danielam

Why? The answer is ultimately spiritual and cultural (note the shared etymology of "culture"[0], "cult"[1] and "cultivate"[2]). The article does point to the consumerist ethos as a factor. This is true. Consumerism is a vicious and degrading religion. But what drives consumerism is a fundamental restlessness and malaise characteristic of modernity that stands behind both work-for-work's-sake—the world of "total work"—and the pursuit of the myriad empty recreations on offer. Both are forms of escape and marks of a diseased soul. You can't fix the problem simply by reforming workplace practices alone, though that could, of course, help because it would at least create the space needed to pursue leisure. But by simply bandaging the symptoms, we avoid trying to determine the root cause. We persist in the same pathological condition. Truncate work in the absence of leisure and that space will be filled with either some other work or more recreation.

(N.b. I recommend Josef Pieper's "Leisure: The Basis of Culture"[3] if you want to understand what leisure is and how it differs from recreation.)

[0] https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=culture

[1] https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=cult

[2] https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=cult

[3] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/767958.Leisure

Computational law isn't new by any stretch.

I was told by a Bajan that something similar holds in Barbados, viz., the reason you see so many unpainted houses in Barbados is because it classifies them as unfinished for tax purposes. However, I read somewhere that the tax deduction is actually quite small, so take that for what it’s worth.

> Plus a lot of rich-person-worship (1) and self-glorification (2).

I could not resist (Chesterton's "The Fallacy of Success")[0].

[0] https://www.commonlit.org/en/texts/the-fallacy-of-success

They did. Check again.

Also see the Benedictines in this regard (e.g., "Ora et Labora" and the Rule of St. Benedict)[0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pray_and_work

Right, or if funds are earmarked across the board to some adequate degree.

In this vein and of possible interest:

https://www.wolfson.cam.ac.uk/about/news/there-just-one-fund...

(Direct link to journal article can be found within.)

The Clementine Vulgate is a great example here. You can buy a copy with the Douay-Rheims translation alongside the Latin from Baronius Press, or read it online[0].

[0] http://catholicbible.online/side_by_side/NT/Jn

N.b. in “An Essay in aid of a Grammar of Assent”[0], John Henry Newman makes a distinction between real and notional apprehension that would, I think, be useful here.

[0] http://www.newmanreader.org/works/grammar/chapter4-1.html

In my experience, quite well, though I have not had to reach for Java libraries that often, either because Clojure equivalents exist, or because someone else had already put a wrapper around the Java library.

Clojure fills this gap rather nicely, and you can always fall back on Java libraries, if necessary. If you haven't given it a try, I recommend it. Rich Hickey has put a good deal of thought into its design.

Furthermore, you will have a much easier time finding companies that use Clojure than any other Lisp (and where they don't, you stand a better chance of convincing management to allow it at companies that make heavy use of languages that target the JVM).

Requiescat in pace.

> Your hypothesis on knowing presumes that we have knowledge at all and that rationality leads to truth.

So your plan is to rely on some extra-rational means of developing this epistemology? That's quite a feat. Though I shudder to ask: how would you know your method leads to the truth?

> Thirdly, these knowing agents are often victims to fallacies, delusions, and severe hallucinations

How would you know? Wouldn't you need to have apprehended a truth by which you could judge something to be a hallucination?

If you mean Hume's skepticism toward causation, then all I can say is that, as with all things Hume, he is highly overrated. The presuppositions that his arguments rest on aren't even accepted by most people who, to steal from Stroud, bow reverentially at his feet. For instance, most who pay homage to Hume do not accept his severe restrictions vis-a-vis causality in the realm of perception. But it is precisely this crude imagist theory of perception that Hume grounds his arguments against the knowledge of causation in.

(Which is not to dismiss your point about their being a kind of savagery and philosophical philistinism among scientists. This was certainly Feyerabend's view.)

