Interesting analogy here with physicists regarding heliocentrism as a convenient fiction for more accurate prediction calculations than geocentrism, for decades after Copernicus, since heliocentrism obviously made no physical sense and violated everything we knew about everything.
(This is covered at length in Kuhn's _Copernican Revolution_, which is in many ways a better book than _Scientific Revolutions_, although also less significant.)
Yes! But we associate Copernicus with pre-Enlightenment, so it's easy to dismiss geocentrism as the fantasies of the pre-scientific mind or something. I'm still blow away by atoms being a 20th century consensus. The scientific paradigm shifts between 1880-1945 are unprecedented. Relativity is probably the least interesting one of them all.
I’ve long been interested in the relationship between Greek and Indian philosophy, particularly regarding Madhyamaka, a foundational philosophy for Mahayana Buddhism, which resembles the Eleatics so closely that it can’t be convergent evolution. I’m looking now for a parallel with Ptolemaic metaphysics vs Indian computational positivism. (There doesn’t seem to be a good analogy here, but I’ll continue to ponder.)
And also interesting for the reflections on the Bitter Lesson. I agree with Sutton that attempts to computationalize cognitivist theories have not gone well so far, and probably never will. (That a main point of my academic AI research.) I also agree with you that the e/acc-ish maximalist interpretation is almost certainly wrong (as well as repugnant, as you note).
I became interested in philosophical ideas underlying Madhyamaka as well, largely after having read "The Embodied Mind" by Varela, Thompson, and Rosch.
An interesting take from a "Philosophical Psychology" viewpoint. Practising empiricists had long been dismissed for shallow "Phenomenologists" by Physicists but eventually prevailed on the sheer weight of accumulated evidence over which Perrin agonises in the 20th Century almost 200 years later.
As a side note, around the same time that people debated continuous vs atomic structure of matter, they were also debating analogous/similar questions regarding the nervous system. While cells were already known, the prominent theory in neuroscience at the end of the 19th and the early 20th centuries was that the brain is one large continuous network and everything is electrically coupled/wired (the "reticular theory"). The "neuron doctrine", that the tissue is composed of individual discrete cells, was only really accepted later on.
(Also, famously, the big advocate for the neuron doctrine, Ramon y Cajal, has based his case using the experimental technique for staining tissue that was developed by the big advocate of the reticular theory, Golgi).
Thanks for reviewing this chapter in the history of science. It's mind boggling indeed that only 100 years ago many thought atoms were only a convenient way to calculate! I tried to sketch an account of how we update the way we see the world (from intuitively to scientifically) in a recent blog post myself. You have a great account of the beautiful notion of the universality of a mole of "stuff" and that mysterious Avogadro's number... thanks
Interesting analogy here with physicists regarding heliocentrism as a convenient fiction for more accurate prediction calculations than geocentrism, for decades after Copernicus, since heliocentrism obviously made no physical sense and violated everything we knew about everything.
(This is covered at length in Kuhn's _Copernican Revolution_, which is in many ways a better book than _Scientific Revolutions_, although also less significant.)
Yes! But we associate Copernicus with pre-Enlightenment, so it's easy to dismiss geocentrism as the fantasies of the pre-scientific mind or something. I'm still blow away by atoms being a 20th century consensus. The scientific paradigm shifts between 1880-1945 are unprecedented. Relativity is probably the least interesting one of them all.
There's an interesting parallel here with Indian astronomers' calculations and the underlying philosophical commitments, as I recently wrote here: https://realizable.substack.com/p/on-computational-positivism
Thank you, this was very interesting!
For two reasons:
I’ve long been interested in the relationship between Greek and Indian philosophy, particularly regarding Madhyamaka, a foundational philosophy for Mahayana Buddhism, which resembles the Eleatics so closely that it can’t be convergent evolution. I’m looking now for a parallel with Ptolemaic metaphysics vs Indian computational positivism. (There doesn’t seem to be a good analogy here, but I’ll continue to ponder.)
And also interesting for the reflections on the Bitter Lesson. I agree with Sutton that attempts to computationalize cognitivist theories have not gone well so far, and probably never will. (That a main point of my academic AI research.) I also agree with you that the e/acc-ish maximalist interpretation is almost certainly wrong (as well as repugnant, as you note).
Thank you!
I became interested in philosophical ideas underlying Madhyamaka as well, largely after having read "The Embodied Mind" by Varela, Thompson, and Rosch.
An interesting take from a "Philosophical Psychology" viewpoint. Practising empiricists had long been dismissed for shallow "Phenomenologists" by Physicists but eventually prevailed on the sheer weight of accumulated evidence over which Perrin agonises in the 20th Century almost 200 years later.
I remember being convinced by Mach for a while, but images of atoms (newish at the time) settled the question for me.
As a side note, around the same time that people debated continuous vs atomic structure of matter, they were also debating analogous/similar questions regarding the nervous system. While cells were already known, the prominent theory in neuroscience at the end of the 19th and the early 20th centuries was that the brain is one large continuous network and everything is electrically coupled/wired (the "reticular theory"). The "neuron doctrine", that the tissue is composed of individual discrete cells, was only really accepted later on.
(Also, famously, the big advocate for the neuron doctrine, Ramon y Cajal, has based his case using the experimental technique for staining tissue that was developed by the big advocate of the reticular theory, Golgi).
Thanks for reviewing this chapter in the history of science. It's mind boggling indeed that only 100 years ago many thought atoms were only a convenient way to calculate! I tried to sketch an account of how we update the way we see the world (from intuitively to scientifically) in a recent blog post myself. You have a great account of the beautiful notion of the universality of a mole of "stuff" and that mysterious Avogadro's number... thanks