If finding a question interesting is enough for it to count as useful per your pragmatism, then it seems like literally any line of questioning could be licensed by pragmatism. I guess I'm curious what pragmatism means to you -- what is it to take a pragmatist point of view in philosophy?
@@KaneB In theory, it's true that literally any line of questioning could be licensed by pragmatism (At least William James's version of it). But in practice, we are stuck with many, often times conflicting, desires and goals. The range of what is and isn't practical becomes much narrower when we consider the totality of desires and goals any individual agent might have. I might desire to believe in Santa Claus. But when I go to the north pole and fail to see him there, I will be disappointed. Once I consider that I also desire to be able to make consistent predictions about my future phenomena, a vast swath of naïvely-practical beliefs become impractical. When it comes to philosophy and useless questions, I think the pragmatist can still make sense of their uselessness by arguing that their payoff or cash-value is likely much less than for questions which have greater phenomenological consequences.
@@KaneB I guess my pragmatism is pretty relativist. I think the core of it is like “we should merge practical and epistemic rationality” and “believe whatever would be most consistent with your goals.” I agreed with ~everything in your relativism videos, but I prefer to call myself a pragmatist rather than a relativist because I like to emphasize the goal-dependent nature of truth etc. and I’m less personally interested in “useless” questions than you I think
Philosophy has huge practical implications. If the Christian God exists then most of us live a wrong life in almost any aspect, ontologically, metaphysically, ethically, practically. If we live in a simulation who repeats itself after finished we could live much more reckless and against our internal angst. Philosophy tries to provide us with the ultimate answers and though it did not succeed so far and though one can doubt its success its still a good idea to pursue the quest of truth & knowledge bc after all we do not know for sure that its hopeless and so there‘s some hope. Science on the other side just rides with utility but utility is a b*tch, truth isnt, i.e. there are contexts where something useful turns out to be false and harmful, but truth (if you got it) stands like a rock!
This is another problem I have with the practicalist criticism of philosophy: it seems to me that many of the debates that they attack as impractical actually have all sorts of practical implications. This is why, in the video, I suggested such a narrow definition of what counts as "practical utility" -- where it's basically just a matter of the kind of applications we get from science. I suspect that few practicalists would endorse such a narrow definition. But on any broader definition, it's going to be tough to exclude what they want to exclude. That said, I am not as hopeful about the prospects of finding The Truth as you are, nor an I sure that The Truth matters much anyway. But then I've always been more attracted to the skeptical, destructive aspect of philosophy.
@@KaneB Me too, but I feel that Skepticism leads many to a foolish conclusion of hopelessness or desperation. Skepticism is not Nihilism. A Skeptic just points out that any recognition comes with some risk of hit & miss, i.e. no recognition with guaranteed truth. That means two things: 1. If the Skeptic is right, we could still get truths. We'll just lack certainty. Even more, if the Skeptic is right, his very own theorem applies to itself, i.e. it keeps possible that we will find some insight someday that we'll recognize as a guaranteed truth. 2. If the Skeptic is wrong then of course there'd be some possible recognition of a guaranteed truth by brute logic. So as bleak as Skepticism seems, it's much more open and friendly unlike Nihilism (that has no good arguments though bc it's just a negative dogmatism after all). So looking for meaningful truths keeps being a smart way to live, at least for some time, at least at the start you should strive for the Gold Standard. Again, if Jesus exists, you better get it during your lifetime. That's huge. The same goes for free will, the structure of the world, afterlife...all these stuff would matter and it would change the course of your life one way or the other. And Philosophy helps there, much more than if you tackle those questions just with a (narrower perspective of) scientific background. After awhile though you may get tired, you may settle for utility or functionality and you may ban above questions from your to-do-list. That is en vogue now, but as we laugh about what was en vogue 500 years ago, our successors might laugh about us one day. In any way, if philosophy prevents you from sitting bored under a tree, waiting for death to come, then it has some value.
something ive always wondered about the "philosophy is useless " discourse is where fields like philosophy of politics or of economics come into the discussion. I mean, these things dont strike me as useless as theyre directly about practices in the world such e.g taxes / wealth redistribution e.g behavioural economics etc.
Dennett's use of Chess/Chmess is amusing because many people might say "who cares?" about Chess itself, and consider the years spent on learning its deeper truths to be an example of how much time people have wasted in the past. But there is possibly a "practical" goal to studying Chess, and that is the practice of one's strategic mind and problem-solving abilities and ability to think ahead more than just react. People could disagree with that last sentence, but for the ones who do agree, I would suggest further than limiting oneself to Chess alone can lead to a sort of strategic stagnation - people who can only think of certain strategies, ones that have been studied and rehashed over and over -- but changing it up with Chmess would require more strategic flexibility, like one could imagine that in practical terms, say in warfare, enemy capabilities change with new technology, and many historical battles have been lost from failure to adapt to the new strategic landscape. By playing Chess variants instead of just Chess alone, one trains to have adaptive strategy. Maybe. I could be wrong, as I often am.
This raises an important challenge to practicalism, which is that practical utility can come from all sorts of unexpected sources. Everything we do has unforeseen costs and benefits. Actually, Dennett himself recognises this: the best we can do is suggest a few rules of thumb for identifying topics that have a good chance of being important... But in the end, he acknowledges that we have to let people pursue whatever projects strike their fancy. Even the most abstruse and seemingly pedantic work in philosophy might have connections to topics that are considered more significant, or might prompt new theoretical developments that have applications elsewhere. (Consider how philosophical work on the interpretation of indicative conditionals played a role in the development of non-classical logics.) If we did attempt to reform philosophy along practicalist lines, it's not at all obvious what that reform would look like.
More than 2 decades ago (an eternity in computer engineering) Deep Blue didn't know anything about that. Deep Blue didn't care any more about chess than perhaps Dennett does; but, it still beat Kasparov. I think practicality can be measured, and invested in on a rational basis. Studying war, is the best way to learn to react to wars. The claim that unexpected practical results can emerge from dedicating scarce resources to investigating 'impractical' avenues... is well... you just really don't know.
I'm not certain that philosophy does not have practical applications. I think that ethics, even meta ethics, helps you develop your own moral sense. Certainly continental philosophy has motivated many of the hypothesis in psychology. Philosophy of science has guided us to create more convincing models and theories. And just like 'useless' math you never know when your philosophy will pay dividends. But, I was also return to your first argument. Satisfying personal curiosity is its own virtue so the argument from practicality falls flat from the get go. Honestly, I find it very hard to think of any justifications for practacalism.
I agree, and I think this is another serious problem practicalism: there's a good case to be made that, by the practicalist's own lights, much of the philosophy they criticize has practical pay-offs. Of course, you can always adopt a more narrow criterion of practical utility that will rule out that philosophy, but then you're in danger of the objection I discussed in the video that practicalism itself gets ruled out as impractical.
the discussion is a wee bit specious, art has value, and usefulness, it doesn't exist in a vacuum, it aids our understanding of the self, it reveals the strange beauty, poetry or cruelty of the natural world, and our psyches therein, art relieves and enlightens, pleasures the senses, adds beauty and uplift, inspires our spirits, heightens consciousness, or deconstructs beliefs-disrupts, blows away old ideas, it aids in understanding science, philosophy, our natures, it reveals the zeitgeist, the collective unconsciousness, it opens doors to the mysterious psyche, and reveals more mysteries, therein. it provides relief from the mundane world, and on and on .. important for human psychological survival, we don't live by bread alone
15:26 and then they start to add the contents of the rooms and then if they're mapping the city they themselves are operating in, they end up having to include the map inside itself - whoops! (This is also the problem with simulating the world in which the simulators live)
11:53 I do think aiming to achieve truth-as-correspondence is just confused though. Mainly because 1) it’s very unclear how to cash out the correspondence relation independent of goals, as you sort of hint at with the idealization point, and 2) you obviously only care about certain types of truths; most truths are totally uninteresting (e.g. the number of hairs on my arm or whatever)
I don't think my point there rests on conceiving of truth as correspondence. All that's required is that (a) many philosophers aim at truth and (b) truth sometimes comes apart from utility. This leaves plenty of room for debate about what exactly truth is, and under what circumstances truth matters. To be clear, my own view is that correspondence theory is confused, but I'd say the same about every theory of truth. But more importantly, I don't see how entering into *this* debate -- where we ask questions like: what is truth? is correspondence theory intelligible? etc. -- is supposed to have any practical pay-offs. This is useless philosophy par excellence.
