I skipped philosophy and always regretted it, for the same reasons pg mentions (it seems to be the ultimate in reality)
In the last 3 years, however, I've picked up some great philosophy CDs from The Teaching Company. I spent 400 bucks instead of all that tuition, and I learned enough philosophy to really appreciate it.
I agree somewhat and disagree somewhat with Paul's essay. On one hand, pragmatism seems to be the only rational resposne to so much generalizing! And he's right -- philosopher's have continuously pushed the boundaries of language well past the breaking point.
But I think Paul overgeneralizes, which is ironic since that seems to be part of the claim he's making against philosophy. I view the field as really smart people trying to come to grasp ultimate truths on which the rest of science can be constructed. Many times they have succeede, like J.S. Mills, or Newton. Philosophy generates science.
But you can't take it too seriously. Philosophy is like a dance, or a way to play the tuba. If you're having fun with it, and you're generating something of value (I would agree with the life-changing criteria but simply making a buck from geralizing where nobody else did is enough for me) then you're a philosopher. Anybody who's ever sat designing a program where you get that "a ha!" moment, where you realize by generalizing in these few areas you've made a whole new practical and valuable thing, is right up there with Russell in my book. Anybody who has went through requirements sessions, only to have the code still not match the needs because of the slipperiness of language understands Wittgenstein.
Although unpopular with many people, Ayn Rand approached philosophy in some ways as you are proposing. She strove to discover general principles that, once grasped, change the way one acts. Personally, reading and understanding her philosophy has changed my life and the decisions I make a great deal.
For anyone interested, I have a site http://www.ImportanceOfPhilosophy.com that explains why I think philosophy is so important and which is mainly based on Ayn Rand's philosophy.
One of the ways I (and others) knock Ayn is that she didn't have an effect on later developments in philosophy. But she did have an effect on people's lives. By pg's definition, is she more relevant -- or is she reheated Nietzsche with some Stirner stirred in?
IMHO Rand is vastly different from Nietzsche. There is obviously some degree of influence, but Nietzsche is subjective, anti-systematic and anti-rational, while Rand is almost the canonical example of a philosophy that attempts to be objective, systematic and rational.
As for Rand's limited influence on subsequent development in philosophy, that's an interesting point. Why is this the case? Even if you disagree with Rand's philosophy, I think it's pretty outrageous that her work isn't even mentioned in more university philosophy programs. There are only a few other philosophers whose work provides as complete a system for understanding reality, the nature of knowledge, and the nature of ethics (I'd include Aristotle, Plato, and Hegel as others that are similarly complete, but there aren't too many after that).
So why is Rand's work not taught more often? I'd say that is mostly the result of the biases and predilections of the typical university philosophy department.
This is changing very quickly these days. Rand is mentioned in most courses on contemporary philosophy. Her ethics is usually called "enlightened self-interest" or "rational egoism."
There are now quite a number of Ayn Rand philosophy chairs at various high profile universites in the country.
It's funny, but one of the reasons Rand is coming into universities these days is the attitude that no theory is any better than any other i.e, subjectivism. The very thing that Rand spent so much time attacking!
(I got this from talking to the guys who run the Ayn Rand Institute, which is largley responsible for these developments.)
Edit: Regarding Nietzsche, you are 100% corrent. For what it's worth Rand was adamant that her ethics was nothing like Nietzsche. Here's the most positive thing she had to say about him: "as a poet, he projects at times (not consistently)a magnificent feeling for man's greatness, expressed in emotional, not intellectual terms."
Re: Rand's ethics being nothing like Nietzsche's...
When you really dig into Rand, her ethics are essentially a modernized version of Aristotle's virtue ethics. Most of her ethical theory revolved around core values (Reason, Purpose, Self-Esteem) and virtues that supported these values (Pride, Rationality, Integrity, Productiveness, Independence, and Justice). Many argue she left out a few important virtues like benevolence, but overall it's a pretty good and useful list. She didn't necessarily agree with Aristotle's "Doctrine of the Mean" (virtue is the mean between two extremes), but otherwise her ethics are very Aristotelian.
No, it's for the same reason that intelligent design isn't taught in biology classes, or that the timecube theory isn't taught in physics classes, or that homeopathy isn't taught in med school. Rand's output was pseudophilosophy.
On what grounds would you call Rand's work "pseudophilosophy", rather than philosophy proper? Just because you don't like something does not mean it is automatically disqualified from the class of philosophies.
I think that to qualify as a philosophy, something must be a system of thought that proposes a notion of metaphysics, epistemology, and a system of ethics. Rand's "output" obviously qualifies, whether you happen to agree with it or not.
Intelligent design and time cube theory ought not to be taught because they can be objectively verified as false. Such a test plainly does not apply to philosophy -- and even if it did, it would disqualify plenty of philosophers who are taught, such as the pre-Socratic philosopher Thales.
> On what grounds would you call Rand's work "pseudophilosophy", rather than philosophy proper?
Well, for a start, there was the fact that she reviewed, and dismissed on "philosophical" grounds, a book of Immanuel Kant's after she read the back cover. Sure, that's an example, but by no means an atypical one. She dismissed nearly everything after Aristotle, usually on superficial grounds. Such wholesale dismissal of the established field, such grandiosity of claims (especially in the face of such shallow thinking) has direct parallels with pseudoscience.
> I would personally say that to qualify as a philosophy, something must be a system of thought that proposes a notion of metaphysics, epistemology, and a system of ethics. Rand's "output" obviously qualifies
...for a definition of "philosophy" you have pretty much quoted verbatim from her work, but without admitting that or even acknowledging the existence of alternative perspectives? You do see the problem with that, don't you...?
> Intelligent design and time cube theory ought not to be taught because they can be objectively verified as false.
No. They can't. That's the whole point of pseudoscience - if their claims were verifiable but wrong, it would just be forgotten. But pseudoscientists make unverifiable claims precisely in order to claim that because their claims have not been disproven, they should be given parity.
As for teaching Thales, how does one teach that Socrates was an advance if one does not teach what he was advancing from? Similarly, the Rutherford model of the atom is still mentioned in science classes - by your logic it should be forgotten as pseudoscience, but it wasn't. One cannot teach science without teaching that models are superseded by better models as they are created - that is the very nature of the scientific process. And the reason science and philosophy were commingled until a couple of centuries ago is that it's at the heart of the philosophical process too. One rejects models because one can demonstrate that an alternative model better fits the observable reality; one doesn't superficially reject them without bothering to understand them first because one finds their implications in disagreement with the conclusions one is seeking to prove!
1. You claim that she dismissed a book by Kant after reading the back cover.
Please provide a reference.
2. You don't like his definition of philsophy.
What definition do you like?
3. You claim pseudophilosophy should not be taught in philosophy classes.
Anyone and everyone agrees with that point. You still leave open the issue of whether Rand's work is in fact pseudophilosophy. Please support your claims.
See above. The books in which I could have located a reference are long gone; but it's in one of her short essays (if pushed, I'd suggest that it might be found in For the New Intellectual... but wouldn't want to be held to that).
> What definition do you like?
From wikipedia: "Different philosophers have had varied ideas about the nature of reason, and there is also disagreement about the subject matter of philosophy." If not even the people who do it professionally can agree on a definition, it would be presumptuous of me to try.
Nonetheless, you misread my objection. I am objecting to the assertion that Rand's work is without question philosophy, using the definition of philosophy by which Rand identified herself as one. It's tautological; it begs the question.
Likewise, my criticism of Rand is not that her conclusions are not reasonable conclusions (although I have my own opinions on that). It is that the methods by which she reached those conclusions are not those of a serious philosophical investigation. Rand's entire "philosophy" was carefully contrived to justify the conclusions she wanted justified, and that makes it worthless as philosophy - and inherently dishonest, to boot.
> You still leave open the issue of whether Rand's work is in fact pseudophilosophy.
I haven't even presented a definition of pseudophilosophy, let alone one you have agreed upon, so it's hard to see how you can assert that I haven't proved my case. So:
: I define "pseudophilosophy" as "justification masquerading as philosophy" - or, to elaborate, "a contrived rationalisation of a priori conclusions, constructed primarily to justify those conclusions rather than to examine their validity".
: I claim that the evidence of Rand's flight to the US from revolutionary Russia, and the emotions expressed in her early fiction (primarily We the Living and Anthem, but even back as far as The Husband I Bought) demonstrate the a priori nature of her strident individualism and anti-collectivism. I do not criticise this; indeed, I have a lot of sympathy with it.
: I note that her philosophical oeuvre developed over the next few decades, from its clumsy emotive (and none the worse for that) beginnings in Anthem, through its 30-year gestation in The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, to its expression in direct form in works such as For The New Intellectual and Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal.
: I therefore conclude that in this case, she contrived her philosophical justification to fit her a priori conclusions about the rightness of capitalism and the abhorrence of altruism.
Note that I remain in sympathy with the feelings that drove her; indeed, I would go so far as to say that I share them. But to look upon her rationalisation of those feelings as anything other than a rationalisation, the self-justification of a woman who could not allow herself to simply be, is something I find absurd.
> Rand's entire philosophy was carefully contrived to justify the conclusions she wanted justified, and that makes it worthless as philosophy
"Worthless" is far overstating the case: in general it is hard to prove very much about the true motivations of philosophers, particularly long-dead ones. For example, it is quite likely that the exact lines of reasoning in Descartes' Meditations was contrived to reach the conclusions he wanted to reach beforehand, but to say that makes the whole thing "worthless" is pretty silly. Many philosophers can be criticized as developing rational arguments for positions they hold intuitively.
Considering that one of his "results" is a philosophical proof of the existence of God, I'd say he might have gone up a bit of a garden path...
> Many philosophers can be criticized as developing rational arguments for positions they hold intuitively.
Indeed, but the key is doing so from a position of trying to prove your intuitively-held position wrong, and I'd suggest that this is what distinguishes philosophers. Some of them - for instance, Wittgenstein - even manage to do it.
Going back to the science analogy, new hypotheses are accepted not once supporting evidence is found - even UFOs have supporting evidence, after all! - but only for as long as attempts to produce confounding evidence fail.
> Well, for a start, there was the fact that she reviewed, and dismissed on "philosophical" grounds, a book of Immanuel Kant's after she read the back cover.
This is utterly irrelevant to the point in question. Rand's attitude toward other philosophers was pretty uninformed, I agree, but it is evidence of Rand herself being silly, superficial, etc., The point is that those are properties of Rand, not of her philosophy. To equate her (many) imperfections as an individual with inherent properties of her philosophy is essentially an ad hominem argument -- and it's even more debatable that merely dismissing the alternatives to one's theory automatically makes your own theory "pseudophilosophy".
As for my definition of philosophy, sure, it is also Rand's view, but I think it is fairly reasonable. Surely a philosophy must include some claims about 1. the nature of reality 2. our ability to understand that reality, if any 3. how we ought to act within that reality. If you think it's such a flawed definition, what definition would you prefer, and how does Rand's "output" not qualify?
As for ID/etc. being provably false, I agree with you, I mispoke. But I still don't see how you've proven, or even really supported, your argument that Rand is somehow "pseudophilosophy", and other systems of thought are "real" philosophy. That just sounds like superficial bigotry to me -- actually the same sort of thing you accuse Rand of, with respect to Kant.
You can't verify (prove) that ID is false, or that there is no God, or anything like that. It isn't an issue for scientific tests, and certainty is never possible anyway.
