HN Theater @HNTheaterMonth

⬐ oger

God as a rootkit is a tantalizing analogy you could draw from his talk...

⬐ bicubic

Sounds like Catholicism with extra steps...

⬐ goldenkey

The reason why most atheists hate the term God is mostly because they don't understand the nomenclature like Godhead and the trinity. Even Bertrand Russell believed in God, in the same sense as this "rootkit of reality."

We have a reality - unless you deny it is running on something, even itself, then an object with the same characteristic of what is commonly referred to as God, is a consequence.

⬐ krapp

Most atheists don't hate the term God, nor do they hate God. It would be irrational to hate something that you don't even believe exists.

>We have a reality - unless you deny it is running on something, even itself, then an object with the same characteristic of what is commonly referred to as God, is a consequence.

That's a tautology: "reality exists, therefore God exists, given some arbitrary definition of God for some arbitrary definition of reality."

Atheists don't believe in God - any God, or Gods (because consider that there are many from the Judeo-Christian complex to the ancient 'pagans' to the nameless spirits of shamanism and animism) because no religion has provided any credible evidence of their supernatural claims, not because concepts like Godhead and the Trinity are incomprehensible.

⬐ rick22

Its better to download and watch as it stutters very frequently.

⬐ None

None

⬐ buchhalter37

Joscha Bach is a perfect example of the tech community fetishizing its own ways of making sense of the world. Can the speaker acknowledge that his model of the world is the result of growing up in a rationality-loving Western tradition of thought? No. Can he even interpret a question as the start of a conversation rather than a challenge to his intelligence? No. Listening to Joscha Bach is like listening to the screams of computer scientists as they are slowly squeezed to death.

⬐ leereeves

The "rationality-loving Western tradition of thought" has given us cures for diseases, crops that feed 7 billion people, worldwide communications, and machines that fly, travel to other planets, even drive themselves. Those are pretty good reasons to trust that way of making sense of the world.

And your closing remark just sounds like an attack on the pitch of his voice, further weakening your argument, such as it is.

⬐ dingoegret

Are you really doing the whole "look what my people have invented" thing? Lol

Yes no one else in the world has ever progressed humanity. We were all living in caves until teh west man invented medicine (actually first meaningfully invented by Muslims along with introducing such basic things as repetitious hygiene). No civilization or maximum crop yields in China before the white man in Europe y'all.

⬐ buchhalter37

Great argument for white supremacy...

Watch the talk and the Q&A, interested to know what you think after that.

Love, A new HN User excited to have an informed exchange of views

⬐ leereeves

What the hell does that have to do with white supremacy? Rationality is available to anyone regardless of race, and isn't exclusively a creation of white people either.

You called it a "Western" tradition of thought and I was merely echoing your words. In truth, "the East" contributed a lot, many people in "the West" don't value rationality, and many people elsewhere do. Our rational view of the world is a shared achievement and inheritance by and for anyone who chooses to contribute.

⬐ ultrasounder

Upvoted!.

⬐ buchhalter37

Did you edit your comment to remove the condescending remark about my new HN account? Wow.

Well I’m glad to hear that “the East” had something to contribute too!

⬐ rwnspace

Please, it's quite obvious your intent is in part to generate emotion and not purely 'informed exchange'. Your tone is not appropriate to this community. Some things I've learned here: give your fellow conversationalists as much benefit of the doubt as you can. It's wise to avoid tactics of rhetoric such as reductio ad absurdum. Try explain your thoughts in such a way that we do not have to guess.

I'm actually quite sure you have something interesting to contribute, but please, politeness is important here.

⬐ buchhalter37

Apologies for the sarcasm. I felt that the previous comment was very much ad hominem and the edit was particularly insidious. But you’re right, no excuse for bad form here :)

⬐ dkersten

Or he edited it out because after reflection he realised t didn’t add anything useful? That often happens to me — I write something more snarky than I meant to and only realise after the fact and then edit my comment to remove it. My intent, when I do this, is not one of malice.

⬐ leereeves

Do you not feel your initial comment was ad hominem? "Listening to Joscha Bach is like listening to the screams of computer scientists as they are slowly squeezed to death."

I initially reacted to that and replied more harshly than I should have, so I edited the comment slightly to remove the emotion. What's insidious about that?

⬐ pantalaimon

[this comment was written in response to the parent, which was [flagged] while I was typing]

I find the backlash Joscha receives (also in this talk) from the Social Justice community surprising, given that afaik he never took a stand on the issue. Let me attempt an explanation, using ideas from this talk. If a god is a virtual entity that 'runs' next to your consciousness with properties of being omnipotent (knows all your thoughts) and that it judges you for your behavior, you can also have a Beelzebub as a virtual entity that is not quite as omnipotent, but tries to inject 'bad' thoughts into your brain. But since it is not omnipotent, you can fight it.

Now for these kind of entities to be successful they need to have additional properties to protect themselves, similar to biological organisms. Any thought questioning it is a threat to such virtual entity and therefore for such entity to be successful, it must have the property that any thought questioning it must be evil. They also need additional properties to encourage spreading and to avoid mutations.

