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I argue that we live in an anti-philosophy era. I'm not sure this will change in our lifetimes, but I think it will necessarily change if we survive for long en

I argue that we live in an anti-philosophy era. I'm not sure this will change in our lifetimes, but I think it will necessarily change if we survive for long enough. To illustrate: there is common belief that metaphysics became irrelevant -- that it was replaced by science. This is, in itself, a metaphysical position, and a misunderstand about what science is and does. Of course, reasoning about what science is and does is part of philosophy. So is the discussion of knowledge itself, what is knowable and how can we trust the various methods of seeking more knowledge. A lot of stuff surrounding these topics happened in the XX century. The acritical use of the yardstick of "progress" as the ultimate value for everything (along with its little cousin: "productivity") is, in itself, a philosophical position. One that is currently maintained by social norms and authority. Which does not mean it is "wrong". I am only claiming that it is accepted by most people without any reflection. Some boundaries of scientific knowledge are quite visible. For example, consciousness. You might argue that consciousness emerges from matter interacting in a complex way (emergentism), and you might be right, but this is accepted as a serious scientific theory although it has zero content -- no way to falsify empirically, no explanatory mechanism proposed. Real philosophy is a very subversive endeavor at the moment. Perhaps it always was. It's something for those who love knowledge, but not for those who expect any public recognition.

