Top modern philosophy books

Want to know what passes as a great modern philosophy book? Here are the top ones with some relation to science (and a couple of others):

Most-cited Anglophone philosophy books published since WWII (according to Google Scholar)

These are rounded to the nearest 100. I tried to find all post-WWII philosophy books with at least 5,000 citations. ...

1. Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) (89,500)

2. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (1971) (65,000)

8. Karl Popper, Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge (1963) (15,700)

14. Jerry Fodor, The Modularity of Mind (1983) (12,800)

16. Daniel Dennett, Consciousness Explained (1991) (11,100)

20. Karl Popper, Objective Knowledge:  An Evolutionary Approach (1972) (10,100)

21. Paul Feyerabend, Against Method (1975) (9,900)
Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945) (9,500)
John Searle, The Construction of Social Reality (1995) (8,400)
Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons (1984) (8,200)
David Chalmers, The Conscious Mind (1996) (7,400)
Jerry Fodor, The Language of Thought (1975) (7,300)
Daniel Dennett, Darwin's Dangerous Idea (1995) (7,000)
Martha Nussbaum, Women and Human Development:  The Capabilities Approach (2001) (6,900)
Hubert Dreyfus, Stuart Dreyfus & T. Athanasiou, Mind over Machine (2000) (6.800)
John Searle, Intentionality (1983) (6,500)

Popper occasionally said sensible things, but those are disavowed by modern philosphers.

Where are the philosophers who have contributed to modern scientific understanding? These books have hurt the cause of science more than they are helped.

Isosceles triangles and common sense

Geography professor and popular anthropology writer Jared Diamond writes:

In fact, common sense should be invoked more often in scientific discussions, where it is sometimes deficient and scorned. Scientists may string out a detailed argument that reaches an implausible conclusion contra ...

The proof purported to demonstrate that all triangles are isosceles, i.e. have two equal sides. Of course that conclusion is wrong: most triangles have unequal sides, and only a tiny fraction has two equal sides. ...

The proof tacitly assumed that that perpendicular bisector did intersect the triangle’s base, as is true for isosceles and nearly-isosceles triangles. ...

Conclusion: don’t get bogged down in following the details of a proof, if it leads to an implausible conclusion.

He apparently never understood the flaw, as his reasoning would imply that a nearly-isosceles triange must be isosceles.

Mathematics is all about understanding what is a valid proof, and what is not. Diamond did not get the point.

It figures, as his books are filled with illogical arguments that he takes to be conclusive.

Here is his second example:

This discovery became explained only two decades later by Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity, for which the Michelson-Morley experiment offered crucial support.

Another two decades later, though, another physicist carried out a complicated re-analysis of Michelson’s and Morley’s experiment. He concluded that their conclusion had been wrong. If so, that would have shaken the validity of Einstein’s formulation of relativity. Of course Einstein was asked his assessment of the re-analysis. His answer, in effect, was: “I don’t have to waste my time studying the details of that complex re-analysis to figure out what’s wrong with it. Its conclusion is obviously wrong.” That is, Einstein was relying on his common sense. Eventually, other physicists did waste their time on studying the re-analysis, and did discover where it had made a mistake.

This is a funny one, because the textbooks agree that Michelson-Morley was crucial for the development and demonstration of relativity, but Einstein himself regarded it as unimportant for his contribution. That is because Einstein's work was largely a reformulation of Lorentz's, and Einstein relied on Lorentz's analysis of Michelson-Morley.

The experiment was re-done many times. If Einstein did not care much about the first experiment, why would he bother with the subsequent ones? This is a story of indifference, not common sense.

Diamond ends up arguing that the Clovis ppl were the first settlers of the Americas. I have no idea about that.

Predicting quantum supremacy for 2017

SciAm reports:

Quantum computing has long seemed like one of those technologies that are 20 years away, and always will be. But 2017 could be the year that the field sheds its research-only image.

