> Some philosophical research projects ... are rather like working out the truths of chess. A set of mutually agreed upon rules are presupposed — and seldom discussed — and the implications of those rules are worked out, articulated, debated, refined. So far, so good. Chess is a deep and important human artifact, about which much of value has been written. But some philosophical research projects are more like working out the truths of chmess. Chmess is just like chess except that the king can move two squares in any direction, not one. I just invented it — though no doubt others have explored it in depth to see if it is worth playing. Probably it isn’t. It probably has other names. I didn’t bother investigating these questions because although they have true answers, they just aren’t worth my time and energy to discover. Or so I think. There are just as many a priori truths of chmess as there are of chess (an infinity), and they are just as hard to discover...
Ah, I believe this is the same "mess we're in" from Joe Armstrong's eponymous 2014 Strange Loop conference talk[0]:
> This is a device that we can imagine. I try to find a big sausage machine where you put sausage meat, you know, you turn the handle. So we put all programs into it, and we turn the handle, and a smaller number of programs come out. Then we can throw away all the other programs. And that breaks the second law of thermodynamics. The trouble with software, you see, its complexity increases with time. We start with one program, and it splits and becomes two programs and four programs.
> Files and systems, they mutate all the time. They grow in entropy. Disks are absolutely huge. And there's all these problems with naming. Naming's horrible. If you've got a file or something, what file name should it be? What does it have? What directory should I put it in? Can I find it later?
(68% match)
> When you have an idea, you have a little box and you type something into the box. I've done this, I've implemented it. You have a little box and then there's a little icon, Sherlock Holmes at the bottom. You type this stuff into the box and you press the Sherlock Holmes button. And the idea is that will find among all my files that I'm interested in, the most similar thing to what I've just put in this box. So I want it to find the most similar thing to this new thing. And then I want to know, is it different? So once it's found them, it makes a list of them in order.
(64% match)
Edit: Just had the revelation that I am posting these quotes straight out of a RAG on the transcript of his talk.
I guess Mr Dennett never came across the ideas of Mr Cantor.
[Yes, yes… I know they’re both countable.]
The problem is that in any field, if you start digging to understand the underlying concepts of that field and how they are defined, at some point you hit philosophy and start working with philosophical concepts.
The other problem is that there’s some real quack philosophy around, too. Various traps that philosophers sometimes fall into.
FWIW, I have also seen the dismissive STEM attitude toward the philosophical tradition. It helps to remember that the philosophical tradition predates the scientific tradition significantly, and that it does not take logical positivism or reductionism as givens. Having studied both disciplines, I feel like philosophy has seriously enhanced my understand of the world even if I don’t use it in my day-to-day scientific work.
And they probably know other people in the department who teach things that might be interesting to a STEM student even if that student hardly knows it yet.
Logicians are somewhat different in studying formal systems, and there are strong links to (foundations of) mathematics. But logics are typically developed and analyze to study some otherwise philosophically motivated questions.
Few generalisations hold of philosophy departments across traditions and regions, and this is untrue of departments in the analytic tradition of which Dennett was part. Philosophical logicians are often interested in more than logic for logic’s sake, and other philosophers share that interest; see e.g. Williamson’s /Modal logic as metaphysics/.
That's an interesting point.
I think there's also a cost to that-- philosophy lugs around a lot of pre-scientific baggage that is poorly specified but historically important. Free will comes to mind, especially within the Christian history of resolving the apparent contradiction of horrific natural/manmade evils existing in the face of an omniscient, omnipotent, and benevolent god.
There are of course other historical contexts to notions of free will. But when philosophers talk about any of these in places where laypeople here them, it seems like those historical contexts are gone and they end up strongly implying a general purpose free will that is neither well-specified or in some cases even coherent.
It would be like a bunch of programmers debating "functions," with one meaning functional programming, another meaning any programming language where functions are a first-class citizen, and yet another meaning the set of all keywords "function" or "FUNCTION" in any programming language in history. That's not going to be a fruitful discussion.
So I'd speculate people in STEM can smell the lack of systematic thinking in some of these discussions and unfortunately throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Edit: clarification
>implying a general purpose free will that is neither well-specified or in some cases even coherent.
To the contrary, I find that it is the layman who has an airy-fairy conception of free will that couldn't possibly exist, while the philosophers are generally more down-to-earth and use "free will" that normal people use the term in a non-philosophical context.
>So I'd speculate people in STEM can smell the lack of systematic thinking in some of these discussions and unfortunately throw the baby out with the bathwater.
