There is a functional/imperative distinction, but I don't think it's located in the language

It can be -- Haskell is purely functional, I would say early FORTRAN is purely imperative.

and Java, which lacks lambda expressions as a symptom of much bigger problems

Java has true closures (anonymous inner classes). But you don't want to use them. Or Java for that matter :).

I used to like functional programming much more when younger, before I realized the entire point of functional programming is to hide the causality of the program from the human, and the human needs the causality of the program to reason about the program and to debug. Sure, functional programs are easier for computers to handle, but human time is more precious.

Debugging non-trivial functional program projects requires the reinvention of imperative (causal) style (if you are very smart, this happens on the fly in your head, and the program still looks functional).

That this article wrote about the functional/imperative distinction in the way it did is a reminder that lesswrong is an attractor for holy war prone young people :). Keep religion out of science please!

How is the distinction between functional and imperative programming languages "not a real one"? I suppose you mean that there's a continuum of language designs between purely functional and purely imperative.

Not exactly. There is a functional/imperative distinction, but I don't think it's located in the language; it's more a matter of style and dialect. The majority of the difference between functional style and imperative style is in how you deal with collections. In functional style, you use map, filter, fold and the like, mostly treat them as immutable and create new ones, and use a lot of lambda expressions to support this. In imperative style, you emulate the collection operators using control flow constructs. Most major programming languages today support both syles, and the two styles act as dialects. (The main exceptions are non-garbage-collected languages, which can't use the functional style because it interacts badly with object ownership, and Java, which lacks lambda expressions as a symptom of much bigger problems).

These styles are less different than they appear. A lot of use of mutation is illusory; it matches to a palette of a dozen or so recognizable patterns which could just as easily be written in functional form. In fact, ReSharper can automatically translate a lot of C# between these two styles, in a provably-correct fashion; and if you want to prove complicated things about programs, the infrastructure to make that sort of thing easy is part of the price of admission.

But there's a catch. Programmers who start in a functional language and avoid the imperative style don't learn the palette of limited mutations, and to them, imperative-style code is more inscrutable than to programmers who learned both styles. And while I'm much less certain of this, I think there may be an order-dependence, where programmers who learn imperative style first and then functional do better than those who learn them in reverse order. And I don't think it's possible to get to the higher skill levels without a thorough grasp of both.

What's your objection to the violinist thought experiment? If you're a utilitarian, perhaps you don't think the waters here are very deep. It's certainly a useful way of deflating and short-circuiting certain other intuitions that block scientific and medicinal progress in much of the developed world, though.

Abstractly, bee hives produce honey. Concretely, this bee hive in front of me is producing honey. Abstractly, science is the product of professions, institutions, ect. Concretely, science is the product of people on our planet doing stuff.

It sounds like you're conflating abstract/concrete with general/particular. But a universal generalization might just be the conjunction of a lot of particulars. I prefer to think of 'abstract' as 'not spatially extended or localized.' Societies are generally considered more abstract than mental states because mental states are intuitively treated as more localized. But 'lots of mental states' is not more abstract than 'just one mental state,' in the same way that thousands of bees (or 'all the bees,' in your example) can be just as concrete as a single bee.

But when you say science is a bunch of abstractions (like I think your definitions are)

We're back at square one. I still don't see why reasoning is more abstract than professions, institutions, etc. We agree that it all reduces to human behaviors on some level. But the 'abstract vs. concrete' discussion is a complete tangent. What's relevant is whether it's useful to have separate concepts of 'the practice of science' vs. 'professional science,' the former being something even laypeople can participate in by adopting certain methodological standards. I think both concepts are useful. You seem to think that only 'professional science' is a useful concept, at least in most cases. Is that a fair summary?

This is exactly why I want to avoid defining science with abstractions. It literally does not make sense if you think of science as it is. "Scientific" imports essentialism.

Counterfactuals don't make sense if you think of things as they are? I don't think that's true in any nontrivial sense....

'Scientific' is not any more guilty of essentializing than are any of our other fuzzy, ordinary-language terms. There are salient properties associated with being a scientist; I'm suggesting that many of those clustered properties, in particular many of the ones we most care about when we promote and praise things like 'science' and 'naturalism,' can occur in isolated individuals. If you don't like calling what I'm talking about 'scientific,' then coin a different word for it; but we need some word. We need to be able to denote our exemplary decision procedures, just to win the war of ideas.

