[Poll] Less Wrong and Mainstream Philosophy: How Different are We?

[EDIT: The way I had initially described the distinction was misleading, as pointed out by thomblake. I apologize for potentially skewing the results of the poll, although I don't think my revised version is that far off from the earlier version. Still, I should have been more careful.]

Moral realism: There are objective moral facts, i.e. there are facts about what is right and wrong (or good and bad) that are not constituted by a subject's beliefs and desires.

Moral anti-realism: The denial of moral realism.

4thomblake9yIs that right? I've understood that you can be a realist about subject-sensitive objective moral facts. Is that different from saying that the facts are "agent-relative"?

2pragmatist9yYou're right, my potted descriptions here are misleading. Certain forms of relativism are appropriately classified as realist. I'll edit my descriptions.

6lukeprog9yMy 'Other' answer is "Depends what you mean [http://lesswrong.com/lw/5u2/pluralistic_moral_reductionism/]."

2[anonymous]9yFrom that article: But this is orthogonal to the question of moral realism: you can have realism just as well with or without moral universalism. So I think you're just a moral realist.

3Nisan9yI've never seen a completely satisfying reduction of moral facts, and I don't know whether such a successful reduction would be a vindicative or an eliminative one. Am I a moral realist or an anti-realist?

0EricHerboso9yThat sounds like "undecided" to me.

3asparisi9yOther: While there are objective "moral facts" this is because we are implying various subjective human values into the word 'moral.' Given the word 'moral' there are certain facts about what that behavior is like, but they are not "out there in the world" and are highly contextual.

2Rob Bensinger8yLean toward: moral realism. My leanings are semantic. There is not one unified object or semantic value that all members of our linguistic community intend by 'moral.' So we must either choose one of the semantic values in advance, or leave all moral statements underdetermined. I think choosing a semantic value that naturalizes morality (e.g., 'morality is behaving in accord with a decision procedure that optimizes for the overall preference satisfaction of all preference-bearers') is much more useful and conducive to our goals than choosing one that forfeits all moral convictions to the Dark Side. If we want to win, we have to convince people in general to move toward a LessWrongier perspective; and convincing people without making any appeal to words like 'good,' 'bad,' 'right,' 'wrong,' 'moral,' or 'immoral' is a hell of a handicap.

[-]DanArmak9y 8

Humans regularly disagree about lots of objective things, because they're wrong about them.

[-]FiftyTwo9y 7

Meta:

IAWYC but it is slightly problematic that the Philpapers survey polls the opinions of all philosophers, rather than those in a specific field. I am unsure if the opinions on current debates in metaphysics held but political philosophers will be much better than an average college graduate's. It might be interesting to contrast the 'lesswrong position' on question X with the position of 'mainstream philosophers' who study the relevant sub-field.

[-]pragmatist9y 12

You can filter the survey results by specialization. Use the AOS (Area of Specialization) drop down menu.

9gwern9yAll I can say is that you're not going to be happy with the 'philosophy of religion' statistics.

[-]gwern9y 7

Hopefully some of these questions will be folded into Yvain's yearly survey.

[-]jimrandomh9y 7

It's too late now, but if you put all the questions in the same comment then it's less work to vote in all of them and you can see correlations between answers to the different questions.

2Jayson_Virissimo9yYes, but then how would you handle the "Other" options?

1jimrandomh9yThey'd end up less organized, buy you could still ask people to comment; they'd just have to say which answer went with which 'Other' option.

6TheOtherDave9yI prefer the current approach; I am not answering the questions all at once.

Science: scientific anti-realism or scientific realism?

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[-]pragmatist9y 23

Scientific anti-realism: While there may be strong reasons to believe in the empirical predictions of our best scientific theories, there are no strong reasons to believe in their theoretical claims about unobservable entities (such as quarks).

Scientific realism: There are strong reasons to believe in the theoretical claims about unobservable entities made by our best scientific theories.

3prase9yOther: the distinction between scientific realism and anti-realism is mostly meaningless. If a scientific theory makes claims about "unobservable entities" (not sure what exactly it means), either these claims are logically entangled with testable claims that have been experimentally verified and then the reasons to believe in them are as good as the reasons to believe the verified claims (supposedly about "observable objects") or these claims are independent of the rest of the theory and presumably untestable, which means that the theory is un-Occamian and shouldn't be considered good scientific theory.

2[anonymous]9yI think that's just realism.

1Protagoras9yI think you've given a good example of why this question is so problematic, because what prase said sounds more like anti-realism to me. Though mostly my view is that the more you try to figure out what "realism" could mean, the less sure you will be about it; I picked "lean anti-realism" myself because I think "realism" is shorthand for a huge bundle of claims that really should be unbundled and evaluated separately.

1[anonymous]9yVoted lean toward Scientific Realism, but possibly confused. There's no difference between "observed" and "inferred". Also, some parts of our models "exist" others are just parts of models.

[-]Eliezer Yudkowsky9y 11

God: theism or atheism?

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[-]lukeprog9y 22

Note: I don't think most theistic philosophers would consider the simulation hypothesis to be a variant of theism.

[-]DanArmak9y 13

That's because they say "theism" but they mean "traditional religion". They probably wouldn't accept a reification of Azathoth either, or the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

4drnickbone9yThis is because the folks who take the simulation hypothesis as a serious possibility (like Bostrom) also believe we are in a non-interventionist simulation (one without a creator/controller who regularly intervenes to answer prayers, reward worship and so on). They don't seem to care too much about whether there are other simulations somewhere whose creators do intervene. Generally they'd concede the point if pressed (OK, somewhere in the universe of simulations and simulators there are gods, but not around here. Happy?) and then move on. The main point about "theism" (as opposed to "deism" say) is that God or the gods really affect us. They don't just exist as an abstract debating point: it actually matters to us that they exist.

3asparisi9yIf the being(s) running the simulation are all-knowing and all-powerful with respect to the simulation, I think most philosophers would go there, even theistic ones. Hell, if Spinoza's God counts as a theistic position, then the simulation hypothesis is practically golden.

"Gods are ontologically distinct from creatures, or they're not worth the paper they're written on." -- Damien Broderick.

Can anyone exhibit an actual theist who says that a Matrix Lord composed of non-mental, non-mysterious parts counts as a God? So far as I know this position is held solely by people who want to mock the Simulation Hypothesis.

[-]fezziwig9y 13

Pretty sure the Mormons qualify. I'm not one myself, but I used to live next door to a few, and this looks like a fair representation of their beliefs. The money quote:

Mormons believe that human beings are children of God, and as such, have within them the potential to become like God. Got it? Let me say it more clearly. We believe that we can become Gods....Here’s shocker #2–we believe God used to be a man, just like us.

4adamisom9y... which explains why there is actually a Mormon Transhumanist group, and why there was even a conference on the subject in April where I live (Salt Lake City; unfortunately couldn't attend)

[-]Jayson_Virissimo9y 13

Hi, I'm a simulation-theist. Nice to meet you.

8arundelo9yIf someone asks you whether you believe in a god, how likely are you to say "yes" versus "it's complicated"? (Or versus "no"?)

5Jayson_Virissimo9yI'm quite likely to answer in the affirmative in most contexts. On the other hand, "are you religious?" would tend to get some version of the "it's complicated" answer.

3komponisto9yI hold it in order to mock theism. Physicalist reductionism is such a fundamental part of my belief system that I think charity requires that theism be interpreted as the SH. I appeal to the popular perception of the absurdity of the SH in order to undermine professions of belief in theism.

2[anonymous]9yIf the non-mental parts they are composed of are unlike the non-mental parts we are composed of, I would. I am made of quarks and leptons and things in Life are made of dead cells and live cells, and IMO that's more than enough for us to be ontologically distinct from us. The same would apply to the next level up (if there's one).

2asparisi9yWell, hence the confusion about Spinoza's God. It's not really ontologically distinct for him, since his God 'is' the universe. (His God is also just mental-stuff, but Spinoza was an idealist, so to him all stuff was mental-stuff.) Now, Spinoza's might not count as a 'Matrix Lord' since he denies that God 'chooses' anything in our sense (he holds to a very strong version of the Principle of Sufficient Reason) so it's not like God is 'running' the simulation, as it were: God just is the simulation according to Spinoza. Likewise, most theistic philosophers are comitted to God being omniscient, omnipotent, and (usually) omnibenevolent. But some put that in 'absolute' terms while some put it in terms of this world: omnipotent regarding this world, etc. For the latter group, there is no clear philosophical dilemma in saying that a Matrix Lord counts as God, especially if that Matrix Lord is also the "First Cause." In fact, assuming that such a Matrix Lord exists, most theistic philosophers would be required to say it counts as God.

[-]Eliezer Yudkowsky9y 15

I just hit "Accept: Theism" by accident. Yes, accident, not divine providence, thank you very much. Is there a way to revote?

6jimrandomh9yCurrently no, there's no option to revote. I have a todo list which this is on, but it may be awhile as that todo list has way-cooler things on it like split-test polls, and I might not even get to any of it at all.

1adamisom9yI nearly did too, which makes me wonder if a few people did; the only difference is an 'a' and I guess I assumed atheism would be at the top

1[anonymous]9yI think it is not obviously wrong that we live in some slices of "all possible worlds", and within all possible worlds there are beings with fancy super powers or perfect moral authority. At the same time I recognize that the religious awe and devotion I have felt at times are quirks of my brain and not a result of causal interaction with those possible-world-thingies. But I'm not sure whether or not to label those thingies as gods / deities, in addition to calling them weird aliens to whom religion has no access. Finding out whether some of those thingies are simulating me wouldn't have any influence on my choice of label.

Laws of nature: Humeanism or non-Humeanism?

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[-]pragmatist9y 23

Humeanism: The laws of nature are compressed descriptions of salient patterns in the distribution of physical events.

Non-Humeanism: The laws of nature are not mere descriptions. They determine the distribution of physical events.

5DanArmak9yLeaving aside any putative True Theory of Everything which we don't know yet, the laws we actually know and use today are definitely Humean. We should know, we made them that way.

1Rob Bensinger8yThis wording suggests that a major distinction between Humeans and non-Humeans is that the former consider laws of nature 'descriptions' (i.e., linguistic/conceptual entities) while the latter consider laws of nature mind-independent. But we could frame the distinction either linguistically or metaphysically. Metaphysically, Humeans think that Nature's patterns are ultimately just coincidental recurrences, while non-Humeans think that observed patterns have some cause or explanation in a deeper unifying structure. I suspect that a lot of the support for Humeanism in the above poll can be explained by people pattern-matching 'laws of nature are... descriptions' to 'positivism / metaphysical humility,' whereas in reality Humeanism is just as substantive and speculative a metaphysical thesis as is non-Humeanism. As an aside, it should be noted that Hume himself was not a 'Humean' in the above sense. So the modern terminology is historically misleading here.

2pragmatist8yI think contemporary Humeans would disagree with your characterization. They distinguish between accidentally true generalizations (like the fact that no human is over 10 feet tall) and law-like generalizations. Not all patterns count as laws, hence the use of "salient" in my definition. So a law is not merely a coincidental recurrence. Many Humeans believe that any particular instance of a salient pattern of recurrences is explained by the existence and salience of the pattern, so laws are explanatory. Also, a number of Humeans do cite metaphysical humility as an advantage of their account of laws. Unlike non-Humeans, who need an additional fundamental metaphysical kind besides spatio-temporally distributed properties (i.e. laws of nature), Humeans purport to make do with just the properties themselves, reducing the laws to the properties. If this works, then it does seem like a more metaphysically parsimonious account, at least according to some accounts of parsimony. Of course, the Humean account is still a metaphysical account, so it wouldn't be congenial to the strict positivist, I suppose.

2Rob Bensinger8yOut of curiosity, do you have on hand any good articles on how Humeans (metaphysically, epistemically, etc.) distinguish 'mere patterns' from 'capital-p Patterns'? (Aside from anthropocentric concepts like explanatory reducibility.) 'Salience' is usually an anthropocentric / psychological concept. What is meant by it here? I ask because we have to be careful not to allow non-Humean 'salience-making' properties. If salience is something metaphysical that makes certain patterns objectively 'special' and 'lawful' and 'regular', then I'd normally think of salience as non-Humean. On the other hand, if 'salience' is a non-unifying brute fact ('brute correlation,' 'unexplainable recurrence', 'irreducible coincidence', etc.), or is somehow relative to our human projects and interests and standards, then I'd normally think of it as Humean. Does this jibe with your experience? Yes. And 'metaphysical humility' here means 'metaphysical commitment to a smaller domain of entities or kinds'. My point was just to hammer home that it doesn't mean 'avoiding doing difficult speculative metaphysics' or 'skeptically withholding judgment' or 'treating lawfulness as a human construct' or 'positivistically denying that non-Humean laws are intelligible'; the latter four options preclude Humeanism as much as they preclude anti-Humeanism, and my worry was that some positivism-friendly LessWrongers would misconstrue Humeanism as somehow unmetaphysical, rather than just as metaphysically sparse. (Though, again, this is complicated; non-Humeans claim that Humeanism is metaphysically profligate, say, because brute correlations that continue to recur, and recur, and recur are more startling than unitarily 'law-governed' recurrences. Cf. Eliezer's concerns [http://lesswrong.com/lw/g7n/secondorder_logic_the_controversy/] with treating our universe as metaphysically first-order.) A side-note, since it hasn't come up: A lot of people in the Humeanism debate unpack the dispute modally. On this co

0pragmatist8yThe classic neo-Humean account is David Lewis's. It's described in the SEP here [http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/laws-of-nature/#Sys]. I also wrote a post about it here [http://lesswrong.com/lw/ct3/natural_laws_are_descriptions_not_rules/]. The account does appeal to the simplicity of descriptions, which is arguably a somewhat anthropocentric concept, but I see that as a feature, not a bug. The laws are ways of efficiently organizing our understanding of the universe, not fundamental mind-independent entities (see the last section of my post). I don't think Lewis would agree with my characterization in this regard, I should say.

8maia9yOther: What's the difference?

7AlexMennen9yOther: there are high-level laws of nature that are compressed descriptions, and low-level laws of nature that determine events.

[-][anonymous]9y 11

That's non-Humeanism.

2AlexMennen9yThat makes sense. Non-Humeanism it is, then.

4Jayson_Virissimo9y"Lean toward: non-Humeanism", because given that we are in a simulation, it should be possible to recover "laws" that are isomorphic to constants in the source code via reverse engineering (natural science). Whether Humeanism holds outside of our own "world" seems like a separate question.

1[anonymous]9yOther: Both. Our laws are compressions of the distribution of physical events. There is some underlying rule set that determines the distribution of physical events.

1magfrump9yIf I believe that the reason we get nicely compressed descriptions of salient patterns, because the mathematical abstractions have concrete realizations in the symmetries at the basis of physics, is that Non-Humeanism? And if I further hold the propositional belief that using the words "The laws of nature are not mere descriptions." is likely to make me too attached to current beliefs about physics (or more likely evolutionary psych) and the belief that one can never have perfect knowledge, so any conception of natural laws I (or anyone) will ever have will be Humean, should I have hit "other"?

