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[Poll] Less Wrong and Mainstream Philosophy: How Different are We?
Despite being (IMO) a philosophy blog, many Less Wrongers tend to disparage mainstream philosophy and emphasize the divergence between our beliefs and theirs. But, how different are we really? My intention with this post is to quantify this difference.
The questions I will post as comments to this article are from the 2009 PhilPapers Survey. If you answer "other" on any of the questions, then please reply to that comment in order to elaborate your answer. Later, I'll post another article comparing the answers I obtain from Less Wrongers with those given by the professional philosophers. This should give us some indication about the differences in belief between Less Wrong and mainstream philosophy.
Glossary
analytic-synthetic distinction, A-theory and B-theory, atheism, compatibilism, consequentialism, contextualism, correspondence theory of truth, deontology, egalitarianism, empiricism, Humeanism, libertarianism, mental content externalism, moral realism, moral motivation internalism and externalism, naturalism, nominalism, Newcomb's problem, physicalism, Platonism, rationalism, relativism, scientific realism, trolley problem, theism, virtue ethics
Note
Thanks pragmatist, for attaching short (mostly accurate) descriptions of the philosophical positions under the poll comments.
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Comments (627)
Physicalism: A physical duplicate of our world (i.e. a world in which all the same physical properties are instantiated at the same space-time locations) must necessarily also be a mental duplicate (i.e. all mental states instantiated in that world must be identical to the mental states instantiated in this one).
Anti-physicalism: The denial of physicalism.
"Same space-time location" means "same relative distances and time intervals within each world"?
Beware that some words might mean different things to different communities. For example, if a philosopher calls himself/herself an "anti-reductive naturalist," there's a good chance they are a strict reductionist in the LW sense. It may help to read the "thoughts on specific questions" section of this page of the PhilPapers Survey site.
Excellent point. I'll add a glossary to the article sometime within the next 24 hours in order to diminish some of the confusion.
I've tried to do that already, adding comments below each question that I think might be confusing.
Is there somewhere a glossary for all the questions? That would be very helpful (beyond this survey).
Also - there was already a similar thread:
http://lesswrong.com/lw/56q/how_would_you_respond_to_the_philpapers_what_are/
The comments have some answers (though not in a convenient machine readable form).
Externalism: The representational content of our mental states (e.g. what objects our beliefs are about) is dependent upon properties of our external environment, not just upon properties of our brain state.
Internalism: The representational content of our mental states is fixed by our brain state.
This looks like an unheard falling tree problem, the problematic term being "the representational content of our mental states".
Agreed with Richard above, it's hard to know what to do with "the representational content of our mental states". How would I know if the representational content of one of my mental states had changed? What would I expect to observe differently?
That said, I voted "internalism", roughly on the grounds that while I can posit things that might deserve the label "an aspect of the representational content of a mental state that depends on properties of my external environment," I don't actually seem to care about any of them.
I voted "Lean toward: externalism", but the I get the feeling that even asking the question shows that you're barking up the wrong tree.
If you take Dennett's intentional stance towards our mental states, I think you can only do so by considering the external environment that the brain is operating in. Which I guess makes me an externalist (which is what I answered), but I'm not sure whether that's the traditional definition.
Other: embodied cognition (externalism but moreso).
Russellianism: The meanings of our (referential) words are the objects to which they refer. When I say "Socrates is mortal", the meaning of the word `Socrates' in that sentence is a particular person who lived in ancient Greece.
Fregeanism: The meanings of our words are not directly objects in the world but the particular way we conceive of those objects. Two words referring to the same object can have different meaning since they correspond to different ways of conceiving the object. For instance, "morning star" and "evening star" both refer to to the same object (Venus), but they have different meanings.
Both Russellianism and Fregeanism make assumptions about the way language is related to the world that I reject.
Other: This.
Likewise.
What assumptions do you have in mind?
Voted Other. I would say the meanings of our words are the desired state changes in the world correlated with the use of those words. I don't know if that position has a name.
I'm not sure I entirely understand the question. Isn't it just the distinction between connotation and denotation?
Other: Yes.
Other: Seems like a semantic problem about the word "meaning".
Yes: There are certain sentences which are true solely by virtue of the meanings of the words involved, so these sentences are not subject to empirical falsification. Example: "All bachelors are unmarried." It is impossible for this sentence to be false, provided the words retain their ordinary meaning.
