9 ms·

It galls me every time I see “neuroscientists”/“neuropsychologists” and the like considering themselves to have essentially discovered the problem of mind-brain

by mdeck_ 6y ago

It galls me every time I see “neuroscientists”/“neuropsychologists” and the like considering themselves to have essentially discovered the problem of mind-brain duality, fundamental questions about what consciousness is, and so forth, as if philosophers haven’t been carefully studying these topics for hundreds and in some cases thousands of years—and as if many were not continuing to study it in philosophy departments to this day. This guy for instance seems not to have read much or any philosophy. The interviewer appropriately poses question regarding Searle and Chalmers, but from his answers he doesn’t seem familiar with these quite important thinkers. I’m genuinely confused—what is it that makes someone who calls themselves a scientist want to avoid having their lit reviews include writings categorized as philosophy?

titzer 6y ago
Galling can go both ways. Why is it that philosophists have gone hundreds or thousands of years thinking on a problem and produced no tangible results and yet Science put a man on the moon? Reproducibility.
- keiferski 6y ago
  No tangible results? You live in a world shaped entirely by political philosophy, which itself is almost inseparable from philosophy writ large historically. The modern political Western world is entirely built on Kantian ideals.
  - NoOneNew 6y ago
    I think the biggest problem is the hubris to known knowledge. One thing I liked about the author was the acknowledgment that Freud made mistakes, but shouldn't be 100% dismissed either. I like relating this to modern atom theory. How vital is the understanding of electrons to atoms these days? It's borderline impossible to imagine how atoms work without knowing anything about electrons. Dalton developed modern atom theory in 1804. Electrons weren't discovered until the 1890s. 90 years of people probably saying, "it's impossible to get tangible results from testing atoms". Freud's theories are almost 100 years old now. We've come a long way... but how more advanced is atomic theory an extra 100 years after electrons were discovered? We are still stupid when it comes to psychology, thus unable to really make tangible results... yet. The faster that concept is respected, I truly think the faster advancements can be made because people won't get hung up on bad pop science declarations from innocent studies that are doing to their best to just discover some grain of truth.
    - SubiculumCode 6y ago
      Freud probably set us back 100 years. So much wasted effort spent pursuing a charlatan's musings.
      - NoOneNew 6y ago
        You're right, his work helped stop further vital research into wandering uterus and methods to cure women's tendencies to hysteria and insurrection, like lobotomies. Oh, the good ol' days. Again, he wasn't perfect by any stretch, but his work and push of psychoanalysis is the seed to our current forms of therapy. Yes, modern therapy still isnt perfect for war and trauma induced PTSD but holy shit it's better than cranking up the voltmeter on someone, pumping them full of cocaine and tobacco and snakeoil, or just locking them up in a padded room. This doesn't include some of the archaic religious torture practices some places of the world still utilize to this day. The dude was on the right track compared to the rest of his time. Give credit where credit is due. It's not like you invented the transistor. We all stand on someone else's shoulders. Hindsight is a whole hell of a lot easier than foresight. Again, we dont think Dalton set us back in atomic theory since he was the pioneer. Why the hate for any other pioneer then?
        SubiculumCode 6y ago
        If he was such a pioneer of psychology and psychiatry, why is Freud pointedly ignored in Psychology and Psychiatry departments? And seriously, was the idea of subconscious motivations that innovative for his time?
- pfortuny 6y ago
  What is a result? Honestly. It is not solutions what Philosophers seek. Mostly they pose questions. The problem with Science is that it just answers them. And Scientist deem that sufficient. The hard thing is to tackle questions which have only personal answers. Universal ones are easy.
- endisneigh 6y ago
  What do you mean no tangible results? Pretty much everything around is derived from some philosophical idea that's been normalized throughout the population.
- mdeck_ 6y ago
  By definition philosophy has come to refer to the study of things that cannot be resolved by empirical inquiry. So, every time human advancements have ACTUALLY allowed us to answer a question, it ceases to be the realm of philosophy. For instance, Plato and other Ancient Greek philosophers theorized about the basic building blocks of matter—what their shapes and natures were. That question has become one of physics. That’s why philosophy is referred to as the Mother of the Sciences. This hardly makes philosophy worthy of your description as lacking “tangible results.”
- evv555 6y ago
  Progression of mathematics and Platonic ontologies are closely intertwined.
  - nescioquid 6y ago