[-]Eliezer Yudkowsky9y 14

Time: B-theory or A-theory?

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[-]pragmatist9y 22

B-theory: Specifying the temporal ordering of all events in space-time exhausts all the objective temporal facts about those events.

A-theory: Specifying the temporal ordering of all events in space-time does not exhaust all the objective temporal facts about them. There is a further temporal fact about a given event: whether it is in the past, in the present or in the future. These are objective facts that are not fixed by merely specifying which events happen earlier or later.

6DanArmak9yIn the past, present or future of what? Of me, who is saying it? But that is merely a temporal fact of the first kind: the given event is in the past/future of the event of my saying whether it is in my past/future.

9pragmatist9yThe point of A-theory is that past, present and future are non-relational. There is an objective fact of the matter about which slice of the space-time manifold is the present, although this fact keeps changing, of course. So yeah, one way to think of the difference between A-theory and B-theory is that the B-theorist thinks of past, present and future as relational terms. Just saying "past" isn't enough, you need to specify what it is in the past of. But the A-theorist thinks it makes sense to talk of past, present and future simpliciter.

4DanArmak9yAn event (a point in spacetime) is really objective wrt time: that is, it is outside of time. The ordering of two events is also objective. The matter of where we are in time - and therefore, whether an event is in our past or in our future - is constantly changing as time flows. It is not a time-objective fact about an event that it is in our future, for tomorrow it will be a fact about the same event that it is in our past. So these facts about an event are subjective: they depend on when in time you are when you are making the judgement. Disagreeing with this seems like saying the word "objective" should mean two different things in the two above paragraphs. Which is apparently what almost all big philosophical arguments reduce to. Sigh.

2pragmatist9yYou're describing a B-theoretical perspective. An A-theorist will disagree with this characterization. Many A-theorists believe that the only objects that exist are present objects. So time isn't like space, where "here" is "here" rather than "there" simply because you happen to be "here" and not "there". You could have been "there", in which case "there" would have been "here" for you. Time, A-theorists claim, is different, because you couldn't be located anywhere (anywhen) else except in the present. It's not that the present is the present for you because you happen to be there; it's that the only time at which objects exist (and, by extension, you could exist) is the present. So it's not like there are other people who exist at other times, for whom the present is different. Don't ask me to defend this view, though, because I think it's nuts. A-theory vs. B-theory is one of those philosophical debates which should be declared closed. B-theory has clearly won.

0drnickbone9yI don't think anyone's made A-theory consistent with special relativity. But you can bodge general relativity/cosmological models a bit to get something that looks a bit like A-theory by insisting on a preferred foliation (e.g. look at spacelike surfaces with constant proper time since the Big Bang, and count everything on one such surface as the "real now")

1crazy889ySee Craig Borne "A Future for Presentism" for someone who claims to have made an A-theory consistent with special relativity.

1pragmatist9yBourne, from what I recall, makes A-theory consistent with special relativity by positing that there is an (undetectable) privileged reference frame. Is this correct? If it is, I wouldn't really call that "consistent with special relativity", more like "flying in the face of the central lesson of special relativity".

1crazy889yYeah, that's basically right but I'm not sure that you're being entirely fair to Bourne. First, I think under standard definitions of consistent, he does show that an A-theory is consistent with SR (ie. they can both be true at once). Second, I'm not sure it's fair to say that he is "flying in the face of the central lesson of SR" - he may be flying in the face of the standard way of interpreting this lesson but his claim is precisely that this way of intrepreting the lesson isn't the only way. The lesson can also be interpretted as "no privileged reference frame can be detected." I agree with the basic anti-Bourne sentiment but wonder whether the wording of your response undermines his claims more than they deserve - I don't think they are inconsistent nor that they fly in the face of the central lesson. I guess I more just think that postulating undetectable physical features of the world in order to make a metaphysical thesis - that is based on intuition (the "present" intuition) that can be explained away - come out to be true is undesirable. Though it should be noted that Bourne's conclusion is mostly that presentism is the only sensible A-theory but that it's not possible to decide between presentism and a B-theory (that is, he doesn't argue that presentism must be true).

0drnickbone9ySo this is just like the "bodge" I described for general relativity/cosmology, but with even less justification? The preferred foliation has no physical motivation at all, and is plucked entirely out of the aether (so to speak). I'm not sure I'd count that as consistent with special relativity. Though in principle it would give the same predictions as special relativity.

3drnickbone9yHere's maybe another way of thinking about it ... A theory: The English sentence "Today is a Thursday" has the same meaning on all days when it is spoken, but its truth-value varies depending on when it is spoken. (The sentence always corresponds to the same proposition, but that proposition has variable truth value). B theory: The English sentence "Today is a Thursday" means something different when it is spoken on different occasions. Each specific utterance has a truth value which never changes. (Again, each utterance corresponds to a different proposition, but any one such proposition always has the same truth value.) If you can live with propositions whose truth value changes with time, then you're probably an A-theorist. If something smells fishy about that, and you think that in any given possible world, a proposition is either true or false and never changes its truth value, you're probably a B-theorist.

2[anonymous]9yIf put this way, definitely B. "Now" is a deictic, meaning 'at the time when I'm speaking', much like 'here' is a deictic meaning 'in the place where I'm speaking'.

2faul_sname9yWhat happens when you throw relativity into the mix? How do you specify the order of events in space-time when it varies based on the location of the observer?

8pragmatist9yIn relativity you still have temporal ordering of events, but it is not a total order [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_order]. In a Newtonian world, every event is either earlier than, later than or simultaneous with every other event. In relativity, some events can still be unambiguously described as earlier than or later than others. Event A is earlier than event B if it is in B's past light cone. There is no longer a relationship of simultaneity, however, and some pairs of events are not related by the earlier than/later than relation. The temporal order is a partial order [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partial_order].

6AlexMennen9yPartial ordering.

[-]prase9y 10

Lean toward B-theory if pushed to answer, but I wonder what cognitive algorithm even generated this as a possibly interesting question.

Also, who the hell has invented the names for that?

7[anonymous]9yI hate names likes that (incl. System 1 vs. System 2 thinking, Type I vs Type II errors, etc.). I can never remember which name stands for which thing.

5[anonymous]9yJ. M. E. McTaggart.

6Alicorn9yAnd he didn't mean to name competing theories about time; he was trying to dismiss the both of them.

1[anonymous]9yI think he was just a B-theorist (though he thought the self-contradictory A-theory was an ineliminable part of our thoughts about time).

5Alicorn9yWikipedia appears to confirm my memory of it ("McTaggart argued that the A series was a necessary component of any full theory of time, but that it was also self-contradictory and that our perception of time was, therefore, ultimately an incoherent illusion.")

2Rob Bensinger8yPhilosophy trivia: "J.M.E. McTaggart" stands for "John McTaggart Ellis McTaggart".

8Oscar_Cunningham9y"Other": The nature of physics has a strong possibility of being such that the question makes no sense.

2[anonymous]9ySame other, but with the nuance that there is probably a refinement of the question that does make sense. A rough, likely wrong attempt at a refinement: 1. B'-time: as before, but with a partial order of events; 2. A'-time: as before, but with the extra data coming from any observer who can specify those events that conclusively are in their past or future.

1magfrump9ySort of lean toward B-theory, but I suspect other temporal facts may exist. However, they are not of the form "X is in the present/future/past." Also, the nature of time may make these the wrong questions to ask as noted below.

0diegocaleiro9yOther: Events might not be ordered, yet time exists. This would be the case with the Timeless Barbourian Physics Yudkowsky discusses in the sequences. Also could be the case if some variety of many worlds of quantum style, or all possible worlds of Lewis style is the case. The Anthopic folk, like me, Katja, Bostrom and several others, might also amuse themselves by inquiring: Could in one of the many infinite universe (or Big universe) theories be the case that all time-like facts are some form of indexical fact?

[-]pragmatist9y 6

Perhaps an example of an epistemic theory of truth will help. Suppose you have a scientific community grappling with a certain set of problems. As their inquiry proceeds, they solve some problems and uncover new ones. In the process, they also greatly refine their methods. Imagine they eventually come to a stage where all their problems have been solved according to their own standards of warrant, and no open problems remain. One theory of truth (due to Charles Peirce) says that their beliefs at this stage of inquiry are true by definition. Truth is just w... (read more)

[-]Jayson_Virissimo9y 6

Perceptual experience: disjunctivism, qualia theory, representationalism, or sense-datum theory?

[pollid:105]

9pragmatist9yDisjunctivism: In normal cases, when a person is perceiving something, the object of their perception is a mind-independent object. The character of the person's phenomenal experience is explained by the properties of the object (for instance, a person perceiving an apple has an experience of redness because the object of their perception -- the apple -- is red). However, when a person is hallucinating or experiencing an illusion, the object of their perception is some sort of mind-dependent entity (perhaps sense-data; see below). So hallucination and veridical perception are substantially different kinds of mental processes. Representationalism: Perceptual experience is representational. It represents our immediate environment as being a certain way. Since representations can be both accurate and inaccurate, we can understand both veridical perception and hallucination as the same kind of process. The difference is merely in the success of the representation. To be perceiving is to be representing one's immediate environment in certain ways (visually, aurally, etc.), and perception is accurate to the extent that this representation corresponds to reality. Sense-datum theory: The objects of our perception are not mind-independent entities, they are mind-dependent objects called sense-data. These are objects like "a red spot at such-and-such position in my visual field". We infer the existence of mind-independent objects from patterns in the sense-data we perceive. Qualia theory: [I don't think I fully understand the claims of qualia theory. I have tried to describe the kinds of things qualia theorists say, but if it appears confused that's because I am confused.] The phenomenal character of our perceptual experience (the particular way our experience feels) is non-representational. We don't infer information about the external world from the particular feel of our conscious experience; rather, our conscious experience is simply what it feels like (from the inside

4Swimmy9yI wonder how many disjunctivists have actually taken hallucinatory drugs?

3TheOtherDave9yJust to be clear: sense-datum theory is not asserting that distal stimuli don't exist or that we're unjustified in inferring their existence or otherwise making a claim about existence. It is merely asserting that we infer their existence from sense data, as opposed to, um.... doing something other than that. Yes?

2pragmatist9yYes, the claim is that mind-independent objects are not the direct objects of perception, sense-data are. In so far as perception gives us information about distal objects, that information is inferred from patterns in sense data.

2arborealhominid8yI'm not totally clear on the distinction between representationalism and sense-datum theory. Do you think you could explain it in a bit more detail?

0Peterdjones9yI think qualia theory is quite othogonal to (in)direct realism. Different qualia tbeorists hold qualia to be direct perceptions of external properties, or to be qualitites of sense data, or to be adverbial. Etc.

0pragmatist9yThen in what sense is it a distinct view about perception? Are the poll options just poorly formulated?

1Peterdjones9yYes. Sense dataum theory barely differs from representationalism, direct relaism isn't mentioned, and qualia theory is orthogonal.

1pragmatist9yI'm not sure I agree with your assessment. Sense datum theory is significantly different from representationalism, since sense data aren't supposed to intentional objects. Disjunctivism is the only form of direct realism anyone takes seriously any more, as far as I'm aware. You may be right about qualia theory, but I have heard people use the term as a stand-in for adverbialism. I suspect that's what it's supposed to represent in the poll.

0Peterdjones9yIt looks like the list of options was cribbed from the The SEP article [http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/perception-problem/#3] , but without much context.

0torekp9yFor someone who isn't confident of understanding qualia theory, you stated it quite well. Near the end it could use a tweak, I think: "my conscious experience in its entirety isn't essential to my knowing that the apple is red. The phenomenal quality of the experience is just an effect ..." This leaves the verbal issue open, of whether perceived facts as well as phenomenal qualities count as part of "conscious experience".

3ModusPonies9yOther: all of these seem like plausible models with a nonzero amount of predictive power. I don't see how the truth of one of these implies that the others are false. Representationalism and sense-datum theory seem the most useful, I guess, but my real answer is "I don't know, ask a neurologist."

1BrassLion9yI'm not sure how you would even create a test to distingush these models. I'm not sure if my understanding is incomplete or if that's a warning sign that they aren't different or aren't coherent.

2Eugine_Nier9yOther: These are all true for different meanings of "the object of one's perception".

0Peterdjones9yIll-formed question. See my other comment.

[-]Jayson_Virissimo9y 6

Moral judgment: externalism or internalism?

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[-]pragmatist9y 23

Externalism: It is possible for a person to sincerely hold a moral belief (or make a moral judgment) without feeling any motivation to adhere to that belief/judgment. The claim is not just that the motivation might be trumped by other motivations, it is that it is possible for there to be no motivation at all.

Internalism: It is impossible to sincerely make a moral judgment without being motivated to act in accordance with it, although it may be the case that the motivation is trumped by other countervailing motivations.

[-]Alejandro19y 19

Other: This is a not-very-interesting definitional question as to exactly which kind of mental states should be counted as "sincerely making a moral judgement".

General defense of the above type of reply: Voting "Other" on questions that seem to you confused or seem to turn on irrelevant matters of small definitions, rather than making up a definition and running with it, etcetera, is probably a good barometer of LW-vs.-philosophy opinion.

The subject matter of humanity::morality is a mathematical object which Clippy could calculate, if it ever had any reason to do so, which it wouldn't, but it could, without being at all motivated to do anything about that. However, if "morality" is being given an agent relative definition then no, whatever you're not motivated to do anything about, even in the slightest, doesn't seem like it should be called Alejandro::morality.

7thomblake9yI doubt it. In my experience, if you allow a "Please specify" answer, philosophers will pick that for practically any distinction.

7[anonymous]9yIt is, at any rate, if you have some evidence that philosophers (professional? historical? what?) make up definitions and run with them when they don't understand a question. Otherwise, it's probably a very, very bad barometer.

3drnickbone9yDon't psychopaths count as evidence for "externalism"? (They know what they're doing is wrong but don't care.)

5TheOtherDave9yNot in and of itself. Suppose a psychopath says "I know killing people is wrong but I don't care" and kills someone. Wearing an externalist hat, I say "See? They made a moral judgment, but it doesn't constrain their behavior." Wearing an internalist hat, I say either "Maybe it did constrain their behavior, just not enough to prevent them from killing someone, because other factors motivated their behavior that aren't present in non-psychopaths" or "Maybe it wasn't a sincere moral judgment, they were just echoing what they've been told, like a blind person saying stop signs are red." That said, I can imagine well-designed experiments that would be evidence for one or the other. E.g., if we identify what parts of the brain are generally engaged during moral judgments, and what parts of the brain are engaged during recitation of memorized facts, and determine that when psychopaths say "killing people is wrong" the latter brain areas are engaged but the former are not, I would consider that evidence that psychopaths don't in fact make sincere moral judgments when they say that.