Two wrongs don't make a right. I'd say it's more important to stop teaching pseudoscience in science classes than to use it as a justification for teaching pseudophilosophy in philosophy classes. And in general, novels should be taught in literature classes, not philosophy classes - although the example of L'Etranger suggests that there is room for crossover.
(Anyway, the majority of Rand's work takes the form of non-fictional essays. Her novels made her name, but it's clear she saw them only as means to an end.)
Actually, there is a good reason TO teach pseudo-science in science classes: to expose the student to literature which is not science. One of the most critical features that defines a person as a "scientist" is his healthy skepticism. This is very often NOT taught in science classes.
Since most pseudo-scientists have a genuine concern over some problem, and they have obviously acquired what little scientific exposure they did from their schooling, then I claim that if more science classes covered pseudo-science, explaining why it is not true science, then I predict a distinct drop in pseudo-science will result.
> while Rand is almost the canonical example of a philosophy that attempts to be objective, systematic and rational.
I tend to think of Rand's work as the canonical example of a philosophy that is defined primarily by its _claims of_ being objective, systematic, and rational.
But isn't that the point? Its the only reason I have an interest in philosophy.
--
> didn't have an effect on later developments in philosophy
And in a sense, Paul was arguing against that in this essay. When you think about it, it was exactly this effect that has lead Philosophy to remain so stagnant for so many years.
I think those are pretty good axioms to build upon. I don't think Rand came up with a grand unified theory of human behavior but she started from the right place... As opposed to our Greek ancestors...
yes, but what is "self?" what is "interested?" How does the meaning change when you put "self interested" together as a phrase?
As Paul mentioned in his essay, you're already bumping into what words mean.
I can tell you what an integer is, what a square root is, and what a ratio is, and as a result, I can (by looking it up in a book and typing in the text, heh heh) prove that the square root of 2 can't be expressed as the ratio of two integers. But can we do the same thing with the phrase "self interested"? Without pushing the meaning of words out to their breaking point?
>I can tell you what an integer is, what a square root is, and what a ratio is, and as a result, I can (by looking it up in a book and typing in the text, heh heh) prove that the square root of 2 can't be expressed as the ratio of two integers.
sure, but these words have precise definitions. Paul alluded to this when he wrote "in fact, it would not be a bad definition of math to call it the study of terms that have precise meanings".
"Ratio", "Square Root", and "Integer" have precise definitions, whereas "self interest" is imprecise.
Ok but you're jumping down the rabbit hole to quickly. Physicists assume spherical cows, early mathematicians assumed only integers, why can't Rand assume that "self" is the thoughts and actions encased in one's skin? It is a good jump off point and a lot of useful philosophies can be derived from there. Sure they eventually break down once you push the definitions hard enough, but that just means the model needs to be refined. Newtonian Physics needed to be refined as well, that didn't mean it should have been scrapped.
Actually, there already is stuff that's far more refined (and empirically true) than Ayn Rand. It's called evolutionary psychology. Unfortunately, understanding it leaves one feeling rather unedified. It's like realizing that you've been a pawn in somebody else's game, and will continue to be one until your life ends. With Ayn Rand fans, this kind of message doesn't seem to be in demand.
I think there's an important difference here. Early mathematicians started with an exact definition that turned out to be incorrect (ie., that all numbers could be represented as either integers or the ratio of integers).
The refinement you're talking about here isn't so much a matter of modifying an incorrect but exact definition as it is clarifying an irrefutable but ambiguous definition.
That said, maybe something could come of this if you truly got to the very basic building blocks. For instance, an integer is just a definition - an exact one, but a definition nonetheless. So we can define a rational number as the ratio of two integers, and then build a refutable hypothesis from it - that all numbers are either integers or the ratio of integers.
I have serious doubts as to whether "self interest" could ever be defined as precisely as an integer, though.
"Self" and "interested" never appear in isolation in the above example, so we can only speculate on their precise interpretations when used in isolation. However, the compound concept "self-interested" has a well-defined meaning, even in casual, every-day conversations.
Calling into question the meaning of "self-interested" is merely a filibuster.
I couldn't disagree more. "Self interested" absolutely does not have a well understood meaning in casual, every-day conversations. It's one of the most ambiguous terms out there.
Try this out: at a dinner party (one that you don't care if you're invited back), declare that "all people act out of self-interest, ultimately."
Odds are good that two people will disagree quite vehemently about this, and at the core will be a fundamental disagreement about what it means to be "self-interested".
This pair of sentences is confusing: "All societies invent cosmologies. Occam's razor suggests their motivation was whatever it usually is."
I can't figure out what the second sentence is trying to tell me. That societies' motivations for inventing cosmologies are their motivations for inventing cosmologies? And what does this have to do with writing in verse rather than prose?
I meant the presocratic philosophers were probably driven by the same motives that drive people in any other society to make up stories about the origins and nature of the world.
Occam's Razor is a pretty lovely bit of guidance, if not philosophy, that's both general and useful. My college had a great books curriculum, and the few books from the last 100 years changed my thinking as much as all the earlier ones combined. Rawls' veil of ignorance is especially elegant.
One note about modern philosophy, though. One of my cofounders enjoys reading about neuroscience, and I was talking to him about modern philosophy a few months ago. He suggested, quite wisely, that in a few hundred years, the early 21st century work that philosophers read is as likely to come from science-oriented guys like Steven Pinker and Daniel Dennett (i.e. the meaningoflife.tv cohort) as it is from traditional philosophers.
Software is applied philosophy. Where else can you deal with everything that western philosophy offers, from classification to epistemology to the philosophy of language and science -- and at the end of the day produce something that has immediate value for someone? All of this working, real-world stuff we're doing, from heuristics to machine learning and meta-programming -- it's all applied philosophy.
But software has the shortest feedback loop between high metaphysical concepts and practical instantiation. For example, OO is a variation on the notion of Forms.
I'll elaborate: in systems design you start with nothing. With words, ideas, feelings. Heck -- most of the time people can't even express what they want the system to do! When you start like that, you are in a completely impracticable spot.
Not only that, but when you do get the words out, they're all just abstractions of other things. "We'd like the user to see the most relevant article" Well gee, what do you mean by "relevant"? What do you mean by "see"? It's the same exact problem you face when you're talking about stuff most people consider BS, like are we real or not.
So you start in this totally meaningless set of concepts, you refine, you abstract, you categorize -- in short, you take a trip through each of the major branches of philosophy. When they say "user", do they mean something that is part of an abstract type of "person"? Or is that over-designing? When we look at scaling past ten million users, what's the impact of applying various principles of set theory, such as normalization? When we say we want the machine to learn what the user wants, do we really mean just what his next actions will be?
We do all of this automatically, without realizing that some pretty smart other people have walked many of these roads before. Because those guys have been there, done that, all of these sciences have been created: sciences like hardware and software design, debugging, complexity theory. For the most part, we don't need to learn about all of these smart people and the full stories of their ideas. After all, only about 1 or 2 percent of what they did lived on after them. But by understanding a more complete version of what they thought, sometimes it can save you going down a dead end. And heck, it can just make discovering the answer more fun. And at the end, when all of that BS comes toghether for a real, live, working system? It's a thing of beauty. Did you even build a system for a large organizatino and every department had a different idea of what reality was? Did you look for wrong and right people, or think of the word "paradigm" (Kuhn -- sort of)
You can't take philosophy like you would a hard science. It doesn't progress or evolve from one phase to another, and half of it doesn't even make sense with the other half. That's okay, though. It doesn't mean that it is not useful, just different.
I'm currently a philosophy of science and molecular biology double major, and I have to say I agree with Paul Graham's criticisms of traditional philosophy. None of it really makes sense, and is generally nothing more than someone's opinion. Yet we hold philosophers such as Aristotle in high regard.
Philosophy of science is different from classical philosophy in that it focuses on more concrete aspects. One of the best classes I took was the philosophy of artificial intelligence. We discussed what it is to be conscious, and how we differed from a computer, it at all.
Other classes focused on the history of evolution or relativity and studied how these theories were formed and the arguments from the scientific community against them. While a lot of the readings are books or essays by people simply giving their opinions, I've learned to consider what they have to say, but that it is OK and in fact encouraged to disagree and give your own opinion. Since philosophy cannot be "proven" like a mathematical proof, another's opinions are not any more correct than my own as long as both are formed logically.
What I took from philosophy was not the opinions of the "great philosophers", but rather was the ability to think about things logically and confidently make my own opinions on them.
Basically, consciousness is nothing special and we don't differ from computer at all in that we're simply a more complex computer than anything we've created thus far.
The brain is composed of neurons. Each neuron either fires or it doesn't, just like on or off in a computer. This is determined by chemical reactions in and outside the cell. A powerful enough computer can simulate this down to the atomic level, it's just physics. Just because the computers we build don't function the same as the brain doesn't mean that the brain isn't a computer. Some attempts at AI have taken this approach, and while they generally work, we don't yet have the processing power to scale it.
When a certain stimulus happens, the effects it has on the brain, which include thoughts, is predictable and computable by doing the physics. We just have this illusion of "free will" and making choices. Our personalities are simply the result of how our brain's wiring developed from our environmental stimuli.
This also brings to light an important topic in philosophy of science: determinism. Is the world deterministic or not? If it's not, then physics and the sciences simply don't work. If the world is deterministic, which all evidence we have says that it is, then free will cannot exist. It's just easier and more comforting for people to pretend we have free will.
Yet that doesn't even address consciousness. Just behaviour.
I don't mean consciousness as in functioning state of the brain (i.e., as opposed to unconsciousness), or about the ability of a representational system to picture and reason about itself. I talk about the feeling of being (I wrote a semi-serious comment about this in this thread: search for metaesthesia).
You can rightly claim that this is not observable beyond the first person, and thus it's out of the scope of science. But I guess we all have a personal unscientific take on it, or we can make up one as good as any other when so prompted. That was what I was asking you about.
My take is that consciousness is probably unique to humanity. Yet other great entities, probably have something better than consciousness. Because of the limitations of our own consciousness and what our language allows us to express, we won't ever be able to comprehend the supreme state of existence that makes up what a star has that is better than consciousness. It just doesn't make sense to me to look at a star and somehow perceive ourselves as better or different than that dumb object because we think.
Better? What does that mean in this context? How do you compare a consciousness to a 'supreme state of existence', for value or otherwise? Who can perceive both, to perform such a comparison?
Hate to be unpoetic, but how is a star anything more than a big ball of burning gas? I don't feel humans are 'better' than stars. The only loosely related comparison I can think of is complexity: there is more to know about humans than about stars.
>Who can perceive both, to perform such a comparison?
Our fourth dimensional overlords.
It's really tough to go anywhere with this conversation because it quickly hits the limits of what our consciousness can express. I feel that our consciousness is missing something that would allow us to understand why the big ball of burning gas exists on a higher plane of existence than us. This is of course completely impossible to justify.
Yes, our reasoning platform is not made to deal with this kind of stuff, but it's fun, in a perverse way, to see where can it take us.
Kinda like passing a bitmap image to an audio player, or passing it through a mp3 compressor and loading the resulting data in an image viewer, trying to discover anything interesting in the output.
Sometimes we find ourselves working with schemas that clearly have elements of truth, but that for some reason don't seem to hold up well empirically. Often times this is because the schema we have in our heads is more broadly defined than the underlying phenomenon.
