Request For Collaboration
I want to work on a paper: “The Information Theoretic Conception of Personhood”. My philosophy is shit though, so I am interested in a coauthor. Someone who has the relevant philosophical knowledge to let the paper stand the tests of academic rigour.
DM me if you’re willing to help.
One sentence thesis of the paper: “I am my information”.
Some conclusions: A simulation of me is me.
I have no idea of the length, but I want to flesh the paper to be something that meets the standards of Academia.
I will be frank. This sounds like a lame deal for anyone who takes you up on the offer. “My physics is shit, but I have a great idea for a new theory of gravity. PM me if you are a professional physicist and want to coauthor a paper.” “My writing is shit, but I have a clever idea for a story and would like someone to write it it for me.”
First you should do 90% of the work you know about, then maybe you can find a professional to do the last 10% plus the things you didn’t know about. Read the relevant philosophy! Go read wikipedia, read the stanford encyclopedia of philosophy, go to your library and check out a book or three. Do a lot of writing! Make arguments, try to find good ways to phrase things, think of counterarguments other people might use, explain how this builds on and extends the stuff you read about. Then maybe, if you put that out in the public and ask for someone to devote their time to making this idea spread, you might get takers.
My advice is to let go of the idea of “standards” or “tests” that you just need to pass and you’ll be golden. Too many people think of life as a class where you get graded fairly, but life (even academic life) is more like recess at school, where accurately reading people and being on point wins the day. Imagine academia as a circle of cool kids talking to each other, and you coming in from the outside. If you aren’t even listening to what they’re saying now, how can you jump in with a remark and hope that everyone will go “oooh”? Almost nothing in life works like that! If you want to make a contribution that will be appreciated, you can’t do that while being blind to the field and the people composing it. That, and not some random standard of rigor, is why you need to learn.
What is your goal here? Are you taking a course that you have to write a paper for? Are you a graduate student writing a thesis? Do you need academic publications because you want a tenure track position in a university? Are you trying to work out ideas for yourself by writing them down and seeing where they take you? Do you have something you want to say and get feedback from other people who are both knowledgeable and interested in the topic? Because the answer matters a lot.