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’m only familiar with about a third of these (not counting Tarski who I agreed with JoshuaZ is more of a mathematician than philosopher), but the ones that I am familiar with do not seem as interesting/impressive/fruitful/useful as the advances I mentioned in the grandparent comment. If you could pick one or two on your list for me to study in more detail, which would you suggest?
I know you aren’t asking me, but my choices to answer this question would be Popper’s Philosophy of Science; Rawls and Nozick’s Political Philosophy and Quine.
According to my own philosophical interests, which as it turned out (i.e., apparently by coincidence) also seems well aligned with what’s useful for building FAI. I guess one thing that might be causing us to talk a bit past each other is that I read the opening post as talking about philosophy in the context of building FAI (since I know that’s what the author is really interested in), but you may be seeing it as talking about philosophy in general (and looking at the post again I notice that it doesn’t actually mention Friendly AI at all except by linking to a post about it).
Anyway, if you think any of the examples you gave might be especially interesting to someone like me, please let me know. Or, if you want, tell me which is most interesting to you and why.
Made me laugh for a second seeing those two on the same line because Popper (falsifiability) and Kuhn (Structures of Scientific Revolutions) are not particularly related.
Most of your examples seem valid but this one is strongly questionable:
Tarski’s convention T
This example doesn’t work. Tarski was a professional mathematician. There was a lot of interplay at the time between math and philosophy, but it seems he was closer to the math end of things. He did at times apply for philosophy positions, but for the vast majority of his life he was doing work as a mathematician. He was a mathematician/logician when he was at the Institute for Advanced Study, and he spent most of his professional career as a professor at Berkley in the math department. Moreover, while he did publish some papers in philosophy proper, he was in general a very prolific writer, and the majority of his work (like his work with quantifier elimination in the real numbers, or the Banach-Tarski paradox) are unambiguously mathematical.
Similarly, the people who studied under him are all thought of as mathematicians(like Julia Robinson), or mathematician-philosophers(Feferman), with most in the first category.
Overall, Tarski was much closer to being a professional mathematician whose work sometimes touched on philosophy than a professional philosopher who sometimes did math.
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.)
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).
Being No One is a very challenging book (I still haven’t read it because it’s too hard for 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.
(For example, despite being a reasonably well-known mathematician, there is only one reference to S. S. Abhyankar in the MacTutor history of mathematicians.)
I think Nick is actually an example of how rationality isn’t that useful for making philosophical progress. I’m a bit reluctant to say this (for obvious social reasons, which I’m judging to be outweighed by the strategic importance of this issue) but his work (PhD thesis) on anthropic reasoning wasn’t actually very good. I know that at least one SI Research Associate agrees with my assessment.
ETA: I should qualify this by saying that while his proposed solution wasn’t very good (which you can also infer from the fact that nobody ever talks about or builds upon it around here despite strong interest in the topic) he did come up arguments/considerations/thought experiments, such as the Presumptuous Philosopher, that we still discuss.
I’ll freely admit that I haven’t actually read any of his work, and I was mainly making the comment due to the generally fanboyish response he gets ’round these parts. I found your comment very interesting, and may investigate further.
A straight-up philosopher who is useful to FAI (more X-Risk, but it’s probably still applicable.) Obviously, your examples are the ones that immediately occurred to me, so I didn’t want to repeat them.
If you want to look at interesting advances in philosophy, read the stuff by the CMU causality gang (Spirtes/Scheines/Glymour, philosophy department, also Kelly). Of course you will probably say that is not really philosophy but theoretical statistics or something. Pearl’s stuff can be considered philosophy too (certainly his stuff on actual cause is cited a lot in phil papers).
Look, everything counts as phil:
Old science may also have counted as phil. in the days when they weren’t distinct. However WD’s exmaples were
of contemporary developements that seem to be considered not-phil by contemporary philosophers.
certainly his stuff on actual cause is cited a lot in phil papers
Science in general is quoted quite a lot. But there is a difference between phils. discussing phil. and phils. discussing non-phil as somethign that can be philosophised about. if only in tone and presentation.
Perhaps a more relevant question, in the context of the OP, is whether those problems are representative of the types of foundational (as opposed to engineering, logistical, strategic, etc.) problems that need to be solved in order to build an FAI.
