Concerning Stephen Hawking’s Claim That Philosophy Is Dead (2012) [pdf]
filozofskivestnikonline.com
filozofskivestnikonline.com
In my personal experience, roughly 90% of philosophy publications are trash (give or take), but the remaining 10% are extremely interesting and worth reading both by philosophers and people outside the field. You have to pick carefully. Moreover, if you look at the history of philosophy that has always been the case, although the percentage of trash might have increased a little bit lately due to the nature of peer reviewing and the overall state of the discipline as a profession (too many people, not enough room for originality, too much focus on number of publications and self-promotion).
Hawking's point was different, though, and he's essentially right. The vast majority of all professional philosophers simply don't have the mathematical skills and time to keep at pace with any developments in physics after special relativity and early quantum physics. But don't blame the philosophers alone for it, this is the result of our educational system and the extreme rise of mathematical methods in sciences in general. Who can afford, in our modern society, to master the latest developments of String Theory and what's going on in philosophy with its many areas and subareas, all of this at the same time?
On a side note, if you're interested in formal philosophy, exact philosophy, philosophy as a science or however you might call it, I'd recommend studying mathematics instead and philosophy only as a secondary topic or not at all. It's easy to get into a philosophy department as a mathematician, there are many examples, but the other way round? Not going to happen.
When science achieves quantifiable improvements to average human lifespan, our take on life too will change.
You mean like it's done over the last couple hundred years?
Yes, imagine the world before penicillin and after it. They are not the same.
This is an interesting point. "Advancement" doesn't mean the fields are only getting narrower. Advancement means having to deal with increasing number of multi-disciplinary fields. So, the expectancy of convergence is positive.
With marginal increase of lifespan one may only see specialization. But if one dares to imagine a 1.5x to 2x lifespan, the meaning of "time" will change.
All economical decisions are also subconsciously factoring lifespan, with a mental model of "division by time" to see if something is worth that fraction of their life.
The imbalance created by say a 1.5x or 2x rise in lifespan will surely make way for more scientific enlightenment of masses.
Edit: corrected word "Specialization" into "Advancement"
But what of ethics, aesthetics, politics and other more humanistic branches of philosophy requires those doing working within them to keep pace with the latest developments in physics and maths?
Your second statement assumes the affirmative to the question I asked; that the ontology of science does indeed serve as the only valid foundation for all other ontologies, unless I'm missing something. Philosophers call this the theory of 'causal closure'[1] It has many implications that you may or may not agree with in the areas of consciousness, free will, ethics, etc.
Are you familiar with his follow-up, 'Reassembling the Social'? I'm not, but in reading a summary it seems to propose better methods for comparing ontologies and systems.
Sure, those claims are often exactly those made in subdisciplines like metaphysics and plain-language philosophy, but they're still suspect in a way that, for instance, philosophy of science is not. Plain language is ambiguous and full of conceptual holes: everyone learns that. The difference in dealing with the sciences is that we try to ground all of our "sentences", as philosophers would say, in actions that an experimenter can actually perform in the real world.
When you start elevating "plain language" above the actions that actually cash it out, you start running into problems.
We violently exploded and cooled, and the crispy outer crust of a planet started to organize itself, eventually resulting in a loose group of combinations of matter called people. I mean that's what happened.
That, or we're here to be nice to other people... I don't think the mathematical models are at issue here.
Your answer is not the answer. How we was able to explode when there was nothing to explode? When there was no space to explode?
Once upon a time lived a man named Newton. He invented gravitational theory. We study this theory in school and have no questions for it (or at least the most people don't). But the contemporaries of Newton had a lot of questions. They didn't like the idea of long-range interaction between planets. How planets can know their masses and masses of other planets to move smoothly by Newton's law of gravity?
Make a break, think a little about how did you feel about newtonian gravity before you discover general relativity. Isn't newtonian gravity looked great theory explaining all the things? And if so, maybe general relativity in you mind is another semantic stopsign* like newtonian gravity was? Maybe its just the cheap way to answer complex questions without answering?
I'm not sure about general relativity, but I'm almost sure about quantum mechanics: QM do not answer questions, QM is just a bunch of calculation methods to predict nature behaviour. Like Newton gravity equation was just calculation method, which is able to predict, but unable to explain.
> That, or we're here to be nice to other people... I don't think the mathematical models are at issue here.
Yes, you are right. Mathematics is unable to solve such a problems, because philosophy has not made sufficiently strict and clean abstractions, which mathematicians can use in their equations. Mathematics can't work with real problems, only with abstract ones.
