomy, biology and geology wich was considered natural philosophy in ancient times.

For anyone interested in this topic, I hereby plug one of my favourite podcasts: https://historyofphilosophy.net/

There has been a lot of progress in the questions that have been considered philosophical but as soon as they get answered they are no longer considered philosophy. So something like how did all the animals get here or how many primes are there become biology and maths. Some of the current questions philosophers ponder like what is the nature of consciousness or what is quantum weirdness about will likely go the same way eventually.

Free will has been settled though, hasn't it? The best case for it these days seem to be a language game called "compatibilism" where you redefine free will to mean something vague about acting according to motivations, and when someone accepts that definition you turn around and say "Aha! We do have free will after all!"

A more charitable way of putting it is that naive understandings of free will are incoherent but if we're going to have to make up a definition of free will we might as well do so while maintaining as much of traditional distinctions between free will and non-free will as possible.

For instance if I decide hit someone and do so that might be considered blameworthy. If someone else decides to pick me up and throw me at that person then that wouldn't be blameworthy of me. Traditionally you'd distinguish between these by invoking free will and I think that's a useful distinction to make.

Well, since we are motivated by self preservation it might make sense to talk about blameworthiness when we figure out whether to lock you up or the person who threw you, or to cut out the brain tumor that caused you to suddenly become aggressive. Invoking free will still does not make any sense though, because you cannot choose your past, and I don't think you can argue that the past doesn't have any causal influence over you.

The notion that something is only free will if it uncaused is not at all the compatibalist position. The general compatibilist position is that an action is done with free will of a person if the causal chain it is part of runs through that person's intent for the action to occur, or conventionally that person's 'will'.

If you choose to define an action as representing free will only if it is uncaused then first, you've made up a definition entirely at odds with the normal English usages and, second, your definition is useless because it only cuts actions into those actions that exist and those that don't and we already have a perfectly good word for that so the new one is redundant.

Okay I accept your compatibilist definition that actions are done with free will despite being part of a causal chain. Congratulations, you won the language game, and can proceed to claim we agreed free will is real. You now have as much free will as a rock rolling down a hill.

> If you choose to define an action as representing free will only if it is uncaused then first, you've made up a definition entirely at odds with the normal English usages

I was trying to be precise, and assumed you agree that something that's part of a causal chain cannot be reasonably be called "free" by any common sense definition. You can't change the past after all, can you? If not then you're a product of circumstance just like everything else in the universe.

I think that if I'm walking down the road on a hot day and get thirsty and then I decide to buy a soda then my purchase is of my free will despite being cause by the heat, cause by society teaching me about buying things, etc. And I insist that if you told a non-philospher I bought it of my own free will they would agree. So I think you're entirely wrong to say that something that is part of a causal chain cannot be called free.

Now, if you told a normal person that someone in that circumstance couldn't have done anything except buy the soda they would agree that would mean I didn't have free will but they wouldn't see why. To them the "My decisionness" and "Could have been differentness" are the same thing. But philosophically we have to choose one or the other and it's both more useful, in terms of carving reality at the joints, and in greater accordance with common usage to pick "My decisionness" as what we interpret "free will" to mean.

I'm sorry I'm not directly addressing your point about changing the past, but that's because I'm still rather confused by how it relates to free will. Certainly I'd say that nobody can change the past.

> So I think you're entirely wrong to say that something that is part of a causal chain cannot be called free.

Yes you can call it free since you have defined free to mean acting according to your motivations, just like I predicted in my original comment. But since your behavior is caused by your motivations, and your motivations have it's own causes, and so on, I really don't see what you actually win (except the language game) by describing the process as free. It's about as free as the last cogwheel in a machine.

> I'm sorry I'm not directly addressing your point about changing the past, but that's because I'm still rather confused by how it relates to free will.

Suppose your will is a function of your brain, and suppose that your brain is a function of gene expression and environmental stimuli. Suppose you are unable to choose your genes, and suppose that you are unable to alter the history of environmental stimuli. It follows that the causes of your will are outside your control. If you don't control your will, then your will is not free.

> if we're going to have to make up a definition of free will we might as well

So we've begged the question.

To me, the way this is worded, it lays bare that compatibilism is about the ethics of 'free-will' and not its ontology. It's a completely different discussion and somewhat counterproductive.

