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You’re not alone. I think a lot of people, especially in STEM, pooh-pooh philosophy at first. The problem is that in any field, if you start digging to underst

You’re not alone. I think a lot of people, especially in STEM, pooh-pooh philosophy at first. The problem is that in any field, if you start digging to understand the underlying concepts of that field and how they are defined, at some point you hit philosophy and start working with philosophical concepts. The other problem is that there’s some real quack philosophy around, too. Various traps that philosophers sometimes fall into.

keiferski 3y ago
Whom would you describe as a "quack" philosopher?
- klodolph 3y ago
  I picked the wording of my comment carefully… “quack philosophy” is what I said, not “quack philosopher”. That was very, very intentional. I don’t think I have ever described somebody as a quack philosopher.
  - keiferski 3y ago
    Ok, then what works would you describe as quack philosophy? I don't think the distinction is really that relevant.
    - klodolph 3y ago
      Ok. I think the distinction is important, and relevant, and even critical. It is a distinction I will continue to make. I put the concept of “philosophical zombies” as quackery. At best, the p-zombie thought experiment shows that we haven’t really come up with a definition of consciousness that explains what we want it to explain. Some people use p-zombies as part of a larger argument against physicalism. Chalmers published a modal logic argument against physicalism using p-zombies. One of the tricky things about modal logic is that it requires a deeper understanding of modal logic in order for you (you, someone reading a modal logic argument) to make good decisions about which propositions you are willing to accept in a modal logic argument. Since most people only have an intuitive understanding of modal logic, it is a good way to win an argument but a bad way to explain your position. I’d say that this work (p-zombies) is quackery in the sense that it’s consistently directed at something which I consider to be unproductive, which is the work of undermining or attacking physicalism / physical monism. At some point, in these discussions, you end up having some argument about the semantics of ontology and how you define “existence”. If your semantics for “existence” admits non-physical things to exist (like, if you’re a Platonist), and you’re having a conversation with someone who believes in physicalism, then I don’t think either person in the conversation is going to get much out of it, other than a better way to explain their own position. Edit: I hope that paints a complete enough picture and covers the important parts of my complaints about p-zombies. I don’t have my finger on the pulse of philosophy and I may be missing something important, maybe there’s some really important argument p-zombies are used for, and maybe I don’t understand Chalmers; that’s always a risk. My main complaint here is that it seems to be some tool to make an argument against physicalism, but this tool doesn’t help you understand physicalism, or help you understand its alternatives. It’s just an argument that you can have between somebody who believes in physicalism and somebody who doesn’t, where neither person will agree with the other one after hearing the argument.
      - keiferski 3y ago
        I can see how you would find that unproductive, but I don't know if it really counts as quackery. Quack: 1) A practitioner who suggests the use of substances or devices for the prevention or treatment of disease that are known to be ineffective. 2) A person who pretends to be able to diagnose or heal people, but is unqualified and incompetent. The inside baseball term more relevant to what you're talking about, I think, is "talking past each other." https://www.jstor.org/stable/25655279 https://www.jstor.org/stable/25655279 A quack philosopher would seem to me to be someone that claims to be doing philosophy or interpreting the ideas of a philosopher, but doing so in an egregiously wrong or misleading manner. You also might want to check out this article for more on p-zombies, by the way: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/zombies/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/zombies/
        klodolph 3y ago
        > I can see how you would find that unproductive, but I don't know if it really counts as quackery. Oh, here’s the thing—it’s not actually important to argue about what the word “quackery” means. I’ve explained what I meant by “philosophical quackery”, and if you want to talk about the content of what I wrote, then by all means, respond to the content. If, instead, you want to start a fight about what the word “quackery” means, and whether I was wrong to use it, then I’m out. That sounds like a waste of time.
        keiferski 3y ago
        You used the word quackery, and I pointed out that this is an inaccurate term and that yes, the phenomenon you're describing is a thing called "talking past each other" and that it is a frequent criticism from within philosophy itself. I'm not sure what else there is to say here. If you call people something, perhaps it's important to actually know what that thing means? This seems to happen often in conversations critical of philosophy: terms are used unclearly, and the attempt to actually clarify those terms is hand-waved away as "I don't want to argue about definitions." So I think your criticism here is not that there are quack philosophical works, but that there are unproductive ones that do nothing but restate established positions. Which is definitely a true thing.
- ithkuil 3y ago
  I realized that it was mostly my problem of not understanding what philosophers do
  - keiferski 3y ago
    Yes, I think that's a common experience. Many people expect philosophers to be something like wise old village elders, whereas in reality they are more like lawyers working in extremely niche areas of law.
- bugbuddy 3y ago
  Zizek comes to mind immediately. My younger self used to be more open minded but even then he was way out there and way too bombastic.
  - keiferski 3y ago
    Meh, Zizek may be redundant and attention-seeking, but I wouldn't call him a quack. He has done some legitimate work, even if I definitely wouldn't call myself a fan. I like his books, but someone like Alan Watts is much more prone to quackery, IMO.
    - helboi4 3y ago
