B.A. in Philosophy by University of Sao Paulo (USP), Brazil, and technical analyst at a Brazilian railway lab.
alexgieg
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It seems to me this would work for Analytic Philosophy, but not for other philosophical traditions. For instance:
a. Continental Philosophy has, since Heidegger (or, arguably, Husserl) taken a turn away from conceptual definitions towards phenomenological descriptions, so anything concept-based is subject, as a whole, to all manners of phenomenological criticisms;
b. Classic Philosophy frequently isn’t formalizable, with its nuclear terms overlapping in a very interdependent manner, the same applying to some Modern ones. Splitting them into separate concepts doesn’t quite work;
c. And Eastern Philosophies have a strong tendency to operate apophatically, that is, through negation rather than affirmation of concepts, so that every nuclear term comprises a set of negations, resulting in a kind of mix of “a” and “b”, with inverted signals.
In short, a Philosophy Web, as proposed, would be a specific kind of meta-philosophical effort, and since every meta-philosophy is itself a philosophy, thus subject to being marked as an item among others in alternative meta-philosophical taxonomies, as well as of being refutable from opposite methodologies, it wouldn’t be able to encompass more than a specific subset of philosophical thinking.
These a few problems with that. One is that you just figured out how the universe works without examining the the universe. Another is that it you can’t get MWI out if it...unless you regard it as a statement only about subjective probability.
I’m not sure I understood these two points. Can you elaborate?
The unstated part of the argument being that free will must be neither-deterministic nor probabilistic?
Actually, the state part. It’s my original comment. Although maybe I wasn’t as clear as I thought I was about it.
I know what “reductionism” means.
This isn’t quite the same reductionism as understood in physics, it has to do with Whitehead’s discussion of the problem of bifurcationism in nature (see the next block for details). In this context even a Jupiter-sized Culture-style AI Mind orders of orders of magnitude more complex than a human brain still counts as “physical reduction” in regards to “objective corporeality” if one assumes its computations capable of qualia-perception.
The problem is that you haven’t explained why reducing the qualia of free will disposes of free will, since you haven’t explained why free will “is” the qualia of free will, or why free will (the ability as opposed to the qualia) can’t be physically explained.
Free will is always perceived as qualia. You perceive it in yourself and in others, similarly to how you perceive any other qualia.
Any attempt at reducing it to the physical aspects of a being describes at most the physical processes that occur in/with/to the object in correlation with that qualia. Therefore, two philosophical options arise:
a) One may assume the qualia thus perceived is as fundamental as the measurable properties of the corporeal object, thus irreducible to those measurable properties, and that the corporeal object is thus a composite of both measurable properties and qualia properties.
In this scenario the set of the measurable properties of a corporeal object can be abstracted from it forming a pseudo-entity, the “physical object”, which is the object studied via mensuration, that is, via mathematical (and by extension logical) procedures and all they provide, among which statistical and probabilistic methods. Any conclusion arrived through them is then understood to describe the “physical object”, which, being only part of the full corporeal object, makes any such conclusion partial by definition, as they never cover the entirety of all properties of the corporeal object, in particular never covering its qualitative properties, as all they ever cover are its quantitative properties.
b) Or one may assume the qualia thus perceived is a consequence of those measurable properties, reducible to them, and therefore the corporeal object is those measurable properties, that is, that the corporeal object and the physical object are one and the same.
The burden of proof for case “a” is much lighter than that of case “b”. In fact, case “a” is the null hypothesis, as it corresponds to our direct perception of the world. Case “b”, in contrast, goes against that perception, and therefore is the one that needs to provide proof of its assertions. In particular, in the case of free will, it’d need to identify all the measurables related to what’s perceived as free will, then show with absolute rigor that they produce the perceived qualia of free will in something formerly devoid of it, and then, somehow, make that generated qualia perceptible as qualia to qualia-perceivers.
