9 ms·

Death

56 points by sutro 18y ago

Tichy 18y ago
Confirms my prejudice that studying maths and economics is much more worthwhile than philosophy. (Edit: I have only read chapter 23, which is concerned with choices and values - really, game theory and economics give you much better insights here, with fewer words).
- thorax 18y ago
  That's not very fair. "Worthwhile" can be judged in lots of ways. I agree that math and economics are very practical, but that doesn't mean philosophy is without value. I was a very interested in philosophy in college, and if I had chosen anything other than CompSci, that probably would have become my major. I have a lot of respect for people exploring metaphysical questions. While it's easy to dismiss them as "non-practical", I can't think ill of people who try to seek underlying meaning behind the day-to-day sciences/morality/etc. and improve our understanding of truth and logic. Those questions are really far harder than the ones I tackle day-to-day or even in my highest math/CS studies. I still feel like a wimp sometimes for not trying to attack "deeper" questions and paradoxes. In a sense, philosophy asks questions that all the sciences, ultimately, try to get us closer to answering. I don't think there's as much glory in asking the questions, but there's still a whole lot of them to ask. That being said, I understand your position entirely. Had I become an engineer without being introduced to philosophy first, everything there (sans the logic/fallacy discussions) would seem impractical. Now I see it as a fundamental that helped to start most of the major branches of science, and keeps growing discussion around some of the tougher problems we've yet to solve.
  - Retric 18y ago
    Most philosophy questions are a result of language not abstract ideas. When someone says something 'blue boy dry kite' you try and extract meaning so when encountering an idea that lacks meaning you still try and parse it. Some words even imply a world view that could be wrong. So: Q: What is ethics in a random universe? A: They are not compatible concepts. (In other words the question is wrong.) PS: As to the few big questions like life after death there is nothing in philosophy that let's you tackle such questions.
    - thorax 18y ago
      Philosophy (as I see it) is about asking big questions before science has a good answer. It's not about tackling questions as much as it is about posing questions and testing possible answers with logic before experiments or empirical evidence are available. Saying it has something to do with language parsing really sounds like a misguided generalization from some discussions. For an example nearer to a hacker's heart, take the "brain-in-a-vat" concept: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain_in_a_vat http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain_in_a_vat While science can't simulate this (well) for someone we can ask quite yet, I believe there's value in thinking about the implications of a fully simulated reality. This discussion was more or less started in the 1600's before we had any sort of technology that could remotely get us near to this. We still can't explore it yet, but it's a valid question and it's an important discussion on subjective reality. I think it's very healthy and productive for people to ask and explore deeper questions about reality. To pretend that you can't study things without experiments is taking the scientific method. True, experimental evidence is required (in my mind and for most educated folks in our era) to confirm or disprove even the most well-founded theories. Still, there is a very abundant space of theories that are nearly impossible to prove. I feel there's value in discussing them, building conceptual models, and reasoning about them before science is ready.
      - Tichy 18y ago
        Stuff like "brain in a vat" is exactly why I dismiss most philosophy. Where is the reference to that possibility in the lecture that was posted here? If we (or one of us) is just a brain in a vat, surely it would have a lot of implications for the value of life? I think "brain in a vat" only makes a stronger case for mathematics. After all, in the end what else but information and it's transformation matters? Everything else can be stripped away. And stuck with pure information, I think we are talking maths.
        GavinB 18y ago
        Amusing that you dismiss philosophy in the first paragraph and then go right ahead and engage in it in the second.
  - Tichy 18y ago
    Usually when I try to read a philosophical text, I find it very unsatisfying. The philosophers are just not rigorous, effectively invalidating all their own thoughts. Take chapter 23 from the lecture. It is about "how to live life in the face of death" and possible ways to maximize "value". But it seems to dodge the question what is value in the face of death, which would be the only worthwhile question. Instead it dwells on ways to optimize value, which could be better done with solid economic theory (it is "how to invest actions and time to maximize results"). Why does it matter what value one's life has? The lecture doesn't seem to give an answer. Will there be a judgment in afterlife, depending on our lives value? I don't think so. I think the "value" is strictly a subjective, individual thing, and therefore Philosophy can't help much