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paper-machine comments on Philosophy Needs to Trust Your Rationality Even Though It Shouldn't - Less Wrong
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Comments (169)
I'm not sure that more rationality in philosophy would help enough as far as FAI is concerned. I expect that if philosophers became more rational, they would mainly just become more uncertain about various philosophical positions, rather than reach many useful (for building FAI) consensuses.
If you look at the most interesting recent advances in philosophy, it seems that most of them were made by non-philosophers. For example, Turing, Church, and other's work on understanding the nature of computation, von Neumann and Morgenstern's decision theory, Tegmark's Ultimate Ensemble, and algorithmic information theory / Solomonoff Induction. (Can anyone think of a similarly impressive advance made by professional philosophers, in this same time frame?) Based on this, I think appropriate background knowledge and raw intellectual firepower (most of the smartest humans probably go into math/science instead of philosophy) are perhaps more important than rationality for making philosophical progress.
I think the canonical example would be Thomas Metzinger's model of the first-person perspective.
Would't there be at least one reference to his book in SEP if that was true?
http://plato.stanford.edu/search/searcher.py?query=metzinger ?
Yeah, I did the same search, but none of those results reference his main work, the book that paper-machine cited (or any other papers/books that, judging from the titles, are about his main ideas).
They're still citations to his body of work, which is all on pretty much the same topic. SEP is good, but it is just an encyclopedia, after all, and Being No One is a very challenging book (I still haven't read it because it's too hard for me). A general citation search would be more useful; I see 647 citations to it in Google Scholar. (I don't know of a citation engine specializing in philosophy - Philpapers shows a fair bit of activity related to Metzinger but doesn't give me how many philosophy papers cite it, much less philosophy of mind.)
This lecture he gives about the very same topic is much more accessible.
Thank you for posting this.
He suggests that the reason we don't have awareness that our sensory experiences are created by a detailed internal process is that it wasn't evolutionarily worthwhile. However, we're currently in an environment where at least our emotional experiences are more and more likely to be hacked by other people who aren't necessarily on our side, which means that self-awareness is becoming more valuable. At this point, the evolution is more likely to be memetic (parents teaching their children to notice what's going on in advertisements) than physiological, though it's also plausible that some people find it innately easier to track what is going on with their emotions than others.
Has anyone read The Book of Not Knowing by Peter Ralston? I've only read about half of it, but it looks like it's heading into the same territory.
I didn't even try to read the book, but went through a bunch of review papers (which of course all try to summarize the main ideas of the book) and feel like I got a general understanding that way. I wanted to see how his ideas compare to his peers (so as to judge how much of an advance they are upon the state of the art), and that's when I found the SEP lacking any discussion of them (which still seems fairly damning to me).
Apparently, his follow-up book "The Ego Tunnel" deals with mostly the same stuff and is not as impenetrable. Have you read it? I'd be interested in hearing your thoughts on it.
Ironically, my problem with that book was that it was too easy and simple.
No idea why this would be true.
(For example, despite being a reasonably well-known mathematician, there is only one reference to S. S. Abhyankar in the MacTutor history of mathematicians.)