A good example of this is the phenomenon of prodigies. We know there are some people in society who are exceptionally talented in certain areas, and we call these people prodigies. We then have certain schemas that we apply to these prodigies in our quest for wisdom.
But even though prodigies clearly exist, our schemas often seem to not hold up so well. For example, studies have shown that child prodigies are often not significantly more successful than the rest of us when they grow up. And similarly, many prodigious adults were completely unremarkable as children. Why is this? How is it possible for such exceptional children not to make anything of themselves, and for such exceptional adults to have been completely average as children?
Malcolm Gladwell observes that the reason for this is because when we describe child prodigies, we are describing people who are gifted at learning. Whereas when we describe adult prodigies, we are actually describing people are gifted at doing.
Because we are applying one set of sensemaking tools to both groups, our schemas tend to not hold up so well even though they are based on an underlying truth. The solution to this is to create one set of schemas for understanding and dealing with child prodigies, and another set of schemas for understanding and dealing with adult prodigies.
There are often areas where we engage in fuzzy thinking, and apply one toolset to multiple distinct phenomena. Philosophers and thinkers can create enormous value by identifying distinct phenomena, and giving suggestions for how to think about each one.
PG actually does this in his essay How to Make Wealth. He observes that money and wealth are not the same thing so we should think about them differently. Specifically, that money is sort of an abstraction of wealth, but for various reasons we can benefit from thinking about wealth on a lower level. Providing the sort of disambiguation that this essay does is really valuable, which is why this is arguably the most useful of all the PG essays.
It seems like with math we start with something we know is true but not necessarily useful (like just the concept of a line) and then we abstract our way to usefulness. This is opposed to philosophy, which generally takes the stance that all models are false but some models are useful. In philosophy we usually start with something that is useful in certain situations but not necessarily universally true, and then we disambiguate our way down toward truthfulness. I don't really see a problem with philosophy as long as it is empirically useful under at least in certain conditions.
I feel there are two major issues with philosophy today:
1. No "philosophical method" the same way there is a scientific method, which means philosophy doesn't really build on each other from one philosopher to the next.
2. No real way to categorize ideas the same way you can categorize physics research, which makes it hard to find prior art. So even though Malcolm Gladwell and PG make really good arguments, there is no guarantee that people in the future will use these arguments. As opposed to science where is something is proven true it becomes the basis for future works.
Ok, I am hitting a wall here. I can imagine ways to classify ideas and put them in boxes. It will take some work, but I can see it there. But as for the method, it keeps slipping me. What more, I have this uneasy feeling that we might not have one which will be unlike the scientific method. For me the scientific method is obvious, common sense, of course-it-is kind of method. Just like Darwin's evolution. Once I saw it I simply cannot imagine how else things could have been. If I am right, then we should just open another branch of science for this. Its like one of those big company buys small unsuccessful company and makes it rock kinda stuff.
IMHO it's hard to argue that any philosopher is more influential than Plato, especially when you consider the clear neo-Platonic influences on Christian theology, and the subsequent influence that that tradition has had on Western civilization.
Elaboration: keep in mind the whole point of creating a city in words was to get a look at the soul, and Socrates hints at the fact the city wouldn't be practical in real life.
Not sure what you're referring to there, but the feudal ideas of class determined by birth and lack of social mobility were adopted from the Republic (though the ruling classes certainly took some liberties in their interpretation; some analyses of the Republic suggest it wasn't meant to be quite so rigid).
The germanic tribes already had class structure before they crossed over into the former imperial territories. And in any case, every settled agricultural society in history (Egypt, India, China) has had so far as we know a rigid social hierarchy. That of medieval Europe was by world standards comparatively porous. So unless you can point to some specific evidence that the germanic tribes that ruled early medieval Europe were influenced by the Republic, we should assume that they were just doing what they would have done anyway.
FWIW, I do remember a reference to early Catholic structure based on the Republic, but it'll take me a while to go back and find that reference.
We've gone off-topic, though: the main point here is that Diogenes' own philosophy is worthy, even though society at that time found it less palatable than Plato's.
People ignored it (and still do) because it's less certain than Plato's "reliable" model of patterns, and also because it means giving up material comforts.
Plato, despite his intellect (or perhaps because of it), turned out to be, as you say yourself, "naive and mistaken".
Yet Diogenes was able to see that about Plato then, as a contemporary.
And while it's true that he never sat down to write anything himself, his work has endured via written accounts of others (Diogenes was a real person, not a mythical figure).
For a better presentation of the contemporary view of philosophers like Plato, you should read Aristophane's Clouds. It's also alot deeper in meaning than a mere facile mockery of poorly understood ideas.
It's been a while since I read the Clouds. IIRC, it was a lot of scatological and Mae West style humor (i.e. "Is that a sword under your tunic, or are you happy to see me?").
Aristophanes has literary value, but he was just exposing holes in Plato's logic for comedic and theatrical value; he was not himself a serious philosopher.
Isn't that the whole problem expressed in two words?
Euclid was arguably "more serious" as a philosopher than a mathematician -- his principal contribution was to build a logical framework around others' results.
I want to start punning now -- who was more serious, Edward Teller or Richard Feynmann? -- but it's not useful. I'll simply note a certain dissonance in calling Diogenes serious, as you seem to.
Leo Strauss would say otherwise. He has a whole book about Aristophane's take on Socrates, highlighting the crucial tension between the philosopher and the rest of society - the reason Socrates was killed. According to Allan Bloom, the whole enlightenment project can be explained as an attempt to solve this problem by displacing religion with philosophy, through science.
"Dear Ladies and Gentlemen, I am here today to convince you that the Great Gatsby could not possibly be an allegory for animal beastiality. I have three reasons for this belief. First, none of the main characters in Gatsby are animals. While Daisy does have a pet dog, there is no reason to believe that Gatsby ever expresses an interest in man-on-dog relations. [insert paragraphs two and three.] In conclusion, the Great Gatsby could not possibly be an allegory for animal beastiality, and it would be simply absurd to believe otherwise."
/Agreeing with pg, intelligence can only be demonstrated by finding what is, not what isn't.
I don't know what motivates people on reddit (don't they all upvote you automatically, like the people here?), but Diogenes' criticism of Plato was not simple whining, it was criticism based on a serious philosophy (cynicism) which stands in stark contrast to Plato's.
Uh, have you read Plato's dialogues? The defining characteristic is that they aren't philosophical treatises, i.e. not pedantic monologues claiming all knowledge. Their whole point is to stimulate the reader to think for themselves on very interesting questions.
So what happens if I am merely testing whether people care more about the quality of my comments, vs some ideology I may or may not buy into?
If this is going to be a better community than reddit, the way a person argues and supports their view should matter more than whether they happen to hold a controversial idea. For the most part I've been pretty impressed.
1. I'm actually very surprised at how many Ayn Rand fans there are on this site. For a fringe philosophy that has fewer followers than Scientology there seems to be an unusually high concentration here. I am a big Ayn Rand fan, so this is a pleasant surprise for me.
2. Ayn Rand's book Intorduction to Objectivist Epistemology is the most interesting book on the theory of concept formation I've read. I have not come across anything that I found more plausible. One of the most appealing parts of it was that she tied concept formation to a similar process as algebra.
Specifically to the point of this article, I would certainly say that it changes the way you think. The chapters on definitions and concept hierarchy make your thinking radically more efficient. Even if you're a programmer and have no interest in philosophy I'd say it's definitely worth a read.
Considering that the people on this site are more or less exactly the kind of people with whom Rand surrounded herself, and anyone who fancies themselves at all creative or exceptional is likely to identify with the Roark or Galt characters (who are, nonetheless, only ever described from an external perspective) - and frankly, the more likely to so identify the less their achievements tally with their self-estimation - I'd say it's not at all surprising.
I'd also say it doesn't bode well for the future. From my perspective, being a Rand fan is a demonstration of an unfortunate lack of either insight or critical thinking. Maybe the ability to believe bullshit, so long as it's positive bullshit, is a strength in an entrepreneur. But being unable to distinguish harsh truth from desirable illusion is not a strength in someone who is truly creative, whether in thought or in anything else.
I like Roark, but I think Galt is overrated. He doesn't do much. Dagny is more appealing and more similar to Roark -- they both heroically pursue active goals against stiff opposition.
It's funny, everyone likes Roark more than Galt :)
Yeah, I thought there just wasn't enough characterization with Galt, compared to any of the other characters. He just kind of appears towards the end of the novel and you never really understand what is motivating him on an emotional level. Maybe I'm just not remembering it properly, it's been 6 or 7 years since I read Atlas Shrugged.
Personally I see Galt as something of a disproof-by-overextension of some of Rand's ideas. Galt was her "perfect man". For a character to be human, the author must be able to get inside their head. For even Ayn Rand herself to be unable to thus think like Galt indicates to me that she was unable to make her own thoughts follow her own ideals. As any Rand follower will agree, the quickest way to get your thoughts to stall and boggle is to try and deny a natural axiom, or push through a contradiction. (Similarly you get much the same stall-and-boggle leading to an authorial 3rd person stance, when other erroneous ideas are tried to destruction - compare most utopian fiction.) So that's a strong warning signal.
What could be the fault she ran into? I think she had a bit of the "chasing words" disease. The words for her were "rational", "mind", "self-interest" - and those are words that break down quite quickly and thoroughly when you look at the brain and the human organism in context. (In her defense, she was writing some 50 years before the science would become any good.)
That's one weakness of Objectivism which has become more apparent to me in the last few years. The philosophy seems to almost construct a platonic form of "rationality" and "self-interest" and never really reconnect with concretes, staying entirely in the abstract. So it ends up handling most cases pretty well, but a lot special cases get left behind.
Still, when I re-think through her reasoning again and again, I don't see how one could reach any different fundamental principles. Special cases are just that, and the best course seems to be to just deal with them as they arise.
Actually, her theory of "mind" is probably the worst flaw. All the modern psychological research indicates that the rule-following, conscious mind you use to do formal "reason" is a tiny, weak, singly threaded, monitoring rather than commanding subsystem in a brain that is mostly fast, parallel, unconscious, and NOT rational.
I like how you call Rand's work bullshit but don't provide a single example. In fact it wouldn't surprise me if you haven't read any of her work. Most of her critics haven't.
Also, it's interesting that you don't try to reconcile the fact that the Y Combinator is one of the most successful startup incubators ever, and that there is a large presence of Ayn Rand fans on here. Do ya think there might be a connection there? no of course not, it's just that entrepreneurs like to believe in bullshit.
In my experience it's very rare to meet a person who calls themselves an Objectivist who isn't way above average in intelligence and ambition. And don't tell me about the 14 yearolds you've talked to on various online forums - I don't think you'd want people to judge you by how you behaved when you were a kid. I'm talking about people 25+. All the guys I knew from university who were Objectivists are now either working at Google, some big time law firm, or have started their own company (I'm in the lattermost category.)
> In fact it wouldn't surprise me if you haven't read any of her work.
Try "all her novels and at least 4 books of essays". In fact, I seem to have read more Rand than many Objectivists. It was a while ago, though, and the books have long since left my possession.
Let me guess - your next argument will be "you didn't understand it then". If so, we're done here, for the same reason I don't argue with Christian fundamentalists who claim I don't understand Christianity.
edit: Sorry, some of your other assertions amuse me.
> Also, it's interesting that you don't try to reconcile the fact that the Y Combinator is one of the most successful startup incubators ever, and that there is a large presence of Ayn Rand fans on here.
