The Grand Design (2010) | Hacker News Reader

The Grand Design (2010)

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>Traditionally these are questions for philosophy, but philosophy is dead. Philosophy has not kept up with modern developments in science, particularly physics.

I'm sorry, what kind of non sensical bias is that? That's like saying that science doesn't care about truth, or is more important than truth. After all, "Truth is one of the central subjects in philosophy. It is also one of the largest." [1]

[1] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/truth/

While I do not think the opinion stated in that quote is a useful one, neither do I think it is any better to say that it implies science does not care about truth, on the basis that philosophy has declared itself to be concerned with truth. It is reasonable to assume that both enterprises are seeking truth in their own ways. Einstein and Bohr seem to have considered their work to be philosophical in nature, and Tim Maudlin has feet in both camps.

I think that is exactly animationwill’s point — that the statement he made is ridiculous, and so too is the author’s statement.

Doesn't the whole article basically suggest that modern science isn't really concerned with truth as much as useful models?

Isn’t your question an inherently philosophical one? What is truth, when all you will ever have in science are models, experiments, and results?

Science shows us that we can model the same "truth" in many ways.

This entire thread is misguided. Science and certain sub disciplines (e.g. logic) of philosophy are relatable and quite entwined. But lets say philosophy is really just an aspect of critical thinking which is missing in many parts of human experience (e.g. current politics). Regarding science it seems the opposite of the authors unintelligent claim is more the case, that science has moved further away from philosophy. Limitations of science are at core a place where critical thinking and reason take place. Think of Kant, Hume, and other science oriented philosphers. Empiricism and epsitemic functions of science are literally couched in philosphy. No, Heidegger and Foucault are not very relevant to science. Yet where real world results entrance the scientist and non scientist alike, all too often any philosophical implications are left unattended. Truth is a concern of both science and philosophy but it isnt always a relevant approach. Ethics and morality are very important in scientific discovery. Theological speculation is a side note to both, and no we arent living in a simulation so stop being idiots.

>Traditionally these are questions for philosophy, but philosophy is dead. Philosophy has not kept up with modern developments in science, particularly physics.

I largely agree with this perspective on philosophy. Philosophy poses as a sort of higher level view of reality than physics or science. Rather than thinking of philosophy as a higher level view I think of it as a biased point of view.

Things like the philosophy of ethics or religion really drive this point through. Religion and ethics are human inventions that don't exist outside of the human experience.

I'm sure there are great ideas that have arisen from within philosophy, but the field as a whole tries to unionize religion, ethics, science, morality and logic as if these areas of thought are suppose to peers. Morality and religion is as specific to human behavior as the mating behavior of chimpanzees; they should not be put into the same bin as science and logic.

Logic is a field of philosophy [1]. As most inductive reasoning is. It would be impossible to separate philosophy from math, and in turn math from physics. Philosophy is not intended to be a high level view but a low level one, willing to examine the core structures of any system, weather those are man made ones such as ethics or beliefs, or supposed nature laws such as the physical world.

It’s is true that some modern philosophers have done poorly to keep up with recent discoveries. However this is also true of many other proponents of different fields (i.e. neurology has been accused in lacking cognitive/computer science knowledge, biological science is often accused of lacking knowledge in statistical models). No matter the claim we don’t tend to decide entire fields of study are useless because we disagree with some of its practitioners.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logic

Religion and morality is part of philosophy as well. Does this mean it is impossible to separate Morality and Mathematics?

What is the mathematical formula for good and evil?

>Philosophy is not intended to be a high level view but a low level one,

We're talking about the same thing, high or low is just the choice of symbolic direction as nothing is really "lower" or "higher." Let's remove that from the semantics to remove the confusion. I mean a universal framework that unionizes all viewpoints into a cohesive whole similar to how assembly language unionizes all programming languages into a single cohesive language.

I think this fairly well points out that we do not actually mean the same thing when we say “high” and “low”. Although, I will concede that the two terms are often interchangeable and often misused.

Correct me if I’m reading you wrongly, but It seems to me when you say high level you’re offering philosophy up as an umbrella where all things that fall beneath it are then equivocated.

My argument is that I do not believe this. I believe philosophy is a tool best used to build things up from the bottom. I think when physics asks a question of itself, we can safely call that philosophy. In much the same way, it is also philosophy when we ask ourselves if what we are doing is morally “right”. Same tool, vastly different jobs. With little to no connection inherent between the jobs themselves.

This would be the same in mathematics if I were to offer an axiom in traditional number theory (specifically all positive integers in a base 10 system). I would then need to argue that my proposed axiom did not apply also to propositional calculus, as no reasonable mathematical would believe that they were equivalent. This is not to say there is no overlap, there very well may be if interpreted correctly. But it does not by its existence imply they should be the same thing.

This is also where I think we agree. For me physics’ ability to question its axioms are in fact what separates it from things like religious dogma. An axiom that is indisputable is dogma in a sense. So the reason why science is so powerful is this ability to question and not take results on faith. To remove philosophy from that would be to diminish what sets it apart.

So with the tool metaphor I’d just say agin that not all practitioners use their tools wisely. But this does not mean we should throw out all of our hammers just because we see someone using one upside down.

I would also suggest reading more on the topic of ethics in philosophy. I think you may find that the field is far more scientific then you believe it to be. You’ll also note that there are many similarities in its logic and methods of categorization. The issue is simply that it is much more difficult to answer questions in ethics than it is to find out what happens to an object on a frictionless plane. And if physics is the one true answer, than not much can be considered purely human made. As humans abide the same physical laws that frictionless planes do.

>Correct me if I’m reading you wrongly, but It seems to me when you say high level you’re offering philosophy up as an umbrella where all things that fall beneath it are then equivocated.