    Your comment piques my interest, and I'd like to know more. My first thought was about the Timaeus (geometrical structures of matter/elements), but I haven't read any treatments about Plato's theory of forms and the development of mathematics.
    - evv555 6y ago
      The cliffnotes version is "plato's forms/ideas" are a first attempt at articulating what abstractions are. Progression of Math is a chain of ideas leading back to these early thoughts. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundations_of_mathematics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundations_of_mathematics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_mathematics#Platonism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_mathematics#Plat...
- tablespoon 6y ago
  > Galling can go both ways. Why is it that philosophists have gone hundreds or thousands of years thinking on a problem and produced no tangible results and yet Science put a man on the moon? Reproducibility. Someone should probably let you know that science is a subset of philosophy (or "philosophism" as you seem to think it's called).
  - whatshisface 6y ago
    Although true, that's like defending all human speech by saying that philosophy is a subset of all human speech, which itself has science as a subset.
    - tablespoon 6y ago
      > Although true, that's like defending all human speech by saying that philosophy is a subset of all human speech, which itself has science as a subset. Not really. To use your analogy a bit, the GGP was basically rejecting human language in favor of English on account of it being so wonderful that English-speakers visited the moon. It's nonsense. If you reject philosophy, you reject science.
      - whatshisface 6y ago
        >If you reject philosophy, you reject science. It doesn't take that much charity to interpret that what the original poster was saying as, "I reject the subset of philosophy that is not science, on the grounds that the subset which is science has all of the value," a legitimate position at least which is not tautologically false. I guess the reason why one thing being good could make another thing bad would be that time spent using nonscientific philosophical techniques to answer questions incurs an opportunity cost, that you are not using scientific techniques to answer them. Or even that trying to answer questions that scientific techniques can't solve incurs an opportunity cost, that you could be answering other questions that you had a chance at solving. (That would be a consistent belief if you thought that nonscientific thought couldn't make progress on questions, even if you conceded that scientific techniques could not make progress on all questions.)
- omginternets 6y ago
  Yours is literally a philosophical question. You are doing philosophy. Surely you see the relevance and importance of your own question... More to the point, most of what you hold dear is precisely philosophical in nature. Let us list but two, which I draw directly from your comment: 1. The value of putting a man on the moon 2. The superior (epistemological!) quality of scientific knowledge. That last one bears repeating. The entire reason you think that you think science is better than philosophy is because of a philosophical stance. You are manifestly an empiricist, albeit one who does not understand empiricism and its rational context very well. Respectfully, I leave you with the following quote by Gordan Fee: Before you can say, ‘I disagree,’ you must be able to say, ‘I understand.’ It is axiomatic that before you level criticism you should be able to state an author’s position in terms that he or she would find acceptable. Your position betrays an ignorance of philosophy that would appall history's greatest scientists.
  - titzer 6y ago
    > Your position betrays an ignorance of philosophy And your entire reply rests on misreading of my comment; note that I said "a problem" not "all problems". There are many problems that philosophists have made absolutely no progress on in centuries or millenia because on those narrow questions the dialog is horribly imprecise and does not give rise to reproducible, testable things. Almost everyone who replied to me assumed that I meant all of philosophy is useless from basically missing the "a" word in my comment.
    - omginternets 6y ago
      That's fair. Please accept my apology for this oversight. Nevertheless, it makes your comparison with "putting a man on the moon" very puzzling. Why not compare this great achievement of science with a great achievement of philosophy? Moreover, you place science and philosophy in opposition with each other, yet science is exactly a subset of philosophy. And while you might point to the higher epistemological quality of empiricism (as opposed to, say, metaphysics), you would have to concede that science is also tackling easier questions by a significant margin, precisely because they can be apprehended through epistemologically-objective observation. Given the above, the charitable interpretation remains ignorance. One might even qualify it as "galling".
apples_oranges 6y ago
Funny you say that.. I've recently read a book about child psychology and it was constantly praising the progress of science (specifically neuroscience).. yet I've read all this stuff before, for example in Jung or even in the Stoics. Ok maybe they didn't know. Or maybe it's science's job to methodically confirm knowledge, that has so far been rather anecdotal, and scientists can pat themselves on the back for it, why not. But it somewhat annoyed me to read that book anyway. They just made it sound like some breakthrough research, which I think it wasn't.