To use a classic analogy, even something much more simple, such as showing that the qualia “color red” is the electromagnetic range from 400 to 484 THz cannot be done yet. Note that this isn’t the same as showing that the qualia “color red” is associated with and carried by that EM range. For instance, if I close my eyes and think about an apple, I can access that qualia without a 400~484 THz EM wave hitting my eyes. As such, my affirmation that the qualia “color red” is distinct from the EM wave is straightforward and needs no further proof, while any affirmation involving the assertion that the qualia “color red” is reducible to, first, the measurable physical property “400~484 THz EM wave”, second, to the measurable physical properties of neurons in a brain, are the ones that need thorough proof.
While any such proof—for colors, as the entry level “easy” case, then for the much more difficult stuff such as free will—doesn’t appear, opting for “a” or for “b” will remain an arbitrary preference, as philosophical arguments for one and for the other cancel out.
That {QM}’s the best known example {of “indeterministic physics”} .
From the summary of the bifurcation problem I provided above I think it’s more clear what I mean as indeterministic. From an “a” point of view QM is still entirely about physical objects, saying much about their measurable properties but nothing actually about their qualia. Hence, all it says is that some aspects of corporeal objects are fuzzy, the range of that fuzziness however being strictly determined and that, if MWI is correct, even this fuzziness is more apparent than real, since what it really is saying is not that such physically measurable aspects are fuzzy, but rather that the physical object branches very deterministically into so many ways.
Whether such “fuzziness within a determined range in a single world” or such “deterministic branching in many worlds” works as carriers for, or in correlation to, qualia properties of the full corporeal object, including but not limited to the free will qualia perceived by qualia-perceivers, is an entirely different problem, and there’s no easy, straight jump from one domain to the other. I suppose there may be, but no matter how much physically measurable randomness properties one identifies and determines, there’s still no self-evident link between this property of the physical object and the “free will” qualia of the full corporeal object.
You can conceivably have free will while having no qualia , or while having a bunch of qualia, but not that one.
From the exposed, you may have determinations in the form of single values or that of value ranges with inherent randomness while having no qualia, but stating these physical determinations imply having the “free will” qualia is a logical jump.
Taking from the “color red” example again, you may have an extremely energetic 400~484 THz EM wave, and yet no “color red” qualia at all for the simple lack of any qualia-perceiver in its path, or for the lack of any qualia-perceiver who however lacks the ability to extract a “color red” qualia from that carrier, or because the EM wave was absorbed by a black body etc.
Hence, while physically measurable randomness may be a “free will” qualia carrier, the lack of qualia perception would still result in the “free will” qualia carried by it to be lost. Conversely, a qualia-perceiver may have free will even in the absence of the typical physical carrier of “free will” qualia, as in the analogous case of a mind capable of imagining the “color red” qualia despite the absence of it usual “400~484 THz EM wave” carrier.
the branching structure as whole is deterministic, not that the branches are individually.
That depends on how you consider probabilities. One usual take, when it comes to concrete events, is that the probability of something that actually happened is 1.0, since it actually happened. Therefore, when you look at a sequence of causes and events backwards, that is, as history, this after-the-fact sequence is always strictly deterministic even if every single one of its links had a less-than-1.0 probability of happening before it actually happened in that specific way.
Maps aren’t territories, even though territories are modelled with maps. Modelling isn’t ontological identity.
Well, if you prefer that terminology, I can restate it this way: maps that only provide deterministic and/or probabilistic (which I understand as a superset of deterministic) nodes cannot deal with neither-deterministic-nor-probabilistic features of the territories they’re trying to make.
To provide an example: a map that only provides RF frequencies says nothing of colors unless it also maps the connection of RF frequencies, to colors, via visual cortexes and all the associated biological organs, and provides primitives for the qualia of those colors.
It’s not obvious that being reducible to physics is the same as being reducible to deterministic physics,
Sorry, I wasn’t clear. “Physical reducibility” is a technical expression that refers to the philosophical assumption that the whole of concrete object, that is, both its quantitative properties as well as its qualitative properties, arises exclusively from its quantitative properties, in other words, that the a concrete object is “nothing but” the physical object.
it’s not obvious that indeterministic physics can’t support free will,
I’m not sure what you mean by “indeterministic physics”. Do you mean QM?
and it’s not obvious that you need a quale of free will to have free will. Just as you can live and die without knowing you have a spleen.