But we could talk about “philosophy” as well, since, to be honest, I’m not sure why some topics count as “philosophy” and others don’t. It seems to me that my list of advances do fall under Wikipedia’s description of philosophy as “the study of general and fundamental problems, such as those connected with reality, existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language.” Do you disagree, or have a alternative definition?
It seems to me that my list of advances do fall under Wikipedia’s description of philosophy
I agree. But there are also some systematic differences between what the people you cited did and what (other) philosophers do.
The former didn’t merely study fundamental problems, they solved them.
They did stuff that now exists and can be studied independently of the original works. You don’t have to read a single word of Turing to understand Turing machines and their importance. You need not study Solomonoff to understand Solomonoff induction.
Their works are generally not shelved with philosophy in libraries. Are they studied in undergraduate courses on philosophy?
I think the criticism is indeed pointed towards the scientific “field” of Philosophy, AKA people working in Philosophy Departments or similar.
I doubt many here are targeting the activity of philosophy, nor the people who would identify as “philosophers”, but rather specifically towards Philosophy academics with a specialization in Philosophy, who work in a Philosophy Department and produce Philosophy papers to be published in a Journal of Philosophical Writings (and possibly give the occasional Philosophy class or seminar, depending on the local supply of TAs).
IME, a large fraction of real, practicing philosophers are actively publishing papers on arXiv or equivalent.
I think the criticism is indeed pointed towards the scientific “field” of Philosophy
Did you mean academic field?
I doubt many here are targeting the activity of philosophy, nor the people who would identify as “philosophers”, but rather specifically towards Philosophy academics with a specialization in Philosophy, who work in a Philosophy Department and produce Philosophy papers to be published in a Journal of Philosophical Writings (and possibly give the occasional Philosophy class or seminar, depending on the local supply of TAs).
You mean professional phi. bad, amateur phil good. Or not so much amaterur phil as the sort
of sciencey-philly cross-disciplinary stuff done by EY and Robin and Botrom and Tegmark do. Maybe.
But actually some of it is quite bad for reasons which are evident if you know phil.
You mean professional phi. bad, amateur phil good.
A good professional study of philosophy itself is to me indistinguishable from someone doing metaresearch, i.e. figuring out how to make the standards of the scientific method even better and the techniques of all scientists more efficient. IME, this is not what the majority of academics working in Philosophy Departments are doing.
OTOH, good applied philosophy, i.e. the sort of stuff you do once you’ve studied the result of the above metaresearch, is basically just doing science. In other words, doing research in any field that is not about how to do research.
So yes, in a sense, most academics categorized as “professional phil” are less good than most academics categorized as “amateur phil” who mainly work in other disciplines. The latter are also almost exclusively “sciencey-philly cross-disciplinary”.
I’m guessing we both agree that non-academic-nor-scientist amateur philosophers are less likely to produce meaningful research than any of the above, and yet is pretty much the stereotype that most people (in the general north-american population) assign to “philosophers”. Then again, the exclusion of “scientists” from that category feels like begging the question.
So yes, in a sense, most academics categorized as “professional phil” are less good than most academics categorized as “amateur phil” who mainly work in other disciplines
Is the “so” meant to imply that that follows from the forefgoing? I don’t see how it does.
I was responding to the sentence:
“If you look at the most interesting recent advances in philosophy, it seems that most of them were made by non-philosophers.”
..which does not mention “advances in philosophy useful to FAI”.
Do you disagree, or have a alternative definition?
None of them have been much discussed by phils. (except possibly Bostrom, the Diane Hsieh of LessWrongism).
Theory of computation is obviously used by the computational theory of mind as well as philosophy of language and of mathematics and logic. Decision theorists are commonly employed by philosophy departments and all current decision theories descend from vNM’s. AIT actually doesn’t seem to be much discussed by philosophers (a search found only a couple of references in the SEP, and even the entry on “simplicity” only gives a brief mention of it) which is a bit surprising. (Oh, there’s a more substantial discussion in the entry for “information”.)
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.
Quine’s attack on aprioricity and analycity.
Kuhn’s’ and Popper’s philosophy of science.