No we mean the same thing. Though I do not agree with you that philosophy is more fundamental then science or logic.

>You’ll also note that there are many similarities in its logic and methods of categorization.

Any random topic can be founded on arbitrary axioms to create theorems of unlimited complexity. This does not justify study imo.

It is certainly true that science is founded on philosophy and is arguably a branch of it, but the implicit question in the controversial passage from the review is whether modern philosophy's methods are adequate. In that regard, as pointed out by Eliezer Yudkowsky [1], two millenia of philosophic inquiry was blindsided by the more radical epistemic and metaphysical implications of 20th. century physics.

Personally, I feel that philosophy of the mind's preoccupation with materialism (or its denial) [2] is a distraction that is holding it back.

[1] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Bp8vnEciPA5TXSy6f/can-you-pr...

[2] http://www.timcrane.com/uploads/2/5/2/4/25243881/crane_hist_... p. 13

I'd have to give it serious thought, but if I were to agree, I'd also have to add that: The last two millennia of physics were also blindsided by it's own implications of it's discoveries in the 20th century.

Philosophy of mind I think is only a good example of all the things we still do not understand about neurology and cognitive science. I am not personally disheartened by it, as I typically get excited about unanswered questions. But I would agree modern day philosophers would be well advised to read more interdisciplinary science journals if they want to remain relevant. A good example of this is the Bereitschaftspotential from Libet's famous experiments.The experiment was sound the results were sound, the interpretations however may not have been. Diligent philosophers could have pointed this out, but it was the work of a medical researcher who did disprove it's underlying assumptions.[1][2]

[1]https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2019/09/free-will... [2]https://www.researchgate.net/publication/230624040_An_Accumu...

> The last two millennia of physics were also blindsided by it's own implications of it's discoveries in the 20th century.

Putting aside whether we have had two millennia of physics as a distinct discipline, the point here is that progress on these issues was made by the methods of physics, rather than those of philosophic epistemology and metaphysics.

But that's exactly the point - science and logic are also specific to human behaviour. Our ideas of what constitutes science and logic are wholly subjective, and boil down to certain kinds of predictability, inference, and consistency within our own experience.

We have no idea how universal, representative, or complete that experience really is. Worse, whenever we've assumed in the past that our science and logic are complete and perfectly self-consistent, we've always been proven wrong.

So IMO it's likely that we're operating with a small subset of the experiential and philosophical sophistication available to more advanced sentiences - and it would be naive and irrationally self-congratulatory to assume otherwise.

Well of course you can get really abstract, but let's keep the topic on things that we know about to the best of our knowledge. As far as we're aware science and logic applies to things outside of our own experience.

This is a semantic issue. Yeah you're not technically wrong that science and logic is part of the human experience.

But at the same time there is a demarcation between science/logic and religion. What's the semantic word used for this demarcation? I chose "human experience" but I'm sure you can agree that's just a semantic choice and that the principles of science and logic as far as we're "aware" apply "outside" of the "human experience" while religion and morality do not.

> principles of science and logic as far as we're "aware" apply "outside" of the "human experience"

On the contrary if you take a critical thinking course, you'll see that your logic does apply to the human experience

>On the contrary if you take a critical thinking course, you'll see that your logic does apply to the human experience

Of course it does. I didn't say otherwise. All things we talk about are technically experienced through humans and thus all things are touched by the human experience. But that's just pedantics... we can think outside of that and assume that there are experiences other than our own even though technically the only thing we can experience is the "human experience."

There is a demarcation here that I'm talking about that separates science and religion. Perhaps culture is a better word than experience. What if I say that science and logic apply outside of "human culture" while religion and morality do not? Would that help you understand my point?

> What if I say that science and logic apply outside of "human culture" while religion and morality do not?

I would say that when it comes to morality in particular, I have the opposite intuition in that morality would be highly likely to extend behind the human experience. As you say in another comment, yes I agree that the rules are arbitrary and there is no absolute morality. However, that’s like that saying in statistics that all models are wrong. Yes, but some are useful.

All moral systems may be arbitrary (a perspective that by the way is a part of philosophy), but some are useful, perhaps even necessary, for the well-functioning of society. Discussing how to make, extend, and enforce these moral systems seems likely relevant to any society made of independent agents, whether human or not.

As a meta point, just as you can’t defeat science by doing better scientific experiments (because you’ll only ever be improving science by doing so), you can’t defeat philosophy by providing better philosophical arguments. The points you made about morality are points that other philosophers have already made. You are not avoiding philosophy by declaring morality to be arbitrary and defending your assertion, you are in fact doing the opposite and contributing to the philosophical discourse on the nature of morality.

Religion and morality are only two broad areas of philosophy. There are many more, if you care to look.

>All moral systems may be arbitrary (a perspective that by the way is a part of philosophy), but some are useful, perhaps even necessary, for the well-functioning of society. Discussing how to make, extend, and enforce these moral systems seems likely relevant to any society made of independent agents, whether human or not.

There are physical structures in your brain that point to genetic transmission of moral behavior. This indicates that morality is a product of natural selection. Moral behavior exists because it helps us survive similar to how hunger helps us survive. So what is the point of creating a philosophy around Morality when we don't create such philosophical studies around hunger? Why is there a philosophy of morality and not a philosophy of hunger when both sets of behaviors are arbitrary and serve the purpose you stated: "but some are useful, perhaps even necessary, for the well-functioning of society. Discussing how to make, extend, and enforce these <hunger/energy seeking/sex-drive> systems seems likely relevant to any society made of independent agents, whether human or not."