Retric 8y ago
> reasoning about what science is and does is part of philosophy Only if you approach Philosophy with a lot more rigor and math than what people have historically done. The useful parts of discussing what you call the 'philosophy of science' involves quite a bit of statistics for example. What people call useless is cruft dealing with Known Unknowable's which suck up time without getting anywhere. IMO, it's not that Philosophy is dead, it's just when you keep calling the useful bit's something else eventually people don't care about the leftovers.
- TelmoMenezes 8y ago
  > Only if you approach Philosophy with a lot more rigor and math than what people have historically done. The useful parts of discussing what you call the 'philosophy of science' involves quite a bit of statistics for example. I disagree. For example, Karl Popper's positions on the philosophy of science became the current mainstream view. His positions are not based on statistics, but on good-old-fashioned qualitative reasoning. I know many scientists who mention Popper by name when discussing such matters. Carl Sagan also helped popularize it in his book "Demon-Haunted World", with his "invisible dragon in the garage" story. The ability to do statistics at incredible scales (currently known as Machine Learning) raises further questions about what science should be. Questions about such quantitative methods themselves. Rigor does not have to be quantitative in nature -- and let's not forget that the very idea of quantitative science was introduced by Descartes, another famous philosopher. > What people call useless is cruft dealing with Known Unknowable's which suck up time without getting anywhere. Depends on where you want to get. Noncommunicable knowledge is a very interesting topic, for those with the inclination. It is ok if you are not curious about such things, but I would argue that it is also ok to be. It deeply intersects mathematical logic (e.g. Gödel) and theoretical computer science (e.g. the halting problem). Will it help us create better gadgets? Probably not? Will it help us better understand the human condition? Probably yes.
  - Retric 8y ago
    Gödel is vast overkill. The list of things you can't compute with small finite amounts of processing power is vastly longer than the list of things you can't compute with infinite processing power. AKA, Gödel is true but irreverent because it's not on the border of anything decidable. If you say the bonds are between 9^9 and 9↑↑↑↑9 that's just not useful.
    - humanrebar 8y ago
      The general idea that certain statistical problems are intractible is fair though. But we don't exactly discourage the idea that we will solve, say, nutrition some day.
    - chrisweekly 8y ago
      >"Gödel is true but irreverent" quite sure "irrelevant" is the intended word here. :)
- pasabagi 8y ago
  I don't know where the idea that philsophy doesn't involve rigor and maths comes from. Leibniz came up with the entscheidung's problem, for god's sake! If you take the most basic interest in logic, maths, or even computers, you can't swing a cat without hitting a philosopher.
  - Retric 8y ago
    I am referring to computation, not abstractions. What's the trade-off between X and Y is the kind of place where having some specific numbers is very helpful. EX: At what point if any can you say testing theories on public data produces more value than noise.
    - foldr 8y ago
      I'm having trouble seeing how any of that relates to your original comment or the responses to it. You said "[reasoning about what science is and does is part of philosophy] only if you approach Philosophy with a lot more rigor and math than what people have historically done." That comes across as a broad comment about levels of rigor in philosophy, not a comment on the usefulness of quantitative data in making trade-offs.
      - Retric 8y ago
        "reasoning about what science is and does is part of philosophy." I am saying some of that analysis benefits from real hard data. So, if your saying all of that analysis falls under philosophy, then I don't think that's what most people mean when the use the term.
        foldr 8y ago
        Sure, but philosophers usually do look at hard data where appropriate.
        pasabagi 8y ago
        I actually think 'hard data' is typically about as relevant to philosophy as it is to maths. Not everything is reducible to stats. I just find it weird to be using a machine that's a recognizable descendant of the work of philosophers, as much as engineers or mathematicians, then to be saying casually that philosophy isn't rigorous.
nwbrown 8y ago
Science didn't replace philosophy. Science is philosophy. That's why scientists used to be called natural philosophers. Yes, in the modern era we have gotten much more specialized in the modern era and that arguably is a loss. But it is kinda necessary given the depth that many fields have gotten.
- IncRnd 8y ago
  You appear to be a PHD.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
- chrisweekly 8y ago
  >"Science didn't replace philosophy. Science is philosophy." More precisely, science is a subset of philosophy.
lmm 8y ago
> To illustrate: there is common belief that metaphysics became irrelevant -- that it was replaced by science. This is, in itself, a metaphysical position That argument doesn't seem valid. The notion that fairies don't exist is, in itself, a fairyological position; still, few would accept that fairyology is a legitimate field of endeavour. > I am only claiming that it is accepted by most people without any reflection. Many things are accepted by most people without much reflection. Often that's because they really are as simple as they look. > Some boundaries of scientific knowledge are quite visible. For example, consciousness. You might argue that consciousness emerges from matter interacting in a complex way (emergentism), and you might be right, but this is accepted as a serious scientific theory although it has zero content -- no way to falsify empirically, no explanatory mechanism proposed. What are the outstanding empirical questions about consciousness? As soon as you go down to an empirical level, you find that no mysticism is necessary: there are valid, interesting questions to be asked and answered, but they are no more outside science than questions about how, say, protein folding works.
- TelmoMenezes 8y ago
  > That argument doesn't seem valid. The notion that fairies don't exist is, in itself, a fairyological position; still, few would accept that fairyology is a legitimate field of endeavour. You are using Popper's criterion for what constitutes a valid scientific theory, but I think you misunderstand me. My claim is that saying that theoretical physics is the ultimate explanation of reality is a metaphysical position. Cosmology describes the big bang but it does not answer the question "why is it so?". Maybe there is no answer. Maybe it is not knowable. Maybe theoretical physics cannot have the total picture. These are all metaphysical questions that seem perfectly legitimate to me. If you are not allowed to ask or talk about these questions, I would say that you just accepted a religious faith. I am not trying to sell you anything except doubt and curiosity :) > Many things are accepted by most people without much reflection. Often that's because they really are as simple as they look Perhaps. Perhaps not. > What are the outstanding empirical questions about consciousness? As soon as you go down to an empirical level, you find that no mysticism is necessary: there are valid, interesting questions to be asked and answered, but they are no more outside science than questions about how, say, protein folding works. You are implicitly making the strong claim that knowledge can only be attained through empiricism. This is clearly not the case. I know that I am conscious and I assume that you are, but I cannot use empiricism to test this hypothesis, not can you use it to verify that I am, indeed, conscious. So there is something very fundamental -- in fact the only thing I know with 100% certitude -- that cannot be empirically tested. Your use of the word "mysticism" betrays the current bias against such questions. I am not proposing any woo. I'm just curious. Even being curious about certain topics nowadays gets you labelled and a "mystic". I think this illustrates the point that I wanted to make in the beginning.