@@KaneB yeah I think these questions can be practically relevant to AI safety research, say when you’re trying to peer inside an artificial neural network and figure out what its “true beliefs” are and stuff but it is a niche thing
@@norabelrose198 That's an interesting application -- I don't know anything about this, but I would wonder how much this turns on our theory of truth. I would have thought that, when we talk about the true beliefs and false beliefs of an AI, we don't need to have a philosophical theory of truth. In fact, attributing "true beliefs" seems to be somewhat metaphorical since, arguably, no current AIs literally have beliefs. Anyway, my initial thought is: If we want to know what an AI will do, what its practical consequences will be, isn't it enough to know how it is representing the world? This is the case for people as well: if I know your goals and your beliefs, I can predict what you will do; I don't need to know whether the beliefs are true. The truth/falsity of your belief will make a difference to whether you are likely to achieve your goals, of course. But again, I can make that assessment without a philosophical theory of truth.
19:00 this is a good point, which is why I’m mainly trying to philosophically deconfuse people in my own field (AI safety) instead of talking to philosophers :)
When it comes to philosophy I have no problem with useless knowledge. I find many of the questions interesting but they still have to be truths about the real world, otherwise I lose interest. Some philosophical discussions seem like discussions about fiction and they don't even use interesting formal systems.
I understand that you are making a general point, and it is not merely to be contrarian, but I find that working out the truths of chmess being a "total waste of time" to be quite a bit overstated. It is likely to be a grand waste of time (relative to other interests and pursuits) for perhaps almost everyone but a relative handful of people. And even then, they are not likely to get the most out of it that they should to make it "worth their while" even if that relative handful were to take up the pursuit with reasonable efficacy and integration into their lives. It is probably not as unworthwhile as digging for gold in random locations, but even doing that is not a "total" waste of time. It seems, more to the point, that nothing actually is a total waste of time, nor totally worthwhile, or at least it would be hard to know if it really were in either case. I would only have to find something, however trite, that makes something worthwhile, or a waste of time, respectively, to disprove such a notion. If it is that easy to disprove such a notion, it is perhaps almost always an overstatement, and therefore should be used very carefully or sparingly. Especially in a philosophical context. With specific regard to chmess, it would make delivering checkmate significantly harder without doing any overhauls of the movements of all the other men, would only minimally change the king's movement and without making qualitative changes. Indeed, one could still decide to make a rule whether he must move in the same direction or could change direction. If the former, he would then move as the bishops formerly moved centuries ago. It would make kings more than a mere liability until the endgame, and create a rather interesting version of chess. Bobby Fischer decided chess was becoming far too much of a battle of memorization for the upper levels of play, and far less of a creative fight. His randomization idea for piece placement behind the pawns (of which idea there are obviously plenty of variations existing and possible), was in his mind and the minds of many a very desirable modification without changing any other rules of the game. Certainly it is more drastic than merely changing the king's move from one to two squares. Chess has gone through some changes in the past with castling, first move of the pawn, etc. But of course you go on to make these points in other ways, so I know that it is not lost on you, of course. I just think that it is interestingly hard to find a "total" waste of time PER SE.
I'm mainly a pragmatist but can't wait to watch this one! I hope it will be as useless and as praiseworthy as I think it will be 😁 Kane B slowly turning us into philosophers :))
I consider the diversity benefit. Truly philosophical method can have more diversity without excluding no use in mind. It doesn't matter when you find the extensions to the value of the outputs. we can only do this and check the work of diverse inputs for it. i feel like i'm shoehorning in diversity to the extending inputs. I'm not sure how to ensure diversity, just that priority is an undue constraint.
Nothing is usefull or useless when there is no meaning in life, when there is no target for it to reach. There are no wrong answers if there was no question to begin with. And life itself cannot have meaning because if it had ultimate meaning, when people would reach it, their life becomes meaningless and whats the point in reaching it, if life becomes meaningless at the end anyway. Someone might say that after that first "checkpoint" comes another meaning etc., so in this case, first one wasnt real meaning to begin with thus there is no real ultimate meaning, just bunch of time consuming tasks that will make you busy. Consider all that, the ultimate meaning for life should not be reachable, but whats the point to even try to reach it then?
I might try to argue saying that there could be an ultimate meaning, being the action of living itself. Instead, I’ll just thank you for making me have an existential crisis.
In Germany Philosophy after Kant went into slump like this with Positivists, a mere helping hand to "science". But Schopenhauer absolutely OWNED them with FACTS and LOGIC.
There isn't any general rule to determine this, but there are some philosophical projects that are more closely related to "practical" investigations. A lot of applied ethics can have fairly direct practical implications, such as how work on informed consent in medical contexts might be applied to shape the rules of medical institutions. Similarly, there are many philosophers of science who work closely with scientists -- as I mentioned, Dennett has made plenty of contributions to cognitive science. Sometimes philosophical problems arise in scientific contexts, and it can be useful to have people with philosophical expertise addressing them.
I don't necessarily think that philosophy should bend over backwards in order to satisfy practical desires, but it does seem clear to me that modern philosophy has gotten to a point where it has almost abandoned practical value entirely. Take moral philosophy, for instance, which is loaded with technical terms and details. If a moral philosopher did discover an objective basis for morality, it would be completely useless, because it wouldn't be applicable by laymen in their daily lives. If a moral theory cannot actually help people actually live better lives, then what is it good for?
I've always had the sense that moral theories generally serve the function of allowing a framework for moral reasoning. With moral debates there's usually always an impasse on values and the debate can't go any further. Frameworks serve as a medium to give more compelling cases as to which values are "more correct" than others, rather than just "agreeing to disagree". To what degree it actually does serve this purpose I'm not sure.
I'm agree that the moral realism/anti-realism debate has no obvious practical applications -- my guess is that establishing moral realism wouldn't make much of a difference to anything, beyond the intellectual satisfaction of people interested in that debate. However, if you're interested in practical applications of philosophy, I think there's plenty of contemporary moral philosophy that would be with checking out. There's a lot of work in applied ethics on topics like climate change, global justice, treatment of animals, informed consent, etc... Our views on these issues will shape how we act in our personal lives and how we organise society, and we don't need an "objective basis of morality" to reason about these things. So maybe you're just not looking at the right literature? Meta-ethics has always been more abstract, less focused on dealing with practical problems.
@@KaneB I actually do think that most topics in philosophy have practical implications, I just don't think that modern philosophers are particularly good at understanding what they are and how to show them to the general public. Take the problem of induction, for instance, which I think has a lot of value for psychotherapy, particularly in treating anxiety disorders. After all, how do we know that something terrible that happened in the past won't repeat itself? If the sun didn't rise on some day in the past, then it is surely possible that it will not rise tomorrow. It's not that we need an objective basis of morality, it's that academic philosophy wouldn't be able to do anything with it because it would be formulated in language only understood by academic philosophers. It would be like having a formula for quantum gravity that is so complicated that we cannot actually derive any results from it in a reasonable timeframe.