> This is an unhelpful nebulous statement, at its worst a circular definition and victim to the Münchhausen trilemma.

It is most certainly not circular. We are knowing agents first and know things spontaneously. Only on reflection do we begin to ask what knowledge is, what the limits of rational inquiry are, etc. But to be able to reflect on something, there must first be something to reflect on. Thus, we must know something before we can begin to consider epistemological questions or even have those questions in the first place. Methodic doubt always leads to incoherent conclusions because it is ultimately irrational.

> Not at all, I suggest to read Critique of Pure Reason.

I am not surprised by this recommendation given what you said. The Kantian position is extremely problematic and your appeal to it explains your reaction.

> I'll also note that epistemology was well established by Western philosophy long before Descartes.

This was never my claim. I only claimed that epistemology is not an ideal starting point. Obviously, epistemology predates Descartes. Modern philosophy onward (that is to say, beginning with Descartes, traditionally, anyway) shifts its concerns away from metaphysics to epistemology. Thus, epistemology supplants metaphysics as what one might call the primary concern of philosophical inquiry.

That's an excellent question. My road to philosophy was a long one. It took me a while to realize that the kinds of questions I was asking or preoccupied with—often having to do with basic presuppositions and what reality must be like for the facts as we know or accept them to obtain, questions of identity, etc—were ultimately philosophical in nature.

I would first distinguish between history of philosophy from philosophy itself. Sometimes these two things are confused, much like people will sometimes confuse being a philosophy professor with being a philosopher (these two can coincide, naturally, but the former does not necessarily entail the latter). Some history is edifying, of course, because philosophical arguments and discussion occur in time, and indeed, history will incidentally enter the picture on its own as a way of presenting the dialectical refinement of some position (for example, the typical way Aristotle's theory of act and potency is presented is by beginning with Parmenides, followed by a somewhat idealized version of Heraclitus and then by showing how Aristotle's theory resolves the resulting aporia).

In retrospect, I would recommend something in the Aristotelian vein. It not only serves as a strong and sound foundation, as well as a good base from which to examine other positions, but it will save you a lot of grief later (even here, it took me a long time to overcome ingrained biases and habits of mind that were insinuated by the modern education system). I would highly recommend some of Edward Feser's books. He's well known for writing in a lucid style that dispenses with some of the the needless jargon that some philosophers are known for. On the introductory side, "Aquinas" [0] is probably a good starting point. A follow up, or if you can handle something a bit more substantive to begin with, would be his "Scholastic Metaphysics" [1]. I emphasize metaphysics first because the most basic philosophical questions are metaphysical; everything else benefits greatly from a clear understanding of metaphysical issues. Avoid any philosophical approach that begins with methodological doubt. It will destroy your capacity to know or to reason and may actually succeed in driving you mad (no joke). Groarke [5] wonderfully argues how such doubt is ultimately unresolvable through reason because it isn't a rational doubt—something that arises when we are met with, say, conflicting evidence—but a _willed_ doubt.

I'll leave it at that, partly because I would have to take some time to think about what additional recommendations I should make so that they would be most helpful to you, and partly because I think the recommendations I've made above will occupy you for some time and lead you in a direction of inquiry all on their own.

(Some honorable mentions: David Oderberg's "Real Essentialism" is a nice complement to [1]. Etienne Gilson's "Being and Some philosophers" [2] is also a nice trek through metaphysics. His "Methodical Realism" [3] is also a nice quick read in which he argues against idealism, while "The Unity of Philosophical Experience" [4] is a historical tour of how various major philosophers in history have failed.)

[0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6963088-aquinas

[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/19160503-scholastic-meta...

[2] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2479290.Being_and_Some_P...

[3] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/12409190-methodical-real...

[4] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/232542.The_Unity_of_Phil...

[5] https://ndpr.nd.edu/news/an-aristotelian-account-of-inductio...