- shadowgovt 6y ago
  The thing to remember about philosophy is that philosophy is more akin to mathematics than to science. It's the exercise of taking some postulates and forming a theory atop the assumption the postulates are true. Whether the philosophy you end up with actually reflects reality is a function of whether those postulates map to real things... The philosophy can (and, in history, many times, has) live independently of the postulates, describing an interesting, self-consistent world that just isn't real. Aristotle described matter as being made up of atoms, and he's first-order-approximation correct, but his mechanistic details of how they worked were extremely wrong. Descartes' famous "I think, therefore I am" proof rests extremely heavily on an assertion he makes earlier in the Discourse where he combats the hypothesis that he's just a brain in a jar being fed lies by an evil demon by asserting that the God that would allow that reality would be a really shitty god, so he dismisses it out of hand. It's through scientific investigation that we came to discover which parts of Aristotle's philosophy matched reality and which can be discarded (and we lack the scientific insight, as of yet, to have strong evidence for or against that evil-demon brain-in-a-jar hypothesis. ;) ). There are a thousand, thousand algebras that are internally-consistent but ultimately uninteresting because they map to nothing we observe in the universe, and then there's linear algebra. There are a thousand, thousand philosophies that are internally-consistent hot garbage, and then there's Jung. To say "Jung described this, why did it take science so long to discover it?" is like saying "Complex wave functions already describe quantum mechanics; why did it take physicists so long to realize that?" Now, what philosophy does gift us with (if it's grounded in strong logical consistency) is a roadmap of where to look next if we notice that things in reality do align to the postulates, because the philosopher has already imagined, in vivid detail, the consequences of those assertions. And that is extremely cool.
pfortuny 6y ago
Because you know, Aristotle was not a Scientist, so he must be wrong everywhere else. Same for anyone: from Plato to Descartes to Hume to Nietzsche to Husserl. Like Vizzini in the Princes Bride: "Plato, Aristotle... Morons". It is so easy to mistake science for wisdom.
danaliv 6y ago
Smart people have a tendency to think that their intelligence is enough to figure out anything. Turns out it's basically impossible to have an original thought in most fields without first getting caught up. Actually, now that I think about this, I'd extend it to just about everyone, not just academics/engineers/etc. Imagine two people working on a plumbing problem. An hour into it, Bob waltzes in, looks at it, and says, "did you try __?" The two people who have actually been working on it roll their eyes and mutter, "yes, Bob, we've been working on it." Sometimes Bob will get lucky and notice something they didn't, because they're too deep in the weeds, but I think people dramatically overestimate how likely this is.
- cecilpl2 6y ago
  It's important to recognize this tendency in everyone. When I have the instinct to say something like that, I switch gears and recognize that I'm not helping - I'm actively asking them to stop working on the problem and get me caught up. Usually the only time I'm actually helpful in situations like that is if I have esoteric knowledge or experience that is uncommon and directly related to the problem at hand - "Oh, I ran into this 3 years ago, here's what we did to solve it". Your peers have already tried the obvious things. Another rule of thumb to notice when this is happening is the word just. "Why don't you just..." is a belittling thing to say, as if they hadn't already thought of the obvious. Better is "why didn't X work"?
- lostmsu 6y ago
  On the other hand smart people tend to avoid simple solutions to "hard" problems, that reduce their ego to a mechanical process. For instance, I don't see a good reason why having consciousness of X is in any way fundamentally different, than having an ability to play StarCraft at MMR Y this instant in time. IMHO, conceptually they are the same and the only difference is the game being measured.
bondarchuk 6y ago
Searle: Chinese room argument Chalmers: philosophical zombies As you say, these topics have been carefully studies for thousands of years but these two have done a lot to muddy the waters with confusing arguments, and I don't blame anyone for disregarding them.
- danaliv 6y ago
  Have they muddied the waters, or have they shown that the problem is far more difficult than you want it to be?
  - joefourier 6y ago