No: Every sentence is potentially open to empirical falsification. [EDIT: I guess the "No" answer would also be appropriate for those who believe that no sentence is open to empirical falsification, although I would be very surprised if anyone on this site fits that description.]
The Yes answer seems obvious, is there some sort of gotcha?
This was the most surprising poll result, to me.
Huh. Well, I'm willing to be convinced.
So, OK, sticking with pragmatist's example, can you summarize the conditions under which "All bachelors are unmarried" becomes false while the words retain their ordinary meaning? (I recognize that we might just turn out to disagree on what their ordinary meaning is, which I think would be uninteresting, but I'm hoping it won't come to that.)
Not the source of my surprise.
Thanks for priming everyone who reads this thread before voting, though.
Huh, yeah, I'm pretty surprised too. Possibly even for the same reason :P
Other: Unique meanings are a useful approximation, but if you stretch an approximation thin enough it develops holes. For example, "bachelor" in middle english refers to a squire, and squires can be married.
Other: Lean toward two-dimensionalism.
Can you elaborate on this? I haven't heard of it in this context before.
The idea is that the meaning of an utterance isn't just one thing; it's kind of the overlap between two distinct propositions: the sense (that is, the concept or idea by which we find the referent), and the referent, the actual entity to which it refers. The standard textbook example is the word "water"; the sense of "water" would basically correspond to a descriptive, conceptually encoded "water"-iness, and the referent would be the substance itself. Basically, you've got your ideas about water, you've got the abstract entity you recognize or impute as a member of the reference class (the substance H2O considered in abstract, or a pond, or a glass of clear odorless transparent liquid on the table in front of you), and both are relevant to determining the actual semantic content.
I don't know the definition of any of the "-ism"s. Should I not answer the questions? I imagine that others will be in the same position as I am.
EDIT: Thanks to pragmatist for the explanations!
B-theory: Specifying the temporal ordering of all events in space-time exhausts all the objective temporal facts about those events.
A-theory: Specifying the temporal ordering of all events in space-time does not exhaust all the objective temporal facts about them. There is a further temporal fact about a given event: whether it is in the past, in the present or in the future. These are objective facts that are not fixed by merely specifying which events happen earlier or later.
What happens when you throw relativity into the mix? How do you specify the order of events in space-time when it varies based on the location of the observer?
In relativity you still have temporal ordering of events, but it is not a total order. In a Newtonian world, every event is either earlier than, later than or simultaneous with every other event. In relativity, some events can still be unambiguously described as earlier than or later than others. Event A is earlier than event B if it is in B's past light cone. There is no longer a relationship of simultaneity, however, and some pairs of events are not related by the earlier than/later than relation. The temporal order is a partial order.
Partial ordering.
In the past, present or future of what?
Of me, who is saying it? But that is merely a temporal fact of the first kind: the given event is in the past/future of the event of my saying whether it is in my past/future.
The point of A-theory is that past, present and future are non-relational. There is an objective fact of the matter about which slice of the space-time manifold is the present, although this fact keeps changing, of course. So yeah, one way to think of the difference between A-theory and B-theory is that the B-theorist thinks of past, present and future as relational terms. Just saying "past" isn't enough, you need to specify what it is in the past of. But the A-theorist thinks it makes sense to talk of past, present and future simpliciter.
An event (a point in spacetime) is really objective wrt time: that is, it is outside of time. The ordering of two events is also objective.
The matter of where we are in time - and therefore, whether an event is in our past or in our future - is constantly changing as time flows. It is not a time-objective fact about an event that it is in our future, for tomorrow it will be a fact about the same event that it is in our past. So these facts about an event are subjective: they depend on when in time you are when you are making the judgement.
Disagreeing with this seems like saying the word "objective" should mean two different things in the two above paragraphs. Which is apparently what almost all big philosophical arguments reduce to. Sigh.
"Other": The nature of physics has a strong possibility of being such that the question makes no sense.
Same other, but with the nuance that there is probably a refinement of the question that does make sense.
A rough, likely wrong attempt at a refinement:
Sort of lean toward B-theory, but I suspect other temporal facts may exist. However, they are not of the form "X is in the present/future/past." Also, the nature of time may make these the wrong questions to ask as noted below.
Lean toward B-theory if pushed to answer, but I wonder what cognitive algorithm even generated this as a possibly interesting question.