jonbarker 8y ago
I think the anti-philosophy era you are referring to is actually more like an anti-intellectual, anti-science, and generally populist movement that seems to be picking up steam. The most irritating manifestation of which says that you can't learn anything from books, something I increasingly hear people saying. I'd say the progress in more recent philosophy has been the efforts of multidisciplinary types like those in neuroscience and philosophy (ie Sam Harris) to enable more useful and practical 'popularizations' like the realization that meditation has benefits. Unfortunately debates about what 'grue' and 'bleen' are, while actually fascinating when you dig into it, and potentially even having practical consequence, generated an anti-philosophy populist movement that resembles general anti-intellectualism, and isn't helpful.
amvalo 8y ago
> To illustrate: there is common belief that metaphysics became irrelevant -- that it was replaced by science. This is, in itself, a metaphysical position, and a misunderstand about what science is and does. This reminds me of religious people who say "Ha! Atheism is just another religion!" In both cases, there's an inability to conceive of what a truly apathetic position looks like.
- buu700 8y ago
  It is a theological position, but it'd be silly to call atheism a religion just as it would be to call theism a religion.
- amvalo 8y ago
  > The acritical use of the yardstick of "progress" as the ultimate value for everything (along with its little cousin: "productivity") is, in itself, a philosophical position. There it goes again! It would seem philosophy is unavoidable.
mrleiter 8y ago
> I am only claiming that it is accepted by most people without any reflection. If you discuss philosophy with a scientist/tech-person, on most occasions this happens, or at least from my experience. Questions about usefulness, measurability etc are the ones that are discussed first. And that's fine on an individual level. But as a generation on a whole, it's a turn into a somewhat morally ambiguous direction. Algebra is based on five axioms [1], and an axiom by definition is a condition that is assumed to be true. How can you prove that 1+1 is really 2? There have been attempts to prove this, like in Pricipia Mathematica [2]. So basically what I am trying to say is that there is no absolute and not everything must have a value. [] http://www.aaamath.com/ac11.htm http://www.aaamath.com/ac11.htm [2] https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/278974/prove-that-11-2 https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/278974/prove-that-1...
- humanrebar 8y ago
  > How can you prove that 1+1 is really 2? Worse, we're often tripped up figuring out if 1 + 1 is the correct expression in the first place. A lot of science and technology is bottlenecked on getting accurate and useful inputs.
  - ColanR 8y ago
    I did not know about that aspect of the problem. What do you mean, that "we're often tripped up figuring out if 1 + 1 is the correct expression in the first place"? That we might be using the wrong paradigm for mathematic formulations?
    - humanrebar 8y ago
      In real life, there are problems like classification and precision that cause problems in making broader conclusions. If you are measuring poverty rates, for instance, you could be basing your decisions on several different benchmarks. The statistics, math, machine learning, etc., are all downstream from what we're even measuring and counting in the first place. In a more elementary formulation, we could say one bag of rice plus one bag of rice is two bags of rice. But one bag of rice is underfilled and the other is contaminated with pests. So you don't really have two bags of rice after all. So maybe 8/10 + 0 is the correct expression in that case.
AnimalMuppet 8y ago
> I argue that we live in an anti-philosophy era. Francis Schaeffer said that most (formal) philosophy today is really anti-philosophy - either it doesn't tackle the big questions, or it gives non-rational answers. He said that the real philosophy today is being done by people like film-makers and musicians.
visarga 8y ago
> For example, consciousness. You might argue that consciousness emerges from matter interacting in a complex way (emergentism) Define consciousness. It's hard, because the word is a suitcase of meanings. On the other hand, define an agent. It's much easier. An agent has to have three things - sensing, ability to act and ability to learn from sparse rewards. It is embodied in an environment, learns from the environment and depends on the environment for its "complexity". Many problems go away when you learn how to represent the question in a better way.
- humanrebar 8y ago
  To be fair, a lot (all?) of philosophy is very old. Many new developments are to improve the detail and precision of philosophical terminology.
stcredzero 8y ago
Real philosophy is a very subversive endeavor at the moment. Perhaps it always was. It's something for those who love knowledge, but not for those who expect any public recognition. If you take the entire history of philosophy, it can be summed up as a discipline which inspires thoughts and questions. In a way, it's like a form of entertainment. I'm not sure it necessarily involves knowledge.
pjc50 8y ago
I have a suspicion, which I don't really have the training or references to back up, that what happened to philosophy is related to the self-destruction of Art as a direct result of the World Wars. Before 1914, it was still possible to be naive in the West and believe that everything happens for some sort of supreme purpose. Then we saw the mass destruction of humans on a society-wrecking scale, senseless deaths among the shells and gas; an entire generation returning with unacknowledged PTSD. Then this power got turned on civilians. The only possible response artistically to Guernica was a sprawling, fractured, ugly painting. Inevitably the catastrophe scaled up: everything "traditional" was appropriated and turned to Fascism, and Fascism destroyed everything that it could reach that didn't support it. Finally we built the Bomb, and realised that there wasn't really anything standing between us and the power to destroy entire civilisations in an afternoon. We were standing in the wreckage of our own ethical systems, and have had to gradually rebuild them. This gave us the principles of human rights, and the realisation that equality of respect was the only real moral imperative. If we allow humans to deem other humans to be inherently inferior, this will be used to justify mass atrocities. Nobody is coming to redeem us and there is no final judgement to look forward to; we have to liberate ourselves in this lifetime. In the face of this challenge, philosophy could either collapse into post-modernism, an endless hall of mirrors of signifier and signified; or it could mobilise and be used to deconstruct power relations and correctly label injustices. That gave us post-colonialism, queer theory, multiple generations of feminism, and so on. We have to live with the Other, and the question is how. (The question of consciousness will be solved by the first AI to win a Nobel Prize for writing in defence of its own consciousness. I have no idea whether that will be next century or next year.) (Please insert references to Derrida, Foucault, Butler, Lacan, etc as applicable; I don't see too many other people referencing modern philosophy in this discussion? Or you could downvote as well, I guess that's a philosophical argument?)
