I agree, the long dead white guys approach to Philosophy is far too prominent particularly in introductory courses, which of course attracts all the wrong sort of people into it. [The stereotype of the pretentious freshman relativist is sadly far too common.]
At least my own experience includes studying Godel, Russell etc in the context of philosophy, and there are a great many logic postgrads (on the payroll as you said) whose papers are highly technical and mathematical, and have direct applications in computing and other practical sciences.
On a wider note, the best ‘principled’ division between philosophy and hard science in my opinion is between the methodology of induction vs deduction. Not sure where that would put computer science.
But in the context of the original quote, if thats the division then I’d disagree that philosophers are obsolete, as most of the techniques we use for considering the meaning, interactions and validity of beliefs originated and is developed on in philosophy.
Where can I read badass philosophy? (There’s some incredulity here. It’s sad that the opinion of a domain expert isn’t enough to convince me philosophy isn’t a rotten field.) Note that I don’t doubt that philosophers have said stuff about Gödel, but I want the Gödel-equivalent work.
most of the techniques we use for considering the meaning, interactions and validity of beliefs originated and is developed on in philosophy
That would mostly be probability theory, right? That left the philosophy-cradle long ago—or can you show me the modern developments?
Nietzsche is pretty badass in his own way, though he doesn’t write the same kind of stuff analytical philosophers write about (it seems to me that it’s two different genres that just happen to share a name). It’s more about social / intellectual / historical commentary than about science.
It’s sort of philosophy crack: intensely pleasurable and satisfying to read, but wrong about 90% of things. (The other 10% consists of brilliant original insights that no other philosopher within a century of him could have seen. On the other hand, it can be difficult to distinguish these from the rest of his corpus.)
I agree, and bought one of these! But he’s not doing any work, just saying “Transhumanism will rock, when it’s invented sometime after my death!”. Sort of a motivational poster.
Nietzsche always struck me as non-transhumanist. Quick google tells me Bostrom agrees with me about this and people seem capable of making long arguments for and against.
Nietzsche is a prime example of a philosopher that pretty much everything I’ve understood him saying, I’ve disagreed with. But he is quite badass.
Transhumanism uses tech to change bodies and minds, Nietzsche uses old pathways.
Yeah, that’s his mistake. He points at the right goal, but can’t say how to get there. As I said, no real work.
Transhumanism wants to boost everyone, Nietzsche only a select few.
I think that’s unfair to Freddy. His Zarathustra puppet goes around telling everyone to do it, but they aren’t interested. Obviously he was envisioning individual progress as opposed to inventing tech then distributing it to Muggles, so he thinks that if few people want to put in the effort then few people will get boosted.
Transhumanism likes individual liberties.
I don’t understand what Bostrom means by that. AFAICT, Fred is huge on individual liberties.
Transhumanism comes from the Enlightenment.
I fail to see the relevance.
What I got from reading Nietzsche (before I got any exposure to transhumanism) was an extremely pretty way of saying “Striving to improve yourself a lot is awesome”. No argument why, no proposed methods, some very sucky assumptions about what it’d be like. Just a cheer, and an invitation for people who share this goal to band together and work on it. Which is what transhumanists have done.
Nietzsche seems to always see the project of self-improvement in opposition to the project of building a functional society out of multiple people who don’t kill each other, and the second one always seemed more important to me.
It’s hard for me to understand what he’s saying because he doesn’t engage (much? at all?) with Actually True Morality, that is the utilitarian/”group is just a sum of individuals” paradigm. The question of whether it’s OK for the strong to bully the weak almost doesn’t seem to interest him.
One man is not a whole lot better than one ape, but a group of men is infinitely superior to a group of apes.
ETA: I often like to think of FAI as not the ultimate transhuman, but the ultimate institution/legal system/moral code.
You might say that Nietzsche takes opposition to the Repugnant Conclusion to an extreme: his philosophy values humanity by the $L^\infty$ norm rather than the $L^1$ norm.
That’s an emendation, not the original; in most of his mid-to-late works, he really does mean that the absolute magnitude of a character, without reference to its direction, is of value.
No one believes in the $L^1$ norm. There is only Nietzsche, who believes in $L_\infty$, and utilitarians, who believe in the integral.
In this thread: people using mathematics where it doesn’t belong.
I suppose. It’s a more efficient and fun form of communication then writing it out in English, but it loses big on the number of people who can understand it.
I know how it looked when you jumped in (presumably from the Recent Comments page), but both of us did know the proper math- it’s the analogy that we were ironing out.
I read from the start of the L^p talk to now, and I can’t think why both of you bothered to speak in that language. The major point of contention occurs in a lacuna in the L^p semantic space, so continuing in that vein is… hmmm.