Also, who the hell has invented the names for that?
J. M. E. McTaggart.
And he didn't mean to name competing theories about time; he was trying to dismiss the both of them.
I think he was just a B-theorist (though he thought the self-contradictory A-theory was an ineliminable part of our thoughts about time).
Wikipedia appears to confirm my memory of it ("McTaggart argued that the A series was a necessary component of any full theory of time, but that it was also self-contradictory and that our perception of time was, therefore, ultimately an incoherent illusion.")
Humeanism: The laws of nature are compressed descriptions of salient patterns in the distribution of physical events.
Non-Humeanism: The laws of nature are not mere descriptions. They determine the distribution of physical events.
Leaving aside any putative True Theory of Everything which we don't know yet, the laws we actually know and use today are definitely Humean. We should know, we made them that way.
I assumed the question was referring to the fundamental laws of the universe, which would be a theory of everything.
A true theory of everything is by definition never wrong. In which case there's no observable difference between Humeanism and non-Humeanism, and it makes no sense to talk about the theory "determining" events or merely "describing" them.
Define: theory of everything: maximally compressed, true and complete description of the physical evolution of the universe over time.
Other: there are high-level laws of nature that are compressed descriptions, and low-level laws of nature that determine events.
That's non-Humeanism.
Other: What's the difference?
If I believe that the reason we get nicely compressed descriptions of salient patterns, because the mathematical abstractions have concrete realizations in the symmetries at the basis of physics, is that Non-Humeanism?
And if I further hold the propositional belief that using the words "The laws of nature are not mere descriptions." is likely to make me too attached to current beliefs about physics (or more likely evolutionary psych) and the belief that one can never have perfect knowledge, so any conception of natural laws I (or anyone) will ever have will be Humean, should I have hit "other"?
Externalism: A subject's belief can be justified even if the justification is not consciously available to the subject. For instance, if the belief is formed on the basis of a reliable perceptual faculty, it may be a justified belief even if the subject is not aware that the relevant faculty is reliable or even that the relevant faculty is the source of the belief.
Internalism: A subject's beliefs are justified only if the subject has conscious access to the justification.
Aren't these just different definitions of the word "justified", rather than arguments about what is actually "justified"?
Quite possibly.
Voted for "externalism", but caring about whether a belief is "justified" is probably a mistake.
Other: "Justification" is just another complicated pre-Bayes way of trying to understand what belief is.
Same
Other:
I dithered on this a lot.
I sympathize with the meta-answer (as above) of discarding the notion of a "justified belief" in favor of talking about how experiences serve as evidence for beliefs, but it's not clear to me that that precludes engaging with the question at its own level. Yes, whether a belief is "justified" can be expressed more precisely in terms of confidence intervals based on available evidence, but I'm not convinced that it needs to be.
I end up saying it depends.
I would say I'm justified in believing the two objects I'm looking at are the same size if they look the same size to me, even if I'm not consciously aware of the process whereby I arrive at that belief, even in cases where it turns out that they aren't the same size after all. Which is an externalist position as described here.
But I would not say I'm justified in believing any proposition I happen to believe. In some cases I would declare a belief unjustified if I'm not aware of the mechanism whereby I arrive at it. So I'm not comfortable describing myself as an externalist in a broader sense, or even as leaning towards externalism in a broader sense.
Thinking about it some more, I suppose this dichotomy dissolves if I'm willing to treat sufficiently vague patterns as a "relevant faculty". "I believe the objects are the same size because that's what my eyes report and my eyes have a good track record about that sort of thing" might qualify as having conscious access to justification, in which case I suppose I'm an internalist... I can't imagine a belief I would call justified for which there isn't some kind of explanation of that sort, however vague, that I can make. But this seems uninteresting.
Incompatibilism: One cannot have free will in a deterministic universe.
Compatibilism: One can have free will in a deterministic universe.
Other: "Free will" is a confused term, so the question is unanswerable. If one takes the mechanism that results in the confusion about free will and labels that "free will", then of course compatibilism holds.
Upvoted in agreement. (I responded other as well.)
Other: it depends entirely on what one defines "free will" to mean, and all disagreements on the question are due to different definitions. Nobody is disputing actual facts. (That is, nobody who accepts a deterministic or random universe, as specified in pragmatist's definitions.)