Clearly humans do not act morally. Pure moral behavior does not aid in survival. Rather a blend altruistic behavior and self interested behavior aids in survival. How natural selection implements this behavior is arbitrary. For humans, natural selection has NOT chosen to implement survival behavior through a singular processor, in short we do not see our survival as a blend of altruistic and self interested behavior. IN fact we do not even behave with "survival" on the forefront of our minds. Rather our behavior is implemented by our brain using conflicting emotional goals. These goals aid in our survival and exist for the purpose of our survival and are awareness of this fact or lack thereof is not a requirement.

We are aware of what evil behavior is, and we feel the emotions related to temptation we also feel guilt... we are also aware of good behavior and we feel emotions that reward us for altruistic behavior but also punish us when we do too much good to our own detriment. Genetic tuning of our emotional response largely influence our behavior. An evil person feels little response in harming others and an altruistic person feels great reward in helping others.

Morality and law arises as a phenomenon of our neo cortex attempting to parametrize and formalize these emotions. It is a mechanical side effect of trying to make greater sense of a mechanism that only has a singular purpose of survival. Morality is just a made up categorization of behaviors for a specific system.

The question is why then do we spend so much time trying to formalize ethics, fairness and altruistic behavior but spend almost no time trying to formalize other survival instincts like hunger or lust?

The hypothesis is complex but it exists. The neocortex (our higher level consciousness) is said to have evolved later in the evolution of life as a sort of higher level layer of consciousness that has executive control over our overall actions. Instincts like hunger and sex drive are baser survival instincts required for all things to survive and evolved relatively early before the neocortex. Many living things with no higher level consciousness such as bacteria display primitive versions of these instincts.

As a result our neocortex has no trouble recognizing hunger instinct or sex drive as separate modules within the human brain as these modules remain very well separated as they were created in different times of our species evolution. Therefore we don't care to analyze these modules as they are easily recognized as base instincts.

Group behavior involving altruism on the other hand evolved at a later time with the neocortex. Altruism aids in survival but its' benefits are not immediate and as a result like the neocortex such behaviors take longer to evolve. As a result it is harder for us to separate and see that these emotions are the same basal instincts as hunger because these modules are so integrated with the neocortex as they evolved together. We make the mistake and assume that morality arises from logic when it is in fact just a set of emotions reacting to certain actions and behaviors.

Due to the fact that the morality module in our brain is a product of natural selection you can actually probe it to find internal illogical inconsistencies that are unresolved because resolving such conflicts do not aid in survival. See the trolley problem: https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Trolley_problem and various edits to it like the fat man or the fat villain. Arbitrary edits that change the circumstance but not the overall logical moral consequences have a huge influence on human response showing that our modal module is not internally consistent because there was no need for mother nature to make it fully consistent as it does not aid in our survival. When you examine moral conflicts try to self-reflect. You will find that like all people you try to make sense of why you "feel" something is wrong in once case and why it isn't in another case. This process is exactly as I described, an attempt to formalize the resulting output of the moral module of your brain, but you just don't realize that this is what you're doing.

If it is worth studying morality as a philosophy then it is worth studying hunger and sex-drive as a philosophy as well. Philosophy chooses morality as a zone of study because it does not fully strip away the emotions and biases involved with the human experience in the same way that logic and science does.

> Why is there a philosophy of morality and not a philosophy of hunger when both sets of behaviors are arbitrary and serve the purpose you stated: "but some are useful, perhaps even necessary, for the well-functioning of society. Discussing how to make, extend, and enforce these <hunger/energy seeking/sex-drive> systems seems likely relevant to any society made of independent agents, whether human or not."

You are moving the goalposts. First, it was about whether or not morality is specific to human culture or not. Now, it’s about whether or not the study of morality counts as philosophy compared to the study of hunger or sex.

And yes, while I agree with most of your arguments about morality, you’re still making philosophical points. Yet again, you demonstrate an ignorance of what philosophy is in your attempts to brush it aside.

>You are moving the goalposts.

No goal post was moved. All my original points still stand. I am simply giving you the scientific explanation of morality... a deeper look than what philosophy has to offer. And why such an arbitrary construct makes philosophy a flawed field of study.

The hierarchy from existence to morality flows along a single branch of a highly complex tree. It flows like this:

   Existence-> atoms -> molecules -> evolution -> biology -> human biology -> neurology -> morality.

From this diagram of a single branch you can see that Morality is a biological phenomenon specific to humans. However, philosophy does NOT obey this categorization. It arbitrarily goes down this branch selects morality and places it side by side with "existence" as a field of study. Why didn't philosophy choose biology instead? Why did it have to flow specifically down the chain and pick out this really specific thing to humans called morality? Because when philosophy was invented many people were too stupid to realize that they had a biased view of the world with humanity and morality at the center of the universe.

Philosophy doesn't approach morality from this angle, it approaches it from a axiomatic logical angle as if it was a foundational thing when really morality is this very specific and arbitrary biological phenomenon.

>And yes, while I agree with most of your arguments about morality, you’re still making philosophical points. Yet again, you demonstrate an ignorance of what philosophy is in your attempts to brush it aside.

In logical debates, people tend not to make personal comments like "you're demonstrating ignorance" or other potentially disparaging garbage like that. If philosophers were truly logical they would just attack the subject matter rather than the character. I have a thesis how is it wrong? If you think evidence is flawed point it out. Deconstruct my points logically rather than stating your opinions about me and my points. Be more "philosopher" like.

Additionally this whole "you're still making philosophical points" is largely the main problem with philosophy. Someone decided hey lets' take any topic that's remotely interesting and package it up and put it under one field of study and call it philosophy. Great this package is so large that any thing that comes out of my mouth even criticism just happens to touch it.

