Below are my positions on a fairly extensive range of philosophical issues. The list is based on the PhilPapers survey which made its rounds in the intertubes last year, as well as Sabio’s post with a proposed table of views you fill out (which was also based on the same survey). I’ve integrated everything below and made a few minor changes. My positions are in bold/underline. I’ve left some blank, with comments.
And yes, I know this is mostly a bit of geekery and most people won’t know what many of the options mean — but if something strikes your fancy, feel free to LMGTFY! I’ll later post on some of these in more detail.
- School of philosophy: Analytic, Continental, Chinese, other?
- A priori knowledge: yes or no?
- Abstract objects: Platonism or nominalism? (Don’t know enough about this)
- Aesthetic value: objective or subjective?
- Analytic-synthetic distinction: yes or no? (Don’t know enough about this)
- Epistemic justification: internalism or externalism? (Don’t know enough about this)
- External world: idealism, skepticism, or non-skeptical realism? (To me these are one and the same)
- Free will: compatibilism, libertarianism, or no free will?
- God: theism or atheism?
- Knowledge: empiricism or rationalism? (Neither predominates)
- Knowledge claims: contextualism, relativism, or invariantism? (Don’t know enough about this)
- Laws of nature: Humean or non-Humean?
- Logic: classical or non-classical? (Don’t know enough about this)
- Mental content: internalism or externalism?
- Meta-ethics: moral realism or moral anti-realism? (Although I think this is mostly a quibble about word meanings)
- Metaphilosophy: naturalism or non-naturalism?
- Mind: physicalism or non-physicalism?
- Moral judgment: cognitivism or non-cognitivism? (Same as metaethics)
- Moral motivation: internalism or externalism? (Don’t know enough about this)
- Newcomb’s problem: one box or two boxes? (Although I kind of reject the premise)
- Normative ethics: deontology, consequentialism, or virtue ethics?
- Perceptual experience: disjunctivism, qualia theory, representationalism, or sense-datum theory?
- Personal identity: biological view, psychological view, or further-fact view?
- Politics: communitarianism, egalitarianism, or libertarianism? (Don’t know enough about these as applied in philosophy)
- Proper names: Fregean or Millian? (Don’t know enough about this)
- Science: scientific realism or scientific anti-realism?
- Teletransporter (new matter): survival or death? (Or death if the old body is left conscious enough to experience its annihilation)
- Time: A-theory or B-theory?
- Trolley problem (five straight ahead, one on side track, turn requires switching, what ought one do?): switch or don’t switch? (With the appropriate caveats of course!)
- Truth: correspondence, deflationary, or epistemic? (Don’t know enough about this)
- Zombies: inconceivable, conceivable but not metaphysically possible, or metaphysically possible?
Sabio also has a similar table for atheism but I found it to be much less straightforward to fill out — maybe one day.
If you want to share what kind of philosopher you are, the laziest way is probably to write a comment where you write out each option you’d pick, in the same order.
Also, based on my DKs, I’ve realised I don’t know jack!
19 comments ↓
Michael:
#8 are you a compatibalist because you have a philosophical understanding of free will, or do you hold with the ‘spooky’ free will that pervades most people’s thinking?
#20 I can play with the premise (part of being a determinist) and think you have to choose one box.
#21 I have to be a mixture on this. The ends do not justify the means in most (but not all!) cases.
#24 There is no rational justification for anything other than libertarianism.
#28 A-Theory seems to make more sense to me, but like many of these I haven’t read enough about the topics to make a solid argument.
#29 please explain the difference between switching the track and killing a healthy person to harvest their organs. Personally I would probably switch in that situation but I currently think I shouldn’t.
#30 the re-animation of dead flesh has already been achieved.
Incidentally, I think I have sorted Newcomb’s Problem:
P(Om) is the probability the person assigns Omega of being able to accurately predict their decision ahead of time.
A. P(Om) x $1m is the expected return from opening one box.
B. (1 – P(Om))x$1m + $1000 is the expected return of opening both boxes (the probability that Omega was wrong times the million plus the thousand.)
Since P(Om) is dependent on people’s individual belief about Omega’s ability to predict their actions it is not surprising different people make different decisions and think they are being rational – they are!
