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"Understanding our reasoning capacities as the outcome of a natural physical process leads to my agreement with Dawkins's claim that any philosophical result pr

"Understanding our reasoning capacities as the outcome of a natural physical process leads to my agreement with Dawkins's claim that any philosophical result prior to 1859 can be disregarded." I'm sorry my friend, but...no. I'm open to a lot of ideas and directions that a discussion may take but this is just a non-starter, a laughable example of exactly the sort of benighted, willful ignorance that dooms fruitful discussion. This is the kind of statement you can only make if you haven't read philosophy written before 1859. I mean, of course, _The Origin of Species_ was a watershed to be sure, but there's certain philosophical freight even Darwin can't carry. I think underneath this is a problem of false analogy. Philosophical insight is not the same species as math, and doesn't "build" the same way, in a scaffold of proofs and deductive confidence towards an inevitable conclusion that, once reached, can be accepted on its own terms without understanding of the prior movements. I'd suggest reading a bit further and broaden your engagement. As a mathematician, you might appreciate Pierre Duhem's views on religion and history, Whitehead's ideas on the history of science, and in particular I'd say check out Hans Jonas' "Is God a Mathematician?". All of those pass the 1859 smell test as well, so, bonus!

davesims 15y ago
Ok, let me apologize. "Laughable" and "benighted" are the kinds of uncharitable language I'm arguing against using. The charitable read of this statement would have acknowledged its substance -- the idea that after Darwin there was a 'clearing of the decks' so to speak, and to some degree that's true although not to the extent Dawkins claims. From a philosophical standpoint, certainly Teleology was seen to have been dealt a death blow, at least the kind of teleology advocated by folks like Paley, and that was a massive turn. I'm unaware of any serious philosopher or historian of ideas that would suggest it's wise to dismiss all prior developments out of hand, though. If that's not laughable, it's certainly dangerous.
- robertk 15y ago
  I don't see why. Without mechanical tools and rudimentary physics, progress on flying machines was nil until the Wright brothers. Without better tools to study brains, there is no reason to expect we have produced any valuable answers to the sorts of "big questions" brains ask about themselves.
robertk 15y ago
Thank you for the references. I wasn't trying to debate the point, only offer one perspective on your question. To elaborate a little more, the reason why philosophy prior to 1859 is not relevant is because philosophy is the study of human thought (and the answers it produces to philosophical questions), whereas the origin of the organ which produces human thought was fundamentally misunderstood without the evolutionary framework. A good analogy here is alchemy; Darwin's results implied prior philosophy was the wrong approach as chemistry implied the confused results of alchemy, and all the latter's results were reduced to no more than historical curiosity. As an addendum, the reason why philosophy has been unsuccessful at producing answers is because it assumes human thought or language or existence as something fundamental. As Eliezer points out, rather than ask "do we have free will?", the productive perspective is to ask "what sort of algorithm does our brain run which makes it believe such a question is meaningful or answerable?" Have you read the Less Wrong series on rationality? It's a good exposition of the thinking process of someone like me. Certainly the attempts prior to 1859 were brave, but it was quackery. Much like Erdos's comments on the collatz conjecture, we are not yet ready for such questions (although neuroscience will get us close in the next century).
- davesims 15y ago
  "the origin of the organ which produces human thought was fundamentally misunderstood without the evolutionary framework." This is a concise version of the fundamental category mistake Dawkins makes. In one sentence, we've dogmatically blown past thousands of years of deep reflection on the mind/body question. It's not as if the idea that mind were reducible to matter had never been broached before, or that the Mendelian breakthrough provided some evidence that was philosophically pertinent. And Certainly Origin of Species does not put a cap on that discussion any more than Dennett's Consciousness Explained does. It's very much a live question to this day, as it was a live question when Cicero and Lucretius engaged on the very same terms. If the mind/body problem has not been settled now (and it certainly wasn't in 1859, that's more than anyone could possibly claim) then for that reason at least no one should take Dawkins seriously on this count, and fortunately very few serious thinkers do. "although neuroscience will get us close in the next century" This is first-rate eschatology, more cashing out of the infinite blank check of the Future of Science (let us pray). This is dogmatism, not science, not philosophy. It's hope.
loup-vaillant 15y ago
> Philosophical insight is not the same species as math, and doesn't "build" the same way […] Err, I think this one is a non-sequitur. The actual argument would be to say that science and philosophy aren't the same. But, as a believer of reductionistic materialism myself, I fully expect science to confirm or disprove nearly every philosophical insight there ever was (except maybe the moral ones, but even then, moral realism isn't far from my mind). Of course, it's not like Darwin invalidated all prior philosophy, but it did invalidated some beliefs, like Young Earth Creationism. So here is what I believe to be the correct phrasing: "Any philosophical result prior to the science that falsified it can be disregarded". Well, you can scrap "philosophical": it applies to any result.
- davesims 15y ago
  Nice to see this thread keep going. So.. "I fully expect science to confirm or disprove nearly every philosophical insight there ever was" "Any philosophical result prior to the science that falsified it can be disregarded" These are the non-sequiturs. Science is a sub-species of philosophy, whether you're willing to acknowledge it or not. Any reasonable survey of the history of science and its foundations must acknowledge this from an historical standpoint, and any objective examination of the ideas should quickly see Science's dependence on philosophical foundations. I don't want to be unkind, but this is precisely the kind of historical and intellectual illiteracy I'm talking about. What you're stating here is truly dogmatic and emotive, and disconnected from anything resembling a healthy contextualization or understanding of the centuries of thinkers and writings that were poured into building the very worldview you take for granted. You and I would have to go through some long discussion and/or remedial reading to get to the point where we could progress the argument reasonably, and I suspect you'd run out of patience and just wave your hand, make another high-handed dogmatic statement about The Sovereignty of Science and move on to something that made you less uncomfortable. I hope not, but my experience with discussions like this makes me suspect so.
  - loup-vaillant 15y ago
    I think I agree with most of what you just wrote. Now, regarding my "correct" phrasing, I did not reduce the sentence to its essence. If I do, there's not much left: "Any result that has been falsified can be disregarded", which is a near-tautology (sorry about that). About science being a sub-specie of philosophy, well, it certainly looks like so. I am not well versed in the history of science and philosophy, but I do recall that many scientific fields either spawned from philosophy, or answer what was once philosophical questions. As for philosophical foundations, well, there's Bayes, Occam's Razor, and of course the plain old scientific methodology. We indeed don't have to look very far. Now about my assumptions: In a trivial sense, there's only one reality (or world, or universe). Each of us looks at it from a different window, of course, but if it weren't the "same" reality, we wouldn't be interacting at all. Now the trick is to figure out what this reality is. Relativism is bullshit. More precisely, for any given two contradictory models of reality, at least one of them contains mistakes. Yes/no questions are even easier: the correct answer is bound to be either "yes" or "no". Not neither, not both. For instance, for any definition of "God", there is a God, or there is none. Bayesianism is most probably the best we'll ever have to understand reality. Note that it rules out the possibility of ever forming absolutely correct answers: for any yes/no question, I am bound to qualify my answer with probabilities, and that will not match reality itself. For instance, if reality says "yes", while I say "yes with probability 90%", I am wrong. Less wrong however than "yes with probability 65%". Reductionist materialism is very probably correct. That is, there is no such thing as an indivisible mental entity. Minds are composed of parts (like neurons), and so are love potions (if there's such a thing). In principle, anything, whether it thinks or not, can be studied and ultimately understood in non-thinking terms. It may be beyond the grasp of our mere human brains, however. Determinism is probably correct. Given current knowledge, it means that the universe probably follows some form of the Everett branches (the Copenhagen interpretation is just crazy).