I guess you found "maybe the ability to believe bullshit... is a strength" confusing. I chose the word "strength" for a reason, although "advantage" would fit well too.
I also covered that in another thread, where you were perfectly welcome to reply. Nobody did.
> Do ya think there might be a connection there?
Correlation? Not without better data. But even if there is a correlation, that is not causation; and I find it hard to take someone who would assert otherwise seriously as a thinker.
So here's one for you. What proportion of successful YC startups were founded by Objectivists? What proportion of failed or abandoned ones were?
> In my experience it's very rare to meet a person who calls themselves an Objectivist who isn't way above average in intelligence and ambition.
In my experience it's very rare to meet a person who ridicules Objectivism who isn't way above average in intelligence, perceptiveness and sensitivity.
Shall we get into a pissing match about whose experience is better, or shall we simply agree that personal experience is not a useful data point?
> All the guys I knew from university who were Objectivists are now either working at Google
What argument of yours should I respond to? then one where you assert without any evidence that her work is bullshit?
You think you can just dismiss an entire body of thought by throwing out ad hominems?
Look, I know that you're smart enough to know that I'm a pretty smart guy, so comparing me to a "Christian fundamentalist" just makes you look ridiculous. Offer a serious argument to support your claims (as I did to support mine, if you read the above posts) or just don't bother posting.
Edit (response to above "edit", since you didn't feel like writing a new post): This really isn't going anywhere, let's just leave it here. I'm sure you're a top notch programmer, but seriously man it's just not cool to go around name-calling people you disagree with. I replied to your posts with respect, so did everyone else on this site.
> then one where you assert without any evidence that her work is bullshit?
I didn't assert that, I implied that in the course of asserting something else.
> You think you can just dismiss an entire body of thought by throwing out ad hominems?
Yeah, actually I do, if it's a very small body and hasn't done much thinking.
> comparing me to a "Christian fundamentalist"
Again (and this is REALLY getting tedious), I didn't compare you to a Christian fundamentalist, I compared Objectivist arguments that I have heard before (and predicted that you would use, partly in order to ensure that you didn't) with those of Christian fundamentalists.
> I know that you're smart enough to know that I'm a pretty smart guy
Er, no - at the moment that is a conclusion I simply cannot draw. Your thinking displays evidence of being muddled and irrational, with little grasp of logic or ability to distinguish between claims made of the argument and claims made of the arguer.
I have no doubt that you think you're a pretty smart guy, and I bet you didn't have to work too hard at school to achieve results. But I also think that because of this, you tend to interpret criticism as a personal attack, and you are slow to recognise when someone really does have something to teach you, especially when you don't think that person is as bright as you think you are.
Someone else has come along and downmodded every single post I made in this thread. Result? Instant karma drop of 10%. By one person. Because I said something they didn't like.
pg, please delete or disable my account forthwith. I am not prepared to stay in a place where that's acceptable - and by allowing the behaviour, you make it acceptable. I would do it myself, but news.yc doesn't even allow me to change my fucking password. (I hope you're not storing them as plaintext.)
It flies in the face of economics - while many economists tend towards the libertarian side of things, the honest ones acknowledge things like externalities, merit goods, and other market 'abnormalities'. People live in communities and have for thousands of years, and there are aspects of that that you can't simply throw out the window in favor of The Individual. Her thinking strikes me as some sort of utopia that is about as relevant to the real world as Karl Marx, albeit in a direction that I personally find more appealing. However, I find the writings of people like Milton Friedman more compelling, because they discuss the real world, human frailties and all, and are less absolute/extreme.
I also find all the scenes involving female protagonists being more or less raped as weird and disturbing. But that's perhaps tangential to her philosophy.
All told, though... I'm just not interested in "philosophy" as this wishy washy thing, that's not my thinking style. I prefer things like economics, or at most, going one removed from that and talking about what a society wants to accomplish and how it wants to treat its citizens.
I took one philosophy elective first semester of my undergrad and boy did it screw me.
For the longest time I kept asking my friends "how can you prove to me THAT tree is in fact a tree?" It was all part of realizing that current philosophy is just a play on words. I do believe that once you understand that, you can think beyond the frivolous debates.
"in fact, it would not be a bad definition of math to call it the study of terms that have precise meanings."
What meanings? I think that math is made of structure, not meaning. The latter is a human phenomenon. For example, a proof using geometry and one using algebra might be mathematically identical, but have different meanings (created when they are perceived).
I think the question is whether you can say the terms used in either proof have precise semantics. Any of the terms in a correct geometry proof can be traced back precisely to the initial axioms, which are terms with meanings defined as precisely as possible.
The symbology used to form each proof is universally accepted and agreed upon. The symbol "=", for example, is taken not as a verb (a becomes b), but as a statement of truth (a IS b). Likewise, "+" has a specific meaning. The juxtaposition of terms is implicitly understood (e.g., all mankind agrees to interpret it as) as multiplication of some form (which is generalized in higher mathematics to function composition, which makes sense once it's explained). It is the ultimate language, where one symbol has one, and only one, meaning.
It is the structure which is a human phenomenon. The fact that you can express any algebraic expression in reverse polish notation is a great example of this. 1 2 + 3 4 <asterisk> / has the same meaning as (1+2)/(3*4). (Sorry for the <asterisk> thing -- the markup system of this blog is positively broken since it doesn't provide a means of escaping the markup characters.) The symbols, and hence the meaning behind them, remain the same.
No, I meant that when you learn about e.g. the chemical elements, you don't also learn who discovered each of them. It's accepted knowledge; you're taught it as facts.
In philosophy, most of the exam questions have someone's name in them. E.g. "explain x's concept of y."
I also had problems with the sentence, probably because it doesn't ring especially true. I can name the discoverer of most of what I know about physics, right from the names: Newtonian physics, Bohr's model, the Schrodinger equation, Euclidian geometry, Gaussian curves... E=Mc2...
FWIW, I too got stuck at that sentence like nowhere else in the text; it took me some tries to macro-expand. Maybe your proofreaders got past it without blinking because they are more acquainted with that point?
(Although Newtonian physics and Euclidean geometry are not really counterexamples.)
[branch of philosophy]: [equiv. branch of science] without a laboratory.
I'm not sure philosophy can really be improved beyond the obvious: ie, introducing experimentation after the theorization. But then it's no longer philosophy.
FWIW, PG's thoughts on philosophy are largely confined to "analytic philosophy", which I agree suffers from the problems he talks about. There is a whole other tradition of sorts (sometimes referred to as "continental philosophy"), taking a different path from Kant, including Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida, Foucault, Badiou, etc. This side of philosophy tends to suffer from being extremely difficult to understand, but yields much genuine insight for those who take the time to study it.
There's also the pragmatic tradition, as DanielBMarkham notes. I'm less familiar with it, but many have seen commonalities between Heidegger and the Pragmatists.
Ayn Rand's writing can be inspirational, but her philosophy was poorly conceived.
i think it's precisely the opposite. analytic philosophers try to say clear and precise (yet admittedly, often trivial) things while continental philosophers take on grandiose-sounding concepts and discuss them nonsensically (but with FEELING).
And so I think pg's arguments don't apply to highly-regarded philosophy done in the past 30-odd years (highly-regarded, that is, by other philosophers). I don't think Lewis was confused about how he used words when he developed functionalism, or modal realism in On the Plurality of Worlds. Nor was Kripke in Naming and Necessity, carefully separating epistemology from metaphysics in his theory of reference. I don't think searle was confused about words in his Chinese Room argument, and I don't think Parfit is confused about words in stating his ethical paradoxes and reductionist account of personal identity in Reasons and Persons. Nearly all of these arguments are terribly controversial, indicating that their conclusions actually matter to people, yet they are considered paradigms of good philosophy, and all were written in the past 30-odd years. Chinese Room was in fact a direct response of sorts to john mccarthy's argument that his thermostat can have beliefs.
So the point is that there is good philosophy being done out there, even if it may be too recent for pg to have been exposed to it in college, and may be more cautious and exact (and therefore, far less grandiose) than the old "proofs of god's existence."
This side of philosophy tends to suffer from being extremely difficult to understand, but yields much genuine insight for those who take the time to study it.
"There are things I know I learned from studying philosophy. The most dramatic I learned immediately, in the first semester of freshman year, in a class taught by Sydney Shoemaker. I learned that I don't exist. I am (and you are) a collection of cells that lurches around driven by various forces, and calls itself I. But there's no central, indivisible thing that your identity goes with. You could conceivably lose half your brain and live. Which means your brain could conceivably be split into two halves and each transplanted into different bodies. Imagine waking up after such an operation. You have to imagine being two people."
Whew, I'm glad I just watched Star Trek to learn this, and didn't spend tens of thousands at Harvard. (I'm referring to the numerous times someone was 'duplicated' in a transporter accident)
But that, like your Star Trek example, is more pie-in-the-sky science fiction. While it may make you think about the issue, it doesn't force you to confront it in the same way. Brain splitting seems more plausible; I wouldn't be surprised to see something like that in a few years.
It'd be useful to see some support for your claims about the history of philosophy. Specifically:
1. Aristotle's Metaphysics, and the like, had no effect on its readers. I'd also like a clearer definition of "did something." I.e. does changing the way one thinks about practically theoretical fields "do something?"
2. No one challenged the two until the 1600s. Kant, by himself, isn't a good source since his philosophical agenda was to overthrow the relevance of religion (which was tightly coupled with classical thought). See Allan Bloom's Closing of the American Mind for details.
For my undergrad I studied the classics, and I'd say your generalizations are too general. People, such as Aristophanes, said the same things about Plato in his day that you say in your essay. Yet, generations of great thinkers have chosen Plato over the Cynics and Epicureans, today's relativists and materialists. Your critique of the uselessness of philosophy is more indicative of the fact that many of the humanities in academia today are purposely biased towards relativism or materialism.
While I agree that philosophy should be tested with practice, I don't think practicality should restrict inquiry. Otherwise, we become very short sighted. Math is a great example of this, which you've pointed out in one of your essays.
Finally, you misunderstand Aristotle's support for 'useless' theory. You're confusing 'useless' with 'pointless.' All useful activities are done for a specific goal, they aren't important in themselves. Therefore, the ultimate point of useful activities is by definition 'useless.' Aristotle thinks the final goal we all aim for is happiness, and the highest form of happiness is a kind of knowledge.
I'm of the opinion that [good] Sci Fi is a weak form of philosophy. Societies that don't exist are constructed and described, and then readers can read and digest the implications.
Reading philosophy is still good mental exercise, and it gives you interesting ways to think about the world. Learning to call bullshit on intimidating ideas is a good thing to learn.
I agree that one test of it is whether it changes the way you do things -- or at least gives you an imperative to do so that you're too weak or cowardly to heed (see Nietzche, Thoreau, Schopenhauer, Seneca).
But I dunno -- the whole math versus the world mentality always strikes me as a symptom of too much craving for certainty. Math never told us anything about the rights of man.
I dunno about math. But conclusively telling people in clear terms that we were all monkeys once asserts equality of humankind in a brutally ironic way.
Does it? Gorillas were all monkeys too, and they are not equal to us[1].
I agree thinking about evolution can give you an insight on human rights. It's interesting to reason about how moral rules emerge from certain social traits, and why have such traits proven evolutionarily stable.
[1] I don't mean humans intrinsically 'deserve' 'rights' that other living beings don't.