- ontology 8y ago
  It's simpler than that. Progress in critique continued, we got effective anti-capitalist critique and marginalization-based feminist epistemology, and everything else. We had tons of progress, and the only thing we didn't do was update our ontological models of the knowledge we generated, and roll them into our public school curriculums. The only reason every single person on this planet (barring WHO millenium development goal resistance areas) doesn't know the difference between a hack and academic philosophy is that we didn't formalize it in a way they'd understand and teach it to them. Society doesn't have to build or rebuild ethical systems, compete with critique, or compete with noise, fascism, mental illness, policy, or a saturated marketplace. You can teach meta-ethics to people and watch them use informed consent in everything (since it's often identified as the best way to be an agent in self interested understanding of pursuing and developing what you want, while participating in society effectively to help others).
venture189 8y ago
There's an unfortunate perception that philosophy is utterly divorced from reality or pragmatic concern. To be honest they might have a point, but I still find philosophy to be of great value to me personally.
- ontology 8y ago
  I mean, they don't have a point. Even if you accept obscurantism as existent and harmful, and academic philosophical consideration a violation of exploit in exploit/explore, and normative ethics as confusing regarding discussion in social maturity, and descriptive ethics as confusing regarding discussions of philosophy of law or politics or government, the unfortunate perception that philosophy is divorced from reality comes from a lack of education in academic philosophy as a field and practice, and potentially a socially/politically condoned trend of publishing any "10 step" pop-philosophy book that makes the advertising/economy/adult-education/media engine keep humming.
mannykannot 8y ago
>Some boundaries of scientific knowledge are quite visible. For example, consciousness. You might argue that consciousness emerges from matter interacting in a complex way (emergentism), and you might be right, but this is accepted as a serious scientific theory although it has zero content -- no way to falsify empirically, no explanatory mechanism proposed. There is nothing wrong with it as a hypothesis. At least science is investigating the issue, while philosophy (with some exceptions) seems to be preoccupied with merely pumping its intuitions that this can never be - intuitions that, by the argument you presented in the above quote, have 'zero content.'
scythe 8y ago
I don't think it's just this. A philosopher must have a reasonably sufficient grasp of most extant practical working knowledge of the world. If a philosopher makes claims which are inconsistent with the working knowledge of some people, those people will quickly demonstrate the philosopher's claims to be false. Some particular contemporary examples include Noam Chomsky's[1] misapprehension of the Khmer Rouge, Eliezer Yudkowsky's[1] squabbles with quantum physicists, or the widespread abuses of mathematical concepts by "postmodern" continental philosophers as described by Sokal and Bricmont: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fashionable_Nonsense https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fashionable_Nonsense And these are the better examples of would-be contemporary polymaths who make stabs at using philosophy to achieve broader social aims (as opposed to continuing long-running arguments about the ontological status of possible worlds and what Wittgenstein really said about Godel's theorem). There's so much to know it's hard not to be wrong about some of it. That situation is unique to the modern era. So I don't think it's just about an anti-philosophy mindset being popular. Philosophy has, for practical purposes, become harder to do. 1: please don't reply to tell me that Chomsky and Yudkowsky aren't real philosophers, I know that, but I wanted examples people would recognize, and anyway their beliefs are roughly consistent with the popular positions in philosophy, and they failed in the general way I am describing, so the shoe fits
ozy 8y ago
consciousness: https://psyarxiv.com/387h9 https://psyarxiv.com/387h9
vorg 8y ago
> I argue that we live in an anti-philosophy era Could be just the U.S. When Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone was published there, they changed its title to HP and the Sorcerer's Stone. Perhaps they knew anything mentioning philosophy wouldn't be bought by Americans.
hackinthebochs 8y ago
>This is, in itself, a metaphysical position I can't help but cringe every time I see this, which is a lot. It is not at all substantive to use a nominalist position in metaphysics as somehow vindicating the field. Nominalism about metaphysical issues is the opposite of vindicating or substantiating the field.
- jdtang13 8y ago
  You're missing the point. The purpose of the statement is to show that the speaker who says "science has superseded philosophy" can't possibly really believe in what he's saying, because he's using philosophy to justify the superiority of science. Which makes no sense. If the physical sciences were really superior to philosophy, then they wouldn't need to rely on philosophy for their justification. The statement is meant to expose a common hypocrisy. It is not meant to be an actual argument to support philosophical study, which could still be totally useless. It would be more convincing if the science-lover could use empirical methods to disprove the need for philosophy.
  - hackinthebochs 8y ago
    >because he's using philosophy to justify the superiority of science. But saying something is a philosophical position doesn't mean he is using philosophy to justify that position! Philosophy purports to be a general analysis of how things are, so in some sense everything is a philosophical position. But this doesn't bootstrap the value of philosophy, not in any substantive sense.
  - bloaf 8y ago
    Isn't the real issue that meta-physics is that it always follows actual-physics? That is, if the metaphysicist says something like "guns don't really exist" and the physicist says "but I made a real gun, can I shoot you with it to prove it?" the metaphysicists always back down. Or put less aggressively, it is metaphysics that has to conform to discoveries in physics, not the other way around. So the point the pro-science people are making is that any metaphysicists who deny the efficacy of science can't possibly believe what they are saying because they are not willing or able to actually live their lives according to their beliefs.
bloaf 8y ago
>To illustrate: there is common belief that metaphysics became irrelevant -- that it was replaced by science. This is, in itself, a metaphysical position I think that is wrong. What happened is that we realized we knew so little about physics that most of our meta-physical ideas were basically a case of "garbage in, garbage out." We had bad physics, and so we also had bad meta-physics. So we put meta-physics on hold until we had a body of physical knowledge that wasn't garbage to get meta about. That's why all these "advances in metaphysics" are all physics discoveries.

