I've believed for many years that Plato got something incredibly fundamentally wrong: he believed that logic, math, and the language of thought was primary and preceded existence.
This error underlies all kinds of things all the way up to and including the present-day philosophical fad of "rationalism." (the Yudkowski variety)
It's a popular idea because it's a "truthy" idea. When we introspect, thought feels primary, and there are certain patterns that exist in the universe that are so fundamental that they seem to precede any concrete.
Logic and mathematics are chief among these. It is impossible to imagine a universe where 2+2=15 or not-true=true. The apparent transcendental fixity of these things leads us to think there exists some category of truths that precede existence.
I do believe these things are fixed and axiomatic, but I do not believe this implies that they precede existence. It implies that they are deep fundamental laws of the universe, and nothing more. Being something that exists within and is embodied in this universe means that we have inductively learned (both through evolution and neural learning) these laws. We can't imagine a universe where they are different because such a universe would be fundamentally alien to a degree that would invalidate our very cognitive processes. Something that evolved in such a universe -- if such a universe were even able to support life -- would have an utterly alien form and function.
Ultimately it all reduces to the anthropic principle. We are here and exist in this universe because we are having this conversation. If we didn't exist, we would not be, and if the universe were fundamentally different we might be having a similar conversation in which we assume those laws are axiomatic and immutable, and would be incapable of imagining any different.
I think this is a very bad error, and one with a body count. It leads to beliefs like "only one form of human being is consistent with the eternal order of nature," which implies that anything else is an abomination and should be marginalized or killed.
I leads to insane forms of magical thinking like New Thought / "The Secret" / prosperity gospel / etc. where people believe that our thoughts determine reality. It leads to nonsense like the AI hard takeoff "foom" idea, which only makes sense if you think that a sufficiently intelligent being can deduce all that it needs to know from the laws of logic and mathematics without embodiment. (The Yudkowski super-AI is just a philosopher king.)
I don't think it's a coincidence that Plato is the father of many forms of authoritarianism either. Authoritarianism naturally precedes from the idea of transcendent laws that can be grasped by sufficiently intelligent philosopher kings without feedback from reality.
Edit:
I'm not 100% certain it's impossible to imagine mathematically and logically alien universes. I wonder if one could simulate such a universe by encoding an alien system of logic/math behind the scenes in the form of a kind of translation table. There's been some work in artificial life and cellular automata like this.
You're essentially describing Idealism vs Materialism.
Related is Nietzsche thinking he was the one to overturn Plato. Heidegger thought that Nietzsche was instead the logical conclusion of metaphysics. Heidegger's project was about "returning to the Question of Being" which he thought was first occluded by Plato, so he is in strong conversation with the Pre-Socratics. Deleuze has an interesting critique of Plato built on flipping the latter's hierarchy of model and copy.
> insane forms of magical thinking like [...] where people believe that our thoughts determine reality.
This can't be hand-waved away as easily as you might think.
Yes, those are the proper terms.
Nietzsche was weird. He was not an idealist but he posited this transcendent idea of "will" which is basically New Thought. But I'm not an expert on Nietzsche so maybe there is more nuance here.
There is a kernel of truth to New Thought and its kindred ideas -- if you believe in your future success, you are less likely to become discouraged. In many cases success is claimed by those who are willing to fail over, and over, and over, and over again until they succeed. But that's a brain hack, not metaphysics. Your thoughts have determined your behavior, which has increased your odds of success, which can then be retroactively interpreted as magic if you are so inclined.
As far as hand waving it away -- I think the burden of proof is on those who claim such an extraordinary thing as "our thoughts determine reality." I want to see someone actually bend a spoon without touching it. Then we'll talk.
>But I'm not an expert on Nietzsche so maybe there is more nuance here.
not just more nuance, that's a straight up misreading of Nietzsche. For one Nietzsche rejected any notion of transcendence, free will and was an (idiosyncratic) materialist and not a self help writer. He did not think you could manifest success by believing in it, or even that this mattered.
In fact one of his central ideas, Eternal Recurrence, implies the exact opposite. He argued that you ought to imagine the worst possible state you can be in, recurring over and over and say yes to the world purely out of love of fate, Amor Fati
"My formula for greatness in a human being is amor fati: that one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity. Not merely bear what is necessary, still less conceal it—all idealism is mendacity in the face of what is necessary—but love it"
Will in Nietzsche is immanent, he had nothing to do with New Thought, an as far as I'm aware idealistic American religious movement, he couldnt' be farther away from it if you tried to be honest.
The Will to Power is a complicated concept that can be interpreted many different ways. And actually his whole point was attempting a purely immanent philosophy. WtP is not a transcendent.
The idea of Platonic forms (and rejection of it) is better thought of as the debate between Universalism and Nominalism. Does there exist an perfect, "ideal" representation of a Chair, or is a Chair just a human construct made of it's constituent parts?
Funnily enough, Computer Science is quite platonic, the concept of OOP with classes and instances is pretty much a direct analogy between a platonic form and it's instance, and conceptually we have ideas like the Turing Machine that can be defined as universals that would exist in any culture. In contrast, much of "Continental" Philosophy and the associated Postmodern and Critical Theory movements are very much motivated by the rejection of universalism and the "great other" for a more cynical view of power dynamics shape the discourse of language itself.
Counterpoint: I think Plato was right that logic and math are primary and precede existence, although timeless so precede doesn't have much meaning.
It's one of the good bits of Plato unlike advocating for dictatorship and many iffy things. I don't see how it leads on to all the other things you mention like Yudkowski and The Secret.
I disagree about math and logic being somehow constrained by our lack of imagination or cognitive processes. However, I also don’t think that “existence” is a real thing. What exactly is it supposed to mean? All else being equal, what is the difference between something that exists and something that doesn’t (but conceivably could exist)? The fact that we are able to perceive it in our universe? That would be a strangely subjective notion. The fact that it is part of the universe we live in? But the non-existent thing is part of its own universe that we just happen to not live in. So that reduces back to the subjective notion.
It seems more parsimonious to me to not assume that there is a strange boolean flag “exists” attached to things, and that everything logically possible just is, and we are merely part of the logically possible things.
> It implies that they are deep fundamental laws of the universe
Rather they are deep fundamentals of what your brain can contain, so you perceive them as fundamental to the universe.
If we admit there are all sorts of phenomena which we cannot observe directly, which we ultimately observe through machines we construct -- does your imagination permit that there are possibly thoughts that are literally unthinkable to you? What would an artifact that allows us to contain some shadow or essence of these thoughts look like?
> This error underlies all kinds of things all the way up to and including the present-day philosophical fad of "rationalism." (the Yudkowski variety)
I’m not sure where you’ve gotten the impression that Yudkowsky and the rationalists are Platonists, it’s totally false. Almost all of them are hardcore nominalists, and several have written very lengthy diatribes about how ontological categories are purely human constructs which are only useful insofar as they serve human needs.
Many argue that rationalism itself, the elevation of reason above all other values and forms of knowledge, descends directly from Plato. I have only read a few of the Socratic dialogues myself, but I certainly have gotten the impression that this is a reasonable take on Plato and a departure from earlier traditions such as the Pythagoreans and other pre-Socratics -- most notably Parmenides -- who did not take a purely rationalistic view.
The person I'm replying to isn't talking about "rationalists" in the sense of Descartes and Spinoza, they mean the people in the Bay Area who read Eliezer Yudkowsky and talk about AI safety. And those people are not Platonists in the least. If anything, the usual accusation levied at them is that they drift too far in the nominalist direction. This is evident in pretty much all their writing, so I'm wondering where the GP is getting the impression that Platonism is their intellectual original sin.