Rationality has proven to be a good antidote to such entities, so it's just natural that new entities will evolve that have developed properties that give them immunity to that.

I think 'patriarchy' is such a Beelzebub. To simplify it: Rationalist arguments were mostly developed by white men, and thus are thoughts connected to the Beelzebub.

⬐ claudiawerner

Either your view of patriarchy is misconstrued, or you've heard about it from a source unfamiliar to me or indeed social science researchers who take the concept very seriously. Before talking about it being an idea which cannot be challenged, I'd also draw your attention to the very challenging debates in social science and philosophy which do question it. Their inaccessibility to laypeople (including me) is something to be improved on, perhaps, but I don't think we can say it's such a concept as you are describing it to me, short of a mass academic conspiracy.

The understanding of this current rationality as purely an antidote to pernicious ideas and mysticism is a relatively new one; in fact, in the 60s and 70s a big argument in critical theory was that by deplacing religion as a bearer of objective rationality, science took up a semi-religious role itself, and questions of morality or things that natural science (as opposed to the science of philosophy) could not answer were brushed aside as too mystical to be worthy of consideration, and consigned to the same dustbin us 'rational' people dumped religion in. This is also shown in the anti-positivism controversy, that is to say to what extent we can apply the methods of natural science to the social sciences. Your characterisation of patriarchy (which seems to stem from positivist ideology) seems incomplete in the face of the debate. Are there any scientists who agree with your characterisation?

I hadn't even heard of Joscha Bach before viewing the link, so I can't comment on his case in particular.

⬐ leereeves

"A mass academic conspiracy" is precisely what we see in the social sciences. Any social scientist who publishes a heretical view is excommunicated. The evidence is never considered; the mere idea, indeed merely a few heretical words, is enough to end a career.

I could name a number of examples but I'm confident you're familiar with a few of them.

⬐ claudiawerner

Does this conspiracy exist despite the fact that there are both more libertarian and more Marxist philosophers than you can shake a stick at? And are you sure that you intended to say a conspiracy (as in, a coordinated movement among researchers) rather than peer pressure against challenging prevailing orthodoxies? Either way, the "orthodoxy" of patriarchy isn't one of them.

In fact, the presence of positivist and liberal philosophers in academic philosophy is far, far greater than the presence of heterodox economists (think Marxians, neo-Ricardians post-Keynesians and Sraffians) in economics. The rejection of certain ideas actually seems to be much more of a problem in public media in which figures such as Slavoj Zizek can no longer write for papers like The Guardian.

⬐ leereeves

I was referring to "patriarchy" and related ideas, where political pressure trumps science and ends academic careers if anyone expresses unpopular ideas.

And you claim "the orthodoxy of patriarchy is not one of them"?

I find it hard to believe you aren't familiar with stories from Google, CERN, Harvard, etc, etc where people were driven out for questioning the theory that patriarchy is solely responsible for the differences in careers between men and women.

⬐ claudiawerner

People being kicked out from their jobs for questioning orthodoxies in society isn't nearly the same problem as philosophers being ejected from the field for questioning it. I'd also be cautious about saying the stories from Google for instance (all I can think of is Damore) were simply trying to spark genuine debate on the matter. Phrasing is, of course, also important, just as a professor saying "I'll give you an A if you sleep with me" to a student is different from him saying (in a news op-ed or such) "I don't think it's wrong to sleep with students in exchange for grades". Even most libertarians draw some line between locutionary and illocutionary freedoms of speech.

So while it may be a problem (though I'm skeptical), it's not the problem I was discussing. Academia rightfully tries to hold itself to the standard of free inquiry (if in good faith), but Google and Harvard have no such obligation, even to themselves. I think we probably disagree on whether there should be such an obligation.

⬐ leereeves

I never said philosophers. They're free to say what they want because few people pay much attention to what they say. You included social science in your earlier comment and I was discussing that field specifically. The overlap between "orthodoxies in society" and orthodoxies in that field is so complete that research is largely agenda-driven and dictated by politics.

And isn't Harvard academia? Isn't Google in a position to restrict free inquiry both inside and outside academia?

Perhaps we do disagree about whether there should be an obligation to allow free expression. You may have found its restriction temporarily comfortable; perhaps you're even glad that people who disagree with you weren't allowed to speak in those cases. But the backlash against such restriction helped lead to the election of Trump. When we abandon liberal values we return to the chaos of no-holds-barred fights for power.

⬐ claudiawerner

Simply because an area of study and society share the same orthodoxies, I wouldn't say that's sufficient to qualify as research being agenda-driven, though maybe you could say there's a pressure to operate under a certain agenda, all sciences face the same in that scientists must first decide what to study before they study it, and as such based on the probabilities they can reckon with (being clever people) they can tell if something will lead to a "good" or a "bad" result. In fact, a recent study of submissions in Nature found that very few actually began with a hypothesis, and instead the research was exploratory.