Rawls’ and Nozick’s political philsophy
Kripkes New Metaphsycal Necessity
ETA:
Austin’s speach act theory
Ryles critique of Cartesianism
HOT theory (various)
Tarski’s convention T
Gettier’s counteraxamples
Parfitt on personal identiy
Parfitt on ehtics
Wittgenstein’s PLA
I’m only familiar with about a third of these (not counting Tarski who I agreed with JoshuaZ is more of a mathematician than philosopher), but the ones that I am familiar with do not seem as interesting/impressive/fruitful/useful as the advances I mentioned in the grandparent comment. If you could pick one or two on your list for me to study in more detail, which would you suggest?
I know you aren’t asking me, but my choices to answer this question would be Popper’s Philosophy of Science; Rawls and Nozick’s Political Philosophy and Quine.
Interesting to whom? Fruitful for what?
According to my own philosophical interests, which as it turned out (i.e., apparently by coincidence) also seems well aligned with what’s useful for building FAI. I guess one thing that might be causing us to talk a bit past each other is that I read the opening post as talking about philosophy in the context of building FAI (since I know that’s what the author is really interested in), but you may be seeing it as talking about philosophy in general (and looking at the post again I notice that it doesn’t actually mention Friendly AI at all except by linking to a post about it).
Anyway, if you think any of the examples you gave might be especially interesting to someone like me, please let me know. Or, if you want, tell me which is most interesting to you and why.
Made me laugh for a second seeing those two on the same line because Popper (falsifiability) and Kuhn (Structures of Scientific Revolutions) are not particularly related.
Not at all. i should probably have put them on separate lines.
Most of your examples seem valid but this one is strongly questionable:
This example doesn’t work. Tarski was a professional mathematician. There was a lot of interplay at the time between math and philosophy, but it seems he was closer to the math end of things. He did at times apply for philosophy positions, but for the vast majority of his life he was doing work as a mathematician. He was a mathematician/logician when he was at the Institute for Advanced Study, and he spent most of his professional career as a professor at Berkley in the math department. Moreover, while he did publish some papers in philosophy proper, he was in general a very prolific writer, and the majority of his work (like his work with quantifier elimination in the real numbers, or the Banach-Tarski paradox) are unambiguously mathematical.
Similarly, the people who studied under him are all thought of as mathematicians(like Julia Robinson), or mathematician-philosophers(Feferman), with most in the first category.
Overall, Tarski was much closer to being a professional mathematician whose work sometimes touched on philosophy than a professional philosopher who sometimes did math.
Mackie’s Argument from Queerness
Hare and Ayers’ work on Expressivism
Goodman’s New Riddle of Induction
Wittgenstein
Frankfurt on Free Will
The Quine-Putnam indispensability thesis
Causal Theory of Reference
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.)
Nick Bostrom?
I think Nick is actually an example of how rationality isn’t that useful for making philosophical progress. I’m a bit reluctant to say this (for obvious social reasons, which I’m judging to be outweighed by the strategic importance of this issue) but his work (PhD thesis) on anthropic reasoning wasn’t actually very good. I know that at least one SI Research Associate agrees with my assessment.
ETA: I should qualify this by saying that while his proposed solution wasn’t very good (which you can also infer from the fact that nobody ever talks about or builds upon it around here despite strong interest in the topic) he did come up arguments/considerations/thought experiments, such as the Presumptuous Philosopher, that we still discuss.
I’ll freely admit that I haven’t actually read any of his work, and I was mainly making the comment due to the generally fanboyish response he gets ’round these parts. I found your comment very interesting, and may investigate further.
Just in case this refers to me: I agree with your assessment of Bostrom’s thesis, but I’m no longer a SI research associate :-)
As an example of what?
A straight-up philosopher who is useful to FAI (more X-Risk, but it’s probably still applicable.) Obviously, your examples are the ones that immediately occurred to me, so I didn’t want to repeat them.
Why does that count as phil?
or that?
or that?
OK. That resembles modal realism, which is deifnitely philosphy, although it is routinely condemned here as bad philosophy.
Look, everything counts as phil: (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_philosophy). Philosophy gets credit for launching science in the 19th century.
Philosophers were the first to invent the AI effect, apparently (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect).
