Comment by jff | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jff | Hacker News Reader

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One thing that struck me strongly when taking a Philosophy of Technology course at my university (part of a concentration in philosophy) was that these philosophers really had no understanding of the technology they were trying to discuss. They'd simply latch on to something they heard--I recall "cybernetics" was one such topic--and misconstrue a bunch of news articles about it, then publish papers at each other defending and attacking their varied misconceptions. I also found that a lot of these papers included early content devoted to explaining how philosophy is super important to science/technology--but why should we bother listening to them if they can't even get the facts right?

There can be interesting things to find in philosophy, but until they actually bother to learn more about a subject instead of running off to write a paper because they came up with a great metaphor to explain what they think a gluon is, I don't see much value in their philosophizing on actual practical/scientific things.

I'm not sure what you're thinking of in particular, but I'm guessing that most talk about cybernetics in modern philosophy is derived from Heidegger's claim that in modernity, we lose any an ultimate referent for our chains of signification. Everything gets taken as for the sake of something else (e.g. as a resource to achieve some ends extrinsic to it), but there is no final "something else" to make it all meaningful. The reason he calls this "cybernetic" is because it deals with unending loops instead of the sort of hierarchical organization we might have seen in pre-modern times (e.g. with God at the top of the tree of meaning).

Philosophy often attempts to dip below accepted meanings and systems of thought. This may make it seem like philosophers "have no understanding of the technology they're trying to discuss", but in fact they aren't necessarily discussing technology in the sense which one might assume. They're trying to get at a completely different strata of thought than the "how-to" of any given technology.

Perhaps. If the French school hadn't tried to use quantum mechanics in completely bizarre ways, leading many people to label them as wankers and thereby staining the entire profession, I might agree. The fact that the French view still persists 50 years later doesn't give me confidence.

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