      Yeah Alan Watts is definitely way more of a quack. I like and respect Zizek though he's not a philosopher I rate highly.
  - klodolph 3y ago
    I think it’s easy to get turned off by Žižek’s kind of bombastic approach to explaining philosophy to lay people. It’s also, I’d say, hard to develop sympathy for continental philosophy, especially if we are American, and a lot of his positions seem kind of like nonsense if you don’t understand some of the underlying frameworks he uses (something he shares in common with a lot of continental philosophers) or if you don’t bridge the wider gap between reader and writer that continental philosophers tend to have. Žižek has made comments about so many different things, so publicly, that it’s hard to avoid finding something you disagree with. But it’s also hard to avoid finding something you agree with.
- kirubakaran 3y ago
  Philosophers who study ducks' perception of reality
  - keiferski 3y ago
    Nagel really missed an opportunity to name his paper, "What Is It Like to Quack?" instead of "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?".
lisper 3y ago
[flagged]
- Angostura 3y ago
  “I’m going redefine these philosophers as scientists, so that I can ridicule philosophy more easily “
- klodolph 3y ago
  Could you elaborate on how Kant does work that seems to be little more than the obfuscation of trivial or false ideas?
  - lisper 3y ago
    Sorry, I made a mistake. I meant Wittgenstein, not Kant, who wrote one of the premier works of philosophical nonsense: the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus [1]. I believe that Wittgenstein himself once admitted that it was basically intended to be a practical joke kind of like the Sokal affair [2], but I can't find the reference right now. But some people seem to still take it seriously. The biggest problem in classical philosophy is that there were fundamental things they simply didn't know. In particular, anything written before 1936 doesn't have the benefit of Turing's results on universal computation, and so it suffers from all kinds of misconceptions about human exceptionalism. These mistakes are understandable, but nonetheless the products of ignorance, and should be of little more than historical interest today. But AFAICT contemporary philosophers still take them seriously. [1] https://www.wittgensteinproject.org/w/index.php?title=Tractatus_Logico-Philosophicus_(English) https://www.wittgensteinproject.org/w/index.php?title=Tracta... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair
    - pdonis 3y ago
      > I meant Wittgenstein, not Kant I think Kant would have been another justifiable example. I found Bertrand Russell's commentary on Kant to be apt: "Hume, with his criticism of the concept of causality, awakened him from his dogmatic slumbers--so at least he says, but the awakening was only temporary, and he soon invented a soporific which enabled him to sleep again."
raddan 3y ago
This is sad. I teach an upper-level undergraduate course on programming language theory, and one major component of the course is reduction proofs. Many students find proof by contradiction (reductio ad absurdum) to be a confusing concept. I have always directed those students toward Dennett’s helpful video (https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=sVUMAqMmy7o https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=sVUMAqMmy7o) and most of them respond positively to Dennett’s lucid style. RIP. FWIW, I have also seen the dismissive STEM attitude toward the philosophical tradition. It helps to remember that the philosophical tradition predates the scientific tradition significantly, and that it does not take logical positivism or reductionism as givens. Having studied both disciplines, I feel like philosophy has seriously enhanced my understand of the world even if I don’t use it in my day-to-day scientific work.
- kijin 3y ago
  I think it depends a lot on which tradition of philosophy one is first exposed to. Most STEM people will find Anglo-American analytic philosophy (where Dennett firmly belonged) much easier to approach than continental philosophy or the classical stuff, but unfortunately casual readers tend to get exposed to a lot more of the latter. It's like the first programming language you learned. It will shape your perception of what programming is all about for a long time afterward, and might even turn you away from programming altogether. But there are lots of programming languages, and they're just different ways to make the same silicon do something interesting!
  - ngcc_hk 3y ago
    In a sense that is a myth. Guess this is based on the idea of silicon and Turing complete. The silicon argument might be right if we treat it on its own. Input, process and output. But one think of the system where the silicon or multiple of them plus some analogue or biological input and output. It is not the same. The process affect the speed and response … you can imagine one use lisp, basic or cnn to drive a car … can you. The turning complete is not physical as above and real world ish. Hence it sound all true. But people forgot we do not have unlimited memory. Our tur8ng complete is in practice not. To sum it all may be we kick human out of the loop all silicon and human language might have a chance the same using the same language (but still physical real world above …)
philosopher123 3y ago
This is also problem with any field. There are ton of scientific theories that seem legit but its def out there.
sampo 3y ago
> I think a lot of people, especially in STEM, pooh-pooh philosophy at first. A lot of philosophy ignores biology, sometimes even physics. In topics where biology would be immensely relevant, like with philosophy of mind. Dennett didn't try to ignore biology, he was deeply aware and well read in biology as well.
- cogman10 3y ago
  This seems like a really weird statement to me. Most of the philosophy I'm familiar with is concerned with abstract notions and concepts like morality. I'm really having a hard time seeing how biology or physics would inform it one direction or another. Like, what sort of biology would have made Kant's notions of morality different?
  - glenstein 3y ago