How does this (or does it at all) relate to specific positions in philosophy? You mentioned pragmatism (I'm a big fan, reading some Dewey atm), how about positivism or empiricism more broadly? It seems to me that 'practicalism' isn't a 'live option', to use a concept from James, are there actual practicality schools/thinkers? I guess you take Dennet to be one. edit bc I forgot to say 'good video', lol
Yeah, practicalist attitudes can be found among some positivists and empiricists too. But as far as I know, there isn't really any philosophical movement that, as a whole, embraces practicalism. There are pragmatists, positivists, and empiricists who are not practicalists. Even so, it's a view that is explicitly held by some philosophers... And I suspect that it's a worry that nags at *many* philosophers. Philosophers often seem to be a little embarrassed to admit when their work is useless. I don't think they should be!
As I'm using the term here, the idea is just that some inquires and theories will have practical pay-offs in the sense that they allow us to make novel predictions or to control nature. This doesn't have to be treated in normative terms. A useful theory might be applied in ways that we consider very bad -- for example, one of the practical applications of science was the development of nuclear weapons. As for how to determine whether a theory will be useful in this sense, that's no easy matter. There are all sorts of unexpected connections between theory and practice. But this is a problem for the philosophical practicalists. You'd have to get me on board with practicalism before I'd start worrying about how to identify the useful inquiries!
I am a skeptic about predictive powers. Pragmatism is susceptible to memory skepticism similar to how Realism is susceptible to external world skepticism. So as long the Pragmatist can not deliver, I see no reason to give him special privileges above other philosophies.
There are a lot of mathematicians. both past and present, that resent the practical use of mathematics... for being, in their view, a crudity or a distraction. This is not my view.
For the most part, I'm disinterested in 'whether or not' philosophy is, or ought to be, practical. In my experience, some people (and that's more than one) appear to wax supercilious... or brow beat their supposed foes.
Use is generally reserved for objective judgements and not subjective ones. Subjective things have no practicality but are essential for the enjoyment of life, enrichment and for subjective understanding/wisdom*. *I say wisdom here but it's a problem with the English language. Other languages have multiple words for different ways of knowing. For example kennen vs. wissen (sp?) in German. Knowing a person vs. knowing a fact. Knowing facts is a more objective knowing, knowing a person is subjective oriented. Philosophy has also tended to be more objective leaning outside of the realm of ethics, and the separation of natural philosophy/sciences from philosophy and the birth of modernism, we've been pushed towards more and more objective truths.
I'm not sure how you're using the objective/subjective distinction here. I usually understand that distinction to be that the objective is mind-independent while the subjective is mind-dependent. If that's how you're defining those terms, it would be very odd to divorce utility from subjectivity, since surely utility is going to depend on some way on what our goals are. The only reason why e.g. growing crops or building rockets is useful is because we care about things like feeding people or sending satellites into space.
Maybe useless as a term/concept is as useless or as meaningless as meaningful/useful or not. In my own opinion most of what we humans produce is useless, but for many other people its not. Its a bit positivistic starting to point out what is useful and meaningful. I can fully understand there is a debate thought, and i guess in i the end of the spectrum its needed.
In this video, I'm treating "utility" in a narrow sense, where it's a matter of building new technologies or controlling nature or improving scientific theories. But honestly, my actual inclinations are to be super pluralist about this. I'd say that nothing more is required for a concept to be useful than that somebody feels like it has some sort of positive or negative impact on them. And I have a similar take on meaning: Nothing more is required for a concept to be meaningful than that, when a person is presented with the concept, they nod their heads and say, "yep, I get it."
I'm not familiar enough with ancient philosophy to say if any of them were practicalists. Practicalism is specifically the view that philosophy is legitimate only if it delivers practical pay-offs in the sense of helping to control nature or improve human life. I don't know if this conception of philosophy was ever articulated by the ancients. But my impression is that plenty of Aristotle's theorising has no obvious practical utility... And similarly for Plato, though both of them also produced plenty of work that did aim to promote practical ends. I think one difficulty of attributing practicalism to the ancients is that practicalism takes off partly in response to the remarkable predictive and technological success of modern science. Part of what motivates worries about philosophy's utility is that in this respect, it pales in comparison to science; then we have to think about how to reform philosophy to get it up to par. This wasn't an issue for ancient philosophers.
I'd call myself a moderate practicalist, but I guess in a somewhat different sense from the one you focused on. In my book, your video was laudably practical, and Dennet's paper (assuming you represented it fairly) is a big impractical waste of time and ink. Why the latter? Because of the chess variants, which you were right to mention. Dennet wrote an article about "chmess" without bothering to check what actual people in the real world are doing first. Five minutes of research would have shown him that his "chmess" argument is total nonsense. And that's exactly the kind of anti-practicalism that makes my head spin. It's idle theorizing in total divorse from reality. I see quite a lot of it in academic philosophy (as well as in hype-driven amateurish pseudo-philosophy of the sort some natural scientists like engaging in, such as the "simulation hypothesis" you mentioned). Philosophy of language is particularly full of it: most scholars in the field only need to spend a mimute or two actually listening to people talk to one another, to see all their fancy theories are total BS. Very few, if any, are in the least bothered by that fact. By contrast, your argument was, at every point, grounded in people's real practices and circumstances, used examples from real life and from literature and art. That's *my* idea of practical philosophy.
I guess I can get on board with practicalism in this sense, but the way I would frame this kind of objection is just to say that the methods used by these philosophers are not, in my judgment, effective means to their goals. I don't think you're going to learn much about how language works by armchair analysis of the logical form of toy sentences. On the other hand, I've always favoured methodological pluralism in philosophy. I want there to be philosophers who approach questions in ways that I think are totally misguided. Also, I'm not sure why the simulation argument is divorced from reality. To take Chalmers' version of the argument: (1) If there are no sim-blockers, then most sentient beings are simulations. (2) If most sentient beings are simulations, we are probably simulations. (3) So, if there are no sim-blockers, we are probably simulations. (4) There are no compelling reasons to believe that there are sim-blockers. (5) So, for all we know, we might be simulations. Whether or not we find that argument persuasive, it seems to me that the evaluation of the premises appeals to what is going on in reality. In order to figure out whether there are sim-blockers, we have to consider what sorts of technologies might exist, what sorts of moral constraints intelligent civilisations might observe, what is required for an entity to have a mind, etc. A lot of these seem to be open questions to me. Looking at what people in the real world are doing doesn't provide either a knockdown case against the argument's conclusion, or any reason to think that the argument is meaningless or incoherent in any way. But maybe I'm missing your point.
@@KaneB On philosophy of language, I share your methodological pluralism as an ideal (at least if it does not preclude people from also criticizing methods they see as problematic), but in real-world academia a single methodology tends to near-monopolize the field at any given time. A paper that does *not* drill through the usual made-up examples, but still frames its discussion as philosophical, is virtually unpublishable. Doubting the relevance of logic to language is beyond the pale. On simulation, I'm quite surprised at Chalmers (or better, I'm disappointed with him). The scholar who coined the term "the hard problem of consciousness" should have realised characters in a simulation can't be conscious of anything (by that same token, you can create an identical argument claiming we're all literary characters, with the added benefit that we know for a fact lit-blockers don't exist). It's conceivable that our experiences of the world are simulated, but that's just the old brain in a vat argument. Saying that *I* am simulated is nonsense for the same reason that saying my consciousness is an illusion is nonsense.