"Why are we here? Where do we come from?"
Regarding the assumption, you're not far off though. I'm willing to assume a way stronger claim (without proof):
Everything that can be explained, can be explained using mathematical models.
I have many reasons for accepting this claim, but I'm also sure that not all of my colleagues would agree with it.
But since I'm working in formal ethics, I can answer your last question. Many problems of value theory and practical reasoning can be solved with formal methods and have been studied by decision theorists since the 50s. For example: parity, value incommensurability, non-additive value aggregation, claims about the intransitivity of betterness, etc. There are mathematical models for all of these. You also cannot make informed claims about, say, practical reasoning and how reasons combine to a from decision or intention to act without knowing at least Arrow's theorem, the various ways in which it can be circumvented, the limitations of qualitative value aggregation, and some fundamental results from measurement theory. Similar things can be said about normative systems (laws, moral codes, deontic rules, etc.), which are also studied by computer scientists and AI. To give another example, social choice is an important part of politics and I don't think you could do proper political philosophy without knowledge of social choice and related methods from economics. Problems of distributive justice and and fairness have been studied extensively in welfare economics and they are not all based on "egoistic agents" and utility maximization.
Mathematical method is needed to show that philosophical claims are consistent and to perhaps make them more precise. That certainly doesn't require keeping pace with the latest developments, though, it only requires awareness and some (limited) understanding of old results in applied mathematics, in fields like logic and model theory, order theory and measurement theory, or statistics.
Obviously, all of this is just my personal opinion and you can find plenty of math-haters in philosophy.
https://books.google.com/books?id=nVZ7AAAAQBAJ&lpg=PP1&pg=PR...
Ethics is what drove GPL and RMS' whole life and his talks are about. Linux is based on Philosophy/Ethics. When people dismiss RMS genius (I don't agree with him on most things but recognize him as an amazing mind) they don't hear him through the perspective of Ethics or know much of the discipline.
2. I haven't bashed a whole field, I have merely stated my experience. Curiously, most colleagues I've talked about it share this sentiment.
3. I'm a big fan of RMS and always compare him to Socrates. :-)
99% of Moms can answer that one. (If everyone jumped off a building would you?) Just cause everyone else is doing doesn't make it right :)
> I'm a big fan of RMS and always compare him to Socrates. :-)
Stoic till the ends of his days, and with a smile.
Also if you don't know the significance of my son's name (Soren) I usually just nod my head nicely and walk away from philosophy "experts."
Since Kierkegaard was totally forgotten and wasn't rediscovered made popular in Germany by Boltmann till the 20th Century and no English translation till the 1940's I really don't see the significance of your comment.
> How about 1/10?
Not sure what you are saying there
>It's a realistic view of a great study
90% of CS Journal Articles are garbage? 90% of Math in Journals are garbage? 90% of Medicine Writing Journals are Garbage?
It isn't acceptable to disparage a Philosophy and call it a waste of time. It's right up there with it being okay to say "I'm not good in math" in professional settings. Both remarks are totally acceptable to say but they really shouldn't
I don't know where you got this, but it is an exaggeration of the truth. And unless you think the same thing is just waiting to happen to all the other philosophers that surrounded him, doesn't change the fact that most philosophy is tossed aside for good reason.
And yes, the same can be said of many different fields.
Yes I discounted everything you have said because you skimmed philosophy. At that one remark I discount anything you would say since Philosophy is 100% not skimmable and that was a dense article from one of the up and coming giants in contemporary philosophy.
> roughly 90% of philosophy publications are trash
One of the great fights is to keep philosophy relevant. In college, teaching philosophy has a large barrier which is students negative view of philosophy. It was always my motive to help students to discover philosophy as an awesome discipline that will expand their world and thought process. You just slammed 90% of your contemporaries.
From Article: "Paul Feyerabend: “The younger generation of physicists, the Feynmans, the Schwingers, etc., may be very bright; they may be more intelligent than their predecessors, than Bohr, Einstein, Schrödinger, Boltzmann, Mach and so on. But they are uncivilized savages, they lack in philosophical depth…”
The current upper academic culture has PhDs making broad sweeping comments in fields that they actually don't know enough about to make a conclusion. Stephen Hawking was guilty of doing the same thing about Philosophy.
On the contrary, every philosophers skims all the time, because there are tons of publications and it is impossible to carefully work through all of them. But you have to at least take a glance to check whether you should work through them carefully. There is simply no way around that, it's the reality of our work.
a dense article from one of the up and coming giants in contemporary philosophy.
