It had its time of glory in the past. In ancient Greece, philosophy
was not yet distinguished from the science of that time, thus we
might say both were comparable in quality. Then they faced many
centuries of near-absence during the dark ages of Christian
domination, before resurrecting together and having their glory
period in the time of Enlightenment.
Enlightenment philosophy signed its good new insights of truth, by
some valuable practical accomplishments (usefulness for mankind,
that can be compared with the technical usefulness of science):
- An initial impulse to the development of science
- Democracy, constitutions, separation of powers
- Declaration of human rights, the right of expression (outside
religious dogmas)
- Criticism of religion, a limitation of the
Church's domination, the separation of church and state
- Development of education and university
- More lately: the end of slavery, a criticism of the political
& religious colonialism and of the arrogance towards
other civilizations
However, the situation is now very different, as science made a
tremendous lot of progress since that time, leaving philosophy far
behind. Philosophy didn't make any comparable progress of
methods or knowledge, and thus became a sterile discipline.
Some attempts of reform to remodel philosophy after science
have been made, such as the development of analytic philosophy
by Bertrand Russel who also contributed to the new foundations of
mathematics (set theory). It may be acknowledged that analytic
philosophy is a bit less irrational than continental philosophy.
But, apart from a few interesting clues such as his celestial teapot
and other remarks on religion, much of the length of Russel's
philosophy (such as his theory of the mind) remained of poor value
(long developments on pointless details that cannot contribute to
the progress of knowledge in any effective way).
For example, after the good fruits of democracy produced by the
Enlightenment philosophy, what further political revolution did
philosophy bring to mankind ? Well, it brought the Marxist
revolution.
Despite its claims, Marxism is not rational. Most philosophers did
not notice the problem, and thus welcomed Marxism in their field.
Only Karl Popper developed famous writings showing the
discrepancy between Marxism and science, by observing the difference
between the Marxist and the scientific way of testing a theory
against experience (falsifiability), for example the way Einstein's
general relativity made precise predictions to be tested.
Despite this, the community of so-called "intellectuals" (of
humanities, not scientists) kept holding Marxism as a
rational theory and valid philosophy. Of course if you measure
a philosophy by its convincing power to the masses, then, Marxism is
among the best, just in the same way religions previously were. In
fact Marxism is itself a modern religion exploiting the newly
fashionable claim of scientificity. But the success of a
convincing power to the people (even to be taken as "scientific" by
an unscientific class of self-proclaimed "intellectuals") hardly has
anything to do with truth and rationality.
Now you don't need anymore to study and examine it in much details
to find evidence for its lack of rationality: just look at its
fruits (the Soviet Union). The combination of its convincing power
with its utter falsity, just means it is at the antipodes of reason:
it is powerfully misleading.
We shall discuss this more closely in Part IV.
The irrational character of philosophy, can be inferred from its
inability to naturally converge to a consensus on given questions:
many philosophers keep presenting opposite views on fixed issues,
that remain unresolved for a very long time.
Paul Graham's
criticism of philosophy
"When things are hard to
understand, people who suspect they're nonsense generally keep
quiet. There's no way to prove a text is meaningless. The
closest you can get is to show that the official judges of some
class of texts can't distinguish them from placebos.
And so instead of denouncing
philosophy, most people who suspected it was a waste of time
just studied other things. That alone is fairly damning
evidence, considering philosophy's claims. It's supposed to be
about the ultimate truths. Surely all smart people would be
interested in it, if it delivered on that promise.
Because philosophy's flaws
turned away the sort of people who might have corrected them,
they tended to be self-perpetuating. "
(and many other arguments worth reading too)
Richard Feynman (physics Nobel laureate) made harsh criticisms of
philosophy:
Richard Feynman wrote: |
When I sat with the philosophers I
listened to them discuss very seriously a book called
Process and Reality by Whitehead. They were using words in
a funny way, and I couldn’t quite understand what they
were saying. (...)
What happened [at the seminar] was typical—so
typical that it was unbelievable, but true. (...). A
student gave a report on the chapter to be studied that
week. In it Whitehead kept using the words “essential
object” in a particular technical way that presumably he
had defined, but that I didn’t understand.
After some discussion as to what “essential object”
meant, the professor leading the seminar said something
meant to clarify things and drew something that looked
like lightning bolts on the blackboard. “Mr. Feynman,” he
said, “would you say an electron is an ‘essential
object’?”
Well, now I was in trouble. I admitted that I hadn’t
read the book, so I had no idea of what Whitehead meant by
the phrase; I had only come to watch. “But,” I said, “I’ll
try to answer the professor’s question if you will first
answer a question from me, so I can have a better idea of
what ‘essential object’ means. Is a brick an essential
object?”
What I had intended to do was to find out whether
they thought theoretical constructs were essential
objects. The electron is a theory that we use; it is so
useful in understanding the way nature works that we can
almost call it real. I wanted to make the idea of a theory
clear by analogy. In the case of the brick, my next
question was going to be, “What about the inside of the
brick?”—and I would then point out that no one has ever
seen the inside of a brick. Every time you break the
brick, you only see the surface. That the brick has an
inside is a simple theory which helps us understand things
better. The theory of electrons is analogous. So I began
by asking, “Is a brick an essential object?”
Then the answers came out. One man stood up and
said, “A brick as an individual, specific brick. That is
what Whitehead means by an essential object.”
Another man said, “No, it isn’t the individual brick
that is an essential object; it’s the general character
that all bricks have in common—their ‘brickiness’—that is
the essential object.”
Another guy got up and said, “No, it’s not in the
bricks themselves. ‘Essential object’ means the idea in
the mind that you get when you think of bricks.”
Another guy got up, and another, and I tell you I
have never heard such ingenious different ways of looking
at a brick before. And, just like it should in all stories
about philosophers, it ended up in complete chaos. In all
their previous discussions they hadn’t even asked
themselves whether such a simple object as a brick, much
less an electron, is an “essential object.” |
"philosophy
of science is about as useful to scientists as ornithology is
to birds"
(forgetting that, in fact, ornithology has been useful to birds in
some ways...)
People say to me, “Are you
looking for the ultimate laws of physics?” No, I’m not… If it
turns out there is a simple ultimate law which explains
everything, so be it — that would be very nice to discover. If
it turns out it’s like an onion with millions of layers… then
that’s the way it is. But either way there’s Nature and she’s
going to come out the way She is. So therefore when we go to
investigate we shouldn’t predecide what it is we’re looking
for only to find out more about it. Now you ask: “Why do you
try to find out more about it?” If you began your
investigation to get an answer to some deep philosophical
question, you may be wrong. It may be that you can’t get an
answer to that particular question just by finding out more
about the character of Nature. But that’s not my interest in
science; my interest in science is to simply find out about
the world and the more I find out the better it is, I like to
find out…
(The Pleasure of Finding Things Out p. 23)
From
this Feynman's text on science:
".
..what science is, is not what
the philosophers have said it is, and certainly not what the
teacher editions say it is. What it is, is a problem which I set
for myself after I said I would give this talk.
After some time, I was reminded of a little poem:
A
centipede was happy quite, until a toad in fun
Said,
"Pray, which leg comes
after which?"
This raised his doubts to such
a pitch
He fell distracted in the
ditch
Not knowing how to run.
All my life, I have been doing
science and known what it was, but what I have come to tell
you--which foot comes after which--I am unable to do, and
furthermore, I am worried by the analogy in the poem that when I go home I will no
longer be able to do any research."
From this
Feynman's interview:
"Philosophers, incidentally, say
a great deal about what is absolutely necessary for science, and
it is always, so far as one can see, rather naive and probably
wrong. . .
My son is taking a course in
philosophy, and last night we were looking at something by
Spinoza--and there was the most childish reasoning! There were
all these Attributes and Substances, all this meaningless
chewing around, and we started to laugh. Now, how could we do
that? Here's this great Dutch philosopher, and we're laughing at
him. It's because there was no excuse for it! In that same
period there was Newton, there was Harvey studying the
circulation of the blood, there were people with methods of
analysis by which progress was being made! You can take every
one of Spinoza's propositions and take the contrary propositions
and look at the world--and you can't tell which is right. Sure,
people were awed because he had the courage to take on these
great questions, but it doesn't do any good to have the courage
if you can't get anywhere with the question.
It isn't the philosophy that gets me, it's the pomposity. If
they'd just laugh at themselves! If they'd just say, "I think
it's like this, but Von Leipzig thought it was like that, and he
had a good shot at it too." If they'd explain that this is their
best guess.... But so few of them do; instead, they seize on the
possibility that there may not be any ultimate fundamental
particle and say that you should stop work and ponder with great
profundity. "You haven't thought deeply enough; first let me
define the world for you." Well, I'm going to investigate it
without defining it! "
Another Physics Nobel laureate, Steven
Weinberg, wrote (Chapter "Against Philosophy" of his book
"Dreams of a final theory"):
"The insights of philosophers have occasionally benefited
physicists, but generally in a negative fashion—by protecting
them from the preconceptions of other philosophers.(...) without
some guidance from our preconceptions one could do nothing at
all. It is just that philosophical principles have not generally
provided us with the right preconceptions.