Computing giants Google and Microsoft recently hired a host of leading lights, and have set challenging goals for this year. Their ambition reflects a broader transition taking place at start-ups and academic research labs alike: to move from pure science towards engineering.

“People are really building things,” says Christopher Monroe, a physicist at the University of Maryland in College Park who co-founded the start-up IonQ in 2015. “I’ve never seen anything like that. It’s no longer just research.”

Google started working on a form of quantum computing that harnesses superconductivity in 2014. It hopes this year, or shortly after, to perform a computation that is beyond even the most powerful ‘classical’ supercomputers — an elusive milestone known as quantum supremacy. Its rival, Microsoft, is betting on an intriguing but unproven concept, topological quantum computing, and hopes to perform a first demonstration of the technology.

The quantum-computing start-up scene is also heating up. ...

Academic labs are at a similar point.

I am predicting that none of these groups achieve quantum supremacy in 2017, but the year will end with everyone predicting it for 2018. And that pattern will repeat for a few years.

Whereas classical computers encode information as bits that can be in one of two states, 0 or 1, the ‘qubits’ that comprise quantum computers can be in ‘superpositions’ of both at once. This, together with qubits’ ability to share a quantum state called entanglement, should enable the computers to essentially perform many calculations at once. And the number of such calculations should, in principle, double for each additional qubit, leading to an exponential speed-up.

Scott Aaronson likes to say that this explanation is wrong, because quantum computers do not necessarily get an exponential speedup.

These articles do not even cite any skeptics anymore. There is a consensus. They are so far committed that I expect them to refuse to admit that they have been proven wrong for about ten years after they have been proven wrong. And I predict that they will be proven wrong.

The Trouble with Quantum Mechanics

Steven Weinberg writes The Trouble with Quantum Mechanics in the NY Review of Books:

The development of quantum mechanics in the first decades of the twentieth century came as a shock to many physicists. Today, despite the great successes of quantum mechanics, arguments continue about its meaning, and its future. ...

Probability enters Newtonian physics only when our knowledge is imperfect, ...

Many physicists came to think that the reaction of Einstein and Feynman and others to the unfamiliar aspects of quantum mechanics had been overblown. This used to be my view. After all, Newton’s theories too had been unpalatable to many of his contemporaries. ...

It is a bad sign that those physicists today who are most comfortable with quantum mechanics do not agree with one another about what it all means. The dispute arises chiefly regarding the nature of measurement in quantum mechanics. ...

The introduction of probability into the principles of physics was disturbing to past physicists, but the trouble with quantum mechanics is not that it involves probabilities. We can live with that. The trouble is that in quantum mechanics the way that wave functions change with time is governed by an equation, the Schrödinger equation, that does not involve probabilities. It is just as deterministic as Newton’s equations of motion and gravitation. That is, given the wave function at any moment, the Schrödinger equation will tell you precisely what the wave function will be at any future time. There is not even the possibility of chaos, the extreme sensitivity to initial conditions that is possible in Newtonian mechanics. So if we regard the whole process of measurement as being governed by the equations of quantum mechanics, and these equations are perfectly deterministic, how do probabilities get into quantum mechanics? ...

What then must be done about the shortcomings of quantum mechanics? One reasonable response is contained in the legendary advice to inquiring students: “Shut up and calculate!” There is no argument about how to use quantum mechanics, only how to describe what it means, so perhaps the problem is merely one of words.

This is a very strange complaint. Obviously he understands perfectly well how probability, measurement, and chaos get into quantum mechanics, because there is wide agreement on how to do the calculations that predict experiments.

So his problem is purely philosophical. If this is a problem, then I think that most theories have problems if you take them too literally and ask too many philosophical questions.

