Figuring out the underlying substance behind “philosophy” is a central project of metaphilosophy, which is far from solved, but my usual starting point is “trying to solve confusing problems which we don’t have established methodologies for solving” (methodologies meaning explicitly understood methods), which I think bakes in the least amount of assumptions about what philosophy is or could be, while still capturing the usual meaning of “philosophy” and explains why certain fields started off as being part of philosophy (e.g., science starting off as nature philosophy) and then became “not philosophy” when we figured out methodologies for solving them.
I think “figure out what are the right concepts to be use, and, use those concepts correctly, across all of relevant-Applied-conceptspace” is the expanded version of what I meant, which maybe feels more likely to be what you mean.
This bakes in “concepts” being the most important thing, but is that right? Must AIs necessarily think about philosophy using “concepts”, or is that really the best way to formulate how idealized philosophical reasoning should work?
Is “concepts” even what distinguishes philosophy from non-philosophical problems, or is “concepts” just part of how humans reason about everything, which we latch onto when trying to define or taboo philosophy, because we have nothing else better to latch onto? My current perspective is that what uniquely distinguishes philosophy is their confusing nature and the fact that we have no well-understood methods for solving them (but would of course be happy to hear any other perspectives on this).
Regarding good philosophical taste (or judgment), that is another central mystery of metaphilosophy, which I’ve been thinking a lot about but don’t have any good handles on. It seems like a thing that exists (and is crucial) but is very hard to see how/why it could exist or what kind of thing it could be.
So anyway, I’m not sure how much help any of this is, when trying to talk to the type of person you mentioned. The above are mostly some cached thoughts I have on this, originally for other purposes.
BTW, good philosophical taste being rare definitely seems like a very important part of the strategic picture, which potentially makes the overall problem insurmountable. My main hopes are 1) someone makes an unexpected metaphilosophical breakthrough (kind of like Satoshi coming out of nowhere to totally solve distributed currency) and there’s enough good philosophical taste among the AI safety community (including at the major labs) to recognize it and incorporate it into AI design or 2) there’s an AI pause during which human intelligence enhancement comes online and selecting for IQ increases the prevalence of good philosophical taste as a side effect (as it seems too much to hope that good philosophical taste would be directly selected for) and/or there’s substantial metaphilosophical progress during the pause.
Figuring out the underlying substance behind “philosophy” is a central project of metaphilosophy, which is far from solved, but my usual starting point is “trying to solve confusing problems which we don’t have established methodologies for solving” (methodologies meaning explicitly understood methods), which I think bakes in the least amount of assumptions about what philosophy is or could be, while still capturing the usual meaning of “philosophy” and explains why certain fields started off as being part of philosophy (e.g., science starting off as nature philosophy) and then became “not philosophy” when we figured out methodologies for solving them.
This bakes in “concepts” being the most important thing, but is that right? Must AIs necessarily think about philosophy using “concepts”, or is that really the best way to formulate how idealized philosophical reasoning should work?
Is “concepts” even what distinguishes philosophy from non-philosophical problems, or is “concepts” just part of how humans reason about everything, which we latch onto when trying to define or taboo philosophy, because we have nothing else better to latch onto? My current perspective is that what uniquely distinguishes philosophy is their confusing nature and the fact that we have no well-understood methods for solving them (but would of course be happy to hear any other perspectives on this).
Regarding good philosophical taste (or judgment), that is another central mystery of metaphilosophy, which I’ve been thinking a lot about but don’t have any good handles on. It seems like a thing that exists (and is crucial) but is very hard to see how/why it could exist or what kind of thing it could be.
So anyway, I’m not sure how much help any of this is, when trying to talk to the type of person you mentioned. The above are mostly some cached thoughts I have on this, originally for other purposes.
BTW, good philosophical taste being rare definitely seems like a very important part of the strategic picture, which potentially makes the overall problem insurmountable. My main hopes are 1) someone makes an unexpected metaphilosophical breakthrough (kind of like Satoshi coming out of nowhere to totally solve distributed currency) and there’s enough good philosophical taste among the AI safety community (including at the major labs) to recognize it and incorporate it into AI design or 2) there’s an AI pause during which human intelligence enhancement comes online and selecting for IQ increases the prevalence of good philosophical taste as a side effect (as it seems too much to hope that good philosophical taste would be directly selected for) and/or there’s substantial metaphilosophical progress during the pause.