    Kant used Newtonian assumptions about the time and space, treating them as absolute, and treating them not as properties of physics but necessary preconditions for us being able to experience anything. Relativity overturned those Newtonian assumptions on which Kant depended, although he might say we nevertheless have to experience time as constant and space in three dimensions, regardless of how those things turn out to "really" work, since that's the only way we can do it. So it's no longer obvious that time and space are just given absolutely, and due to that, they no longer make for a comfortable starting point for philosophical assumptions. If nature itself is different, then we might not even be experiencing it that way in the first place. More tentatively, I think our advancing understanding of how brains and machines embody concepts, our understanding of the differences of biological creatures combined with new physics, is suggestive at a bare minimum that reality could be experienced differently, and/or that we can understand how we experience these things empirically with better knowledge about brains, instead of asserting that everything is governed at the outset by this or that philosophical assumption.
    - cogman10 3y ago
      > Kant used Newtonian assumptions about the time and space, treating them as absolute, and treating them not as properties of physics but necessary preconditions for us being able to experience anything. Ok... this is non sequitur. It really doesn't matter that time moves at different speeds for any of Kant's philosophical positions. 2 people could be traveling at 0.5c and 0.00000001c and that makes no difference in Kant morals on how they should behave. And, practically speaking, unless there's a drastic development in propulsion the only bearing relativity has on day to day life is making sure the GPS works correctly. It is, otherwise, completely non-impactful to anyone beyond astrophysicists.
scoofy 3y ago
This honestly makes sense to me. Philosophy basically teaches you how to think about things really well. When talking about STEM folks, however, you're already dealing with extremely analytical people, but to them, analytical thinking is just intuitive. Spending a bunch of time figuring out why something that seems obvious is obvious probably seems like a waste of time to a lot of people, but it can certainly help in the long run. We can't see our own blindspots, so even if something seems obvious, I think it's useful to understand it.
rvense 3y ago
The amusing thing is that these quick dismissals of philosophy are all instances of philosophical thought. Usually neither good, nor consistent, nor original thought, but nevertheless.
- mistermann 3y ago
  Threads like this strongly reinforce my belief that we live in a simulation, this comment section is surreal.
  - rvense 3y ago
    Ah, but is it so different to other HN threads? Tribalism, misunderstanding, attempted witticisms...
    - mistermann 3y ago
      When contemplating technology stuff people are usually very disciplined about striving correctness...on certain topics though, it seems like the opposite becomes true: no effort, and don't you dare suggest it. It is both funny and not.
omginternets 3y ago
One of the most delicious ironies in life is to ask these people why they think philosophy is poo-poo, and then revel in the fact that their answer is exactly philosophical in nature.
OkayPhysicist 3y ago
That mindset frustrated me a lot in university. My school required a pretty broad survey of academia, with a class each in lower and upper division math, science, history, philosophy, and theology to graduate, and there were a lot of students (especially, for whatever reason, engineers) who hated it. To a t, these people were dullards. They rarely had deep knowledge about anything, most of the time not even about the field they professed such dedication to. The entire point of an undergraduate education is to establish a foundation of baseline knowledge to allow you to contextualize new information, and if you don't engage with it, there's not a lot of opportunities to make up for it later.
renewiltord 3y ago
That's because the majority of Philosophy courses are History of Philosophy courses whereas other logic-oriented fields occupy less time on "History of". While top departments like Princeton still focus on the quality of the arguments, they do devote entire course lengths to readings of ancient philosophers which are less elucidative about logic and reasoning than they are about the History of Philosophy. In comparison, the Seven Bridges of Konigsberg is a bare introduction in Graph Theory and Hamilton carving quarternions into Broom Bridge is an amusing aside before you get to the meat of the subject. A lecturer might amuse you with Kekule's dream before telling you about a Benzene ring but the ring is the thing, not the dream. Philosophy is a field with time-translation symmetry but is taught akin to fields without (e.g. Literature, History, Sociology). Fields without TTS need you to build up from the replay log. But fields with TTS can do something far better: they can distill "truths" into snapshots. Consequently, as a child I read about Galois Theory without reading Analyse d’un Mémoire sur la résolution algébrique des équations or a translation thereof. Conjectures and Refutations shows how to accelerate through a replay log, indexing at key-frames so that we don't need to play every frame to get to the conclusions we're searching for. Good field. Bad practice.
- BlueTemplar 3y ago
  Isn't this focusing on these courses too much as an academic pursuit ? Most students will not stay in academia, but making them think about questions like what is it to live a good life seems to me pretty important for the education of future citizens ! And in fact ancient philosophers being historically so remote is likely to be a good thing, to prevent emotional knee-jerk rejections that is at risk of happening with more recent philosophers too associated with current politics.
CuriouslyC 3y ago
Having done a deep dive in philosophy at one point, the vast majority of it is ego stroking half-nonsense designed to be maximally unintelligible, because academics tolerate ridiculous amounts of jargon and equate hard to understand with meaningful or important. People like Robert Nozick, Thomas Nagel, John Searle and David Chalmers are by far the exception rather than the rule.
- SJC_Hacker 3y ago
  The philosophers that did STEM seem to be the good ones. Its the artsy types that only read Sartre and Heidigger an Derrida, and never got their hands dirty by working in a lab, doing sufficiently higher level math, engineered and built modern tech are the annoying ones.
naasking 3y ago
Philosophy, like every field, follows Sturgeon's law: 90% of it is crap.

