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Comment by theVirginian | Hacker News Reader

As someone with a major in philosophy, I can attest that it is in fact something we talked about often.

How deep do you go? Do you talk about P and NP? Or deeper, like interactive proofs or complexity-based definitions of randomness?

Philosophy generally has its own language for talking about these kinds of problems, and generally its own starting points. Gilles Deleuze laid a lot of the groundwork for using ideas from chaos theory to work on philosophical problems during his life (starting with some of his work in the 1960-70s). Some links:

- http://www.protevi.com/john/DG/PDF/Remarks_on_Complexity_The...

- http://www.euppublishing.com/doi/abs/10.3366/jipt.2010.0004

It could perhaps be useful to do similar work with computational complexity theory.

What is being discussed in those links is commonly called complex systems theory[0] which is a mathematical/scientific/philosophical field concerned with how complexity (in the natural language sense of the world) arises from what appear to be simple natural laws. For example, how chaotic dynamics arise from deterministic systems, how biology arises from chemistry, or how consciousness arises from neural activity. It is connected to chaos theory, nonlinear dynamics and systems theory.

It is completely different to computational complexity[1] which is what is being discussed in Aaronson's article.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex_system

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computational_complexity_theory

My mistake, I meant it as a basis for incorporating computational complexity. The original article posted shows how computational complexity is applicable to non-linear systems, which I think are philosophically more interesting. Deleuze's work would provide some good groundwork for seeing how those kinds of ideas can be applied in a philosophical context.

The difficulty is that if you get too deep into this stuff you stop doing philosophy and start doing something useful. Philosophers have to be very careful these days or they'll get dragged out of the tiny circle of darkness they insist on occupying.

There is a place for philosophy, but it shrinks every time a new discovery is made. It hasn't been quite as roughly treated as theology has, but the lag is only about a century. The vast majority of what philosophers once spent their time talking about is now part of some empirically grounded special science, where making stuff up and asserting broad foundational claims without proof or testing is no longer viable.

Linguistics, in particular, has carved off large chunks. Physics likewise: no fun speculating on the nature of space and time when we can pin them down pretty precisely. Various combinations of sociology, psychology, economics and political science have heavily encroached on moral philosophy.

This is not to say that the world can't always use a few philosophers to poke around in the darkness and perhaps cross the boundaries of other fields to good effect, but the majority of the work that was once their exclusive preserve is now almost always better handled by people with actual, detailed, empirical knowledge of the subject.

There is no value in privileging the human scale or human imagination, and fortunately no need to live within the artificial restrictions that philosophers place on themselves, particularly their refusal to do experiments or even make systematic observations to test their ideas, preferring instead to rely on "what just makes sense", because that has always worked so well in the past. Insisting on empirical testing is in no way limiting because ideas that cannot be tested are irrelevant, as they must not have any impact whatsoever on any aspect of existence (if they did, observing and/or manipulating that aspect of existence would allow the ideas related to them to be tested.)

Philosophy does teach a certain kind of rigour in thinking, because without either empiricism or mathematical deduction to fall back on philosophers have to be extremely meticulous to avoid falling off the real axis entirely, but that starts to look more like a skill that ought to be taught to everyone rather than the basis for an entire academic discipline.

> There is a place for philosophy, but it shrinks every time a new discovery is made.

How do you define philosophy? can't we see science as as subset of philosophy?

Philosophy of science is something you might be familiar with. It takes a tangential approach to science and it is highly frowned upon in the philosophy community to make judgements about science directly. Instead the idea is to reason about the scientific process intead of trying actively to define it. Let the scientists do their job, then as a philosopher you try to construct an intellectual framework to make sense of what they are doing. The realism-antirealism debate is an example of that today. People argue about whether the science being done at CERN, and the models they produce to explain the observed phenomena, are explaining the "real" world as it is, or if they are simply convenient mathematical theories that attempt to explain empirical phenomena. There is no debate over wether or not they are doing valid science, the debate is over what the process they engage in and the conclusions they draw imply for our understanding of reality, our experience, and what it means to attain knowledge. The people debating these issues are by no means removed from the scientific community either. Most professors who write these papers either are physicists themselves or work closely alongside them and have intimate understandings of the science and math before they start to write. The papers are themselves targeted at other physicists and philosophers with understandings of these topics far more advanced than my own.

I find it unfortunate when people like the commentator above make the claims that they do because it detracts from the respect that the field of philosophy deserves. It may not have the most obvious practical applications but it deserves attention and some of it is really mind-bending stuff. When people like Steven Hawking shit on the subject it's really a shame. They are causing themselves to miss out and they are driving potential great thinkers away.

This is wrong. It is also a terrible misunderstanding of philosophy. It is completely possible to approach a problem from a "useful" perspective and a philosophical perspective simultaneously and many people do this. I had professors with a Phd in both Philosophy and in Physics because each academic discipline deals with similar problems independently.

Philosophy does not deal with testing empirical theories. No there has not been encroachment by linguistics, sociology, psychology, or economics.

I'm sorry you wasted so much time typing this comment, I've read it three times now and I cant find a single thing you got right.

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