Compatibilism isn't simply a language game. The "free will" question has centuries of ethical baggage attached to it that are critical to a functioning justice system, among other concerns. Compatibilists basically say that although basic scientific reasoning would assert that there is no Ghost in the Machine, and that true libertarian free will is a delusional fantasy, that anything that comes from the brain of a single individual is that individual's free will, by definition.

If I hold a gun to your head and force you to do something, that isn't your free will, but if you choose to do something without my influence, that is your free will. Whether you actually had the option to make another choice (whether any specific moment in time has multiple different future paths based on some magical internal rational agent) is irrelevant.

You are "simply" along for the ride, but it is still you making your decisions, as opposed to someone or something else.

> The "free will" question has centuries of ethical baggage attached to it that are critical to a functioning justice system, among other concerns.

In that case the concept is detrimental to our justice system. Take away free will and it still makes sense to protect society from dangerous agents, the only thing that changes is the notion of justice being somehow predicated on retribution and punishment instead of rehabilitation and restoration.

> that anything that comes from the brain of a single individual is that individual's free will, by definition.

In that case free will is the effect of your past causal history molding the neuronal structure in your brain, your brain's current chemical composition combined with electrical signal processing. Describe where there is something "free" in that.

> If I hold a gun to your head and force you to do something, that isn't your free will, but if you choose to do something without my influence, that is your free will.

That does not make any sense. It's not like I can choose to ignore my self preservation instinct when I'm on top of a tall building, but suddenly can't ignore it when being threatened by you. You seem to claim that we are influenced by our environment only in some subset of circumstances. How can you tell when that switch is turned on or off?

> Whether you actually had the option to make another choice (whether any specific moment in time has multiple different future paths based on some magical internal rational agent) is irrelevant.

How are you defining free will if the ability to make choices is irrelevant? Also it seems to contradict your previous sentence that I have the ability to make a choice unless you are influencing me.

Free will has been settled? What?

In order to author your decisions, you'd first have to author the decision to author your decision, and so on. So you would need to decide what your next thought is going to be before your think it, as well as deciding what that thought was going to be. Clearly, that's nothing like how our minds work.

If you remain unconvinced, try meditating for like 5 minutes. That is, focus on nothing but your breath for as long as possible. You could not avoid having other thoughts pop into your head even if your life depended on it.

I don't think that one follows from the other: I sometimes have violent thoughts when I'm angry at someone, but I'm never actually violent. (Another example would be the popular quip that average men think of sex N times per unit of time, with N being much larger than how often they actually have sex.) This suggests that there is at least one more step between having a thought and acting on it, that your argument is not considering.

My argument wasn't considering the difference between having a thought and acting on it because I did not think it was an important distinction.

Whatever mechanism there is that makes you act on some thoughts but not on others, that mechanism is itself subject to the same mystery as thoughts are. What I mean is, you would have to make the decision to make the decision to act, but not before having made the decision to make that decision, and so on. What we in fact experience is no such regression of decisions, but instead merely the sensation of the thought, possibly followed by the sensation of acting.

That you identify yourself as the voluntary thinker of your thoughts and actor of your actions is a beneficial psychological feature surely, it's the difference between someone suffering from schizophrenia and someone not, but that feeling is necessarily an illusion because of the reasons I have explained.

No, that's just a word game. In order for me to get up from bed, I have to want to get up from bed, then I have to want to want to get up from bed, then I have to want to want to want to get up from bed. You can make anything absurd with that.

The question of free will is whether I want to get up from bed, or I have to get up from bed. It doesn't matter how the mind works, it matters whether or not the choice is freely taken or is coerced.

Describe the subjective process by which you decided whether to get up. Probably you just felt like it, or were coerced by your bladder. If you had a reason, then your actions are a product of that reason, which itself is part of a casual chain of past circumstances that you can't control now. If you didn't have a reason, then your decision to get up or stay was random, and that's not free either.

> If you remain unconvinced, try meditating for like 5 minutes. That is, focus on nothing but your breath for as long as possible. You could not avoid having other thoughts pop into your head even if your life depended on it.

The secret is not avoiding thoughts, but having the same thought (a blank canvas, a black void, your breathing, etc.) for five minutes.

> Free will has been settled? What?

It's constantly being settled - in fact, it has been settled several times in these threads.

Philosophy i think is the same question and message repeated in each era in the language of that era. (Modern lingo and memes and such)

The question is “what’s the point”.

Philosophies that get overly powerful turn into religions. Original questioning rooted in science (refusal to look away from reality) can become dogma. Yin becomes yang and back again.