Physicists do of course carry around with them a working
philosophy. For most of us, it is a rough-and-ready realism, a
belief in the objective reality of the ingredients of our
scientific theories. But this has been learned through the
experience of scientific research and rarely from the teachings
of philosophers.
This is not to deny all value to philosophy(...). But we should
not expect [the philosophy of science] to provide today's
scientists with any useful guidance about how to go about their
work or about what they are likely to find.
After a few years' infatuation with philosophy as an undergraduate
I became disenchanted. The insights of the philosophers I studied
seemed murky and inconsequential compared with the dazzling
successes of physics and mathematics. From time to time since then
I have tried to read current work on the philosophy of science.
Some of it I found to be written in a jargon so impenetrable that
I can only think that it aimed at impressing those who confound
obscurity with profundity. (...) But only rarely did it seem to me
to have anything to do with the work of science as I knew it.
(...)
I am not alone in this; I know of no one who has participated
actively in the advance of physics in the postwar period whose
research has been significantly helped by the work of
philosophers. I raised in the previous chapter the problem of what
Wigner calls the "unreasonable effectiveness" of mathematics; here
I want to take up another equally puzzling phenomenon, the
unreasonable ineffectiveness of philosophy.
Even where philosophical doctrines have in the past been useful to
scientists, they have generally lingered on too long, becoming of
more harm than ever they were of use.(...)
Mechanism had also been propagated beyond the boundaries of
science and survived there to give later trouble to scientists. In
the nineteenth century the heroic tradition of mechanism was
incorporated, unhappily, into the dialectical materialism of Marx
and Engels and their followers (...) and for a while dialectical
materialism stood in the way of the acceptance of general
relativity in the Soviet Union
(...) We are not likely to know the right questions until we are
close to knowing the answers.(...)
The quark theory was only one step in a continuing process of
reformulation of physical theory in terms that are more and more
fundamental and at the same time farther and farther from everyday
experience.
homeschooling
physicist
"But… many introductory books on
philosophy take the tack that “philosophy is not so much a set
of answers as a way of asking questions: the important thing
about philosophy is not specific answers, but rather the
philosophical way of thinking”
Yeah – that is because the answers that philosophers have come
up with over the centuries have been almost uniformly bad!
(...)
Ethics is too important to be
left to the philosophers.
(...)
children should also be taught
not to think “philosophically,” in the manner of current and
recent academic and professional philosophers. On the contrary,
they should be explicitly told that, for at least the last two
centuries, the philosophical enterprise as carried out by
professional philosophers has been an obvious failure and that
the vast increase in our knowledge of reality during the last
several centuries has been due not to philosophy but to natural
science."
In the same site:
Is
philosophy futile -
more
texts
on philosophy
Physicists
dissing philosophy:
"
Science, philosophy, and religion all make claims to have a broad,
integrated view of reality. But, the views of reality they arrive at differ
dramatically.
It would be quite surprising if
three such radically different approaches to confronting reality
were to give compatible pictures of reality.
Of course, they do not.
...in some ways, both the
creationists and the postmodernists deserve credit for seeing
something that more sensible, moderate folks try to evade: in
the long-term, science, philosophy, and religion cannot co-exist."
A quote from Cantor
One philosopher
acknowledges and sums up the importance and relevance of top
scientists'harsch criticism of philosophy, so as to take
lessons how to consequently reform the academic practice
of philosophy.But other philosophers prefer to reject such criticism
and keep justifying their flaws anyway.
More debates if you wish :
Weinberg's
"Against Philosophy"
Why
philosophize
Does
philosophy make you a better scientist
Round
Table Debate: Science versus Philosophy ?
Another
discussion
Science Vs. Philosophy
Very long
discussion which then diverts from the subject
Other philosophers try to justify philosophy's flaws through empty
arguments:
How pitiful it is to observe how philosophers
are not even able to give a decent answer to a simple question.
They try to justify their inability of finding decent answers
by claims such as : the value of philosophy would be to focus
on asking the right questions (or eliminating the wrong questions)
and eliminating some wrong answers (a sort of intellectual garbage
collecting). But these are just blind unjustified beliefs,
as the real effect of their work is just the opposite: to
multiply and preciously accumulate wrong questions and wrong
answers (intellectual garbage collectioning).
This reminds me the joke
"How many Microsoft engineers
does it take to screw in a light bulb? None. They just define
darkness as an industry standard." and other "It's not a bug,
it's a feature".
In reply to the criticism that philosophy lost its usefulness
since the Enlightenment time, philosophers often react by
glorifying themselves of their uselessness, by the straw man
argument that, well, optimized financial productivity is not the
right ultimate value, and thus should not be the exclusive purpose
of public school curricula.
But, while I agree that numerical measure of the short-term
financial profit should not be the final and exclusive criteria of
value for an intellectual discipline, the trouble is that
philosophers seem to have no other meaningful
alternative criteria of value either, except the very negation of
the usefulness criteria (together with their intimate but
unjustified conviction). Namely, they seem to be raising
wastefulness (uselessness) as their ultimate value, as if the very
fact something brings no fruit, could serve as an evidence that it
must surely be very spiritual. This reminds me the Shadoks'
insights :
"
I
pump, therefore I am
It is better to pump even if nothing happens, than risk that
something is going worse by not pumping...
their rocket was not highly
developed, but they had calculated that it still had 1 chance
over 1 million to work. And they hurried to fail the 999
999 first tests to ensure that the millionth works."
With wastefulness as their ultimate value, their work victoriously
turns out to be universally wasteful, for whatever purpose
including the development of the mind and critical thinking itself.
The belief they must be good for the spirit or whatever
undefinable ideal just based on the observation of their
worthlessness for financial profit, is but a superstition among
others. They may of course reject this criticism as straw man too,
as this description is not exactly their claim, but it does not
matter what they exactly claim: this is what they are doing in
practice anyway.
How to explain the failure of philosophy ? Well, once cause is the general
dumbness of its members as will be illustrated by below examples,
another important cause (maybe a corollary, the
only remaining kind of thing dumb people have the ability to think about instead of
serious issues) is its traditional obsession for essentialism (focusing on the ultimate nature of
everything - well, by the way, this is precisely
a usual character of cranks), to be contrasted with science's
non-essentialism. Science has its own care for
essences when needed; it is just not an obsession.
Philosophy just failed to follow this model.
We might also describe the difference between science and philosophy
in this way:
Science is the practice of rationality, while philosophy has
theories of rationality. And these theories are usually wrong because
disconnected from practice, because, in fact, there is no better
way to understand rationality, than by practicing it. Which philosophers usually
utterly fail at, despite their claims.
But... is this really awful if philosophy is dominated by cranks ?
Well, not necessarily. After all, in order for idiots to stop
bothering scientists, they need to go somewhere else and find
another public. So, philosophy can be considered useful for its
social role of a huge intellectual bin where idiots can gather,
while science on its own side can stay somewhat cleaner.
OK, philosophy is so diverse that it may also be possible to find
there a minority of decent approaches: a
possible example (I only looked briefly)
Remarks on logical positivism and falsificationism
As philosophers can easily notice, there is a flaw in the way
Weinberg takes the example of logical positivism and its
unfortunate consequences for criticizing philosophy. Indeed, logical
positivism was rather made by scientists themselves, precisely as a
movement against philosophy, and was popular among scientists but
not among philosophers, who quickly rejected it. Thus, philosophers
cannot be responsible for these troubles.
Let's explain this issue in more details.
Once understood well, the statement of the principles of
science, including the "logical
positivism" principle, is not affected by Weinberg's criticism of
logical positivism: the troubles only come from a caricatural
form of logical positivism not balanced by the other
principles we stated (conceptual reconstruction of reality).
The difference made by philosophers between verificationism (as
stated by logical positivists) and Popper's falsificationism (that
was later widely taken as a reference of scientificity) is a mistake.
Once analyzed well, these are more or less two ways of
popularizing the same logical concept. Well, the details of the
formulation of logical positivism can have been imperfect and
deserve a few corrections. But the main difference is not about
what they really mean, which is the same, but a difference of "how
they feel", how they might be misinterpreted by irrational
people.
To the eyes of a large public as well as many philosophers, Marxism
and Psychoanalysis made an impression of being "verified", thus
scientific. But this impression of "verification" was a mere
illusion, obtained by emptying of meaning the concept of
"verification". Then, Karl Popper discovered that another phrasing,
"falsificationism", was better suited and efficient to explain how
Marxism and Psychoanalysis are false sciences, as they do not stand
to the practice of verification used in real science. This was okay,
but then he went to wrong conclusions by mistaking this
difference of usefulness (for irrational people to more easily
notice the lack of scientificity of some ideologies) for a deep
conceptual difference. The result is that he replaced the
initial misinterpretation of the nature of science, by another
misinterpretation, that does not carry the same risks of misuse but
can carry some too.
