Order of Kilopi
Chris posted this link to a cartoon exchange between a philosopher and an engineer on another thread.
I don't wish to hijack that thread, so I'm reposting the link here. I'll be interested to hear opinions.
Who does the cartoonist think is the loser in the brief exchange?
Why, on the internal evidence of the cartoon, are engineers banned from philosophy conferences?
Grant Hutchison
Order of Kilopi
Obviously it isn't possible to anlyse the exchange without bringing one's own preconceptions into it. As an engineer, I'd like to think that the engineer "won" by deflating the pompous, pseudo-intellectual claptrap of the philosopher with practical, down-to-earth, calling-a-spade-a-spade, no-nonsense answers.
But clearly, engineers are banned because they aren't prepared to engage in an intelligent debate. They think that by ingoring all the subtleties of the problem they have solved it. In fact, all they have done is swept the problem under the carpet. Engineering solution to a bigger problem? Get a bigger carpet!
Order of Kilopi
That's why I love the cartoon, and I'm genuinely not sure who the cartoonist thinks is the loser of the debate. I know who I think loses, and I'll say why later, but I am interested to get opinions.Originally Posted by Strange
Grant Hutchison
Honored Member
Ha.
I think the joke is that they are talking about two different things and don't realize it.
I've had a very similar debate for almost two decades now on the recording and transmission/duplication of digital information.
Moderator
Obviously, the philosophers lost, because now they don't have any engineers at their conferences. Before, they did. Net loss.
Order of Kilopi
I wish I had said that!
Established Member
Engineers do not have the luxury of time to debate philosophical ideas. They produce tangible items, ususally under a fixed, sometimes rapid, timeframe. If an engineer takes an exhorbitant amount of time to produce a design, there is an adage for that: At some time in the project, you have to shoot the designer and get on with production.
Furthermore, engineers do not have the luxury of precision beyond what is required for margins of safety, in producing products. An engineer and a philosopher argued over this situation:
You are at one end of a room and there is a beautiful woman (smart woman for those of you BAUTers who voted that way in the poll) at the other end of the room. You may move 1/2 the remaining distance toward her each second.
The philosopher will not attempt to move toward the woman because he will never reach the woman (only after an infinite number of seconds), so the journey is futile.
The engineer took the journey, because he knows he will get close enough.
Established Member
It seems to me that the cartoonist was making fun of both of them. On one hand, I can laugh at the engineer because he's clearly missed the point. On the other hand, I can laugh at the philosopher because, practically speaking, the question he's asking is stupid.
As a programmer, I laugh at them both. This is a real problem with practical implications that I actually do encounter in real life, and they've both missed the point: The engineer fails to realize there's a conundrum there, and the philosopher fails to understand that it really doesn't matter which one you pick as long as you're consistent about it.
Order of Kilopi
Well I actually have a good friend who is getting his Master's on his way to his PHD in philosophy. Just listening to him grade papers with a couple of other TA's is an education. I have a couple of points.
One, a couple of very vocal members, whos physics I have the highest regard for, seem to have the heads firmly entrenched with regard to the actual state of modern philosophy. Seriously. It's almost like they want to bash priests, but can't due to the no religeon clause, so they take it out on the philosophers.
That's like small children having a tantrum and claiming not to be related to their own mothers. What? Physics was born like Venus? Rising out of the ocean on a seashell? Or was it a direct offshoot of the laws of correct and honest observation put forth by the schools of philosophy?
And even the cartoon isn't accurate because in philosophy there was the concept of uniqueness called haicisity* (sp?) that specifically deals with this situation and was old by the late 1800's.
Now there are some present day theorectical philosophers who boggle even my friend. That's there job. And one is proposing the consequences of the reality of parallel Universes that has a similar theme to that cartoon.
Believe it or not philosophy has a peer review.
Now....how many of you physicists don't think that whole cartoon couldn't be reversed, as from the perspective of the layman, with some really wild, new and theorectical. Wait, what? black holes are real, physical, macro-scale objects but only have three physical qualities? Mass, temperature and spin? No surface, no volume, no height, width or depth, no color...Yeah, I know, that was from the fifties, but I was trying to make it as accurate as that cartoon.
*phonetically pronounced HEXsisity.
Moderator
But, to push the metaphor even further than even I would've expected, someone may revere their grandparents, but detest their cousins.
