it would be interesting to have social games that could extract answers for these questions from ordinary people who don't know what the terms mean
Why "social"?
MVP. Mobile and disruptive come later.
What professional philosophers believe – Survey results
21–30 of 115 posts
Re: What professional philosophers believe – Survey results
#22If you have a good understanding of consciousness / mind, you can derive the answer for most philosophical problems from that.
Nice, you almost managed to get a spit-take out of me for this post.
I'll just note that the philosophers who answered this survey do not appear to agree with you.
Re: What professional philosophers believe – Survey results
#23If you have a good understanding of consciousness / mind, you can derive the answer for most philosophical problems from that.
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Re: What professional philosophers believe – Survey results
#24There's quite a bit of further discussion (including explanations of a number of the questions) scattered across a couple different LessWrong threads.
Explanations of many of the questions: http://lesswrong.com/lw/emj/poll_less_wrong_and_mainstream_p...
What do professional philosophers believe, and why? http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/hbw/what_do_professiona...
Here's a list of links to more discussions: http://philpapers.org/bbs/thread.pl?tId=420 I haven't actually gone through these, though.
You might also want to check out:
Survey of eating habits among philosophers: http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2012/10/philosophers-e...
Survey of beliefs among economists: http://gregmankiw.blogspot.com/2009/02/news-flash-economists...
Re: What professional philosophers believe – Survey results
#25If you have a good understanding of consciousness / mind, you can derive the answer for most philosophical problems from that.
The success of science in explaining everything else, however, means that practically we can treat the mind as an epiphenomenon.
What do you mean by "practically we can treat the mind as an epiphenomenon"?
Re: What professional philosophers believe – Survey results
#26I'm surprised scientific realism fared as well as it did.
Re: What professional philosophers believe – Survey results
#27The contrarian in me can't help but think that the least popular answer is the "right" one :-)
I get you are joking but... That's just as bad as thinking that the most popular answer is the right one. The best you can do is to decide which one is best by analyzing the contents, not the % values.
Re: What professional philosophers believe – Survey results
#28Si tacuisses, philosophus mansisses.
Re: What professional philosophers believe – Survey results
#29A lot to dive into there, but the God results immediately jump out at me.
People who tend to be interested in philosophy and are theists probably tend to go into religion rather than philosophy.
Not knowing which faculties at which institutions this derives from (although, one could probably assume that they're not Theist institutions) that is a plausible explanation.
However, if you change the Population selection to the "No Affiliation" option the numbers are still pretty skewed in the atheist direction.
Re: What professional philosophers believe – Survey results
#30I was surprised to see so many leaning towards the switch in the Trolley problem. I still haven't made my mind on that.