ata comments on How would you respond to the Philpapers "What are your Philosophical Positions" Survey? - Less Wrong

9 Post author: InquilineKea 11 April 2011 12:40AM

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Comment author: ata 11 April 2011 02:44:40AM *  3 points [-]

A priori knowledge: You can get knowledge of something by interacting with it or by being descended from ancestors who were selected by it. If you raised a human brain in a vat with no sensory input, it would not eventually discover arithmetic.

Abstract objects: Is this seriously still a thing in philosophy? Anyway, nominalism.

Aesthetic value: Subjectively objective.

Analytic-synthetic distinction: Yes, I suppose. There are things that are true by definition (but not a priori).

Epistemic justification: Seriously, they still actually classify their positions along these lines?

External world: There is one.

Free will: Shut up. (Or: my long answer, in response to the "Dissolving the Question" assignment. I still mostly agree with that comment even though I wrote it over three months ago.)

God: Atheism. Also, shut up.

Knowledge: Bayesian. (I don't think the old-timey "rationalism" vs. "empiricism" distinction is useful enough to keep around.)

Knowledge claims: I'm not going to bother trying to understand what this argument thinks it's about.

Laws of nature: This one too.

Logic: Classical logic (with all words removed) seems to be the most broadly useful, because you can make a logic gate that implements the AND and NOT operators, but not one that implements the modal "necessarily" operator (etc.).

Meta-ethics: Non-magical cognitivism.

Metaphilosophy: Naturalism.

Mind: Physicalism.

Moral judgment: A bit of both (moral assertions usually convey a mixture of both factual claims and emotional expression).

Moral motivation: Moral beliefs are obviously not universally automatically compelling. The degree to which they tend to be compelling to humans is a question for cognitive science.

Newcomb's problem: One box.

Normative ethics: Consequentialism.

Perceptual experience: I've not been able to determine exactly what all of these positions are after a few minutes of searching, but I predict that none of them is both true and non-trivial.

Personal identity: Patternism (best rescues the 'personal identity' intuition from uselessness).

Politics: Working on deleting all political views from my brain so I can start over with better epistemology now.

Proper names: As with many debates, the very premise of this one seems to be predicated on mind projection.

Science: Realist.

Teletransporter (new matter): Survival.

Time: B-theory seems trivially true.

Trolley problem (five straight ahead, one on side track, turn requires switching, what ought one do?): Switch.

Truth: Correspondence.

Zombies: Inconceivable!