The fact that my criticisms touch "philosophy" is why the field and word itself is loaded. It's stupid, if philosophy encompasses a bunch of BS but also logic than if I use logic to discount that BS than OF COURSE I'm going to be using "philosophy" because "logic" is part of "philosophy." Why don't you make "logic" part of the definition of "scientology" that way whenever you try to use logic to explain why scientology is wrong you will inevitably be using "scientology" to prove "scientology" wrong and be self defeating. Kind of a dumb way to defeat arguments.

> In logical debates, people tend not to make personal comments like "you're demonstrating ignorance" or other potentially disparaging garbage like that.

The point wasn’t to attack you, the point was that it’s futile to discuss “philosophy” if you continue to misrepresent what it is. Which is why I don’t have much more to say about the rest of your comment.

There is nothing misrepresented here. I am simply presenting facts and a conclusion based off of those facts. Other people have different facts and different conclusions based off of those facts. You think, philosophy is legit? Great, I respect your opinion, but I disagree and I will show you with pure logic why you are wrong and why I disagree.

If you disagree with my conclusion don't become emotional and call it a "misrepresentation." Deconstruct my conclusion and break it down to prove me wrong.

Any comment on my character or my actions is illogical and constitutes a personal attack. Focus on my conclusion. If I say philosophy is illegitimate than rather than say that I am "ignorant" or "misrepresenting" philosophy, stay logical and state that the conclusion is illogical and incorrect. Going into personal territory than running away like a scared cat by saying you have nothing more to say is a complete admission that you cannot win an argument by being logical or impersonal.

What's really going on here is that have nothing to say because logic has utterly defeated any capacity for you to deliver a counter argument. You cannot say anything because you know you are completely and utterly illogical and irrational and wrong.

If you had an argument you would present it, but of course we both know you have nothing.

> If you had an argument you would present it, but of course we both know you have nothing.

I’ve already presented some of my arguments. But of course we both know that you are being intellectually dishonest.

> What's really going on here is that have nothing to say because logic has utterly defeated any capacity for you to deliver a counter argument. You cannot say anything because you know you are completely and utterly illogical and irrational and wrong.

Ironic, isn’t it? Who’s being smug and emotional now? How old are you, out of curiosity?

But sure, I will engage with you on your childish level.

> No goal post was moved.

You originally said, and I quote:

> ...the principles of science and logic as far as we're "aware" apply "outside" of the "human experience" while religion and morality do not.

And when I gave reasons as to why entities outside of “human experience” might still have a use for morality, you did not counter that but instead moved the goalposts to:

> Why is there a philosophy of morality and not a philosophy of hunger

Boom, you were out-logic’d but unable to admit it. Wow. You can’t say anything about this because you were simply flat out wrong.

> All my original points still stand. I am simply giving you the scientific explanation of morality... a deeper look than what philosophy has to offer.

That’s what I mean, you refuse to acknowledge that the philosophical perspective takes into account the scientific one. It encompasses it. It’s greater than it. Science cannot be “deeper” than philosophy because philosophy includes the scientific perspective.

Funny how you accuse others of playing word games, when in reality that’s all you do. Because we both know your arguments have no other substance to them.

>But sure, I will engage with you on your childish level.

See, personal insults. That's why my post went on an expose to get you to say something substantial. Now you engage me because your pride is hurt.

>Ironic, isn’t it? Who’s being smug and emotional now?

I'm not being being emotional. Just triggering you to get you to respond. Also why does age matter here. It's irrelevant to me that you are clearly under the age of 10. I don't judge people based off age.

>And when I gave reasons as to why entities outside of “human experience” might still have a use for morality,

Anything central to the human experience can be considered useful by entities outside of humanity. For example swimming. Fish swim. So do humans. Therefore where is the philosophy of swimming? Clearly for some reason we feel morality is more important than swimming. My thesis is that it is NOT. Morality is just arbitrary behaviors with no more meaning than the motions that keep your head above water.... meaningless but maybe coincidentally meaningful to something else like fish.

And here's another indication of your bias. Who says intelligent entities are central to the universe? The concept of intelligence is another human invention. Clearly "intelligence" is just an arbitrary phenomenon that occurred on Earth. The fact you place anything "useful" to "entities" outside of the "human experience" is another form of bias similar to "intelligent design." Intelligence is NOT central to the universe or the creation of the universe. Like morality, Intelligence is a phenomenon in the universe as arbitrary as morality.

There is nearly an infinite amount of very low entropic structures that can be formed by atoms. The structures that encompass and lead to intelligence are a small arbitrary fraction of the total amount of these structures and therefore arbitrary.

Thus not even "intelligence" and "existence" are categories that go side by side... let alone "morality."

As I said before there is a clear categorical tree which indicates the origins of many concepts throughout the universe. The placement of morality and "entities with intelligence" on this categorical tree indicates that it is just an arbitrary creation. The placement of existence lives at the root of this tree.

>That’s what I mean, you refuse to acknowledge that the philosophical perspective takes into account the scientific one. It encompasses it. It’s greater than it. Science cannot be “deeper” than philosophy because philosophy includes the scientific perspective.

You can define a word "gloop" to encompass literal feces and science and logic. Therefore the concept of "gloop" which includes feces is more fundamental than science because it literally encompasses the scientific perspective. Does this make sense to you? I just defined a word that encompasses feces and science! This is the garbage logic you're presenting to me. Just replace feces with some obscure field of study from philosophy and you have the same BS.

Do you get it? I am saying philosophy is an arbitrary category made up by biased people who thought morality is as central of a question as existence. There is literally no difference between "gloop" and "philosophy."

>Funny how you accuse others of playing word games, when in reality that’s all you do. Because we both know your arguments have no other substance to them.