with it. Perhaps what is useful is to get a better idea of the effects of our decisions (will people be harmed by my life style, that kind of stuff). But then again it seems "hard sciences" would be much better suited to answering that question than ancient poems and philosophy. Even if you believe in a judgment after life, I guess then you should assign a probability to the kind of god you will encounter and align your actions accordingly. I just don't see how philosophy could help. Except if you say mathematics is a special kind of philosophy - I could accept that. So in theory there could be useful philosophy, but I have never seen it (except for maths). Take that lecture: I actually new I could safely skip most of the chapters because they are obviously irrelevant (like the one's about "is there a soul or not"). They are just WAY too shortsighted. I bet they don't have a proper definition of what a soul would be, to begin with.
    - thorax 18y ago
      Usually when I try to read a philosophical text, I find it very unsatisfying. The philosophers are just not rigorous, effectively invalidating all their own thoughts. Yeah, I agree with most of your points. I feel this is a little more true of modern philosophers I read-- there is less rigor than is warranted. I don't feel it invalidates the important parts (to me), which are the questions raised by their arguments/discussion. Why does it matter what value one's life has? The lecture doesn't seem to give an answer. This lecture aside, (as I mentioned), I personally feel the value in philosophy is in the questions it raises and areas it explores, not specifically in any answers it provides. I also want those answers, but I don't look to philosophers to provide them. Sometimes they offer conceptual models that do help in scenarios where science isn't giving me a better one, but their "answers" are more like "suggestions" that may later give way to formal theories and empirical experiments once science catches up. They are just WAY too shortsighted. I think philosophers, as a whole, aren't short-sighted. I've always believed that the best philosophers explore different "assumption trees" in their quest for earnest questions. Certain assumptions have to be made in order to discuss much of anything at all in philosophy (e.g. we exist, etc) so some of the short-sightedness symptoms you sense might just be hidden in the assumptions of that particular discussion.
- bOR_ 18y ago
  game theory never seemed that convincing (I'm a theoretical biologist). Most people just don't seem to be that mathematically inclined and they stop iterating through some decision problem well before where logic should take them. As such, it makes a lot of the points that the field is making m00t, as they try pin the results derived from Homo economicus / logicus onto Homo Sapiens. see http://slashdot.org/pollBooth.pl?qid=1518&aid=-1 http://slashdot.org/pollBooth.pl?qid=1518&aid=-1 for an example of this. The result seems to be an outcome of people only thinking one step ahead, and those thinking superrational (i.e. estimating how much steps ahead people will be thinking, and chosing according to that). Philosophy (reading transcript 23 now as well) might in general be more useful to a human mind then some theoretical system on how a non-existant optimal human would behave. Just read it. It's nice I think, especially if you've never been exposed to the ideas in there and if you are willing to seriously consider the questions raised. I'd rate it as more useful than game theory by far.
  - Tichy 18y ago
    The most interesting aspect of Game Theory I have encountered are the "Evolutionary Stable Strategies". Not sure if they are even officially considered Game Theory, as I read about them in a Dawkins book. But I think the concept is extremely important when trying to understand the world around us. It makes the "people are just not rational" aspect irrelevant - evolution in the long run is rational, or rather mindlessly testing all the relevant strategies, so we still need Game Theory to figure out which strategies will be the most likely to prevail.
  - nazgulnarsil 18y ago
    game theory wouldn't be interesting if it was the study of the actions of perfect bayesian reasoners. that's the whole point, studying where we DON'T make the purely rational choice and why. Exposing cognitive bias is very important for every field of science.
    - bOR_ 18y ago
      Then I might just have been unlucky with the game theory talks that I've heard. Most dealt with endless variants of the prisoners dilemma: in space, non-absolute, stochastic, with and without memory. All seemed a bit too abstract for what we would actually encounter irl
- fireywrath114 18y ago