Other, purely because in reading pragmatist's definitions I also accidentally read two other comments which confused me. My position is that we do not have contracausal free will, yet our decisions feel like that from the inside, and that indeed the question itself is usually a disguised query for whether we can ever be morally responsible for things, which I believe is a separate question.
Note: I don't think most theistic philosophers would consider the simulation hypothesis to be a variant of theism.
That's because they say "theism" but they mean "traditional religion". They probably wouldn't accept a reification of Azathoth either, or the Flying Spaghetti Monster.
My 'Other' answer is "Depends what you mean."
From that article:
But this is orthogonal to the question of moral realism: you can have realism just as well with or without moral universalism. So I think you're just a moral realist.
[EDIT: The way I had initially described the distinction was misleading, as pointed out by thomblake. I apologize for potentially skewing the results of the poll, although I don't think my revised version is that far off from the earlier version. Still, I should have been more careful.]
Moral realism: There are objective moral facts, i.e. there are facts about what is right and wrong (or good and bad) that are not constituted by a subject's beliefs and desires.
Moral anti-realism: The denial of moral realism.
Is that right? I've understood that you can be a realist about subject-sensitive objective moral facts. Is that different from saying that the facts are "agent-relative"?
You're right, my potted descriptions here are misleading. Certain forms of relativism are appropriately classified as realist. I'll edit my descriptions.
Thanks! I was concerned I had it wrong.
I tend to view game strategies that lead to the best stable equilibrium as moral injunctions ( tit for tat, cooperate first) These are provable ( under certain assumptions) so I lean towards saying they are "real"
For the record, I misread pragmatist's definition. My answer, which was Lean toward moral realism, should have been lean toward moral anti-realism. (I missed the "that are not agent-relative" part.)
Yeah, I'm not sure that part is correct, or it needs clarification.
Externalism: It is possible for a person to sincerely hold a moral belief (or make a moral judgment) without feeling any motivation to adhere to that belief/judgment. The claim is not just that the motivation might be trumped by other motivations, it is that it is possible for there to be no motivation at all.
Internalism: It is impossible to sincerely make a moral judgment without being motivated to act in accordance with it, although it may be the case that the motivation is trumped by other countervailing motivations.
Other: This is a not-very-interesting definitional question as to exactly which kind of mental states should be counted as "sincerely making a moral judgement".
I accept externalism on the part of some possible sentient creatures, but I think this question with respect to humans is a question of definitions, and even if you decide on a definition it becomes an empirical question I don't know the answer to.
Other: I was unable to resolve my thoughts on this at all, and am not sure to what degree hearing more arguments either way would help that.
Moral particularism
For the record, I consider myself a consequentialist who is also a moral particularist.
Is that possible? Can you both think a) that one should in general act so as to maximise happiness/utility/whatever, and b) there are no general moral rules?
I think that's a contradiction.
Consequentialism doesn't require a commitment to maximization of any particular variable. It's the claim that only the consequences of actions are relevant to moral evaluation of the actions. I think that's a weak enough claim that you can't really call it a general moral principle. So one could believe that only consequences are morally relevant, but the way in which one evaluates actions based on their consequences does not conform to any general principle.
If Luke had said that he's a utilitarian who is also a particularist, that would have been a contradiction.
That's a good point. So I should take from Luke's claim that he does not believe one should (as a moral rule) maximise expected utility, or anything like that? And that he would say that it's possible (if perhaps unlikely) for an action to be good even if it minimizes expected utility?
Fair enough. I should have been more specific. I'm a particularist who thinks consequentialist reasoning is appropriate in certain contexts, but deontological reasoning is appropriate in other contexts. So I'm pretty sure "Other" is the right pick for me.
All three in weighted combination, with consequentialism scaling such that it becomes dominant in high-stakes scenarios but is not dominant elsewhere. I believe that consequentialism, deontology and virtue ethics are mutually reducible and mutually justifying, but that flattening them into any one of the three is bad because it raises the error rate, by making some values much harder to describe and eliminating redundancy in values that would have protected them from corruption.
Thinking about this...
So, yes, in many cases I make decisions based on moral principles, because the alternatives are computationally intractable. And in a few cases I judge character traits as a proxy for doing either. And I endorse all of that, under the circumstances. Which sounds like what you're describing.
But if I discovered that one of my moral principles was causing me to act in ways that had consequences I anti-value, I would endorse discarding that principle. Which seems to me like I'm a consequentialist who sometimes uses moral principles as a processing shortcut.