I don't see how anything is funny here. More like your pride is hurt so you want to pretend you're above it all by thinking everything I say or do is like a funny game to you. In actuality when you read it nothing is funny, it's just words.

Also I never accused others of playing "word games" I am saying people are ignorant and are participating in a word game without even knowing it. Philosophers don't realize how loaded the word "philosophy" is but they realize how "gloop" is a loaded word. It's pure ignorance or bias. You spend 4 years studying philosophy and suddenly you encounter evidence that shows you the entire field is loaded? What human in their right mind is logical enough to drop philosophy right then and there? No one. This is what's going on with you. Your bias prevents you from making the truly logical maneuver similar to how a christian who's been worshipping Christ for 20 years won't be able to give up his religion based off of a logical argument.

>The points you made about morality are points that other philosophers have already made. You are not avoiding philosophy by declaring morality to be arbitrary and defending your assertion, you are in fact doing the opposite and contributing to the philosophical discourse on the nature of morality. You can arbitrarily move the boundaries of the definition of a word to encompass whatever you want. That is what philosophy is. If I want to talk about something meta well being meta is part of philosophy because I defined it that way.

How about I redefine irrationality to include logic? Then when someone says I'm being irrational I just tell them they that irrationality is part of logic and that I'm actually being logical.

Philosophers always get into these meta paradoxes. These aren't profound concepts it's just language semantics involving the arbitrary definition of a word. If you define philosophy to be a many arbitrary academic fields including logical paradoxes and logical arguments then trying to logically argue your way out it of course it creates a sort of paradox. But the paradox only exists because of the arbitrary definition and that is exactly my argument.

Philosophy is an arbitrary definition. A hodgepodge of ideas many which have no relation to one another but it happens to include logic and self referential paradoxes that can be used to entrap anyone who attempts to argue against it. Word play has no meaning in the face of actual concepts, if philosophy is a word play then what's the point? It's basically the study of every single thing on the face of the earth.

It appears you don’t even know what philosophy is. If you think it’s all word play, you must either be unwilling or unable to understand the concepts behind the words.

All concepts can be victims of wordplay regardless of the complexity of the concept. Logic is Logic and religion is religion. These two words are concepts.

The word "Philosophy" combining the concepts like religion, morality, science and logic into a singular field of thought is called "word play" because the very definition of "Philosophy" is the combination of several of these concepts. Logic is used by math but it is not math, logic is used by science but it is not science. Could one say the same about philosophy? Can you remove all those concepts of religion and morality and science from philosophy and does the word "philosophy" have enough merit like "logic" to stand on it's own without resting on the shoulder of actual concepts?

The answer is no. The reason is because philosophy itself has no meaning it is simply a grouping of concepts and therefore "word play." My main argument in this entire thread is that the grouping that "philosophy" encompasses is arbitrary and flawed. Religion and Logic do not belong in the same group.

> Morality [...] is as specific to human behavior as the mating behavior of chimpanzees

It's true that a lot of what has been written about morality and ethics turns out to make a lot of assumptions that tend to limit it to human beings; Kant's "rational agents" are pretty clearly just humans, certainly adult, likely neurotypical. Although he probably intended for it to be a truly universal concept, the definition he provides is so narrow that it actually excludes many ordinary humans, much less non-human intelligences.

The frontier of ethics is to consider a more generalized ethical framework that can encompass other forms of intelligence. In the short term we'll need theories like that to deal with AI; in the long term perhaps also for aliens, uplifted animals, digital copies of human brains, or other even stranger things.

>The frontier of ethics is to consider a more generalized ethical framework that can encompass other forms of intelligence.

You cannot derive morality from pure logic. Good and evil has nothing to do with a truth table.

In addition there is a huge body of evidence that are specific moral behaviors are the result of natural selection. https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Natural_morality. Morality are just arbitrary behavioral principles that assisted us in survival,. In the same way that feeling hungry helps us survive so does feeling guilty, the two are one and the same. Moral behavior is no different then behaviors caused by hunger. Why not create a philosophy of hunger?

Once you think things through you will realize that an ethical framework does not exist outside of the human experience. You can create your own axiomatic morality framework to encompass aliens and AI but realize that you are just creating an arbitrary set of rules, you are not discovering anything profound about the universe.

> In addition there is a huge body of evidence that are specific moral behaviors are the result of natural selection.

There's a huge body of argument, which argues that various "moral" behaviors could have arisen via natural selection. Actual evidence? Not so much.

There is evidence. Physical evidence in fact.

You can find people with mental conditions that involve a complete lack of morality. If you scan these people with an MRI you actually find actual correlated differences in their brain.

The term for this type of mental condition is antisocial personality disorder. The popular term is psychopathy.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/the-neuroscien...

It's hard to beat an MRI of the brain and an arrow pointing to a picture of the part of your brain that is moral.

Unless you disagree with physical structures in the brain being the result of natural selection, such evidence supports morality being the result of natural selection.

All right, here's a structurally similar claim: Snoring is the result of natural selection. The physical features of our throats cause snoring (we can actually change this with surgery). And the physical features of our throats are the result of evolution. So...

So now we need to define exactly what we mean by "is the result of". Is it accidentally the result of an evolutionary process (and we are explaining it with post-hoc rationalizations)? Or is it the result of a process that evolution actually drove toward that outcome, because it was beneficial? (Or is snoring actually beneficial for the survival and reproduction of the species?)

All mutations are accidental. Whether a macro feature on a biological lifeform is accidental feature or a feature driven through generations of natural selection can be judged through the complexity of the outcome. Complexity arises from random mutations being selected and building on each other.