If A > B they choose one box, if B > A they choose both boxes.
This also shows why people will change their views if the amount in the visible box is changed (to $990,000 or $10).
Basically, in this instance, if you think the probability of Omega being able to determine your future action is greater than 0.5005 then you select a single box, if less than that you select both boxes. At P(Om)=0.5005 the expected return of both strategies is $500,500.
Interesting. The first thing I didn’t understand was the “LMGTFY”. So I googled it: Let me google that for you.
Then there are many other things I didn’t know, for example, Newcomb’s Problem. I looked it up on Wikipedia. I’ll think about it (and read the comment above).
One question though. (I tried to read about it, but I don’t quite understand — and don’t have the time to try to understand.) What is a (non-)Humean law of nature? -Thanks
(Perhaps I should have known, since I live in the city where Hume lived [Edinburgh], but, alas, I don’t)
#8: acompatibilism is the idea that free will is consistent with determinism (or even requires it) so there’s nothing spooky about it unless you find the idea spooky, but nothing supernatural.
#21: I guess applying my previous posts on metaethics I should correct that I use a mix of all of these because I don’t think there is an overarching principle but I tend to be consequentialist much of the time.
#24: I’m ready to be dazzled!
#29: the difference is the degree of involvement which our brain responds differently to (as well as some other things like belief in the sovereignty of body ownership etc), but of course I’m not claiming consistency.
#30: this is about p-zombies: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie
Maybe I should have abstained from answering the one about Humean laws due to not knowing enough to but as far as I see this relates to Hume’s vision of causality. Hume was the one who proposed the original problem of induction and believed we can never be justified in assuming general laws based on past experience. So I’d imagine a Humean view of laws of nature is that they are just cases of us using induction on past experience.
On Newcomb’s problem the assumption is that P(Om)=1. Where this doesn’t sit well is that this is a self-referential paradox akin to the Liar’s Paradox since visualising the outcome requires visualising your current thinking propagating back in time to influence Omega’s decision. But this may of course be a limitation of our intuition which is why I lean to taking 1 box.
The stupid Zorex stole my last comment, so I’ll summarise:
When P(Om) tends towards 1 then you have to make the irrational decision but it ceases to be a decision the nearer to 1 you get.
When you give someone an option all the data is available to work out what their decision will be (to Omega at least) and using natural laws the result is as predictable as a computer program.
Given we know that then the only rational decision is to choose the irrational option. Mainly because you don’t have a choice – the result is pre-determined.
Isn’t this the basis of compatibilism, that your decision brain follows purely natural laws but that you still have free will? (While I agree with what Dennett, Blackford etc. have to say about this position I cannot accept the term and prefer to use the term weak-determinist to show that our actions are potentially predictable.)
#24 You have to start from first principles, which basically include self-determination and the principle of property rights.
(Excuse the use of gender here, but it makes it easier.)
There is a man, Adam, in a forest. Alone. Does he have any rights or obligations? Seems like he has every right possible and no obligations (possibly a moral obligation not to torture the animals).
Another man appears in the forest – Ben. They tentatively agree to stay on their own side of the forest.
One year all their crops fail. Adam has a small river in his section and has been fishing and stored up some fish. Ben is starving and wants food off Adam.
Does Adam have a right to keep his stock and not help Ben? Does Ben have a right to force Adam to hand over what is his? Adam doesn’t know if his stocks will last until the next crops, should he defend his property against Ben?
I would suggest that while Adam may have a moral responsibility to help his neighbour there is no actual obligation to do so.
What if it wasn’t just Ben, but Ben and Charlie, should they, being the majority, have the right to force Adam to hand over what is his?
If it isn’t just two, but a hundred, or a thousand? What number of people wanting your property makes it alright for them to take it against your will?
Taking this to its logical conclusion you are only obliged to hand over what you have agreed to had over, and no amount of people trying to take what is not theirs makes it right.
