Trusting philosophical intuitions and/or the way people use words to the point of making strong metaphysical claims about the world, despite the findings of cognitive science / evolutionary psychology / experimental philosophy / etc. that there doesn't seem to be any good reason to trust those intuitions / ways of talking
How about "there is no alternative"? (bu you have a further intuition that pointing out that we are all in the same boat regarding intuition is "crazy"...hmmmm)
Moral realism
What are the alternatives? Subjectivism is much more broken than STEM types tend to realise.
Mathematical Platonism
Fairly popular in STEM circles!
Libertarian free will (I'm looking for arguments other than those from religion)
Arguments for naturalistic libertarian free will tend to be towards its coherence/possibility rather than its reality. Check out Tony Dore and Robert Kane
The view that there actually exist abstract "tables" and "chairs" and not just particles arranged into those forms
What do you mean? Platonism?
The existence of non-physical minds (I'm looking for arguments other than the argument from the Hard Problem of Consciousness)
Why? That's the main argument, and a serious challenge for reductive physicalism.
Penrose's arguments for Platonism, with commentary:
"Our individual minds are notoriously imprecise, unreliable and inconsistent in their judgements" "Road to Reality", Roger Penrose, p12-13
So when we do maths we are not using our minds, but something else? Or maybe we are just using our minds in disciplined way -- after all, the discipline of maths has to be painfully learnt.
"Does this not point to something outside ourselves with a reality that lies beyond what each individual can achieve?"
What is achieved by individuals is a...
For a while now I've been trying hard to understand philosophical viewpoints that defer from mine. Somewhere along the line I've picked up or developed a lot of the LW-typical viewpoints (not sure if this was because of LW, or if I developed them earlier and that's what later attracted me to LW), but I know there are a lot of smart people out there who disagree with those viewpoints. I've tried to read articles and books on this, but they either don't address what I'm looking for somehow, or they're so technical that I have a hard time following them. I've also talked at some length with a philosophy professor, but our conversations often seem to end with me still being confused and the professor being confused about what it is I might be confused about.
I'm thinking maybe it'll help to get some input from people who do intuitively agree with my viewpoints, hence this post. So, can someone please tell me what the central arguments or motivations are for promoting the following:
Epistemology:
Ontology / philosophy of mind:
I suspect I'm having trouble with the ontology issues because of my trouble understanding the epistemology issues. Specifically, I keep getting the impression that most (all?) of the arguments for the ontology issues boil down to trusting philosophical intuitions and/or the way people use words. Something along the following lines:
Or the equivalent using the way people talk about things.
But this just seems totally ludicrous to me. If we trust cognitive science, evolutionary psychology, etc., and if those fields give us perfectly plausible reasons for why we might intuitively feel this way / talk this way, even if it didn't reflect the truth, then what could possibly be your motivation for sticking to your intuitions anyway and using them to support some grand metaphysical theory?
The only thing I can think of is that people who support using intuitions like this say, "well, you're also ultimately basing yourself on intuitions for things like logic, existence of mind-independent objects, Occamian priors, and all the other viewpoints that you view as intuitively plausible, so I can jolly well use whatever intuitions I feel like too." But although I can hear such words and why they sound reasonable in a sense, they still seem totally crazy to me, although I'm not 100% sure why.
Any help would be appreciated.