"philosophy is dead"
The other day I had a long discussion over the Stephen Hawking's (and by the way my number one hero) quote "philosophy is dead". As you can imagine, I was the only person in the crowd who thought Stephen Hawking was right! Hawking argues that science and particularly theoretical physics has advanced so much that philosophers weren't able to keep up with that.One of the counter arguments I was hearing was that philosophy never meant to answer questions about the world but to raise questions that people haven't thought about before. Even if you reduce the role of philosophy to that still I would say this is not a good argument. People who have expertise in a field are the ones who can ask the right questions. A person who doesn't have the basic knowledge about the laws of physics can be easily misguided, and end up with poor explanations of natural phenomena, in that sense a philosopher will be no better than a priest.
"we are no more than biological machines."
Over and over I hear from people outside the science world, and amazingly also from some people inside the scientific community that they think humans have something that machines will never have. Here again I have to refer to Stephen Hawking's saying "we are no more than biological machines", and by machines it doesn't necessarily mean silicon based machines, but the important thing is that our behavior is determined by a dynamic model in a deterministic way.Freedom is an illusion. We are as free as a computer program, the only difference is that we are way more complicated than any man made machine which have been built so far to replicate human behavior. But can we ever build an artificial intelligence which is as smart or even smarter than a human? the answer is absolutely! We have already made computer programs which can beat human performance in specific tasks, now we only need to go a step further. Why haven't we managed to build such an AI so far? Firstly, the field is quite new, specifically the new branch of AI which is referred to as "Machine Learning", is quite new. Most of the tools that we are using now in machine learning community have been developed in last 20 years or so. Secondly, human brain has tremendous amount of computational power. That means to be able to compete with humans we need extremely fast machines. I'm not sure if we are there yet, but I think current generation of hardware is quite close. But I would say that's not the difficult part, even if we have a machine as fast as a human, we still need the model, the brain. What's nice about machine learning is that you can build models based on data, but that requires time to gather the data and process it. We humans sure took our time to gather this data and natural selection did the processing for us. I'm talking about one billion years of evolution. Does it mean that we need one billion year to train a model as powerful as a human? I seriously don't think so. Natural selection is an effective completely unsupervised method. With small amount of supervision we can save a lot of processing time.
This is indeed an interesting topic. I can see two scientific reasons for while philosophy is not dead.
ReplyDeleteFirstly, Hawking himself acknowledges that Gödel's incompleteness theorems indicate that there cannot be a set of physical laws which fully explain the universe:
http://www.damtp.cam.ac.uk/events/strings02/dirac/hawking/
Secondly, science has so far a very limited understanding of what consciousness is and how it works. For instance, we do not know HOW consciousness can be described by an algorithm. We do not even know if it actually CAN be described by an algorithm. I think this is a good quote:
"We have no idea how consciousness emerges from the physical activity of the brain and we do not know whether consciousness can emerge from non-biological systems, such as computers... At this point the reader will expect to find a careful and precise definition of consciousness. You will be disappointed. Consciousness has not yet become a scientific term that can be defined in this way. Currently we all use the term consciousness in many different and often ambiguous ways. Precise definitions of different aspects of consciousness will emerge ... but to make precise definitions at this stage is premature."
from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consciousness
/Magnus
Magnus, For the first part, I don't see any conflict between Stephen Hawking's statement that philosophy is dead, and Goedel's theorem. If it's not possible at all to explain the universe fully with a fixed set of laws, surely philosophers can't do anything about it. Btw, by reading Hawking's latest book I got the impression, scientists are still hopeful to find the ultimate theory.
DeleteAgain for the second part, I really don't see how philosophers can help with that. I think again this is machine learning experts', and neuroscientists' business to address the issue of consciousnesses.
My interpretation was that you argued that philosophy was dead because science can be used to solve all problems. That was why I wanted to stress that we cannot expect physics to fully explain the physical world. As you say we cannot expect philosophy to give us those final answers either. Whether it is meaningful or not to still think about such “unsolvable” problems is subjective, but I would say it is.
ReplyDeleteI also think it is meaningful to think about and discuss morality, ethics and politics from a philosophical point of view although we cannot expect any definite answers.
In the second part I wanted to stress that it is definitely not a scientific fact that human reasoning and consciousness works in the same way as a machine / algorithm / program. I thought you had that as an argument for why philosophy was dead, but now I see that it is a separate section, although at least I consider it to be related. Since it is so far from being solved my subjective view is that it is meaningful to address the problem from all points of view, including philosophical.