Thanks for writing this. To respond briefly, I chose to write this book to be accessible to a wide audience since my hope is that it plants something like “philosophical seeds” in the minds of its readers, which I hope includes many working on AI (both capabilities and safety). For this reason, and to keep the length of the book manageable, I chose to leave out much of the background that you highlight here.
You’re right that I’m a fan of Husserl’s and Heidegger’s philosophical work, and you are correctly seeing the influence of their work on mine. I also find several frameworks helpful for making sense of the world, and among those are transcendental idealism, phenomenology, Buddhsim, and cybernetics. I chose to avoid making arguments in the book explicitly for any of these because they don’t seem necessary to me to the project of the book. That is, I think someone could disagree with me on all of these frameworks and I’d hope they’d still get something from the book, namely learning something about fundamental uncertainty, which I see as being so fundamental that it can be seen no matter what assumptions you make. Of course, my arguments are going to betray my beliefs, I think it’d be hard for them not to, and if anything this is probably a weakness of the book that I couldn’t write a version with wider appeal that less tries to point towards particular answers.
Thanks for writing this. To respond briefly, I chose to write this book to be accessible to a wide audience since my hope is that it plants something like “philosophical seeds” in the minds of its readers, which I hope includes many working on AI (both capabilities and safety). For this reason, and to keep the length of the book manageable, I chose to leave out much of the background that you highlight here.
You’re right that I’m a fan of Husserl’s and Heidegger’s philosophical work, and you are correctly seeing the influence of their work on mine. I also find several frameworks helpful for making sense of the world, and among those are transcendental idealism, phenomenology, Buddhsim, and cybernetics. I chose to avoid making arguments in the book explicitly for any of these because they don’t seem necessary to me to the project of the book. That is, I think someone could disagree with me on all of these frameworks and I’d hope they’d still get something from the book, namely learning something about fundamental uncertainty, which I see as being so fundamental that it can be seen no matter what assumptions you make. Of course, my arguments are going to betray my beliefs, I think it’d be hard for them not to, and if anything this is probably a weakness of the book that I couldn’t write a version with wider appeal that less tries to point towards particular answers.