I’m not sure I understand this point either. Are you referring to philosophical zombies?
That’s a contradiction in terms
Not really. The sentence you split forms a single reasoning. The first part is the claim, the second is the justification for the claim. You can read them in reverse if you prefer, which would gives it a more syllogistic form.
Which? Logical or causal?
Both, since causal determinism is logically modelled. More specifically, causal determinism is a subset and a consequence of logical determinism, which is inherent to all forms of logical reasoning, including this one.
In any case, the point of causal determinism is that there is only on possible outcome to a state, ie. only one path going forwards. / If you mean an RNG as opposed to a pseudo RNG, yes it does make it less deterministic...by definition.
That’s precisely what MWI and similar notions disagree with. But yes, if we assume a single world, then the consequence is one of the alternatives, and none of the others.
Huh? That’s not generally acknowledged. / That is not universally acknowledged.
True. I’m arguing against the generally acknowledge view. My position is based on traditional non-physically-reducible qualia-based concepts of free will as present in, e.g., Aquinas and Aristotle.
Evidently, if one assumes all qualia is physically-reducible, then free will as such doesn’t exist and is a mere subjective interpretation of deterministic and/or randomly-determined processes, but that’s precisely the same I’ve said, except that coming from the other direction.
Formal logic, mathematics, informal deductive reasoning, algorithmics etc. are all interchangeable for the effects of my point, and usually also mutually translatable. Using any of them to model reality always yields a deterministic chain even when probabilistic paths are involved, because on can always think of these as branching in a manner similar to MWI: starting from such and such probabilities (or likelihoods, if the question is about one’s knowledge of the world rather than about the world itself) we end up with a causal tree, each of whose branches, when looked backwards, forms a logic causal chain.
That’s why free will cannot be modeled in terms of probabilities or likelihoods. Inserting a RNG in a logical chain only makes it more complex, it doesn’t make it less deterministic, and again causes free will proper to disappear, as it’s then reduced to mere randomness.
“Probably most ambitious people are starved for the sort of encouragement they’d get from ambitious peers”
This, I think, is one of the roots of smart people getting into weird stuff. Contrarians, contra-cultural types, conspiracy theorists (the inventors, not the believers) and the like are usually very smart, they just don’t optimize their smarts in a good direction, so a newly minted smart person will feel attracted to them. The end result are very suboptimal communities of smart individuals going in all kinds of weird directions.
That’s my case, mind. Finding the rationalist community has helped me put breaks on some of my weirdest aspects, but by no means on all of them. Which might or not be smart of me, no idea yet at this point.
A fundamental difficulty in thinking logically about free will is that it involves thinking logically.
Logic, by its very nature, has embedded as its most essential hidden premise a deterministic structure. This makes all reasoning chains, no matter what their subject (including this one), to be deterministic. In other words, a deterministic structure is imposed upon the elements that will be logically analyzed so that they can be logically analyzed.
This leads one, if they ignore this structure is present as the very first link in chain, then proceeds to analyze the entire chain minus this hidden first premise in an attempt to determine what can be abstracted out from it, to incur into an involuntary ‘begging the question’ and to conclude all elements present in the chain, and all their mutual relations, are strictly deterministic. And, by extensions, that free will doesn’t exist in reality, when the most we can actually say is that free will doesn’t exist as a deduced link within deterministically structured logical reasoning chains.
Notice that this doesn’t preclude free will from being part of deterministically structured logical reasoning chains, it only says where free will cannot be present. It can still be present as an irreducible axiomatic premise, an “assuming free will exists...” used to reach further deductions. But that’s it. Any attempt at moving it from the position of an axiom down into the chain proper will invariably fail because the chain itself doesn’t admit of it.
I wonder if more positive encounters would help gradually change the bias, also for your own well-being (...)