'Professional science' is not an exemplary decision procedure, any more than 'the buildings and faculty at MIT' is an exemplary decision procedure. It's just an especially effective instantiation thereof.

I can't think of any abstraction more important in making progress with something.

Maybe we're just not approaching the problem at the same levels. When I ask about what the optimal way is to define our concepts, I'm trying to define them in a way that allows us to consistently and usefully explain them (in any number of paraphrased forms) to 8th-graders, to congressmen, to literary theorists, such that we can promote the best techniques we associate with scientists, philosophers, and mathematicians. I'm imagining how we would design a scientific+philosophical+mathematical+etc. literacy pamphlet that would teach people how to win at life. It sounds like you're instead trying to think of a single sentence that summarizes what winning at life is, at its most abstract. 'Adopt a self-improving feedback cycle linking you to reality' is just a fancy way of saying 'Behave in a way that predictably makes you better and better at doing good stuff.' Which is great, but not especially contentful as yet. I only care about people understanding how winning works insofar as this understanding helps them actually win.

I think you're reifying abstraction and doing so will introduce pitfalls when discussing them.

I think your definitions are more abstract than mine. For me, mathematics, philosophy, and science are embodied brain behaviors — modes of reasoning. For you, if I'm understanding you right, they're professions, institutions, social groups, population-wide behaviors. Sociology is generally considered more abstract or high-level than psychology.

(Of course, I don't reject your definitions on that account; denying the existence of philosophizing or of professional philosophy because one or the other is 'abstract' would be as silly as denying the existence of abstractions like debt, difficulty, truth, or natural selection. I just think your abstraction is of somewhat more limited utility than mine, when our goal is to spread good philosophizing, science, and mathematics rather than to treat the good qualities of those disciplines as the special property of a prestigious intellectual elite belonging to a specific network of organizations.)

Feedback cycles are great, but we don't need to build them into our definition of 'science' in order to praise science for happening to possess them; if we put each scientist on a separate island, their work might suffer as a result, but it's not clear to me that they would lose all ability to do anything scientific, or that we should fail to clearly distinguish the scientifically-minded desert-islander for his unusual behaviors.

Also, it's not clear in what sense mathematics has a self-improving recursive feedback cycle with reality. Actually, mathematics and philosophy seem to function very analogously in terms of their relationship to reality and to science.

If I'm going to promote something to laypeople, it's that a mechanism of recursive self-improvement is desirable.

I'm not sure that's the best approach. Telling people to find a recursively self-improving method is not likely to be as effective as giving them concrete reasoning skills (like how to perform thought experiments, or how to devise empirical hypotheses, or how to multiply quantities) and then letting intelligent society-wide behaviors emerge via the marketplace of ideas (or via top-down societal structuring, if necessary). Don't fixate first and foremost on telling people about what our abstract models suggest makes science on a societal scale so effective; fixate first and foremost on making them good scientists in their daily lives, in every concrete action.

I said the distinctions have become more blurred

I thought you were saying that the distinctions have become less blurred? Now I'm confused.

I define philosophy, math, and science by their professions.

That's fine for some everyday purposes. But if we want to distinguish the useful behaviors in each profession from the useless ones, and promote the best behaviors both among laypeople and among professionals, we need more fine-grained categories than just 'everything that people who publish in journals seen as philosophy journals do.' I think it would be useful to distinguish Professional Philosophy, Professional Science, and Professional Mathematics from the basic human practices of philosophizing, doing science, or reasoning mathematically. Something in the neighborhood of these ideas would be quite useful:

mathematics: carefully and systematically reasoning about quantity, or (more loosely) about the quantitative properties and relationships of things.

philosophy: carefully reasoning about generalizations, via 'internal' reflection (phenomenology, thought experiments, conceptual analysis, etc.), in a moderately (more than shamanic storytelling, less than math or logic) systematic way.

science: carefully collecting empirical data, and carefully reasoning about its predictive and transparently ontological significance.

Do you think these would be useful fast-and-ready definitions for everyday promotion of scientific, philosophical, and mathematical literacy? Would you modify any of them?

