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My last ex was a PhD literature student in a very prestigious university. One of her perennial complaints was that I did not take as much interest in her work as she would like, which, though I denied it at the time, has a kernel of truth. The problem was not a lack of interest in her as a person, but in the nature of the intellectual game she was required to play.
Most humanities programs are, to put it bluntly, huffing their own farts. There is little grounding in fact, little contact with the real world of gears, machinery, or meat. I call this the Reality Anchor. A field has a strong Reality Anchor if its propositions can be tested against something external and unforgiving. An engineer builds a bridge: either it stands up to traffic and weather, or it does not. A programmer writes code: either it compiles and executes the desired function, or it throws an error. A surgeon performs a procedure, the patient’s outcome provides a grim but objective metric. Reality is the ultimate, non-negotiable peer reviewer.
Psychiatry is hardly perfect in that regard, but we care more about RCTs than debating Freudian vs Lacanian nonsense. Does the intervention improve outcomes in a measurable way? If not, it is of limited use, no matter how elegant the theory behind it.
When a field loses its Reality Anchor, the primary mechanism for advancement and evaluation shifts. The game is no longer about correctly modeling or manipulating the world. The game becomes one of status. Can you convince your peers of your erudition and wit? Can you create ever more contrived frameworks while studiously ignoring that your rarefied setting has increasingly little relevance to reality? Well, you better, and it is best if you drink the Kool-Aid. That is the only way you will get grants or cling on to a barely living wage. It helps if you can delude yourself into thinking your work is meaningful, since few people can handle the cognitive dissonance of genuinely pointless or counterproductive jobs.
Most physicists agree on the laws of physics, and are arguing about more subtle interpretations, edge cases, or speculating about better models. Most nuclear engineers do not disagree that radioactivity exists. Most doctors do not doubt that paracetamol reduces pain. Yet, if you go to the cafeteria of a philosophy department and ask ten people about the true meaning of philosophy, you will get eleven contradictory answers. When you ask them to establish consensus, they will start clobbering each other. In a field anchored by social consensus, destroying the consensus of others is a viable path to power.
Deconstructing a takeout menu, as in the Onion article, is the logical endpoint: a mind so trained in critique that it can no longer see a thing for what it is*, only as an object to be dismantled to demonstrate intellectual superiority. Critique becomes a status-seeking missile.
*I will begrudgingly say that the post-modernists have a point in claiming that it isn't really possible to see things "as they are." The observation is at least partially colored by the observer. But the image taken by a digital camera might be processed, but it is still more neutral than the same image run through a dozen Instagram filters. Pretending to have objective reality helps.
The relation of the humanities to "reality" varies so drastically from field to field, and even from paper to paper, that it's almost impossible to make generalizations. You have to just take things on a case by case basis, determine what the intent was, and how well that intent was executed upon.
If we're going to regard analytic philosophy as one of the humanities (as you seem to do), then the "reality anchor" is simply how well the argument in question describes, well, reality, in addition to its own internal logical coherence. You have previously shared your own philosophical views on machine consciousness and machine understanding. Presumably, you did think that these views of yours were well supported by the evidence and that they were grounded in "reality". So it's not that you devalue philosophy; it's just that you think your own philosophical views are obviously correct, and the views of your philosophical opponents are obviously incorrect, which is what every single philosopher has thought since the beginning of recorded history, so you're in good company there.
Literary studies can end up being quite empirically grounded. You'll get people who are doing things like a statistical analysis of the lexicon of a given book or a given set of books, counting up how many times X type of word appears in Y genres of novels from time period Z. Or it can turn into a sort of literary history, pulling together letters and diary entries to show that X author read Y author which is why they were influenced to do Z kind of writing. Even in more abstract matters of literary interpretation though, I think it's rash to say that they have no grounding in empirical fact. There's a classic problem in Shakespeare studies, for example, over whether Shakespeare intended Marcus's monologue in Titus Andronicus to be ironic and satirical. I believe that most people would agree by default that there is a fact of the matter over whether Shakespeare had a conscious intent or not to write the speech in an ironic fashion (this assumption of course reveals philosophical complexities if you poke at it enough, but, most people will not find it to be too troublesome of an assumption). Of course the possibility of actually confirming this fact once and for all is now forbidden to us, lost as it is to the sands of time. But, since we know that people's thoughts and emotions influence their words and actions, we can presumably make some headway on gathering evidence regarding Shakespeare's intent here, and make a reasoned argument for one position or the other.