Retric 8y ago

> reasoning about what science is and does is part of philosophy Only if you approach Philosophy with a lot more rigor and math than what people have historically done. The useful parts of discussing what you call the 'philosophy of science' involves quite a bit of statistics for example. What people call useless is cruft dealing with Known Unknowable's which suck up time without getting anywhere. IMO, it's not that Philosophy is dead, it's just when you keep calling the useful bit's something else eventually people don't care about the leftovers.

TelmoMenezes 8y ago
> Only if you approach Philosophy with a lot more rigor and math than what people have historically done. The useful parts of discussing what you call the 'philosophy of science' involves quite a bit of statistics for example. I disagree. For example, Karl Popper's positions on the philosophy of science became the current mainstream view. His positions are not based on statistics, but on good-old-fashioned qualitative reasoning. I know many scientists who mention Popper by name when discussing such matters. Carl Sagan also helped popularize it in his book "Demon-Haunted World", with his "invisible dragon in the garage" story. The ability to do statistics at incredible scales (currently known as Machine Learning) raises further questions about what science should be. Questions about such quantitative methods themselves. Rigor does not have to be quantitative in nature -- and let's not forget that the very idea of quantitative science was introduced by Descartes, another famous philosopher. > What people call useless is cruft dealing with Known Unknowable's which suck up time without getting anywhere. Depends on where you want to get. Noncommunicable knowledge is a very interesting topic, for those with the inclination. It is ok if you are not curious about such things, but I would argue that it is also ok to be. It deeply intersects mathematical logic (e.g. Gödel) and theoretical computer science (e.g. the halting problem). Will it help us create better gadgets? Probably not? Will it help us better understand the human condition? Probably yes.
- Retric 8y ago
  Gödel is vast overkill. The list of things you can't compute with small finite amounts of processing power is vastly longer than the list of things you can't compute with infinite processing power. AKA, Gödel is true but irreverent because it's not on the border of anything decidable. If you say the bonds are between 9^9 and 9↑↑↑↑9 that's just not useful.
  - humanrebar 8y ago
    The general idea that certain statistical problems are intractible is fair though. But we don't exactly discourage the idea that we will solve, say, nutrition some day.
  - chrisweekly 8y ago
    >"Gödel is true but irreverent" quite sure "irrelevant" is the intended word here. :)
pasabagi 8y ago
I don't know where the idea that philsophy doesn't involve rigor and maths comes from. Leibniz came up with the entscheidung's problem, for god's sake! If you take the most basic interest in logic, maths, or even computers, you can't swing a cat without hitting a philosopher.
- Retric 8y ago
  I am referring to computation, not abstractions. What's the trade-off between X and Y is the kind of place where having some specific numbers is very helpful. EX: At what point if any can you say testing theories on public data produces more value than noise.
  - foldr 8y ago
    I'm having trouble seeing how any of that relates to your original comment or the responses to it. You said "[reasoning about what science is and does is part of philosophy] only if you approach Philosophy with a lot more rigor and math than what people have historically done." That comes across as a broad comment about levels of rigor in philosophy, not a comment on the usefulness of quantitative data in making trade-offs.
    - Retric 8y ago
      "reasoning about what science is and does is part of philosophy." I am saying some of that analysis benefits from real hard data. So, if your saying all of that analysis falls under philosophy, then I don't think that's what most people mean when the use the term.
      - foldr 8y ago
        Sure, but philosophers usually do look at hard data where appropriate.
        pasabagi 8y ago
        I actually think 'hard data' is typically about as relevant to philosophy as it is to maths. Not everything is reducible to stats. I just find it weird to be using a machine that's a recognizable descendant of the work of philosophers, as much as engineers or mathematicians, then to be saying casually that philosophy isn't rigorous.

nwbrown 8y ago

Science didn't replace philosophy. Science is philosophy. That's why scientists used to be called natural philosophers. Yes, in the modern era we have gotten much more specialized in the modern era and that arguably is a loss. But it is kinda necessary given the depth that many fields have gotten.