  Wow. Philosophy really has added so much to the world that you people seem to have blinded yourself towards: Scientific method, traced back to Aristotle, or Charles Peirce. Both well known and respected philosophers. B.F. Skinner's behaviorism research which was pivotal within psychology; also a respected philosopher. I really can keep going on and on, but it doesn't seem necessary. Philosophers have been responsible for turning heads in new directions, as opposed to just those logically connected to an idea. Those arguments which call philosophy not well thought out or baseless are looking at these novel ideas as baseless without some body of evidence to back them up. Treating the philosopher's ideas a hypothesis rather than their declaration of fact should satisfy some comments based around how they can be worthwhile. Try writing a 200 page book describing a large-scale system in exact detail which covers all loose ends, and I think you'll run into the same issues with vague-ness and seeming leaps in logic. Half of the interest in philosophy is the argument, the debate and defending and fleshing out one's ideas. To turn out something that's perfect really detracts from the evolution of ideas. At the very least, this training your mind how to overcome arguments and refining your ideas leads to people of stronger characters, sharper minds, and a more diverse set of interests than just the issue in front of them. Sure game theory describes a way to get what you want based on the circumstances, but do they go into what virtues are, how ethics apply, or even how life is changed by what you're doing? The ideas may not be set in stone and clear as day, but they make people think about different ideas and offer more insight based on the research that people have done than just "aha, this protein does inhibit viruses." The synthesis of ideas and cross-application nowadays is where science is at. Sure they may get there eventually using cold hard facts and logic, but every once in a while, a baseless argument ties in pretty nicely and can advance a theory more quickly just by making people think a bit harder.
  - DanielBMarkham 18y ago
    Upvoted for mention of C.S. Peirce. Never hear that much about him, but he was the man, at least 120 or so years ago.
  - pfedor 18y ago
    Philosophy really has added so much to the world that you people seem to have blinded yourself towards: Scientific method, traced back to Aristotle If you want to read what a real scientist has to say about the value that philosophy adds to science, I suggest "Dreams of Final Theory" by Steven Weinberg, chapter 7, "Against philosophy": http://depts.washington.edu/ssnet/Weinberg_SSN_1_14.pdf http://depts.washington.edu/ssnet/Weinberg_SSN_1_14.pdf
- maurycy 18y ago
  Why not have the best of all worlds? Philosophy of math generated a lot of interesting questions in the past.
- yelsgib 18y ago
  The salient question is "what is value?" One aim of Philosophy is to align our abstractions with our intuitions. Game theory/math can't do this, sorry. Your prejudice is undoubtedly based on your lack of understanding of math, economics, and philosophy. Please do not be so arrogant. (note that I'm not claiming a perfect understanding of any of these - and yes, I realize this is ad hominem - but I'm fairly bored/frustrated by reading these same tired criticisms of philosophy)
  - Tichy 18y ago
    "One aim of Philosophy is to align our abstractions with our intuitions" I don't understand this sentence. I guess it means "philosophy is subjective"? If your understanding of those subjects is so great, then please elaborate. Also, I was referring to chapter 23, which seems to be purely about economic decisions. So clearly maths and economics are much better suited for treating the issue.
    - yelsgib 18y ago
      What does "subjective" mean? This question is not so straightforward as you (may) think. This is a microcosm of my point. What is value? How do we determine the relative values of our life decisions descriptively? How do we do so prescriptively? My claim is not that my understanding of the subjects is great - it's that your understanding of them (from what you've said in the comments) is shallow. Subjects do not exist independent of semantics - math and economics are only "useful" if we can transform our observations into their abstractions and vice versa (1 apple and 1 apple -> 1 + 1 = 2 -> 2 apples). Philosophy can give us tools for performing those transformations. It's very difficult to say what is of value in life (is a family of value? food? shelter? what are their relative worths?) and so is correspondingly difficult to use our abstract tools (math, economics, game theory) on the components of our observation (money, time, etc.) I'm not saying that chapter 23 is great, but I can motivate its use in -normal people's- lives. Normal people can't understand game theory, but that doesn't mean that they -should- or that they -need to- in order to survive or think about how they want to structure their lives. My real point is just that it seems very arrogant to me to assert that some hack Yale professors ideas validate your "prejudices" re: philosophy. It's better to say honestly that you don't understand philosophy. Maybe you don't want to. That's fine. I don't care. My point is that you shouldn't rail against it if you don't understand it. No one cares about your personal preferences, so you conflate them with moral high-ground and assert them in a public sphere. Good luck with everything :)
- nazgulnarsil 18y ago
  You do know what PhD stands for don't you? Everything is philosophy at high enough (or you could say low enough) level. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_mathematics http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_mathematics educate yourself.
  - nazgulnarsil 18y ago
    it's quite amusing that "do" and "don't" can be switched in that first question and the meaning is the same.
iamelgringo 18y ago
-1 off topic
- mechanical_fish 18y ago
