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How about:
- a link to the article by Luke that you're talking about
- the names of some good current philosophy journals
I can help with the second request:
I am not very interested in convincing you.
You said:
It's striking how much value there is in academia that I didn't notice
So look for the value! Don't write the entire field off, lots of smart people there, probably you are missing something.
But for example quite a few very smart causal inference people are in philosophy. That conference on decision theory MIRI went to in Cambridge was hosted by philosophers. Some philosophers deal with very hard problems that do not map onto empiricism very well, etc.
I think Luke will agree with you on what you say here, though. I remember commenting on one of his posts that was critical of philosophy, saying that his arguments didn't really apply to the area of philosophy I'm involved in (technical philosophy of science). Luke's response was essentially, "I agree. I'm not talking about philosophy of science." I think he'd probably say the same about philosophical work on decision theory and causal inference.
Indeed. Kant is a poor example for offensive continental philosophy because while he was a very bad writer, but you can reconstruct sensible ideas he was trying to express, at least when it's not about ethics. The really offensive philosophy is the one where the obscurity of the writing is not accidental in this way, but essential, and where the whole thing falls apart once you try to remove it.
Analytical philosophers also do not routinely scoff at Kant except for 1) his lack of skill as a writer and 2) his ethics.
I don't know of many analytic philosophers who scoff at his ethics, although there are certainly many who disagree with it. There are also many analytic philosophers who consider his ethics to be a significant advance in moral reasoning. As an example, Derek Parfit, in his recent book, constructs an ethical system that tries to reconcile the attractions of both consequentialism and Kantian deontological ethics.
Kant's discussion of the categorical imperative, especially the first formulation of the imperative (act according to the maxim that you would will to be a universal law), prefigures various contemporary attempts to reformulate decision theory in order to avoid mutual defection in PD-like games, including Hofstadter's notion of superrationality and Yudkowsky's Timeless Decision Theory. Essentially, Kantian ethics is based on the idea that ethics stems from nothing more than a commitment to rational decision-making and common knowledge of rationality among interacting agents (although with Kant it's not so much about knowing that other agents are rational but about respecting them by treating them as rational). I don't fully agree with this perspective, but I do think it is remarkably astute and ahead of its time.
I was wondering the very same thing as I wrote the post. Kant and Hegel are the two founders of continental philosophy, and both are difficult to read. Pretty much all 20th century continental philosophers are terribly hard to read.
I would speculate that, while people might not be sure they understand Kant & Hegel, they also can't be sure they don't understand them. They require no math; they are analogical enough that reading them is more like reading literature than math. A person reading Kripke either understands it or does not. Reading Heidegger is more like reading Tolstoy; you feel you can always go back to it and discover more.
Perhaps more importantly, they tackle bigger questions. Analytic philosophers start with questions they think they can answer; continental philosophers start with questions they want the answers to.
Also, continental philosophers can never be refuted. The logical positivists made the mistake of stating their claims clearly enough that people could listen to less-precise statements claiming to refute them, and believe they'd been refuted.
Here's a random excerpt from Kant:
It is impossible to think of anything at all in the world, or indeed even beyond it, that could be taken to be good without limitation, except a GOOD WILL. Understanding, wit, judgement and whatever else the talents of the mind may be called, or confidence, resolve and persistency of intent, as qualities of temperament, are no doubt in many respects good and desirable; but they can also be extremely evil and harmful if the will that is to make use of these gifts of nature, and whose distinctive constitution is therefore called character, is not good. It is just the same with gifts of fortune. Power, riches, honour, even health, and the entire well-being and contentment with one's condition, under the name of happiness, inspire confidence and thereby quite often overconfidence as well, unless a good will is present to correct and make generally purposive their influence on the mind, and with it also the whole principle for acting; not to mention that a rational impartial spectator can never more take any delight in the sight of the uninterrupted prosperity of a being adorned with no feature of a pure and good will, and that a good will thus appears to constitute the indispensable condition even of the worthiness to be happy.
Here's a random excerpt from Bertrand Russell, an analytic philosopher:
Traditionally, there are two sorts of data, one physical, derived from the senses, the other mental, derived from introspection. It seems highly questionable whether this distinction can be validly made among data; it seems rather to belong to what is inferred from them. Suppose, for the sake of definiteness, that you are looking at a white triangle drawn on a black- board. You can make the two judgments: "There is a triangle there", and "I see a triangle." These are different propositions, but neither expresses a bare datum; the bare datum seems to be the same in both propositions. To illustrate the difference of the propositions: you might say "There is a triangle there", if you had seen it a moment ago but now had your eyes shut, and in this case you would not say "I see a triangle"; on the other hand, you might see a black dot which you knew to be due to indigestion or fatigue, and in this case you would not say "There is a black dot there." In the first of these cases, you have a clear case of inference, not of a datum.