@@whycantiremainanonymous8091 Yes: I don't have a problem with people pursuing silly projects, but it is a problem of there's no room for other kinds of projects. But I feel sanguine when I consider the history of philosophy: it seems that different philosophical methodologies come in and out of fashion, and even if a methodology achieves a very broad consensus for some time, it doesn't tend to last. I also suspect that methodologies fall out of favour not usually due to knock-down arguments against them, but just because philosophers run out of interesting things to do with them. For these reasons, I don't tend to be too concerned about criticizing methodologies that I think are misguided. (I mean, it can be fun and intellectually stimulating to do that. But I don't care so much whether other people take my criticisms on board.) I don't see any reason to believe that simulations could not be conscious. I don't know what substrate is necessary for consciousness... And if you find the hard problem at all compelling, I would have expected that you would be sympathetic to agnosticism on this question. I also don't think we're going to get an answer to this question by just looking at what people in the real world are doing.
@@whycantiremainanonymous8091 The reason why it's nonsense to say that consciousness is an illusion is because "illusion" implies that there is an appearance that does not correspond to reality... But for consciousness, the appearance just is the reality. If I appear to myself to be conscious, then I just am conscious. That's how I understand the objection to the view that consciousness is an illusion. I don't see how this applies to the simulation argument. The claim being made by that argument is that my conscious states are realized by processes in a computer simulation. That doesn't strike me as more problematic than e.g. the claim that my conscious states are realized by arrangements of atoms.
@@KaneB The history of philosophy is long, while human life is short 😃 Also, with philosophy of language, we're talking about a tradition going back all the way to Aristotle. What the telescope did to Aristotle's (and Ptolemy's) cosmology, the tape recorder should have done to his theory of language, but it's proving more resistent... On the simulation argument, the substrate is not really the issue. My consciousness is real regardless of its substrate. The putative computer chips running the simulation exist in the real world, so if there's a consciousness substrate there (let's allow that highly improbable option for argument's sake), it's just a silicon brain in a silicon vat. The claim "We are living in a simulation" is thus identical to older versions of scepticism about the external world, unless we add the claim that consciousness itself is simulated. Note that this latter claim implies that fictional characters (not their real-world substrate, but the imaginary characters themselves) are conscious. And that is not really different from claiming consciousness is an illusion, or, in this case, a fiction. On observing what real people do, the relevance here is less direct, but maybe if we notice people's tendency to get carried away with the latest technological fad, that could warn us to take arguments about computer simulations with a good grain of salt.
As an economist, I do not assign preferences to people. If you gain pleasure or utility from "useless" philosophy, then indeed it is not useless for you. That being said, I kinda assume that people that study philosophy do so because they want to gain knowledge and wisdom. With this goal in mind, philosophy is going down the wrong path because it just seems to cause confusion and befuddlement and uselessness. People seeking knowledge would be better off studying econ than philosophy. Econ does both make predictions as well as fight poverty. Philosophy could be so much more than it currently is if it would just pull its head out of its ass. I think philosophy and econ would both benefit from a paradigm shift in engaging in public engagement. In this sense, you are on the cutting edge of this paradigm shift. If I could just get you interested in knowledge again...
your assumption would be wrong. i know several philosophers and philosophy students who approach the very categories of wisdom and knowledge with deep suspicion. in actual fact a lot of philosophy is concerned with things other than those categories.
@@InventiveHarvest i don’t see the problem. the human mind, if it even exists, is more or less made of cognitive biases and heuristics, the knowledge of which doesn’t even help to counteract them. it doesn’t hurt to be skeptical of knowledge and wisdom as existent things. or maybe it does hurt. i honestly don’t think it’s even possible to gauge the possible harm or lack thereof there is in being deeply suspicious.🤷🏽♀️
@@InventiveHarvest let me be perfectly clear. i do accept that the brain exists, what i specifically mean is that the common notion of mind (selfhood, the “I”, etc.) as it has been classically understand is something i suspect may be an illusion, or rather not an existent thing. i think what we commonly refer to as the self, “you-ness” is more or less an image generated by a composition of habituated neural pathways. “you” are basically a cluster of cognitive/behavioral/emotional habits. and yes i don’t really see the harm in this.
Goethe or Gautier idk: “Nothing is really beautiful unless it is useless; everything useful is ugly, for it is the expression of some need, and man's needs are ignoble and disgusting like his poor weak nature. The most useful place in a house is the water-closet. […] No, fools, no, cretins and goitrous creatures that you are, a book does not make gelatine soup;--a novel is not a pair of seamless boots; a sonnet is not a syringe with a continuous stream; a drama is not a railroad […] no, two hundred thousand times, no. You cannot make a nightcap out of a metonymy, or wear comparisons by way of slippers; you cannot use antithesis as an umbrella; unluckily we have not the secret of clapping a few variegated rhymes upon the stomach as we put on a waistcoat. I have a firm conviction that the ode is a garment too light for winter, and that one would be no more warmly clad with the strophe, the antistrophe, and the epode, than the wife of the cynic who was contented to have only her virtue as a chemise and went about as naked as your hand, as history tells us. The purpose of art is to create beauty; and for the artist beauty is an end in life. He has, I repeat, no other purpose, no other end in view, and if he himself perceives that his object is beautiful, his life is not wasted, it is justified.”
Nice quote... Not that I care so much about beauty either. There is so much more to art than beauty, and many of the best artworks involve ugliness, darkness, and discomfort. I've always found the idea that beauty is the end of art to be a remarkably shallow view of art, actually.
There's a reason I refer to my opponents as "practicalists" rather than "pragmatists"... Practicalists tend to be pragmatists or at least sympathetic to pragmatism, but not all pragmatists are practicalists.
Though re James and religion, a crucial point for him is that the choice between the secular life and religious life is momentous: as he sees it, the stakes in the debate are high, and it makes a practical difference which worldview is right.
@@KaneB Fair enough, i got my understanding of James through the Varieties and through Rorty - which he admits is deliberately misconstrued to support his own view of pragmatism🤣 thanks for taking the time to clear up my ignorance!
I would have thought that philosophical practicalism meant practicalism within philosophy, ie, studying practical modes of philosophy more related to the real world, as opposed to studying things like, do green men have burnt orange blood?
I just invented the term "practicalism" for this video. I don't know if it's used elsewhere in philosophy. But I've not encountered any philosophers studying green men. Grue men on the other hand...
You inteoduced the term uselessness and the spent some time undermining the term. There are many variations of Chess that are played and studied - Crazy Hose, 360 etc , so Dennett's example is poor.
I’m a pragmatist, but I would say that if you personally find these “useless” questions interesting, then their answers aren’t useless to you!
If finding a question interesting is enough for it to count as useful per your pragmatism, then it seems like literally any line of questioning could be licensed by pragmatism. I guess I'm curious what pragmatism means to you -- what is it to take a pragmatist point of view in philosophy?
@@KaneB In theory, it's true that literally any line of questioning could be licensed by pragmatism (At least William James's version of it). But in practice, we are stuck with many, often times conflicting, desires and goals. The range of what is and isn't practical becomes much narrower when we consider the totality of desires and goals any individual agent might have.
I might desire to believe in Santa Claus. But when I go to the north pole and fail to see him there, I will be disappointed. Once I consider that I also desire to be able to make consistent predictions about my future phenomena, a vast swath of naïvely-practical beliefs become impractical.
When it comes to philosophy and useless questions, I think the pragmatist can still make sense of their uselessness by arguing that their payoff or cash-value is likely much less than for questions which have greater phenomenological consequences.
@@KaneB I guess my pragmatism is pretty relativist. I think the core of it is like “we should merge practical and epistemic rationality” and “believe whatever would be most consistent with your goals.”
I agreed with ~everything in your relativism videos, but I prefer to call myself a pragmatist rather than a relativist because I like to emphasize the goal-dependent nature of truth etc. and I’m less personally interested in “useless” questions than you I think
That map analogy is amazing. Never thought of a guide like that.
Pure math phds: finally a video for us!
"Oh you studied math? Then what's 9,155,013 times 345,012?!?!?"
🙄 I just tell people I flunked out of highschool now.