  I don't think this is necessarily true, but in this case I'd agree with you. This link utterly fails to convince me that it's on topic.
sethg 18y ago
Does the Yale philosophy department have a "Taxes" course, as well?
- steveplace 18y ago
  Certainly.
Herring 18y ago
You gotta figure something's gone horribly wrong if you're still reading Plato for anything. Anyone got some decent resources to wash away the taste of fail?
- river_styx 18y ago
  You're right. Classics are such a waste of time. Let's throw out Ovid, Homer, Dante, Bach, and Mozart while we're at it.
  - maurycy 18y ago
    You're comparing oranges to apples, and depreciating philosophy, which is more science than art. No one seriously discusses papers of guys who believed odd scientific theories from XVI.
    - river_styx 18y ago
      My point is that, even if you dismiss those works as having little scientific value, they have great literary value as well.
      - maurycy 18y ago
        So, their place would be in the literature courses, not philosophy ones.
        river_styx 18y ago
        You're still not getting it. What I'm saying is that Plato's works have both philosophical and literary value. Even if you dispute the first, there is still the second. I'm not sure why this is would mean moving them from philosophy to literature courses (or why those should be mutually exclusive in the first place).
  - jazj 18y ago
    I'm game.
fauigerzigerk 18y ago
What about the "Hacking Death" lecture? I'd really love to find a cool hack to make death a little more palatable ;-)
- j2d2 18y ago
  I think the 60's discovered a few.
- abcde 18y ago
  Well, I'm a transhumanist so I don't believe that I will necessarily die. I would guess the best bet for a compsci major is to try to invent a AI or something that enhances cognition so that scientific research is sped up enough to find a cure for death before you die.
mynameishere 18y ago
27. Parrots, and
- DanielBMarkham 18y ago
  He's just pining for the fjords
- clueless 18y ago
  could someone enlighten us as to what this means?
  - mhartl 18y ago
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Parrot http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Parrot
andreyf 18y ago
Most Philosophy departments have something like this, although with more wordy names. At Rutgers, there was (01:730:371) Philosophies of Death and Dying. http://catalogs.rutgers.edu/generated/nb-ug_current/pg20657.html#82082 http://catalogs.rutgers.edu/generated/nb-ug_current/pg20657....
- lg 18y ago
  Yeah, and at Rutgers I think this is usually a summer class taught by a grad student and taken by nonmajors trying to fulfill a requirement. Probably for good reason.
mrtron 18y ago
Dying is easy to understand, and you won't fail to accomplish it. Living well on the other hand...
- yelsgib 18y ago
  "well" Dying is not easy to understand.
time_management 18y ago
A major philosophical problem with death is that its character changes dramatically depending on what happens afterward, and nobody knows what does happen, which makes the whole topic rather difficult to evaluate. The best we can do is to study how death's approach affects our lives, which has more to do with our attitudes toward it and what we think will happen. If there's no afterlife, death is to be hated intensely, but not feared at all, because no unpleasant experience will come from death itself, though the prelude may be terrible. In fact, the great casualty of materialism is not death but aging. Death becomes neutral, while aging becomes terrible, pointless, and ultimately disgusting. The fact that we're aging from the first moment of life makes materialism especially horrifying. No offense to the atheist materialists here, but I'd become severely depressed if I thought materialism were the case, because the omnipresence and inevitability of eventual bodily failure are rarely far from my mind. If there is an afterlife, death is not to be hated, and possibly to be loved, but it is to be feared, because it marks a transition into a sort of existence we know nothing about. Many atheists who have near-death experiences describe an initial, liminal point of awareness, surprise, and fear. They anticipated eternal sleep in death, and yet experience a moment of awareness while being "dead", and this is shocking to them. So it seems like exactly one of these two attitudes-- hatred, fear-- is appropriate for death. It seems like very few people can sustain the sort of metaphysical confidence that would prevent them from having one of these two attitudes; I think it's psychologically difficult to keep perfect faith. Death could be hated and feared by a person who anticipated a negative afterlife, but few people anticipate such a fate for themselves, and indeed this scenario seems far more unlikely than any of the alternatives (namely, a positive afterlife such as heaven, a neutral-positive one such as rebirth, or the dismal but ultimately neutral scenario of annihilation).
delackner 18y ago
Thank you. This is the most thoughtful and really mind expanding thing I have read in months. I notice a lot of commentary on lecture 23. Skip that. Read 16 onward. The meat of this whole thing is his really long treatment of the questions of why we fear death, what it is we fear, what about death is so bad, and what that suggests about how we should LIVE. These are not new concepts, but it is easy to try to ignore them.