6RichardKennaway9yWe know from the effects of morphine that it is possible to experience "pain" without it "hurting". (I wonder if any philosopher foresaw that this is even possible?) Given that, it is quite conceivable to me that a psychopath might experience the feeling of "moral wrongness" without the motivation "I shouldn't do this". Maybe that isn't what's going on, but no process of reasoning about morality can rule it out. Philosophers, even materialist ones, are apt to think of the mind as being some sort of logical entity, about which they can prove that certain mental behaviours are impossible. But when the brain goes funny, all of those arguments fail. Which implies that when the brain hasn't gone funny, the arguments still don't prove anything, because how do we know that even a normal brain doesn't do other "absurd" things? Only by observing how it actually works, not by any process of pure reason. Compare "akrasia". How can you want to do a thing, have the ability, and yet not do it, all the while bemoaning the fact that you aren't doing it? Obviously absurd, impossible, a contradiction. But the fact that people do go funny in this way is so familiar to everyone that philosophers can't get far by arguing that it can't happen.

2TheOtherDave9yI certainly agree that we can discover things about the world that make us realize that some phenomenon P that we naively thought was indivisible in fact turns out to have internal structure, such that an event can demonstrate some-but-not-all-of P. I'm mostly of the opinion that when that sort of thing happens, the best move is to get very clear about what level of abstraction we're talking about, what concepts apply at that level, and how we refer to those concepts. Sometimes it's useful to talk about "cells", but if I'm interested in how mitochondria interact with the endoplasmic reticulum the concept to which "cell" refers isn't useful to me; I need new concepts (and it's probably best if I don't assign them homophonic labels). Are people on morphine actually experiencing pain? Yes, they are. No, they aren't. It's mostly not a helpful question. They are experiencing some properties of pain and not others, and what we've discovered is that our normal experience of pain has separable internal structure. So far, so good. And, sure, when an actor playing Oedipus screams and yells about how painful having his eyes plucked out is, he's experiencing some of the properties of pain, and it can be interesting to consider which properties those are. But I can also jump up a level and ask whether the actor is really experiencing pain, and on balance my answer is pretty unambiguously "no." (Though I'm prepared to make exceptions for certain actors and performances, given enough counterevidence.) Similarly, if I experience akrasia, that tells me that motivation has internal structure, and I can experience some of its components (e.g., the belief that I want to do something) without others (e.g., the actually-doing-it). At a lower level, I can usefully consider the relationship between those components. At a higher level, I can ask whether I'm really motivated to do it. (My usual answer is "no." I understand that judgments vary on this one.) So, OK. I agree that moral j

5drnickbone9yBut a blind person can still sincerely say that "stop signs are red". Their justification for saying so may be different from a sighted person's, but the statement is still sincere (the blind person really believes it). Is it part of the internalist claim that it is just impossible to acquire moral knowledge by such third-party means? For instance, simply observing what other people say about "right" and "wrong" and building an inductive concept about what actions the words describe, but without any emotional preference for "right" over "wrong"?

2TheOtherDave9yI can't speak for internalism, but it certainly seems to me that what I'm doing when I say that it's wrong for me to eat pork by the standards of Judaism is different from what i would be doing, were I an observant Jew, if I said it was wrong for me to eat pork.

3drnickbone9yBut still, how does this break the analogy with "red" for a blind person? For instance, a blind person could sincerely believe all of the following: "Stop signs are red" "My evidence for believing that stop signs are red is that sighted people have told me so" "Red things aren't red just because people say they are. Rather they have some inherent property to do with the way light reflects off them which causes people to describe them as red" "Some religious sects call certain signs red which everyone else calls orange, but these sects are wrong; the signs are in fact orange. Members of the sects have been brought up that way, and are sincere in their beliefs, but they are still wrong" "If I were a member of such a sect, I'd probably also believe that the orange signs are red" In short it seems possible to have a complete and sincere set of beliefs in "red" as an objective world property, without ever seeing red yourself or ever having any emotional response to it. I don't immediately see why the same can't be true for moral beliefs.

2TheOtherDave9yFair enough. It's certainly true that there are two different things being done by psychopaths and nonpsychopaths in the original example, but it might be that both of those things count as genuine moral beliefs, just as the two different things involving a stop sign can count as genuine beliefs about color. OTOH, it might be that only one of them counts as a genuine moral belief, just as only one of the things involving a stop sign counts as a genuine perception of color.

3magfrump9yI accept externalism on the part of some possible sentient creatures, but I think this question with respect to humans is a question of definitions, and even if you decide on a definition it becomes an empirical question I don't know the answer to.

2[anonymous]9yOther: I was unable to resolve my thoughts on this at all, and am not sure to what degree hearing more arguments either way would help that.

[-]mapnoterritory9y 6

Is there somewhere a glossary for all the questions? That would be very helpful (beyond this survey).

Also - there was already a similar thread:

http://lesswrong.com/lw/56q/how_would_you_respond_to_the_philpapers_what_are/

The comments have some answers (though not in a convenient machine readable form).

3Jayson_Virissimo9ypragmatist has added comments with descriptions of the key terms to most of the poll question comments. Interesting; perhaps someone would be willing to check them against this newer data for changes in Less Wrongers' beliefs over time.

[-]Rob Bensinger8y 5

A few problems with this LW survey:

Most of the interesting options in the original PhilPapers Survey are collapsed into 'Other'. This makes it needlessly tempting to side with one of the named positions in order to make one's answer usefully contentful. It also makes our comparisons to the original poll much cruder. The original survey provided (regularly used) options for: 'accept all', 'reject all', 'accept an intermediate view', 'accept an alternative', 'the question is too unclear to answer', 'there is no fact of the matter', 'insufficiently familiar

... (read more)

[-]DanArmak9y 5

Suppose the switch is stuck halfway between "straight" and "turn". It will take some effort to move it to either position. If you leave it alone, the trolley will take a path at random with equal probability.

If you take the time to move the switch to either position, you will be seen. The survivors will thank you and the families of those you chose to kill will sue to put you in prison. Newspapers will print your photo and denigrade philosophers of ethics in deeply misguided editorials. Your unique and memorable name and face will be forever associated with the story.

If you don't touch the switch and run away, nobody will know you were there.

What do you choose?

Zombies: inconceivable, conceivable but not metaphysically possible, or metaphysically possible?

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[-]pragmatist9y 11

A zombie is physically identical to a human being but does not possess phenomenal experience. There is nothing it is like to be a zombie.

Inconceivable: We cannot fully conceive of a zombie. If you think you have a coherent conception of a zombie, it is because you haven't thought about your conception carefully enough. Sufficient thought will reveal that your conception is incoherent.

Conceivable but not metaphysically possible: One can arrive at a coherent conception of zombies, but objects that match this conception cannot possibly exist, not even in worlds with different laws of nature than ours.

Metaphysically possible: The existence of zombies is possible.

3TheOtherDave9yGiven these options, I think I have to reluctantly choose "metaphysically possible." A decent respect to the opinions of Less Wrong requires that I should declare the causes which impel me to this. I have never been able to conceive of a zombie and a physically identical non-zombie without subsequently concluding that my conception leads to positing causeless effects (e.g., a zombie spontaneously talking about its nonexistent phenomenal experience while using all and only the cognitive structures that the non-zombie uses to talk about actual phenomenal experience). But, well... causeless effects aren't incoherent, or metaphysically impossible, they're just vanishingly unlikely. . (Not even necessarily that. E.g., in a world where there are only a few possible utterances, one of which, X, is conventionally understood to be a reference to the speaker's phenomenal experience, it's not even all that unlikely for a zombie to just kind of coincidentally happen to utter X in exactly those circumstances that a non-zombie analog utters them due to phenomenal experience.) Further, nothing in these definitions asserts that humans do have phenomenal experience, which allows for Dennett's answer ("We're all zombies.") In which case cause and effect aren't even at issue... all of us zombies just happen to talk about phenomenal experience despite not having any, because our brains are wired to do so, presumably for signalling reasons but possibly because the Matrix Lords think it's funny, or for other reasons. This strikes me as implausible... I mean, it sure does seem to me that I have phenomenal experience, and I can't imagine being wrong about that. But that might just be a failure of my imagination. Which seems to add up to "zombies are metaphysically possible" on this account. I'm not quite sure.

4pragmatist9yHow did you answer the physicalism question? If you think any physical duplicate of our world must also be a mental duplicate then I think you're committed to the impossibility of zombies. Think about it this way: Do you think there can be a world where the distribution of micro-physical properties is identical to ours but which does not have tables? Presumably no, because you believe that once microscopic properties are distributed a certain way in some location, you can't avoid having a table in that location. But you don't think the same is true of phenomenal experience if you believe zombies are possible. You think that there needs to be something more than just the right distribution of physical properties for consciousness to appear. I suspect you're conflating epistemic and metaphysical possibility when you say causeless effects are vanishingly unlikely. Take the sentence "2 + 2 = 5". I think its metaphysically impossible for that to be true (assuming the meanings of the terms are kept constant) -- there is no possible world in which it is true -- but I don't assign it probability 0 because (as Eliezer has pointed out) I acknowledge that there is some possible sequence of experiences that might lead me to believe it (or increase my credence in it). Thinking something is impossible does not mean assigning it probability 0. Dennett doesn't think we're all zombies, BTW. He's skeptical of qualia as a coherent concept, but he doesn't deny that we have phenomenal experience.

2TheOtherDave9yI don't believe mental events have nonphysical causes, which is precisely why I consider zombies to entail causeless effects. And yeah, perhaps I'm just reading too much into "metaphysically impossible" as distinct from "impossible"; the truth is I really don't know how to think cogently about what would be impossible if the laws of nature were different. The "we're all zombies" bit was intended with tongue in cheek; it's actually a direct quote of his from some book or another -- Consciousness Explained, probably -- that I read like 20 years ago and stuck with me. He isn't entirely serious when he says it, of course, and IIRC has a little footnote that says "To quote this phrase out of context would be the height of intellectual dishonesty." or words to that effect. EDIT: That said, another relevant Dennetism that stuck with me was his response to an undergrad at a seminar I was listening in on years back. The undergrad said, in effect, "But I don't feel like a merely computational process!" and he replied "How do you know? Maybe this is exactly what a merely computational process feels like!"

1[anonymous]8yWhat is meant by “conception” exactly? Because that doesn't appear to make sense to me.

0Rob Bensinger8yWent for "metaphysically possible". I think zombies exist, and we are they.

0[anonymous]9yOther: I wouldn't say it's inconceivable exactly, but I think the thought experiment, in framing the possibility of a decoupling of phenomenal experience from cognitive architecture, primes for some intuitions that don't make a lot of sense to me.

Truth: correspondence, deflationary, or epistemic?

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9pragmatist9yCorrespondence: A proposition is true if and only if it bears some sort of congruence relation to a state of affairs that obtains. When I say that "P is true", where P is some proposition, I am saying that P stands in this relation to some portion of reality. Deflationary: Ascribing truth to a proposition amounts to no more than asserting the proposition. It does not mean you are attributing some further property to the proposition (such as congruence with some state of affairs). Saying "P is true" is the same as just saying "P'. Epistemic: To say that a proposition is true is just to say that it meets a high standard of epistemic warrant, and that we are thereby justified in asserting it. The search for truth and the search for justification are not separate goals. There is no more to truth than sufficiently powerful justification.

2RichardKennaway9y"Deflationary" is not the same sort of thing as the other two theories, either of which one might believe while being a deflationist. In fact, I don't see a reason to think deflationism is false. What is actually meant by "just saying P" is not answered by deflationism, but by an actual theory of truth. And I still think that after consulting the Stanford Encyclopedia on the subject [http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/truth-deflationary/].

4pragmatist9yThe whole point of deflationism is that there is nothing further to be said about truth other than what I said in my description. They think of truth as a shallow notion that plays no significant explanatory role in our accounts of language and meaning. If you think that the deflationist claim needs to be backed up by a more substantive theory of truth then you are not a deflationist. So there you have it, a reason to think deflationism is false. You can think of deflationism as an anti-theory of truth rather than a theory of truth. The central claim is that no theory of truth is needed. The linguistic function of truth claims can be understood in terms of the formal disquotational scheme I outlined, and there isn't really any deeper metaphysical question about what Truth is. If you ask a deflationist, "What do you mean by 'just saying P'?", he might respond with a theory of meaning -- a theory that gives a systematic account of how sentences are assigned semantic content -- but he will not respond with a theory of truth.

2RichardKennaway9yIt seems to me that if a deflationist answers the question "when can you correctly say "snow is white"" with the answer "when snow is, in fact, white", then the deflationist is a correspondencist. If he says "when you have good enough evidence that snow is white", he is an epistemicist. Deflationism on its own is surely just a shallow concern with the word "truth". Of course asserting "it is true that P" is the same as asserting P, but that is not an interesting fact. Is deflationism historically a response to some obsolete idea about "truth" as an immaterial substance that adheres to true propositions, by virtue of which they are true? Neither of the other two theories assert such an idea.

1drnickbone9yI think there might be a difference here between truth of a proposition and truth of a sentence. Ascribing truth to a proposition looks the same as just asserting the proposition (deflationary account). Ascribing truth to a sentence looks like a combination of mapping it onto a proposition (interpreting the sentence) and then asserting that proposition. Since I would regard propositions and states of affairs as either the same, or isomorphic, this looks like the correspondence theory of truth for sentences.

1Benjy Forstadt2yI strongly agree. This has been discussed in the literature, I believe. For instance, it comes up in discussions of the semantic paradoxes. There is no paradox involved in “disquotation” for propositions: the proposition that p just is the proposition that it’s true that p. When you’re talking about sentences though, you run into the liar paradox if you say that “p” is true if and only if p.

External world: idealism, skepticism, or non-skeptical realism?

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[-]pragmatist9y 12

Non-skeptical realism: A mind-independent reality exists, and we have epistemic access to its structure. We can acquire substantial knowledge about reality.

Skepticism: A mind-independent reality exists, but we lack epistemic access to it. We cannot know the nature of reality. We only have access to how things appear to us, and we should take seriously the possibility that this is very different from how things actually are.

Idealism: Reality is not mind-independent. It is either wholly or partly mentally constituted. We can know about reality because there is not much (or no) distance between how things appear to us and how things actually are.

4drnickbone9yI'm not sure how well this fits with fallibilist accounts of knowledge (e.g. probabilism, Bayesianism). A Bayesian doesn't "rule out" possibilities when setting probabilities strictly between 0 or 1, so this technically looks like "skepticism". But if I claim that I'm 99.9999% certain that a mind-independent reality exists and I have substantial knowledge about it, that really doesn't sound very skeptical!

0pragmatist9yYou can read "rule out" as "no longer take seriously". The probability of a hypothesis doesn't have to go down all the way to 0 before I stop taking it seriously. I've edited the original description to reflect this.

1drnickbone9yThanks for this clarification. I was going for "lean towards non-skeptical realism" but would say "accept non-skeptical realism" under your new formulation. I don't rule out a simulation hypothesis, for instance, but can't say I give it serious probability weighting. (Bostrom considers it one of three disjuncts, and I can give reasons to assign the other disjuncts much higher probability.)

0[anonymous]9yExactly what I was going to say.