davesims 15y ago

Ok, let me apologize. "Laughable" and "benighted" are the kinds of uncharitable language I'm arguing against using. The charitable read of this statement would have acknowledged its substance -- the idea that after Darwin there was a 'clearing of the decks' so to speak, and to some degree that's true although not to the extent Dawkins claims. From a philosophical standpoint, certainly Teleology was seen to have been dealt a death blow, at least the kind of teleology advocated by folks like Paley, and that was a massive turn. I'm unaware of any serious philosopher or historian of ideas that would suggest it's wise to dismiss all prior developments out of hand, though. If that's not laughable, it's certainly dangerous.

robertk 15y ago
I don't see why. Without mechanical tools and rudimentary physics, progress on flying machines was nil until the Wright brothers. Without better tools to study brains, there is no reason to expect we have produced any valuable answers to the sorts of "big questions" brains ask about themselves.

robertk 15y ago

Thank you for the references. I wasn't trying to debate the point, only offer one perspective on your question. To elaborate a little more, the reason why philosophy prior to 1859 is not relevant is because philosophy is the study of human thought (and the answers it produces to philosophical questions), whereas the origin of the organ which produces human thought was fundamentally misunderstood without the evolutionary framework. A good analogy here is alchemy; Darwin's results implied prior philosophy was the wrong approach as chemistry implied the confused results of alchemy, and all the latter's results were reduced to no more than historical curiosity. As an addendum, the reason why philosophy has been unsuccessful at producing answers is because it assumes human thought or language or existence as something fundamental. As Eliezer points out, rather than ask "do we have free will?", the productive perspective is to ask "what sort of algorithm does our brain run which makes it believe such a question is meaningful or answerable?" Have you read the Less Wrong series on rationality? It's a good exposition of the thinking process of someone like me. Certainly the attempts prior to 1859 were brave, but it was quackery. Much like Erdos's comments on the collatz conjecture, we are not yet ready for such questions (although neuroscience will get us close in the next century).

