A century ago Ludwig Wittgenstein changed philosophy
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Picasso is a good example. He broke the rules of art in creative ways because he had such a firm understanding of artistic methods. Nietzsche, with his deep grounding in Ancient Greek and Latin philology, is another modern innovator.
Today, however, we’ve largely adopted the conclusions of the innovators. Rather than try and recreate what led to these breakthroughs in the first place. Discipline and training are mostly irrelevant in a world that is more concerned with novelty and shock value.
Getting this right is a Really Hard Problem because there are entrenched interests for whom this poses an existential threat. There is a lot of power that comes from being an arbiter of truth in a society.
(I think one of the great unsung heroes of humanity is Jimmy Wales. He could have cashed in bigly on Wikipedia, but he chose not to, and as a result Wikipedia is one of the greatest repositories of objective knowledge ever assembled. And it’s free. It’s a freakin’ miracle. Arxiv is also big step in the right direction IMHO.)
[1] https://phys.org/news/2018-10-real-fake-hoodwinks-journals.h...
I think that in the near future there will be a mode shift about how we think about science and technology in general. Simulation will start to replace analytic reasoning (since logical deduction inside our heads has reached its limits of analyzing complex systems), and science will become more and more indistinguishable from engineering (The question of 'what is possible?' will begin to replace 'why is this possible?'). I'm both terrified and excited about this new era.
The Grand Problem of Complexity is a good name for it.
But to give you a bunch of unorganized links if you want to follow a similar line of thought:
- Cybernetics (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cybernetics)
- Systems theory (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systems_theory)
- Seeing how theoretical physics has been left behind in progress for many decades in favor of fields like chemistry, biology, and earth sciences - which all seem to use those discovered laws of physics, and is increasingly trying to arrive at conclusions through computer simulation of those physical laws.
- Thinking about the relationship between computer graphics (which brings the virtual to the real) and computer vision (which brings the real to the virtual) - and its interplay between the two.
- Continental philosophy (I'm currently reading Batallie's The Accursed Share and it's giving lots of good insights about 'societal' systems and the general economy. Deleuze & Guattari also talks a lot about cybernetics, although their books are notoriously hard to decipher and I've only read second-hand explanations of it. And a few writings from Nick Land (preferably something before his breakdown) seems quite illuminating. Marx also seems to have some surprising proto-insights about the cybernetics of capitalism - it's an area of research I might delve into it later.)
Otherwise somebody has likely already cloned or mirrored Wikipedia.
I mean, in the past there could be a guy alone that discovers 10 math theorems alone and his proofs can be understood by highschool students.
Today we hail new proofs in maths that require 30 pages of proof that few people on Earth can understand.
The same for physics.
To me, the trend is clear.
"This book is written for such men as are in sympathy with its spirit. This spirit is different from the one which informs the vast stream of European and American civilization in which all of us stand. That spirit expresses itself in an onwards movement, in building ever larger and more complicated structures; the other in striving after clarity and perspicuity in no matter what structure. The first tries to grasp the world by way of its periphery -- in its variety; the second at its centre -- in its essence. And so the first adds one construction to another, moving on and up, as it were, from one stage to the next, while the other remains where it is and what it tries to grasp is always the same."
- Wittgenstein, "Philosophical Remarks", Preface
Will the current trend continue so that future discoveries are more and more intricate but also more and more specialised and thus perhaps less interesting? Or will there be a paradigm shift so that we lose interest in many of our "fundamental" results and there will be new low hanging fruits waiting to be "discovered"? Wittgenstein was more sympathetic to the latter view and often countered the view that mathematical results are discovered with the idea that mathematical results are invented (which does not make him a naive constructivist, however).
IIRC he expressed the opinion that his mastery of traditional painting was a burden and had to be unlearned before he could make his best work.
It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child.
...or this one:
All children are artists. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.