    The Chinese room argument certainly only exists to muddy the waters. The whole premise is a misdirection by having a human execute a Chinese-speaking program by hand, then asking if the human understands Chinese, completely ignoring the fact that is the program that is responsible for the behavior, not the human. That would be like asking if neurotransmitters understand Chinese instead of focusing on the brain as a whole. Philosophical zombies are a bit more interesting. However it flirts a bit too much with dualism in assuming something indistinguishable from a human can lack some "qualia" that a real human has. A more useful perspective would be from a human brain simulation angle.
    - bondarchuk 6y ago
      Indeed. If you reject that "the room as a whole" speaks Chinese, you reject functionalism. If you think philosophical zombies are conceivable, this is also a rejection of functionalism. Ultimately the acceptance or rejection of functionalism is (as far as I can tell) only a matter of dogma, and these two arguments serve to find out which dogma you (implicitly) subscribe to. Personally I place the rejection of functionalism on basically the same level as the acceptance of dualism. I don't know what precisely has happened to make most serious researchers reject dualism, but perhaps non-functionalism will run the same course.
      - GoblinSlayer 6y ago
klmadfejno 6y ago
Well googling Mark Solms Searle returns at least one paper by him that directly explores Searle's views so I'd say you're just sensitive. Ironically, you're opining on the scientist of opining on consciousness without having read philosophy, without having read the scientist.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
keiferski 6y ago
I continually go back to the story of Socrates and the Oracle of Delphi. 2500 years later and it’s still relevant today. The Oracle of Delphi pronounced Socrates the wisest of Greeks; and Socrates took this as approval of his agnosticism which was the starting point of his philosophy: ‘One thing only I know’, he said, ‘and that is that I know nothing’. Philosophy begins when one begins to doubt — when one begins to question the accepted wisdom of tradition. Particularly the one’s cherished beliefs, one’s dogmas and one’s axioms. Puzzled by the priestess of Delphi’s statement, Socrates felt obliged to seek the meaning of her remark. By questioning others who had a reputation for wisdom, he came to see that he was wiser than they, because unlike them he did not claim to know what he did not know.
op03 6y ago
No need to be confused or galled. Info asymmetry in society will keep growing as Info keeps growing. On the other hand that 6 inch chimp brain we have, has no way to keep up no matter what tech is produced within our lifetimes. So only thing worth doing is point people at things you know and keep walking, sort of like two ants passing each other in the universe.
- keiferski 6y ago
  Just be sure to look at the moon, not the pointing finger.
omginternets 6y ago
I have a Ph.D in Cognitive Neuroscience, and my dissertation was on the neurophysiological correlates of consciousness [0]. I can assure you that Philosophy of Mind is part of the curriculum. About a third of my dissertation deals with Descartes, Helmholtz, Ryle, Dennett, Searle, and others. The general consensus among my peers is that philosophy is an essential part of scientific inquiry. Studying philosophy of mind is regarded as the only way to ensure the empirical questions we're asking even make sense, or that our discoveries are non-trivial. It bears repeating: the cognitive neuroscientists I frequented have a deep respect and genuine interest in philosophy. [0] Specifically: I presented evidence that attention was a causal mechanism in conscious access. We were able to take stimuli that were initially not consciously perceived, and induce a conscious percept after the stimulus had disappeared by manipulating exogenous attention.
- SamBam 6y ago
  > We were able to take stimuli that were initially not consciously perceived, and induce a conscious percept after the stimulus had disappeared by manipulating exogenous attention. That's cool! Can you say more about how the experiment worked?
  - omginternets 6y ago
    https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0148504 https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal... Here's a pure psychophysics study we performed. It gets at the essence of the mechanism without forcing you to wade through pages of fMRI-related esoterica. I'm happy to answer any questions :)
    - cmehdy 6y ago
      That's a cool experiment, and a well-written article, thanks! I've had a tiny bit of experience dealing with the visual system in a related but distant field (the feedback loops of visual accommodation and vergence and conflicts that can emerge with stereoscopic 3d - and I wish I had understood and done actually insightful things..). This left me wondering about the important place of vision-based experiments in the theories of perception as well as consciousness. What are your thoughts about that subject? For example, would similar research be doable with other senses just as well, or is that something that we have a harder time grasping or even formulating (due to a certain bias towards vision) ? edit: I've read the other comment about the double-take so in this case there seems to be some ways to test that out on other senses, but my question still holds when talking about the overall field and the prevalence of vision in this kind fo research
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