Philosophy has huge practical implications. If the Christian God exists then most of us live a wrong life in almost any aspect, ontologically, metaphysically, ethically, practically. If we live in a simulation who repeats itself after finished we could live much more reckless and against our internal angst. Philosophy tries to provide us with the ultimate answers and though it did not succeed so far and though one can doubt its success its still a good idea to pursue the quest of truth & knowledge bc after all we do not know for sure that its hopeless and so there‘s some hope. Science on the other side just rides with utility but utility is a b*tch, truth isnt, i.e. there are contexts where something useful turns out to be false and harmful, but truth (if you got it) stands like a rock!
This is another problem I have with the practicalist criticism of philosophy: it seems to me that many of the debates that they attack as impractical actually have all sorts of practical implications. This is why, in the video, I suggested such a narrow definition of what counts as "practical utility" -- where it's basically just a matter of the kind of applications we get from science. I suspect that few practicalists would endorse such a narrow definition. But on any broader definition, it's going to be tough to exclude what they want to exclude.
That said, I am not as hopeful about the prospects of finding The Truth as you are, nor an I sure that The Truth matters much anyway. But then I've always been more attracted to the skeptical, destructive aspect of philosophy.
@@KaneB Me too, but I feel that Skepticism leads many to a foolish conclusion of hopelessness or desperation. Skepticism is not Nihilism. A Skeptic just points out that any recognition comes with some risk of hit & miss, i.e. no recognition with guaranteed truth. That means two things:
1. If the Skeptic is right, we could still get truths. We'll just lack certainty. Even more, if the Skeptic is right, his very own theorem applies to itself, i.e. it keeps possible that we will find some insight someday that we'll recognize as a guaranteed truth.
2. If the Skeptic is wrong then of course there'd be some possible recognition of a guaranteed truth by brute logic.
So as bleak as Skepticism seems, it's much more open and friendly unlike Nihilism (that has no good arguments though bc it's just a negative dogmatism after all).
So looking for meaningful truths keeps being a smart way to live, at least for some time, at least at the start you should strive for the Gold Standard. Again, if Jesus exists, you better get it during your lifetime. That's huge. The same goes for free will, the structure of the world, afterlife...all these stuff would matter and it would change the course of your life one way or the other. And Philosophy helps there, much more than if you tackle those questions just with a (narrower perspective of) scientific background. After awhile though you may get tired, you may settle for utility or functionality and you may ban above questions from your to-do-list. That is en vogue now, but as we laugh about what was en vogue 500 years ago, our successors might laugh about us one day.
In any way, if philosophy prevents you from sitting bored under a tree, waiting for death to come, then it has some value.
something ive always wondered about the "philosophy is useless " discourse is where fields like philosophy of politics or of economics come into the discussion. I mean, these things dont strike me as useless as theyre directly about practices in the world such e.g taxes / wealth redistribution e.g behavioural economics etc.
This video is awesome! The map example was so cool, that really drove the point home.
Dennett's use of Chess/Chmess is amusing because many people might say "who cares?" about Chess itself, and consider the years spent on learning its deeper truths to be an example of how much time people have wasted in the past.
But there is possibly a "practical" goal to studying Chess, and that is the practice of one's strategic mind and problem-solving abilities and ability to think ahead more than just react. People could disagree with that last sentence, but for the ones who do agree, I would suggest further than limiting oneself to Chess alone can lead to a sort of strategic stagnation - people who can only think of certain strategies, ones that have been studied and rehashed over and over -- but changing it up with Chmess would require more strategic flexibility, like one could imagine that in practical terms, say in warfare, enemy capabilities change with new technology, and many historical battles have been lost from failure to adapt to the new strategic landscape. By playing Chess variants instead of just Chess alone, one trains to have adaptive strategy. Maybe. I could be wrong, as I often am.
This raises an important challenge to practicalism, which is that practical utility can come from all sorts of unexpected sources. Everything we do has unforeseen costs and benefits. Actually, Dennett himself recognises this: the best we can do is suggest a few rules of thumb for identifying topics that have a good chance of being important... But in the end, he acknowledges that we have to let people pursue whatever projects strike their fancy. Even the most abstruse and seemingly pedantic work in philosophy might have connections to topics that are considered more significant, or might prompt new theoretical developments that have applications elsewhere. (Consider how philosophical work on the interpretation of indicative conditionals played a role in the development of non-classical logics.) If we did attempt to reform philosophy along practicalist lines, it's not at all obvious what that reform would look like.
More than 2 decades ago (an eternity in computer engineering) Deep Blue didn't know anything about that. Deep Blue didn't care any more about chess than perhaps Dennett does; but, it still beat Kasparov. I think practicality can be measured, and invested in on a rational basis. Studying war, is the best way to learn to react to wars. The claim that unexpected practical results can emerge from dedicating scarce resources to investigating 'impractical' avenues... is well... you just really don't know.
I'm not certain that philosophy does not have practical applications. I think that ethics, even meta ethics, helps you develop your own moral sense. Certainly continental philosophy has motivated many of the hypothesis in psychology. Philosophy of science has guided us to create more convincing models and theories.
And just like 'useless' math you never know when your philosophy will pay dividends. But, I was also return to your first argument. Satisfying personal curiosity is its own virtue so the argument from practicality falls flat from the get go. Honestly, I find it very hard to think of any justifications for practacalism.
I agree, and I think this is another serious problem practicalism: there's a good case to be made that, by the practicalist's own lights, much of the philosophy they criticize has practical pay-offs. Of course, you can always adopt a more narrow criterion of practical utility that will rule out that philosophy, but then you're in danger of the objection I discussed in the video that practicalism itself gets ruled out as impractical.
Being a chess variant aficionado, I was pretty unconvinced by Dennett's example...
the discussion is a wee bit specious, art has value, and usefulness, it doesn't exist in a vacuum, it aids our understanding of the self, it reveals the strange beauty, poetry or cruelty of the natural world, and our psyches therein, art relieves and enlightens, pleasures the senses, adds beauty and uplift, inspires our spirits, heightens consciousness, or deconstructs beliefs-disrupts, blows away old ideas, it aids in understanding science, philosophy, our natures, it reveals the zeitgeist, the collective unconsciousness, it opens doors to the mysterious psyche, and reveals more mysteries, therein. it provides relief from the mundane world, and on and on .. important for human psychological survival, we don't live by bread alone
I am useless! Thank you! 😅
Nice
Awesome video thanks. This is why I love post-structuralism which some would call useless. It enhances my perspective
Thanks dawg, glad to you liked the video!
15:26 and then they start to add the contents of the rooms and then if they're mapping the city they themselves are operating in, they end up having to include the map inside itself - whoops!
(This is also the problem with simulating the world in which the simulators live)
That reminds me of another Borges story, The Aleph -- the Aleph being an object that contains the whole universe, including the Aleph itself.
11:53 I do think aiming to achieve truth-as-correspondence is just confused though. Mainly because 1) it’s very unclear how to cash out the correspondence relation independent of goals, as you sort of hint at with the idealization point, and 2) you obviously only care about certain types of truths; most truths are totally uninteresting (e.g. the number of hairs on my arm or whatever)
I don't think my point there rests on conceiving of truth as correspondence. All that's required is that (a) many philosophers aim at truth and (b) truth sometimes comes apart from utility. This leaves plenty of room for debate about what exactly truth is, and under what circumstances truth matters. To be clear, my own view is that correspondence theory is confused, but I'd say the same about every theory of truth. But more importantly, I don't see how entering into *this* debate -- where we ask questions like: what is truth? is correspondence theory intelligible? etc. -- is supposed to have any practical pay-offs. This is useless philosophy par excellence.