Dogma, while safe, doesnt evolve and eventually is disconnected from modernity. (Not using the right memes and lingo anymore)

The same message can be right or wrong depending on how it is said and in which cultural era it is said.

A strong belief in having already gotten the point or belief that execution is the only thing left leaves no room for philosophy which is about the wiggle room of constant flux.

The current era is a bit strange in that science itself has become a sort of dogma. “scientism” masquerading as true science is another way of putting it. There’s a belief that certain people, idiots and infidels hold back everyone. The yin blames the yang and so becomes it.

> Philosophy i think is the same question and message repeated in each era in the language of that era. (Modern lingo and memes and such) > The question is “what’s the point”.

In fact, very little of what philosophers are interested in can be fit into this reductive sort of question--and in fact, several major philosophers could be characterized as specifically trying to take that sort of question out of the realm of philosophy.

Philosophy was incredibly relevant in past eras, for some time it was all of science itself. As the different disciplines gained their own identity and took their toys, philosophy decreased.

I'd argue applied philosophy, as compared to purist philosophy, is very relevant today. Just like mathematics.

The comments here are largely what I expected to find: people throwing around the names and quotes of famous philosophers from centuries past, as though it's a pissing contest to see who has read the most books on the topic. Modern discussions around philosophy are effectively a circle jerk: person 'A' regurgitates a quote from one philosopher, and then person 'B' is expected to regurgitate another quote to counter.

While the historical works are an important piece of the puzzle, it would be nice if more folks could avoid equating "studying philosophy" with "literally studying existing books on philosophy - and nothing else".

It seems what happened is that all the promising/useful areas of inquiry from ancient philosophy have since become their own fields. "Natural philosophy" became physics/biology/chemistry and so forth. Thus university philosophy departments were basically left with the dregs -- lots of debates over non-falsifiable claims, lots of debates caused by poor definitions of words. Ethics is the only subfield of modern philosophy I can think of that seems useful and interesting to me. Maybe political philosophy too, but that has mainly moved to the political science department.

doesn't it seem like hubris to assume that philosophy has stopped producing "successful" fields? Computer science broke off less than 100 years ago...

And one might add that the branching off point was some extremely esoteric work in the foundations of mathematics and philosophy of language that would have struck most people at the time as entirely speculative and useless.

I agree with the author that there has been progress. Oddly enough, the more important philosophy becomes, the more invisible it is to people -- even the people making the progress! The ideas are the air, the questions are being asked, and leading practitioners, many times simply from being part of the environment, pick up the conversation in a much better place than they would have, say, 50 years ago.

The interesting question is the reverse: where has the progress of philosophy failed or gone backwards? (I imagine asking and talking about such a question would be quite controversial!)

I was a philosophy major. The first few sentences struck a chord with me. I had a discussion with a professor. We were discussing Plato. He questioned why I was having issues with the topics being taught. I told him "because he (Plato) is wrong".

Later I came to realize that we learn the history of philosophy not because we're stuck in the dark ages. We study it because it provides context, in one way or another, to what we believe today and why we do.

Philosophers always seem to intent in discussing why philosophy has value. While every piece of science which moved onwards and away from philosophers are intent on showing why they have value.

It also seems just laughable when philosophers try to impose their field on others they know nothing about. Like philosophy in the multiverse or quantum mechanics. It boils down to “I don’t understand this thing, likely others don’t either so they need someone uniquely skilled like me to explain it to them!”

You never see them actually going into the concrete problems of other fields like: The philosophy of the Navier-stokes equation in light of new more efficient micro fluidics chips”. Philosophers thrive on the boundary between what we know really well and what we know but not that well. And that boundary is shrinking. That’s why there is a feeding frenzy in philosophers discussing recent advances in deep connected graphs of simple computing nodes for modeling and classification, from people who don’t even know what a a matrix is and postulating laughable things like that’s these networks will spontaneously develop their own understanding of philosophy purely based on the fact that’s the space they exist in is called something to do with intelligence.

I sort of agree with you. Philosophers I knew in grad school were somewhat of dilletantes who didn’t want to commit to becoming an expert within a single scientific epistemology.

But... I don’t know, that feels a little uncharitable too.

I think the charitable reading is that yes, a philosopher of science doesn’t know the science as well as the scientist. They are not as close to the cutting edge of what we know....