> It's best to start with epistemology, epistemology is the foundation for all works in philosophy, which an understanding of is necessary for not only a good rigor but to know what is possible to know, so you don't your waste time.

I could not disagree more with this position. This is a common view in philosophy Descartes onward, but it is untenable because to know what can be known presumes knowing what is to be known first. Similar attitudes exist with respect to methodology. Method always follows knowledge of the real. Otherwise, how could you know which method to use? Before you decide to use a hammer, you must first know you have a nail and a couple of planks to assemble. The style of philosophizing that Descartes initiated is ultimately the death knell of philosophy and frankly all knowledge.

Epistemology is always done reflexively. We can only examine what knowledge is after we've come to know something. Metaphysics is really the best place to start and on which everything else depends.

> Firstly, this is contestable, and secondly it creates a tautology.

I didn't say it was incontestable. I only said that it seems to be the case and that the evidence seems to favor that opinion. It would be more interesting to hear why you think it is contestable. Also, I'm not sure how this is tautological.

> But also - consider that that humans have cognitive and physical limits.

If anything, that would seem to suggest that these impose a bound on how much we can automate. Arguably, this means an upper bound would be determined by the maintainability of such technologies.

> Even if there is in principle always new opportunity created by automation, which I do find plausible, I see no logic supporting the idea that these new opportunities would necessarily be widely addressable by the majority of humans.

If you are making that claim on the basis of cognitive limitations, then see my previous point. But by the same token, if cognitive limitations impose a limit, then it would seem to suggest that the problem space would require a greater division of labor in order to render it tractable.

> It seems like there is no convincing argument to the contrary either.

That jobs are created seems to me to be more convincing, but I leave that as a matter of opinion substantiated only to the degree that I have in my OP.

> There is also something a bit odd in my mind about looking at human existence in terms of needed occupations. > Isn’t the entire point of technology to eliminate work?

From a certain point of view, yes. Economically valuable work is only needed to the degree that it costs something to attain a (licit) good and to the degree that the good is desired by someone else. If those desires could be satisfied without cost, no real opportunity for a market exists because no need for exchange exists. But I cannot imagine that that situation could ever obtain. And therefore, because it could never obtain, the only thing most people can exchange for a desired good is something obtained through the exchange of labor for capital. So it's a bit moot since labor appears endemic to the human condition.

I just don't see why automation of one thing necessarily means a net loss of jobs. If anything, automation entails complex technology and complex technology, among other things, requires labor to produce and to maintain.

Has anyone actually convincingly argued that automation reduces the net number of jobs over time? My impression is that this belief entails a kind of parochialism about job loss, i.e., that it merely tracks the specific kinds or manifestations of jobs that automation has rendered obsolete while ignoring either the fact that particular occupations remain but now make use of new, more sophisticated methods, or the new jobs created by the needs and complexities introduced by new technologies.

Think of our ancestors. How many occupations were there? Arguably fewer than we have today. Certainly, your great grandmother had to wash the dishes herself, but we didn't have factory workers at dishwasher manufacturing plants, dishwasher repairmen, dishwasher dealers, and so on. With the introduction of the dishwasher, there is a reduced need for human dishwashers, but the technology also introduced a whole new industry in its place to support it.

I almost want to say that some law of conservation or even entropy is observed. We are exchanging one kind of burden for another or potentially many.

When I was a child, I was in the supermarket with my mother and apparently I was repeating some Polish phrase containing the infinitive “to be”. The Polish equivalent is “być” which sounds like “bitch”. From what I’ve been told, it drew some attention, but the impression I’m left with is that eavesdroppers were more amused than offended. Similarly, my Spanish-speaking classmates in school found it amusing that a common way to refer to one’s aunt is “ciocia” which is pronounced like the Spanish word “chocha”. The same holds for English words like “duper” as in “super duper” which sounds almost like the Polish “dupa” (especially when spoken in non-rhotic English). This extends to brand names (the name of the German lighting manufacturer Osram is a good example: it is the simple future first conjugation of the Polish transitive verb “to shit all over“).