I'm not sure if there's any baby in the bathwater if philosophy lacks systematic thinking, if by "lacking systematic thinking" you mean something like "not thinking definitions and arguments through". Luckily it doesn't seem that philosophy does this. But maybe I'm misunderstanding you - maybe you're talking about the philosophical discussions that laymen generally overhear, which tend not to be discussions held by philosophers but by other laymen. And I do think you would be right to say that these discussions generally aren't very coherent, and reflect poorly on philosophy as a discipline.
It be be tautological, but a lack of systemic thinking makes a discussion bad philosophy, or epistemic bunk as they say in the trade.
Or maybe his point, in a discussion like this on HN, a lot of people are jumping into the conversation in-the-middle, without catching up on the history.
Perhaps, but seeing poor thinking in others is a lot easier than seeing it in oneself. I don't recall encountering any STEM folks who haven't made a logical/epistemic/other error on the proposition of whether we have free will. It is one of those questions that seems to put the mind into some sort of a weird downgraded mode.
This entire comment section is...interesting.
It's like the first programming language you learned. It will shape your perception of what programming is all about for a long time afterward, and might even turn you away from programming altogether. But there are lots of programming languages, and they're just different ways to make the same silicon do something interesting!
The silicon argument might be right if we treat it on its own. Input, process and output. But one think of the system where the silicon or multiple of them plus some analogue or biological input and output. It is not the same. The process affect the speed and response … you can imagine one use lisp, basic or cnn to drive a car … can you.
The turning complete is not physical as above and real world ish. Hence it sound all true. But people forgot we do not have unlimited memory. Our tur8ng complete is in practice not.
To sum it all may be we kick human out of the loop all silicon and human language might have a chance the same using the same language (but still physical real world above …)
Perhaps finding it confusing is a recent development.
Philosophers shoud better stay away from physics. Not saying here, that the thought experiments can't provide valuable insights. It's just they can't be used to define the truth about the reality.
To a t, these people were dullards. They rarely had deep knowledge about anything, most of the time not even about the field they professed such dedication to. The entire point of an undergraduate education is to establish a foundation of baseline knowledge to allow you to contextualize new information, and if you don't engage with it, there's not a lot of opportunities to make up for it later.
A lot of philosophy ignores biology, sometimes even physics. In topics where biology would be immensely relevant, like with philosophy of mind. Dennett didn't try to ignore biology, he was deeply aware and well read in biology as well.
Most of the philosophy I'm familiar with is concerned with abstract notions and concepts like morality. I'm really having a hard time seeing how biology or physics would inform it one direction or another.
Like, what sort of biology would have made Kant's notions of morality different?
Relativity overturned those Newtonian assumptions on which Kant depended, although he might say we nevertheless have to experience time as constant and space in three dimensions, regardless of how those things turn out to "really" work, since that's the only way we can do it.
So it's no longer obvious that time and space are just given absolutely, and due to that, they no longer make for a comfortable starting point for philosophical assumptions. If nature itself is different, then we might not even be experiencing it that way in the first place.
More tentatively, I think our advancing understanding of how brains and machines embody concepts, our understanding of the differences of biological creatures combined with new physics, is suggestive at a bare minimum that reality could be experienced differently, and/or that we can understand how we experience these things empirically with better knowledge about brains, instead of asserting that everything is governed at the outset by this or that philosophical assumption.
I think you are more wrong than right here. My understanding (informed by Onora O'neill, Dan Bonevac, and various Stanford Encyclopedia entries :-)) is that Kant does not specifically depend on Newtonian assumptions but that human perceptions have to be mediated by time and space. Instead of overturning Kant, relativity and QM put even more distance between what we, as mortal, physical beings, can perceive versus whatever is really going on in the world.
Kant's project was to discover, given all of that, what anyone can say about things like ethics. He even goes so far to say that what he is trying to do is universal and he would like it to apply to other forms of intelligent beings.
I understand the point about mediation, and I tried to speak to it directly in the portion you quoted. You are exactly right about the way Kant uses that in his argument. It's flexible enough that it can be understood as resilient, I think.
I tried show how science can nevertheless speak to it in several ways. One is the convenient equivalence between Kant's necessary conditions and nature as we understood it at the time. That equivalence makes it easier to be comfortable positing time and space as we understand them as necessary conditions that are prior to nature. It would be harder (but not impossible!) to entertain if there was daylight between what we believed our faculties to be and what we believed the natural world to be, if what was "necessary" was something different than what we thought we experienced (such as, say, a singular loaf of unified spacetime). An implication of Kant's view, as I understood him, was that we should be ready to believe it's different anyway, but nevertheless, it's easier to swallow when it perfectly aligns with how we thing the world really is.