IncRnd 8y ago
You appear to be a PHD.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
chrisweekly 8y ago
>"Science didn't replace philosophy. Science is philosophy." More precisely, science is a subset of philosophy.

lmm 8y ago

> To illustrate: there is common belief that metaphysics became irrelevant -- that it was replaced by science. This is, in itself, a metaphysical position That argument doesn't seem valid. The notion that fairies don't exist is, in itself, a fairyological position; still, few would accept that fairyology is a legitimate field of endeavour. > I am only claiming that it is accepted by most people without any reflection. Many things are accepted by most people without much reflection. Often that's because they really are as simple as they look. > Some boundaries of scientific knowledge are quite visible. For example, consciousness. You might argue that consciousness emerges from matter interacting in a complex way (emergentism), and you might be right, but this is accepted as a serious scientific theory although it has zero content -- no way to falsify empirically, no explanatory mechanism proposed. What are the outstanding empirical questions about consciousness? As soon as you go down to an empirical level, you find that no mysticism is necessary: there are valid, interesting questions to be asked and answered, but they are no more outside science than questions about how, say, protein folding works.

TelmoMenezes 8y ago
> That argument doesn't seem valid. The notion that fairies don't exist is, in itself, a fairyological position; still, few would accept that fairyology is a legitimate field of endeavour. You are using Popper's criterion for what constitutes a valid scientific theory, but I think you misunderstand me. My claim is that saying that theoretical physics is the ultimate explanation of reality is a metaphysical position. Cosmology describes the big bang but it does not answer the question "why is it so?". Maybe there is no answer. Maybe it is not knowable. Maybe theoretical physics cannot have the total picture. These are all metaphysical questions that seem perfectly legitimate to me. If you are not allowed to ask or talk about these questions, I would say that you just accepted a religious faith. I am not trying to sell you anything except doubt and curiosity :) > Many things are accepted by most people without much reflection. Often that's because they really are as simple as they look Perhaps. Perhaps not. > What are the outstanding empirical questions about consciousness? As soon as you go down to an empirical level, you find that no mysticism is necessary: there are valid, interesting questions to be asked and answered, but they are no more outside science than questions about how, say, protein folding works. You are implicitly making the strong claim that knowledge can only be attained through empiricism. This is clearly not the case. I know that I am conscious and I assume that you are, but I cannot use empiricism to test this hypothesis, not can you use it to verify that I am, indeed, conscious. So there is something very fundamental -- in fact the only thing I know with 100% certitude -- that cannot be empirically tested. Your use of the word "mysticism" betrays the current bias against such questions. I am not proposing any woo. I'm just curious. Even being curious about certain topics nowadays gets you labelled and a "mystic". I think this illustrates the point that I wanted to make in the beginning.

jonbarker 8y ago

I think the anti-philosophy era you are referring to is actually more like an anti-intellectual, anti-science, and generally populist movement that seems to be picking up steam. The most irritating manifestation of which says that you can't learn anything from books, something I increasingly hear people saying. I'd say the progress in more recent philosophy has been the efforts of multidisciplinary types like those in neuroscience and philosophy (ie Sam Harris) to enable more useful and practical 'popularizations' like the realization that meditation has benefits. Unfortunately debates about what 'grue' and 'bleen' are, while actually fascinating when you dig into it, and potentially even having practical consequence, generated an anti-philosophy populist movement that resembles general anti-intellectualism, and isn't helpful.

amvalo 8y ago

> To illustrate: there is common belief that metaphysics became irrelevant -- that it was replaced by science. This is, in itself, a metaphysical position, and a misunderstand about what science is and does. This reminds me of religious people who say "Ha! Atheism is just another religion!" In both cases, there's an inability to conceive of what a truly apathetic position looks like.

buu700 8y ago
It is a theological position, but it'd be silly to call atheism a religion just as it would be to call theism a religion.
amvalo 8y ago
> The acritical use of the yardstick of "progress" as the ultimate value for everything (along with its little cousin: "productivity") is, in itself, a philosophical position. There it goes again! It would seem philosophy is unavoidable.

mrleiter 8y ago

> I am only claiming that it is accepted by most people without any reflection. If you discuss philosophy with a scientist/tech-person, on most occasions this happens, or at least from my experience. Questions about usefulness, measurability etc are the ones that are discussed first. And that's fine on an individual level. But as a generation on a whole, it's a turn into a somewhat morally ambiguous direction. Algebra is based on five axioms [1], and an axiom by definition is a condition that is assumed to be true. How can you prove that 1+1 is really 2? There have been attempts to prove this, like in Pricipia Mathematica [2]. So basically what I am trying to say is that there is no absolute and not everything must have a value. [] http://www.aaamath.com/ac11.htm http://www.aaamath.com/ac11.htm [2] https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/278974/prove-that-11-2 https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/278974/prove-that-1...

