Hello Curt, nice post. From your conversation with Neil De Grasse Tyson, I recall that he not only dismissed philosophy of science as useless, but earlier in the conversation, when you started to talk about Chaitin’s incompleteness theorem, NDT dismissed it as just a distraction that would potentially even have distracted astrophysicists from making great progress for the past 50 years if they had wasted time thinking about such issues. This brings me to something strongly related which is highly relevant to your show: The root cause of the 50 year stagnation of is essentially physicists not having studied Kolmogorov complexity enough. This is explained in this new paper which also mentions Chaitin’s incompleteness theorem somewhere: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.23194
Hello Curt, nice post. From your conversation with Neil De Grasse Tyson, I recall that he not only dismissed philosophy of science as useless, but earlier in the conversation, when you started to talk about Chaitin’s incompleteness theorem, NDT dismissed it as just a distraction that would potentially even have distracted astrophysicists from making great progress for the past 50 years if they had wasted time thinking about such issues. This brings me to something strongly related which is highly relevant to your show: The root cause of the 50 year stagnation of is essentially physicists not having studied Kolmogorov complexity enough. This is explained in this new paper which also mentions Chaitin’s incompleteness theorem somewhere: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.23194
Hi Curt. Excellent post!
Philosophy without physics is ham. Physics without philosophy is eggs. Together they’re breakfast.
That is a useless worldview though. Philosohy is totalizing; and therefore tautological - it contains no information.
If you accept it - you are doing philosophy.
If you reject it - you are also doing Philosohy.
Heads you are right; tails - I am wrong.
How does one actually escape this sort of intellectual totalitarianism?
It is precisely the kind of hedging that makes people dislike philosophers and the subtle air of intellectual imperialism around it.
Is it even that philosophy is useful - or is it that anything useful just gets subsumed as “Philosophy”?
In the end everybody is still doing ontology engineering. Some engineered ontologies survive whatever selection pressures we subject them to.
If our utility functions intersect - great! I’ll borrow your ontology when it suits me.