@@KaneB yeah I think these questions can be practically relevant to AI safety research, say when you’re trying to peer inside an artificial neural network and figure out what its “true beliefs” are and stuff but it is a niche thing
@@norabelrose198 That's an interesting application -- I don't know anything about this, but I would wonder how much this turns on our theory of truth. I would have thought that, when we talk about the true beliefs and false beliefs of an AI, we don't need to have a philosophical theory of truth. In fact, attributing "true beliefs" seems to be somewhat metaphorical since, arguably, no current AIs literally have beliefs.
Anyway, my initial thought is: If we want to know what an AI will do, what its practical consequences will be, isn't it enough to know how it is representing the world? This is the case for people as well: if I know your goals and your beliefs, I can predict what you will do; I don't need to know whether the beliefs are true. The truth/falsity of your belief will make a difference to whether you are likely to achieve your goals, of course. But again, I can make that assessment without a philosophical theory of truth.
19:00 this is a good point, which is why I’m mainly trying to philosophically deconfuse people in my own field (AI safety) instead of talking to philosophers :)
Me explaining to my mom why i dont have a job and still live with her in my 30's
When it comes to philosophy I have no problem with useless knowledge. I find many of the questions interesting but they still have to be truths about the real world, otherwise I lose interest. Some philosophical discussions seem like discussions about fiction and they don't even use interesting formal systems.
BASED!
Conceptual NEET and NEET supremacy worldwide.
I understand that you are making a general point, and it is not merely to be contrarian, but I find that working out the truths of chmess being a "total waste of time" to be quite a bit overstated. It is likely to be a grand waste of time (relative to other interests and pursuits) for perhaps almost everyone but a relative handful of people. And even then, they are not likely to get the most out of it that they should to make it "worth their while" even if that relative handful were to take up the pursuit with reasonable efficacy and integration into their lives. It is probably not as unworthwhile as digging for gold in random locations, but even doing that is not a "total" waste of time. It seems, more to the point, that nothing actually is a total waste of time, nor totally worthwhile, or at least it would be hard to know if it really were in either case. I would only have to find something, however trite, that makes something worthwhile, or a waste of time, respectively, to disprove such a notion. If it is that easy to disprove such a notion, it is perhaps almost always an overstatement, and therefore should be used very carefully or sparingly. Especially in a philosophical context.
With specific regard to chmess, it would make delivering checkmate significantly harder without doing any overhauls of the movements of all the other men, would only minimally change the king's movement and without making qualitative changes. Indeed, one could still decide to make a rule whether he must move in the same direction or could change direction. If the former, he would then move as the bishops formerly moved centuries ago. It would make kings more than a mere liability until the endgame, and create a rather interesting version of chess. Bobby Fischer decided chess was becoming far too much of a battle of memorization for the upper levels of play, and far less of a creative fight. His randomization idea for piece placement behind the pawns (of which idea there are obviously plenty of variations existing and possible), was in his mind and the minds of many a very desirable modification without changing any other rules of the game. Certainly it is more drastic than merely changing the king's move from one to two squares. Chess has gone through some changes in the past with castling, first move of the pawn, etc. But of course you go on to make these points in other ways, so I know that it is not lost on you, of course. I just think that it is interestingly hard to find a "total" waste of time PER SE.
"Useless" suits us, we carry it well.
I'm mainly a pragmatist but can't wait to watch this one! I hope it will be as useless and as praiseworthy as I think it will be 😁 Kane B slowly turning us into philosophers :))
Thanks dawg! Hope you enjoy it.
Thanks Kane, keep the cognitive conundrums coming
Could you please make a video about the topic of relations in metaphysics? I would really appreciate it.
I have no idea how to describe what I mean by this, but you look more british in this video than in any other video you've made
Finally something l can relate to as an utterly useless person who enjoys useless activities 😂
I consider the diversity benefit. Truly philosophical method can have more diversity without excluding no use in mind. It doesn't matter when you find the extensions to the value of the outputs. we can only do this and check the work of diverse inputs for it.
i feel like i'm shoehorning in diversity to the extending inputs. I'm not sure how to ensure diversity, just that priority is an undue constraint.
Nothing is usefull or useless when there is no meaning in life, when there is no target for it to reach. There are no wrong answers if there was no question to begin with. And life itself cannot have meaning because if it had ultimate meaning, when people would reach it, their life becomes meaningless and whats the point in reaching it, if life becomes meaningless at the end anyway. Someone might say that after that first "checkpoint" comes another meaning etc., so in this case, first one wasnt real meaning to begin with thus there is no real ultimate meaning, just bunch of time consuming tasks that will make you busy. Consider all that, the ultimate meaning for life should not be reachable, but whats the point to even try to reach it then?
I might try to argue saying that there could be an ultimate meaning, being the action of living itself. Instead, I’ll just thank you for making me have an existential crisis.
In Germany Philosophy after Kant went into slump like this with Positivists, a mere helping hand to "science". But Schopenhauer absolutely OWNED them with FACTS and LOGIC.
а ежи?
I love hedgehogs.
@@KaneB he means one Russian streamer with dirty pants
@@MeowSin11 Oh okay. I don't know who that is.
@@KaneB i love Kane B
Non-philosopher here,
In philosophy, is there even a way to tell which philosophical activities are useful or not?
There isn't any general rule to determine this, but there are some philosophical projects that are more closely related to "practical" investigations. A lot of applied ethics can have fairly direct practical implications, such as how work on informed consent in medical contexts might be applied to shape the rules of medical institutions. Similarly, there are many philosophers of science who work closely with scientists -- as I mentioned, Dennett has made plenty of contributions to cognitive science. Sometimes philosophical problems arise in scientific contexts, and it can be useful to have people with philosophical expertise addressing them.
I don't necessarily think that philosophy should bend over backwards in order to satisfy practical desires, but it does seem clear to me that modern philosophy has gotten to a point where it has almost abandoned practical value entirely. Take moral philosophy, for instance, which is loaded with technical terms and details. If a moral philosopher did discover an objective basis for morality, it would be completely useless, because it wouldn't be applicable by laymen in their daily lives. If a moral theory cannot actually help people actually live better lives, then what is it good for?
I've always had the sense that moral theories generally serve the function of allowing a framework for moral reasoning. With moral debates there's usually always an impasse on values and the debate can't go any further. Frameworks serve as a medium to give more compelling cases as to which values are "more correct" than others, rather than just "agreeing to disagree". To what degree it actually does serve this purpose I'm not sure.
I'm agree that the moral realism/anti-realism debate has no obvious practical applications -- my guess is that establishing moral realism wouldn't make much of a difference to anything, beyond the intellectual satisfaction of people interested in that debate. However, if you're interested in practical applications of philosophy, I think there's plenty of contemporary moral philosophy that would be with checking out. There's a lot of work in applied ethics on topics like climate change, global justice, treatment of animals, informed consent, etc... Our views on these issues will shape how we act in our personal lives and how we organise society, and we don't need an "objective basis of morality" to reason about these things. So maybe you're just not looking at the right literature? Meta-ethics has always been more abstract, less focused on dealing with practical problems.
@@KaneB I actually do think that most topics in philosophy have practical implications, I just don't think that modern philosophers are particularly good at understanding what they are and how to show them to the general public. Take the problem of induction, for instance, which I think has a lot of value for psychotherapy, particularly in treating anxiety disorders. After all, how do we know that something terrible that happened in the past won't repeat itself? If the sun didn't rise on some day in the past, then it is surely possible that it will not rise tomorrow.
It's not that we need an objective basis of morality, it's that academic philosophy wouldn't be able to do anything with it because it would be formulated in language only understood by academic philosophers. It would be like having a formula for quantum gravity that is so complicated that we cannot actually derive any results from it in a reasonable timeframe.
