/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.18834591]

Philosophy is such a waste of time. I've spent the past 4 years studying all of it because I thought it was going to show me some enlightening truths or something of the sort but it's done nothing but fill up my brain with useless information. Everything in philosophy is stuff we all already know but written out over 500 pages. Do you really need to a year and half slowly reading a terribly written 700 page historical philosophy book on whether a chair is actually a chair? You already know all the arguments in the book. I guarantee everyone in the world could you give you all the arguments in the 400 year period of philosophical debate. Nothing would be enlightening. We read it for ego because there is no other reason to read it. You aren't going to learn anything you didn't already know. You can this test out if you haven't already read the great works of philosophy. Ask them. What did you learn? What did you learn that wasn't already obvious? They can't tell you. It's a fraud. The fucking self help philosophy books like Epicurus, Schopenhauer etc. Those are usually better than most philosophy works because at least they're poetic but still do you really need to read a 600 page book to tell you that you shouldn't do things that are bad for you and that you should do things that are good for you. Really. You needed that? 99.9% of philosophy is completely useless and a waste of time. I mean rarely rarely is it useful. One out of 600 philosophy books will make you go. "Wow I never thought about it like that" or "Wow that can be useful in our society". Spend your time learning something useful or soul stirring.

[Anonymous No.18834608]

Agreed.

[Anonymous No.18834642]

I see philosophy as an inquiry on an aspect of reality, the most important being the one on the nature of reality itself. This is the way philosophy should be taught, as a perspective on life that will lead you to a journey of discovery, not a boring absorption of encyclopedic knowledge of who thought what about what. In this manner, you only read a philosophy book AFTER you have already conceived something of your own about x facet of reality (politics, for example), and the entire process ceases to be a dull absorption and becomes a conversation, a debate of you against someone who lived hundreds of years ago who thought something different than what you have already devised.
Further into the idea of the philosopher as an investigator of reality, no philosopher should go without a solid knowledge of Mathematics and Science, for that would be ignoring what we know most rigorously. The different is, the philosopher doesn't limit himself to investigating that which can be a subject to the scientific method, and is free to reflect upon matters that the mind alone can undertake.

[Anonymous No.18834655]

>>18834591
You're stupid for thinking philosophy would enlighten you. But okay, you at least finally came to the right conclusion.

[Anonymous No.18834658]

Philosophy has always been about two things. Finding out the way things work, and giving life advice. The first function has been totally supplanted by the experimental scientific method. Modern philosophers still haven’t gotten over that fact. The telling you how to live part can still be relevant but most philosophers fuck it up because a) they still can’t let go of fucking metaphysics; and b) most philosophers are fucking nerds with no people skills and no life experience, especially ever since philosophy became an actual career choice in modern times (it was also the case for some in Ancient Greece and that’s how you got Sophists).

[Anonymous No.18834668]

>>18834642
This is why people who major in Philosophy will often be frustrated at the end of their studies: they know what dozens of philosophers thought but were barely ever taught to develop their own ideas. You don't need to develop something original (as that is difficult as fuck), the mere process of seeking to express your reflections on your experiences will make you original and give you intellectual confidence and authority. What other people thought comes after, as a conversation, not just another point of view to memorize.

[Anonymous No.18834684]

>that can be useful in our society

[Anonymous No.18834697]

>>18834668
>they know what dozens of philosophers thought but were barely ever taught to develop their own ideas
What, you need a guide how to think for yourself? If you haven't your own thought already before you start studying and just use the thoughts of other philosophers to deepen your argumentation, you're lost anyways.

[Anonymous No.18834714]

>>18834684
Politics and ethics are useful in our society. Issues like healthcare, immigration. abortion, religion, economics, capital punishment all have huge effects on the lives of people.

[Anonymous No.18834716]

>>18834668
Modern philosophy is basically back to being scholastic. The dogma of the church is simply replaced by that of the department you’re in.

