4 ms·

>Ancient philosophy rarely contains information. Sounds like you haven't read much, gee. What a strange comment. It has a far higher signal/noise ratio than mo

>Ancient philosophy rarely contains information. Sounds like you haven't read much, gee. What a strange comment. It has a far higher signal/noise ratio than modern philosophy, I'd say, maybe because usually only the best has survived.

whatshisface 8y ago
>It has a far higher signal/noise ratio than modern philosophy You can look at it this way: every possible statement seems to have been made by at least one ancient philosopher, especially once you include the non-western traditions. There were atom-ists, and continuum-ists, and so on. If you view ancient philosophy as one big bucket of sentences, it will fill up sentence space fairly uniformly. You could reconstruct ancient philosophy just by coming up with reasonable-sounding claims about things they were aware of back then until you ran out of possibilities, although that wouldn't produce the historical association of certain views with certain people. A distribution that uniformly fills space is, in the technical sense of the word, "no information." If you trim it down (for example by doing experiments and discarding whatever doesn't match your newfound knowledge of reality), you get a distribution that "has information." To put it concretely, finding out that an ancient philosopher said something doesn't help, because ancient philosophers said everything they could think of. Whether that is better or worse than what philosophers are doing now is up to philosophers to decide, I guess.
- teolandon 8y ago
  I haven't actually taken every single statement said by ancient philosophers (if you can even clearly classify philosophers as 'ancient' -- what's the date cutoff?), and put them in a bucket, and checked that the sentence space in that bucket is filled up uniformly. However, new sentences are made every day, new words made very often. Nobody cares about the technical sense of the words "no information". If your argument was extended from 'ancient philosophy' to 'anything ever said by humans', then anything ever said by humans would fill the sentence space fairly uniformly, so finding out that anyone has said anything doesn't help. A single human has not considered and thought about every sentence possible. They have their own beliefs and knowledges, and by reading ancient philosophy, they can expand that knowledge base, change those beliefs. Ancient philosophy is not inconsequential, and it certainly contains "information".
  - dpark 8y ago
    I think whatshisface is being overly dismissive of the value/information in ancient philosophy. But the heart of his comment is that you can cherry pick pretty much whatever you want from ancient philosophy because the corpus is so large. If you, e.g., selectively choose statements that vaguely line up with quantum mechanics, you haven’t proven that Ancient Greeks knew quantum mechanics or had some unexpectedly deep understanding of the universe. You did something equivalent to P-hacking to dig meaningless correlations out of the noise.
    - dr_dshiv 8y ago
      Right, it would be inappropriate to claim that Plato predicted the big bang! He did arguably explicitly predict that basic mathematical/geometric forms underlie the structure of the universe. E.g., that atoms would be composed of pyramids, cubes, dodecahedrons and that the behaviour of atoms would be based upon the different geometric properties of basic forms. That idea is only partially correct, however. Atoms are based on the basic mathematical forms -- but on the spherical harmonics of electron clouds, not point geometries. Whoops! Otherwise, the idea is commensurable with modern atomic understanding. Earth, water, air and fire correspond not to elements (ice can melt, obviously) but to phases of matter. (Solid, liquid, gas, plasma). There is a reason Classical Greek philosophy underlies western civilization. They were not dummies and there is still a lot we can learn from them. It's not like all their ideas were examined in the 1800s and we took all the good ones, leaving the classics as a sort of intellectual skin worth shedding. Instead, it is the core we build on. It's worth understanding the core -- and giving them the benefit of the doubt to identify interesting ideas. Like that the universe begins with "the one" :)
      - dpark 8y ago
        That is some impressively hand-wavy equivalency. Plato predicted something pretty much entirely wrong and you're pretending he was generally correct. Plato believed, without evidence, that there were some indivisible units of matter. That's all he got right (and even that was arguably incorrect given subatomic particles).
  - 8y ago
- ta1234567890 8y ago
  This argument could be used pretty much for any field and it's just BS. If you apply the same principle to all of language then you could say language has no information. Try it with a dictionary, the words are distributed pretty uniformly, does the dictionary have no information? Same for the whole universe. So are you saying that "information" only exists when some arbitrary observer (in this case you), applies some sort of filter or boundary to what they are looking at?
  - whatshisface 8y ago
    >Try it with a dictionary, the words are distributed pretty uniformly, does the dictionary have no information? That is not true at all: the dictionary is highly concentrated in correctly-spelled English words. If the dictionary was evenly spread over the space of sequences of letters A-Z it would not be useful at all, because next to Cat would be Cas and Cau.
  - Retra 8y ago
    Words are not distributed uniformly in a dictionary at all. They are distributed according to the grammatical structure of the text.