Second, for a different way of stating a similar point, if time and space are non-newtonian in some important way, we may have to understand that that is what we experience in the first instance, and we would have to wrestle with the fact that our intuitions may attest to a variety of possible underlying necessary conditions. (Wittgenstein has been mentioned in this thread, so for a paraphrase of something he supposedly said, in reply to a student noting that it looks like the sun goes around the earth: "What would it look like if the earth went around the sun?" So it may be with the nature of our faculties.)
Third, as we gain deeper understanding of brain functions of ourselves and other creatures, we may have inroads to how certain of our conscious experiences depend on conceptual abstractions or models. And if so, it transforms it into an open empirical question rather than one where we are simply stuck presuming necessary conditions. Kant might insist that that is all already through the lense of our faculties such as they are, but we, with more information, would be increasingly comfortable just not entertaining them as we get increasingly robust empirical understandings of conscious experience.
None of these is a "defeater" argument by itself and there's a lot that can be talked about here of course, but I think given 21st century science, if Kant were trying to present his vision for the first time we might find it more challenging to reconcile with what we know of the natural world.
Only in *very* specific situations which are extremely extremely extremely unrelated and WELL out of both practical and theoretical bound to the human perception of reality.
Relativity is kind of the trivia of physics, it really has not informed much technology apart from a few things in space - compare this to, say, quantum electrodynamics which tells us why weird stuff happens in things we've made quadrillions of (not to mention quantum computing, etc.)
The only time we would have ever brushed up against it naturally might have been when we put clocks into space so that we could better send nukes into other parts of the globe.
GPS is kind of a huge one, though it technically is just a few clocks in space.
I find it interesting that you say: "although he might say we nevertheless have to experience time as constant and space in three dimensions". The physicist/philosopher/physiologist/mathematician Hermann von Helmholtz (who was, I think, very much inspired by Kant) wanted to prove that, given some basic measurement axioms (demanding constant curvature etc.), Euclidean geometry is necessarily the geometry of our internal perceptual manifolds (Kant's view is, I believe, essentially that these internal manifolds must have the same geometry as physical space-time). But it turned out that pseudo-spherical geometry also satisfies these axioms. So, although there is something, as far as your general description goes, to your 'defence' of Kant, and I think Helmholtz himself would've said that he's working within Kant's framework, it is still insufficient to vindicate everything that Kant said. I believe Helmholtz agreed, however, that our spatial imagination is three dimensional.
And Kant furthermore asserts that: 4. In addition to (1), there is no mind-independent space-time, space and time as such are mind-dependent. This means that our descriptions of the world are necessarily, e.g. Euclidean.
I don't think (1), (2), (3) are at all controversial, although only (2) and its consequences are a contribution of Kant himself, but (4) is, I'm pretty sure, quite universally rejected nowadays.
My understanding is that post-relativity, Neokantians have been trying to reconcile Kant's thought with the implications of relativity. Philosophy as a discipline is, as I understand it, happy to work with new scientific discoveries, and not going to stick with philosophical dogma in the face of contradicting science. Besides, beyond a certain level, doesn't science have to give way to philosophy? I don't see holding certain philosophical assumptions (not really assumptions, but intuitions or propositions argued from intuitions) as a necessarily bad thing or even an avoidable thing, as long as it's open to both philosophical and scientific criticism, where applicable.
The fact that the relation is one of an amendment or a reconciliation to new data is a point in favor of skepticism against his original assumptions, but not a defeater.
I would agree that we can credit intuitions as being more than mere assumptions, and I think you're right about The legitimacy of positing assumptions as long as they're posited in a spirit of openness and responsiveness to philosophical and scientific criticism. What do you know, a healthy and reasonable of reply on philosophy. To tie this to Daniel Dennett, I have found one of his most valuable contributions to be a notion of the principle of charity, which is to credit the person you correspond with with the most reasonable possible interpretation, and I think the best philosophical exchanges are carried out in that spirit, and so I think he would highlight yours as the response in this thread that best embodies that principle.
Ok... this is non sequitur. It really doesn't matter that time moves at different speeds for any of Kant's philosophical positions. 2 people could be traveling at 0.5c and 0.00000001c and that makes no difference in Kant morals on how they should behave.
