I can imagine someone several hundred years ago having figured out, purely based on first-principles reasoning, that life is no crisp category at the territory but just a lossy conceptual abstraction. I can imagine them being highly confident in this result because they’ve derived it for correct reasons and they’ve verified all the steps that got them there. And I can imagine someone else throwing their hands up and saying “I don’t know what mysterious force is behind the phenomenon of life, and I’m pretty sure no one else does, either”.
But is this a correct conclusion? I have an option right now to make a civilization out of brains-in-vats in a sandbox simulation similar to our reality but with clear useful distinction on life VS non life. Like, suppose there is a “mob” class.
Like, then, this person there, inside it, who figured out that life and non life is a same thing is wrong in a local useful sense, and correct in a useless global sense (like, everything is code / matter in outer reality). People inside the simulation who found the actual working thing that is life scientifically, would laugh at them 1000 simulated years later and present it as an example of presumptuousness of philosophers. And i agree with them, it was a misapplication.
I see your point, but I don’t think this undermines the example? Like okay, the ‘life is not a crisp category’ claim has nuance to it, but we could imagine the hypothetical smart philosopher figuring out that as well. I.e., life is not a crisp category in the territory, but it is an abstraction that’s well-defined in most cases and actually a useful category because of this <+ any other nuance that’s appropriate>.
It’s true that the example here (figuring out that life isn’t a binary/well-defined thing) is not as practically relevant as figuring out stuff about consciousness. (Nonetheless I think the property of ‘being correct doesn’t entail being persuasive’ still holds.) I’m not sure if there is a good example of an insight that has been derived philosophically, is now widely accepted, and has clear practical benefits. (Free Will and implications for the morality of punishment are pretty useful imo, but they’re not universally accepted so not a real example, and also no clear empirical predictions.)
Well, it’s one thing to explore the possibility space and completely the other one to pinpoint where you are in it. Many people will confidently say they are at X or at Y, but all that they do is propose some idea and cling to it irrationally. In aggregate, in hindsight there will be people who bonded to the right idea, quite possibly. But it’s all mix Gettier cases and true negative cases.
And very often it’s not even “incorrect” it’s “neither correct nor incorrect”. Often there is frame of reference shift such that all the questions posed before it turn out to be completely meaningless. Like “what speed?”, you need more context as we know now.
And then science pinpoints where you are by actually digging into the subject matter. It’s a kind of sad state of “diverse hypothesis generation” when it’s a lot easier just go blind into it.
But is this a correct conclusion? I have an option right now to make a civilization out of brains-in-vats in a sandbox simulation similar to our reality but with clear useful distinction on life VS non life. Like, suppose there is a “mob” class.
Like, then, this person there, inside it, who figured out that life and non life is a same thing is wrong in a local useful sense, and correct in a useless global sense (like, everything is code / matter in outer reality). People inside the simulation who found the actual working thing that is life scientifically, would laugh at them 1000 simulated years later and present it as an example of presumptuousness of philosophers. And i agree with them, it was a misapplication.
I see your point, but I don’t think this undermines the example? Like okay, the ‘life is not a crisp category’ claim has nuance to it, but we could imagine the hypothetical smart philosopher figuring out that as well. I.e., life is not a crisp category in the territory, but it is an abstraction that’s well-defined in most cases and actually a useful category because of this <+ any other nuance that’s appropriate>.
It’s true that the example here (figuring out that life isn’t a binary/well-defined thing) is not as practically relevant as figuring out stuff about consciousness. (Nonetheless I think the property of ‘being correct doesn’t entail being persuasive’ still holds.) I’m not sure if there is a good example of an insight that has been derived philosophically, is now widely accepted, and has clear practical benefits. (Free Will and implications for the morality of punishment are pretty useful imo, but they’re not universally accepted so not a real example, and also no clear empirical predictions.)
Well, it’s one thing to explore the possibility space and completely the other one to pinpoint where you are in it. Many people will confidently say they are at X or at Y, but all that they do is propose some idea and cling to it irrationally. In aggregate, in hindsight there will be people who bonded to the right idea, quite possibly. But it’s all mix Gettier cases and true negative cases.
And very often it’s not even “incorrect” it’s “neither correct nor incorrect”. Often there is frame of reference shift such that all the questions posed before it turn out to be completely meaningless. Like “what speed?”, you need more context as we know now.
And then science pinpoints where you are by actually digging into the subject matter. It’s a kind of sad state of “diverse hypothesis generation” when it’s a lot easier just go blind into it.