Kant is talking about good and evil, delight, happiness, character, honor, etc., while Russell is talking about looking at triangles. Which one are people going to want to read?
Kant is talking about good and evil, delight, happiness, character, honor, etc., etc, while Russell is talking about looking at triangles. Which one are people going to want to read?
Except Kant also talked quite a bit about triangles and Russell also talked quite a bit about good and evil. And Kant discussed perceptual epistemology a whole lot more than Russell did. The Critique of Pure Reason, Kant's most significant work, is about epistemology, not ethics.
Also, while much of twentieth-century continental philosophy does build on Kant (although a lot of it is a reaction against Kant), so does much of twentieth-century analytic philosophy. In many ways, the true heirs of Kant in the twentieth century were the logical positivists. Their epistemology was closer to Kant's than any prominent continental philosopher's was. So Kant has just as much claim to being a founder of analytic philosophy as he does to being a founder of continental philosophy.
Kant was not the most lucid writer, but his style was not remotely "analogical" or "literary" (look through Kant's famous Transcendental Deduction and see whether those descriptors seem apt).. And much of Kantian philosophy is precisely formulated and subject to falsification. In fact, quite a bit of it has been falsified (his contention that space is necessarily Euclidean, for instance).
I'm not a relativist, although my argument here was made in a relativism agnostic manner.
No it wasn't. Relativists have no non-subjective notion of "normativity", thus the subjective/normative distinction makes no sense to them.
Edit: In practice of course, most relativists are willing to treat things like murder as if they are objectively wrong. However, this is a case of their System I protecting them from the consequences of their System II beliefs, similar to the way New Agers who don't believe in objective reality manage to avoid walking out of high story windows.
Relativists have no non-subjective notion of "normativity", thus the subjective/normative distinction makes no sense to them.
This is not true of all relativists. There are relativists who believe in entirely objective agent-relative moral facts. In other words, they would say something like, "It is an objective moral truth that X is wrong for members of community Y". The normative force of "X is wrong" would apply even to members of community Y who don't believe that X is wrong (hence the objectivity), but it wouldn't apply to people outside community Y (hence the relativism).
"The greatest pleasure is to vanquish your enemies and chase them before you, to rob them of their wealth and see those dear to them bathed in tears, to ride their horses and clasp to your bosom their wives and daughters."
The man who said that is suspected of being an ancestor of about 8% of all living Asians so you probably should listen to him :-P
Yeah, but what does Genghis Khan's dad say? He is, remarkably, suspected of being a direct ancestor of even more living Asians than Genghis!
Mordecai Kaplan would be unhappy to hear that commitment to ritual and tradition requires belief . Committing oneself to a hard line to avoid backsliding is justifiable without divine command theory.
Mordecai Kaplan would be unhappy to hear that commitment to ritual and tradition requires belief
I think the issue is not whether commitment to ritual -- as in, a commitment to go through the motions -- requires belief, it's whether experiencing ritual as beautiful requires belief. I think it's plausible that immersing oneself in the context of the ritual, including the requisite belief set, makes it far more meaningful and awe-inspiring. Merely aesthetic appreciation of ritual may not inspire the same depth of feeling as you would experience if every move in the ritual were wrought with spiritual significance for you.
So participating in the tradition without believing may also count as "depriving oneself of beauty". I wouldn't really know, though. I've been a non-believer my entire intellectually aware life, so I have no basis for comparison. I will say that I can't imagine any ritual or tradition driving me into the kind of frenzy you see at some charismatic Pentecostal churches, for instance. But I can't really imagine being driven to the kind of frenzy you see in the average audience for the The Price is Right either, so this may be an issue of personality rather than belief.
This is going to be a somewhat technical reply, but here goes anyway.
Boltzmann entropy, on the other hand, is a property of regions of phase space, not of ensembles or distributions. The famous Boltzmann formula equates entropy with the logarithm of the volume of a region in phase space. Now, it's true that corresponding to every phase space region there is an ensemble/distribution whose Shannon entropy is identical to the Boltzmann entropy, namely the distribution that is uniform in that region and zero elsewhere.
You cannot calculate the Shannon entropy of a continuous distribution so this doesn't make sense. However I see what you're getting at here - if we assume that all parts of the phase space have equal probability of being visited, then the 'size' of the phase space can be taken as proportional to the 'number' of microstates (this is studied under ergodic theory). But to make this argument work for actual physical systems where we want to calculate real quantities from theoretical considerations, the phase space must be 'discretized' in some way. A very simple way of doing this is the Sackur-Tetrode formulation which discretizes a continuous space based on the Heisenberg uncertainty principle ('discretize' is the best word I can come up with here -- what I mean is not listing the microstates but instead giving the volume of the phase space in terms of some definite elementary volume). But there's a catch here. To be able to use the HUP, you have to formulate the phase space in terms of complementary parameters. For instance, momentum+position, or time+energy.