Historically one of the tools that was used to keep racism on the move was stories about ancistry.eg.Africans were told that they have no history, that all the ancient historic structures that they saw were built by a lost white race that lived there. Similar stories can be found in all cultures propagating racism, Inside Hinduism they had stories which claimed some people descending from the gods while the others just happened to be standing around.
This is what was broken quiet unintentionally by Darwin,
I can't see how Darwin's theses refute that history about the African white aboriginals, unless that "they have no history" is supposed to mean that their ancestors didn't exist anywhere (?).
Did Hinduism revise their creational myths, or was the whole creed discredited as a result of Darwin?
For all I know, which is not much in this topic, Darwin may have helped debunk racist stories. OTOH, Darwinism offers new pretexts for racism. Didn't Nazis abuse a good deal of Darwin (along with Nietzsche) to cook their ideologies?
Isn't an essay based on the assumption we don't exist doomed from the beggining?
We are not cells and molecules. We are souls. Strange that an essay that talks about philosophy doesn't have even once the word soul.
Ancient Greek philosopher Aristotel seperates animals from humans as beings that have soul and the ability to think.
His work "Physics" tried to capture concepts people ignore even these days, and tried to examine in an amazing use of reason various metaphysical phenomena trying to find balance between whats real, fake and imaginary.
If you read the works of Aristotel and others, in original Greek you will be amazed by his astonishing ability to convey truth in a wonderful ingenious word of speech.
--
Plato talked about many not-connected subjects in a very indirect way to put the reader in becoming part of his works. Ingenius!
A very important concept of Socrates and Plato is the world of ideas. A seperate existance/entity/world that we all have access to. Modern science doesn't accept that, as there is not proof for that. But doesn't the fact that a lot of people share similar ideas at different place and time may be a small clue of exactly that?
See, the problem is that you are simply wrong. I do not believe in the soul, and I cannot say for certain that it does not exist. I CAN say for certain that we are just cells and molecules. Our brains are composed of neurons, which are simply complex chemical reactions. The cell is basically a test tube, separating off the chemicals from everything else. A certain threshold of a chemical interacts with a molecule on the neuron surface, and it "fires", which causes it to release chemicals to an adjacent neuron, and this repeats.
If we had a powerful enough computer to simulate the physics of how each cell works or simulated the connections of neurons, do you really think it won't be able to "think" like we do? Our brains really aren't any different from a computer. A neuron either fires or it doesn't; on or off; 1 or 0.
Humans aren't special. Other animals can clearly think and react to their environment to make "decisions", but they just aren't as powerful of a computer as we are.
On that note, I assume you also believe we have free will? Well, we don't. With a certain set of stimuli, you will make the same decision/"choice" every time. If you understand what I said above, this would become apparent.
With regards to the soul, where did the soul come from? Do primates have souls? If they don't, then it had to come into existence at some point. Was there a set of parents who were soulless and had a child who magically had a soul? What about groups of people that had a long time in isolation to evolve separately, such as the indigenous peoples of Australia and the Americas? Do they have souls? How about the "hobbit" that was found in Indonesia that's 12,000 years old and is a separate branch from homo sapiens? What about neanderthals?
If a human gets a soul upon conception, and identical twins are caused by a zygote that splits, does each twin only have half a soul?
DNA evolved from RNA and it took billion years to do just that. DNA tried to perfect it self through its evolution. Your human body to evolve during its growth a lot of cells are destroyed of course while you are shaping.
So basically we are all derivatives of that process. Everybody knows that.
The point is that philosophy is not about getting a claim and considering it substantial to eliminate other probabilities.
Metaphysics is not feasible they are part of a material world. they react with it of course but it exists whether you can accept it or not.
Everyone is trying to understand what happened to all that antimatter that was created during the bing bang. For every molecule there is another anti.
And what about time? who can explain that mystical concept? in the possibility that you can go beyond it, means it may not even be valid as a concept as we know it.
In all these strange ideas, it's impossible to be satisfied that everything is only molecules.
If everything is a chemical random chain reaction how can we all have similar ideas or visions of the future? and note that Greeks never considered chemistry as different from Physics. Only recently did Chemistry claim it's independence.
The point is that philosophy is not about getting a claim and considering it substantial to eliminate other probabilities.
But this is precisely what PG identified as being wrong with philosophy as it is currently taught.
Metaphysics is not feasible they are part of a material world.
What?
they react with it of course but it exists whether you can accept it or not.
If it reacts with the material world, it leaves the realm of philosophy, and enters the realm of testability (and hence, science). It ceases to be metaphysics, and becomes normal physics.
Everyone is trying to understand what happened to all that antimatter that was created during the bing bang. For every molecule there is another anti.
As I understand it, we have a pretty good idea as to what happened to all the anti-particles. Nature seeks the state of equilibrium at all times. Anti-particles would be attracted to their opposites, and destroy each other; this would be detected today as the cosmic background radiation, and represents the boundary in time at which the universe ceases to be opaque.
The question should be, why is there more matter than anti-matter? This is the actual question that is being pondered by cosmologists.
And what about time? who can explain that mystical concept?
Einstein.
In all these strange ideas, it's impossible to be satisfied that everything is only molecules.
These ideas happen to be testable in a laboratory, and the results are reproducable.
If everything is a chemical random chain reaction how can we all have similar ideas or visions of the future?
Because we communicate with each other. You didn't learn what you know today in a total vacuum. You were raised in a family. You went to school. Everything you know and value in your life is through indoctrination via institutions external to you. As you grow older, you internalize them. And as we all know from studying everything from perceptrons to propeganda, the more you beat something into someone's brain, the more they're going to accept it as truth.
This is what happened in philosophy. Three Greeks decided to write down what they thought they knew. Three people. Only three. Yet, they shaped the course of ALL humanity, directly or indirectly. We're still feeling the repurcussions of their thoughts today. The very fact we're having this discussion is because of them.
Only recently did Chemistry claim it's independence.
You state this as if it were some kind of political movement, just in its ways, and noble in its endeavors. In fact, most chemists of yesteryear thought that chemistry (which evolved from alchemy, remember, and had nothing to do with physics at all) was not related to physics. But as time progressed, there was an ever-increasing unification between physics and chemistry. Today, a chemist will more often than not agree that it's a narrow subset of what we call physics.
It's very highly specialized, but it is still physics. When I was most recently going through college, that was the first thing that the instructor mentioned. Chemistry is so thoroughly influenced by quantum mechanics that to deny it is itself pseudo-science. Nearly all of the early atomic research was performed by chemists (who, at the time, did NOT think of chemistry as a branch of physics). It was only when chemists wanted to peer into the behavior of their chemical reactions (from ionic bonds to fission, and all points in between) that the seeds for what we now call Quantum Physics were planted.
No, the realization that (quantum) physics and chemistry are essentially concerned with the same things is itself a very recent phenomina -- late 20th century at the earliest.
I definitely agree with the criticisms of philosophy. I did a minor in philosophy, and its an absolute complete waste of time.
PG's redefinition of philosophy is something I've been thinking/writing about a bit recently. I prefer to call it insight, and I don't think its worth trying to define by itself. Insight is the abstract thinking that gets to the heart of a real problem or class of problems, it by definition illuminates our understanding. Calling it philosophy will just cause everyone who attempts it to miss the point. Plus philosophy has a history and a workforce, all of which will completely derail any attempt to redefine the field.
Cause and effect is a complex thing, but at least partly because of Paul Graham, I quit a 9-5 job and tried to start a startup. Whether that was a wise thing to do or not, given the circumstances, is quite another question. :-)
So PG's a pretty useful philosopher, at least according to his own test: "The test of utility I propose is whether we cause people who read what we've written to do anything differently afterward." Good stuff, PG.
240 comments
[ 2.3 ms ] story [ 244 ms ] threadIn the last 3 years, however, I've picked up some great philosophy CDs from The Teaching Company. I spent 400 bucks instead of all that tuition, and I learned enough philosophy to really appreciate it.
I agree somewhat and disagree somewhat with Paul's essay. On one hand, pragmatism seems to be the only rational resposne to so much generalizing! And he's right -- philosopher's have continuously pushed the boundaries of language well past the breaking point.
But I think Paul overgeneralizes, which is ironic since that seems to be part of the claim he's making against philosophy. I view the field as really smart people trying to come to grasp ultimate truths on which the rest of science can be constructed. Many times they have succeede, like J.S. Mills, or Newton. Philosophy generates science.
But you can't take it too seriously. Philosophy is like a dance, or a way to play the tuba. If you're having fun with it, and you're generating something of value (I would agree with the life-changing criteria but simply making a buck from geralizing where nobody else did is enough for me) then you're a philosopher. Anybody who's ever sat designing a program where you get that "a ha!" moment, where you realize by generalizing in these few areas you've made a whole new practical and valuable thing, is right up there with Russell in my book. Anybody who has went through requirements sessions, only to have the code still not match the needs because of the slipperiness of language understands Wittgenstein.
For anyone interested, I have a site http://www.ImportanceOfPhilosophy.com that explains why I think philosophy is so important and which is mainly based on Ayn Rand's philosophy.
As for Rand's limited influence on subsequent development in philosophy, that's an interesting point. Why is this the case? Even if you disagree with Rand's philosophy, I think it's pretty outrageous that her work isn't even mentioned in more university philosophy programs. There are only a few other philosophers whose work provides as complete a system for understanding reality, the nature of knowledge, and the nature of ethics (I'd include Aristotle, Plato, and Hegel as others that are similarly complete, but there aren't too many after that).
So why is Rand's work not taught more often? I'd say that is mostly the result of the biases and predilections of the typical university philosophy department.
There are now quite a number of Ayn Rand philosophy chairs at various high profile universites in the country.
It's funny, but one of the reasons Rand is coming into universities these days is the attitude that no theory is any better than any other i.e, subjectivism. The very thing that Rand spent so much time attacking! (I got this from talking to the guys who run the Ayn Rand Institute, which is largley responsible for these developments.)
Edit: Regarding Nietzsche, you are 100% corrent. For what it's worth Rand was adamant that her ethics was nothing like Nietzsche. Here's the most positive thing she had to say about him: "as a poet, he projects at times (not consistently)a magnificent feeling for man's greatness, expressed in emotional, not intellectual terms."
When you really dig into Rand, her ethics are essentially a modernized version of Aristotle's virtue ethics. Most of her ethical theory revolved around core values (Reason, Purpose, Self-Esteem) and virtues that supported these values (Pride, Rationality, Integrity, Productiveness, Independence, and Justice). Many argue she left out a few important virtues like benevolence, but overall it's a pretty good and useful list. She didn't necessarily agree with Aristotle's "Doctrine of the Mean" (virtue is the mean between two extremes), but otherwise her ethics are very Aristotelian.
I think that to qualify as a philosophy, something must be a system of thought that proposes a notion of metaphysics, epistemology, and a system of ethics. Rand's "output" obviously qualifies, whether you happen to agree with it or not.
Intelligent design and time cube theory ought not to be taught because they can be objectively verified as false. Such a test plainly does not apply to philosophy -- and even if it did, it would disqualify plenty of philosophers who are taught, such as the pre-Socratic philosopher Thales.
Well, for a start, there was the fact that she reviewed, and dismissed on "philosophical" grounds, a book of Immanuel Kant's after she read the back cover. Sure, that's an example, but by no means an atypical one. She dismissed nearly everything after Aristotle, usually on superficial grounds. Such wholesale dismissal of the established field, such grandiosity of claims (especially in the face of such shallow thinking) has direct parallels with pseudoscience.