Were I actually a deontologist, as described here, presumably I would shrug my shoulders, perhaps regret the negative consequences of my moral principle (perhaps not), and go on using it.
Admittedly, I'm not sure I have a crisp understanding of the distinction between moral principles (which consequentialism on this account ignores) and values (on which it depends).
Consequentialism: The morality of actions depends only on their consequences.
Deontology: There are moral principles that forbid certain actions and encourage other actions purely based on the nature of the action itself, not on its consequences.
Virtue ethics: Ethical theory should not be in the business of evaluating actions. It should be in the business of evaluating character traits. The fundamental question of ethics is not "What makes an action right or wrong?" It is "What makes a person good or bad?"
I lean toward Consequentialism but I support something like deontology/virtue ethics for reasons of personal computability.
Voted for "lean toward consequentialism". As someone once put, I consider the “fundamental” rules to be consequentialist¹, but some of the approximations I use because the fundamental rules are infeasible to calculate from scratch every time resemble deontology or virtue ethics, much like QFT and GR are time-reversal symmetric but thermodynamics isn't. Also, ethical injunctions (i.e. fudge factors in my prior probability that certain behaviours will harm someone to compensate for cognitive biases) and TDT-like game-/decision-theoretical considerations make some of my choices resemble deontology, and a term in my utility function for how awesome I am make some of my choices resemble virtue ethics.
I accept consequentialism but I also believe that "acting like I'm following virtue ethics" tends to have the best consequences.
Other: I think it's a false dichotomy. I think that an ideal system of government will probably sometimes have to sacrifice libertarian principles in favor of egalitarian ones, and sometimes have to sacrifice egalitarian principles in favor of libertarian ones.
What principles will it use in making such choices?
How happy, safe, productive, etc. people are. I don't see either libertarianism or egalitarianism as terminal values.
I believe Richard's point is that e.g. egalitarianism is in fact a system for making these sorts of choices (are people more equal? Yes? Do that!).
And of course the principles that you use define your "actual" system, which is neither egalitarian nor libertarian (which would be "are people more free? Yes? Do that!")
Ideal by what metric? Unless you're a moral realist, there probably isn't such a thing.
Ideal in terms of fulfilling my terminal values, which contain a term for the satisfaction of others.
You're right. My comment was silly and aggressive. (Of course it did not seem that way when I wrote it.) I seem to have a blind spot when I think I see moral realism.
My apologies.
Other: utilitarianism
Other utilitarianism: symmetrized_Manfred_utilitarianism :P
What if I simply don't know?
If libertarian vs. egalitarian is the main axis along which members of a group differ politically, it's a very unusual group.
What are we really trying to find out about the group? Possibilities that come to mind include:
Scientific anti-realism: While there may be strong reasons to believe in the empirical predictions of our best scientific theories, there are no strong reasons to believe in their theoretical claims about unobservable entities (such as quarks).
Scientific realism: There are strong reasons to believe in the theoretical claims about unobservable entities made by our best scientific theories.
What is and isn't observable changes over time. Quarks are not in principle unobservable.
Conversely, we couldn't observe Neptune before we had telescopes or spaceships, but surely no philosophers would argue that the scientists who predicted its existence due to gravitational influences on Uranus's orbit should have disbelieved in the theory's unobservable predictions.
Most scientific anti-realists acknowledge this. If quarks become observable then there would be good reason to believe in them. But the mere fact that they are part of an empirically successful theory is not sufficient reason.
Of course, it's unclear whether the observable/unobservable distinction makes sense. Does seeing something through a microscope count as observing it? How about an electron microscope? How about tracks in a bubble chamber?
I hope you mean "if they are actually observed".
But, if we didn't believe (to a degree) in theoretical predictions before making observations to confirm them, then we wouldn't know what observations to attempt, and would almost never actually observe something useful!
Anchoring on what most humans can observe unaided is just silly. I have acute myopia since age 6; without modern glasses I wouldn't be able to observe the moon in the sky - or to read about any scientific theories. Should I discount them on that account? Or if someone were born with unusually fine eyesight, making them the only person able to observe a tiny mote of dust - should everyone else disbelieve them? If a trained dog barks when he smells explosives, which humans can't smell, should we ignore the dog?
