Bear with me while I just naively tackle the question, what is philosophy?
Where to start? Well, we could start with “I think therefore I am”, which is the “E equals M C squared” of philosophy, its most famous proposition. Where did that proposition come from, what is the process that produced it?
I was familiar with an anecdote about Descartes, that while serving as a soldier as a young man, he was shut up one night in a house, and had some thoughts that were formative for his philosophy. I had hoped that we might be able to say, that was the night that he first tried out universal doubt, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. It’s more that he had some big ideas (like algebraic geometry), and realized that he could spend his life developing them.
So all we can say is that Descartes thought a lot, and that at some point he had thoughts which he distilled into the cogito argument, which he later put into a book. Can we at least say what sequence of thoughts is characteristic of the cogito? You have to end up asking yourself, is there anything I can’t doubt? And after doubting your memories, your sensations, all your beliefs, you end up saying: I am definitely doubting, which is a kind of thinking, and I cannot be thinking unless I exist, so I definitely exist.
What kind of thoughts were these? Descartes was reasoning about reality, and about what we can know about reality. That itself might pass as a first approximate definition of philosophy. But perhaps it’s not enough; perhaps there are other mental faculties which are an essential part of the process. How do I know what I am thinking, or that I am thinking—is this self-knowledge obtained through reasoning? Maybe it’s due to a different faculty, more akin to perception but directed inwardly—this is sometimes called intuition (this is intended as a technical name for inner perception, it’s something different from intuition in the sense of creative leaps to complex truth through pattern matching). In characterizing the cognition that produces philosophy, we might want to include intuition along with reasoning, as faculties that are involved…
I’ll pause here because I’m not aiming to produce an ultimately precise characterization of philosophy’s nature, but just to illustrate what’s involved. We can say: philosophy is a kind of thinking, it is directed at certain very general or fundamental or mysterious topics (we stipulate this to distinguish it from thought which occurs within the bounds of some other discipline), there will be some arbitrariness or edge cases, and so on.
Now suppose we want to “formalize” (or even “automate”) philosophy. One of the very first questions would be: must philosophy and philosophical progress, occur in the form of thinking? If it does, then you also have a big part of the reason why there’s no well-known formalization of philosophy: because we don’t have a “formalization” of thinking. In turn I see at least two perspectives on this. One would be to focus on “general intelligence”, and say, we won’t know what thinking is, until we know how general intelligence works. The other would be to focus on consciousness, and say, we don’t know how to think about thinking because we don’t know how to think about consciousness.
But that is not entirely true; we actually do know some ways to think about consciousness. It’s just that they do not fit into the methods of formal and natural science, because those by construction have excluded consciousness as an object. To think about consciousness, first you must allow yourself to use your natural faculty of thinking informally about it, and then you can try to be rigorous about it. This kind of thinking about consciousness has been pursued in philosophy, in literature, in psychology… And to be fair, pretty much anyone who comes up with a theory of consciousness, even if it is a wrong theory, must do a certain amount of informal-to-formal thinking-about-thinking.
So that’s one approach to why we lack formalization of philosophy: it won’t come without progress on consciousness.
On the other hand, suppose we go back to the question: must philosophy and philosophical progress occur in the form of thinking? - and suppose we try out the answer no. Suppose we entertain the idea of making progress on the subject matter of philosophy just via computation, without the use of consciousness. Maybe it’s possible, but it seems like you would need to have formalized philosophy first, in order to then pursue it mechanically. And this leads me back to the previous barrier: you can’t formalize philosophical thinking until you understand thinking, and you can’t understand thinking without understanding consciousness, and you can’t understand consciousness without allowing yourself to first freely use the natural capacity for informal thinking about consciousness, and seeing it where it leads.
Incidentally, there is a school of thought due to Edward Zalta which aims to formalize ontology. Zalta’s work might be of interest to would-be formalizers of philosophy in general.
must philosophy and philosophical progress occur in the form of thinking?
Well, I think there are trivial non-thinking versions of this.
Like, imagine you learn that there are advanced aliens somewhere nearby and you have an option to snoop on their internet. You can advance human understanding of philosophy much more by snooping around their internet and lifting their philosophical arguments / concepts from there, than advance it by thinking yourself.
Other variants are like funding universities, having very smart kids with affordances to pursue philosophical research, etc.
Or, if you limit progress to my personal understanding of philosophy? Then I can just read stuff and get better than what I would have thought up myself. Same strategy, in some sense.