Ah! I have plenty of extremely positive experiences with black people, from black friends, to coworkers, to acquaintances, to (awesome!) teachers, to college friends. For me, people are all individuals, no exception, and I cannot think in terms of groups or collectivities even if I tried forcing myself to do so. As such, I have always been extremely careful not to allow this irrational trigger to affect anything real, and this is why I described this quirk as “extremely annoying”. It’d be an easy but deeply flawed pseudo-solution to keep the problem at bay by distancing myself from situations that trigger it, but I refuse to do that.
If it helps to visualize it, imagine walking around and suddenly noticing a tiger looking at you growling at their signature 18Hz, or a snake rising their head. Your body would react in a split instant, much faster than your conscious mind registers it, by pumping you with adrenaline in order to increase to the max your chances of survival. That, more or less, is what happens, so the most I can do, and this I make myself do all the time, is to forcefully shut the adrenaline pump down once it opens, and carry on as if it hadn’t opened up. The mechanism by which it opens, though, that one is beyond my conscious control, and while familiarity reduces its triggering, it unfortunately doesn’t fully eliminate it.
Which is why I linked it to PTSD. When a person suffers a trauma and develops PTSD, their brain physically rewires as a defense mechanism. Barring some very experimental psychotropic treatments being currently researched, this physical rewiring cannot be reversed. It can at most be eased, but fully reversed, not yet, no.
Which subcultures are these?
The furry fandom and the otherkin community here in Brazil.
It’s okay if you don’t want to answer.
Nah, I’m an open book. I make a point of not keeping secrets unless absolutely necessary. There’s no risk in doxing if you yourself provide the doxa beforehand. ;-)
I would indeed be interested in your mention of this sort of thing having “changed in a bad way”.
Well, in my case it came due to robbery. Until my late teens / early adulthood I was robbed four times, which wasn’t uncommon in the region of Brazil I lived at the time (crime rates have diminished a lot in the intervening decades). From those, three were by black thieves, blacks being a very discriminated-against group here, even if not as much as in the US. The third time has caused in me what I suppose I could describe as a “micro-PTSD”, because from that day my System 1 began making me acutely aware, in a fight-or-flight manner, of the presence of unknown black people around me, something that didn’t happen before.
This is extremely annoying, to say the least. No matter how much I want to turn off this trigger, it remains “there”, unconsciously activating whenever I’m distracted from actively suppressing it at the System 2 level. That said, over time I’ve managed to learn to suppress it very quickly, but I always worry on occasion it may be not be quick enough, that the person at whom it triggered will notice that split-second spark of irrational fear in my eyes before I can consciously force it off.
On the not quite bright side, gaining this trigger made me understand how racial biases develop and perpetuate. But I still would have very much preferred to never have gained it to begin with.
I’m not sure what it means for a newborn to be transgendered.
Over the last two to three decades many clinical studies have been developed scanning the brains of transgendered individuals. Brain regions have been identified that mark brains as clearly masculine, feminine, or somewhere in between, and transgendered individuals’ brains show the properties of the brains typical of the other sex, meaning trans women have structurally female brains in male bodies, and trans men have structurally male brain in female bodies. You can find a fairly comprehensive list of papers on this at the Causes of Transexuality Wikipedia article. Additionally, gender dysphoria is characterized, as I see it, by a clear mismatch between body shape and the homunculus, which further points to transgenderism being a neurological fact.
The 1:20,000 factor comes from the prevalence of gender dysphoria in adults, that is, from this brain/body mismatch. This paper refers to different studies and their ranges, some finding a prevalence as low as 1:100,000, others one as high as 1:10,000:
Kenneth J. Zucker & Anne A. Lawrence (2009) Epidemiology of Gender Identity Disorder: Recommendations for the Standards of Care of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, International Journal of Transgenderism, 11:1, 8-18, DOI: 10.1080/15532730902799946
In the US roughly 1⁄300 identify as transgender and in the rationality community maybe 1⁄30.
