Just to say that in general, apart from the stuff about consciousness, which I disagree with but think is interesting, I think that Chalmers is one of the best philosophers alive today. Seriously, he does a lot of good work.
bryjnar
Karma: 914
Yep.
Alternatively, scientific problems might have got a lot harder! Compare the sheer amount of maths needed to understand quantum mechanics compared to something like gravitation.
(and I’m assuming you’re taking into account inflation etc.)
I’d mostly agree, but the particular criticism that you levelled isn’t very well-founded. Questioning the way we use language and the way that philosophical questions are put is not the unheard of idea that you portray it as. In fact, it’s pretty standard. It’s just not necessarily the stuff that people choose to put into most “Intro to the Philosophy of X” textbooks, since there’s usually more discussion to be had if the question is well-posed!
Sometimes, they are even divided on psychological questions that psychologists have already answered: Philosophers are split evenly on the question of whether it’s possible to make a moral judgment without being motivated to abide by that judgment, even though we already know that this is possible for some people with damage to their brain’s reward system, for example many Parkinson’s patients, and patients with damage to the ventromedial frontal cortex...
Huh?
Examples like that are the bread and butter of discussions about motivational internalism: precisely the argument that tends to get made is that because it’s not motivating it’s not a real moral judgement. You may think that’s stupid in other ways, but it’s not that philosophers are ignorant of what psychology tells us, some of them just disagree about how to interpret it.
I strongly disagree. Almost every question in philosophy that I’ve ever studied has some camp of philosophers who reject the question as ill-posed, or want to dissolve it, or some such. Wittgensteinians sometimes take that attitude towards every question. Such philosophers often not discussed as much as those who propose “big answers” but there’s no question that they exist and that any philosopher working in the field is well aware of them.
Also, there’s a selection effect: people who think question X isn’t a proper question tend not to spend their careers publishing on question X!
The intermediary here is mostly notional. CEA is the only entity with legal existence, but on a practical level nearly all employees are effectively GWWC, 80k employees etc., with the CEA employees mainly being for shared services such as operations. So there isn’t really much of overhead or anything.
Not precisely. In many ways, yes, but for example they don’t model the axiom of PA that says that every number has a successor.
I was assuming we’ve specified the behaviour of the numbers sufficiently in the background ;) But the difficulty of doing that is part and parcel of the FOL weirdness: you don’t get the Lowenheim Skolem theorem in SOL! I was going to say that you need Compactness to prove it, but now that I think about it I don’t know that you need it, although it’s usually used in the proof of the upwards component.
That would do. Also: {”Jim has non-zero height and Jim is less than 1/n metres tall”}. It generally screws up talk about numbers in this way.
It’s true that SOL is incomplete, but I actually think this is a feature. Completeness gets you Compactness, and Compactness is just plain weird. It’s really useful for proving stuff, but I’m pretty sure it’s not true of the logic we use day-to-day.
I was only addressing the point I directly quoted, where MTGandP was questioning the multiplicative factor that Will suggested. I was merely pointing out why that might look low!
I agree that the argument is still pretty much in force even if you put animals pretty much on parity.
Just to be clear: EAA is an 80k project at the moment, but at some point it may become a fully-fledged sub-organization of CEA, like GWWC and 80k.
The segmentation by target area is deliberate: GWWC in particular is in many ways a much more conservative organization, but that correspondingly broadens its appeal to people who aren’t necessarily on board with full-on consequentialism and wouldn’t be much concerned about animal rights.
It’s almost certainly more like −10,000N. One can determine this number by looking at the suffering caused by eating different animal products as well as the number of animals eaten in a lifetime (~21000).
I think Will is assuming that animal suffering has a fairly low moral weight compared to human suffering. Obviously, considerations like this scale directly depending on how you weight that. But I think most people would agree that animal suffering is worth less than human suffering, it’s just a question of whether the multiplier is 1⁄10, 1⁄100, 0, or what.
Looking back, it’s hard to say what gave me that impression. I think I was mostly just confused as to why you were spending quite so much time going over the syntax stuff ;) And
First of all, the dichotomy between “logic” and “mathematics” can be dissolved by referring to “formal systems” instead.
made me think that you though that all logical/mathematical talk was just talk of formal systems. That can’t be true if you’ve got some semantic story going on: then the syntax is important, but mainly as a way to reach semantic truths. And the semantics don’t have to mention formal systems at all. If you think that the semantics of logic/mathematics is really about syntax, then that’s what I’d think of as a “formalist” position.