2Rob Bensinger8yThree problems: 1. This seems to entail the absurd proposition "p, but we have no way of knowing that p". I.e., it's not clear how to cash out 'epistemic access' in a way that allows us to know that there is a mind-independent world, without knowing anything further about that world. This uncharitably commits skepticism to an internal tension, if not an outright contradiction. 2. "We only have access to how things appear to us", inasmuch as it implies "We have access to how things appear to us", is itself a substantive doctrine about how reality breaks down, and one skepticism need not endorse. So this uncharitably assigns certain doctrinal commitments to skeptics as a group. 3. This reading assumes that skeptics are realists of some sort, or that they privilege realism as a hypothesis over idealism. The original question does not state this, so idealistic or neutral skeptics may be unfairly biased by this interpretation. 'Mentally constituted' is vague. If this just means that part of reality is mental (or irreducibly mental), then it seems to treat dualism as a form of idealism, which is very nonstandard.

0pragmatist8yFair enough. I should have said something like: "A mind-independent reality might exist, and if it does then we lack epistemic access to it."

[-]pragmatist9y 5

I hope you mean "if they are actually observed".

Yeah, that's it.

But, if we didn't believe (to a degree) in theoretical predictions before making observations to confirm them, then we wouldn't know what observations to attempt, and would almost never actually observe something useful!

The anti-realist doesn't say that we don't believe in theoretical entities. She says that we don't have strong reason to believe in them. I suspect most of us believe in things we don't have strong reason to believe in. It might be an anthropological fact that ... (read more)

[-]pragmatist9y 5

What is and isn't observable changes over time. Quarks are not in principle unobservable.

Most scientific anti-realists acknowledge this. If quarks become observable then there would be good reason to believe in them. But the mere fact that they are part of an empirically successful theory is not sufficient reason.

Of course, it's unclear whether the observable/unobservable distinction makes sense. Does seeing something through a microscope count as observing it? How about an electron microscope? How about tracks in a bubble chamber?

Trolley problem (five straight ahead, one on side track, turn requires switching): straight or turn?

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Trolley problem: There is a trolley traveling along a set of tracks. The driver has lost control of the trolley. On the track ahead of the trolley are five people who cannot get off the track in time and will all die if the trolley gets to them. You are standing next to a lever that can switch the track the trolley will take, preventing the deaths of the five people. On the other track is a single person who also cannot get away in time and so will die if you switch the track. Do you refrain from switching the track ("straight") or do you switch the track ("turn")?

3DanArmak9yAddendum: you are not allowed to explicitly consider e.g. future reputational effects of your choice. (Most people will hate you for flipping the switch or just for being involved no matter what you do. The safest bet is to run away if you haven't been seen near the switch yet.)

3roystgnr9yInteresting - I hadn't heard that added to the problem before. Are you allowed to explicitly consider other psychological effects of your choice? (e.g. presumably people would update their beliefs to account for "marked-as-currently-unused trolley tracks are more dangerous than I thought" and "in-active-use trolley tracks have another level of safety I hadn't considered")

4RichardHughes9yPresuming I value the lives of all the people involved equally, I turn on to the side track. If I have a strong reason not to let the person on the side track die - they're a relative, I know them well, they owe me money, I'm in love with them, whatever - I let it go straight. This is a really easy problem if you accept that you're only a marginally good person at best.

2r_claypool9yOops, I meant to choose "Accept: turn" instead of "Accept: straight"

[-]DanArmak9y 42

Too late, and now they're dead.

6TheOtherDave9yAs, to be fair, are their billions and billions of counterparts in hypothetical-experiment land who are tied to the tracks further from convenient switches.

1[anonymous]9yIs this about what I think would be normatively better to do or about what I predict I would actually do if personally faced with such a situation?

5TheOtherDave9yTraditionally, trolley problems are asking about normative ethics. My prediction would be "Other: dither ineffectually."

Newcomb's problem: two boxes or one box?

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[-]J_Taylor9y 13

Me: I didn't mean to two-box!

Omega: Why would you share an excuse with an omniscient agent?

Me: Because even if there is no causal connection between me giving an excuse, and me being excused, there may be a logical connection. Also, why would an omniscient agent ask a question?

Omega: Due to meta-level concerns. Obviously.

Abstract objects: nominalism or Platonism?

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[-]pragmatist9y 21

An abstract object is an object that does not correspond to any pattern of matter and energy in space-time. Purported examples of abstract objects are numbers, properties, sets, etc. An object that does correspond to some concentration of matter/energy in space-time is called a concrete object.

Nominalism: Abstract objects do not exist.

Platonism: Abstract objects exist.

[-]Kaj_Sotala9y 20

Still not sure what this means. Is there some sense in which this distinction pays rent in anticipated experience?

[-]RobertLumley9y 20

I voted other because of my confusion on this point. I think we need to taboo "exists".

[-]Wei_Dai9y 11

Using my recent attempt at (partially) tabooing "exists" to translate:

Nominalism: We can't rationally care about abstract objects.

Platonism: We can rationally care about abstract objects.

So far Platonism appears to be "winning" according to this definition since UDT is Platonist in this sense, and there isn't really a "nominalist decision theory" that's equivalent or seems as promising.

3DanArmak9yThat just shifts the ground to disagreeing about what is "rational" when arguing about different epistemologies.

1[anonymous]9yShifting the ground to an easier, more tractable problem? Awesome.

2drnickbone9yThat seems a rather new argument for Platonism. But what about possibilist versions of Platonism as in "Abstract objects are ones which possibly exist"? It seems quite rational to care about things which might happen, or which might exist without conceding that they actually will happen or actually do exist.

1RichardHughes9yI voted 'other' to the original question. I would vote 'accept platonism' to this question.

2pragmatist9yMy inclination is to say that it doesn't, and that the disagreement is really just about how to use the word "exist". But there are a couple of ways in which the distinction might have a bearing on anticipated experience. One prominent argument for Platonism is the Quine-Putnam Indispensability Argument, which says that our best strategy for ontological commitment is to believe in the existence of those objects over which our best scientific theories indispensably quantify. So if one cannot dispense with quantification over mathematical objects while maintaining the integrity of our best theories, then we should believe in the existence of those mathematical objects. If one accepts this criterion, then whether or not one believes in the existence of abstract objects depends on whether our best theories indispensably quantify over such objects, so the Platonism vs. nominalism debate depends on science. Hartry Field wrote a book [http://www.amazon.com/Science-Without-Numbers-Defence-Nominalism/dp/0691072604/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1348677655&sr=8-3&keywords=hartry+field] where he tries to axiomatize Newtonian continuum mechanics without any quantification over real numbers. Also, it's plausible that Tegmark's Level IV multiverse hypothesis assumes Platonism, since it requires that mathematical structures have independent existence. So if you believe Tegmark's hypothesis constrains anticipation, then perhaps Platonism does as well.

7shminux9yAnother false dichotomy. The word exist means different things to different people.

2komponisto9yYes, this is definitely a confused question. "Correspondence" is complicated. People shouldn't use "exists" to mean "corresponds to some pattern of matter and energy" (so apparently I'm a Platonist); yet they also shouldn't ignore the ontological distinction between numbers and atoms (so I guess I'm also kind of a nominalist).

5thomblake9yOther: Aristotelianism. Abstract objects exist when instantiated. The "form of 2" does not exist in a world of forms somewhere, but 2 billiard balls is an instance of both '2' and 'billiard ball'.

0Rob Bensinger8yI agree this is an 'Other' doctrine, and 'nominalism' is a bad name for the doctrine of concretism (i.e., everything is spatiotemporal). But isn't Aristotelianism a form of 'nominalism' as defined here? Doesn't your Aristotelianism deny, or refuse to affirm, any "object that does not correspond to any pattern of matter and energy in space-time"? Properties are not ordinarily thought of as objects, and even so if you think that all properties are instantiated, then they do seem to be spatiotemporal, though perhaps in an informational rather than 'matter/energy' sense. Hm.

0thomblake9yI'm not sure if Aristotle actually believed an object could be an instance of two forms. That's pretty advanced polymorphism.

2[anonymous]9yIn the loose sense of 'form' (cf. Physics I.7), I think objects could: a rabbit has the form of a rabbit, and if it's white it has that form too. That's also consistant with the relationship between primary and secondary substances and non-substances from Categories. On the other hand, in Metaphysics, 'form' is pretty much restricted to the identity of a substance. Still I think Aristotle would be happy enough with polymorphism so long as you made a distinction between substance-forms and non-substance-forms.

0thomblake9ySounds about right to me.

1DanArmak9yWhat do platonists say the word object means, if some objects are abstract? What is a property that is true of all objects? What are some categories of non-objects?

5pragmatist9yFor most Platonists, an object is something we quantify over. So, for instance, numbers are objects, because we say things like "There is one even prime" (existential quantification), and "All multiples of 6 are also multiples of 2" (universal quantification). Any domain over which we quantify is a domain of objects.

3DanArmak9yThen what does it mean for an abstract object like 2 to "exist"?

8jimrandomh9yOther: I hold a Tegmark-style "all mathematical objects exist" view, but additionally hold that this requires promoting the type of the "exists" property from boolean-valued to real-valued, so that this becomes "all mathematical objects have nonzero degree of existence", and most ordinary usages of the word "exists" pick up an implied "as a substructure of" relation to some set of universes. This "as a substructure of" relation excludes platonic objects when present, so nominalism vs. platonism reduces to the word "exists" being a pair of homonyms.

0Rob Bensinger8yAugustinian!!!!!! hssss

3crazy889yI think there's some truth in the claim that this is just a debate over the word "exists" but actually, in philosophy there's a fairly well-regarded meaning of the word and the debate tends to be about this meaning. I think that's one of the reasons comparisons of people from LW with philosophers will be misleading, philosophers use a lot of technical vocabulary that differs from the standard usage. So by "exists" philosophers tend to mean something like "is quantified over in our fundamental theory of the universe". So nominalists in mathematics tend to be arguing something like (and this is a dangerously rough approximate), "we can describe the universe without referring to numbers etc". See Hartry Field for an example. This is rough but actually, platonism begins to seem a lot more plausible when it's understood in the way that philosophers actually use it. I suspect, then, that those from LW and philosophers are just answering different questions here.

2Spinning_Sandwich9yI think I'm more comfortable with the negation of Platonism than with the positive claim of nominalism, but I suppose in this context we have 'nominalism' = '~Platonism'. Whether what is usually meant by 'nominalism' is the same is as unclear to me as I am uncomfortable with the idea of making a positive claim about it.

2WrongBot9yOther: Existence is a two-valued function, not one-valued.

1pragmatist9yCould you elaborate, please?

0WrongBot9ySorry for the very belated reply, but I was struggling to find the words to describe exactly what I meant. Luckily, Eliezer has already done most of it for me in his latest post [http://lesswrong.com/lw/ezu/stuff_that_makes_stuff_happen/]. Thing A exists with respect to Thing B iff Thing A and Thing B are both part of the same causal network. So ArisKatsaris was half-right, but things outside our past and future light cones can be said to exist with respect to us if they have a causal relationship with anything that is inside our past and future light cones.

1[anonymous]9yOther: Abstract objects clearly have some kind of logical existence, but it is very different from concrete existence. Also, I'm confused on this one. Also, the answer doesn't matter, so who cares. Basically Taboo exists

Politics: libertarianism or egalitarianism?

[pollid:87]

[-]novalis9y 10

Other: utilitarianism

2Manfred9yOther utilitarianism: symmetrized_Manfred_utilitarianism :P

[-]Desrtopa9y 10

Other: I think it's a false dichotomy. I think that an ideal system of government will probably sometimes have to sacrifice libertarian principles in favor of egalitarian ones, and sometimes have to sacrifice egalitarian principles in favor of libertarian ones.

4RichardKennaway9yWhat principles will it use in making such choices?

[-]Desrtopa9y 10

How happy, safe, productive, etc. people are. I don't see either libertarianism or egalitarianism as terminal values.

8TheOtherDave9yMy real answer is "somewhere in between," but I think that pretty much describes everyone. I ended up answering in terms of current political structures and what direction I think they should move in.

4bramflakes9yWhat if I simply don't know?

3RichardHughes9yI voted 'other' and downvoted the question. Lordy, what the heck are you doin' bringing this in here? D:

3MixedNuts9yOther: solve scarcity, let everyone have infinite everything.

3AspiringRationalist9yIf libertarian vs. egalitarian is the main axis along which members of a group differ politically, it's a very unusual group. What are we really trying to find out about the group? Possibilities that come to mind include: * The philosophical viewpoints that underlie our political views * Our political preferences along various axes, such as interventionist vs. non-interventionist economic, social and foreign policy * Party preferences

2[anonymous]9yThat's the American sense of "libertarianism", right? I take this question to be about the horizontal axis of The Political Compass.

3Jayson_Virissimo9yFor what it's worth, I interpreted it as liberalism versus socialism.

4[anonymous]9yThat's the European sense of “liberalism”, right?

0Jayson_Virissimo9yAffirmative.

1[anonymous]9yOther: Do the right thing. Consequentialism and all that. Would gladly bow completely to an FAI, but value freedom. Would accept some people doing better than others, but it would suck if the have-nots can't do anything about it. What a simplistic dichotomy...

Justification: externalism or internalism?

[pollid:81]

[-]novalis9y 29

Other: "Justification" is just another complicated pre-Bayes way of trying to understand what belief is.

Externalism: A subject's belief can be justified even if the justification is not consciously available to the subject. For instance, if the belief is formed on the basis of a reliable perceptual faculty, it may be a justified belief even if the subject is not aware that the relevant faculty is reliable or even that the relevant faculty is the source of the belief.

Internalism: A subject's beliefs are justified only if the subject has conscious access to the justification.

[-]DanArmak9y 23

Aren't these just different definitions of the word "justified", rather than arguments about what is actually "justified"?

3pragmatist9yQuite possibly.

2tut9yYes. The question is what you mean when you say the word "justified" regarding a belief, without stating a definition.

0diegocaleiro9yDanArmak, Much of what goes by "philosophy" these days is isomorphic to that, in case that shocks you.

[-]Oscar_Cunningham9y 13

Voted for "externalism", but caring about whether a belief is "justified" is probably a mistake.

Analytic-synthetic distinction: yes or no?

[pollid:78]

[-]pragmatist9y 22

Yes: There are certain sentences which are true solely by virtue of the meanings of the words involved, so these sentences are not subject to empirical falsification. Example: "All bachelors are unmarried." It is impossible for this sentence to be false, provided the words retain their ordinary meaning.

No: Every sentence is potentially open to empirical falsification. [EDIT: I guess the "No" answer would also be appropriate for those who believe that no sentence is open to empirical falsification, although I would be very surprised if anyone on this site fits that description.]

8benelliott9yThe Yes answer seems obvious, is there some sort of gotcha?

9pragmatist9y[VOTE BEFORE READING THIS COMMENT TO AVOID PRIMING.] The most prominent critic of the distinction is Quine. You can read about the reasons for his opposition here [http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/quine/#AnaSynDisArgAgaLogEmp]. A quote:

0diegocaleiro9yThere is also Chalmers 2009 I guess paper about this, which breifly reviews the history of what happened after Quine polarized the topic. Revisability and Conceptual Change. Chalmers attemps (in my view succesfully) to rescue 80% of what matters in the distinction, avoiding Quinean and post Quinean traps.

4pengvado9yIs "some sentences of first-order logic are tautologies" a sufficient reason to vote yes? If so, clearly we should be talking about that rather than complicated human-language examples like bachelors. If not, what's the difference?