[Anonymous No.18834721]

>>18834591
>>18834608
>>18834642
All theoretical philosophy is nothing other than the pursuit of clarity on the imperatives of practical reason, which only derive their worth because of our organisation as social animals in a civil society. This is what it has always been and receives its clearest expression in the Kantian dictum that the practical has primacy over the theoretical. What philosophy, then, tries to do is rationally deduce and demonstrate to the civil socius how it must organise itself and why it must do so on pain of its very existence. To do this in a rigorous and systematic manner, i.e., with relying on dogma, i.e., fixed principles derived from contingent conventions and activity, we must launch an investigation into the world-whole (the super-socius organisation) in which the socius and we ourselves are always situated. It is in this investigation that questions such as the is/ought distinction arise. Nevertheless, the pull remains strong bc the pragmatic answer of (if it works it works) remains unsatisfactory insofar as that all practical historical social self-organisations do not work at all and if they do only for the select. The imperatives the socius lays on its particulars repeatedly lose their legitimacy under the sear of a scrutinising mind and exposes all of our worth to be arbitrary and meaningless, a particularly painful realisation bc these ideas themselves do not precede the socius but presuppose it for their constitution.

[Anonymous No.18834752]

>>18834697
No one is born knowledgeable of how to make the best of their mental faculties. You need the Trivium for that.

[Anonymous No.18834808]

It can help you mentally by giving you a better frame of the world to look at. It can also help you understand other subjects when you see where their beginnings were. It's also fun and if you get into more recent content you will discover more groundbreaking original concepts. A lot of people are fucking stupid too and I wouldn't say they know how to live life well instinctively.

[Anonymous No.18834827]

>>18834658

Science is a craftsmanship epistemology. It's a great way to understand things in terms of facts and facts with close proximity to a first fact. And this way of understanding things is useful for building particle things and manipulating ones immediate environment. Science used to but no longer emphasizes truth as apparent to the senses

[Anonymous No.18834828]

>>18834591
Stop lying to yourself. You have spent 4 years browsing 4chan, not reading philosophy

[Anonymous No.18835101]

>>18834591
>e. I've spent the past 4 years studying all of it
false

[Anonymous No.18835208]

>>18834591
>What did you learn that wasn't already obvious?

Logical positivism: The idea that if a statement can't be verified even in principle then it doesn't matter whether you take it to be true or false. This principle is correct but is rejected by philosophers probably for political reasons (it was popular in the USSR). They gave stupid arguments against it, e.g., is this principle itself verifiable? This is like asking whether Euclid's axiomatic geometry can prove its own axioms.

Positivism dispenses of most philosophical questions people ask, e.g., does time go backward or forward? is my red the same as your red? do p-zombies exist?

Formal logic / mathematical foundations: This became an extremely deep area of contemporary math, and it's where set theory and homotopy type theory come from. It was mostly developed by mathematicians, but some philosophers, like Russell or Kripke, also contributed to it.

Modern cog-sci ideas: These include predictive processing, the extended mind (Andy Clark is a prominent philosopher working on these), and macrocognition, i.e., collective minds (Bryce Huebner wrote a good book on this). These all sprang out of the 1980s, when philosophers were inspired by Everett's many-world interpretation of quantum mechanics and understood its relationship to consciousness. Some philosophers writing on this topic were Daniel Dennett and Derek Parfit, although Douglas Hofstadter IMO made the most contributions (but he's a cog-sci guy).

Superrationality and acausal decision theories: This concept is due to Hofstadter but is a contribution to philosophy. It's a way of formulating a precise form of religious ethics within the context of game theory. It was extended to asymmetric games by Ron Maimon and reformulated with computers by Gary L. Drescher in his book "Good and Real". The Lesswrong people are into this today and formulated a variety of decision theories that play correctly in situations like Newcomb's Paradox.

[Anonymous No.18835345]

Most people don't realise you can either be a philosopher or an artist. A philosopher tries to understand everything whereas an artist only cares about what is good. The artist wins because he cares about truth whereas the philosopher doesn't.

[Anonymous No.18835376]

>>18834591
anon, the one thing that you learn (very quickly) in reading philosophy is that there is very little we can be certain of
going into this with the expectation of boundless wisdom and enlightenment and coming out empty handed is 100% on you, not philosophy

[Anonymous No.18835790]

>>18834591
Which philosophers were worth it to you then?

