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Jayson_Virissimo comments on Rationality Quotes: June 2011 - Less Wrong
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Robert Nozick, The Nature of Rationality
If you haven't read this book yet, do so. It is basically LessWrongism circa 1993.
What do you mean by Philosophy in that quote? Contemporary philosophy already incorporates knowledge from other fields including computer science, and this is an ongoing process of adaption.
If it refers to 'philosophy' as some static corpus of knowledge from before a certain point then yes it is trivially true.
When they start making real, mathy progress, they'll stop calling themselves philosophers, like natural philosophers are now called physicists.
If we are arguing from the common uses of the term 'philosophers' then that isn't the case. Logicians make progress in the same manner as mathematics, and are sill classed as philosophers. (They also have strong links with computer scientists professionally but thats a side point.)
If your definition is that Philosopher = person who does not make "real, mathy progress" then its just a tautology. All members of this set, who don't make progress, will not make progress, become obsolescent and be replaced.
Sorry if I sound confrontational. But I am unsure what the larger point that is being made about the methods/knowledge of philosophers. It seems to primarily be a tribal "computer scientists good, philosophers bad" statement, unless something precise and meaningful is meant by "philosophers."
Yeah, common usage. Things like "Are they on the payroll of the Philosophy Department?", and "Do students study it to avoid getting into hard sciences?". (I acknowledge that the philosophy I was taught covers long-dead white guys, not modern breakthroughs - the sorry state of philosophy classes is only a weak point against philosophy, like the sorry state of science journalism.)
I got the impression that people who actually invent logic (like Boole or Gödel) were either classified as mathematicians in their time, or classified such nowadays even though they called themselves philosophers. (Like we call early physicists physicists, not philosophers.) Counterexample?
15 of the Senior Philosophers at Oxford list Logic or Rationality as one of their areas of expertese, all philosophy student study at least first-order logic, and further courses are offered.
Boolos, Putman, Quine and Kripke are notable philosopher-logicians
That doesn't quite answer his question, I believe.
You have to point not just to people called logicians, by themselves or others, but to useful logical progress made by such people.
Boolos did Frege's theorem, Quine did New Foundations, among other things, Kripke our standard modal-logic semantics... I don't how useful they are, but they're definitely logic.
I agree, the long dead white guys approach to Philosophy is far too prominent particularly in introductory courses, which of course attracts all the wrong sort of people into it. [The stereotype of the pretentious freshman relativist is sadly far too common.]
At least my own experience includes studying Godel, Russell etc in the context of philosophy, and there are a great many logic postgrads (on the payroll as you said) whose papers are highly technical and mathematical, and have direct applications in computing and other practical sciences.
On a wider note, the best 'principled' division between philosophy and hard science in my opinion is between the methodology of induction vs deduction. Not sure where that would put computer science.
But in the context of the original quote, if thats the division then I'd disagree that philosophers are obsolete, as most of the techniques we use for considering the meaning, interactions and validity of beliefs originated and is developed on in philosophy.
Where can I read badass philosophy? (There's some incredulity here. It's sad that the opinion of a domain expert isn't enough to convince me philosophy isn't a rotten field.) Note that I don't doubt that philosophers have said stuff about Gödel, but I want the Gödel-equivalent work.
That would mostly be probability theory, right? That left the philosophy-cradle long ago - or can you show me the modern developments?
Nietzsche is pretty badass in his own way, though he doesn't write the same kind of stuff analytical philosophers write about (it seems to me that it's two different genres that just happen to share a name). It's more about social / intellectual / historical commentary than about science.
It's sort of philosophy crack: intensely pleasurable and satisfying to read, but wrong about 90% of things. (The other 10% consists of brilliant original insights that no other philosopher within a century of him could have seen. On the other hand, it can be difficult to distinguish these from the rest of his corpus.)
I agree, and bought one of these! But he's not doing any work, just saying "Transhumanism will rock, when it's invented sometime after my death!". Sort of a motivational poster.
Nietzsche always struck me as non-transhumanist. Quick google tells me Bostrom agrees with me about this and people seem capable of making long arguments for and against.
Nietzsche is a prime example of a philosopher that pretty much everything I've understood him saying, I've disagreed with. But he is quite badass.
Look at Philpapers.org, and search for recent papers in whatever you're interested in I guess.
Theres a lot of stuff about the recent (last decade) experimental philosophy (X-Phi) movement available online which may allay some of your concerns about Philosophical Methodology.
For a more informal look at how professional philosophers behave http://philosiology.blogspot.com/ is quite amusing.
Lukeprog did a set of articles not long ago about the relationship between philosophy and less wrong rationality which can probably give you more than I can off the top of my head.
Will read, thanks!
I read lukeprog's ads for philosophy. Doesn't show the money. The most badass stuff he's shown is just basics ("reductionism is true" as opposed to actual reductions, etc.).