As Weinberg said, the main possible value of philosophy is to refute
some errors of other philosophers. So, Popper was good
for warning against Psychoanalysis and Marxism as
pseudo-sciences, while David Stove
was good for warning against the irrationality of Popper and other
science philosophers (Feyerabend, Kuhn...). Among his writings see for example
Popper and After: Four Modern Irrationalists and
What is
Wrong with Our Thoughts?
Now some philosophers can still feel proud about all these remarks,
putting forward that this is all a philosophical debate about the foundations
of science which do not seem clear, so that philosophers are needed
to warn people about this lack of clarity. Sorry, I still disagree.
This problem is a problem for philosophers just because they have the
wrong language to approach it. As I explained there, the solution
requires some mathematics, namely the concept of information
entropy. This is essentially equivalent to the approach of Bayesian inference,
just generalized to any amount of complex, structured data with its
correlations, while Bayesian inference focuses on only one observation or a
repetition of uncorrelated instances of the same observation. (Now I am aware that just
a mathematical formula like this does not solve all problems about verification/induction/falsification
as remains the interpretation problem commented below).
So, what is the contribution of philosophers on this topic then ? It is essentially to mislead
and turn into ridicule in the eyes of proper thinkers and scientifically aware people,
some amateur thinkers such as
those evangelists ("Inspiring Philosophy" youtube channel - as they tried to argue
to me in private conversation, sorry I have not published the relevant excerpts)
who went to follow and mistake as serious the courses they attended of
"philosophy of science" given by philosophers
and then proudly claim in debates with scientists that logical positivism is no more
a basis of science, referring for this to the current fashion among philosophers.
As if in matters of the foundations of science, the opinions of philosophers
mattered Wouahahahaaaaaa
The interpretation problem
As philosophers like to point out, non-trivial facts of science usually do not come naked but
require some skills for properly interpreting observations. I'm just not convinced that philosophers would be well
placed to bring the needed skills, which I'd rather see as more often, depending on cases,
matters of common sense (which not all people have), accuracy of thinking (logical intuition),
or scientific expertise (having a large enough body of knowledge in some field).
About clarifying scientific concepts
An example of a "philosophical subject" of interest for Jean-Marc
Lévy-Leblond (if I remember well ; but he is physicst before being philosopher)
is about noticing that
modern theories such as relativity and quantum physics, failed to go
through a work of cleaning up their fundamental concepts
and vocabulary to a comparable extent as classical physics had
succeeded before. So they are still often presented inside
the language, intuition and even mathematical parameters of
classical physics. This conflict between the modern intended
theories and the classical intuitions and language still used to
expressed them, brings these theories an unfortunate reputation
of being counter-intuitive.
That's right, but: what's the use of making a philosophy about it ?
This is not a genuine subject for philosophy. This is just a task
for science professors to clean up existing knowledge. And this is
an administrative problem to pay attention to this question, and
provide incentives to:
- publish better courses cleaning up each possible subject, once for
all in the world (or several times, of course, but each
time caring to do better again than previously);
- For each subject where such a work was already done by
someone in the world, take the new view and reform teaching after
it.
Unfortunately, while such works exist (as I'm caring myself to do
some), the education system is so conservative that the necessary
changes are not done (because professors are usually so busy
repeating over and over again the same old teachings in boring old
ways, and are so "the best in their fields", that they have no time
to seriously care whether a better way might already have been
produced by somebody else).
But hopefully, in a future time when the cleaning up will have been
done, what will remain of the philosophy whose thesis was to claim
that the cleaning up is not done yet ? Rather do the cleaning up,
than philosophize on its lack.
About consciousness and animals
It is really terrifying to see so many philosophy teachers insane enough to proclaim
that only humans would be conscious while animals would not, without even any
question, while both science and common sense demonstrate the opposite (not to speak
about NDEs telling about meeting again deceased pets in the beyond).
About identities
Once I visited a philosophy course which claimed to prove that no 2 objects can
be identical. However this reasoning was invalid, but to find the error there it would
be necessary to understand quantum physics, and how the mathematical structure
of quantum physics proves that 2 particles of the same kind are absolutely identical,
i.e. they do not and cannot have any hidden identity that makes them 2 different objects.
But philosophers cannot understand this, because they're not good mathematicians, thus
can't follow the proof. Instead they'll keep their strong faith that such a proof is impossible
because they believe their little reasoning to be correct...
So official philosophy keeps presenting and claiming the
correctness of some reasonings, long after it was refuted by quantum physics.
Discussion on determinism
Once I saw a seminar on determinism. The possibility/impossibility of determinism or indeterminism...
The whole discussion consisted in exploring some kind of range of theoretically
possible universes. i.e. laws of evolution to wonder if they can be deterministic or indeterministic... after
which I had a little attempt to discuss with him and other present philosophers...
Seriously, where did that approach of the "range of possible universes" come from, if
not from pure blind prejudice ? Where is the justification why we should accept that it even
makes any sense to regard these presumed "possible universes" as possibilities at all, not
to speak about why exclude the possibility of further possibilities beyond that given range ?
Of particular interest in this "range of possibilities", was a class of differential equations like
those of classical physics. So some partial descriptions of phenomena that could be
expressed in the 19th century was in this "range of possibilities", as well as a kind of invocation
of statistical thermodynamics in a kind of reference, again, to its 19th century understanding
(and there was no room for discussion or possible mutual understanding as their view
of seemed to be fixed, as non-physicists at ease in their absolute confidence to perfectly
understand this 19th century baby attempt to approach thermodynamics, while I cared to clarify the topic on a modern basis).
But at no point of the
discussion did the speaker ever seem interested in the question whether modern
physics, i.e. quantum physics, that is the kind of laws of physics which was scientifically found
to be the case or at least somehow closer to the truth than his 19th century example, could be
found to actually fall anywhere in his a priori "range of possibilities". Problem : how the fuck could
I take seriously a reasoning based on some a priori "range of possibilities" where our
particular universe does not seem able to fit ?
Compatibilism
What a crap ! sounds like "1=1 and 1≠1 do not contradict each other".
And it is reported to be very popular among philosophers ! This "solution" to how humans could have free will
if the universe was deterministic (which is known to not be the case) consists in redefining "free will" into...
nothing that makes any sense, actually.
Ignorance of quantum physics, again
Quote from Quantum
Mechanics and the Hard Problem by Lennart
WarnemyrWhen I studied Philosophy of mind by Kim (2011) during an introductory
course in Philosophy of Mind I was struck by how classical Kim’s view of the physical was. He wrote
things like “mere con gurations and motions [...] of material particles, atoms and molecules” ,
“bits of matter” and “the gray matter of your brain”. Kim mentions non-classical concepts like
“electrons [...] quarks, [...] spin”, but he never uses them as they are used in the theory they
belong to and thus treats them as classical physical concepts.
A famous philosopher : Wittgenstein
I once happened to visit a university course of philosophy, the teacher
was presenting some views which, he said, he took from Wittgenstein,
who he agrees with.
And what was the claim ? It essentially meant that there does not exist such
a science as mathematics with any open problems, since by nature,
all mathematical propositions are tautologies (mere ridiculously useless
combinations, or rather repetitions, of the same trivialities).
Well, my question is : why would people believing such idiocies be worth
the care to explain why they are wrong ? Just have a look at Godel's speedup theorem,
for example, and more generally, all known facts about incompleteness such as Chaitin's work
on randomness in mathematics... during that course I tried to mention
Godel's incompleteness theorem as an illustration of the falsity of this philosophy.
He dismissed my point, claiming to know the topic and denying that any point could
be made there (the discussion was too short to enter any detail) so that the conversation
ended without any common understanding. It turns out to be a well-known fact that
Wittgenstein
himself never understood the incompleteness theorem. A
discussion about it.
Another example of what I see as a logically necessary but quite non-trivial fact : Communism Cannot Work.
Both this logical fact and its non-obviousness had some concrete consequences...
See also the testimony
of how his attitude has nothing to do with reason.
Apart from this, well, it can be true indeed as he denounced, that many people commit the error
of trying to speak the unspeakable in such a way that it is not going anywhere. Nevertheless
the problem is not that there is any well-defined absolute limit to expressibilility. I don't see one.
Rather, what I generally see in the world is a lack of imagination in the people's thoughts and
use of language to express any wise and interesting ideas. Because not only the pure language
of maths is already able to express a lot of things, the ordinary use of language being not strictly
mathematical, remains open to the possibility of stimulating diverse thoughts beyond pure maths,
thus escaping any well-defined boundary.
Here I mean not only the possibility to tell lots of sterile bullshit as so often happens, but also,
eventually, to develop high intelligent thoughts as well. I experienced this myself as I found
some non-standard ways of using ordinary language to explain things in diverse texts...
Postmodernism and "science studies"
A community of ideological flaws can be seen between Marxism,
which dismisses its opposing theories (economic liberalism) as a
mere matter of social forces rather than of truth (so as to use ad
hominem as an excuse to not bother arguing rationally), and the
postmodernist "science studies".