So I don't think there's a direct causal connection, and in fact it could also be said that results from social sciences have influenced the political climate in turn, though the education system. It's clearly a dialectical relationship.

Harvard may be academia, but I got the impression you were talking about people being ejected not for coming out with a paper that challenges the orthodoxies of social justice (of which there are many, just yesterday I read part of a PhD which argued that many forms of hate speech should not be restricted in a liberal state) but rather something else outside of the academic process.

I can't say I'm very much in favour of liberalism in general, and I don't think that restrictions on some speech lead to tyranny as it's frequently alleged they would. One need not be a trusting citizen to hold this position, and I see no reason why the state (or an organization, of course) should not be very opinionated about what it allows and what it does not. The question "what if they start banning the kind of things you say?" is a moot point when I'm not arguing for such a ban. Just as any restriction on speech might be uncomfortable for you, only some are uncomfortable for me. You will protest when Harvard starts kicking people out for left-wing or right-wing views, but I'll only protest when they start kicking people out for left-wing views. I make no secret of this bias, and I think the obsession with being as abstract and neutral in general has taken a lot of force out of arguments for how we ought to run society.

⬐ dang

Now you're trolling. (In this case, lighting a piece of flamebait and tossing it into an inflammatory situation, which you helped to make inflammatory in the first place). Doing that will get you banned here. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and use this site in the intended spirit, we'd be grateful.

⬐ chobeat

Nobody here criticized the value of reason. The problem is when you overvalue reason. Water is good for you, too much water kills you.

Saying "too much water is bad" or "water is not good when your problem is that your socks are wet" is not an attack on water itself. You waterists should all calm down.

⬐ gr__or

This argument needs some reason tbh.

⬐ chobeat

A good part of the 20th century's philosophy is about this. I mean, many philosophers talked about it extensively even before (Kant? Hume?). It's not an argument, it's a whole branch of philosophy and epistemology.

I've never read a book specific to this topic but if you want one, here's one that looks good, engineer-friendly and simple enough: https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/outer-limits-reason

⬐ leereeves

Nobody here denied there are limits to rationality; as you point out, reason itself has in fact proven that there are.

But as far as I know there's no proof that consciousness is beyond the limits of reason. The mere fact that reason is limited is not a universal argument against all rational discussion.

⬐ chobeat

No, it's not, but the problem with his argument is that he gives a narrow and extremely specific definition of consciouness and then all the structure works.

I'm not really that much in the debate about consciousness but I'm a lot into the one about intelligence: there are many definitions of intelligence and none of them seems satisfying. You can define intelligence from a rational point of view, as some kind of function or model, but it's extremely narrow, arbitrary and limited. That's the trick he uses. To me it's not enough. The very idea of intelligence is restrictive, antropocentric and confusing. That's because with the existing tools we have (including reason) we cannot converge to a satisfying idea of intelligence, that eludes our analysis.

⬐ fossuser

I think part of it is that the grandparent’s comment feels like a thinly veiled defense of religion - which is mostly just tedious.

⬐ chobeat

Why? There's not a single reference to religion or any hint that the author might be religious.

⬐ None

None

⬐ fossuser

I suppose it’s the tone and the comment about “growing up in a rationality loving western tradition of thought”.

Maybe I’m paranoid, but in experience what comes next is typically some mystic mumbo-jumbo or talk about things we “just can’t understand” etc. then usually the speaker is religious.

I’d be happy to be wrong. The religion argument is just boring.

⬐ chobeat

the alternative to reason is not religion. It can be empathy, emotion, spirituality. You can call it mumbo jumbo if you want to, but it's an integral part of how humans experience themselves, the others and the world.

⬐ fossuser

We’re probably mostly disputing definitions - I don’t consider those things separate from rationality (well except for spirituality).

⬐ chobeat

Oh they are. When you have to take decisions, give priorities, give up control in favor of something else, you will see how big the gap is.

Then if you see emotions as a subset of rationality, then it's again your rational view of the world and how you make sense of it, but it's not the position held by most people.

⬐ fossuser

I think this is a pretty good blog post that summarizes how I think of it: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/RcZCwxFiZzE6X7nsv/what-do-we...

⬐ anongraddebt

The logical positivists of the early 20th century held a semi-silly, self-defeating, and untenable position/range-of-positions in epistemology. No one in analytical philosophy takes their original, strong version of empiricism seriously.

One problem is that the more nuanced and plausible weaker versions of empiricism are not held by a number of prominent thinkers in the sciences. Instead, many of them (experts in their respective domains) continue to believe in and espouse semi-silly, self-defeating, and untenable versions of empiricism.

Whether Bach actually does is perhaps arguable. What the parent was referring to when he mentioned western rationality being myopic at times is probably something like what I described above.

⬐ staplers

You can also take rationality to religious extremes and ignore things outside our perception.