56 points by sutro 18y ago

Tichy 18y ago

Confirms my prejudice that studying maths and economics is much more worthwhile than philosophy. (Edit: I have only read chapter 23, which is concerned with choices and values - really, game theory and economics give you much better insights here, with fewer words).

thorax 18y ago
That's not very fair. "Worthwhile" can be judged in lots of ways. I agree that math and economics are very practical, but that doesn't mean philosophy is without value. I was a very interested in philosophy in college, and if I had chosen anything other than CompSci, that probably would have become my major. I have a lot of respect for people exploring metaphysical questions. While it's easy to dismiss them as "non-practical", I can't think ill of people who try to seek underlying meaning behind the day-to-day sciences/morality/etc. and improve our understanding of truth and logic. Those questions are really far harder than the ones I tackle day-to-day or even in my highest math/CS studies. I still feel like a wimp sometimes for not trying to attack "deeper" questions and paradoxes. In a sense, philosophy asks questions that all the sciences, ultimately, try to get us closer to answering. I don't think there's as much glory in asking the questions, but there's still a whole lot of them to ask. That being said, I understand your position entirely. Had I become an engineer without being introduced to philosophy first, everything there (sans the logic/fallacy discussions) would seem impractical. Now I see it as a fundamental that helped to start most of the major branches of science, and keeps growing discussion around some of the tougher problems we've yet to solve.
- Retric 18y ago
  Most philosophy questions are a result of language not abstract ideas. When someone says something 'blue boy dry kite' you try and extract meaning so when encountering an idea that lacks meaning you still try and parse it. Some words even imply a world view that could be wrong. So: Q: What is ethics in a random universe? A: They are not compatible concepts. (In other words the question is wrong.) PS: As to the few big questions like life after death there is nothing in philosophy that let's you tackle such questions.
  - thorax 18y ago
    Philosophy (as I see it) is about asking big questions before science has a good answer. It's not about tackling questions as much as it is about posing questions and testing possible answers with logic before experiments or empirical evidence are available. Saying it has something to do with language parsing really sounds like a misguided generalization from some discussions. For an example nearer to a hacker's heart, take the "brain-in-a-vat" concept: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain_in_a_vat http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain_in_a_vat While science can't simulate this (well) for someone we can ask quite yet, I believe there's value in thinking about the implications of a fully simulated reality. This discussion was more or less started in the 1600's before we had any sort of technology that could remotely get us near to this. We still can't explore it yet, but it's a valid question and it's an important discussion on subjective reality. I think it's very healthy and productive for people to ask and explore deeper questions about reality. To pretend that you can't study things without experiments is taking the scientific method. True, experimental evidence is required (in my mind and for most educated folks in our era) to confirm or disprove even the most well-founded theories. Still, there is a very abundant space of theories that are nearly impossible to prove. I feel there's value in discussing them, building conceptual models, and reasoning about them before science is ready.
    - Tichy 18y ago
      Stuff like "brain in a vat" is exactly why I dismiss most philosophy. Where is the reference to that possibility in the lecture that was posted here? If we (or one of us) is just a brain in a vat, surely it would have a lot of implications for the value of life? I think "brain in a vat" only makes a stronger case for mathematics. After all, in the end what else but information and it's transformation matters? Everything else can be stripped away. And stuck with pure information, I think we are talking maths.
      - GavinB 18y ago
        Amusing that you dismiss philosophy in the first paragraph and then go right ahead and engage in it in the second.
- Tichy 18y ago
  Usually when I try to read a philosophical text, I find it very unsatisfying. The philosophers are just not rigorous, effectively invalidating all their own thoughts. Take chapter 23 from the lecture. It is about "how to live life in the face of death" and possible ways to maximize "value". But it seems to dodge the question what is value in the face of death, which would be the only worthwhile question. Instead it dwells on ways to optimize value, which could be better done with solid economic theory (it is "how to invest actions and time to maximize results"). Why does it matter what value one's life has? The lecture doesn't seem to give an answer. Will there be a judgment in afterlife, depending on our lives value? I don't think so. I think the "value" is strictly a subjective, individual thing, and therefore