by mdeck_ 6y ago

titzer 6y ago

Galling can go both ways. Why is it that philosophists have gone hundreds or thousands of years thinking on a problem and produced no tangible results and yet Science put a man on the moon? Reproducibility.

keiferski 6y ago
No tangible results? You live in a world shaped entirely by political philosophy, which itself is almost inseparable from philosophy writ large historically. The modern political Western world is entirely built on Kantian ideals.
- NoOneNew 6y ago
  I think the biggest problem is the hubris to known knowledge. One thing I liked about the author was the acknowledgment that Freud made mistakes, but shouldn't be 100% dismissed either. I like relating this to modern atom theory. How vital is the understanding of electrons to atoms these days? It's borderline impossible to imagine how atoms work without knowing anything about electrons. Dalton developed modern atom theory in 1804. Electrons weren't discovered until the 1890s. 90 years of people probably saying, "it's impossible to get tangible results from testing atoms". Freud's theories are almost 100 years old now. We've come a long way... but how more advanced is atomic theory an extra 100 years after electrons were discovered? We are still stupid when it comes to psychology, thus unable to really make tangible results... yet. The faster that concept is respected, I truly think the faster advancements can be made because people won't get hung up on bad pop science declarations from innocent studies that are doing to their best to just discover some grain of truth.
  - SubiculumCode 6y ago
    Freud probably set us back 100 years. So much wasted effort spent pursuing a charlatan's musings.
    - NoOneNew 6y ago
      You're right, his work helped stop further vital research into wandering uterus and methods to cure women's tendencies to hysteria and insurrection, like lobotomies. Oh, the good ol' days. Again, he wasn't perfect by any stretch, but his work and push of psychoanalysis is the seed to our current forms of therapy. Yes, modern therapy still isnt perfect for war and trauma induced PTSD but holy shit it's better than cranking up the voltmeter on someone, pumping them full of cocaine and tobacco and snakeoil, or just locking them up in a padded room. This doesn't include some of the archaic religious torture practices some places of the world still utilize to this day. The dude was on the right track compared to the rest of his time. Give credit where credit is due. It's not like you invented the transistor. We all stand on someone else's shoulders. Hindsight is a whole hell of a lot easier than foresight. Again, we dont think Dalton set us back in atomic theory since he was the pioneer. Why the hate for any other pioneer then?
      - SubiculumCode 6y ago
        If he was such a pioneer of psychology and psychiatry, why is Freud pointedly ignored in Psychology and Psychiatry departments? And seriously, was the idea of subconscious motivations that innovative for his time?
pfortuny 6y ago
What is a result? Honestly. It is not solutions what Philosophers seek. Mostly they pose questions. The problem with Science is that it just answers them. And Scientist deem that sufficient. The hard thing is to tackle questions which have only personal answers. Universal ones are easy.
endisneigh 6y ago
What do you mean no tangible results? Pretty much everything around is derived from some philosophical idea that's been normalized throughout the population.
mdeck_ 6y ago
By definition philosophy has come to refer to the study of things that cannot be resolved by empirical inquiry. So, every time human advancements have ACTUALLY allowed us to answer a question, it ceases to be the realm of philosophy. For instance, Plato and other Ancient Greek philosophers theorized about the basic building blocks of matter—what their shapes and natures were. That question has become one of physics. That’s why philosophy is referred to as the Mother of the Sciences. This hardly makes philosophy worthy of your description as lacking “tangible results.”
evv555 6y ago
Progression of mathematics and Platonic ontologies are closely intertwined.
- nescioquid 6y ago
  Your comment piques my interest, and I'd like to know more. My first thought was about the Timaeus (geometrical structures of matter/elements), but I haven't read any treatments about Plato's theory of forms and the development of mathematics.
  - evv555 6y ago
    The cliffnotes version is "plato's forms/ideas" are a first attempt at articulating what abstractions are. Progression of Math is a chain of ideas leading back to these early thoughts. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundations_of_mathematics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundations_of_mathematics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_mathematics#Platonism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_mathematics#Plat...