> I would personally say that to qualify as a philosophy, something must be a system of thought that proposes a notion of metaphysics, epistemology, and a system of ethics. Rand's "output" obviously qualifies
...for a definition of "philosophy" you have pretty much quoted verbatim from her work, but without admitting that or even acknowledging the existence of alternative perspectives? You do see the problem with that, don't you...?
> Intelligent design and time cube theory ought not to be taught because they can be objectively verified as false.
No. They can't. That's the whole point of pseudoscience - if their claims were verifiable but wrong, it would just be forgotten. But pseudoscientists make unverifiable claims precisely in order to claim that because their claims have not been disproven, they should be given parity.
As for teaching Thales, how does one teach that Socrates was an advance if one does not teach what he was advancing from? Similarly, the Rutherford model of the atom is still mentioned in science classes - by your logic it should be forgotten as pseudoscience, but it wasn't. One cannot teach science without teaching that models are superseded by better models as they are created - that is the very nature of the scientific process. And the reason science and philosophy were commingled until a couple of centuries ago is that it's at the heart of the philosophical process too. One rejects models because one can demonstrate that an alternative model better fits the observable reality; one doesn't superficially reject them without bothering to understand them first because one finds their implications in disagreement with the conclusions one is seeking to prove!
Please provide a reference.
2. You don't like his definition of philsophy.
What definition do you like?
3. You claim pseudophilosophy should not be taught in philosophy classes.
Anyone and everyone agrees with that point. You still leave open the issue of whether Rand's work is in fact pseudophilosophy. Please support your claims.
See above. The books in which I could have located a reference are long gone; but it's in one of her short essays (if pushed, I'd suggest that it might be found in For the New Intellectual... but wouldn't want to be held to that).
> What definition do you like?
From wikipedia: "Different philosophers have had varied ideas about the nature of reason, and there is also disagreement about the subject matter of philosophy." If not even the people who do it professionally can agree on a definition, it would be presumptuous of me to try.
Nonetheless, you misread my objection. I am objecting to the assertion that Rand's work is without question philosophy, using the definition of philosophy by which Rand identified herself as one. It's tautological; it begs the question.
Likewise, my criticism of Rand is not that her conclusions are not reasonable conclusions (although I have my own opinions on that). It is that the methods by which she reached those conclusions are not those of a serious philosophical investigation. Rand's entire "philosophy" was carefully contrived to justify the conclusions she wanted justified, and that makes it worthless as philosophy - and inherently dishonest, to boot.
> You still leave open the issue of whether Rand's work is in fact pseudophilosophy.
I haven't even presented a definition of pseudophilosophy, let alone one you have agreed upon, so it's hard to see how you can assert that I haven't proved my case. So:
: I define "pseudophilosophy" as "justification masquerading as philosophy" - or, to elaborate, "a contrived rationalisation of a priori conclusions, constructed primarily to justify those conclusions rather than to examine their validity".
: I claim that the evidence of Rand's flight to the US from revolutionary Russia, and the emotions expressed in her early fiction (primarily We the Living and Anthem, but even back as far as The Husband I Bought) demonstrate the a priori nature of her strident individualism and anti-collectivism. I do not criticise this; indeed, I have a lot of sympathy with it.
: I note that her philosophical oeuvre developed over the next few decades, from its clumsy emotive (and none the worse for that) beginnings in Anthem, through its 30-year gestation in The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, to its expression in direct form in works such as For The New Intellectual and Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal.
: I therefore conclude that in this case, she contrived her philosophical justification to fit her a priori conclusions about the rightness of capitalism and the abhorrence of altruism.
Note that I remain in sympathy with the feelings that drove her; indeed, I would go so far as to say that I share them. But to look upon her rationalisation of those feelings as anything other than a rationalisation, the self-justification of a woman who could not allow herself to simply be, is something I find absurd.
"Worthless" is far overstating the case: in general it is hard to prove very much about the true motivations of philosophers, particularly long-dead ones. For example, it is quite likely that the exact lines of reasoning in Descartes' Meditations was contrived to reach the conclusions he wanted to reach beforehand, but to say that makes the whole thing "worthless" is pretty silly. Many philosophers can be criticized as developing rational arguments for positions they hold intuitively.
> Many philosophers can be criticized as developing rational arguments for positions they hold intuitively.
Indeed, but the key is doing so from a position of trying to prove your intuitively-held position wrong, and I'd suggest that this is what distinguishes philosophers. Some of them - for instance, Wittgenstein - even manage to do it.
Going back to the science analogy, new hypotheses are accepted not once supporting evidence is found - even UFOs have supporting evidence, after all! - but only for as long as attempts to produce confounding evidence fail.
This is utterly irrelevant to the point in question. Rand's attitude toward other philosophers was pretty uninformed, I agree, but it is evidence of Rand herself being silly, superficial, etc., The point is that those are properties of Rand, not of her philosophy. To equate her (many) imperfections as an individual with inherent properties of her philosophy is essentially an ad hominem argument -- and it's even more debatable that merely dismissing the alternatives to one's theory automatically makes your own theory "pseudophilosophy".
As for my definition of philosophy, sure, it is also Rand's view, but I think it is fairly reasonable. Surely a philosophy must include some claims about 1. the nature of reality 2. our ability to understand that reality, if any 3. how we ought to act within that reality. If you think it's such a flawed definition, what definition would you prefer, and how does Rand's "output" not qualify?
As for ID/etc. being provably false, I agree with you, I mispoke. But I still don't see how you've proven, or even really supported, your argument that Rand is somehow "pseudophilosophy", and other systems of thought are "real" philosophy. That just sounds like superficial bigotry to me -- actually the same sort of thing you accuse Rand of, with respect to Kant.
(Anyway, the majority of Rand's work takes the form of non-fictional essays. Her novels made her name, but it's clear she saw them only as means to an end.)
Since most pseudo-scientists have a genuine concern over some problem, and they have obviously acquired what little scientific exposure they did from their schooling, then I claim that if more science classes covered pseudo-science, explaining why it is not true science, then I predict a distinct drop in pseudo-science will result.
If you don't understand how people can make the claim, fine - but please do grasp that all this demonstrates is the paucity of your understanding.
I tend to think of Rand's work as the canonical example of a philosophy that is defined primarily by its _claims of_ being objective, systematic, and rational.
But isn't that the point? Its the only reason I have an interest in philosophy.
--
> didn't have an effect on later developments in philosophy
And in a sense, Paul was arguing against that in this essay. When you think about it, it was exactly this effect that has lead Philosophy to remain so stagnant for so many years.
-People are self interested.
-This is not a bad thing.
I think those are pretty good axioms to build upon. I don't think Rand came up with a grand unified theory of human behavior but she started from the right place... As opposed to our Greek ancestors...
As Paul mentioned in his essay, you're already bumping into what words mean.
I can tell you what an integer is, what a square root is, and what a ratio is, and as a result, I can (by looking it up in a book and typing in the text, heh heh) prove that the square root of 2 can't be expressed as the ratio of two integers. But can we do the same thing with the phrase "self interested"? Without pushing the meaning of words out to their breaking point?
Not without words you can't.
"Ratio", "Square Root", and "Integer" have precise definitions, whereas "self interest" is imprecise.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del's_incompleteness_the...
The refinement you're talking about here isn't so much a matter of modifying an incorrect but exact definition as it is clarifying an irrefutable but ambiguous definition.
That said, maybe something could come of this if you truly got to the very basic building blocks. For instance, an integer is just a definition - an exact one, but a definition nonetheless. So we can define a rational number as the ratio of two integers, and then build a refutable hypothesis from it - that all numbers are either integers or the ratio of integers.
I have serious doubts as to whether "self interest" could ever be defined as precisely as an integer, though.
Calling into question the meaning of "self-interested" is merely a filibuster.
Try this out: at a dinner party (one that you don't care if you're invited back), declare that "all people act out of self-interest, ultimately."
Odds are good that two people will disagree quite vehemently about this, and at the core will be a fundamental disagreement about what it means to be "self-interested".
Would pictures help? Maybe some cartoon animals sounding out the words for you?
I am big PG fan, but the non-startup articles don't appeal to me, this in particular.
loll: To hang extended from the mouth, as the tongue of an ox or a dog when heated with labor or exertion.
It's not cartoon animals, but...
I can't figure out what the second sentence is trying to tell me. That societies' motivations for inventing cosmologies are their motivations for inventing cosmologies? And what does this have to do with writing in verse rather than prose?
I'll see if I can rephrase that...
Edit: I did. Clearer now?
One note about modern philosophy, though. One of my cofounders enjoys reading about neuroscience, and I was talking to him about modern philosophy a few months ago. He suggested, quite wisely, that in a few hundred years, the early 21st century work that philosophers read is as likely to come from science-oriented guys like Steven Pinker and Daniel Dennett (i.e. the meaningoflife.tv cohort) as it is from traditional philosophers.
Software is applied philosophy. Where else can you deal with everything that western philosophy offers, from classification to epistemology to the philosophy of language and science -- and at the end of the day produce something that has immediate value for someone? All of this working, real-world stuff we're doing, from heuristics to machine learning and meta-programming -- it's all applied philosophy.
Not only that, but when you do get the words out, they're all just abstractions of other things. "We'd like the user to see the most relevant article" Well gee, what do you mean by "relevant"? What do you mean by "see"? It's the same exact problem you face when you're talking about stuff most people consider BS, like are we real or not.
So you start in this totally meaningless set of concepts, you refine, you abstract, you categorize -- in short, you take a trip through each of the major branches of philosophy. When they say "user", do they mean something that is part of an abstract type of "person"? Or is that over-designing? When we look at scaling past ten million users, what's the impact of applying various principles of set theory, such as normalization? When we say we want the machine to learn what the user wants, do we really mean just what his next actions will be?
We do all of this automatically, without realizing that some pretty smart other people have walked many of these roads before. Because those guys have been there, done that, all of these sciences have been created: sciences like hardware and software design, debugging, complexity theory. For the most part, we don't need to learn about all of these smart people and the full stories of their ideas. After all, only about 1 or 2 percent of what they did lived on after them. But by understanding a more complete version of what they thought, sometimes it can save you going down a dead end. And heck, it can just make discovering the answer more fun. And at the end, when all of that BS comes toghether for a real, live, working system? It's a thing of beauty. Did you even build a system for a large organizatino and every department had a different idea of what reality was? Did you look for wrong and right people, or think of the word "paradigm" (Kuhn -- sort of)
You can't take philosophy like you would a hard science. It doesn't progress or evolve from one phase to another, and half of it doesn't even make sense with the other half. That's okay, though. It doesn't mean that it is not useful, just different.
Philosophy of science is different from classical philosophy in that it focuses on more concrete aspects. One of the best classes I took was the philosophy of artificial intelligence. We discussed what it is to be conscious, and how we differed from a computer, it at all.
Other classes focused on the history of evolution or relativity and studied how these theories were formed and the arguments from the scientific community against them. While a lot of the readings are books or essays by people simply giving their opinions, I've learned to consider what they have to say, but that it is OK and in fact encouraged to disagree and give your own opinion. Since philosophy cannot be "proven" like a mathematical proof, another's opinions are not any more correct than my own as long as both are formed logically.