LuMo explains:

When it comes to well-defined laws governing the evolution of probabilities in time, it's just a plain stupidity to suggest that these laws are "troubling" in any sense. Quantum mechanics doesn't change anything about the meaning of probabilities, their relationship to imperfect knowledge, the existence of well-defined equations by which these probabilities evolve as well as discontinuous Bayesian/collapse changes by which the probabilities jump after an observation. The only thing that is new in quantum mechanics is the uncertainty principle (due to the nonzero commutators) which, among other things, forbids any perspective in which two generic observables are perfectly known at the same moment. The nonzero commutators make it unavoidable to talk about probabilities between 0% and 100% i.e. about imperfect knowledge. But what the "knowledge", "imperfect", "probability" etc. mean is exactly the same as it always was. ...

At any rate, I consider Weinberg to be a 100% anti-quantum zealot ... at this point. It's sad.

Weinberg's hangup about probabilities is especially strange. He says that probabilities enter classical mechanics "when our knowledge is imperfect", and enters quantum mechanics because "not everything can be simultaneously measured." Okay, I can accept that, but why is it a problem? Our knowledge is always imperfect in the classical case because of observation errors, and always imperfect in the quantum case for the additional reason that it is impossible to predict the measurement of variables that cannot be simultaneously measured. So yes, probabilities are appropriate in either case.

I can only infer that Weinberg has some conceptual misunderstanding of probability, but I don't see what it is.

He favorably describes the many-worlds interpretation, but does not endorse it.

Physics professor Frank Tipler does endorse the many worlds:

Most physicists, at least most physicists who apply quantum mechanics to cosmology, accept Everett’s argument. So obvious is Everett’s proof for the existence of these parallel universes, that Steve Hawking once told me that he considered the existence of these parallel universes “trivially true.” Everett’s insight is the greatest expansion of reality since Copernicus showed us that our star was just one of many. Yet few people have even heard of the parallel universes, or thought about the philosophical and ethical implications of their existence.

Quantum mechanics is a theory of physics on an atomic scale, so only crackpots apply quantum mechanics to cosmology. Maybe most of them believe in many-worlds, I don't know, but I really don't think that most physicists do.

Blaming Einstein for the name Relativity

Jim Holt writes:

In physics, as Emmy Noether showed us with her beautiful theorem, invariance turns out to entail the conservation of energy and other bedrock conservation principles — "a fact," noted Richard Feynman, "that most physicists still find somewhat staggering."    

And in the mind of Albert Einstein, the idea of invariance led first to e = mc², and then to the geometrization of gravity.   

So why aren't we hearing constantly about Einstein's theory of invariance? Well, "invariant theory" is what he later said he wished he had called it. And that's what it should have been called, since invariance is its very essence. The speed of light, the laws of physics are the same for all observers. They're objective, absolute — invariant. Simultaneity is relative, unreal.  

But no. Einstein had to go and talk about the "principle of relativity." So "relativity"—and not its opposite, "invariance"—is what his revolutionary theory ended up getting labeled.

No, Einstein did not conceive the geometrization of gravity. As a recent paper noted:

It is generally believed that Einstein identified gravitation with the non-Euclidean geometry of spacetime. However, contrary to common belief, as Lehmkuhl showed [7], Einstein himself did not believe that general relativity geometrized gravitation: "I do not agree with the idea that the general theory of relativity is geometrizing Physics or the gravitational field" [8].

[7] D. Lehmkuhl, Why Einstein did not believe that General Relativity geometrizes gravity. Studies in History and Philosophy of Physics, Volume 46, May 2014, pp. 316-326.
[8] A letter from Einstein to Lincoln Barnett from June 19, 1948; quoted in [7].

Einstein also did not originate the terms "relativity" or "principle of relativity". As well as I can determine, Maxwell invented the term "relativity", and Poincare popularized the "principle of relativity", long before Einstein ever wrote anything on the subject.

In short, relativity was named by those who invented it, not Einstein.

Holt likes "invariance" because it suggests a group action, but Einstein missed that. The group is called the "Lorentz group", because that is what Poincare called it in a 1905 paper that was published before Einstein submitted his famous relativity paper. Poincare named it after Lorentz, who did pioneering work on it ten years earlier.