But he also did this:
It always reminds me of the story about the woman who approached Picasso in a restaurant, asked him to scribble something on a napkin, and said she would be happy to pay whatever he felt it was worth. Picasso complied and then said, “That will be $10,000.”
“But you did that in thirty seconds,” the astonished woman replied.
“No,” Picasso said. “It has taken me forty years to do that.”
Ultimately, Picasso made a lot of witty, silly comments. I'm not sure I'd read much into them. Here's one of my favorites, although I can't seem to find an actual source:
Art is the currency of the infinite. I’m rich, I should know.
Ultimately, though, I'm not sure it's quite relevant to what I mean. Today, artists are still "taught" a lot of theory (too much, probably) and the educational goal isn't usually to be childlike.
>I was walking about in Cambridge and passed a bookshop, and in the window were portraits of Russell, Freud and Einstein. A little further on, in a music shop, I saw portraits of Beethoven, Schubert and Chopin. Comparing these portraits I felt intensely the terrible degeneration that had come over the human spirit in the course of only a hundred years.
"This book is written for such men as are in sympathy with its spirit. This spirit is different from the one which informs the vast stream of European and American civilization in which all of us stand. That spirit expresses itself in an onwards movement, in building ever larger and more complicated structures; the other in striving after clarity and perspicuity in no matter what structure. The first tries to grasp the world by way of its periphery -- in its variety; the second at its centre -- in its essence. And so the first adds one construction to another, moving on and up, as it were, from one stage to the next, while the other remains where it is and what it tries to grasp is always the same."
I can't help but feel that this description of the "vast stream" captures the current trend in most of software development and academia quite well...
Consider yourself lucky to be in the minority of those who appreciate what is truly rare and precious about humans, who are in turn a rare and precious part of life, which is in turn a rare and precious part of the universe.
This desire is precisely what leads Faust to become so frustrated with the limits of human knowledge that he makes an ill-advised bet with (more or less) the Devil, trading an option on his immortal soul for the keys to that essence.
In Goethe's Faust anyway:
Jaded cynicism, crass commercialism, and the dissapearance of a cultured class that is above mass market culture, they way high/upper middle class, academics, doctors, etc., one were.
Believe it or not, for example, once there was a class of people, more so in Europe, that not only went to the Opera, but also actually liked it, followed it, could get the references, and knew its history and the history of classical/romantic/etc music, the way their today's equivalent will know the pop stars of the day.
Given the above, it's easy that soem of them would take e.g. the twelve-tone music of Schoenberg or Stravinsky's innovations seriously, even if only to be offended by them - and some of, course, to be inspired.
Today's equivalent would at best read something like the New Yorker and the hacks featured in NYT best-selling books of the day, but will seldom have the wide culture that once was quite widespread across parts of the middle and upper middle classes.
People also seem more desperate to sell out quick for a quick buck - even artists today just want to play the game, go ahead with the galleries and agents, and give out much more easily than an early 20th century artist. This diminishes the period between "serious work" and "selling out", often to zero (whereas for Picasso it took decades, and for Van Gogh, it never happened).
In the UK the post-war BBC carried on with (what is called) the Reithian tradition (after Lord Reith) until marketisation started to overwhelm everything in the 80s.
This isn't to say that classical music is somehow always utterly superior to pop. It was about giving people experiences they wouldn't have had otherwise, and to give them more choices about what to listen to and maybe enjoy.
The UK also had an art school track for bright creative working class kids, some of whom went on to make a living in music and/or fashion. Marketisation also destroyed that, because of course student debt destroys your choices and limits your options so you literally can't afford to take risks.
Today it's almost forbidden culturally to even suggest that it coule even be (superior).
The thing is, to say such a thing, you need some kind of shared cultural basis (of what's superior and what's not), one that even those who don't "like X" (the way we might like peanut butter or not), nonetheless agree on (and whether they care or not, feel like it's somewhat their loss for not liking it).