Everyone should know about the Sokal affair, an episode of the Science Wars:
"The physicist Alan Sokal submitted
the article “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative
Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity” proposing that quantum gravity is
a linguistic and social construct and that quantum physics supports
postmodernist criticisms of scientific objectivity. Social Text published
the article in the Spring/Summer “Science Wars” issue in May 1996.
Later, in the May 1996 issue of Lingua Franca, in the article “A
Physicist Experiments With Cultural Studies”, Prof. Sokal
exposed his parody-article, “Transgressing the Boundaries” as an
experiment testing the intellectual rigor of an academic journal that would
“publish an article liberally salted with nonsense if (a) it
sounded good and (b) it flattered the editors’ ideological
preconceptions”
However
Sokal's hoax should not be overestimated, as it was only
directed to a precise movement (postmodernism) that should not be
confused with the whole of philosophy or social sciences: in this
interview Alan Sokal said:
"I
should make clear that I don’t think my parody article settles
anything. It doesn’t by itself prove much – that one
journal was sloppy. So it wasn’t the parody itself that proved
it, it was the things that I and other people wrote afterward
which I believe showed the sloppiness of the philosophy that a
lot of postmodernist literary theory types were writing. But
again, I wasn’t the first person to make those criticisms. It
was only after the fact that I went back into the literature and
found philosophers had made many of these criticisms long before
me. All I did in a certain sense was to find a better public
relations method than they did."
But he also expresses his skepticism on the possibility for
philosophy of science to fulfill its goal of understanding the
scientific method:
"So I guess you’re right that I’m
skeptical that there can ever be a complete over-arching theory
simply because science is about rationality; rationality is
always adaptation to unforeseen circumstances – how can you
possibly codify that? But that doesn’t mean philosophy of
science is useless, because all of these attempts that have
failed as final codifications of scientific method nevertheless
contributed something."
Anti-Science
Phenomenon
"Practitioners of the social
sciences have not learned, in their own disciplines, much that
is operationally indisputable, readily reproducible, and
internationally agreed to; so they cannot easily conceive such a
thing to be possible in any field. Knowing in their own
discipline that ideology governs "knowledge" as well as theory,
they presume that must be so in all fields."
Also, the end of the above quoted Weinberg's chapter "against
philosophy" tells about the relations between science and
"science studies" by sociologists.
Some interesting observations are without problem:
"For instance, Sharon Traweek has
spent years with elementary particle experimentalists at both
the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center and the KEK Laboratory in
Japan and has described what she had seen from the perspective
of an anthropologist. This kind of big science is a natural
topic for anthropologists and sociologists, because scientists
belong to an anarchic tradition that prizes individual
initiative, and yet they find in today's experiments that they
have to work together in teams of hundreds. As a theorist I have
not worked in such a team, but many of her observations seem to
me to have the ring of truth, as for instance: The physicists
see themselves as an elite whose membership is determined solely
by scientific merit. The assumption is that everyone has a fair
start. This is underscored by the rigorously informal dress
code, the similarity of their offices, and the "first naming"
practices in the community. Competitive individualism is
considered both just and effective: the hierarchy is seen as a
meritocracy which produces fine physics. American physicists,
however, emphasize that science is not democratic: decisions
about scientific purposes should not be made by majority rule
within the community, nor should there be equal access to a
lab's resources. On both these issues, most Japanese physicists
assume the opposite."
But other aspects present a strong opposition:
"It
is simply a logical fallacy to go from the observation that
science is a social process to the conclusion that the final
product, our scientific theories, is what it is because of the
social and historical forces acting in this process. A party of
mountain climbers may argue over the best path to the peak, and
these arguments may be conditioned by the history and social
structure of the expedition, but in the end either they find a
good path to the peak or they do not, and when they get there
they know it. (No one would give a book about mountain climbing
the title Constructing Everest.) I cannot prove that science is
like this, but everything in my experience as a scientist
convinces me that it is. The "negotiations" over changes in
scientific theory go on and on, with scientists changing their
minds again and again in response to calculations and
experiments, until finally one view or another bears an
unmistakable mark of objective success. It certainly feels to me
that we are discovering something real in physics, something
that is what it is without any regard to the social or
historical conditions that allowed us to discover it.
Where then does
this radical attack on the objectivity of scientific knowledge
come from? One source I think is the old bugbear of positivism,
this time applied to the study of science itself. If one refuses
to talk about anything that is not directly observed, then quantum
field theories or principles of symmetry or more generally laws of
nature cannot be taken seriously. What philosophers and
sociologists and anthropologists can study is the actual behavior
of real scientists, and this behavior never follows any simple
description in terms of rules of inference. But scientists have
the direct experience of scientific theories as desired yet
elusive goals, and they become convinced of the reality of these
theories.
There may be another motivation for
the attack on the realism and objectivity of science, one that
is less high-minded. Imagine if you will an anthropologist who
studies the cargo cult on a Pacific island. The islanders
believe that they can bring back the cargo aircraft that made
them prosperous during World War II by building wooden
structures that imitate radar and radio antennas. It is only
human nature that this anthropologist and other sociologists and
anthropologists in similar circumstances would feel a frisson of
superiority, because they know as their subjects do not that
there is no objective reality to these beliefs—no cargo-laden
C-47 will ever be attracted by the wooden radars. Would it be
surprising if, when anthropologists and sociologists turned
their attention to studying the work of scientists, they tried
to recapture that delicious sense of superiority by denying the
objective reality of the scientists' discoveries?
Relativism is only one aspect of a wider, radical, attack on
science itself. (...) These radical critics of science seem to
be having little or no effect on the scientists themselves. I do
not know of any working scientist who takes them seriously."
A delicious self-criticism article by Bruno Latour : "Why
Has Critique Run out of Steam" (archived pdf
- beginning + references in web
archive), questioning the field of social studies he created
himself, considering how it turned out to lead to conspirationism,
denialism, and endangering our planet by the way it is used by
political lobbies for denying scientific evidence on global warming:
"...I myself have spent sometimes
in the past trying to show the "lack of scientific certainty"
inherent in the construction of facts. I too made it a "primary
issue." But I did not exactly aim at fooling the public by
obscuring the certainty of a closed argument–or did I? After
all, I have been accused of just that sin. Still, I'd like to
believe that, on the contrary, I intended to emancipate the
public from a prematurely naturalized objectified fact. Was I
foolishly mistaken? Have things changed so fast?
In which case the danger would
no longer be coming from an excessive confidence in
ideological arguments posturing as matters of fact–as we have
learned to combat so efficiently in the past–but from an
excessive distrust of good matters of fact disguised as bad
ideological biases! While we spent years trying to detect the
real prejudices hidden behind the appearance of objective
statements, do we have now to reveal the real objective and
incontrovertible facts hidden behind the illusion of
prejudices?
..."
Pathological absolutizing as a substitute for clarity, and some other bullshit
Copy of discussion in youtube comments
[me] There is little sense to try defending philosophy "in the void", not knowing what can be the
opposite view.(...)
An important dimension of the problem you missed, is : can philosophy as it now stands,
help someone to not tell some terrible nonsense in guise of argument ? I see Dave Yount
defeated his own side in his article by committing this:
"Here is a smattering of questions that remain to be answered or are still debated these
days in disciplines other than philosophy: (...) Physics: What light exactly is (both a wave
and a photon) and the essence of gravity;"
No, this is not an open physics problem anymore since the discovery of quantum physics ! only a problem with popularization.
[PhilosophyVajda] Thanks for your comment. I disagree about there being little sense in
defending. This video is for an introductory course in philosophy. Most students need
help with basic reasoning and argumentation. One skill I want my students to acquire
is the ability to better navigate the common situation, when one's opponent does not
make their own view clear and defend it well. The hope is that we can do a good job of
reconstructing plausible (perhaps strong!) arguments on behalf of the opponent. It is a
valuable skill to acquire: I need to understand my opponent's view, even if they can't
articulate it well. This allows me to spot errors in my reasoning by considering legitimate
objections. But it is also useful socially. Your opponent might not be articulate, and may
get frustrated with debate. One way to help them is by identifying their reasoning better
than they can. This is one of the first steps in steel-manning opponents, rather than (the
tendency) to straw-man. Of course, we can look at more opponents. Many who would
benefit from this lecture are just out of highschool.
That said, your critique of Yount may have merit in making claims where one is not
sufficiently qualified. My presentation of an author is not an endorsement of that author.
Same goes for most any of my videos. But even so, Yount's point illustrative, even if it is
not correct. One can find a functionally equivalent one (surely you can give an open
question in physics?), and it would do the job in supporting his point. Would it not?