ROTFL. You've got be kidding me... You know what I was told when I started studying philosophy? If you want to become a famous philosopher, you should write as vague and ominous as possible. People seem to like that, even if makes no sense. Spot on.
You just slammed 90% of your contemporaries.
Sure, but they do the same. All of them. That's my point. I have not met a single philosopher in my life who didn't mourn about the horrible, horrible trash that they have to read, and I've met quite a few.
Not only that, it's a very old tradition among philosophers to hold their discipline in disregard, a tradition that started with Socrates and certainly hasn't ended with Wittgenstein. Nearly every famous philosophy has slammed his discipline, and I'd bet that the less famous did, too, they are just no longer known so it's harder to verify in the library.
How can you "promote" philosophy in college without being aware of that? And why would you promote philosophy at all? Nobody should come to philosophy without a burning interest in particular philosophical questions, anyone else drops out of the study program anyway.
Sub-par academic discipline. I read everything in my Graduate classes and that was 2,000 to 13,000 pages a class a semester. If you aren't careful with your reading you must be careful to not speak of your ignorance. This is why we have PhD silos. It is 100% expected that a Philosophy/Theology/Literature PhD has read everything in his point of study. In my classes it was 100% expected that I read all the major primary works on whatever we were studying and all the significant secondary sources (that is always subjective but it always equaled hundreds of pages)
> Sure, but they do the same. All of them. That's my point. I have not met a single philosopher in my life who didn't mourn about the horrible, horrible trash that they have to read, and I've met quite a few.
My parents : "Just cause everyone else is doing it doesn't mean its right" Also my empirical evidence is different then yours.
> How can you "promote" philosophy in college without being aware of that?
I am 100% aware that that statement is untrue. Historically they would disagree with different schools of thought but they would even quote other philosophers as evidence to back up their point.
> How can you "promote" philosophy in college without being aware of that? And why would you promote philosophy at all? Nobody should come to philosophy without a burning interest in particular philosophical questions, anyone else drops out of the study program anyway.
A) Every student with a BA or a BS with some rare exceptions must all complete a Philosophy/Ethics class. I guess I should have told them to all drop out instead of having to learn Philosophy in this class for the next 13 weeks?
B) You have acted dismissive to the article and of my words. You use empirical evidence so I kind of am done with this discussion.
C) Your presenting yourself cynic and not a skeptic. Those are polar opposites.
That is the exact opposite of careful reading, that is skimming. But of course your super-brain can process and fully understand 13,000 pages per class per semester without skimming. How ridiculous.
>I am 100% aware that that statement is untrue.
No, you're just trolling, and I'm starting to doubt that you even have studied philosophy.
>My parents : "Just cause everyone else is doing it doesn't mean its right"
...and also not that it's false...
>Also my empirical evidence is different then yours.
<sarcasm>Well, I'm so sorry that I haven't used your empirical evidence in my original post then.</sarcasm>
But what's even more troubling about your post is that you confuse empirical evidence with personal experience, which are the words that I have used. That's exactly the kind of sloppiness that is rightly giving philosophy such a bad rap.
>You use empirical evidence so I kind of am done with this discussion.
I would leave that standing as is, except I need to point out that empirical evidence != personal experience. So much for your reading comprehension.
>You have acted dismissive to the article and of my words.
Yes, that article is crap, full of deviations, jumps in thinking, loose association, and vague and fuzzy vocabulary. It's a light essay, not what I would count as serious philosophy.
If you cannot live with the fact that others disagree with you about your articles, then philosophy is really not the right place for you to be, because, as you should have noticed by now, people disagree a lot in philosophy.
>Every student with a BA or a BS with some rare exceptions must all complete a Philosophy/Ethics class. I guess I should have told them to all drop out instead of having to learn Philosophy in this class for the next 13 weeks?
Frankly speaking, I have gotten doubts whether they learn philosophy in those classes at all, as opposed to history of philosophy, fast reading, and essay writing.
>Your presenting yourself cynic and not a skeptic.
Oh dear, how cliche is that. I'm neither a skeptic nor a cynic. I have clearly stated that 10% of the publications in philosophy are extremely interesting and worth reading. Similar things can be said about every discipline, the vast majority of what is published is sub par, only the ratio of trash:good differs from discipline to discipline. If you cannot even agree with that, then I can only shake my head in disbelieve and move on.