I strongly disagree. Almost every question in philosophy that I've ever studied has some camp of philosophers who reject the question as ill-posed, or want to dissolve it, or some such. Wittgensteinians sometimes take that attitude towards every question. Such philosophers often not discussed as much as those who propose "big answers" but there's no question that they exist and that any philosopher working in the field is well aware of them.

Also, there's a selection effect: people who think question X isn't a proper question tend not to spend their careers publishing on question X!

Could you taboo/define 'philosophy,' 'math,' and 'science' for me in a way that clarifies exactly how they don't overlap? It'd be very helpful. Is there any principled reason, for example, that theoretical physics cannot be philosophy? Or is some theoretical physics philosophy, and some not? Is there a sharp line, or a continuum between the two kinds of theoretical physics?

if that's a philosophy department's purpose then it doesn't need to be funded beyond that.

If that's a philosophy department's purpose, and nothing else can fulfill the same purpose, then philosophy departments are vastly underfunded as it stands. (Though I agree the current funding could be better managed.)

But the real flaw is that we think of philosophy as a college thing. Philosophical training should be fully integrated into quite early-age education in logical, scientific, mathematical, moral, and other forms of reasoning.

I've substituted problems that philosophy is actually working on (metaethics and conciousness) with one that analytic philosophy isn't (meaning of life).

Unless it is. Maybe the MoL breaks down into many of the other topics studied by philosophers. Maybe philosophy is in the process of reducing it.

Meaning comes from mind. Either we create our own meaning (absurdism, existentialism, ect) or we get meaning from a greater mind that designed us with a purpose (religion). Very simple

No, not simple

How could computer science or science dissolve this problem? (1) By not working on it because it's unanswerable by the only methods we can have said to have answered something,

You say it is "unanswerable" timelessly. How do you know that? It's unanswered up to present. As are a number of scientific questions.

or (2) making the problem answerable by operationalizing it or by reforming the intent of the question into another, answerable, question.

Maybe. But checking that you have correctly identified the intent, and not changed the subject, is just the sort of armchair conceptual analysis philosophers do.

Through the process of science, we gain enough knowledge to dissolve philosophical questions or make the answer obvious and solved

You say that timelsessly, but at the time of writing we have done where we have and we don't where we haven;t.

(even though science might not say "the meaning of life is X" but instead show that we evolved, what mind is, and how the universe likely came into being -- in which case you can answer the question yourself without any need for a philosophy department).

But unless science can relate that back to the initial question , there is no need to consider it answered.

What instruments do use to get feedback from reality vis a vis phenomenal consciousness and ethical values? I didn't notice and qualiometers or agathometers last time I was in a lab.

If I want to know what's happening in a brain, I have to understand the physical/biological/computational nature of the brain.

That's necessary, sure. But if it were sufficient, would we have a Hard Problem of Consciousness?

If I can't do that, then I can't really explain qualia or such.

But I am not suggesting that science be shut down, and the funds transferred to philosophy.

You might say we can't understand qualia through its physical/biological/computational nature. Maybe, but it seems very unlikely,

It seems actual to me. We don't have such an understanding at present. I don't know what that means for the future, and I don't how you are computing your confident statement of unlikelihood. One doens't even have to believe in some kind of non-physicalism to think that we might never. The philosopher Colin McGinn argues that we have good reason to believe both that consc. is physical, and that we will never understand it.

and if we can't understand the brain through science,

We can't understand qualia through science now. How long does that have to continue before you give up? What's the harm in allowing philsophy to continue when it is so cheap compared to science?

PS. I would be interested in hearing of a scientific theory of ethics that doens't just ignore the is-ought problem.

Any discussion of what art is. Any discussion of whether or not the universe is real. Any conversation about whether machines can truly be intelligent. More specifically, the ship of Theseus thought experiment and the related sorites paradox are entirely definitional, as is Edmund Gettier's problem of knowledge. The (appallingly bad, by the way) swamp man argument by Donald Davidson hinges entirely on the belief that words actually refer to things. Shades of this pop up in Searle's Chinese room and other bad thought experiments.

I could go on, but that would require me to actually go out and start reading philosophy papers, and goodness knows I hate that,