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Comment by raddan | Hacker News Reader

This is sad. I teach an upper-level undergraduate course on programming language theory, and one major component of the course is reduction proofs. Many students find proof by contradiction (reductio ad absurdum) to be a confusing concept. I have always directed those students toward Dennett’s helpful video (https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=sVUMAqMmy7o) and most of them respond positively to Dennett’s lucid style. RIP.

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.

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STEM often overlooks the fundamental work that was done in philosophy that led to breakthroughs within STEM. For example, Claude Shannon's undergraduate philosophy course is what taught him boolean algebra, which ultimately led him to design digital circuits. https://bentley.umich.edu/news-events/magazine/the-elegant-p...

Although formal logicians are quite isolated in philosophy departments -- while their colleagues are debating whether Plato or Kant had a better idea of what it meant to be "good", the logicians are basically doing math with symbols rather than numbers.

That's true, but in a way this is a good thing for CS students. In schools with analytic philosophy departments, you can expect to find a logician there. So every CS student can stop by their philosophy department and meet the logician, and when they do, they'll find someone who they can connect and communicate with in a similar way that they already (by junior or senior year, certainly) do with their math and CS theory instructors. Yes, they're specialized, but they're still guaranteed to be philosophically literate and they can help bridge some really interesting topics for CS students.

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.

Ethics are discussed very little in current philosophy, at least in the analytical tradition. Plato is mostly of historical interest, and of Kant's work it's mostly philosophy of mind, epistemology and metaphysics.

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.

This is not accurate. Ethics is very well-studied in analytic philosophy, and discussion of Plato and Kant are central topics.

>formal logicians are quite isolated in philosophy departments

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/.

jhbadger: But logicism, the idea that all of math can be reduced to logic, is itself a controversial philosophical thesis!

> 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.

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

Free will is prescientific baggage? Why so? What do you think about the famously atheist Dennett's defense of free will? I think this is the kind of free will generally talk about whether laymen are around to listen or not.

>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.

Any competent philosopher will define terms, often spending most of their time defining terms!

It be be tautological, but a lack of systemic thinking makes a discussion bad philosophy, or epistemic bunk as they say in the trade.

I think his point was that, lets say some philosophers or programmers, are having a detailed discussion. But are overheard by lay-people, maybe mid-argument, without the background, having not heard the definitions, would takeaway a lot of misunderstandings.

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.

> 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.

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.

I think it depends a lot on which tradition of philosophy one is first exposed to. Most STEM people will find Anglo-American analytic philosophy (where Dennett firmly belonged) much easier to approach than continental philosophy or the classical stuff, but unfortunately casual readers tend to get exposed to a lot more of the latter.

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!

In a sense that is a myth. Guess this is based on the idea of silicon and Turing complete.

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 …)

I'm pretty sure I was introduced to the concepts of proof by contradiction and by induction in the final year or two of high school, but that was fifty years ago in England.

Perhaps finding it confusing is a recent development.

What, we're all just assuming the law of the excluded middle now?

I don’t really believe this stuff, but it is interesting project: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructivism_(philosophy_of_...

Me too, fifty years ago in Wales

Me too, 3 months ago in California.

Me too, 20 years ago in Austria.

Thought experiments (including "reductio ad absurdum" method) aren't the best to explain the phenomenons of physical world: https://www.richardcarrier.info/archives/17279

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.

I find philosophy essential even though many philosophers can be painful and/or seemingly irrelevant to read. Still, I think I’m at a point now, where finding intellectual discomfort is preferable to not.

For that example my exposure is shocking when first exposed to this line of argument. Is sq root of 2 is rational? Assume it is … Never heard of his example. But that is better as it involves no maths.

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