⬐ dingoegret

No the Rick & Morty cult of Athiest pounding Dawkins books is getting tedious. I get it though, I was also once 14 years old and thought being nihilistic was cool. Do you realize human civilization is a result of religion? The first cities were built as communities around temples. No one was irrational until suddenly, magically they were; with the accidental discovery of coal. The most impressive history of human development coincides with with the worship of rationality by pure accident. That's what transitioning to a powerful new energy source to replace agrarianism will do. Not because people stopped being religious. Are you kidding me

⬐ AnIdiotOnTheNet

I think it's more a criticism of pure empiricism as a model of reality.

⬐ nabla9

> rationality-loving

Can you mention some non-rational ways you think are better?

⬐ chobeat

Rationality works for some things, doesn't work for others. Do you want to make sense of the world in a way that helps with your suffering? Rationality doesn't work for most people.

Do you want to include in your model of the world knowledge that cannot be obtained with rationality? Well, then you should use something that is different than rationality.

As a society we held rationality above everything else for a couple of centuries thanks to illuminism. Yes, it helped a lot and rationality is a good tool to solve a lot of problems. Is it a perfect tool? No. Is it an omnipotent tool? Is it the tool to kill all the other tools? No. Luckily, as a society, in the last century we began to understand the limits of rationality and we are slowly transitioning to a world where rationality is used only in the context where it belongs, acknoledging its limits. The same happend with religion. In the past we used religion to explain everything and it wasn't good. Then we said: "Ok, religion takes the spot of religion and just that". The same is happening with rationality but engineers didn't take note yet, pretty much as priests took a while to be content with their spot (and still try to make religion leak in other parts of society).

⬐ stpasta

I don't think the point here is that rationality is bad. The point is that the speaker should have acknowleged that there is something to be gained from thinkers who aren't old white men in the broadly-speaking European tradition.

⬐ sayno3

Anyone who thinks in these terms: "only old, white men are taken seriously," is certainly an idiot projecting their insecurities and failures on a scapegoat that is popular and acceptable to hate on.

⬐ krapp

>The point is that the speaker should have acknowleged that there is something to be gained from thinkers who aren't old white men in the broadly-speaking European tradition.

Why is the race, age, gender or ethnicity of the thinker relevant to the credibility of their ideas?

⬐ stpasta

I assume that a person's background contributes to their ideas in some way (cf. Whorf/Sapir), hopefully not to their credibility. I'll let someone else come up something here.

I am most interested in the fact that he said that his theory could not be improved by drawing on thinkers from other cultures. Why? Because his theory itself implies that other cultures have things to contribute.

As he said, cultures have more intelligence (i.e. better theory creation powers) than individuals. One would guess, then, that he would say a good theory should maximize the number of cultures it draws from and the degree to which it draws from them.

However his theory is at best the product of one culture or at worst (and I think this is what he implied in his question and answer response) the product of one individual.

⬐ chobeat

Because ideas are not pure and unbiased. Every single event in your life contributes to your biases, to the way you conduct science, to the way make statements and the content of these statements.

Race, gender and class in this case are clearly connected because he embodies all the stereotypes of the white male STEMlord. It makes sense, he summarized readings from others like him to appeal to a crowd of people like him. The crowd is becoming aware of this echo-chamber/safe-space for engineer and questions his motives, because they have been fed the same ideas over and over and he doesn't challenge them but just reinforces them.

⬐ leereeves

A photon doesn't care what race or gender you are. Neither does a computer. Mathematics developed in India or China or Africa works just as well in Europe, and vice versa.

You're absolutely right: our thoughts and ideas are biased and impure. That's why it's so important to test them with science and reason.

⬐ chobeat

Mathematics and physics are fields where reason works pretty well (in most cases). Nobody would argue against that. But they are the exception, not the rule.

Also for example, mathematics and physics are usually fields that rarely have direct applications and most of the time they provide tools for other fields. What if the physics and maths we have now, or the way we frame the problems these fields should solve, are biased? What if this bias is preventing the creation of useful tools for other fields?

The problem is that we must acknowledge the impossibility to "think outside of the box" of reason. By doing so we open ourselves to a wider spectrum of possible discoveries and constructions, even within science and engineering. What exists might not be biased in itself, but the fact that we reached some results instead of others is dependant on cultural biases that exist outside the field itself and inside the individuals and organizations pursuing science and engineering.

⬐ leereeves

Who's forbidding anyone to "think outside the box of reason"?

It's rather the opposite here; some are trying to forbid reason to stray outside the box they believe it belongs in. The possibility that reason might explain mental processes appears to be so threatening that many people are attacking this video for daring to try.

And not with any specific objection, but simply with attacks on reason itself.

⬐ chobeat

This video isn't trying anything new. These are ideas that we've seen already, just presented in a way that is palatable to engineers.

Reason itself can understand its limits. That's a good thing, we are lucky and we got to that poitn.

> It's rather the opposite here; some are trying to forbid reason to stray outside the box they believe it belongs in.

Nobody is forbidding anything, as long as you don't make it dangerous. Excesses of reason led to great crimes in the last centuries but this is not the case.

