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Comment by p1esk | Hacker News Reader

You're kidding right? The majority of people, and many modern philosophers still have essentially the same beliefs regarding consciousness/perceptions as what Leibniz wrote here:

"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!

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That's why philosophy is in a crisis right now, because it's in fundamental dissonance with scientific observation. You may disagree that this is a problem, but at that point you're implicitly arguing that the intents of philosophy no longer contain a desire to describe and reflect the actual world.

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.

"Philosophy" is a diverse field - it's a collection of opinions. None of which seem particularly dominant at the moment. Philosophy as a whole has always been partially ahead, and partially behind science, as new scientific theories create new philosophical questions, not answered by those theories. I'm pretty sure it's going to stay this way for the foreseeable future.

There are clearly dominant opinions. It just that those who know this don't often become philosophers, they become scientists. Because it's quite pointless to spend one's career beating dead horses.

There are deep questions that science can't answer. 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.

What do you mean by 'deep' questions? The existence of mystery is wholly dependent upon ignorance. So I'm curious why you think there's anything deeper than ignorance at work there.

"Now we are at a point where this is apparently no longer the case"

It hasn't really been the case since Galileo and Newton made hash of Aristotle's notions of physics.

Luckily, some philosophy doesn't compete with the formal sciences because it operates outside of their remit; e.g. moral philosophy, political philosophy and epistemology. It is here that some meaningful work can still be done without fear of being empirically outgunned.

For better or worse science is encroaching there too, in to the study of morality at any rate. See http://www.amazon.com/The-Moral-Animal-Evolutionary-Psycholo... for example.

Which scientific observation is philosophy* in fundamental dissonance with?

*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.

It should be clear from the context of the entire discussion, as you are probably well aware, which philosophical theses we're talking about. My personal opinion is that catching commenters with gotchas based on how they didn't include stringent qualifiers into every single sentence just so they can't be purposely misconstrued is probably not the most productive debate technique to go with here.

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.

Your comment would have more value if you provided a specific example. Which philosophers refuse to consider scientific evidence? Is the scientific evidence conclusive enough? Does it mean the entire subfield of philosophy of mind is in crisis? 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.

> Your comment would have more value if you provided a specific example.

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.

First of all, when I said "science can't answer" I did not mean "science won't answer, ever". However, we might not get anything useful from science regarding those questions during our lifetime.

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.

There are many people on HN who explicitly believe that all philosophy is worthless, so when you say "philosophy is in crisis", I read you as saying "philosophy is in crisis."

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.

> That's why philosophy is in a crisis right now, because it's in fundamental dissonance with scientific observation.

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.

Someone posted a novel take on this problem 10 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9905847

Yeah that's good! I like Heidegger in that he traces the root meaning of words. So philosophy is love of wisdom, and everyone knows that but they seem to mistake the field for metaphysics and whatever else incomprehensible word jumble it loosely applies to.

Maybe it is a love of wisdom that drives some philosophers to drone on endlessly because maybe they feel we need more sleep!

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