How does this (or does it at all) relate to specific positions in philosophy? You mentioned pragmatism (I'm a big fan, reading some Dewey atm), how about positivism or empiricism more broadly? It seems to me that 'practicalism' isn't a 'live option', to use a concept from James, are there actual practicality schools/thinkers? I guess you take Dennet to be one.
edit bc I forgot to say 'good video', lol
Yeah, practicalist attitudes can be found among some positivists and empiricists too. But as far as I know, there isn't really any philosophical movement that, as a whole, embraces practicalism. There are pragmatists, positivists, and empiricists who are not practicalists. Even so, it's a view that is explicitly held by some philosophers... And I suspect that it's a worry that nags at *many* philosophers. Philosophers often seem to be a little embarrassed to admit when their work is useless. I don't think they should be!
Both truth and practicality are too usefull for my tastes
is usefulness normative? how to determine when something is useful?
As I'm using the term here, the idea is just that some inquires and theories will have practical pay-offs in the sense that they allow us to make novel predictions or to control nature. This doesn't have to be treated in normative terms. A useful theory might be applied in ways that we consider very bad -- for example, one of the practical applications of science was the development of nuclear weapons. As for how to determine whether a theory will be useful in this sense, that's no easy matter. There are all sorts of unexpected connections between theory and practice. But this is a problem for the philosophical practicalists. You'd have to get me on board with practicalism before I'd start worrying about how to identify the useful inquiries!
I am a skeptic about predictive powers.
Pragmatism is susceptible to memory skepticism similar to how Realism is susceptible to external world skepticism.
So as long the Pragmatist can not deliver, I see no reason to give him special privileges above other philosophies.
There are a lot of mathematicians. both past and present, that resent the practical use of mathematics... for being, in their view, a crudity or a distraction. This is not my view.
Yeah they're the cool mathematicians 😎
When the cogsci guys would get together with the philo guys, the cogsci guys termed the the philosophical discussion 'mental masturbation.'
Masturbation is great though. Who the hell objects to masturbation?!
For the most part, I'm disinterested in 'whether or not' philosophy is, or ought to be, practical. In my experience, some people (and that's more than one) appear to wax supercilious... or brow beat their supposed foes.
@@KaneB masturbation is a very usefull practice.
Use is generally reserved for objective judgements and not subjective ones.
Subjective things have no practicality but are essential for the enjoyment of life, enrichment and for subjective understanding/wisdom*.
*I say wisdom here but it's a problem with the English language. Other languages have multiple words for different ways of knowing. For example kennen vs. wissen (sp?) in German. Knowing a person vs. knowing a fact. Knowing facts is a more objective knowing, knowing a person is subjective oriented.
Philosophy has also tended to be more objective leaning outside of the realm of ethics, and the separation of natural philosophy/sciences from philosophy and the birth of modernism, we've been pushed towards more and more objective truths.
I'm not sure how you're using the objective/subjective distinction here. I usually understand that distinction to be that the objective is mind-independent while the subjective is mind-dependent. If that's how you're defining those terms, it would be very odd to divorce utility from subjectivity, since surely utility is going to depend on some way on what our goals are. The only reason why e.g. growing crops or building rockets is useful is because we care about things like feeding people or sending satellites into space.
Maybe useless as a term/concept is as useless or as meaningless as meaningful/useful or not. In my own opinion most of what we humans produce is useless, but for many other people its not. Its a bit positivistic starting to point out what is useful and meaningful. I can fully understand there is a debate thought, and i guess in i the end of the spectrum its needed.
In this video, I'm treating "utility" in a narrow sense, where it's a matter of building new technologies or controlling nature or improving scientific theories. But honestly, my actual inclinations are to be super pluralist about this. I'd say that nothing more is required for a concept to be useful than that somebody feels like it has some sort of positive or negative impact on them. And I have a similar take on meaning: Nothing more is required for a concept to be meaningful than that, when a person is presented with the concept, they nod their heads and say, "yep, I get it."
So was Aristotle a 'practicalist?' ... and Plato and 'anti-practicalist?'
I'm not familiar enough with ancient philosophy to say if any of them were practicalists. Practicalism is specifically the view that philosophy is legitimate only if it delivers practical pay-offs in the sense of helping to control nature or improve human life. I don't know if this conception of philosophy was ever articulated by the ancients. But my impression is that plenty of Aristotle's theorising has no obvious practical utility... And similarly for Plato, though both of them also produced plenty of work that did aim to promote practical ends. I think one difficulty of attributing practicalism to the ancients is that practicalism takes off partly in response to the remarkable predictive and technological success of modern science. Part of what motivates worries about philosophy's utility is that in this respect, it pales in comparison to science; then we have to think about how to reform philosophy to get it up to par. This wasn't an issue for ancient philosophers.
@@KaneB Do you do any online tutoring?
@@Lady_Graham Yes. If you're interested, send me an email and we can set something up (see my channel description; I can't write emails in comments).
I'd call myself a moderate practicalist, but I guess in a somewhat different sense from the one you focused on. In my book, your video was laudably practical, and Dennet's paper (assuming you represented it fairly) is a big impractical waste of time and ink.
Why the latter? Because of the chess variants, which you were right to mention. Dennet wrote an article about "chmess" without bothering to check what actual people in the real world are doing first. Five minutes of research would have shown him that his "chmess" argument is total nonsense.
And that's exactly the kind of anti-practicalism that makes my head spin. It's idle theorizing in total divorse from reality. I see quite a lot of it in academic philosophy (as well as in hype-driven amateurish pseudo-philosophy of the sort some natural scientists like engaging in, such as the "simulation hypothesis" you mentioned). Philosophy of language is particularly full of it: most scholars in the field only need to spend a mimute or two actually listening to people talk to one another, to see all their fancy theories are total BS. Very few, if any, are in the least bothered by that fact.
By contrast, your argument was, at every point, grounded in people's real practices and circumstances, used examples from real life and from literature and art. That's *my* idea of practical philosophy.
I guess I can get on board with practicalism in this sense, but the way I would frame this kind of objection is just to say that the methods used by these philosophers are not, in my judgment, effective means to their goals. I don't think you're going to learn much about how language works by armchair analysis of the logical form of toy sentences. On the other hand, I've always favoured methodological pluralism in philosophy. I want there to be philosophers who approach questions in ways that I think are totally misguided.
Also, I'm not sure why the simulation argument is divorced from reality. To take Chalmers' version of the argument:
(1) If there are no sim-blockers, then most sentient beings are simulations.
(2) If most sentient beings are simulations, we are probably simulations.
(3) So, if there are no sim-blockers, we are probably simulations.
(4) There are no compelling reasons to believe that there are sim-blockers.
(5) So, for all we know, we might be simulations.
Whether or not we find that argument persuasive, it seems to me that the evaluation of the premises appeals to what is going on in reality. In order to figure out whether there are sim-blockers, we have to consider what sorts of technologies might exist, what sorts of moral constraints intelligent civilisations might observe, what is required for an entity to have a mind, etc. A lot of these seem to be open questions to me. Looking at what people in the real world are doing doesn't provide either a knockdown case against the argument's conclusion, or any reason to think that the argument is meaningless or incoherent in any way. But maybe I'm missing your point.
@@KaneB On philosophy of language, I share your methodological pluralism as an ideal (at least if it does not preclude people from also criticizing methods they see as problematic), but in real-world academia a single methodology tends to near-monopolize the field at any given time. A paper that does *not* drill through the usual made-up examples, but still frames its discussion as philosophical, is virtually unpublishable. Doubting the relevance of logic to language is beyond the pale.
On simulation, I'm quite surprised at Chalmers (or better, I'm disappointed with him). The scholar who coined the term "the hard problem of consciousness" should have realised characters in a simulation can't be conscious of anything (by that same token, you can create an identical argument claiming we're all literary characters, with the added benefit that we know for a fact lit-blockers don't exist). It's conceivable that our experiences of the world are simulated, but that's just the old brain in a vat argument. Saying that *I* am simulated is nonsense for the same reason that saying my consciousness is an illusion is nonsense.