Member
Normally, the diametral positions are taken by "natural scientists" and "human scientist" (as a sum-up of all not-natural sciences). Here, philosopher and engineer are substitutes.
Philosophy: looking for logical rules in a thought system of possible interactions -> does not meet the needs of most people. So far: in most cases irrelevant; Philosopher ask questions most people are not interested in in give answer nobody needs.
Natural Science: looking for logical rules in the only known real system (universe) -> knowledge may help to prevent fatalities So most people accept scientific rearch, but mostly, if there is a direct economic benefit.
Engeneering: the trial to achive a technology out of the knowledge of natural sciences -> Engineers are doing the best which the known matter and giving that benefits people demand for the investment of research.
Between 1 and 2 there is mostly no overlap.
The problem with all not-natural science is a lack in valuability and, because there are no experiments, questions for replicability and verificationability do not arise. Everything is only opinion, and therefore there is no progression. "Believing", not "Knowledge" is the basic of that methode. It is interesting to see that a special type of people is attracted by "human sciences" and there are problems in most cases, when they start to cope with procedures coming from mathematics and natural sciences.
By the way: a clone is not a 1 to 1 copy on atomic level. Even the arrangement of cells is different, also some epigenetic markers in the DNA coming from biochemical reaction of a metabolism to the environment.
Order of Kilopi
I don't see why (the cartoon's) conversation needs a "winner"; it's just a difference in view. Though I'd personally agree with the engineer.
Bad Post-Doc
The philosopher's side of the debate reminds me of the sort of thing you talk about in the dorms at two in the morning. It sounds all powerful and deep, and then you wake up the next morning and realize it wasn't. The question works for bacteria, but not for something which doesn't just reproduce by cell division.
_____________________________________________
Gillian
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Order of Kilopi
Same here. I'd say the engineer won.Obviously it isn't possible to anlyse the exchange without bringing one's own preconceptions into it. As an engineer, I'd like to think that the engineer "won" by deflating the pompous, pseudo-intellectual claptrap of the philosopher with practical, down-to-earth, calling-a-spade-a-spade, no-nonsense answers.
Moderator
Except in this case.
The first sentence of the cartoon says "So...if a perfect duplicate of you is made,"
Member
Yes, "if"...
"perfect duplicates" are ruled out by the Pauli principle if not made out of bosones...
Order of Kilopi
A lot of this discussion seems to argue about the cloning process as we know it; however the first panel of the cartoon only says "if a duplicate you was made". I took that to mean some as-now unknown (and likely impossible) process that exactly copies you atom by atom in an instant, rather than cultivates a new living being through what we know as cloning. That said:
I agree; the cartoonist needed a better philosophical question to propose. A copy is a copy, even if it's identical to the original. It just is.
Order of Kilopi
One big difference: the Philosopher lives in the world of abstract ideas, so things like perfect duplicates are possible. The Engineer lives in the real world, where the constraints of Physics (known and not-yet-known) must apply.
Since I'm an Engineer, you can probably guess which world I live in most of the time (and who I think won). But I enjoy occasional visits to the other world, too.
Established Member
If I understand what the idea was, then I think the real problem is that the philosopher in the cartoon worded the question poorly.
The hypothetical isn't supposed to be that you take an object and then Xerox it. It's supposed to be that it sort of splits by binary fission, like in the bacteria example mentioned above, except the additional assumption is that the two "child" objects both perfectly identical to the original.
As I mentioned, it's a sort of contrived situation, but a situation like this can and does happen in computer science. There's an operation called "forking" where a process is split into two identical copies - same code, same data, same everything. Depending on how the computer's operating environment is set up, it is possible to end up in a situation where the child processes have any way of distinguishing between each other. (In reality the case is that one is a copy of the other and they can be distinguished, but that information isn't necessarily available to the program.) A situation like that can be a real problem. Usually if you're forking a process it's because you want the two child processes to be doing two different tasks, and if they're given no way to reliably and consistently identify themselves according to some "original/copy"-type distinction, then it's potentially much harder for the programmer to ensure that each does a different task instead of both doing the same task and the other being neglected.
So of course in any well-designed system the operating environment does supply both of the children with some way to distinguish between themselves. But there are always poorly-designed systems.
All this by way of saying, the question isn't just stoner philosophy. Computer software is abstract, sure, but it's not imaginary, and it is possible for a software engineer who hasn't really thought about the problem this philosopher is talking about to unwittingly create a design flaw that lives in the real world.