davesims 15y ago
"the origin of the organ which produces human thought was fundamentally misunderstood without the evolutionary framework." This is a concise version of the fundamental category mistake Dawkins makes. In one sentence, we've dogmatically blown past thousands of years of deep reflection on the mind/body question. It's not as if the idea that mind were reducible to matter had never been broached before, or that the Mendelian breakthrough provided some evidence that was philosophically pertinent. And Certainly Origin of Species does not put a cap on that discussion any more than Dennett's Consciousness Explained does. It's very much a live question to this day, as it was a live question when Cicero and Lucretius engaged on the very same terms. If the mind/body problem has not been settled now (and it certainly wasn't in 1859, that's more than anyone could possibly claim) then for that reason at least no one should take Dawkins seriously on this count, and fortunately very few serious thinkers do. "although neuroscience will get us close in the next century" This is first-rate eschatology, more cashing out of the infinite blank check of the Future of Science (let us pray). This is dogmatism, not science, not philosophy. It's hope.

loup-vaillant 15y ago

> Philosophical insight is not the same species as math, and doesn't "build" the same way […] Err, I think this one is a non-sequitur. The actual argument would be to say that science and philosophy aren't the same. But, as a believer of reductionistic materialism myself, I fully expect science to confirm or disprove nearly every philosophical insight there ever was (except maybe the moral ones, but even then, moral realism isn't far from my mind). Of course, it's not like Darwin invalidated all prior philosophy, but it did invalidated some beliefs, like Young Earth Creationism. So here is what I believe to be the correct phrasing: "Any philosophical result prior to the science that falsified it can be disregarded". Well, you can scrap "philosophical": it applies to any result.

davesims 15y ago
Nice to see this thread keep going. So.. "I fully expect science to confirm or disprove nearly every philosophical insight there ever was" "Any philosophical result prior to the science that falsified it can be disregarded" These are the non-sequiturs. Science is a sub-species of philosophy, whether you're willing to acknowledge it or not. Any reasonable survey of the history of science and its foundations must acknowledge this from an historical standpoint, and any objective examination of the ideas should quickly see Science's dependence on philosophical foundations. I don't want to be unkind, but this is precisely the kind of historical and intellectual illiteracy I'm talking about. What you're stating here is truly dogmatic and emotive, and disconnected from anything resembling a healthy contextualization or understanding of the centuries of thinkers and writings that were poured into building the very worldview you take for granted. You and I would have to go through some long discussion and/or remedial reading to get to the point where we could progress the argument reasonably, and I suspect you'd run out of patience and just wave your hand, make another high-handed dogmatic statement about The Sovereignty of Science and move on to something that made you less uncomfortable. I hope not, but my experience with discussions like this makes me suspect so.
- loup-vaillant 15y ago
  I think I agree with most of what you just wrote. Now, regarding my "correct" phrasing, I did not reduce the sentence to its essence. If I do, there's not much left: "Any result that has been falsified can be disregarded", which is a near-tautology (sorry about that). About science being a sub-specie of philosophy, well, it certainly looks like so. I am not well versed in the history of science and philosophy, but I do recall that many scientific fields either spawned from philosophy, or answer what was once philosophical questions. As for philosophical foundations, well, there's Bayes, Occam's Razor, and of course the plain old scientific methodology. We indeed don't have to look very far. Now about my assumptions: In a trivial sense, there's only one reality (or world, or universe). Each of us looks at it from a different window, of course, but if it weren't the "same" reality, we wouldn't be interacting at all. Now the trick is to figure out what this reality is. Relativism is bullshit. More precisely, for any given two contradictory models of reality, at least one of them contains mistakes. Yes/no questions are even easier: the correct answer is bound to be either "yes" or "no". Not neither, not both. For instance, for any definition of "God", there is a God, or there is none. Bayesianism is most probably the best we'll ever have to understand reality. Note that it rules out the possibility of ever forming absolutely correct answers: for any yes/no question, I am bound to qualify my answer with probabilities, and that will not match reality itself. For instance, if reality says "yes", while I say "yes with probability 90%", I am wrong. Less wrong however than "yes with probability 65%". Reductionist materialism is very probably correct. That is, there is no such thing as an indivisible mental entity. Minds are composed of parts (like neurons), and so are love potions (if there's such a thing). In principle, anything, whether it thinks or not, can be studied and ultimately understood in non-thinking terms. It may be beyond the grasp of our mere human brains, however. Determinism is probably correct. Given current knowledge, it means that the universe probably follows some form of the Everett branches (the Copenhagen interpretation is just crazy).