@@whycantiremainanonymous8091 Yes: I don't have a problem with people pursuing silly projects, but it is a problem of there's no room for other kinds of projects. But I feel sanguine when I consider the history of philosophy: it seems that different philosophical methodologies come in and out of fashion, and even if a methodology achieves a very broad consensus for some time, it doesn't tend to last. I also suspect that methodologies fall out of favour not usually due to knock-down arguments against them, but just because philosophers run out of interesting things to do with them. For these reasons, I don't tend to be too concerned about criticizing methodologies that I think are misguided. (I mean, it can be fun and intellectually stimulating to do that. But I don't care so much whether other people take my criticisms on board.)
I don't see any reason to believe that simulations could not be conscious. I don't know what substrate is necessary for consciousness... And if you find the hard problem at all compelling, I would have expected that you would be sympathetic to agnosticism on this question. I also don't think we're going to get an answer to this question by just looking at what people in the real world are doing.
@@whycantiremainanonymous8091 The reason why it's nonsense to say that consciousness is an illusion is because "illusion" implies that there is an appearance that does not correspond to reality... But for consciousness, the appearance just is the reality. If I appear to myself to be conscious, then I just am conscious. That's how I understand the objection to the view that consciousness is an illusion. I don't see how this applies to the simulation argument. The claim being made by that argument is that my conscious states are realized by processes in a computer simulation. That doesn't strike me as more problematic than e.g. the claim that my conscious states are realized by arrangements of atoms.
@@KaneB The history of philosophy is long, while human life is short 😃 Also, with philosophy of language, we're talking about a tradition going back all the way to Aristotle. What the telescope did to Aristotle's (and Ptolemy's) cosmology, the tape recorder should have done to his theory of language, but it's proving more resistent...
On the simulation argument, the substrate is not really the issue. My consciousness is real regardless of its substrate. The putative computer chips running the simulation exist in the real world, so if there's a consciousness substrate there (let's allow that highly improbable option for argument's sake), it's just a silicon brain in a silicon vat. The claim "We are living in a simulation" is thus identical to older versions of scepticism about the external world, unless we add the claim that consciousness itself is simulated. Note that this latter claim implies that fictional characters (not their real-world substrate, but the imaginary characters themselves) are conscious. And that is not really different from claiming consciousness is an illusion, or, in this case, a fiction.
On observing what real people do, the relevance here is less direct, but maybe if we notice people's tendency to get carried away with the latest technological fad, that could warn us to take arguments about computer simulations with a good grain of salt.
As an economist, I do not assign preferences to people. If you gain pleasure or utility from "useless" philosophy, then indeed it is not useless for you.
That being said, I kinda assume that people that study philosophy do so because they want to gain knowledge and wisdom. With this goal in mind, philosophy is going down the wrong path because it just seems to cause confusion and befuddlement and uselessness. People seeking knowledge would be better off studying econ than philosophy.
Econ does both make predictions as well as fight poverty. Philosophy could be so much more than it currently is if it would just pull its head out of its ass.
I think philosophy and econ would both benefit from a paradigm shift in engaging in public engagement. In this sense, you are on the cutting edge of this paradigm shift. If I could just get you interested in knowledge again...
your assumption would be wrong. i know several philosophers and philosophy students who approach the very categories of wisdom and knowledge with deep suspicion. in actual fact a lot of philosophy is concerned with things other than those categories.
@@samparr3368 that's what I am saying. Students come to philosophy seeking knowledge and they come away with deep suspicion.
@@InventiveHarvest i don’t see the problem. the human mind, if it even exists, is more or less made of cognitive biases and heuristics, the knowledge of which doesn’t even help to counteract them. it doesn’t hurt to be skeptical of knowledge and wisdom as existent things. or maybe it does hurt. i honestly don’t think it’s even possible to gauge the possible harm or lack thereof there is in being deeply suspicious.🤷🏽♀️
@@samparr3368 you don't even know if your mind exists and don't see the harm in that?
@@InventiveHarvest let me be perfectly clear. i do accept that the brain exists, what i specifically mean is that the common notion of mind (selfhood, the “I”, etc.) as it has been classically understand is something i suspect may be an illusion, or rather not an existent thing. i think what we commonly refer to as the self, “you-ness” is more or less an image generated by a composition of habituated neural pathways. “you” are basically a cluster of cognitive/behavioral/emotional habits.
and yes i don’t really see the harm in this.
Goethe or Gautier idk: “Nothing is really beautiful unless it is useless; everything useful is ugly, for it is the expression of some need, and man's needs are ignoble and disgusting like his poor weak nature. The most useful place in a house is the water-closet. […] No, fools, no, cretins and goitrous creatures that you are, a book does not make gelatine soup;--a novel is not a pair of seamless boots; a sonnet is not a syringe with a continuous stream; a drama is not a railroad […] no, two hundred thousand times, no. You cannot make a nightcap out of a metonymy, or wear comparisons by way of slippers; you cannot use antithesis as an umbrella; unluckily we have not the secret of clapping a few variegated rhymes upon the stomach as we put on a waistcoat. I have a firm conviction that the ode is a garment too light for winter, and that one would be no more warmly clad with the strophe, the antistrophe, and the epode, than the wife of the cynic who was contented to have only her virtue as a chemise and went about as naked as your hand, as history tells us.
The purpose of art is to create beauty; and for the artist beauty is an end in life. He has, I repeat, no other purpose, no other end in view, and if he himself perceives that his object is beautiful, his life is not wasted, it is justified.”
Nice quote... Not that I care so much about beauty either. There is so much more to art than beauty, and many of the best artworks involve ugliness, darkness, and discomfort. I've always found the idea that beauty is the end of art to be a remarkably shallow view of art, actually.
i don’t think most pragmatists would disagree with you, that’s kinda the whole point with James’ spiel on religion
There's a reason I refer to my opponents as "practicalists" rather than "pragmatists"...
Practicalists tend to be pragmatists or at least sympathetic to pragmatism, but not all pragmatists are practicalists.
@@KaneB sorry i thought i heard you say that most pragmatists are practicalists in the sense you’re using the term
oh gotcha, didn’t see your edit!
Though re James and religion, a crucial point for him is that the choice between the secular life and religious life is momentous: as he sees it, the stakes in the debate are high, and it makes a practical difference which worldview is right.
@@KaneB Fair enough, i got my understanding of James through the Varieties and through Rorty - which he admits is deliberately misconstrued to support his own view of pragmatism🤣 thanks for taking the time to clear up my ignorance!
Yep, I'm playing chmess now.
Hi Kane, I am interested in private tutoring. I am hoping my email has reached you. Thanks!
I just checked and I don't seem to have received an email from you. Maybe try re-sending it? Or sending it from a different address?
I would have thought that philosophical practicalism meant practicalism within philosophy, ie, studying practical modes of philosophy more related to the real world, as opposed to studying things like, do green men have burnt orange blood?
I just invented the term "practicalism" for this video. I don't know if it's used elsewhere in philosophy. But I've not encountered any philosophers studying green men. Grue men on the other hand...
i praise uselessness every day
why w0uld y0u want t0 be useful in this w0rld is what i say
Here is one useless comment
Wonderful
It isn't. It benefits the algorithm and gives me an idea, as well as an opportunity to refute your argument.
You inteoduced the term uselessness and the spent some time undermining the term.
There are many variations of Chess that are played and studied - Crazy Hose, 360 etc , so Dennett's example is poor.
This is literally the greatest thumbnail I’ve ever seen 🥹
It's from an artwork by Katsushika Hokusai.