But what they can do is look closer at how the scientist knows. And what other people who are not that scientist know. And from there situate the knowledge in a wider context. Not knowledge the universe but knowledge about knowings.

Well, we have progressed to philosophers like John Gray (the author of Straw Dogs, not the relationship counselor who wrote that Mars/Venus thingy), though he would presumably argue that we haven't, given his views on progress.

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

The comments on that site are pretty cringey. Of course most comment sections are like an intellectual version of one of those gore sites that shows you a procession of photos of mangled bodies or grotesque carcinomas surgically removed from patients. If there has been progress it has not trickled down.

Only on that site? Most comments on this thread are quite cringey as well to my ears...

I still visit HN because its comments are above average. Some of the topical subreddits are decent too. Of course above average is not saying much.

I'll take this opportunity to plug a paper of mine, "A machine that knows its own code", as a humble example of recent progress made in philosophy :)

https://philarchive.org/archive/ALEAMT

If science is statements about facts, then philosophy is statements about other statements, the only requirement being that these statements are non-contradictory.

That makes mathematics just a subdivision in philosophy, in which statements about statements must be (axiomatically) derived exclusively from a completely explicit starting point. Since math mostly took over logic and epistemology (as computability), general philosophy has indeed lost its most important subjects.

Philosophy is simply meant to shrink and downsize. Reasoning without any particular method gets naturally replaced by reasoning with one. If philosophy had grown, that would not have been a good sign. It would not have been progress.

> the only requirement being that these statements are non-contradictory.

> That makes mathematics just a subdivision in philosophy, in which statements about statements must be (axiomatically) derived exclusively from a completely explicit starting point.

The main problem with philosophy is exactly the reason which makes above wrong. A global definition of 'contradiction' is not possible, Nor is even something that resembles a consensus to a sufficiently strong degree to make it meaningful.

This is precisely the reason why you can have radically opposing schools of thought that are simultaneously existing. The trivial example being mathematical empiricism or coherentism, both of which directly oppose the axiomatic approach you've provided, from different angles.

A more absurd example is to say it's never the case that all philosophers would agree "P and not P" is not true (including the sentence itself), let alone it being false (i.e. negation as failure), because the value of "P and not P" is dependent upon your theory of truth and no global theory of truth exist without G.E. Moorean appeals to common-sense.

In my very limited experience, the few philosophers I've known are teachers or earn their living doing something else. This tells me philosophy is not terribly practical, at least as it is being taught now. It is my impression that they love debating between themselves about the most impractical subjects, writing their thoughts in long form, and being extravagant.

I am most likely prejudiced because, as an engineer, my education has always been utilitarian. Maybe we really are in an anti-philosophy era and I am just one more ignorant.

Is ethics an impractical subject?

Asking for progress in philosophy is the wrong way to approach it. Philosophy is a domain that lives on exploring new ideas, asking different questions, refining answers.

A more appropriate approach in my opinion would be to ask if there has been a consistent evolution in philosophy? Do ideas and areas build on its predecessors. Do they take reference?

Another approach would be asking whether philosophy has impacted mankind in any way that is understandable? Each era had its philosophers and trains of thought.

> My opinion is that there is significant and ongoing progress in philosophy...

> 16. Much greater incorporation of the insights of women into philosophy...

How is the "incorporation of the insights of women into philosophy" a progress in philosophy? This is not a progress in a philosophical subject; it is not a discovery in philosophy; it is not even a philosophical topic; at best it is political correctness.

In the past, philosophy had a lot of ground to cover. Today science covers all the ground on what is, what exists, what can be modeled. Philosophy only the ground of what matters.

For example, free will is entirely a science question. How to interpret what science can tell us so far, and how or if it matters, that is a philosophical question.

Might depend on what you mean by progress. Culturally we are very far from even where we were in the age of my parents. In terms more like that from the sciences or academic philosophers I can't say, though I'd guess they'd argue "Yes!".

On a related note, I still love this interview: Scott Aaronson on Philosophical Progress:

https://intelligence.org/2013/12/13/aaronson/

Pierre Grimes and the Noetic Society - Arthur O. Lovejoy's "The Great Chain of Being" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNMWl9cky84

Has there been progress in art?

Interesting question. No if you mean aesthetics, yes if you mean techniques.

I was recently wondering about the same. I regularly hear about breakthroughs in math, physics, biology, chemistry, you name it. I never heard about a breakthrough or significant new ide in philosophy.