[me] No. Philosophy is supposed to be an art of thinking well and not telling too much
bullshit. I do not see what else its goal might be. And I do not see a better way to argue
for its success by showing how, as a philosopher, you actually succeed in not telling too
much bullshit when you discuss something. The article of Yount failed at that on one of
its very few aspects which can be readily and objectively checked. Did you notice this
error yourself before I pointed this out ? Second, you put forward the idea that a given
kind of modification would fix the point. Is that a good idea you have ? Well, still no. This
illustrates another widespread flaw of philosophical thinking : the inability to think
otherwise than in caricatural absolutes. The usual philosophical way of thinking about anything is : "Is
this 100% white ? We can't be sure. So is this 100% black then ? well, we can't be sure
of that either. So we cannot know anything about it then". That's all. So, the article of yount considers
the stupidly absolutist claim : "Someone might say that philosophy is only concerned
with questions that no one can answer". Well I don't know where is this claim from.
Nevertheless, a big difference between physics and philosophy is that physics could
solve over 99% of its problems, which are hugely high-skilled, while philosophy could solve less
than 1% of its own, which are often ridiculously childish and/or nonsensical. And the main report
I could see of a claimed "solved philosophical problem", was that it was so claimed only
based on a growing consensus instead of genuine evidence, and this consensus was to
the stupid incorrect answer (the supposed refutation of dualism). That big difference
between >99% and <1% is all what matters to someone who can think sanely instead of
philosophically, instead of an absolutist version of the question (whether an open problem
exists in physics, and whether a solvable problem exists in philosophy). Of course
unsolved physics problems still exist, so what ? Moreover, the argument of the article
said "But there are myriad research projects going on in ... physics..." as if it implied
something about the existence of open problems. It does not. First, in physics there
are not myriads of research projects, there is mainly just one, that is the LHC, and it
only succeeded to confirm at a high price what was conjectured long ago. Second, if
there are research projects in physics it does not mean that there are open problems,
only that there happened to be physicists hired for life in institutions and who desperately
need to justify their jobs, so they need to make up some story of a research project.
More comments.
The story of how philosophy happened to dismiss logical positivism, is another example of
effect of pathological absolutizing, or straw man argument : misinterpreting an idea in caricatural
ways to end up finding flaws in this caricature, then throwing the baby with the bathwater.
Related article : Politically correct fanatics by Winston Wu.
More notes
After reviewing some of the existing philosophical papers on the
growing block time theory (especially those from 2017 to 2021 from
this
list and both articles and both videos by Vincent
Grandjean in Collège de France), I wrote the following
(written in 2021; added here in 2022):
The paradox of the heap
I saw this "paradox" in the list of Vincent
Grandjean's paradoxes seminar. I also saw a version of it,
presented as a case of "indetermination" of (the answer to a given
question about) the future, in one of his articles about time.
Whenever I see any philosopher mention this "paradox" as if it was
anything serious, this seems to me so ridiculous, and a symptom of
a more general thinking flaw typical of the academic philosophers
community; explanations on this will then be used to explain some
deep aspects of the contrast of approaches to the growing bloc
theory of time.
So, what is this thinking flaw. Caricaturally let me describe it
by qualifying a philosopher as the opposite of a physicist :
- A physicist is a master in the art of making and
understanding, better than the common man, relevant
approximations in order to get some numerical results about a
given physical problem, correctly within a given desired margin
of accuracy ;
- A philosopher, on the other hand, is a master in the art of
artificially failing to understand the practices of
approximations which the common man, so often (though not always
of course), has great successes with.
Indeed, among the common man's practices of approximations, is
the possible use of the word "heap" to describe something which he
may need to speak about. However, like many other words and
phrases used by the common man, this belongs to the language of
approximation, which the philosopher seems to have big troubles
with, as he visibly, quite often, keeps desperately searching for
clear and rigorous meanings to all such words and possibly
utterable propositions made out of them (as well as the possible
words and propositions expressed by diverse scientists across
their respective fields of investigation, whose useful technical
languages sometimes keep a similar kind of fuzziness to that found
in the language of the common man). So, the philosopher has
problems with the use of the word "heap" which he fails to
understand. He may, for example, put forward the complaint that
the word "heaps" is lacking a precise definition, and try to play
with this word to form with it some weird sentences and kinds of
story-telling so as to test the limits of its meaningfulness, just
like children may like to play putting things together in ways
they were not designed for, curious of what will come out of that
; with the difference that, unlike children usually aware that
they are just playing, philosophers often mistake their own games
as if these could be a serious and productive form of
investigation on the nature of reality.
Now of course, the "paradox of the heap" has its clear and obvious
solution, or rather, a natural reason why it never was a paradox
in the first place, and which academic philosophers might be the
only kind of people on Earth ignorant about; but which therefore I
am now feeling ridiculously obliged to write down in case some
academic philosopher reading this page would need it:
- In the case when a common man happens to utter a sentence
using the name "heap" in it, this usually means that, when he
undertook to utter this sentence, he decided to do it this way
because he happened to perceive this word as clear enough to be
inserted that way in his sentence so as to be well enough
understood by his intended listener(s) for his given purpose. In
this case, therefore, it usually does not belong to the
legitimate role of the philosopher to challenge the grounds and
relevance of this decision, except of course in these special
cases when, just like any ordinary listener, he would happen to
really need some higher degree of accuracy of information than
he perceives to have got from the given sentence, for any action
or understanding aimed in the given context. In such an
exceptional case, then, the listener may have (or not) the
chance to react at this feeling of ambiguity by questioning the
speaker, which drives the story to some equivalent of the
following opposite case :
- In the opposite case, then, of a common man having something
to say, for which, during some fraction of a second, he may have
considered the relevance of using the word "heap" as a part of
his sentence, but then felt this option as unsatisfactory to
convey to his sentence the desired level of accuracy to be well
enough understood by his listeners for the given purpose, it is
then up to him to very quickly undertake a comparison of
relevance of this option against competing other possibilities,
such as the possibilities to replace the word "heap" by phrases
like "big heap", "small heap" and so on, up to any more complex
detailed explanations, to finally try to select from there some
hopefully optimal compromise between the needs of clarity and
those of saving time and effort from explanatory works.
So, this was the clearly satisfactory, ultimate explanation of what
the word "heap" really means, resolving for all practical purposes
any "paradoxes" which philosophers could find in it. And the
ultimate meaning of so many other words and phrases which
philosophers could have troubles with can be also explained to them
in the same manner.
Improper future tense semantics
Once so clarified this case of the "heap" which, I hope, could be
seen rather simple (though it might still depend), we may hopefully
be better equipped to address the slightly more subtle problem of
trying to decipher the behavior of the common man who may happen to
utter claims (predictions) about the future, and even to possibly
utter some meta-claims about such claims, such as the claim that
some sentence X "about the future" would be clear and meaningful, or
claims that someone who previously made a given prediction "was
right" or "was wrong" at the time that prediction was made,
depending on whether the unfolding facts turned out to confirm or
infirm the validity of that prediction.
Indeed, I see natural to classify such claims as essentially similar
to claims about "heaps", namely, that the whole role of such
sentences, simply and satisfactorily, is to serve as convenient
tools in the practice of approximative communication. Therefore, any
elaborate attempt by the philosopher to take such sentences on
word by trying to systematically analyze them, may this be in
terms of a logical system, or a clear semantics of any kind,
would be, purely and simply, a misunderstanding.
Any ponderings on the kind of questions which may be relevant
instead about such sentences, then, namely questions about their
usefulness in given contexts so as to convey to their listeners some
intended kinds of ideas and understandings while avoiding any
wasteful cost of additional efforts that would be involved by trying
to convey the same useful ideas by other means, will be here left as
an exercise for the interested reader.
That was to answer the kind of wish (motivation) to make sense of
claims about the future as expressed by Vincent Grandjean, namely,
to fit with the common people's uses better than they themselves
really meant. However there are other, more metaphysically serious
discussions on the topic, which I will address.
The source of mistakes
Now will be a tentative explanation about where philosophers come
from and what could lead them so astray into this kind of mistakes.
Philosophers are people in research. They are not the only beings
in research, though. Other people and even animals are also, quite
often, beings in research. Now of course, there are differences. A
first difference is that, while animals, for example, are usually
searching for food for their stomach, philosophers are often
rather searching for food for their mind. But the difference of
concern, here, is that the latter appear quite less successful in
their research than the former. Now if we focused on reviewing the
philosophers research (as they did themselves of course... with
even too much focus, I would say, to have any new chance of success) it could look hard
to figure out where their failures come from, and more
interestingly, how it might be possible to do much better. But
some insights can be pointed out by checking the other side of
this comparison : where the frequent success of animals and people
in the search for food for the stomach comes from.
So, how can animals and people so often succeed in their research
? Well, mainly based on their rich experience of previous success
in the same research. They know how to find food because they
already succeeded to find food before and they remember. Children
learn how to find food as they are taught by their parents who
know. Young animals also naturally find easily, guided for this by
their genome which somehow represents an heritage of millions of
years of experience of the same success.
Now, what are philosophers searching for ? They are searching for
new knowledge. Some deeper insights on life and the nature of
reality than they ever heard anyone discovering before. Plain and
simple, they just don't know what they are really searching for.
Because, well, if only they already knew what this knowledge on
the deeper nature of reality, which they are searching for, really
is, then... by definition, their search would already be over. But
since they don't know what they are searching for, how could they
better know how to effectively search for it ?