[Anonymous No.18835925]

>>18835208
>Logical positivism: The idea that if a statement can't be verified even in principle then it doesn't matter whether you take it to be true or false. This principle is correct but is rejected by philosophers probably for political reasons (it was popular in the USSR). They gave stupid arguments against it, e.g., is this principle itself verifiable? This is like asking whether Euclid's axiomatic geometry can prove its own axioms.
This is a misrepresentation of the verification principle. And the usual critique still applies: how do you verify the verigication principle?

[Anonymous No.18836531]

>>18835208
>Anonymous 08/12/21(Thu)12:13:21 No.18835208>>18835925>>18834591(OP)
>>What did you learn that wasn't already obvious?
>
>Logical positivism: The idea that if a statement can't be verified even in principle then it doesn't matter whether you take it to be true or false. This principle is correct but is rejected by philosophers probably for political reasons (it was popular in the USSR). They gave stupid arguments against it, e.g., is this principle itself verifiable? This is like asking whether Euclid's axiomatic geometry can prove its own axioms.
>
>Positivism dispenses of most philosophical questions people ask, e.g., does time go backward or forward? is my red the same as your red? do p-zombies exist?
>
>Formal logic / mathematical foundations: This became an extremely deep area of contemporary math, and it's where set theory and homotopy type theory come from. It was mostly developed by mathematicians, but some philosophers, like Russell or Kripke, also contributed to it.
>
>Modern cog-sci ideas: These include predictive processing, the extended mind (Andy Clark is a prominent philosopher working on these), and macrocognition, i.e., collective minds (Bryce Huebner wrote a good book on this). These all sprang out of the 1980s, when philosophers were inspired by Everett's many-world interpretation of quantum mechanics and understood its relationship to consciousness. Some philosophers writing on this topic were Daniel Dennett and Derek Parfit, although Douglas Hofstadter IMO made the most contributions (but he's a cog-sci guy).
>
>Superrationality and acausal decision theories: This concept is due to Hofstadter but is a contribution to philosophy. It's a way of formulating a precise form of religious ethics within the context of game theory. It was extended to asymmetric games by Ron Maimon and reformulated with computers by Gary L. Drescher in his book "Good and Real". The Lesswrong people are into this today and formulated a variety of decision theories that play correctly in situations like Newcomb's Paradox.

[Anonymous No.18836597]

>>18835208
The problem is that you can't conclusively verify anything, only assemble evidence for and against. Science can only describe how the world seems to work.

[Anonymous No.18836618]

Fiction is better than Philosophy

[Anonymous No.18836803]

>>18834591
>Think of philosophy as a history of ideas and end up not enjoying it.
That is 100% your fault.

[Anonymous No.18837247]

>>18835925
The verification principle is a definition of meaning, a sort of axiom, not something to be verified. It's analogous to asking, "How do you prove the axioms of Euclidean geometry within the framework itself?" You assume the axioms.

Of course, one is free to not be a logical positivist and assume different axioms. You can believe that Russell's teapot exists, or that there are p-zombies, or whatever you want. But the verification principle is a particularly useful principle because you'll never have any evidence that the teapot or zombies exist, by definition of the verification principle.

[Anonymous No.18837262]

>>18836597
This isn't a real problem. You can't be 100% certain of anything, including the laws of mathematics, because you might just be living in a simulation in which you're programmed to have your current beliefs, or because everyone (including you) who verified those laws made an oversight, or some other contrived scenario. In practice, you're always verifying something up to some tiny probability p of being wrong. But this is fine, you just look at the evidence and update your prior probability in a Bayesian way.

[Anonymous No.18837282]

>>18834591
spinoza's ethics unironically helped me beat my porn addiction

[Anonymous No.18837359]

>>18834591
Either you didn‘t study philosophy at university, or you‘re an idiot to learn nothing at uni. In any case, stop projecting, fag.

[Anonymous No.18837393]

>>18834697
This. Too many people study, and most people study the wrong things.
If you’re not already some kind artist, prodigy, inspired person who‘s simply never had time to read, never had direction, never had a form or method to express himself in, you‘ll struggle after uni because uni will seem like nothing but more independent and or difficult school to you, where you meet mildly more interesting people than elsewhere.

