How to Do Philosophy

Paul, what do you think of Modern Art, especially painting? It seems to me the very same arguments you made about philosophy hold there. People try to look impressive by doing something opaque and incomprehensible and calling it art. If you don't "get it" that is used as even further evidence as to their genius. It seems to me the same situation you talk about, when there is a market for people producing and consuming such things.

I would love to know your take on the subject.

Pike's comment at the beginning of the Markovified text is brilliant:

> For those unfamiliar with M. Baudrillard's work, the thesis of the essay is, in a nutshell, that reality is indistinguishable from good simulation.

There is no science before Thales, 600BC. There is general agreement that Thales is first to deduce certainties, implicitly building on inductions. So, the key to explaining the Greek miracle is an inspection of what we know about Thales. Pythagoras reversed Thales in that he took the integration of induction and deduction and when applied to numbers reified them making them subjective. The history of mathematics argued over the source of a numbers certainty (cardinality) for 2350 years which mostly consisted of arguments to explain the relation between god and cardinality. God is a bogus concept, it has no existential content. Kant refusing to accept the obvious devloped an argument that took the god/cardinal problem and made it impossible to integrate them in the hope of saving the god part from reasoned inspection. From Kant developes a new aecular, subjective view of cardinality. Excepting Ayn Rand, no one has ever gone back to Pythagoras to correct his mystic error.

Consider any "vocalizable concept" X. There are 4 directions you can move from X.

"Meta" - you can ask the set of questions "what can we say about claims about X?"

"Anti-meta" - you can ask the questions "what can X say about other things?" (make X a meta-concept of some other concept)

"General" - you can ask the question "do there exist generalizations of X?" (commonly known as abstraction, although the term is ambiguous - generalization is more precise)

"Specific" - you can ask the question "do there exist instances of X?"

Answering questions in these 4 directions gives you information about what you really want to know - what is X? What is "true" of X?

Philosophy is exploration and characterization of this "idea space." Nothing more. Nothing less. Very useful, if people would only do it once in a while.

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Quick example:

"What is free-will?" = X

Meta:

Does free-will correspond to a thing? What classes of things is it in? What are our intuitions? What can we meaningfully say about free-will?

Anti-meta:

Suppose we define free-will well. What concepts does it enable? Are those concepts meaningful?

General:

Are there generalizations of free-will? How about just plain old "will"? What can we say about "will"? How about "freedom?" What's that?

Specific:

Are there any hard-and fast examples of free will? Are there any "thought-experiments" we can perform to try to shake out our intuitions? For instance, if everything were systematic/deterministic, what would this imply?

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My claim is that this method is useful for getting terms to be well-defined in the way that PG requires of math. You just keep doing this sort of analysis over and over until you get down to essential definitions.

Best to start from the bottom, though.

That is an interesting question. I wonder if there is even a way to know if the space has merely local maximums.