Those are baselines, to be fair. I’d expect there are much better, more philosophy specific approaches to this.
Those are all forms of progress in which you have someone else do the thinking. I’m talking about whether there can be philosophical progress without any thinking anywhere at all.
(I have sidestepped the scenario in which AI achieves philosophical progress by thinking, because we don’t understand what thinking is, enough to say whether an AI is thinking or not, which brings us back to the first answer, that progress regarding the nature of consciousness, intentionality, thinking, etc, is needed before you have any chance of formalizing or automating philosophy.)
Well, my point is more like, are there actions that are not themselves / primarily thinking about philosophy by yourself, that would reliably advance human understanding of philosophy i.e. constitute philosophical progress? And there are some, like stealing data from aliens.
You can bracket how exactly that method works on the inside, to just your interactions with it.
> Or, if you limit progress to my personal understanding of philosophy? Then I can just read stuff and get better than what I would have thought up myself. Same strategy, in some sense.
I think (ha!) that acquiring an understanding of philosophy does require ‘thinking’ in a way that some other fields do not. For example, I can get a reasonably good understanding of the history of WW2 by memorizing a sufficiently long list of facts and being able to reproduce them exactly. Obviously thinking, extrapolating, making inferences would help to improve one’s understanding further—but there’s some sense in which a large percentage of the ‘content’ of a historical understanding of WW2 is indeed contained in the bare facts as they happened. This makes sense as history is indeed first and foremost a study of “what happened?”, and secondarily a study of “why”, “how”, etc. I don’t think the same applies to philosophy. To take an example from my own experience, memorizing Deleuze & Guattari’s definition of a “Rhizome” will do little to help you apply it. I suspect that even memorizing the whole of ATP would do little in that regard! So with regards to improving your “personal understanding” of philosophy, I do think that you need to think, even when given the results of past philosophers to go off of. In some sense I would think of those results as a shortcut towards where to think, what paths of deliberation are productive to go down. So while you would certainly benefit more from reading those alien blogposts than by thinking on your own, you would need to balance (in some proportion -- 50⁄50, 90⁄10, I don’t know) thinking and reading to actually maximize your own understanding.
Bear with me while I just naively tackle the question, what is philosophy?
Where to start? Well, we could start with “I think therefore I am”, which is the “E equals M C squared” of philosophy, its most famous proposition. Where did that proposition come from, what is the process that produced it?
I was familiar with an anecdote about Descartes, that while serving as a soldier as a young man, he was shut up one night in a house, and had some thoughts that were formative for his philosophy. I had hoped that we might be able to say, that was the night that he first tried out universal doubt, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. It’s more that he had some big ideas (like algebraic geometry), and realized that he could spend his life developing them.
So all we can say is that Descartes thought a lot, and that at some point he had thoughts which he distilled into the cogito argument, which he later put into a book. Can we at least say what sequence of thoughts is characteristic of the cogito? You have to end up asking yourself, is there anything I can’t doubt? And after doubting your memories, your sensations, all your beliefs, you end up saying: I am definitely doubting, which is a kind of thinking, and I cannot be thinking unless I exist, so I definitely exist.
What kind of thoughts were these? Descartes was reasoning about reality, and about what we can know about reality. That itself might pass as a first approximate definition of philosophy. But perhaps it’s not enough; perhaps there are other mental faculties which are an essential part of the process. How do I know what I am thinking, or that I am thinking—is this self-knowledge obtained through reasoning? Maybe it’s due to a different faculty, more akin to perception but directed inwardly—this is sometimes called intuition (this is intended as a technical name for inner perception, it’s something different from intuition in the sense of creative leaps to complex truth through pattern matching). In characterizing the cognition that produces philosophy, we might want to include intuition along with reasoning, as faculties that are involved…
I’ll pause here because I’m not aiming to produce an ultimately precise characterization of philosophy’s nature, but just to illustrate what’s involved. We can say: philosophy is a kind of thinking, it is directed at certain very general or fundamental or mysterious topics (we stipulate this to distinguish it from thought which occurs within the bounds of some other discipline), there will be some arbitrariness or edge cases, and so on.