whatshisface 8y ago

>It has a far higher signal/noise ratio than modern philosophy You can look at it this way: every possible statement seems to have been made by at least one ancient philosopher, especially once you include the non-western traditions. There were atom-ists, and continuum-ists, and so on. If you view ancient philosophy as one big bucket of sentences, it will fill up sentence space fairly uniformly. You could reconstruct ancient philosophy just by coming up with reasonable-sounding claims about things they were aware of back then until you ran out of possibilities, although that wouldn't produce the historical association of certain views with certain people. A distribution that uniformly fills space is, in the technical sense of the word, "no information." If you trim it down (for example by doing experiments and discarding whatever doesn't match your newfound knowledge of reality), you get a distribution that "has information." To put it concretely, finding out that an ancient philosopher said something doesn't help, because ancient philosophers said everything they could think of. Whether that is better or worse than what philosophers are doing now is up to philosophers to decide, I guess.

teolandon 8y ago
I haven't actually taken every single statement said by ancient philosophers (if you can even clearly classify philosophers as 'ancient' -- what's the date cutoff?), and put them in a bucket, and checked that the sentence space in that bucket is filled up uniformly. However, new sentences are made every day, new words made very often. Nobody cares about the technical sense of the words "no information". If your argument was extended from 'ancient philosophy' to 'anything ever said by humans', then anything ever said by humans would fill the sentence space fairly uniformly, so finding out that anyone has said anything doesn't help. A single human has not considered and thought about every sentence possible. They have their own beliefs and knowledges, and by reading ancient philosophy, they can expand that knowledge base, change those beliefs. Ancient philosophy is not inconsequential, and it certainly contains "information".
- dpark 8y ago
  I think whatshisface is being overly dismissive of the value/information in ancient philosophy. But the heart of his comment is that you can cherry pick pretty much whatever you want from ancient philosophy because the corpus is so large. If you, e.g., selectively choose statements that vaguely line up with quantum mechanics, you haven’t proven that Ancient Greeks knew quantum mechanics or had some unexpectedly deep understanding of the universe. You did something equivalent to P-hacking to dig meaningless correlations out of the noise.
  - dr_dshiv 8y ago
    Right, it would be inappropriate to claim that Plato predicted the big bang! He did arguably explicitly predict that basic mathematical/geometric forms underlie the structure of the universe. E.g., that atoms would be composed of pyramids, cubes, dodecahedrons and that the behaviour of atoms would be based upon the different geometric properties of basic forms. That idea is only partially correct, however. Atoms are based on the basic mathematical forms -- but on the spherical harmonics of electron clouds, not point geometries. Whoops! Otherwise, the idea is commensurable with modern atomic understanding. Earth, water, air and fire correspond not to elements (ice can melt, obviously) but to phases of matter. (Solid, liquid, gas, plasma). There is a reason Classical Greek philosophy underlies western civilization. They were not dummies and there is still a lot we can learn from them. It's not like all their ideas were examined in the 1800s and we took all the good ones, leaving the classics as a sort of intellectual skin worth shedding. Instead, it is the core we build on. It's worth understanding the core -- and giving them the benefit of the doubt to identify interesting ideas. Like that the universe begins with "the one" :)
    - dpark 8y ago
      That is some impressively hand-wavy equivalency. Plato predicted something pretty much entirely wrong and you're pretending he was generally correct. Plato believed, without evidence, that there were some indivisible units of matter. That's all he got right (and even that was arguably incorrect given subatomic particles).
- 8y ago
ta1234567890 8y ago
This argument could be used pretty much for any field and it's just BS. If you apply the same principle to all of language then you could say language has no information. Try it with a dictionary, the words are distributed pretty uniformly, does the dictionary have no information? Same for the whole universe. So are you saying that "information" only exists when some arbitrary observer (in this case you), applies some sort of filter or boundary to what they are looking at?
- whatshisface 8y ago
  >Try it with a dictionary, the words are distributed pretty uniformly, does the dictionary have no information? That is not true at all: the dictionary is highly concentrated in correctly-spelled English words. If the dictionary was evenly spread over the space of sequences of letters A-Z it would not be useful at all, because next to Cat would be Cas and Cau.
- Retra 8y ago
  Words are not distributed uniformly in a dictionary at all. They are distributed according to the grammatical structure of the text.