Consider another example : the police searching for a criminal.
As they know very well, their search can be very difficult as long
as they don't know what the criminal who they are searching for,
looks like ; but it suddenly becomes easier once they got,
hopefully a picture, or at least a robot portrait of him. But, how
can they get such a robot portrait ? If they simply tried to draw
a portrait themselves out of their imagination, based on their
guesses of what a criminal doing some given crimes should look
like, their chances to draw it correctly would be very small; now,
hopefully, they are usually aware of this, which is why they do
not proceed in this way. Instead, the only way is to have the
testimony of someone who actually saw this person, and remembers
what he looked like. Also, we need good reasons to trust that the
given witness had a clear vision and memory, and also that it was
indeed a vision of the criminal searched for, rather than of
anyone else who might have been on the crime scene by accident.
What about a similar risk with food : how can people and animals
distinguish good food from anything which might look pretty but
which would not be food ? It takes not only an experience of
finding things before, as examples to follow, but also the
condition that the things so found were confirmed to be good food,
rather than misleading experiences of having found things that
looked nice but were actually not proper food. Fortunately, this
risk is usually avoided for a clear and powerful reason : if
anyone once tried to feed himself with anything else than proper
food, he would have quickly got sick, which would have probably
forced him to recognize his mistake, and from there, no more eat
the same another time. Or anyway if he still didn't, and also if
any other people had been tempted to follow for any long time his
bad example, then by the force of things such people would have
probably not survived, so that, sooner or later, such a practice
would have got an end anyway.
Back to the case of philosophers. Disclaimer : I am not a historian
of philosophy. I am thus not claiming to be faithful to any
chronological order, but I will just use time metaphorically for
what I only mean as an abstract, conceptual order.
So, they were searching for some deeper understanding of stuff
than the common man. Then by lack of having ever effectively found
such a thing, they tried to focus their research by putting their
imagination at work to imagine some robot portraits of what such a
deeper understanding might look like. So, they first undertook to
give it a name : they decided to call this "the essence" of
things; and, in case such an essence of a given thing would not be
unique, it might become different attributes : after all, it would
be nice for a concept of "essence" to also take the job of
explaining what makes things differ from each other, so that, for
this, we probably need a multiplicity of essences as well.
Therefore, it could look like, we may need to research multiple
qualities or properties which would be "essential" to these
things.
Now, once having got a pretty name "essence" for the concepts we are
searching for, also declined in the form of an adjective "to be
essential" for properties to qualify things, something more was
lacking : some definitions for what these special words could
actually mean. Then, whole philosophical theories have been
developed to offer candidate definitions for these words. Doing so,
they seemed to neglect that this is not the usual way known to be
successful how to develop concepts and names, which usually starts
with a familiarity with the examples, before developing an intuitive
understanding and description (way of classifying things into given
kinds, which will serve as their intuitive definitions), after which
a name is given to refer to these already clear concepts and
definitions with their known ranges of examples. Admittedly, this
usual method to coin names and concepts does not ensure these
concepts to have absolutely clear sense in the foundations of
reality; but that is not its purpose anyway... and philosophers seem
to be the only people in the room to strangely forget this
sometimes. But this should anyway warn us that a great deal of care
is needed when trying to proceed the creation of concepts in a
different way.
Indeed, philosophers still had no examples for what could be
"essences" and "essential properties" of things (since they still
had no specially deep insights into reality). They only had some
more precise expectations of what these should look like. And...
no real way to check for sure that these more precise expectations
could really match the mysterious ultimate target of their
research.
Later, a horrible news came and filled the philosophical community
with dismay: their dear definition of what "essences" or
"essential" meant, which had been taught to generations of
students, turned out to not
be possibly the right one, since some ridiculous stuff was
finally discovered to fit into this definition without possibly
looking like their originally intended target, which this
definition was meant to describe.
Now, we can observe that this mistake with the words "essence"
and "essential" is of the same kind as with with the word "heap" :
a baseless expectation for words and sentences to make clearer and
deeper sense than they were initially meant to. Some words and
concepts from common language like "heap", and the "concrete" vs.
"abstract" distinction, because they were designed and selected by
experience to work for a fuzzy kind of semantics only ; some
additional words introduced by philosophers for their own
purposes, because, beyond pious wishes, these words like "essence"
have never been properly designed to mean anything at all, i.e.
may turn out to belong to the same category as what formerly
respected names like "Zeus" or "phlogiston" are now generally
recognized to be in.
So, what happened: starting with a world where the language and
concepts did not appear clear, they dreamed of a better world
where language and concepts would be much clearer and deeper. But
they did not know how to get there, so all they could find to try
was to dream themselves there, and voila. They did not make any
big and serious trip which could be effective to reach their
destination, or possibly they tried to, and might even have put a
lot of energy in there, but by lack of a good compass to reliably
give them the right direction in doing so, they did not really
succeed going anywhere worth it.
Simply, there is a direct contradiction in this combination of
attitudes or expectations which seem widespread in philosophy : to
mainly keep the same language, concepts and basic experiences as
the common man, and to directly and correctly give this
all a much clearer and deeper semantics than the one known to fit.
Indeed, if any deeper layer of reality is to be identified, then,
at least, it should have a significant deal of differences from
our usual one, so that any proper translation and explanation of
the usual reality in terms of a deeper one, should require a deal
of translation work, which would turn our familiar stuff into a
more complex form than the form of its basic appearance. Such a
complexity would be quite heavy to work with, if we tried to
describe a lot of familiar stuff through such lenses. Since
philosophers would anyway not have enough energy for such a task
(ifever they had a clue how to do it right), one should admit that
any reasonable hope of expressibility (to not mention
discoverability) of a proper solution in any manageable amount of
efforts, will at least require to discard a lot of our "familiar
reality" and language, as out of subject. A condition which they
seem traditionally far from being ready for. But, yes, I
understand, in lack of a good compass to tell where to go, the
mere request to go a long way would not have sufficed anyway.
Metaphysics in free fall
"Traditionally, quantum entities were thought to be
indiscernible: two quantum entities share every property and every
relation. That leads directly to a violation of the Principle of
the Identity of Indiscernibles (PII) in quantum mechanics. The
violation of PII, on its turn, leads immediately to two distinct
possibilities on what concerns the metaphysical status of its
entities: they are either non-individuals (i.e., entities without
identity conditions) or else they are indiscernible individuals;
that is, entities individuated by some Transcendental Principle of
Individuality (TI), like bare particulars, primitive thisnesses,
haecceities and the like (see French and Krause 2006, chap. 4).
That much seems to be uncontroversial in the traditional
metaphysical analyses of quantum entities. Still according to a
more recent tradition, the fact that we have at least two options
leads directly to a form of metaphysical underdetermination:
quantum mechanics provides no hint as to which of the previous
metaphysical packages should be preferred"
http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/12880/1/Jonas%20R.%20Becker%20Arenhart.pdf
The Popularity Battle
Instead of an effective means to test their theories and
arguments against reality, the main or perhaps only available
criterion of quality they have, is their convincing ability, i.e.
popularity, including peer-review, in the eyes of... other
philosophers. These may be doing their best in trying to assess the
quality of works from their own viewpoint, but anyway as people
also ignorant of what the hoped for deeper insights on reality
would look like... and even often without a strong scientific
background when that would be needed : reviews by genuine
scientists are not often at play there, for example. I guess even
philosophy of science articles are usually reviewed mainly by
other philosophers, rather than scientists of the involved fields.
That is how :
- Bohmian
Mechanics, for example, can enjoy a large popularity among
philosophers in contrast with its general unpopularity among
quantum field theorists, whose own insights can be the basis of
some deep reasons for them to dismiss this theory beyond the
somewhat naive perspective of philosophers.
- Philosophers of physics, or of time theory, often refer to "causal set theory" as if it was a physical theory. It isn't. It is just a dream, a wish to invent some
kind of theory that might someday be made compatible with known physics. But we are still far from there. There is no good reason to believe that a theory of this kind is actually conceivable, and there
are good reasons to believe the opposite. Namely, it is a kind of synomym of superdeterminism,
that is a class of theories known as having no possible member.
Now if someone wants to be serious in referring to science
as it now stands, rather than losing one's mind into science fiction fantasies, one should not refer
to "causal sets" as a part of physics : it isn't. There are much better reasons to refer to
parapsychology as a part of science, than to refer to "causal sets" as a scientific theory.
This may be a side effect of the terrible ambiguity of the use of the word "theory" which
may be used as well to name the most well-established facts, and the most hopeless,
implausible hunches.
- Some largely outdated or inaccurate elements from science do
not seem exceptional among examples or references of philosophical
articles.
Examples: the possibility of a Big Crunch ; the confusion between
- the conflict of the Hidden Variables and Spontaneous collapse
interpretations of quantum physics with Special Relativity,
- and the conflict of Quantum Field theory (which is
relativistic), with our theory of gravitation (General
Relativity).