The mindset is to always try writing something which stands by itself, develop your ideas and yourself. There is no guide per se but to strife ever higher is a general direction to orientate your whole literary, philosophical - academic being around.

[Anonymous No.18837444]

>>18834591
The only use I have for philosophy is deprogramming or I guess mind hacking yourself to see another side of thinking. Hard studying philosophy alone is useless and deprograms you from everything and leaves you where you started. Its support to be used as a companion to helo you sculpt and form yourself, not a major subject you study like you would study molecular science or physics. You use it to apply it while you study those other subjects. Its why the best examples of actual philosophers were people who were good at their profession but also ventured into philosophy and applied it, not studying nothing but that and just ending up a useless loser like most modern philosophers. Its why for all their cringe moments self help leaning stuff has more of an obvious point in existing since it focuses on being practical.
>>18834642
This
>>18834697
Most people do read philosophy to essentially get assimilated into a line of thinking instead of using it to develop theirs its nonsense and ruins the point of it. God forbid you tell them this either

[Anonymous No.18838276]

>>18834658
>still can't let go of metaphysics
t. brainlet hasn't read jack shit
Their discourse on metaphysics literally leads them to present-at-handedness type of just living life like everyone else, socializing just like other people, but doing it in a way that only through the accumulation of knowledge that you can only be happier because you have a better foresight of what is truly desirable (idealism)

[Anonymous No.18838686]

>>18834608
Nothing disgusts me more than "cosplayers"

[Anonymous No.18838709]

>>18837282
How?

[Anonymous No.18838816]

Philosophy is the best intellectual activity, in my opinion. It's the mind's attempt to explain what exactly it knows about the universe. Since the beginning, when the first atoms were formed, the quest to explain what it's like to be alive and make sense of what we are perceiving has been what the human race is all about. The discovery of the laws of gravitation, the theory of evolution, Einstein's theory of relativity. Philosophy is no different in this regard. A man tries to explain the very nature of his existence and the very universe. It's his way of grappling with reality. This is the best use of the mind. This is what we know as philosophy and it is what separates us from mere animal in my view. The capacity for self awareness, introspection, reflection, and communication is what enabled us to become what we are as a species.

[Anonymous No.18838873]

>>18835208
If the verification principle is correct how come all the positivists abandoned it themselves? It runs into problems even just from the fact even so-called analytic truths aren't all in principle provable, given Godel's incompleteness proof, and here these people want to say synthetic sentences must be verifiable if they're not to be meaningless, which absolutely ruins the possibility of proving laws of physics, since universal laws cannot be verified. Moreover they had to swap verification for the weaker confirmation notion because we never really verify anything, we just lend increasing support to it with experiences, projectibility is necessary to say what it is we verify, but projectibility depends on ignoring underdetermination, and the later positivists preferred to just admit that the best they had going was fallible confirmation rather than infallible verification.

[Anonymous No.18839011]

>>18835345
Well said.

[Anonymous No.18839015]

>>18834591
That's why you take the Guenon pill

[Anonymous No.18839055]

>I've spent the past 4 years studying all of it
no you haven't. You have, at best, tried to read what anons consider the "cannon" and got burned out not even halfway through those books. Just be honest and admit that you are an incompetent consoomer who tried to larp as an intellectual. Youtube philosophy is made for you in that case.

[Anonymous No.18839119]

>>18834591
>Yes, I have already thought of everything.
>Yes, I already understand how create a utopia on earth.
>Yes, I already understand to how to maximize my personal development and feelings of meaningfulness.

How can someone be so genuinely deluded? You must be trolling

[Anonymous No.18839126]

>>18834591
No you're just a commoner interfacing with philosophy from a commoner's position.
The reality is that philosophy is utilized by the elites and whoever otherwise steers human civilization on its course.
Great strength is nothing without equally strong ideas to direct and maintain it.
So what naturally happens then is there's a trickle down effect with these ideas and this is why you have the incorrect assumption that you already know these things and have no use for them because they have already permeated every aspect of your carefully curated experience living in civilization.
It's exactly the same way that you are subject to the powerful and often oppressive effects of capitalism but in reality you are not actually a capitalist yourself you simply exist under a capitalist regime. So too do you live under a philosophers regime.
Of course were you to actually fully understand these powerful ideas AND find yourself in a position to use them in an appropriately powerful way you wouldn't think this way but you do and that firmly places you in the realm of the commoner.
It's a bit of a black pill maybe but it's better you understand this sooner rather than later.