A complex module in our brain that formulates moral judgements on certain behaviors is by probability more likely to be an outcome of generations of natural selection. Such a module arising by accident is roughly equivalent to the probability of a tornado self assembling a 747 airliner from random junk by accident.

You're pulling out the "tornado in a junkyard" argument to advocate for evolution? There are those who think that exact same argument applies to something like morals arising as the result of a series of accidental mutations.

I'm not arguing against it.

I'm saying morals are a macro feature arising from a series of accidental mutations as opposed to a macro feature arising as a side effect similar to your snoring example.

The complexity of the moral module is too complex to be a single accidental mutation... it must be naturally selected out of a multitude of mutations building on each other to produce such a feature. This is very unlike snoring which is caused by mechanisms that are far more simplistic.

I think the fundamental error you're making here is thinking of philosophy as a monolithic metastructure of human thought rather than thousands of discrete silos of academic study representing millions of perspectives over the course of human history.

I would argue that one of the reasons we have so many societies that are so heavily dependent on scientific understanding yet also so perilously ignorant of science is because of the dearth of philosophical study in those cultures.

In order to parse scientific understanding without wasting its insights we need to already have the mental tools needed to critically asses the usefulness and truth of said knowledge.

That is what philosophy provides. From epistemology to logic to the wider existential questions, exploration of philosophy is what leads most modern people to rationality, whatever their starting points.

For many people, understanding their religious or moral philosophy within the wider network of possible options that people have considered valid over the eons is the first step in the direction of scientific literacy.

To discount that study because you're already a rationalist is reductive and self-sabotaging.

Yeah, I agree. I'm more arguing for the fact that philosophy is not more fundamental than science.

Think of it in the sense of in the big quest to answer the big fundamental question of existence we likely won't find it through philosophy because of a category error. Religion and ethics is not more fundamental than logic yet philosophy places them side by side as peers.

This doesn't mean we should just throw the whole thing in the trash or that nothing good ever came out of it. I'm not saying that.

>Religion and ethics is not more fundamental than logic yet philosophy places them side by side as peers.

See, this is what I was talking about before, you're speaking of 'philosophy' as though it's one big thing and there's a unified perspective there.

I don't think that anyone in their right mind would argue that ethics are as fundamentally true as logic any more than they would argue that a scientific theory is more proven than a mathematical proof.

You just attacked a strawman, is my point. That was my point before, too. Philosophy is the exploration of perspectives, it isn't a single thing. It's an action. Just like science.

Many people hold it as something more fundamental than science, which is ultimately what I'm "attacking"

It is more fundamental than science.

Trivially, you can show this by pointing to the fact that science branched off of "it".

But more relevantly, if you can't clearly organize your thoughts into a coherent perspective or think critically and draw logical conclusions, you can't follow the scientific method in the first place. Nobody can.

>Trivially, you can show this by pointing to the fact that science branched off of "it".

This doesn't hold. Chemistry branched off of alchemy, this doesn't make alchemy real or more fundamental than chemistry.

>But more relevantly, if you can't clearly organize your thoughts into a coherent perspective or think critically and draw logical conclusions, you can't follow the scientific method in the first place. Nobody can.

The scientific method cannot draw conclusions. In practice it's mostly used to establish correlations only. When used in attempt to directly prove something it can only do so to a statistical degree and can never in actuality arrive at a "conclusion" that one can arrive at with logic.

I'm just saying that the description I wrote above has nothing to do with the ethics of the death penalty which philosophy places as more "fundamental." I mean if you're saying philosophy is the study of anything and everything then yes it is more fundamental, but as blurry as they are, the boundaries of what philosophy encompasses are way more limited than "everything." I am saying that the boundaries are also arbitrary and biased and therefore not more fundamental than science.

>The scientific method cannot draw conclusions. In practice it's mostly used to establish correlations only. When used in attempt to directly prove something it can only do so to a statistical degree and can never in actuality arrive at a "conclusion" that one can arrive at with logic.

You need to be able to logically extrapolate from the body of existent evidence to form new testable hypotheses. You're right that I shouldn't have use the word 'conclusion' but the point still stands that the mental tools of the scientific method are the exact same ones that were refined by philosophy for millennia before the scientific method was first formalized by Bacon. Rational philosophy is a bare minimum prerequisite to consistent scientific inquiry.

>I'm just saying that the description I wrote above has nothing to do with the ethics of the death penalty which philosophy places as more "fundamental."

I'd like to see a source for that. Really sounds like another strawman to me.

>I mean if you're saying philosophy is the study of anything and everything then yes it is more fundamental, but as blurry as they are, the boundaries of what philosophy encompasses are way more limited than "everything."

"Philosophy is the study of general and fundamental problems concerning matters such as existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language. It is distinguished from other ways of addressing fundamental questions (such as mysticism, myth, or religion) by its critical, generally systematic approach and its reliance on rational argument. It involves logical analysis of language and clarification of the meaning of words and concepts."

- source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outline_of_philosophy

>I'd like to see a source for that. Really sounds like another strawman to me.

"It is more fundamental than science." - entropicdrifter

>Rational philosophy is a bare minimum prerequisite to consistent scientific inquiry.

Labeling something as rational philosophy doesn't give philosophy purview over all of rationality. This whole logic and science came from philosophy thing doesn't mean anything given the fact that chemistry came from the BS field of alchemy so there's no point talking about whether or not science or logic came from philosophy.

Philosophy is an old field of thought and it's outdated. Similar to how alchemy is outdated and basically useless.

>Philosophy is the study of general and fundamental problems concerning matters such as existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language.

You quoted wikipedia. Which is a generally trusted source I cited the entire field as flawed which means I'm saying that wikipedia is accurately describing the definition of a field that is flawed.

