Oxford announces new degree in Computer Science and Philosophy

The point of a philosophy education is not to teach you anything in particular; there's no body of knowledge to absorb in the same way that there is for math or any scientific or engineering discipline. At most, you can treat a philosophy education as a history course focusing on the history of human thought (which is why, in response to some other posters, it's important in philosophy to study the past, even if no one believes such things anymore: it's more like history than physics).

The really valuable thing for me, however, was learning the process itself: how to make assumptions and pre-conditions clear and separate them from the rest of your thinking, how to make arguments clearly and fairly, how to break complex questions or topics down into smaller pieces and the put them back together, how to not take it personally when someone disagrees with you. A philosophy course of study will also make you a better, clearer writer and communicator. (And yes, sure, there's plenty of room for BSing and incomprehensibility in there, but if you take that away from a philosophy course you're missing out.)

All those skills translate and complement computer science very well. At its core, the process of software engineering (as opposed to just programming) is the art of taking something really complex and breaking it down into the right set of components: ones that are large enough to be useful, but small enough to be correct, and with the right relationships between them. Taking a large program or problem and breaking it down like that is basically exactly the same set of skills that you develop when you study (and do) analytic philosophy. Being able to clearly separate assumptions, facts, conjecture, predictions, and arguments is also a key skill in a domain like CS where thinking outside the box, as it were, is always important, and where the rules and possibilities change so rapidly. And of course, it never hurts to become a better writer: I've worked with and known some brilliant engineers who were far less productive than they should have been simply because they couldn't present their ideas clearly enough to other people, and there's simply no way to get a team to all work in the same direction if they don't all share the same vision. A brilliant idea that no one else understands because it's been poorly communicated is usually fairly worthless.

As an aside: I know PG doesn't seem to think he got much value out of his philosophy classes, but I wonder if his essays would be as clearly thought out and put together as they are without it. I certainly know my own writing would be far less clear (and far less rigorous) if I hadn't done my BA in philosophy and if I'd just focused on CS.

That is the point many in this thread are trying to make. The essence of the question is usually more persistent than it first seems.

That the physical can influence or even determine the mental has been known for at least as long as 3000 years. Those particular experiments you reference don't add much to the philosophical discussion of libertarianism at all.

However, I think the true philosophical problem of free will is deciding what exactly a "will" is and what it means to be "free". You've got to answer that question before you can decide whether free will is compatible or incompatible with determinism.

"when something has been solved by science, philosophers stop worrying about that realm so much"

The "so much" part was what troubled me -- most of the philosophy of mind class was historical developments, etc., but occasionally it did step into the realm of science, while ignoring everything science had to offer. Perhaps I had an ill-informed professor, but when the parent says that philosophy of mind deals with "messy questions", that suggests that sometimes it can tread on the toes of fact, even if unintentionally. The inability to recognize when that was happening was what disappointed me.