Leibniz's Philosophy of Mind (2013)
plato.stanford.edu
plato.stanford.edu
I liked this so much when I once read it, I wrote it down to keep it.
"One is obliged to admit that perception and what depends upon it is inexplicable on mechanical principles, that is, by figures and motions. In imagining that there is a machine whose construction would enable it to think, to sense, and to have perception, one could conceive it enlarged while retaining the same proportions, so that one could enter into it, just like into a windmill. Supposing this, one should, when visiting within it, find only parts pushing one another, and never anything by which to explain a perception. Thus it is in the simple substance, and not in the composite or in the machine, that one must look for perception."
For example, look up "Chinese room argument", written in 1980. Leibniz would be proud!
For most of human history, philosophy was expressly designed to perform discovery - albeit speculatively - on universal principles without the invocation of religion. It was understood that any concrete scientific knowledge of an area would supersede whatever philosophical construct had covered the same subject before. Now we are at a point where this is apparently no longer the case, and philosophers who refuse to consider current scientific understanding are no longer in a position to claim a strong barrier between religion and philosophy.
It hasn't really been the case since Galileo and Newton made hash of Aristotle's notions of physics.
*There's a whole other point to be made about how it's confused to think that philosophy can be in dissonance with a scientific observation, as opposed to some particular school/theory of philosophy.
As far as content goes, _xander already made that objection for you, by the way.
But you're right, the majority of people in this thread seem to think my previous comment is of negative value to the discussion and I accept their judgement. It's just too late to delete it, sorry about that.
The entire thread is an example of a topic where I think philosophy has been overtaken by scientific developments, the entirety of philosophy of mind. I will certainly go into more detail, however, that won't make my opinion any less of an extreme outlier's position.
Let me instead illustrate the problem:
> I'd rather say the science of mind is in crisis, since we still have no good scientific explanation of intelligence, consciousness, or how a brain works in general.
I'm not saying this to insult you but to show the depth of the conceptual distance, to my ear this sounds like the equivalent of a creationist asserting that we still have no good scientific explanation for the development of organisms.
To start off with, the answer to unknown variables is not to just make them up, and that includes getting rid of the postulate that they're fundamentally unknowable, too. Next, we do have an increasingly good understanding of the basic machinery that drives biological information processing. I know, because I worked there. There is no justifiable corner in neuroscience reserved for proclamations of "and this is where magic happens". Instead, what we see every day is consistent with the fact that there is just biology at work, no need for quantum consciousness or dualism or any of those quackeries. The biochemical mechanisms are complex and involved, as is expected after billions of years of appending spaghetti code, but it's not fundamentally unknown or unknowable. And finally, consciousness - no matter how brilliant of a scientist Daniel Dennett may be otherwise - consciousness as it's being used in theory of mind is not a scientific concept. Anesthesiologists sometimes use the word as a synonym for being awake, but that's the extent of it.
I want to pick one other comment you made in this thread which I think underscores the magnitude of the conceptual rift between our positions:
> There are deep questions that science can't answer.
This, if anything, is a position that refuses to consider scientific evidence. People who talk about "deep questions" usually allude things such as 'the meaning of life', 'the purpose of the universe', and 'the nature of consciousness' - all of which are not scientific concepts to begin with. They are personal at best, if not even religious. I hope I'm not mis-characterizing your position here, if so, please correct me.
To me, this sentence starts off with the implied postulate that there are questions which are inaccessible to science by definition, which is certainly a correct statement. It's much more debatable whether it's a meaningful statement though. Constructing questions that can't be answered is very easy, and if you're good at it you may even attach some subjective deepness to them. Carl Sagan's invisible dragon is a good and poignant example of such a construction.
> The only "clearly dominating opinion" about them is "we don't know". To some, thinking about those questions is "beating dead horses", others become philosophers.
It's not very important whether the horse is dead or not, but does matter if it's real or imaginary. Even then, beating imaginary horses is still fine as long as you're aware of the fact, but it becomes a problem when you try to pass off a non-measurable horse as a real object.
"We don't know, so let's find out" is a valuable statement, because it prompts investigations which further our knowledge. "We don't know, because it can't be known" is the intellectual equivalent of salting the earth, and it's usually the precursor to "We can never know, so I made something up, which by designating it a 'philosophical framework' I then recursively define as deep knowledge".
In closing I'd like to re-iterate that despite your invitation this elaboration most likely did nothing to increase the perceived value of my position - not necessarily because I'm inarticulate or generally insufferable, although both of these may still be true - but because we all came into this discussion with our world view thoroughly in place.
Second, the questions I referred to as "deep", and your examples of those questions - do you not see any value in asking them? For example, "are we living in a simulation?" is a meaningful question to me. Even if we might never know the answer, I still want to explore the possibility. Note I said "we might never know", not that "we can never know".
Finally, I said "science of mind" is in crisis because the explanation of how mind works proved to be more difficult than most people expected, again and again in the last 100 years. The task is well defined, we have a working example in front of us, we have tools to analyze it, and yet, we still have no general theory.
So I do think it was not clear from context. But I'm glad that I know the target you intended.
In any case, I still disagree. I think the Chinese Room thought experiment is not a good one, and the thesis that it's arguing for is wrong. However, I do not think it is any scientific observation that refutes it. The objections I've seen to it are philosophical in nature.
Also, I do not agree with _xander. First, I do not think epistemology is in any privileged position. At an abstract level, epistemology is no freer from the findings of statistics and empirical psychology of reasoning than philosophy of mind is free from the findings of neuroscience and psychology. Second, I do not think that philosophy of mind is badly off. Of course there are people who advance positions I find misguided (Searle is one), but that's not the same as the field being misguided.
This may or may not be true, but it looks like an off-topic response to the comment, because there doesn't seem to be anything dissonant in Leibniz' statement and scientific observation.
Maybe it is a love of wisdom that drives some philosophers to drone on endlessly because maybe they feel we need more sleep!
Still a bit too late for Leibniz by that argument, but within the ballpark.
Unfortunately, I don't have my notes from when I was researching this a few years ago, so I will have to concede that this may be faulty memory attributing things to the wrong individual.
Did you know he made a mechanical calculator? Here's a pretty cool link from the wolfram blog: http://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2013/05/dropping-in-on-gottfr...