One of the goals of psychoanalysis is to interrogate fundamental assumptions about what an "outcome" even is, which outcomes are desirable and worth pursuing in a given individual context, and what it means to actually "measure" a given "outcome". Presumably, empirical psychiatry does not take these questions to be its proper business, so it's unsurprising that there would be a divergence in perspective here. (If someone were to present with complaints of ritualistic OCD behaviors, for example, then psychoanalysis is theoretically neutral regarding whether the cessation of the behavior is the "proper" and desirable outcome. It certainly may very well be the desirable outcome in the majority of cases, but this cannot be taken as a given.)
I can't really ask for a better steelman for the positions I'm against, so thank you.
You accuse me of engaging in philosophy, and I can only plead guilty. But I suspect we are talking about two different things. I see a distinction between what we might call instrumental versus terminal philosophy. I use philosophy as a spade, a tool to dig into reality-anchored problems like the nature of consciousness or my ethical obligations to a patient. The goal is to get somewhere. For many professional philosophers I have encountered, philosophy is not a tool to be used but an object to be endlessly polished. They are not in it to dig, they're here to argue about the platonic ideal of a spade.
(In my case, I'm rather concerned that if we do instantiate a Machine God: we'd better teach it a definition of spade that doesn't mean our bones are used to dig our graves)
This is especially true in moral philosophy. I have a strong conviction that objective morality does not exist. The evidence against it is a vast, silent ocean; the evidence for it is a null set. I consider it as likely as finding a hidden integer between two and three that we've somehow missed. This makes moral arguments an interesting class of facts, but only facts about the people having them. Potentially facts about game theory and evolutionary processes, since many aspects of morality are conserved across species. Dogs and monkeys understand fairness, or have kin-group obligations.
I must strongly disagree, this doesn't represent my stance at all. In fact, I would say that this is a category error. The only way a philosophical conjecture can be "incorrect" is through logical error in its formulation, or outright self-contradiction.
My own stance is that I am both a moral relativist and a moral chauvinist, and I deny these claims are contradictory. My preference for my own brand of consequentialism is just that: a preference. I do not think a Kantian is wrong so much as I observe that they must constantly ignore their own imperatives to function in the world.
That makes philosophical arguments not that different to debating a favorite football team. Can be fun over a drink, often interesting, but usually not productive.
This brings me back to your defense of the humanities. You give excellent examples of how these fields can be anchored to reality, like the statistical analysis of a lexicon. I do not doubt these researchers exist, my ex did similar work.
My critique is about the center of gravity of these fields. For every scholar doing a careful statistical analysis, how many are writing another unfalsifiable post-structuralist critique by doing the equivalent of scrutinizing a takeout menu? My experience suggests the latter is far more representative of the field's culture and what is considered high status work. The exceptions, however laudable, do not disprove the rule about the field's dominant intellectual mode.
I am a Bayesian, so I am fully on board with probabilistic arguments. Yet, once again, in the humanities or in philosophy, consensus is rare or sometimes never reached. I find this farcical.
The core difference, as I see it, is the presence of a robust error correction mechanism. In my world, bad ideas have an expiration date because they fail to produce results. Phlogiston theory is dead. Lamarckian evolution is dead. They were falsified by reality (in the Bayesian, not Popperian sense). Can we say the same for the most influential ideas in the humanities? The continued influence of figures like Lacan, despite decades of withering critique, suggests the system is not structured to kill its darlings. It is designed to accumulate "perspectives," not to converge on truth.