tablespoon 6y ago
> Galling can go both ways. Why is it that philosophists have gone hundreds or thousands of years thinking on a problem and produced no tangible results and yet Science put a man on the moon? Reproducibility. Someone should probably let you know that science is a subset of philosophy (or "philosophism" as you seem to think it's called).
- whatshisface 6y ago
  Although true, that's like defending all human speech by saying that philosophy is a subset of all human speech, which itself has science as a subset.
  - tablespoon 6y ago
    > Although true, that's like defending all human speech by saying that philosophy is a subset of all human speech, which itself has science as a subset. Not really. To use your analogy a bit, the GGP was basically rejecting human language in favor of English on account of it being so wonderful that English-speakers visited the moon. It's nonsense. If you reject philosophy, you reject science.
    - whatshisface 6y ago
      >If you reject philosophy, you reject science. It doesn't take that much charity to interpret that what the original poster was saying as, "I reject the subset of philosophy that is not science, on the grounds that the subset which is science has all of the value," a legitimate position at least which is not tautologically false. I guess the reason why one thing being good could make another thing bad would be that time spent using nonscientific philosophical techniques to answer questions incurs an opportunity cost, that you are not using scientific techniques to answer them. Or even that trying to answer questions that scientific techniques can't solve incurs an opportunity cost, that you could be answering other questions that you had a chance at solving. (That would be a consistent belief if you thought that nonscientific thought couldn't make progress on questions, even if you conceded that scientific techniques could not make progress on all questions.)
omginternets 6y ago
Yours is literally a philosophical question. You are doing philosophy. Surely you see the relevance and importance of your own question... More to the point, most of what you hold dear is precisely philosophical in nature. Let us list but two, which I draw directly from your comment: 1. The value of putting a man on the moon 2. The superior (epistemological!) quality of scientific knowledge. That last one bears repeating. The entire reason you think that you think science is better than philosophy is because of a philosophical stance. You are manifestly an empiricist, albeit one who does not understand empiricism and its rational context very well. Respectfully, I leave you with the following quote by Gordan Fee: Before you can say, ‘I disagree,’ you must be able to say, ‘I understand.’ It is axiomatic that before you level criticism you should be able to state an author’s position in terms that he or she would find acceptable. Your position betrays an ignorance of philosophy that would appall history's greatest scientists.
- titzer 6y ago
  > Your position betrays an ignorance of philosophy And your entire reply rests on misreading of my comment; note that I said "a problem" not "all problems". There are many problems that philosophists have made absolutely no progress on in centuries or millenia because on those narrow questions the dialog is horribly imprecise and does not give rise to reproducible, testable things. Almost everyone who replied to me assumed that I meant all of philosophy is useless from basically missing the "a" word in my comment.
  - omginternets 6y ago
    That's fair. Please accept my apology for this oversight. Nevertheless, it makes your comparison with "putting a man on the moon" very puzzling. Why not compare this great achievement of science with a great achievement of philosophy? Moreover, you place science and philosophy in opposition with each other, yet science is exactly a subset of philosophy. And while you might point to the higher epistemological quality of empiricism (as opposed to, say, metaphysics), you would have to concede that science is also tackling easier questions by a significant margin, precisely because they can be apprehended through epistemologically-objective observation. Given the above, the charitable interpretation remains ignorance. One might even qualify it as "galling".

apples_oranges 6y ago

Funny you say that.. I've recently read a book about child psychology and it was constantly praising the progress of science (specifically neuroscience).. yet I've read all this stuff before, for example in Jung or even in the Stoics. Ok maybe they didn't know. Or maybe it's science's job to methodically confirm knowledge, that has so far been rather anecdotal, and scientists can pat themselves on the back for it, why not. But it somewhat annoyed me to read that book anyway. They just made it sound like some breakthrough research, which I think it wasn't.