Philosophy can't help much with it. Perhaps what is useful is to get a better idea of the effects of our decisions (will people be harmed by my life style, that kind of stuff). But then again it seems "hard sciences" would be much better suited to answering that question than ancient poems and philosophy. Even if you believe in a judgment after life, I guess then you should assign a probability to the kind of god you will encounter and align your actions accordingly. I just don't see how philosophy could help. Except if you say mathematics is a special kind of philosophy - I could accept that. So in theory there could be useful philosophy, but I have never seen it (except for maths). Take that lecture: I actually new I could safely skip most of the chapters because they are obviously irrelevant (like the one's about "is there a soul or not"). They are just WAY too shortsighted. I bet they don't have a proper definition of what a soul would be, to begin with.
  - thorax 18y ago
    Usually when I try to read a philosophical text, I find it very unsatisfying. The philosophers are just not rigorous, effectively invalidating all their own thoughts. Yeah, I agree with most of your points. I feel this is a little more true of modern philosophers I read-- there is less rigor than is warranted. I don't feel it invalidates the important parts (to me), which are the questions raised by their arguments/discussion. Why does it matter what value one's life has? The lecture doesn't seem to give an answer. This lecture aside, (as I mentioned), I personally feel the value in philosophy is in the questions it raises and areas it explores, not specifically in any answers it provides. I also want those answers, but I don't look to philosophers to provide them. Sometimes they offer conceptual models that do help in scenarios where science isn't giving me a better one, but their "answers" are more like "suggestions" that may later give way to formal theories and empirical experiments once science catches up. They are just WAY too shortsighted. I think philosophers, as a whole, aren't short-sighted. I've always believed that the best philosophers explore different "assumption trees" in their quest for earnest questions. Certain assumptions have to be made in order to discuss much of anything at all in philosophy (e.g. we exist, etc) so some of the short-sightedness symptoms you sense might just be hidden in the assumptions of that particular discussion.
bOR_ 18y ago
game theory never seemed that convincing (I'm a theoretical biologist). Most people just don't seem to be that mathematically inclined and they stop iterating through some decision problem well before where logic should take them. As such, it makes a lot of the points that the field is making m00t, as they try pin the results derived from Homo economicus / logicus onto Homo Sapiens. see http://slashdot.org/pollBooth.pl?qid=1518&aid=-1 http://slashdot.org/pollBooth.pl?qid=1518&aid=-1 for an example of this. The result seems to be an outcome of people only thinking one step ahead, and those thinking superrational (i.e. estimating how much steps ahead people will be thinking, and chosing according to that). Philosophy (reading transcript 23 now as well) might in general be more useful to a human mind then some theoretical system on how a non-existant optimal human would behave. Just read it. It's nice I think, especially if you've never been exposed to the ideas in there and if you are willing to seriously consider the questions raised. I'd rate it as more useful than game theory by far.
- Tichy 18y ago
  The most interesting aspect of Game Theory I have encountered are the "Evolutionary Stable Strategies". Not sure if they are even officially considered Game Theory, as I read about them in a Dawkins book. But I think the concept is extremely important when trying to understand the world around us. It makes the "people are just not rational" aspect irrelevant - evolution in the long run is rational, or rather mindlessly testing all the relevant strategies, so we still need Game Theory to figure out which strategies will be the most likely to prevail.
- nazgulnarsil 18y ago
  game theory wouldn't be interesting if it was the study of the actions of perfect bayesian reasoners. that's the whole point, studying where we DON'T make the purely rational choice and why. Exposing cognitive bias is very important for every field of science.
  - bOR_ 18y ago
    Then I might just have been unlucky with the game theory talks that I've heard. Most dealt with endless variants of the prisoners dilemma: in space, non-absolute, stochastic, with and without memory. All seemed a bit too abstract for what we would actually encounter irl
fireywrath114 18y ago