Why is Tyler Cowan, an economist, trying to answer this question himself? Why doesn't he interview a philosopher or several? Would we read a philosopher talk about progress in economics? Will Cowan next address progress in software engineering? There's a real intellectual arrogance to the post.

He's actually done a few of those, for example this recent interview with Agnes Callard

https://medium.com/conversations-with-tyler/agnes-callard-ty...

I think people generally don't speak well on the topic of economics, but it would be fine if an informed philosopher inquired about "progress" in economics. The topic of the philosophy of economics itself often is ignored or swept under the rug, and that's a shame. Economics has a lot to offer and isn't just what the ideological conceit of the moment deems it to be.

Additionally, people should show an interest in fields that are external to their own narrow specialty, and ask meaningful questions to help them understand.

The perspectives and methods of economics could definitely provide some insight on the topic of software engineering. It's a historically recent phenomenon, and there is plenty to be studied about its impact.

> it would be fine if an informed philosopher inquired about "progress" in economics

Inquiring is different than answering the question yourself by naming things easily accessible to economists - it implies that Cowan doesn't know anymore about philosophy than I do, and that his standard of 'progress' is 'things that I find useful'.

Philosophy is great. I go a lot to a meetup.com group in my area.

Very underfunded field. Questioning the status quo or each other is not very well accepted today.

Wow this post really pisses me off.

A lot of these issues are addressed in Continental Philosophy which never really caught on in America because of its association with Hegel and Marx.

I wonder why the author doesn’t... oh American Economics professor... no a philosophy prof that’s why.

Philosophy is sophistry. I like R. Scott Bakker's take on the semantic apocalypse, and the lack of progress in philosophy. https://rsbakker.wordpress.com/2011/06/21/what-is-the-semant...

Arguing about the progress in philosophy is sophistry. There's been plenty of progress that has affected lots of lives. It just doesn't happen to fit someone else's narratives or views.

No, philosophy as a academic field has failed. It's common knowledge for those in the field to know that none of the primary problems of philosophy has been solved despite being worked on for 2000 years. What every academic tries to do now is work on the secondary problems.

> It's common knowledge for those in the field to know that none of the primary problems of philosophy has been solved despite being worked on for 2000 years.

We have different definitions of "failure." Without the last 2000 years of philosophy, we wouldn't have formal logic, liberal democracy, the existential outlook, or any number of fundamental conceits that you and I use on a daily basis.

Whether or not any single fundamental question has been "solved" is irrelevant to progress in a field like philosophy.

could you clairify the following: what is an example of a primary problem? what is an example of a secondary problem? what is failure by your definition? what state would a problem be in if it were "solved"? is a problem solved when everybody agrees on a solution? what, then, happens when a contrarian states otherwise? e.g. parmenides was one of the first monists, and that was more or less not acknowledged for a long time after plato, but has since come back into vogue somewhat; was the problem of "is our universe one" solved, and then unsolved?

Look into every sub field of philosophy and the debates that have gone on about certain topics for thousands of years. For example, the mind-body problem in epistemology.

To clarify, no the field is not based on social consensus but logic. How do we explain certain things? For example, Kant believed that logic as a field had been "solved" in the sense there needs no more progress in the field as the techniques developed were sufficient to solve logic problems. Until Godel came along and improved on logic in the 20th century. Solving in this sense is a technical definition not the social one.

Why Singapore? (no rhetorics here, simply curious)

There is a general cultural malaise that started with WW1 and its massive effect on Western society. WW2 then iterated on it, remnants of that old culture escaped to the US to power Hollywood, Broadway, Universities for a while - but this is coming to an end too.

Visit European museums, look at art right up to WW1. The massive meat grinder, the fall of empires and its cultural structures gave way to capitalist societies that churn faster, which benefits technology and consumption, but is detrimental for non-profit long term projects.

The Sistine Chapel will not happen again, anytime soon.

If it happens, it will come out of Asia. Western society lit itself on fire.

Not since Nietzsche. Every philosopher afterwards has merely been quibbling over semantics. It’s a dead field but one whose proponents as a side effect tend to be good enough at rhetorical tricks that they still get funding. If every university philosophy department were to be abolished overnight nothing of value would be lost.

What about the pragmatists?

Yes. Jordan Peterson is proving a framework that connects the seemingly disparate philosophies of religion and of the modern scientific.

yes. ayn rand and jordan peterson.

yes. Ayn Rand and Jordan Peterson.

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