keiferski 3y ago

Whom would you describe as a "quack" philosopher?

klodolph 3y ago
I picked the wording of my comment carefully… “quack philosophy” is what I said, not “quack philosopher”. That was very, very intentional. I don’t think I have ever described somebody as a quack philosopher.
- keiferski 3y ago
  Ok, then what works would you describe as quack philosophy? I don't think the distinction is really that relevant.
  - klodolph 3y ago
    Ok. I think the distinction is important, and relevant, and even critical. It is a distinction I will continue to make. I put the concept of “philosophical zombies” as quackery. At best, the p-zombie thought experiment shows that we haven’t really come up with a definition of consciousness that explains what we want it to explain. Some people use p-zombies as part of a larger argument against physicalism. Chalmers published a modal logic argument against physicalism using p-zombies. One of the tricky things about modal logic is that it requires a deeper understanding of modal logic in order for you (you, someone reading a modal logic argument) to make good decisions about which propositions you are willing to accept in a modal logic argument. Since most people only have an intuitive understanding of modal logic, it is a good way to win an argument but a bad way to explain your position. I’d say that this work (p-zombies) is quackery in the sense that it’s consistently directed at something which I consider to be unproductive, which is the work of undermining or attacking physicalism / physical monism. At some point, in these discussions, you end up having some argument about the semantics of ontology and how you define “existence”. If your semantics for “existence” admits non-physical things to exist (like, if you’re a Platonist), and you’re having a conversation with someone who believes in physicalism, then I don’t think either person in the conversation is going to get much out of it, other than a better way to explain their own position. Edit: I hope that paints a complete enough picture and covers the important parts of my complaints about p-zombies. I don’t have my finger on the pulse of philosophy and I may be missing something important, maybe there’s some really important argument p-zombies are used for, and maybe I don’t understand Chalmers; that’s always a risk. My main complaint here is that it seems to be some tool to make an argument against physicalism, but this tool doesn’t help you understand physicalism, or help you understand its alternatives. It’s just an argument that you can have between somebody who believes in physicalism and somebody who doesn’t, where neither person will agree with the other one after hearing the argument.
    - keiferski 3y ago
      I can see how you would find that unproductive, but I don't know if it really counts as quackery. Quack: 1) A practitioner who suggests the use of substances or devices for the prevention or treatment of disease that are known to be ineffective. 2) A person who pretends to be able to diagnose or heal people, but is unqualified and incompetent. The inside baseball term more relevant to what you're talking about, I think, is "talking past each other." https://www.jstor.org/stable/25655279 https://www.jstor.org/stable/25655279 A quack philosopher would seem to me to be someone that claims to be doing philosophy or interpreting the ideas of a philosopher, but doing so in an egregiously wrong or misleading manner. You also might want to check out this article for more on p-zombies, by the way: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/zombies/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/zombies/
      - klodolph 3y ago
        > I can see how you would find that unproductive, but I don't know if it really counts as quackery. Oh, here’s the thing—it’s not actually important to argue about what the word “quackery” means. I’ve explained what I meant by “philosophical quackery”, and if you want to talk about the content of what I wrote, then by all means, respond to the content. If, instead, you want to start a fight about what the word “quackery” means, and whether I was wrong to use it, then I’m out. That sounds like a waste of time.
        keiferski 3y ago