2torekp9yThe answer to your first question will be controverted for pretty much the same reasons that the analytic-synthetic distinction itself is, I think. Quineans will claim that insofar as those sentences of first order logic are actually used in science, they become enmeshed in the holism of cognitive meaning. Good point to raise, nevertheless.

4Manfred9yOther: Unique meanings are a useful approximation, but if you stretch an approximation thin enough it develops holes. For example, "bachelor" in middle english refers to a squire, and squires can be married.

2Spinning_Sandwich9yI probably should have voted for "Other," but I voted for "Lean toward: yes" because I still outright agree in certain contexts. Quine's Two Dogmas is certainly enough to make me doubt the usefulness of the analytic/synthetic distinction as regards ordinary language, but for formal languages, this is not the case. It's also not clear to me whether it's impossible to construct a language (for communication) clear enough to make sense of analytic/synthetic distinctions. This is one of those wonderfully agnostic positions that philosophy often leaves me with.

2[anonymous]9yOther: Lean toward two-dimensionalism.

2Alicorn9yCan you elaborate on this? I haven't heard of it in this context before.

3[anonymous]9yThe idea is that the meaning of an utterance isn't just one thing; it's kind of the overlap between two distinct propositions: the sense (that is, the concept or idea by which we find the referent), and the referent, the actual entity to which it refers. The standard textbook example is the word "water"; the sense of "water" would basically correspond to a descriptive, conceptually encoded "water"-iness, and the referent would be the substance itself. Basically, you've got your ideas about water, you've got the abstract entity you recognize or impute as a member of the reference class (the substance H2O considered in abstract, or a pond, or a glass of clear odorless transparent liquid on the table in front of you), and both are relevant to determining the actual semantic content.

2[anonymous]9yThis was the most surprising poll result, to me.

0jsteinhardt9yI assume you also expected far more of the (currently) less popular answer?

0arundelo9yOther: I think the distinction clearly exists (in the sense that it's a human concept that carves reality more or less at the joints, so that a person can learn the definition and then come up with examples), but it's not useful for much apart from arguments-about-words-rather-than-things, and, because of the fuzziness of definitions, in practice it's more like a continuum than a strictly binary distinction.

Mental content: externalism or internalism?

[pollid:76]

[-]pragmatist9y 20

Externalism: The representational content of our mental states (e.g. what objects our beliefs are about) is dependent upon properties of our external environment, not just upon properties of our brain state.

Internalism: The representational content of our mental states is fixed by our brain state.

[-]RichardKennaway9y 28

This looks like an unheard falling tree problem, the problematic term being "the representational content of our mental states".

1[anonymous]9yVoted other for essentially this reason.

[-]TheOtherDave9y 11

Agreed with Richard above, it's hard to know what to do with "the representational content of our mental states". How would I know if the representational content of one of my mental states had changed? What would I expect to observe differently?

That said, I voted "internalism", roughly on the grounds that while I can posit things that might deserve the label "an aspect of the representational content of a mental state that depends on properties of my external environment," I don't actually seem to care about any of them.

4novalis9yIf you take Dennett's intentional stance towards our mental states, I think you can only do so by considering the external environment that the brain is operating in. Which I guess makes me an externalist (which is what I answered), but I'm not sure whether that's the traditional definition.

2Oscar_Cunningham9yI voted "Lean toward: externalism", but the I get the feeling that even asking the question shows that you're barking up the wrong tree.

1faul_sname9yOther: What? I'm not understanding the question.

2pragmatist9yDoes this help [http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/emj/poll_less_wrong_and_mainstream_philosophy_how/7ix8] ?

0faul_sname9yYes. I presume they haven't had time to notice they're in different physical environments (as they will diverge in a matter of milliseconds as they see different things and different neurons fire).

1[anonymous]9yOther: embodied cognition (externalism but moreso).

Mind: anti-physicalism or physicalism?

[pollid:75]

[-]pragmatist9y 24

Physicalism: A physical duplicate of our world (i.e. a world in which all the same physical properties are instantiated at the same space-time locations) must necessarily also be a mental duplicate (i.e. all mental states instantiated in that world must be identical to the mental states instantiated in this one).

Anti-physicalism: The denial of physicalism.

2Vladimir_Nesov9yIn what sense is a duplicate distinct from an original in these definitions?

4pragmatist9yA physical duplicate is identical to the original in its distribution of physical properties. This leaves open the possibility that there are non-physical properties which could differ between the worlds. Of course, if you believe there are no independent non-physical properties, then the physical duplicate would in fact be identical to the original.

1prase9y"Same space-time location" means "same relative distances and time intervals within each world"?

0BrassLion9yIs this the same as asking whether there is a 1:1 correspondence between mind states and brain states?

0Jayson_Virissimo9y"Other": I maintain a physicalist stance (à la van Fraassen), but do not affirm physicalism.

Because it is not relevant. B-theory time and A-theory time are not related like an affine space is related to a vector space. You can't get from B-theory time to A-theory time by picking an origin and calling it "the present". The whole point of the A-theory is that the present is not a static point in time. It moves. The particular mathematical representation you suggest doesn't capture this.

2shminux9yRight, I was pondering that [http://lesswrong.com/lw/emj/poll_less_wrong_and_mainstream_philosophy_how/7iiz] , too: Indeed the transformation does not capture this apparently moving origin. What does "moving" mean in this context? How would you describe it mathematically? In the block universe model, this is ought to be pretty easy by introducing a shifting origin, but it is probably harder in the growing block universe model. I need to think about it some more, feel free to point me to any mathematical references if you know of any. Though I do not think I will continue in this thread, due to the distracting karma burn it seems to extract, reminding me that, on average, people don't want me to.

Believe me, plenty of philosophers understand what an affine space is. Not enough, unfortunately, but still plenty.

[-]komponisto9y 4

A lot of philosophy is like this.

However, it takes a while to get to this point. The math in question dates essentially from the 19th century, while questions about time are ancient.

[-]Jayson_Virissimo9y 4

Teletransporter (new matter): survival or death?

[pollid:107]

[-]pragmatist9y 11

Teletransporter: You are placed in a machine that will instantaneously disintegrate your body, in the process recording its exact atomic configuration. This information is then beamed to another machine far away, and in that machine new matter is used to construct a body with the same configuration as yours. Would you consider yourself to have survived the process, and teleported from one machine to the other ("survival")? Or do you think you have died, and the duplicate in the far away machine is a different person ("death")?

4torekp9yIt's important to distinguish between and In other words, it's important to avoid the worst argument in the world. [http://lesswrong.com/lw/e95/the_worst_argument_in_the_world/] I believe that the former statement is implied by a uniquely best answer to a set of verbal questions - but at the same time, it's a mere technicality.

0BrassLion9yVoted Lean: Death but want to change my answer to "have no bloody clue". For the record, when I first thought about this I was accept: death.

1kybernetikos8yI tend to think death, but then I'm not sure that we genuinely survive from one second to another. I don't have a good way to meaningfully define the kind of continuity that most people intuitively think we have and so I conclude that it could easily just be an illusion.

[-]Jayson_Virissimo9y 4

Knowledge claims: contextualism, relativism, or invariantism?

[pollid:103]

[-]pragmatist9y 14

Contextualism: The truth of a knowledge claim depends on the context in which it is uttered. A claim such as "Alice knows that she is not in the Matrix" might be true in certain contexts (when explaining to someone in ordinary conversation why Alice didn't lose sleep over the movie Matrix) but false in other contexts (when uttered in an epistemology class in a discussion about the possibility of us being in the Matrix). The usual analysis is that the same sentence about knowledge expresses different propositions in different contexts (just like the sentence "It's raining here" expresses different propositions in different contexts).

Relativism: Whether a subject possesses knowledge of a certain proposition is relative to a set of epistemic standards. Relative to one such set, she might know that the proposition is true, while relative to another set, she does not qualify as knowing this. So, strictly speaking, "knowledge" is a three-place function, taking as arguments a subject, a proposition and a set of standards.

Invariantism: Knowledge claims are either true or false simpliciter. Their truth does not vary depending on context, and they are not relativized to epistemic standards.

EDIT: A couple of people have said that the difference between contextualism and relativism is unclear. I have tried to clarify in this comment.

0Rob Bensinger8yNone of the prior discussion reflects an understanding of 'contextualism' as standardly conceived by philosophers (if the Stanford Encyclopedia exposition is representative of philosophers' views). So I suspect the polling data for this question will need to be tossed out. Here's a clearer explanation of the difference between these doctrines: contextualism = The semantic thesis that 'x knows y' may vary in truth-value depending on the social and psychological status of the knowledge-attributor. I.e., 'x knows y' often or always fails to have a determinate truth-value, unless it is clear from context that we are really saying 'x knows y relative to evaluator z,' where z is someone evaluating 'does x know y?' Thus, a better name for 'contextualism' would be 'attributor contextualism' (which it has indeed been called). Note that contextualism does not imply that the distribution of knowledge in the world is arbitrary or just a matter of subjective opinion; there may be very strict constraints on what sorts of 'subjective opinions' held by an evaluator affect knowledge-relative-to-an-evaluator. For instance, it is plausible that 'I know I have hands' would count as true if the evaluator were your psychiatrist, but would count as false if the evaluator were someone with whom you were debating the Simulation Hypothesis. That's not because of the evaluator's mere opinions; it's because there are higher standards for knowledge in metaphysical debates than in everyday conversation. An evaluator with crazy, unrealistic standards wouldn't have his/her own, equally legitimate beliefs about what counts as knowledge; s/he would just be consistently in error. Nor is contextualism a meta-semantic claim about how the word 'knowledge' varies across linguistic communities; rather, it is the semantic claim that 'knowledge' in all (standard-English-speaking) contexts would frequently be judged to vary based on the state of the evaluator. Contextualism could turn out to be false for

0pragmatist8yIn your discussion of contextualism, you are conflating "evaluator" and "attributor", I think. An attributor is someone who makes a knowledge-claim, i.e. attributes knowledge of some proposition to someone (including, possibly, to himself). An evaluator is someone who judges the truth of the knowledge-claim made by the attributor. So if you say "I know I have hands" to a psychologist, you are the attributor, not the psychologist. You are the one making the knowledge-claim (about yourself, in this case). The psychologist is the evaluator, and according to contextualism she will (or possibly should) evaluate your claim according to your context, not her own. So if the psychologist hears about you making the claim in the context of a discussion of the Simulation argument, she should probably judge it false, irrespective of the context in which she is situated at the time she is making the evaluation. I believe this agrees more or less with the definition (and discussion) above. Your definitions of relativism and invariance seem to agree with mine.

0Rob Bensinger8yI wasn't aware that there was an established distinction between the two. Thanks for the information! Though nothing of great weight can rest on it, since: 1. Every attributor is a (self-)evaluator. Asserting 'p' is equivalent to asserting 'p is true'. 2. Every evaluator is an attributor. To determine that some attributor's knowledge-claim is true or false, one must oneself attribute knowledge (or lack thereof) to the relevant agent. Yes. But if the psychologist evaluates your claim, by weighing in on its truth or falsehood, then the psychologist becomes a distinct attributor. I varied the psychologist or metaphysician as attributor, rather than paying much mind to self-attribution/self-evaluation, simply because I thought it would be less intuitive to talk about a person's knowledge-claims failing to meet his or her own psychological/social state. But, sure, strictly speaking I could have just varied the psychological state of someone self-attributing knowledge, and thereby made that person's own beliefs about his/her knowledge true or false. (At least, I think standard contextualist theories allow this.) Interesting. I think it's more complicated than that. For instance, I think contextualism predicts that the psychologist, in a later dinner conversation with a metaphysician friend, might say: 'Earlier I told a patient that he knew he had hands; but, of course, really he doesn't have hands.' The contextualist interprets this as meaning that the psychologist's state has importantly changed, hence her knowledge-attributions have changed, hence her knowledge- evaluations have changed. (Presumably part of the reason the psychologist's knowledge-attributions have changed in this case is that she's in a social context that includes a metaphysician with psychologically embedded 'higher standards'. I.e., contextualism predicts that social overlap produces synchronizations in correct knowledge attribution.) Note that an invariantist mi

[-]Jayson_Virissimo9y 4

Aesthetic value: objective or subjective?

[pollid:101]

6thomblake9yThis is one of those cases where I'm not sure exactly what "objective" and "subjective" are supposed to mean. Probably 2-place words, but probably objective ones.

3Vaniver9yI went with Other because I think aesthetic judgments are mostly the same for humans, but will be whatever evolution spits out for non-humans [http://lesswrong.com/lw/ro/2place_and_1place_words/]. There's some objective (aesthetic value is a product of evolution) and some subjective (because it's a product of evolution, it's environment-dependent and subject to variation). For all I know, though, that position is Accept:subjective, since 2-place words would be a radical new insight to most philosophers who pick Accept:objective.

2hankx77879yOf course this question is universally (snerk) misunderstood as "objective" = "universal", which are not actually synonymous.

2pragmatist9yOther: I'm genuinely undecided about this. I don't think I lean substantially in either direction.

1komponisto9yOther: a complex weighted mixture of both, and varying according to context. Similar to ethical value.

[-]Alicorn9y 4

It seems like the sentence I quoted indicates that he didn't consider it a "full theory of time". I don't feel like rereading the actual paper, though.

7[anonymous]9yLooking at the paper, I find that you're right.

1crazy889yFrom memory, McTaggart argues that change is a necessary part of our concept of time. That B-theories can't account for change and that A-theories are incoherent. Consequently, time does not exist (but presumably something with some similarities to time does)

Although it looks like you either have all information regarding where/when all events occurred relative to each other (which would necessarily give information about where/when all events happened in relation to an observer) or you have a partial ordering, which means you don't have all the information.

The partial ordering actually encodes a surprising amount of information about space-time. Specifying the temporal ordering relationship between space-time points also fixes the topological structure of space-time, its differential structure, and the met... (read more)

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sense_and_reference

Consequentialism doesn't require a commitment to maximization of any particular variable. It's the claim that only the consequences of actions are relevant to moral evaluation of the actions. I think that's a weak enough claim that you can't really call it a general moral principle. So one could believe that only consequences are morally relevant, but the way in which one evaluates actions based on their consequences does not conform to any general principle.

If Luke had said that he's a utilitarian who is also a particularist, that would have been a contradiction.

2[anonymous]9yThat's a good point. So I should take from Luke's claim that he does not believe one should (as a moral rule) maximise expected utility, or anything like that? And that he would say that it's possible (if perhaps unlikely) for an action to be good even if it minimizes expected utility?

[-]DanArmak9y 4

Meta-poll: this is not one of the original poll questions. It's just something I wanted to ask.

What is your opinion of modern philosophy, if the questions in this survey are taken as representative, important, unresolved issues in the field?

Interesting questions: most open philosophical problems are meaningful, useful, or interesting, and it is worthwhile to research them. If philosophers come to a broad agreement on a currently open issue, non-philosophers should pay attention.

