fubarobfusco comments on Outside View(s) and MIRI's FAI Endgame - Less Wrong

16 Post author: Wei_Dai 28 August 2013 11:27PM

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Comment author: fubarobfusco 29 August 2013 02:26:00AM 25 points [-]

In the history of philosophy, there have been many steps in the right direction, but virtually no significant problems have been fully solved, such that philosophers can agree that some proposed idea can be the last words on a given subject.

This is a selection effect. Those problems that once were considered "philosophy", and that have been solved, have largely ceased to be considered fitting subjects for philosophizing. They are now regarded as the subject matter of sciences — or, in the cases where the solution was to explain away the problem, superstitions.

Comment author: Pablo_Stafforini 29 August 2013 09:10:21PM *  8 points [-]

Here's David Chalmers addressing that claim:

the 2009 PhilPapers Survey surveyed around 1000 professional philosophers on answers to thirty important questions in philosophy, and typically found that answers to major questions were distributed something like 50-50 or 60-40 or 70-30, once agnostics and other intermediate options were removed. This suggests that at least where these questions are concerned, large collective convergence has not been achieved.

Now, you might say that these are the big questions of the moment and therefore are precisely those that are unanswered, so the result is no surprise. There is correspondingly little agreement on the current big questions of physics: the status of string theory, for example. To avoid this worry, it is important that the big questions be individuated not by current debate but by past importance.

To properly address this issue, we would need analogs of the PhilPapers survey in (for example) 1611, 1711, 1811, 1911, and 2011, asking members of the community of philosophers at each point first, what they take to be the big questions of philosophy, and second, what they take to be the answers to those questions (and also the answers to any big questions from past surveys). We would also need to have analogous longitudinal surveys in other fields: the MathPapers Survey, the PhysPapers survey, the ChemPapers Survey, the BioPapers Survey, and so on. And we would need a reasonable measure of convergence to agreement over time. I predict that if we had such surveys and measures, we would find much less convergence on answers to the big questions suggested by past surveys of philosophers than we would find for corresponding answers in other fields.

Comment author: jkaufman 31 August 2013 11:58:54AM 3 points [-]

Did people in 1711 classify their work into "Math, Phys, Chem, Bio, and Phil"? What if ideas that we call Philosophy now are a subset of what someone in 1711 would be working on?

Comment author: alex_zag_al 19 October 2014 02:13:31PM 0 points [-]

They wouldn't classify their work that way, and in fact I thought that was the whole point of surveying these other fields. Like, for example, a question for philosophers in the 1600s is now a question for biologists, and that's why we have to survey biologists to find out if it was resolved.

Comment author: benkuhn 29 August 2013 03:05:58AM 3 points [-]

For the examples I can think of (mostly philosophy of mind), it seems to me that the sciences would have emerged whether or not any progress was made while it was still considered the domain of philosophy. Are there better examples, where the "philosophical" progress was actually important for the later "scientific" progress?

Comment author: fubarobfusco 29 August 2013 03:23:38AM 7 points [-]

It's my impression that many scholars whom we now might regard as astronomers, mathematicians, or physicists — such as Galileo, Descartes, or Newton — thought of their own work as being in the tradition of philosophy, and were thought of as philosophers by their contemporaries.

For instance: Galileo expounded his astronomy (or Copernicus's) in a work with the style of Socratic dialogues. Descartes' Geometry was an appendix to his philosophical Discourse on Method. The social role of "scientist" didn't exist until much later.

Comment author: Wei_Dai 29 August 2013 04:04:24AM 6 points [-]

The way I see this, among the problems once considered philosophical, there are some subsets that turned out to be much easier than others, and which are no longer considered part of philosophy. These are generally problems where a proposed solution can be straightforwardly verified, for example by checking a mathematical proof, or through experimental testing.

Given that the philosophical problems involved in designing FAI do not seem to fall into these subsets, it doesn't obviously make sense to include "problems once considered philosophical" in the reference class for the purposes I described in the OP, but maybe I should give this some more thought. To be clear, are you actually making this suggestion?

Comment author: fubarobfusco 29 August 2013 05:32:09AM 4 points [-]

It seems to me that we can't — in the general case — tell in advance which problems will turn out to be easier and which harder. If it had turned out that the brain wasn't the engine of reasoning, but merely a conduit for the soul, then cognitive science would be even harder than it actually is.

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