[ExI] Philosophy and philosophers/was Re: Strong AI Hypothesis: logically flawed

John Clark johnkclark at gmail.com
Sat Oct 4 00:49:30 UTC 2014


On Fri, Oct 3, 2014 at 1:54 AM, Dan <danust2012 at gmail.com> wrote:

>
> > What about folks like John Searle, Saul Kripke, W. V. O. Quine, Bertrand
> Russell, and Frege?
>

I can't say anything about Saul Kripke because I've never heard of him,
unfortunately I have heard of John Searle and his dimwitted Chinese Room;
as for W. V. O. Quine and Bertrand Russell I've read books by them and like
them, but like Frege they were all mathematicians/logicians. And none of
the people on your list came within a light year of the gigantic
contribution to philosophy that Charles Darwin made, and he never had a
philosophy course in his life.  As Daniel Dennett (well OK, I don't hate
ALL philosophers) said:

"If I were to give an award for the single best idea anyone has ever had,
I'd give it to Darwin."

> There's a whole branch of philosophy of science devoted to discussing
> quantum field theory (Michael Redhead), spacetime theory (Lawrence Sklar,
> John Earman)
>

And what important new ideas did they come up with that Einstein, Dirac or
Feynman hadn't discovered a half century before?

> In fact, a hobby horse of mine is attacks on Aristotle
>

Me too, if people must ancestor worship a ancient Greek it should be
Archimedes not Aristotle or Plato.

 > Don't mention Adler again.
>

OK, maybe that was a low blow, most philosophers aren't THAT bad.

  John K Clark
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