Comment by nathan_compton
1 month ago
God, can we fucking quit with this "philosophy is bullshit" stuff. Like there are literally Faculty in Philosophy all over the world trying to understand AI. Philosophy faculty do stuff, they try to understand things, most of the ideas we are talking about here came from philosophers.
Philosophy seems a term generally reserved for the stuff we don't understand yet and so is inherently kind of speculative. Once you have a definite answer it gets called science instead.
Science is a sub-discipline of Philosophy. My degree in physics is called a "Doctorate of Philosophy."
You're confusing philosophy with religion.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy
> Philosophy (from Ancient Greek philosophía lit. 'love of wisdom') is a systematic study of general and fundamental questions concerning topics like existence, knowledge, mind, reason, language, and value. It is a rational and critical inquiry that reflects on its methods and assumptions.
It is literally a self-reflective science.
I recommend taking a basic philosophical course at a local community college, or reading some literature or even watching YouTube videos on the subject of philosophy. Or just skim the Wikipedia article if nothing else. It might completely transform how you perceive and act upon the world.
An example near the start of that article is
>Physics was originally part of philosophy, like Isaac Newton's observation of how gravity affects falling apples.
like back then people would wonder how apples fall and it was labeled philosophy. Now we understand gravitation it's part of physics for the most part. People launching satellites seldom call a philosopher to calculate the orbit.
It remains to be seen if qualia, which we don't understand very well and are so regarded as philosophical, make the transition to neuroscience.
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That's not it at all. I would ask what you consider science to be?
Understanding the world through experiment?
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> Like there are literally Faculty in Philosophy all over the world trying to understand AI.
There surely are. The problem is that they are failing. While the practical nerds are coming up with some pretty good ideas.
And this was what philosophy was supposed to be for! Like, they've been arguing on their pins for centuries about the essence of consciousness and the uniqueness of the human condition and whatnot. AND HERE WE ARE AT THE DAWN OF NON-HUMAN INTELLIGENCE AND THEY HAVE NOTHING USEFUL TO SAY.
Basically at what point do we just pack it in and admit we all fucked up?
It seems to me that 'Philosophy is meaningless' has been ingrained into so many people it's almost propaganda-esque!
To see this sentiment from supposed 'scientific' individuals is shocking. I wonder if they could define what science actually is.
Blame philosophy as a field for actively kicking out anything which gains a practical application. If it is propaganda it is coming from inside the house of philosophy.
I had a computer science professor who had degrees in philosophy because he was old enough that computer science didn't exist as a major at the time. The logical arguments of philosophy proved useful for understanding interactions of boolean mathematics. Yet that triumph of philosophy didn't further interest in the field or gain prestiege among philosophers. Just the opposite really.
As far as I can tell it is for dumb reasons possibly related to Ancient Greeks and their obsession with 'purity of thought (read: not referencing reality) it is practically an axiom that if it is useful or grounded in objective reality it isn't treated as philosophy anymore. All likely stemming from motivated reasoning against checking their priors and from frankly many of the Ancient philosophers being influenced by a need to flatter their patrons who held the practical in disdain. As notoriously seen in Aristotlian physics with impetus physics where projectiles keep moving in the same direction until impetus is depleted and then fall.
Speculation of the origon of the pathology aside, there seems to be this deep-seated antiempericalism in philosophy. Which means at best you get 'philosophy of science' which isn't proper philosophy because it pollutes itself by daring to use reality and experimentation as benchmarks for theories. When philosophy gains a practical usage it doesn't become something called 'practical philosophy' and the focus of more interest by philosophers, it gets shunned. Natural philosophy didn't remain philosophy - it became science.
To be fair there is probably some interaction driving the divorce from the opposite direction, of the practical portions of philosophy being pilfered by those only looking for results as opposed to some sort of unquantifiable enlightenment.
Science is of course a process of refinement of ideas against the reference point of reality. Anything mathematically consistent can be a model but experimentation is needed to see how well your model corresponds to reality.
How many philosophy papers or textbooks would you say you read in a typical year?
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