And, practically speaking, unless there's a drastic development in propulsion the only bearing relativity has on day to day life is making sure the GPS works correctly. It is, otherwise, completely non-impactful to anyone beyond astrophysicists.
This wasn't about Kant's morals. This was about the idea that Newtonian conceptions of space and time familiar to Kant were necessary preconditions to experience.
In comparison, the Seven Bridges of Konigsberg is a bare introduction in Graph Theory and Hamilton carving quarternions into Broom Bridge is an amusing aside before you get to the meat of the subject. A lecturer might amuse you with Kekule's dream before telling you about a Benzene ring but the ring is the thing, not the dream.
Philosophy is a field with time-translation symmetry but is taught akin to fields without (e.g. Literature, History, Sociology). Fields without TTS need you to build up from the replay log. But fields with TTS can do something far better: they can distill "truths" into snapshots. Consequently, as a child I read about Galois Theory without reading Analyse d’un Mémoire sur la résolution algébrique des équations or a translation thereof.
Conjectures and Refutations shows how to accelerate through a replay log, indexing at key-frames so that we don't need to play every frame to get to the conclusions we're searching for. Good field. Bad practice.
Most students will not stay in academia, but making them think about questions like what is it to live a good life seems to me pretty important for the education of future citizens !
And in fact ancient philosophers being historically so remote is likely to be a good thing, to prevent emotional knee-jerk rejections that is at risk of happening with more recent philosophers too associated with current politics.
Its the artsy types that only read Sartre and Heidigger an Derrida, and never got their hands dirty by working in a lab, doing sufficiently higher level math, engineered and built modern tech are the annoying ones.
It is both funny and not.
Spending a bunch of time figuring out why something that seems obvious is obvious probably seems like a waste of time to a lot of people, but it can certainly help in the long run. We can't see our own blindspots, so even if something seems obvious, I think it's useful to understand it.
Žižek has made comments about so many different things, so publicly, that it’s hard to avoid finding something you disagree with. But it’s also hard to avoid finding something you agree with.
I like his books, but someone like Alan Watts is much more prone to quackery, IMO.
I don’t think I have ever described somebody as a quack philosopher.
I put the concept of “philosophical zombies” as quackery. At best, the p-zombie thought experiment shows that we haven’t really come up with a definition of consciousness that explains what we want it to explain. Some people use p-zombies as part of a larger argument against physicalism. Chalmers published a modal logic argument against physicalism using p-zombies. One of the tricky things about modal logic is that it requires a deeper understanding of modal logic in order for you (you, someone reading a modal logic argument) to make good decisions about which propositions you are willing to accept in a modal logic argument. Since most people only have an intuitive understanding of modal logic, it is a good way to win an argument but a bad way to explain your position.
I’d say that this work (p-zombies) is quackery in the sense that it’s consistently directed at something which I consider to be unproductive, which is the work of undermining or attacking physicalism / physical monism. At some point, in these discussions, you end up having some argument about the semantics of ontology and how you define “existence”. If your semantics for “existence” admits non-physical things to exist (like, if you’re a Platonist), and you’re having a conversation with someone who believes in physicalism, then I don’t think either person in the conversation is going to get much out of it, other than a better way to explain their own position.
Edit: I hope that paints a complete enough picture and covers the important parts of my complaints about p-zombies. I don’t have my finger on the pulse of philosophy and I may be missing something important, maybe there’s some really important argument p-zombies are used for, and maybe I don’t understand Chalmers; that’s always a risk. My main complaint here is that it seems to be some tool to make an argument against physicalism, but this tool doesn’t help you understand physicalism, or help you understand its alternatives. It’s just an argument that you can have between somebody who believes in physicalism and somebody who doesn’t, where neither person will agree with the other one after hearing the argument.
Quack: 1) A practitioner who suggests the use of substances or devices for the prevention or treatment of disease that are known to be ineffective.
2) A person who pretends to be able to diagnose or heal people, but is unqualified and incompetent.
The inside baseball term more relevant to what you're talking about, I think, is "talking past each other." https://www.jstor.org/stable/25655279
A quack philosopher would seem to me to be someone that claims to be doing philosophy or interpreting the ideas of a philosopher, but doing so in an egregiously wrong or misleading manner.
You also might want to check out this article for more on p-zombies, by the way: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/zombies/
Oh, here’s the thing—it’s not actually important to argue about what the word “quackery” means. I’ve explained what I meant by “philosophical quackery”, and if you want to talk about the content of what I wrote, then by all means, respond to the content.
