and i thought that this wiki article was created automatically by a wikipedia bot - in this case it would have been more complete (interesting why they don't use a bot to create the list of lists of lists)
I wonder how they were able to agree on a list of "Unsolved problems in philosophy". My best guess is they didn't involve philosophers in the creation of the list.
Many of those problems are of the "seriously, who cares?" sort! For example: "How many straws can you remove from a bale before it's not longer a bale?", which has the answer "Words are not meant to be numerically precise so stop inventing problems"
This is the new anti-intellectualism. Highly technical people displaying complete unwillingness to engage with philosophical problems, understand why they are problems, why they are difficult, and how their first-pass solution is massively flawed.
I don't disagree with this in general principle, but "how many straws can you remove from a bale" points pretty transparently to the failed mapping between our black-and-white language and the shades-of-grey world. It's a shallow insight and to refer to it as an "unsolved problem" feels very strange to me. What depth am I missing?
Not anti-intellectualism at all, and not even anti-philosophy.
If I'm anti- anything, I am against those philosophers who refuse to make disprovable assertions and instead use rhetoric and non-formal logic to make their points.
The reason is simple, their stuff comes and goes. They contradict each other -- and often do not accept scientific fact simply because they do not understand it.
Philosophy was once the only way to investigate some particularly hard problems, such as "where do we come from?" or "what is the mind?". With recent scientific and technological advances, we actually got some fact-based answers there. Cosmology, standard model, evolutionary biology, neuroscience are evidence-based sciences that override, and often contradict, most philosophical speculations of the past. A lot of philosophers simply do not have the domain knowledge anymore.
I know that some argue that those sciences are philosophy, but, frankly, that's stretching reality.
No, that's just the very bad problem. Normaly we'd use several different words to describe various amount of hay.
This is problem is on par with "have you already stopped to beat your wife?"
Pseudo-intelectualism is just another form of anti-intelectualism.
Exactly. I forgot which exact essay but Paul Graham has a great point about most controversies in philosophy being an argument over imprecise definitions. Exceptionally intelligent, young would-be philosophers see this and thus choose not to study philosophy, leading to the current situation where we have few incisive professional academic philosophers. If it's worth anything, I feel I learned more about how to live a good life from reading Graham's essays than in three semesters of studying academic philosophy in college.
Aside: paraphrasing another answer, you can remove all of the straws from a bale, and you're left with a bale of zero straws.
I guess 'all the straws' is as many as you can remove. If you removed any more than that, you would have to put some back to return to bale of zero straws.
I have reconciled to the fact that, we will never be able to solve physics. There is recursive why, which we can never stop with, there will be always smaller and bigger things to deal with.
By what reasoning did you come to the conclusion that there will 'always be bigger and smaller things to deal with?'
I'm interested in if there is a compelling reason to believe this? I'm not attempting to argue that we are near complete knowledge of the universe (and especially what potentially may lie beyond or outside of it, if there is anything or not).
Absolutely. A lot of my thesis could be considered classical mechanics (orbital dynamics, specifically). A very old problem that is still open is the question of whether the solar system is stable. (Newton worked on this question 300 years ago.) The state of the art can only reliably integrate orbits for the next few million years. After that, numerical limitations and chaos make it hard to predict exactly what the dynamics in the far future will be. All we can do is make statistical predictions (which we hope are unbiased).
The best predictions are that there is a ~1% chance that two planets will collide before the Sun dies. Here's a nice article:
I remember being told once that we don't have good simulation techniques for predicting the sounds produced by, for instance, the collision of two solid bodies. Lots of work has been done on modeling the kinematics and the optical appearance, but not on the audio side.
there's still interesting issues of numerical accuracy in the point-mass case: E.G. is there a "good" way to calculate positions to arbitrary precision given starting conditions given in arbitrary precision, and what the relationship is.
I think the granular pile problem is still unsolved: Can you predict the cone angle of a pile of granular material given a small set of initial parameters?
I heard somewhere that when we apply all our knowledge to compute the position of the moon, it is a couple of feet off when we measure it, and we don't know why.
I have been trying to find a source for that, but I've failed. Perhaps someone reading this knows? :)
These are general overall topics. Dive into any one of them and you'll find hundreds if not thousands of open questions. My particular field was amorphous solids and the glassy phase transition but yeesh boiling it down to just one questions is big over simplification.
Don't worry, plenty of things out there we don't understand :)