> The possibility that reason might explain mental processes appears to be so threatening that many people are attacking this video for daring to try.

Reason can explain mental processes for sure: it's called neuroscience and it's a thriving field. But consciousness or intelligence are not only about mental processes. I mean, you can believe so but then we say your opinions are naive, because there's plenty of evidence that mechanicism is not enough to explain human experience. We are not attacking this video, we are criticizing it for making the same mistakes of so many reductionists before him. If the attacks seem vague is because probably you're missing the whole discourse going on in the last 20 years in the Philosophy of Mind and related fields.

Also reason is not sacred, get over it.

⬐ leereeves

If there are compelling arguments from "the whole discourse going on in the last 20 years in the Philosophy of Mind and related fields" then please introduce those arguments.

"You can believe [something] but then we say your opinions are naive" is not actually an argument, nor is it productive discussion.

⬐ chobeat

Here you go:

https://books.google.it/books?id=r0Bf3lLys6AC&printsec=front...

https://books.google.it/books?id=OVGna4ZEpWwC&printsec=front...

These are just a couple of modern books with an anti-reductionist approach.

⬐ leereeves

So no particular argument stands out as relevant and compelling?

I can tell you I'll never read those books. Philosophy is a field that's never contributed anything useful and never actually reached a conclusion on anything.

⬐ chobeat

can you acknowledge that "maybe" it's just that you cannot understand the whole thing? You know, many scientists engaged in philosophy (as if science is not a branch of philosophy, lol), as well as many artists, politicians, economists and most of the most brilliant minds every produced by the humankind. Why do you think they are wrong in that endeavour and you're right?

⬐ leereeves

I have no trouble understanding philosophy, it's not at all deep or challenging compared to advanced mathematics or physics. It's just unproductive. Ask five philosophers for an answer and you'll get ten opinions.

⬐ chobeat

what? Philosophy is not about giving answers. It's about many things, but it stopped being about giving answers a long time ago. It's about creating realities, it's about destructuring other people's answers. It's about asking questions. It's about understanding why all the answers are partial. But philosophy is a never ending endeavour, like science. They don't deal in absolutes, they deal in "this is good enough for now but that's not the truth".

⬐ leereeves

Precisely what I'm saying. Philosophy isn't even about looking for answers. You're right that science and philosophy were once united, but philosophy abandoned evidence-based inquiry long ago and left the search for real answers to science.

Perhaps one day we'll really understand intelligence and consciousness. Perhaps not. But if we do, I'm confident the answers will come from neuroscience, psychology, and/or AI, rather than philosophy.

⬐ chobeat

> Some time ago science diverged from philosophy

Without epistemology there's no science. Period. Science needs philosophy because they have two complementing roles. If philosophy (or non-scientific thinking in general) doesn't define concepts, science has nothing to work with. Science's role is not to make up concepts. Sometimes a single person does that during scientific inquiry but he's stepping outside of science's responsability and ill-defined concepts created so many complications throughout science's history. Just think about psychiatry.

> and philosophy abandoned evidence-based inquiry.

Big citation needed.

> Perhaps one day we'll really understand intelligence and consciousness. Perhaps not. But if we do, I'm confident the answers will come from neuroscience, psychology, and/or AI, rather than philosophy.

That's not the point. For sure the scientific understanding of intelligence and consciousness will come from science. The role of philosophy is different: it's to define what's the intelligence your trying to make sense of, it's trying to frame the problem you want to solve with science, it's about pointing science towards the evidence you want to model and let it do its course because now the exchange is always been: "Go science, fetch there" and science replied "there's nothing there, but I've found neurons". "Oh nice, let's try there", "Still nothing, but I've found networks in the brain and processing in the visual cortex and the rest of the body", "Umh, weird. Maybe it's an emergent property". "Try there" and so on. Neuroscientists are heavily involved in philosophy in the first place because this back and forth is much more intense than in other fields and there's evidently something wrong in how the problem is framed.

⬐ leereeves

> If philosophy (or non-scientific thinking in general) doesn't define concepts, science has nothing to work with.

That's certainly not true. Physical concepts were invented by the physicists. Viruses, bacteria, prions, etc were discovered by biologists. Algorithms were invented by computer scientists and mathematicians. Philosophers had very little if anything to do with it.

> philosophy abandoned evidence-based inquiry

If I'm wrong about this you can easily prove it. Just point me to the evidence-based philosophy.

> the exchange is always been: "Go science, fetch there"

No philosopher pointed the way for Einstein or Planck or Euler. You could claim that they were practicing a non-scientific mode of thought but it was based on a scientific, not philosophical, education, and personally I think that's a very narrow, mechanical view of science.

I don't mean to completely dismiss your chosen field. There might be value in it that I'm not seeing, and even if it's merely interesting but unproductive there's still value in that.

I just mean to say two things: 1) it's not for me, and 2) when it intersects with other fields philosophers need to contribute something more specific/productive than "you should read these philosophy books". Practitioners of different fields collaborate by sharing relevant information, not by expecting people in other fields to learn their field.

