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Comment by Veedrac | Hacker News Reader

Is it just me or is the title not supported by the article?

Just you. :) It probably refers to this part:

> Q: Your colleague David Chalmers has fretted that “there has not been large collective convergence to the truth on the big questions of philosophy,” such as God, free will and consciousness. Does this lack of convergence bother you?

> A: I disagree with Dave here. Overwhelmingly most philosophers are atheists or agnostics, which I take to be convergence to the truth. Most are compatibilist about free will and believe in it, which I also take to be convergence to the truth. Almost all believe in consciousness and most don’t have a clue how to explain it, which is wisdom. It is not that there isn’t convergence, it is that the outliers who do not converge get much more attention than the great mass of convergers, who don’t particularly stand out.

This is a general claim about the highly educated. People with degrees are much more likely to be atheist, hold a coherent view about free will, and believe in consciousness without being able to explain it.

This isn't evidence of philosophy making progress, because atheism among the educated is a scientific and cultural trend, the debate about consciousness is primarily an ancient fight about definitions, and believing in consciousness without being able to explain it is certainly not progress in any productive sense.

When most ancient philosophers were theists and believed in libertarian free will and an immaterial soul, was that a convergence to the truth, too?

I'm not sure what point you're making. When people believed in a flat Earth, or geocentrism, or miracles, those things did not contradict empirical knowledge of the world. Since then, we have established empiricism as the most useful tool for examining the real world, and expanded the scope of human knowledge considerably. I'm not sure what about that you might take issue with.

The idea that consensus entails convergence to the truth, when the best thinkers have consensus on antithetical ideas in different time periods.

You're ignoring the different amounts of information those people had about their environments. Do you happen to have issues with a particular scientific consensus, is that where we're going here?

It might be that our modern thinkers are missing the forest for the trees because they are overwhelmed with information about their environment.

I don't have any issue with the current consensus, it just seems incorrect reasoning to say consensus is convergence to truth. Why isn't consensus just groupthink, a notoriously bad way to arrive at the truth?

The current consensus is the closest that science gets to "truth". Depending on your definition of "groupthink" (which seems like a deliberately pejorative term), either that describes most categories of knowledge, or we can suggest that the difference is that there is a rigorous methodology and system of verification for these beliefs.

Consensus does not have the best track record in science. Much better is the actual evidence and experimentation instead of what people who call themselves "scientists" think about the evidence.

Consensus is the track record of science. Observations are not theories.

"These answers to age-old questions are popular right now, so I'm just going to declare 'Problem solved!' and attribute it to philosophical progress".

That's some hard-hitting philosophy right there.

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