Other: the distinction between scientific realism and anti-realism is mostly meaningless. If a scientific theory makes claims about "unobservable entities" (not sure what exactly it means), either these claims are logically entangled with testable claims that have been experimentally verified and then the reasons to believe in them are as good as the reasons to believe the verified claims (supposedly about "observable objects") or these claims are independent of the rest of the theory and presumably untestable, which means that the theory is un-Occamian and shouldn't be considered good scientific theory.
I think that's just realism.
An abstract object is an object that does not correspond to any pattern of matter and energy in space-time. Purported examples of abstract objects are numbers, properties, sets, etc. An object that does correspond to some concentration of matter/energy in space-time is called a concrete object.
Nominalism: Abstract objects do not exist.
Platonism: Abstract objects exist.
Another false dichotomy. The word exist means different things to different people.
I agree with you that the distinction here gets at what people mean by "exists," but am not sure what makes that a false dichotomy. Personally, I lean towards nominalism precisely because "exist" isn't a verb I would apply to abstract objects... whatever it is that existence consists of, abstract objects don't do that thing.
Wikipedia:
For example, abstract objects could be considered to exist in the minds of people imagining them, and consequently in some neuronal pattern, which may or may not match between different individuals, but considered to not exist as something independent of the conscious minds imagining them. While this is a version of nominalism, it is not nearly as clear-cut as "abstract objects do not exist".
What do platonists say the word object means, if some objects are abstract? What is a property that is true of all objects? What are some categories of non-objects?
For most Platonists, an object is something we quantify over. So, for instance, numbers are objects, because we say things like "There is one even prime" (existential quantification), and "All multiples of 6 are also multiples of 2" (universal quantification). Any domain over which we quantify is a domain of objects.
Then what does it mean for an abstract object like 2 to "exist"?
There are many different answers to this question. One common answer is that we should believe an object exists if a theory we accept quantifies over that object. If quantum field theory requires quantification over the integers then 2 (and other integers) exist. Since contemporary physics doesn't quantify over a domain containing phlogiston, phlogiston does not exist.
There's something wrong when smart people argue and disagree over a question when there are many different ideas as to what the words in the question actually mean...
Still not sure what this means. Is there some sense in which this distinction pays rent in anticipated experience?
I voted other because of my confusion on this point. I think we need to taboo "exists".
My inclination is to say that it doesn't, and that the disagreement is really just about how to use the word "exist". But there are a couple of ways in which the distinction might have a bearing on anticipated experience.
One prominent argument for Platonism is the Quine-Putnam Indispensability Argument, which says that our best strategy for ontological commitment is to believe in the existence of those objects over which our best scientific theories indispensably quantify. So if one cannot dispense with quantification over mathematical objects while maintaining the integrity of our best theories, then we should believe in the existence of those mathematical objects. If one accepts this criterion, then whether or not one believes in the existence of abstract objects depends on whether our best theories indispensably quantify over such objects, so the Platonism vs. nominalism debate depends on science. Hartry Field wrote a book where he tries to axiomatize Newtonian continuum mechanics without any quantification over real numbers.
Also, it's plausible that Tegmark's Level IV multiverse hypothesis assumes Platonism, since it requires that mathematical structures have independent existence. So if you believe Tegmark's hypothesis constrains anticipation, then perhaps Platonism does as well.
It's a prerequisite that a question must not pay rent in anticipated experience before it can be part of philosophy.
As far as I can see, none of the questions in this survey have any relation to anticipated experience.
I think a number of discoveries in psychology and neuroscience are relevant to the physicalism vs. anti-physicalism question.
I think relativity basically destroys the case for A-theory. The idea of an "objective present" loses all attraction (for me at least) when you realize that there is no such thing as objective simultaneity.
I think there's plenty of evidence that God does not exist (and there is plenty of potential evidence that would convince me that He does).
Other: Aristotelianism.
Abstract objects exist when instantiated. The "form of 2" does not exist in a world of forms somewhere, but 2 billiard balls is an instance of both '2' and 'billiard ball'.
Other: I hold a Tegmark-style "all mathematical objects exist" view, but additionally hold that this requires promoting the type of the "exists" property from boolean-valued to real-valued, so that this becomes "all mathematical objects have nonzero degree of existence", and most ordinary usages of the word "exists" pick up an implied "as a substructure of" relation to some set of universes. This "as a substructure of" relation excludes platonic objects when present, so nominalism vs. platonism reduces to the word "exists" being a pair of homonyms.