If, instead, you want to start a fight about what the word “quackery” means, and whether I was wrong to use it, then I’m out. That sounds like a waste of time.
I'm not sure what else there is to say here. If you call people something, perhaps it's important to actually know what that thing means? This seems to happen often in conversations critical of philosophy: terms are used unclearly, and the attempt to actually clarify those terms is hand-waved away as "I don't want to argue about definitions."
So I think your criticism here is not that there are quack philosophical works, but that there are unproductive ones that do nothing but restate established positions. Which is definitely a true thing.
“Quackery” is not some technical term here. It is a mistake to rely too much on technical definitions of words. If you rely too much on technical definitions and dictionary definitions for non-technical words, then you will probably misunderstand what people mean, relatively frequently.
I could also insert some comment about the history of philosophy and modernism / post-modernism, here. If you take the stance that a word means something independently, in some kind of platonic sense, then you agree with the modernists. If you take the stance that a word’s meaning comes from how it’s interpreted by people who read it, you agree with the post-modernists.
I’m just trying to use a word to convey some sort of meaning. If that word didn’t convey the intended meaning to you, I can use different words. Which I did.
> terms are used unclearly, and the attempt to actually clarify those terms is hand-waved away as "I don't want to argue about definitions."
Terms are generally used unclearly, it is unavoidable. When I say that “I don’t want to argue about definitions”, what I mean is that I want to talk about subject X, and I used the word “quackery” to describe it. I want to talk about subject X, not about the definition of “quackery”, which is irrelevant.
A discussion about the word “quackery” is immaterial because I can clarify things by re-explaining subject X using different words. I did that—but apparently you are not interested in clarifications, because your actions indicate a greater interest in fighting over whether I used the word “quackery” correctly.
Yes, and I thought I understood that meaning and addressed it when I said this is typically called "talking past each other."
> So I think your criticism here is not that there are quack philosophical works, but that there are unproductive ones that do nothing but restate established positions. Which is definitely a true thing.
Can you clarify how this isn't what you mean? How is what you're saying different from what I interpreted it as meaning?
No, because that’s just an argument about “who said what” and nobody cares about that stuff.
If you had some response you wanted to make about the content of what I said, then I missed it. I don’t know what your viewpoint is at all, except about what the definition of “quackery” is, which is apparently important. If you made some kind of response to the content what I wrote, I missed it.
I’ve said twice now that the phenomenon you described (and mislabeled as quackery) is called “talking past each other” and it’s a common criticism. I then linked you to a paper discussing this, and I agreed with you that this is a problem.
The definition of quackery is relevant here, because it implies that philosophical works exist which are deliberately “fake” or pretending to be philosophy when they aren’t. A doctor that is unproductive and wastes everyone’s time isn’t a quack, they’re just unproductive. The phenomenon you described is therefore not quackery, it’s just being unproductive in a way often referred to as “talking past one another.”
This is just a rehashing of the exact same thing I already said. I cannot make this any more clear.
But if (when?) it was possible to empirically discriminate between these beliefs, it would stop being philosophy and would become science ! (Assuming you see them as exclusive rather than nested.)
I guess that, unlike in the sub-field of philosophy that are mathematics, where starting with different axioms isn't as much of a deal (outside of turf wars of mathematics departments ?), the issue is that you have plenty of questions that most people deeply care about, so disagreements can turn quite violent indeed ?
There are ton of scientific theories that seem legit but its def out there.
But many many years later, there's been a lot of churn in whose work I value and whose I don't. I wouldn't be surprised if I see his work in a very different light now. This news may be what gets me yo pick it up again and find out.
He consistently argues that studying consciousness and perception is difficult but not impossible, and we will slowly make progress in this scientific endeavor just like all others we have attempted thus far. In philosophy circles he is sometimes derided as having too scientific a mindset, but that is what draws me to him. He’s very endearing to listen to as well—very idiosyncratic.
Now to address your misguided belief on the mind being reduced to the brain.
Under atheistic materialism what is happening is matter in motion. This means even the matter in your brain. What does that mean? Your brain is determined by the laws of physics, chemistry, etc and even your comment was determined. You destroy the possibility of justified knowledge claims under that worldview when taking it to its logical conclusion. Also as Sean Caroll noted, quantum physics and stochastic probabilities don't mean anything, taking the worldview to the logical conclusion means determinism of the movement of matter.
You also can't account for universals and particulars on that view and solve the problem of the and the many.