= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
JackV comments on Philosophy Needs to Trust Your Rationality Even Though It Shouldn't - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (169)
Your examples include:
(1) Any discussion of what art is.
(2) Any discussion of whether or not the universe is real.
(3) Any conversation about whether machines can truly be intelligent.
I agree that the answers to these questions depend on definitions, but then, so does the answer to the question, "how long is this stick ?". Depending on your definition, the answer may be "this many meters long", "depends on which reference frame you're using", "the concept of a fixed length makes no sense at this scale and temperature", or "it's not a stick, it's a cube". That doesn't mean that the question is inherently confused, only that you and your interlocutor have a communication problem.
That said, I believe that questions (1) and (3) are, in fact, questions about humans. They can be rephrased as "what causes humans to interpret an object or a performance as art", and "what kind of things do humans consider to be intelligent". The answers to these questions would be complex, involving multi-modal distributions with fuzzy boundaries, etc., but that still does not necessarily imply that the questions are confused.
Which is not to say that confused questions don't exist, or that modern philosophical academia isn't riddled with them; all I'm saying is that your examples are not convincing.
I think he meant that those questions depend ONLY on definitions.
As in, there's a lot of interesting real world knowledge that goes in getting a submarine to propel itself, but that now we know that, have, people asking "can a submarine swim" is only interesting in deciding "should the English word 'swim' apply to the motion of a submarine, which is somewhat like the motion of swimming, but not entirely". That example sounds stupid, but people waste a lot of time on the similar case of "think" instead of "swim".
Ok, that's a good point; inserting the word "only" in there does make a huge difference.
I also agree with BerryPick6 on this sub-thread.