Wow. Philosophy really has added so much to the world that you people seem to have blinded yourself towards: Scientific method, traced back to Aristotle, or Charles Peirce. Both well known and respected philosophers. B.F. Skinner's behaviorism research which was pivotal within psychology; also a respected philosopher. I really can keep going on and on, but it doesn't seem necessary. Philosophers have been responsible for turning heads in new directions, as opposed to just those logically connected to an idea. Those arguments which call philosophy not well thought out or baseless are looking at these novel ideas as baseless without some body of evidence to back them up. Treating the philosopher's ideas a hypothesis rather than their declaration of fact should satisfy some comments based around how they can be worthwhile. Try writing a 200 page book describing a large-scale system in exact detail which covers all loose ends, and I think you'll run into the same issues with vague-ness and seeming leaps in logic. Half of the interest in philosophy is the argument, the debate and defending and fleshing out one's ideas. To turn out something that's perfect really detracts from the evolution of ideas. At the very least, this training your mind how to overcome arguments and refining your ideas leads to people of stronger characters, sharper minds, and a more diverse set of interests than just the issue in front of them. Sure game theory describes a way to get what you want based on the circumstances, but do they go into what virtues are, how ethics apply, or even how life is changed by what you're doing? The ideas may not be set in stone and clear as day, but they make people think about different ideas and offer more insight based on the research that people have done than just "aha, this protein does inhibit viruses." The synthesis of ideas and cross-application nowadays is where science is at. Sure they may get there eventually using cold hard facts and logic, but every once in a while, a baseless argument ties in pretty nicely and can advance a theory more quickly just by making people think a bit harder.
- DanielBMarkham 18y ago
  Upvoted for mention of C.S. Peirce. Never hear that much about him, but he was the man, at least 120 or so years ago.
- pfedor 18y ago
  Philosophy really has added so much to the world that you people seem to have blinded yourself towards: Scientific method, traced back to Aristotle If you want to read what a real scientist has to say about the value that philosophy adds to science, I suggest "Dreams of Final Theory" by Steven Weinberg, chapter 7, "Against philosophy": http://depts.washington.edu/ssnet/Weinberg_SSN_1_14.pdf http://depts.washington.edu/ssnet/Weinberg_SSN_1_14.pdf
maurycy 18y ago
Why not have the best of all worlds? Philosophy of math generated a lot of interesting questions in the past.
yelsgib 18y ago
The salient question is "what is value?" One aim of Philosophy is to align our abstractions with our intuitions. Game theory/math can't do this, sorry. Your prejudice is undoubtedly based on your lack of understanding of math, economics, and philosophy. Please do not be so arrogant. (note that I'm not claiming a perfect understanding of any of these - and yes, I realize this is ad hominem - but I'm fairly bored/frustrated by reading these same tired criticisms of philosophy)
- Tichy 18y ago
  "One aim of Philosophy is to align our abstractions with our intuitions" I don't understand this sentence. I guess it means "philosophy is subjective"? If your understanding of those subjects is so great, then please elaborate. Also, I was referring to chapter 23, which seems to be purely about economic decisions. So clearly maths and economics are much better suited for treating the issue.
  - yelsgib 18y ago
    What does "subjective" mean? This question is not so straightforward as you (may) think. This is a microcosm of my point. What is value? How do we determine the relative values of our life decisions descriptively? How do we do so prescriptively? My claim is not that my understanding of the subjects is great - it's that your understanding of them (from what you've said in the comments) is shallow. Subjects do not exist independent of semantics - math and economics are only "useful" if we can transform our observations into their abstractions and vice versa (1 apple and 1 apple -> 1 + 1 = 2 -> 2 apples). Philosophy can give us tools for performing those transformations. It's very difficult to say what is of value in life (is a family of value? food? shelter? what are their relative worths?) and so is correspondingly difficult to use our abstract tools (math, economics, game theory) on the components of our observation (money, time, etc.) I'm not saying that chapter 23 is great, but I can motivate its use in -normal people's- lives. Normal people can't understand game theory, but that doesn't mean that they -should- or that they -need to- in order to survive or think about how they want to structure their lives. My real point is just that it seems very arrogant to me to assert that some hack Yale professors ideas validate your "prejudices" re: philosophy. It's better to say honestly that you don't understand philosophy. Maybe you don't want to. That's fine. I don't care. My point is that you shouldn't rail against it if you don't understand it. No one cares about your personal preferences, so you conflate them with moral high-ground and assert them in a public sphere. Good luck with everything :)
nazgulnarsil 18y ago
You do know what PhD stands for don't you? Everything is philosophy at high enough (or you could say low enough) level. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_mathematics http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_mathematics educate yourself.
- nazgulnarsil 18y ago
  it's quite amusing that "do" and "don't" can be switched in that first question and the meaning is the same.