[Anonymous No.18840552]

>>18834591
>spent the past 4 years studying all of it because I thought it was going to show me some enlightening truths or something of the sort but it's done nothing but fill up my brain with useless information
you've passed the tutorial, now the real fun begins

[Anonymous No.18840696]

>>18836597
You say this but I bet when you flip the light switch you're 100% certain the light will turn on.

[Anonymous No.18840764]

>>18838709
can't beat the lust through will; you can only dissipate it through having a distinct idea of how the desire works within you.

[Anonymous No.18840940]

>>18839055
What gay meme is that

[Anonymous No.18840956]

>>18840940
hard problem of consciousness, basically argues that consciousness isn't material because even if you had perfect knowledge of a bat's brain, you wouldn't know how it feels to be one. The animal was chosen for the exemple because they have echolocation which no human can truly feel.

[Anonymous No.18841044]

>>18840696
I’m not for two reasons: One, I’m not 100% sure if anything; But more importantly the bulb could be burnt out.

[Anonymous No.18841069]

>>18837262
You just abandoned the verification principle.

[Anonymous No.18842040]

>>18841069
That's incorrect. The idea of using Bayesian inference in the context of verification is mentioned by Carnap in Logical Foundations of Probability. The positivists were saying just what I said.

[Anonymous No.18842150]

>>18838873
They didn't all abandon it, Carnap stuck with the program his whole life. Wittgenstein abandoned it because of stuff like the Sraffa gesture, as he describes in Philosophical Investigations. He didn't understand how you could formally describe the recognition of, for instance, a hand gesture. This is because he didn't understand Turing's results on computation. Today it's obvious to everyone familiar with computers that you can in principle formalize such gestures, by writing a visual recognition algorithm, although it's difficult.

Quine's analytic/synthetic critique from Two Dogmas of Empiricism misses the point. You can formulate positivism without any reference to verification by saying that it means that two theories are in the same equivalence class if they make all the same predictions about empirical observations. The analytic/synthetic distinction isn't actually paramount, it's a red herring.

You misunderstand Godel's theorem, but you misunderstand it in a standard way that's really the fault of most presentations of it. You need to know about Turing's PhD thesis result: given a formal theory F powerful enough to describe arithmetic, by Godel incompleteness it's either inconsistent or incomplete. But you can adjoin Con(F), the consistency of F, to make a strictly stronger theory, and then adjoin Con(F + Con(F)), etc. You can continue adjoining consistency statements any ordinal number of times. Turing proved that given any computer program, there's some countable computable ordinal such that adjoining consistency statements in this way that ordinal number of times lets you prove the program halts, i.e., solve the halting problem for that program. The limit of countable computable ordinals is the Church--Kleene ordinal, and by Turing's result, iterating up to there in principle lets you prove any true claim. This is a resurrection of Hilbert's program (indeed, the first result along these lines was proving the strength of Peano arithmetic is described by epsilon_0, this having been proved by Hilbert's student Gentzen). This created the field of "ordinal analysis".

I agree that strict verificationism isn't tenable because in practice, we never perfectly verify anything but just gather more evidence for it. The way to fix this is with Bayesian inference + Solomonoff induction (the mathematical version of Occam's razor). Bayesian inference means you start with a prior probability and update it, given new evidence, using Bayes's law. Solomonoff's contribution was to say that the simplest theory is the one that has the lowest Kolmogorov complexity when encoded. This is how you solve the problem of underdetermination. I consider this in the spirit of the positivists since Carnap was working on extending positivism with Bayesian methods already in the 1950s.

[Anonymous No.18842198]

>>18842150
>Today it's obvious to everyone familiar with computers that you can in principle formalize such gestures, by writing a visual recognition algorithm, although it's difficult.
This is predicated on exactly the kind of ontological presuppositions (in this case materialistic "mind as really really really well-developed algorithm but in principle still algorithm") that Wittgenstein was actually trying to bracket out of his considerations in the Investigations. This is not something he failed to consider, it's just a priori inadmissible at the meta-linguistic, meta-formal level Wittgenstein was working at.

