Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

What professional philosophers believe – Survey results

philpapers.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 115 posts

Re: What professional philosophers believe – Survey results

#101

Post by knowtheory »

Herring wrote: post #84
knowtheory wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's sad that more people don't study the philosophy and sociology of Science, especially people in engineering and the sciences. Scientists make ontological and metaphysical claims about the nature of the universe, and unless they avail themselves of the philosophy of science there are a lot of arguments that one can't defend against.. There are a lot of fundamentalists who avail themselves of Thomas Kuhn's argument…

I don't know if it's sad really. I guess it depends what your priorities are. There's fighting off philosophical arguments, and there's getting things done. Too much emphasis on either one reduces your ability to do the other.

Fighting off philosophical arguments is a fundamental part of politics and convincing other people that you are right.

You're also right that there's only so much time in the day, but it depends on who you have to go through to get stuff done. Who do you need money, or approval from.

Re: What professional philosophers believe – Survey results

#102

Post by kruhft »

Jayschwa wrote: post #85
kruhft wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But switching requires an action that will cause the death of another. Rational people look for a lower number of deaths and the less rational (emotional) look to avoid action creating the misery of someone else. People that pull the switch are thought to have more sociopathic tendencies even though doing the action would result in a lower overall number of deaths.

> Rational people look for a lower number of deaths and the less rational (emotional) look to avoid action creating the misery of someone else. Whether or not the action is rational depends on the underlying principles. If the most important thing is to minimize lives lost, then the moral math of causing harm to one for the benefit of many is simple. However, not everyone would agree with this principle. It's not nec…

By rational I mean the traditional "by the numbers" type of people, not if the action (or inaction) is a rational choice. Pulling the lever is the obvious choice for the rational type due to loss of less lives, a strictly numeric calculation with no regards to feelings.

Discussing this problem with my G/F showed me a side which is from what I would call a "non-rational" or emotional person. Their choice not to pull the lever is just as rational to them, but not in the cold, hard, numeric way of the rational person. To them it is rational to not cause harm to others if they would never have been harmed, even if more people will be harmed in the end.

It was a bit of a heated discussion that really made me stop and think about why this is such an important question. There is no right answer and each side is quick to justify exactly why their choice is the "right" choice. And the more you think about it the more you realize why both sides can think the way they do; a perfect philosophical question :)

The comment about sociopaths pulling the lever was due to the test being given in prisons to people that were diagnosed as sociopaths. That was the choice that the majority of them took when given the test.

Re: What professional philosophers believe – Survey results

#104

Post by saraid216 »

jgesture wrote: post #11
purephase wrote: post #6

A 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.

It's worth noting that philosophy's questions very often treat theistic worldviews with a significant amount of irreverence. A lot of these questions are relatively worthless when you can answer them with, "Whatever God decided on."

Re: What professional philosophers believe – Survey results

#105

Post by nsxwolf »

patdennis wrote: post #39

Here's one of my favorites. Glad to see the pros are evenly split, because this one really toasts my brain too. Teletransporter (new matter): survival or death? Accept or lean toward: survival 337 / 931 (36.2%) Other 304 / 931 (32.7%) Accept or lean toward: death 290 / 931 (31.1%)

The best way to know how you lean is to really ask yourself if you'd step into the thing or not.

For me, no way in hell.

Re: What professional philosophers believe – Survey results

#106

Post by RivieraKid »

kruhft wrote: post #102
Jayschwa wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Rational people look for a lower number of deaths and the less rational (emotional) look to avoid action creating the misery of someone else. Whether or not the action is rational depends on the underlying principles. If the most important thing is to minimize lives lost, then the moral math of causing harm to one for the benefit of many is simple. However, not everyone would agree with this principle. It's not nec…

By rational I mean the traditional "by the numbers" type of people, not if the action (or inaction) is a rational choice. Pulling the lever is the obvious choice for the rational type due to loss of less lives, a strictly numeric calculation with no regards to feelings. Discussing this problem with my G/F showed me a side which is from what I would call a "non-rational" or emotional person. Their choice not to pull t…

That makes sense and I mostly agree. But if you look at it from another perspective, pulling the lever is emotional too in a sense, because the puller feels that less deaths is the better outcome. Ethics is fundamentally about what we feel is right (which is influenced by the society a lot).