(Even STEM rewards new discoveries, but someone conducting an experiment showing Einstein's model of gravity works/doesn't work in a new regime is doing something far more important and useful than someone arguing about feminist interpretations of underwater basket weaving)
My own field of psychiatry is a good case study here. We are in the aftermath of a replicability crisis. It is painful and embarrassing (but mostly in the softer aspects of psychology, the drugs usually work), but it is also a sign of institutional health. We are actively trying to discover where we have been wrong and hold ourselves to a higher standard. This is our Reality Anchor, however imperfect, pulling us back. I do not see an equivalent "interpretive crisis" in literary studies. I do not see a movement to discard theories that produce endless, unfalsifiable, and contradictory readings. The lack of such a crisis isn't a sign of stability. To me, it seems a sign the field may not have a reliable way to know when it is wrong. The Sokal Affair, or my own time in the Tate, shows that "earnest" productions are indistinguishable from parody.
This is not an accident. It flows directly from the incentive structure. In my field, discovering a new, effective treatment for depression grants you status because of its truth and utility. In literary studies, what is the reward for simply confirming the last fifty years of scholarship on Titus Andronicus? There is little to none. The incentive is to produce a novel interpretation, the more contrarian the better. This creates a centrifugal force, pushing the field away from stable consensus and towards ever more esoteric readings. The goal ceases to be understanding the text and becomes demonstrating the cleverness of the critic.
Regarding psychoanalysis and outcomes, I am a simple pragmatist. If a person with OCD is happy, I have no desire to treat them. If they are a paranoid schizophrenic setting parks on fire, the matter is out of my hands. In most cases, patients come to us because they believe they have a problem. We usually agree. That shared understanding of a problem in need of a solution is anchor enough.
This is why I believe the humanities are not a good target for limited public funds, at least at present. I have no objection to private donors funding this work. But most STEM and medical research has a far more obvious case for being a worthy investment of tax dollars. If we must make hard choices, I would fund the fields that have a mechanism for being wrong and a track record of correcting themselves, while also raising standards of living or technological progression.
Dear Lord what a beautiful illustration of Jung's dichotomy between extroverted thinking and introverted thinking. Textbook. I'm practically giddy over here.
Anyway, it's all exactly as you describe. Some people do just want to endlessly polish for its own sake. That's what they like to do. And that's ok with me. You get the same thing in STEM too. Mathematicians working on God knows what kinds of theories related to affine abelian varieties over 3-dual functor categories or whatever. None of it will ever be "useful" to anyone. But their work is quite fascinating nonetheless, so I'm happy that they're able to continue on with it in peace.
I'm a bit confused here. I believe you've claimed before that a) first-person consciousness does exist, and b) sufficiently advanced AI will be conscious. Correct me if I'm wrong here. You asserted these claims because you think they're true, yes? And so anyone who denies these claims is saying something false?
These claims (that first-person consciousness does exist, and that sufficiently advanced AI will be conscious) are philosophical claims. There are philosophers who deny one or both of them. Presumably you don't think they're making a "category error", you just think they're saying something false.
Of course, there's a lot of indefensible crap out there. But 90% of everything is crap. I simply defend the parts that are defensible and ignore the parts that are indefensible.
That's a relatively accurate statement!
Some people just want to get things done. Some people just want to sit back and take a new perspective on things. Nature produces both types with regularity. Let us appreciate the beautiful diversity of types among the human race, yes?
That's because you haven't been looking. There's basically never not an interpretive crisis going on in literary studies.
In the early 20th century you had New Criticism, and people criticized that for being overly formalist and ignoring social and political context, so then you had everything that goes under the banner of "postmodernism", ideology critique, historicism, all that sort of stuff, and then you had some people who said that the postmodernist stuff was leading us astray and we had gotten too far from the texts themselves and how they're actually received, so they got into "postcritique" and reader response theory, and on and on it goes...
In general, people outside of the humanities underestimate the degree of internal philosophical disagreement within the humanities. Here's an hour long podcast of Walter Benn Michaels talking about the controversy engendered by his infamous paper "Against Theory", if you're interested.
