Eliezer: I really like this post, but it seems to me that empirically it was substantially a cultural practice in philosophy, including Kant etc, that enabled those early 20th century Germans (and only those people, in that particular culture, with that particular philosophical tradition) to seem, vaguely a significant subset of those assumptions that they did know existed but that other philosophers and lay people didn’t know existed. That philosophy also lead them down some wrong roads, such as towards thinking mind was fundamental rather than emergent, and it certainly didn’t enable them to see all of the assumptions that they didn’t know existed, but there seems to be a known partial reason that the quantum revolution was so local, one credited by some of the physicists in question.
For what it’s worth, I have only a lay understanding of quantum physics, still don’t really know what you mean by configurations and amplitudes, and was able to see, fairly easily, the assumption that “Bob” in your assumption didn’t see, basically about particles being “things” with “properties” attached to them, (an assumption that Chalmers, in “The Conscious Mind” seems to know is rejected by physics but to find it impossible to reject, leading him to mention his disturbance in a physical view of particles as “pure causal flux”, which I would call “pure relationship” and which at least a few philosophers surely mean by “radical emergence”) although I would have described it somewhat differently, e.g. not by explicit reference to technical information that I didn’t have.
I don’t think that the problem is that it is impossible with effort and training to learn to recognize one’s blind spots a-priori. Rather, I think that philosophy attracts many kinds of people, only one of which is the type of person who has a talent that he wants to develop in recognizing his blind spots. Philosophy then provides, to different extents in different places and times, some training in this skill and some reward of status for the development of it. Currently, it seems to me that neither Analytic nor Continental philosophy provides significant training or status relating to this as opposed to other skills. More particularly, both seem to provide far less such training or reward in status than contemporary theoretical physics, theoretical computer science and probably some parts of math.
The main problem, it seems to me, relates to this issue of rewarding with status. In physics, ultimately status goes to those who make the correct predictions enabling correct beliefs to actually attain dominance in the field even if they are counter-intuitive (or too intuitive to qualify as ‘deep’), while in philosophy, without experiments, correct beliefs always exist at a very low incidence at equilibrium, far less popular or ‘official’ than clever descriptions of those cognitive illusions such as empty labels http://lesswrong.com/lw/ns/empty_labels/ (in this case, the particle without the mathematical relationships it participates in) that act as attractors to human naive ontology. As a result, the average physicist is better at this type of philosophy than the average philosopher is, while the average highly esteemed physicist is astronomically better at it than the average highly esteemed philosopher.
BTW I’m not really convinced that “Bob” would be correct in “any classical universe”, or even that classical universes are conceivable rather than apparently conceivable.
Eliezer: I really like this post, but it seems to me that empirically it was substantially a cultural practice in philosophy, including Kant etc, that enabled those early 20th century Germans (and only those people, in that particular culture, with that particular philosophical tradition) to seem, vaguely a significant subset of those assumptions that they did know existed but that other philosophers and lay people didn’t know existed. That philosophy also lead them down some wrong roads, such as towards thinking mind was fundamental rather than emergent, and it certainly didn’t enable them to see all of the assumptions that they didn’t know existed, but there seems to be a known partial reason that the quantum revolution was so local, one credited by some of the physicists in question.
For what it’s worth, I have only a lay understanding of quantum physics, still don’t really know what you mean by configurations and amplitudes, and was able to see, fairly easily, the assumption that “Bob” in your assumption didn’t see, basically about particles being “things” with “properties” attached to them, (an assumption that Chalmers, in “The Conscious Mind” seems to know is rejected by physics but to find it impossible to reject, leading him to mention his disturbance in a physical view of particles as “pure causal flux”, which I would call “pure relationship” and which at least a few philosophers surely mean by “radical emergence”) although I would have described it somewhat differently, e.g. not by explicit reference to technical information that I didn’t have.
I don’t think that the problem is that it is impossible with effort and training to learn to recognize one’s blind spots a-priori. Rather, I think that philosophy attracts many kinds of people, only one of which is the type of person who has a talent that he wants to develop in recognizing his blind spots. Philosophy then provides, to different extents in different places and times, some training in this skill and some reward of status for the development of it. Currently, it seems to me that neither Analytic nor Continental philosophy provides significant training or status relating to this as opposed to other skills. More particularly, both seem to provide far less such training or reward in status than contemporary theoretical physics, theoretical computer science and probably some parts of math.
The main problem, it seems to me, relates to this issue of rewarding with status. In physics, ultimately status goes to those who make the correct predictions enabling correct beliefs to actually attain dominance in the field even if they are counter-intuitive (or too intuitive to qualify as ‘deep’), while in philosophy, without experiments, correct beliefs always exist at a very low incidence at equilibrium, far less popular or ‘official’ than clever descriptions of those cognitive illusions such as empty labels http://lesswrong.com/lw/ns/empty_labels/ (in this case, the particle without the mathematical relationships it participates in) that act as attractors to human naive ontology. As a result, the average physicist is better at this type of philosophy than the average philosopher is, while the average highly esteemed physicist is astronomically better at it than the average highly esteemed philosopher.
BTW I’m not really convinced that “Bob” would be correct in “any classical universe”, or even that classical universes are conceivable rather than apparently conceivable.