Obviously this is impractical from the current state of society, but we can use the basic principles to generally point us in the direction of what is right and logical – this tends to be smaller government providing fewer services and fewer laws, but not always…
Wow. Nothing else I’ve seen this week has made me feel quite so uneducated as this post
Funny though… the format of that reminds me of one of those personality quizes. The idea that by asking a series of either/or questions you can eventually pinpoint the kind of category someone belongs in. But what if you’re the kind of philosopher who doesn’t believe in the mutual exclusivity of alternatives? Who doesn’t subscribe to that kind of dualism (which I realise is possibly the wrong use of the term, by the way)? Then you’re kind of stuck. Ahh, this is making my brain hurt
Deb — as I said I’m doing a philosophy-related honours and I didn’t know half the stuff so I think you’re excused!
As for no exclusivity, the actual survey had other options for each question (eg. other, don’t know, a combination). For a few of these I did have to say “bit of both”.
Except zombies — to me that’s clear as day
For Newcomb’s problem I agree it would be rational to choose the irrational option. However I’m just not sure what it means to have a decision theory or predictive theory that takes into account the actions or reasoning of the deciding agent (especially since the problem applies a NOT operation to make it a paradox!) A related article about why such self-referential problems might be a trick: http://www.paul-almond.com/RefutationofPenroseGodelTuring.htm (I think Paul Almond is a programmer not an academic which makes him one of the best non-academic philosophers I’ve read)
As for the derivation of libertarianism, to me that just provides the best refutation of it since even in this small case it is predicated on a person’s supposed moral right to be a sociopath and not help someone being the *most important* political principle.
The crux I think is in this: “while Adam may have a moral responsibility to help his neighbour there is no actual obligation to do so” — I don’t understand what the difference between a responsibility and an obligation is (or how it can possibly help here). But I think this just brings us back to our previous clashes on morals.
Michael, your argument tends towards socialism or communism, which is a valid worldview but not one that can be argued from first principles.
The overarching principle must be that someone is autonomous and cannot be forced to do anything, or not do something, unless it impinges on someone else’s rights, in general it must cause harm. Electing not to help someone in need may be selfish, sociopathic or whatever but it is not something that should be enforced. And it is not something that is enforced in society either (with the exception of parents and kids) otherwise we’d be giving a lot more in foreign aid.
If it’s not a case of survival for Ben, he just feels annoyed that Adam has more, then does Adam have any moral obligation to hand over his extra? If not then what’s the difference? The principle is the same.
I wasn’t making an argument for anything, just pointing out what I see as problems with your proposed argument. But the thing I don’t understand is how you claim that your political view is the one that’s derived from first principles and something like socialism isn’t. This comes back to the problems any system has with deriving anything from first principles.
I’ll come back to the actual examples later, gotta go for now.
michael, thank you for the kind comment. I notice you referenced an article by me (the Penrose one) in relation to Newcomb’s paradox. I actually wrote an article which discusses a situation with some similarities to Newcomb’s problem – and to avoid any issues about backward causality, contradiction, etc, it actually describes the mechanism by which the situation is set up, so that there need be no debate about what is actually going on or will happen. I’m not sure if you have seen it, but it is here: http://www.paul-almond.com/GameTheoryWithYourself.htm
Hi Paul — I’m a new fan of your site so I’ve downloaded that article a few months ago along with about 15 others — most still sitting in my to read pile.
The ones that hit me the hardest were the ones about Mind, Substrate & Value — I used to dismiss Searle’s wall computation argument but after reading the first 2 papers am not so sure. However it’s weird since if true it would be the most fundamental, important, paradigm-shifting etc discovery of all time, completely dwarfing anything like QM.
Any plans on finishing that series (couldn’t find the last paper)? I’m finishing honours in philosophy of mind this year but I’ve already scheduled some time next year to think about these problems.
Hi michael
So far, I have written the first three articles in the “Minds, Substrate and Measure” series. I am intending to write further articles in this series. In fact, Part 4 has been partially completed for some time now. One reason it has taken longer is that I have had to deal with a lot of objections, and it seemed to make sense to include answers to some of these rather than just pressing on. I have also been involved with my current series of articles “An Attempt to Generalize AI”, which is about developing an over-arching model of human cognition which could also be used as an AI method: That has taken a lot of time. (Incidentally, if you want to read any of my articles that actually deal with cognition/AI I suggest this most recent series, and I also suggest missing some of the earlier articles in the series and starting at “An Attempt to Generalize AI: Part 15″, as this contains an organized account of everything up to when it was written, without all the false starts, etc.)