Those times, had that (shared cultural agreement).
In more modern times, after the 60s especially, and in the US doubly so, culture is whatever one makes it, the mass consumer is king (because everybody wants his/hers money, so they treat them as such), and personal taste is the be all end all, end of discussion.
Whereas in another era, to say Bieber or Drake are inferior to Bach, for example, would be so self-evident and accepted by all (for the Bieber's and Drake's of their era), as to not even be worth saying.
This is a strange comparison though. It's like saying strawberries are inferior to lobster. Sure, they're both eaten as food, but they serve very different purposes, and comparing them doesn't really make sense.
the rest of original comment in my profile simply too long
I've been diving into (or revisiting) Darwin, Thoreau, Ruskin, Tolstoi, to name a few. It was an incredibly rich era that could help us better navigate this one.
I get a sense that Orwell, Huxley, and Bradbury, had a better connection to it and could articulate warnings of where the mid-20th century might end up if it progresses on its path. I don't think we've ever been closer to realizing their warnings.
Wittgenstein emphasised on numerous occasions (for example directly at the beginning of his lectures on the foundations of mathematics in 1939) that his interest in these proofs was _philosophical_ and that he never intended to criticise any of them _on mathematical grounds_. He explicitly said that his aim was not to interfere with mathematicians, but to investigate the _philosophical conclusions_ drawn by these mathematicians from their proofs.
What exactly Wittgenstein found problematic is hard to describe in a short comment, because much of it depends on Wittgenstein's view of philosophy as a whole, but one example is the platonist bent of Gödel's theorem and his conviction that there are some mathematical "facts" that can never be discovered by mathematical reason. Wittgenstein wants to ask what it means to say that something is "intuitively true", but not provable in any consistent system, but he does not want to object to Gödel's results, merely its "standing".
In Cantor's case Wittgenstein is interested in the concept of the transfinite and of infinities "bigger" than other infinities. He does not object to Cantor's proof at all, but regards the philosophical conclusions drawn from it with suspicion.
(One good example of a philosophical abuse of Gödel's theorem is the argument that computers will never be able to think like humans, because Gödel's theorem demonstrates a limit to what any computer can do as a formal system, but we humans can nevertheless grasp the unprovable statements as intuitively true. This is basically the argument by J. R. Lucas. This is the kind of philosophical nonsense that Wittgenstein wanted to attack and his position on these matters is coincidentally quite similar to Turing's position, who was a student of Wittgenstein's lectures on the foundations of mathematics.)
It certainly did not help that the so-called Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics are in some parts highly selective constructions by the editors of his posthumous writings.
tl;dr: it's complicated. Wittgenstein never objected to the mathematical results by Gödel and Cantor, but he thought that their results were often blown out of proportion by shoddy philosophical conclusions made on the basis of these perfectly fine mathematical arguments.
I'm guessing constructivists have found better ways to approach infinity than Witty, without conceding that infinity is real.
These are excerpts, some paragraphs are missing, but the gist is more or less there and you can find the full discussion in 'Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics'.
The Part II of the Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics, which is the part on Cantor, is especially questionable. It is compiled from two documents of Wittgenstein's Nachlass, Ms-117 and Ms-121, but only about a third of the remarks in Ms-121 were included in the published book. There are also other notebooks were Wittgenstein discussed Cantor (most notably Ms-162a and Ms-126b) and which were not published at all. The editors made the decision to exclude some of these remarks because Wittgenstein's notebooks often contain merely drafts of remarks that were never fully developed, so it would be wrong to say that the published book is a deliberate misrepresentation of Wittgenstein's thoughts, but the situation is definitely quite nuanced and complex.
I personally think that the Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics are very interesting, but that it's a disservice to Wittgenstein and any reader of his works to read his remarks on the philosophy of mathematics as a disconnected collection of aphorisms. The context really matters and his more mathematical remarks only make sense against the backdrop of the Philosophical Investigations and perhaps even his later writings such as On Certainty.