This last mistake is committed around the note 61 of the thesis "Structure
and transition: towards an accretivist theory of time");
there are genuine speculations that the solutions to both
conflicts may be linked, but it is another topic.
While this relatively unfavorable condition for the development of
philosophical research could be excused as an external necessity to
deal with, such an excuse begins to lose validity when the issue of
popularity of ideas across the philosophical community, moves from
its basic unfortunate role of the only available compass driving the
direction of philosophical works as a cause, into also
taking this role as a target.
To be more precise, when strategical concerns towards matters of
popularity (the word "marketing" would be clearer, just probably too
strong here) happen to be explicitly stepping into the concepts and
arguments of philosophical works themselves at the expense of purely
rational concerns (the main point of Vincent Grandjean: Symmetric
and asymmetric theories of time),
that is starting to look quite terrible from a scientist's viewpoint.
More notes (added later)
A long quote explaining some of this
About a traditional ridiculous mistake I see as specific to academic
philosophy and a few other fields, against common sense : the mistake of
giving unfounded confidence in tentative strict, literal, rational categories where
these are inappropriate and not actually justified on rational
grounds (sorry I can't even qualify as rational anyone who goes on
publishing or referencing claims of rational analysis of something
without double-checking their appropriateness). I mean I do not see
this trouble in hard sciences precisely insofar as these focus on
specific issues where hard rational analysis can find its genuine
field of validity. I mean of course, for those scientists who are
not mistaking their field of research as if it was "everything" of
reality ; if there are such hard scientists mistaking their field of
research as if was the whole reality, or applying a priori given
rational categories without proper checking, then I would say it is
their personal philosophical mistake and not a trouble with hard
sciences themselves, abstractly taken in their own right.
I found a nice expression of the situation expressed in William
James' Afterdeath Journal. I mean that is what can be
expected from a dead philosopher indeed, i.e. someone who had been familiar
with philosophers fallacies, then could get out and see some of what was
wrong with this (yet I would not say he sees it all). In his description he
seems to dismiss all hard
rationality as irrelevant, but I guess it mainly comes from two
factors:
- It sounds like he just recently discovered what it means for someone to
NOT try to talk about metaphysics, and appears somewhat excited about it,
but still not everything about it seems clear to him
just yet. Indeed he appears to keep the exclusive obsession towards the topic of
metaphysics which is typical of philosophers (and for which I
may agree that many such attempts of rational categorization by
philosophers fail) as if it was the only topic of interest in
life; he does not happen to be interested in hard sciences
(which is not only physics but also mathematics, and other
possibilities of properly using deep rationality that I will not
detail here); that is his choice.
- He is concerned with materialist scientists, i.e. skeptics, who may
be loud in scientific popularization indeed, and some wild
pseudo-scientific speculations which popularization can also be
biased for, but I do not consider them representative of science
or rationality.
So here is the quote :
For while the physical world is operationally
predictable (and then, only generally speaking), that
predictability is operative only when inner components of the
mind act upon physical properties in a certain very precise
fashion. The physical world must be "turned on." Only then does
it appear with its predictable elements. Only then do objects
have reality, flowers grow, seas turn with their tides, and the
splendid sun's heat warms the land.
So far, science has only examined results. By its
insistence upon the priority and superiority of matter's
dominance, it ties its own hands. The very focus of its beliefs
leads it toward an endless categorizing in which it follows
minute particles into a deepening invisibility. The hypothetical
discovery of each new minuscule particle exerts an
ever-deepening hypnotic effect, leading the scientist down a
road that is self-defeating if he hopes to delve into those
phenomena that exist beneath the world's operating reality.
The mind, so entranced by these matters, so led astray,
itself possesses the abilities to perceive the inner structure
of life, but in a different fashion. The old methods of
measurement do not apply to a nonphysical reality; yet the mind
has its own values, its own methods and measurements, and the
mind's very existence is its own evidence. To that evidence,
science remains blind.
The scientist often says impatiently, "I deal with the true
or false world. A phenomenon exists or it doesn't. An object is,
or isn't. I deal with provable facts." This attitude alone shuts
out from science's province the very unpredictability, the very
creativity from which the predictable world emerges.
Modern science rightly rebelled against the excesses,
exaggerations, and superstitions of religion and against a rigid
system of beliefs that encouraged man to interpret the natural
world only in the light of its own dogmas. Yet science went
overboard to prove itself, adopting many of those authoritative
characteristics and denying the existence of any phenomenon that
is not observable according to its own set of limited
measurements, or that does not agree with its basic theories.
In whatever erroneous a fashion, however, religion did
attempt to categorize inner realities, for it numbered its
"species" with as much vigor and self-righteousness and
determination as any scientist pinpointing the number and kinds
of rocks, birds, gases, or particles. The demons, minor gods,
mythological creatures, hells and heavens were all in their way
the results of this same kind of specification, misapplied; for
in the inner reality, such methods are ludicrous.
Both religion and science seek "truth," but the literal
interpretation, physical reality is as limiting as the literal
interpretation of the Bible. There are fundamentalist scientists
quibbling over whether the universe is forever expanding, or is
endlessly expanding and contracting—and that is as much an
exercise in futility as medievals debating how many angels can
sit on the top of a pin. The attitudes of mind, the childish
literal interpretations are the same; equally absurd, if the
greater issue of truth is to be involved.
The very definitions of truth are at fault.
Science and psychology owe their birth to religion's
failure in conducting that search [for truth]. They are
split-offs from religion, each with their own methods, yet they
have to a large extent converged. For all of psychology's stated
interest in man's subjective nature—held while still maintaining
its basic objective stance— psychology is de- pending more and
more upon technology and scientific instruments to measure the
mind's products and behavior; a new futility also perpetuated
because of limited concepts and misunderstandings concerning the
pursuit of truth itself.
For what does truth mean? In scientific terms, it means a
provable fact such as "Today is Wednesday" or "An apple is a
fruit." These facts are operational; one categorizes time, and
the other, an object. Neither tells us anything about time or
objects, however.
In fact, the belief that today, Wednesday, is followed by
Thursday, while operationally true, also leads to drastic
misconceptions about the nature of time itself, couching it in
the consecutive terms of everyday experience. This discrepancy
goes quite unnoticed when you meet a friend for a Wednesday
appointment, and the convenient use of time is to be maintained
in any orderly physical world.
Scientists know, however, that time is relative, and if the
dictum "Time is relative" is a fact or truth, then is the fact
of consecutive time true or false? If false, then no day is
Wednesday, whether the statement is operationally true or not.
For that matter, Wednesday does not exist in the same way that
our apple does. In that regard, the statement that an apple is a
fruit is the "truer" of the two statements. But even the apple's
fruitness tells us nothing of the origin of fruits, or explains
how the apple has fruit rather than animal characteristics; and
no matter how far you go with this kind of truth finding, you
will ultimately be led to a point where one fact contradicts
another, or another framework of facts, or where you simply run
into ignorance—a point of no answers.
The reason is astonishingly simple. The overemphasis upon
categorization leads to an infinitely larger and ever-increasing
number of facts, each considered true; and with this
multiplication, the discrepancies collected along the way also
multiply. You end up with various disciplines, each with their
fact-truths, and under examination the facts of one discipline
too often do not apply to those of another field--a "fact" that
those in all disciplines often conveniently overlook.
Within any one school of knowledge these discrepancies are
invisible, and overall people operate in a fairly predictable
environment regardless, eating delicious apples and secure in
the knowledge that each Wednesday is followed by a Thursday. It
would serve no purpose, either, to say that apples are not
fruits; a statement that is false if you accept the apple's
fruitness. But the truth or falsehood of such statements are
beside the point of basic truth, which should deal with the
innate nature of time or with the innate nature of objects
rather than with their specifics. Under what conditions is an
apple a fruit or a chair a chair? Under what conditions do we
experience time as Wednesday, or as a series of consecutive
moments, and under what conditions might time behave elsewise?
Do any of these phenomena exist independently of our perception
of them?
How academic philosophy is just a religion among others
Like Christianity and probably many other religions, academic
philosophy fooled itself by developing and falling into its own
vocabulary traps.
For example, Christianity uses the phrase "the Word of God" to mean
the Christian Bible ; "knowing God" to mean having learned the
Christian doctrine, having faith in it, and practicing prayer ;
"testimony" to mean someone's personal story of having arbitrarily
chosen to believe in Jesus without due evidence, and then
arbitrarily believed this to have meant "knowing Jesus personally"
no matter how baseless that belief could be, as if any other kind of
story could not deserve to be seen as an authentic testimony ;
"mission" to mean going to preach the Gospel, as if no other kind of
mission could be a legitimate and worthy mission in God's eyes, etc.
It is by the force of such fallacies that Christians made it
inconceivable for themselves how anyone could make sense of life and
fulfill its deepest purpose otherwise than by being Christian and
dedicating their efforts to their religion.
So doing, they completely miss the fact that they are far from the
only ones, since so many other religions equally lead their
followers to believe their other religion is the only one that can
be followed when caring about the sense of life in the right way.