I'd be happy if you could direct me to any of these novel and esoteric readings. My impression is that the direction of force is the opposite, and that readings tend to be conservative because agreeing with your peers and mentors is how you get promoted (conservative in the sense of adhering to institutional trends, not conservative in the political sense).
Well, that's something that psychoanalysis actually does take a theoretical stance on. You can't trust the patient about what the problem is. Frequently, what they first complain about is not the root cause of what's actually going on. It might be. But frequently it's not. Any "shared understanding" after a one week period of consultation is illusory, because people fundamentally do not understand themselves. (I will relay a lovely anecdote about such a case in a reply to this comment, so as not to overly elongate the current post.)
I suppose that's where the rub always lies, isn't it. Well, you're getting your wish, since humanities departments are shuttering at an unprecedented rate. I fully agree that there is no "utilitarian" argument for why much of this work should continue. All I can do is try to communicate my own "perspective" (heh) on how I see value in this work, and hope that other people choose to share in that perspective.
Isn't it a massive meme (based in fact) that even the most pure and apparently useless theoretical mathematics ends up having practical utility?
Hell, it even has a name: "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences"
Just a few examples, since you probably know more than I do:
Number theory to modern cryptography
Non-Euclidean geometry was considered largely a curiosity till Einstein came along.
Group theory and particle physics
So even if the mathematicians themselves want to claim their work is just rolling in Platonic hay for the love of the game, well, I'll smile and wait. It's not like it's expensive either, you can run a maths department on roughly the budget for food, chalk and chalkboards.
(It's amazing how cheap they are, and how more of them don't just run off to a quant firm. Almost makes you believe that they genuinely love maths)
Have I? I'm pretty sure that's not the case.
The closest I can recall going is:
We do not have a complete mechanistic model of consciousness in humans
We do not know what the minimal requirements of consciousness even are in the first place
I have no robust way of knowing if other humans are conscious. I'm not an actual solipsist, because I think the odds are pretty damn solid (human brains are really similar), but it is not actually a certainty.
Ergo, LLMs might be conscious. I also always add the caveat that if they are, they are almost certainly an incredibly alien form of consciousness and likely to have very different qualia.
In a sense, I see the question of consciousness as irrelevant when it comes to AI. I really don't care! If an ASI tells me it's conscious, then I'll just shrug and go about my day. What I care far more about is what an ASI can achieve.
(If GPT-5 tells me it's conscious, I'd say, great, now where is that chart I asked for?)
It looks to me like less of a crisis rather than business as usual. What I see is a series of cyclical fads going in and out of fashion, and no real consistency or convergence.
How many layers of rebuttal and counter-rebuttal must we go before a lasting consensus is achieved? I expect most literary academics would say that the self-licking nature of the ice cream cone is the point.
Contrast with STEM: If someone proves that the axiom of choice is, strictly speaking, unnecessary, that would cause a revolution. Even if such a fundamental change doesn't happen, the field will make steady improvements.
Uh.. This really isn't my strong suit, but I believe that the queer theoretical interpretation of Moby Dick or the post-colonial reading of The Tempest might apply.
I do not think Shakespeare intended to say much on the topic of colonial politics. I can grant that sailors are hella gay, so maybe the critical queers have something useful to say.
I don't think you really need psychoanalysis to get there. Depressed people are often known to not acknowledge their depression. I've never felt tempted to bring out a psychoanalysis textbook to solve such problems, I study them because I'm forced to, for exams set by sadists.
Definitely not! The article you're referring to was about theoretical physics having surprising application to the real world, not pure math. The rabbit hole of pure math goes ridiculously deep, and only the surface layers are in any danger of accidentally becoming useful. Even most of number theory is safe - the Riemann Hypothesis might matter to cryptography (which is partly why it's a Millennium Problem), but to pick some accessible examples, the Goldbach Conjecture, Twin Primes conjecture, Collatz conjecture, etc. are never going to affect anyone's life in the tiniest way.