⬐ dang

Would you please stop? On the internet, the more grandiose a statement, the more empty it is, and posting like that in a flamewar is damaging this site for what it can actually be good at.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

⬐ chr1

The problem with anti-reductionist approach is that it doesn't explain anything and doesn't predict anything.

It simply says "i was wrong about all those other things, but this next thing you can't explain in principle, because reasons (many books of untestable claims here)".

Even if we assume that consciousness or intelligence cannot be explained by physics, the anti-reductionist position still doesn't add anything because we need to try to explain it with physics anyway to find out that it is not possible.

⬐ friendlybus

It adds the ability to survive in an environment where all the perceived facts are against you, like a desert. Physics in theory might save you from a water-less desert, but you won't be able to access that as a useful solution in the stranded-survivor situation.

⬐ chr1

How exactly philosophy is going to save anyone in a desert?

⬐ scarecrowbob

I certainly like logic and rationality. Rational thought is a super fine tool, and for the purpose of what I'm gonna say maybe it is okay to reduce "rational thought" to "logic" for the sake of thinking about it:

I find it difficult to use logic when a) you don't really know all the premises that you're starting from and b) you have a material / emotional / ideological / or identity-driven stake in the outcome.

If you have a simple closed system where you can know how everything works and you're just trying to get the system to some state, then logic is very good for that.

If you have a more complex system where you are open to being wrong about premises and are open to reworking those premises when you come to paradoxes, that seems okay.

Unfortunately much of my life has come down to systems where I have to just give up having a rational view of a process or object and intuit my way through things or guess about stuff. Simply guessing is a rational process, but I do it a lot in my life.

Or, conversely I've occasionally rationalized my into believing things about the world that aren't true because I wanted them to be true.

I've seen other folks do that often. I've seen a lot of people make technical decisions where they think they are using a "superior" technology when in fact they are driven by a fear of missing out, a need to identify with what they think is cool technology, or simply need to find a solution to a technical problem so they don't have to solve a more difficult to solve non-technical problem.

⬐ maroonblazer

>I find it difficult to use logic when a) you don't really know all the premises that you're starting from and b) you have a material / emotional / ideological / or identity-driven stake in the outcome.

When you discover a non-logical way of making progress on one of those types of problems do you attempt to re-use that approach on other problems of that same type? Or perhaps change the approach slightly to account for the slightly different nature of the problem? If so then you're using rationality/logic.

>I've seen other folks do that often.

The observation you're making is that they're not being logical/rational, but rather merely pretending to be.

⬐ dkersten

> I find it difficult to use logic when a) you don't really know all the premises that you're starting from and b) you have a material / emotional / ideological / or identity-driven stake in the outcome.

Does it being difficult mean that other approaches are better? Point b is basically saying you have a vested interest (emotionally) in it (the topic, whatever it may be) being a certain way. Foregoing rationality and logic in favour of something else isn’t going to get you better results. Most often, it means you will instead argue based on feelings and emotion. Better would be to find a way to take a step back and re-evaluate your stance.

As for point a, the only solution I can see to that is to seek more information.

⬐ mannykannot

"Can he even interpret a question as the start of a conversation rather than a challenge to his intelligence?"

How ironic that this should pop up in a post that is nothing but an ad-hominem rant.

⬐ haliax

I've been watching this comment thread unfold with a mixture of frustration (it's verging on flamewar) and curiosity.

As someone who is fairly steeped in the rationality-loving tradition and those ways of making sense of the world that are common in tech, I'd ask the following:

Can you or someone else on this thread point to a gentle introduction to the types of thought besides rationality that you're thinking of and how they're grounded? Is it possible for someone who accepts rationality to follow and credit these arguments without having to take any new beliefs as axiomatic?

Put another way, can rationality guide me at least part way to some of these other things?

⬐ buchhalter37

As chobeat kindly pointed out, nobody is criticizing rationality or reason here. It’s the worship of rationality that I think is deeply problematic.

Examples? Economic models of society. Lesswrong.com. Joscha Bach’s talk.

Rationality is not the answer to life, the universe and everything. (It’s 42.)

⬐ haliax

I understand that no one is criticizing reason, I just wanted to understand what alternatives were being proposed.

⬐ friendlybus

>Can you or someone else on this thread point to a gentle introduction to the types of thought besides rationality that you're thinking of and how they're grounded? Is it possible for someone who accepts rationality to follow and credit these arguments without having to take any new beliefs as axiomatic?

This is the substance of Sam Harris's career and his debates with Peterson. It's a fundamental unknown if you can base metaphorical conversations in rationality.

Peterson will make biological/scientific arguments for religious metaphorical stories and Sam will reduce everything back to what is only groundable. Sam will then go on to argue we should only agree on the metaphors or qualia that are undeniable, burning fingers on hot stoves as a guaranteed shared experience and metaphor. If you can bridge the gap between rationality and metaphor you have found meaning (according to Peterson) or a million billion dollars if you have some business skills and world peace.

