I often feel like a lot of problems would be solved if we could just make working through Li and Vitanyi a requirement for aspiring philosophers.
There are two things similar to a “philosophy coach” I can imagine:
One would be if someone has thought deeply about something, and you’ve only thought briefly, you could try to express yourself to them and then they could help you quickly learn what avenues of thought are more promising than others, and what path they took to reach where they are.
Another is someone better at philosophy writing than you helping you edit your drafts.
I think a perhaps-more-practical version of “work thru li & vitanyi” is “learn computer science”—eg, the book “logic and computability” might be a good text for philosophers. (It is thorough and technical, but introductory.)
I use algorithmic information theory (in philosophy-esque applications) about 200x more than I use model theory, so I’m not sure it’s more practical not to learn it. Though I agree that you might be able to learn the content-independent “way of thinking” in easier ways.
I just think there’s something really important about the concept of computation, for philosophy. It seems even more important than materialism, in terms of how it shapes thoughts about a variety of subjects. Like, yeah, algorithmic information theory is pretty great, but as a prerequisite you should be thinking of things in terms of computations, and this to me seems like the more important overall insight.
I’m absolutely on board with this, though I doubt it would help much with the kinds of work I do in either field (philosophy or psychology), though maybe not; in the last few years I had no choice but to pick up R and I think I’d be quite a bit further along if I’d taken computer science courses earlier. Even so, there’s still a lot of low hanging fruit for people who work in philosophy or philosophy-adjacent fields to do that probably wouldn’t benefit all that much from understanding computer science. That’s not to say it might not help in some way, but I’m not sure exactly how or if it would be of comparatively high value compared to studying other topics.
I’m mostly referring to the way of thinking where you can think of things in terms of computations. Without this, you might have weird ideas about what the mind can do with information, what can constitute a successful map/territory relationship, etc. Sorry, I’m not being very specific here; I just think there are a ton of philosophical errors which boil down to not understanding computation.
Granted, most of the important points are probably already “in the air” from computers playing such a central role in life and society today. People probably don’t need formal information theory to have good intuitions about what information is, today, compared to in the past. But it probably still helps!
I often feel like a lot of problems would be solved if we could just make working through Li and Vitanyi a requirement for aspiring philosophers.
There are two things similar to a “philosophy coach” I can imagine:
One would be if someone has thought deeply about something, and you’ve only thought briefly, you could try to express yourself to them and then they could help you quickly learn what avenues of thought are more promising than others, and what path they took to reach where they are.
Another is someone better at philosophy writing than you helping you edit your drafts.
I think a perhaps-more-practical version of “work thru li & vitanyi” is “learn computer science”—eg, the book “logic and computability” might be a good text for philosophers. (It is thorough and technical, but introductory.)
I use algorithmic information theory (in philosophy-esque applications) about 200x more than I use model theory, so I’m not sure it’s more practical not to learn it. Though I agree that you might be able to learn the content-independent “way of thinking” in easier ways.
I just think there’s something really important about the concept of computation, for philosophy. It seems even more important than materialism, in terms of how it shapes thoughts about a variety of subjects. Like, yeah, algorithmic information theory is pretty great, but as a prerequisite you should be thinking of things in terms of computations, and this to me seems like the more important overall insight.
I’m absolutely on board with this, though I doubt it would help much with the kinds of work I do in either field (philosophy or psychology), though maybe not; in the last few years I had no choice but to pick up R and I think I’d be quite a bit further along if I’d taken computer science courses earlier. Even so, there’s still a lot of low hanging fruit for people who work in philosophy or philosophy-adjacent fields to do that probably wouldn’t benefit all that much from understanding computer science. That’s not to say it might not help in some way, but I’m not sure exactly how or if it would be of comparatively high value compared to studying other topics.
I’m mostly referring to the way of thinking where you can think of things in terms of computations. Without this, you might have weird ideas about what the mind can do with information, what can constitute a successful map/territory relationship, etc. Sorry, I’m not being very specific here; I just think there are a ton of philosophical errors which boil down to not understanding computation.
Granted, most of the important points are probably already “in the air” from computers playing such a central role in life and society today. People probably don’t need formal information theory to have good intuitions about what information is, today, compared to in the past. But it probably still helps!