Hacker News Reader

Comment by lukeasrodgers | Hacker News Reader

Sometimes I wish that when folks opined on such matters they would consider that there is a wealth of philosophical literature covering the same ground that generally has already anticipated your points, contradicted them, strengthened them, provided sharper terminology for discussing them, etc.

In this case, I'm thinking of natural kind terms (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/natural-kinds/) and, less well known, Boyd's homeostatic property cluster theory. It is kind of amazing to me that this article has 310 comments and not a single person has raised the question natural kinds.

OTOH I am heartened that people are effectively doing philosophy in the wild without getting too concerned with "whether other people have already said this before" which can be paralyzing.

View on HN

I have the impression that people don't take philosophy very serious, and I would venture that that is because philosophy has such a meagre empirical record, nor a solid formal base outside of mathematics and logic. This makes it practically impossible to judge the merits of a particular idea.

A somewhat extreme example: does it matter what Heidegger has said about a certain topic for any discussion? Or Žižek, for that matter.

Heidegger, no.

Žižek said some faintly reasonable things during his pandemic period, and semi-recently published an okay introduction to Hegel in the context of contemporary life.

Also the man is very hot when he takes his shirt off.

Philosophy provides rigorous arguments for and against various ideas, and assumptions behind those ideas. These ideas usually aren't empirical, but they are ideas many people have or questions people ask. Ethics, aesthetics, the nature of knowledge, truth, what exists, how to live, etc.

People who don't take philosophy very seriously still engage in those topics. They just ignore that the topics have a history of being discussed seriously and often put forth their own unexamined assumptions. Scientists aren't immune to this.

What? Heidegger is one of the most influential philosphers of the 20th century. Dasein directly relates to the conversation about if an "intelligent" AI could exist and if it could/would have a sense of self similar to that of humans

Heidegger requires so much willing interpretation, it’s preposterous. Would people be impressed by Chatgpt if its output were in similar style?

> philosophy has such a meagre empirical record

So they re-hash the same arguments with an equal lack of data and come to the same conclusions with equally dubious applications.

It’s not so bad when it’s just randos posting in internet forums, but now we’re seeing people with real influence leaping from unfounded premises to untestable conclusions with unswerving confidence.

Mind explaining to someone with only a cursory knowledge of the philosophy of natural kinds, what it contributes to this topic?

Very briefly, the idea of a natural kind term is that of a term that “carves nature at its joints” (Plato’s metaphor), ie is not just a convenient way of splitting the world up into entities but one that reflects the true structure of reality.

Philosophers have debated various criteria for determining what constitutes a natural kind, which I think would have added some clarity to the article.

A related approach that could have added clarity (though I can’t recall whether it deals with natural kinds per se) is Hacking’s Social Construction of What? which lays out a sort of hierarchy for how socially constructed a given phenomenon is. It attempts to add rigor to our intuitions around how objective or subjective a given judgement is.

He's aware. When someone disagrees with you about AI, sending them Plato entries is generally unhelpful and pointless

Reply on news.ycombinator.com