It’s like arguing whether the moon is pale-green or pale-blue, and deciding that since plain English just doesn’t cut it, why not discuss the issue in Japanese?
deciding that since plain English just doesn’t cut it, why not discuss the issue in Japanese?
Why not, if you know Japanese, and it has more suitable means of expressing the topic? (I see your point, but don’t think the analogy stands as stated.)
No offense to Fred, but he’s a bitter loner. Idealistic nerd wants to make the world awesome, runs out and tells everyone, everyone laughs at him, idealistic nerd gives up in disgust and walks away muttering “I’ll show them! I’ll show them all!”.
Also, he thinks this project is really really important, worth declaring war against the rest of the world and killing whoever stands in the way of becoming cooler. (As you say, whether he thinks we can also kill people who don’t actively oppose it is unclear.) This is a dangerous idea (see the zillion glorious revolutions that executed critics and plunged happily into dictatorship) - though it is less dangerous when your movement is made of complete individualists. As it happens, becoming superhumans will not require offing any Luddites (though it does require offending them and coercing them by legal means), but I can’t confidently say it wouldn’t be worth it if it were the only way—even after correcting for historical failures.
By the same token, group rationality is in fact the way to go, but individual rationality does require telling society to take a hike every now and then.
FAI as not the ultimate transhuman, but the ultimate institution/legal system/moral code
It certaintly shouldn’t be a transhuman. Eliezer’s preferred metaphor is more like “the ultimate laws of physics”, which says quite a bit about how individualistic you and he are.
Nietzsche can’t know what the Superman will look like—nobody can. But he provides a great deal of assistance: he is extremely insightful about what people are doing today (well, late 1800s, but still applicable), how that tricks us into behaving and believing in certain ways, and what that means.
But he wrote these insights as poetry. If you wanted an argument spelled out logically or a methodology of scientific inquiry, you picked the wrong philosopher.
I didn’t see much transhumanism in Nietzsche, I just like reading him because he has a lot of interesting ideas while living in a quite distant intellectual context.
Look at Philpapers.org, and search for recent papers in whatever you’re interested in I guess.
Theres a lot of stuff about the recent (last decade) experimental philosophy (X-Phi) movement available online which may allay some of your concerns about Philosophical Methodology.
Lukeprog did a set of articles not long ago about the relationship between philosophy and less wrong rationality which can probably give you more than I can off the top of my head.
I read lukeprog’s ads for philosophy. Doesn’t show the money. The most badass stuff he’s shown is just basics (“reductionism is true” as opposed to actual reductions, etc.).
Lormand: Read the first half, skimmed the other. Lowered my opinion of Dennett, didn’t change my mind otherwise. The goal is pretty non-badass in the first place: to disprove Dennett’s argument about qualia, not to actually answer the question, let alone look into the black box labeled “quale”. It’s mostly right. It makes the common mistake of forgetting the author is a brain, though. This leads to generalizing from one example (the same old “Only analytic reflection in the form of a stream of words counts as thought” canard), and to forget about physical law (there is brain circuitry that gives rise to a quale, you can mess with it, that’s where inferences are hidden).
Lanier: Consciousness is is the computer, not in the meteor shower, you pickleplumbing niddlewick! And of course specifying a conscious mind doesn’t instantiate it, you have to run it… and did you just conflate “computers are not fundamental” and “computers don’t exist”? Yeah, every physical system is a computer (a basket of apples plus gravity that drops more in performs addition), you want a specific-algorithm-detector. We don’t know the consciousness algorithm, so obviously it’s hard to detect, but at least you could look for optimization processes, which are well-defined in terms of thermodynamics. And worse than all the particular mistakes - you’re falling for mysterious answers to mysterious questions again. Don’t those people ever learn from history?
Quine:I don’t get it. (This is a good sign—I’m an outsider, if there’s advanced work then I shouldn’t get it.) Why are you talking about language in the first place? Why not just define logic (as a set of axioms for manipulating strings), then say “‘Analytic truth’ is a fancy word for ‘tautology’”, and then worry about how natural language maps onto logic? And why are you looking for meanings and definitions in words rather than in cognitive processes? (The reason “bachelor” and “unmarried man” are synonymous, but not “creature with a kidney” and “creature with a heart” is because, upon hearing the word “bachelor”, we translate it to “unmarried man”, then reason about unmarried men, whereas upon hearing “creature with a kidney”, we reason about creatures with kidneys, then notice they’re the same as the creatures who have a heart.) And what does this have to do with reductionism? (Is this the same old confusion between probability estimates and statements in a language?)
I agree, the long dead white guys approach to Philosophy is far too prominent particularly in introductory courses, which of course attracts all the wrong sort of people into it. [The stereotype of the pretentious freshman relativist is sadly far too common.]