SO it doesn't matter if you cite wikipedia. I'm not arguing against the definition of philosophy I'm arguing how philosophy is a flawed field that has zero equal standing to science.

The quote above is exactly my point. What does "values" have to do with existence. "Values" and "language" are human inventions similar to how literature and poetry are human inventions. Existence is not a human invention, in fact "humans" themselves are an outcome of existence.

The hierarchy of study is off, they mix things like "human values" "religion" and ethics with more fundamental things like logic.

Than analogy of alchemy and chemistry is still apt. In the past alchemist use to study, earth fire and water as fundamental elements. While earth, fire and water are worthy subjects of study but the categorization is flawed. Fire, water and earth are not fundamental. The hierarchy is off just like how philosophy is off.

Existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language are not fundamental atoms to be studied as a group. It as mixed a bag as to study as Poetry and Math. Sure you can study math and poetry under one field, and you can probably discover some really amazing math under this field but it still doesn't give any credence to lumping poetry and math together under one school of thought.

Wood is a whole category of biological material made up of cells from certain plant life, fire is a chemical reaction of carbon with oxygen and water is a molecule of two hydrogen and one oxygen. These three elements have nothing to do with each other and are categorized incorrectly under alchemy just like how language and values and existence and reason and mind are categorized incorrectly in philosophy. What I value has literally nothing to do with existence, yet philosophy places these side by side. Modern science has made is clear that as far as we're aware the human experience is not central to the universe.... the human experience is a side effect of the universe and is one experience out of what could be multitudes of experiences in and outside of the animal kingdom yet philosophy places "values" and "existence" side by side. That is the flaw. There is no strawman. The strawman is basically a figure built by your own mind in hopes that I will attack it.

Not hard to believe how such a field as "philosophy" came about given that it existed since and before the days of "alchemy" which explains why the field is so flawed in categorizing everything. Back then people didn't know any better, but like religion some misguided beliefs continue on... religion and philosophy are two things from the past that are basically obsolete.

Inevitably every philosopher I've ever debated with turns around to me to tell me that some of the ideas I talk about are already ideas thought about by philosophers and that my entire argument is ironic. Please this is what happens when you define philosophy to encompasses logic and paradoxical logic. Yeah if you define philosophy to encompass so much than inevitably even criticism against philosophy will likely touch philosophy..... just like how if I criticise alchemy by bringing up earth water and fire.... oooh I'm criticising alchemy by bringing up alchemy itself.... oooh the irony. Stop.

>The hierarchy of study is off, they mix things like "human values" "religion" and ethics with more fundamental things like logic.

Who? Who are 'they'? Last time I checked pretty much every modern academic philosopher has a specialized area of study. That's what I was asking for sources on. You keep asserting that Philosophy (as a whole, singular field of study, which again it isn't even remotely) equally weights subjective human thought with objective logic and rationality.

You make the same fallacious argument here: >It as mixed a bag as to study as Poetry and Math. Sure you can study math and poetry under one field, and you can probably discover some really amazing math under this field but it still doesn't give any credence to lumping poetry and math together under one school of thought.

Philosophy is not a single school of thought. That's why I quoted you the definition. That's literally the central point of my entire argument, which you continuously have ignored or dismissed out of hand in favor of your personal definition of the term.

>Inevitably every philosopher I've ever debated with turns around to me to tell me that some of the ideas I talk about are already ideas thought about by philosophers and that my entire argument is ironic. Please this is what happens when you define philosophy to encompasses logic and paradoxical logic. Yeah if you define philosophy to encompass so much than inevitably even criticism against philosophy will likely touch philosophy..... just like how if I criticise alchemy by bringing up earth water and fire.... oooh I'm criticising alchemy by bringing up alchemy itself.... oooh the irony. Stop.

You're the one trying to redefine philosophy. It's a valid criticism to say that the term is too unspecific, sure, but it's also valid to argue that you have only a vague idea at best what you're talking about if you're not using the literal definition of the academic field correctly.

>The quote above is exactly my point. What does "values" have to do with existence. "Values" and "language" are human inventions similar to how literature and poetry are human inventions. Existence is not a human invention, in fact "humans" themselves are an outcome of existence.

We wouldn't even be having this debate if your understanding and use of the language involved was more disciplined.

>These three elements have nothing to do with each other and are categorized incorrectly under alchemy just like how language and values and existence and reason and mind are categorized incorrectly in philosophy.

Philosophy is a method of studying thought. It is no more a single school of thought than Science is a single theory.

>Philosophy is not a single school of thought. That's why I quoted you the definition. That's literally the central point of my entire argument, which you continuously have ignored or dismissed out of hand in favor of your personal definition of the term.

If philosophy is so varied than how can it be more fundamental than science? You literally said that "philosophy" is more fundamental than science. How can a mixed bag of various schools of thought be more fundamental than science?

That's my argument. That's what I've been arguing about from beginning.

By the same token you could argue that science is less fundamental than philosophy because science includes gobs of relatively useless, unimportant information like the latin names of various extinct bugs that are no longer relevant to any current work. My point there is just that your argument doesn't really hold up since you can apply it to either side.

Philosophy is the logically framed exploration of various paradigms of thought. This is more fundamental to the human ability to understand the world than raw data because it allows us to devise tests for our interpretations of that data and put the results to good use. Without logic and a foundational understanding of rationalism and the fallibility of the human mind, chemistry would still be alchemy.

That's my point. We have people thinking they understand science in this day and age who really have no idea what they're talking about and thus end up in pseudoscientific dead ends all the time. This is because they haven't incorporated the foundational philosophies of science and therefore lack the mental discipline to practice it. You even see this at the institutional level with labs never producing follow up studies to show results are reproducible, thus rendering their initial research moot all for the sake of crass capitalistic gain. Likewise you see this in the weakening of the integrity of the scientific press, with their constant slew of clickbait headlines.

