This is the kind of thing that when I take the outside view about my response, it looks bad. There is a scholarly paper refuting one of my strongly-held beliefs, a belief I arrived at due to armchair reasoning. And without reading it, or even trying to understand their argument indirectly, I’m going to brush it off as wrong. Merely based on the kind of bad argument (Bad philosophy doing all the work, wrapped in a little bit of correct math to prove some minor point once you’ve made the bad assumptions) I expect it to be, because this is what I think it would take to make a mathematical argument against my strongly-held belief, and because other people who share my strongly-held belief are saying that that’s the mistake they make.
To be fair to yourself, would you reject it if it were a proof of something you agreed with?
If they had gone out and ‘proven’ mathematically that sentient robots ARE possible, I’d be equally skeptical—not of the conclusion, but of the validity of the proof, because the core of the question is not mathematical in nature.
This is the kind of thing that when I take the outside view about my response, it looks bad. There is a scholarly paper refuting one of my strongly-held beliefs, a belief I arrived at due to armchair reasoning. And without reading it, or even trying to understand their argument indirectly, I’m going to brush it off as wrong. Merely based on the kind of bad argument (Bad philosophy doing all the work, wrapped in a little bit of correct math to prove some minor point once you’ve made the bad assumptions) I expect it to be, because this is what I think it would take to make a mathematical argument against my strongly-held belief, and because other people who share my strongly-held belief are saying that that’s the mistake they make.
Still not wasting my time on this though.
To be fair to yourself, would you reject it if it were a proof of something you agreed with?
If they had gone out and ‘proven’ mathematically that sentient robots ARE possible, I’d be equally skeptical—not of the conclusion, but of the validity of the proof, because the core of the question is not mathematical in nature.