Interesting debate: most philosophical problems are confused debates, e.g. over... (read more)

8TheOtherDave9yOther: I often find these sorts of questions useful as a way of clarifying my own understanding of related subjects, and I think clarifying understanding can lead to pragmatic value even in the absence of an agreed-upon answer. That is, sometimes it is useful to go from "I am confused about X" to "there are three possibilities (X1, X2, X3) and I know what each one entails but I don't know how to choose among them", even though the question remains equally unanswered. This is similar to your "interesting debate" option, I suppose, but different enough that I felt uncomfortable picking it.

3Swimmy9yPhilosophical problems as a whole are a mix of all 3, and I don't know enough about modern philosophy to empirically determine which answer reigns in the "most." Voted "Other."

3Oscar_Cunningham9y"Uninteresting", but perhaps only due to Sturgeon's law.

1diegocaleiro9yThere probably is a gigantic bias to the "Uninteresting" amount of responders. If you find those uninteresting, you wouldn't get here in the first place. So, given now it is about 25% "Uninteresting" I'd guess more than 50% LWers are of that opinion.

1magfrump9yOther: unanswered philosophical questions are about evenly distributed between interesting questions that will soon be matters of engineering, confused and revealing questions, and historical nonsense. I produced easy examples of all three categories without trying.

1Vaniver9yThis book [http://lesswrong.com/lw/5vs/epistemology_and_the_psychology_of_human_judgment/] makes the argument that (paraphrased, and put into LW terms) most philosophy is uninteresting because their curiosity doesn't seek to annihilate itself. Instead of asking "how can we actually improve our knowledge?" they bicker over the definition of JTB. The tools and insights of philosophy can be useful when you try to answer the practical questions, but most controversial topics are controversial because there are a lot of wrong ideas there, not because it's a hot new empirical question (Higgs: does it exist? If so, how big is it?).

1TimS9yUninteresting artifacts of history. But some (moral realism or not) are vitally important to figuring out effective social engineering. But I'm in a minority in this community in thinking that social engineering is desirable (other than as an inevitable effect of physical engineering/ technological progress).

1Manfred9yADBOC with talking about "most," so I voted other. But maybe I should have voted "Uninteresting."

1Alejandro19yI voted for "Interesting questions", because a slight majority of the polled questions fall in that category to me, and that matches the literal meaning of "most". But when 30-40% of the key questions of a discipline look "Uninteristing", it is not a great endorsement for it.

[-][anonymous]9y 4

That's rationalism. 'Both' would be a contradiction.

[-]DanArmak9y 4

A true theory of everything is by definition never wrong. In which case there's no observable difference between Humeanism and non-Humeanism, and it makes no sense to talk about the theory "determining" events or merely "describing" them.

Define: theory of everything: maximally compressed, true and complete description of the physical evolution of the universe over time.

1RobertLumley9yThis was a point of some confusion to me. But "The laws of nature" to me means the fundamental laws of the universe, not the models we come up with. I dismissed my confusion as "oh, this must be another obnoxious thing that mainstream philosophy thinks."

[-]drnickbone9y 3

There is a recognized distinction here between a moral decision procedure and the criterion for an action to be right or wrong.

Pretty much all serious act utilitarians approve a rule-utilitarian decision procedure i.e. they recommend moral agents to follow the usual moral rules (or heuristics) even in those cases where the agent believes that departing from the rules would lead to better consequences. The justification for such a decision procedure is of course that humans are not ideal reasoners, we can not predict and evaluate all consequences of our a... (read more)

[-]pragmatist9y 3

In relativism, a single utterance of a knowledge claim can be assessed differently depending on the assessor's epistemic standards. So the truth value of a knowledge claim can vary depending on who is doing the assessing.

In contextualism, the truth value of a knowledge claim only varies if the context of utterance is different. A single utterance of a knowledge claim will have a fixed truth value, independent of who is assessing the claim. You only get variance when you vary the context in which the utterance is made, just like you only get variance in the meaning of "It's raining here" if you vary the context in which it is uttered.

Does that help?

4TheOtherDave9yEr... well, not yet, but might be a step towards helping. I get that, if the conditions "different assessor" and "different context of utterance" are separable, then relativism makes distinct claims from contextualism. That is, if I have a different assessor but the same context (or even the same assessor whose epistemic standards have changed, and the same context), then contextualism asserts that the truth value of my claims is necessarily unchanged, and relativism asserts that it might change. What I can't fathom is how that happens, even in principle. Isn't the assessor, and the assessor's epistemic standards, part of the context of the utterance?

4[anonymous]9ySo imagine you read an ancient text in which the claim "the voice of Zeus follows upon his blows" appears as a description of the relation between thunder and lightening. THe assessor and facts about the assessor are nowhere part of the context of the utterance, because the utterance was made thousands of years before you were born. An invariantist would say 'that's false, there's no such thing as Zeus'. A relativist would say 'That's false to me (no Zeus), but it might have been true for the person who wrote it if they had different standards for truth." A contextualist would say 'So Zeus doesn't exist, but the voice and blows of Zeus are just terms for lightening and thunder. If someone made this comment knowing what we know about stoms, it would be false. But I assess this statement as true, because I take the utterer to be talking about lightening and thunder.'

2TheOtherDave9y(nods) I think I get it now... thanks! (More thoughts here [http://lesswrong.com/lw/emj/poll_less_wrong_and_mainstream_philosophy_how/7irm] )

3pragmatist9yThe assessor doesn't have to be a person standing there listening to the utterance. Suppose I told you that my friend Alice says that she knows OJ Simpson killed his wife, and I ask you what you think about her knowledge claim. If you were a relativist, you would evaluate the truth of the knowledge claim in accord with your epistemic standards, or you might even say, "Well, relative to standards X her knowledge claim is true, but relative to standards Y it's false." If you were a contextualist, on the other hand, you'd ask me "In what context did she make this knowledge claim?" and then base your evaluation of the knowledge claim on my answer. You allow the context to set the epistemic standard you use for evaluation. Another example: Suppose Bob says "Alice knows P" in one context, and Charlie says "Alice doesn't know P" in another context. For a contextualist, it might be the case that Bob and Charlie are not disagreeing at all. If the contexts are sufficiently different, you can't pit their knowledge claims against one another. A relativist, on the other hand, can pit the knowledge claims against one another, by relativizing them to the same epistemic standard. Only one of them will be true according to that standard.

2TheOtherDave9yAh! (lightbulb goes on) Throughout, I have been implicitly understanding "context" to mean context of evaluation. Which is not what we mean at all, we mean context of utterance. Which, indeed, you even said explicitly, and I failed to read carefully enough. Yes, this makes perfect sense. Thinking about this now, I think I endorse contextualism, even though attempting to implement it gives me a headache. That is, whether I'm comfortable saying that you actually know X is a function of what evidence for and against X I believe you're aware of, but my brain strongly tends to replace (my beliefs about) what evidence you're aware of with what evidence I'm aware of. I no longer remember what my vote was. Thanks for your patience.

[-]thomblake9y 3

though this mostly looks like a debate over definitions

When you've reached this point, you understand a philosophical debate, for most 20th-century philosophical debates.

[-][anonymous]9y 3

Well, Frege's big thing (the big thing that didn't fall over, anyway) is a distinction between 'sense' and 'reference', where the 'sense' of a word is something like what we mean by it, and the reference of a word is the actual, real thing the word is about. He came up with this to explain why someone could know the meaning (in the sense of 'sense') of 'the evening star' and 'the morning star' without knowing that they're in fact the same thing (they have the same referent, i.e. Venus).

[-]Vaniver9y 3

Typical examples of the difference between correspondence and epistemic have to do with people being right on accident. For example:

"I don't carry any cash," Bob lies to the mugger. Unbeknownst to Bob, a pickpocket has stolen his wallet, and so he is in fact not carrying any cash.

Is Bob's statement true? Is it a justified true belief?

Correspondence would say that Bob did tell the truth, but epistemic would say that Bob's statement, though true, was unjustified.

6fubarobfusco9yThe philosophers call these Gettier problems [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gettier_problem]. This particular story introduces what seems like it should be an extraneous detail: Bob, in saying he doesn't carry cash, is intending to deceive. But our everyday concept of truth is related somehow to honesty; the truth is what a well-informed and honest person would say. Bob here is being dishonest (he wants the mugger to believe something Bob thinks is false) and misinformed, so his dishonesty fails at his goal of protecting his cash. This goal is already lost. Knowing that, the question "but is his statement true?" seems to be unneeded essentialism.

2Vaniver9yMy impression is that this is what the whole debate is about. What matters to Corresponders is whether or not statements describe reality. Bob's statement correctly predicts whether or not he has cash on him- and "correct prediction" is their standard for truth. They wouldn't care that his dishonesty and misinformation cancel each other out, but would agree that in general dishonesty and misinformation lead to less correct predictions.

[-]MugaSofer9y 3

If someone I knew had their physical body destroyed but they were uploaded with complete accuracy, I would consider them to be the same person (consistent with psychological view) [...] I don't accept that my upload would really be me (more like physical view).

This is consistent how?

3TheOtherDave9yWell, I'm not obligated to use the same standards for myself as other people.

1Caerbannog9yI can observe myself in a way I that can't others. From my vantage point, a copy or upload of someone else behaves the same as the 'original'. From that same vantage point, a newly created copy of myself is clearly 'outside' my mind and therefore observationally different.

0MugaSofer9yBut surely the copy is as much the same person as the "you" of five minutes ago as the original?

[-]asparisi9y 3

That depends on the Rationalist (Spinoza arguably denies this in his idealism, and one could argue that Plato is a rationalist who believes that all knowledge is a priori.) but the point here is that I think that knowledge always has an empirical part and a rational part.

In other words, I reject the a priori/a posteriori demarcation.

[-]pragmatist9y 3

I would say it's more like novalis thinks there is no substantive distinction between empiricism and rationalism.

[-]Jayson_Virissimo9y 3

Language: Russellianism or Fregeanism?

[pollid:77]

[-]pragmatist9y 25

Russellianism: The meanings of our (referential) words are the objects to which they refer. When I say "Socrates is mortal", the meaning of the word `Socrates' in that sentence is a particular person who lived in ancient Greece.

Fregeanism: The meanings of our words are not directly objects in the world but the particular way we conceive of those objects. Two words referring to the same object can have different meaning since they correspond to different ways of conceiving the object. For instance, "morning star" and "evening star" both refer to to the same object (Venus), but they have different meanings.

[-]maia9y 11

Other: Seems like a semantic problem about the word "meaning".

4Wei_Dai9yNot really. We can frame the debate between Russellianism and Fregeanism in pragmatic terms: is it useful to model expressions as having or relating to Fregean "senses" (ways of thinking about, objects, properties, and relations) in addition to "intensions" and "extensions"? Note that philosophers of language are already quite aware of the need to avoid purely semantic debates about the word "meaning". As evidence, see this paragraph from the SEP [http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/meaning/]:

7pragmatist9yBoth Russellianism and Fregeanism make assumptions about the way language is related to the world that I reject.

5[anonymous]9yWhat assumptions do you have in mind?

1novalis9yOther: This.

0diegocaleiro9yI take both views to be inconsistent with cognitive neuroscience. Or, at a more abstract, simplified, level, with Yudkwosky's suggestion of how to think about conceptual clusters, http://lesswrong.com/lw/nl/the_cluster_structure_of_thingspace/ [http://lesswrong.com/lw/nl/the_cluster_structure_of_thingspace/] There is also an important distinction between "Language" and "Languages" made by Lewis, relating to how people think about language as within, or separate from the world. I'm unable to find source though.

4bramflakes9yI'm not sure I entirely understand the question. Isn't it just the distinction between connotation and denotation?

3Manfred9yOther: Yes.

1faul_sname9yWhat exactly do they mean by "meanings"? Do they mean "mental state triggered by the word" or "what the word is referencing"? Because it could go either way, depending on which definition of "meaning" we're using.

1TheOtherDave9yVoted Other. I would say the meanings of our words are the desired state changes in the world correlated with the use of those words. I don't know if that position has a name.

0amcknight9yIt seems to me that we can mean things in both ways once we are aware of the distinction.

[-]Kindly9y 2

You're allowed to be mistaken or lying. I suspect a contextualist would argue that exactly one of your assertions is true, depending on what the context of the discussion is.

[-]pragmatist9y 2

Think of it this way. There are two people, A and B, who are exact physical duplicates of one another. They are, however, embedded in different environments. If you think that A and B must necessarily have all the same beliefs, you are an internalist. If you think their beliefs can be different, you are an externalist.

0[anonymous]9yThey are the same, they pretty clearly have the same beliefs. I infer from the disagreement that this is about "knowledge" (which is a lot more confused than belief). With knowledge, it depends how you define it (does it have to be true?). Other.

2pragmatist9yNo, it is not about knowledge, it's about belief (or any other representational state). An externalist believes that the content of a belief -- what a belief is about -- is determined by causal entanglements with the environment. I have beliefs about Eliezer Yudkowsky because my brain states are causally entangled with Eliezer Yudkowsky. These beliefs need not qualify as knowledge. Say a physical duplicate of me appeared on Mars by a random thermal fluctuation. Even though that duplicate has the same brain state as I do, his brain state is not causally entangled with Eliezer, so the externalist would say that he does not have beliefs about Eliezer. If you think this is obviously false, you are most likely an internalist.

0[anonymous]9ykeyword "about".

[-]adamisom9y 2

Cool. I should have specified 'I'm intrigued; can you move down a level of specificity (as to how)?'

2komponisto9yMost people seem to believe that it's absurd to suppose we're living in the Matrix; I point out that theism is not significantly different from this.

1Jayson_Virissimo9yAccording to my informal experiments with presenting the SA to friends, the absurdity reaction is highly sensitive to framing-effects and especially the particular sequence in which I present the premises.

Proper names: Fregean or Millian?

[pollid:106]

[-]pragmatist9y 10

This is the same distinction as Russellianism vs. Fregeanism, except applied specifically to proper names. I think in the Philpapers survey, this question replaced the Russellianism vs. Fregeanism one.

Fregean: The meaning of a proper name is a way of conceiving of its bearer. Different names for the same bearer may be associated with different ways of conceiving, and thus have different meanings. For instance, "Superman" and "Clark Kent" have different meanings.

Millian: The meaning of a proper name is its bearer. The meanings of "Superman" and "Clark Kent" are identical.

8[anonymous]9yOther: both can be true depending on the situation. This can be only meaningfully interpreted as a question of psychology (what goes on in people's heads), there's no way in which one method of ascribing meaning to names is 'truer' than the other so asking to choose between the two looks like a confused question.

Logic: classical or non-classical?

[pollid:104]

[-]pragmatist9y 11

Classical: The standard kinds of logic that you learn in undergraduate logic classes are the best (or right) logics, the ones that best model (ETA: idealized versions of) our inferential processes. Examples of classical logics are Boolean logic and first-order predicate calculus. Classical logics are bivalent (sentences can only be true or false), obey the principle of the excluded middle (if a proposition is not true, its negation must be true) and obey the law of non-contradiction (a proposition and its negation cannot both be true).

Non-classical: The best logic is not classical. Non-classical logics usually reject the principle of the excluded middle or the law of non-contradiction. An example of a non-classical logic is dialetheism, according to which there are true contradictions (i.e. some sentences of the form "A and not A" are true). Proponents of non-classical logics argue that many of our scientific theories, if you probe deeply, involve inconsistencies, yet we don't regard them as trivially false. So they claim that we need to revise the way we understand logic to accurately model our inferential processes.