I’m not aware of these numbers, but it wouldn’t surprise me if there’s a conceptual confusion between being transgender in the strict, biological brain vs. body sense, and being gender non-conformant. In my case, I’m behaviorally gender non-conformant, having a very high number of stereotypically female traits (I’ve been described by people as “very androgynous”, with one saying I was “the most androgynous person” they’ve ever met), but in terms of my brain-body matching I’m clearly cis male, experiencing no gender dysphoria of any sort. Therefore, I don’t consider myself transgendered, although, yes, I can see how there might be a use case in making the word encompass both strict biological transgenderism and gender non-conformance.
Thanks, that’s very nice to know!
I’m involved in subcultures with even higher proportion of transgendered people, being relatively fluid myself, so it’s always nice to find other contexts in which transgendered individuals have a higher representativeness than they have in the general population.
I wish the LW team would prioritize thinking about how to enable such discussions to happen more safely on LW
One way to do this would be to create a tag for socially risky topics, and make posts marked as such visible only when logged in, to accounts that have existed for more than ‘t’ time with at least ‘k’ of karma. The original poster would be able to add the tag to their own post, but not remove it unless they themselves meet the minimum ‘tk’ threshold. Others would be able to add or remove it only if they themselves have those same stats. And comments made under a topic thus marked would by default inherit the same tag and properties. This would make it possible to have such conversations with little risk, with further improvements possible.
I don’t know about the majority, but I can say for at least a few, when they say “I don’t see people in terms of race”, they’re being literal, not metaphoric. I was like this until my late teen years, when it changed, in a bad way—which I can detail if there’s interest. But the point is, until that moment I really couldn’t see race, at all. I evidently noticed people had different skin colors, hair types, and eye shapes, but this didn’t register with me as significant in any way, shape or form, concrete or abstract.
And one comment about the AMAB and AFAB acronyms. A study I read years ago showed that about 1 in 20,000 newborns are transgendered. This means that 99.995% of the time the gender assigned at birth is indeed the gender the person will have. Now, the usual, in contexts in which one has a 99.995% likelihood of making a correct guess, is to simply say “x is y”. Evidently, for the 0.005% of cases in which the that guess was incorrect, it makes sense to say they were “incorrectly AM/FAB”, but outside of these exceptional cases of misassignment, using these expressions gives the impression the assignation is incorrectly made way more often than it in fact is.
Scott Alexander … claimed that many theists would change their mind if you could convince them on a gut-level that there could exist a godless moral world.
I guess I, and apatheists in general, are exceptions to this prediction, for while I personally am a theistic apatheist—and of the polytheist variety at that --, I don’t believe morality depends on divine will, be it either that of an absolute god, or that of a pantheon of gods. Reality, as I understand it, is essentially amoral, with morals being features we mortals add to it. Hence, my view is essentially similar to that of a godless moral world, except it has gods in it (or, more precisely, transcendent to it).
I would be grateful if someone could give me not only reasons why and how there can be a morality without God, but also arguments that could speak to my gut-level.
An usual approach is to find morality as a distillation from natural impulses filtered through high level cognition.
Dr. Larry Arnhardt, author of a number of books merging classic philosophy, classic liberalism, and evolutionary biology, identify 20 natural desires in human nature, all evolved through natural selection, which determine how humans interact with the world. Each one of those can be thought of a different axis along which uses and customs (a.k.a mores, from which “morals” and “morality”) develop; then are reasoned about, leading to the development of formal moral codes, to different ethical system, and to meta-ethical frameworks, through so many abstraction layers.
Different individuals hierarchize those desires differently, and different societies also have their own hierarchies for them, their members aligning or not with their societies’ hierarchy. One of those desires is “religious understanding”, so it isn’t really surprising that so many societies, and individuals, seek to interpret the entire set of desires, the uses and customs surrounding each one, and their corresponding abstractions, in terms of, and as part of, a religious understanding, which is, I venture, where the notion of morality sourced in divine design finds its root.