        You used the word quackery, and I pointed out that this is an inaccurate term and that yes, the phenomenon you're describing is a thing called "talking past each other" and that it is a frequent criticism from within philosophy itself. I'm not sure what else there is to say here. If you call people something, perhaps it's important to actually know what that thing means? This seems to happen often in conversations critical of philosophy: terms are used unclearly, and the attempt to actually clarify those terms is hand-waved away as "I don't want to argue about definitions." So I think your criticism here is not that there are quack philosophical works, but that there are unproductive ones that do nothing but restate established positions. Which is definitely a true thing.
ithkuil 3y ago
I realized that it was mostly my problem of not understanding what philosophers do
- keiferski 3y ago
  Yes, I think that's a common experience. Many people expect philosophers to be something like wise old village elders, whereas in reality they are more like lawyers working in extremely niche areas of law.
bugbuddy 3y ago
Zizek comes to mind immediately. My younger self used to be more open minded but even then he was way out there and way too bombastic.
- keiferski 3y ago
  Meh, Zizek may be redundant and attention-seeking, but I wouldn't call him a quack. He has done some legitimate work, even if I definitely wouldn't call myself a fan. I like his books, but someone like Alan Watts is much more prone to quackery, IMO.
  - helboi4 3y ago
    Yeah Alan Watts is definitely way more of a quack. I like and respect Zizek though he's not a philosopher I rate highly.
- klodolph 3y ago
  I think it’s easy to get turned off by Žižek’s kind of bombastic approach to explaining philosophy to lay people. It’s also, I’d say, hard to develop sympathy for continental philosophy, especially if we are American, and a lot of his positions seem kind of like nonsense if you don’t understand some of the underlying frameworks he uses (something he shares in common with a lot of continental philosophers) or if you don’t bridge the wider gap between reader and writer that continental philosophers tend to have. Žižek has made comments about so many different things, so publicly, that it’s hard to avoid finding something you disagree with. But it’s also hard to avoid finding something you agree with.
kirubakaran 3y ago
Philosophers who study ducks' perception of reality
- keiferski 3y ago
  Nagel really missed an opportunity to name his paper, "What Is It Like to Quack?" instead of "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?".

lisper 3y ago

[flagged]

Angostura 3y ago
“I’m going redefine these philosophers as scientists, so that I can ridicule philosophy more easily “
klodolph 3y ago
Could you elaborate on how Kant does work that seems to be little more than the obfuscation of trivial or false ideas?
- lisper 3y ago
  Sorry, I made a mistake. I meant Wittgenstein, not Kant, who wrote one of the premier works of philosophical nonsense: the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus [1]. I believe that Wittgenstein himself once admitted that it was basically intended to be a practical joke kind of like the Sokal affair [2], but I can't find the reference right now. But some people seem to still take it seriously. The biggest problem in classical philosophy is that there were fundamental things they simply didn't know. In particular, anything written before 1936 doesn't have the benefit of Turing's results on universal computation, and so it suffers from all kinds of misconceptions about human exceptionalism. These mistakes are understandable, but nonetheless the products of ignorance, and should be of little more than historical interest today. But AFAICT contemporary philosophers still take them seriously. [1] https://www.wittgensteinproject.org/w/index.php?title=Tractatus_Logico-Philosophicus_(English) https://www.wittgensteinproject.org/w/index.php?title=Tracta... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair
  - pdonis 3y ago
    > I meant Wittgenstein, not Kant I think Kant would have been another justifiable example. I found Bertrand Russell's commentary on Kant to be apt: "Hume, with his criticism of the concept of causality, awakened him from his dogmatic slumbers--so at least he says, but the awakening was only temporary, and he soon invented a soporific which enabled him to sleep again."