I believe this to be a false dichotomy; both empirical and rational processes generate knowledge, although particular kinds of knowledge (such as the colors of objects or the truth of theorems) may be restricted to arising from one or the other.
Should we be discussing the questions before others have had a chance to vote without being swayed?
I meant this as an explanation of my 'Other' vote, but yes we should discuss, because postponing discussion is not a realistic option - comments will go unwritten, rather than being delayed. Spoiler tags would be helpful, but I don't think we have them.
You're right.
Yes, if it elucidates what the questions mean.
This position is basically rationalism. Contemporary rationalists don't deny the possibility of empirical knowledge. That would be a fairly absurd position to hold in the present. They say that there are also non-empirical sources of knowledge. Empiricists deny the existence of non-empirical sources of knowledge.
Suppose I flip a coin 999 times and it comes up heads. I then flip it a hundredth time but don't look at it.
I would be comfortable saying I know without looking that it came up heads. (Sure, there's a chance I'm wrong. There's a chance I'm wrong if I look, too. If "knowledge" denotes the state of absolute certainty, we don't ever know anything. It makes more sense to interpret "knowledge" as denoting greater-than-threshold confidence.)
Would a contemporary empiricist say that I don't know that, because I didn't see it?
That I know this, but it's not novel information?
That it's novel information, but I obtain it through sensory experience? (E.g., observing the previous 999 flips)
Other?
Other: Agree that it's a false dichotomy.
Empiricism: Our only source of novel information about the world is sensory experience.
Rationalism: There is some information about the world that we can arrive at by rational cogitation, without having to rely on sensory experience.
Other: I would tend to regard our reason as a sense.
Other for basically the same reason as this, though I never thought of it in those words.
Then you're an empiricist.
I would say it's more like novalis thinks there is no substantive distinction between empiricism and rationalism.
He definitely thinks there's a substantive difference: if reason is a sense, and all our knowledge comes from the senses (including reason) then all our knowledge is a posteriori. Rejecting the mechanism of a priori knowledge acquisition is rejecting rationalism (regardless of how the word 'rational' mutates in the mean time).
So that's the mysterious common sense people talk about!
Other: both.
That's rationalism. 'Both' would be a contradiction.
Rationalism: doesn't work for arbitrary minds, but works for us, as we aren't arbitrary minds (yay evolution).
I was going to post a snarky comment to the effect that if you discard outright religious views and cognition motivated by them, there doesn't seem to be much left to non-naturalism. But the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy says it better:
So non-naturalism looks like mostly a combination of religion and arguments over the meaning of the word "natural". As in, if we found evidence that spirits of the dead affected physical events, that would promote them to the status of natural physical phenomena. So of course everything that exists is "natural" - according to some definitions of the word.
What is there to non-naturalism that is worth the time of seriously investigating it?
One could say the same thing of a lot of philosophy.
Trolley problem: There is a trolley traveling along a set of tracks. The driver has lost control of the trolley. On the track ahead of the trolley are five people who cannot get off the track in time and will all die if the trolley gets to them. You are standing next to a lever that can switch the track the trolley will take, preventing the deaths of the five people. On the other track is a single person who also cannot get away in time and so will die if you switch the track. Do you refrain from switching the track ("straight") or do you switch the track ("turn")?
Addendum: you are not allowed to explicitly consider e.g. future reputational effects of your choice. (Most people will hate you for flipping the switch or just for being involved no matter what you do. The safest bet is to run away if you haven't been seen near the switch yet.)
What is the psychological view, if it's non-physical(ist)?
I believe, the distinction is whether 'you' are the physical atoms that make up your brain, or just the pattern those atoms form. So you were instantaneously replaced by an identical copy, would you still be the same person?
Has implications for things like uploading.
Physical view: The maintenance of personal identity requires bodily continuity. So, for instance, one cannot preserve a person by downloading their psychological state into a computer.
Psychological view: The maintenance of personal identity requires continuity of psychological states. As long as there is a continuing stream of psychological states with the appropriate causal relations between them, the person persists.
That's not how I understood the question. Now it turns out my vote is wrong.
I should not have voted without understanding the question fully. But if I read the survey where the questions are taken from, I will probably also learn what is considered there to be the mainstream position, which will bias my answers.