Order of Kilopi
I'm calling this as a nonsense question because the philosopher was set up from the beginning to fail. His stance only represents a poor stereo-type. Edit to remove unnessasary insult: Ah, everybody knows I'm a loud blow hard, I don't need to underline it. I apologize to the cartoonist. (No, nobody yelled at me. I can think this stuff up on my own.)
If I shoot my opponent in the foot before a race, enigineeringly speaking, I'm the faster contestant in that race. Philisophically speaking I'm a poophead and a cheater. There are no physics laws governing poopheads and cheaters or the secondary motives of things with free will, only philisophical ones.
Last edited by BigDon; 2010-May-14 at 08:32 AM. Reason: what I said.
Order of Kilopi
If there was a process which instantly made a an atom-for atom copy (not a clone; bad philosopher - that's a common misuse of a biological term) of a human then you could tell which was the original and which was the copy by its location.
If you wanted to continue to tell the difference betweeen them you could keep the copy in a locked rooms. The Society for the prevention of cruelty to exact copies might object, but (going on the internal evidence of the cartoon) it is possible to define the difference. Therefore the engineer was right and the philosopher was annoying.
Oh, and the fact that the copy was in a different location would satisfy the Exclusion Principle as well, methinks.
Order of Kilopi
The whole conversation reminded me a little bit of one of the Discworld books, where [spoiler] Granny Weatherwax and another witch are trapped in a mirror maze and have to figure out which [of the multiple images of themselves] is the real one in order to exit.
Granny solves the problem with the engineer's approach.
I have always agreed with her on that point.
Moderator
I think the idea was to use the wording of the cartoon, so for purposes of this thread, it was worded correctly.
Probably, only philosophers make that mistake.
Established Member
Engineer won because his final answer to Q."who's to say which came first" A"The guy who came first" was both very scientific and very philosophical at the same time - so much so that it epitomized the scientific v. philosophical clash.
Order of Kilopi
That is one of the funniest, and truest, things I've seen on this forum!
Personally, I think the cartoonist is knocking the philosophers, essentially taking the same stance we see here all the time: engineers deal in the truth, philosophers deal in shadows and mirages of their own making. Further, banning the engineers is intended as an added jab at the philosophers-- not only can they not see the truth, they cannot even deal with it when they are confronted by it, so they just ban it.
However, I also agree with all the points Grant has made about how this narrow view of the exchange misses essentially its entire purpose for existing. The cartoonist is the creationist knocking Darwinism-- a cartoon like that writes itself, imagine your own version.
Order of Kilopi
There's a "clash" between science and philosophy? What clash is that? Science asserts truths based in its criteria, philosophy says "that's a nice criteria you have there, let's look under its hood." That's what philosophy says about everything. There's no clash, there's merely a search for consistency, or an ignoring of that search.
Order of Kilopi
They both fail because a scientist is busy working while they are arguing.
Established Member
Responding to the cartoon, the last frame was a philosopher banning engineers from future conferences. It appeared to me such a severe ban was based upon his perceived clashing of engineers and philosophers.
Order of Kilopi
Haecceity; "thisness".
We probably all agree that the original and the "clone" acquire separate "thisness" as they live separate lives. But the engineer's answer seems to be about "wasness": he seems to believe that "the guy who came first" can tell that he came first, simply by introspection.
The cartoon philosopher defines his perfect duplicate at the atomic level. There have been a couple of calculations (one by Tegmark) which suggest that's "good enough" to transfer the instantaneous contents of a central nervous system.
The engineer appears a little triumphalist in his last declaration. So I think the cartoon is intended to have a winner and a loser. I do wonder which the cartoonist had in mind, however.
Yes, but that one's out of the box, with cloned phones and credit cards. The philosopher has (as philosophers do) defined his usage pretty well.
But the engineer didn't just say "it's possible"; he said "the guy who came first" can tell the difference.
Grant Hutchison
Order of Kilopi
What if the peculiar nature of the copying process causes the original to be moved three feet to the left, while the copy appears three feet to the right of where the original was standing. Or is it that the original moves three feet to the right, and the copy appears on the left? I can't remember which way we set the controls. Maybe we can ask the two of them which one was the original and which one was the copy to sort it out?
Conserve energy. Commute with the Hamiltonian.
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