The issue with the decay of scientific rigor in western culture is fundamentally a philosophical one.

Do you see my point? Individuals and societies fail to do good science without well-considered philosophy. The converse is not true. Science depends on philosophy, not the other way around.

You seem to imply that knowledge of human experience-centric matters (morality, religion, perception, language, social sciences, the list goes on) is lesser than knowledge centered around the nature (obviously excluding the human experience).

You used the word "bias", but researchers of course try to use scientific approaches as much as possible. Humanities thinkers are also preoccupied with truth and knowledge. It's just that their field is much more subjective. But it is a fallacy to conclude that therefore they are less serious or important subjects. You'd be basically expecting us to drop a subject just because it is harder.

>You seem to imply that knowledge of human experience-centric matters (morality, religion, perception, language, social sciences, the list goes on) is lesser than knowledge centered around the nature (obviously excluding the human experience).

Yes because across human cultures (morality, religion, perception, language, social sciences, the list goes on) most of these things differ and if we were to encounter extraterrestrial beings I'm positive that such concepts such as morality and language could be foreign to them as well.

One thing that we can assume to be universal across all cultures and even extraterrestrial life forms is logic.

>You'd be basically expecting us to drop a subject just because it is harder.

No I'm saying keep it seperate not drop it. Literature is more similar to religion than it is to logic; the grouping philosophy makes of logic and science with religion is erroneous as clearly religion and science are completely different things.

Sorry but you'll have to explain how universality makes an area of knowledge more important, useful, serious or any other similar adjective. The human experience not only exists, but it's by definition central to us, so how is this not extremely important?

And your argument about science being different from religion therefore grouping both under philosophy is wrong simply ignores what "philosophy" is supposed to mean and how areas of knowledge relate to each other. I'm sorry, unlike your point about natural vs human sciences I can't see AT ALL what you mean here.

>Sorry but you'll have to explain how universality makes an area of knowledge more important, useful, serious or any other similar adjective. The human experience not only exists, but it's by definition central to us, so how is this not extremely important?

Because to be unbiased is to separate yourself from the human experience. What makes your experience more central than the experience of a dolphin? Does a dolphin know morality as we know it? I don't know.

Though I do know that the dolphin is bounded by the laws of logic just as we are bounded.

>And your argument about science being different from religion therefore grouping both under philosophy is wrong simply ignores what "philosophy" is supposed to mean

Probably does. I'm not arguing for the definition of philosophy. If the definition of philosophy actually involves a unionization of faith based principles and science than I'm not arguing for a new definition.

I'm more arguing more for the fact that philosophy should not be labeled as something more fundamental than science. It is because of the category error that does not make philosophy more fundamental than science/logic.

So in a sense if you want to find out the reason for existence, you likely need to get more fundamental than science and logic and because philosophy involves things like ethics or religion it is, imo, not the true path to answering these fundamental questions.

Much of mathematics in the early days involved philosophical speculation... It was only later on that the field learned to separate the metaphysical speculations from the actual mathematics. I think philosophy is kind of suffering from the same issue.

>So in a sense if you want to find out the reason for existence, you likely need to get more fundamental than science and logic and because philosophy involves things like ethics or religion it is, imo, not the true path to answering these fundamental questions.

Some philosophies and branches of philosophy involve ethics or religion.

Some don't really touch on them at all.

The scientific method could be described as a philosophy about the best way to approach the accrual of knowledge, armed only with the assumption that reality outside one's mind is real and that we can observe it in a reproducible way.

Likewise, you could describe mathematics as another branch of philosophy, since it is literally logic represented in a more abstract form.

Just as an aside, it's pretty ironic for you to say, "don't use the prescriptive branches of philosophy, just the descriptive ones like logic and the scientific method" because that is itself an example of prescriptive philosophy, borne of the logical conclusions of a subjective opinion rather than objective fact

Sorry, I'll drop the philosophy discussion because I don't find it interesting (don't mean this as an attack to you in any way though)

On the first discussion: I think it's interesting that you keep using "unbiased" when you maybe should be using "objective". I'll take a shot and say that you want to reinforce the negative connotation the word "bias" carries so you can further demerit the humanities. And this is really ironic because this only reveals your own biases.

See, it doesn't matter that you don't like how imprecise we humans are. We are all we directly experience during our lives. Everything you see and feel comes tinged with human subjectiveness. There is us and there is the rest. Hell, if I think, therefore I am, the first, and so far the only thing I can say for sure that exists is me. So we are arguably the single most important thing we should study.

Now, if you are able to create mathematical and computational models that describe we humans, then great, humanities became as pointless as Plato's theory of atoms. I mean, social sciences often use math tools. But we're doing the best we can with what we have, and it's not because it's easier to predict a chemical reaction than a social trend that one becomes more important.

Again, your argument on objectivity holds no water. The importance of a field isn't related to how easy it is to find absolute answers.

It has nothing to do with imprecision. Nor does it have anything to do with objectivity.

I'm more talking about the neutrality and "centrality" of the choices of study.

Something like ethics and religion are more a biased choice that say something like logic from my perspective. What if we encountered an alien race or intelligent beings with no form of religion or ethics? Dolphins or chimpanzees perhaps? It's certainly possible but I would argue it's hard to imagine finding an intelligent race of beings not governed by the rules of logic. That's why I consider logic an unbiased choice and religion and ethics a biased and arbitrary choice. Our bias tends towards the the human experience as opposed to a truly more neutral perspective.

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