I know it has been a long time since the last “Minds, Measure, Substrate and Value” article, but I will get back to it. I actually know, more or less, what I will be sending in the later articles of the series. So far, the articles have attempted to show that we need to take a particular view of minds and their relationship to physical substrates to have a coherent view of probability for observers being in various situations – which means, basically, to have any coherent view of probability at all. This would lead to a weird form of dualism in which minds seem to be getting some special, fairly extreme, philosophical treatment. The later articles will apply the same approach to things in general, so that what the articles so far have said about minds will apply to all physical objects: Minds will then not be treated any differently to anything else. Such a view, however, will have wide-sweeping cosmological implications. (It basically puts us in just about the most extensive multiverse you can imagine. Anyone feeling uncomfortable with what has been said about minds, so far, would probably be absolutely horrified by all this.) It is, however, the only way of avoiding a rather silly form of dualism. Steve Grand and I discussed some of this in a debate at http://machineslikeus.com/forum/cryptic-ontology and that may give some idea where things are going to go in future. Incidentally, I am aware that other people have proposed extensive cosmologies like this based on abstraction. What I am really trying to do is to show that there isn’t any way out of it: that we can construct thought experiments that leave out concept of probability in a mess if we don’t face some issues about what “abstraction” really means.
While I have not provided Part 4 yet, the fact that I have a good idea what I will be saying in it means I have no problem answering any questions or objections by email.
Thanks Paul, I’m bookmarking the page on Machines Like Us and will look at the generalised AI papers in a few months when I’m done with my honours thesis. I’ll defer any comments about this “infiniteverse” until I’ve had a proper read through all the arguments.
One thing is that remember the first few papers referenced the idea a physical system being interpretable as any computation applying even to a single atom, is this part of your upcoming part 4?
I also got your email but it accidentally got deleted before I could read it. I think you mentioned an email from me — this was probably automatically sent by my blog when I replied to a comment (if you clicked on subscribe to comments).
“One thing is that remember the first few papers referenced the idea a physical system being interpretable as any computation applying even to a single atom, is this part of your upcoming part 4?”
It gets mentioned in Part 4. I decided that Part 4 won’t go ahead and propose a full, cosmological view yet, because it is more important to deal with some of the objections that have been made in placed like “Less Wrong”. The idea here is simple. An interpretation is when some algorithm takes some input from physical reality and produces some object – and the view is that the algorithm is actually “finding” that object. In the first three articles, the objects in which we are interested are minds. Now, although the Searle wall issue is a good example, it gets a lot of attack based on various issues. To get away from this idea a bit, we can ask how much input you need for the finding algorithm? Why not just apply it to an atom, or to an electron? You could abstract all this other stuff from that. Some people would say it is cheating because the finding algorithm would contain more information than what it is finding, but that is a cognitive fallacy based on some idea of “what should be fair”: In fact, one critic even put it in terms of “Would you buy a computer program that solved a problem in a way that required you to put more information in than…â€? This misses the point: We aren’t looking at a commercial issue, or one of fairness. We are looking at what a valid interpretation should be, and with regard to the relative lengths of the finding algorithm and the sequence of bits that it reads as input data, there is no obvious cutoff point at which we can say that an interpretation is invalid. People who try to propose such a cutoff point tend to do it on “commonsenseâ€? or intuitive grounds. The lack of a cutoff point is significant. In fact, I just said we might consider applying the finding algorithm to a single electron. Why do we even need that? We could apply the finding algorithm with no input at all. We would, in effect, be abstracting nothing, and anything therefore said to exist as a result of being findable by such an algorithm would be an abstraction of nothing: In a view like this, its existence would be logically implied by the existence of …nothing. As I maintain that a view like this is necessary to get a coherent view of probability (because otherwise we can easily break our ways of dealing with probability and reference classes in some thought experiments), it means I seem to be implying that all abstractions of anything exist, and that the existence of the physical world (or worlds, really) as an abstraction of nothing.
I am hoping to describe the cosmological view in Part 5 (though when I say things like this about this series it keeps changing), but it is probably fairly obvious how that will proceed.
Leave a Comment