shadowgovt 6y ago
The thing to remember about philosophy is that philosophy is more akin to mathematics than to science. It's the exercise of taking some postulates and forming a theory atop the assumption the postulates are true. Whether the philosophy you end up with actually reflects reality is a function of whether those postulates map to real things... The philosophy can (and, in history, many times, has) live independently of the postulates, describing an interesting, self-consistent world that just isn't real. Aristotle described matter as being made up of atoms, and he's first-order-approximation correct, but his mechanistic details of how they worked were extremely wrong. Descartes' famous "I think, therefore I am" proof rests extremely heavily on an assertion he makes earlier in the Discourse where he combats the hypothesis that he's just a brain in a jar being fed lies by an evil demon by asserting that the God that would allow that reality would be a really shitty god, so he dismisses it out of hand. It's through scientific investigation that we came to discover which parts of Aristotle's philosophy matched reality and which can be discarded (and we lack the scientific insight, as of yet, to have strong evidence for or against that evil-demon brain-in-a-jar hypothesis. ;) ). There are a thousand, thousand algebras that are internally-consistent but ultimately uninteresting because they map to nothing we observe in the universe, and then there's linear algebra. There are a thousand, thousand philosophies that are internally-consistent hot garbage, and then there's Jung. To say "Jung described this, why did it take science so long to discover it?" is like saying "Complex wave functions already describe quantum mechanics; why did it take physicists so long to realize that?" Now, what philosophy does gift us with (if it's grounded in strong logical consistency) is a roadmap of where to look next if we notice that things in reality do align to the postulates, because the philosopher has already imagined, in vivid detail, the consequences of those assertions. And that is extremely cool.

pfortuny 6y ago

Because you know, Aristotle was not a Scientist, so he must be wrong everywhere else. Same for anyone: from Plato to Descartes to Hume to Nietzsche to Husserl. Like Vizzini in the Princes Bride: "Plato, Aristotle... Morons". It is so easy to mistake science for wisdom.

danaliv 6y ago

Smart people have a tendency to think that their intelligence is enough to figure out anything. Turns out it's basically impossible to have an original thought in most fields without first getting caught up. Actually, now that I think about this, I'd extend it to just about everyone, not just academics/engineers/etc. Imagine two people working on a plumbing problem. An hour into it, Bob waltzes in, looks at it, and says, "did you try __?" The two people who have actually been working on it roll their eyes and mutter, "yes, Bob, we've been working on it." Sometimes Bob will get lucky and notice something they didn't, because they're too deep in the weeds, but I think people dramatically overestimate how likely this is.

cecilpl2 6y ago
It's important to recognize this tendency in everyone. When I have the instinct to say something like that, I switch gears and recognize that I'm not helping - I'm actively asking them to stop working on the problem and get me caught up. Usually the only time I'm actually helpful in situations like that is if I have esoteric knowledge or experience that is uncommon and directly related to the problem at hand - "Oh, I ran into this 3 years ago, here's what we did to solve it". Your peers have already tried the obvious things. Another rule of thumb to notice when this is happening is the word just. "Why don't you just..." is a belittling thing to say, as if they hadn't already thought of the obvious. Better is "why didn't X work"?
lostmsu 6y ago
On the other hand smart people tend to avoid simple solutions to "hard" problems, that reduce their ego to a mechanical process. For instance, I don't see a good reason why having consciousness of X is in any way fundamentally different, than having an ability to play StarCraft at MMR Y this instant in time. IMHO, conceptually they are the same and the only difference is the game being measured.

bondarchuk 6y ago

Searle: Chinese room argument Chalmers: philosophical zombies As you say, these topics have been carefully studies for thousands of years but these two have done a lot to muddy the waters with confusing arguments, and I don't blame anyone for disregarding them.