Re: What professional philosophers believe – Survey results

#107

Post by jules »

deadairspace wrote: post #99
nemo1618 wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fun fact: there are 18.5 million billion trillion quadrillion Planck times per second. So you can think of the universe as a simulation that runs at 1.85*10^43 FPS, where each "frame" sees all light-speed particles move one Planck length in their direction of travel.

Is there any actual justification for viewing spacetime as being discrete, with unit 1 Planck length/time? As far as I'm aware, the Planck length is just a length you get when you multiply a load of constants together.

You're absolutely right. The plank time is just a time such that events that happen in sufficiently smaller time intervals probably need new physics to describe. This is comparable to how very fast moving objects needed more than Newtonian physics to describe, namely relativity, or how very small objects needed quantum mechanics. It may be that that new physics is discrete, but at this point we have no idea.

Re: What professional philosophers believe – Survey results

#108

Post by jules »

Zikes wrote: post #77
tekacs wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes but surely that has something to do, at least in part, with the implied reduction in quality between the sent and received document? I would hope that any working 'teletransporter' would provide a near-enough-perfect replica?

It could create a replica that's exactly the same atom-for-atom, but it would still be a replica. Destroying the original at the source would make it a 'teletransporter', and not destroying the original at the source would make it a 'duplicator'. By any external measure the replica could be functionally and physically identical to the original, but so long as new matter is used it would still be a replica.

Physically there isn't really a difference between new matter and old matter. Suppose that instead of moving an electron from A to B, you destroyed an electron at A and created one at B (through some kind of reaction between other fundamental particles). There isn't really a physical difference between the two resulting situations. Unlike conventional objects, electrons can't be marked or otherwise identified, they are really exactly identical. Electrons are just blips in the continuous fields of physics (electromagnetic field, higgs field, etc). If you could do the same with a complete person, then there may not be any physical difference between moving the person or "teleporting" the person. So if there is fundamentally no difference between those two things, then perhaps we should be agnostic to whether it is teleportation or creation-destruction. The really difficult questions are about the consciousness of such a person, and I think at this point we don't have an answer for those questions.

Re: What professional philosophers believe – Survey results

#109

Post by pbhjpbhj »

Zikes wrote: post #50
patdennis wrote: post #39

Here's one of my favorites. Glad to see the pros are evenly split, because this one really toasts my brain too. Teletransporter (new matter): survival or death? Accept or lean toward: survival 337 / 931 (36.2%) Other 304 / 931 (32.7%) Accept or lean toward: death 290 / 931 (31.1%)

What if it didn't destroy the old one? Would there be any doubt at all?

cf. The Prestige, one of my favourite films.

Re: What professional philosophers believe – Survey results

#110

Post by pbhjpbhj »

jules wrote: post #107
deadairspace wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there any actual justification for viewing spacetime as being discrete, with unit 1 Planck length/time? As far as I'm aware, the Planck length is just a length you get when you multiply a load of constants together.

You're absolutely right. The plank time is just a time such that events that happen in sufficiently smaller time intervals probably need new physics to describe. This is comparable to how very fast moving objects needed more than Newtonian physics to describe, namely relativity, or how very small objects needed quantum mechanics. It may be that that new physics is discrete, but at this point we have no idea.

>a time such that events that happen in sufficiently smaller time intervals probably need new physics to describe //

Physically¹ events happen instantaneously we just can't tell at which precise instant they happen. This is true even with quantised time.

- - -

¹ Perhaps that should say "in the mathematical model of the physical universe we base our science on".

Post reply on HN