I answered "psychological", but I should perhaps note that I don't understand "continuing" to imply "uninterrupted". I have no problem with the idea of a personal identity that is shut down for a while before being booted back up (with its internal state saved), or one that is computed on a timesharing system.
Yeah, I should have clarified. "Continuity" here does not mean temporal continuity; it means causal continuity. Future states are appropriately causally related to past states. So if I disintegrate right now, and simultaneously, by some bizarre chance, an atom-for-atom duplicate of me is produced by a thermal fluctuation on Mars, that duplicate would not be me, since the appropriate causal connections between my psychological state and his are lacking.
Hm.
My instinct is to say that I don't require causal continuity either... e.g., to say that if I appeared on Mars I would consider myself to still be the person who used to exist on Earth, despite the lack of causal connection.
That said, I don't really take that instinct seriously, since I'm incapable of actually imagining this happening without positing a causal connection I just don't happen to be aware of. The alternative is... well, unimaginable.
So, I dunno. Maybe I do require continuity in that sense, I'm just willing to posit it for any sufficiently complex system.
Other: For everyone else that I observe, an exact atom-for-atom duplicate is the same person as the original. If a copy of me were made, my 'mind' would reside in the original.
I accept that my duplicate would claim to be the original, of course.
That's not 'other', that's the psychological view (assuming you would still say they're the same person if one was duplicated minus a left pinky).
I'm not sure what you mean by "the original" here.
Suppose the atom-for-atom duplicate were constructed (for sound technical reasons) inside a duplication chamber, and it came to awareness inside that chamber. Would it claim that it had somehow had been swapped into the chamber and the duplicate swapped out, without it noticing? Or would it acknowledge that it had been constructed in the duplication chamber, but claim to be the original nonetheless?
I answered "lean toward psychological view", as I'm about evenly split between the psychological view and just considering the whole concept of personal identity incoherent/a wrong question in the first place.
Same. I think I might possibly be describable as more of an anticriterian than anything else.
Other: Psychological states include some bodily states like sensory input, and possibly as much as "social contact." There is no firm boundary between physical and psychological. Uploads are possible, but will require emulation of more than just a brain. An atom-by-atom instantiation of the same mind (including enough of the body and environment) will be the same person.
It's too late now, but if you put all the questions in the same comment then it's less work to vote in all of them and you can see correlations between answers to the different questions.
Yes, but then how would you handle the "Other" options?
They'd end up less organized, buy you could still ask people to comment; they'd just have to say which answer went with which 'Other' option.
I prefer the current approach; I am not answering the questions all at once.
Retracted. Sorry. Didn't read post properly.
It would be interesting to have "how well do you think you understand the question?" parallel to each question. I'd imagine less consistency on questions where most participants had to look up the terms on Wikipedia prior to answering.
I've posted brief explanations for some of the questions as replies to those questions. I haven't posted explanations for those questions that I believe the vast majority of LW users will understand. If you don't understand a question, I'm fairly certain that if you scroll down far enough you'll find a comment from me with an attempt at explication.
Thanks for the clarifications, without them the questions made little sense to me. (Well, with them most polls appear poorly defined false dichotomy, but at least this unfortunate fact becomes clear).
Hopefully some of these questions will be folded into Yvain's yearly survey.
Stop saying these questions are false dichotomies! None of them are, because they all have an 'other' option!
I think for future polls like this, mandate in the OP that all comments about questions be ROT13ed in order to avoid priming future respondents.
That would be too cumbersome to use for the commenters.
One respect in which Less Wrongers resemble mainstream philosophers is that many mainstream philosophers disparage mainstream philosophers and emphasize the divergence between their beliefs and those of rival mainstream philosophers. Indeed, that is something of a tradition in Western philosophy.
Other: I often find these sorts of questions useful as a way of clarifying my own understanding of related subjects, and I think clarifying understanding can lead to pragmatic value even in the absence of an agreed-upon answer.
That is, sometimes it is useful to go from "I am confused about X" to "there are three possibilities (X1, X2, X3) and I know what each one entails but I don't know how to choose among them", even though the question remains equally unanswered.
This is similar to your "interesting debate" option, I suppose, but different enough that I felt uncomfortable picking it.
I voted for "Interesting questions", because a slight majority of the polled questions fall in that category to me, and that matches the literal meaning of "most". But when 30-40% of the key questions of a discipline look "Uninteristing", it is not a great endorsement for it.