161–170 of 177 posts
I did a math and philosophy double major. The danger of a degree like this is that the stark reality of a programming job will seem unbearably boring in comparison to what you studied in school.
Yeah, I must say that programming web apps and battling with CSS is pretty dull after studying philosophy.
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You can manage to do something like that as a CS PhD if you have the right advisor, though it's harder to pull off than it used to be as CS has gotten much more obsessed about being a rigorous science. It especially used to be the case in AI, and in some corners still is, that a good thesis makes conceptual and philosophical advances in analyzing problems and domains (or proposing new problems), which are "validated"…
I would deeply appreciate advice from you or anyone who has thoughts. I did a double major in CS and Business during my undergrad at CMU ('09) and focused very much on practical learning (read: programming/web apps) and corporate/startup endeavors. However, I was always drawn towards studying the relationship between minds and machines on my own time. Mostly triggered from Godel's theorem, reading GEB/AI books, and s…
"Big AI" isn't very much in favor currently, partly for good reasons and partly for bad reasons. There's a strong worry about being too unrigorous or philosophical or vague or even sci-fi. Academic AI probably overcorrects for a fear of being seen like crazy singularity-mongers, and there's also a legacy of having over-promised some big-AI stuff in the '50s and '60s. Most funding is also for more concrete technical projects, though there is a subset of people doing some funded research in the area of artificial creativity and creativity support (Margaret Boden and Gerhard Fischer are two entry points into that literature).
So, most research tends to be much narrower and investigate specific empirical or mathematical questions, like whether a particular reinforcement-learning algorithm converges, or how to improve an object-tracking algorithm, or something of that sort. Even in Cog Sci departments, the theses tend to be more specific, like doing an eye-tracking study that investigates some question about perception. To the extent the "bigger picture" stuff gets done at all, there's a feeling that it's a late-career thing people like Hofstadter can get away with, but it's harder to do as a PhD thesis.
Not sure that actually answered your question, but the short version is: it's hard to get in a position where you can study the kind of stuff discussed in GEB, but if you can think of more specific technical questions on the peripheries of your big-picture interests, it may be more doable.
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I was a philosophy major and my take was always that "philosophy is the study of things science hasn't yet solved". Yes, it butts up to science and when you tread over the line that helps you either prove or disprove that part of the theory. It is like a financial model for a startup. In the beginning you guess at what your revenue and expenses are. Then you learn some facts (my rent is $xxxx/mo and I currently have…
I always imagined philosophy as the study of things beyond the realm of science. By saying that its the study of things science hasn't yet solved, you're saying that philosophy is speculation about things that science will possibly solve, but speculation without taking science to date into account, and without empiricism. That just sounds like bad science. Am I misunderstanding your point? In fact, your last three li…
Even more recently, the entire field of psychology grew directly out of philosophical speculation about mental states. Starting with Kant in the late 18th century and ending with James early in the 20th, the study of the mind became an accepted part of natural philosophy or science (having James on the faculty of Harvard certainly didn't hinder the acceptance of psychology as a science).
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Some great computer scientists and AI pioneers, for instance Terry Winograd, turned to philosophy to look for solutions to some untractable technical problems. Some philosophers like Bertrand Russell initiated some of the deepest scientific questions. And it's still philosophy (in the figure of Karl Popper) that defined what makes science. Philosophy is the meta-science par excellence. Apparently you had some bad luc…
I sympathise with your position that philosophy is a kind of meta-science, with the caveat that that is only one kind of philosophy. But Karl Popper did not define what science is. That's an ongoing question (and one to which I think there is no single answer.)
You're on the slippery slope to philosophy, here :)
The biggest problem with them, that they dare to reason about things, which they never learnt or have no hands-on experience.
They will substitute benchmarks and experiments by their theoretical logical conclusions.
Same thing happens with people, who have PhD in one field and try to reason about things in different distant domain.
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That's like answering, "How do I write a good book?" with "Start typing." Applying isn't the same thing as "getting in"--it's one small part. Where do you apply to? What matters in the application? Do you apply under the course or do you apply generically? Are "A-levels" a thing that matters? What are people looking for in applicants, or how do you find out?
I applied to Oxford for the 2011 cycle (as an American student), and it is fairly different. Oxford works under the tutorial system. There's a set number of courses and subjects, and every course is specific and roughly fixed. This is basically what the U.S. system calls a major, but you don't generally study anything outside of major. Every class you take is within your course. For the course I applied to, every wee…
http://www.maths.ox.ac.uk/prospective-students/undergraduate...
(Previously this was part of the interview process)
In the UK system, if you tend to apply having done half your A-Levels, meaning you'll get a conditional offer asking for specific grades when you complete them (AAA etc). If you apply after having finished them (and after having met their requirements, obviously), then you can get an unconditional offer.
That said, philosophy is incredibly important. But, as PG has noted, we tend to do a poor job of it (http://paulgraham.com/philosophy.html). We need to spend more time focused on saying useful, testable things. In short, the best scientific results merge with philosophy. So, everyone should be a philosopher, but should do the majority of their philosophy as science.
Again, both philosophy and computer science are important, but after studying both pretty intensely for 3.5 years (I graduated with over 180 credit hours), you have to pick and choose the philosophy. It's mostly useful for setting the initial biases on which the rest of your science will depend and for continuing to think about things science can't speak to, yet.
Caveat: this is an anecdote, and your mileage may vary, but I think it illustrates a point of contention in the "two cultures". As a computer science major in the US, I once took a "philosophy of mind" course out of a genuine multi-faceted interest in AI. I was working on undergraduate machine learning research at the time, so I used to pore over the green Norvig/Stewart AI book like a religious text. Unfortunately,…
This major is undoubtedly related to the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford. The academics associated with it take a very technical perspective, so I think you'd be satisfied. I believe Nick Bostrom is the main guy behind the FHI.
FYI, the Future of Humanity Institute does have an opening for a postdoc in computer science who wants to branch out into more philosophical/futuristic areas, i.e., they want an academic who already knows algorithms and wants to learn philosophy of mind and rigorous futurism.
Caveat: this is an anecdote, and your mileage may vary, but I think it illustrates a point of contention in the "two cultures". As a computer science major in the US, I once took a "philosophy of mind" course out of a genuine multi-faceted interest in AI. I was working on undergraduate machine learning research at the time, so I used to pore over the green Norvig/Stewart AI book like a religious text. Unfortunately,…
I apologize if I am bad at articulating this. Philosophy of the Mind is much different from Artificial Intelligence. And it is also much different from Neuroscience. Neuroscience asks 'How does the Brain work?' (Based in biology and chemistry). Artificial intelligence asks 'How do I simulate human intelligence?' (Based in math, and computer science, complexity theory). Philosophy of the mind asks a lot of messy quest…
I think by trying to create True AI we will learn more about these questions than philosophy will ever be able to teach us.
Hopefully they won't rely too much on SAT marks for the admission process, and will look at our portfolios. It would be a shame to miss out on a potential star for this program because of low standard test grades. This is a super opportunity!