6komponisto9yIs that the right criterion? Or should it be: the ones that best model the correct inferential processes, whether or not we humans adhere to them?

1TheOtherDave9yI lean towards classical, but with the proviso that we have to be careful about what counts as a statement. Sneak in a statement with ambiguous truth values, and classical logic halts and catches fire. Personally I'm OK with rejecting such statemetns.

0[anonymous]9yWhat does Bayesian probability theory count as?

3Jayson_Virissimo9yBayesian probability is an extension of classical logic. I don't think philosophers consider it to be non-classical.

0kilobug8yIn my AI lessons, the "non-classical logic" course including all the probabilistic theories : fuzzy logic, Bayesian, ... that's why I voted "lean : non-classical", but I guess it's just a matter of vocabulary.

0[anonymous]9yOkay, so “Accept: classical” be it.

6pragmatist9yOther: Different logics are appropriate for modeling how one should infer in different domains. Classical logics are fine for many applications but it is possible (maybe even plausible) that non-classical logics will be better models for certain applications. For instance, fuzzy logic (a many-valued logic) has been successfully employed to control subway systems and build thermostats.

3RichardKennaway9yAnd yet the metalanguage is always classical logic. Even the most enthusiastic proponents of other systems never use them to talk about those systems. So I go firmly with "classical".

3pragmatist9yThat seems consistent with my view. For the specific application you mention -- talking about logical systems -- classical logics are our best models. It could still be the case that other logics are better for other applications. What makes this particular application the trump card, so that the fact that classical logic is best for doing metalogic means that it is the best simpliciter?

3RichardKennaway9yFirst, I shall ask the question "what is logic?" And I shall answer it. In the context of the present poll, "logic" means those methods of reasoning that are guaranteed to produce, from true premises, only true conclusions. And the poll is asking whether classical logic is it. Particular formalisms used to model particular things are not, in this sense, logic, although they may be expressed in logic. For example, number theory is not logic. Neither is geometry, or physics, or probability theory. Neither, I claim, is fuzzy logic, despite the word "logic" in its name. You can say, "here is a set of functions (which I shall call fuzzy logic truth tables), and here are some theorems about how they behave (which I shall call fuzzy reasoning), and here are some physical systems whose description uses these functions." That does not mean that those functions are actually a form of logic, as I just defined it. Bang-bang controllers like the room thermostat were invented (in 1883 [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermostat]) long before fuzzy control theory (about which I've heard anecdotally that the term was invented only to avoid someone's patent claims). The closest anyone has come to promulgating an alternative system is intuitionistic logic, which is a pessimistic version of classical logic, in which the axiom of the excluded middle is dropped. In intuitionistic logic, you cannot infer P from not-not-P, or carry out proof by contradiction. However, I think intuitionism is simply a mistake, a historical accident which would never have happened if there had not been a half century between the codification of mathematical logic and the invention of the computer. Everything that is useful in intuitionism is given by computability theory and classical logic.

4pragmatist9yI agree with you that a logic is an account of truth-preserving inference. But, by this definition, fuzzy logic absolutely qualifies as a logic. The rules of inference in fuzzy logic are truth-preserving, provided we're talking about "full" truth, i.e. we're not in the realm of fuzziness. There are other non-classical logics, besides intuitionism, that also provide accounts of valid inference that are truth-preserving. Relevance logic [http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/logic-relevance/], for example.

0Rob Bensinger8yMy interpretation of this question is metaphysical: 'Is reality classical?' This is shorthand for: 'Is there any fact that is fundamentally, objectively, and in principle... ... inexpressible? ... vague? ... contradictory? ... indeterminate? (I.e., neither the case nor not-the-case.) ... etc. But this is a strange set of questions, and I suspect most professional philosophers and LessWrongers are instead answering a confused mixture of (mostly trivial) questions like 'which logic do I find most useful?'.

0RobinZ9yOther: The objection to classical logic stated in pragmatist's summary [http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/emj/poll_less_wrong_and_mainstream_philosophy_how/7inv] needs to be addressed, but I lack sufficient knowledge of the field to determine whether the best resolution of these objections is likely to take the form of (a) a solution within classical logic or (b) the adoption of a non-classical logic.

A priori knowledge: yes or no?

[pollid:100]

5pragmatist9yYes: There are certain facts we can come to know for which our knowledge need not be based on sensory experience. No: The sort of justification that elevates belief to knowledge must always appeal to sensory experience.

0Rob Bensinger8yThis isn't quite right. As others have noted, 'sensory experience' is very ambiguous here. A better definition: Yes: There is at least one proposition one can be justified in believing merely by knowing the meaning of that proposition. I.e., no more experience is required than is necessary to understand the proposition in the first place. No: One cannot be justified in believing any proposition merely from knowing its meaning.

0pragmatist8yThe definitions you provide are traditionally associated with the analytic/synthetic distinction, not the a priori/a posteriori distinction. While many philosophers have held that all and only analytic propositions are true a priori, other philosophers have disagreed. Kant, for instance, regarded the truths of arithmetic and geometry as a priori true but not analytic [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analytic%E2%80%93synthetic_distinction#Kant.27s_version_and_the_a_priori.2F_a_posteriori_distinction] , i.e. not true in virtue of the meanings of the terms involved. He thought our knowledge of these truths was based on the forms of our spatial and temporal intuition. There are also those who argue that certain moral truths are justified a priori (Kant was one of them). Again, I doubt that they would say that this is because their truth follows from the meanings of the terms involved. It's true that "sensory experience" is ambiguous, but that ambiguity has been at the heart of philosophical discussion about the a priori, so I think my definitions do capture the standard usage. I'd also note that "meaning" is similarly ambiguous.

2Rob Bensinger8yI think both of our definitions are reasonably common, and that both are also somewhat misleading. I recommended mine partly because I've seen it from a lot of sources, e.g.: Penguin Dictionary of Philosophy, entry on a priori: "'It can be known a priori that p, if anyone whose experience is enough for him to know what "p" means, requires no further experience in order to know that p.'" Allen Wood, leading Kant scholar: "A proposition is known a priori when knowledge of it does not depend in any way on the specific contents of experience, when any experience that would suffice to enable us to entertain the proposition would also be sufficient to give us knowledge of its truth." So I think this 'quasi-analytic' definition is the more traditional one, though perhaps it doesn't fully capture modern usage. I also recommended it because I find the dispute over analyticity more philosophically interesting and deep than the dispute over what counts as sense-data. 'Is the experience of reasoning a sensory experience?' seems more obviously terminological than 'Is 2+2=4 true purely in virtue of its meaning?' You say that the ambiguity of the term 'senory experience' "has been at the heart of philosophical discussion about the a priori", but I think it's been mostly a blind-alley, and that the really substantive debates about the a priori have instead concerned the nature of justification in the absence of any experiential evidence, including memory, phenomenological introspection, telepathic insight, divine revelation... -- all of which fail to be conventionally 'sensory'. Or perhaps: Absent any experiential evidence aside from my experience with natural chains of reasoning and inference...? Here [http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/apriori/#ExpHowPriJusPos], I think, is where the heart of the dispute over the a priori lies: The question, not of whether our reasoning chains and intuitions are 'sensory,' but over whether they afford a categorically different kind of epi

3[anonymous]9yA priori knowledge is knowledge from the operation of a mind. It is a sort of sensory experience.

1RobinZ9yWhat, precisely, is the distinction between this and the "Knowledge: empiricism or rationalism?" question?

2Rob Bensinger8yA good way of unpacking the distinction: A-priorism is a normative (evaluative, epistemological) thesis, whereas rationalism is a descriptive (factual, psychological) one. A-priorism says that we have warrant to believe some things without appealing to any evidence (more strictly: without appealing to any information beyond that which was required to understand the proposition in the first place). Rationalism says that we arrive at some of our understanding of reality without an essential causal dependence upon prior experience. (E.g., we have some extremely primitive proto-understanding of 'space' or 'causality' or 'quantity' that precedes our experiential acquaintance with the instances of those categories.) So an empiricist can assert a-priorism, if s/he thinks that in principle we could justify certain claims without any reference to experience, but also thinks that as a matter of fact our cognitive, epistemic, and conceptual grasp on everything, including our grasp on linguistic truths like 'all bachelors are bachelors,' stems entirely from sensory data. A-priorism doesn't entail rationalism. A rationalist must make the further assertion that some kinds of understanding are not only justifiable without appeal to empirical data, but are also obtainable without a causal basis in past empirical encounters. An empiricist might claim that our grasp of time, for example, developmentally arises via the sequence of external events imprinting itself upon the rudimentary sense-data-gathering faculties of the embryonic brain; whereas a rationalist would claim that we have some sort of grasp on time 'built in' by the evolved structure of our brain, requiring little if any 'pre-structured' sensory input to develop. Our experiential acquaintance with time is then mainly dependent on our innate makeup, rather than our innate makeup being mainly shaped by the temporality of our actual sense-data. (Notice that these are fuzzy distinctions; presumably actual brain developme

0RobinZ8yThat makes sense - thanks!

1Risto_Saarelma9yHasn't this one been resolved by computer science [http://dml.cs.byu.edu/~cgc/docs/mldm_tools/Reading/Need%20for%20Bias.pdf]?

1Jayson_Virissimo9yI think Evo-Psych was first.

[-]TimS9y 2

Sure - falsifiability is the key issue.

I think that the physical realism sides would make different predictions about the process of scientific progress. So we compare those predictions to the actual data from the history of science. I happen to think Kuhn and Feyerabend make the better argument about how to interpret the history, so I'm an anti-realist. If one thinks Kuhn and Feyerabend made a mess of the history, realism is a much more appealing position. I almost think pragmatist didn't go far enough in his explanation of the difference.

[-]TimS9y 2

Whereas I say that EY's position in the QM sequence would be right - if rationalism were more correct than empiricism.

Of course, I think your position on "knowing" is much too practical :) The fact that resolving physical realism vs. anti-realism doesn't pay rent at the engineer's bench does not mean it doesn't matter to Science. Whereas you are a hardcore instrumentalist.

I'll grant you that rationalism vs. empiricism is not a well-formed question if one is an instrumentalist.

[-]Alejandro19y 2

According to Quine's meaning holism, explained by pragmatist here, the concepts of "bachelor" and "marriage" are embedded in a wider network of concepts like "human", society", "legal relation", etc, and their use presupposes an amount of "truisms" such like that there exists humans, that humans can get involved in socially-endorsed legal relations, etc.

I find it conceivable that some of this truisms turn out to be false (e.g. imagine you are a brain in a vat) and that the entities you think of as hum... (read more)

3TheOtherDave9ySure, I can believe that. I mean, I can't imagine it, but I believe it's possible in some way that I can't imagine. I certainly agree that meaning is holistic in the sense pragmatist explains, such that the meaning of such a sentence can change based on systemic effects. But to believe that, and believe that "bachelor" and "marriage" have their ordinary meanings at the same time, is beyond me.

8Alejandro19yThe contention is that "the ordinary meaning" of a word is a fuzzy and ill-defined concept, once holism creeps in. Consider another example (used by Putnam, I think). Physicists first introduced the concept of "momentum" as the product of mass and velocity. A central fact that made the concept useful was that momentum is conserved in an isolated system. Later, with relativity, it became clear that the conserved quantity is not really the product of mass and velocity, but includes a speed-of-light dependent factor as well [http://www.batesville.k12.in.us/physics/PhyNet/Mechanics/Relativity/relativistic_momentum.html] . Physicists started then calling this quantity "momentum". Now, was this a change in the meaning of the word "momentum", or a new fact discovered about the same physical entity momentum? This would seem to depend on whether the first early modern physicist who used the word intended "momentum" to have a fixed meaning as the product of mass and velocity, or as the quantity conserved in an isolated system. But he probably didn't make his intention clear, and in any case his private intention does not matter if meaning is social and holistic. Even if most pre-Einstein physicists would have (if questioned, which they weren't) agreed that "momentum" meant definitionally mass times velocity, post-Einstein physicists may be perfectly justified in saying they would have been wrong, that Einstein made a new physical discovery about the same quantity they were trying to talk about and not merely changed the meaning of words. What is "the ordinary meaning" (pre-Einstein) of "momentum" is not a question with a well-defined answer; the relevant unit of meaning was the whole physical theory, which was replaced by a new one, and we cannot make a clean distinction between which were changes in meaning and which were changes in factual beliefs. It is more difficult to imagine something like this happening for "bachelor", but according to Quineans, the difference is o

5fubarobfusco9yConsidering the present controversy over "the definition of marriage", I think we can imagine many such cases. Is a man who has lived with the same woman for ten years — but has never had a wedding — a "bachelor"? How about a man who has had a commitment ceremony with another man? (Does it matter if the invitations said "marriage" or "commitment ceremony"?) A man who has a marriage of convenience to a woman he has never slept with, for purposes of immigration? A man from a culture where he was, as a young boy, married by his family to a young girl, but who has left that setting and never seen her since? A man who believes he is married to a particular woman, but subsequent careful inspection of family history reveals that she is his long-lost sister and thus the marriage is invalid for incest? A Catholic priest? Just as subsequent physics discoveries can problematize the definition of "momentum", subsequent social and personal-history discoveries can problematize the definition of "bachelor". The "ordinary meaning" is only had by choosing to ignore problems.

2TheOtherDave9yOK, I think I follow. For my own part, I would say that if we take the relevant unit of meaning to be the whole physical theory (a position I find compelling in principle, if unwieldy in practice), it follows that changing the physical theory does not preserve preexisting meanings. I would not say that the meaning of "momentum" changed, precisely, but that "momentum" acquired a new meaning in addition to its old one, and anyone talking about momentum in a relativistic context is using the new meaning, even though people talking about momentum in a non-relativistic context can go on using the old meaning. (I would also say that the intent of the first physicist to use the term is effectively irrelevant.) This also implies that people who try to copy over assertions about momentum from non-relativistic contexts to relativistic ones are essentially confusing homophones... similar in principle to what happens if I try to copy over assertions about monarchs from lepidopterological contexts to governmental ones. But, OK, I can understand how someone could sensibly argue that no, the meaning is preserved, because the meaning was always fuzzy in the first place, we just became aware of the fuzziness late in the game. (This seems to in turn depend on a strongly externalist account of meaning.)

[-][anonymous]9y 2

Ahh, that. What would be an empirical difference between the two? If none, then there is nothing to resolve.

But that's the whole question: is it affine or non-affine?

As to what empirical difference it makes (and whether or not 'none' means that the question is meaningless) is I suppose a matter for another survey question.

But, if you think Julian Barbour or EY are generally on the right track about the implications of quantum physics, then you're a B-theorist. Fundamentally, the rejection of A-theory is the rejection of the reality of change. If you're a B-theorist, change is on the map, but not anywhere in the territory.

[-]siodine9y 2

For example, abstract objects could be considered to exist in the minds of people imagining them, and consequently in some neuronal pattern, which may or may not match between different individuals, but considered to not exist as something independent of the conscious minds imagining them. While this is a version of nominalism, it is not nearly as clear-cut as "abstract objects do not exist".

