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1. I don't understand what any of this has to do with what I said. 2. Beware of learning philosophy from slatestarcodex. What he writes may sound very smart and convincing to people who have not studied philosophy, but Scott Alexander is often very, very misleading and extraordinarily simplistic. Much of what he brings up has been debated intensely among philosophers, with more interesting insights than his. For example, the entire exposition you laid out, with its distinction between deductive proof and inductive/probabilistic extrapolation, had already been worked out, pretty much in full, but the 17th century (see, e.g. Leibniz). We've learned a thing or two since then. In general, Alexander (and, in fact, the Rationality movement with which, I believe, he is associated) represent more or less the state of philosophy in the 17th and 18th centuries. The choice of stopping at the 18th century is, of course, one of the many ideological choices made by the Rationality movement, so take with a huge grain of salt anything you read by an author associated with that movement. Not that it's not true -- it's just very inaccurate and so, misleading. As you brought up quantum mechanics, the philosophy of the Rationalists, let's call them, amounts to Newtonian mechanics. True, but inaccurate and misses (or, in their case, chooses to ignore) some interesting and important phenomena. Of course, Newtonian mechanics just sounds better to most people, as it fits with their observations, and that is precisely what the Rationalists count on: that their 18th century philosophy would sound "common sensical" to their philosophically-lay readers, while more modern philosophy would sound, like qunatum mechanics, bizarre and foreign, and so likely to be discounted or even ridiculed by their readers. |
2. My philosophy has relatively little to do with Slate Star Codex, so attacking him does nothing to disprove it.