However, this wasn't how Boltzmann himself envisioned the partitioning of phase space. In his original "counting argument" he partitioned phase space into regions based on the collective properties of the particles themselves, not the external constraints.
My previous point illustrates why this naive view is not physical - you can't discretize any kind of system. With some systems - like a box full of particles that can have arbitrary position and momentum - you get infinite (non-physical) values for entropy. It's easy to see why you can now get a fluctuation in entropy - infinity 'minus' some number is still infinity!
I tried re-wording this argument several times but I'm still not satisfied with my attempt at explaining it. Nevertheless, this is how it is. Looking at entropy based on models of collective properties of particles may be interesting theoretically but it may not always be a physically realistic way of calculating the entropy of the system. If you go through something like the Sackur-Tetrode way, though, you see that Boltzmann entropy is the same thing as Shannon entropy.
Boltzmann's original combinatorial argument already presumed a discretization of phase space, derived from a discretization of single-molecule phase space, so we don't need to incorporate quantum considerations to "fix" it. The combinatorics relies on dividing single-particle state space into tiny discrete boxes, then looking at the number of different ways in which particles could be distributed among those boxes, and observing that there are more ways for the particles to be spread out evenly among the boxes than for them to be clustered. Without discretization the entire argument collapses, since no more than one particle would be able to occupy any particular "box", so clustering would be impossible.
So Boltzmann did successfully discretize a box full of particles with arbitrary position and momentum, and using his discretization he derived (discrete approximations of) the Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution and the Boltzmann formula for entropy. And he did all this without invoking (or, indeed, being aware of) quantum considerations. So the Sackur-Tetrode route is not a requirement for a discretized Boltzmann-esque argument. I guess you could argue that in the absence of quantum considerations there is no way to justify the discretization, but I don't see why not. The discretization need not be interpreted as ontological, emerging from the Uncertainty Principle. It could be interpreted as merely epistemological, a reflection of limits to our abilities of observation and intervention.
Incidentally, none of these derivations require the assumption of ergodicity in the system. The result that the size of a macrostate in phase space is proportional to the number of microstates emerges purely from the combinatorics, with no assumptions about the system's dynamics (other than that they are Hamiltonian). Ergodicity, or something like it, is only required to establish that the time spent by a system in a particular macrostate is proportional to the size of the macrostate, and that is used to justify probabilistic claims about the system, such as the claim that a closed system observed at an arbitrary time is overwhelmingly likely to be in the macrostate of maximum Boltzmann entropy.
So ultimately, I do think the point Carroll was making is valid. The Boltzmann entropy -- as in, the actual original quantity defined by Boltzmann and refined by the Ehrenfests, not the modified interpretation proposed by people like Jaynes -- is distinct from the Gibbs entropy. The former can increase (or decrease) in closed system, the latter cannot.
To put it slightly more technically, the Gibbs entropy, being a property of a distribution that evolves according to Hamiltonian laws, is bound to stay constant by Liouville's theorem, unless there is a geometrical change in the accessible phase space or we apply some coarse-graining procedure. Boltzmann entropy, being a property of macrostates, not of distributions, is not bound by Liouville's theorem. Even if you interpret the Boltzmann entropy as a property of a distribution, it is not a distribution that evolves in a Hamiltonian manner. It evolves discontinuously when the system moves from one Boltzmann macrostate to the next.
How is this:
What we may think are fundamental laws of our universe, are merely descriptions of the nature of possible futures consistent with our continued existence.
compatible with this:
Everett Many Worlds is either correct or at least on the right track
Is quantum mechanics an exception to the claim that our conception of the fundamental laws is based on an observation selection effect? Why would it be one?
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Isn't that motte/bailey: "philosophy, a diseased discipline" is not a very discriminating title. The best line of his post is this:
And this is definitely ok!
But again, I am not super interested in arguing with people about whether philosophy is worthwhile. I have better things to do. I was only pointing out in response to the OP that I have been harping on LW's silly anti-academic sentiment for ages, that's all.
Not sure it's motte-and-bailey. I do think there are several serious pathologies in large swathes of contemporary philosophy. And I say this not as a dilettante, but a professional philosopher. There are areas of philosophy where these pathological tendencies are being successfully held at bay, and I do think there are promising signs that those areas are growing in influence. But much of mainstream philosophy, especially mainstream metaphysics and epistemology, does suffer from continued adherence to what I consider archaic and unhelpful methodology. And I think that's what Luke is trying to point out. He does go overboard with his rhetoric, and I think he lacks a feel for the genuine insights of the Western philosophical tradition (as smart and insightful as I think Yudkowsky is, I really find it odd that someone who purports to be reasonably familar with philosophy would cite him as their favorite philosopher). But I think there is a sound point lurking under there, and not merely a banal "motte"-style point.
I absolutely agree with you on the silliness of the anti-academic sentiment.