raddan 3y ago

This is sad. I teach an upper-level undergraduate course on programming language theory, and one major component of the course is reduction proofs. Many students find proof by contradiction (reductio ad absurdum) to be a confusing concept. I have always directed those students toward Dennett’s helpful video (https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=sVUMAqMmy7o https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=sVUMAqMmy7o) and most of them respond positively to Dennett’s lucid style. RIP. FWIW, I have also seen the dismissive STEM attitude toward the philosophical tradition. It helps to remember that the philosophical tradition predates the scientific tradition significantly, and that it does not take logical positivism or reductionism as givens. Having studied both disciplines, I feel like philosophy has seriously enhanced my understand of the world even if I don’t use it in my day-to-day scientific work.

kijin 3y ago
I think it depends a lot on which tradition of philosophy one is first exposed to. Most STEM people will find Anglo-American analytic philosophy (where Dennett firmly belonged) much easier to approach than continental philosophy or the classical stuff, but unfortunately casual readers tend to get exposed to a lot more of the latter. It's like the first programming language you learned. It will shape your perception of what programming is all about for a long time afterward, and might even turn you away from programming altogether. But there are lots of programming languages, and they're just different ways to make the same silicon do something interesting!
- ngcc_hk 3y ago
  In a sense that is a myth. Guess this is based on the idea of silicon and Turing complete. The silicon argument might be right if we treat it on its own. Input, process and output. But one think of the system where the silicon or multiple of them plus some analogue or biological input and output. It is not the same. The process affect the speed and response … you can imagine one use lisp, basic or cnn to drive a car … can you. The turning complete is not physical as above and real world ish. Hence it sound all true. But people forgot we do not have unlimited memory. Our tur8ng complete is in practice not. To sum it all may be we kick human out of the loop all silicon and human language might have a chance the same using the same language (but still physical real world above …)

philosopher123 3y ago

This is also problem with any field. There are ton of scientific theories that seem legit but its def out there.

sampo 3y ago

> I think a lot of people, especially in STEM, pooh-pooh philosophy at first. A lot of philosophy ignores biology, sometimes even physics. In topics where biology would be immensely relevant, like with philosophy of mind. Dennett didn't try to ignore biology, he was deeply aware and well read in biology as well.

cogman10 3y ago
This seems like a really weird statement to me. Most of the philosophy I'm familiar with is concerned with abstract notions and concepts like morality. I'm really having a hard time seeing how biology or physics would inform it one direction or another. Like, what sort of biology would have made Kant's notions of morality different?
- glenstein 3y ago
  Kant used Newtonian assumptions about the time and space, treating them as absolute, and treating them not as properties of physics but necessary preconditions for us being able to experience anything. Relativity overturned those Newtonian assumptions on which Kant depended, although he might say we nevertheless have to experience time as constant and space in three dimensions, regardless of how those things turn out to "really" work, since that's the only way we can do it. So it's no longer obvious that time and space are just given absolutely, and due to that, they no longer make for a comfortable starting point for philosophical assumptions. If nature itself is different, then we might not even be experiencing it that way in the first place. More tentatively, I think our advancing understanding of how brains and machines embody concepts, our understanding of the differences of biological creatures combined with new physics, is suggestive at a bare minimum that reality could be experienced differently, and/or that we can understand how we experience these things empirically with better knowledge about brains, instead of asserting that everything is governed at the outset by this or that philosophical assumption.
  - cogman10 3y ago
    > Kant used Newtonian assumptions about the time and space, treating them as absolute, and treating them not as properties of physics but necessary preconditions for us being able to experience anything. Ok... this is non sequitur. It really doesn't matter that time moves at different speeds for any of Kant's philosophical positions. 2 people could be traveling at 0.5c and 0.00000001c and that makes no difference in Kant morals on how they should behave. And, practically speaking, unless there's a drastic development in propulsion the only bearing relativity has on day to day life is making sure the GPS works correctly. It is, otherwise, completely non-impactful to anyone beyond astrophysicists.