Looking at his biography, you feel like people were just hanging out with him because he was rich, since his personality was so bad and he clearly hated everyone he ever met.
The problem with poetry today is not a lack of talent, it is an inability for that talent to get mass attention when 1) poetry has been marginalized in today's media landscape, and 2) cultural scenes are now so fractured that people can't reach agreement on who is great and therefore keep the list of great poets going.
You could spend your whole life studying philosophy/economics/political science, etc, write an amazing thesis, many volumes long, have all sorts of insights. And in terms of the world's massive population: how would you stand out? Would you be famous? Would people read you? Considered canon / important? Unlikely. You might get some notoriety, but that notoriety is more likely to spread to rather mediocre or showmen pop-philosophers like a Jordan Peterson (or their equivalent on the "left").
And in some ways knowledge of many kinds has been democratized, and information and materials more broadly available to all. So we're building a broader knowledge base and things are applied in that way, rather than by "great men"... which is likely the sign of a mature civilization and a more democratic ethos.
(This publication was a driving factor us in our production pipeline coping with MathML, and the necessary SVGs.)
Nonsense, Wittgenstein seems to argue. If no one else could understand how you feel even in principle, then neither could you. If you can talk about it then people will understand, because we use the same words the same way. And when we don't, it's not because of some kind of epistemological solitary confinement - it's just a misunderstanding, and there are language games for resolving those too.
You don't have to read philosophy to know that "no one else could possibly understand how I feel" is actually a common sentiment, though. The truly therapeutic part for me was the idea that even though there may be problems that can't be solved, they can sometimes be dissolved. (i.e. seeing the problem statement itself as nonsense)
The private language argument had a similar effect for me, but more-so in dissolving the insistence some people make over subjective vs. objective. Through the private language argument, you see that that opposition is really more about personal vs. public. Wittgenstein does not dissolve the personal; but the private language argument does dissolve the kind of fundamentally private subjectivity that people often reference or hold in that debate on subjective vs. objective.
Wittgenstein was, IIUC, one of the founders and leaders of analytic philosophy, which I personally had very little respect for since it essentially punted on the questions that philosophy has dealt with since it's creation; the "non-sense" you mention.
Then, I ran across Angus Graham's writings on Zhuangzi (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/zhuangzi/). Zhuangzi was a better analytic philosopher than any of the modern analytics that I've seen.
https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/in-the-a... https://news.cgtn.com/news/3d51544f3341444e/index.html
Well sort of, but perhaps what it made questionable is the stronger pitch that wisdom translates to mastery of go.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wittgenstein_(film)
I don't know enough to comment on its biographical accuracy but it's a great weird movie by one of the greatest experimental directors of our age.
[Edit: mentioned in TFA but very briefly. Not sure where to watch it now but... internets...]
[0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/bypass-paywal...
http://gayinfluence.blogspot.com/2012/04/ludwig-wittgenstein...
The importance of his later works Philosophical Investigations seems to be underlooked in the article in favor of his earlier Tractatus, which is a bit sad. Wittgenstein's later work, although fiercely criticized by rigid supporters of logical atomism (such as Russell), seem to have contributed much more to the advancement of philosophy in overall.
A bit like how George Harrison and Ringo Starr became so good because they were in the presence of Lennon and McCartney.
Being around great people and in that kind of environment is what leads to these kinds of breakthroughs.
Ringo Starr is often considered one of the great rock and roll drummers.
I'd like to think they all became so good partly because they were in the presence of each other.
Unfortunately it seems Wittgenstein didn't understand (or chose to reject) the second half of the treatise he borrowed from (which very roughly is "given this model of the world/ethics, a model of emotion, and a model of emotion as a function of the world/ethics, what doesn't it make sense to feel?"), and didn't live a happy life.
The title "Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus" was not Wittgenstein's idea, but Moore's.