My career never went that way, so I've only dipped my head into the rabbit hole, but even I can rattle off many examples of fascinating yet utterly useless math results. Angels dancing on the head of a pin are more relevant to the real world than the Banach-Tarski paradox. The existence of the Monster group is amazing, but nobody who's not explicitly studying it will ever encounter it. Is there any conceivable use of the fact that the set of real numbers is uncountable? If and when BB(6) is found, will the world shake on its axis? Does the President need to be notified that Peano arithmetic is not a strong enough formal system to prove Goodstein's theorem?
These questions are all meaningful to me. I'm weird, though. I'm not even particularly good at math.
I hate dynamic programming, but it seems that you can't "jump ahead" when calculating prime numbers. This feels like computational irreducibility. The world in which this property exists, and the one in which it doesn't, are meaningfully different.
The Collatz conjecture, and BB, relate to the ability to generate large things from small ones. It seems relevant for this question: Can you design a society which is both novel and stable over infinite time? Would it have to loop, repeating the same chain of events forever, or is there an infinite sequence of events which never terminates, but still stays within a certain set of bounds? If we became all-powerful and created an utopia, we might necessarily trap ourselves in it forever (because you cannot break out of a loop. If you loop once, you loop forever). It may also be that any utopia must necessarily be finite because it reaches a state which is not utopian in finite time.
Some other questions are about the limitations of math. It's relevant whether a system of everything is possible or not (if truth is relative or absolute). If trade-offs are inherent to everything, then "optimization" is simply dangerous, it means were destroying something every time we "improve" a system. It would imply that you cannot really improve anything, that you can only prioritize different things at the cost of others. For instance, a universal paperclip AI might necessarily have to destroy the world, not because it's not aligned, but because "increase one value at the cost of every other value" is optimization.
I also have a theory that self-fulfilling prophecies are real because reality has a certain mathematical property. In short, we're part of the thing we're trying to model, so the model depends on us, and we depend on the model. This imples that magic is real for some definitions of real, but it also means that some ideas are dangerous, and that Egregores and such might be real.
You can, actually. Testing whether a specific number is prime is actually pretty easy (disclaimer: there are subtleties here I won't go into), and doesn't require computing the numbers earlier than it. It's factoring a number which is apparently hard (although there are still much faster methods than iterating over the numbers before it). This is why RSA is practical: it's computationally very easy to search for 1000-digit prime numbers, but very hard to recover two of them after they've been multiplied together.
I think the rest of your questions veer more into spirituality, philosophy, and ethics than math, so I'm not sure I'm the right person to ask. I have all the spirituality of a wet fart. But I can tell you that the Collatz conjecture is not relevant when discussing the future of civilization. :)
That doesn't seem like a way to generate prime numbers directly, but to sort of chip at the problem by creating a scaffolding around it and then getting close and closer. It doesn't feel elegant like some math does. And yeah, I think that pure maths is largely useless (because its scope is wider, i.e. less restricted than our reality). We can find interesting properties in math which hints at properties in reality, though. At high levels of abstraction, these things overlap. "The dao of which can be spoken is not the real dao" is a logical conclusion, since you can judge the limits of a system from within said system. Gödel did the same with math. You can use a similar line of thinking to derive that everything is relative (there's nothing outside of everything, so there can be no external point of reference).
Maybe this is "abstract reasoning" rather than math? I'm not sure what it is, but this ability is useful in general. I don't suffer from the philosophical problem of "meaning in life" because I recognized that the question was formulated wrong (which is why there's no answer!). I also figured out enlightenment, which you usually cannot reach by thinking because it requires not thinking. But you can sort of use thinking to show that thinking is the cause of the issue, and then "break free" like that.
Edit: Nietzsche came up with his "Eternal recurrence" through logic, showing that if time goes back infinitely, the world would already have been looping forever. Same with his "Perspectivism", that there's no facts, only perspectives. He wasn't a mathematician, he was just highly intelligent.
But I'm sort of weird, most subjects I think about don't fit any common categories
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