[glenstein]

I'm actually quite agreeable to idea the that much of philosophy is incoherent nonsense. I would have completely gone to bat for this commenter if they said Heidegger was such an example. Or Searle for that matter. I can even see the case for Kant. And they all have their defenders, just not me.

But even for someone as sympathetic to that argument as I am, I don't see any version of Wittgenstein's reflections on the Tractatus as agreeing it to be nonsense much less a paradigmatic example of it. It's not just a matter of the later Wittgenstein being the "good" stuff. The Tractatus built on the work of Frege and was incredibly dense in its logical expressions, and half the challenge is keeping up with him, because he did philosophy from the perspective of an engineer, knowledgeable in logical and mathematical notation. It's one of the essential works of philosophy from the 20th century.

[knightoffaith]

What do you think is nonsensical about Searle? My sense is that he's very much not obscurantist in the way one might think Heidegger or Kant is (of course, the defense is that they use technical language because they're discussing technical things). But maybe you just mean that his arguments fail.

[glenstein]

The deep dive version of this convo might be a topic for another time, but the most concise answer I can give is to grab a copy of I Am A Strange Loop by Douglas Hofstadter, and flip to chapter 2 where he discusses an idea proposed by John Searle about the so-called "terribly thirsty beer can." This is an argument from Searle that he believes is a knockdown argument against the idea of consciousness embodied in something that isn't a biological mind as we know it. It is, and I do not say this lightly, it is just stunningly naive.

Hofstadter's dispensation of it in chapter 2 is to my mind, a completely decisive dressing down of the fundamental naivety of Searle's ideas about minds. I can't find any convenient quotation of the passage on the internet, but in my copy of the book it's page 29 chapter 2.

I think it puts on perfect display how truly ridiculous Searle's ideas are, and I think the Chinese room idea is similarly discreditable, and ultimately I think that Searle was more a fraud who more appropriately belongs in the category anti-science apologists along the lines of intelligent design proponents, rather than a positive contribution to the canon of Western analytic philosophy. And the extent to which he has gained influence in academic philosophy is something I take as discrediting of it as a field, to the extent that Searle is it's standard bearer. So if the commenter above cited him instead of Wittgenstein I would be cheering it on as a legitimate observation.

[knightoffaith]

Thanks for the citation, I failed to get through GEB but you've piqued my interest in IAASL.

Could you say something more about him being an anti-science apologist? I can see your case that his arguments fail, but I don't see the anti-science.

[glenstein]

I would acknowledge that this is a rather original take of my own and you won't find many people who subscribe to it.

But the essence of it is, if you consider optimists about the possibility of computers and AI, whether they be philosophers or programmers for major tech companies, and then you consider an opposing camp, made up of various 20th century philosophers, the most prominent of them being Hubert Dreyfus and John Searle, the second camp attempts to approach the problem by asserting that there's an essence to intelligence or consciousness, and that essence is captured in certain key pieces of vocabulary, such as insight, "thinking" and so on. They declare that these are special things that human minds have, that by definition, in some sense, cannot be modeled by any formal description or scientific investigation, and the essence of their definitions is always a moving target.

Their approach to the topic also parallels that of intellectuals who insisted that Darwin was wrong about evolution, and the essence of their insistence was a failure of imagination for the explanatory power of evolution. Obviously I'm oversimplifying, but in some ways you could consider the crux of the debate to be this posture of incredulity that the spectacular complexity of life could be explained the iteration of essentially simple and blind rules.

Searle and Hubert Dreyfus, but Dreyfus especially, looked at the logic gates of computing, and then looked at the dynamic, associative, poetic, analogy oriented aspects of human thinking and thought that these contain some magical essence that couldn't possibly be modeled by computers, and that the fundamental ideas of computing needed to be replaced by some new set of core ideas. However, our recent breakthroughs, while they are based on special and new principles that relate to vector databases, convolutional networks and so on, perhaps exhibiting the very core ideas that Dreyfus and Searle believed were missing, those breakthroughs have happened on the same old boring foundation of computing, with logic gates and whatnot, and there was a failure of imagination on their part to understand that those foundational principles could give rise to the more dynamic concepts that they believed were necessary, and that these two things were not in fact in conflict at all.

And the preemptive assertion that they belong to two a category inaccessible to computing principles as they understood them, indeed to any sort of in computational principles of any kind whatsoever, is something that I would contend is a fundamentally anti-scientific instinct that comes from a place of lacking imagination.