[HN Gopher] The Philosopher Who Believes in Living Things
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The Philosopher Who Believes in Living Things
Author : lermontov
Score : 21 points
Date : 2023-03-01 20:32 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.newyorker.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.newyorker.com)
| UncleOxidant wrote:
| https://archive.is/wbnKq
| avgcorrection wrote:
| HN: Ascribing agency to things is silly. It's all just cause and
| effect.
|
| Also HN: This program is my new search engine and chat buddy.
| Shouldn't we face the possibility that it might have a sort of
| sentience?
| skadamou wrote:
| I suppose every way of understanding (even scientific laws) is
| just a model for how things might work. Some of these models
| (Newton's laws of motion) are more useful than others but are
| obviously still fallible (Relativity being a correction to
| Newton's laws). I'm not sure how useful of a model animism is but
| maybe it's reasonable to keep it in mind for some edge cases?
| Even if it is just emotionally satisfying, I guess that's kind of
| an edge case.
| RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote:
| Science is based on chasing the gods out of natures. We talk
| about cold and warm fronts and circulatory patterns instead of
| Thor being angry.
|
| Ascribing agency to inanimate things is a return to the pre-
| scientific past and an abandonment of science.
|
| I rather happen to like my antibiotics and weather prediction
| more than sacrifices to the gods.
| edgyquant wrote:
| >Ascribing agency to inanimate things is a return to the pre-
| scientific past and an abandonment of science.
|
| This is just so wrong. That these things are inanimate is not a
| scientific view it is an interpretation, period. People are
| allowed to interpret the world in other ways and most of the
| greatest scientific minds did not have this atheistic view. If
| you look you'll find this is a relatively modern condescension.
|
| >I rather happen to like my antibiotics and weather prediction
| more than sacrifices to the gods.
|
| This is hyperbole at best. Irrelevant to the discussion.
| LesZedCB wrote:
| I figure this would be the kind of response to this article
| here.
|
| please I highly recommend Facing Gaia by Bruno Latour,
| mentioned in the article. he's not by any stretch anti-science.
| it's about recognizing that's things as such have agency, even
| if they are "inanimate" and when we treat them that way we are
| actually better prepared to deal with the impact they impose.
|
| in fact, his probably most famous work, We Have Never Been
| Modern specifically addresses the concern you raise, with
| regard to exactly what science is supposed to be. but you have
| to read trying to understand that science ignores philosophy at
| its own peril.
| ergonaught wrote:
| Unless and until someone can identify how chemical reactions
| possess any degree of agency regarding their reaction, people
| making such assertions are divorced from fact, reality, and
| science.
|
| They are expressing wholly unsupported beliefs.
|
| That's fine, but beliefs aren't knowledge, and they aren't
| science, and they have nothing at all going for them anymore
| except that they make people feel warm fuzzies. Those aren't
| science either.
|
| Philosophers have a relevance problem, but as long as you can
| slap "quantum" on any jumble of nonsense and have a million
| people agree with it, they'll at least have an audience.
| Errancer wrote:
| But Latour is precisely doing what you demand in the first
| paragraph. The fact that he is claimed to be anti-
| scientific is extremely ironic. His counter-intuitive
| conclusions come from the attempt of defending science
| because the traditional accounts failed. You use "fact",
| "reality", "science", "beliefs", "knowledge" without any
| degree of irony but do you know how hard it is to defend
| them on the philosophical grounds? Most people are naive
| positivists and even positivists from Vienna circle quickly
| gave up on such positions because they were so hard to
| maintain. Latour was not a stupid opportunist and you can
| find this in his biography. If you think he was wrong then
| first make sure you understand what he was even trying to
| argue for. Without this understanding how can you square
| your claims about knowledge and your actions? Do you
| believe that your opinions have no metaphysical assumptions
| whatsoever? Or do you think that your opinions are true so
| you can a priori deny any contrary opinions as false?
| LesZedCB wrote:
| unless you can demonstrate we humans are more than chemical
| reactions and physics, can can it be any other way than
| highly complex, emergent systems based in the laws of
| physics and chemistry are capable of exhibiting what we
| both call "human agency?"
|
| systems theory is the crux here. and Latour's Actor Network
| Model is basically just systems theory. if you refrain from
| reducing the scope of your systems to a single chemical
| reaction but looks at the complex interplay withing
| systems, you start to see what I'm actually talking about.
| UncleOxidant wrote:
| > it's about recognizing that's things as such have agency,
| even if they are "inanimate"
|
| From the article:
|
| _" A piece of shiny plastic on the street pulls your eye
| toward it, turning your body in a different direction--which
| might make you trip over your own foot and then smash your
| head on the concrete, in a series of events that's the very
| last thing you planned or intended. Who has "acted" in such a
| scenario? You have, of course. Human beings have agency. But,
| in her telling, the piece of plastic acted, too. It made
| something happen to you."_
|
| No, your reaction to seeing the shiny plastic on the ground
| is what happened to you. Your brain recognized it as
| something potentially interesting and/or valuable. The shiny
| piece of plastic did not somehow will you to pick it up, it
| cannot and does not have agency. I can't believe I'm having
| the conversation on HN. WTF is going on?
|
| EDIT: Thought experiement: If you were blind or it was night
| time and you were walking by the shiny plastic you would not
| even notice it to pick it up.
| shaunxcode wrote:
| not even a mention of animism?
| UncleOxidant wrote:
| The word isn't used, but isn't that exactly what's being
| described?
| krapp wrote:
| Yes, it's weird. The article even claims the premise begins
| with French philosopher Bruno Latour, but this just seems
| like a modern interpretation of the oldest metaphysical
| framework in human history.
| causality0 wrote:
| The modernity of the nonsense seems to matter more to the HN
| front page these days more than the degree to which something is
| nonsense.
|
| _According to Bennett, hoarders are highly attuned to these
| truths, which many of us ignore._
|
| And here is where she completely loses the plot. Up until that
| point it's kind of a bass-ackward way of acknowledging that human
| beings are not special and not fundamentally different from the
| world around us. Her "everything is magic" conclusion is 180
| degrees off correct, which is that nothing is magic, including
| human agency.
| UncleOxidant wrote:
| _" If the Mississippi possesses anything at all, it is agency-
| such a powerful agency that it imposes itself on the agency of
| both regular people and the Army Corps of Engineers."_
|
| No, the Mississippi is a river: A collection of water acted upon
| by gravity and weather. It does not have agency - the Mississippi
| cannot decide to flood a town or breach a levy.
| animal_spirits wrote:
| I don't see how that is any different than a human being. We
| are all just a collection of particles being acted upon by
| certain fundamental laws of the universe. Why do you think
| you're so different?
| UncleOxidant wrote:
| Computation and information.
| animal_spirits wrote:
| Can you elaborate?
| LesZedCB wrote:
| don't you think it's funny in your counterpoint to inanimate
| objects being agents you literally use the word "acted on?"
|
| > A collection of water acted upon by gravity and weather
|
| that's the point of the Actor Network Theory.
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