humanrebar 8y ago
> How can you prove that 1+1 is really 2? Worse, we're often tripped up figuring out if 1 + 1 is the correct expression in the first place. A lot of science and technology is bottlenecked on getting accurate and useful inputs.
- ColanR 8y ago
  I did not know about that aspect of the problem. What do you mean, that "we're often tripped up figuring out if 1 + 1 is the correct expression in the first place"? That we might be using the wrong paradigm for mathematic formulations?
  - humanrebar 8y ago
    In real life, there are problems like classification and precision that cause problems in making broader conclusions. If you are measuring poverty rates, for instance, you could be basing your decisions on several different benchmarks. The statistics, math, machine learning, etc., are all downstream from what we're even measuring and counting in the first place. In a more elementary formulation, we could say one bag of rice plus one bag of rice is two bags of rice. But one bag of rice is underfilled and the other is contaminated with pests. So you don't really have two bags of rice after all. So maybe 8/10 + 0 is the correct expression in that case.

AnimalMuppet 8y ago

> I argue that we live in an anti-philosophy era. Francis Schaeffer said that most (formal) philosophy today is really anti-philosophy - either it doesn't tackle the big questions, or it gives non-rational answers. He said that the real philosophy today is being done by people like film-makers and musicians.

visarga 8y ago

> For example, consciousness. You might argue that consciousness emerges from matter interacting in a complex way (emergentism) Define consciousness. It's hard, because the word is a suitcase of meanings. On the other hand, define an agent. It's much easier. An agent has to have three things - sensing, ability to act and ability to learn from sparse rewards. It is embodied in an environment, learns from the environment and depends on the environment for its "complexity". Many problems go away when you learn how to represent the question in a better way.

humanrebar 8y ago
To be fair, a lot (all?) of philosophy is very old. Many new developments are to improve the detail and precision of philosophical terminology.

stcredzero 8y ago

Real philosophy is a very subversive endeavor at the moment. Perhaps it always was. It's something for those who love knowledge, but not for those who expect any public recognition. If you take the entire history of philosophy, it can be summed up as a discipline which inspires thoughts and questions. In a way, it's like a form of entertainment. I'm not sure it necessarily involves knowledge.

pjc50 8y ago

I have a suspicion, which I don't really have the training or references to back up, that what happened to philosophy is related to the self-destruction of Art as a direct result of the World Wars. Before 1914, it was still possible to be naive in the West and believe that everything happens for some sort of supreme purpose. Then we saw the mass destruction of humans on a society-wrecking scale, senseless deaths among the shells and gas; an entire generation returning with unacknowledged PTSD. Then this power got turned on civilians. The only possible response artistically to Guernica was a sprawling, fractured, ugly painting. Inevitably the catastrophe scaled up: everything "traditional" was appropriated and turned to Fascism, and Fascism destroyed everything that it could reach that didn't support it. Finally we built the Bomb, and realised that there wasn't really anything standing between us and the power to destroy entire civilisations in an afternoon. We were standing in the wreckage of our own ethical systems, and have had to gradually rebuild them. This gave us the principles of human rights, and the realisation that equality of respect was the only real moral imperative. If we allow humans to deem other humans to be inherently inferior, this will be used to justify mass atrocities. Nobody is coming to redeem us and there is no final judgement to look forward to; we have to liberate ourselves in this lifetime. In the face of this challenge, philosophy could either collapse into post-modernism, an endless hall of mirrors of signifier and signified; or it could mobilise and be used to deconstruct power relations and correctly label injustices. That gave us post-colonialism, queer theory, multiple generations of feminism, and so on. We have to live with the Other, and the question is how. (The question of consciousness will be solved by the first AI to win a Nobel Prize for writing in defence of its own consciousness. I have no idea whether that will be next century or next year.) (Please insert references to Derrida, Foucault, Butler, Lacan, etc as applicable; I don't see too many other people referencing modern philosophy in this discussion? Or you could downvote as well, I guess that's a philosophical argument?)

ontology 8y ago
It's simpler than that. Progress in critique continued, we got effective anti-capitalist critique and marginalization-based feminist epistemology, and everything else. We had tons of progress, and the only thing we didn't do was update our ontological models of the knowledge we generated, and roll them into our public school curriculums. The only reason every single person on this planet (barring WHO millenium development goal resistance areas) doesn't know the difference between a hack and academic philosophy is that we didn't formalize it in a way they'd understand and teach it to them. Society doesn't have to build or rebuild ethical systems, compete with critique, or compete with noise, fascism, mental illness, policy, or a saturated marketplace. You can teach meta-ethics to people and watch them use informed consent in everything (since it's often identified as the best way to be an agent in self interested understanding of pursuing and developing what you want, while participating in society effectively to help others).

venture189 8y ago

There's an unfortunate perception that philosophy is utterly divorced from reality or pragmatic concern. To be honest they might have a point, but I still find philosophy to be of great value to me personally.