EDIT: Sorry, this was probably more fundamental than gentle..

There is a logic to metaphor. If you believe that touching the stove with your finger will give you a burning sensation and you believe that others experience roughly the same as you, you can build the metaphor that others consciously experience pain. It's not based on the objective scientific understanding of the pain chemicals in someone's consciousness, but you reasoned up from your own experience into someone else's.

The question is best answered by exploring where you perceive the edge of metaphor vs rationality to be.

⬐ None

None

⬐ friendlybus

The talk is structured with the same metaphors as 'traditional Christianity'. I don't know why the comment section sees such a divide. The few differences are that modern Christianity does not seek to provide metaphors for describing what the world is, only how to behave. Joscha is willing to do both.

Christianity is happy to have 'magic' leaps of faith. That's what magic is, reasoning up from truth. Joscha calling magic impossible, is in itself a trap. But overall a lot of the metaphors are the same. For example don't be a pleasure-seeking hippy like the Dude. Christian values are replaced with reward reinforcing structures, but are ultimately the same conversation. The God that Joscha thinks exists and is evil, is a god Christians wouldn't believe in. Taking in all ideas and evaluating them is the same idea across both Christian and Joscha's stories.

It's much of the sameness. For all the disdain for religion, Joscha's ideology and Christianity are both systems of metaphor. I would hope people are making up their own mind on what metaphors to use. I'm curious how many people agree wholesale with Joscha and/or Christianity without niggling disagreements.

⬐ state_less

> For example don't be a pleasure-seeking hippy like the Dude.

FWIW, I interpreted the Dude as not so much a pleasure seeking hippy rather as not a pleasure denying person.

He make an extra effort for people, which isn't pleasure seeking. For example he goes to see his landlord's dance cycle to show support, and in fact the dance cycle is hilariously bad. He also shows concern for bunny, even if it's misplaced.

When he stumbles across the german in the pool black out drunk and learns he's a nihilist and quips, "That sounds exhausting." In other words, the guy seems to have to work pretty hard (getting drunk to the point of being unconscious and proudly proclaiming his beliefs to everyone he meets) at not believing in anything.

The narrator at the end says, "It's good to know the dude is out there taking it easy for all us sinners." The dude simply abides.

⬐ friendlybus

>FWIW, I interpreted the Dude as not so much a pleasure seeking hippy rather as not a pleasure denying person.

Yeah I agree, I rolled in Josch's 'too much meditation is bad' sentiment into that appraisal of the Dude.

The Big Lebowski is the normal world turned upside, a deconstruction of our traditional symbols. The rich guy is a fraud, the trophy wife is a whore, the bad guy doesn't believe in anything or can achieve anything. Jesus is a pedophile (disturbingly prescient :P). The good guy dies pointlessly of a heart attack in a parking lot and nothing ever gets done in the end (does he ever get his rug back?).

At best it's a comedy and worst it's a post modern deconstruction of our normal state of affairs. It's fun, bad and good. I watch it just to see what condition my condition is in, if I can't laugh at it, I need to improve my life conditions :P.

The Dude is just the guy to be the hero of that story, laid back and unconcerned beyond the rug keeping his room whole.

⬐ state_less

Yeah, it really did tie the room together :)

⬐ chobeat

In the beginning, when he gave a simple and arbitrary definition of Intelligence, I already got where he was going.

It's a well-worded, better-than-average, STEMlordish explanation of reality but still very limited. The guy is smart but should read more before trying to propose just another theory of reality/mind/everything.

⬐ sometime

The worst aspect of our universe might be that it does not care about our feelings. We have evolved to gain status in terms of competence and knowledge, but most edifices of ideas eventually collapse (beyond ars gratia artis), because there is only one truth and many ways to perceive it. Computationalism renders centuries worth of philosophical, religious and perhaps even mathematical inquiry redundant. People have erected their careers upon claims that can be casually explained away by simple computational mechanisms. It's easy to see how the simplicity could be perceived as insulting. It's a tragedy, really and Bach might be a bit too insensitive about this.

⬐ chobeat

Can you be more smug please?

Also your dunning-kruger is showing.

Simple answer to complex problems, outside science and engineering, are almost always wrong. The world is complex and naive answers are not sufficient, even if the subjectively make sense to you.

The guy is part of the establishment you're talking about: reason dominated the humankind for a few centuries and we are just now managing to converge to something better, while still being immersed in a reason-based society that is crumbling, leaving big voids filled by any kind of ideological scum because the post-reason is not here yet. But anyway, your conspiracy of philosophers against engineers has no root in reality and it's just fear of the complexity of the world.

⬐ sometime

> Simple answer to complex problems, outside science and engineering, are almost always wrong.

True, but it seems that the universe is simple at its foundation and complex in some of the things that emerge from it.