It's worth knowing that Wittgenstein has often been mocked for misunderstanding Godel. I believe Putnam has a good article on it.

It's not fair to make the critique I'm about to make because I don't have time right now to back it up, so I won't state it as a rebuke, just as an opinion: your worldview and its concomitant epistemology (and vice versa) are very of a kind, and while within that worldview it obviously appears to you that you have addressed the critiques of people like Quine and Wittgenstein and so on, in my opinion they (and others like me) would reply that you're adding epicycles on epicycles rather than "getting" the substance of the problem. In Kuhn terms you're trying to save normal science by deepening it rather than realizing a fundamental rupture with the whole paradigm has occurred. A probabilistic approach is not a real answer to the fundamental problems with verificationism, because the critiques of verificationism go deeper than that, striking at the underlying ontological presuppositions, which you do a good job of showing in your post - you instinctively know to relate your Turing-esque worldview of computational thought to your Bayesian epistemology, because they are both rooted in the same underlying assumptions, and it's THOSE assumptions which Wittgenstein was critiquing in principle. Again I am stating all this as what I think someone like me would reply etc because I don't want to reply to your thoughtful post with "lol no" and not back it up further but I did want to say something.

[Anonymous No.18842207]

>>18839055
Based nagelposter

I can't believe a grown ass man has to tell other grown ass men that the inner phenomenological experience of being a bat kinda disrupts their vacation plans

[Anonymous No.18842211]

>>18839126
This man speaks the truth, read philosophy even halfway seriously for a few years and you'll see all the -isms baked-in in every facet of daily life.

[Anonymous No.18842221]

>>18842198
I don't even need to read these people to intuitively know you're right and to intuitively know the other guy is wrong, especially re: the hand gesture issue. Remember Heidegger's meteoric rise to philosophical stardom? All because he reminded boneless European intellectuals only mystery can precede and ground the knowable? Why does civilization have to wait for these autists to play catch-up?

[Anonymous No.18842306]

>>18837393
If its better for me to write and develop my own ideas instead of to read the work of others before them, then who will read my ideas if everyone in the future decides to do the same?

[Anonymous No.18842310]

>>18837393
I’m going to quietly spell check and reword your post, then put it up on a wall near my desk. This is great advice.

[Anonymous No.18842350]

>>18834808
>if you get into more recent content you will discover more groundbreaking original concepts
Could you give me some examples of this content?

[Anonymous No.18842384]

>>18841044
dope cope

[Anonymous No.18842387]

>>18834591
Most people learn at least to present their thoughts in a coherent manner, and they don't need to study four years of philosophy for that.
I really hope English is not your first language.

[Anonymous No.18842409]

>>18842198
Thanks for your comments. The argument for that particular ontological presupposition, that the mind can be thought of as a computer, is that to posit otherwise is really saying that there's some sort of non-computable law of physics that's involved in my brain, and it's very difficult to see how such a law would arise and be relevant to one's cognition. Penrose and Hameroff took this approach seriously in The Emperor's New Mind by positing a non-computable quantum effect in microtubules in the brain, but the critique that's usually given (by Tegmark and others) is that the probability of a quantum coherent state existing at the temperature of the brain for a meaningful length of time in the way Penrose and Hameroff describe is vanishingly small.

If you reject the existence of non-computable processes in the brain, then you admit that everything the brain does is computable and can therefore be described by a Turing machine. This is Turing's point, and from what I saw of Wittgenstein, he doesn't address it.

This point isn't particularly materialistic either, it's arguably closer to idealism since it's saying that the mind isn't dependent on the physical substrate but is inherent in the abstract algorithm itself. It's a sort of Platonic point of view.

[Anonymous No.18842413]

>>18840956
In my humble thought, if one truly had the PERFECT knowledge of a bat's brain, then you would certainly know how it feels to be one.

[Anonymous No.18842437]

>>18840956
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_echolocation

[Anonymous No.18842714]

>>18842413
I actually agree, the though experiment is a bit dishonest. For exemple, somebody with perfect knowlege of how a dvd work should be able to see a film by looking at one and the brain is orders of magnitude more complexe, so anybody who could perfectly understand a bat brain would have vastly superhuman capacity. Just like a simulation can only be perfect if it's greater than what it's simulating, you only qualify as perfectly understanding something if you can think of an exact model.