Surely if the infinitude of the universe doesn’t affect that statement’s truth, it can’t affect that statement’s meaningfulness? Seems pretty obvious to me that the meaning is the same in a finite and an infinite universe: you’re talking about the mathematical concept of a Turing machine in both cases.
I think you’re confused if you think the finitude of the universe matters in answering the mathematical question of whether T halts. Answering that question may be of interest for then figuring out whether certain things in our universe that behave like Turning machines behave in certain ways, but the mathematical question is independent.
Your confusion is that you think there need to be objects of some kind that correspond to mathematical structures that we talk about. Then you’ve got to figure out what they are, and that seems to be tricky however you cut it.
We don’t know whether the universe is finite or not. If it is finite, then there is nothing in it that fully models the natural numbers. Would we then have to say that the numbers did not exist? If the system that we’re referring to isn’t some physical thing, what is it?
A few things:
I don’t think we disagree about the social construct thing: see my other comment where I’m talking about that.
It sounds like you pretty much come down in favour of the second position that I articulated above, just with a formalist twist. Mathematical talk is about what follows from the axioms; obviously only certain sets of axioms are worth investigating, as they’re the ones that actually line up with systems in the world. I agree so far, but you think that there is no notion of logic beyond the syntactic?
First of all, the dichotomy between “logic” and “mathematics” can be dissolved by referring to “formal systems” instead.
Aren’t you just dropping the distrinction between syntax and semantics here? One of the big points of the last few posts has been that we’re interested in the semantic implications, and the formal systems are a (sound) syntactic means of reaching true conclusions. From your post it sounds like you’re a pretty serious formalist, though, so that may not be a big deal to you.
So I have a couple of problems with this post.
Firstly, I think that luke simply has a very different idea of what philosophy ought to be doing compared to most philosophers. For example, most philosophers think that doing a fair amount of what is (more or less explicitly) History of Philosophy is a) of independent interest b) useful for training new philosophers and c) potentially fruitful.
I’m not terribly convinced by a), I have some sympathy with b) (many classic philosophers are surprisingly convincing and it’s worth taking the time to figure out why they’re wrong), and I strongly disagree with c) (if they had good insights, there should be better presentations of them by now!). I think the disagreement about a) is the most important, however, as it indicates a simple difference in what people are trying to do with philosophy.
On that ground it just seems childish of luke to criticise Article #2 on the grounds that it’s really history: of course it is, that’s part of what philosophy departments do. So luke wants to change the way philosophy tends to be done, fine, but it’s churlish to assume that that’s the way things already are and that the current practitioners are just bad at it.
Secondly, I think I disagree with luke about what a lot of philosophy is trying to do. Luke finds a lot of so-called “linguistic” philosophy frustrating because he doesn’t feel it solves problems that are “out there”. I’d say that it’s not trying to. The clearest way I can think of to put it is like this: philosophy is often trying to solve the problems that ordinary people come up against when they use words. In that situation it’s highly relevant to find out, say, what they mean by the word “knowledge”, as otherwise your answers will have no relevance to the epistemic concepts they actually use.
Philosophers aren’t trying to build an AI, so they’re not usually so interested in the ideal epistemology. They’re interested in what humans are doing. And that involves a lot of probing the language that humans use. In particular, the much-maligned thought-experiments and “intuitions” are actually perfectly respectable data about what the author, as a competent language-user thinks about the words in question (which is what the author in article #3 is presumably trying to do in a specialised way). I think it’s a confusion to think that thought-experiments are meant to tell us about the deep structure of the world! (admittedly, this is a mistake that is made by some philosophers!)
Basically, luke wants to do something completely different to most philosophers, and so is confused that they don’t seem to be doing what he wants them to do.
Couple of other things:
For the record, I think that plenty of philosophers write lots of bullshit, but then so does everyone else. Philosophy is hard, people go astray.
Article #4… it’s discussing some of the potential implications of atheism with regards to people’s responses to various artworks. What’s so problematic?