What I took from philosophy was not the opinions of the "great philosophers", but rather was the ability to think about things logically and confidently make my own opinions on them.
When a certain stimulus happens, the effects it has on the brain, which include thoughts, is predictable and computable by doing the physics. We just have this illusion of "free will" and making choices. Our personalities are simply the result of how our brain's wiring developed from our environmental stimuli.
This also brings to light an important topic in philosophy of science: determinism. Is the world deterministic or not? If it's not, then physics and the sciences simply don't work. If the world is deterministic, which all evidence we have says that it is, then free will cannot exist. It's just easier and more comforting for people to pretend we have free will.
I don't mean consciousness as in functioning state of the brain (i.e., as opposed to unconsciousness), or about the ability of a representational system to picture and reason about itself. I talk about the feeling of being (I wrote a semi-serious comment about this in this thread: search for metaesthesia).
You can rightly claim that this is not observable beyond the first person, and thus it's out of the scope of science. But I guess we all have a personal unscientific take on it, or we can make up one as good as any other when so prompted. That was what I was asking you about.
Hate to be unpoetic, but how is a star anything more than a big ball of burning gas? I don't feel humans are 'better' than stars. The only loosely related comparison I can think of is complexity: there is more to know about humans than about stars.
Our fourth dimensional overlords.
It's really tough to go anywhere with this conversation because it quickly hits the limits of what our consciousness can express. I feel that our consciousness is missing something that would allow us to understand why the big ball of burning gas exists on a higher plane of existence than us. This is of course completely impossible to justify.
Kinda like passing a bitmap image to an audio player, or passing it through a mp3 compressor and loading the resulting data in an image viewer, trying to discover anything interesting in the output.
A good example of this is the phenomenon of prodigies. We know there are some people in society who are exceptionally talented in certain areas, and we call these people prodigies. We then have certain schemas that we apply to these prodigies in our quest for wisdom.
But even though prodigies clearly exist, our schemas often seem to not hold up so well. For example, studies have shown that child prodigies are often not significantly more successful than the rest of us when they grow up. And similarly, many prodigious adults were completely unremarkable as children. Why is this? How is it possible for such exceptional children not to make anything of themselves, and for such exceptional adults to have been completely average as children?
Malcolm Gladwell observes that the reason for this is because when we describe child prodigies, we are describing people who are gifted at learning. Whereas when we describe adult prodigies, we are actually describing people are gifted at doing.
Because we are applying one set of sensemaking tools to both groups, our schemas tend to not hold up so well even though they are based on an underlying truth. The solution to this is to create one set of schemas for understanding and dealing with child prodigies, and another set of schemas for understanding and dealing with adult prodigies.
There are often areas where we engage in fuzzy thinking, and apply one toolset to multiple distinct phenomena. Philosophers and thinkers can create enormous value by identifying distinct phenomena, and giving suggestions for how to think about each one.
PG actually does this in his essay How to Make Wealth. He observes that money and wealth are not the same thing so we should think about them differently. Specifically, that money is sort of an abstraction of wealth, but for various reasons we can benefit from thinking about wealth on a lower level. Providing the sort of disambiguation that this essay does is really valuable, which is why this is arguably the most useful of all the PG essays.
It seems like with math we start with something we know is true but not necessarily useful (like just the concept of a line) and then we abstract our way to usefulness. This is opposed to philosophy, which generally takes the stance that all models are false but some models are useful. In philosophy we usually start with something that is useful in certain situations but not necessarily universally true, and then we disambiguate our way down toward truthfulness. I don't really see a problem with philosophy as long as it is empirically useful under at least in certain conditions.
I feel there are two major issues with philosophy today:
1. No "philosophical method" the same way there is a scientific method, which means philosophy doesn't really build on each other from one philosopher to the next.
2. No real way to categorize ideas the same way you can categorize physics research, which makes it hard to find prior art. So even though Malcolm Gladwell and PG make really good arguments, there is no guarantee that people in the future will use these arguments. As opposed to science where is something is proven true it becomes the basis for future works.
though it's really starting to turn into a faq
Plato is the stuffed shirt know-it-all, and Diogenes is the smart-alecky devil's advocate ready to poke holes in Plato's ideas, thereby cutting him down a few notches: http://faculty.quinnipiac.edu/libraries/tballard/diogenes.ht... and http://members.optushome.com.au/davidquinn000/Diogenes%20Fol...
Ultimately, Diogenes is more important.
I don't see how you can say that. He left no work. All we have to judge him by is a few probably apocryphal stories.
Plato was an elitist to the extreme, and his notions of a rigid class hierarchy did shape early feudal civilization in Europe.
But most important? Would you want to live in his Republic?
The germanic tribes already had class structure before they crossed over into the former imperial territories. And in any case, every settled agricultural society in history (Egypt, India, China) has had so far as we know a rigid social hierarchy. That of medieval Europe was by world standards comparatively porous. So unless you can point to some specific evidence that the germanic tribes that ruled early medieval Europe were influenced by the Republic, we should assume that they were just doing what they would have done anyway.
We've gone off-topic, though: the main point here is that Diogenes' own philosophy is worthy, even though society at that time found it less palatable than Plato's.
People ignored it (and still do) because it's less certain than Plato's "reliable" model of patterns, and also because it means giving up material comforts.
Yet Diogenes was able to see that about Plato then, as a contemporary.
And while it's true that he never sat down to write anything himself, his work has endured via written accounts of others (Diogenes was a real person, not a mythical figure).
Aristophanes has literary value, but he was just exposing holes in Plato's logic for comedic and theatrical value; he was not himself a serious philosopher.
Isn't that the whole problem expressed in two words?
Euclid was arguably "more serious" as a philosopher than a mathematician -- his principal contribution was to build a logical framework around others' results.
I want to start punning now -- who was more serious, Edward Teller or Richard Feynmann? -- but it's not useful. I'll simply note a certain dissonance in calling Diogenes serious, as you seem to.
/Agreeing with pg, intelligence can only be demonstrated by finding what is, not what isn't.
The very idea! ;)
If this is going to be a better community than reddit, the way a person argues and supports their view should matter more than whether they happen to hold a controversial idea. For the most part I've been pretty impressed.
1. I'm actually very surprised at how many Ayn Rand fans there are on this site. For a fringe philosophy that has fewer followers than Scientology there seems to be an unusually high concentration here. I am a big Ayn Rand fan, so this is a pleasant surprise for me.
2. Ayn Rand's book Intorduction to Objectivist Epistemology is the most interesting book on the theory of concept formation I've read. I have not come across anything that I found more plausible. One of the most appealing parts of it was that she tied concept formation to a similar process as algebra.
Specifically to the point of this article, I would certainly say that it changes the way you think. The chapters on definitions and concept hierarchy make your thinking radically more efficient. Even if you're a programmer and have no interest in philosophy I'd say it's definitely worth a read.
I'd also say it doesn't bode well for the future. From my perspective, being a Rand fan is a demonstration of an unfortunate lack of either insight or critical thinking. Maybe the ability to believe bullshit, so long as it's positive bullshit, is a strength in an entrepreneur. But being unable to distinguish harsh truth from desirable illusion is not a strength in someone who is truly creative, whether in thought or in anything else.
Yeah, I thought there just wasn't enough characterization with Galt, compared to any of the other characters. He just kind of appears towards the end of the novel and you never really understand what is motivating him on an emotional level. Maybe I'm just not remembering it properly, it's been 6 or 7 years since I read Atlas Shrugged.
What could be the fault she ran into? I think she had a bit of the "chasing words" disease. The words for her were "rational", "mind", "self-interest" - and those are words that break down quite quickly and thoroughly when you look at the brain and the human organism in context. (In her defense, she was writing some 50 years before the science would become any good.)
Still, when I re-think through her reasoning again and again, I don't see how one could reach any different fundamental principles. Special cases are just that, and the best course seems to be to just deal with them as they arise.
Also, it's interesting that you don't try to reconcile the fact that the Y Combinator is one of the most successful startup incubators ever, and that there is a large presence of Ayn Rand fans on here. Do ya think there might be a connection there? no of course not, it's just that entrepreneurs like to believe in bullshit.
In my experience it's very rare to meet a person who calls themselves an Objectivist who isn't way above average in intelligence and ambition. And don't tell me about the 14 yearolds you've talked to on various online forums - I don't think you'd want people to judge you by how you behaved when you were a kid. I'm talking about people 25+. All the guys I knew from university who were Objectivists are now either working at Google, some big time law firm, or have started their own company (I'm in the lattermost category.)
Try "all her novels and at least 4 books of essays". In fact, I seem to have read more Rand than many Objectivists. It was a while ago, though, and the books have long since left my possession.
Let me guess - your next argument will be "you didn't understand it then". If so, we're done here, for the same reason I don't argue with Christian fundamentalists who claim I don't understand Christianity.
edit: Sorry, some of your other assertions amuse me.
> Also, it's interesting that you don't try to reconcile the fact that the Y Combinator is one of the most successful startup incubators ever, and that there is a large presence of Ayn Rand fans on here.
I guess you found "maybe the ability to believe bullshit... is a strength" confusing. I chose the word "strength" for a reason, although "advantage" would fit well too.
I also covered that in another thread, where you were perfectly welcome to reply. Nobody did.
> Do ya think there might be a connection there?
Correlation? Not without better data. But even if there is a correlation, that is not causation; and I find it hard to take someone who would assert otherwise seriously as a thinker.
So here's one for you. What proportion of successful YC startups were founded by Objectivists? What proportion of failed or abandoned ones were?
> In my experience it's very rare to meet a person who calls themselves an Objectivist who isn't way above average in intelligence and ambition.
In my experience it's very rare to meet a person who ridicules Objectivism who isn't way above average in intelligence, perceptiveness and sensitivity.
Shall we get into a pissing match about whose experience is better, or shall we simply agree that personal experience is not a useful data point?
> All the guys I knew from university who were Objectivists are now either working at Google
...so no self-compromise there, then...
> some big time law firm
...where integrity is so highly prized...
You think you can just dismiss an entire body of thought by throwing out ad hominems?
Look, I know that you're smart enough to know that I'm a pretty smart guy, so comparing me to a "Christian fundamentalist" just makes you look ridiculous. Offer a serious argument to support your claims (as I did to support mine, if you read the above posts) or just don't bother posting.
Edit (response to above "edit", since you didn't feel like writing a new post): This really isn't going anywhere, let's just leave it here. I'm sure you're a top notch programmer, but seriously man it's just not cool to go around name-calling people you disagree with. I replied to your posts with respect, so did everyone else on this site.
I didn't assert that, I implied that in the course of asserting something else.
> You think you can just dismiss an entire body of thought by throwing out ad hominems?
Yeah, actually I do, if it's a very small body and hasn't done much thinking.
> comparing me to a "Christian fundamentalist"
Again (and this is REALLY getting tedious), I didn't compare you to a Christian fundamentalist, I compared Objectivist arguments that I have heard before (and predicted that you would use, partly in order to ensure that you didn't) with those of Christian fundamentalists.
> I know that you're smart enough to know that I'm a pretty smart guy
Er, no - at the moment that is a conclusion I simply cannot draw. Your thinking displays evidence of being muddled and irrational, with little grasp of logic or ability to distinguish between claims made of the argument and claims made of the arguer.