[Anonymous No.18843519]

It's pretty much a waste of time as a discipline to learn, but it is the most important thing we have as a means to cultivate the mind, and it will only become more important no matter how neglected. Note how 99.9% of people can't even into philosophy including those who have degrees in it. This indicates something very wrong culturally.

[Anonymous No.18844115]

>>18842221
>I don't even need to read
Say no more, my dude

[Anonymous No.18844142]

>>18834591
i only really read philosophy do develop my own thoughts. if you really think that all of philosophy has nothing to challenge or develop your thoughts with then you probably aren't actually reading it

[Anonymous No.18844179]

>>18834827
I almost hope we come up with a new word for science after we come out of this globo homo COVID 1984 world. The term has been so abused all I can associate with it is the crazies screeching about the vaxx and the cult of the bureaucrat "expert"

[Anonymous No.18844468]

Read this every night, finished it in 2 days. Its not that difficult, you don't need any complementary text. Anyone with a high school education should be able to read this. If you really want a challenge then read it in its original language.

[Anonymous No.18844479]

Philosophy is for NPCs filtered by fiction and poetry.

[Anonymous No.18844616]

>>18844468
>>18844468
>Anonymous 08/13/21(Fri)23:00:31 No.18844468▶
>File: s-l640.jpg (49 KB, 480x640)
>Read this every night, finished it in 2 days. Its not that difficult, you don't need any complementary text. Anyone with a high school education should be able to read this. If you really want a challenge then read it in its original language.

[Anonymous No.18844627]

>>18844616
Actually I finished one day, not two. My bad.

[Anonymous No.18844638]

>>18844627
>>>18844616(You)
>Actually I finished one day, not two. My bad.

[Anonymous No.18844938]

>>18842437
Based and reductionistpilled

[Anonymous No.18845350]

>>18842150
>They didn't all abandon it, Carnap stuck with the program his whole life
Carnap absolutely abandoned verification for confirmation by the mid-1930s.
>Quine's analytic/synthetic critique from Two Dogmas of Empiricism misses the point.
Quine's point is two-fold. First, that analytic statements aren't a separate class of sentences. By that we need to understand that if analytic truths are truths by definitions, those definitions are equivalences between two things, definiens and definiendum, and the mere equivalence doesn't generate the truth of the equivalence unless the two parts flanking the equivalence symbol are themselves meaningful, in "Truth by Convention" he discusses it more. If I say P means Q this is not telling you that either P or Q have meaning proper, or truth, you don't conjure the truth of P or Q from saying P means Q like that. His second point is that experiences can't verify single statements within a theory because those statements within a theory depend on coherence with other statements. The experiences could just as well confirm some other statement if some auxiliary hypothesis is true to explain how. This might not be obvious to see at first if you stick to a sense datum language til you realize even sense datum language is theory-loaded, but it becomes especially obvious when you shift from verification to confirmation, where projectibility (for the sake of confirming universal laws of nature) is required. But Carnap would admit that even saying things about particular objects, defined as classes of particular experiences, also requires projectibility and thus we can't really escape the problem if we stick to a sense-data language (this is precisely why he moves to confirmation in "Testability and Meaning").
>You misunderstand Godel's theorem
You can go to meta languages to make incomplete theories complete, but that ascent generates incompleteness one level up.
>The way to fix this is with Bayesian inference + Solomonoff induction
No matter how much you rigorize induction it's still going to be based on projectibility based on some hope that the predicate you're making inferences about is one and not another, for cases of membership you can't yourself check. This is grue/bleen, plus/quus, gavagai, and so forth. Underdetermination is unavoidable unless you accept Lewisian naturalness and that immediately brings you back to metaphysics, which is a welcome decision for Lewis and other supporters of naturalness anyway.
>Solomonoff's contribution was to say that the simplest theory is the one that has the lowest Kolmogorov complexity when encoded.
Why should a theoretical virtue like simplicity (Occam's razor and what not) determine verisimilitude? This has been criticized. There's no reason to believe some lawlike correlation exists between simplicity and truth of a theory, and many philosophers of science find the reliance on theoretical virtues worrisome since it's not empirical or analytic, but pragmatic.