scoofy 3y ago

This honestly makes sense to me. Philosophy basically teaches you how to think about things really well. When talking about STEM folks, however, you're already dealing with extremely analytical people, but to them, analytical thinking is just intuitive. Spending a bunch of time figuring out why something that seems obvious is obvious probably seems like a waste of time to a lot of people, but it can certainly help in the long run. We can't see our own blindspots, so even if something seems obvious, I think it's useful to understand it.

rvense 3y ago

The amusing thing is that these quick dismissals of philosophy are all instances of philosophical thought. Usually neither good, nor consistent, nor original thought, but nevertheless.

mistermann 3y ago
Threads like this strongly reinforce my belief that we live in a simulation, this comment section is surreal.
- rvense 3y ago
  Ah, but is it so different to other HN threads? Tribalism, misunderstanding, attempted witticisms...
  - mistermann 3y ago
    When contemplating technology stuff people are usually very disciplined about striving correctness...on certain topics though, it seems like the opposite becomes true: no effort, and don't you dare suggest it. It is both funny and not.

omginternets 3y ago

One of the most delicious ironies in life is to ask these people why they think philosophy is poo-poo, and then revel in the fact that their answer is exactly philosophical in nature.

OkayPhysicist 3y ago

That mindset frustrated me a lot in university. My school required a pretty broad survey of academia, with a class each in lower and upper division math, science, history, philosophy, and theology to graduate, and there were a lot of students (especially, for whatever reason, engineers) who hated it. To a t, these people were dullards. They rarely had deep knowledge about anything, most of the time not even about the field they professed such dedication to. The entire point of an undergraduate education is to establish a foundation of baseline knowledge to allow you to contextualize new information, and if you don't engage with it, there's not a lot of opportunities to make up for it later.

renewiltord 3y ago

That's because the majority of Philosophy courses are History of Philosophy courses whereas other logic-oriented fields occupy less time on "History of". While top departments like Princeton still focus on the quality of the arguments, they do devote entire course lengths to readings of ancient philosophers which are less elucidative about logic and reasoning than they are about the History of Philosophy. In comparison, the Seven Bridges of Konigsberg is a bare introduction in Graph Theory and Hamilton carving quarternions into Broom Bridge is an amusing aside before you get to the meat of the subject. A lecturer might amuse you with Kekule's dream before telling you about a Benzene ring but the ring is the thing, not the dream. Philosophy is a field with time-translation symmetry but is taught akin to fields without (e.g. Literature, History, Sociology). Fields without TTS need you to build up from the replay log. But fields with TTS can do something far better: they can distill "truths" into snapshots. Consequently, as a child I read about Galois Theory without reading Analyse d’un Mémoire sur la résolution algébrique des équations or a translation thereof. Conjectures and Refutations shows how to accelerate through a replay log, indexing at key-frames so that we don't need to play every frame to get to the conclusions we're searching for. Good field. Bad practice.

BlueTemplar 3y ago
Isn't this focusing on these courses too much as an academic pursuit ? Most students will not stay in academia, but making them think about questions like what is it to live a good life seems to me pretty important for the education of future citizens ! And in fact ancient philosophers being historically so remote is likely to be a good thing, to prevent emotional knee-jerk rejections that is at risk of happening with more recent philosophers too associated with current politics.

CuriouslyC 3y ago

Having done a deep dive in philosophy at one point, the vast majority of it is ego stroking half-nonsense designed to be maximally unintelligible, because academics tolerate ridiculous amounts of jargon and equate hard to understand with meaningful or important. People like Robert Nozick, Thomas Nagel, John Searle and David Chalmers are by far the exception rather than the rule.

SJC_Hacker 3y ago
The philosophers that did STEM seem to be the good ones. Its the artsy types that only read Sartre and Heidigger an Derrida, and never got their hands dirty by working in a lab, doing sufficiently higher level math, engineered and built modern tech are the annoying ones.

naasking 3y ago

Philosophy, like every field, follows Sturgeon's law: 90% of it is crap.