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Comment by challenger22 | Hacker News Reader

https://ianwrightsite.wordpress.com/2018/11/24/hegelian-cont...

Both TFA and the linked article referenced by TFA seem to me to be the ramblings of somebody trying really, really, hard to pull a rabbit out of a hat. By linking together abstract concepts you can prove that philosophy and mathematics are one and the same!

>So it’s very remarkable that Hegel’s mystical starting point, which is purely conceptual and abstract – and makes no reference to physical reality or empirical knowledge whatsoever – nonetheless implies a structure of ‘becoming’ that is equivalent to the fundamental structure found everywhere in physical science.

Well, you can read Hegel this way... I guess. Figure it makes for some really warm and fuzzy insightful feelings, regardless of whether they are meaningful.

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Your criticism reminds me of the book "Prodiges et vertiges de l'analogie"; it is only available in French, but Wikipedia has a good summary [0]:

> Jacques Bouveresse is interested in the incompleteness theorems of Kurt Gödel and their philosophical consequences. On this account, he has attacked, in a popular work Prodiges et vertiges de l'analogie, the use made of these theorems by Régis Debray. Bouveresse denounces the literary distortion of a scientific concept for the purpose of a thesis. This distortion, according to him, has no other purpose than to overwhelm a readership which lacks the training necessary to comprehend such complex theorems. Bouveresse's reproach to Debray is not that he uses a scientific concept for the purpose of an analogy, but that he uses such a difficult to understand theorem in the attempt to provide an absolute justification in the form of the classic sophism of the argument from authority. According to Bouveresse, the incompleteness of a formal system which applies to certain mathematical systems in no way implies the incompleteness of sociology, which is not a formal system.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Bouveresse#Incompleten...

"Hegel aims to merely observe what is there – once we drop all our knowledge, all our presuppositions, all our theories, and even the sense of our own existence.

...

"I think it’s worth emphasising that when Hegel talks about pure being he isn’t talking about an abstract concept. He’s actually talking about a real phenomenon, an actually existing thing, which he claims we all have immediate access to, if we’re prepared to perform the mental exercise."

I cannot help but read the claim of the second paragraph as being a presupposition of the sort disavowed in the first.

well, hegel did-apparently-love his contradictions.

Doublethink is a powerful thing!

Philosophical thinking has its own kind of structure which is very lovely but quite distinct from the rigorous logical way you learn by studying mathematics. I learned the latter in school and the former after. (The former is a lot about 'thinking with words' in a very long attention-span manner, and about holding multiple perspectives in your head at the same time and refining analogies by slowly making your ideas clearer and clearer. Very unlike the intense intuitive sort of thinking done in maths.) Both are very useful but I feel like totally different people when I apply one or the other to making sense of things, and I'm still not sure how to mesh them together into one brain-tool. Maybe one day with enough practice will brain-plasticity make me enlightened, or maybe I'm too old and cemented for them to merge.

Try looking at a Monet painting very close (like leaning over those protective wire barriers at the museum until the guards shoo you away)...it’s a mess of gloppy paint. After awhile you see structure and you can start to build up an understanding of his method in the madness.

Now step back 30 feet...oh, it’s water lilies or a bridge or a willow tree.

The brain is very plastic indeed both in constructing things or interpreting them.

Ok but how do you know which perspective/interpretation of things is the 'correct' one? Or are all correct and you just have to hold them all in your mind at the same time?

(This is a question I'm struggling with for real right now so if I could get some kind of answer to this it would ease a lot of my brain pressure. I never used to have this problem before I learned how to 'generate' new perspectives by 'thinking with words'. It always used to be just one perspective, just one identity.)

I think that's up to your "human" interpretation of the "correct" one. We can go even further down and say the painting is just a collection of atoms, or further up and say it's just a piece of the museum building it's contained in.

All of them are "true" and "correct", but which one is relevant? That's when you need to start to place things into context, and it wildly varies depending if you're an ant, a human being or a rock.

I don't know Hegel, if there is one thing I know it's that everyone starts talking about him by saying "he's obscure, even by deep-in-the-weeds philosophical standards". BUT I think a lot of his whole thing is to instead of trying to find a 'correct' 'one' you look at the tension between multiple interpretations.

Like Monet: splotches of paint resolve into water lilies but we're not seeing water lilies we're seeing various RGB luminance values from our optic nerves and our brain resolves them to a scene which we again break down into constituent parts, water stems, flowers... and rebuild into water lilies... which we again dissect looking for meaning.

The point then is to look at a perspective as just a point in a greater flux. The flux is the correct 'one' that's where the meaning is.

I'm sure Hegel would slap the taste out of my mouth for that analogy but he's dead and no one else seems to know what he meant either, so I feel safe.

>Ok but how do you know which perspective/interpretation of things is the 'correct' one?

Which one has predictive power?

Given how intertwined between philosophy and mathematics is the history and foundational logic underlying computation, programmers of all people should not be quick to dismiss the mathematical insights found in philosophy.

There are those philosophers which are as concerned with logic as you'd expect from a pure mathematician ;-)

If you're interested, Shapiro's "Thinking about Mathematics: The Philosophy of Mathematics" gives a nice introduction into that topic, discussing several schools of philosophy and their thinkers (without forcing the authors pov on the reader). We had a seminar discussing that book, and while most philosophy students seemed happy to skip that seminar (too much math/logic), those of us with a MINT background (CS major here) found it quite amazing.

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