ontology 8y ago
I mean, they don't have a point. Even if you accept obscurantism as existent and harmful, and academic philosophical consideration a violation of exploit in exploit/explore, and normative ethics as confusing regarding discussion in social maturity, and descriptive ethics as confusing regarding discussions of philosophy of law or politics or government, the unfortunate perception that philosophy is divorced from reality comes from a lack of education in academic philosophy as a field and practice, and potentially a socially/politically condoned trend of publishing any "10 step" pop-philosophy book that makes the advertising/economy/adult-education/media engine keep humming.

mannykannot 8y ago

>Some boundaries of scientific knowledge are quite visible. For example, consciousness. You might argue that consciousness emerges from matter interacting in a complex way (emergentism), and you might be right, but this is accepted as a serious scientific theory although it has zero content -- no way to falsify empirically, no explanatory mechanism proposed. There is nothing wrong with it as a hypothesis. At least science is investigating the issue, while philosophy (with some exceptions) seems to be preoccupied with merely pumping its intuitions that this can never be - intuitions that, by the argument you presented in the above quote, have 'zero content.'

scythe 8y ago

I don't think it's just this. A philosopher must have a reasonably sufficient grasp of most extant practical working knowledge of the world. If a philosopher makes claims which are inconsistent with the working knowledge of some people, those people will quickly demonstrate the philosopher's claims to be false. Some particular contemporary examples include Noam Chomsky's[1] misapprehension of the Khmer Rouge, Eliezer Yudkowsky's[1] squabbles with quantum physicists, or the widespread abuses of mathematical concepts by "postmodern" continental philosophers as described by Sokal and Bricmont: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fashionable_Nonsense https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fashionable_Nonsense And these are the better examples of would-be contemporary polymaths who make stabs at using philosophy to achieve broader social aims (as opposed to continuing long-running arguments about the ontological status of possible worlds and what Wittgenstein really said about Godel's theorem). There's so much to know it's hard not to be wrong about some of it. That situation is unique to the modern era. So I don't think it's just about an anti-philosophy mindset being popular. Philosophy has, for practical purposes, become harder to do. 1: please don't reply to tell me that Chomsky and Yudkowsky aren't real philosophers, I know that, but I wanted examples people would recognize, and anyway their beliefs are roughly consistent with the popular positions in philosophy, and they failed in the general way I am describing, so the shoe fits

ozy 8y ago

consciousness: https://psyarxiv.com/387h9 https://psyarxiv.com/387h9

vorg 8y ago

> I argue that we live in an anti-philosophy era Could be just the U.S. When Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone was published there, they changed its title to HP and the Sorcerer's Stone. Perhaps they knew anything mentioning philosophy wouldn't be bought by Americans.

hackinthebochs 8y ago

>This is, in itself, a metaphysical position I can't help but cringe every time I see this, which is a lot. It is not at all substantive to use a nominalist position in metaphysics as somehow vindicating the field. Nominalism about metaphysical issues is the opposite of vindicating or substantiating the field.

jdtang13 8y ago
You're missing the point. The purpose of the statement is to show that the speaker who says "science has superseded philosophy" can't possibly really believe in what he's saying, because he's using philosophy to justify the superiority of science. Which makes no sense. If the physical sciences were really superior to philosophy, then they wouldn't need to rely on philosophy for their justification. The statement is meant to expose a common hypocrisy. It is not meant to be an actual argument to support philosophical study, which could still be totally useless. It would be more convincing if the science-lover could use empirical methods to disprove the need for philosophy.
- hackinthebochs 8y ago
  >because he's using philosophy to justify the superiority of science. But saying something is a philosophical position doesn't mean he is using philosophy to justify that position! Philosophy purports to be a general analysis of how things are, so in some sense everything is a philosophical position. But this doesn't bootstrap the value of philosophy, not in any substantive sense.
- bloaf 8y ago
  Isn't the real issue that meta-physics is that it always follows actual-physics? That is, if the metaphysicist says something like "guns don't really exist" and the physicist says "but I made a real gun, can I shoot you with it to prove it?" the metaphysicists always back down. Or put less aggressively, it is metaphysics that has to conform to discoveries in physics, not the other way around. So the point the pro-science people are making is that any metaphysicists who deny the efficacy of science can't possibly believe what they are saying because they are not willing or able to actually live their lives according to their beliefs.

bloaf 8y ago

>To illustrate: there is common belief that metaphysics became irrelevant -- that it was replaced by science. This is, in itself, a metaphysical position I think that is wrong. What happened is that we realized we knew so little about physics that most of our meta-physical ideas were basically a case of "garbage in, garbage out." We had bad physics, and so we also had bad meta-physics. So we put meta-physics on hold until we had a body of physical knowledge that wasn't garbage to get meta about. That's why all these "advances in metaphysics" are all physics discoveries.