Comment by mattmanser | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mattmanser | Hacker News Reader

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I did Philosophy as a degree and pg's essay, which I read a while ago, was one of crystallization, a total clarification of something that had been bugging me for years.

I personally believe that Philosophy is the place where amateur thinkers reside until a discipline matures and breaks off. Philosophy is thinking without the effort of doing. First it was Physics, Law, Chemistry, Biology, Medicine and we are now seeing Psychology and Sociology departing Philosophy, taking morality and personal identity into the realms of actual science instead of thought experiments. Soon Philosophy will be left with its history and debating the meaning of words. CS and Maths have taken all the interesting logic questions away from Philosophy for example.

I believe what pg advocates at the end has already happened, is always happening to Philosophy. The general truths philosophy helped discover are the sciences, it just that as we get to answering the general truth the philosophers step aside for people who actually do.

Most previously interesting philosophical questions are now interesting scientific questions. There's not much left for philosophers to actually talk about.

> Most previously interesting philosophical questions are now interesting scientific questions.

Well, not "most", but certainly many of them are.

> There's not much left for philosophers to actually talk about.

What? This is silly. "This practice that unveiled the thoughts which have aided science and literature and politics and art for countless generations is probably out of new ideas, let's stop using it!" What's the proof that philosophers are out of new discoveries to make?

In fact, I find that contemporary philosophers interest me more than older ones do, simply because they're making discoveries which are new to this time! I have to remind myself to make my way through classic philosophers' works instead of only reading the new stuff all the time so my thoughts are grounded in the older tradition, but contemporary philosophy touches on a lot of interesting things. Richard Rorty is a recent favorite of mine – his Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity is twenty years old, but still offers some fascinating insights into a subject that is very much dominating a part of our popular culture.

I think you're right about mature disciplines breaking off from philosophy, but I don't see morality and personal identity departing the realm of philosophy any time soon.

Sociologists only tell us how human societies behave, not how they are supposed to behave. You might hold the opinion that we can somehow derive the ought from the is, but if that's the view that you're trying to advocate, then you're already doing metaethics -- a branch of philosophy.

Psychologists and neuroscientists might be able to tell us how children acquire a sense of identity, or how patients identify themselves after massive brain surgery. But I don't think their job description includes figuring out what the essence of a person is, or whether there is such a thing as an essence of a person in the first place.

As for law, it is unlikely that you will be able to settle the question, "Why in hell should anyone obey the law?" or "If the law is unjust, should I still obey it?" until you've settled some questions about morality. Just because a law is (un)constitutional doesn't mean that it is (im)moral.

Guess what, you can even combine questions about morality with questions about personal identity, and throw in some legal theory as well, to end up with some really interesting philosophy [1].

[1] http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/identity-ethics/

We have neurological evidence pointing to how our very sense of "self" exists as a construction of the brain, associated with specific regions.

Drugs that induce "a sense of oneness with the universe" appear to just turn off that "self illusion" part of the brain. Compare it to when I kill my Gnome/KDE daemon and see the shell underneath.

In short, neuroscientists have already discovered "the essence of a person", regardless of job description.

Funny, most of the people I know who drop acid become more interested in philosophy, not less. Methinks you're looking at this the wrong way: it's not that neuroscience "solved" philosophy, it's that neuroscientists invented something that directly proves how fascinating philosophy really is. Thanks neuroscientists! Let's let the philosophers take it from here.

I compare philosophy to when, after you see the shell beneath your GUI, you start realizing that the same principles that affect programming might affect things that aren't on your computer screen – kind of like Plato's shadow puppets, come to think of it. And then you start wondering if things that aren't on your computer screen could affect programming, if only you knew what they were. And then you start wondering how they are all pieced together. And every time you find new pieces, you start wondering where those pieces came from, and every time you start dreaming of new computers, but the really fascinating part is the questions, and the answers are just an afterthought...

I love answers as much as anybody, but I love questions so much more. Drugs and Linux are wonderful answers that provoke even deeper questions. Why not let's ask those questions and see what we let neuroscientists come up with next?

If identifying the brain region or drug that produces the sensation of identity counts as discovering the essence of identity, does identifying the brain region or drug that produces the illusion of being a cat count as discovering the essence of feline nature? Would the illusion provide us with accurate rules to distinguish felines from other animals?

This is exactly the kind of equivocation that contemporary philosophers complain about nearly every time an arrogant scientist announces the end of philosophy. Not because the scientist's answers are uncomfortable, but because they don't even answer the same question. (Arrogant philosophers, in turn, would say in Latin: ignoratio elenchi.)

