Hacker News Reader

Comment by keiferski | Hacker News Reader

The limitations of empirical knowledge have been known for... a few thousand years now. It is a little disconcerting that (some) neuroscientists appear to be completely ignorant of basic philosophical problems.

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

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

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

View on HN

Knowing something to be from both an epistemological perspective and from a neuroscience perspective lends further credence in some (many) circles, even if it’s less fun to dump on people that way.

One way of avoiding confirmation bias is to simply have no prior understanding to confirm though.

I which case you'll never have a second chance to make a first impression (tm)

In Academia, as long as you do the work to finish a manuscript and submit it, you will get another chance to make another impression.

The fact that Plato and Lao Tzu articulated that the noumenon is fundamentally unknowable does not make the fact that evolution results in processes which actively obscure raw data about the world uninteresting; it could theoretically be the case that evolution tended towards more accurate data over time in all processes while still being the case that base reality is unknowable. I think it's been obvious that this isn't the case for some time now; if you couldn't figure it out from the basic principles of evolution, it should have been obvious in light of chronostasis illusions that hack our perception of casaulity into hearing a sound before we press the button which triggers that sound by first conditioning us to expect the sound to come after an artificial delay and then removing that delay. But this doesn't make the modelling done by the researcher something done out of ignorance, I would assume the researcher is probably familiar with that line of prior work and is creating models that help us better understand the process. I do feel like the article is misleading, and the first two sentences are phrased as if the two views presented (accurate data v.s. inaccurate data) are opposed to one another rather than working together towards the same end (survival/procreation). I haven't watched the video, so I don't know how in-depth it gets, but I did upvote your comment despite my reservations because I felt like it added commentary and context that the linked text was missing.

I came here to say the same thing. It's very amusing seeing modern scientists try to speak about things like this while totally unaware of the historical conversations that preceded them

I feel like anyone drawing a line from deep learning to general AI also has this problem. And that appears to be a large part of Silicon Valley.

While I wasn't entirely convinced by a lot of arguments in the philosophy of mind as an undergrad 20 years ago, it definitely addresses problems "in the zeitgiest" now, e.g. with self-driving cars, etc.

And the conversation there is of a higher level than I see now.

I think taking a tiny bit of undergrad psychology, philosophy, and cognitive science, would help a lot of people think more clearly about AI. I didn't necessarily think that was true when I took it, but with hindsight I think there is a big hole in the conversation.

Gary Marcus is an AI practitioner with a psychology background: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_Marcus

he has a decidely different perspective that I think is a lot more grounded and reasoned: https://arxiv.org/abs/1801.00631

Agreed 100%. The media's conflation of "artificial intelligence" with neural networks is particularly irritating.

It would definitely be good for more "AI"-interested tech people to grapple with Searle, Nagel, Chalmers, even if you don't fully buy all their arguments.

> It would definitely be good for more "AI"-interested tech people to grapple with Searle, Nagel, Chalmers, even if you don't fully buy all their arguments.

No, it wouldn't, especially Searle whose best known argument in this area is entirely for a distinction which can by definition make no difference in the material universe. It might have theological/spiritual applications (though beyond holding open the possibility than certain material facts do not demand the naively obvious spiritual conclusions without itself rebutting those conclusions, it doesn't likely to bear much load even there), but from a material perspective it's pure intellectual autoeroticism that has already been granted far too much attention by people who could contribute more to human progress by spending that time on (almost literally) any other pursuit.

It also matters what problems you work on at the beginning of your career and who you are surrounded by.

People who work on things that nobody in their group has good answers for, become much more aware of other disciplines and the histories, as they go looking for better answers.

But if entering a group working on known paths, or existing ideas (being tested), then wandering too far from base camp is going to look unfocused. The existing path has to hit a dead end. Which in many fields/professions takes decades.

Herbert Simon started off with Political Science. But look where the path takes him as he doesn't find answers on what he is working on - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_A._Simon

Made me think of:

https://fliptomato.wordpress.com/2007/03/19/medical-research...

Discussed here:

https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/9602/rediscover...

> “These people haven’t fully accepted the intricacies of certain well known abstract philosophies? Dummies. They are obviously not contributing useful scholarship to their field.”

In all fairness, speculative philosophy and evolutionary neuroscience are completely different angles on the problem. Also the problem at hand is not arguing about the philosophical properties of empirical knowledge, but that evolution may favor an increasing level of "ignorance" in order to maximize survival. Which may be surprising to, say, some hegelians who believe that as time passes species get more enlightened.

You are completely right, I guess "Good artists copy; great artists steal".

Here's a related, although sort of tangent, NPR episode about originality: https://www.npr.org/programs/ted-radio-hour/321797073/what-i...

Also, even in neuroscience this is not new at all, Maturana and Varela researched and wrote about this subject extensively, their book The Tree of Knowledge is a good starter.

I don't think it relates to originality at all. If you're interested in solving a problem, it helps to understand or at least be aware of the underlying foundations of it. A whole lot of modern scientists don't seem to understand the basics of empiricism (what science is) or philosophy of science in general. Thus you get situations like this one, where an apparently brilliant neuroscientist reaches a conclusion that a philosopher in Ancient Greece did 2,300 years ago. It's a waste of time and resources that could have been avoided by simply educating scientists on the history of philosophy.

Why is this the current state of affairs? My guess is because Anglo-American academic philosophy [1] has gone a little too far down the language analysis hole and subsequently isn't perceived as relevant by scientists. It's a tragedy and unfortunately the supposed irrelevance of philosophy continues to be perpetuated by science popularizers.

[1] The academic philosophy traditions in continental Europe and the English-speaking world have drifted apart over the past ±150 years. You see less of this blatant ignorance of philosophy in somewhere like France. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continental_philosophy

> Thus you get situations like this one, where an apparently brilliant neuroscientist reaches a conclusion that a philosopher in Ancient Greece did 2,300 years ago.

Or, this scientist did the research, learned about what philosophers did 2300 years ago and then adapted/repackaged the message/knowledge in a way that fits his audience.

Also, in your statement you are essentially saying the scientist was not original because he reached the same conclusion as someone else before him.

Then you conclude that being unoriginal is a waste of resources.

So of course this relates to originality.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com