Notice, on the other hand, that “intellectual understanding” is also an evolved desire, so it isn’t surprising those who place it at the top of their hierarchy of desires will see things in non-religious terms. Or maybe, if both religious and intellectual understanding are at the top, from an intellectually-rich theological perspective.
In fact, we can notice the interplay between the 20 desires diversely hierarchized in the Christian Bible itself, as it provides not one, but at least four distinct moral codes:
The way God himself behaves as the basis of imitatio dei;
The commandments of God to the Hebrews;
The commandments of God to the Christians;
The way Christians are described acting in the afterlife.
There’s some minimal overlapping between these four moral codes, but on the whole they oppose each other. And one can disagree and criticize them either from a moral perspective based on none of the four, or from one based on a subset of one of those complemented by reasons outside all four.
Hence, if morality were to be of divine origin, then either only the minimalist set of behaviors at the intersection of all customs of all human societies in all times and places counts as the one spark of divinity amidst humanity, or, conversely, the maximalist set of the entire multidimensional ethics-space comprised of the full 20 axes counts. Anything in between would seem, at best, arbitrary, leading to a discussion about which meta-ethical decision making process is of divine origin, and which isn’t etc.
Myself, I have my own ethical framework, which is a combination of Virtue Ethics with a Consequentialism based not on utilitarian criteria, but on the preservation of information. Taking the four Biblical moral codes, it intersects with a subset of the commandments given to the Christians, but it certainly doesn’t align with the other three. I wouldn’t, however, assign my ethical code to any deity affirming it’s authoritative because of that assigning. But if I met a deity who opposed and acted contrary to it I’d feel quite on my right to criticize that deity as immoral from the perspective of my own ethics, irrespective of it being divine or not, and not out of hubris, but because I really would think of them as acting immorally.
I wouldn’t say that Confucianism is a religion.
If we go for a very technical take, the term “religion” refers only to Christianity. That’s because the term was adopted during the Reformation era, and later expanded during the Enlightenment, to make some sense of what was going on between the different Nation States going for this or that version of Christianity, and then by contrasting all of those takes with the novel alternatives of Deism, Agnosticism, Atheism, of political power grounded on the people vs. on God etc., all the while “back porting” it to the question of the earlier disputes between Christendom’s (the original term) original great schism and earlier heresies, and between those as a whole vs. Judaism, Islam, and so-called Paganism. As such, any attempt of extending it to anything beyond primarily Christianity internal disputes, and secondarily Abrahamic disputes, is fraught with complications, since one’s operating more on the basis of analogies than on a strictly defined conceptual axis. For more details, check Catholic philosopher Edward Feser’s blog post What is religion?
Given that, taking Confucianism to be a religion, or taking it not to be a religion, are both arguably valid, since it comes down to which aspects one’s emphasizing and deemphasizing in their analogical approach.
Now, I consider Confucianism a religion because it had and has a priesthood, rites, temples, and presented itself as a continuation and development of ancient Chinese beliefs. Confucius himself, for instance, was a well regarded and accomplished expert in the art of ritual animal sacrifices, and it’d be very odd to try and disengage his religious piety from his intellectual work, when both in fact complement each other. It’d be akin to thinking of the Neoplatonic philosophers, and Neoplatonism, as non-religious despite many of them being pious worshippers of several Greek deities, deities who in turn can be taken to be as abstract as Confucianism’s Tian. In fact, the very Physis referred to by the scholar mentioned in the Wikipedia article was a duly worshipped primordial goddess in the Orphic tradition in Greece.
Other polytheistic and/or ancestor-worshipping belief systems have similar traits. In fact, in the set of human belief systems, it’s modern Western ones that stand out as somewhat weird—or rather WEIRD—in their sharp distinction between secular and religious spheres of influence and action. Most everyone else doesn’t do that. Hence, maybe it’d be more accurate to say neither that Confucianism is a religion, nor that Confucianism isn’t a religion, but rather that Confucianism, Neoplatonism, Hinduism and others are all holistic paths (that they’re “daos”), and that both Western religions and non-religions alike are, all of them, so many daos.