Anyway, you should perhaps take it a bit easier and try sounding like a normal person rather than some highly pretentious 'eminent scholar'. I didn't like your article and I still don't like it, okay? You disagree with my assessment of the article and the state of philosophy. Fine. Noted. Bye!
I came to the conclusion that philosophy has such a negative image among many empirical and structural scientists because philosophers don't clearly distance themselves from this kind of crap. So even "serious" philosophers are considered as part of this crap to the outside. Physicists on the other hand are often very outspoken about "crackpot physics" (mathematicians [I am one] are in my mind a little less outspoken, but still very clear in distancing themselves from crackpot mathematics).
Having voluntarily heard two lecture series of philosophy, I have to admit that there are some questions that philosophers consider that are actually exciting. But the large problem that I see is that (in opposite to structural or empirical science) the philosophers working on the individual isolated topics seem to have no desire to unite their individual parts into a big united theory (like the abstract and very encompassing frameworks in mathematics or the attempts in physics to unite general relativity with quantum field theories).
But that is precisely how it is. Things that do not interact, do not exist.
What kind of predictive statement are you trying to make? How does the world change if your statement is correct, as opposed to false? What would be different?
Perhaps you meant rather that you've given me a free pass on the Turing Test, or the equivalent for "dogs on the internet". Thanks, I guess, but I don't see what problems that solves, and anyway it's still about the nature of a sensed entity rather than the existence of an unsensed one.
If there were some other fundamental means by which reality might be modified besides the basic interactions we know, our standard model of particle physics couldn't work so well, right? So to our knowledge, interaction is the one and only thing that puts a thing into existence or not.
As a side note: that is also the reason why WIMPs (weakly interacting massive particles) are a candidate for dark matter. The idea is that there might exist a form of matter that only interacts very weakly and thus it is incredibly hard to confirm its existence. Furthermore these WIMPs are massive (compared to other known elementary particles), so they might be out of reach of our particle accelerators.
These kinds of predictions follow from that.
You're looking at this backwards, I think.
You claimed that a thing must interact in order to exist. If this is false then things exist but do not interact. Things which exist but do not interact with anything would not change anything we see in the world at all, and cannot in any way be tested for. The statement provides no predictions.
Let us presume that existence and interaction can be separate. Let us also assume for a moment that there is a definition of 'existence' without interaction. Then a reality with a thing that exists but doesn't interact is equivalent to a reality where this thing doesn't exist. If a thing's existence and non-existence yield equivalent realities, we can always assume that it does not exist. Therefore, we can set 'it interacts' and 'it exists' to be equivalent for all practical purposes.
That's my line of thought, which of course still doesn't exclude that things can 'exist' but not 'interact'. But if you would press me, I'd ask for a definition of the word 'existence' without using any form of interaction. I wouldn't know a proper answer to that.
But to push into a few thought experiments:
If I go into a room and it is sealed up so that nothing at all may escape and the room may never be opened, do I cease to exist? Or do you? Do we now have two realities? Is it possible to construct a setup where discrete realities no longer explain the true nature? Can I construct a system where two agents will disagree on where the boundaries are between these realities? Since we can create things where two parties cannot agree on the ordering of events, perhaps this could be extended to identify a setup and point in time where two parties would disagree on whether or not something exists (I'm really not sure on this, I feel the answer is no but then I think that about other things that smarter people than me can construct).
Do you consider only current technology or must we also consider things we don't yet know? When humanity was in its early stages, did one tribe not exist to the other? Did some countries not exist?
Do things "exist" if they don't currently interact, and may never interact, but possibly could?
The practical conclusion is perhaps that the term "exist" isn't very helpful.
Disclaimer: I'm not trying to offend. If I do offend, please give me the benefit of the doubt and tell me why I'm mistaken.
The idea that interaction is key means there can be nothing supernatural. Everything that can cause an observable effect must do so by some natural means, and must therefore have some natural component to it as well. And if there is a natural component to something, then its interactions with that component must be via another natural component. Follow the reasoning and this precludes supernatural phenomena completely.
In brief, this is why I can't believe in any kind of deity, unless understood in the Clarkian sense of sufficiently advanced technology. I just haven't been able to see how the concept is not a logical fallacy.
What is it? It's not matter. It's not energy. Perhaps we could say that it's an electrochemical pattern that exists in the brains of a few million people. But if we all died would a non-material thing named "Occam's Razor" exist? If everyone who knew what Occam's Razor died, and then a hundred years later some one read about it in a book, would it spring back into existence?