iamelgringo 18y ago

-1 off topic

mechanical_fish 18y ago
I don't think this is necessarily true, but in this case I'd agree with you. This link utterly fails to convince me that it's on topic.

sethg 18y ago

Does the Yale philosophy department have a "Taxes" course, as well?

steveplace 18y ago
Certainly.

Herring 18y ago

You gotta figure something's gone horribly wrong if you're still reading Plato for anything. Anyone got some decent resources to wash away the taste of fail?

river_styx 18y ago
You're right. Classics are such a waste of time. Let's throw out Ovid, Homer, Dante, Bach, and Mozart while we're at it.
- maurycy 18y ago
  You're comparing oranges to apples, and depreciating philosophy, which is more science than art. No one seriously discusses papers of guys who believed odd scientific theories from XVI.
  - river_styx 18y ago
    My point is that, even if you dismiss those works as having little scientific value, they have great literary value as well.
    - maurycy 18y ago
      So, their place would be in the literature courses, not philosophy ones.
      - river_styx 18y ago
        You're still not getting it. What I'm saying is that Plato's works have both philosophical and literary value. Even if you dispute the first, there is still the second. I'm not sure why this is would mean moving them from philosophy to literature courses (or why those should be mutually exclusive in the first place).
- jazj 18y ago
  I'm game.

fauigerzigerk 18y ago

What about the "Hacking Death" lecture? I'd really love to find a cool hack to make death a little more palatable ;-)

j2d2 18y ago
I think the 60's discovered a few.
abcde 18y ago
Well, I'm a transhumanist so I don't believe that I will necessarily die. I would guess the best bet for a compsci major is to try to invent a AI or something that enhances cognition so that scientific research is sped up enough to find a cure for death before you die.

mynameishere 18y ago

27. Parrots, and

DanielBMarkham 18y ago
He's just pining for the fjords
clueless 18y ago
could someone enlighten us as to what this means?
- mhartl 18y ago
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Parrot http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Parrot

andreyf 18y ago

Most Philosophy departments have something like this, although with more wordy names. At Rutgers, there was (01:730:371) Philosophies of Death and Dying. http://catalogs.rutgers.edu/generated/nb-ug_current/pg20657.html#82082 http://catalogs.rutgers.edu/generated/nb-ug_current/pg20657....

lg 18y ago
Yeah, and at Rutgers I think this is usually a summer class taught by a grad student and taken by nonmajors trying to fulfill a requirement. Probably for good reason.

mrtron 18y ago

Dying is easy to understand, and you won't fail to accomplish it. Living well on the other hand...

yelsgib 18y ago
"well" Dying is not easy to understand.

time_management 18y ago

A major philosophical problem with death is that its character changes dramatically depending on what happens afterward, and nobody knows what does happen, which makes the whole topic rather difficult to evaluate. The best we can do is to study how death's approach affects our lives, which has more to do with our attitudes toward it and what we think will happen. If there's no afterlife, death is to be hated intensely, but not feared at all, because no unpleasant experience will come from death itself, though the prelude may be terrible. In fact, the great casualty of materialism is not death but aging. Death becomes neutral, while aging becomes terrible, pointless, and ultimately disgusting. The fact that we're aging from the first moment of life makes materialism especially horrifying. No offense to the atheist materialists here, but I'd become severely depressed if I thought materialism were the case, because the omnipresence and inevitability of eventual bodily failure are rarely far from my mind. If there is an afterlife, death is not to be hated, and possibly to be loved, but it is to be feared, because it marks a transition into a sort of existence we know nothing about. Many atheists who have near-death experiences describe an initial, liminal point of awareness, surprise, and fear. They anticipated eternal sleep in death, and yet experience a moment of awareness while being "dead", and this is shocking to them. So it seems like exactly one of these two attitudes-- hatred, fear-- is appropriate for death. It seems like very few people can sustain the sort of metaphysical confidence that would prevent them from having one of these two attitudes; I think it's psychologically difficult to keep perfect faith. Death could be hated and feared by a person who anticipated a negative afterlife, but few people anticipate such a fate for themselves, and indeed this scenario seems far more unlikely than any of the alternatives (namely, a positive afterlife such as heaven, a neutral-positive one such as rebirth, or the dismal but ultimately neutral scenario of annihilation).

delackner 18y ago

Thank you. This is the most thoughtful and really mind expanding thing I have read in months. I notice a lot of commentary on lecture 23. Skip that. Read 16 onward. The meat of this whole thing is his really long treatment of the questions of why we fear death, what it is we fear, what about death is so bad, and what that suggests about how we should LIVE. These are not new concepts, but it is easy to try to ignore them.