Now suppose we want to “formalize” (or even “automate”) philosophy. One of the very first questions would be: must philosophy and philosophical progress, occur in the form of thinking? If it does, then you also have a big part of the reason why there’s no well-known formalization of philosophy: because we don’t have a “formalization” of thinking. In turn I see at least two perspectives on this. One would be to focus on “general intelligence”, and say, we won’t know what thinking is, until we know how general intelligence works. The other would be to focus on consciousness, and say, we don’t know how to think about thinking because we don’t know how to think about consciousness.
But that is not entirely true; we actually do know some ways to think about consciousness. It’s just that they do not fit into the methods of formal and natural science, because those by construction have excluded consciousness as an object. To think about consciousness, first you must allow yourself to use your natural faculty of thinking informally about it, and then you can try to be rigorous about it. This kind of thinking about consciousness has been pursued in philosophy, in literature, in psychology… And to be fair, pretty much anyone who comes up with a theory of consciousness, even if it is a wrong theory, must do a certain amount of informal-to-formal thinking-about-thinking.
So that’s one approach to why we lack formalization of philosophy: it won’t come without progress on consciousness.
On the other hand, suppose we go back to the question: must philosophy and philosophical progress occur in the form of thinking? - and suppose we try out the answer no. Suppose we entertain the idea of making progress on the subject matter of philosophy just via computation, without the use of consciousness. Maybe it’s possible, but it seems like you would need to have formalized philosophy first, in order to then pursue it mechanically. And this leads me back to the previous barrier: you can’t formalize philosophical thinking until you understand thinking, and you can’t understand thinking without understanding consciousness, and you can’t understand consciousness without allowing yourself to first freely use the natural capacity for informal thinking about consciousness, and seeing it where it leads.
Incidentally, there is a school of thought due to Edward Zalta which aims to formalize ontology. Zalta’s work might be of interest to would-be formalizers of philosophy in general.
Well, I think there are trivial non-thinking versions of this.
Like, imagine you learn that there are advanced aliens somewhere nearby and you have an option to snoop on their internet. You can advance human understanding of philosophy much more by snooping around their internet and lifting their philosophical arguments / concepts from there, than advance it by thinking yourself.
Other variants are like funding universities, having very smart kids with affordances to pursue philosophical research, etc.
Or, if you limit progress to my personal understanding of philosophy? Then I can just read stuff and get better than what I would have thought up myself. Same strategy, in some sense.
Those are baselines, to be fair. I’d expect there are much better, more philosophy specific approaches to this.
Those are all forms of progress in which you have someone else do the thinking. I’m talking about whether there can be philosophical progress without any thinking anywhere at all.
(I have sidestepped the scenario in which AI achieves philosophical progress by thinking, because we don’t understand what thinking is, enough to say whether an AI is thinking or not, which brings us back to the first answer, that progress regarding the nature of consciousness, intentionality, thinking, etc, is needed before you have any chance of formalizing or automating philosophy.)
Well, my point is more like, are there actions that are not themselves / primarily thinking about philosophy by yourself, that would reliably advance human understanding of philosophy i.e. constitute philosophical progress? And there are some, like stealing data from aliens.
You can bracket how exactly that method works on the inside, to just your interactions with it.
I don’t know about the last part:
> Or, if you limit progress to my personal understanding of philosophy? Then I can just read stuff and get better than what I would have thought up myself. Same strategy, in some sense.
I think (ha!) that acquiring an understanding of philosophy does require ‘thinking’ in a way that some other fields do not. For example, I can get a reasonably good understanding of the history of WW2 by memorizing a sufficiently long list of facts and being able to reproduce them exactly. Obviously thinking, extrapolating, making inferences would help to improve one’s understanding further—but there’s some sense in which a large percentage of the ‘content’ of a historical understanding of WW2 is indeed contained in the bare facts as they happened. This makes sense as history is indeed first and foremost a study of “what happened?”, and secondarily a study of “why”, “how”, etc. I don’t think the same applies to philosophy. To take an example from my own experience, memorizing Deleuze & Guattari’s definition of a “Rhizome” will do little to help you apply it. I suspect that even memorizing the whole of ATP would do little in that regard! So with regards to improving your “personal understanding” of philosophy, I do think that you need to think, even when given the results of past philosophers to go off of. In some sense I would think of those results as a shortcut towards where to think, what paths of deliberation are productive to go down. So while you would certainly benefit more from reading those alien blogposts than by thinking on your own, you would need to balance (in some proportion -- 50⁄50, 90⁄10, I don’t know) thinking and reading to actually maximize your own understanding.