Yes, we already know which binaries produce the KDE Plasma Desktop when executed from the bash shell. We also know exactly which bits produce which parts of the GUI. But what we really wanted to know were the conceptual, historical, and perhaps even ethical significance of the design decisions and system architecture that make KDE what it is. (If we replaced Qt with something else, would it still be KDE?) You can't answer that question by showing us a million lines of C++.

Would the illusion provide us with accurate rules to distinguish felines from other animals?

"Felines" as a group exist only as a cognitive shortcut. Looking at the genetic and evolutionary data, we find a continuum where felines and other families bleed together in a very fine gradient. We just happened to draw boundaries in the interest of productive discussion. We will never find "the essence of feline nature" because there is no such concrete thing as a "feline" which would have such.

For a human example: at what point do we stop being conscious when falling asleep?

He didn't ask you whether there are accurate rules for distinguishing between felines and other families, he specifically and precisely asked you if you can deduce those rules from the illusion! It's the same inference you were trying to make about the nature of the self. Read more carefully.

Short answer: no. Long answer: no, because we derive these distinctions from the real world instead, changing them as necessary to better reflect new knowledge. See "birds are dinosuars" and "the brontosaurus never existed".

You should be careful with this grand pronunciations about what scientist have discovered, given that your last sentence doesn't have much to do with anything that precedes it. A "sense of self" is not the same thing as the "self". Nor does association/correlation of the self with brain regions imply identity between those two things.

I posit that no distinction lies between "the sense of self" and "self". Where would you draw the line between these two instead?

If there is indeed no distinction between the two, which might very well be the case, you would still need to supply a logical argument as to why there is no distinction between the two. Philosophy isn't about positing grand-sounding statements without proof. It's about backing up such statements with valid logic.

Something like: Hello, I analysed 12 different ways in which people use the word "self", and came up with precise definitions for each of them so that there is no room for ambiguity or vagueness. Here I demonstrate that each and every one of them has exactly the same logical structure as, and is therefore reducible to, the phrase "the sense of self", a precise definition of which follows: blah blah blah. Therefore, I posit that "self" === "the sense of self".

Neuroscientists can show how certain biochemical processes cause members of homo sapiens to confuse the self with the sense of self, but error theory is not a positive demonstration. So I maintain that a healthy dose of philosophy is still required.

Also, just because you can't draw a line between two things doesn't mean that there's no distinction between them. Is abortion the same as murder just because foetal development is a continuous process with no sharp boundaries?

What definitions of "self" and "sense of self" are we using? We will have to draw that line before I can begin to erase it.

Yes, you will have to draw that line and some other distinctions, and that is exactly his point. Determining what is a good, useful definition that all rational participants can agree to, and clearing all other conceptual baggage before the discussion can even get off the ground is (just a small) task of philosophy. It does not belong to (neuro)science, and therefore if that task needs to be performed, as you admit, it follows that (neuro)science is not sufficient to determine the "nature of the person", contrary to what you originally claimed.

Determining what is a good, useful definition that all rational participants can agree to, and clearing all other conceptual baggage before the discussion can even get off the ground...

That's a lot of new qualifiers; in other words, a "No True Scotsman" fallacy.

It sounds like you're talking about the equivalent of a "Python language development mailing list", whereas I'm saying "it's all just assembly anyway". Technically, such a higher-level discussion as found in the former can be useful, but I don't expect anyone on there to claim that there's some essential "Python nature" separate from the ones and zeroes (and the electrical configurations of the developer brains, other physical components, etc.).

Someone can talk about what Python "should" do all day long, and try to determine the "nature of Python", but I really only care about the programmers when it comes to writing or debugging my actual code, especially when the code behind the mailing list breaks.

Once again you're missing the point. Nobody here agreed or disagreed with you about the nature of persons. What everyone is claiming is that you're simply espousing a position withing philosophy, which may or may not be true, and requires a philosophical argument, and you're pretending that the case has been closed by neuroscience. Hell, even the "No True Scotsman" is a fallacy identified by a philosopher in a domain of informal logic, which is a branch of philosophy.

So you don't care what python should or should not do, but you think that python should not break your mailing list?

You are missing the forest for the trees here. Philosophy as a field is not about any of the individual ideas explored by any school of thought or individual philosopher. Philosophy is about constructing systems of thought and exploring them. Science, as a methodology, is but one of these systems it produced that happend to end up being very useful. But comparing the 2 is comparing apples and oranges. Like comparing all of philosophy to utilitarianism or the like.

This might be an interesting read. Also the comments about Krauss on that blog are useful because Krauss is representative of many contemporary scientists. http://maverickphilosopher.typepad.com/maverick_philosopher/...

Independent of the question whether Krauss should be trying to do philosophy, the actual philosophy he was trying to do was positively demolished by David Albert here[1]. Especially the second paragraph is damning.

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/25/books/review/a-universe-fr...

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