If you want to look at interesting advances in philosophy, read the stuff by the CMU causality gang (Spirtes/Scheines/Glymour, philosophy department, also Kelly). Of course you will probably say that is not really philosophy but theoretical statistics or something. Pearl’s stuff can be considered philosophy too (certainly his stuff on actual cause is cited a lot in phil papers).
Science in general is quoted quite a lot. But there is a difference between phils. discussing phil. and phils. discussing non-phil as somethign that can be philosophised about. if only in tone and presentation.
Your quoting is confusing.
Perhaps a more relevant question, in the context of the OP, is whether those problems are representative of the types of foundational (as opposed to engineering, logistical, strategic, etc.) problems that need to be solved in order to build an FAI.
But we could talk about “philosophy” as well, since, to be honest, I’m not sure why some topics count as “philosophy” and others don’t. It seems to me that my list of advances do fall under Wikipedia’s description of philosophy as “the study of general and fundamental problems, such as those connected with reality, existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language.” Do you disagree, or have a alternative definition?
I agree. But there are also some systematic differences between what the people you cited did and what (other) philosophers do.
The former didn’t merely study fundamental problems, they solved them.
They did stuff that now exists and can be studied independently of the original works. You don’t have to read a single word of Turing to understand Turing machines and their importance. You need not study Solomonoff to understand Solomonoff induction.
Their works are generally not shelved with philosophy in libraries. Are they studied in undergraduate courses on philosophy?
Turing’s work on AI (and Searle’s response) was discussed in my undergrad intro phil course. But that is not quite the same thing.
Not in my undergraduate program, at least.
I think the criticism is indeed pointed towards the scientific “field” of Philosophy, AKA people working in Philosophy Departments or similar.
I doubt many here are targeting the activity of philosophy, nor the people who would identify as “philosophers”, but rather specifically towards Philosophy academics with a specialization in Philosophy, who work in a Philosophy Department and produce Philosophy papers to be published in a Journal of Philosophical Writings (and possibly give the occasional Philosophy class or seminar, depending on the local supply of TAs).
IME, a large fraction of real, practicing philosophers are actively publishing papers on arXiv or equivalent.
Did you mean academic field?
You mean professional phi. bad, amateur phil good. Or not so much amaterur phil as the sort of sciencey-philly cross-disciplinary stuff done by EY and Robin and Botrom and Tegmark do. Maybe. But actually some of it is quite bad for reasons which are evident if you know phil.
Yes, my bad.
A good professional study of philosophy itself is to me indistinguishable from someone doing metaresearch, i.e. figuring out how to make the standards of the scientific method even better and the techniques of all scientists more efficient. IME, this is not what the majority of academics working in Philosophy Departments are doing.
OTOH, good applied philosophy, i.e. the sort of stuff you do once you’ve studied the result of the above metaresearch, is basically just doing science. In other words, doing research in any field that is not about how to do research.
So yes, in a sense, most academics categorized as “professional phil” are less good than most academics categorized as “amateur phil” who mainly work in other disciplines. The latter are also almost exclusively “sciencey-philly cross-disciplinary”.
I’m guessing we both agree that non-academic-nor-scientist amateur philosophers are less likely to produce meaningful research than any of the above, and yet is pretty much the stereotype that most people (in the general north-american population) assign to “philosophers”. Then again, the exclusion of “scientists” from that category feels like begging the question.
Is the “so” meant to imply that that follows from the forefgoing? I don’t see how it does.
I was responding to the sentence: “If you look at the most interesting recent advances in philosophy, it seems that most of them were made by non-philosophers.”
..which does not mention “advances in philosophy useful to FAI”.
None of them have been much discussed by phils. (except possibly Bostrom, the Diane Hsieh of LessWrongism).
Theory of computation is obviously used by the computational theory of mind as well as philosophy of language and of mathematics and logic. Decision theorists are commonly employed by philosophy departments and all current decision theories descend from vNM’s. AIT actually doesn’t seem to be much discussed by philosophers (a search found only a couple of references in the SEP, and even the entry on “simplicity” only gives a brief mention of it) which is a bit surprising. (Oh, there’s a more substantial discussion in the entry for “information”.)
Surely that is the other way round. Early computer theorists just wanted to solve mathematical problems mechanically.
What is your point? His day job was physicist.