The standard model fits on a sheet of paper and it commonly makes predictions that are accurate to the ~20th decimal place. Neural networks can be expressed in fraction of that complexity and evolution is even simpler. Computations that emerge from these things are often complex beyond our comprehension, and hence it is a good heuristic to distrust simple explanations in the sciences about emergent phenomena such as psychology, sociology, economy and biology.

⬐ chobeat

Yes but consciousness is not in any way a foundation of the universe. It's a foundation of our own experience, but if you take a mechanicistic, reductionist approach, consciousness is pretty high in the ranking of things. I'm not saying its explanation must be necessarily complex, but so far the simple explanations didn't work.

> Neural networks can be expressed in fraction of that complexity

That's not an explanation. That's a rule to construct them. Same for evolution: one thing is to define a basic rule that underlies a phenomena, another thing is to explain why we like peanut butter and jelly using evolutionary psychology. The basic rule doesn't capture much. And sometimes, maybe, there's not even a basic rule to begin with, because we conflate a lot of stuff in concepts that have no root or relationships in the physical world.

⬐ sometime

> Yes but consciousness is not in any way a foundation of the universe.

The universe is fractally structured regarding simplicity: It is simple at its foundation upon which we find layers of evidently chaotic processes (e.g. brownian motion, thermodynamics, fluid dynamics), which in turn converge to metastable rule sets that are seemingly simple again (e.g. evolution, neural networks). Unpredictable fluctuation from the chaotic layers below are either exploited as a computational mechanism (e.g. for probabilistic modeling or adaptations of unpredictability in behavior) or averaged out by regulation (homeostasis), so simple rules remain plausible despite the underlying chaos. Those simple rule sets in turn produce complex processes (e.g. psychology, science), which in turn produce simple processes (e.g. game theory, economics). Of course the higher up in this hierarchy, the more unstable rule sets become, e.g. most economic theories make poor predictions, but evolution is an extremely reliable theory.

⬐ gr__or

I certainly fetishize it, but not as much as I fetishize good criticism. This is not it though. Please make it substantial.

⬐ claudiawerner

I agree with some of your comment, in particular the fetishisation of a particular way of thinking that seems extremely common among hackers and computer scientists; you can read it here, if you're interested[0].

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18759388

⬐ buchhalter37

That captures a lot of my thoughts, yes! If you read German, I also found this interesting dissection of an earlier talk: http://mspr0.de/?p=4521

⬐ xkore7

Agree - Too many bold statements, too much pseudo-certainty, and no room for questions. Early on in his talk, he declares infinite as solved/irrelevant - bordering on philosophical laziness. As presented by Mr.Bach, "computational functionalism" is not all that different than most organized religions - ornamental, dogmatic and mostly wrong.

⬐ dang

Can you please not post in the flamewar style to Hacker News? It leads to dumb discussion and, worse, it damages the container here.

Generic ideological tangents are particularly tedious and off topic. We don't need yet another flamewar about "Western civilization" or "the value of reason" or whatever. An internet forum is not capable of producing anything new about anything so grandiose—only pomposity and anger.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

⬐ DyslexicAtheist

probably one of the best talks of yesterday. The speaker has no doubt read GEB so it might appeal to the HN crowd ...

Speaking of Nominative Determinism, not only is his last name Bach, he covered Gödel's incompleteness theorem in the talk :-)

I will need to re-watch this at least one more time because it was so full of goodies. The Q/A was as good as the talk itself. 13/10 would watch again :)

⬐ snailletters

Joscha Bach is great. He has many other talks available on his website. [0]

His Twitter [1] is also a fun and interesting place, check it out.

0. http://bach.ai/videos/ 1. https://twitter.com/Plinz

⬐ platz

Speaker did not offer an alternative to dualism as claimed. It was dualism. He just focused mostly on the mental part e.g. neuroscience and psychology.

His model for explaining how brains organize thoughts (the 'easy' problem), does not address how the physical world allows for consciousness in the first place (the 'hard' problem c.f. David Chalmers https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2018/12/03/epis... ).

⬐ xfs

Did he mention Scott Aaronson's Ghost in the Quantum Turing Machine? That is a great take on consciousness and free will that I know of.

⬐ DanielleMolloy

He didn't mention it yesterday, but thanks for the pointer!

⬐ mark_l_watson

Interesting, and he makes me want to GEB.

⬐ rick22

What is GEB ?

⬐ DyslexicAtheist

Gödel Escher Bach, see https://hn.algolia.com/?query=goedel%20escher&sort=byPopular...

⬐ pantalaimon

If you haven't seen then yet, Joscha also did talks in a similar vein in the previous years:

https://media.ccc.de/v/30C3_-_5526_-_en_-_saal_2_-_201312291...

https://media.ccc.de/v/31c3_-_6573_-_en_-_saal_2_-_201412281...

https://media.ccc.de/v/32c3-7483-computational_meta-psycholo...

https://media.ccc.de/v/33c3-8369-machine_dreams

And if you understand German, he was also in the last Alternativlos Podcast where he talked about some ideas from this talk, but also some more

https://alternativlos.org/42/