At least my own experience includes studying Godel, Russell etc in the context of philosophy, and there are a great many logic postgrads (on the payroll as you said) whose papers are highly technical and mathematical, and have direct applications in computing and other practical sciences.
On a wider note, the best ‘principled’ division between philosophy and hard science in my opinion is between the methodology of induction vs deduction. Not sure where that would put computer science.
But in the context of the original quote, if thats the division then I’d disagree that philosophers are obsolete, as most of the techniques we use for considering the meaning, interactions and validity of beliefs originated and is developed on in philosophy.
Where can I read badass philosophy? (There’s some incredulity here. It’s sad that the opinion of a domain expert isn’t enough to convince me philosophy isn’t a rotten field.) Note that I don’t doubt that philosophers have said stuff about Gödel, but I want the Gödel-equivalent work.
That would mostly be probability theory, right? That left the philosophy-cradle long ago—or can you show me the modern developments?
Nietzsche is pretty badass in his own way, though he doesn’t write the same kind of stuff analytical philosophers write about (it seems to me that it’s two different genres that just happen to share a name). It’s more about social / intellectual / historical commentary than about science.
It’s sort of philosophy crack: intensely pleasurable and satisfying to read, but wrong about 90% of things. (The other 10% consists of brilliant original insights that no other philosopher within a century of him could have seen. On the other hand, it can be difficult to distinguish these from the rest of his corpus.)
I agree, and bought one of these! But he’s not doing any work, just saying “Transhumanism will rock, when it’s invented sometime after my death!”. Sort of a motivational poster.
Nietzsche always struck me as non-transhumanist. Quick google tells me Bostrom agrees with me about this and people seem capable of making long arguments for and against.
Nietzsche is a prime example of a philosopher that pretty much everything I’ve understood him saying, I’ve disagreed with. But he is quite badass.
The source is Bostrom’s 2004 paper A history of transhumanist thought, page 4. I’ll paraphrase the difference he lists:
Yeah, that’s his mistake. He points at the right goal, but can’t say how to get there. As I said, no real work.
I think that’s unfair to Freddy. His Zarathustra puppet goes around telling everyone to do it, but they aren’t interested. Obviously he was envisioning individual progress as opposed to inventing tech then distributing it to Muggles, so he thinks that if few people want to put in the effort then few people will get boosted.
I don’t understand what Bostrom means by that. AFAICT, Fred is huge on individual liberties.
I fail to see the relevance.
What I got from reading Nietzsche (before I got any exposure to transhumanism) was an extremely pretty way of saying “Striving to improve yourself a lot is awesome”. No argument why, no proposed methods, some very sucky assumptions about what it’d be like. Just a cheer, and an invitation for people who share this goal to band together and work on it. Which is what transhumanists have done.
Nietzsche seems to always see the project of self-improvement in opposition to the project of building a functional society out of multiple people who don’t kill each other, and the second one always seemed more important to me.
It’s hard for me to understand what he’s saying because he doesn’t engage (much? at all?) with Actually True Morality, that is the utilitarian/”group is just a sum of individuals” paradigm. The question of whether it’s OK for the strong to bully the weak almost doesn’t seem to interest him.
One man is not a whole lot better than one ape, but a group of men is infinitely superior to a group of apes.
ETA: I often like to think of FAI as not the ultimate transhuman, but the ultimate institution/legal system/moral code.
You might say that Nietzsche takes opposition to the Repugnant Conclusion to an extreme: his philosophy values humanity by the $L^\infty$ norm rather than the $L^1$ norm.
(Assuming that individual value is nonnegative.)
That’s an emendation, not the original; in most of his mid-to-late works, he really does mean that the absolute magnitude of a character, without reference to its direction, is of value.
But certainly the people who believe in the $L^1$ norm don’t take the absolute value...
What? The L^1 norm is the integral of the absolute value of the function.
In this thread: people using mathematics where it doesn’t belong.
I should say:
No one believes in the $L^1$ norm. There is only Nietzsche, who believes in $L_\infty$, and utilitarians, who believe in the integral.
I suppose. It’s a more efficient and fun form of communication then writing it out in English, but it loses big on the number of people who can understand it.
Yes, that’s what I should have written.
I know how it looked when you jumped in (presumably from the Recent Comments page), but both of us did know the proper math- it’s the analogy that we were ironing out.
I read from the start of the L^p talk to now, and I can’t think why both of you bothered to speak in that language. The major point of contention occurs in a lacuna in the L^p semantic space, so continuing in that vein is… hmmm.
It’s like arguing whether the moon is pale-green or pale-blue, and deciding that since plain English just doesn’t cut it, why not discuss the issue in Japanese?
Why not, if you know Japanese, and it has more suitable means of expressing the topic? (I see your point, but don’t think the analogy stands as stated.)
If we extend the analogy to the above conversation, it’s an argument between non-Japanese otaku.