That would be conceptualism and is a moderate anti-realist position about universals (if you're a physicalist). Nominalism and Platonism are two poles of a continuum about realism of universals. So, you probably lean towards nominalism if you're a physicalist and conceptualist.

[-]Caerbannog9y 2

Yes, my duplicate would think the same way as me.

In a world that has duplicators, my duplicate would not claim to be original without evidence one way or the other.

In our real world, if a copy of me were made using "magic", both versions would believe themselves to be the original (at least at first). I had this kind of very specific scenario in mind when I said both would claim to be original, but did not explain this in the earlier comment (inferential distance and all that).

[-]DanArmak9y 2

There's something wrong when smart people argue and disagree over a question when there are many different ideas as to what the words in the question actually mean...

[-]bramflakes9y 2

I think for future polls like this, mandate in the OP that all comments about questions be ROT13ed in order to avoid priming future respondents.

8DanArmak9yThat would be too cumbersome to use for the commenters.

2TheOtherDave9yAgreed. I would be OK with having two posts, though, one of which is for discussion which people can therefore ignore until they've voted. That said, this whole site primes people for some of these questions.

[-]Eliezer Yudkowsky9y 10

Personal identity: physical view or psychological view?

[pollid:94]

[-]pragmatist9y 24

Physical view: The maintenance of personal identity requires bodily continuity. So, for instance, one cannot preserve a person by downloading their psychological state into a computer.

Psychological view: The maintenance of personal identity requires continuity of psychological states. As long as there is a continuing stream of psychological states with the appropriate causal relations between them, the person persists.

7TheOtherDave9yI answered "psychological", but I should perhaps note that I don't understand "continuing" to imply "uninterrupted". I have no problem with the idea of a personal identity that is shut down for a while before being booted back up (with its internal state saved), or one that is computed on a timesharing system.

2pragmatist9yYeah, I should have clarified. "Continuity" here does not mean temporal continuity; it means causal continuity. Future states are appropriately causally related to past states. So if I disintegrate right now, and simultaneously, by some bizarre chance, an atom-for-atom duplicate of me is produced by a thermal fluctuation on Mars, that duplicate would not be me, since the appropriate causal connections between my psychological state and his are lacking.

6TheOtherDave9yHm. My instinct is to say that I don't require causal continuity either... e.g., to say that if I appeared on Mars I would consider myself to still be the person who used to exist on Earth, despite the lack of causal connection. That said, I don't really take that instinct seriously, since I'm incapable of actually imagining this happening without positing a causal connection I just don't happen to be aware of. The alternative is... well, unimaginable. So, I dunno. Maybe I do require continuity in that sense, I'm just willing to posit it for any sufficiently complex system.

2faul_sname9ySo where does the information to build the copy of you on Mars come from? It's all fine and well to say "thermal noise" but if you allow for brains to be built from thermal noise with any sort of frequency, you end up with the bigger philosophical problem of Boltzmann brains. Unless you're proposing a mechanism by which the brain in question is your brain, in which case you've reintroduced causality.

2pragmatist9yI agree that Boltzmann brains are a philosophical problem, but they're a problem precisely because our current best physical theories tell us that brains can fluctuate into existence. I don't think the right way to deal with the problem is to say, "Boltzmann brains are problematic, so let's just deny that they can exist."

1faul_sname9yYes, but our current best physical theories also mean that they probably fluctuate into existence considerably less often than they form under normal circumstances (human brains, at least). A mind is a complex thing, so the amount of information it takes to replicate a mind is probably far higher than the amount of information it takes to specify an environment likely to give rise to a mind. If you discard the causal process that gives rise to minds in practice and postulate thermal noise as the cause instead, you end up postulating Boltzmann brains as well. I didn't mean that Boltzmann brains are a particularly big philosophical problem, just that they become one when you try to do philosophy where you postulate very specific things occurring by "random chance".

2DanArmak9yThat's not how I understood the question. Now it turns out my vote is wrong. I should not have voted without understanding the question fully. But if I read the survey where the questions are taken from, I will probably also learn what is considered there to be the mainstream position, which will bias my answers.

Other: Leaning toward a causal view. In other words, your past self has to be the cause of your future self, but the specific atoms are irrelevant.

4[anonymous]9yHoly crap! I'm identical with my kid!

4Eliezer Yudkowsky9yCausal descent is a necessary but not sufficient condition, just like a QM-ignorant "physicalist" doesn't necessarily believe that if I grind you up and make a new person out of those "particular particles", it is the same person just in virtue of being made out the "same particles". Not that there's any such thing as the "same particles" in modern physics, just waves in a particle field, etc.

3[anonymous]9yRight, but causal descent is common to the physical and psychological views. 'Physicalism' among philosophers generally doesn't refer to some kind of 'same atoms' view. That's an incoherent view long before we bring in considerations of quantum physics, and the 'same particles' issue. Mostly that kind of physicalism is restricted to people who are wrong on the internet. Physicalism among (most) philosophers who hold that view is the claim that your identity is tied to a particular animal (or whatever hardware) that has physical persistance conditions (like the processes which keep it alive, etc.). If you create an atom-for-atom duplicate of that animal, and then kill one of the two of them, you haven't therefore killed both of them. They're not identical in that sense, and that's the sense of 'identity' that physicalists are calling personal identity. So nothing about quantum physics, so far as I can see, makes a difference to this question.

3[anonymous]9yBased on pragmatist's interpretation [http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/emj/poll_less_wrong_and_mainstream_philosophy_how/7ifg] , this sounds like the physical view.

2pragmatist9yIt sounds like the psychological view to me, although I guess that depends on what Eliezer means by "self".

2MugaSofer9yThis confuses me. I'm a bunch of LessWrong posts? I voted Accept: psychological view.

1[anonymous]9yVoted other for essentially this reason. Still very confused about this question.

9Kaj_Sotala9yI answered "lean toward psychological view", as I'm about evenly split between the psychological view and just considering the whole concept of personal identity incoherent/a wrong question [http://lesswrong.com/lw/og/wrong_questions/] in the first place.

3Matt_Simpson9yOther: I suspect the answer to this question depends on the particular question you're asking. Often, I think, this is a values question - e.g. in what form do I want to continue existing?

3asparisi9yOther: I think that personal identity is in a certain sort of brain process, rather than a static "brain state." (so, no "static minds") The physical view implies that personal identity can be reduced to certain brain states, and I reject that: a valid sort of active processing is important.

2Mutasir9yPhysical view/other (?). I consider personal identity to be based only on the memory of past self, not actual brain process or existence of memory independent conscious mind. It may be very well that the experience of personal continuity is only an illusion as there is no actual continuity at all, only the recollection of previous events (including the attempts of introspection). An exact copy of me wouldn't be any different than myself.

2Caerbannog9yOther: For everyone else that I observe, an exact atom-for-atom duplicate is the same person as the original. If a copy of me were made, my 'mind' would reside in the original. I accept that my duplicate would claim to be the original, of course.

4TheOtherDave9yI'm not sure what you mean by "the original" here. Suppose the atom-for-atom duplicate were constructed (for sound technical reasons) inside a duplication chamber, and it came to awareness inside that chamber. Would it claim that it had somehow had been swapped into the chamber and the duplicate swapped out, without it noticing? Or would it acknowledge that it had been constructed in the duplication chamber, but claim to be the original nonetheless?

2Caerbannog9yWhether the duplicate claimed to be the original or not depends on the individual, I suppose. If I lived in a world that contained such duplication chambers, and found myself waking up in one, I would not know whether I was "the copy" or not without some outside evidence. I'd be inclined to accept that either I was a copy, or someone was playing a trick on me to make me think so. I understand that the duplicate would have the same memories and personality as me, but would not have my subjective sense of experience.

2[anonymous]9yThat's not 'other', that's the psychological view (assuming you would still say they're the same person if one was duplicated minus a left pinky).

1magfrump9yOther: Psychological states include some bodily states like sensory input, and possibly as much as "social contact." There is no firm boundary between physical and psychological. Uploads are possible, but will require emulation of more than just a brain. An atom-by-atom instantiation of the same mind (including enough of the body and environment) will be the same person.

Metaphilosophy: naturalism or non-naturalism?

[pollid:91]

6DanArmak9yI was going to post a snarky comment to the effect that if you discard outright religious views and cognition motivated by them, there doesn't seem to be much left to non-naturalism. But the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy says it better [http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-non-naturalism/]: So non-naturalism looks like mostly a combination of religion and arguments over the meaning of the word "natural". As in, if we found evidence that spirits of the dead affected physical events, that would promote them to the status of natural physical phenomena. So of course everything that exists is "natural" - according to some definitions of the word. What is there to non-naturalism that is worth the time of seriously investigating it?

1Kindly9yWhat is a naturalism?

0Jayson_Virissimo9yOther: Naturalism is the appropriate stance to take with respect to our own world, but our own world is (probably) not all there is. If the simulator were to intervene, then these interventions could reasonably be described as being supernatural. Does this view have a name already? If not, I nominate relativistic naturalism.

Knowledge: empiricism or rationalism?

[pollid:90]

Empiricism: Our only source of novel information about the world is sensory experience.

Rationalism: There is some information about the world that we can arrive at by rational cogitation, without having to rely on sensory experience.

6Caerbannog9yOther: Agree that it's a false dichotomy.

6FiftyTwo9yHow? If there is >1 fact "we can arrive at by rational cogitation, without having to rely on sensory experience." Then rationalism, if not then Empiricism.

1thomblake9yMost of the "false dichotomy" claims here are from folks claiming it's an "unheard tree in the woods" problem - if you use one definition, you get one answer, and if you use another definition, then it's another answer, so if we just tabooed the relevant words then the dispute would go away.

1[anonymous]9yAgree on other. Rational cogitation is a kind of sensory experience.

6jimrandomh9yI believe this to be a false dichotomy; both empirical and rational processes generate knowledge, although particular kinds of knowledge (such as the colors of objects or the truth of theorems) may be restricted to arising from one or the other.

[-]pragmatist9y 10

This position is basically rationalism. Contemporary rationalists don't deny the possibility of empirical knowledge. That would be a fairly absurd position to hold in the present. They say that there are also non-empirical sources of knowledge. Empiricists deny the existence of non-empirical sources of knowledge.

8TheOtherDave9ySuppose I flip a coin 999 times and it comes up heads. I then flip it a hundredth time but don't look at it. I would be comfortable saying I know without looking that it came up heads. (Sure, there's a chance I'm wrong. There's a chance I'm wrong if I look, too. If "knowledge" denotes the state of absolute certainty, we don't ever know anything. It makes more sense to interpret "knowledge" as denoting greater-than-threshold confidence.) Would a contemporary empiricist say that I don't know that, because I didn't see it? That I know this, but it's not novel information? That it's novel information, but I obtain it through sensory experience? (E.g., observing the previous 999 flips) Other?

5pragmatist9yI think the contemporary empiricist would say that all the information you have about the thousandth flip comes from your past sensory experience -- your experience of the previous 999 flips plus other relevant experience (such as, say, experiences that form the basis for your beliefs about the base rate of unfair coins). The extent to which your belief about the thousandth flip justifiably differs from maximum entropy (or zero information) is entirely attributable to your prior experiences.

3TheOtherDave9yOK, so an contemporary empiricist doesn't deny the possibility of inference. Good. Does a contemporary empiricist deny the possibility of inference engines being constructed in ways that bias them towards certain conclusions? E.g., that two people might be born with their brains wired such that, given the same sensory experiences, one of them infers A and the other infers B? (In both cases, presumably, the information about A or B comes from past sensory experience, it's just that the process for getting one from the other differs.) If not, then I no longer have a crisp sense of what contemporary empiricists and rationalists actually disagree on.

4pragmatist9yLike I said in another comment, I identify as a rationalist because empiricism, construed literally, does not allow for informative priors, which makes learning impossible. I'm pretty sure, though, that if you brought this up to a philosopher who identifies as an empiricist, the response would be "Well of course that's not what I mean by empiricism. Informative priors are fine." But then, like you, I'm not so sure how to interpret the rationalism/empiricism distinction.

2Rob Bensinger8yGiven your definitions of 'rationalism' and 'empiricism,' an empiricist would need to assert that informative priors, if they exist, either are not "novel information about the world" or are novel information that we derive from experience. We aren't perfect Bayesian reasoners, and you haven't defined 'information,' so this doesn't seem perfectly open-and-cut to me. One approach an empiricist could take would be to deny that our primordial priors (i.e., our earliest expectations), in themselves, constitute information about the world; perhaps we can use them as a handy framework for genuinely informative research, but the framework itself is not knowledge, Another approach would be to deny that we have expectations before possessing any sense-perception; perhaps neurological development relies extensively upon sensory input from our environments before anything as cognitively complex as 'expectation' or 'belief' enters the picture. Or one could adopt a mixed strategy.

2shminux9yWhat are those, besides instincts? Any examples?

5pragmatist9yI call myself a rationalist because learning is impossible with maximum entropy priors, so if we can learn about the world through experience, we must start out with informative priors, which means we have some information about the world that is not attributable to experience. However, I suspect that this kind of position would not be recognized as rationalism by many philosophers. A more traditional rationalist claim is that reason can provide us with novel information about the world. As an example, consider a Platonist who believes that the integers actually have some kind of independent, objective existence, and aren't just the elements of a useful formal system constructed by humans. In that case, someone who proved Fermat's Last Theorem would have discovered a fact about certain objects in the world, but not through sensory experience.

2TimS9yIsn't this what EY argues for at the end of QM sequence? He seems to think there are ways of knowing things when empirical evidence is insufficient to resolve the dispute.

2DanArmak9yShould we be discussing the questions before others have had a chance to vote without being swayed?

4jimrandomh9yI meant this as an explanation of my 'Other' vote, but yes we should discuss, because postponing discussion is not a realistic option - comments will go unwritten, rather than being delayed. Spoiler tags would be helpful, but I don't think we have them.

2DanArmak9yYou're right.

2RichardKennaway9yYes, if it elucidates what the questions mean.

5Eliezer Yudkowsky9yOther: What the hell does Solomonoff Induction count as?

8gwern9yI'd call it empirical, without a doubt: it's as 'unrational' as possible, since it admits every possible computable sequence and selection of which one is determined by observations. If that isn't empirical...

2MugaSofer9yI'd say rational, since it's a priori.

5Manfred9yRationalism: doesn't work for arbitrary minds, but works for us, as we aren't arbitrary minds (yay evolution).

3novalis9yOther: I would tend to regard our reason as a sense.

4DanArmak9ySo that's the mysterious common sense people talk about!

2FiftyTwo9ySurely you should just substitute in "our other senses"?

2lucidian9yOther: rationalism with a caveat of embodied cognition.

2drnickbone9yWent for "Other". Bayesian updating appears to be a mixture of "rationalism" and "empiricism".

1Manfred9yTo quote Esar ( :D )

0RobinZ9yOther: Although human minds can discover facts about the world through non-sensory processes, their ability to do so only exists through the action of evolution by natural selection - and natural selection is a basically-empirical process.