Surprisingly, Ycombinator co-founder Paul Graham was a philosophy major for most of his college years. He has a lot to say about it in one of his essays:
Philosophy Has Made Plenty of Progress
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Re: Philosophy Has Made Plenty of Progress
#22> Philosophy, in its purest form, contains the study of what it is to live a good human life. I don't think this a properly general definition of philosophy (although he says "contains",maybe he is not after generality). I would say philosophy is the science of definitions. This is why it is fundamental.
I don't think say Kierkegaard or Nietzsche can be reduced to just making definitions.
Why? Could you please elaborate(
Re: Philosophy Has Made Plenty of Progress
#23Could someone with better understanding explain compatibalism to me? I’m struggling to grasp how it can allow for both determinism and free will.
Communication over the internet is hard and I’m not sure if I can convey the idea briefly in a HN post, but the idea is simple. The assumption that free will and determinism are at odds with each other is ungrounded when you actually look into it.
“Non-determinism” implies randomness which is NOT what we are talking about when we say something like “Susie made a decision.” She makes a decision for reasons, and those reasons are the determinant (cause) of her choice. When you look into what decision making actually is, I.e. the procedures that underlying it, you find that it MUST be the case that our thinking is mostly if not all deterministic for free will to be of any meaning at all.
So really, the question is “why wouldn’t they be compatible?” And it says a lot about our introspective blind spots that we have for so long thought that free will and determinism were at odds with each other.
Re: Philosophy Has Made Plenty of Progress
#24Could someone with better understanding explain compatibalism to me? I’m struggling to grasp how it can allow for both determinism and free will.
To put it shortly but slightly inaccurately, compatibilism basically comes from the idea that "free will" is implied by "moral responsibility", and then it is noted that moral responsibility and determinism are compatible.
For more detail, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/compatibilism/#FreWil.
Re: Philosophy Has Made Plenty of Progress
#25Could someone with better understanding explain compatibalism to me? I’m struggling to grasp how it can allow for both determinism and free will.
The English Wikipedia article was not very enlightening, so I went over to the German Wikipedia which includes this helpful example:
> According to [David] Hume, free will is not the ability to choose otherwise given the exact same inner and outer condition. He considers it the hypothetical ability to choose otherwise, had the actor been in a psychologically different state because of different wishes or beliefs.
(Sorry for the rough translation, but I think it brings the point across.)
In general, the debate seems to be on what you take "free will" to mean. Philosopher/neuroscientist Joscha Bach [1] defines it as "the ability to do what one has recognized as right", contrasting it e.g. with compulsory behavior.
[1] https://bach.ai, although the source of the quote is the German podcast https://alternativlos.org/42/
Re: Philosophy Has Made Plenty of Progress
#26I don't think philosophy is keeping up with the progress in AI, neuroscience and game theory. If it did, there would be less discussion about the 'Chinese room', qualia and 'hard problem' of consciousness. Instead, we'd head about embodiment, rewards, agents vs environments, learning, representation, exploration-exploitation tradeoff, and such. There are theories of language and meaning in philosophy, but in AI there…
The is how philosophy is, in relation to stuff outside of philosophy. For example, there's the discipline of epistemology, study of knowledge. There are actual working versions of science, that deals with all the hairy compromises and complications of reality. Car Vs picture of a car. Still the contribution is philosophers had a major role in creating the scientific method (eg Karl Popper).
Describing the scientific method, not creating it.
Re: Philosophy Has Made Plenty of Progress
#27Philosophy to me is a kind of fanciful thinking. Article mentions something about being "purely theoretical", but is your life theoretical or real? If it's real you can't approach it by pure theory. As well as there is much more to life than just thinking.
Re: Philosophy Has Made Plenty of Progress
#28Is it just me or is the title not supported by the article?
Just you. :) It probably refers to this part:
> Q: Your colleague David Chalmers has fretted that “there has not been large collective convergence to the truth on the big questions of philosophy,” such as God, free will and consciousness. Does this lack of convergence bother you?
> A: I disagree with Dave here. Overwhelmingly most philosophers are atheists or agnostics, which I take to be convergence to the truth. Most are compatibilist about free will and believe in it, which I also take to be convergence to the truth. Almost all believe in consciousness and most don’t have a clue how to explain it, which is wisdom. It is not that there isn’t convergence, it is that the outliers who do not converge get much more attention than the great mass of convergers, who don’t particularly stand out.
Re: Philosophy Has Made Plenty of Progress
#29Could someone with better understanding explain compatibalism to me? I’m struggling to grasp how it can allow for both determinism and free will.
Compatibilists are inconsistent determinists.
They claim we're "free" when we're doing what we want; not being forced by external circumstances to do something we don't want. Basically the idea of being free if you're a puppet and love your strings. I find the idea ignores how everything is one entity and what encompasses the puppet, "being the stage & props" must also be loved by the puppet for one to be free. So the perfect life fairytale is needed to be free?
Re: Philosophy Has Made Plenty of Progress
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
The is how philosophy is, in relation to stuff outside of philosophy. For example, there's the discipline of epistemology, study of knowledge. There are actual working versions of science, that deals with all the hairy compromises and complications of reality. Car Vs picture of a car. Still the contribution is philosophers had a major role in creating the scientific method (eg Karl Popper).
Describing the scientific method, not creating it.
Describing, defining & creating are very closely related, if you're creating a system of thought/debate. It's an institution.
Karl Popper obviously didn't create the method out of whole cloth, but the ideas he formalized & championed became a real platform. Nearly any scientist/science advocate (degrasse tysson, dawkins..) dealing with an "is this science" question paraphrases him Popper.