I don't see why "invariance" is a better name anyway. The theory's origin was with attempts to understand the motion of the Earth, with a key observation being that the motion we see is relative to the Earth's frame of reference. The theory shed new light on an ancient and easy-to-understand question. Getting to invariants is a little more obscure.

The future is uncertain

Professor Anthony Sudbery writes in Aeon mag, as an intro to his forthcoming book:

Aristotle formulated the openness of the future in the language of logic. Living in Athens at a time when invasion from the sea was always a possibility, he made his argument using the following sentence: ‘There will be a sea-battle tomorrow.’ One of the classical laws of logic is the ‘law of the excluded middle’ which states that every sentence is either true or false: either the sentence is true or its negation is true. But Aristotle argued that neither ‘There will be a sea-battle tomorrow’ nor ‘There will not be a sea-battle tomorrow’ is definitely true, for both possibilities lead to fatalism; if the first statement is true, for example, there would be nothing anybody could do to avert the sea-battle. Therefore, these statements belong to a third logical category, neither true nor false. In modern times, this conclusion has been realised in the development of many-valued logic. ...

Aristotle formulated the openness of the future in the language of logic. Living in Athens at a time when invasion from the sea was always a possibility, he made his argument using the following sentence: ‘There will be a sea-battle tomorrow.’ One of the classical laws of logic is the ‘law of the excluded middle’ which states that every sentence is either true or false: either the sentence is true or its negation is true. But Aristotle argued that neither ‘There will be a sea-battle tomorrow’ nor ‘There will not be a sea-battle tomorrow’ is definitely true, for both possibilities lead to fatalism; if the first statement is true, for example, there would be nothing anybody could do to avert the sea-battle. Therefore, these statements belong to a third logical category, neither true nor false. In modern times, this conclusion has been realised in the development of many-valued logic. ...

Knowledge of the future, therefore, is limited in a fundamental way. It is not that there are true facts about the future, but the knowledge of them is not accessible to us; there are no facts out there, and there is simply no certain knowledge to be had. Nevertheless, there are facts about the future with partial degrees of truth. We can attain knowledge of the future, but that knowledge will always be uncertain.

His explanation is sensible enuf, but it is funny how he has to dive into quantum mechanics to reach the same conclusions that Aristotle reached 2.5 millennia earlier.

Yes, Laplace mentioned a deterministic fantasy in 1814, but he also had a very probabilistic view of the world.

Awe for the Second Law of thermo

Harvard psychology professor (and popular Jewish atheist science writer) Steven Pinker writes:

Why the awe for the Second Law? The Second Law defines the ultimate purpose of life, mind, and human striving: to deploy energy and information to fight back the tide of entropy and carve out refuges of beneficial order. ...

The biggest breakthrough of the scientific revolution was to nullify the intuition that the universe is saturated with purpose: that everything happens for a reason. In this primitive understanding, when bad things happen — accidents, disease, famine — someone or something must have wanted them to happen.

So science eliminated all these diverse purposes for bad things, and unified them into one central purpose that explains them all?

This is like ancient Judaism discovering that river gods, weather gods, and all the other gods could be combined into one true God. Or early scientists discovering that all known energy sources could be trace to the one Sun.

Scott Aaronson endorses Pinker's essay and adds:

Again and again, people imagine that, if their local pocket of order isn’t working how they want, then they should smash it to pieces, since while admittedly that might make things even worse, there’s also at least 50% odds that they’ll magically improve.  In reasoning thus, people fail to appreciate just how exponentially more numerous are the paths downhill, into barbarism and chaos, than are the few paths further up.  So thrashing about randomly, with no knowledge or understanding, is statistically certain to make things worse: on this point thermodynamics, common sense, and human history are all in total agreement.

He doesn't realize it, but he is making an argument for political conservatism. The policies of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton have led us downhill into barbarism and chaos. We need a government that is willing to go back to what has worked before, and make America great again.