The difference between someone with an IQ of 115 and someone with an IQ of 175 is four standard deviations. Four standard deviations is huge. It is equal to the difference between a PhD in science and someone hovering on the edge of an intellectual disability.
I’d be careful with this kind of comparison. IQ numbers and SDs may look like cardinal measurements, but they’re actually an ordinal hierarchical system. What one can say is that someone with IQ n+1 is “smarter than” someone with IQ n, who in turn is “smarter than” someone with IQ n-1. But there’s no way, for now, to convert that in a cardinality.
Hence, in an absolute sense of literal, actual intelligence, the difference in between an IQ 175 and an IQ 115 may be either greater or smaller than the difference in intelligence between an IQ 115 and an IQ 55. My personal hunch is that it’s much smaller, although, evidently, I have no way to back that up.
Chinese religions were never exported mostly because of their lack of use in governance.
That’s quite incorrect. In addition to my reply above to ChristianKI, I’ll add that Confucianism has been exported all around Asia precisely because of its use in governance, having historically resulted in extensive political changes in the Vietnamese, Korean and Japanese governments of old.
The Chinese fight Catholicism this way precisely because Catholism is politic in a way that their homegrown religions weren’t.
Confucianism is extremely political. If I remember right, when an emperor’s government began to severely fail, their priests practiced rites to determine whether they had lost the Mandate of Heaven and a new emperor should be chosen, opening the way for religiously-legitimated rebellions to replace the distrusted dynasty.
This influence of religion on politics in part explains the reason the CCP is always so worried about, and ruthless towards, any religion that deviates from its ideology du jour.
My comments:
That’s actually not the case. Analytic Philosophy is preeminent in the US and, to some extent, the UK. Everywhere else it’s a topic that one learns among others, and usually in a secondary and subsidiary manner. For example, I majored in Philosophy in 2009. My university’s Philosophy department, which happens to be the most important in my country and therefore the source of that vast majority of Philosophy undergraduates and graduates who then go on to influence other Philosophy departments, was founded by Continental philosophers, and remains almost entirely focused on that, with a major French sub-department, a secondary German one, some professors focusing in Classic and (continental style) English philosophers. In the Analytic tradition there was exactly one professor, whose area of research was Philosophy of Science.
Formalization, of any kind, is mostly an Analytic approach. When one formalizes a Continental philosophy, it cease being the original philosophy and becomes an Analytic interpretation of that Continental philosophy, so not the original anymore. And there’s a remarkable loss of content in such a translation.
They have “experiences” and “perceptions”. Husserl’s project, for instance, was to re-fund Philosophy in the manner of a science by insisting that the objects (in the proper Kantian meaning of the word) philosophers work upon be first described precisely so that, when two philosophers discuss about them, they’re talking about precisely the same thing, so as to avoid divergences due to ambiguities in regards to the objects themselves. Phenomenology then, as Husserl understood it, was to focus on developing a full description of phenomena (perceived objects), to only afterwards philosophize about them. Phenomena, therefore, don’t have opposites, since they’re raw “objectively shared subjetive perceptual descriptions”, never concepts. Heidegger was a student under Husserl, so much of his work consists in describing phenomena. And those who then followed both did the same, with so many different emphasis and methods, and mutual criticisms went more about aspects other phenomenologists didn’t notice in this or that described phenomena.
I’ll give an example of how hard that can be. In Buddhist logic there are five truth categories: true, false, true-and-false, neither-true-nor-false, and unitive. In Jain logic, there are seven: true, false, undefined, true-and-false, true-and-undefined, false-and-undefined, true-false-and-undefined. Philosophy Web, as I understand it at least, would focus strongly on opposite categories, that is, this is true therefore those are false, which are seen similarly from the others’ perspectives, so other truth-categories get sidelined. And that’s without entering the topic of the many different Western dialectical methods, such as Hegel’s, who has historically-bound time-dependent truth-variability linked to the overcoming of oppositions.
I don’t mean to imply it wouldn’t be a useful project though. I’m just pointing out its actual scope in practice will be narrower than your original proposal suggests.