[Anonymous No.18845413]

>>18834591
Your mistake is thinking that just "studying philosophy" in a vacuum is a legitimate thing. Its not a homogenous discipline that develops easily from one aspect to the next with clear steps inbetween each one, like maths/science.
Each branch or movement in philosophy may have very broad historical/theoretical roots in a previous one but by and large all the systems are completely incompatiable. The break that happened in physics with the shift to Euclidean Geometry to modern day ones took 2000 years to occur. Meanwhile, philosophy leaves trends in the trash every century or two since medieval times.
Just trying to "study philosophy" is stupid unless you are interested in the history of ideas/history of the subject itself. Sure its good to have a historical grounding, this is usually what you spend the first year or two in an undergraduate degree doing, but unless you are studying an older movement or a thinking specifically because you like their work and you want to be a scholar specifically then yes obviously you're going to be wasting your time. Also just wading through borderline unreadable, primary texts like Critique of Pure Reason or Phenomenology of Spirit with no reason to other then because its PhiLoSoPHy doesn't make you smart. Learning should be thought-out and intentioned beforehand. Philosophy is great for teaching you how to think critically and construct arguments but each aspect of it is incredibly particular. You wouldn't say you study engineering and then exclusively read B52 bomber construction manuals out of context as though its going to unlock the hidden secrets of engineering to you lmao

[Anonymous No.18845417]

>>18842150
Continuing from >>18845350 I just want to add a few clarifications about what the positivists believed, since it's important. Neurath was a coherentist meaning he believed truth was a function of the internal consistency of the theory. Carnap was a conventionalist about existence claims, and about the choice of the primitives of the theory, and he also believed necessity issued forth from (conventional) logical form, thus the only thing he wasn't a conventionalist about seems to have been the interpretations of the contingent sentences of the theory. For this reason the Carnap of the Aufbau says that he could have made his system start from a different base, not his sense-data (or rather "elementary experiences") but physical objects. It seems then that based on what your theory says, sense experience will verify or confirm ad thus interpret as true sentences internal to a theory equally well, for example the phenomenalist and the physicalist theories will both find some sentence of their theory turn out true given some experience. But the theories themselves are obviously incommensurable, despite this point of contact of sorts. Now Carnap did say it's up to us (pragmatic interests) to pick between these theories, but he was not saying those pragmatic interests determined which theory was "the true theory" to the exclusion of the others. That in itself would commit him too much to a metaphysical realism he rejected. As such, Carnap was basically saying this: We cookie-cut up the world as we wish, into the individuals that exist and the primitive predicates, and the world (if you still want to call it "the world") only provides a very minimal truth condition for our contingent (synthetic) sentences. This potential in Carnap was never explicitly spelled out by him but you can cobble it up from what he says across his works. Nelson Goodman, a close follower of Carnap, clearly saw the potential for what it was, and spells out his own "irrealism" in no unclear terms in this way. Meanwhile Neurath who I mentioned at the beginning, as a coherentist, is likewise defining truth itself internal to a theory as well, and not in terms of correspondence to anything beyond. Quine was very influenced by Neurath actually, and by Carnap too, despite his criticisms Quine himself held views like theirs. Point is, with the exception of Moritz Schlick, the positivists had understandings of theoretical truth and reality which should make ordinary scientists blush. They were not scientific realists: as I said, Carnap was more or less a proto-irrealist, it's like Kantianism but with its transcendental necessities turned relativistic, very interesting stuff actually, and it owes to Carnap's being influenced by Dilthey and the neo-Kantians, he was also influenced by Frege who himself seems suggestive sometimes (despite his clear realism) of the idea that we cookie-cut up the world.

[Anonymous No.18845727]

>>18834591
It depends, I guess.
My short inquiry into philosophy has mostly been positive so far.
I really got into formal logic and Stoicism. These two things alone has immensely improved my quality of living.
Moreover, I've always found everything related to metaphysics to be more exciting than anything else out there.
>Spend your time learning something useful or soul stirring
Like what?