Given how ubiquitous this phenomenon is, and how international UPenn is, I am having trouble comprehending how a professor could be fired for a perfectly banal Chinese expression which many of us have heard many times in American cities with significant Chinese populations.

In this vein, "The Free Press" by Hilaire Belloc[0].

[0] https://archive.org/details/freepress00bellgoog/page/n12/mod...

St. Stanisław of Kraków[0] is a similar figure.

[0] https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/14246a.htm

I just posted a link[0] with some of Friedman's response to what's going on. TLDR: aside from Belarus' geopolitical importance and predicament, it sounds like what's going on is largely a matter of speculation, though the events of the last decade read in light of geopolitical realities seem to suggest Russian involvement.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24121275

"We want our beliefs to be true, but if we don’t even know what they mean, we’re in trouble. A single sentence might be true in some sense, false in some other sense, and meaningless in a third. If you believe 'St. Trinian’s is a pretty little girls’ school,' what do you believe?"

When someone claims they believe that statement, they have a meaning in mind. Amphiboly is a feature of syntax and spoken language, not beliefs. Confusion, on the other hand, is.

"In 'the eggplant is a fruit,' probably what is meant is that all eggplants are fruits. In 'the dog is a Samoyed,' probably what is meant is that some dog is a Samoyed."

What he's describing is equivocation. However, something similar occurs when words or phrases are analogical (for example "healthy body" vs. "healthy sandwich"). Which brings me to...

"This problem is pervasive. Linguists catalog many distinct ways a sentence can be ambiguous. On analysis, almost any sentence can be read with multiple meanings. [...] natural languages—English, Chinese, Tamil—are hopelessly broken. They are incapable of adequately expressing true beliefs."

Why broken? By what measure? And why? That we must grapple with ambiguities doesn't mean natural language isn't serving its proper purpose. And incapable? I do hope that's hyperbole because, as the author has no doubt noticed, the entire article, including the quoted claim, is written in English.

"Modern rationalism’s first major improvement on traditional logic replaced natural language sentences with mathematical formulae."

Modern rationalism? Also formal languages can help, but they aren't magic bullets. I am still vulnerable to equivocation.

And why the dismissal of Aristotelian logic for which the author offers no tangible justification, like:

"Frege’s 1879 invention of modern formal logic fixed several outstanding defects in traditional, Aristotelian logic"

"Outstanding defects" is, to riff on the article's fixation, ambiguous. Three features of Aristotelian term logic that Fred Sommers identifies as "missing" are the inability to deal with particulars in a systematic way, the absence of relations and the absence of compound propositions. If those are defects, then fine, but even without those features, the logic is immensely useful in a broad range of applications. Also, recall that it dominated logic for two millennia (I highly recommend (Joyce 1916)). I think it deserves a bit more credit. Furthermore, Sommers updated term logic with his own "algebraized" term functor logic which accounts for these three "deficits". Worth also noting is that Sommers saw Fregean logic as a regression to Platonic views of subject and predicate and rejects putting them in separate universes (Sommers 1982).

"He solved several long-standing technical problems, in which Aristotelian logic gave outright wrong answers"

Wrong answers? Like?

"In Fregean epistemology, we can eliminate the ambiguity of 'is' [examples follows]"

How does that depart from the copula in term logic in any relevant way? Chapman's examples transcribed into term logic are "every Eggplant is a Fruit" and "some Dog is a Samoyed". Each is governed by laws of immediate inference. So what ambiguity is he talking about here that his FOL examples don't also suffer from?

"But what if you see a dog, and it’s obviously a Samoyed, but you don’t know its registry number? What do you believe then?"

You believe exactly what you've described.

Oh, Ludwig Feuerbach.