Here there is a post about this: http://lesswrong.com/lw/58d/how_not_to_be_a_na%C3%AFve_computationalist/
A fun critique of Dennett http://www-personal.umich.edu/~lormand/phil/cons/qualia.htm
A fun critique of zombies (and Dennett, and Searle and Chalmers) http://www.davidchess.com/words/poc/lanier_zombie.html
The single most famous paper in analytical philosophy is an attach on the sacred cows of...analytical philosophy http://www.ditext.com/quine/quine.html
Lormand: Read the first half, skimmed the other. Lowered my opinion of Dennett, didn't change my mind otherwise. The goal is pretty non-badass in the first place: to disprove Dennett's argument about qualia, not to actually answer the question, let alone look into the black box labeled "quale". It's mostly right. It makes the common mistake of forgetting the author is a brain, though. This leads to generalizing from one example (the same old "Only analytic reflection in the form of a stream of words counts as thought" canard), and to forget about physical law (there is brain circuitry that gives rise to a quale, you can mess with it, that's where inferences are hidden).
Lanier: Consciousness is is the computer, not in the meteor shower, you pickleplumbing niddlewick! And of course specifying a conscious mind doesn't instantiate it, you have to run it... and did you just conflate "computers are not fundamental" and "computers don't exist"? Yeah, every physical system is a computer (a basket of apples plus gravity that drops more in performs addition), you want a specific-algorithm-detector. We don't know the consciousness algorithm, so obviously it's hard to detect, but at least you could look for optimization processes, which are well-defined in terms of thermodynamics. And worse than all the particular mistakes - you're falling for mysterious answers to mysterious questions again. Don't those people ever learn from history?
Quine:I don't get it. (This is a good sign - I'm an outsider, if there's advanced work then I shouldn't get it.) Why are you talking about language in the first place? Why not just define logic (as a set of axioms for manipulating strings), then say "'Analytic truth' is a fancy word for 'tautology'", and then worry about how natural language maps onto logic? And why are you looking for meanings and definitions in words rather than in cognitive processes? (The reason "bachelor" and "unmarried man" are synonymous, but not "creature with a kidney" and "creature with a heart" is because, upon hearing the word "bachelor", we translate it to "unmarried man", then reason about unmarried men, whereas upon hearing "creature with a kidney", we reason about creatures with kidneys, then notice they're the same as the creatures who have a heart.) And what does this have to do with reductionism? (Is this the same old confusion between probability estimates and statements in a language?)
This strikes me as wrong. The proper work of philosophers and computer scientists seem like they have very little overlap. Yes, philosophers often mistakenly do computer science work, but that is irrelevant.
is there a reason I should want to read an earlier, less developed version of LessWrong, by someone who is not a consequentialist, when I could just read LessWrong?
The quote isn't talking about philosophy in general, but epistemology specifically. If you take naturalized epistemology seriously (which LessWrongers do), then it seems to follow quite easily that neuroscientists and AI researchers are relatively more important to the future of epistemology than philosophers (remember that most branches of modern science were once a part of philosophy, but later broke off and developed their own class of domain specialists).
One reason to read it would be to provide ourselves with some perspective on how LessWrongism fits into the larger Western intellectual tradition. Nozick is much better about showing how his ideas are related to those of other thinkers than the contributors to Less Wrong are (we share much more in common with Wittgenstein, Quine, Hempel, and Bridgeman than the impression you would get from reading the Sequences). Having this perspective should increase our ability to communicate effectively with other intellectual communities.
His being or not being a consequentialist doesn't seem to have very much to do with the validity of his work in epistemology, decision theory, philosophy of science, or metaphysics. Also, his ethical theory doesn't really fit neatly into the deontological/consequentialism dichotomy anyway. Arguably his ethics/political theory amounts to consequentialism with "side-constraints" (that can even be violated in extreme circumstances). It doesn't seem to be any less consequentislist than, say, rule-utilitarianism.
I don't particularly feel driven to communicate to members of other intellectual communities.
Am I exempt from having to read that book?
I will exempt you this one time, but I do not want to see you in my office again! Is that understood?
It should be noted that currently my brain interprets all requests for me to do stuff as requests for me to stay up when I should be sleeping.
It that case, you are hereby commanded to initiate your sleep cycle immediately.
The interesting issue is that, since this requires getting up, going upstairs, brushing teeth, etc., I fear the twinge of starting, and end up with an aversion to going to sleep as well.
If you really need to be sleeping, just relocate yourself to bed and crash. You can brush your teeth in the morning. (Alternately, decide how many more hours of sleep you're willing to skip in exchange for the chance that you will eventually decide to brush your teeth.)
Interruptions will prevent me from sleeping for about another half-hour. I have a planned schedule to reflect this. The chance that I will follow this schedule is high.
ETA: 90% of the work of this process is getting up, not the brushing the teeth bit.
An idea I've been kicking around -- and am tempted to pull into a coherent form -- is that actually there is a close connection between philosophy and computer science.
Much of philosophy is arguments about various abstractions. Computer science is about using abstractions to engineer software and about proofs about software-related abstractions.
To give one example: I think of the philosophical debate about the semantics of proper nouns as coupled to the notions of reference vs value equality in programming language design.
What are you comparing Less Wrong to?
Who proved consequentialism?
He was comparing Less Wrong to a book I was quoting from.
No one did, but proof is much too high a requirement anyway. Although, I don't think I am alone in recognizing the theories put forward in the The Metaethics Sequence as the least defensible part of Less Wrong doctrine.