One of the crucial tools of this delusion consists, for each group,
in forming its own bubble of collective thought, inside which
unanimity appears to be reached. They only admit like-minded people
inside their own bubble, or, even if they are not aware of doing it,
it automatically happens anyway by nature due to the fact they have
a specific label under which they believe that proper thinkers should
join, after which they only consider those people who endorse this label, as voices to be
counted in the consensus to be formed. Then, they use the consensus
reached inside it as an implicit argument to consider their religion
as the necessary conclusion of "all serious people", at least in
good approximation, and thus dismiss as insane, hubristic, extremely
insulting and thus not deserving any consideration or reply, any
view which strongly diverges from this "consensus". I have
commented elsewhere about the deluding sport of humility
contests and complaints
against the perceived "insulting" attitude of one's opponent,
and so I will not repeat here all what still applies here from
there.
So, the followers of every given religion are usually mainly
familiar with the arguments for their own specific religion, rather
than those for another religion, or those against their own; and it
is based on this context that "everything objectively looks as if"
this clearly was the one possibly serious religion, and it would have to be a conspiracy
of God or the universe if reality turned out to be otherwise. Now,
who would care spending one's time criticizing a specific religion,
and why ? Few people care for such a dirty work, but if someone
cared, those targeted by the criticism would just wonder what is
wrong personally with him, instead of trying to understand the
actual arguments (which will be hard to understand anyway).
Consider this : if the rest of people are not criticizing your
religion, but just stay away from it and keep silent about it, then
this silence is objectively the worst possible insult against it, since it means
they regard it as not even worth any attention or reply. If you
really understand this, then you should welcome and praise as one of
the most respectful and generous acts in the world, anyone's
devastating criticism against your view, because doing this means
considering you worth their care to explain to you what a really
different viewpoint looks like, and why it is that not everyone is
following you, an explanation which you might waste your life
missing otherwise. But, things are more often perceived quite differently :
an attitude of silence and avoidance towards a given religion, feels like the polite way
(unlike explicit criticism), because it is the way to leave the devout members in
peace with their solipsism.
Now, academic philosophy is just a religion among others in the
sense just described : it starts with an abuse of its holy word
"philosophy" to confuse itself (the study of its specific
literature) with, well, just the same general care for the sense of
life which is the obsession of any other religion, making it
inconceivable for them that anyone else might try to distinguish
both.
Of course, it has it excuses to "justify" this confusion it makes.
Namely, it may insist that its own approach would be the
rational approach to the sense of life, as if this sufficed to
make it the only valid one.
You know what ? Every other religion also sees itself as the
rational approach to the sense of life. And they have their
own respective excuses to see themselves that way. For example,
Muslims insist that there would be scientific evidence for the truth
of Islam... Buddhists or similar teachings like to insist that they are
not teaching any doctrine but just inviting their followers to make
their own "scientific research" about the effects of meditation...
fundamentalists Christians have their "logical proof" of the
resurrection of Jesus, so that one cannot deserve to be seen as a
rational thinker unless one devoutly follows and accepts the
validity of their argument.
Even if you try to strengthen the requirement in terms of the concern for a rational approach
so as to exclude most religions, this remains unlikely to exclude another competing ideology
with its different literature and many followers : the so-called "scientific
skeptics" (who are not always friends with academic philosophy, especially as they
usually support logical positivism unlike philosophers), claiming to combine the authority
and reliability of science (which was itself not a real threat for philosophy due to the division of topics),
with a concern for topics close to human life (which philosophy was supposed to be the voice of). Now, how
do philosophers respond to this challenge ? It seems, they often ignore it: unless I missed something,
they are objectively direct competitors, yet they managed to ignore each other just by the magic of
using different holy keywords to virtually separate their agendas. What I could see from philosophers
often looks like the story of "skepticism" started with Xenophanes and Pyrrho of Elis, and almost
ended with Hume. The modern movement of scientific skepticism almost did not seem to appear
on their radar screen, despite its recent huge impact on society as an ideological basis of health
policies. The concern seems to have been more often expressed by the keyword "scientism"...
which seems to be often confused with experimentalism as opposed to theoretical and deductive
approaches, a confusion promoted by the "scientific skeptics" themselves... but unless I miss something,
the arguments appeared to be quite superficial; in particular, distinctions between scientific skepticism and
genuine science may have been often overlooked.
Social observations show the simple and devastating reason why the "most rational approach" argument has no
weight : who is the judge of what is genuinely rational and what isn't ? Anyone can always qualify himself as
following the "most rational way". Thus, as long as philosophers are their own judges, their argument from how
rational they think they are, remains void.
This can explain why science and technology could progress, while philosophy didn't : science and
technology (as well as most fields of human work, including arts), have some verdict/feedback from an
external reality to decide what works and what doesn't, what is
effectively valid and useful and what isn't; math has its rigorous validity criteria; in arts you cannot meaningfully
dismiss the public as mistaken about whether something is good for them or not.
These do not remain hopelessly subjective and fanciful as happens for philosophy, whose only feedback,
that is peer-review, can well be completely misguided.
Academic philosophers keep observing and complaining that their
works are not taken seriously by scientists, but visibly could not
decipher the real reasons for this fact, since they keep absurdly
trying to defend their discipline out of the point, never questioning their basic ridiculous misuse of the word
"philosophy", trying to argue that scientists "need philosophy" or
"are trying to do philosophy anyway", and therefore should need the
works of philosophers for this reason. No, of course, the claim
(rather, the ridiculous presupposition) of academic philosophers for
having their favorite literature being taken as the necessary reference for
any act of serious thinking and exploration on the sense of life or other big questions,
is not legitimate.
However, they keep forever keeping their defense out of the point,
since maybe scientists did not waste their time insisting on the
exact terms of the disagreement (or even, some of the most visible
ones did not provide the proper explanations), and anyone who would
dare expressing the divergence in the correct way would be dismissed
as insane, ridiculous, arrogant, insulting... and thus not deserve
any reply.
What else ? That scientists would owe something to philosophers
because historically, science was born from philosophy. Well, humans
descend from apes also, but this does not mean that apes have lessons to teach to humans
about how to live.
So, it is possible to express academic philosophy as a specific
belief or faith like the faith of any religion : the belief that its
specific literature is, in average, the best available literature
which anyone needs to study, and will then hold as relevant, to
properly try to explore the sense of life. Obviously, this statement of the philosophers faith,
is only believed by less than 0.1% of the world's population, and thus rejected by more
than 99.9%. Yet this definition of the point of the value of philosophy
has largely been missed, with philosophers focusing on claiming to defend
their jobs by ruminating trivialities of the form "it is better to try thinking about the sense
of life than not", just like Christians trying to defend their faith by ruminating arguments
of the form "it is better to follow God's will than not", and
remaining clueless about why
this does not suffice to get the rest of the world to run up and say Amen !
I would even suspect this mistake to be linked with the above mentioned mistake
of denying the consciousness of animals : a kind of confusion between the experience
of consciousness and the practice of academic philosophy. Indeed how is it possible
to determine whether animals are conscious if not from the observation whether they are
able to read and write some philosophical literature ?
If you ask : if that literature is not the best, then, what can be
better ? This is out of topic, as the point here is not my own suggestions, but
the general fact of the unpopularity of the philosophers references; different people would
bring their own references (or a denial of the need to refer to any specific literature),
and that is what philosophers fail to address. Yet, out of topic thus,
I would suggest the literature on Near Death Experiences (though of course some fraud or nonsense may also exist
there sometimes such as Eben Alexander and the Urantia book) and the
channeled books from Jane Roberts. Indeed after a lot disappointment
and debunking of fallacies from diverse religious teachings I
happened to find and see these as globally good, though I do not
mean the study of this specific literature to be necessary either :
as this literature itself states, there is no necessity to study any
specific literature at all for finding the sense of life, as the
experience of life itself with its endless diversity, is its own purpose
(and it is up to everyone to find the sense of one's own life, which may differ
from that of others) with no general need of doctrinal expression.
One of the worst possible arguments : that academic philosophers should be held as
the reference because they are the ones having jobs in academia,
unlike religions. This would be taking things upside down. There
were times and places (and there still are) where theologians of specific religions were
the ones having jobs in academia, and so they assumed having the right for
their respective teachings to be held as the truth reference for
this reason. Then it happened to require bloody revolutions for
taxpayers to kick these out from their positions and declare
that "The Republic does not recognize, pay, or subsidize any
religious sect". Now how much blood may it require to manage similarly
putting back "philosophy" to its right place ?
A mathematician's response to the
philosophy of mathematics
My own metaphysical article, showing by contrast the pitiful state of affairs which prevailed in academic philosophy on the concerned topics.
So wanna bring a philosophical view over scientific activities ?
Great, let me answer by bringing
a techno-scientific view over metaphysical research,
and let us see which one is deeper and more far-reaching !
More external links
Sinking into life: the tragedy of our lost philosophy
Quora question : What are some criticisms of philosophy?
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