I looked at his list of books on Amazon, and was a bit surprised to realize I had read (and own a copy) of “Darwin’s Dangerous Idea.” So I’m not quite as ignorant of his work as I thought I was.
(I admired that book quite a lot, although I thought it was not as good as Dawkins’ “Climbing Mount Improbable,” which I thought was a brilliant masterpiece.)
Nice. I may have to use that IRL with the folks that call me that.
But yeah - no. Wish it were so. I get to reading something like Hegel, or Spinoza and my brain shuts down. I have no shame in admitting I get most of my insights about different philosopher’s topics and positions via other writers. I read the source material but don’t apologize if my eyes roll up into my head.
Such as…?
Dawkins is a biologist, which is where I think the difference lies.
Except philosophy doesn’t give you an answer though. There isn’t anything definite in philosophy since everything can be debated and supported. Even questions as to what’s right and wrong can go for enternity. In my study of it I just got trapped. Realizing that nothing is definite or universal, that morality is more relative than anything else, that one can’t know anything. Most early philosophers had to use god just to hold their argument together. It’s small wonder that philosophy doesn’t go anywhere or make any progress. When nothing is definite and all is subject to endless debate, how is that progress?
Assuming that other people even exist or that we even can understand the complexities of life.
What good is a school that doesn’t give a right or wrong answer? What possible use is there for such a thing?
I’m not impaired, I just realized what a dead end philosophy turns out to be. You don’t seem to understand that for most, the concept that this is an illusion is more than most can bear, it essentially unwrites everything that we know of our lives. If there even are others. Concepts like that aren’t anything that people can recover from, but that doesn’t make them impaired. It’s the fault of those who ask such a question headless of what it might do to others and don’t even offer a remedy to it. It’s almost like they get some sick joy out of watching people go mad at such a thing just because no one takes them seriously. Keep your false sympathy, you don’t hope I recover. You’re likely reveling in my agony. I have known people who have killed themselves from being exposed to such a thought and I’m pretty close to going there myself.
Science is perhaps the only good thing philosophy has birthed. Not ethics, metaphysics, or philosophy of mind.
You seem to be stuck on equating philosophy with the idea that reality is an illusion.
Biologists are better writers than philosophers? (I kid! I kid!)
Dawkins certainly has the advantage that we know, for certain, a hell of a lot about evolutionary biology, while human consciousness is still (somewhat) mysterious. It’s a little harder to write about materially.
I set a personal record for dropping a college class.
I went to my first Philosophy class and got the syllabus. Sat through a miserable hour listening to the professor.
I went directly from class to the Admin building to drop and add a different class. I threw the syllabus into the trash on the way out. Thank goodness I hadn’t bought the textbook yet.
Life is too short to waste on stuff like this.
Oh, bully for you. Doesn’t that make you ejumakated.
I don’t see a distinction between the two.
It would certainly save you unnecessary pain and suffering.
We’ve been trying to alleviate this ignorance.
Philosophy looks at the hypothesis, “Life is an illusion,” and follows the consequences. It also looks at the contrary hypothesis, “Life is not an illusion.”
This is valid in both philosophy and science. It’s how intelligent life functions. “What if I put vanilla into the cake mix… Hm…maybe not…”
Not really. Unless “computer science” counts as a philosophy to you? (I wouldn’t argue with that, but many would.)
The endless navel gazing that can entrap even experienced philosophers (and I think we’ve all been in Machinaforce’s shoes, just usually not for years at a time).
Life is a journey, bud. Not a destination. Enjoy the process, and stop being so antsy to get somewhere.
Philosophy is thinking about thinking, for the most part. The study of consciousness, or morality, or solipsism is really just a tiny part of the whole. I mean, look at your experience in this thread. You’ve convinced no one to join your side. Maybe if you studied the philosophy of argument, aka “logic”, you’d get somewhere? You’re spinning your wheels, going nowhere, while accusing the extremely large, diverse and ancient human activity we call philosophy of doing that very thing.
If you’re upset that the scenery never changes, go outside. Give it a nice long think. Maybe you’ll come to the conclusion that the problem is you. That’s not an insult. People change. Hell, some of us enjoy it when we change our minds. That’s evidence of growth. (Of course, it isn’t always!)
Anyway, good luck, and stop taking everything so seriously.
It certainly gets philosophical at some of the edges, such as information theory, computability theory, AI, and the implications of NP Completeness and Quantum Computing.
Lots of these ideas mesh nicely with general epistemology: what do we know, and what can we know?
Math and Philosophy have been intertwined at least since Euclid proved there were infinitely many primes, and the Pythagoreans proved that the square root of two was irrational (“not commensurate with the side.”) Those are math things…but they are also philosophy things!
Correct. You do not.
How much of a discussion of the article do you want?
From the attempting to claim that everyone else is somehow setting up qualia as “special” to positioning his case as “subversive” and characterizing his case as a “radical” challenge the article is, to my read, full of him being very full of himself.
His claim that anyone who would state that a machine which can give output the same as a wine tester is not necessarily having the subjective experience of a wine tester (the Turing test restated but presented as original) is engaged in “a last ditch defense of the inwardness and elusiveness of our minds” is presented as something deep but is simply false; certainly his saying so don’t make it so.
All that dancing. Because he starts out presuming what others presume, “that we can isolate qualia from everything else that is going on” — but no, such a belief is not necessarily “in principle or for the sake of argument” when one believes that there is a way “the juice tastes to Dennett at time t …” Why presume such a presumption?
Qualia are the variety of dimensions of subjective experience that “I” know “I” experience and that I presume others built like me and reacting similarly as me likely also experience in some manner but not necessarily the same manner as do I, impacted by many other factors, top-down, bottom-up, status of other states, past experiences. Understanding how these subjective experiences emerge is not yet accomplished even if some of the mechanisms involved have been elucidated. They still can be studied and the dimensions of those experiences elucidated. He instead seems to be trying to equate qualia as the ghost in the machine and then attempting to exorcise it.
To me that effort seems to be deepity at best. A wordy cumbersome read that presents itself as a profound truth that ultimately is a bit trite if not just false.
YMMV but I find that taste of Dennett to not whet my appetite for more.
It is a destination, the same one for each person on the planet. Death.
But it’s not a journey. Philosophy is proof enough of that, people are eager to get to the answers of the questions they raised. The same goes for science.
If I haven’t convinced anyone it’s because none of them have gone through what I am right now. Unless I can actually impart that onto others then they’ll never get it.
I never spin my wheels like this prior to my study of philosophy so I can rightly blame the field for that, as have other people I know. The general opinion is that philosophy is just a hamster wheel, asking questions without giving answers or the wisdom it claims to seek. The age of something speaks nothing to its effectiveness, and as diverse as it might be it doesn’t function in any of those fields.
The problem is philosophy, it changed my mind for the better in the same way someone drops you down a well and doesn’t even give you a rope to get out.
You also realize that philosophy states there is no such thing as growth right? That implies an objective sense of “better” which doesn’t exist.
I’m torn between “Hogwash” and “Cite?”
So…both.