No offense to Fred, but he’s a bitter loner. Idealistic nerd wants to make the world awesome, runs out and tells everyone, everyone laughs at him, idealistic nerd gives up in disgust and walks away muttering “I’ll show them! I’ll show them all!”.
Also, he thinks this project is really really important, worth declaring war against the rest of the world and killing whoever stands in the way of becoming cooler. (As you say, whether he thinks we can also kill people who don’t actively oppose it is unclear.) This is a dangerous idea (see the zillion glorious revolutions that executed critics and plunged happily into dictatorship) - though it is less dangerous when your movement is made of complete individualists. As it happens, becoming superhumans will not require offing any Luddites (though it does require offending them and coercing them by legal means), but I can’t confidently say it wouldn’t be worth it if it were the only way—even after correcting for historical failures.
By the same token, group rationality is in fact the way to go, but individual rationality does require telling society to take a hike every now and then.
It certaintly shouldn’t be a transhuman. Eliezer’s preferred metaphor is more like “the ultimate laws of physics”, which says quite a bit about how individualistic you and he are.
Nietzsche can’t know what the Superman will look like—nobody can. But he provides a great deal of assistance: he is extremely insightful about what people are doing today (well, late 1800s, but still applicable), how that tricks us into behaving and believing in certain ways, and what that means.
But he wrote these insights as poetry. If you wanted an argument spelled out logically or a methodology of scientific inquiry, you picked the wrong philosopher.
I didn’t see much transhumanism in Nietzsche, I just like reading him because he has a lot of interesting ideas while living in a quite distant intellectual context.
Look at Philpapers.org, and search for recent papers in whatever you’re interested in I guess.
Theres a lot of stuff about the recent (last decade) experimental philosophy (X-Phi) movement available online which may allay some of your concerns about Philosophical Methodology.
For a more informal look at how professional philosophers behave http://philosiology.blogspot.com/ is quite amusing.
Lukeprog did a set of articles not long ago about the relationship between philosophy and less wrong rationality which can probably give you more than I can off the top of my head.
Will read, thanks!
I read lukeprog’s ads for philosophy. Doesn’t show the money. The most badass stuff he’s shown is just basics (“reductionism is true” as opposed to actual reductions, etc.).
Here there is a post about this: http://lesswrong.com/lw/58d/how_not_to_be_a_na%C3%AFve_computationalist/
A fun critique of Dennett http://www-personal.umich.edu/~lormand/phil/cons/qualia.htm
A fun critique of zombies (and Dennett, and Searle and Chalmers) http://www.davidchess.com/words/poc/lanier_zombie.html
The single most famous paper in analytical philosophy is an attach on the sacred cows of...analytical philosophy http://www.ditext.com/quine/quine.html
Lormand: Read the first half, skimmed the other. Lowered my opinion of Dennett, didn’t change my mind otherwise. The goal is pretty non-badass in the first place: to disprove Dennett’s argument about qualia, not to actually answer the question, let alone look into the black box labeled “quale”. It’s mostly right. It makes the common mistake of forgetting the author is a brain, though. This leads to generalizing from one example (the same old “Only analytic reflection in the form of a stream of words counts as thought” canard), and to forget about physical law (there is brain circuitry that gives rise to a quale, you can mess with it, that’s where inferences are hidden).
Lanier: Consciousness is is the computer, not in the meteor shower, you pickleplumbing niddlewick! And of course specifying a conscious mind doesn’t instantiate it, you have to run it… and did you just conflate “computers are not fundamental” and “computers don’t exist”? Yeah, every physical system is a computer (a basket of apples plus gravity that drops more in performs addition), you want a specific-algorithm-detector. We don’t know the consciousness algorithm, so obviously it’s hard to detect, but at least you could look for optimization processes, which are well-defined in terms of thermodynamics. And worse than all the particular mistakes - you’re falling for mysterious answers to mysterious questions again. Don’t those people ever learn from history?
Quine:I don’t get it. (This is a good sign—I’m an outsider, if there’s advanced work then I shouldn’t get it.) Why are you talking about language in the first place? Why not just define logic (as a set of axioms for manipulating strings), then say “‘Analytic truth’ is a fancy word for ‘tautology’”, and then worry about how natural language maps onto logic? And why are you looking for meanings and definitions in words rather than in cognitive processes? (The reason “bachelor” and “unmarried man” are synonymous, but not “creature with a kidney” and “creature with a heart” is because, upon hearing the word “bachelor”, we translate it to “unmarried man”, then reason about unmarried men, whereas upon hearing “creature with a kidney”, we reason about creatures with kidneys, then notice they’re the same as the creatures who have a heart.) And what does this have to do with reductionism? (Is this the same old confusion between probability estimates and statements in a language?)