If I restrict myself to the topic at hand, then I have to say I don't see how he manages to construe the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo (CEN) as intrinsically opposed to contemplation or speculative knowledge—science that seeks knowledge for its own sake and not merely to master nature—or how he construes it as essentially utilitarian. I have a suspicion that this is a corollary of his position that God is merely a projection of Man, but my understanding is that this position is a consequence of Kantian skepticism and the resulting agnosticism. If you can't know things in themselves, then all you have left is science as mastery of nature.

One difficulty with the claim that somehow CEN is intrinsically opposed to theory is the failure to explain the entire Christian intellectual tradition. Since we're talking about science specifically, it becomes impossible to explain the enormous successes of the sciences in the West and historically the relative poverty of their success in every other civilization. While the stirrings of science occurred in a number of civilizations—and we should give them their due—and while the Greeks may be argued to be the most successful of the bunch, nowhere but the West, whatever its faults, do we see the flourishing of a sustained and vibrant scientific culture. If we take a broader and classical view of science, one embraced by the Greeks, to include any systematic body of knowledge, then this period of flourishing extends far into the centuries preceding the rise of modern science and includes the intellectually vibrant Middle Ages. Indeed, without the Middle Ages, it is difficult to imagine how modern science could have emerged in the first place. Without arguing that this could only have happened in the West (that is Jaki's position, as far as I understand it), it suffices to note that it did happen in the West and it did so in a culture that embraced CEN.

The fact that neither Jewish civilization, nor Islamic civilization for that matter, ever truly had a sustained and sophisticated philosophical or scientific culture does not support Feuerbach's thesis. Again, his claim is that CEN is intrinsically opposed to theoretical endeavors (which includes philosophy). But all I need to show is one example of where CEN did not stifle science.

Here I would add that one thing that stifled science in the Islamic world is not CEN, but the belief that Allah is essentially pure will, and a pure will that can contradict itself. Accepting that kind of creator can only discourage speculative science. Here, we can appeal to Feuerbach's own words when he says that the origin of a thing tells us about that thing. A world created by a self-contradicting creator doesn't inspire much confidence in the intelligibility of what he's created.

In stark contrast, Christianity (certainly Catholic Christianity) conceives of the world as utterly intelligible. To put it somewhat poetically, the world is divine thought or divine word and therefore intelligible and knowable through and through (we have to note both the immanence and transcendence of God to avoid both pantheism and deism). When John says "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.", the original Greek uses the word "λόγος" for word. Anyone familiar with Greek knows that the English translation of λόγος is utterly inadequate to express its meaning (the Latin "verbum" does a better job). In Exodus, when Moses asks God who he should say has sent him, God responds with "I Am" (or "Ehyeh", from which we get Yahweh). God is revealing himself as Being itself and in revealing himself is making himself known. So God himself is intelligible and therefore Being is intelligible. (Aristotelian metaphysics dovetails nicely because while Aristotle managed to provide us with a rich and robust theory of being, he stops short of discovering the act or principle of existence which Gilson argues was stifled by pagan eternalism. We have to wait for Avicenna for that to happen, later refined by Averroes and finally Aquinas.

Don't follow the part about polytheism. I would say, if anything, polytheism is a hindrance to the development of science. For one, the capriciousness of the gods makes nature arbitrary and unpredictable.

FWIW, Stanley Jaki argues something quite different to what you've written in "Science and Creation" and "The Road of Science and the Ways of God".

P.S. A quick search doesn't bring up any noteworthy Georg Feuerbachs.

In this context, these symbols are conventional signs taken to refer to meanings that are not themselves. Concepts are apprehensions of form, or we might say "meanings", the what-it-is-to-be of the given thing. When I write "123", that series of characters obviously is not itself the number 123. A human interpreter in possession of a mental dictionary can read that series of squiggles to arrive mentally at the concept of the number 123. But all that exists in computers are representations, not the things they are meant to represent, and their meanings are entirely in the mind of the human observer who assigns conventional meanings to those representations.