If the question, “Which interpretation of quantum mechanics is correct?” is posed to physicists, my guess is that the surprisingly popular opinion would be: the Everett interpretation, which in my opinion – and I consider myself a mild expert in the foundations of QM – is the correct one.
Stabilizer
Karma: 3,213
In the United States, constructivist views of knowledge are closely linked to such progressive movements as post-colonialism and multiculturalism because they supply the philosophical resources with which to protect oppressed cultures from the charge of holding false or unjustified views.
Even on purely political grounds, however, it is difficult to understand how this could have come to seem a good application of constructivist thought: for if the powerful can’t criticize the oppressed, because the central epistemological categories are inexorably tied to particular perspectives, it also follows that the oppressed can’t criticize the powerful.
Paul Boghossian, Fear of Knowledge: Against Relativism and Constructivism, pg. 130
Just to be clear: In the section you refer to, he is only pointing out that there is a tension between physics’s view of time and the intuitive, everyday view of time. He summarizes the view of some continental philosophers who say that this tension means physical laws are wrong. He never claims that he, personally, believes that therefore physical laws are wrong.
Indeed, he notes that physicists have always countered that they can explain, using their theories, why we have the intuitions that we have about time. And actually, David Albert is just such a physicist (turned philosopher). He’s spent a large chunk of his career trying to explain how intuitive conceptions of time can be obtained from fundamental physics’s conception of time.
I don’t think you and the article’s author really have a disagreement here. Notice that the author is not trying to tell you what the correct moral facts are. He’d be happy to accept that many proposed moral facts are actually false. He is simply trying to show that whenever we make moral judgements, we are implicitly assuming the existence of some moral facts – erroneous though they might be.
A great articulation of why people find it hard to adopt a naturalistic worldview
Your view is consistent with the article’s. The assumption that one ought to improve the well-being of humans would be a moral fact. The fact that emotional system 1 acquired noisy and approximate knowledge of moral facts would simply mean that evolution can acquire knowledge of moral facts. This is unproblematic: compare, for example, how evolutionarily evolved humans can obtain knowledge of mathematical facts.
For more on this, I recommend this Stanford Encyclopedia article; especially Section 4.
The Maze of Moral Relativism
Thank you for this clear and useful answer!
Thanks! It looks very related, and is perhaps exactly the same. I hadn’t heard about it till now. The Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy has a good article on this with different possible resolutions.
Triple or nothing paradox
Fair enough. Good examples: Hegel --> Marx --> Soviet Union/China. Hegel --> Husserl --> Heidegger <---> Nazism.
The version of Windows following 8.1 will be Windows 10, not Windows 9. Apparently this is because Microsoft knows that a lot of software naively looks at the first digit of the version number, concluding that it must be Windows 95 or Windows 98 if it starts with 9.
Many think this is stupid. They say that Microsoft should call the next version Windows 9, and if somebody’s dumb code breaks, it’s their own fault.
People who think that way aren’t billionaires. Microsoft got where it is, in part, because they have enough business savvy to take responsibility for problems that are not their fault but that would be perceived as being their fault.
I think he’s implicitly restricting himself to philosophy. A “grand mistake” in philosophy has little ill effects.
The chief trick to making good mistakes is not hide them—especially not from yourself. Instead of turning away in denial when you make a mistake, you should become a connoisseur of your own mistakes, turning them over in your mind as if they were works of art, which in a way they are. The fundamental reaction to any mistake ought to be this: “Well, I won’t do that again!” Natural selection doesn’t actually think this thought; it just wipes out the goofers before they can reproduce; natural selection won’t do that again, at least not as often. Animals that can learn—learn not to make that noise, touch that wire, eat that food—have something with a similar selective force in their brains. We human beings carry matters to a much more swift and efficient level. We can actually think that thought, reflecting on what we have just done: “Well, I won’t do that again!” And when we reflect, we confront directly the problem that must be solved by any mistake-maker: what, exactly, is that? What was it about what I just did that got me into all this trouble? The trick is to take advantage of the particular details of the mess you’ve made, so that your next attempt will be informed by it and not just another blind stab in the dark.… The natural human reaction to making a mistake is embarrassment and anger (we are never angrier than when are angry at ourselves), and you to work hard to overcome these emotional reactions. Try to acquire the weird practice of savoring your mistakes, delighting in uncovering the strange quirks that led you astray. Then once you have sucked out all the goodness to be gained from having made them, you can cheerfully set them behind you, and go on to the next big opportunity. But that this not enough; you should actively seek out opportunities to make grand mistakes; just so you can recover from them.
-Daniel Dennett, Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking
I wish I could give you another upvote for introducing me to the concept of déformation professionnelle.
$30 donated. It may become quasi-regular, monthly.
Thanks for letting us know. I wanted to donate to x-risk, but I didn’t really want to give to MIRI (even though I like their goals and the people) because I worry that MIRI’s approach is too narrow. FHI’s broader approach, I feel, is more appropriate given our current ignorance about the vast possible varieties of existential threats.
What steep learning curve do you wish you’d climbed sooner?
Snowden revelations causes people to reduce sensitive Google searches. (HT: Yvain)
I must say that I called it.
Wait, I think the link is missing.
Brian Christian and Tom Griffiths, Algorithms to Live By