danaliv 6y ago
Have they muddied the waters, or have they shown that the problem is far more difficult than you want it to be?
- joefourier 6y ago
  The Chinese room argument certainly only exists to muddy the waters. The whole premise is a misdirection by having a human execute a Chinese-speaking program by hand, then asking if the human understands Chinese, completely ignoring the fact that is the program that is responsible for the behavior, not the human. That would be like asking if neurotransmitters understand Chinese instead of focusing on the brain as a whole. Philosophical zombies are a bit more interesting. However it flirts a bit too much with dualism in assuming something indistinguishable from a human can lack some "qualia" that a real human has. A more useful perspective would be from a human brain simulation angle.
  - bondarchuk 6y ago
    Indeed. If you reject that "the room as a whole" speaks Chinese, you reject functionalism. If you think philosophical zombies are conceivable, this is also a rejection of functionalism. Ultimately the acceptance or rejection of functionalism is (as far as I can tell) only a matter of dogma, and these two arguments serve to find out which dogma you (implicitly) subscribe to. Personally I place the rejection of functionalism on basically the same level as the acceptance of dualism. I don't know what precisely has happened to make most serious researchers reject dualism, but perhaps non-functionalism will run the same course.
    - GoblinSlayer 6y ago

klmadfejno 6y ago

Well googling Mark Solms Searle returns at least one paper by him that directly explores Searle's views so I'd say you're just sensitive. Ironically, you're opining on the scientist of opining on consciousness without having read philosophy, without having read the scientist.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

keiferski 6y ago

I continually go back to the story of Socrates and the Oracle of Delphi. 2500 years later and it’s still relevant today. The Oracle of Delphi pronounced Socrates the wisest of Greeks; and Socrates took this as approval of his agnosticism which was the starting point of his philosophy: ‘One thing only I know’, he said, ‘and that is that I know nothing’. Philosophy begins when one begins to doubt — when one begins to question the accepted wisdom of tradition. Particularly the one’s cherished beliefs, one’s dogmas and one’s axioms. Puzzled by the priestess of Delphi’s statement, Socrates felt obliged to seek the meaning of her remark. By questioning others who had a reputation for wisdom, he came to see that he was wiser than they, because unlike them he did not claim to know what he did not know.

op03 6y ago

No need to be confused or galled. Info asymmetry in society will keep growing as Info keeps growing. On the other hand that 6 inch chimp brain we have, has no way to keep up no matter what tech is produced within our lifetimes. So only thing worth doing is point people at things you know and keep walking, sort of like two ants passing each other in the universe.

keiferski 6y ago
Just be sure to look at the moon, not the pointing finger.

omginternets 6y ago

I have a Ph.D in Cognitive Neuroscience, and my dissertation was on the neurophysiological correlates of consciousness [0]. I can assure you that Philosophy of Mind is part of the curriculum. About a third of my dissertation deals with Descartes, Helmholtz, Ryle, Dennett, Searle, and others. The general consensus among my peers is that philosophy is an essential part of scientific inquiry. Studying philosophy of mind is regarded as the only way to ensure the empirical questions we're asking even make sense, or that our discoveries are non-trivial. It bears repeating: the cognitive neuroscientists I frequented have a deep respect and genuine interest in philosophy. [0] Specifically: I presented evidence that attention was a causal mechanism in conscious access. We were able to take stimuli that were initially not consciously perceived, and induce a conscious percept after the stimulus had disappeared by manipulating exogenous attention.

SamBam 6y ago
> We were able to take stimuli that were initially not consciously perceived, and induce a conscious percept after the stimulus had disappeared by manipulating exogenous attention. That's cool! Can you say more about how the experiment worked?
- omginternets 6y ago
  https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0148504 https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal... Here's a pure psychophysics study we performed. It gets at the essence of the mechanism without forcing you to wade through pages of fMRI-related esoterica. I'm happy to answer any questions :)
  - cmehdy 6y ago
    That's a cool experiment, and a well-written article, thanks! I've had a tiny bit of experience dealing with the visual system in a related but distant field (the feedback loops of visual accommodation and vergence and conflicts that can emerge with stereoscopic 3d - and I wish I had understood and done actually insightful things..). This left me wondering about the important place of vision-based experiments in the theories of perception as well as consciousness. What are your thoughts about that subject? For example, would similar research be doable with other senses just as well, or is that something that we have a harder time grasping or even formulating (due to a certain bias towards vision) ? edit: I've read the other comment about the double-take so in this case there seems to be some ways to test that out on other senses, but my question still holds when talking about the overall field and the prevalence of vision in this kind fo research

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]