I have no doubt that you think you're a pretty smart guy, and I bet you didn't have to work too hard at school to achieve results. But I also think that because of this, you tend to interpret criticism as a personal attack, and you are slow to recognise when someone really does have something to teach you, especially when you don't think that person is as bright as you think you are.
pg, please delete or disable my account forthwith. I am not prepared to stay in a place where that's acceptable - and by allowing the behaviour, you make it acceptable. I would do it myself, but news.yc doesn't even allow me to change my fucking password. (I hope you're not storing them as plaintext.)
It flies in the face of economics - while many economists tend towards the libertarian side of things, the honest ones acknowledge things like externalities, merit goods, and other market 'abnormalities'. People live in communities and have for thousands of years, and there are aspects of that that you can't simply throw out the window in favor of The Individual. Her thinking strikes me as some sort of utopia that is about as relevant to the real world as Karl Marx, albeit in a direction that I personally find more appealing. However, I find the writings of people like Milton Friedman more compelling, because they discuss the real world, human frailties and all, and are less absolute/extreme.
I also find all the scenes involving female protagonists being more or less raped as weird and disturbing. But that's perhaps tangential to her philosophy.
All told, though... I'm just not interested in "philosophy" as this wishy washy thing, that's not my thinking style. I prefer things like economics, or at most, going one removed from that and talking about what a society wants to accomplish and how it wants to treat its citizens.
Sampling from what -- "meaning-space"?
For the longest time I kept asking my friends "how can you prove to me THAT tree is in fact a tree?" It was all part of realizing that current philosophy is just a play on words. I do believe that once you understand that, you can think beyond the frivolous debates.
What meanings? I think that math is made of structure, not meaning. The latter is a human phenomenon. For example, a proof using geometry and one using algebra might be mathematically identical, but have different meanings (created when they are perceived).
It is the structure which is a human phenomenon. The fact that you can express any algebraic expression in reverse polish notation is a great example of this. 1 2 + 3 4 <asterisk> / has the same meaning as (1+2)/(3*4). (Sorry for the <asterisk> thing -- the markup system of this blog is positively broken since it doesn't provide a means of escaping the markup characters.) The symbols, and hence the meaning behind them, remain the same.
Few were sufficiently correct that people have forgotten who discovered what they discovered.
In philosophy, most of the exam questions have someone's name in them. E.g. "explain x's concept of y."
(Although Newtonian physics and Euclidean geometry are not really counterexamples.)
[branch of philosophy]: [equiv. branch of science] without a laboratory.
I'm not sure philosophy can really be improved beyond the obvious: ie, introducing experimentation after the theorization. But then it's no longer philosophy.
There's also the pragmatic tradition, as DanielBMarkham notes. I'm less familiar with it, but many have seen commonalities between Heidegger and the Pragmatists.
Ayn Rand's writing can be inspirational, but her philosophy was poorly conceived.
Insights such as?
Whew, I'm glad I just watched Star Trek to learn this, and didn't spend tens of thousands at Harvard. (I'm referring to the numerous times someone was 'duplicated' in a transporter accident)
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42607
But that, like your Star Trek example, is more pie-in-the-sky science fiction. While it may make you think about the issue, it doesn't force you to confront it in the same way. Brain splitting seems more plausible; I wouldn't be surprised to see something like that in a few years.
1. Aristotle's Metaphysics, and the like, had no effect on its readers. I'd also like a clearer definition of "did something." I.e. does changing the way one thinks about practically theoretical fields "do something?"
2. No one challenged the two until the 1600s. Kant, by himself, isn't a good source since his philosophical agenda was to overthrow the relevance of religion (which was tightly coupled with classical thought). See Allan Bloom's Closing of the American Mind for details.
For my undergrad I studied the classics, and I'd say your generalizations are too general. People, such as Aristophanes, said the same things about Plato in his day that you say in your essay. Yet, generations of great thinkers have chosen Plato over the Cynics and Epicureans, today's relativists and materialists. Your critique of the uselessness of philosophy is more indicative of the fact that many of the humanities in academia today are purposely biased towards relativism or materialism.
While I agree that philosophy should be tested with practice, I don't think practicality should restrict inquiry. Otherwise, we become very short sighted. Math is a great example of this, which you've pointed out in one of your essays.
Finally, you misunderstand Aristotle's support for 'useless' theory. You're confusing 'useless' with 'pointless.' All useful activities are done for a specific goal, they aren't important in themselves. Therefore, the ultimate point of useful activities is by definition 'useless.' Aristotle thinks the final goal we all aim for is happiness, and the highest form of happiness is a kind of knowledge.
1. Creative, logical thinking is an inherent part of what we do and love.
2. We created and own the best communication and research network in history.
3. Programming brings our ideas into existence in very short order, and allows us to model pretty much every aspect of reality.
Unfortunately, we also tend to get stuck in our own little world of ideas, a important strength which is our major flaw.
I agree that one test of it is whether it changes the way you do things -- or at least gives you an imperative to do so that you're too weak or cowardly to heed (see Nietzche, Thoreau, Schopenhauer, Seneca).
But I dunno -- the whole math versus the world mentality always strikes me as a symptom of too much craving for certainty. Math never told us anything about the rights of man.
I agree thinking about evolution can give you an insight on human rights. It's interesting to reason about how moral rules emerge from certain social traits, and why have such traits proven evolutionarily stable.
[1] I don't mean humans intrinsically 'deserve' 'rights' that other living beings don't.
This is what was broken quiet unintentionally by Darwin,
Did Hinduism revise their creational myths, or was the whole creed discredited as a result of Darwin?
For all I know, which is not much in this topic, Darwin may have helped debunk racist stories. OTOH, Darwinism offers new pretexts for racism. Didn't Nazis abuse a good deal of Darwin (along with Nietzsche) to cook their ideologies?
We are not cells and molecules. We are souls. Strange that an essay that talks about philosophy doesn't have even once the word soul.
Ancient Greek philosopher Aristotel seperates animals from humans as beings that have soul and the ability to think.
His work "Physics" tried to capture concepts people ignore even these days, and tried to examine in an amazing use of reason various metaphysical phenomena trying to find balance between whats real, fake and imaginary.
If you read the works of Aristotel and others, in original Greek you will be amazed by his astonishing ability to convey truth in a wonderful ingenious word of speech.
--
Plato talked about many not-connected subjects in a very indirect way to put the reader in becoming part of his works. Ingenius!
A very important concept of Socrates and Plato is the world of ideas. A seperate existance/entity/world that we all have access to. Modern science doesn't accept that, as there is not proof for that. But doesn't the fact that a lot of people share similar ideas at different place and time may be a small clue of exactly that?
If we had a powerful enough computer to simulate the physics of how each cell works or simulated the connections of neurons, do you really think it won't be able to "think" like we do? Our brains really aren't any different from a computer. A neuron either fires or it doesn't; on or off; 1 or 0.
Humans aren't special. Other animals can clearly think and react to their environment to make "decisions", but they just aren't as powerful of a computer as we are.
On that note, I assume you also believe we have free will? Well, we don't. With a certain set of stimuli, you will make the same decision/"choice" every time. If you understand what I said above, this would become apparent.
With regards to the soul, where did the soul come from? Do primates have souls? If they don't, then it had to come into existence at some point. Was there a set of parents who were soulless and had a child who magically had a soul? What about groups of people that had a long time in isolation to evolve separately, such as the indigenous peoples of Australia and the Americas? Do they have souls? How about the "hobbit" that was found in Indonesia that's 12,000 years old and is a separate branch from homo sapiens? What about neanderthals?
If a human gets a soul upon conception, and identical twins are caused by a zygote that splits, does each twin only have half a soul?
So basically we are all derivatives of that process. Everybody knows that.
The point is that philosophy is not about getting a claim and considering it substantial to eliminate other probabilities.
Metaphysics is not feasible they are part of a material world. they react with it of course but it exists whether you can accept it or not.
Everyone is trying to understand what happened to all that antimatter that was created during the bing bang. For every molecule there is another anti.
And what about time? who can explain that mystical concept? in the possibility that you can go beyond it, means it may not even be valid as a concept as we know it.
In all these strange ideas, it's impossible to be satisfied that everything is only molecules.
If everything is a chemical random chain reaction how can we all have similar ideas or visions of the future? and note that Greeks never considered chemistry as different from Physics. Only recently did Chemistry claim it's independence.
But this is precisely what PG identified as being wrong with philosophy as it is currently taught.
Metaphysics is not feasible they are part of a material world.
What?
they react with it of course but it exists whether you can accept it or not.
If it reacts with the material world, it leaves the realm of philosophy, and enters the realm of testability (and hence, science). It ceases to be metaphysics, and becomes normal physics.
Everyone is trying to understand what happened to all that antimatter that was created during the bing bang. For every molecule there is another anti.
As I understand it, we have a pretty good idea as to what happened to all the anti-particles. Nature seeks the state of equilibrium at all times. Anti-particles would be attracted to their opposites, and destroy each other; this would be detected today as the cosmic background radiation, and represents the boundary in time at which the universe ceases to be opaque.
The question should be, why is there more matter than anti-matter? This is the actual question that is being pondered by cosmologists.
And what about time? who can explain that mystical concept?
Einstein.
In all these strange ideas, it's impossible to be satisfied that everything is only molecules.
These ideas happen to be testable in a laboratory, and the results are reproducable.
If everything is a chemical random chain reaction how can we all have similar ideas or visions of the future?
Because we communicate with each other. You didn't learn what you know today in a total vacuum. You were raised in a family. You went to school. Everything you know and value in your life is through indoctrination via institutions external to you. As you grow older, you internalize them. And as we all know from studying everything from perceptrons to propeganda, the more you beat something into someone's brain, the more they're going to accept it as truth.
This is what happened in philosophy. Three Greeks decided to write down what they thought they knew. Three people. Only three. Yet, they shaped the course of ALL humanity, directly or indirectly. We're still feeling the repurcussions of their thoughts today. The very fact we're having this discussion is because of them.
Only recently did Chemistry claim it's independence.
You state this as if it were some kind of political movement, just in its ways, and noble in its endeavors. In fact, most chemists of yesteryear thought that chemistry (which evolved from alchemy, remember, and had nothing to do with physics at all) was not related to physics. But as time progressed, there was an ever-increasing unification between physics and chemistry. Today, a chemist will more often than not agree that it's a narrow subset of what we call physics.
It's very highly specialized, but it is still physics. When I was most recently going through college, that was the first thing that the instructor mentioned. Chemistry is so thoroughly influenced by quantum mechanics that to deny it is itself pseudo-science. Nearly all of the early atomic research was performed by chemists (who, at the time, did NOT think of chemistry as a branch of physics). It was only when chemists wanted to peer into the behavior of their chemical reactions (from ionic bonds to fission, and all points in between) that the seeds for what we now call Quantum Physics were planted.
No, the realization that (quantum) physics and chemistry are essentially concerned with the same things is itself a very recent phenomina -- late 20th century at the earliest.
PG's redefinition of philosophy is something I've been thinking/writing about a bit recently. I prefer to call it insight, and I don't think its worth trying to define by itself. Insight is the abstract thinking that gets to the heart of a real problem or class of problems, it by definition illuminates our understanding. Calling it philosophy will just cause everyone who attempts it to miss the point. Plus philosophy has a history and a workforce, all of which will completely derail any attempt to redefine the field.
So PG's a pretty useful philosopher, at least according to his own test: "The test of utility I propose is whether we cause people who read what we've written to do anything differently afterward." Good stuff, PG.